Don’t Go Near The Park [Nightstalker/ Curse Of The Living Dead]

Extremely trashy nonsense about 12,000 year old cannibals who must eat children to stay young. Looks like it was made for a tenner by people with a very dodgy moral compass.

The Gestapo’s Last Orgy [L'ultima orgia del III Reich/ Caligula Reincarnated As Hitler]

Deplorable film attempt that’s jam packed with atrocity and covered over with a vague stab at appropriating the plot of The Night Porter to try and justify it all.

The Dorm That Dripped Blood [Pranks/ Death Dorm]

A dreary slasher that whittles its paltry cast down to two survivors so one can say to the other “it’s me, i’m the killer” and there’s nobody left who really gives a fuck. Including the audience.

The House On The Edge Of The Park [La casa sperduta nel parco]

A murderous rapist and his simple minded buddy get invited to a party full of rich folks where they attempt a bunch of raping and murdering until the inevitable final twist appears. I say inevitable because none of the rich folk behave as you’d expect under the threat of rape and murder, the main bad man is David Hess playing the same type of character he played in Last House On The Left and the title itself is a lift from the very same movie. It’s not like they tried very hard to hide what was going to happen.

Man From Deep River [Il paese del sesso selvaggio/ The Country Of Savage Sex/ Deep River Savages/ Mondo Cannibale/ Sacrifice!]

A photographer gets caught by a savage tribe deep in the thai jungle, and ends up living with them, learning their way of life and becoming accepted as a tribesman. Except nobody watching gave a shit, instead audiences only wanted to talk about the excessive weird sex, the abundance of hideously graphic animal cruelty and the cannibals that rock up in the last 20 minutes to chew on some rubber body parts which set the tone for an entire sub-genre of Italian cannibal movie.

Contamination [Alien Contamination/ Contamination - Alien arriva sulla Terra]

The director of Starcrash proves it was no one off of feacal brilliance with yet another movie that's so naively shit it's amazing. This time it's a rip off of Alien with the space crew replaced by a bickering cop and a wooden colonel, the gargantuan spaceship interiors replaced by a coffee factory and the alien removed entirely so now when little wobbly green alien eggs open people simply explode immediately. So many highlights, but my favourite is a scientist who makes a mouse explode in a bell jar to demonstrate the seriousness of the alien threat and the cop amiably comments "I saw that happen to humans".
Utterly King.

Madhouse [There Was A Little Girl/ Scared To Death/ And Then She Was Bad]

A vague Argento attempt that goes laughably over the top every time somebody has to hack up a dummy full of animal guts or the glove puppet dog has to rip a rubbery neck to shreds, which happens a lot.

The Burning

A sleazy Friday The 13th clone with a leering, ogling approach to its female characters made all the more insidious by subplots that try to normalise sexually aggressive behaviour and dismiss sex pests as harmless, which in turn is given an even darker edge by an opening credit that states this was all created by Harvey Weinstein.
All of which is overshadowed by having to watch George from Seinfeld in his early twenties playing a teenager. With hair.

The House By The Cemetery [Quella villa accanto al cimitero]

Fulci's innate inability to handle story, subtlety or logic actually works in his favour as every character behaves unusually, creating weird atmospheres that then frequently explode into an excess of gory stabbing. King.

The Toolbox Murders

Fairly ropey late seventies slasher that was briefly banned by the BBFC because a lady has a wank in the bath.

Cannibal Apocalypse [Apocalypse domani/ Cannibals in the Streets/ Invasion of the Fleshhunters]

An incredibly tame Italian cannibal effort about ex soldiers in New York who occasionally feel the need to nibble on folk. Very low on apocalypse type behaviours.

The Mountain Of The Cannibal God [La montagna del dio cannibale/ Slave Of The Cannibal God/ Prisoner Of The Cannibal God]

I couldn't decide which random moment of exploitative excess peppered through this fairly tame jungle romp got it placed on the video nasty banned list. I reckon it was either the extraordinary amount of real life animal killings or the bit where a cannibal openly fingers herself for a few minutes. Actually no, it was probably the guy fucking the pig. Yeah, the guy fucking the pig is what did it.

The Evil Dead

This Halloween I also watched this absolute masterpiece.

SS Experiment Love Camp [Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur]

In a concentration camp where nazis are impregnating female prisoners to carry their superior gene, a comander abuses his position to get a testicle transplant on the sly because his old ones got bitten off. So basically a film about somebody sponging off their job, we've all done it at some point I suppose.

Cannibal Holocaust [Ruggero Deodato's New Edit]

Not really a new edit at all, just some MS Paint fake film scratches layered over the more lingering shots of animal cruelty which does absolutely nothing to diminish the level of atrocity on offer.

The Bogey Man [The Boogey Man]

A tangled confusion of children murdering adults, haunted mirrors, teenagers suffering random death by sharp implement, ghosts with telekinetic powers, priests exorcising evil and eerie houses with glowing windows. But no Bogey Man. Rubbish.

The Beast In Heat [La bestia en calore/SS Hell Camp/Horrifying Experiments Of The SS Last Days]

A barrage of bad taste lesbian nazis and action footage from other people's films topped with lashings of guffaw inducing dialogue.

Dead & Buried

An attempt to ressurect (ahem) the zombie movies of the 30s and 40s, almost succeeds but despite the best efforts of a fake Fred Ward and a fake Christopher Lloyd the whole thing dribbles to a climax that at best illicits a shrug.

Nightmares In A Damaged Brain [Nightmare/Blood Splash]

A combination of brutal death and graphic sex wreathed in a constant aspiration to not be the grubby piece of sleaze that it most enjoyably is.

Night Of The Demon [Night Of The Bigfoot]

 

Non-stop slaughter that would probably be more horrific if the majority of people weren't dying from shallow flesh wounds.