Month: October 2016

Horrors of Malformed Men directed by Teruo Ishii

Based on the 1926 novel The Strange Tale of Panorama Island by Edogawa Rampo — the so-called Edgar Allan Poe of Japan — as well as at least two Rampo short stories, “The Human Chair” (1925) and “The Walker in the Attic” (also 1925), and also conflating Rampo’s most famous detective character, Kogoro Akechi, the 1969 film Horrors of Malformed Men obviously has a lot of ground to cover. The picture was co-written by its director, genre favorite Teruo Ishii,

The Skin I Live In directed by Pedro Almodovar

I am probably not the best person to comment on a film by the hugely popular Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. Of the man’s 20 or so films to date, I had only seen precisely one — his seventh, 1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and that many years ago. But that film had struck me as being wildly funny and entertaining, I recall, so it was with great enthusiasm that I popped Almodovar’s 18th offering, The Skin I Live In,

Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism directed by Harald Reinl

I have written elsewhere about my longtime love for redheaded Italian actress Lucianna Paluzzi, who captivated this viewer back in 1965 by dint of her portrayal of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. agent Fiona Volpe in the James Bond outing Thunderball. Two years later, another redheaded S.P.E.C.T.R.E. agent also caught my fancy: Helga Brandt, Agent No. 11, in the Bond blowout You Only Live Twice. Brought to indelible life by German actress Karin Dor, she remains, 45 years later, one of the sexiest of the Bond “bad girls,”