THE FOREST (1982)

 While most slasher films of the 1980's were happy enough to go by the numbers and just give us the standard maniac-in-the-woods-kills-stupid-teens formula over and over again this little flick by the great director Don Jones(SCHOOLGIRLS IN CHAINS and THE LOVE BUTCHER) went on crazy step further and decided to throw a stupid ghost story right in the middle of their perfectly fine killer on the loose tale.  You also get some cannibalism and a scene where a fellow inadvertently ends up eating his wife.  While this might not be the bloodiest, goriest or even all that scary horror flick out there, and it was obviously made on a pretty low budget, I do give it extra credit for at least trying something different and melding two genres together even if it doesn't always make much sense.  Like for one thing I'm not sure if the ghosts are supposed to be helping our campers survive or helping them get offed one by one since they seem to be playing both sides of the fence(at least up until the thrilling conclusion).  Check it out anyway if you dig slashers and want to see one that's slightly off the expected track.

THE BLOODY VAMPIRE (1962)

 I will say that this Mexican vampire movie has a lot of good creepy atmosphere but besides that there's mostly just a bunch of talking and it all moves at the pace of a turtle.  Right from the opening sequence we get a slow motion carriage driven by a skeleton which is a cool visual but not really all the interesting when it kicks off a gab-fest of a movie that seems to have a run-time that never ends.  There was a sequel to this for some reason (maybe the original Mexican version is somehow better than the crappy dubbed version I watched?) called INVASION OF THE VAMPIRES but I'm in no rush to catch that one.  Amazingly the U.S. dub is edited down and still runs a good 100 minutes and seems even longer.
 K. Gordon Murray who brought this to America filmed a crazy pre-credit sequence where he tried to hypnotize the audience with some swirly screen nonsense.

Our title character becomes one of the stupidest looking vampire bats(complete with big rabbit ears!) that I've ever seen in one of the few scenes where anything worthwhile happens:

BRUNO SAMMARTINO: STRONGMAN (1974)

By the time I started watching pro wrestling, as a little fellow, Bruno Sammartino was just an announcer who would occasionally get back in the ring when someone pissed him off enough but I knew from all the magazines that he was the former world champ and a big deal throughout most of the 70's. This documentary, which was an episode of a TV sports series called THE WINNERS, is a pretty cool look at the old days of wrasslin' before it was just a silly TV show and it at least pretended to be a real sporting event and a look at the guy who represented that mentality of staying true to the act no matter what. Besides being a neat look at old school WWWF it's also interesting that this was directed by George Romero and I've never noticed it listed anywhere in any of his biographies before. I guess everyone just lumps it in with all the stuff he shot for TV in the early part of his career. Also interviewed here is Bill Cardille who was the news reporter in Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Neat time capsule deal here.

 

TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL (2010)

 On the surface this seems like it would be a movie I would hate.  I mean it's an intentional horror-comedy and it's fairly new.  That alone is almost always a formula for a shitty time but amazingly I enjoyed this stupid tale of two hillbillies who get mistaken for stereotypical kill-crazy psychobillies by a bunch of dumb college kids.  Our two title idiots are sorta like if you took Abbott & Costello, made them hicks and dropped them in the middle of a backwoods slasher flick.  It's at least a unique spin on things and not another awful zombie flick   You get all the things that make up a decent slasher including     some gore with multiple impalement, a girl who has face weed-whacked off and a guy jumping into a wood-chipper among other tasty bits and some of these things are even achieved with practical FX which is nice in a world full of lazy asshole filmmakers.  There's some hot ladies who aren't unwatchably annoying like most modern actresses and this is worth viewing if you don't mind something dumb yet amusing.   

CONQUEROR WORM (1968)

 It's kinda weird that I've never seen this movie and yet MARK OF THE DEVIL is one of my favorite movies and I've seen it dozens of times.  Coming at the movie from my perspective I think it really works as the blueprint for that later Udo Kier witch-hunting flick and while it's tame in comparison and I can imagine at the time it was released this would have been a pretty controversial film for the masses.  There probably weren't a whole lot of things before this where we saw people burned alive while screaming.  You also get Vincent Price but it's a different Price than in anything I've seen him in before.  Not the usual stereo-typically flamboyant performance from him here it's all very somber and convincingly evil and that fits perfectly with the subject matter.  He's also helped out by a real bastard of a sidekick who just can't wait to get to torturing suspects.  There's also some slight nudity and some eye violence depending on which cut you're viewing.  I'm pretty sure the old VHS copy I watched of this had a few bits missing so look for a nice widescreen print with the original WITCHFINDER GENERAL title if you wanna see the full picture of what was responsible for a lot of those great witchy/satany epics from the 70's.  The original title of WITCHFINDER GENERAL is way cooler and the only reason AIP changed the name here in America was to try and lump this in with the Vincent Price/Roger Corman Poe flicks which this has nothing at all to do with.  The director Michael Reeves went on to OD after making this which sucks because he was a talented guy and got what is considered by many people the greatest performance ever out of Vincent Price.  Donald Pleasence was the original choice to star here which I think would have been interesting but way different.

