MonsterHunter

I was too grossed out by these chicks to actually count them, but I’m pretty sure that at no time in this movie from Ted V. Mikels (we’re still trying to forget him from the killer cat food movie, The Corpse Grinders and that other ugly chick movie, The Doll Squad) was there ever a gang of girls that amounted to ten. This girl gang of disaffected miners seemed to hover at about six or seven, but with all the murky night shots that took place early in the film, Teddy might have snuck in a few extras without me noticing. Read More »

This movie, according to the liner notes (how do you get a job writing liner notes for forgettable 70s British sexploitation pictures anyway?) was trying to capitalize on a fad that was sweeping across Britain at the time. Supposedly it was the “in” thing to do to have yourself an au pair girl. I guess some genius came up with the idea that since British women were so fugly, they would import chicks from better looking countries (Denmark, Sweden, the South Pacific) to come and do light household chores around the home. Light household chores like the husband. I’m not sure what the British woman thought of this whacky new fad, but if it meant that she didn’t have some beak-nosed guy with crooked teeth and werewolf sideburns trying to paw her every night after a hearty meal of fish and chips, then I’ll bet there wasn’t a lot of noisy complaints around the flat. Read More »

Jane Fonda plays sexy “astronavigatrex” Barbarella in this sci-fi sex romp. This is one of those movies where it sounds better than it’s actually executed. The story (such as it is) involves Barbarella going to the planet Lythonian to bring back Earth scientist Duran Duran (that name seems familiar) from the Black Queen. She needs to do this because Duran invented something called the positronic ray which erases people and puts them into the fourth dimension never to be seen again. Read More »

Tatsuya is just your regular Japanese guy. His father broke into his mother’s house and raped her while forcing her husband to watch. Then growing up with his mother who is still married to the same guy, he would peek through the keyhole and watch his step father bump uglies with his mistress while Tatsuya’s mother was forced to watch. It’s pretty much The Waltons but seen through the lens of Japanese popular culture. Read More »

According to the Internet Movie Database, in less than thirty years, Joe D’Amato managed to get credit for directing some 198 movies. Beyond The Darkness is probably his most famous one. If you’ve never heard of D’Amato or this movie, you may be more familiar with Jurassic Pork, Robin Hood: Thief of Wives, or The Erotic Adventures of Aladdin X. He also lent his directing talents in some capacity to Zombie 5: Killing Birds and Contamination .7 if your tastes run towards something other than obscure Italian adult knock-offs of major Hollywood films. He’s probably the only director who could make a movie called Endgame and you wouldn’t be able to guess if it was a porno or a post-apocalyptic adventure without actually watching it. Read More »

If you’ve seen George Romero’s zombie movies too many times, are tired of the wan imitations from Italy, and befuddled by the recent Japanese wave of undead films that stress low budget style over storytelling, then it may be time for you to look into a cheap Chinese import. Bio Zombie is a movie out of Hong Kong that puts a frenetic, comedic spin on the zombie genre and is surprisingly entertaining once the zombies finally start rampaging in the second half of the movie. Read More »

Herschell Gordon Lewis made Blood Feast in 1963 and it has the distinction of being the first gore film. In fact, H.G. and producer David F. Friedman will tell you that right at the beginning of the audio commentary. They’ll also tell you that films like Halloween and the Nightmare on Elm Street series owe their existence to Blood Feast. Read More »

Any ambivalence that I had for watching a movie about a killer turkey disappeared as soon as I laid eyes on our hero, a biker by the name of Herschell. The only thing I have to say is why in the hell didn’t anyone tell me this movie starred Elvis? Read More »

Instantly boring, this British production from the early 1970s about a guy who goes to Greece because he’s impotent and ends up getting turned into a vampire by a hot broad also manages to be insanely stupid. While I’m sure this movie had great appeal for all those British dudes without any motion in their ocean, for us American guys with plenty of rise in our Levis, the whole thing seemed a bit silly! Read More »

Mickey Hargitay was a body builder who starred in Hercules Vs. The Hydra, Delirium, and a couple of other Italian schlock flicks, but the most impressive item on his resume is that he was once the husband of Jayne Mansfield. He puts all that vital experience to use in Bloody Pit Of Horror as a guy that runs around shirtless in red tights, torturing and killing the folks who just wanted to use his castle to do some cheesecake photo shoots for a horror anthology they were working on. Read More »

