"The Crazies"(2010)d/Breck Eisner

I believe I went on record somewhere saying that,if Hollywood feels the need to cram an assload of rehashed retread remakes down our throats,they should at least remake films that would benefit from an update,and I'm pretty sure I cited George A. Romero's minor classic,The Crazies,as an example.Feel free to go back and scour the archives if you wanna.Of course,I enjoy the original just fine,but an actual budget certainly wouldn't have hurt it.So when I heard that Crazies was on the upcoming remake list,I actually wasn't sickened to my stomach for once by the news.With a competent director,a good cast,some impressive effects,a solid screenplay,a reimagining could have boosted the film's stock right into classic ground.As per usual,I wasn't that enthused,but remained cautiously optimistic while avoiding the big horror sites usual advance dicksucking and carefully calculated pimping for the studio,as that sort of stuff alone can turn me off of a film.If I want to see something,all the cookie cutter trailers that give away the whole plot in two minutes for the airheads in the audience and contrived teasers in the world aren't gonna intensify that for me.When positive reviews started returning on tonight's entry,I had my faithful and trusty roommate score us a copy for screening purposes,and the wheels were set in motion.
It's not a terrible movie,which is some sort of hollow victory for remakes,but it certainly isn't good,either.Eisner does a real paint-by-the-numbers job in the director's chair,fumbling every opportunity to rise above the original away like a wet bar of soap,instead embracing mediocrity like a twenty-five dollar head queen on tenth ave and forty sixth back in 1988.Script?Pretty pungent,absolutely zero backstory on any of the characters prior to getting dosed with Trixie whatsoever,and with the time they conserved by cutting to the chase,they manage to inject very little.The titular crazies really never go all that crazy.It's almost like the films makers must be mentally retarded,and upon watching the 1973 version,only managed to pull one idea from it."Pitchfork!That'll be really scary!"Because besides that particular scene,there's not a whole helluva lot really going on.Like the mongoloids responsible for the Black Christmas remake..."Eyeball!Pretty crystal unicorn!"Unless someone can prove me wrong,that's my prognosis and I'm sticking to it.

Ah, bravo Figaro!Bravo, bravissimo!Fortunatissimo per verità!
The sheriff(Olyphant) of Ogden Marsh,Iowa,"the friendliest place on earth"(I always thought that was Honey Pot,Pa.Either way,you gotta admit,it's a great name for a town.),has got his hands full.He's got a pregnant she-doctor(Mitchell) for a wife,it's the first day of spring,and the town's inhabitants have begun to show signs of infection by the Trixie virus,a government-born biological weapon accidentally unleashed on the populace after a plane goes down in a marsh that empties into a tributary that supplies the town's water aptly named for sewer worker Ed Norton's wife.I'm kidding about the last part.A shotgun-brandishing town drunk wanders onto the local baseball diamond,only to eat sheriff-inflicted,bullet-laden death after a very mild-pazzo off.Then a local farmer takes it upon himself to lock his wife and son in a closet as he douses his digs in gasoline and burns 'em to the ground while he cuts the grass,whistling.Some bufords hunting out of season discover the bloated,gaseous remains of a parachuting soldier in the bottoms,leading the lawman and his trusty deputy(Joe Anderson)to discover the wreckage of a massive government plane submerged in their swamp.With the government's chocolate in Ogden Marsh's peanut butter,the military is swift upon the scene to quarantine the infected,relocate the healthy,and generally push decent people around like they were ninety-eight lb beach weaklings.Meanwhile,back at the corpse house,the sheriff discovers the mortician has gone perma-crackers himself,sewing the eyes and mouths shut of living folks,and attacking him with a bone saw,nearly making him a her in the process(a bit Jackie Chan-esque here,I thought).

If Radha leans this way,she's got a clear view of the Beatles leaving the plane.
While in an insolation tent,strapped to a gurney,Judy,who's been split from her husband for a mistaken pregnancy fever,awakes to a military camp overtaken by the infected loons,one of which has a propensity for skewering people strapped down to gurneys with a pitchfork.Just before he can run the incapacitated medical practitioner,or her assistant,Becca(Danielle Panabaker),who happens to be strapped down herself,a few loons down,David and Russell show up on the scene and blow him to high heaven.The four then sneak their way through the decimated,burning city towards David's old cruiser up on blocks in his garage,stopping to watch Becca's boyfriend and his mother eat military lead and get fried like city chickens with a flame thrower.Once they get the sedan roadworthy,they duck into a car wash to avoid a military chopper,and encounter a cadre of kill-crazy cunts there,with Becca eating a violent hose-lynching in the process.And then there were three,and one of those,Russell,is showing subtle early signs of infection,so in true "take one for the team" fashion,gets himself blown away by soldiers so that David and his wife can escape.The two make their way to an abandoned truck stop where they make the grisly discovery that the troops have also been wiping out the healthy townspeople in a clean sweep,and after battling with some more nutjobs,they barely escape in an eighteen wheeler before the entire town of Ogden Marsh is leveled with a nuke.They walk towards Cedar Rapids where a satellite camera picks them up,with "initiate containment protocol" flashing on the screen.The end,or the cue for a direct-to-video sequel with neither of these actors featured?I'll let you be the judge.

No,you didn't leave your barbituates on my passenger seat.Fuck off,Bruce Dern.
Eisner,ironically,has three more higher profile remakes in the works,to the tune of Escape From New York,Cronenberg's The Brood,and Flash Gordon.I can only shake my head and shrug it off as a direct result of a Hollywood board meeting of talentless cretins high on psilocybin mushrooms,saying things like..."Dude,what's a good movie?""Uhhh,that Escape one with Stuntman Mike as the eyepatch dude with the rad gun...""Totally,brah!Let's remake that fucker..."Just wait til our giallo screenplay falls into the right pair of hands.Patience.Radha we've seen earlier in genre fare such as 2007's Rogue and Silent Hill a year before.Joe Anderson some of you will remember from Carter Smith's very weird The Ruins(2008).The lovely Panabaker saw some screen action in the Friday the 13th remake.There's also one brief cameo to note.While exploring the lifeless shell of the town,a woman rides by the sheriff on a bicycle,singing.This is none other than Lynn Lowry,star of the original,I Drink Your Blood,and various other seventies classics.Pretty nice touch,I gotta say,and exactly how a cameo should be handled.Too little,too late.On the ratings scale the new Crazies merits a single wop,and a 'script for mild anti-psychotics.

Looks like Jason Statham with a glue-on porn stache and some sort of veiny braille tree situation on his grillage.

