Category: Italian Cinema

Nightmare Beach (1989)

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Who is the deranged maniac that’s killing off all the spring breakers in south Florida? And by “all the spring breakers” I mean one hitchhiker, one biker babe, one call girl, one peeping tom, one all-conference wide receiver, and one spring breaker.

Is it the corrupt and perpetually pissed off police chief with bondage gear and photos of dead girls in his trailer? Is it the mayor who’s trying to keep a lid on the killings so as not to hurt business? Is it the reverend who constantly nags his ugly daughter to go to church and stop drinking Old Milwaukee?

Or maybe it’s the biker leader who got the electric chair for a crime he didn’t commit. Or perhaps it’s the alcoholic doctor who shoots himself while he’s on the phone with the mayor. Okay, it’s probably not him. Continue reading “Nightmare Beach (1989)” →

Cannibal Apocalypse (1980)

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An observation about Vietnam vets and post traumatic stress disorder needs to be made after watching this odd hybrid of the Italian cannibal and Rambo genres. It probably would be better for your mental well-being if you are having flashbacks about how crappy the war was (specifically that time your friends bit you when you were rescuing them from a tiger cage) if your bedroom wasn’t adorned with photos from the war, including a really nicely framed and matted picture of a bunch of stuff blowing up.

John Saxon, the serious-looking dude from Enter The Dragon, plays Norman, the veteran tormented by the fact that his worthless pal bit him and now all these years later, he is starting to get the urge to take bites out of the young skanky neighbor girl. Continue reading “Cannibal Apocalypse (1980)” →

Nightmare Castle (1965)

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Dr. Arrowsmith is one of those mad scientists who is always running off to some convention or other, leaving his sexy wife at home with the hunky handyman. I’m pretty sure his wife held out as long as possible before having an affair with this dude (just until after she heard the carriage take off, I’d wager), but a sexy gal has needs that a scientist obsessed with inventing a rejuvenation formula for his girlfriend is too busy to satiate!

Dr. Arrowsmith is halfway to the Mad Scientist Convention when he realizes that he left his paper, “On the Benefits of a Young Virgin’s Blood For Rejuvenating Beauty-Impaired Hags,” in his greenhouse. He gets an eyeful when he runs into his wife and the gardener and he can’t tell where she ends and he begins. Continue reading “Nightmare Castle (1965)” →

Ulysses Against the Son of Hercules (1962)

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Ulysses Against the Son of Hercules PosterThis movie was kind of like Midnight Run, only, you know, not as good. In this Italian strongman epic, Pericles is charged with bringing in Ulysses because Ulysses offended the gods by poking out the eye of some cyclops that just happened to be the son of Neptune. (Who knew, right?)

Pericles immediately gets to work on his mission and the next thing we know he’s on a Phoenician pirate ship ramming Ulysses’ boat and taking him captive. I won’t lie to you. When I first I got a look at Ulysses, I was kind of put off by his short blonde hair, his old wore out look and his generally skeevy nature. Continue reading “Ulysses Against the Son of Hercules (1962)” →

Nightmare City (1980)

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A movie which somehow achieves the bizarre status of being ahead of its time and also a slavish copy of more popular contemporaries, Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City proves that the Italian exploitation filmmakers of yore were even better at their trade than anyone at the time even realized.

Coming in the wake of George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead and Lenzi’s fellow Italian legend Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, Nightmare City doesn’t take any pains to hide the debt it owes those two films. Of course, it should be noted that Lenzi himself stated in an interview on the Black Demons DVD that Nightmare City was not a zombie movie at all, but was about contaminated people that ran amok. Continue reading “Nightmare City (1980)” →

Nude for Satan (1974)

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Before its DVD release in 1999, Nude For Satan languished hidden in an Italian vault for a quarter century, no doubt the victim of some Illuminati scheme to protect the world from its tempting message of kinky sensuousness through devil worship.

Throughout the film, the Devil does his damnedest to coax unsuspecting viewers over to his camp. He makes a chick’s clothes disappear just by looking at her. A naked woman gets whipped by an ugly butler. He influences a gal to go lesbian. He even has a giant spider menace the star while she was only wearing a skimpy nightgown and black panties! But the Devil also does some bad stuff in the movie, too.

One of his most heinous acts was near the end of the film when he taunted us by having hot babes emerging from tombs getting naked only to interject dudes wearing paint and dressed in red thongs into the scene! And they were dancing! Continue reading “Nude for Satan (1974)” →

Revolt of the Praetorians (1964)

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RevoltofthePraetoriansPosterThe historical record of the assassination of the Emperor Domitian being a combination of mundane palace intrigue and anti-Domitian bias clearly wasn’t the stuff of a sword and sandal fetish film starring tanned hunk Richard Harrison so it was left to first time director Alfonso Brescia to make the story much more well hung with action, all in the patented Italian style of the era. So it is then that Domitian finds himself being beset by a commando raid of jugglers lead by a midget!

It is a testament to the greatness of both the film and Brescia (Cross Mission, Beast in Space) that such an event not only didn’t seem silly, but entirely necessary! After all, those jugglers carried clubs which could be used to clout unfriendly Roman guards to unconsciousness while storming the secret passage that ran underneath the palace! Continue reading “Revolt of the Praetorians (1964)” →