The party line on Machete is that it’s a romping, stomping throwback to the exploitation films of the 1970s, and this line exists, I have no doubt, because the film was born as one of the four fake trailers created for 2007’s Grindhouse, itself probably the most entirely self-aware throwback to the exploitation films of […]
From among the Video Nasties When I hit upon the idea of a Video Nasties retrospective, I had little in the way of a planned schedule, but one thing was always clear, from the first instant: it had to end with Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust. Almost certainly the most widely-banned film in history, and notorious […]
Though the last few years have seen a gradual return to harder and more violent horror movies after about a decade of feeble, teen-friendly thrillers, it’s still hard to be prepared for Piranha 3D, directed by French gorehound Alexandre Aja, from a screenplay by Pete Goldfinger & Josh Stolberg. This is not a film that […]
From among the Video Nasties In 1957, director Jacques Tourneur gave the world Night of the Demon, widely agreed to be one of the finest works ever made by that horror-poetry master. It’s a magnificently atmospheric film about an American scientist running into a demon cult in Britain, made with an almost unbelievable level of […]
From among the Video Nasties The first thing to do is to simply identify the movie I’m about to review, which isn’t easily done. It’s one of those Italian exploitation pictures with such a daunting number of titles that the full list runs well into the teens; but an English-speaker only needs to know that […]
From among the Video Nasties Along the sliding scale of cinematic viciousness, there are certain projects which have the tang of notoriety about them from an entirely conceptual perspective. You do not need to see a Nazi sexploitation flick, for example, to know that “Nazi sexploitation” probably describes a pretty sleazy, trashy affair (you would […]
From among the Video Nasties I hold it a truth that bad movies are good for the soul; but a whole lot of bad movies can kind of get to you after a little while. And while I never expected this all-Video Nasties edition of the summer of blood to reveal much in the way […]
From among the Video Nasties “BANNED IN 40+ COUNTRIES!” shrieks the irritatingly over-designed (and now-defunct) website for the 1978 feature Faces of Death, though it rather innocently fails to provide a list of which countries those were, exactly. It doesn’t matter either way: for the film was of course banned all over the place, most […]
From among the Video Nasties In the special features of a very carefully and lovingly assembled 2002 DVD – the film’s first legitimate release in several years – director Nico Mastorakis admitted that the motivation behind his debut and most famous work, 1976’s Island of Death, was entirely financial. One year before he started making […]
From among the Video Nasties Thus far into the great Summer of Blood ’10 Video Nasties Extravaganza, you could be forgiven for assuming that the Video Nasties list was pretty much a bunch of hot air, trumped-up charges of obscene violence levied against movies that were mostly innocuous and badly-made, guilty perhaps of extreme bad […]
From among the Video Nasties During the Video Nasties era, movies of every stripe made it onto the DPP’s hit-list: slashers, gialli, art films, gory science fiction, and plenty besides. But two genres made a particular splash, and they’re the two genres that most reasonable people would likely consider the most appropriate candidates for a […]
When people like me are pressed to justify our love of those nasty, horrid exploitation movies of the 1970s – and I should mention that people like me are never actually pressed to make this justification, for the other people, not like me, are usually content simply to ignore people like me and dispose of […]