"Tarantulas:The Deadly Cargo"(1977)d/Stuart Hagmann

...except that's a wolf spider,jackasses.
Oh 1977,how I dearly miss you,baby.I only wish I was older during you.As an eight year old,I missed out on Eraserhead and Suspiria in the theaters,though I was already checking out R rated movies with the old man.The skull-chick brushing her hair in the television commercial musta scared the Nutella off his Italian toast or something.All I know is I'm thankful nobody cracked their assbone on the perpetual pile of Micronauts scattered recklessly across the living room floor back then,and that I'm still not sure where Andrew Gold was headed with "Lonely Boy"(number fifty in the top one hundred songs way back then).Let me get this straight,pal.The kid was jealous of his baby sister when he was two years old?And subsequently moved out at age eighteen to find love,still emotionally scarred from the snubbing he took as a toddler?Only,his sister gets knocked up with a baby boy instead,and the cycle continues?You made more fuckin' sense when you wrote "Thank You For Being a Friend",which ended up as the theme song for tv's The Golden Girls,which also has me wondering...are they the "Golden" Girls because of their ages,or because they were part of your stable of geryatric bitches?Fill me in,brother.
1977 was also choice because they still shit out "movie of the week" horror tele-films like this,with absolutely no fucking basis in reality,not one A list star on the cast list(unless you count Claude "I'm always either a trucker,sheriff,or a fireman" Akins,and really,who'd do that.),and a nondescript script with more gaping holes than R. Bud Dwyer's forehead(granted,he only had one in his,but it was a fucking doozy)and chock full o'hokey false movie science that pays off with one of the most head-scratchinest endings you might ever see.Also,you may remember Matthew "Little House on the Prairie" Laborteaux/Labytoreaux/Labyorteaux/Laborteauk,as "Additional Voice" in Disney's Mulan and more recently,as "Additional Voice" in Bride Wars(2009).Yeah,you MIGHT.Seriously,this fucking kid was everywhere back then,you couldn't pull out a huge television power knob without seeing this pouty little prick's grillpiece squeezing every second out of his fifteen minutes.If I end up giving this review one wop afterall,it's gonna be because this annoying fuck gets bitten by spiders,and nobody bothers to save him.Nothing personal,Matthew,if you happen to be reading this between "Additional Voice" gigs.It is what it is.

Dan Challis and Johnny Fever wanna smuggle Ecuadorian coffee together,but they end up with a plane full o' quesa puro instead.
On a renegade smuggling mission direct from Mrs. Folger herself,Howard Hessman and Tom Atkins have recruited tres Ecuadorian peons to shovel pounds and pounds of coffee into burlap sacks,which they plan to turn into profitous folding money back in the States.Only problem is,the Ecuadorians kinda miss the alarming number of hairy mygalamorphs going into the bags with each shovelful.In return for their trabajando mucho,the daring duo opts to let the gents kip amongst the coffee beans during the flight to the northern region of the continent.Some of the spiders escape their burlap prisons and begin to bite the spaniards in the back of the plane.Cue hokey movie science lesson #1:Though,to any arachnophile worth his weight in chelicerae,the featured spiders are both Brachypelma and Aphonopelma species,which are terrestrial and usually extremely mild-tempered with non-toxic venom,the film's director would like you to believe these little darlins are "Ecuadorian banana spiders",capable of causing death in minutes.That's a pretty big fucking stretch,Armstrong,but we'll proceed.Adding insult to injury,one of the plane's engines shits out,forcing the would-be coffee moguls to crash in a field somewhere in an orange-producing burg in California.Literally seconds after the plane goes down,the crash scene is descended upon by all the main characters.Fireman Burt(Akins),Doc Hodgins(Pat Hingle),Mayor Douglas,the police chief,and even Joe and Cindy,a young couple.While trying to pry the plane's door open,they notice a steadily leaking flow of gasoline coming from the wreckage,so they naturally dig a trench around the site to divert the path of the petrol.That'd have been an ace idea if a random jackass on a motorcycle didn't speed out of control directly towards the wreck,crashing his bike,and effectively catching the fuel on fire and blowing up the plane.

Matthew(Matt Laborteaux)may be effin' with oranges here,but it'd be nothing but lemons for him later on.
Hokey movie science lesson #2:Ecuadorian banana spiders are made of a flame proof material,evidently,as the army of arachnids emerges from the explosion totally unscathed and begin biting the good townsfolk immediately,forcing Hodgins to set up a makeshift triage,where Joe's friend,who just happens to be a world-renowned arachnophile,deducts that the responsible culprits must be Ecuadorian banana spiders that stowed away in the coffee beans by the fucking hundreds,which by hokey movie mathematics,means that the some of the burlap sacks must've had more spiders than coffee in them...and still didn't get noticed.Peculiar that.And if that sounds a little funny to you,just wait til you wrap your collective minds around the town's methodology of ridding themselves of the menacing mygalamorphs.Oh yeah,Matthew(Laborteaux) is among the first to notice the spiders,pokes around at one with a stick,just like an annoying little fuck who's begging to get poisoned would do.Only,unlike the usual movie of the week fare of the day,where the snot nose would get a good scare and learn a valuable lesson from it all,this brat gets bitten,suffers,and dies.How fucking hot is that?Meanwhile,the mayor is prepping his oranges for the marketplace,ignoring the warnings of just about everyone in the movie to shut down his processing plant,which,by the way,has become infested with thousands of spiders who are attracted to the bugs that in turn,are attracted to the fruit.Just when all hope seems lost for Amity beac...uhh,the town of Finleyville,Joe researches the hairy antagonists further,coming up with Hokey movie science lesson #3:The Ecuadorian banana spider's biggest natural enemy is a type of wasp,and just the sound of its beating wings will paralyze the spider with fear for several minutes.Joe then surmizes that rounding up some bumblebees and recording the buzz,and amplifying it through a sound system in the plant,will buy them the time that they need to shovel and tong up all the paralyzed spiders and drop them into containers of alcohol.After throwing some fruit on the plant floor to draw the bugs which draws the spiders,they play the recording of the bees(bumblebees,specific South American wasps,what's the difference at this point,really)which freezes the tarantulas,allowing Fireman Bert,Joe,Cindy and the doctor to round the eight-legged varmints up and save the day,despite a momentary power shortage scare they manage to overcome.The shortage of good writing they never do.

What did I fuckin' tell ya?
Cargo proved to be Hagmann's last directorial credit(oh,sweet justice!),Claude Akins kept busy on the small screen up until his death in 1994,with Pat Hingle doing much the same until his death in 2006.Tom Atkins,of course,is very genre busy to this very day,much to the delight of horror nuts everywhere.Hessman was last seen on the genre map in Rob Zombie's H2,which I've yet to suffer through.Thank the gods for small favours.Tonight's entry is light on scares,heavy on polyester wear,and moderately full of unintentional laughs.It crawls upon the rating scale,feebly mustering a mere one wop.

