"Cocodrilo asesino" (1989) d/ Fabrizio De Angelis

Some Italian genre directors, like Fabrizio De Angelis (under his favorite pseudonym Larry Ludman,  here) fully realize that inanimate-looking prop sharks and grainy stock footage aren't the only homicidal animals they can sculpt a horrendous Jaws rip-off around, as the international title of tonight's review, Killer Crocodile (Murder Alligator, too, I shit you not), would lead you to believe. To fabricate Fabrizio's raucous rampaging reptile, none other than the gore FX maestro, Giannetto De Rossi, was called upon, and you can see what the results looked like for yourselves, below. Not quite as jaw-dropping as his work on Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974) or Zombi 2 (1979), but the croc's signature wheeze (Go easy on the 'Ports, big fella?) sounds an awful lot like one of De Rossi's flesh-eating ghouls from the latter film, to me.


"Questo ragazzo sapore come pollo!"
It all kicks off when two night fishermen are interrupted by a legendary killer crocodile. How do we know this? It must be the dramatic titles hastily slapped over a freeze frame of the attacking beast, around one minute in. No tension-packed slow build to a shocking final reel reveal here,  no sir.  Enter a vanilla assembly of would be environmentalists, as led by Richard Crenna's son, who unwittingly stumble upon several fifty-five gallon hand-painted drums of toxic waste sloppily dumped along the river's edge, then lean on a very sweaty and very irritable local judge (Van Johnson) to, you know, clean it all up, maaaaaan. Only he's pals with a cat named Foley (Bill Wohrman) who can't wait to dump his next big shipment of waste in the river. The group's token black girl, Conchita, gets chewed up and spit out first, leading her mourning friends to, you know, side with the croc, maaaaan, instead of the local croc hunting son of a bitch, a scarred up adventurer in a panama hat named Joe (Ennio Girolami), who shares a roomy shack of corrugated cardboard and plywood with his pet snake. "C'monnn Joe. You aren't afraid of a...killer crocodile, are you?", one of the kids actually asks him at one point. Seriously.


How could we have guessed she wasn't gonna be the "final girl".
It seems that Foley's careless dumping of toxic waste has mutated the prop-odile into monstrous (and varying, depending on the shot) proportions, and after comically terrorizing a little girl on a sinking chunk of pier, it starts picking off our young peaceniks, who camp out on the shore of the river in a show of support for the misunderstood monster, who's gotta endure being harpooned and ridden like a surfboard by the relentless Joe. Once their male buddies become the croc's dinner (and not the black girl with two lines, and her dog), the formerly environmentally conscious survivors naturally declare war on the amphibious beast and team up with Joe, who's prone to carrying his shotgun everywhere he goes, and also dramatically admiring his scarred reflection in the mirror in his shack. Foley reassures the judge that he can handle the animal himself, and by "handle", he means "get his arm chewed off after leaving the sweaty adjudicator to drown in a dastardly double cross". Sound ridiculous? Just wait until a bloodied and battered Joe miraculously pops out of the trees and throws one of the boys his cheesy hat, no doubt inspiring the young man to blow the beast up by chucking an outboard motor into its open yap. He repeatedly screams, "Yeah! Yeah!! YEAHHH!!" like a fanatical maniac, while being showered in raining blood. I had to laugh, and you might, too.


"I was in 'The Caine Mutiny' with Bogart, and now I'm doing fucking 'Murder Alligator'...", laments Van Johnson.
Even maestro Riz Ortolani, how can I put this... borrows generously from John Williams' groundbreaking 1975 score in creating one that befits such an unapologetic low budget rip-off of the Spielberg film. De Rossi's animatronic crocodile, on the other hand, almost looks too impressive for the cheap affair, or at least, it might have, if they didn't show so much of it and so damned often. De Rossi himself would direct the sequel, Killer Crocodile 2,  which happened to be shot at the exact same time as it's predecessor, using the same cast. While the gore here is ample and of passable quality, the (non-)acting, editing, and script are all unintentionally laughable, dragging the whole scareless, tension-free production into single Wop territory, as one might have expected.


Joe, the crocodile hunting son of a bitch-1, Quint-0.

