Two crimes occur in an old apartment building in Rome just a few days apart. The first, a suspicious robbery of a bachelor and the second, the brutal stabbing of the woman living just next door. Inspector Ingravallo (Pietro Germi) is called in to solve both cases and his tough, no-nonsense approach immediately begins to…
Shadow of Death – Blu-ray Review (Mondo Macabro)
Denise (Teresa Gimpera) is in a bad marriage! Well, her boring husband Peter and/or John (Larry Ward) is actually very boring, but for real, she’s kind of a dickweed. She’s having an affair with Peter and/or John’s brother named Peter and/or John (Larry Ward’s twin brother Larry Ward). They have concocted a preposterous scheme to…
Evil Judgement – Blu-ray Review (Vinegar Syndrome)
Waitress/dancer Janet (Pamela Collyer) is dating a world class cheesefart of a man named Dino (Jack Langedijk). One night, they get into an argument, and he throws her out of his apartment (before she has a chance to get dressed!), and she turns to her sex worker pal named April (Nanette Workman) for help. April…
Tenebrae – 4K UHD and Blu-ray Review (Synapse Films)
When Dario Argento finished Inferno in 1980, everyone expected him to complete the Three Mothers trilogy with another supernatural horror film. Instead, he said, “I’m going to make the greatest giallo ever made… um… again!” The first time I saw Tenebrae, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Even though some pesky Google searches had spoiled a…
Blu-ray Review – Nothing Underneath/Too Beautiful to Die – Vinegar Syndrome
Nothing Underneath (1985) is the story of Bob Boyle, a boy whose parents just moved to New England- woops, wrong Bob! This film is about Bob Crane (Tom Schanley), a Yellowstone (or Giallostone if you will) National Park ranger, who travels to Milan to find out what happened to his twin sister after he psychically…
Blu-ray Review – The Designated Victim – Mondo Macabro
The giallo was big business in Italy in the early 70’s. Yeah, it got its start in the 60’s, but it seems once Argento took flight with his Bird with the Crystal Plumage the genre really boomed. Hundreds of the films were made just in the 3-4 years after Bird…, and while not everyone took…
UHD Review – Bird with the Crystal Plumage
Bird with the Crystal Plumage is the debut film by director Dario Argento. It is not the first film in the giallo genre, having been preceded by nearly a decade by Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace and The Girl Who Knew Too Much. That being said the film pretty much put the giallo into…
Blu-ray Review – Death Has Blue Eyes – Arrow Video
Niko Mastorakis is simply a wild filmmaker. His debut film “Island of Death” is psychotic trash personified”, and his work in both horror and action throughout the 80’s and 90’s in both action, and horror would really just take things off from there. Death has Blue Eyes would be Mastorakis’ second effort as a director,…
Pulsating Peplums, Manic Mondos and Sexy Subversions: A 1960s Italian Genre Marathon
As a follow-up to my previous marathon of Italian genre films of the ’70s, I thought I’d step back in time and do the same for the swinging ’60s. While the blood and gore might not be as generous in this decade, the Italians still hopped from genre to genre with shameless aplomb, latching onto…
Confuso e nervoso in una stanza buia: A ’70s Italian Genre Marathon
So I got the notion in my head to watch a genre film every year from 1920 to 2021 this month. While I probably won’t post about all of them, I thought I’d at least publish a couple of decades of my watches for shits ‘n’ giggles. To start it all off, I chose that…