Go ahead,Ida,a buck is a buck.Get eatin'!

"Faces of Death"(1978)d/John Alan Schwartz

That's a scan of my old big box Beta copy,direct from the long defunct Video World outlet in Kingston.No other box art for tonight's entry will suffice,in my eyes.I can still remember the first time I gazed upon such a loverly sight as this evening's review on video.I had stopped into Hollywood Video further down the Ave an hour or so earlier and picked up the original,only to find the sequel at the aforementioned Kingston store,where a year membership ran you a hundred bucks at one time!Their impressive horror section was primarily comprised of big box releases,of interesting film fodder like Cannibal Ferox(Make Them Die Slowly),Don't Be Afraid of the Dark,the edited Video Gems (Flesh For)Frankenstein,(Blood for)Dracula,and even Andy Milligan's The Man With Two Heads,and everything else in between.With the forefather of all of my generation's shockumentaries in hand(and its sequel),I held a double screening that night in my parents' parlour.
The vast majority of tonight's entry falls hopelessly flat with its many staged scenes of brutality,peppered with enough animal cruelty to flatline Morrissey's ass in seconds,and tied together by an unkempt Johnny Wadd-lookalike who does an awful lot of pondering and wondering throughout the whole sordid affair,which seems slightly less dated than my cousin's blue suede platform heels he wore to junior prom back in 1975 or something.Outdone on every level by later series,Death Scenes and Traces of Death,Faces still holds a special place somewhere in my thoracic cavity,and will probably remain there as a memory until they open me up post-mortem and try to find anything resembling a human lung.Good luck,fellas.I only hope there are no Dr. Gross-types on hand to offer sagacious on camera banter while they're doing it.

That's just double bleeech on the official bleeechometer.Bleeech.
After some open heart surgery footage,followed by body bagged cadavers,we're served up a choice autopsy,some Mexican mummies montages,pointless pit bull fight footage that culminates in some shots of a bloody,dead dog before taking us off to the Green Inferno,the Amazon jungle for more death-related dealings.There's a staged constrictor made to look like a chewed ear of corn by a school of blood-thirsty pirahnas,and some dart-happy Ibaros a-monkey hunting before settling down to fire-roasted simian for dinner with a shrunken head looking on,uninterested.We then travel to darkest Africa for Masai tribesmen supping on cow's blood right off the tap(translation:carotid artery)before cutting the living fuck out of it,leading us to a woman de-headifying some live poultry and some slaughterhouse footage of cows being given the bovine Columbian necktie for the chosen people,followed by the infamous faked monkey brain brunch scene,complete with rubbery scooped out monkey head that's entirely a different color than the original target of dining abuse.Then we get some douchebag hero-type shooting sharks from the safety of a boat with an AR-15,followed by some fur seal clubbings and skinnings,and alligator poachings.Just when you're prepared to flush your last vested faith in humanity down the shitter,the film switches gears and serves up some faked alligator attacks,political assasinations,and SWAT team standoffs with phony head of the family homicides.

"You've got your salad fork on the wrong side of your plate!",screams the soon-to-be-brained monkey.
Then it's back to the morgue for more cadaver and autopsy fun,before we're treated to a fake death-by-electric-chair execution,where the inmates eyes are taped to avoid them popping out as he's being shocked full of voltage like Ace Frehley(and not to hide the blood tubing for the scene's payoff,mind you).A staged Middle Eastern beheading and fake necrophagic hippie cult's bloody corpse-eating orgy follow that,with a woman's suicide jump to her death over some piped in Dixieland jazz bringing up the rear.Classy.A faked bear attack and some corpse discoveries lead us to the familiar ecological section with hokey protest song about Jesus and a faked man lighting himself on fire sequence before we tread the familiar ground of black and white World War Two footage that includes incendiary bombings and the obligatory concentration camp sequence with emasciated corpses.A section on bubonic plague and rabies leads us to several pieces of film with cholera-ridden Indians and malnourished kiddies.Accident aftermath shots and footage precede an excedingly cheesy paranormal investigation sequence where the ghostbusters monkey with their bunk instruments and sprinkle flour on the floor in hopes of scoring some ghostie footprints.Good luck on that one,boys.Dr. Wadd returns to wax pontificately about living and dying,leading us to a woman popping a tyke out over an appropriately goofy song called "Life" as the credits roll over a mother and her child in a montage Hallmark Cards would find embarrassing.

Staged electrocutions are no solution to revenge-minded retribution.
Schwartz wrote and directed tonight's entry under pseudonyms Conan le Cilaire and Alan Black,even starring as the head of the hokey flesh-dining hippie cult within.The film spurred on several sequels of successively declining levels of quality,after reportedly scoring 35 million at the box office alone.It boasted of being "Banned in 46 Countries!",when in actuality,it was closer to five,with dear old blighty the usual suspect at the top of that list(of course).In the decades since,the film has long been surpassed in ferocity by the aforementioned copycat series,and even more recently,in some really heinous mixtapes floating around on the internet these days.For the record,Japanese horse-entrail porn will probably never make it to my list of turn ons.We've come a long way from the innocent days of Mondo Cane,which upon release was actually considered shocking.Welcome to the 21st century,droogies.On the scale,Faces earns one wop for entertainment value,and another for being the catalyst that revitalized the shockumentary sub-genre,dying at the time.Classic stuff.

After seeing Dr. Frances B. Gross(Michael Carr),I wondered if having crooked glasses and Autobahn-tested hair was any way to go through the late seventies...

"Night of the Living Dead Reanimated"(2009)d/Mike Schneider

Let's get the stupid question outta the way first.You've all seen George A. Romero's 1968 cult classic,Night of the Living Dead before,right?I'm pretty sure there are some Triconympha trying on wigs in the intestine of a termite somewhere that have seen one or more incarnations of it by now.And I'm pretty sure I saw a Shamatari Indian on a NatGeo special give his best,"They're coming to get you,Barbara..." in primitive clicks,snorts,and whistles sometime.Or maybe I was just high,but you get the point.It's pretty much a universal fact that said movie is one of the greatest horror movies of all-time,yes?The only people that would deny the above statement would also bludgeon Santa Claus into a coma tent with a blackjack in front of a crowd of eight year old children.They're no-goodskis,milk-breathed teat-suckers,and we don't like 'em around these parts.There's been a lot of vacuous negative wind billowing about on the interwebs about tonight's review,and frankly,it bums me out.When you get nearly 150 different artists to work on a single project,in a wide range of mediums,styles, and processes,each artist's interpretation of the movie will out in his or her respective work.Some of which,happen to be funny,which has apparently offended the praise police,who have brought forth two stone tablets of horror movie commandments,one of which readeth,"Thou shalt find NO humour in thine horror classics."Excuse me,is what I'll interject with,as made popular in the late seventies by a certain comedian in bunny ears that picked at a banjo a piece from time to time.Though I found many scenes appropriately chilling,I also found lots of humour in the movie,being of a twisted sense myself.As much as I may come off like one,kids,I'm no horror snob,believe me.Before we begin,a tip of my cabbie to Wild Eye's producing partner,Rob Hauschild,for setting me up with the screener for tonight's review.Whenever you want one of your films reviewed,or somebody roughed the eff up,you come and see me.

