The Initiation

I know I tend to see everything as Giallo these days, but if this were Italian it would be one of the better ones.

Encounters Of The Spooky Kind [Gui da gui/ Spooky Encounters]

The feuding sorcerers are excellent, Sammo Hung’s outrageous Kung Fu is excellent and the hopping ghost is fucking excellent.

Roar

Barely a film as people visibly shit themselves in rooms full of lions regardless of whether their character should be shitting themselves or not, and then an editor has done their best to get it all to be a rough approximation of a story. Absolutely mental.

Ghosthouse [La Casa 3]

Italians and their cheeky sequels. Though not a cheeky sequel to the House movies as you might expect, but in fact a cheeky sequel to the Evil Dead movies which were titled La Casa 1 and 2 in Italy. Suffice to say this has nothing to do with either as it focuses on a CB radio enthusiast (not making this up) who is trying to uncover the mystery behind a house that keeps on killing whoever enters it. Most unusual is that nobody seems to be fussed about the mystery of why people blithely insist on going in the house even when they’re aware that it kills people.

Verotika

An anthology of three shitty stories. The only good bit in the first was laughing at the four rubber arms that hung limply off the sides of a six armed man, the second featured no good bits whatsoever and the third one wasn’t even a fucking story, just some woman twatting about in a barrel of jam.

Antiporno [Anchiporuno]

In the seventies Nikkatsu, one of Japan’s major film studios, successfully dipped their toes in the sexploitation market. Their films were known as Roman Porno, distinguishable from the regular pinku eiga of the time by their higher budgets and the fact that directors were given full artistic freedom - as long as they included sex or nudity in the films roughly every ten minutes. A recent attempt to reboot the series saw modern directors given the same brief and here’s Sion Sono pushing things to the absolute limit with an expressionist tirade on the illusion of freedom, the hypocrisy of pornography and a damning indignation of the role of women in Japanese society, with some sex or nudity happening roughly every ten minutes.

House

A horror comedy that fails to scare and is rarely funny.

Big Trouble In Little China

It’s a testament to John Carpenter’s power at his height that he could take a raft of elements that would sink a modern movie - belligerent masculinity, reductionist femininity, lazy racial stereotyping, shoddy special effects - and fashion something so damn cool out of it all.

Oasis Of Fear [Un posto ideale per uccidere/ An Ideal Place To Kill/ Dirty Pictures]

A very odd movie whose narrative shifts and squirms, giving a constant air of mystery, but where everybody acts a bit too calm and collected given the power plays they’re all trying to pull on each other.

Forbidden World [Mutant]

A cheap, tacky alien rip off that manages to succeed by piling on nasty goo, gratuitous nudity and then refusing to hang around any longer than it has to.

There's Always Vanilla

A young drifter who's a bit of a dick returns to his home town and embarks on a doomed relationship with an older model that is probably meant to reveal all sorts of messages about society in seventies Pittsburgh, but the only thing I really got from it is that relationships don't work out when you're a bit of a dick.

Paganini Horror

Luigi Cozzi continues to demonstrate his extraordinary ability to make films with a wide eyed enthusiasm that are so utterly dire to such an extent that they become hysterically funny. The gold here is three ladies standing over a corpse, having an excruciatingly lengthy discussion about the body being smothered by a wood fungus that only grows on a certain type of wood, the same type of wood the dead composer Paganini insisted his violins were made from. All delivered with totally straight faces.

Season Of The Witch [Hungry Wives/ Jack’s Wife]

Extremely low-key portrayal of an ageing housewife’s journey into witchcraft.

Macabre [Macabro]

Typically Italian thriller that intently pursues a goal of having the most insane ending whilst sacrificing logic, sense and rationality from everybody concerned in order to get there.

Alice, Sweet Alice [Communion/Holy Terror]

An interesting curio, with plenty of unsettling moments that would probably be much better if the cast didn’t just yell everything at each other all the fucking time.