“Snuff videos showing scenes of murder, mutilation and cannibalism were on sale alongside Disney films at a children’s comic fair… Trading Standards officers believe the video shows genuine footage of chanting, half-naked Amazon Indians butchering a white man depicted as a jungle explorer.”

THE DAILY MAIL, April 1992

“Many serial killers found an outlet for their vivid sexual fantasies in pornography. Ed Kemper scoured detective magazines for pictures of corpses and frequented ‘snuff movies’ in which intercourse is a prelude to murder.”

Newsweek, quoted in THE AGE OF SEX CRIME, Jane Caputi 1987

“There’s a lot of gay people there, gay men, so they have young boys. You get a lot of rent boys there, because they’re offered a load of money, and then they become snuff movies.”

‘Janet’, quoted in BLASPHEMOUS RUMOURS, Andrew Boyd 1991

It’s the darker side of the film business – the claims that someone, somewhere, is producing films which feature genuine murder and torture. Films which are then sold or screened for vast sums of money to wealthy decadents, who are so bored with life that they can only get their kicks from watching the final taboos being shattered… or videos which are circulated amongst underground networks of child molesters and rapists, ensuring that the violation of the victim continues long after their death. The term for these movies is at once shocking in its cynicism, and unforgettable in the horror of its implications: Snuff.

Nobody is entirely sure when the stories began. Some claim that rumours were circulating as far back as the Forties, but the modern fixation with the idea of the ‘snuff movie’ can be traced to that turbulent period as the Sixties crossed over into the Seventies, and long-held ideas of morality began to crumble. In 1961, a film-maker still risked prosecution for showing naked girls on film; a decade on, and cinemas across America were openly showing hardcore pornography. Nothing seemed taboo any more.

To moral campaigners, the idea of the snuff movie seemed both inevitable and useful. Inevitable, because after all, where else was there for the satiated pornographer and his audience to go? And useful, because it provided a potent weapon to use against the libertarians. Even the most liberal minded individual would, after all, consider freedom to murder a liberty too far, and might even be forced to rethink their deeply held beliefs about sexual freedom in the face of such material. And so began a mythology that has, if anything, grown in potency over the years, to the extent that even now, most people unquestioningly accept the existence of snuff movies as proven fact.

Which is odd. Because despite the hysteria, a single scrap of evidence confirming snuff movies has yet to be found.

What we do have are outright lies, assorted apocryphal tales, staggering cases of mistaken identity and several cases of genuine cinematic death which may seem to fit the bill at first, but don’t actually match the precise snuff movie definition.

The first recognised tales of snuff movie production emerged in Ed Sanders’ exhaustive book on Charles Manson, The Family. Manson was known to be fond of filming Family activity, including sex orgies which he supposedly sold. He is also known to have stolen a van full of NBC TV equipment. In The Family, Sanders interviews an anonymous Family associate who claims to have witnessed the filming of what he describes as “a snuff movie” in which a naked girl is decapitated during a pseudo-occult ritual. Although the video equipment was recovered when police raided the Spahn Ranch, no snuff footage has emerged (other Family films have been seen, but consist of nothing more sensational than skinny-dipping). It was claimed that remaining Family members squirreled the footage away; if true, they hid it well. More than a quarter of a decade on, it still remains a secret waiting to be revealed. Sanders also hints at rumours that various members of Hollywood’s smart set were dabbling in animal porn, torture and snuff movies. Again, such footage, if it exists, has never emerged. Years later, the Manson connection re-emerged when writer Maury Terry tied the Family and snuff production into his exhaustive investigation of satanic connections to the Son of Sam murders in New York. Yet again, no videotapes were ever found to back up these claims.

After years of similar unfounded rumours, the snuff movie was dragged screaming into the public consciousness in the mid-Seventies with the release of Snuff. Hyped as being shot “in South America…where life is CHEAP!”. The film implied – no, almost boasted – that it featured a genuine murder, carried out for the camera. Wherever it played, the film was attacked by feminists, anti-porn campaigners and journalists, who had not long before reported on the case of a so-called snuff movie being intercepted by U.S. Customs en route from – where else? – South America.

The protests were not, however, as spontaneous as they might have seemed. In fact, they were as phoney as the film itself. Grindhouse distributor Allan Shackleton was the warped genius behind the whole sorry scam. It was Shackleton who arranged the pickets and wrote the letters of outrage, Shackleton who planted the story of the Customs seizure (no such interception had in fact taken place), gambling that the negative publicity would ensure major box office returns before the film was run out of town. And it was Shackleton who created Snuff out of an unreleased movie called Slaughter.

Slaughter had been shot in 1971 by husband and wife exploitation movie veterans Michael and Roberta Findlay. Attempting to cash in on the Manson Family headlines, it told of the exploits of a hippy cult leader who leads his followers to murder. It was indeed shot in South America (Argentina, to be exact), where film crews, if not life, were certainly cheap. Filmed without sync sound, the resulting movie was a sorry mess, and sat unreleased until 1975, when Shackleton – a hardened showman distributor with an eye for a good scam – picked it up and decided to revamp it into something that could make money. Noting its incoherence, he figured that the only way audiences would sit through the film would be if they were given a reason to accept – even expect – the amateur style. As a snuff movie, Slaughter’s lack of technical skill became a positive boon.

The first thing Shackleton did was to remove the end of the film, presumably thinking that no-one would have bothered following the plot anyway. He also chopped off the opening and closing credits, giving the film a suitably anonymous appearance. He then hired Simon Nuchtern to shoot a new ending in a studio owned by hardcore adult movie director Carter Stevens, in which the cameras pull back from the action to show the studio set. The “actress” starts to get it on with the “director”, but is then assaulted by him. He reaches for a knife, chops off one of her fingers, followed by the whole hand, then disembowels her. The fact that this footage is considerably better shot than the rest of the film, that the actress bears no resemblance to the woman seen in the earlier footage, and that the special effects are somewhat rubbery didn’t matter. Shackleton knew that, for varying reasons, people would want to believe it was real. And they did. Many still do, despite the truth about Snuff being widely reported. Some believe out of ignorance; others out of cynicism. Anti-Pornography groups are certainly aware of the reality behind Snuff, but still hold it up as proof that women are being routinely murdered for the camera. It’s in their interests for people to believe that the porn industry routinely murders people for profit.

In fact, Snuff was roundly condemned as a tasteless stunt by America’s pornographers. Producer David F. Friedman, who headed the Adult Film Association of America, begged Shackleton not to release the film. Sex film veteran Friedman, in David Hebditch and Nick Anning’s book Porn Gold, traced the snuff hysteria to early Seventies group called the Campaign for Decency in Literature, headed by Charles Keating, who claimed on TV to have evidence that X-rated film-makers were murdering their stars on film. The producer claims that he contacted the CDL and asked them to hand their evidence to the authorities, and, when nothing happened, contacted the FBI himself, who dismissed the claims.

Friedman also offered a $25,000 reward to anyone supplying evidence of snuff movies. It remains uncollected.

Snuff made Shackleton his expected bundle, and faded into history. But it provided new ammunition for pro-censorship groups and moral campaigners. Now, everyone knew that snuff wasn’t just something old men snorted instead of cocaine.

Years later in Britain, where the film had – naturally – never been seen, it emerged on video with spectacularly bad timing. At the beginning of 1982, the first rumblings of what would become the Video Nasty tidal-wave of hysteria were appearing in the press. As the storm over the availability of uncensored video grew, Astra Video – already prime targets for prosecution after releasing the grossly misunderstood I Spit on Your Grave and David Friedman’s early Sixties splatter movie Blood Feast – added Snuff to their roster of titles, featuring the rather ill-conceived (if somewhat accurate) cover blurb “the original legendary atrocity shot and banned in New York… the actors and actresses who dedicated their lives to making this film were never seen or heard from again.” After an outraged Sunday Times article, Astra rapidly withdrew the film from sale, but not before a reasonable quantity had made it to the shops. Tabloid reporters invariably took the film at face value, and the circulation of a “real snuff movie” helped fuel calls for controls over violent videos.

Ironically, slipping out unnoticed on video in Britain a couple of years earlier was a West German rip-off , entitled Confessions of a Blue Movie Star… although the original English language title, The Evolution of Snuff, was far less equivocal. This film was an uneasy mixture of soft porn, documentary and curious moral campaigning – it’s notable as one of the few anti-porn sex films ever made. Supposedly following the career of a German sex starlet who later took her own life, the film suggests that snuff movies are an inevitable symptom of liberal attitudes towards sex. Opening with interviews with various people (including Roman Polanski) who are convinced of the existence of snuff movies, the film reveals its true cynicism and lack of credibility at the end, when it features an interview with a masked “Snuff Movie maker” and then presents an extract from his film. This footage is shocking – grainy, shaky images of a woman seemingly being disembowelled. It looks far more authentic that the footage in Snuff. But it’s also far more recognisable. In fact, it has been lifted from Wes Craven’s brutal 1972 production The Last House on the Left. And although Craven’s movie was condemned by many critics for excessive violence, nobody would suggest that the killings were real…

Although snuff movies would become a standard plot device for film-makers in the Seventies, providing the central or incidental themes in a number of films. Hardcore saw George C. Scott wallowing in the seedy world of pornography, trying to locate his estranged daughter, who he has seen in a porno flick and who, of course, ends up in a snuff movie. Coming from the religiously tortured mind of Paul Schrader, it was a decent film that sadly perpetuated the myth that the porn industry routinely kills its stars.

Similarly, Joe D’Amato’s outrageous Emanuelle in America sees the titular character, played as always by Laura Gemser, investigating corruption and white slavery, at one point watching a ‘snuff movie’ as part of her investigations. The snuff footage in this film is remarkably brutal and realistic – quite what audiences expecting a softcore romp made of it is anyone’s guess.

Last House on Dead End Street is a more impressively disturbing film about a porn producer who moves into snuff movie production. A weird hybrid of sleaze and art, the film for years was the height of cinematic obscurity, only available as fuzzy bootlegs and with no information available about director Viktor Janos. But in 2001, porn director Roger Watkins was revealed as both the director and the star, and the film – which began life as a three hour movie called The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell in 1972 before winding up in the current, thankfully shorter, version in 1977 – is now readily available on DVD. It’s quite unlike anything else you’ll ever see.