Bill Hinzman as the Cemetery Zombie,or Fred Lincoln after a weekend bender at Plato's Retreat?You decide.
After a spirited introduction by horror host,Count Gore De Vol,that harkens back to the glory days of Zacherle and Dr. Shock,the viewer is treated to a wildly original reimagining of the black and white shocker,as artists and animators from all over the globe put their own personal spin on each classic scene in whatever medium they choose.The results are often dazzling,making for a highly enjoyable new artistic joyride in a favorite old cinematic muscle car.Some of the art is truly spectacular and very moving to behold,and coupled with the original soundtrack,succeeds on all levels;in both homage to and as a stand alone,fresh creative collaborative effort.It's all here,from the title sequence with Johnny and Barbara paying their respects at the cemetery,right through to the zombies on the woodpile end titles.Each scene is a mash up of several different artist's interpretations,sometimes shot for shot recreation,which really hits a nostalgic nerve for an old horror-head like this guy over here.Seeing Bill Hinzman as a stop motion animated Mego doll shambling towards the old Pennsylvania farmhouse brought me back to my parents' kitchen,where I had a vcr haphazardly hooked to a thirteen inch black and white television from the sixties,with the forty dollar Media vhs popped in on a rainy Saturday night,the first experience I had with the groundbreaking,historic scene way back when.And it retains its effectiveness here,proving that these artists loved the subject matter just as much as horror buffs like you or I,and its plain to see.

"During the next Soul Train commercial break,that clicker is mine",plots Cooper.
Of course,some sequences were weaker than others for me,such as the inclusion of Ren and Stimpy-esque cartoons,although the Mr. Cooper mouse slapfighting(his face,especially) with the cat zombies through the barricaded window shot was pretty choice,and the news broadcast being delivered by sock puppets lost its momentary appeal to me in less time than that.Mr. and Mrs. Cooper bickering back and forth as Barbie dolls in the cellar also wasn't a big favourite of mine,either,truth be told.That said,none of my least favourite personal scenes truly detracts from the overall feel of the production,though they may set it back a bit,at times.Instead,it gives the air of the movie as a patchwork thank you card from all the original's most creative fans towards one of their most beloved works,and that's not half bad,when you think about it,is it?The classic downer ending is brilliantly juxtaposed against beautiful artwork and magnificent caricatures of the cast,recapturing the unsettling ironic vibe you experienced when first watching the original.Not the same type of screening you get with the 1968 film,but something excitingly new and different.If that's what the filmmakers were aiming for,success is surely theirs.The Emperor approves.

Cooper gets his just desserts,just becoming his daughter's dessert.
In closing,I fully recommend that all woprophiles out there get their mitts on a copy of tonight's entry.You can do so by going right to the source for screening dates,or snag a copy on Amazon.If Night means as much to you,as it means to me,and more importantly,to the people involved in the production itself,you'll do well to see it.Anything else I could say in my current altered state would be overkill,really.Great job,guys,four wops.

Two big thumbs,way the fuck up.

"The Manson Family"(2003)d/James Van Bebber

Just when I think I was out, you rascals keep pulling me back in...Not that I don't enjoy reviewing movies for you loverly people,in fact,it's quite the opposite.I looooove reviewing movies for you.I just needed a couple of days to recharge the ol' batteries.Much partying was partaken in,and your humble N were very glad of it.Onward. Everything's sneaky up around Sneakyville.Tonight we're covering one of the more recent takes concerning the man who once recorded a song called "Don't Do Anything Illegal" before influencing lysergic acid-drenched members of his flock to go out and "totally destroy everyone...as gruesome as you can" on two consecutive nights in August of 1969,after partaking in a couple of unrelated murders himself a month earlier.Maybe if he took his own lyrics more seriously,he wouldn't have spent the vast majority of his life behind bars,I dunno.In the decades since the outrageous murders,Charlie,or "Jesus Christ" as they used to call him around Spahn's Movie Ranch while wacked out on acid dipped in belladonna and rattlesnake venom,has become somewhat of a cultural icon,appearing on clothing,skateboards,cartoons,trading cards,dolls,you name it and that famous piercing stare with the jailhouse swastika between it has probably graced it.Everybody's got their own opinion on Charlie and his "family",and mine is:Sure,he may have done some questionable things in his day,but at least he almost singlehandedly put an end to the stupid fucking Age of Aquarius.Outside of a Phish or Flogging Molly show,you rarely have smelly hippies to deal with anymore,so thank Charlie for that.
Tonight's review focuses on indie director Jim Van Bebber ("Deadbeat at Dawn","My Sweet Satan",and music videos by Pantera,Skinny Puppy,and Necrophagia,among others)and his labour of love that took over ten years to complete.I've always dug Van Bebber's quirky style of cinematography,and unique visions,so when word began to spread about his follow up to Deadbeat being a Manson movie,I was already on board and eagerly awaiting.Like most of you,I did a whole lot of waiting.I'd read people's takes on bits of footage they'd seen here and there and wonder if I was ever gonna catch a glimpse of what promised to be a memorable ride.Eventually,Dark Sky Films stepped in,financing the end of the film,and since,it has enjoyed both a theatrical release and a lush dvd release,as well,which I was all over like Margot Kidder and the shrubbery outside your house.Did it live up to the years of hype?Absolutely.If you're the CSI:Miami type,you might wanna stick with the 1976 telepic,Helter Skelter,but if you're looking for the story through the eyes and words of those actually responsible for the heinous crimes,then you owe it to yourselves to get copies of Manson Family,sharp-ish.Released unrated in the states,there's plenty of gloriously graphic violence and open sexuality to satisfy any hardcore genre nut,as well as a killer soundtrack by some members of Skinny Puppy and Phil Anselmo,who also provides the voice of Satan.Nice.

