Anthropophagous(1980)d/Joe D'Amato

Aristede Massaccesi,Joe D'Amato,Fédérico Slonisco,Romano Gastaldi,he certainly had more aliases than one of the Manson girls.Whatever you choose to call the guy,he was obviously a director with an interesting body of work.Up until his death in 1999,D'Amato(what we'll call him here for now)helmed gialli,westerns,horror,porn,horror-porn,action,period pieces,really everything under the sun.In my opinion,he was at his best shooting pornography,but his small portfolio of horror films has generated an avid base of loyal fans worldwide,with this particular entry among most fan favorites.The Italian busta poster adorned my dining room wall for the past seven years,much to the chagrin of my ex-wife and later,to the delight of my ex-girlfriend!I gotta admit,there is something endearing about this movie,even if I still may not be able to put my finger on it after all these years.

You'd think those giant headphones might have deflected the chop...
A young couple is enjoying an afternoon at the beach with their mutt,the girl going for a swim while the guy lays back in the sand and rocks out to some disco broadcast over headphones slightly smaller than Terex Titan tires.Ironically he's too busy grooving to see her get pulled under,or hear her screams,OR see whatever is lumbering out of the frothy surf,dripping his girlfriend's blood.He gets a meat cleaver slightly smaller than a sheet of wood paneling planted in his skull.Meanwhile,a group of friends vacationing in Greece embarks on a boat tour of the islands for some much needed rest and relaxation.A nice enough oddball named Julie(Zora Kerova)hitches a ride with the two couples,as she plans to meet up with a pair of friends on one of the Aegeans herself.During the trip,she breaks out some tarot cards and gives readings for her new friends,but when the cards foretell doom for everyone aboard,she throws them overboard into the Mediterranean.When they dock for the night on one of the islands,they find the town mysteriously deserted,with no clues as to why,save for a woman who disappears into the shadows.Back on the boat,pregnant Maggie(Serena Grandi)who's twisted her ankle and stayed behind,is abducted by an unsavoury,unseen character who likes breathing heavily.

Sprain your ankle? Soak it three times a day in a bucket full of seawater.The phony-looking latex head is an optional bonus.
As the group investigates the abandoned buildings,they stumble across a bizzare journal that tells an awful tale of a hunger-crazed man who decided to start eating his family when food and contact from the mainland was cut off.They stumble into a hysterical blind girl,who's been hiding in a wine cask with a butcher knife for protection,who warns them that the grim reaper(Luigi Montefiori),the same oatmeal-faced cannibal from the journal, has murdered the entire population of the town and eaten them.Though blind,she has managed to stay alive all this time thanks to her keen sense of smell,knowing whenever this fiend approaches.Soon fate rings a ghoulish dinner bell,and one by one,the group is stalked,chopped,hacked,and munched by this madman until the mindblowing climax,which you'll have to see for yourself,if you have the stomach for it!

What's for dinner tonight,Luigi? Liver and mushed wombs?
Media Blasters did an admirable job in rereleasing this one in a two disc set,restoring two notorious previously cut sequences that I'll refrain from describing(hint:I've alluded to them in the screenshots,and even for a director noted for outrageousness,they're pretty friggin' outrageous!),and a whole slew of extras that any self-respecting horror buff will devour like so many baked lobstertails smothered in melted butter,kind of like your humble N dined on tonight at his father's place.Unfortunately allergic to shellfish,despite a lifelong affinity for such feasts,the violent reaction I tried to avoid by dummying up with Benadryl beforehand caught up with me,ending my Christmas Eve festivities prematurely,and nearly turning my toes up!Hope yours was more pleasant than mine,regardless.D'Amato followed this shocker up with Absurd in 1987,not technically a sequel,though Eastman/Montefiori insists that it is just that.Whatever the case may be,this entry is not bogged down by its shortcomings(the film score,one or two of the gore pieces)and is a true cult classic that must be seen to be believed.Don't let the average Wopsploitation score fool you.Get your hands on it!

Ever famished,the grim reaper(Luigi Montefiori)namnams his own gutty-wuts.