        This month of Italian genre movie reviews is posthumously dedicated to my favorite aunt, Julia from Manhattan, my head scarved horror movie buddy with a perma-hack that sounded like a glasspack muffler coming up our sidewalk, with Chou-Chou San Juliet Monteforte, her abusive male poodle, always in tow. As far back as I can remember, Judy was always down for cinematic scares with her weird little nephew, and we'd always rap about whatever late night gem we'd caught the night before while she downed cups of java and chain smoked Mores at our kitchen table. Things like Jean Brismee's La plus longue nuite du diable aka/ The Devil's Nightmare (1971) and Emilio Miraglia's La notte che Evelyn usci dalla tomba aka/ The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971) scored big with her, and tv series like Dark Shadows, Kolchak the Night Stalker, and Night Gallery were always her favorites. She never shrank from the task of thumbing through the stack of horror mags and comic books I dragged around with me, from room to room, either.

         Over the years, my old man figured out that any horror flick that was too gruesome for his own tastes was right up his sister's alley, and he often sent her off to the movies with me, in his stead. She was there with me for Fulci's Zombi 2 aka/ Zombie (1980) at the American Theater, though I think she managed to see about twenty minutes of the movie in all, spending much of the running time smoking like a rubber burnout out in the lobby, back in the days when that sort of thing wasn't frowned upon at all. " Oooooooooh-hoo-hoo!! Crazy, man, cuh-razy!", she'd exclaim, as the foot long wood splinter entered Olga Karlatos' ocular orbit through the magic of Giannetto De Rossi and company. It was clear to anyone within earshot that she glaringly approved of such things. It was probably her encouragement that sent me off the deep end for those same things growing up, and why I still love seeing them forty years later. 

          So, it is to her gloriously eccentric memory, that the month of October be full of cult classics, exploitation oddities, and black gloved giallo goodness from the land of our heritage,  that seasons the blood pumping through my heart. Welcome to Italoween II...

"Quella villa accanto al cimitero"(1981)d/Lucio Fulci

Tonight, in examining the coda of grue guru Lucio Fulci's unofficial "Gates of Hell" trilogy, 'Quella villa accanto al cimitero', an opprobrious video nasty known internationally as 'House by the Cemetery' that has been alternately banned/censored pretty heavily in the U.K. over the years, we'll find an eerily atmospheric-if-discordant effort with enough gothic punch and inventive kills seasoned with bucketloads of trademark De Rossi red stuff to rightfully vault it into the favorites lists of many enthusiasts worldwide.Though the story, written in part by Dardano Sacchetti, is somewhat disjointed and sluggish in areas, it's aided by the able lens of legendary Sergio Salvati and a baroque Rizatti score in creating an effectively genuine prescience of dread throughout the brisk eighty-seven minute running time.Catriona MacColl, who previously lent her vigorous tonsils to Fulci's Paura nella città dei morti viventi(1980), again proves an adept screamer here, backed by genre regs Paolo Malco, Dagmar Lassander, and Italy's 'coppia di ragazzi dall'aspetto strano' of the eighties, Silvia Collatina and Giovanni Frezza, whose woefully mismatched female-ish ADR voice blows the needle off the creep-o-meter here.Though Fulci, who cameos as a professor, had indeed mastered many diverse genres of film over his career spanning thirty-plus years, his extraordinary grasp on supernatural horror is clearly perceptible during the four year period in which he directed Zombi 2(1979) through to Lo squartatore di New York(1982) without the financial, emotional, and health setbacks that would blemish his work later in the decade.As for tonight's offering, it's a non-linear tale of children and monsters with a dream-like quality amidst the graphic violence that few directors could hope to pull off.But then, that's one more tribute to Fulci and his legacy.Onwards...

For Daniela Doria, it's the end of the story-ah.
After watching a young girl(Daniela Doria), impaled through the back of her head by a knife that juts out of her open mouth, then lifelessly dragged into a cellar after finding her boyfriend's disemboweled body in an abandoned house, we meet Dr. Norman and Lucy Boyle(Catriona MacColl, Paolo Malco) as they relocate from New York to New England with their young, shrill-voiced moptopped offspring, Bob(Giovanni Frezza), into the home of Norman's former colleague, Dr. Petersen, who had mysteriously murdered his lover then hanged himself, while researching old homes.While Lucy packs for the move, Bob is warned by a girl in a photo of just such a home to stay away, and while his parents collect the keys to the Freudstein House, errr... 'Oak Mansion' from Mrs. Gittelson(Dagmar Lassander), who vows to find the couple a babysitter, she appears across the street, telepathically warning him again.The Boyles find Oak Mansion in a state of disrepair, with obligatory creepy babysitter, Anna(Ania Pieroni), taking the time to unblock the foreboding cellar door during the night.The next day, Norman scrutinizes Petersen's findings at the library, where the assistant librarian(Giampaolo Saccarola) informs him that his late colleague's study of area disappearances was private, and creepier still, that he and the other New Whitby inhabitants somehow recognize Norman from a previous visit that he's never made.Meanwhile, little Mae(Silvia Collatina) shows Bob Mary Freudstein's tombstone on the grounds, remarking that she's not really dead, while his mother subsequently discovers the tombstone of Jacob Tess Freudstein...embedded in the floor inside their home.Upon his return, Norman reassures his wife that some old houses contain indoor tombs due to the area's impenetrable ground during the winter season(!).