Really?Three sugarcubes?You should maybe think about sharin',Tate.Insert rimshot.
At the outset,the viewer jumps from 1969 when the infamous murders took place,to 1996 where reporter Jack Wilson (Carl Day) is assembling a documentary about the Manson Family murders utilizing interviews from both eras with the family members,and reconstructing the crimes themselves.The earlier footage involving Tex (Marc Pitman), Patty (Leslie Orr), Sadie (Maureen Allisse) and Bobby (the director himself!)chronicles the hallucinogenic and orgiastic lifestyle the youth had come to realize,and later,the manner in which their self-imposed hedonism finally turned back into a pumpkin,with a barrage of failed record deals,mounting money problems,in-cult rivalries,and the inability to cope with these problems when you're constantly banged out of your fucking gourd on drugs,culminating in the ritualistic slaughter of several innocent people who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.The murders,though slightly hindered by Van Bebber's budgetary woes, are masterfully protrayed with a systemic shock of realism,without the slightest coating of Hollywood gloss,making for a very sobering viewing experience.Make no mistakes about it,Van Bebber's Manson(Marcello Games) isn't the media-concocted,silver tongued sociopath with strange mental powers here,he's simply the uneducated hayseed jailbird with precious little talent,and even less ability to keep his steady flow of indiscernible drug babble to a minimum.That he was able to influence so many people of decent upbringing to such unspeakable acts of sadism remains a historical question mark.The director keeps him mostly in the wings,as a sort of necessary set piece,instead focusing on the "family" themselves.

That's what you get for "Garbage Dump",Charlie.
The reporter,a sensible middle aged man,has little compassion for his subject matter,treating the groups constant orgies and mind-altering acid trips with a moral repugnance and antipathy you'd expect from someone like him.What he doesn't realize,is how deeply intrinsic Manson's iconic status is to many disenfranchised youth,even decades after the fact.Due to his publicized work on the documentary,Wilson is unknowingly stalked by a group of teenaged meth-headed psychopaths,one of which goes by the name Zezozose,the name family member Susan Atkins gave her infant son back in the flowery pre-Death Row days.The group eventually overtake the reporter,explaining the meaning behind "Charlie Don't Surf" before violently stabbing him to death then killing each other.Though I've heard quite a bit of negative feedback from colleagues over the director's fictional framework,I happen to like it as a sort of moral to the whole story.As ineffective a shepherd Charlie was and is,he'll never have a shortage of mindless sheep to wrongfully exhalt him to messianic status,and do his dirty deeds,afterall.

I've hosted this same party quite a few times myself.
All in all,the budgetary limitations(some of the makeup,acting) only add to the grindhouse atmosphere present in tonight's review,raising its stock,in my opinion.I've seen just about everything Manson-related,and this movie sits at the top of my list of such cinema.In conclusion,if you find Manson's story halfway interesting,you'd do well to screen this one.Van Bebber offers seldom-visited insight into young lives that were turned upside down or in some tragic cases,ended prematurely, with some obviously hardcore research hours logged(I've done it myself,so it can be said),and his inimitable verite style of filmmaking and editing equivalent to serving up a satisfying slab of genre goodness for all parties interested.He's a base talent of the rawest caliber,for sure.If you aren't a fan of his work already,this will make you one.The highest scale rating possible and a full recommendation from your humble N for tonight's entry.

They're just scratchin' peace symbols in his tombstone.

"Blood Feast"(1963)d/Herschell Gordon Lewis

Ahhh,this one takes me back.I was twelve or thirteen when I first ordered tonight's review,along with its follow-up,2,000 Maniacs(1964),from Cult Video,and though I'd already read enough about the movie,nothing could prepare me for the first time I popped it into the Panasonic.Globally recognized as the first splatter film,Feast hasn't got too much else going for it besides that dubious distinction.The acting is abysmal,the camerawork is shoddy,even the soundtrack,ineptly provided by H.G. himself will have you bleeding out of the nose like the fountain at Trevi.My prejudicial love for it aside,this is quite possibly one of the worst movies ever made.As you droogs would expect,this also makes it one of the most enjoyable sixty-seven minutes you could ever spend.Watch as non-actors with hokey drawn on eyebrows stumble through ridiculous dialogue while bowing to a clothes mannekin painted gold.Watch Playboy Playmate for June 1963,Connie Mason,so uncomfortable in front of a camera lens that she shivers,as she makes out with Bill Kerwin,a guy who looks old enough to be her father.Watch animal entrails being amateurishly splashed over curvy Floridian cuties of the day.Awful as it is,it remains the pioneer for all gore flicks that would follow,and deserves its place in horror movie history.

Dig Fuad's crazy hypno-brows.One glance and bitches are under his power.
Victim number one overhears a news broadcast on her transistor radio telling all women in the area to lock their doors and windows,as a killer is loose.Sounds like the optimum time for a bubble bath,with her copy of "Ancient Weird Religious Rites" written by Fuad Ramses(Arnold)nearby.The author pays the young bubblehead a personal visit,and with a long knife,pokes her eye out before some prolonged off-camera hacking produces a bloodied mannekin leg.He'll take that,thanks.Mrs. Fremont(Lyn Bolton),a society well-to-do who looks as though she jacked Minnie Pearl for her wardrobe,inquires about throwing a party for her daughter Suzette(Mason) at an Exotic Catering service,run by none other than...Fuad himself.This guy doesn't keep all his eggs in one basket,does he."Have you ever had...an EGYPTIAN FEAST?"he asks,using his hypno-brows to convince the woman to book him for the party.He limps to the back of his store afterwards,where he's got an altar to Ishtar or Macy's summer Mod line of 1963,one or the other,set up.He talks to the Mother of Gold Spray Paint in Fashion Pose about the upcoming feast,and the ingedients he's yet to collect.Ingredients?A young couple necking on the beach at night is disturbed by a machete-wielding caterer with a limp,the man is knocked cold,the woman is de-brain-ified with the blade,and for some reason,a boa constrictor bears witness to the horrible crime.Afterwards,the Chief(Scott H. Hall) and his lone detective,Pete(Kerwin)discover that both victims belonged to some sort of book club.Pete may have a fledgling hunch about the connection...