1980’s Effects is considerably less interesting. Shot in Pittsburgh by Dusty Nelson and featuring several George Romero collaborators (Tom Savini, Joe Pilato, John Harrison), this is the tale of a horror film maker who decided real death will be cheaper than special effects. It’s a nice idea, but the film is unfortunately very dull and clumsily produced.

Even worse is Australian film Final Cut, made the same year, in which a pair of journalists gain access to a reclusive media mogul who might be producing snuff movies for his own pleasure. Very little happens and the best thing about the film is the video cover.

Snuff movies – or, rather, snuff TV – also featured in David Cronenberg’s hallucinatory Videodrome, in which the director played with a ‘what if’ idea – in this case, ‘what if the fears of the censors were true/’ in a tale of video-induced hallucinations via a signal hidden inside brutal torture and murder videos being beamed from (where else?) South America.

While these films all explored the idea of the snuff movie, it wasn’t until the Eighties that the phrase and the hysteria would fully explode into mainstream consciousness. As the Seventies wave of liberalism gave way to the Eighties Thatcherite New Morality and hard-line feminism, it somehow became easier to accept that pornographers – evil, corrupt exploiters of women, every one of them – would cheerfully kill for the cameras. And by the 1990s, British newspaper hacks, bored with the term ‘video nasty’ were starting to use ‘snuff’ as a description for just about any violent movie, culminating in one tabloid notoriously referring to Japanese amine film Akira as ‘Manga snuff’. Now, apparently, even cartoon characters were being murdered for real, despite never having actually existed in the first place!

Feminist writers and moral campaigners both routinely told tales of snuff movies which were dressed up as proven fact, but which were always vague enough to avoid scrutiny. No names, no evidence. Films that the authorities had been unable to see were apparently easily accessed by anti-porn fanatics. And invariably, the public followed suit. Everyone these days, it seems, knows someone who’s mate has seen a snuff movie.

In many cases, these snuff movies turn out to be more indicative of the gullibility of the viewer – or, perhaps, their desire to believe. The Amazon snuff movie reported (in a cynically racist manner) by The Daily Mail, and quoted at the top of this article, turned out to be Ruggero Deodato’s 1979 production Cannibal Holocaust, a film which has been mistaken for the Real Thing in Britain more than once. At least that film, with it’s powerfully authentic pseudo-documentary style, looks the part; more ludicrous was the insistence by zealous staff from Liverpool Trading Standards and various media (including Channel Four News) that Joe D’Amato’s Anthropophagous (a generally tedious horror movie about a cannibal killer lurking on a Greek island), seized during video nasty raids in 1993 was a snuff movie. Similarly, a scurrilous Channel 4 documentary series ran an episode on ‘satanic abuse’, claiming to show footage of killings in occult rituals – in reality, it was performance art footage by Genesis P. Orridge’s Temple of Psychik Youth.

Flower of Flesh and Blood, an episode from the Japanese  film series Guinea Pig, has also convinced many people – including actor Charlie Sheen, who reported it to the authorities after watching aghast. In Britain, a National Film Theatre employee was taken to court after customs seized a tape of the film, and only narrowly escaped a jail sentence when experts declared the film to be a clever simulation. And indeed it is. Catering to the Japanese audience’s blood lust, the film is a carefully constructed fake snuff movie – devoid of any narrative structure, it simply shows a woman being killed and hacked apart by a man dressed as a Samurai. However, the film still features standard cinematic devices and full credits, which one would hardly expect to find on evidence of crime, and the DVD edition also comes with ‘behind the scenes’ footage exposing the whole artifice.

In more recent years, the scuzzier end of US shot-on-video sleaze has seen similar ‘recreation’ movies. The likes of Snuff Kill and Snuff Perversions are virtually plotless collections of faked snuff movies, designed to look as real as possible – deliberately crude, basic and often minimalist, these films exist only to appeal to the warped tastes of ghouls who really want to see the real thing but who will, in its absence, settle for these reconstructions instead. There’s certainly no entertainment value to be had from such movies, but one can easily imagine them being taken for the real thing by newspaper hacks, politicians and censorial groups.

Meanwhile, the improbably titled Very Very Sexy Snuff Movie is a low budget French addition to the continuing slew of ‘snuff’ titles. This anthology offering includes “a tale of three young East European women who are kidnapped by a sick producer of snuff movies and held prisoners on the movie set”. Its torpid tagline is: ‘Sexier dead than alive’. And, Sonrie – Snuff Inc from Argentina (‘where life is cheap” perhaps? Certainly where FILMS are cheap, given the $600 budget of this movie) is an alleged ‘snuff comedy’, though you might struggle to see where the humour is.

Of course, a long-standing tradition of the snuff movie mythology was that such films were made in South America, where “Life Is Cheap!”. Unsubstantiated stories of prostitutes and children being smuggled over the border into the US, where they would be raped and murdered by organised rings of snuff film-makers, had circulated throughout the Seventies. By the Eighties, however, the mythology had developed to the extent where these films were happening anywhere and everywhere and were. One of the most insistent claims made regarding snuff movies relates to paedophile rings and satanic cults.

In both instances, the evidence remains non-existent, but has been so widely distorted and exaggerated that most people genuinely believe it. The most recurrent individual tale concerns footage of the murder of Jason Swift and several other children at the hands of a group of paedophiles in the early Eighties. At the start of the Nineties, newspapers reported that the deaths of several children had been videotaped, although there was no evidence to support this. The reports would subsequently resurface with remarkable frequency; the raids which netted Anthropophagous were reported as possibly having found such footage. Not true. And the Powers That Be conveniently float the rumour whenever calls for stricter censorship are made. So it’s worth re-stating for the record: there is no evidence whatsoever that the killings were filmed for any reason, let alone for commercial purposes. No tapes found. No cameras found. No statements from the convicted killers. Nothing.

Various cases in which murderers have filmed their activities have been held up as proof of snuff movie production. In 1985, Californian police found videotapes of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng torturing and murdering several women. Many people took these as final confirmation of the existence of snuff movies, but they were wrong. These tapes, shot for the killer’s own personal gratification (much as the Moors Murderers audio-taped and photographed their victims) don’t fit the definition of films being produced for commercial reasons; of people dying on camera for the profit of shadowy underworld figures; of movies which sell to rich, jaded degenerates for thousands of dollars a time. And despite rumours, there is no evidence to suggest that the tapes had ever been seen by anyone other than the two killers.

And tasteless documentary films such as Executions, Faces of Death, True Gore, Death – The Ultimate Horror, Death Scenes, Snuff – A Documentary About Killing and others don’t qualify either, featuring as they do news footage (or, in the case of the Faces of Death series, rather unconvincing reconstructions) of accidents and crime scenes. Salacious they may be; offensive, probably; but hardly snuff movies. The same is true of war atrocity videos (such as the Bosnian propaganda tape that was being sold on the streets of London at the height of the Balkan war), or various medical studies, ranging from surgical operations to post-mortem footage, that have entered into general underground circulation.

Arguably, the closest we’ve come to real snuff movies are the shocking murder videos posted to the internet – be they jihadist executions, murderous drug gangs in Mexico – where life really DOES seem cheap – slaughtering those who have crossed them or Russian murderers filming their killings and then posting them online, these are very, very real. But snuff movies in the accepted sense? They are not being shot to order for money, so no. And tellingly, no-one seems to be calling these clips ‘snuff movies’. Perhaps it’s too trivial a term to be used for such obviously real atrocities.

Despite the overwhelming lack of evidence to support it though, the Snuff myth will never die. There are too many people with a vested interest in keeping it alive. Feminists see snuff as proof of the dehumanising effect of pornography – another level of the abuse of women. Moral campaigners cite snuff as proof that we need stronger censorship. Fundamentalist Christians use snuff as a way of backing their claims of widespread satanic abuse, which could only be stopped by outlawing Satanism. Yet all these groups seem to miss the point. Because even if snuff movies do exist, they exist beyond the law of every nation in the world, and no legal changes will alter that fact. Murder is already a criminal offence.

In almost thirty years of hysteria, there has yet to be a single ‘commercially’ produced snuff movie found anywhere on the planet. And yet TV programmes like The Knock and CSI still feature storylines about the cracking of a snuff movie ring by customs, or the police, as if such events are common occurrences.

Mainstream thriller 8mm perpetuated the myth further (the very title of Joel Schumaker’s film shows the lack of intelligence at work – would actual snuff movie makers shoot on film, given the expense, difficulty and risks involved, when video cameras are widely available?) and has been at the forefront of a new generation of movies playing with the myth.

Preceding it was Mute Witness, made in 1994 and set in Russia, where a make-up artist (Marina Zudina) who can’t speak finds herself seeing what appears to be a porno shoot taking place after hours in the film studio where she works, only for the shoot to turn nasty as the lead actress is murdered on screen. The authorities don’t believe her, but the snuff film crew (led by Alec Guinness, in scenes shot a decade before the rest of the film!) decide she must be silenced anyway…

Possibly the interesting movie treatment of the subject is Tesis, made in 1996 by Alejandro Amenábar, a thriller that uses snuff movies as a way of examining our fascination with violence and murder, with Ana Torrent as a film student who finds a videotape featuring a snuff movie and decides to investigate its origins. It’s a solid thriller that is smarter than most.

The ever opportunist Bruno Mattei (as ‘Pierre Le Blanc’) climbed on what little bandwagon 8mm spawned with 2003’s Snuff Trap, though the plot – a mother searches for her daughter who might have been involved in porno snuff movie production – is closer to Hardcore. As with most of Mattei’s later, shot-on-video films, this is barely watchable.

Bernard Rose, director of Candyman, made Snuff Movie in 2005, where a horror film director exorcises the demons of his wife’s murder at the hands of a hippy cult in the 1960s (a neat tie-in to Manson) by shooting snuff movies, killing off auditioning actors. Grubbier than you might expect from the director, but fairly mainstream in its approach, Snuff Movie is a decent film but hardly innovative.

Still, it’s better than the likes of The Great American Snuff Film or The Cohasset Snuff Film, all of which are throwaway SOV splatter movies that are frankly best avoided. None of these films offer any new insight and instead attempt to trade on the notoriety of the ‘S’ word.

