Inferno is a 1980 Italian supernatural horror film written and directed by Dario Argento. It stars Leigh McCloskey, Irene Miracle, Eleonora Giorgi, Sacha Pitoeff, Daria Nicolodi, Alida Valli and Veronica Lazar.

The cinematography was by Romano Albani and Keith Emerson composed the film’s thunderous musical score. The story concerns a young man’s investigation into the disappearance of his sister, who had been living in a New York City apartment building that also served as a home for a powerful, centuries-old witch.

A thematic sequel to Suspiria (1977), the film is the second part of Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy. The concluding entry, The Mother of Tears, was released in 2007. All three films are partially derived from the concept of “Our Ladies of Sorrow” (Mater Lachrymarum, Mater Suspiriorum and Mater Tenebrarum) originally devised by Thomas de Quincey in his book Suspiria de Profundis (1845).

Argento invited his mentor, Mario Bava, to provide some of the optical effects, matte paintings and trick shots for the film. Some of the cityscape views seen in Inferno were actually tabletop skyscrapers built by Bava out of milk cartons covered with photographs. The apartment building that Rose lived in was in fact only a partial set built in the studio—it was a few floors high and had to be visually augmented with a small sculpture constructed by Bava. This sculpture was set aflame toward the end of production and served as the burning building seen in the climax.

Bava also provided some second unit direction for the production. Film critic Maitland McDonagh has suggested that Bava had his hand in the celebrated watery ballroom scene, but that sequence was shot in a water tank by Gianlorenzo Battaglia, without any optical effects work at all.Bava’s son, Lamberto Bava, was the film’s assistant director.

Unlike Suspiria, Inferno received a very limited theatrical release and the film was unable to match the box office success of its predecessor. While the initial critical response to the film was mostly negative, its reputation has improved considerably over the years. Film critic Kim Newman has called it “perhaps the most underrated horror movie of the 1980s.” In 2005, the magazine Total Film named Inferno one of the 50 greatest horror films of all time.

Plot teaser:

A young woman called Rose (Irene Miracle) becomes curious about her gloomy apartment block having found a reference to it in an old book about alchemy called “The Three Mothers”. Increasingly spooked by her strange discoveries, she writes a letter to her brother Mark (Leigh McCloskey), an American music student living in Rome. Mark’s girlfriend Sara (Eleonora Giorgi) sees the letter first and, intrigued, heads for Rome’s central library to look for the book Rose mentioned.

Supernatural forces menace Sara in the bowels of the building, and on her return home she and a neighbour (Gabriele Lavia) are murdered. Traumatised by Sara’s death, and worried for his sister’s safety, Mark travels to New York, however he finds that Rose has gone missing. In the course of his investigations he meets Rose’s friend the Countess Elise (Daria Nicolodi), a rich neurotic who lives in the same block, and a neighbouring antique dealer, the bad tempered Kazanian (Sacha Pitoeff), from whom Rose bought the book. Neither are much help, and soon Mark too is beset by occult forces. To survive he must attempt to decode a riddle pointing to an ancient evil hidden somewhere close by…

Review:

If Dario Argento’s Suspiria had some critics backing off with their hands over their ears, its 1980 follow-up Inferno bamboozled them altogether. Taking the daring colour extravagance and shrieking rock music of Suspiria down just a few notches, and selecting a cast from areas as diverse as TV soap opera Dallas (Leigh McCloskey) and art-house classic Last Year in Marienbad (Sacha Pitoeff), Argento plunged deep into his most avant-garde cinematic labyrinth.

Inferno blends Gothic mystery and modernist abstraction into something utterly unique. The story, though watchable separately to Suspiria, is linked to its sister film by references to the opium-derived writings of 19th Century decadent author Thomas De Quincey. One piece in particular, from the collection of essays “Suspiria de Profundis”, provided Argento with a few tantalizing fragments on which to base his occult mysteries. “Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow” told of the dominion of three female spirits, Mater Lachrymarum, Mater Suspiriorum and Mater Tenebrarum. Argento eagerly adopted these manifestations and begins Inferno with a voice-over that relishes their names as a litany of evil.

