La Casa 4 (1988) d/ Fabrizio Laurenti

It's been a minute, but we have returned with genre goofiness from the Boot just for you, as promised. Does this mean we won't be doing an Italian-themed month of reviews in Wop-tober? Hardly the case. This mutt, a Joe D'Amato produced sequel to Umberto Lenzi's La Casa 3 aka/ Ghosthouse (1988), unrelated genre fare rebranded as "House" movies to coincide with Sam Raimi's legendary Evil Dead movies, which just so happen to have been distributed as La Casa and La Casa 2, respectively, in Italy, at the time. Laugh all you want, there were several more to come after this one. Vidmark unleashed it upon unsuspecting American home video enthusiasts as "Witchery" in 1988. I'm pleased to report that nothing works in this movie, from the direction, to the pacing, to the special effects, right on down to the acting. Buckle up...
  

"T' ain't a finer stewing onion in all of London than this!"
In my best estimation, it would seem that Gary (David Hasselhoff) is a horny, young photographer who's taken his writer/girlfriend Leslie (Leslie Cumming) to a remote Massachusetts island and a run-down resort hotel where she can research famous witch lights...or gates to Hell...or something paranormal or other, as it's incredibly difficult to anybody to understand most of her dialog. Hard to tell if she's drunk, handicapped, or just affecting the most puzzling portrayal ever committed to celluloid, on purpose. Either way, when she's not emotionlessly mumbling her lines and pacing the hallways, she's denying Gary access to the poontang like some kind of virgin. The hotel formerly belonged to an old German woman (Hildegard Knef) with an all-black wardrobe who may have turned her toes up decades earlier as the result of a potent witch hunt, as she was tragically pregnant with child (cue: slo-mo flopper out upstairs window). Only she seems to be still flitting mysteriously about the old place, and she's likely plotting a course for gruesome, bloody retribution, as these witch-types usually are.


"Dis is a message from Aquaman to yer pal Jeremy Wade. 'E sez knock it off or else."
Meanwhile,  with Mater Rose (Annie Ross) having designs on buying the property,  her Brooks clan is arriving with a pair of horny realtors (including Hasselhoff's then wife, sultry blonde soap opera star, Catherine Hickland) via boat to assess the purchase, restoration costs, etc. There's her husband Freddie (Bobby Chanpagne), and their two children, the adult Jane (Linda Blair), who's very pregnant and having weird visions, and bashful young Tommy (Michael Manchester), who looks authentically petrified to be in front of the camera. Naturally, things go sour in a hurry, and in a most graphically violent and innovative manner, if not always (okay, ever) a coherent one. The lady in black and her spinning jeweled pin unlock a very seventies tele-visual effect-laden doorway to another dimension, where taunting witch-bullies eat still-born fetus parts, old women get hung upside down in a roaring fireplace, unable to scream with their lips sewn shut, and puffy nippled virgins lose their hymen to a yuck mouthed, leering Satan. You can assuredly bet that Linda Blair's character will be possessed and lip syncing gibberish with a cock metal hair do before the end credits roll, as well. That's a given...


Bert was the last Cockney chimney sweep she'd ever cross...
With confusing and inept fare such as this being exported from Italy in the late eighties, it isn't hard to see that the earlier Golden Era for the genre was shrinking rapidly in the rear view mirror, and an inevitable flat line was on the horizon. Claudio Fragasso's La Casa 5 aka/ Beyond Darkness (1990), also produced by D'Amato, would come next. Nobody's any good in this one, with Leslie Cumming of Zombie 5: Killing Birds (1987) fame cementing her position as the worst on screen, scene after laughable scene, and perhaps Hasselhoff delivering the only cringe-less performance, albeit a pedestrian one. Despite the constant flow of negativity that's just been bellowing out of me concerning Witchery, and the inevitable single Wop I've got to lay upon it, you might just have a blast taking this one in with your buddies, if rotten fun is occasionally your fancy. You know what I'm saying. Scream Factory will be releasing it as a Blu-ray on a double bill with it's predecessor, Ghosthouse, in June, so look out for that.


"Rock and roll crazy naaaaaaaaht! You are the hero toniiiiiiiiiiiight!"

