"The World is dead. It raped itself...But I'll purify it with blood!" -George Eastman with Manic Panic highlights, wearing homoerotic Stormtrooper armor. When a youthful Dr. Graves first discovered Max-sploitation existed, I had what amounted to a mini-stroke. A whole slew of movies featuring modified
FACES OF DEATH transcended its physical form. It grew like a starving void, spreading like an eldritch cancer. It bulged against the film reels within the VHS and bloomed violently out of the plastic housing. The metastasis could not be stopped by the barrier of its slipcase with the drawing
If your movie has Ol' Scratch in the title, I better see him make an appearance. Satan's Storybook has an Aldi-brand Lou Cypher with shag carpet legs. The Devil's Rain has Borgnine's titanic eyebrows perfectly channeling the man downstairs. Asylum Of Satan is
It's surreal watching a seventies movie in high definition. I'm sure this has been talked about before, and using far more pretentious language, but it's an unmooring experience. During the wedding scene in The Bride (Or Last House on Massacre Street if yer'
Frank Zito is 1980 New York made flesh. He is the blinding lights of the porno theaters, beaming photons that promise lust across slush-slick sidewalks. He is the steam from a manhole cover obscuring a figure that watches you, as you fumble for your keys in the doorway. He is
Bruno Mattei would have remade all of his movies. I'm paraphrasing, but he said as much in an interview on the Blue Underground DVD for, I think, Hell Of The Living Dead. I respect his honesty. I also respect his callous disregard for the notion of creative licensing.
Dear friends, Hellmaster (AKA Them if yer' nasty) is bad. I want to be up front about that. If you want me to judge the film on its ability to have an understandable plot structure, create meaningful character arcs and give something for David Emge to do, then I
There's a world where your daydreams become nightmares that involve a Kali-coded devil woman and the metal band D.C. Lacroix. This is a place where your girlfriend has a Pentagram badly tattooed on her butt, and a fully stocked bar in her living room. In this world
Ugliness can be a powerful cinematic tool. That should go without saying when it comes to the horror genre, but we are in a world far removed from the phrase "Go without saying." Michael Rooker in a crumbling apartment, stammering slowly through a dark confession in Henry: Portrait
"It was the start of the year in our old Celtic lands, and we'd be waiting in our houses of wattles and clay. The barriers would be down, you see, between the real and the unreal, and the dead might be looking in to sit by our
Long Deprived of Light -Part 2- As we walk, the ground slopes downward and the already dampened sounds of the surface world become a memory. The packed soil of the tunnel darkens, settling on the color of pitch. Illumination from the mag light makes for a weak amber portal, one
Long Deprived Of Light "See! Right-fuckin'-here!" He emphasizes the words by jumping up and down on kissing layers of autumns past. Hollow thudding accompanies the collision of his combat boots. For once in his life Roger-fuckin'-Kormick is right. Which means the tunnels are real.