HauntedWeen – or Hauntedween — is a 1991 low budget American horror comedy directed and co-scripted by Wm. Doug Robertson. It stars Brien Blakely, Blake Pickett, Brad Hanks and Leslee Lacey and was filmed in Kentucky (also William Girdler’s base for Abby) with local performers and crew over a two year period.

The Burber Haunted House is a family run business. Horror obsessed young Eddie (he reads Famous Monsters of Filmland) tries to scare a young girl but when she’s accidentally impaled, Eddie flips and makes sure that she soon dies a swift death. His mother takes him away…

Twenty years later, a group of fraternity students are invited by a mysterious stranger — who claims to be an alumni — to renovate the Burber house, start a new haunted house business and raise money for their sorority. Unfortunately, a killer is in residence and a massacre soon ensues. Plus, the spook show visitors don’t realise that the gory deaths they are witnessing are not just part of the show…

This is an amiable early 90s slasher movie that reflects regional US filmmakers having a go at releasing a VHS release (as it was then) on their own terms and generally succeeding in delivering what renters for such fare wanted. Humour in low budget movies can be painful but HauntedWeen manages to be agreeably tongue-in-cheeks and delivers the cheap gory deaths and fleeting nudity necessary to appeal to young male horror fans. Acting is ok and there’s more attempt at characterisation than usual in such offerings, plus a few musical numbers that don’t numb the brain as is often the case. Despite the awful title, a surprising thumbs up!

Adrian J. Smith, Horrorpedia

‘The visuals in Hauntedween are certainly a step above many shot-on-video flicks, and it’s obvious that -– aside from being horror geeks -– the cast and crew put a lot of time and care into the work here. The result is a fun little handmade film that works because it has the right sense of humor and pacing. Shots might not look as polished or composed as what you’ll find on an episode of American Horror Story, but scenes move along fast, and even though most of the killing doesn’t happen until the final 20 minutes or so, there are plenty of wacky masks, bare breasts, and entertainingly idiosyncratic moments to keep the film’s amiable pace steady.’ Geek New Wave

IMDb | Official site

We are most grateful to Geek New Wave for some of the images above

Zombie Hunter Rika aka Zombie Killer Rika and High School Girl Rika: Zombie Hunter (original title: Saikyô heiki joshikôsei: Rika – zonbi hantâ vs saikyô zonbi Gurorian) is a 2008 Japanese comedy horror splatter movie directed by Ken’ichi Fujiwara and co-written with Takeyuki Morikaku.It stars Lisa Kudô (as Risa Kudô playing Rika), Mina Arai, Lemon Hanazawa, Chris Ryô Kaihara, Kôtarô Kamijô, Ryûnosuke Kawai and Eiichi Kikuchi.

When typical Japanese high school student Rika skips school to visit her grandfather, she fails to take into account the fact that his remote village is infested with the living dead. What happens next isn’t pretty, but fortunately, Grandpa Ryuhei just happens to be the greatest surgeon ever! Picking up what’s left of Rika, he dusts her off and rebuilds her, better than she was, into the ultimate zombie fighter! Now, together with her friends Takashi and Yuji, Rika must take on the monstrous master of carnivorous cadavers: the grand-high lowest of the low, Zombie Boss Glorian.

“Modern Japanese zombie flicks tend to boast cheap budgets, extreme gore, gonzo comedy, illogical plotting, and are sometimes peppered with an unsettling degree of sleaziness in regards to the treatment of women. You get most of that here, too. Although those looking for an abundance of naked Japanese schoolgirl flesh won’t get nearly as much as they’d like, and while the action and gore effects deliver what you’d expect, some viewers accustomed to truly over-the-top Japanese zombie mayhem might be underwhelmed.” Dread Central

” … this film goes for fun over titillation. Sure, there are some great sleazy moments (3 maids arguing over who has the biggest norks but whipping them out and comparing them) but the overriding essence of this movie is just crazy gory nonsense. Oh yes there is some nice gore going on here – loads of rubbery flesh ripping and head decapitation, blood a plenty and some great makeup too (particularly the suspiciously friendly zombie with the disgusting googly eye!)” Devouring the Zombie Films of the Living

“There were a fair few interesting and uncomfortable moments of gore, lots of blood and there’s plenty of flesh-eating, but I’m scrambling for many positive things to say. An amateur script that felt like it was being made up as it went along, dry lacklustre acting performances from people who genuinely looked like they didn’t want to be there, and shot capture and direction that looked cheap and harried as if Ed Wood with his one take what-ever happens approach was in charge; it’s bad film.” Watching the Dead

“There is not much style to the Ken’ichi Fujiwara’s direction, and the film tends to lack a certain snap, but Tak Sakaguchi’s action choreography adds an occasional burst of liveliness (e.g., a zombie fight featuring a guy flopping around, kicking zombies, and bouncing off cars is fun). The HD cinematography definitely looks like video with an image that skews green. As expected, there is plenty of viscera (practical and CG) and nakedness.” Rodney Perkins, Twitch Film

IMDb

The Bighead is a 2013 American horror film directed by Michael Ling, who adapted the screenplay from Edward Lee’s novel. It stars Raquel Cantu, Carrie Malabre, P. David Miller, Michael Coons, Orson Chaplin, Lance Trezona, Ashley Totin and Cheetah Platt.

According to the official website, the Large Melon production is “set in the West Virginian backwoods where vicious monsters, both human and supernatural, go on a terrifying rampage in search of a special young woman.  Their path of destruction uncovers long held secrets and puts the fate of the entire world in jeopardy.”

The film was financed through crowdfunding site Kickstarter and is planned as a sampler to help finance a full length feature.

The Bighead has caused controversy with critics and audiences thanks to its extreme bad taste, sex and violence. According to Dread Central, over twenty people walked out of a November 6th 2013 screening at the Hollyshorts Film Festival.

Relatos de Presidio (‘Tales from Prison’) is a popular “sensacionales” Mexican comic with horror and crime themes aimed at adults. Published by Editorial Toukan (and running to over 800 issues), the far from politically correct artwork and stories in Relatos de Presidio feature gory scenes of death and torture involving victims from both sexes.

‘Sensacionales’ or ‘La revisit vaquero’ are very low quality black and white comics printed in tones of sepia featuring about four panels per page in a four square diagram. The pocket size books generally have approximately one hundred pages and are famous for portraying voluptuous women on their covers. Most are sold cheaply at newsstands, either new or second-hand (similar to Italian fumetti).

Adult comics have a unique place in Mexican culture. Sensacionales are trashy and exploitative, but they also represent a genuinely popular indigenous medium. The dominant role of adult comics in Mexico is relatively new. From the 1930s through the 1970s, Mexico had a thriving comic-book industry with many genres. Titles such as Pepín, Fantomas, and Memín Penguín sold millions of copies during this era. But in the 1980s, American superhero comics poured into Mexico. That, combined with the perception that comics were only for kids, nearly wiped out indigenous comic books in Mexico. The only genre to survive, and even thrive, was a unique form of adult pulp comics.

Wikipedia | Comic Vine | Related: Jacula | Secrets of Haunted House | Vampirella

Cellar Dweller is a 1988 horror film, about a comic book artist who unleashes a demon after drawing it. It was directed by John Carl Buechler, written by Chucky creator Don Mancini (as Kit Du Bois), and stars Debrah Farentino, Brian Robbins (C.H.U.D. II: Bud the C.H.U.D.), Yvonne De Carlo (The Munsters), Pamela Bellwood, Vince Edwards and Jeffrey Combs (Re-Animator, Would You Rather).

On October 29, 2013, Scream Factory released the film on DVD for the first time, along with Contamination 7, Catacombs and The Dungeonmaster as part of the second volume of their Scream Factory All-Night Horror Marathon series.

Thirty years have passed since the grisly murder/suicide of Colin Childress, creator of the comic book, Cellar Dweller. But, as often happens to those ignorant of it, comic book artist Whitney Taylor is doomed to repeat history in a most grotesque way. Little does she know that her twisted renderings will soon reincarnate the bloody hysteria of Cellar Dweller.

Buy Cellar Dweller on Scream Factory DVD from Amazon.com

‘The film is a little light on gore, though what we do have is wonderful — Cellar Dweller casually gnaws on torn-off limbs and hurls severed heads around like so many volleyballs.  What did take me by surprise was the quantity of high-quality female nudity on display in this film, including a prolonged shower sequence cut short by a grisly Cellar Dweller attack.’ Radiation-Scarred Reviews

‘This is no stunner of a movie it has to be said but like a lot of the Empire movies that came out in the 80′s it has it’s own style that rubs off on me very easily. I did enjoy watching this, though it’s nowhere as good as some of the other titles that came out of the Empire stable.’ Horror Chronicles

‘The movie has little-to-no plot, but it somehow managed to keep me entertained. I suppose it could have had to do with the interesting-looking creature and decent amount of gore. It’s no surprise that a low-budget movie like this pulled off such make-up effects behind the creature since director John Carl Buechler went on to do various other effects for genre movies. Although the movie has an incredibly simple plot and it barely makes it past an hour-15-minute-running-time, it does successfully dish out an interesting little cheesy 80′s horror tale.’ Upcoming Horror Movies

Wikipedia | IMDb

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1978 science fiction thriller directed by Philip Kaufman, and starring Donald Sutherland (Don’t Look Now), Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright (Alien) and Leonard Nimoy (Them!). It is a remake of the 1956 film of the same name, which was based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney. A box office success, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was very well received by critics, and is considered by some to be among the greatest film remakes.

In deep space, a race of gelatinous creatures abandon their dying world. Pushed through the universe by solar wind, they make their way to Earth and land in San Francisco. Some fall on plant leaves, assimilating them and forming small pods with pink flowers. Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), an employee at the San Francisco health department, is one of several people who bring flowers home. The next morning, Elizabeth’s partner, Geoffrey Howell (Art Hindle), suddenly becomes distant, and she senses that something is wrong. Her colleague, health inspector Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland), suggests that she see his friend, psychiatrist Dr. David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy). Kibner suggests that Elizabeth wants to believe that Geoffrey has changed because she is looking for an excuse to get out of their relationship.

