Three of the cinema’s best genres are finally mixed together to produce a love child of death, dismemberment, and amputee fellatio! Taking the very finest elements of the Vietnam POW movie, the stolen Nazi gold movie, and the micro-budget mid 1980s Italian action movie, Dog Tags manages to even work in a strip club scene for no reason except that director Romano Scavolini (Nightmare In A Damaged Brain) is just that damn good! Could anything less be expected from the brother of the writer of American Rickshaw? Continue reading “Dog Tags (1987)”
Category: 1980s
Car Crash (1981)
Car Crash is the single best 1970s movie of 1981! This film from Antonio Margheriti (The Ark of the Sun God, Jungle Raiders) stars two of the biggest names of the decade – Trans Am and Travolta! Continue reading “Car Crash (1981)”
Massacre in Dinosaur Valley (1985)
This Brazil-set cannibal epic from one of your off-brand Italian auteurs (Michele Massimo Tarantini) is an entry level one meaning that normal people will be repulsed by its sleazy smorgasbord of violence which includes people shot, impaled, gutted, raped, enslaved, drowning in quicksand, dying in plane wrecks, animal abuse and of course a breast scratched by a triceratops claw. Continue reading “Massacre in Dinosaur Valley (1985)”
Rolf (1984)
Mario Siciliano was a pretty minor player as far as Italian scuzz cinema goes with credits on a few spaghetti westerns, a bunch of sex comedies, and Evil Eye. Mario proves though that it isn’t how much you do, but what you do with what you have. Some folks like Lamberto Bava or Bruno Mattei may be willing to share their gifts with us three or four times a year. Others, like Mario, may simply explode one day on the scene and burn brightly for a single film or two before returning to the relative obscurity whence they came. Continue reading “Rolf (1984)”
Bloody Psycho (1989)
Does the fact that the there were at least four different moments during the completely expected “shock” ending that I didn’t understand mean that that movie was incompetent crud? Or am I in the presence of deranged movie genius when a drunked up bum asked our hero if he just shit his pants? Continue reading “Bloody Psycho (1989)”
Virus (1980)
Meteor strike, nuclear war, zombie outbreak. All ways our world could end horribly where the dead are the lucky ones (as the various movie posters would undoubtedly exclaim). But there is another apocalypse we should add to the list. To the top of the list that is. Big budget foreign end of the world movie riddled with actors familiar from mainstream domestic film and TV cashing easy paychecks. Continue reading “Virus (1980)”
Night of the Demons (1988)
Night of the Demons is another one of those movies where a bunch of poorly constructed teen characters (they are all “types” as opposed to people – good girl, douche boyfriend, fat slob, scared black guy, girl who flashes panties as part of a shoplifting ring – the usual horror movie tropes) get stalked and murdered by monsters while trapped in a particular location (in this case an old funeral home). Continue reading “Night of the Demons (1988)”