The Snuff mythology has crept into more mainstream movies recently too. 2007’s Vacancy saw Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson as a bickering couple who find themselves staying at a run down motel, only to find that the video tapes left on top of the TV are actually snuff movies. Worse still, they are snuff movies filmed in the very room that they are staying in! This begins a better-than-expected cat and mouse thriller, with the couple trying to escape from the snuff movie makers who run the motel and lure hapless guests to their on screen death. Vacancy 2: The First Cut follows the origin of the snuff movie ring and is less effective.

The snuff movie myth also informs films like V/H/S and its sequels, which blur the line between found footage – which of course tries to pass itself off as an authentic document – and snuff movie mythology. Several other films have also touched on the subject, including The Brave, Urban Legends: Final Cut and Sinister, while the idea of internet snuff via live feeds – often tied to ideas of reality TV – have appeared in Live Feed, My Little Eye, ICU and Halloween: Resurrection amongst others.

But let’s remember that these films, good or bad, are simply exploiting a public fear for profit. Like alien autopsy videos, they give a salivating public what it wants. The truth wouldn’t sell tickets at the box office or online rentals. And in the end, the truth doesn’t matter. Snuff movies will continue to make headlines because they make great headlines, and people will continue to believe in their existence, because people need to believe. It’s a sick idea that’s simply seems too good not to be true.

David Flint, Horrorpedia

‘She lured them with her beauty and destroyed them with her sex’

Scream of the Butterfly is a 1965 American low budget exploitation film directed by Argentinian Eber Lobato from a screenplay by Alan J. Smith (who also appears as Christian) and Howard Veidt (who co-directed without credit). Trash auteur Ray Dennis Steckler (The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies; The Horny Vampire; Blood Shack) was the cinematographer.

The film stars Nélida Lobato (the director’s wife), William Turner, Nick Novarro, Richard Beebe, Robert Miller (The 2-Headed Transplant; Shock Waves), John Richards, Leona Gage (Tales of Terror), John Fife and Ron Haydock (a Steckler regular).

Rock band The Emcees provide a sax-infused instrumental and the title of the film apparently inspired Jim Morrison to add the phrase to the lyrics of The Doors song, “When the Music’s Over“.

In the US, the film was distributed theatrically by exploitation ‘n’ sexploitation outfit Emerson Film Enterprises, whose horror roster included the likes of Monstrosity (1963), The Devil’s Mistress; Manos: The Hands of Fate (both 1966) and Psyched by the 4D Witch. It was later rescued from obscurity by a Something Weird Video release on VHS (in 1994) and DVD (in 2003).

Plot teaser:

Beautiful Marla (Nélida Lobato) marries a rich bland businessman, Paul (William Turner) or his money, then embarks on an affair and plans to use her boyfriend David (Nick Navarro) to help murder her husband. But David has a special secret lover of his own…

Buy Day of the Nightmare + Scream of the Butterfly from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Reviews:

“This is a sordid gem of sex-ploiter noir that is hampered primarily by the dreadful acting of Turner and Novarro and an ill-fitting pseudo-Freudian conclusion (which is the part written by Veidt). Still, even the conclusion continues the delightfully mean-spirited, drenched in cynicism banter.” Alfred Eaker, 366 Weird Movies

” …it’s no classic and those with a short attention span need not apply, but there is something special about this little flick. The district attorney scenes interjected in-between the soap operatics get a little old, what with all the yelling and side comments from the three men involved. But the low-budget cinematography by cult favorite Ray Dennis Steckler is quite accomplished, making good use of light and shadow.” Casey Scott, DVD Drive-in

“Despite some typically atrociously acting, this has a more interesting structure than the usual sexploiter, as it cuts back and forth between the present-day officials and their Rashomon-like recollections. Plus, there’s a terrific surprise ending, which spurs Marla’s demise — but giving it away would ruin the fun. This might be a tad tame for more deviant viewers, but it’s nose-deep in the type of tough ‘n’ tawdry delights that made the grindhouse era so unforgettable.” Steve Puchalski, Shock Cinema

“Quickly paced — even if a bit herky-jerky due to the fact the action is split between the “present-day” scenes of attorneys having a conference about a murder case, and the sexy flashback action of Marla frolicking about in very little clothing — the film is made even more entertaining by some consistently creative camerawork and direction that drive the story almost by themselves. Shades of Grey

“I don’t think Eber and Nélida Lobato ever made another movie but they should be remembered for this one.” Michael J. Weldon, The Psychotronic Video Guide

Buy The Psychotronic Video Guide from Amazon.co.uk

Filming locations:

Lake Mead and Las Vegas, Nevada

IMDb

Witchfinder is a 2013 American-made short film directed by Colin Clarke and starring Dave Juehring and Valerie Meachum. It is part of the Daredevil Films stable which is based in Rockford, Illinois. It won the Best Narrative Film Award at the 2013 Mosaic World Film Festival.

“After putting a witch to death, a righteous witch hunter finds himself haunted by a spectral curse in this award-winning short horror film from director Colin Clarke (Raven’s Hollow, Frankenstein vs the Wolfman). In the spine-tingling tradition of Hammer Films, Mario Bava, and the classic Witchfinder General, with a scary ending guaranteed to creep you out enough to sleep with the lights on!”

A noteworthy lesson in ‘less-is-more’, Witchfinder, over the course of 18 minutes, achieves more through what it doesn’t show and a surprising stillness to the cinematography and performance than many offensively-budgeted films do over a tortuous 90 or more minutes. There’s little to shake the rafters in terms of plot innovation but the balance of driving forward the plot whilst maintaining a measured and restrained drama to proceedings is impressive. A simple, broken local approaches his local neighbourhood witch, asking for the object of his affections to turn her attentions from her lover to him. Witch obliges through some messy smearing and some incantation of Devil names. Witchfinder interrupts, gets busy with a hammer and an iron mask – bad things happen. What more do you need?

Shot in rural Illinois in a distant time of Goodwives and succubi, on a very basic level this is competent enough not to have digital watches and flashy cars on show but far more than this, there’s little to suggest this was made with limited resources. One would hope that even with money to burn the film-makers would keep things this simple. The acting is not stellar but no-one disgraces themselves and there are no attempts at make-me-a-superstar histrionics. There’s no time to give us heady character development or complex back-stories, so we’re left with a good old-fashioned yarn, one without showbiz and larks but heavy on atmosphere and a strange sadness. It must be said that short films do little for me as a rule, filling a gap in the market I don’t recognise as necessarily being there but Witchfinder shows promise for bigger and better things. It also nails my attention-span at being pretty much dead on 18 minutes.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

http://vimeo.com/70819282

http://daredevilfilms.net/

Watchers III (also Watchers 3 on publicity) is the 1994 second sequel to the horror film Watchers directed by Jeremy Stanford (Stepmonster) from a screenplay by Michael Palmer (Carnosaur 2), loosely based on the novel Watchers by Dean R. Koontz . It stars Wings Hauser (The Carpenter; Bedroom Eyes II; Tales from the Hood), Gregory Scott Cummins, Daryl Keith Roach, John Linton, Lolita Ronalds, Ider Cifuentes Martin, Frank Novak. Executive produced by Roger Corman, the exteriors were shot on location in Peru.

The film was followed by a further entry in this minor franchise in 1998, Watchers: Reborn.

Plot teaser:

A top secret experiment spawns two highly intelligent life-forms: Einstein, a golden retriever with an IQ of 175; and the Outsider, a deformed monstrosity that exists to kill and to avenge its creators. When the Outsider escapes into the jungles of South America, the government sends in Ferguson (Wings Hauser) and some ex-military convicts to catch the beast. But what starts out as a high-speed chase ends in carnage. Only Einstein knows the Outsider’s motives, and only the canine can outsmart the creature…

Reviews:

A low-rent Predator rip-off that also manages to ride on the tail of the ridiculous Watchers franchise — so we have more inane scenes of the supposed ultra-intelligent golden retriever dog barking warnings about ‘The Outsider’ or how to diffuse a bomb — but, strangely, the isolation of the authentic jungle settings, the timely gore moments, and Wings Hauser’s overly ‘sincere’ leadership role, make this a more agreeable time-waster than its predecessors. Plus, the hilariously daft monster harks back to Corman’s earliest 50s cheapo efforts.

Adrian J Smith, Horrorpedia

“Wings tries his best in this, and it’s plenty entertaining. He continues to reaffirm his status as a DTVC Hall of Famer through his efforts in crap like this. Between his scenes with the dog, to his dialog in funny-that’s-supposed-to-be-cool military speak (you know, “Checkmate this is Goose Down, do you read me?”), he delivers. I totally give him an A for effort. The problem is, you can get the same satisfaction out of seeing him guest star on an episode of Walker: Texas Ranger or something, and you’re in and out the door in half the time.” Direct to Video Connoisseur

“Enhanced by rugged jungle locations, and well directed by Jeremy Stanford, this is better-than-usual work for Corman. Michael Palmer’s script … is totally derivative of other actioners, but makes for a gpgood advebture that is marred only by a beast-creature that sometimes looks more ludicrous than hideous.” John Stanley, Creature Features

Choice dialogue:

“Are you an idiot? Or are you just fuckin’ stupid?”

“They took his head. They took his goddam head!”

Wikipedia | IMDb

Women’s Camp 119 – Italian title K.Z.9 Lager di Sterminio – is a 1977 Italian exploitation film directed by Bruno Mattei. It was released in Italy two months after Mattei’s first Nazi-themed film SS Girls (aka Private House of the SS), with which it shares numerous cast members, and stars Ivano Staccioli, Lorraine de Salle, Nello Riviè and Gabriele Carrara.