Meanwhile, Matthew’s friend Jack Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum), a struggling writer who owns a mud bath with his wife Nancy (Veronica Cartwright), discovers a deformed body on one of the beds and calls Matthew to investigate. Noticing that the body (which has adult features but lacks distinguishing characteristics) bears a slight resemblance to Jack, Matthew breaks into Elizabeth’s home and finds a nearly complete double of her in the bedroom garden. He is able to get Elizabeth to safety, but the duplicate body has disappeared by the time he returns with the police…

Variety wrote that it “validates the entire concept of remakes. This new version of Don Siegel’s 1956 cult classic not only matches the original in horrific tone and effect, but exceeds it in both conception and execution.” The New York Times‘ Janet Maslin wrote “The creepiness [Kauffman] generates is so crazily ubiquitous it becomes funny.”

‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a masterclass in slowly building paranoia, but also allows itself to have spectacular action scenes, and impressive moments of visceral horror. The semi-formed pod creatures are creepy – a single moment of blood running from the nostril of one a far more potent moment that many a horror set piece – and the scene where the pods give birth to these half-formed creatures while the human version sleeps and begins to rot remain impressively grotesque. The few moments of gore – Sutherland smashing in the head of a semi-formed pod, a character’s face collapsing as their duplicate is completed – are suitably horrible, while Adams gets the most unsettling topless scene in film history. This is a truly great film – evidence that a remake can actually bring something new to a story and a great stand-alone piece. Jack Finney’s original novel is the gift that keeps giving – there have been two more versions of the story since this one – but Kaufman’s movie remains the one to beat.’ David Flint, Strange Things Are Happening

Buy Invasion of the Body Snatchers on Arrow Video Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk

Wikipedia | IMDb

Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence is a 1993 horror action film, and the second sequel to Maniac Cop, directed by William Lustig and Joel Soisson from a screenplay by Larry Cohen (It’s Alive, Q: The Winged Serpent, The Stuff). It stars Robert Davi, Paul Gleason, Jackie Earle Haley, Robert Z’Dar, Caitlin Dulany and Gretchen Becker. The film was originally rated “NC-17“, and some extreme violent acts were cut to get an “R” rating.

A priest practicing voodoo resurrects Matt Cordell (Robert Z’Dar), who takes his badge and comes back from the dead to do his bidding. Meanwhile, a pair of cameramen who are hoping to make it big, come across a convenience store robbery, where a police officer named Katie Sullivan (Gretchen Becker) intervenes in a hostage situation, where she manages to wound the suspect, but realizes that the clerk is his girlfriend, and she had let him in purposefully to rob the store. There is a crossfire, and while Kate is severely wounded, she ends up killing the clerk in return. When rushed to the hospital, she is rendered comatose and brain dead, much to the chagrin of investigating officer Sean McKinney (Robert Davi), who had caught the report of Katie using excessive force in a hostage situation, seeming to make the clerk an innocent victim, and in response threatening to free the badly injured Frank Jessup.

Meanwhile, stalking Katie’s progress, Cordell goes to the hospital to watch her. He kills one of her supervising physicians with defibrillator paddles, and the physician set to sign the warrant to cut Kate’s life support, by exposing him to high amounts of X-Ray radiation. The reporters who had framed Kate are then murdered as well…

Buy Unrated Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence Blue Underground Blu-ray + DVD combo from Amazon.com

“Out of all three Maniac Cop films, Badge of Silence is the most misunderstood and underappreciated. This is understandable, as a poor script and studio interference has resulted in an uneven mess in which Cordell almost seems like an afterthought. The main focus of the story is McKinney’s efforts to clear the name of his friend, whilst the powers-that-be attempt to hang her out to dry as an example against police brutality. But the inclusion of Houngan seems a little ridiculous, as this takes the story in a direction that does not fit with the tone and mythology of the series. In fact, this is yet another example of filmmakers being forced to unnecessarily explain the reasons behind their antagonists, usually because all other ideas have been exhausted.” Christian Sellers, Retro Slashers

“Maniac Cop 2 was a pretty fantastic action-horror hybrid and some of what we get here is outstanding but you can definitely tell which sequences were directed by William Lustig and which were directed by producer Joel Soisson, he just doesn’t have the action-chops of Lustig but he gives it quite a shot with the crazy police cruiser vs. ambulance car chase at the end of the movie, it’s completely fucking nuts…” Ken Kastenhuber, McBastard’s Mausoleum

Wikipedia | IMDb

The 1970s saw old taboos falling away in the cinema, and few horror film sub-genres benefited from the relaxation in censorship more than the cannibal film. In fact, this is a genre that scarcely existed prior to the Seventies. Sure, horror films had long hinted at cannibalism as a plot device – movies like Doctor X (1932) and others portrayed it as an element of psychosis without ever being overly explicit, and this would continue into the 1970s with films such as Cannibal Girls Frightmare and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – but no one had really explored the idea explicitly. Some things were just too tasteless, and cannibalism was something of a no-no with assorted censor boards around the world.

Yet the idea that remote tribes in the Amazon or on islands like Papua New Guinea were still practising cannibalism was a common one at the time, thanks to a conflation of suspicion, colonialist ideas, misunderstanding of tribal rituals (such as head hunting / shrinking) and old-fashioned racism. And, if we are to be fair, these beliefs were not entirely without validity, as some cultures still did practice cannibalism, albeit not as determinedly as was often made out. Certainly, the subject was exploited – 1956 roadshow movie Cannibal Island promised much in its sensationalist promotional art, even if the film itself was Gaw the Killer, an anthropological documentary from the 1931, re-edited and re-dubbed, that was notably lacking in anthropophagy, despite the best efforts of the narrator to suggest otherwise.

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Elsewhere, cartoons and comic books perpetuated the idea that any great white hunter who was captured by natives was bound to end up in a cooking pot, and Tarzan movies hinted that he bones the natives wore as decoration were not all from animals. 1954′s Cannibal Attack saw Johnny Weissmuller playing Johnny Weissmuller, fighting off enemy agents in a cannibal-filled jungle.

Hell Night director Tom De Simone’s terrible movie Terror in the Jungle (1968) had a small boy captured by a cannibal tribe and only saved by his ‘glowing’ blonde hair. Worship of blonde white people would be a theme in later, trashier cannibal movies too). Even the children’s big game hunting Adventure novel series by Willard Price had a Cannibal Adventure entry. But notably, none of these early efforts actually went the extra mile – the natives in these films may have been cannibals, but we had to take the filmmakers and writers word for that – no cannibalism actually took place on screen.

In the 1960s, the Mondo documentary would also take an interest in bizarre tribal rituals, and these mostly Italian films would subsequently come to inform the style of the cannibal films that emerged later. Certainly, later shockumentaries such as Savage Man, Savage Beast, This Violent World and Shocking Africa were closely related to contemporary films like Man from Deep River and Last Cannibal World, with their lurid mix of anthropological studies and sensationalism.

One such mondo movie was the 1974 Italian/Japanese Nuova Guinea, l’isola dei cannibali. Tribal scenes from this production – which also includes footage of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip on a Royal visit to the island (!) – were inserted into the zombie film Hell of the Living Dead (1981) to add verisimilitude. It was  later opportunistically released on DVD in the USA as The Real Cannibal Holocaust.

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The cannibal film as we know it now began in 1972, with Il paese del sesso selvaggio, also known as Deep River Savages, The Man from Deep River and Sacrifice!  It was directed by Umberto Lenzi, who would spend the next decade playing catch-up in a genre he pretty much invented with scriptwriters Francesco Barilli and Massimo D’Avak. This film essentially set many of the templates for the genre – graphic violence, extensive nudity, real animal slaughter and the culture clash between ‘civilised’ Westerners and ‘primitive’ tribes.

The film is, essentially, a rip-off of American western A Man Called Horse, with Italian exploitation icon Ivan Rassimov as a British photographer who finds himself stranded in the jungles of Thailand and captured by a native tribe. Eventually, after undergoing assorted humiliations and initiation rituals, he is accepted within the community, who are at war with a fierce, more primitive cannibal tribe.

Co-starring Mei Mei Lai (who would become one of the sub-genre’s stock players), the film is set up more as an adventure story than a horror film, but the look and feel of the story would subsequently inform other cannibal movies, and the scene where the cannibal tribe kill and eat a native certainly sets the scene for what is to come.

Buy The Man from Deep River + Warlock Moon + Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat on DVD from Amazon.com

Made in 1976, Ruggero Deodato’s Ultimo mondo cannibale (Last Cannibal World; Cannibal; Jungle Holocaust) also had the feel of an old-school jungle adventure, though Deodato expanded on what Lenzi had started – this tale of an explorer (played by Massimo Foschi) who is captured by a cannibal tribe features a remarkable amount of nudity (Foschi is kept naked in a cage for much of the film, teased and tormented by the tribe) and sex – including an animalistic sex scene between Foschi and Mei Mei Lai (Rassimov also co-stars). It also featured more graphic gore and real animal killing – the latter would become the achilles heel of the genre, something that even its admirers would find hard to defend. Even if the slaughtered animals were eaten by the filmmakers, showing such scenes for entertainment still left a bad taste with many, and over and above the sex and violence, would be the major cause of censorship for these films.

The Last Cannibal World proved to be a popular hit around the world (it even played UK cinemas after BBFC cuts) and sparked a mini-boom in cannibal film production. In 1977, Joe D’Amato continued his bizarre mutation of the Black Emanuelle series – which, under his guidance, had evolved from soft porn travelogue to featuring white slavery, rape, snuff movies, hardcore sex and even bestiality – with Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (aka Trap Them and Kill Them), a strange and uniquely 1970s mixture of of softcore sex and hardcore gore, as Laura Gemser goes in search of a lost cannibal tribe. Quite what audiences expecting sexy thrills thought when they were confronted with graphic castration scenes is anyone’s guess, but the film played successfully across Europe and America, albeit often in a cut form.