"La casa fantasma" (1988) d/ Umberto Lenzi

Humphrey Humbert's at it again, this time using the same Massachusetts funeral home location that Lucio Fulci utilized seven years earlier with his own Quella villa accanto al cimitero aka/ House by the Cemetery (1981). Just to clarify, by Humphrey Humbert, we mean Hank Milestone / Humphrey Longan / Humphrey Milestone / Harry Kirkpatrick / Bob Collins himself. Umberto Lenzi has got more aliases than the Manson women, eh? When he wasn't condemning innocent animals to violent, on camera, snuff-death in his wildly controversial cannibal movies, Lenzi often took on projects like tonight's review, a mess as unlikely as it is incoherent. Let's have a look...


"I'll remove your vocal chords for food, " offers Dr. Butcher (Donald O'Brien).
While young Henrietta (Kristen Fougerousse) is on dark, creepy cellar-timeout for scissoring the family feline, her father takes a mystery scalp axing and mother gets knife necked upstairs, and Henrietta's disturbing, nursery rhyme whispering Jester doll may or may not have had a hand in it. Fast forward twenty years, where Martha's (Lara Wendell) data programming, ham radio enthusiast boyfriend, Paul (Greg Scott), receives a spooky transmission complete with nursery rhymes, cries for help, and screams. Naturally, this translates into the couple driving out to the source of the broadcast (with Martha getting five beans ganked by a black ghost-ophile hitchhiker along the way, I might add), where another ham radio user (I don't remember this being a terribly popular phenomenon in the late eighties, maybe I'm just ignorant?) has pitched camp at the brightly lit spook-house with his brother, sister, and brother's girlfriend in tow, against the warnings of grizzled psycho caretaker, Valkos (Donald O'Brien). Valkos doesn't 'warn', so much as physically attack the unwanted guests with a butcher cleaver, but who's keeping score at this point?


Throat lozenges and Visine probably won't rectify this situation.
Sure enough, Paul's kooky tape recording happen to be the voices of fellow citizen's band champion, Jim, and his young sister, who kinda looks like teenaged Jim Carrey in drag while under duress when the family camper springs to life, knocking her ass over tit. Wouldn't you know it,  Henrietta's ghost makes the scene, and that's when unplugged metal ceiling fan blades are mostly likely to cut a body's throat, along with your obligatory hammer kills, body bifurcations, pitchfork impalings, disappearing Dobermans, expanding, exploding glass shards all about the place, water taps pouring blood, echo chamber laughter, and even the Grim Reaper makes a cameo before the end credits. There's also the matter of that otherworldly Jester doll, and his nursery rhyme, inaudible to untrained ears, but to a professional drum such as mine, the song's whispered message is pretty clear: Watch something else...watch something else.


The Grim Reaper got a hunnert problems, but cuttin' a mothafucka ain't one of 'em.
Lenzi followed this one up with three efforts, House of Witchcraft (made-for-tv), Le porte dell'inferno aka/ Hell's Gate, and Paura nel buio aka/ Hitcher in the Dark, the following year. Wendel has appeared in genre fare such as Mio caro assassino (1972), Il profumo della signora in nero (1974), Un'ombra nell'ombra (1979), and even Tenebre (1982). Scott also showed up in Fatal Attraction (1987) and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987). It should also be noted that no less than the late, great Aristide Massaccesi,  Joe D'Amato himself, was an uncredited producer on this one. Wrapping it up, shitty acting, a mundane script, and mostly over lit, under dressed frames not to mention Lenzi's production line attitude towards this sort of thing by this time,  force me to lay the single woppo upon it. He'd done worse, but also a lot better in and out of the genre, over the years.


"Get your mock scepter outta my frenulum of labia minora!"

"Sangue negli abisi" (1990) d/ Raf Donato, Joe D'Amato

When you're dealing with Italian Jaws rip offs, things usually go one of two ways: a) The movie is laughably terrible and thus, a fucking blast to behold. b) The movie is Sangue negli abisi, or Deep Blood, an awful, sloppy, boring mess fumbled through for the most part, by Raf Donato, and completed by Roman porn king Joe D'Amato, our focus tonight as we kick off a month long selection of genre movies from Italy here at the Wop. As rotten as this thing is, and trust me, it's as rotten as the meat dumpster behind the slaughterhouse during a Texas heatwave, Italian trashmaster Bruno Mattei still somehow borrowed footage from it for his own pathetic Jaws rip-off, Fauci Crudelli/Cruel Jaws (1995).