THE CORPSE GRINDERS (1971)

 The films of Ted V. Mikels all look awesome on paper.  There's horror, women-in-prison, girl gangs, revenge stuff and all kinds of exploitation goodness in his filmography.  Unfortunately a good majority of the ones I've seen are a bit on the dull side.  This one though is probably my favorite of them all.  It's the tale of a cat food company who starts using human ingredients in their product.  They also luckily have a big meat-grinding machine in the back room that just so happens to fit people in it.  What luck!  They woulda got away with it too if it didn't start making all the neighborhood cats go crazy for citizens throats.  For a film with the title THE CORPSE GRINDERS there really isn't all that much blood but it's still great for it's overabundance of cheesiness.  There's a great grave-robber character who conveniently lives right in the graveyard with his wife who's quite a large woman who totes around and talks to a baby doll(this is never addressed or explained).  There's the mafia guy from BLACK BELT JONES going around whacking people, a mute one-legged lady who is talked to with the weirdest sign language ever used on film, a strange old Gilligan-looking fellow and all kinds of additional weirdos and silliness.  On the sexy side of things there's also our large-breasted leading lady and another gal who strips down to her panties and bra to relax with a nice cold beer and pose for the audience which I thought was very nice.
 Finally got a chance to see this on a big screen last night and now I feel my life is closer to being complete.
 According to some posters this was released at some point on what had to be an amazing triple bill with THE UNDERTAKER AND HIS PALS and THE EMBALMER.

 

BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS (1970)

 When I first saw this movie as part of a horror marathon a few years back I completely hated it. It's certainly the last thing you want to see smack dab in the middle of a bunch of bloody horror flicks. It just drains whatever energy you might have due to it's talky bits. Seeing it last night as the first part of a double feature with THE CORPSE GRINDERS with a much better crowd it was actually pretty entertaining. While I would never call it a good movie it offers up a little gore, a little nudity, an unexpected drag queen and a whole bunch of strange acting and dialogue(there's some great talk about how to keep women happy which is priceless). Directed by the legendary crap cinema master Andy Milligan this is far from his worst work (I think that might be SURGIKILL) and in the right frame of mind this can be an entertaining watch for lovers of bad movies.
  The story itself is just a variation on SWEENEY TODD and apparently this was re-released under that title after it's initial run on 42nd street.  I'm sure it's better than that Johnny Depp horseshit.

FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966)

 Clunky FX and all this is still a neat sci-fi flick mostly just cuz the idea is cool even if it doesn't really make much sense in reality and is full of Hollywood cliches. It's also one of those films you would probably appreciate more if you saw it as a kid. Also I can't imagine anyone under maybe the age of 35 would have the patience to sit through this after a lifetime of being conditioned by the mass media machine to need constant cuts and cartoony CGI before something is labelled as a "real" movie.
 Does anyone not already know what this is about? A team is shrunk down and sent into a politician's body to save him from a blood clot in the brain by shooting it with a laser beam. It's based on an Isaac Asimov book and has spawned many spoof comedies, crappy 80's sci-fi things and episodes of dumb TV shows. I'm kinda shocked this hasn't been remade badly yet but I'm sure it's only a matter of time. Raquel Welch is thrown in here for sex appeal and Donald Pleasence is the highlight for me playing his usual crazy-man character. Check it out if you're a sci-fi nerd of any sort.

NAKED PURSUIT (1968)

 This movie is basically a 70 minute rape scene interspersed here and there with flashbacks of riots and protests.  The story concerns a lady who we find out is at the beach to jump off some rocks and commit suicide.   She encounters an escaped perv and he accosts her until she somehow decides life is worth living and claims to have won something at the end.  It's not so much a rape movie like I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE though since this comes down slightly more on the artistic side of things and has less of an exploitation feel.  It's also Japanese so although it somehow manages to have a happy ending this probably didn't win too many feminism awards.  Then again the woman does seem pretty strong and triumphant at the end so maybe it would if it wasn't for the camera lingering on shots of a mostly naked young girl which take up a lot of the screen time.  Probably a good watch for fans of naked Asian chicks and gratuitous zoom lens shots.