D’Amato returned to the genre in 1978 with Papaya – Love Goddess of the Cannibals, with Sirpa Lane which, despite its title features no cannibals, in a film that again mixed gore and softcore yet still managed to be rather dull.

Also in 1978, we had the only cannibal film with a big name cast. Mountain of the Cannibal God (aka Slave of the Cannibal God; Prisoner of the Cannibal God) saw former Bond girl Ursula Andress stripped and fondled by a cannibal tribe as she and Stacey Keach search for her missing husband. The starry cast didn’t mean that director Sergio Martino wasn’t going to include some particularly unnecessary animal cruelty and a bizarre (faked) scene of a man fucking a pig though, as well as graphic gore. At heart an old fashioned jungle adventure spiced up with 1970s sex ‘n’ violence, the most remarkable part of the film is how Martino managed to persuade Andress to appear completely naked. Perhaps she just wanted to show off how good her body was 16 years after Dr No!

Buy The Mountain of the Cannibal God on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

That same year saw an Indonesian entry in the genre with Primitives, also known as Savage Terror. This was essentially a rehash of The Last Cannibal World, but with less gore and no nudity, which resulted in a rather plodding jungle drama. This one is definitely for genre completists only, and proved to be a major disappointment when released on VHS to a cannibal-hungry public by Go Video in the UK as a follow-up to Cannibal Holocaust.

Ahh yes, Cannibal Holocaust. The Citizen Kane of cannibal movies, and the genre’s only undisputed masterpiece, the film would also become the most notorious film in the genre, shocking audiences and censors alike and even now seen as being about as extreme as cinema can go.

The film began life as just another cannibal film, Deodato hired to make something to follow up The Last Cannibal World. But with the relative freedom granted to him (all his backers wanted was a gory cannibal film), he came up with a movie that critiqued the sensationalism of the Mondo movie makers and the audience’s lust for blood, with his tale of an exploitative documentary crew who set out to film cannibal tribes but through their own arrogance and cruelty bring about their own demise.

Deodato’s film effectively invents the Found Footage style of filmmaking, his fake documentary approach being so effective that he found himself facing a trial, accused of actually murdering his actors! Given that the film mixes real animal killing with worryingly effective scenes of violence, all shot in shaky, hand-held style, it’s perhaps no surprise that people thought it was real – even into the 1990s, the film was reported as being a ‘snuff movie’ by the British press.

But there is more going on here than mere sensationalism and sadism – Deodato’s film fizzes with a righteous anger and passion, and makes absolutely no concession to moral restraint. There’s a level of intensity here that is beyond fiction – certainly, the story of the film’s production and reception would make for a remarkable movie in its own right. Almost imprisoned and seeing his film banned in Italy and elsewhere (in Britain, it was one of the first video nasties), Deodato was suitably chastened, and never made anything like it again.

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But despite the bans, the legal issues and the outrage, Cannibal Holocaust was enough of a sensation to spawn imitators. Umberto Lenzi returned to the genre he’s more or less invented in 1980 with Eaten Alive (Magiati Vivi; The Emerald Jungle; Doomed to Die), which managed to mix cannibal tribes, nudity and gore with a story that exploits the recent Guyana massacre led by Jim Jones. This tale of a fanatical religious cult leader had an cannibal movie all-star cast – Ivan Rassimov, Mei Mei Lai and Robert Kerman (aka porn star R. Bolla) who had starred in Cannibal Holocaust were joined by Janet Agren and Mel Ferrer in what is a textbook example of a cheap knock-off. Not only does the film cash in on earlier movies and recent news events, it actually ‘cannibalises’ whole scenes from other films, Lenzi’s own Man from Deep River amongst them. Yet despite this, it’s fairly entertaining stuff.

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Lenzi followed this with Cannibal Ferox (aka Make Them Die Slowly; Let Them Die Slowly), a more blatant imitation of Cannibal Holocaust. Kerman again makes an appearance (albeit a brief one), while Italian cult icon John Morghen (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) headlines a fairly ham fisted tale of an anthropology student who sets out to prove that cannibalism is a myth, only to find she’s very, very wrong. Directed with indifference by Lenzi (who clearly had no interest in theses films beyond a pay check), the film features more gratuitous animal killing and some remarkably sadistic scenes (two castrations and a woman hung with hooks through her breasts), which invariably ensured that the film would be “banned in 31 countries”.

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1980 also brought us Zombie Holocaust (aka Doctor Butcher M.D.) in which Marino Girolami opportunistically livened up his Zombie Flesh Eaters imitation by adding a mad doctor, cannibals and nudity to the mix, and Cannibal Apocalypse, where Vietnam vets John Saxon and John Morghen were driven to cannibalism in Vietnam and then go on the rampage in the USA.

Jess Franco entered the genre in 1980 with Cannibals (aka The White Cannibal Queen) and Devil Hunter (aka Man Hunter), but the crudity of the cannibal movie was unsuited to a director more at home with surreal, erotic gothic fantasies. Cannibals was the more interesting of the two – Franco’s intense close-ups and slow motion during the cannibalism scenes add a bizarre, almost dream-like edge to the proceedings, in a tale that mixes a one-armed Al Cliver and a naked Sabrina Siani as the blonde goddess worshipped by the ‘cannibal tribe’. Devil Hunter is a ridiculous mishmash with a kidnapped movie star, a bug-eyed, big-dicked monster and cannibals. Franco himself was dismissive of both films, and they are recommended only for the completist.

Cannibals

Similar to the Franco films (coming from the same producers and featuring footage from Cannibals) is the tedious Cannibal Terror, a French effort that sees a bunch of kidnappers hanging out in a cannibal-infested jungle. It’s pretty hard work to sit through even for the most ardent admirer of Eurotrash. Meanwhile, cannibalistic monks cropped up in the 1981 US movie Raw Force (later retitled) Kung Fu Cannibals but they were only one of the smorgasbord element in this exploitation trash and being a ‘religious order’ rather than a tribe merit just a brief mention here.

After this flurry of activity, the genre began to fizzle out, exploitation filmmakers moving on to the next big thing (i.e. knock offs of Conan and Mad Max). It wasn’t until 1985 that we saw a revival of the jungle cannibal film with Amazonia (aka White Slave), directed by Mario Gariazzo. A strange mix of revenge drama and cannibal film, the movie is a gender-reversal of Man from Deep River, with Elvire Audray as Catherine Miles, brought up by a cannibal tribe after her parents are murdered in the Amazon. Despite some gore and nudity, it’s a rather plodding affair. It should not be confused with Ruggero Deodato’s Cut and Run, also sometimes called Amazonia but which – despite the setting and some gruesome moments – was not a return to the cannibal genre for the director.

More fun was Massacre in Dinosaur Valley (aka Naked and Savage), a cheerfully trashy affair directed by Michele Massimo Tarantini, with the survivors of a plane crash – including nubile young models and Indiana Jones like palaeontologist Michael Sopkiw battling slave traders, nature and cannibal tribes (but not dinosaurs) in the Amazon. Gratuitous nudity, splashy gore, bad acting and a ludicrous series of events ensure that this one is a lot of fun.

Natura Contro, retitled Cannibal Holocaust II but unconnected to the earlier film, is possibly the most obscure of the films in the sub-genre. Made in 1988, it is the final film by Antonio Climati, best known for his uncompromising Mondo movies of the 1970s. It’s surprising then that this is fairly tame stuff by cannibal movie standards, telling the story of a group of people who head to the Amazon to find a missing professor. By 1988, both the Italian exploitation film and the cannibal genre were breathing their last, and the excesses of a decade earlier were no longer commercially viable – the mainstream audience for such films had dwindled considerably, while censorship had tightened up.

Natura Contro

It would be another fifteen years before we saw the return of the jungle holocaust film, and then it was hardly worth it. Bruno Mattei, a prolific hack since the 1970s, had someone managed to keep making films, and in 2003 knocked out a pair of ultra-low budget, almost unwatchably bad cannibal films. In the Land of the Cannibals (aka Cannibal Ferox 3) and Cannibal World (aka Cannibal Holocaust 2) were slow, clumsy and boring attempts to cash in on the cult reputation of Mattei (a couple of years later, he’d make two similarly dismal zombie films) and the reputation of the earlier cannibal movies (needless to say, these are not official sequels to either Holocaust or Ferox). These two films seemed to be the final nail in the genre’s coffin.

But with the reputation of Cannibal Holocaust continuing to increase, and a general return to ‘hard core horror’ in the new century with films like Saw and Hostel, the cannibal film has seen a slight revival. But although Deodato has talked about making a sequel to Cannibal Holocaust, the new films have been American productions, even though they are informed by the Italian films of the past.

Jonathan Hensleigh’s Welcome to the Jungle , made in 2007, channels Holocaust with its found footage format as a group of remarkably annoying treasure hunters head to New Guinea in search of the missing Michael Rockerfeller, hoping to cash in on his discovery. Instead, their bickering attracts the attention of local cannibal tribes, who stalk and slaughter them. There;s an interesting idea at play here, but the characters are all so utterly loathsome that you’ll struggle to make it to the point where they start getting killed.

The latest attempt to revive the genre comes from Eli Roth, who’s Green Inferno is about to be released. The film takes its title from Cannibal Holocaust (one of Roth’s favourite films) and the plot – student activists travel to the Amazon to protect a tribe but find themselves captured by cannibals – sounds like a copy of Cannibal Ferox. Having received positive reviews at festivals, we hope the film is able to capture the spirit of the original movies, if not their frenzied style.