In the last months of World War 2, at the Rosenhausen Experimental Camp in Germany, Dr. Franz Wieker (Ivano Staccioli) conducts ghastly medical experiments on unfortunate women imported from Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. When not being operated upon, the victims must cope with the attentions of sadistic Oberleutnant Otto Ohlendorf (Gabriele Carrara) and Chief ‘Kapo’ Martha (Gota Gobert), a predatory lesbian. Meanwhile Wieker’s unwilling assistant Dr. David Meisel (Nello Riviè), and Maria Black (Lorraine de Salle), a Jewish medical student forced to participate in the running of the experiments, try to maintain their humanity and to seek a chance to escape…

Women’s Camp 119 contains all the staple ingredients of the Nazisploitation cycle; maniacal ‘Dick Dastardly’ Nazi officers, sadistic lesbian warders, a couple of unwilling doctors plagued with guilt at their involvement, along with sundry beatings, mutilation and torture. In other words, it’s disgusting, exploitative trash wallowing in the worst of human history. What could one possibly say in its favour? Well, I imagine the reason most horror fans watch the Italian ‘Nazisploitation’ films is to gawp at their outrageous violence and gasp in disbelief at their sheer bad taste. That certainly covers it for me. Seen from such a vantage point, Women’s Camp 119 undoubtedly delivers the goods. The gruesome scenes are really quite disgusting, and Mattei creates some truly pathological images of brutality. An early scene depicting a room full of women being killed with Zyklon-B nerve gas achieves a revolting intensity by showing the dead bodies streaked with excrement (victims of Zyklon-B would defecate uncontrollably as they died). Elsewhere, we witness gory uterus transplants, hideously smashed limbs left to heal without treatment, and plentiful flagellation, interspersed with extensive nudity. An atmosphere of madness and degeneracy takes hold here and there, something which Mattei may genuinely have striven for rather than being merely accidental, although it doesn’t prevent other scenes from descending into absurdity. The monstrous Lieutenant Ohlendorff (Carrara, over-the-top star of Mattei’s SS Girls) spits irony-free howlers like “Lick my boots forever, dog!” or “You’ll wipe the asses of every one of us until you turn purple with fatigue!” One ridiculous moment has Riviè and de Salle flicking through repellent colour photographs of skin diseases in a medical textbook while exchanging over-acted ‘significant’ glances. Then there’s the fate of two homosexual prisoners, seen knitting in their cell, who are forced to undergo ‘treatment’ for their ‘condition’, which involves three women diving onto the horrified queens’ beds where they squirm around in a miserable attempt at coitus.

So there’s plenty to laugh at, if you’re in that sort of a mood. If you’re not, then Women’s Camp 119 is just a reprehensible piece of trash from beginning to end, nowhere more so than when Commander Wieker watches real newsreel footage of the death camps, images we’re all familiar with from such programmes as The World at War. It may be splitting hairs when dealing with such a morally bankrupt sub-genre, but for my money this inclusion is altogether the sickest tactic employed in the so-called Nazi cycle (and considering that the footage in question was filmed by Allied forces, it’s not only morally objectionable but historically ludicrous as well.) One is tempted to drive a judgemental tank over Mattei and classify him as the lowest sort of scumbag, though it’s better to try and understand what he was thinking. Perhaps he got carried away trying to outdo Don Edmonds (Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS), Sergio Garrone (SS Experiment Camp) and Mario Caiano (Nazi Love Camp 27)? Maybe he thought he was just joining in with the spirit of provocation, trying to play the game of nihilism for fun and profit harder and better than the others? Or maybe, with a distributor breathing down his neck demanding more nastiness for the Japanese market, he was ‘just obeying orders’?

The offensiveness of Women’s Camp 119 is compounded rather than alleviated by its gestures toward moral seriousness. Despite decent Dr. Meisel and cool-headed med-student Maria acting as crude pontificatory avatars for decency and kindness, one never believes the film’s pose of integrity. The character of Kurt, a deranged slobbering servant of the Nazis whom they allow to molest female prisoners, is presented in the film as the epitome of sick deranged lust. However, for his scenes to be valid Kurt should be less comedic, and the camera much less eager to share his pleasure; instead Mattei presses the lens against the quivering breasts of Kurt’s victims with the same gluttonous glee as the character we’re invited to despise, suggesting perhaps a degree of unconscious self-hatred on the director’s part. Random inconsistencies abound, such as why a cure for sterility should matter to a regime obsessed with genetic purity (surely the genes of the sterile are unworthy of propagation?) and as the final credits roll, a gallery of real-life Nazis still at large after the war founders on careless research: Karl Silberbauer, described onscreen as “the torturer of Anna Frank [sic]” was in fact merely the arresting officer who took Anne Frank into custody. He was not the one who first betrayed her whereabouts to the police, nor was he her ‘torturer’. The brief information presented onscreen about Franz Murer, Josef Mengele and Walter Rauff is broadly accurate, although it erroneously states that Rauff went to live in America in 1949, when in fact he lived briefly in Ecuador before settling in Chile in 1958.

The current absence of a decent digital transfer makes it hard to gauge the cinematography, by Mattei’s frequent collaborator Luigi Ciccarese. Musically, the film benefits from a ponderously dark and doomy score by Alessandro Alessandroni (strangely one of the more memorable cues here pops up uncredited in the Franco De Masi score for The New York Ripper five years later). From a dramaturgical standpoint the film lacks vitality; there is no sense of accumulation to the horrors, and no formal structure to the material. Everything just plods along until the Allied bombings bring the story to a close; within the narrative there is no exploration of tensions between the captors, and only the most cursory of relationships between the prisoners. Yes, there is the usual escape and capture element, which occupies the last reel or two, but as per usual with these films there’s little energy invested in making us care.

It may seem a tad hypocritical of me to attack a film like this for immorality while at the same time enjoying its tastelessness, but it’s difficult to avoid when the film itself is so inherently confused and contradictory. If a director styles his work as a cartoon ‘for mature audiences only’, a live action version of the Italian fumetti (adult comics which often featured Nazi sex-and-horror tales), it’s easy to go with the flow and let the shocking imagery tickle your jaded sensibilities. I would put something like The Beast in Heat in this category. But if there’s an attempt to ‘get serious’, it seems to me right that we should take a more critical position. Women’s Camp 119, with its use of real-life Auschwitz imagery*, and its sententious coda about the Nazis who got away, falls into the latter category, making it a difficult film to defend without falling into contradiction.

Note: Sergio Garrone pulled the same stunt by using photographs from the death camps in the credits sequence of SS Camp 5, Women’s Hell (1976), his companion-piece to the more notorious SS Experiment Camp (1976).

Stephen Thrower, Horrorpedia

IMDb

Poseidon Rex is a 2013 American sci-fi horror film directed by Mark L. Lester (Class of 1984; Firestarter). It stars Brian Krause, Anne McDaniels and Steven Helmkamp.

Plot teaser:

A small, secluded island off the coast of Belize suddenly finds itself terrorized by a deadly predator from the planet’s distant past when deep sea divers accidentally awaken an ancient evil…

Buy Poseidon Rex on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

“The often inane screenplay, by frequent Lester collaborator Rafael Jordan (Dragons of Camelot, Pterodactyl), vaguely recognizable cast struggling to make the script seem intelligible and strictly functional cinematography betray the movie’s most earnest intentions, however. Lacking sufficient self-parody to entertain as a campy monster-movie spoof or the budget to thrill as action-adventure or sci-fi, much like the creature it depicts, Poseidon Rex represents a throwback that even its own distributor can’t really get behind.” Justin Lowe, The Hollywood Reporter

“I have seen numerous films in this current, decade-long wave of cheap monster movies – from Sharknado to Spring Break Shark Attack to Megalodon – andPoseidon Rex, by measuring against its peers, stands a mite taller. It’s not a hidden gem by any means, but it has a slickness and a professionalism that is certainly lacking from the relatively snarky Sharknado or the even-cheaper mockbusters produced by The Asylum. One can always tell if the makers of a B-movie are sincere about making an entertaining film, or if they’re just being cynical. The makers of Poseidon Rex clearly meant it.” Witney Seibold, Nerdist

“The action sequences are nonsensical and cheesy, as expected, but Poseidon Rex fails to get even remotely creative with its kills, which greatly damages the final product and the primary reason most people will watch the movie. Most would be willing to endure unbearable dialogue and a groan inducing love story for a few spectacularly silly dinosaur kills, but we are deprived of such.” Cliff Wheatley, IGN

IMDb

WH

‘Don’t throw rice… just scream your head off!’

The Bride – aka The House That Cried Murder, No Way Out and Last House on Massacre Street – is a 1972 American horror film directed by Jean Marie Pélissié, and written and produced by John Grissmer, the director of Scalpel (1976) and Blood Rage (1983). Composer Peter Bernstein, son of Elmer, also contributed scores to Silent Rage; Dark Asylum and  Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys.

The film stars Robin Strasser (also in supernatural TV movie And the Bones Came Together), Arthur Roberts (Chopping Mall; Not of This Earth; The Mummy’s Kiss), John Beal (The Vampire, 1957 and Amityville 3-D) and Iva Jean Saraceni (Creepshow).

Plot teaser:

Barbara (Robin Strasser) is about to marry David (Arthur Roberts) who works for her father (John Beal). A strong-willed woman, she intends that she and David will move into a house she has designed and built herself, which stands isolated in the middle of the countryside. On their wedding day, after the ceremony, Barbara discovers David in a steamy clinch with his old flame Helen (Iva Jean Saraceni) and attacks him with a pair of scissors, before smashing the wedding cake and driving away in the bridal limousine.

Weeks pass by and she doesn’t return. David invites Helen to move in with him at his house but it’s not long before strange events proliferate: the two of them receive threatening telephone calls and David suffers terrifying nightmares about Barbara… Is she still alive and seeking vengeance, or is she dead and haunting him? Either way the pressure is driving him towards madness, culminating in a terrifying visit to the house that Barbara built…

Buy The House That Cried Murder on DVD from Amazon.com

Review:

Shot in thirty days in June and July 1972, on location in Connecticut and North Salem, New York, this strange little film feels as though it was written to make use of the central location, a bizarre modernist monstrosity with sharp angled walls and giant windows looking out over beautiful cornfields. There’s also some kind of feminist slant to the action, with David’s weaknesses and Barbara’s strengths contrasted. Barbara is the dominant force in their relationship, and the idea that she designed and built the projected marital home herself emphasises the inversion of traditional gender roles. By comparison, David is weak, lazy, dishonorable, and lacking a sense of personal responsibility.

