Director Sergio Martino is an old hand at these types of movies (Italian trash), having been behind 2019: After The Fall Of New York and Mountain Of The Cannibal God as well as forays into the giallo, spaghetti western, and Eurocrime arenas. And having worked extensively with the likes of Daniel Greene in flicks like After the Condor and Beyond Kilimanjaro, Across the River of Blood, if anyone could take a plastic alligator named Kruna and make an entertaining film out of it, it would be Sergio. Continue reading “The Great Alligator (1979)”
Category: Horror
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)
Having ridden the success of their monster films for somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 years, by 1948 Universal had gone through about all the permutations of monsters battling one another they could think of. In an effort to suck even more money out of these played out ideas, they decided to insert their monsters into a comedy starring Abbott and Costello. The first of what turned out to be an ongoing series of these horrorific comedies is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and it is by far and away the best and funniest of the series. Continue reading “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)”
Phase IV (1974)
Ants are our most fearsome and deadly bug and understandably so. With their eight big hairy legs, eight nasty eyes and sometimes being the size of a dinner plate, I wouldn’t want to wake up finding myself staring at their gigantic fangs which are just itching to inject some kill juice into me! Throw in the business where they spin webs, and wrap their prey into cocoons so they can suck the blood clean out of them and you have yourself the Terminator of creepy crawlies! Continue reading “Phase IV (1974)”
Curse of the Fly (1965)
Truly, the Fly has his final and most horrifying revenge on us in this, the final film in the original trilogy. Just like the other star of the previous two films, the Fly joins Vincent Price on vacation and actually sits the whole movie out!
I try not to expect too much out of some of these movies, but is it really out of line to expect that in a film entitled The Curse Of The Fly, that the Fly be running around groping ingenues and choking lab assistants? Aren’t we owed scenes of some actor valiantly struggling not to tip over due to the top heavy nature of the giant fly-head mask he has to wear?
At the very least, we should get some flashbacks that show the Fly in his prime, complete with that honey-combed point of view shot they used whenever they wanted to show us what the Fly was seeing. But you know what we get? A glossy 8×10! Continue reading “Curse of the Fly (1965)”
Return of the Fly (1959)
Vincent Price returns to a series of films he is famous for being in, but if you actually watch them both (he didn’t appear in the third movie, Curse of the Fly) you’ll notice that he doesn’t do much but faint, talk with a lisp and make pained faces at the fates of his various relatives. Continue reading “Return of the Fly (1959)”
Bloody Pit of Horror (1965)
Mickey Hargitay was a body builder who starred in Hercules vs. the Hydra, Delirium, and a couple of other Italian schlock flicks, but the most impressive item on his resume is that he was once the husband of Jayne Mansfield.
He puts all that vital experience to use in Bloody Pit Of Horror as a guy that runs around shirtless in red tights, torturing and killing the folks who just wanted to use his castle to do some cheesecake photo shoots for a horror anthology they were working on.
There is a distinctly awesome vibe going on in this film and it has something to do with the fact that the well-oiled Hargitay runs around in his way too snug tights, his little red hood, and his large black belt, all the while complaining about how everyone is “corrupting the harmony of my perfect body.” This is the sort of thing you rarely get in horror films, even Italian ones! Continue reading “Bloody Pit of Horror (1965)”
Deep Red (1975)
Deep Red echoes Daro Argento’s earlier (and not as good) The Bird With The Crystal Plumage with its tale of a foreigner in Rome witnessing and getting himself mixed up in a murder (and getting everyone around him killed along the way). Don’t let the fact that this feels like an instance of a director remaking his own movie deter you from checking it out because Argento is able to play up his strengths (kinetic camera work, sudden vicious violence, a sense of isolation) and jettison all the barnacles that slow his other pictures down (pointless red herrings, lazy plotting, all the self-referential crap that helped to sink Tenebre). Continue reading “Deep Red (1975)”