I don’t think that Richard really wanted to be governor all that badly. Sure, he was giving interviews, holding court in his fancy office shuffling files while advising his secretary he was not to be disturbed, and having cocktail party receptions, but I don’t think his heart was in it. And I sure know his dingus wasn’t in it either! Because it kept getting into his stripper/singer girlfriend when his old lady was out of town at her mother’s! Read More »

And on the sixth day, God created Trash! And it was good. Especially his hair! That’s right Trashers, Mark Gregory hits the big screen yet again, this time portraying the greatest role of all time, the very first man! Well, after his role as Trash in Bronx Warriors, his role as Johnny Hondo in War Bus Commando, and his role as Thunder in all three Thunder films! Still, playing Adam looks damn good on his resume, too. It certainly plays to his strength of standing around with a stupefied look on his face. After all, everything is new to Adam, so when he acts like a confused five year old when Eve announces she’s making a baby, it’s completely believable! Read More »

So much of the Vietnam POW experience is portrayed in a negative light. There’s the obscene physical abuse as well as the unrelenting mental torture. There’s the inhuman living conditions and the years away from loved ones. There’s the uncertainty of whether you are going to live through the next morning or whether you’re going to get another meal. Then, even if there is a rescue mission mounted by a one man killing machine named Rambo or Braddock, there’s the distinct possibility that you might be one of the anonymous grubby guys who dies in the escape attempt. Read More »

In his earlier Strip Nude For Your Killer, director Andrea Bianchi (Massacre) harnessed man’s deep-seated fear of fat guys in tighty-whities to scare us into dropping our Twinkies and Moonpies lest tons of fashion models get killed by dudes in motorcycle outfits. With Burial Ground, Bianchi raises the stakes, turns it up a notch, and takes terror to a terrifying new freaking level by setting an army of Etruscan zombies loose on a bunch of dirty old sods and horny skanky sluts! Read More »

A couple of observations about Vietnam vets and post traumatic stress disorder need to be made after watching this odd hybrid of the Italian cannibal and Rambo genres. It probably would be better for your mental well-being if you are having flashbacks about how crappy the war was, specifically when your hometown buddies take a bite out of your arm when you’re rescuing them from a tiger cage, if your bedroom wasn’t adorned with photos from the war, including a really nicely framed and matted picture of a bunch of stuff blowing up. Read More »

A woman goes down to the Amazon with her brother and her best friend so that she can find proof that cannibalism never has occurred and is in fact just a cruel myth. How do you prove a negative? Let’s say she goes down there and doesn’t see any cannibalism. What does that prove? Only that on that particular day at that particular time she didn’t see any. I was never real sure about whether she had thought through this whole thing as far as her research methods go, but since this is an Italian gutmuncher I was prepared to suspend my disbelief on that count at least. Read More »

Today was one of those days that I decided to tie up a bunch of nagging loose ends. After moving to this great state six years ago, I finally went and got myself a driver’s license. I had been avoiding doing it because I heard something about taking a stupid written test and since I had a valid license from my old home state, I was outraged that that wasn’t good enough. Read More »

Death Smiled At Murder is an understated and uninteresting Italian horror film that unfortunately brought to mind comparisons to the similarly understated and uninteresting Italian horror film, The House With The Windows That Laughed. That film by Pupi Avati had this slow, pastoral quality to it with its lush countryside scenery and slack pacing. Death Smiled At Murder also has the benefit of some nice scenery and a fancy score that seeks to add some class to a movie that can’t help but betray its roots as an exploitation-revenge-from-beyond-the-grave drama. Since this was a Joe D’Amato movie after all, these low key scenes of characters having parties and going on hunting trips and taking bubble baths were punctuated by jarring shots of poorly realized gore straight out of Lucio Fulci movie. Read More »

This is another one of those giallo movies from Italy. My Italian is about as rusty as my recall of this movie, but roughly translated, giallo means “Italian slasher movie with noxiously bad heavy metal music substituting for suspense.” This time it’s directed by Lamberto Bava (Demons, A Blade In The Dark) and if this film is any indication, he managed to inherit only his last name from his famous father. Read More »

If you’re tired of Italian movies about zombies, cannibals, ancient Greeks, and cross-dressing slashers, Dial: Help provides some welcome relief in that it strives to achieve something just a little different . Striving to achieve something isn’t exactly the same as actually achieving something since the little twist put on things here is that instead of a fashion model being harassed by a guy in a wimpy beard or demented family member, she is being stalked by her telephone! Read More »