Marcy(Ashlyn Marton)didn't have any brains,H.G. had to fake it.
Pete's been cradle robbing with Suzette(judging by Pete's age,he may even have been fallopian tube robbing),and after attending a stuffy lecture on the blood feast of Ishtar,spiced up by a low budget fantasy fleshback sequence,their necking party is interrupted by Pete's police radio,announcing another victim has been discovered,only this one is clinging to life.At the hospital,the girl whose face has been hacked off,and both eyes gouged out,sputters out the clue that the killer kept saying the name "Eetar" before her life support machine farts out.Eetar...Ishtar.Nah,couldn't be.Fuad then abducts Suzette's bubbly,top heavy pal,Trudy Sanders(Toni Calvert)in broad daylight,right from the Fremont's pool.This man's uncanny.Back at his catering digs,he whips Trudy and catches the blood from her wounds in an urn,before throwing that mannekin leg from earlier in the pizza oven.When Pete finds out that the Fremonts are having an Egyptian feast,he phones the professor who gave the lecture,and finds out that Fuad Ramses wrote the book on the subject,the same Fuad Ramses that's catering their party,the same Fuad...you get the idea.Pete,now officially with a hunch,rides over to Ramses Catering place with the chief,and they find the makeshift altar,the gold store window mannekin,a blood draped mannekin on the table,everything.To the Fremonts,old chum!Fuad has Suzette strewn out on the kitchen table with her eyes closed,reciting feaux-Egyptian gibberish,when Mrs. Fremont stumbles upon him,about to lop off her domepiece with his machete.Her screams cause him to limp off into the street,kinda odd,since he was so bold about his killings prior to this.The cops arrive and give chase,but Fuad and his gimp leg prove too agile for the young,healthy officers,and he manages to unwittingly hop into the back of a garbage truck,getting himself compacted amidst piped in phony screams,like the garbage he was.Pete haughtily recalls how he finally cracked the case in sixty minutes,when it took the audience about three,and we see Ishtar,perhaps ready to return to the front window at Macy's at last.

Astrid Olson provides the beef tongue for the Fremont's Egyptian feast(cue cheesy organ).
Despite the myriad of shortcomings it displays,Feast's amateurish gore effects are still kind of shocking today.I'd love to see the audience's expression back in '63 when they were first hit with raw animal entrails and flesh in color.It must have been amazing to witness.Kerwin and Mason would return the next year for Lewis's 2,000 Maniacs,which we'll tackle at a later date,a much more polished effort from the "Godfather of Gore" himself,and more likable entry,for sure.I can remember me and the boys yukking it up on a regular basis with Feast back in the day,drawing pictures of Fuad's eyebrows and Ishtar's fashion pose.There'll always be a spot reserved for it in my black little heart.On the scale it rates one wop.

Fuad(Mal Arnold)gets compacted amidst dubbed screams like the trash that he is.

"Contamination"(1980)d/Luigi Cozzi

You've gotta like a guy like Luigi Cozzi,the man responsible for such cult gems as Starcrash(1979),De Profundis(1989),Paganini Horror(1989),and forgettable 1975 giallo The Killer Must Kill Again,as a man(among many,your humble N included)who enjoyed Ridley Scott's Alien(1979)so much that he set out to film a sequel/homage of sorts,cleverly entitled,"Alien Arrives on Earth".The only problem here,was the definite lack of interest Italian studios showed towards sci-fi fare at the time,forcing Cozzi to disguise his little sci-fi ditty as a horror movie,and even then,producer Claudio Mancini kept sticking his mediterranean proboscis in Luigi's business,demanding his film be titled "Contamination",after a China Syndrome(1979)rip off he'd been working on.Mancini also pushed for James Bond-ish elements in the film,and vetoed Luigi's choice of the luscious Caroline Munro,who'd starred in his earlier Starcrash effort,in the female lead in favor of Louise Marleau,an older,saggy actress who isn't the least bit sexy at all,against the poor director's wishes.Cozzi also wanted a stop motion animated creature for the film's finale,which was ruled out,given the micro-budget he was given to work with.With all these factors against him,he still managed to churn out an enjoyable hunk of Italian B-movie madness,surely the answer to the eternal question:What if Italians set out to rip off Alien(1979) with a budget of thirty-eight bucks?

Give him a minute,he's gotten the wind knocked out of him...
A seemingly abandoned freighter drifts into New York Harbor,carrying the mutilated remnants of its former crew and large green pulsating eggs hidden in containers of coffee,obviously some sort of interplanetary promotional giveaway of sorts.The crew sent in the examine the bloody aftermath soon experiences the secret force of the mysterious orbs firsthand.When the eggs heat up,they explode,showering anyone unlucky enough to be standing within the trajectory with an acidic fluid,which in turn,cause the unlucky bastard to explode from the midsection out.No baby aliens skitting across the floor.Just chunks of labonza scattered to and fro.The military calls in Colonel Stella Holmes(Marleau),a frumpy middle-aged broad who doesn't mind getting slapped in the grillpiece. She quickly brainstorms that the eggs may have something to do with that...failed mission to Mars.With the enlisted help of police lieutenant Aris(Marino Masé),a survivor of the boat incident who volunteers his assistance with a pimpslap,and yaps endlessly about his own balls,she hunts down the surviving astronaut,Commander Hubbard(McCulloch),who suffered a nervous breakdown and subsequently became a raging drunk. She presses the space lush for answers("If you're always in this condition it's quite obvious you couldn't get it up, even if you used a crane”,she tells him.Ouch!),and after brief resistance,he reluctantly agrees to accompany the colonel and lieutenant to ...a coffee plantation in Columbia?

Mix the human stomach with my Aunt Josephine's Sunday sauce and this is the sad result.
To say things bog down a smidge in Columbia,is like saying American film studios rarely utilize originality these days.There's a limply uninspired romantic subplot,and an awful lot of 007-esque elements that come into play that help drag the film down.Colonel Holmes gets locked in a bathroom with a glowing green throbber while both men bicker amongst each other in the hotel hallway as to which one she wants to give her punched out meatsock to(keep that shit,baby).This goes on for about four days,by my estimation.Once they infiltrate the warehouse,it all becomes painfully obvious that Hubbard's former astronaut colleague is alive and well and mind-controlled by an alien intelligence bent on wiping out the human race and conquest of the earth.How do we know this?The fucking guy explains it all to our heroes,and even gives them a tour of the fucking operation a la James Bond before sending them off to fend for themselves against...the Alien Cyclops,a terrifying blend of rubber,vaccuum tubes,and an automobile headlight that abruptly eats the police lieutenant...or,I should say,the police lieutenant has great difficulty climbing and pushing himself into the alien's foodtube.About four days later,the possessed astronaut's belly explodes in slo-mo,and the colonel and recovering drunk astronaut manage to set the otherworldly queen on fire,avoiding her deadly form of mind control and saving the world at the same time.

