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 […]

From among the Video Nasties It’s long been a private suspicion of mine that nearly all of the truly important, influential films in cinema history are also bad. There are exceptions; there always are. But in the main, if a film is extraordinarily significant for this camera technique, or that type of editing trick, or […]

From among the Video Nasties The Video Nasty craze in Great Britain was nominally due to the lurid covers of two particular movies, prominently advertised in publications where too many Nice People could catch an accidental glimpse of them (the actual reason for the Nasties list was of course a complex chain of interrelated cultural, […]

From among the Video Nasties 1981’s The Burning holds the distinction of being one of the very first films on the UK’s Video Nasties list; but I am not reviewing it because of its notoriety. Nor is it here for its quality, although it’s one of the absolute best slasher movies that I’ve ever seen, […]

From among the Video Nasties As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, director Mario Bava – ex-cinematographer, one of the great color stylists of the ’60s and ’70s, and Italy’s best disciple of Alfred Hitchcock – largely invented all the rules of the giallo with 1963’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much and 1964’s Blood and Black Lace, […]

From among the Video Nasties In the fall of 1978, even before it opened in its native United States, George A. Romero’s horror-satire masterpiece Dawn of the Dead was substantially re-edited by Dario Argento for the Italian market, and retitled Zombi; because hey, that’s a good title for a zombie picture, and there hadn’t been […]