Mexican lobby card

However, neither David nor Barbara are portrayed sympathetically. Barbara may be strong but she’s also breezily indifferent to her husband’s misgivings about the new house, making plans for their future without paying attention to his opinion; her arrogant assurance that things will be done her way makes her difficult to root for. Having said that, there’s no doubt that David deserves what he gets. He’s a total bastard, betraying his new wife with their wedding vows still ringing in his ears, then hanging on to his well-paid job with the bride’s father by pretending the ensuing scene was all her fault.

Despite the scissor attack, at first both David and Helen fail to take the threat of a vengeful Barbara seriously, but their easy dismissals don’t last. Barbara’s father spooks David by telling him about a dark side to her character: “Barbara has a special talent for tormenting,” he says, before recounting a story from Barbara’s childhood: one day her pet chicken lashed out and pecked her, causing a gash that required stitches. Afterwards, he says, she took a straight razor and locked herself in her bedroom with the bird. “We could hear that poor creature screaming for more than an hour.”

It’s all too much for David, and in one of the film’s stand-out scenes he has a nightmare about being trapped in the house that Barbara built. Sweating with fear he stumbles around the empty building, menaced by bizarre camerawork, extreme lighting and electronic weirdness on the soundtrack. The scene builds upon a comment from Barbara in an early scene: “A house is always the reflection of its builder.” The film thus condenses its underlying contradictions (a fearful ‘celebration’ of women’s liberation) into a single powerful image – a weak and foolish man trapped in a world created by a malevolent stronger woman.

If the later scenes at the house feel slightly undercooked, The Bride remains a chilling little treat for fans of oddball independent horror, with an ambiguous finale that recalls Mario Bava’s Hatchet for the Honeymoon: a husband trapped in the power of a malevolent wife whose lust for revenge seems likely to keep them busy forever and ever…   

Stephen Thrower, Horrorpedia

Buy Blood Bath 2 Collection on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

UK ‘pre-cert’ video release from Quality Video

Second UK video release from Viz Movies – Buy VHS

Finnish video cover

Spanish video cover

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

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The Last House on the Left is a 2009 remake of the 1972 Wes Craven film of the same name, directed by Dennis Iliadis, and starring Garret Dillahunt, Riki Lindhome, Aaron Paul, Sara Paxton, Martha MacIsaac, Spencer Treat Clark, Monica Potter and Tony Goldwyn.

Plot teaser:

The Collingwood family – father John (Tony Goldwyn), mother Emma (Monica Potter) and teenage daughter Mari (Sara Paxton) – are on vacation at their holiday home, a remote lakeside cottage in the woods. Mari visits her friend Paige (Martha MacIsaac) in town where the two girls meet Justin (Spencer Treat Clark), a nervous young man who offers them marihuana. The three get high, until Justin’s father Krug (Garret Dillahunt) and his two travelling companions – brother Francis (Aaron Paul) and deranged girlfriend Sadie (Riki Lindhome) – spoil the party. In woodland adjacent to the Collingwood property, Paige and Mari suffer torments and indignities at the hands of Krug and his friends, culminating in rape and murder. Afterwards, as a torrentialial rainstorm erupts, Krug and the others seek shelter at the Collingford residence. Unaware of what has befallen their daughter, John and Emma agree to let the visitors stay overnight…

Review:

Before the 21st century mania for horror remakes took hold, surely the last thing anyone expected was for Wes Craven’s grim and upsetting Last House on the Left (1972) to receive a major studio remount. If ever a film felt too grubby and nasty to make it in the multiplexes, this was it. However, the success in the 1980s of A Nightmare on Elm Street and its sequels, and the Scream franchise in the 1990s, saw Craven’s Hollywood stock rise meteorically: his second horror film The Hills Have Eyes (1977) generated a successful remake in 2006 (which in turn begat a sequel in 2007), and the paradigm-shifting Nightmare on Elm Street was remade (less successfully) in 2010. All of which means that Craven’s bad reputation has long ago been redeemed by the only thing that really matters in Hollywood; money.

So what to make of this new adaptation? Essentially the film has been cleaned up and kitted out in the requisite fashionable clothing, given an ‘edgy’ indie horror vibe (big studio-style), and turned into a vengeance-is-good-for-the-soul post 9-11 rage-fest. Dennis Iliadis’s The Last House on the Left is moderately exciting, professionally constructed, but its thoroughly ordinary spirit is never complicated by the violence it depicts. The grunginess and verité naturalism of the original movie are nowhere to be found; ugliness is something you find in the souls of others, not in yourself. Craven incorporated elements of satire in his depiction of a bourgeois American family, scoring scenes of Mari’s clueless parents with deliberately twee music. His abduction scenes were set to rollicking country bluegrass with lyrics making light of the victims’ predicament, leaving the freaked out viewer to wonder just whose side the filmmakers were on. No such anxiety bedevils the viewer in the remake. The music is sensible, soberly orchestral, the limit of Iliadis’s eccentricity being to score horrific scenes with tasteful piano. His version does at least make better sense of a major plot twist, in which the villains, having had their vicious way with Mari and her friend, wind up staying the night with Mari’s parents. Craven struggled to persuade us that the parents would welcome such a shifty quartet on the very day they’d reported their daughter missing; in the new film the parents are still unaware of Mari’s fate when the killers arrive at their door, which works a lot better. Such improvements, however, remain at the level of carpentry; this gentrification of the rickety original hints at conservatism behind the tightened joints and fresh licks of paint.

The 1972 Last House on the Left featured terrifyingly plausible performances from David Hess, Fred Lincoln and Jeramie Rayne as the killers. The remake fails to meet this challenge, with performances seriously lacking in bite. There can be nothing more damning than to say, just four years after seeing this film, that I could not remember the actor playing Krug. Riki Lindhome’s ‘Sadie’ lacks the wildcat Manson-girl vibe of her forebear, and the remodelled ‘Weasel’ (here just ’Francis’) comes across as bland instead of sleazy. Krug’s pathetic son, meanwhile, is transformed from a droopy whey-faced junkie into a sensitive slacker-dude who sweetens the last reel with an act of personal redemption. As for the victims, there’s nothing to distinguish them either. Unlike Sandra Peabody in the original, whose Mari was so sweetly naive that it hurt to watch the extremes of cruelty inflicted upon her, Sara Paxton’s California-hardbody is so cool and composed that one’s anxiety is frankly diluted. Stressing her athleticism, the film seems on the brink of suggesting she can cope with anything.

The most profound make-over is reserved for Mari’s father. In the 1972 version he’s a twittering fool, an ‘embarrassing dad’ from a soap opera; here he’s an imposing masculine presence who has no qualms at all about making the transition from family man to avenger. In interviews, Wes Craven frequently claims that Last House was a reaction to the horror of the Vietnam War and the violence used by the State to suppress dissent. However much salt one takes with this pronouncement, Craven clearly set out to problematize violence – his film ends with Mari’s father, soaked with blood in the wreckage of his home, sickened by the extremity of his actions. Iliadis (reflecting a very different US war experience?) goes to the other extreme, turning violent retribution into a punch-the-air affirmation of right and virility. The film ends on a triumphal ‘up’ note that owes little to Craven’s original conception, and far more to such ‘bludgeon-the-criminal’ favourites as Death Wish.

Stephen Thrower, Horrorpedia

Marvel Zombies was initially a five-issue limited series published from December 2005 to April 2006 by Marvel Comics. The series was written by Robert Kirkman (creator of The Walking Dead) with art by Sean Phillips and covers by Arthur Suydam. The story is set in an alternate universe where the world’s superhero population has been infected with a virus which turned them into zombies. The series was spun out of events of the “Crossover” story-arc of Ultimate Fantastic Four, where the zombie Reed Richards tricked his Ultimate counterpart into opening a portal to the zombie universe.

The series of titles begins with two Ultimate Fantastic Four story arcs, “Crossover” (2005) and “Frightful” (2006), by Mark Millar and Greg Land. The story arcs were followed by a Marvel Zombies limited series by Robert Kirkman and Sean Phillips, who also created the prequel Marvel Zombies: Dead Days and sequel Marvel Zombies 2. A deal between Marvel and Dynamite Entertainment allowed for a crossover with Army of Darkness - Marvel Zombies vs. The Army of Darkness.

With Marvel Zombies 3, Kirkman and Phillips were replaced by Fred Van Lente and Kev Walker. The team continued on to Marvel Zombies 4, a four-issue mini-series starting in April 2009. Van Lente then stayed on to write the first and last issues of Marvel Zombies Return a series of five one-shots looking at different aspects of the outbreak. With Marvel Zombies 5 he teamed up with Kano, with the story picking up from the end of Marvel Zombies 4. A new series was launched in 2011, Marvel Zombies Supreme takes the zombie infection to Earth-712, the universe of Squadron Supreme. It has a new creative team of Frank Marraffino and penciller Fernando Blanco. This was followed by Marvel Zombies Destroy! set in a dimension where Nazi zombies won the war. It was initially written by Frank Marraffino, with art by Mirco Pierfederici but Marraffino’s health issue meant he had to hand over the writing reins to Peter David with issue #3.

Like many of the best films dealing with zombies, no definitive explanation is given in any of the comics as to how our heroes have become infected, though references are made to scientific experimentation and space radiation – all we can say for certain is that there have been outbreaks across the Universe and there appears to be no discrimination as to who it infects – this includes Gods (both based ‘above’ and the likes of Thor), metallic beings such as Ultron and huge entities such as Galactus. In a similar manner to zombie films post-Night of the Living Dead, a bite from an infected being will cause the same devastating effects to be transferred to the victim, providing enough useful flesh remains. Naturally, one of the things which sets to comic series apart from the films are that the characters retain many of their super-powers, which are supplemented by a raging hunger which can only be satiated by the consumption of living flesh.

The disease is incredibly hard to stop once spreading, due to the high survival rate of all zombies. Zombies seem to only need their brain stem to survive and can continue living without any use of their organs, limbs, and body functions.The infection even allows severed heads without lungs or vocal cords to continue speech just to further its infection capability. This was witnessed by Wasp and Hawkeye in the original Marvel Zombies, they were both simply severed heads that somehow still could function; another example would be Captain America who survived for over forty years as a brain on the ground until being put inside the body of Black Panther’s dead son. Although a cure is eventually found, the nature of Marvel is such that this can conveniently be forgotten for the sake of further episodes.