Questo è Fulci! Dov'è il tappeto rosso, bastardi!
When Norman is attacked by a real blood-bomber of a bat after investgating the cellar, the unnerved family drives to the real estate office and demands to be put up in a slightly less haunted house, but are told the switch will take several days to complete...dah dah dummmm.While the doctor is being treated for his bat attack at the hospital, Mrs. Gittelson lets herself into their place with news of a potential new property, where Freudstein's tombstone crumbles into pieces and trapping her ankle in the process.A shadowy fiend emerges from the darkness, shivving her in the throat with a fireplace poker, then dragging her down into the cellar.The next morning, Lucy finds Anne cleaning up a conspicuous bloodstain on the floor that the babysitter deftly skirts around answering any questions concerning.Norman begins to relate the mad tale of Dr. Freudstein(Giovanni De Nava), the Victorian era surgeon that he must travel back to New York to further research, to his wife.At the library, Boyle finds a cassette of Petersen that tells of Freudstein's family's brutal murder at the patriarch's evil hands.Meanwhile, Anne, who's in the cellar looking for Bob, gets decapitated by Freudstein.The boy sees the disembodied head and runs out screaming, his mother in disbelief at her son's bizarre story.That night, Bob sneaks back into the cellar to look for Anne, when his mother hears his eardrum-piercing screams from behind the heavy door that she's unable to pry open herself.Norman makes the scene, laying into the door with an axe as the rotting hands of Freudstein subdue the (still)screaming boy until his father manages to lop one of them off, forcing the surgeon-turned-monster to retreat into the darkness of his grue-splashed laboratory full of instruments and eviscerated cadavers, still holding the boy with his one good(?) hand.After Norman gets his throat ripped out and Lucy gets her dome slammed hard into the concrete floor, Bob struggles to escape up a ladder that leads to the tombstone as Freudstein closes in.The boy is suddenly pulled upwards through the crack to find Mae and her mother, reborn into a dreary, grey undead realm, into which they walk off.A (most likely) false Henry James quote("No one will ever know whether children are monsters or monsters are children.")leaves us to ponder further as the end credits roll...

Pulverized, you say? Clearly, the girl's been contriturated.
Giovanni De Nava, who plays the monstrous Freudstein here, also appeared in Fulci's Murder Rock(1984) as a hotel receptionist, and more memorably, as L'Aldila(1979)'s ill-fated plumber, Joe.Doria was one of Fulci's personal favorite vics, having been colorfully offed in Paura nella città dei morti viventi(1980), Lo squartatore di New York(1982), and Il gatto nero(1981), and even appearing in Di Leo's Avere vent'anni(1978) along the way.All of these friggin' hyperlinks...at least you can use them to fathom a guess as to which Fulci we'll end up tackling next, eh?Sacchetti and Fulci would stop collaborating in 1983, culminating in accusations of plagiarism and theft over a story idea for a sequel to The Postman Always Rings Twice.Regardless of which camp you believe, it's undeniable that the men worked best together, and their output suffered greatly after the split. As is the case with so many Italian genre entries of the period, one needs to leave his logic in the foyer and focus primarily on the glorious visuals and lush atmosphere instead, to truly appreciate tonight's review in it's full deliriously horrific glory.I've seen some venom online directed at Fulci recently, and this movie, specifically, from a few sassy, against-the-grain hipster-pukes, and besides the ignorance of their inattentiveness disturbing me greatly, it's an opinion I could never share.On the rating scale, three big ones for Cimitero, another cult classic from Lucio, and required viewing for any fans of the genre.Recommended.