Certainly, we are unlikely to see anyone making a film quite like Cannibal Holocaust again – there are laws in place to stop it, if nothing else. But we can now look back at this most controversial of horror sub-genres and see that they represent a time when cinema was without restraint. As such, they are more than simply films, they are historical time capsules, and for those with strong stomachs, well worth investigating.

Article by David Flint

Related: Cannibal Holocaust | Devil Hunter | The Man from Deep River | The Mountain of the Cannibal God

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Buy Eaten Alive! Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Christmas is generally seen as a jolly old time for the whole family – if you are to believe the TV commercials, everyone gets together for huge communal feasts while excited urchins unwrap whatever godawful new toy has been hyped as the must-have gift of the year. It is not, generally speaking, seen as a time of horror.

And yet horror has a long tradition of being part of the festive season. Admittedly, the horror in question was traditionally the ghost story, ideally suited for cold winter nights, where people gather around the fire to hear some spine chilling tale of ghostly terror – a scenario recreated in the BBC’s 2000 series Ghost Stories for Christmas, with Christopher Lee reading M.R. James tales to a room full of public school boys. That series was part of a tradition that included a similar one in 1986 with Robert Powell (Harlequin) and the children’s series Spine Chillers from 1980, as well as the unofficially titled annual series Ghost Stories for Christmas than ran for much of the 1970s and is occasionally revived to this day.

A Christmas Carol

The idea of the traditional Xmas ghost story can be traced back to Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol, where miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three ghosts in an effort to make him change his ways. It’s more a sentimental morality tale than a horror story, though in the original book and one or two adaptations, the ghosts are capable of causing the odd shudder. Sadly, the story has been ill-served by cinematic adaptations – the best version is probably the 1951 adaptation, though by then there had already been several earlier attempts, going back to 1910. A few attempts have been made at straight retellings since then, but all to often the story is bastardised (a musical version in 1970, various cartoons) or modernised – the best known versions are probably Scrooged and The Muppet Christmas Carol, both of which are inexplicably popular. A 1999 TV movie tried to give the story a sense of creepiness once again, but the problem now is that the story is so familiar that it seems cliched even when played straight. The idea of a curmudgeon being made to see the true meaning of Christmas is now an easy go-to for anyone grinding out anonymous TV movies that end up on Christmas-only TV channels or gathering dust on DVD.

A Christmas CAROL (1999)

Outside of A Christmas Carol, horror cinema tended to avoid festive-themed stories for a long time. While fantasies like The Bishop’s Wife, It’s a Wonderful Life and Bell, Book and Candle played with the supernatural, these were light, feel-good dramas and comedies on the whole, designed to warm the heart rather than stop it dead. TV shows like The Twilight Zone would sometimes have a Christmas themed tale, but again these tended to be the more sentimental stories.

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The only film to really hint at Christmas creepiness was 1945 British portmanteau film Dead of Night, though even here, the Christmas themed tale, featuring a ghostly encounter at a children’s party, is more sentimental than terrifying. Meanwhile, the Mexican children’s film Santa Claus vs The Devil (1959) might see Santa in battle with Satan, but it’s all played for wholesome laughs rather than scares.

Santa Claus vs The Devil

It wasn’t until the 1970s that the darker side of Christmas began to be explored, and it was another British portmanteau film that began it all. The Amicus film Tales from the Crypt (1972) opened with a tale in which murderous Joan Collins finds herself terrorised by an escaped psycho on Christmas Eve, unable to call the police because of her recently deceased hubby lying on the carpet. The looney is dressed as Santa, and her young daughter has been eagerly awaiting his arrival, leading to a suitably mean-spirited twist. The story was subsequently retold in a 1989 episode of the Tales from the Crypt TV series.

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This film would lead the way towards decades of Christmas horror. Of course, lots of films had an incidental Christmas connection, taking place in the festive season (or ‘winter’, as it used to be known). Movies like Night Train Murders, Rabid and even the misleadingly named Silent Night Bloody Night have a Christmas connection, but it’s incidental to the story. Those are not the movies we are discussing here. No, to REALLY count as a Christmas film, then the festive celebrations need to be at the heart of events.

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Two distinct types of Christmas horror developed. There was the Mad Santa films, like Tales from the Crypt on the one hand, and the ‘bad things happening at Christmas’ movie on the other. The pioneer of the latter was Bob Clark’s 1974 film Black Christmas, which not only pioneered the Christmas horror movie but also was an early template for the seasonal slasher film. Some critics have argued, with good cause, that this is the movie that laid the foundations for Halloween a few years later – a psycho film (with a possibly supernatural slant) set during a holiday, where young women are terrorised by an unseen force. But while John Carpenter’s film would be a smash hit and effectively reinvent the genre, Black Christmas went more or less unnoticed, its reputation only building years later. In 2006, the movie was remade by Glen Morgan in a gorier but less effective loose retelling of the original story.

Black Christmas

Preceding Black Christmas was TV movie Home for the Holidays, in which four girls are picked off over Christmas by a yellow rain-coated killer who may or may not be their wicked stepmother. A decent if unremarkable psycho killer story, the film was directed by TV movie veteran John Llewellyn Moxey.

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Also made for TV, this time in Britain, The Exorcism was the opening episode of TV series Dead of Night (no connection to the film of that name) broadcast in 1972. One of the few surviving episodes of the series, The Exorcism is a powerful mix of horror and social commentary, as a group of champagne socialists celebrating Christmas in the country cottage that one couple have bought as a holiday home find themselves haunted by the ghosts of the peasants who had starved to death there during a famine. While theatrical in style and poorly shot, the show is nevertheless creepily effective.

1980 saw Christmas Evil (aka You Better Watch Out), a low budget oddity by Lewis Jackson that has since gained cult status. In this film, a put-upon toy factory employee decided to become a vengeful Santa, putting on the red suit and setting out to sort the naughty from the nice. It’s a strange film, mixing pathos, horror and black comedy, yet oddly it works, making it one of the more interesting Christmas horrors out there.

Buy Christmas Evil on Arrow DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Also made in 1980, but rather less successful, was To All a Goodnight, the only film directed by Last House on the Left star David Hess and written by The Incredible Melting Man himself, Alex Rebar. This generic slasher, with a house full of horny sorority girls and their boyfriends being picked off by a psycho in a Santa outfit, is too slow and poorly made to be effective.

The most notorious Christmas horror film hit cinemas in 1984. Silent Night Deadly Night was, in most ways, a fairly generic slasher, with a Santa-suited maniac on the loose taking revenge against the people who have been deemed ‘naughty’. The film itself was nothing special It’s essentially the same premise as Christmas Evil without the intelligence), and might have gone unnoticed if it wasn’t for a provocative advertising campaign that emphasised the Santa-suited psycho and caused such outrage that the film was rapidly pulled from theatres.

Buy Silent Night, Deadly Night on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Nevertheless, it had made a small fortune in the couple of weeks it played, and continued to be popular when reissued with a less contentious campaign. The film is almost certainly directly responsible for most ‘psycho Santa’ films since – all hoping to cash in on the publicity that comes with public outrage – and spawned four sequels.

Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 is notorious for the amount of footage from the first film that is reused to pad out the story, and was banned in the UK (where the first film was unreleased until 2009). Part 3 was directed, surprisingly, by Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter) and adds a psychic element to the story. Part 4, directed by Brian Yuzna, drops the killer Santa story entirely and has no connection to the other films beyond the title, telling a story of witchcraft and cockroaches, while Part 5 – The Toymaker – is also unconnected to the other movies.

Buy Silent Night, Deadly Night 3-disc set from Amazon.co.uk

Also made in 1984, but attracting less attention, Don’t Open Till Christmas was that rarest of things, a 1980s British horror film – and one of the sleaziest ever made to boot. Starring and directed by Edmund Purdom from a screenplay by exploitation veterans Derek Ford and Alan Birkinshaw, the film sees a psycho killer, traumatised by a childhood experience at Christmas, who begins offing Santas – or more accurately, anyone he sees dressed as Santa, which in this case includes a porn model, a man at a peepshow and people having sex. With excessive gore, nudity and an overwhelming atmosphere of grubbiness, the film was become a cult favourite for fans of bad taste cinema.

Buy Don’t Open Till Christmas on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

The third Christmas horror of 1984 was the most wholesome and the most successful. Joe Dante’s Gremlins is all too often overlooked when people talk about festive horror, but from the opening credits, with Darlene Love’s Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) belting out over the soundtrack, to the carol singing Gremlins and Phoebe Cates’ story of why she hates Christmas, the festive season is at the very heart of the film. Gremlins remains the most fun Christmas movie ever made, a heady mix of EC-comics ghoulishness, sentiment, slapsick and action with some of the best monsters ever put on film.

Buy Gremlins on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Gremlins would spawn many knock offs – Ghoulies, Munchies, Critters and more – but only Elves, made in 1989, had a similar Christmas theme. This oddball effort, which proposes that Hitler’s REAL plan for the Master Race was human/elf hybrids. When the elves are revived in a pagan ritual at Christmas, only an alcoholic ex-cop played by Dan Haggerty can stop them. It’s not as much fun as that makes it sound.

Family horror returned in 1993 stop-motion film A Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick and produced / co-written by Tim Burton. This chirpy musical see Pumpkin King Jack Skellington, leader of Halloween Town, stumbling upon Christmas Town and deciding to take it over. It’s a charming and visually lush movie that has unsurprisingly become a festive family favourite over the last twenty years.

Santa Claws

Rather less fun is 1996′s Santa Claws, a typically rotten effort by John Russo, with Debbie Rochon as a Scream Queen being stalked by a murderous fan in a Santa outfit. This low rent affair was pretty forgettable. It is one of several low/no budget video quickies that aimed to cash in on the Christmas horror market with tales of killer Santas – others include Satan Claus (1996), Christmas Season Massacre (2001) and Psycho Santa (2003).