The adult nature (that’s is to say, gratuitous gut-munching and gizzard-wrestling) of the comics and the sprawling Universe, already created for the to wander around and the complicated relationships built up over decades, made it a huge success and future spin-offs appeared;

* Spider-ham, already a porcine riff on Spiderman

* Exiles, a multi-Wolverine all-in fight

* Marvel Zombies Halloween/A Christmas Carol

* Marvel Zombies: The Book of Angels, Demons, & Various Monstrosities

Perhaps the most recurring idea is for a film version of the comics. Though extremely competent fan-made movies have appeared online, Marvel itself are adamant that such a spectacle should not appear, for fear that many of their beloved characters would have children running out of cinemas in terror.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Mean-spirited US poster artwork

Bloodrage (also known as Never Pick up a Stranger) is a 1979 psycho thriller exploitation film directed by Joseph Zito (under the pseudonym Joseph Bigwood) from a screenplay by Robert Jahn. It stars Ian Scott, Judith-Marie Bergan, James Johnston, Betsy Ramlow and Lawrence Tierney (The Kirlian Witness; Silver Bullet; The Horror Show).

Director Zito previously directed Abduction (1975) and went on to helm two slashers, The Prowler and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, before focusing on reactionary action movies.

Plot teaser:

A young man named Richard visits Beverly, a local prostitute, and runs into her boyfriend, a police officer named Ryan, on the way into Beverly’s home. Richard and Beverly get into an argument, which ends with Richard accidentally shoving Beverly through a window, killing her. Richard cleans up the scene, evades Ryan when he returns from running errands, and hitchhikes to New York City after disposing of Beverly’s body.

Richard acquires a room in a dingy motel, gets a job at a bottling company, befriends a neighboring drug dealer named Candice, and voyeuristically spies on Nancy, a prostitute who lives across from Candice. Intoxicated by what he felt during Beverly’s death, Richard murders a woman named Lucy, torturing and humiliating her beforehand. Ryan, suspicious of Beverly’s disappearance, heads to New York in search of her, enlisting the aid of the local police, and passing photographs of her around at strip clubs and bars.

During the course of his investigation, Ryan spots Richard in a restaurant, and hears a broadcast announcing that Beverly’s remains were uncovered. Concluding that Richard probably killed Beverly, Ryan finds out where he is staying, and heads there…

Reviews:

” …oozes the atmosphere of the sleazy 70’s and is bound to upset even the steadiest of stomachs, not because it is overly bloody (it’s not) but because of the matter-of-fact way that director Joseph Bigwood (actually Joseph Zito using a pseudonym) treats the material and characters. While the storyline is of the basic ‘serial killer murders prostitutes’ formula, the acting and situations seem so natural and unhampered by not having a big budget (this is an extremely low budget effort) that it makes the killings all the more horrendous”. Fred Adelman, Critical Condition

“The unpolished acting works, too, giving things a reasonably authentic flavor, with Scott especially hitting all the right notes as Richie. This is a guy who would creep you out if you even bothered to pay attention to him, but is so non-descript and unassuming that you probably wouldn’t. You can already hear his neighbors being interviewed on the news saying “I guess I’m kinda surprised he’d do something like this, he just seemed like one of those guy who was sort of — I dunno, there, ya know? Ya never had much reason to pay attention to him one way or another.” How many times have we heard a variation on those very words from somebody talking about a real life psycho?” Trash Film Guru

Choice dialogue:

“She was beautiful… she disgusted me.”

Wikipedia | IMDb

Chislehurst Caves is a 22 miles (35 km) long series of tunnels in Chislehurst, in the south eastern suburbs of London. Today they are a tourist attraction and although they are called caves, they are entirely man-made and were dug and used as chalk and flint mines. The earliest mention of the mines is circa 1250 and they are last believed to have been worked in the 1830s. During the early 1900s they became a popular tourist attraction, but in the First World War, they were used as an ammunition depot, then they were used for mushroom cultivation in the 1930s. During the Second World War, the caves were used as an air raid shelter. Within a short time, it became an underground city of some 15,000 inhabitants with electric lighting, a chapel and a hospital.

In 1903, William Nichols, then Vice President of the British Archaeological Association, produced a theory that the mines were made by the Druids (who apparently conducted blood sacrifices), Romans and Saxons. This theory was used to give names to the three parts of the caves. Tour guides point out supposed Druid altars and Roman features. However this can at best be speculation as the earliest documented evidence for mining is 1250 AD.

Cave carving by Sandy Brown, 1995

In the 1950s and 1960s, the caves were used as a music venue for jazz, skiffle and rock bands. David Bowie, Status Quo, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, Paul Raven (later Gary Glitter) and Pink Floyd all performed there. On October 31, 1974 a lavish media party was held there to celebrate the launch of new UK record company Swan Song Records by Led Zeppelin. More recently, some of the tunnels have been used by the live action role-playing game Labyrinthe. 

Judy Geeson is terrorised in Inseminoid (1981)

The caves have appeared in several television programmes including Doctor Who in a 1972 story titled The Mutants. The caves were also used in the films The Tribe and Norman J. Warren’s Inseminoid and in a 2008 music video for Cradle of Filth a metal band. Two episodes of TV series Most Haunted were filmed at the caves. A twenty year investigation into the supposed supernatural hauntings of the caves – including the legend of the “white woman” – by author James Wilkinson containing the testimonies of many of the guides and owners over a 50 year period was published in 2011 entitled The Ghosts of Chislehurst Caves.

Jon Pertwee as Doctor Who in the BBC episode ‘The Mutants’

Wikipedia | Official site

Stephanie Beacham (born in Barnet, Hertfordshire, 28 February 1947) is an English television, radio, film and theatre actress. Her career began in modelling before she moved into television with roles in series such as The Saint, Callan, and alien invasion cult classic UFO. Her early film roles included The Ballad of Tam Lin (aka The Devil’s Widow), directed by Roddy McDowall.

Other horror roles:

In Michael Winner’s SM-tinged The Nightcomers (1971), a bizarre ‘prequel’ to the events that occurred in Henry James’ novella ‘The Turn of the Screw’, she starred opposite Marlon Brando. Beacham appeared nude in one scene, during the filming of which Brando apparently wore Y-fronts and wellington boots under the bed clothes to ensure Winner did not film anything lower than was necessary.

Horror would be a genre that Stephanie Beacham appeared often in during the 1970s, and she was subsequently cast as Jessica Van Helsing in Hammer’s Dracula A.D. 1972 alongside genre icons Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

Her other horror film appearances are in Amicus period piece  –And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973), Pete Walker’s House of Mortal Sin (aka The Confessional Murders, 1975), Schizo (1976) and Norman J. Warren’s Inseminoid (aka Horror Planet, 1981),

She was featured in the Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense episode ‘A Distant Scream‘ in 1984 before achieving worldwide fame in TV soaps such as The Colbys and Dynasty. In 2000, she appeared in supernatural fantasy Charmed TV episode “Reckless Abandon”.

Wikipedia (click for non-horror roles)

Almedia Theatre, Islington, adaptation

The Turn of the Screw, originally published in 1898, is a gothic ghost story novella written by Henry James.

The novella has had differing interpretations, often mutually exclusive. Many critics have tried to determine the exact nature of the evil hinted at by the story. However, others have argued that the true brilliance of the novella comes with its ability to create an intimate confusion and suspense for the reader.

Plot teaser:

An unnamed narrator listens to Douglas, a friend, read a manuscript written by a former governess whom Douglas claims to have known and who is now dead. The manuscript tells the story of how the young governess is hired by a man who has become responsible for his young nephew and niece after the death of their parents. He lives mainly in London and is not interested in raising the children himself.

The boy, Miles, is attending a boarding school, while his younger sister, Flora, is living at a country estate in Essex. She is currently being cared for by the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. The governess’s new employer, the uncle of Miles and Flora, gives her full charge of the children and explicitly states that she is not to bother him with communications of any sort. The governess travels to her new employer’s country house, Bly, and begins her duties.

Miles soon returns from school for the summer just after a letter arrives from the headmaster stating that he has been expelled. Miles never speaks of the matter, and the governess is hesitant to raise the issue. She fears that there is some horrible secret behind the expulsion, but is too charmed by the adorable young boy to want to press the issue. Soon thereafter, the governess begins to see around the grounds of the estate the figures of a man and woman whom she does not recognise. These figures come and go at will without ever being seen or challenged by other members of the household, and they seem to the governess to be supernatural. She learns from Mrs. Grose that her predecessor, Miss Jessel, and another employee, Peter Quint, had a sexual relationship. It is also implied that Quint sexually molested Miles and the other members of the household. Prior to their deaths, they spent much of their time with Flora and Miles, and this fact has grim significance for the governess when she becomes convinced that the two children are secretly aware of the presence of the ghosts…

Madison Opera adaptation

Adaptations:

• An opera, The Turn of the Screw, composed by Benjamin Britten in 1954
• The Turn of the Screw (1959), an early live television play directed by John Frankenheimer and featuring Ingrid Bergman
• The Innocents (1961), directed by Jack Clayton and featuring Deborah Kerr
• The Nightcomers, a prequel to the actual novel, directed by Michael Winner and featuring Marlon Brando as Quint
• Dan Curtis’s well-regarded TV movie The Turn of the Screw (1974) with Lynn Redgrave

• Harold Pinter directed a Broadway version of the story renamed The Innocents. It starred Claire Bloom and a very young Sarah Jessica Parker as Flora. The production was poorly received and only ran for about two weeks in 1976.
• Rusty Lemorande’s film The Turn of the Screw (1994) with Patsy Kensit and Julian Sands, which updated the story to the 1960s
• The television movie The Haunting of Helen Walker/The Turn of the Screw (1995) featuring Valerie Bertinelli, Michael Gough, and Diana Rigg
• Presence of Mind (1999), an Spanish-made film adaptation with Sadie Frost and Harvey Keitel
• A British television adaptation The Turn of the Screw (26 December 1999) with Jodhi May and Colin Firth
• A 2001 film, The Others starring Nicole Kidman, is cited as being inspired partly by The Turn of the Screw
• BBC Radio 4 broadcast an adaptation in 2004 (later re-broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra on 14 November 2011) by Neville Teller, directed by Peter Leslie Wilde and starring Cathy Sara as the Governess and Joseph Tremain as Miles.
• BBC Radio 4 (and later BBC Radio 7 broadcast in 2010 an adaptation by John Tideyman, directed by Glyn Dearman and starring Charlotte Attenborough as the Governess, Rosemary Leach as Mrs. Grose, Sam Crane as Miles and Jonathan Adams as the Storyteller.
• The story has also been converted into a ballet by William Tuckett.
• A 2009 BBC television drama starring Michelle Dockery and Sue Johnston, set during the 1920s: The Turn of the Screw
• The Italian filmmaker Marcello Avallone will direct a 3-D adaptation of the novel. It will be the first Italian-produced and screened 3-D film.
• A stage play, The Turn of the Screw, adapted by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and presented in a co-production with Hammer at the Almeida Theatre, London, in January 2013.