"See if this grabs ya, Bob...", says the decomposing-yet-imposing Freudstein(Giovanni De Nava).

"Haute Tension"(2003)d/Alexandre Aja

Aja, Aja, Aja.To avoid stupefaction on the subject, we won't be touching on this Aja tonight(Troll 2 or two trolls,you decide), or this Aja(I wouldn't rule out future entries though), but this one, and his breakthrough film, a controversial return to the blood-spattered gory/glory days of the eighties slasher movie, and an unauthorized re-envisioning of Dean Koontz' novel, Intensity.I've been wanting to review this one for ages.Better late than never, as I, a terminal procrastinator, always say.Out of the four horror projects he's taken the director's chair on thus far, this one is far and away my favorite.I'm aware I've previously mentioned Alexandre in a list of directors to watch, and that he's gone ahead and made remakes since, effectively making me look like a big fat liar, but I still think he might have what it takes to be one of the next generation of greats, with a little more effort, of course.Il est temps d'être sérieux déjà, Alexandre!
Cécile de France sort of comes off as and strongly resembles a French Ellen Degeneres for the most part as Marie, while Maïwenn Le Besco appropriately conveys being fully terrified and terrorized with great aplomb as Alex.Phillippe Nahon, on the other hand, is unforgettably diabolical as the grimy killer, whose on-screen handiwork is deftly handled by the Italian gore maestro, Gianetto De Rossi, who blows NC-17 level chunks of gore skyward here with masterful precision, as is usually the case.On a good day, few could match him, and he may have outdone his own best on tonight's movie, released a year later as "Switchblade Romance" in the U.K., and two years later in the U.S. and Canada as "High Tension".

All kashrut and halal dietary laws were observed in this exsanguination.
Marie and Alex(Cécile de France, Maïwenn Le Besco) drive to Alex's parents' house for the weekend.After the obligatory boring tour of the country estate and equally unmoving dinner, the girls hit their respective sacks, with Marie doing some mouse double-clicking in bed to strains of reggae on her headphones while Alex saws logs.The doorbell ominously rings(those middle-of-the-night doorbells are never any good,as history shows us), interrupting both Marie's masturbatory exercise and Alex's father's sleep as well.He answers the door to find out that it's only the friendly neighborhood homicidal maniac(Philippe Nahon), eager to do some spirited candle-snuffing and kidnapping.After slashing the man with a straight razor and wedging his head between two staircase railing posts, he uses a bookcase as a makeshift guillotine, severing his head with a well-placed shove.10.0, 9.9, 10.0, say the judges.Marie, hearing Alex's mother's screaming discovery of her husband's displaced domepiece, frantically rearranges the guest room she's been in and crawls under the bed, to give the murderer the notion that no one's been staying there when he inspects it for new vics.Once the coast is clear, she clambers downstairs to Alex's room to find her chained there(this guy works fast,huh).While looking for a phone in Alex's parents room, Marie is forced to hide in a closet with a slatted door, through which she watches as the fiend cuts Alex's mother's throat(air cut? blood cut?I think he covers both with one good slash) before her very eyes.The girl's younger brother makes a break for a nearby cornfield, but the killer foils his escape plans with a shotgun blast.Alex gets herself dragged into the pyscho's truck, but Marie manages to sneak in with a butcher knife before they're both locked in and he drives off.

You've got a bit of red on you, matey.
The maniac stops at a gas station as Marie hands the shiv to Alex before sneaking inside to get help.Hiding in an aisle, she witnesses the night clerk as he's midsection-hacked with an axe by the burly killer, who returns to the truck and drives off, with Marie taking the dead worker's car keys and follows after, down a desolate road.After driving her car off the road and chasing her, badly injured from the wreck, on foot into the forest, the killer finds himself on the wrong end of a fence post wrapped in barbed wire, but when Marie inspects his motionless body, he springs at her throat.She manages to wrap his barbed wire beaten-grill in a plastic sheet, finally suffocating the bejeezus out of the sick bastard.After returning to his truck, she notices that Alex seems to be less than pleased to see her, perhaps a tad bit terrifed even.The police finally arrive at the gas station, investigating what the tape of the in-store camera, which clearly shows...you ready for it? Marie planting the chopper in the clerk's chest.Wait...whaaaa?We're then treated with how Alex's family really met their untimely late night demise(Marie again).Seems there never was any hulking,smelly pyschopath on the loose afterall, except inside Marie's twisted grey matter.Alex asks the pyschiatric hospital orderlies if the two way glass will hide her visit from the lovesick sappho-schizo, and when a sutured up Marie turns and reaches towards the mirror, well, she has her answer,doesn't she?

