"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!"

"Cannibal Ferox"(1981)d/Umberto Lenzi

After you guys hit the Wop for a best ever record week, I've gotta put some tainted candy and an extra razor blade apple in your treat bags for the effort tonight, kiddies.And what better reward is there, than to cover the granddaddy of grindhouse movies from the Italian potentate of poor taste, Umberto Lenzi.A movie so multitudinously rotten that it embarrassed Johnny Morghen, an actor who had no problem amorously coddling a blow up doll on screen for Lucio Fulci, and known for suffering ultraviolent deaths in genre movies.In tonight's review, also known as "Make Them Die Slowly"(the title I caught it under at the drive in back in the eighties), Lenzi goes easy on Johnny, chopping his hand off, removing his dick with a machete, and extricating his brains after truncating his skull with said blade.Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for animals that appear in front of Lenzi's lens here, as he certainly doesn't shy away from the sadistic cruelty that often befell wildlife in the cannibal subgenre in its heyday.If that sounds too heavy for your karma, you'll probably want to stop reading here and wait for the next review.Also succumbing dilatorily here are Italian genre vets Lorraine De Selle, Zora Kerova, Danilo Mattei, and Robert Kerman, aka/ seventies porn dick, R. Bolla, who seemed to turn up in every one of these pictures back then.Lenzi's screenplay is chock full of marvelously insane dialogue, set to a dated-yet-funky soundtrack provided by Donati and Maglione, while the abundant on-screen splatter is deftly handled by maestro Giannetto De Rossi.The original advertisements boasted of the film's being 'banned in 31 countries', though you'd be hard pressed to find it censored anywhere these days(besides tolerant Britain, of course), let alone being outright banned.Call it what you will, but it definitely rates as a cult classic.Man, I can still remember the queasiness in my stomach from the front seat of my old man's '79 Impala like it was just last night...

After 100 grand of their dope money disappeared, Pigface gets a different type of shot than the one he was looking for.
At the outset, we see a junkie whose quest for horse leads him to the Manhattan apartment of one Mike Logan(Johnny Morghen), only to meet verbal abuse and roughhousing at the hands of two mobsters who Logan has cheated out of a hundred grand("A hundred grand!OUR hundred grand!From OUR dope!") before skipping town.The gangsters issue a message of impending retribution to Logan through "Pigface" that he'll never receive, seeing as how they shoot "Shitface" dead in his tracks before he can ever pass it on.Meanwhile in Paraguay, Rudy and Gloria(Danilo Mattei, Lorraine De Selle) are two siblings planning an excursion with their friend Pat(Zora Kerova) into the green inferno of the Amazon River basin to prove Gloria's theory that cannibalism not only doesn't currently exist, but in fact, has never existed among the primitive tribes; a European myth perpetuated to justify colonization of the region by covetous land barons.After one of the guides chews a phony-looking butterfly on a wire(a bad prop and a bad omen at the same time), a jaywalking iguana causes Rudy to get their jeep stuck in a nearby bog(naturally blowing the engine) forcing them to hoof it through the perilous rain forest.After stumbling across a couple of dead booby trapped savages, the group arbitrarily bumps into two desperate westerners, Mike and Joe, who claim they've been set upon by cannibals.Joe's been shivved by one of the angry primitives, while Mike is blowing through cocaine like Stevie Nicks at Eric Clapton's housewarming party, as he relates the sordid tale of how they ended up in such a predicament after their get-rich scheme of panning for emeralds with a Portuguese guide turned sour and their guide ended up bound to a stake, having his genitals removed and eaten by hungry practitioners of anthropophagy.Looks like man eats man isn't bullshit afterall, is it, Gloria?