1898 version of the novella online

Cry of the Werewolf, also known as Daughter of the Werewolf, is a 1944 film starring Nina Foch, based on a story by Griffin Jay and directed by Henry Levin. Following The Return of the Vampire, this was Columbia studio’s second broadside-attack on Universal’s stranglehold of the horror market.

Plummy-toned tour guide, Peter Althius (John Abbott, the voice of the wolf in Jungle Book) enthrals a captive audience with tales of the strange goings-on in the stately home of the deceased Marie LaTour, rumoured to have been a werewolf.

John Abbott as the guide

To cover all bases, voodoo and vampirism are thrown into the talk as well, though we are informed that being a werewolf is the worst of the lot, a fact proven by the evil quotient being so high that the being cannot help but transform into a bestial form to conduct its killings.

Dr Charles Morris (Fritz Lieber, previously glimpsed in Charles Laughton’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame) , the museum’s director, believes he has discovered the sinister secret about the lupine history of the house, prompting the museum’s janitor to warn LaTour’s daughter/gypsy princess, Celeste (the film’s biggest acting draw, Dutch-born Nina Foch, also seen in the aforementioned The Return of the Vampire and later in epics such as Spartacus and The Ten Commandments).

Celeste acts (at least in the movement sense) and burns the offending evidence and we are introduced to a secret series of rooms accessed by a secret panel in the mantlepiece. Morris is also found dead and his son Bob (Stephen Crane, barely acted again, if you count his appearance in this as acting – he went back to being Lana Turner’s husband – briefly) and future Transylvanian wife, Elsa (Danish-born Osa Massen, later seen in Rocketship X-M) try to piece together the evidence to solve the mystery of the house, past and present.

Also along to fight crime is hard-boiled Lt. Barry Lane (Barton MacLane, The Mummy’s Ghost, 1941’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) who starts as he means to go on, barking (or howling) up the wrong tree and ignoring the supernatural elements and pointing fingers at more obvious suspects. Amidst the perpetual long shadows, Celeste and Elsa face-off to hide/uncover the wolfy goings-on, whilst the men of the picture wander around haplessly spending more time preening and checking legal paperwork than stopping marauding monsters.

Is this the worst werewolf film ever made? Well, latter-day shot-on-video or CGI efforts would definitely take that crown but this is a genuine contender, made worse by the fact that Columbia were making a concerted effort to erase all Universal’s efforts in the process. Their previous horror outing, The Return of the Vampire had been well-received in many quarters but had the added attraction of Bela Lugosi and a thinly veiled (and copyright-dodging) storyline which expanded on 1931’s Dracula, in all but name. Cry of the Werewolf has none of this; Foch is alluring but unbelievable as either a werewolf or gypsy royalty; MacClane is fun but clearly hasn’t been told he’s in a horror film and turns the whole film into a plodding noir crime yarn – elsewhere, some of the acting is excruciating, Crane, it goes without saying but also Abbott who sounds like jumper-wearing comic-folk minstrel Jake Thackray.

In pre-production, film was intended to build on their previous success and be titled Bride of the Vampire, elements of this evidently remaining in the plot, but the success of 1942’s Cat People and the opportunity to exploit a more tragic angle proved too enticing and by the time of filming, vampires has taken more of a back seat. The frantic re-write by Griffin Jay who had, it must be said, more of an affinity with bandages (The Mummy’s Ghost, The Mummy’s Hand and The Mummy’s Tomb were all his) lacks any threat whatsoever, has far too many irrelevant characters and still wasn’t entirely sure where it was going – even at filming stage, it was due to be titled Daughter of the Werewolf. The film marks the debut of director Henry Levin who had a long career, fortunately avoiding further horror films – his most famous effort is probably Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

Perhaps inevitably, given that World War Two was raging, the budget was meagre… and it shows. There is a distinct lack of music in the film, what there is being recycled stock cues. The ferocious werewolf is actually an alsatian, the remedy for the poor hound’s lack of terror being an elastic band wrapped around his muzzle so that it permanently exposes its teeth. Of course, this is also visible to the audience. Inevitably, even War-weary audiences failed to warm to the film and it was hastily repackaged as a double-bill with The Soul of a Monster, at least offering twice the value if not twice the quality.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Thanks to Horrorfind.com for some of the pics.

Choice dialogue:

“A woman likes to have a man a little afraid of her.”

Nina Foch and Osa Massen

Milton Parsons as Adamson, the exuberant funeral director

Osa Massen

Cast:

• Nina Foch as Marie Latour
• Stephen Crane as Robert Morris
• Osa Massen as Elsa Chauvet
• Blanche Yurka as Bianca
• Barton MacLane as Lt. Barry Lane
• Ivan Triesault as Jan Spavero
• John Abbott as Peter Althius
• Fred Graff as Pinkie
• John Tyrrell as Mac
• Robert Williams as Homer
• Fritz Leiber as Dr. Charles Morris
• Milton Parsons as Adamson, the funeral director

Wikipedia | IMDb

Wolf is a 1994 American horror film directed by Mike Nichols and written by Jim Harrison, Wesley Strick, and an uncredited Elaine May, with music by Ennio Morricone and cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno (The Stendhal Syndrome).

The film features Jack Nicholson (The Raven; The Terror; The Shining) and Michelle Pfeiffer in the lead roles, alongside James Spader (The Watcher; Alien Hunter), Kate Nelligan (Dracula – 1979; Thérèse Raquin - BBC TV; Fatal Instinct), Richard Jenkins, Christopher Plummer (The Pyx; Murder by Decree; Vampire in Venice) Eileen Atkins, David Hyde Pierce, and Om Puri.

Plot teaser:

Will Randall is bitten by a wolf while driving home through Vermont after it was seemingly hit by his car. Soon after, he is demoted from editor-in-chief of a publishing house during a takeover by ruthless tycoon Raymond Alden, who replaces him with Will’s ambitious protégé Stewart Swinton. Will begins experiencing physiological changes ranging from increased appetites and libido to hair regrowth and sharper-than-human sensory perceptions. Catching an unfamiliar scent on the clothing of his wife Charlotte, Will rushes over to Stewart’s house, bites Stewart during a brief physical altercation, and rushes upstairs to the bedroom where he finds evidence of Charlotte’s infidelity. Will leaves his wife, takes up residence at the Mayflower Hotel, and as the moon ripens, takes on increasingly bestial aggressive characteristics.

With the help of Alden’s rebellious daughter Laura, Will tries to adapt to his new existence. His first nocturnal escapade as a werewolf takes place at Laura’s guesthouse on the Alden estate where he partially transforms and hunts down a deer by moonlight. In the morning, Will finds himself on the bank of a stream, with blood all over his face and hands, and, fearing notice, hurriedly departs in his Volvo…

Reviews:

“Quite frankly, it’s hard to fathom why exactly anyone would have wanted to make this slick, glossy, but utterly redundant werewolf movie… Overall, this is needlessly polished nonsense: not awful; just toothless, gutless and bloodless … Nichols makes it clear that directing a horror movie was the last thing on his mind. Even make-up wiz Rick Baker is stymied by the air of restraint.” Time Out

“a decidedly upscale horror film, a tony werewolf movie in which a full roster of talents tries to mate with unavoidably hoary material. Offspring of this union is less ungainly than might have been feared, but is also less than entirely convincing, an intriguing thriller more enjoyable for its humor than for its scare quotient.” Todd McCarthy, Variety

“No one puts more wicked zest into playing yuppie scum than the gifted Spader – he’s a roguish delight… Nichols is a master of the telling detail, and his vision of the New York publishing world as an urban jungle is elegantly stylized and bitingly funny… Nicholson is amazing, finding humor and poignancy in a role that could have slid into caricature. His scenes with Pfeiffer, who gives a luminous performance, have a welcome edge, aided by some uncredited scripting from Nichols’ former comedy partner Elaine May… a rapturous romantic thriller with a darkly comic subtext about what kills human values.” Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

“In its own delightfully peculiar way, the film is the only one of its kind ever made – a horror film about office politics… The movie isn’t wholly great; it starts to unravel just after the midway point. Still, there are charms enough all the way through to make it the most seductive, most enjoyable film of the summer… The main attraction, though, is Nicholson – first, last and always – and it’s his modulated suavity and wit that make the film so sublimely entertaining… Though Randall becomes more formidable as the movie progresses, Nicholson sustains his low-key, self-effacing style, and somehow the more he keeps his natural dynamism in check, the more his charisma increases…” Hal Hinson, Washington Post

“The tone of the movie is steadfastly smart and literate; even in the midst of his transformation, the Nicholson character is capable of sardonic asides and a certain ironic detachment… What is a little amazing is that this movie allegedly cost $70 million. It is impossible to figure where the money all went, even given the no-doubt substantial above-the-line salaries. The special effects are efficient but not sensational, the makeup by Rick Baker is convincing but wisely limited, and the movie looks great, but that doesn’t cost a lot of money. What emerges is an effective attempt to place a werewolf story in an incongruous setting, with the closely observed details of that setting used to make the story seem more believable.” Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Egyptian poster for Wolf

Wikipedia | IMDb

‘She walks in terror, stilled with fright. A trail of fear, to fill the night!’

Jennifer is a 1978 horror film directed by Brice Mack from a screenplay by Kay Cousins Johnson and a story by Steve Krantz. It stars Lisa Pelikan, Bert Convy (A Bucket of Blood; Bewitched), Nina Foch (Cry of the Werewolf), John Gavin (Psycho) and Jeff Corey (The Boston Strangler; The Premonition; Curse of the Black Widow). It was released in the USA by American International Pictures.