Ever wonder what the marriage between a concrete saw and a man's torso would look like? Fret not, Gianetto's got you covered.
The cop out twist ending, a half-hearted, illogical break from Koontz's plot if you ask me, really busts up an hour plus of well-crafted tension and suspense.Luckily for Haute, I really like the rest of the movie enough to look past it, as weak as it is.Cécile de France followed this role up with one in the Around the World in 80 Days(2004) remake beside Jackie Chan(I'd rather not voice an opinion on anything he's done post-Rumble in the Bronx, if you don't mind).Maïwenn worked with director Luc Besson in the nineties on Leon:The Professional and The Fifth Element.The 72 year old Nahon's cinematic resume'(which begins in 1962) is much more genre-friendly than the two female stars, having appeared in French fare like the bizarre Calvaire, Gaspar Noe's Irréversible, and The Pack recently.Director Aja has several projects in the works, including a big screen adaption of a Japanese manga, Space Adventure Cobra.Not my bag, man.Tension gets three big ones on the scale.

Dory's short-term memory loss and constant swimming lands her a place in the fishbowl for mentals.

"Zombi 2"(1980)d/Lucio Fulci

We masticate the weekend's tender neckflesh with Lucio Fulci's most well-known film,a box-office smash in Europe,and the subject of multiple bannings and extensive censorship throughout the world.Fulci was suggested as a replacement to direct by Enzo "Great White" Castellari,when the action director turned the script down in its early stages,and the rest,as they say,is history.I first saw this movie in its first run at the American Theater with my late,great Aunt Giulia,who managed to see about 15 minutes of it,due to her frequent lobby visits to smoke cigarettes.Cigarettes and horror movies were her two joys in life,so it's no surprise that she'll always be my favorite Auntie,may her soul rest in peace.My fragile ten year old mind could never have fathomed what it was in for,thus irreparably twisted by what I saw alone in that darkened theater that day.The infamous one sheet proudly hung next to "Maniac!"(1980)in my bedroom until I finally had the common sense to frame the damned thing decades later.Everything about this movie,from the infectious and haunting score by Fabio Frizzi to the arterial spurting goodness of Giannetto De Rossi's effects work,screams masterpiece.The film shot Fulci's career,which was stuck in neutral at the time,into high gear,forever establishing the director as the gory generalissimo of grotesque set-pieces.Arguably one of the greatest horror movies ever made,by one of the greatest directors of genre cinema of all-time.If you're even slightly into horror films,and have passed on this one all this time,I seriously shudder to think what the fuck is wrong with you.Maybe chick flicks are more your speed...

"Put up yer pectoral fins,ya big swimmin' garbage can!",says Aqua-zombie.
When a seemingly abandoned yacht floats into the New York harbor,the investigating patrol officers are surprised by a massive rotting zombie,who proceeds to bite one of the policemen's throat out,before being sent overboard by a flurry of bullets that have little effect on the ravenous walking corpse.After Anne(Tisa Farrow)is questioned about her father's boat by authorities,she joins forces with reporter Peter West(Ian McCulloch),aided by a pair of pleasure cruisers(Pier Luigi Conti and Auretta Gay),to seek out a tiny Carribean island named Matool,where her missing father's last letter came from.Meanwhile,on Matool("That's not a cool place to hit.",says Brian(Conti)),Dr. Menard(Richard Johnson) is fighting an uphill battle against an unknown disease that brings the dead back to life,amidst superstitious villagers and voodoo drums on the other side of the island.His neglected wife,Paola(Karlatos),is on the verge of a nervous breakdown,and seeks refuge at the bottom of a glass of liquor while her husband spends his time peering into microscopes and shooting his patients in the head as they ominously rise from their deathbeds.Back on the boat,Susan(Gay)'s topless snorkelling is interrupted by a huge tiger shark on the prowl,but when she swims to the ocean bottom to momentarily hide from the massive predator,she's attacked by a waterlogged underwater zombie.She retreats to the boat as the zombie and shark duke it out in the depths,the shark chewing the corpse's arm off as the ghoul takes a bite out of the shark's underbelly.