 There's supposed to be an English dub of this that turns it into a way more goofy and straightforward 60's sexploitation flick thanks to Harry Novak but I've only seen the subtitled version.

THE NEW YORK RIPPER (1982)

 This is one of the best Lucio Fulci flicks in my opinion. It doesn't contain any of the supernatural elements that his most well known splatter movies do and I think that's one of the main reasons it appeals to me so much. It's all down and dirty 80's New York set grime where vagina's get sliced open, broken bottles are rammed into crotches and there's plenty of other various slashings and stabbings and it's all done by a Donald Duck-voiced psycho. What you get plotwise is basically a straight forward giallo story that throws a bunch of gore and a sleaze into the mix and I think that's a really good recipe. It feels like Fulci was watching something like Argento's DEEP RED and said hey I can top that in the filth and disgust department and he did. He might have also been watching MANIAC since this does blur the line between giallo and slasher movie with it's explicit bloody kill scenes. The most memorable sequence in here features a woman getting her nipple and eyeball split in half by a razor blade. There's also a totally scummy sequence where a woman gets sexually molested by a guys foot in a bar that's pretty goofy and it all helps support the argument that Fulci wasn't the biggest fan of females in general but just a delight for lowbrow gorebeasts.

 Fun for the whole family!:
 

OGROFF (1983)

 OGROFF (A.K.A. MAD MUTILATOR) has got to be one the oddest things I've ever sat through.  What starts out as a really cheap slasher movie (even cheaper than the VIOLENT SHIT series which is the closest thing I would compare it to) warps into a zombie flick about three quarters of the way through and then ends it all off with some unexpected vampire hi-jinks.  The FX are amazingly low-budget.  They include extremely unrealistic Styrofoam dummy heads being hacked off and smashed and intestines being pulled right out of shirts.  There's  almost no dialogue for 95 percent of the runtime (which is a good thing since the copy I have of this is in French) so it all feels like some bizarre silent gore/art flick made on another planet or maybe just the nightmare of a retarded Fangoria reader.            
 Our title character is a Leatherface wannabe who rides an old shitty bicycle (until he upgrades to a nifty motorcycle) and starts the film out with a bang by killing a little kid and chopping him up right in front of his mum.  Somewhere around the 50 minute mark Ogroff amazingly manages to get himself a girlfriend who wears very tight stripey pants.  Because really who wouldn't fall for a cannibalistic, psychopath who lives in a shed full of entrails in the woods and masturbates using his trusty battle-ax?  From there we find out Ogroff has some pet zombies that he keeps in the basement.  Then a zombie apocalypse happens and finally and unexpectedly (like just about everything else that happens in this) Howard Vernon shows up as a vampire priest.  How the hell they got Vernon to appear in this is anyone's guess!
 I think what I love most about this movie is the insane chaotic feel it has where anything can happen at anytime.  There's chainsaw-fu, battleaxe-fu, knife-fu.  Heads roll, legs and arms roll, tongues roll, pretty much everything rolls at some point.  A must watch for gore-hounds who don't mind a zero dollar budget and blatant in-your-face weirdness.

LOST CONTINENT (1951)

 OK so The Joker from the BATMAN TV show, the dad from LEAVE IT TO BEAVER, a Russian and a comedy relief dude are among a group of air force men and scientists who are searching for a rocket that crashed on some island somewhere and eventually end up encountering some stop-motion dinosaurs in a jungle on top of a mountain.  It feels like a good 60 percent of this movie is taken up by our searchers climbing rocks before they even encounter any giant reptiles and it's a long and boring journey.  Apparently this movie was originally tinted green when they get to the dino-jungle scenes but that wasn't the version I saw.
 While this isn't the worst thing from the 50's you could watch you're better off just going back and viewing the original KING KONG for a way better version of a similar story.

WOODCHIPPER MASSACRE (1988)

 While I generally love movies with the word massacre in the title this has got to be one of the worst.  A shot on video piece of crap (supposedly based on a true story which I'm sure happened nothing like it's depicted here) that appeals exclusively to retro VHS obsessed weirdos and people that think anything from the 80's was just wonderful this movie feels like a homemade version of a what I think is supposed to be a comedy with no gore despite the bloody VHS box.  For most of the video nothing happens except mindless chatter, the sound is awful, the music is grating, it looks like an insane families home movie and it's quite a chore to sit through something like this without questioning your sanity.  There's also an extra-annoying aunt character that you can't wait to die.  It's really a good look at what sucked about the 80's all rolled up into one movie.
 Amazingly the director and star of this, Jon McBride, has had a long career of making stuff like this including the excellently titled CANNIBAL CAMPOUT but I'm pretty sure these aren't for me.