Three of the cinema’s best genres are finally mixed together to produce a love child of death, dismemberment, and amputee fellatio! Taking the very finest elements of the Vietnam POW movie, the stolen Nazi gold movie, and the micro-budget mid 1980s Italian action movie, Dog Tags manages to even work in a strip club scene for no reason except that director Romano Scavolini (Nightmare In A Damaged Brain) is just that damn good! Could anything less be expected from the brother of the writer of American Rickshaw? Read More »

After watching this movie I came to a couple of conclusions. The first is that despite this being directed by their idol, Lucio Fulci, the gorehounds will be somewhat disappointed with it. The second thing I figured out is that in spite of Fulci’s reputation, anyone that enjoys a good, unsettling thriller will come away feeling very satisfied with what they’ve seen. The last and by far the most important thing I learned was that the title refers to a retarded girl’s Donald Duck doll. Read More »

You know, I can never get enough of these movies about deranged Hong Kong taxi cab drivers banging corpses. There’s just something life affirming about knowing that our country is not the only cesspool capable of producing these animals. Besides, with China’s birth control policy, the population over there has become unbalanced, leaving lots of deranged taxi cab drivers whose best bet for a date is the streetwalker-fare they just strangled to death in the back seat of the cab. “Mother is the invention of opportunity” is probably how the rudimentary English subtitles would no doubt put it. Read More »

Still hacking our way through Italian cannibal territory, Eaten Alive is another Umberto Lenzi movie about unknown Italian actors and wayward porn stars stumbling around the jungle getting raped, chopped up and eaten. Along the way several innocent animals also get the axe. At this point in our career, having sat through any number of these movies that highlight needless animal atrocities (see also Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Holocaust), we can barely muster up the outrage (it’s just not that interesting to write about the third go around) and we’ll merely catalog the criminal acts committed against various creatures so that the responsible viewer can beware and the messed up viewer will know if it’s worth getting. Read More »

Anthony Wong stars in this movie that is what Dustin Hoffman’s movie Outbreak should have been: a story about a raping and murdering dude that infects a bunch of people with Ebola by tricking them into eating hamburgers made out of human meat. It really isn’t as funny as it probably sounds which is a bit surprising what with all the rapes, murders, cannibalism, and the on-camera slaughter of frogs and chickens. Read More »

Ranking somewhere below the women-in-prison and above the nunsploitation genres, the “Nazi chicks” movies more than any other type of film make you wonder about the intended audience. I’m not one to judge anyone for what types of movies they like or don’t like, but it’s safe to say that those of you out there pining away for those heady days of the mid to late seventies when lots of aspiring actresses were willing to peroxide their hair, strap on the jackboots, and carry a riding crop like they were expecting to mount Sea Biscuit instead of some toad in an SS uniform are undoubtedly a bunch of degenerates. Whose bright idea was it to attempt to eroticize anything about a genocidal dictator and his mindless followers? And doesn’t it seem the least bit gauche that the Italians and the French would be the ones primarily responsible for these things? Read More »

What follows is my rickety and probably half-right explanation of Emanuelle’s film career. Apparently there was once a movie called simply enough, Emmanuelle. Released in 1974, it starred Sylvia Kristel as a French broad living in Bangkok doing all sorts of things that adults do when they get horny. Sporting such a powerful plot, the movie easily spawned about seven legitimate sequels. But this isn’t our Emanuelle. You see our Emanuelle is known as the Black Emanuelle and she’s a slut of a different color. Read More »

I don’t think there’s a bigger group of prima donnas in the world than horror movie fans. They just sit around debating the finer points of whether some crappy flick has good gore, wringing their hands over which obscure Italian slasher movie is the best, and ranting and raving about boycotting this and that company until they release some scuzzy movie in its properly uncut form. Even worse are the wars they have over what the aspect ratio really is of some movie no one’s ever heard of. Read More »

Presumably the French high-priced call girl Mystère is supposed to be a super sexy broad what with her heavily made up face and flawless features. Why else is everyone prepared to pay her something along the lines of $1000 to sleep with her? Personally, I found her just a bit on the nasty side of super skeevy since she turned three freaking tricks in a single night! Later on when she’s trying to escape a would-be killer, I was just thankful that she could still walk, let alone scurrying around her roof in an effort to fend him off! Read More »