"What's the big idea...dumping your Strawberry Quik in here!"
So, we've got these four young boys roasting weenies over a fire on the beach in broad daylight, when they're suddenly interrupted by what looks to be the town drunk vaguely garbed to resemble some sort of Indian. He lays a tribal legend about a monster from the sea on them, and gives them some ornate piece of wood to bury in the loose sand, but only after they've taken a blood oath to be there for each other, you know, for always. Fast forward several years, and our boyhood chums have now matured into young preppie non-actors, each with their own clunky exposition and flair for flubbing dialog. One's the son of a mayor, who shouts his lines and wears his slacks just south of his nipples, the other's the son of a fisherman who no longer fishes, content to bang a hammer against a wooden coop in the garage rather than fish. He doesn't even clearly explain why he doesn't fish anymore, he just doesn't. The third gets eaten while researching spearfishing locales (I think he does, anyway, if splashing around in strawberry-colored water before disappearing with the edit constitutes a shark attack here) with the fourth, a pouty kid with an annoying accent who's always telling the sweaty sheriff, who later exclaims, "How many sharks could there be out there!",  how to do his job.


"Of course I'm a shark expert. Can't you see me running water over these shark jaws in the sink?", queries Rob Reiner.
Loads of inappropriate synth instrumental, action dialog from a stationary helicopter,  footage of a dead shark being chain-dragged onto a pier by the mouth, a digested waitress, and one consumed mom on a pool float later (her mulleted little boy takes her passing like a champ, btw), the boys convince the fisherman to take them out to hunt the stock footage beast responsible for the deaths. The shark snaps the bait line and scares him into returning to land. Not much of an angler, this guy. Anyway, there's a rotten dramatic exchange between Pouty and his dad, and before you know it, the boys are joined by an eighties-tastic douchebag smartass who has a last second change of heart, they dig up the wooden artifact (and pocket knives, can't forget those), and set out to blow up the shark with crate upon crate of wooden planks painted to look like dynamite. Hell, they even recruit one of their mallrat pals to whip up an electronic shark attractor just for the occasion. Because sharks find yellow metal boxes with flashing lights on top irresistible, apparently. More synth, more stock footage, endless shots of nautical preppies wrapping wood together with electrical tape, and then there's the dollar store underwater explosion we've all been waiting for. Finally over.


"This doesn't look like enough dynamite. I know where we can score a tactical nuke."
I'm not one hundred percent sure about the Florida locals claiming to be actors here, but if I was to make an educated guess, I'd say none of them ever made that same mistake again, save for credit as an extra in a crowd scene, maybe. For some of these mooks, even that'd be a fucking stretch. If any of the shark footage looks familiar to you, it's probably because it was purchased by D'Amato from National Geographic, and packs nearly as much tense thrills and excitement as one of their television specials. There's no nudity, there's no gore, no suspense, hell, there's barely even a shark to speak of, beyond an artificial dorsal fin that wobbles repeatedly as it cuts awkwardly through the surf. One wop is probably me at my most generous here, as there's hardly anything that would merit such a rating in this thing. If you haven't seen this one, you really aren't missing much.


"Yaaaaaahhh! It's a Great White Stock (footage)!!!"

"L'alcova" (1984) d/ Joe D'Amato

We'll take a torrid turn towards the sexy tonight as we examine one of Papa Joe's sultry softcore Brass-esque period pieces from the mid-eighties, starring the source of my every Matool joke, Al Cliver, as well as the brunette bombshell from Avere vent'anni aka/ To Be Twenty(1978) and former Miss Italy 1975, Lilli Carati, D'Amato fave, the Black Emanuelle herself, Laura Gemser, and last, but never least, the angelic apple of my exploitative eye, Annie Belle, who'd not only outgrown the Lolita roles that comprised much of her early acting career by this point, but also the trademark bleached pixie hairdo in favor of lengthier brunette tresses. Naturally, you won't hear any complaints outta this guy.


"But I didn't want a slave, I wanted cornetti di crema!!"
Elio(Al Cliver) is a victorious soldier returning from an Abyssinian conquest to his Italian villa, bearing gifts for his lovely young wife Alessandra (Carati), who's been carrying on with his secretary Wilma (Belle) while he's been out expanding the empire for his Duce, who was political bedfellows with a fuehrer of his own, ahhh, you all know how that story goes by now... He surprises his spouse with a princess-turned-slave named Zerbal (Gemser), a gift from an African king, gracious for not having been snuffed out by the then-advancing fascist war machine. Alessandra initially hates the dusky gift ( Zerbal greets her with "Hello.Go and get yourself fucked." ),  at least until she's given the lanky woman in a kooky saliva-heavy ceremony, after which she's wrapped around Zerbal's impossibly long fingers, in more ways than one, as you had to know was coming.