1997 saw the release of Jack Frost (not to be confused with the family film from a year later of the same name). Here, a condemned serial killer is involved in a crash with a truck carrying genetic material, which – of course – causes him to mutate into a killer snowman. Inspired by the Child’s Play movie, Jack Frost is pretty poor, but the outlandish concept and mix of comedy and horror made it popular enough to spawn a sequel in 2000, Jack Frost 2 – Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman.

That might seem as ludicrous as Christmas horror goes, but 1998 saw Feeders 2: Slay Bells, in which the alien invaders of the title are fought off by Santa and his elves. Shot on video with no money, it’s a film you might struggle to get through.

Rather better was the 2000 League of Gentlemen Christmas Special, which mixes the regular characters of the series into a series of stories that are even darker than usual. Mixing vampires, family curses and voodoo into a trilogy of stories that are linked, Amicus style, it’s as creepy as it is funny, and it’s perhaps unsurprising that Mark Gatiss would graduate to writing the more recent BBC Christmas ghost stories.

The League of Gentlemen

Two poplar video franchises collided in 2004′s Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys, with the great-nephew of the original Puppet Master battling an evil organisation that wants his formula to help bring killer toys to life on Christmas Eve. Like most of the films in the series, this is cheap but cheerful, throwaway stuff.

2005′s Santa’s Slay sees Santa reinvented as a demon who is forced to be nice and give toys to children.Released from this demand, he reverts to his murderous ways. Given that Santa is played by fearsome looking wrestler Bill Goldberg, you have to wonder how anyone ever trusted him to come down their chimney and NOT kill them.

Santa’s Slay

Also in 2005 came The Christmas Tale, part of the Spanish Films to Keep You Awake series, in which a group of children find a woman dressed as Santa at the bottom of a well. It turns out that she’s a bank robber and the kids decide to starve her into handing over the stolen cash. But things take a darker turn when she escapes and the kids think she is a zombie. It’s a witty, inventive little tale.

A Christmas Tale

2006 saw Two Front Teeth, where Santa is a vampire assisted by zombie elves in a rather ludicrous effort. Equally silly, Treevenge is a 2008 short film by Jason Eisener, who would go on to shoot Hobo with a Shotgun. It’s the story of sentient Christmas trees who have enough of being cut down and displayed in people’s home and set out to take their revenge.

Treevenge

Recently, the Christmas horror has become more international, with two European films in 2010 offering an insight into different festive traditions. Dick Maas’ Sint (aka Saint) is a lively Dutch comedy horror which features a vengeful Sinterklaas (similar to, but not the same as, Santa Claus) coming back on December 5^th in years when that date coincides with a full moon, to carry out mass slaughter. It’s a fun, fast-paced movie that also offers a rare glimpse into festive traditions that are rather different to anything seen outside the local culture (including the notorious Black Peters).

Finnish film Rare Exports, on the other hand, sees the original (and malevolent) Santa unearthed during an excavation, leading to the discovery of a whole race of Santas, who are then captured and sold around the world. Witty and atmospheric, the film was inspired by Jalmari Helander’s original short film Rare Exports, Inc, a spoof commercial for the company selling the wild Santas.

Rare Exports

But these two high quality, entertaining Christmas horrors were very much the exception to the rule by this stage. The genre was more accurately represented by the likes of 2010′s Yule Die, another Santa suited slasher, or 2011′s Slaughter Claus, a plotless, pretty unwatchable amateur effort from Charles E. Cullen featuring Santa and the Bi-Polar Elf on an unexplained and uninteresting killing spree.

Slaughter Claus

Bloody Christmas (2012) sees a former movie star going crazy as he plays Santa on a TV show. 2009 film Deadly Little Christmas is a ham-fisted retread of slashers like Silent Night Deadly Night and 2002′s One Hell of a Christmas is a Danish Satanic horror comedy. Bikini Bloodbath Christmas (2009) is the third in a series of pointless tits ‘n’ gore satires that fail as horror, soft porn or comedy.

And of course the festive horror movie can’t escape the low budget zombie onslaught – 2009 saw Silent Night, Zombie Night, in 2010 there was Santa Claus Versus the Zombie, 2011 brought us A Cadaver Christmas, in 2012 we had Christmas with the Dead and Silent Night of the Living Dead is currently in pre-production. None of these films are likely to fill you with the spirit of the season.

So although we can hardly say that the Christmas horror film is at full strength, it is at least as prolific as ever. With a remake of Silent Night Deadly Night, now just called Silent Night, playing theatres in 2012, it seems that filmmaker’s fascination with the dark side of the season isn’t going away anytime soon.

Silent Night

Article by David Flint

Help Me… I’m Possessed (aka The Possessed) is a 1976 horror/exploitation film directed by the Americanised Belgian director Charles Nitzet (Voodoo Heartbeat, The Ravager) and stars Bill Greer in his only acting role, Deedy Peters and Lynne Marter. The film remained in the cinematic wilderness for many years, having only a limited theatrical run in the 1970′s and only appearing on video in 1984.

In the American desert, a young couple have been brutally murdered and the local sheriff immediately suspects fishy goings-on at the castle-like sanitarium run by reclusive Dr Arthur Blackwood (Greer). Assuring the sheriff that his work there is entirely above board and consists of little more than helping disturbed individuals return to society, he does little to allay the police’s fears, not least when his loopy doll-hugging singing sister appears.

Indeed, we soon learn that the doctor is perhaps not entirely qualified, housing a collection of chained up, scantily clad ladies, a Catweazle-alike prisoner and a hunchback in his basement, all at the mercy of his insane experiments, designed to rid them of madness. These ‘volunteers’ when not being whipped and brutalised suffer an even worse fate if they don’t behave or illicit positive results, being killed by snake, guillotine and being hacked up to fit the wrongly-sized coffins.

The arrival of the doctor’s new wife (Peters) sees his plans begin to unravel as disappearing members of staff and her cranky husband arouse her suspicion. Worse still, when she uncovers his experiments she learns that the harnessed ‘evil’ extracted from the patients has manifest itself as something malevolent and hideous…

Written by both Peters and Greer (somewhat remarkably considering her later life as the girlfriend of David Soul and his as writer and producer of TV shambles Charles In Charge), Help Me… I’m Possessed! feels like an amalgam of Al Adamson’s films, slightly restrained H.G. Lewis fare and lunatic imprisonment films like Blood Sucking Freaks. The acting standards are all of the same unremarkable quality but are engaging and fun, particularly Greer who looks completely ill-fitting in the role, and all the better for it. Though the torture and blood-letting are tame in comparison to Lewis’ films, they are still brutal and heartless enough to raise a serious question mark over the film’s initial PG rating!

The title is somewhat misleading (it was filmed with the more apt working title Nightmare at Blood Castle, there’s no possession in the film as such, only the mysterious evil presence which is represented by Lovecraftian red tentacle-like appendages wafting at the camera. Coming to a conclusion just before it starts to go around in circles once too often, perhaps the most arresting aspect of the film is the avant-garde  electronic score, completely unnerving and genuinely excellent though the film does not name any composer, only an Al Bart in the sound department, who evidently did not go on to better things.

Grimy and fun, Help Me… I’m Possessed! was recently released on DVD by Code Red in a double-bill with Blind Dead director Armando de Ossorio’s Demon Witch Child, the connection being that they were both known as The Possessed in various releases.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

With thanks to critic online and mondodigital for some of these images.

Nightmare City (aka City of the Walking Dead, Italian title: Incubo Sulla Cittá Contaminata) is a 1980 Italian-Spanish zombie film directed by Umberto Lenzi. The film stars Hugo Stiglitz, Laura Trotter, Maria Rosaria Omaggio, Francisco Rabal, Sonia Viviani, Eduardo Fajardo and Mel Ferrer. Director Lenzi felt the film was not as much as zombie film but a “radiation sickness movie” with hints of an anti-nuclear and anti-military message.

American TV news reporter Dean Miller (Hugo Stiglitz) waits at an unnamed European airport for the arrival of a scientist that he is about to interview regarding a recent nuclear accident. An unmarked military plane makes an emergency landing. The plane doors open and dozens of zombies burst out and begin stabbing and shooting the military personnel outside. Miller tries to let the people know of this event, but General Murchison of Civil Defense (Mel Ferrer) will not allow it. Miller tries to find his wife Anna who works at a hospital as the zombies begin to overrun the city.

Miller and his wife escape to an abandoned amusement park that is also overrun with zombies. The two climb to the top of a roller coaster and are about to be rescued by a military helicopter. Miller then wakes up revealing the whole situation to be a dream. Miller also learns that today he is about to meet a scientist at the airport. When he arrives a military plane makes an emergency landing.

“Nightmare City might be the very first “running zombie” film, long before 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead made this the new standard. The film is extremely violent, has quite a bit of gore, and some unintended humor. In other words it’s a cheesy “B” grade horror film, that horror collector’s should have in their collections.’” Eddie Scarito, This is Infamous

” … a wild and bloody exercise in excess. The movie has its fans as well as its fair share of detractors. I think it’s an odd amalgamation of themes and ideas given a much larger scope than normally afforded these movies. It’s neither Lenzi’s best and far from his worst. It’s a favorite of mine and sports a great deal of ultra violent entertainment value for shock seekers and gore mongers alike.” Cool Ass Cinema

“Nightmare City also accomplishes what it set out to do with respect to nudity and gore. The zombies have a amusingly shameless compulsion to rip open the shirts of women before they kill them as well as a weird breast-stabbing (and on one occasion, breast-lopping off) fetish.” John Shelton, Bloody Good Horror

“It’s probably fair to say that Nightmare City will always be known for its particular tics (its militaristic, running weapon-wielding zombies), but Lenzi fully exploits them. His movie might be dumb, but it’s rarely boring, and there’s something to be said for any movie that can transcend its tone-deafness as well as this one. It’s probably the only film that considers the plight of aerobic dancers during a zombie apocalypse.” Oh, the Horror!