We’ve all seen movies where the killer is someone close to the heroine that she never suspected. We’re also familiar with the red herrings thrown out to implicate the innocent. And the little kickers at the end of these horror movies that show the villain’s heinous activities aren’t over despite all evidence to the contrary? Well, we’d be shocked if there wasn’t a shock ending! But Night Killer is going to use all these tired and horribly ineffective conventions as just the jumping off point! How do we know that? Because there is a moment in the movie where a woman says, “my grandma, what a big schlong you have!” Read More »

I think I must have missed the wedding. You know, the one where Dario Argento (Suspiria) got married to the steadicam. I think John Carpenter gave the bride away. When you watch Argento’s take on The Phantom of the Opera (not to be confused with the regular version of the film he did about 11 years later), you’re alternately impressed with the sweeping shots of the opera house and nauseated by the floating views he uses to follow some of the action. Read More »

The year is 225 A.B. The A.B. stands for “after the bomb” and the world is a different place than the one we’re used to in Italian gore movies. Gone are the cities infested by zombies, gone are the tropical jungles infested by zombies, gone are the grottos infested by vampires. All that remains are buildings infested with rats. But not just any rats mind you, but rats that look suspiciously like guinea pigs with a nice bronzer applied. It’s all because of the radiation and the accompanying mutation you understand. It makes you wonder what guinea pigs look like in this new world! Read More »

Surprisingly, Roller Blade is not the first post-apocalyptic roller skating movie. Skatetown, U.S.A. and Roller Boogie both preceded it by a decade. And if you don’t think either of those films qualifies as post-apocalyptic, I don’t know what else you’d call one movie starring Linda Blair from the director of Truck Stop Women and another featuring (deep breath!) Patrick Swayze, Flip Wilson, Ruth Buzzi, Horshack, Marcia Brady, Scott Baio, and some chick from Little House On The Prairie! Read More »

I originally figured that since “tenebre” sounded a little like “tentacle” that maybe this movie was going to be about a giant squid. Then I discovered that it was an Italian flick so I figured that some giant squid was on the loose in Rome eating fashion models. It ended up though being a fairly straight forward slasher flick where the murders were all related to a book that Anthony Franciosa’s character Peter Neal had written, called Tenebre. Read More »

I’m going to go out on a limb here and hazard a guess that Sir Laurence Olivier didn’t receive his knighthood for his scene in this movie where he got all turned on by watching his daughter-in-law nursing his grandson and ended up bedding her down at the conclusion of a ten o’clock feeding that left the audience sick to its stomach. Whether this is the single worst scene of this movie is open to debate since the movie is strewn with them, but it has to be the most memorably tacky of them. That you’ve got a venerated film legend cashing a $400,000 paycheck for doing so only adds to queasiness of the scene. Read More »

This movie confirmed to me what I always suspected. Namely, that I have really bad taste. How else can I explain that despite the fact that this film was two hours and twenty minutes of silly soap opera trash, I had little problem sitting through all of it? The story of Jonas Cord was little more than incident after incident of him bullying his way through some business deal or other and treating everyone around him like dirt. I didn’t really mind any of it, even though it never amounted to much and was neatly tied up in one of the most simplistic and least believable endings you’re likely to see. (The movie purports to be a thinly-veiled take on the life of Howard Hughes, but doesn’t have the guts to let Jonas Cord have the same finish as the reclusive tycoon.) Read More »

If you’re like me, you’ve often stayed awake at night worrying that the pet food you feed your no-good ungrateful cat might be made with ground up people. The Corpse Grinders takes this common fear and makes it into a movie about as good as you could expect when the subject matter is cat food. As befitting the definitive film about humans turned into cat food, this is the special edition which means if you’re really demented, you can subject yourself to director Ted V. Mikels’ commentary on the filming of the greatest movie ever made about Soylent Green for pets. Read More »

Six people are on a camping trip on a deserted island (except for the chainsaw wielding maniac, his equally psycho wife and their retarded son, and three or four condom salesmen). The three guys are named Professor (he carries around a video camera), Soldier (he carries around a big knife), and Ken (all Asian movies are required to feature a character with some form of the name Ken - usually Kenny). The three girls are named Linda (Professor’s girlfriend), BeBe (Soldier’s girlfriend) and Winnie (Ken’s girlfriend). Now that you know the main characters, we can set about killing them off. But first Soldier takes everyone’s cell phones and hides them for some murky and ultimately stupid reason, thus assuring the killer free reign until the boat home arrives in the morning. Read More »