Martian landscape or Madonna's uterus?You be the judge.
The multiple slow motion midsection explosions bought Cozzi's film a spot on the UK's Video Nasty list,released uncut years later with a 15 certificate.It was released in the US on video in truncated form as "Toxic Spawn" and "Alien Contamination",before seeing an uncut remastered version appear on dvd from the excellent Blue Underground label.The ugly Canadian actress Marleau most recently translated The Vagina Monologues in French.Big deal.McCulloch has enjoyed a long career in film and television.Cozzi was palgued by budgetary restrictions throughout his career as a director,before moving on to manage and operate Dario Argento's movie memorabilia store,Profundo Rosso,in Rome.Tonight's entry has its shortcomings,granted,but remains a source for a lot of low budgeted fun for the right cult audience.It explodes from the chest in gruelling slow motion with a rating of one wop on the scale.It's time to see the cyclops now...

In the foggy warehouse,the Alien Cyclops makes sure she has her high beam on.

"Le notti del terrore"(1981)d/Andrea Bianchi

Hey Mel Gibson,the outing of your private,Cookie Monster-esque tape recorded vitriol towards Oksana Grigorieva,the mother of your eight month old child and Russian D Lister with a failed music career may have made for some enjoyable listening the past few weeks,and inspired some dynamic new drinking games(Let's do a shot everytime Mel calls Oksana a "cuntwhore",and a pint for every time Mel pants like a Great Dane locked in a Mini Cooper with the windows rolled up on a mid-June afternoon in Phoenix),but the whole cry poverty angle is a bit much,brother.For someone with an estimated fortune of eight hundred and fifty million samoleans to claim to be busted really just bums me out,dude.Failed marriages,legal red tape,back arrears,unfulfilled promises,you should try those little numbers out being a mere working class slob who doesn't have a box at Lakers games.Hell,I don't have five million anything,let alone dollars.And if I did have five million of those little green doggies in a bank account,the last thing I'd be doing would be vein-buldgedly screaming in some eastern bloc floozy's ear about how she didn't give a blowjob when I wanted one.I'd be leading a marching band down Main Street,doing "76 Trombones" from The Music Man(1962),and throwing twenties at anyone who wanted them.Lighten up,Francis,as Sargeant Hulka used to say.
...which naturally segues into tonight's review,since several experts say Gibson's film career is essentially buried deeper than Etruscans in an Italian cemetery now.Andrea Bianchi,perhaps known best for his sleazy giallo,Nude per l'assassino(1975)and stylish 1972 thriller,Night Child,finally focused his lens on flesh-eating cadavers,a popular trend in Italy at the time,unwittingly giving audiences a riotous cult classic for decades to come.Known in some circles as "Continuity Errors of the Dead"(Not really.I just made that up.),Le notti is a numbskulled good time,unintentionally hilarious,with camera shadows appearing in shots,zombie masks not fully camoflaging actors' faces,misspelled titles flashing across the screen,and intelligent ghouls(ludicrously so) that pre-date Romero by four years.Did I mention Peter Bark yet?This is a must for your collection,which you'll revisit over and over again.

A dramatic prairie dog moment for an Italian midget in a toupee.
An archaeological professor(Renato Barbieri)who looks like Johnny Legend's Italian cousin is excavating an Etruscan burial site on top of which an Italian villa is built.He finds a plaque which,upon translation,knocks his proverbial socks off.He retreats to the underground dig site,and chips away at the wall where he discovered the tablet,and when a stone rolls away,he is overtaken by a gaggle of reanimated pre-Toscanans.I imagine the plaque must've falsely claimed to reveal the whereabouts of some Etruscan beard trimmers or something.The villa above belongs to George and Evelyn(Robert Caporali,Maria Angela Giordano),and uhh,her...son,Michael(Peter Bark).I'm thinking Michael probably isn't George's son,as he's an adult Italian toupee-wearing bug-eyed midget who's dubbed by another adult trying to sound like a young boy.He's probably the lovechild of Peter Lorre and Billy Barty.They are joined for a weekend of rest n' relaxation by Leslie(Antonella Antinori)and the moustachioed James(Simone Mattioli),Janet(Karin Well),and Mark(Gian Luigi Chirizzi).During their arrival to the newly purchased and remodeled villa,where Michael performs coitus interruptus midgetus on Evelyn and George trying to get their fuck on,and Leslie's sleep is being disturbed by precognitive nightmares where everybody dies in a horrible manner,the zombies do nothing.Why?They're plotting,I tell you.

The Etruscans pioneered the day cravat,apparently.
The next morning Mark ventures out to take some photos of Janet and ends up looking for his contact lens in the back of her throat with his tongue.James and Leslie don't even bother drumming up excuses,they put a blanket down and immediately start going at it.Evelyn and George take the opportunity to examine the professor's excavated artifacts,probably wondering whose bright idea it was to take the bald dwarf along.And then,without warning,it's fucking zombie time.The decaying ghouls all seem to be garbed in painter smocks or burlap and ascots,which leads me to ponder whether the Etruscan people were all aspiring twentieth century artists or just related to Fred from the Scooby Doo gang.Evelyn,George,and Michael find themselves trapped in the prof's workshop where George's gun pumps large,gore-splattered holes into the zombies with little effect,resulting in the sorry bastard getting his torso ripped asunder,and the zombies feasting on his entrails.The survivors try to make a break for the automobiles,but the zombies are standing guard(!),so they instead retreat to the villa.At this point,the two thousand year old corpses begin to use weapons and tools,like a scythe to remove the maid's head from a second story window(!!),and axes to gain entry to the villa that nobody bothered to secure or board up.Haven't you ever seen Night of the Living Dead(1968),people?Leslie gets dined upon,revives and chews Michael,the butler gets gnoshed by the revived weird-bearded professor,and the zombies outside pool their non-firing neurons and use a battering ram(!!!)to get inside.Evelyn,Mark,Janet,and James make a cross-country break for it(because the unguarded cars made too much sense,apparently),and after sleeping in an outbuilding,they cross a field to find a monastery inhabited by...Etruscan zombies in black robed disguise(!!!).Is there nothing these zombies won't think of?Michael returns as a reanimated corpse,and after several unnervingly incestuous moments while alive,chews his mother's tit off as a zombie,and the remaining survivors,trapped in a dead end room,all summarily end up as meals for the neckerchiefed dead.

"Everyday Italian" with Giada De Laurentiis was never like this!
When surrounded by zombies here,and it seems like the entire Etruscan race was buried in the same cemetery,mind you,all the characters seem to freeze and lovingly survey each individual shambling corpse,instead of running to the hills like Iron Maiden tried warning them to do.Either way,it's harmless(and brainless) fun for all cult afficionados to beat witness to.Bianchi stopped directing in 1993,with several nice genre pieces under his belt.None of the actors did much work of note afterwards,even the infamous Peter "Mother,this cloth smells of death" Bark only took some uncredited roles before disappearing altogether,perhaps in accordance with the misspelled "profecy of the black spider" which scrolls awkwardly at the end of the final reel,promising more "nigths" of terror to be burdened upon us,which,thankfully never came!Log this one as entertaining crap,with a scale rating of one wop,but enjoyability to spare!