"...now this is a very cool place to hit...", exclaims Elio (Al Cliver).
Perhaps incensed at not being able to give Elio his usual post boot removal blow job, Zerbal defiantly switches radio stations, breaks windows, and climbs trees barefoot ("Treat her like a pet, not a slave!" Elio scolds) until she finally turns her new mistress' racial slurs into 'ooh's and 'aah's, leaving a jealous Wilma as the odd lesbian out in the mix. Meanwhile, the jilted pantiless secretary and self-proclaimed 23 year old virgin teases and resists the advances of  his son Furio (Roberto Caruso), a fellow soldier and young guest, when she isn't wanking Elio off in the hallway as they both eavesdrop Zerbal and Alessandra in the bedroom. After a coke and champagne-fueled sass-off between the mistress and secretary, Elio returns with the equipment with which to make moving pictures, showing his three ladies what has to be the most vintage hardcore stag loop I've ever seen, and exclaiming, "We can do better than that!". Having gone belly up financially, he films his wife dressed as a nun, forcing her privates into the face of a bound up Wilma, before letting his filthy gardener Pepe rape her, on camera. Reunited with Furio, Wilma interrupts Zerbal getting a ceremonial slave lickdown from Elio, chucking the stolen stag film she'd made into a candle below, igniting the Abyssinian's gown, and bringing us to a fiery, vengeful climax.


My stone's gone from flint to jade over Wilma (Annie Belle).
The production values are top notch, and D'Amato has decorated the lush Italian countryside with appropriately beautiful people, none of which were strangers to softcore(only Carati made the jump to hardcore features), to play out his perverted power play here, and the performances aren't entirely flat as one might expect, given the prolific director's track record. I'd have given it three Wops if it didn't overextend itself towards the middle, but a solid double seems fitting for a movie whose plot mirrors the director's own life with a knowing smirk, having had to "resort" to pornography due to "economic" reasons, himself.


Amazing how she maintains eye contact with those obstructions in plain view. I know I couldn't do it.

"La morte ha sorriso all'assassino" (1973) d/ Aristide Massaccesi

Let's kick it off properly with what is arguably Italian sleazemeister Joe D'Amato's best genre work, in a Poe-inspired gothic 1973  giallo that stars Euro staple-creep Klaus Kinski and Swede-born confectionery item, Ewa "Candy" Aulin. Insert: lip smack here. In fact, those only familiar with the director's later, more crass efforts might be pleasantly surprised at the attention he dedicates to the film's dreamy look, a juxtaposition of horrible images against beautiful ones that I'm unsure he was ever able to purvey to an audience as effectively as he does here. As far as I know (a range that encompasses "just about everything" to "next to nothing" on any given day), it stands as the only other film in his two hundred (besides 1977's Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals), in which he uses his real name on a directorial credit, from a period when he clearly cared more about the artistic aspects of his movies than the financial success, as was visibly the case later in his career. Some might even go so far as to call it his "masterpiece"... Don't get the wrong idea, folks, this is still a D'Amato movie, and there's plenty of gory splatter and  nudity abound here, and you might have difficulty tracking the incoherent plot line even with the help of microchip implants, but such is the cinema, no?


More style and profile here than a Ric Flair wrasslin' promo. Woooo!
At the turn of the twentieth century, after a handsome doctor (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) impregnates the female half of an incestuous pair of siblings, resulting in the death of mother and child, her jilted, hunchbacked brother Franz (Luciano Rossi) sets out to restore her life. Three years later, on the doorstep of the estate of Walter Von Ravensbruck (Sergio Doria), son of the aforementioned doctor, a gruesome carriage accident finds beautiful passenger, Greta (Aulin) injured and the carriage driver skewered through the heart on the vehicle shaft.Walter calls in Dr. Sturges (Kinski) first to examine the driver's corpse for the authorities, then to diagnose the young, unresponsive woman. Sturges unflinchingly sinks a needle clear into her wide-open eye(!), then recognizes an inscription on the amulet around her neck as just the Incan formula for resurrection he's been looking for, for years! He scurries down to his sub-basement lab and laboriously fiddles with beakers and test tubes, before getting C.T.F.O.ed by mysterious hands just as his latest concoction brings a male corpse back to life. Thorough as a shadowy killer usually is, he re-snuffs Sturges' mute assistant and the reanimated corpse, for good measure. Upstairs, both Von Ravensbruck and his wife are mesmerized by their lovely new guest and play nudie prod games together while a maid that's haunted by visions of Franz gets her facepiece blown the eff off by the shadowy killer, who proves he's not against using a gun once in a while.