Eyeball(1975)d/Umberto Lenzi

As I watched my hulking baby,Trevor,devour his Christmas present last night,a full slice of seeded Italian bread,I courted the notion that the 1970's were indeed the decade of the giallo in Italian film.All the top genre directors churned them out,with the maestro,Dario Argento,surely at the top of the list.It's no surprise then,that jack-of-all-trades and father of the cannibal subgenre,Umberto Lenzi,added his two hundred lira worth with several gialli by the time the decade had passed.Lenzi tackled all sorts of subject matter in his heyday,with varying degrees of commercial and artistic(?) success,and it can be said that the Italian crimedrama/whodunnit was NOT cinematic kryptonite for the Grosseto native.His work in gialli was at least passable,lightyears ahead of movies like,say,Incubo sulla città contaminata(Nightmare City).Eyeball,aka/Gatti rossi in un labirinto di vetro is a decent viewing experience across the board,and I can also add,in the holiday spirit,that though lots of pretty young girls get snuffed, no animals meet a violent on camera demise in the making of said film!Merry Christmas!

Martinez(Raf Baldassarre),the practical joker/tour guide, guffaws his way right into police custody.
Alma Burton cancels her flight to New York to book a trip to Barcelona instead,where a tour bus full of people are taking in the sights,one of which being her husband Mark's(John Richardson) secretary,Paulette(Martine Brochard).Mark has also travelled to this Catalonian capital,to rendezvous with Paulette,and inform her of his impending divorce from Alma.No sooner than tour guide Martinez can drop a mouse at the feet of a young girl in the group for a flirtatious gag,the corpses of beautiful young girls start turning up one by one,all with missing left eyes.Burton recalls returning home a while back,and finding his wife,Alma,unconscious in the yard,clutching his bloody dagger from Vietnam in her right hand,and a disembodied human eye in the grass next to her.Hmmm,he may be onto something there...At the fun fair,another girl is found,dead,eyeless,and clutching a phony gag wind up spider in her dead hand,leading the local constabulary to take in the tour guide for further questioning.But the murders don't stop with his arrest.

If you can't keep your eyes on the prize,at least try to keep them in their respective sockets.
It's soon evident that the murderer may be one of the tour group itself,as a bloody red rain parka is discared by the killer at the scene of the crime,identical to the parkas that Martinez had handed out to the group during a patch of inclement weather.Meanwhile,Burton is contacted by his wife,who's booked a room at the Hotel Presidente,but when he arrives,her suite is empty save for the same bloody dagger he'd seen in her hand earlier.As the plot thickens so does the web of deception.Could it be the kindly Reverend Burton?Mr. Alverado?Mr. Hamilton who lovingly caressed his straight razor while gazing upon his sleeping granddaughter Jenny?Is it Mark's soon-to-be estranged wife Alma,in some psychopathic jealous frenzy?Or is there an unknown suspect with a hidden agenda for the murders?By the film's close,you'll have these and many more questions answered for yourself.

It's not what it looks like,really.The priest(Georges Rigaud) is offering the servant girl money for...oh forget it.Your minds are prepetually gutterish,people.
The cast is filled with all sorts of genre staples,from Rigaud who was in Horror Express,Lizard in a Woman's Skin,and All the Colors of the Dark,among many others,to John Bartha,who acted in Cannibal Ferox,Don't Torture a Duckling,and Violent Rome,to name a few.The list of female victims also contains some memorable names like Ines "Salo" Pellegrini and Mirta Miller,who gained popularity in a few Paul Naschy pictures in the seventies. The Spanish scenery is outstanding,and the soundtrack by master Bruno Nicolai is quite enjoyable,as always.That said,the gore is sparsely sprinkled throughout the story,but not necessary to keep the plot moving at a steady pace,which it does admirably.Not my favorite giallo of all time,not even my favorite Lenzi picture,but certainly a viewable hour and a half stroll down the yellow road waiting to be had.On the snow-laden Woplspolitation scale of excellence,it rates a respectable score of:

Ignoring Ralphie's cautionary Christmas tale,Paulette(Martine Brochard)shoots her eye out.