"Would I(wood-eye)??!!"says Paola(Olga Karlatos).
When the foursome reaches Matool,the good doctor informs Anne of her father's fate;molten lead headshot death after becoming infected by a bite from one of the island's undead.He asks the group to check on his wife at their bungalow,but when they arrive they find her being devoured alive by a pack of flesh-crazed zombies,after being pulled through a smashed doorway by the hair and a twelve inch wooden splinter pierces her eyesocket(!!!).When their jeep breaks down in the middle of the jungle,they find themselves smackdab in the middle of an ancient conquistador graveyard,grown over by the lush foliage.After Susan eats throat-tearing,blood-gurgling death administered by rotten zombie teeth,the remaining three rush to the old church where Menard has set up his makeshift "hospital",only to find that its been surrounded by an army of shambling undead ghouls,only shotgun shells and molotov cocktails temporarily keeping them at bay.During the desperate struggle,dead patients rise inside the hospital,eating the doctor's assistants,and finally the doctor himself.As Peter,Anne,and Brian rush to escape to the boat,they're greeted by Susan's zombie who bites her boyfriend's shoulder before taking one lead delivery to the domepiece.The reporter and girl lock the dying seaman below deck,hoping to use him as proof of their incredible tale when they reach the mainland,but are shocked to hear a radio broadcast of New York City hopelessly under siege by flesh-eating zombies.

Ottaviano Dell'Acqua,making one of the more memorable entrances in cinema history.
What can I say about this one that hasn't already been said?It reeks of atmosphere and tension like few zombie films do.Arguments will go back and forth 'til the end of time over which is better,this,or Romero's "Dawn of the Dead"(1979),which was released as "Zombi" in Europe,thus the 2 tacked onto Fulci's title though there are no connections between the films,with no clear cut winner,in most cases.Both are Top Ten in my book,and too drastically different to compare.Fulci went on to tackle the awful Zombi 3 in the Phillipines,originally slated as a 3D release,but the film was left incomplete due to an illness the maestro came down with on location,only shooting roughly sixty percent of the final production,with Italian sleaze king Bruno Mattei finishing the job.Mattei still claims the finished pile of shit is Fulci's,but I think anyone who knows a little about Italian horror movies can draw their own conclusions on who's film it is.As for Zombi 2,don't let me rave on all day about it,see it for yourself.I strongly recommend it and give it the highest rating possible.

I hope Peter Luger's has enough open tables...

"Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti"(1974)d/Jorge Grau

Tuesday morning here at Castle Wop,and seeing as I've thrown some stale fruit in the faces of my ghost writers,chained up down in the catacombs like the pitiful creatures they are,I don't see why we can't kick things up a notch for a change.I get a kick out of you cats n' chicks regularly reading my ramblings,and since more of you are doing it on a more frequent basis than ever before,I'm gonna touch on some true classics of genre cinema this week.Some of the directors I'll examine,I've never reviewed before,and being favorites of mine(and a lot of you out there,no doubt),I'll have to handle the entries with sap gloves...sorry,I don't own a pair of "kit gloves".Keep reading,and I'll keep writing.
Today's entry is a film I consider one of the most important flesh-eating zombie movies ever made,surely the first color feature to encorporate gut-chewing ghouls,and a must see/must own for anybody interested in such putrefying silver screen subject matter.Spanish director Jorge Grau crafts a wholly atmospheric and creepy tale,with an ecological slant(like so many movies in the early to mid-seventies),that certainly gave rise to moviegoers' wanton sleepless nights after viewing.With Italian gore specialist Gianetto(Zombi 2 et al) De Rossi on board to serve up the splatter,and a solid cast doing a fun job with their respective roles,it's extremely difficult not to love today's flick.Tweaking George A.'s zombie mythos ever so slightly,and doing so in blood-drenched color,Grau's Spanish/Italian co-production stands as one of the best zombie movies of all-time on most lists compiled by anyone who knows their prick from pumpkin butter about horror movies.