“You’ll probably forget the entire movie within a month of watching it, but it’s fun and you’ll get a lot of laughs out of it: terrible acting; zombies standing directly in front of the camera posing; a random dog literally playing with the zombies; the stupidity of the two main characters; the horrible makeup; multiple times people standing still then suddenly jumping into action; woman’s head exploding then in the next shot she’s dead with just a little bloody spot on her forehead; the TV that for no reason explodes into a huge fireball; the completely random harpoon gun and much more.” Dymon Enlow, Happyotter

Raro Video Blu-ray Special Features:

An interview with Umberto Lenzi

Original English trailer

Original Italian trailer

A fully illustrated booklet on the genesis and production of the film

New HD Transfer – Digitally restored

New and improved English subtitle translation

Buy Nightmare City on Raro Video Blu-ray | DVD from Amazon.com

Buy Nightmare City + Hell of the Living Dead bargain zombie double-bill on DVD from Amazon.com

Wikipedia | IMDb | We are grateful to Cool Ass Cinema for a couple of the images above.

WH

Altered Species, also known as Rodentz, is a 2001 horror film written and directed by Miles Feldman [Serge Rodnunsky] (Black Cat, The Dead of Night, Blade of the Vampire). The film stars Allen Lee, Haff Leah Rowan, Guy Veig, Robert Broughton, Richard Peterson, Derek Hofman, Alexandra Townsend and David Bradley.

On a moonlit night, in a remote research laboratory, a major medical breakthrough is about to have deadly results. A chemical compound that was created to “hunt and destroy” deadly cancer cells has leaked from the hazardous waste disposal system into the building’s basement. Now, the rodents involved in the laboratory experiment upstairs are not the only rats in the facility that will become the altered species. Professor Schultz, a leading bio-researcher, has just determined that the addition of a new enzyme now enables his “hunt and destroy” formulation to regenerate for the length of time necessary to neutralize deadly cancer tumors. When three varying degrees of the new mixture are administered to three different rats and the rest poured down the faulty “Waste Hazard” sink, shocking side-effects result in a night of terror…

” … has the dubious distinction of being one of the worst low-budget horror films of the last decade. There’s nothing wrong with the concept of killer rats, but the movie falls flat in just about every area of execution. The acting sucks, the directing sucks, the guy in the big rat suit sucks, the effects suck, the music sucks, even the DVD Case art suck.”Hide the cheese” says the front. “Classic creature feature” says the back”. “This looks bad” says Mike. “I agree. Let’s get it.” says I. And that’s how we stumbled across this rat’s rear end of a film.” Shameface.com

“If only the filmmakers had followed their own tagline, “Hide the cheese…” The cheese is in full view, and it stinks to boot”. Rob Lineberger, DVD Verdict

“Yawnsville story about a gaggle of cookie-cutter college kiddos who decide to get their party started at an abandoned building where a disgraced professor is trying to cure cancer by juicing lab rats full of glowing green goo a la Re-Animator.” Noel Gross, DVD Talk

“It sounds like a set-up for a comedy making fun of bad horror films, but it takes itself rather seriously. For a sub-genre of killer-rat movies such as are usually ultra-stupid, this one is perhaps a half-peg above, competently acted & entertaining, which is not the same as being on any level consequential. It’s beyond trivial.” Wild Realm Reviews

Wikipedia | IMDb

Alan Ormsby has been something of a jack-of-all-trades in the film industry: not only a highly successful and award winning screenwriter, but also director, actor, make-up effects technician and author. And although his career has taken him far from the world of the horror movie, it remains a genre for which he has fond feelings.

As a child, Ormsby grew up watching classic horror and fantasy films like King Kong and Disney’s Pinocchio, and was fascinated by animation. His early ambition was to be a cartoonist, and would hold strange garage shows for the local kids where he told stories and displayed illustrations on huge sheets of paper. After a while, Ormsby graduated to shooting these garage shows on 8mm film, and slowly his interests moved from cartoons to film-making, and acting in particular.

In the late Sixties, he met Bob Clark whilst the two of them were attending the University of Miami. Clark was an aspiring playwright and Ormsby too was developing his writing skills. Before long the two of them were working together on plays, sometimes writing, sometimes directing, sometimes acting. It was the start of a working relationship that would last several years.

When Clark raised a pittance to make a low budget horror film which would become Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, he turned to Ormsby to help him. Although mainly written by Clark, Ormsby would rework elements of the screenplay enough to secure a co-writer credit. He also took the lead role in a cast that was mainly made up of friends and family (Ormsby’s wife Anya took the female lead). On top of this, he also provided the make-up effects for the film, which not only included the expected gore effects but also several zombies. These walking corpses looked surprisingly effective given the low budget and lack of time available.

Children… was successful enough to bring Clark and Ormsby to the attention of a canadian production company who hired them to make another horror film. This time, Ormsby wrote the screenplay for a movie he called The Veteran. Unlike the jokey Children…, this was a dark, fairly low-key tale inspired by J.W. Jacobs’ classic story The Monkey’s Paw, transposed to 1970′s America. In Ormsby’s version of the tale, a soldier killed in Vietnam is wished back to life by his mother, only to return as a zombie in need of blood to live. The film was retitled several times – at one point known as The Night Andy Came Home, it eventually saw release as both Deathdream and Dead of Night in 1972.

In 1974, Ormsby worked with another Children… alumnus, Jeff Gillen, on Deranged, a fairly accurate retelling of the crimes of serial killer Ed Gein, the inspiration behind Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Although the Gein character was renamed Ezra Cobb, the film stuck mainly to the facts, told with a strong sense of gallows humour. A fine twitchy performance from Roberts Blossom and gore effects by a young Tom Savini (supervised by Ormsby) have made the film a cult classic over the last thirty years.

In 1975, Ormsby wrote a book called Movie Monsters: Monster Make-Up & Monster Shows To Put On, which gave kids instructions on mixing fake blood and horror make-up, plus details of how to run effective garage shows, much like those he used to run himself. He also created the doll Hugo: Man of a Thousand Faces (a reference to Lon Chaney).

In 1977, Ormsby would provide the make-up for Ken Weiderhorn’s Nazi zombie film Shock Waves (aka Death Corps).

Throughout the 1980′s and 1990′s, Ormsby would work as a writer on a wide variety of films and TV shows. He won acclaim for his screenplay for My Bodyguard in 1980, and returned to horror a year later, writing Paul Schrader’s controversial remake of Cat People. He also worked again with Bob Clark on Porkys II: The Next Day in 1983.

For TV, he wrote science fiction film Almost Human (1987) and thrillers Indecency (1992), The Disappearance of Nora (1993) and Deadly Web (1996), the latter an early cyberstalking tale.

In 1991, Clark asked Ormsby to write and direct Popcorn, a modern horror film that he was producing. Unfortunately, there were a series of disagreements between Ormsby and studio executives, and he left the project (his screenplay is credited to Tod Hackett). In 1996, he wrote crime thriller The Substitute, about a Vietnam vet who goes undercover as a teacher to root out gang violence. Amazingly, the film has spawned three sequels!

Ormsby’s work has slowed down in the last decade, suggesting that he is now enjoying retirement, though he still pops up for interviews about his early work.

Bio by David Flint, Horrorpedia

Return to Nuke ‘Em High: Volume 1 is a 2013 American sci-fi comedy horror film directed by Lloyd Kaufman from a screenplay by Travis Campbell, Casey Clapp, Derek Dressler, Aaron Hamel and Kaufman himself. It stars Rick Collins, Dan Snow, Clay Von Carlowitz, Kelsey Lehman, David Hook, William Dreyer, Lemmy (from rock band Motörhead), Jeff Lasky, Michael C. Schmahl, Jess Mills and Lloyd Kaufman.

The film, a “revisiting” of Troma’s 1986 Class of Nuke ‘Em High, is set for a limited US theatrical release in January 2014 by Anchor Bay Films.  It was slated to be a single film until Quentin Tarantino’s suggestion that Kaufman split the film into two volumes à la Kill Bill.

Welcome to Tromaville High School, where, unfortunately, the glee club has mutated into a vicious gang of Cretins. Chrissy and Lauren, two innocent lesbian lovers, must fight not only the Cretins, mutants and monsters, but also the evil Tromorganic Foodstuffs conglomerate. Can they and Kevin the Wonder Duck save Tromaville High School and the world?

” … one of the most insane American made splatter films that I’ve ever seen to date, one that falls in-line with all those ridiculous Sushi Typhoon titles made by Yoshihiro Nishimura and Noboru Iguchi, if you haven’t seen those then just think of Evil Dead 2, if you liked that you’ll probably enjoy this.” Alex DiGiovanna, Moviebuzzers.com

“By the usual standards of Troma films, this is typical in that it’s barely a movie, and the non-stop vulgarity becomes an ordeal by the hour point. But the picture isn’t plotted with story beats, only shock moments: what to make of the sequence when a lesbian’s irradiated penis devours a man’s heart? The blanks are filled by one-liners regarding school shootings and George Zimmerman, funny not because of their wit but their audacity.” Gabe Toro, The Playlist

“There will undoubtably be audiences proclaiming Kaufman simply is exploiting sex for perversion, violence for sickness, and dialogue for shock, but believe it or not, everything Kaufman does is calculated. Lloyd’s delivery goes to undoubted extremes, but that’s everything Troma has been built on, and Return To Nuke ‘Em High Volume 1 delivers that calculated assault of insanity in droves.” Matt Donato, We Got This Covered

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Horror High (also known as Kiss the Teacher… Goodbye!  and Twisted Brain) is a 1973 (released 1974) American horror film directed by Larry N. Stouffer (assistant director on Keep My Grave Open) from a screenplay by J.D. Feigelson as ‘Jack Fowler’ (Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Cry for the Strangers, Chiller). It stars Pat Cardi, Austin Stoker (Abby, Assault on Precinct 13, Uninvited), Rosie Holotik (Encounter with the Unknown, Don’t Look in the Basement), John Niland, and Jeff Alexander (Zontar: The Thing from Venus, Curse of the Swamp Creature and The House of Seven Corpses). The odd score by Don Hulette is distinctive. Filmed in Texas, it was distributed by Crown International Pictures. Return to Horror High (1987) has no connection and is not a sequel.