The undead Michael(Peter Bark) comes face-to-face with his mother's living bobbler.

"Rosso sangue"(1981)d/Aristide Massaccesi

A lot of you droogies' first experience with tonight's entry will have come with the Wizard Video vhs release back in the eighties,as "Monster Hunter" in a big box only slightly smaller than the average Irish girl's ass.Ease up,Molly,I'm just sayin'.Though it was often marketed as a sequel to Massaccesi's "Antropophagus",it bears little resemblance to that film,other than the casting of George Eastman in the antagonist role,and the several outstandingly original gruesome guignol-esque set pieces featured within.It plays more like an Italian Halloween rip-off than the aforementioned cult classic,yet still merited inclusion as one of the infamous thirty-nine Video Nasties successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act in dear ol' Blighty back in'84,making the original uncut Medusa tape highly sought after in the collectors world.Aristide handles the red meat of the production with the same zeal of his fellow mediterranean colleagues,but fumbles when dealing with most of the scenes tying it all together,instead serving up repeated tear-shedding tedium in its place,apart from a lot of spirited smoking...I dig that,you know.Also interesting to note,is the German National Socialist Black Metal band who took their name from one of tonight's alternate titles,Absurd,before strangling one of their fans to death with an electrical cord.And you thought Hall and Oates had some unhinged promotions!The cast of tonight's focus includes Edmund (Pieces) Purdom,Christian(Caligula:The Untold Story) Borromeo,Katya Berger,and the always delectable Annie (House on the Edge of the Park)Belle,with a cameo from director Michele Soavi as a biker bound for the bodycount!Despite its weaknesses,Sangue is a fairly decent little slasher from a director whose main legacy will always be hardcore porn.Good stuffs!

You know the drill,this nurse is a little bit screwed.
At the outset,Mikos(Eastman) is being pursued by a man garbed in black(Purdom)through some dense woods.The chase leads the men to the grounds of a house,where the pursued unwittingly impales himself in the labonza on a gate spike,staggering to the house where he collapses,spilling his entrails on the floor like so much vermicelli into a colander.After he's taken to the hospital,the medics notice that he seems to be healing his own wounds without treatment.Sgt. Engleman(Borromeo),the head badge in charge,takes the mysterious man in black who's been hanging around,for questioning,but his lips will sink no ships.Soon afterwards Mikos breaks out of the hospital,skewering a nurse's head with a portable surgical skrewdriver in the process,and suddenly the stranger is ready to sing the sordid song to the authorites like Samantha Sang belting out her flash-in-the-pan hit, "Emotion" with the Bee-Gees on backup on Solid Gold.It seems he's a...biochemist priest(huh??)who runs a reasearch institute that Mikos managed to escape from after becoming contaminated by...umm,something or other,they're awfully vague here,so just throw in a "how come" of your own,I guess...which gives him the ability to regenerate dead cells and tissue,meaning he can self-repair any damage done to his body,save for his grey dome-sponge which,the priest relates,also happens to be the only way to kill him,and that naturally,the contamination has left him a pychopathic killer.Sounds reasonable enough to me.Mikos is struck by a hit-and-run driver,Dr. Bennett(who's apparently in some kind of rush to catch the football game at a friend's house with his wife,makes sense),while doing in a biker(Soavi),leaving the children,Katia(Berger),the disabled daughter with a spinal problem,Willy(Kasimir Berger)the incorrigible little bastard,and Emily(Belle),the delicious babysitter,as a veritable slasher smörgåsbord for the approaching "beard that slays".He introduces pickaxe-based death to a girl's skull cavity and parts the fissures in a bald orderly's skull with a bandsaw,leaving a superhuman maniac in a house with three virtually helpless victims.Let the chaos begin,right?Not exactly.

So that's where fresh pancetta comes from...
Emily prances around the house,little Willy watches entirely too much of a soap opera on television(which means,we end up watching entirely too much soap opera on television,if you know where I'm going here),the priest and cops drive around aimlessly,and the childrens' parents at a friend's house watching entirely too much of a football game(which means...yeah,that drill again)which adds up to roughly twenty minutes of screen time.I shit you not.Where was Mikos during this lull in the action?What was he keeping himself busy with the whole time?Don't be so goddamned inquisitive,horror fans,those details are Nihil ad rem to the mind-n-chunk blowing climax that follows.If you thought the drill and band saw deaths were a bit crass with prolonged focus on lurid details,you ain't seen nothin' yet.Mikos crosses paths with the already volcanically hot Emily,and decides to bake her head in an open oven,while she struggles,still alive.Slowly.Like,go and microwave yourself some Hot Pockets,pour yourself a drink,go out for a cigarette,come back in and he's still baking her frigging head slowly.At which point,Katia miraculously loses her traction,straps and weights,and squares off with the Beard to defend her annoying little brother,who she sends off to get help,from the "Boogeyman".She blinds him with a set of drawing compasses(!)before wailing away at his neck with a ornately fancy axe that an Appalachian goober might have bought off of the Home Shopping Network at three am,if she didn't already have it,finally decapitating him,"destroying the cerebral mass" once and for all.As if watching stuff like this on a regular basis doesn't have the same adverse effect on ours!

Mikos(George Eastman) is still waiting for her to pick an answer to the question he axed.
The score for tonight's entry was handled by Carlo Maria Cordio,a mash up of electronic synths,cheesy guitar riffs,and a reboot of some of the music he penned for Umberto Lenzi's "Mangiati Vivi" oddly enough.What's missing here is the creepy atmosphere that D'Amato(Massaccesi...tomayto,t'amato) produced for his earlier Antropophagus vehicle.Maybe it was the desolate Greek village,maybe the oatmeal n' latex pussed Montefiori(who also wrote Sangue) that struck a nerve in your humble N,but whatever the former had,the latter seems to be missing.If you're as heavily into Italian genre fare as I am,though,you'll definitely wanna score a copy of this flick for yourselves,if only for the gore effects and another loving look at Longtime girlfriend of Pier Luigi Conti aka Al "I'm a lucky,lucky man" Cliver, Annie Belle.The bottom line is this is a Massaccesi vehicle that isn't steeped in graphic depictions of the coital act,and still manages to score two wops on the scale.That,itself,is moderately impressive,is it not?

"That's for doing 'Murder She Wrote'!",Katia(Katya Berger)triumphantly exclaims as she raises Bradford Dillman's exsanguinated domepiece to the heavens.