"...A hot-pussied little whore, who arrived down here looking for freedom, a victim of Puritanical breeding, seeking release for strange new feelings."
When Gloria goes missing, Rudy stumbles upon a small village of indios where the group is forced to hole up due to Joe's infected wounds, worsening by the minute.Mike shares his nostril candy with the formerly puritanical Pat, and after balling her, suggests that making an indio girl might be a kick she could really groove on.When she refuses to cut the frightened young native, the coke-raging pusher plants some hot lead in her himself.In the throes of a fever, Joe confesses to Rudy and Gloria that Mike's wild yarn about cannibals wasn't exactly accurate, and that Logan killed the Portuguese(really one of the local tribesmen) himself, while zooted on Bolivian marching powder, causing the natives to resort to brutal aggression in retaliation.Rudy and Gloria realize that the indios won't split hairs when it comes to their vengeance, and every white will pay for Logan's drug-fueled misdeeds.Mike and Pat sneak off on their own as the males of the tribe return to find Joe's lifeless corpse and soon splay his innards into a raw feast.Eventually, all of the group is captured and locked in a bamboo cage(that Logan had used earlier to instill fear in the locals) to watch as the tribesmen seperate the drug dealer from his third leg via machete and one of the cannibals pops it into his mouth and chews it like Bubblicious(!).After they cauterize his cock-stump(!!), they move the prisoners to another village where Rudy makes a break for it, hiding in a swampy pool from the hunting party until some ravenous pirahna nibbling his open wounds give him away.One poison dart later, and then there were three.An indio-with-a-heart-of-gold(how cliche'!) tries to help the girls, but Logan digs his way out of the bamboo prison and cuts their escape rope before bounding into the jungle.He's almost able to flag down a plane containing a rescue team, but he's abducted again, and his hand is chopped off for his troubles.The cannibals force Gloria to watch as they suspend Pat in mid-air via tit-hooks(!!) to bleed to death and remove the top of Logan's head using a primitive brain-surgery table, eating his brains afterwards(!!!).Gloria barely manages to escape into the dense undergrowth thanks to the aforementioned kind indio(who eats booby-trap death for his troubles) and is rescued by a pair of trappers.Back in New York, Gloria has written a book called Cannibalism: End of a Myth, effectively covering up all the horrors she'd witnessed.

Johnny Morghen loses his organ.
I had six or seven new horror reviews laid out for you guys, to end Wop-tober with an appropriately horrific bang, but alas, my busy social life(...you know, like people on television always seem to have) seems to have temporarily gotten in the way of my good intent.You know me and my sex, drugs, and rock n' roll.Fret not, kids, I'll work them in sometime during November.As is the case with most entries in the cannibal subgenre, pre-PETA, tonight's review is laden with a lot of unnecessary animal cruelty and death that'll turn off a lot of individuals.From a tech standpoint, Ferox is a pretty rotten movie, as evidenced by the single Wop rating, but it remains a grindhouse legend none-the-less, and one of my favorites at that.The ridiculous dialogue and over-the-top gore'll have you rolling in your seats.Grab the Grindhouse Releasing extra-packed deluxe edition disc.Oh, and Happy Halloween, as Dan O'Herlihy so memorably said back in '83...

Pat(Zora Kerova) has had it up to the tits with cannibals already.

"Incubo sulla città contaminata"(1980)d/Umberto Lenzi

When I say that tonight's review is a becloudedly inept, low budgeted mess that often defies explanation, it's less out of criticism than it is out of love.We're talking about the Umberto Lenzi here, exploitation master whose Toscanan ass occupied the director's chair on such diverse genre classics as Attentato ai tre grandi(1967), The Man From Deep River(1972), Eyeball(1975), Napoli Violenta(1976), and, of course, everyone's favorite grindhouse feature, Cannibal Ferox(1981).Even when his lens isn't focused upon despicable acts of animal cruelty or a coked out Johnny Morghen, the man's managed to do everything from gialli and poliziotteschi to westerns and horror movies in his long and illustrious career, even managing to pioneer the cannibal sub-genre along the way.Though tonight's movie, also released under the alternate titles of City of the Walking Dead and Nightmare City, suffers from a Crayola script full of hokey cine-science and putrescent dialogue exchanges made to decompose more rapidly through adventitious performances from its lackluster conclave of actors, as headed by Hugo "One facial expression oughta cover it" Stiglitz and Mel "I've got more Maybelline on than the entire female cast" Ferrer, and filled out by familiar Italian genre faces like Stefania D'Amario, Ugo Bologna, and Maria Rosaria Omaggio, there's an undeniable emptyheaded charm about the Italo-Spanish collaboration that's hard not to notice.I've heard it said that Lenzi's weapon-toting, sprint speed contamino-zombies were an inspirational precursor to Danny Boyle's wildly successful 28 Days Later, and though that comparison holds some modicum of possibility, to be sure, let's not hastily rush to judgment here.Away from the smoke and mirrors of trendy fanboy analysis, Incubo is an uneven, cheap, continuity-free puddle o'schlock n' sloppy gore that vainly tries to cash in on the Italian zombie craze of the day, or, in other words, exactly what you're looking for.