In spite of the cool painted movie poster that this one features with its team of female commandos in form-fitting uniforms leading an assault on enemy troops while stuff is blowing up in the background and an evil looking guy looks on indifferently, I put off watching this one due to the fact that the front of the DVD proclaimed it not simply The Doll Squad, but as Ted V. Mikels’ The Doll Squad. Read More »

Stefano has taken a job finishing a fresco (which is apparently different than a Fresca, a refreshingly different soft drink) at a church on an isolated island somewhere in Italy. I had high hopes for this film by Pupi Avati when Stefano got off the boat and set foot onto the island. There was a sultry broad making eyes at him and a midget greeted him on shore. This midget, Solmi, was the mayor of the island and some of you are probably bursting a few blood vessels trying to place him. He also appeared as Mr. Big in the hit movie Zeder, another film by Pupi Avati! How could you possibly forget that! Read More »

The Intruder Within unsurprisingly accomplishes less than Alien, which it relentlessly rips off for its 90 minutes. But The Intruder Within accomplishes all this failure with less resources! Alien, with its R rating, could have alien parasites busting out of stomachs and cyborgs going haywire and needing to be destroyed. With its theatrical budget it could afford to design a sinister atmosphere with its creepy sets and inspired creature designs. The TV movie market of the early 1980s being what it was, The Intruder Within could only afford a junior varsity version of the alien, could almost give you a glimpse of a little blood, and had to imply the possessed crew member raped another just as the film went dark for a commercial break. It’s blue collar origins were perfectly illustrated with its oil rig setting. That and they traded in Sigourney Weaver for Jennifer Warren. Read More »

I know what you’re thinking. “Ugh, another wan Indiana Jones imitation with lame stunts, rickety temples, and treasure that appears to be fashioned from tin foil and one of my grandma’s vases.” And the super studly video box art doesn’t help. “A fortune in diamonds in the hands of the world’s most evil empire!” it screams as a determined Indy clone brandishes his gun while his sexy girlfriend cowers suggestively behind him. A diamond the size of a microwave oven sits in front of them and the whole picture is jacked up beyond shiny belief, drenched in glittering foil! Crap! Harrison Ford himself would tell you it’s got a better cover than any of his movies ever had! Read More »

If you’ve seen the DVD cover for The Other Hell, you don’t need me to endorse it for you. With “The Bruno Mattei Collection” plastered on it, this baby pretty much endorses itself! Bruno is one of our most dependably prolific Italian filmmakers who dabble in the various forms of exploitation films that country is notorious for. A quick rundown of his credits reads pretty much like a list of low end entries in all those genres: Hell Of The Living Dead, Rats: Night Of Terror, Violence In A Women’s Prison, Robowar. Bruno’s flicks are always the ones you go to after you’ve worked your way through all the better known ones. And usually when it’s all said and done, you feel pretty much like the movie has worked all the way through you, too. Read More »

I knew I was in trouble right from the beginning when a message appeared on the screen that if this film caused someone to meditate, then it would have been worth the effort. I was pretty sure that when I tracked down a copy of The Web Of Silence - A.I.D.S., it was because it was an Italian movie that was going to either gross me out or make me laugh and hopefully both. I was also pretty sure that I didn’t buy it because I was in need of meditation inspiration. That’s what my day job is for. Read More »

He gave us the greatest post-apocalyptic-giant-ratmen-battles-biker movie ever made (Rats: Night Of Terror), the epic crossdresser-battles-zombie movie (Hell Of The Living Dead) and now Bruno Mattei would like to sentence us to one of the all-time scuzziest women-in-prison movies ever! Well, the women-in-prison movie he made right after this one with the same cast, crew, and most of the same story (Women’s Prison Massacre) is also one of the all-time scuzziest, but I’ll leave the debate as to which is actually the scuzziest to the historians. Read More »

Do you remember that women-in-prison movie that starred Laura Gemser? And was co-written by Olivier Lefait? And was directed by Bruno Mattei? You know the one - Laura was wrongly imprisoned in the scuzziest women’s prison in Italy and was relentlessly tormented by the evil guards and depraved inmates. Ursula Flores and Franca Stoppi were a couple of Laura’s enemies that made sure her life was hell. And it also featured Gabriele Tinti as the nice guy who found himself battling along side Laura inside the prison. Read More »