There are some movies where it comes as no surprise that Troma films decided to distribute the film, even though they didn’t actually make it. I mean who else in their more or less right state of mind would ever decide to distribute a film like Nightmare Weekend? I’m not sure there is any right […]
Read more "Nightmare Weekend (1986)"I loved this one. Wow, I didn’t expect. that. Now there is something here that I need to point out right from the start. After all, I know a lot of you out there don’t get it. They look at a film like this and immediately start complaining about the effects. All I can say […]
Read more "Rat Scratch Fever (2011)"One of the elements of the so-called “Ozploitation” era of Australian cinema that has always seemed the strangest to me is how many talented directors made a few, highly regarded films but never went on to make much of anything else. A few of them bogged down in television, turning out episodes of TV shows, […]
Read more "The Big Hurt (1986)"3-D. I don’t know why everyone keeps coming back to 3-D. It seems that there is a fairly regular cycle of 3-D movies: someone invents a new 3-D technology, or perhaps just puts out a few new 3-D movies, and the theaters are suddenly full of films with things coming at you. It happened in […]
Read more "V-World Matrix (1999)"Honorable Mention How in the world do you even begin to talk about a film like Battle Heater? There are some many things that it is — or almost is — that it’s hard to know where to start. Hama (Akira Enomoto) is an electrician who gathers all sorts of electronic junk, repairs it and […]
Read more "Batoru hîtâ [Battle Heater] (1989)"Honorable Mention It has always seemed strange to me that Peter Lorre, who had a long career of playing interesting and often sinister characters, somehow got labelled as a horror icon later in his career, in movies like The Raven, or that episode of Route 66 he did with Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, Jr. […]
Read more "Mad Love (1935)"This is a hard film to write about. Well…at least if you are worried about spoilers. After all, we are almost half-way through a horror film before any of the horror stuff actually starts. Yeah, yeah, there are little hints before that. The mysterious woman the hero sees, things like that. But it could just […]
Read more "Il mulino delle donne di pietra [Mill of the Stone Women] (1960)"Halfway into this creepy little black and white horror film about a witch, her magic mirror, and the ghost of her murdered Goddaughter, it abruptly changes course and becomes… A mad scientist film? Really? Only in Mexico. The director, Chano Ureta, is probably better remembered for The Brainiac, a film about an evil count resurrected […]
Read more "El espejo de la bruja [The Witch’s Mirror] (1962)"‘”Sinister Flesh” was the final motion picture supervised by the legendary showman and impresario Maxwell DeMille. Although photographed in 1974, it was released as a silent film. DeMille maintained the belief that motion pictures should not talk… Unfortunately the movie going public did not share his views and the film was soon forgotten. Only recently […]
Read more "Sinister Flesh (1976)"As I noted in my review of The Man with Nine Lives (1940), the late Thirties and early Forties were one of the busiest moments in Boris Karloff’s career, as he took on an impressive number of projects at different studios. And many of these were mad scientist films. Before I Hang was one of six […]
Read more "Before I Hang (1940)"
rivets on the poster 