Hugo Stiglitz, Hugo Stiglitz, oh, oh, oh, Hugo Stiglitz...Hugo Stiglitz-litz-litz-litz.Falco shoulda totally tried the song out that way.
Dean Miller(Hugo Stiglitz), a television news reporter, awakens from a bad dream, running late for an interview concerning a recent nuclear accident(based on a similar 1976 incident at a chemical plant in Seveso) with a prestigious scientist in the field named Hagenbeck.As Miller and his assistant arrive at the local airport, a large military Hercules air transport silently approaches the runway for an emergency landing with no clearance.The plane is quickly surrounded by airport security and beret-sporting military types who shout cautionary warnings (in familiar dubbing editor Nick Alexander's voice) into a bullhorn, but when the door finally opens moments later, a congregate of crazed radiation-deformed psychos(translation:Italians with latex slopped randomly on their faces) led by Hagenbeck bound from inside, armed with knives, axes, bats, and machine guns, and immediately begin hacking, stabbing, and shooting the fuck out of anybody in attendance, pouncing on open wounds to greedily gulp the red stuff spurting out.Evidently, the military plane was stocked to the gills with handheld melee weapons.Or maybe they just brought their own.One of the tox-omb-pires is swinging a farmer's scythe around.I'm not gonna try explaining that one.Miller and assistant somehow barely avoid ending up dead(translation: unconvincingly playing dead, lying on the asphalt with stage blood sparingly dripped on them) like all the others, making their way to a nearby television studio where some lycra-bound guys and gals are being filmed as they flail about out of sync to some embarrassing disco for the cameras.Miller tries to interrupt the broadcast with an emergency bulletin, but the station's plug is momentarily pulled by the military, as led by Murchison(Mel Ferrer), a General defiant enough to rock enough eyeshadow and lip gloss to choke Adam Ant(in the pre-"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" era, mind you), in attempt to suppress widespread panic.Miller, faced with the impending gag order, chooses to quit his job instead, and extricate his wife(Laura Trotter) from the hospital where she works so they can flee together.

Major Holmes(Francisco Rabal) scrutinizes his wife's(Maria Rosaria Omaggio) major hams.
With the oatmeal-faced rascals on their murderous bender, it seems like every guy in the movie is obligated to call home and warn a wife or daughter not to venture out into the blood-letting hijinks.When Major Holmes(Francisco Rabal) calls his wife(Maria Rosaria Omaggio), she's startled to find the lawnmower running on its own and a bloody knife jutted into the eye of her latest sculpture.Meanwhile, the television studio is attacked(luckily their tv monitors explode into flame when chucked), the hospital is besieged(luckily the doctors have been well-versed in the art of precision scalpel throwing), and despite the military's theory of post mortem tox-ghoul indestructibility(We've estimated they can't be destroyed, after autopsying this here dead one), flames and well-placed lead to the dome does the bastards in, right proper.Miller and wife make it to an abandoned gas station, where they share stale coffee, speculation towards man's responsibility for the countrywide terror spree, and a couple of heartily wooden laughs(!), despite said epidemic, which the military continues to suppress knowledge of to the public, long after they've failed to contain it.In the end, they're rescued in the nick of time by Holmes-in-a-helicopter, but his wife plummets from the sky to her death, unable to hold on long enough.Dean wakes up from his horrible dream alongside his wife in time to rush to the airport with his cameraman for an exclusive interview with Hagenbeck, when an unidentified Hercules transport emergency lands on the runway.Surrounded by security and police, the door slowly begins to open, titles reading "The nightmare becomes reality" flash across the screen, and the credits roll.

Pass the claret to me, Barrett.
As you might have guessed, the infelicitous Stiglitz is even outperformed here by random muck-faced extras(both Dell'Acquas included), whose propensity to run up to the camera and posture dramatically in front of the lens to show off the cheap makeup appliances spirit gummed to their faces is a frequent occurence.Then again, none of the major characters emotes worth a good goddamn here, hardly detracting from the frenetic low brow ambience of the movie, also ushered along by an appropriately groovy Stelvio Cipriani soundtrack.Years after throwing down long dollars at Mondo Kim's(R.I.P.) in Manhattan for the Dutch import region 2 'Red Edition' from Laser Paradise, which suffered from possibly the most impoverished print transfer to disc this side of truck stop horror fifty packs, I spotted the recent out-of-print Blue Underground release at an F.Y.E. for roughly forty dollars less and jumped on it.Though the extras are sparse(a Lenzi interview, a trailer), the print is pretty gorgeous, far better than something like this really deserves.On the scale, one well-deserved wop isn't going to stop a rabid genre nut like you from seeking this one out and adding it to your collection forthwith.I know you guys by now.

Does this mean we're gonna have to sit through the whole goddamned thing again??

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.