"Hold ztill. I'm goink to inzert zis pin into your eyeball..."
Walter's wife Eva (Angela Bo) walls up Greta in the musty cellar, after failing to drown her while giving her a bath, but ultimately fails in stopping the inevitable spectral haunting/ violent death in store for both she and her husband. The Von Ravensbruck's trusty manservant, Semian, reveals himself to be Greta's murderous accomplice, but she inexplicably rewards his loyalty by sending him off to join the choir invisible. After her objet du vengeance, Walter's father, is trapped in his daughter-in-law's crypt as her eyes ominously snap open, we flashback to Greta's resurrection at Franz's hands three years earlier, his success garnering him a nasty end from an ornery black feline that has issues with eyes. The grisly aftermath is discovered by a police inspector, who rehashes the strange details of the case to his elderly, invalid wife, who's been turned away from him in her wheelchair the whole time. When she turns to face him, he realizes that she is in reality, Greta, a harbinger of his own horrible fate, perhaps? Roll credits.


"...and the big dance is tonight! I'm ruined!!!"
What manner of insanity is this? A D'Amato movie that's not hardcore porn, and it merits a Wop, doubled, on the mostly infallible and oft-imitated ratings scale?? Believe it or not, despite his under-use of Kinski here, the convoluted story line, and some signature jerky handheld P.O.V. shots that he'd revisit again and again, in things like Porno Holocaust(1979) and Antropophagus(1980),  this just might be my favorite of all of the director's genre work, with mostly solid performances from the cast, palatable cinematography, and an aptly phantasmagorical score from Berto Pisano. D'Amato would follow this one up with several over the next few years under the name Michael Wotruba, including 1974's Eroi all'inferno, a war movie that also starred Rossi and Kinski. The adorable Aulin would next appear in Jorge Grau's Ceremonia Sangrienta (1973).


"Ho bisogno di aiuto! I've got a sheep's eye glued to my face!"

"Holocausto Porno"(1979)d/Aristide Massaccesi

"Inent(sp) of Porno holocaust is to astonish women eventually." says movies.syl.com about tonight's movie.They also say,"Good characters struggle as awfully as donkeys.",and "Dramatic scrimmage is crank in this nonsense."Now,I'm not sure if exploitation sensation Joe D'Amato was aware just how crank his scrimmage was this time around,but it was obvious to the cats over at that site,I guess.Nevertheless,I think random words cut n' pasted to form nonsense into a movie review(they aren't the only ones guilty doing it either,I've read some other blogs)might have been the optimum way to tackle tonight's offering from Papa Joe.He handled porn masterfully,he handled horror well in one or two instances.When he mixed the two together,the result was always the same.Something like this.Nico Fidenco's disco pop soundtrack doesn't make this one any easier to get through.The cast,which includes Annj Goren,who you'll no doubt remember from dick jerkers like Sesso Nero(Black Sex)and Due sessi in uno(Two Sexes in One),Mark Shannon,Dirce Funari,Lucia Ramirez,and the Grim Reaper himself,Luigi Montefiori(he also wrote the cough,cough...screenplay),have themselves a whole lotta on-screen sex here...Apart from Montefiori/Eastman,who wisely keeps his cazzies off camera.And awaaaaay we go...