He only has eyes for grue.
George(Ray Lovelock)closes his curio shop in the city for the weekend,riding his motorcycle out to the countryside,interrupted while stopped for gas by Edna(Cristina Galbo'),who manages to back her car over his bike at the gas station.With his wheels out of commission,he hitches a ride with the typical woman driver,who's on her way to see her fix-starved needlehead sister Katie(Jeannine Mestre)and her husband Marin(Ruiz Lifante),to discuss dumping the hopeless bitch in a facility.Where would we be without siblings,huh.Unbeknownst to our unlikely duo,a new method of pest control using soundwaves to influence the nervous system of lesser life forms,turning them aggressive towards each other is being tested on the local farmlands.Little do our would-be scientists realize,their waves affect more than pesky bugs,and soon,the unburied dead within the wave range are coming back to life,with shitty attitudes and a penchant for the flesh of the living.Edna bears witness to the first instance of these ghouls in the form of drowned hobo Guthrie(great name!),who fancies terrorizing the girl while George asks local farmers for directions.Guthrie shambles upon Marin while he's shooting some night photographs,and his wife is trying to sneak out to the shed for a good shot in the arm,and kills the man as the auto-flash captures the whole gruesome event.
The inspector(Arthur Kennedy) appears on the case,and between voicing his disdain for George,Edna,and Katie,who's now in the midst of a nervous breakdown("You're all the same, the lot of you with your long hair and faggot clothes."), he questions them all as potential murder suspects,believing there's some whacked out drug cult responsible.Aren't the police just the most reasonable gents in the movies?

Insert joke about Italians eating with their hands here.
George and Edna try to heist the film from Marin's camera to prove her sister's innocence,but none of the shots prove to contain the water-drenched bum-zombie.After seeing violent babies attacking nurses at the hospital,it all becomes clear to George,who drives to the cemetery to see whether Guthrie still rests in peace or not.The couple find themselves trapped in a tomb surrounded by zombies,and when a cop who's been following them can corroborate their wild story,he's abruptly eaten by zombies.George smashes the apparatus out in the field to try and stop the dead ressurection,but fails to realize it isn't the only one of its kind,and before you can say In nomine Patris et fillii et Spiritus Sancti,the walking dead are on a gut-yanking killing spree at the hospital where Edna and her sister have rooms.Nurses get their tits squeezed off,Katie gets the piss strangled out of her by her dead husband,and a doctor takes an axe to the head,among the mounting casualties.George gets there too late,and is forced to burn all the zombies,Edna included,into a pile of ash.The inspector,arriving even later than George,shoots him in the head for his troubles,believing that he caused all the carnage at the hospital himself.When the policeman is later dropped off at the inn where the couple was staying,he's surprised to see George's zombie waiting for him,causing the stubborn fascist cop to eat corpse masticating death in the shadows.Out in the fields,they've repaired the soundwave machine,and increased the range of effectiveness....

After hearing about renewed global interest in his band,Townsend defiantly busted out of rehab.
Spanish-born Galbo' retired from acting in the eighties,and tours the world while instructing Flamenco out of California.Lovelock took part in genre films like La Settima Donna,Roma violenta,and Macchie solari before becoming a staple of Italian televison series.De Rossi worked most recently on the makeup for Christopher Roth(2010),after doing a lot of television,himself.Manchester Morgue,which has sixteen alternate titles to date(!!!), has been Grau's last genre film,though he continued to direct well into the nineties.The English graveyard in the film is believed to hold the body of Little John,of Robin Hood fame,surprisingly.Anyway,if you haven't seen this movie,where the fuck have you been?Get out there and score a copy.Anchor Bay released a beautiful collectible tin presentation of the film,with a slew of nifty extras,several years back,but it isn't impossible to find by any means.One of my favorite zombie movies,and an excellent horror classic for the ages,Morgue slowly rises from the slab with the highest scale rating of Four Wops.

"I choke-ah you throat-ah!I choke-ah you throat-ah!"

Piranha Part 2: The Spawning(1981)d/James Cameron

Take it from ol' B.W.,even the biggest Hollywood hotshot directors have movies under their belts they'd like to forget.Take James Cameron,for example.Sure,he's responsible for big budget spectacles like Aliens,True Lies,The Terminator,and Titanic,but his humble beginnings include Galaxy of Terror(1981) and this particular ridiculous piece of dogshit.Don't get me wrong,I have fond memories of watching it in the rental days,and there are enough elements in place that it manages to entertain despite its shortcomings,but let's not pull punches here:This movie sucks all kinds o' bloated pungent donkey balls.So much so that it's a minor miracle that Cameron went on to have the career he has,I know if I was hiring a director for MY motion picture and he walked in with a nice professional-looking resume that had this movie on it,I'd second guess myself over hiring the bucciaolo to hold my boom microphone.That said,let's reflect on the positive aspects of the film:Lance Henriksen in his pre-leather wallet days,Italian goremeister Gianetto De Rossi admirably assassinates several characters(we won't break his balls about the carnivorous flying fish effects just yet),genre vet Stelvio Cipriani's excellent film score,and of course, Leslie Graves' underutilized D cup gashingas hidden in an eighties-tastic half shirt.If she broke those puppies out,we'd be looking at a different review,my friends.