Lone Wolf(1988)d/John Callas

Here's a lump of SOV coal for your stocking that's so mindnumbingly awful,it's almost surreal.It manages to consistently reek of dogshit in ways most filmfans didn't even think possible.The kind of movie you rented out back then,and ten minutes through you pause it to contemplate running back to the video store to rent something else before they close for the evening to salvage the night for yourself.Actually,it's the kind of movie your dad brought home when you sent him to "rent a horror movie" after he got done running errands with the car,after he saw the mid-transformation shot on the box,thinking he'd picked you a real winner.Oh,he did alright.This flaccid 80's were-cheapie makes "555" look like The Shawshank Redemption.It makes "The Ripper" look like Dog Day Afternoon.It makes "Blood Cult" look like...okay,I'll stop.

When Eddie isn't "rocking you all night long" with Tyxe,he's bickering with his aunt over breakfast.
The year is 1988.The hairstyle is the mullet.The local Colorado high school(?)/junior college(?) is plagued with what the authorities are calling "wild dog attacks".When the kids who look like they're pushing thirty years old aren't being decapitated during the full moon cycle,they hit the local club scene and rock all night long to the sounds of Tyxe,a band whose mere existence defies reason.There's hair metal guys,there's new wave guys,and they play cliche' metal(as defined by tunes whose titles are ripe with originality, like "We're gonna rock you all night long" and "Raised on Rock and Roll").They suck.Eddie is an angst-ridden mullethead who wears a leather jacket and sings for the band,when he's not ditching school occasionally or arguing with his aunt and uncle,who he lives with(and doesn't look much younger than either).At school,he and his bandmates scrap with the preppie/sporto population,who also rock the mullet like nobody's business.The one class everyone seems to take,deals with new technology involving something called computers.The prettiest girl in class,is a vapid blonde hairpig whose hair looks like a cross between Lita Ford and a nuclear explosion.She lost her boyfriend to the mysterious murderer one night when she refused to let him drive under the influence of sipping at some empty beer bottles,causing him to angrily walk home instead.

Someone up there likes him.And someone wrote this script with their feet.
In the class,one of the ancestors of today's computer dork fancies our hairpig heroine,and together,with the help of this... computer...they try to get to the bottom of these horrible deaths.By the way,it's a werewolf.But not just any werewolf,it's one who transforms in a carbon copy manner to The Howling or An American Werewolf in London(eight years earlier),facial structure stretching,hair growing out of the skin,fangs jutting out of the gums,canine ears popping out of head...only the finished product...well,it sucks.The whole mess culminates at the school's Winter Costume Ball,held on a full moon,of course.You know,I bet the werewolf is gonna end up on stage,and someone's gonna remark that IT is the best costume at the gala.Only it isn't even.The nerd melts down some silver into bullets,then gives 'em to uber-loner Eddie,who wan't even the werewolf afterall like we all thought,him being so distant...and mulletastic,and he plugs the beast with them,after it tears through the crowd on a bloody rampage.It was the computer teacher.At the local hospital,someone being treated for werewolf claw-slashes,transforms into a werewolf and attacks the nurse,leaving the path open for another lousy shot-on-video sequel we didn't ask for.Thankfully,they left it at that,took their money and ran like the fucking wind.

An oversized heart,a rubberized lycanthrope,a working fast forward button....
I pondered at great lengths whether or not I should give this piece of shit zero B.W.'s,but eventually came to the realization that I found myself moderately entertained by the film's gaping ineptitudes,making it somewhat of a guilty pleasure.There are no footnotes here,no one went on to act in anything else,as if any of them could act in the first place...the whole cast looks like they put mullet wigs on a warehouse full of Keanu Reeves clones,and then handed them the most banal dialogue imaginable to over-deliver in wooden fashion.The effects are pretty bad,too,despite the on-screen pride the transformations are treated with.You can sit down to this,and remember everything you hated about the eighties,and love dissecting it all over beers and pizza.As such,I'll give it the marginal score of:

Just $14.99 at Spencer's gifts,or wherever fine latex masks are sold.