On first viewing, Inferno is complicated to the point of incomprehensibility. The storyline is gossamer-thin yet tangled, dissolving away as one tries to put a finger on its labyrinth of mysteries. The process of searching for clues is itself the theme of the film, so that the quests conducted by the protagonist and the viewer become enmeshed.

“What’s that, a riddle? I’m not good at riddles,” snaps one of Inferno’s gallery of grotesques, and viewers with a low tolerance for confusion and mystery may feel the same; Inferno communicates vital information with casual misdirection, while lingering enigmatically on facets that prove to be little more than weird, picturesque non-sequiturs. It requires our engagement beyond the level of narrative comprehension, and teases with the suggestion of codes to be deciphered and connections to be made.

Argento, who suffered heavily with viral hepatitis during the shoot, took his fevered fascination with the occult to greater lengths here than Suspiria. The dominant theme this time is alchemy, not witchcraft, but nevertheless both films share the mystic’s mistrust of language. (“Wherever we have spoken openly we have actually said nothing. But where we have written something in code and in pictures we have concealed the truth,” attests the genuine alchemical grimoire “Rosarium philosophorum”, published in 1550.)

In both Suspiria and Inferno the protagonists find language inadequate and obstructive, whereas the breakthroughs are invariably conducted in silence. Inferno’s Mark, who is trying to solve the mystery of his sister’s disappearance in a rambling old New York apartment block, discovers little of value by quizzing the other occupants, and finds simple verbal exchanges fraught with opaque significance. Sharing a lift with a nurse, he tries to make small-talk about his study of musicology, only to have the chit-chat go askew when she persists in hearing the word as ‘toxicology’. Another inhabitant communicates from room to room by means of a network of air vents permeating the building – her voice, which at first seems to come from nowhere, drifts in and out of audibility as it is wafted by capricious air currents.

Buy Inferno on Arrow Video Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk

Elsewhere, telephone calls are broken up by static, a mute character struggles to pass on a secret message by scratching with his fingernail, and an attempted seduction is pointillised by a loud classical record switching on and off, fitfully in synch with a flickering power failure. Even the clearly heard lines sound like the efforts of aliens to fake the English language: “He says it’s his heart. We must give him some heart medicine,” announces a gargoyle-faced woman when Mark suffers a mysterious collapse.

Mystics believe that truth can be heard “more freely, distinctly or clearly [...] with a silent speech or without speech in the illustrations of the mysteries, both in the riddles presented with figures and in words” (C. Horlacher, “Kern und Stern der vornehmsten Chymisch-Philosophischen Schrifften”, 1707). This is a theme to be found in both Suspiria and Inferno.

During the films’ respective climaxes Suspiria’s heroine Suzy and Inferno’s Mark advance along the route to knowledge in silence (although Suzy has her every move accompanied by a raging score from Goblin and Mark rides pillion with prog-rocker Keith Emerson’s ‘switched-on Verdi’ ).

Mark in particular, in a film filled with music, makes a key discovery by looking in silence at a drawing of the building where his sister disappeared, and by quietly observing an ant disappearing into a tiny hole between the floorboards of her old room. Meanwhile, on a visual level, Argento fills the screen with images of ravishing beauty. There are rooms and spaces and characters and situations in this film that feel like the syntax of dreams caught on celluloid. Argento may have fallen from grace over recent years, with a string of dubious or dreadful films, but really, who can complain when he gave us something as bold and strange and magical as this?

Inferno sits in the middle of the most intense and inventive period of Argento’s career, and in many ways can be seen as the high watermark of Italian horror. Revelling in the creative freedom afforded by the massive success of Suspiria, Argento was free to explore his vision without restraint: the result is the most daringly avant-garde horror film ever to emerge from his native country.

Stephen Thrower, Horrorpedia

Offline reading:

Dario Argento: The Man, The Myths & The Magic by Alan Jones (FAB Press) – Buy from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Dario Argento by James Gracey (Kamera Books) – Buy from Amazon.co.uk

The Profondo Rosso Store named after Argento’s 1975 classic film, was founded by director Dario Argento in 1989 and is managed by his longtime partner Luigi Cozzi (director of The Killer Must Strike Again; Contamination, Paganini Horror) who works regularly at the store. It is a horror themed merchandise shop located at Via dei Gracchi 260, Rome, Italy (near the Vatican). Cozzi has written several of the books on sale.