Plot teaser:

Jenifer Baylor (Lisa Pelikan) is a poor, red-headed young woman from West Virginia. Jennifer possesses a power over snakes, an ability to control them and communicate with them. She and her father, Luke Baylor (Jeff Corey), left their home in disgrace, because when Jennifer was around the age of seven, some snakes she had been handling killed the town preacher’s son. She refused to handle snakes ever again, though Luke now runs a pet store and often encourages her to use her power again. Luke is mentally disabled, unable to make meals for himself without burning them, and relies on Jennifer since his wife died. While Luke does run the pet store, he spends most of the time in a back room, listening to Christian radio.

Jennifer receives a scholarship to an upper-class girls private school. While at school, Jennifer encounters a clique of wealthy and cruel girls, who hate her for being poor and different. These girls turn others against Jennifer throughout the movie, but Jennifer also makes friends of her own, including teacher Jeff Reed (Bert Convy). The wealthy girls’ cruelty eventually pushes Jennifer over the edge, causing her to use her special powers again for the sake of revenge against those that hurt her and her new friends…

Reviews:

“Jennifer is a hand-me-down version of Carrie, from which it borrows all of the above, plus a shower scene, final scare and a couple of costumes that look just like Sissy Spacek’s. If it doesn’t copy the precise ending of “Carrie,” the reasons appear to have been financial rather than esthetic ones. Instead of marshaling an entire special-effects department to help Jennifer (Lisa Pelikan) trash her hometown, the film merely shows her summoning up “the vengeance of the viper.” Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“Technically speaking, there isn’t any special or noteworthy about Carrie with Snake’s cinematography, story, or anything else for that matter except maybe the laughably terrible ending wherein an army of snakes and snake demons (or rather, puppets) are unleashed by Jennifer upon all those who had wronged her in the past. The film’s budgetary restraints are never more evident than in the film’s uninspired ending, which could’ve been more effective and chilling if Mack had a better understanding of shadow, editing, or subtly–but then this is the guy who directed Rooster: Spurs of Death!” Examiner.com

“Jennifer is one of those special 1970’s treats. A movie that is sprung forth from the popularity of another (1976’s Carrie) but then goes into it’s own direction and you fall for it’s charms (Whether they be Bert Convy or an awesome theme song).” Cinema du Meep

Wikipedia | IMDb

Wer (also known as Kurt) is a 2013 American horror film directed by William Brent Bell (Stay Alive; The Devil Inside) from a screenplay co-written with Matthew Peterman. It stars A.J. Cook (Wishmaster 3; Ripper; Final Destination 2), Brian Scott O’Connor, Simon Quarterman, Sebastian Roché (Supernatural; The Vampire Diaries), Vik Sahay.

A US release on DVD is slated for September 23, 2014.

Plot teaser:

Defense attorney Kate (A.J. Cook) is called to defend the creepy, yet gentle, Talan (Brian Scott O’Connor) after he is charged with the murders of a vacationing family. She soon learns that he is a werewolf and that he may have been all too capable of the slayings. Things take a turn for the worse when Talan escapes from his imprisonment and runs loose through the city of Paris…

Filming location:

Bucharest, Romania

Wikipedia | IMDb

‘Don’t go to the lake…’

The Dead Don’t Scream is a 2007 action horror film produced, directed and written by Richard Perrin. It stars Caitlyn Camille Perrin, Jerilyn Perrin, Jeremy Schwab, Brad Hartliep, Charles Martin, Lindsey Gardner, Trey Caldwell, Taylor Chadwell, Kelly Vallejo, Mark Osburn, Rick Alan Rhoads. The film’s reported budget was $66,000.

Plot teaser:

A group of college students on a road trip to hell when they stumble across a small Texas town with an entire economy based upon stealing cars. Unfortunately, for them, cars aren’t the only things getting chopped…

Reviews:

” …horror fans can at least take satisfaction in the fact that the film does make a reasonable attempt to deliver the macabre goods that we all expect from these movies. The obligatory nudity is included, but what’s more, there’s plenty of carnage on display, and the make-up FX is excellent for such a low budget production. Throats are slashed and faces are blown off with shotguns. None of it is a hundred percent convincing, but the special effects are quite good.” DigitalHorror.com

Buy The Dead Don’t Scream on DVD from Amazon.com

“Not stellar, due to budget constraints and usage of what they have to work with but still impressive that they pulled it off, gave some new faces screen time and were able to weave an original story around it all.” HorrorNews.net

“The action, blood and gore are delivered in huge quantities. Although there is only once topless scene at the beginning of the film, there are lots of beautiful bikini clad hotties running around for almost the entire movie.” Film Apocalypse!

Filming locations:

Euless, Grand Prairie and Grapevine, Texas

IMDb

Necromentia is a 2009 American horror film directed by Singaporean Pearry Teo (Witchville) and co-written with Stephanie Joyce.

Plot teaser:

Travis cares for his mentally disabled younger brother and works as a torturer for hire. He is also addicted to heroin; it is ketamine, however, that catapults him into the realm of a black-eyed demon called Morbius. Morbius informs Travis that his brother has been taken by another demonic troublemaker called Mister Skinny. Mister Skinny appears as a diaper-wearing fat caucasian butcher in a pig mask who first entices the boy to eviscerate his slumbering baby-sitter. If Travis helps Morbius exact vengeance then Morbius will allegedly help Travis find his dead brother.

Morbius instructs Travis to find Hagen and extract an agreement to use him as a gateway to Hell. Travis does this by assuring the desperate Hagen that the process will allow Hagen to enter the next realm and possibly retrieve the soul of his decomposing lover. Travis proceeds to carve demonic symbols into Hagen’s back and sends him straight into Hell, where he is gruesomely mutilated by a monstrous eyeless beast before ever setting out in search of his lover. Travis follows in search of his own brother and is disabled and dragged into the darkness by the hideous beast…

Reviews:

“Not since the first Hellraiser has there been a film that captures the likes of Barker on screen this well. And let’s be honest, Hellraiser is starting to show its age. With a bigger budget (or with a little more genius) Necromentia could’ve been a true horror masterpiece, now it lacks that tiny bit of fine-tuning to make it rise as one of the best horror flicks ever.” Niels Matthijs, Twitch

“I’ll start with the bad. Some thunder effects in the background, corny. A small portion of the music, cliche. A tired overuse of the gas mask and some shaky camera music video moments. The good? The monster design, done by Pearry himself. The story and dialogue? Much better than his last output. And then there’s fantastic production design with props from a funhouse of madness procured in someone’s sick dreams, all seen through the sheen of German expressionism.” Quiet Earth

“Gore hounds and fans of the Hellraiser films will get a nice kick out of Necromentia, especially with some blatant nods to the Cenobites, as there are plenty of organs being spilled, blades sliding into flesh, fingers getting chopped off and loads of people traveling to a demented afterlife filled with nothing but pain. Just don’t expect the acting or story to be stellar and you’ll enjoy it.” Peter Brown, Shock Till You Drop

Cast:

• Layton Matthews as Morbius
• Chad Grimes as Travis
• Santiago Craig as Hagen
• Zelieann Rivera as Elizabeth
• Zach Cumer as Thomas
• Nathan Ginn as Mr. Skinny

Wikipedia | IMDb

‘He hunted humans for the sheer sport of killing… and made his island paradise into a Hell on Earth!’

Bloodlust! (also known as Bloodlust and Blood Lust) is a horror/thriller film co-written, co-produced and directed by Ralph Brooke.

Filmed in 1959 and released in 1961, the feature was picked up by Crown International Pictures. Crown later re-released it in 1970 as a double feature with Blood Mania. The film’s cinematography was by Richard E. Cunha (director of Giant from the Unknown, She Demons, Missile to the Moon, and Frankenstein’s Daughter).

Plot teaser:

Two couples (Robert Reed, June Kenney, Joan Lora, and Eugene Persson) are on a boating trip when they come across an uncharted island. The four investigate and find themselves in the clutches of Dr. Albert Balleau (Wilton Graff), whose hobby is hunting both animals and humans.

After learning about the terrible secrets of the island from the doctor’s wife (Lilyan Chauvin) and her boyfriend (Walter Brooke) as well as an investigation, the group tries to escape only to be thwarted by Dr. Balleau and his henchmen.

Balleau’s wife and her lover are slain and stuffed, while the men are forced to participate in a The Most Dangerous Game-style hunt, with their girlfriends soon joining them. The hunt includes Balleau’s sailor henchmen and hidden traps, as well as Balleau’s deadly skill…

Buy Film Chest Restored Version on DVD from Amazon.com

Reviews:

“Bloodlust! is no big deal, really, but it is reasonably well made for a quickie drive-in horror film, and it should reward those who come to it with a forgiving attitude. Wilton Graff does a respectable job as the villain, and in particular makes the most of the speech in which he tells how a stint as a sniper during World War II left him addicted to the thrill of hunting humans. Robert Reed makes for a rather dull hero, but he is counterbalanced to some extent by June Kenney’s Betty, who is atypically strong and resourceful for a B-movie heroine of this vintage. Watch especially for the scene in which she uses her judo skills to toss one of Balleau’s men into a vat of acid— not only is it an unexpected show of force, but it leads to a very hard-hitting gore effect by contemporary standards.” 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting

” …delivers satisfying late night chiller charm that is surprisingly daring for an overlooked sixties schlocker unjustly derided as a campy disappointment if it is even remembered at all.” Culture Crypt

“Ultimately, Brooke’s ‘Bloodlust’ is a film that fails on two levels – its fails to be good entertainment, and it fails to be good fodder for fans of so-bad-its-good cinema. With the exception of a few hardy souls interested in seeing “Mike Brady” star in a horror film, Brooke’s ‘Bloodlust!’ has no real target audience, no real entertainment value, and ultimately, no real reason to even be seen. Certainly, making a “bad” film is a terrible mistake, but to make a “forgettable” film like Ralph Brooke did, is just plain unforgiveable.” Examiner.com

The movie was released on DVD as a double feature with Atom Age Vampire on March 20, 2001, and later released on DVD as another double feature in 2002 with The Amazing Transparent Man.