Series: Film / TV

Tragic Ceremony directed by Riccardo Freda

As I have said elsewhere, my abiding love for Italian actress Luciana Paluzzi has, cinematically, led me to some fairly unusual places. From my initial enthrallment with her Fiona Volpe character in 1965’s Thunderball and on to such disparate fare as the British comedy Carlton-Browne of the F.O. (1959), the Japanese sci-fi shlock classic The Green Slime (1968), the Jess Franco WIP flick 99 Women (1969) and the blaxploitation actioner Black Gunn (1972), I have always found that a little Luciana makes any film go down easier.

The Dead Eyes of London directed by Alfred Vohrer

As distinct a film genre as the American film noir of the 1940s and ’50s and the Italian giallo of the 1970s, the German krimi pictures that flourished throughout the 1960s are almost exclusively based on the works of one remarkably prolific author: British novelist Edgar Wallace. The creator of around 175 (!) novels of mystery, crime, and detection, Wallace and his gigantic oeuvre supplied the German film industry of the late ’50s to the early ’70s with a superabundance of material to draw on.

Suicide Club directed by Shion Sono

There are two types of film review that I find it particularly difficult to write. The first is for a movie that I have fallen head over heels in love with, with fear that my gushing words of praise will do little to do the picture justice. And then there is the review for a film that, despite repeated watches, I just cannot wrap my poor aching cerebrum around; in short, one that I just cannot fully understand. Shion Sono’s 2001 offering, Suicide Club, is,

The Sinful Dwarf directed by Vidal Raski

Film buffs who are curious as to what the whole Eurosleaze genre is all about could not find a better exemplar than The Sinful Dwarf. A 1973 picture from Denmark, of all places, the film conflates soft-core porn elements, deformed characters, scenes of ultracamp, and considerable doses of drugs and depravity into one of the sleaziest confections any viewer could possibly hope for.

In this truly one-of-a-kind outing, the viewer meets Lila Lash, a drunken, scar-faced ex-entertainer (played by Clara Keller), who,

City Of The Living Dead directed by Lucio Fulci

The second installment of Lucio Fulci’s so-called Zombie Quartet — coming after 1979’s Zombie and preceding 1981’s The Beyond and The House By the Cemetery — City of the Living Dead (1980) finds the Italian director near the very top of his form, confounding his audience with borderline senseless plots and repulsing viewers with an array of awesome gross-out effects.

In this one, a priest named Father Thomas (Fabrizio Jovine) hangs himself, for reasons never explained,

The Beyond directed by Lucio Fulci

In the 1977 film The Sentinel, a character played by Cristina Raines moves into a Brooklyn Heights apartment building that, as it turns out, sits above the gateway to Hell. But as Italian director Lucio Fulci shows us in the third picture of his so-called Zombie Quartet, 1981’s The Beyond (which picture followed 1979’s Zombie and 1980’s City of the Living Dead and preceded that same year’s House By the Cemetery), there are actually SEVEN gateways on Earth that lead down to the infernal nether regions!

Tokyo Gore Police directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura

Those viewers who thought the pyrotechnic gore FX of Yoshihiro Nishimura in the 2001 cult item Suicide Club to be a bit too over the top may want to hold on to their seats and wrap themselves in a full-length rubber coverall as Tokyo Gore Police begins to unspool. Living up to its title in spades, this 2008 offering does indeed give us a look at the cops in Japan’s capital city in the near future, and ladles out more of the red stuff than The Wild Bunch,

Inferno directed by Dario Argento

In Dario Argento’s 1977 masterpiece, Suspiria, the viewer learns that the ballet school known as the Tanz Akademie, in Freiburg, Germany, was the home to a coven of witches led by a being later revealed to be the Mater Suspiriorum, Latin for “Mother of Sighs.” And three years later, in Argento’s semisequel, Inferno, the viewer learns something even more disturbing. The Mother of Sighs, the oldest, was apparently only one of three sister entities; living somewhere in Rome, there exists the Mater Lacrimarum (Mother of Tears),

The Bloodstained Shadow directed by Antonio Bido

A practically goreless giallo coming fairly late in that genre’s cycle, The Bloodstained Shadow (1978) yet manages to provide all the requisite thrills that Eurohorror fans might reasonably expect. This was the second picture from director Antonio Bido, whose initial giallo entry, The Cat With Jade Eyes (aka Watch Me When I Kill), released the year before, seems almost forgotten today. Drawing liberally from 15 years’ worth of giallo tropes and conventions preceding it (Bido, on this Anchor Bay DVD,