Radioactive monster or Rudy Ray Moore with a Sham Wow tied around his head?You decide,rat soup mothafuckas.
A team of scientific researchers/uber-horny rascals is assembled for a voyage by sea to a deserted island in Santo Domingo that was once a nuclear testing site to investigate strange biological mutations like massive crabs,rats,and turtles...oh yeah,and the legend of a lone family who forgot to evacuate during the bomb tests,resulting in a pasty-faced radioactive negro with an equine-sized hunk o' pantsmeat and a propensity for rape and murder.Take lotsa pictures,guys.Before they embark on their epic journey,carnally frustrated female team members orally explore each other's axe wounds,the "contessa"(Goren) checks into the nearest brothel for a round of "Jungle loads down my gullet" with a pair of oversexed tribesmen,and on the beach,Captain O'Day(Shannon)introduces Annie(Ramirez) to an eggbag so warty it resembles the Nucleon from Johnny Sokko.Once the team arrives on the island,they set up camp roughly eight feet from the shore amidst heavy breathing and some shaky monster's eye view camerawork.After Dr.Lemoir(Montefiori) takes some geiger readings on the beach,Simone(Funari) and the contessa,overcome by the sexiness of the desolate isle,take the opportunity to go Degeneres on each other again,this time upon a massive driftwood log.Annie and the Cap'n are next to explore the erotic possibility of said log.Then Simone forces herself upon her rock-preoccupied husband up against a palm tree.The horrible hanky-headed hoogan peep toms their coital endeavor,then sinks the three pump chump in the frothy drink.He then stuffs his oversized radioactive man-root in Simone's yap,killing her.Death by cock.That's a first,huh.

Rather than bother trying vainly to sneak screenshots of hardcore triple X action from the film past the nazis at Photobucket,here's a black guy with veal parmigiana spirit-gummed to his face.
The monster then dispatches a pair of assistants,sending the remaining team members into a panic,as evidenced by their slightly hurried jogging.The black beast scoops up Anniein the confusion,carrying her to his cave lair,where she discovers a journal.It's always good for radioactive sociopaths to write down their feelings,in between kill/rape sprees.O'Day,Lemoir,and the contessa stumble upon the face-fucked remains of Simone,while back at the cave,the monster brings Annie fruits to eat.Awww,rag-headed rapist,you're not so bad afterall.At the camp,the cap'n,wrought with distress over his missing love,serves up a doggie style dick-down to the contessa,who dramatically weeps as she yanks his junk out,to the dismay of Lemoir who walks off in disgust.Sure,O'Day blasts spooge on the contessa's lower back,but it just isn't the same as Annie.The cap'n stumbles upon one of the workers lying across death's doorstep,who chokes out the dastardly details of his demise before snuffing it.The monster sneaks up on Lemoir at the campsite,and chokes him the fuck out,before issuing a beastly backhander to the contessa,who had been swimming nude,assaulting her unconscious gravy boat with radioactive blast of monster mustard.The cap'n jogs back,speargun in hand,finding the contessa naked and dead with a bloody mess between her thighs.He jogs off again,this time finding Annie,and spears the horny hanky head in the labonza.The monster pulls the spear out and raises it above his head to shiv O'Day,who immediately falls to his back in a moment of passive bitchdom,but Annie orders the beast not to kill him,so he refrains,and falls down dead instead.The two survivors leave the eerie isle by rowboat,pausing for a frothy fuck n'suck,before being spotted waving and yelling(with a third passenger momentarily popping his head into the frame) by a passing cargo ship.Saved!Viewers of this atrocity are not so lucky...

Luckily,a nearby native saw Luigi choking on his Bolognese,and administered the Heimlich in the nick of time.
D'Amato,who makes an uncredited cameo here as a reporter,followed this mess up with Le notti erotiche dei morti viventi,or "Sexy Nights of the Living Dead",which utilized much of the same cast and location,with much of the same headscratching results.Mark Shannon continued his illustrious porn career,occasionally pausing for D'Amato genre fare like Le notti,Emperor Caligula:The Untold Story, and Rosso Sangue.Montefiori/Eastman appeared most recently in 2008's Grindhouse Universe.Funari would only appear in one more film,Killing of the Flesh,a few years later.Ramirez,strangely uncredited as the female lead here, was another D'Amato regular,showing up in Rosso Sangue and Le notti as well as several hardcore appearances.I can still remember my ex-wife's disgust when the German Kult Video print of tonight's entry showed up in my mailbox years ago."This is porn,you fucking pervert!"Is it porn thinly disguised as horror,though,or vice versa?Or perhaps neither.Certainly not the most enjoyable D'Amato vehicle in his long catalogue,but if inept gore,disco music,and HPV-riddled testicles are your cup of tea,then,by all means,have at it.Media Blasters released a new disc a while back,but one copy of this is more than enough for me.One wop.

Heeeey,your African is in my Italian!

"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.

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.