Even Chief Kimbrough(Lance Henriksen)smirks at the idea of flying piranha hybrids.
At the outset two divers decide to have themselves an aqua-fuck next to the sunken remains of a ship,before they're torn to pieces by hundreds of unseen predators.Their bodies are discovered by a professional scuba instructor and single mom named Anne(Tricia O'Neill)while on a dive with a group of tourists.One of her students,a herman named Tyler Sherman(Steve Marachuk)has a fire down below for her,but her ex-husband happens to be the island's own police chief Yarbrough(Lance Henriksen) investigating the mysterious dual demise in the murky depths,and keeping his former partner on a short leash.Meanwhile,her son scores himself a job as first mate on a pleasure boat for a stuffy old snob who doesn't know his own prick from pumpkin butter about boating,and... AND... his bangin' daughter who's got bountiful busoms just a-burstin' out all over the freakin' place.It's gonna be a good summer,as DeNiro once said in a much better movie.Anne convinces Tyler to break into the morgue to take photographs of the dead bodies,and he obliges,figuring the stunt will score him some easy wizard's sleeve from the curious milf.A cleaning lady bursts in on their hijinks and chases them,before(here comes the "Holy Saint Xenobius" moment,wait for it!) a toothy flying fish flies out of a gaping wound in the corpse's midsection and chews the black woman's throat out before smashing out a window and flying off(!!!).Yeah,I'm rubbing my eyes over here,too.

This diver's got a loverly smile,courtesy of makeup wiz Gianetto "Zombi 2" De Rossi.
Yarbrough discovers his ex-wife's credit card at the crime scene the next day,and when he shows up to question her,she's sleeping off a sympathy fuck with Tyler.Meanwhile,two pirate-esque bimbos cheat a poor retarded stuttering resort chef out of a box of supplies before the flying death-dealers make a meal out of them.Anne's son sneaks off with the pillow chested crewmate in a rowboat,and Tyler comes clean about really being a genetic engineer staying at the resort to try and monitor a lost cannister of hybrid piranha/flying fish he'd helped develop.And just in time for the resort's annual fish-stravaganza,where guests call the fish from the ocean's surf by tiki torch in the moonlight.The hotel manager,Raoul,is more concerned with a succesful party than the impending bloody decimation of his tourists.Sniff,sniff,I smell the Jaws formula in here somewhere.The police chief sets out in his chopper to look for his fleshhound son and his concubine,and Anne and Tyler dive to the wreckage to set off explosive charges to rid the island of its winged threat once and for all.The mutant fish fly out of the water and turn the tables on the hotel guests,flapping,biting,and squeaking like bats in the process.Tyler eats carnivorous mutant death at the jaws of his own aquatic Frankenstein-esque creations,but Anne places the charges and after Yarbrough inexplicably crashes his own chopper into the ocean(?),he scores a boat and saves his ex-wife and the two kids just in time for a giant underwater trademark Cameron explosion,saving the day.Sound ridiculous?It is.It really is.

Smoking ganja would prove fruitless for this poor bastard.
In defense of De Rossi,always one of my favorite makeup artists,his gore is top-notch as always.His boxy-looking "fish" which clunk clumsily through the air like Science Patrol spaceships from the old Ultraman television series and resemble winged trout with choppers,can't really be blamed on him.Look at the assinine script he was given to work with,ferchrissakes.Producer Ovidio G. Assonitis allegedly gave Cameron no freedom,only allowing the director to film the movie,cutting it himself,and then re-cutting it when he discovered Cameron trying to edit it himself.Cameron,when asked about the film,smirks "I believe 'The Spawning' was the finest flying piranha movie ever made."Whether you consider the guy a talented director or a blowjob hack who made good,you have to admit he's got a sense of humour.Director of the original 1978 movie,Joe Dante's gotta wince when this movie comes up.This entry flaps and squeaks its way to a scale rating of an embarrasing:

Insert your obligatory "head" joke here.