‘An obvious take off of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (in fact, Vernon’s English class is watching a film version of the novel), Horror High feels like a 50s monster B-movie that’s been transplanted right to the 70s. Besides the obvious 70s stylings, the movie also shows the influence of the more graphically violent films that preceded it, particularly the works of Herschell Gordon Lewis. Though it’s kind of a monster movie, it really ought to be considered more of a proto-slasher due to the way Vernon dispatches of his victims. Not only is it fairly graphic for the era, but it’s also quite creative in its use of various implements of death, such as paper cutter blades and sulphuric acid (which is housed in a huge barrel right in the middle of a classroom!).’ Oh, the Horror!

‘ …foreshadows Harry Kaufman’s The Toxic Avenger (1984) in many important ways such as: featuring a bullied nerd gets who super powers (like hairy forearms) and then runs murderously amok plus, just like many Troma features, this movie was made on a shoe-string budget but was able to engineer some gory and realistic practical effects such as face melting.’ Sleaze Blender

‘Make no mistake, Horror High is total 70s doom. The music score is an eerie prog-rock sounding thing; it’s more Alice Cooper than Goblin, and it’s not nearly as prevalent as it should have been in the finished product. There’s even a spooky, folky ballad theme song, a hallmark of the 70s Doom genre! And woooo….it even has Vernon’s name in it. I can’t recommend “Horror High” enough to fans of the weird. If you haven’t seen it yet, you absolutely NEED to, or…I dunno, the world will implode or something.’ Groovy Doom

‘The gore is passable if rudimentary, but plentiful and in some instances, brutal and shocking. Fingers and heads are sliced off, faces are melted with acid and chest is crushed into pulp are among the bloody bits. In addition, the film frequently features odd camera angles and unusual lighting for added spooky effect.’ Cool Ass Cinema

‘With more than a splash of crudeness in the production values, a storyline not only inspired by “Jekyll and Hyde” (the lit students are seen watching a film of Stevenson’s horror novel) but by the Herman Cohen teenage monster flicks of the 1950s, and an odd mix of intended camp and borderline disturbing displays, Horror High is practically mesmerising and essential 1970s drive-in horror. The overall acting is pretty bad (it’s fun to watch non-actor Niland as the bullish coach and decipher whether he’s plain awful or naturally brilliant) except for former child-star Cardi (who holds the film up quite well and ads pathos to the character) and the always great Stoker, who was such a recognisable fixture in 1970s cult movies, his presence here pretty much gives this cheapie creepy a sense of authenticity.’ George R. Reis, DVD Drive-In

Buy Horror High on Code Red 35th Anniversary DVD from Amazon.com

‘If not a lost masterpiece, Horror High delivers enough sleaze, violence and sensitive science geek meanderings to make for an enjoyable watch. It probably helps if you’re predisposed to like low budget seventies cheapies, but even looking at it objectively with that factor removed from the equation, it’s hard to imagine anyone not at least appreciating the entertainment factor this quirky dime store production provides in spades.’ DVD Talk

‘The Code Red release of Horror High is way better than the Twisted Brain version that was put out on dvd by Rhino Home Video a few years back. The new version looks sharper and sounds better. Most important though is the fact that this is the uncut PG release. Contrary to the rumors ( including what’s written on the back of the box ) there is no R rated version of this movie. When the movie was originally released in 1974 and even during it’s re-release in the early 80′s, it was the same version that is presented here. And it was rated PG. Yes it’s violent enough to have an R rating, but it was given a PG when it was originally released. In fact I couldn’t find a rating code for this movie, so it’s quite possible that the PG rating on the poster was made up, and Crown International just went ahead and booked the film into theaters without a true rating from the MPAA. I love this movie…’ Lightning Boy, Amazon.com

Buy Regional Horror Films, 1958 – 1990 from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Also released as Cérebro Diabólico (Brazil), L’ange merrier (France), Horror gimi (Hungary), Die Teufelsbestie (Germany).

Related: Evilspeak

IMDb

It’s Alive is a 2008 straight-to-DVD remake of Larry Cohen‘s 1974 horror film of the same name. It was directed by Josef Rusnak from a screenplay by Cohen, Paul Sopocy and James Portolese and shot in Bulgaria. The film stars Bijou Phillips, James Murray, Raphaël Coleman, Owen Teale, Skye Bennett and Ty Glaser. Officially released straight-to-DVD on October 6, 2009, it is available in both rated and unrated editions.

Interviewed by Films in Review regarding the remake on December 21, 2009  Larry Cohen gave it a negative review, saying “It’s a terrible picture. It’s just beyond awful” and “I would advise anybody who likes my film to cross the street and avoid seeing the new enchilada.”

Just before the end of her semester at college, Lenore Harker (Bijou Phillips) leaves to have a baby with her architect boyfriend, Frank (James Murray) at his remote log cabin. After discovering the baby has doubled in size in just a month, doctors decide to extract the baby by caesarian section, although Frank is not present. As the doctor cuts the umbilical cord, the newborn goes on a rampage, killing every doctor and nurse in the operating room. When the film cuts back to the new mother, the baby is asleep on her stomach and the room is covered with blood.

After questioning by the police, Lenore is allowed to take the baby home. Authorities arrange for a psychologist to help her regain her memory of the delivery. Soon, baby Daniel bites Lenore when she’s feeding him, revealing his taste for blood…

‘The tone is also a bit more even here. Cohen’s film was slightly awkward at times due to some ill-fitting comedic bits, but this one is played completely straight (as long as you consider Bijou Phillips’ performance and the occasional kill shot to be “straight”). And I like the angle that they went for, which is that the mother felt a responsibility to the child, possibly brought on by guilty feelings of trying to abort it (which is also about the only thing we get in terms of an explanation – which isn’t something that I cared about, for the record. Sometimes mutant babies are just mutant babies).’ Horror Movie a Day

‘Whilst It’s Alive is reasonably well acted and the production is above average, it isn’t scary – at all! Barely any of the deaths are shown, and what we do see is comical, and not intentionally so. The writers try to present us with a reason for Daniel’s blood hungry ways, but I didn’t buy it, and neither will you. Only Lenore’s character is built at all, the others are merely conveniently placed prey for little Daniel, and it is difficult to care about such weak characters.’ Stalk ‘n’ Slash

‘Mediocre film with a few nice bits of gore. It tries to be all creepy and intense but it’s mostly laughable and nothing special.’ The Girl Who Loves Horror

‘In the remake, the baby is just an evil little shit.  It sees something living and–in a whir of cheap CGI–kills it.  Rats, cats, rabbits, birds, humans, it doesn’t matter.  If it has a pulse and gets close enough, it’s going to die.  And it’s going to die in a flood of gushing blood and gore.  That’s right, in place of the compelling characters and nuanced motives from the original film, the remake just offers up frenetic gore.’ Matt Wedge, Obsessive Movie Nerd

‘Bijou Phillips… lacks the presence let alone the gravitas to carry off the tragedy of having created her own monster, and so the film’s examination of maternity and madness falls short’ Anton Bitel, Little White Lies

Buy It’s Alive on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Wikipedia | IMDb

Uncle Sam is a 1996 horror film directed by William Lustig, and written by Larry Cohen. It stars William Smith (Grave of the Vampire), David ‘Shark’ Fralick, Leslie Neale, Bo Hopkins (Tentacles, Sweet Sixteen), Matthew Flint, Anne Tremko, Isaac Hayes, Timothy Bottoms (The Fantasist, Parasomnia), P.J. Soles (Halloween), Tom McFadden, Morgan Paull, Richard Cummings Jr., Robert Forster (Alligator) and Jason Adelman.

In Kuwait, a military unit uncovers an American helicopter downed by friendly fire at least three years ago. As the wreckage is inspected, Master Sergeant Sam Harper, one of the burnt bodies within, springs to life, kills a sergeant and a major, and returns to an inert state after muttering, “Don’t be afraid, it’s only friendly fire!”

Weeks later, Sam’s body is delivered to his hometown of Twin Rivers, which is preparing for Independence Day. Sam’s wife Louise is given custody of the casket containing Sam’s remains, which are left in the home of Sam’s estranged sister Sally, who lives with her patriotic young son, Jody. Sam reanimates in the early hours of the Fourth of July, and proceeds to kill and steal the costume of a perverted Uncle Sam. Sam then makes his way to a cemetery, where he murders two of three juvenile delinquents who had vandalized tombstones, and desecrated an American flag.

During the Independence Day celebration (which a corrupt congressman is visiting) Sam beheads the third delinquent, kills Jody’s teacher (who had opposed the Vietnam War) with a hatchet, and shoots Sally’s unscrupulous lawyer boyfriend in the head. Despite these deaths, the festivities continue, but are thrown into disarray when Sam uses the fireworks gear to blow up the congressman, and a flagpole to impale Louise’s deputy boyfriend. As this occurs, Jody is told by his mother and aunt that his supposedly heroic idol Sam was in fact an alcoholic psychopath who physically and sexually abused them, and only joined the military so he could get a “free pass” to kill people…

Buy Uncle Sam on Blu-ray | DVD from Amazon.com

‘Complementing Cohen’s note-perfect string of nationalistic platitudes, Lustig’s surprisingly evocative widescreen compositions are peppered with an absurd parade of Americana—fireworks, potato-sack races, even a morose, wheelchair bound young boy as a ludicrous representation of the stereotypical Vietnam vet—almost all of which become the instruments of death to an amassed populace that feels no qualms about celebrating its own legacy of militaristic vengeance but draws the line if it threatens to soil their bubble of blithe privilege. Oh, and it features a gliding, dreamlike chase scene on stilts that, no doubt to Sam’s chagrin, momentarily thrusts the video cheapie straight into the realm of swooning Euro-horror.’ Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine

‘And the pace was slower than expected, building character and mood rather than just having Sam running around killing folks nonstop (which is what I was actually expecting). I appreciate that. There are a couple of “Hi I’m – *killed*” characters, but for the most part they are given a few scenes before being offed, and only one character is killed for no reason (the others are flag burners, crooked politicians, or other “Anti-American” types). Again, this was most unusual for a slasher movie, and even more surprising when you consider the ridiculous concept.’ Horror Movie a Day

‘Theoretically, Uncle Sam’s creators are using the format of the slasher film to make us re-examine our notions of patriotism, of sacrifice, of honor and glory and all that crap, while simultaneously forcing us to come to grips with the idea that most of the alternatives that have thus far been postulated are equally full of shit, and that the people who espouse them are as likely as not be stupid, lazy, selfish, and immoral. In and of itself, this isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but anybody with the cognitive horsepower to think in those terms in the first place has probably been thinking in those terms for quite some time, and is likely to be turned off by the fact that Uncle Sam makes its characters on both sides of the issue employ only the worst, least defensible arguments to state their cases, and to couch those feeble arguments in the most simplistic, juvenile terms imaginable.’ 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting

Wikipedia | IMDb

Lynn Lowry is an American actress, best known for her appearances in cult horror and exploitation films during the 1970s.

Born Linda Kay Lowry on October 15^th, 1947, she made her first film appearance in 1970 as part of the cast of ultra-gory shocker I Drink Your Blood, a tale of satanist hippies who become crazed after being infected with rabies. Although she only had a small part (and wasn’t even credited), she did appear in what has since become one of the film’s most iconic moment, brandishing a severed hand.

I Drink Your Blood was the first of three ‘infection’ films that Lowry made over the next few years, and these movies remain her best known and best loved work. After I Drink Your Blood, she had a pivotal role in George Romero’s The Crazies in 1973. This film rejigged the concept of Night of the Living Dead into a more plausible concept – a plane carrying a government bio weapon crashes, infecting the water supply in a small town and causing an outbreak of madness in the local population.

Lowry followed this with David Cronenberg’s Shivers (aka They Came from Within / The Parasite Murders), which again saw an infection – in this case a phallic sex parasite – running rampant, spreading through the self-contained residents of a soulless tower block. In this film, Lowry was effectively the female lead.

In all three of these films, Lowry proved to be an effective presence. Her unusual beauty and hippy chick style helped to create a certain unease, as the viewer was unsure if she was infected or not. In The Crazies, she featured in a controversial incest rape scene, while in Shivers, her character helps show how emotionally dead the characters are before infection (she memorably strips in from of her boss, who shows no reaction) and how sexually liberated they are by the infection.

In each of these films, Lowry has arguably the most memorable scenes – her startling death in The Crazies is an iconic moment, and her “even dying is an act of eroticism” speech in Shivers, along with her appearance at the climax, both erotic and unnerving, remain both unforgettable sequences and the point where the film’s controversial philosophy of liberation through sexual disease is made most clear.

Between these films, she appeared in Lloyd Kaufman’s directorial debut, the sex comedy Battle of Love’s Return, alongside cult movie queen Mary Woronov in Theodore Gershuny’s arthouse sexploitation drama Sugar Cookies, and Radley Metzger’s impressive erotic film Score. These films all took advantage of her willingness to undress and perform softcore sex scenes, and usually featured her as a naïve hippy type who gets caught up in a world of decadence and deviation. But she often turns out to be less the victim than she initially appears.

She also appeared in short-lived TV show How to Survive a Marriage in 1974.

In 1976, she appeared in the vengeance thriller Fighting Mad, and in 1982 had a role in the remake of Cat People. There were a handful of small part TV appearances in the 1980s and 1990s, but for the most part, her screen career was replaced with theatre and a singing work, with Lowry performing with a band playing show tunes, jazz and folk music.

However, in the last decade, she has made a screen comeback, starting in 2005. Her cult status has seen her called upon by a number of horror film makers, keen to have her appear in their movies. The highest profile of these is The Theatre Bizarre, where she appeared in David Gregory’s segment Sweets.

Other films of the last few years include Splatter Disco, Beyond the Dunwich Horror, Schism, Psychosomatika, I Spill Your Guts, The Legend of Six Fingers, Torture Chamber, Cannibals, Night of the Sea Monkey: A Disturbing Tale and several more. She also made a cameo appearance in the 2010 remake of The Crazies.

IMDb | Official website

Bio by David Flint

We Are What We Are is a 2013 American horror film co-wriiten (with Nick Damici) and directed by Jim Mickle (Mulberry Street, Stake Land). It was screened at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and in the Directors’ Fortnight section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. It is a remake of the 2010 Mexican film of the same name. The film stars Bill Sage, Julia Garner, Ambyr Childers, Kelly McGillis, Odeya Rush, Michael Parks, Wyatt Russell and Nick Damici.

A seemingly wholesome and benevolent family, the Parkers have always kept to themselves, and for good reason. Behind closed doors, patriarch Frank rules his family with a rigorous fervor, determined to keep his ancestral customs intact at any cost. As a torrential rainstorm moves into the area, tragedy strikes and his daughters Iris and Rose are forced to assume responsibilities that extend beyond those of a typical family. As the unrelenting downpour continues to flood their small town, the local authorities begin to uncover clues that bring them closer to the secret that the Parkers have held closely for so many years. While the town’s doctor who’s daughter was eaten by Frank watches, the daughters both decide to consume their overbearing father, by eating his flesh while still alive…

‘What’s particularly impressive about We Are What We Are is what it changes (which is a lot) and what it chooses to keep; the central core of both films is very similar and yet fascinating for different reasons. The film also boasts strong essentials in the cinematography and score departments, while Mr. Mickle acts as his own editor, and the result is two disparate subplots that slowly converge in clever and intense fashion. This is a sober and serious horror tale, but it does remember to include some jolts, scares, and seriously bloody bits, too. It’s just a tight little package, all told.’ Scott Weinberg, FEARnet

‘The best element of the picture is how Mickle slowly, painstakingly builds both suspense and grotesque horror. Mickle is a natural born filmmaker and there is seldom a frame or beat that’s out of step. In fact there’s something very peculiar at work here in just how rich his approach is since there’s a genuine attempt to humanize its characters in a way where we often empathize with their situation even when they’re engaging in utterly horrendous actions. This is in stark contrast to the original Mexican version where its characters are pretty reprehensible as human beings…’ Glen Klymkiw, Film Corner

‘The movie saves most of its modest number of jolts for its last quarter or so, which makes them all the more intense. They stick in your craw – and be warned, they’re not for the squeamish… Mickle’s version has all the American Gothic trappings, maybe even pouring it on a bit thick at times. Despite the generally somber tone, there are a few moments when he seems to be tweaking genre buffs’ memories of movies by the likes of Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper.’ Walter Addiego, San Francisco Gate

‘Mickle takes a slightly different tack altogether, using the Grau screenplay as a jumping point to set more of a mood piece, using the gore to accent the feeling of anachronism he sets up with the central family. The violence of Mickle’s We Are What We Are, builds slowly toward a shocking and gruesome finale worthy of any horror fan’s attention.’ Brandon A. DuHamel, Blu-rayDefinition.com

Buy We Are What We Are on Instant Video | DVD | Blu-ray from Amazon.com

Wikipedia | IMDb

W.H.

Evil Come Evil Go is a 1972 American sexploitation horror film written and directed by Walt Davis (Widow Blue/Sex Psycho) for adult movie producer Bob Chinn. It stars Cleo O’Hara, Sandra Henderson, Jane Tsentas (The Jekyll and Hyde Portfolio, Terror at Orgy Castle), Rick Cassidy (Desires of the Devil), Margot Devletian, Chesley Noone (Angel Above – The Devil Below) and porn star John Holmes (who was also assistant director).

Previously available on DVD via Something Weird Video, the film is re-released on a DVD triple-bill by Vinegar Syndrome on January 7, 2014.

Traveling Evangelist preacher, Sister Sarah Jane (Cleo O’Hara), is hellbent on ridding the world of evil, sex-obsessed men. Taking to the streets of Los Angeles, she quickly befriends a gullible young bisexual woman and the two embark on a mad, sex-filled killing spree…

‘Though the film fails to come up with a satisfactory conclusion, the overlong sex scenes (which are pretty graphic and feature plenty of full male and female nudity) bog things down at times and some of the audio is heavily damaged, most of the humour is on target, it’s in very bad taste and O’Hara is hysterically funny as the deranged Southern Belle.’ The Bloody Pit of Horror

‘When it comes to mixing crazed religious harpies, almost-porno sex scenes and gooey gory murders, no film does it better than Evil Come Evil Go!… It’s another peek into the bizarro mind of Davis, but is competently photographed by Manuel S. Conde and better-acted than his more familiar films (The Danish Connection, Sex Psycho). The violence and sex is a tad more restrained this time around for Davis, but it’s still a sleazy, off-the-wall gem which could have only been made in the 1970′s!’ Casey Scott, DVD Drive-In

‘Although quite bloody at times (with much crimson-smeared bared flesh on display) the violence is not as explicit as the sex. And although there is more bloodshed here than in “Sex Psycho” there is nothing as extreme or gory as that movie’s machete to the neck demise. But once again sex and violence do taboo bed-fellows make so what violence there is seems magnified as a result.’ Beardy Freak

Buy on Vinegar Syndrome triple-bill DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com 

Buy Evil Come Evil Go poster from Amazon.co.uk

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