Luigi Cozzi at work

The shop holds regular signings with genre favourites and has the added bonus of hosting the ‘Museo degli Orrori di Dario Argento’ in the downstairs basement. This is a small audio guided tour of props from films such as Demons, Two Evil Eyes, Phenomena, Opera and The Church. Five Euros gets you in. Pray to get out…

Rob Zombie and chums meet Luigi Cozzi

Store site | Facebook

Lamberto Bava signs

Don’t visit on a Sunday, the store is closed. On any other day it is open from 10.30 till 13.00, then from 16.30 until 20.00 post siesta.

Vintage Profondo Rosso Store:

WH

Belgian Poster

Killer Fish – also Killerfish – is a 1978 Italian-French-Brazilian horror movie directed by Antonio Margheriti and starring Lee Majors, James Franciscus and Karen Black. Killer Fish is a Carlo Ponti  Filmar do Brasil production from I.T.C. Entertainment, released by Associated Film Distribution, and presented by Sir Lew Grade.

Plot teaser:

Death, deception and nature have gone wild, as piranhas protect a stolen emerald cache. Paul Diller (James Franciscus) is the mastermind of a multi-million dollar jewel heist. The team, including Robert Lasky (Lee Majors) and his girlfriend, Kate Neville (Karen Black), steal the gems and hurl them to the bottom of Brazil’s deepest lake, which is then filled with deadly man-eating piranha. Soon, all members of the team are pitted against each other in a deadly battle of wits and a deadly battle against piranhas!

Buy Killer Fish on Blu-ray from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Reviews:

“Despite the lukewarm premise and goofy script, Killer Fish still manages to be a pretty entertaining little b-movie. Majors is great as the slicker than grease tough guy ladies man and Karen Black is equally as good as the weird looking sex pot criminal chick. The true stars of this movie though are Margheriti’s miniature sets, all of which blow up really nicely and/or flood when the dam inevitably breaks later in the film. These miniatures share the spotlight with some quality plastic fish (some of which are very obviously on wires) that attack anyone who gets near the jewels.” Rock! Shock! Pop! 

“Margheriti packs the film with a lot of miniature work and explosions that are more effective than models seen in later Italian productions. At times the piranhas seem like an afterthought amidst the destruction. It’s easily digestible Saturday afternoon entertainment.” Italian Film Review

“It may not be a good movie — it’s really inept—but it’s friendly, like Mr. Majors’s quizzical squint, which is, I’m told by people who watch more televison than I do, what Mr. Majors does best. Everyone, in fact, carries on gamely, as people do at a picnic when it rains. Miss Berenson, who looks more and more like Ann Dvorak with very thin eyebrows, maintains a kind of resolute availability, always ready to talk to someone who feels low or lonely. Miss Black makes the mistake of attempting to act, and thus comes across as the party-bore, the person who attempts to steer conversation to important topics when everyone else is interested in gossip.” The New York Times

Locations:

Angra dos Reis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

IMDb | Wikipedia

WH

Demons 2 – Italian: Dèmoni 2, aka Demons 2: The Nightmare Returns -  is a 1986 Italian horror film directed by Lamberto Bava and co-written and produced by Dario Argento. It is a sequel to Bava’s 1985 film Demons and stars David Edwin Knight, Nancy Brilli, Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni as well as Argento’s youngest daughter, Asia Argento, in her debut film performance at the age of ten.

Plot teaser:

A TV documentary shows a group of teens investigating the legendary forbidden zone, in which a Demon infestation once took place. One of the teens causes the resurrection of the lifeless corpse of a demon, and the demon makes it’s way into the nearby world via the TV broadcast. An unlucky girl, having her birthday party at the time, gets possessed by the demon while watching the documentary and soon the entire building in which she lives turns into a living nightmare…

For this sequel, Simon Boswell opted to use British new wave bands such as The Smiths, The Cult, Dead Can Dance and the Art of Noise on the soundtrack as opposed to the heavy metal/rock of the original film.

 Buy Demons 2 on Synapse Films Blu-ray from Amazon.com

Buy Demons 2 on Arrow Video Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk

Reviews:

“Your response to Demons 2 will depend on how you feel about the genre. If you like your horror movies scary, suspenseful, and intelligent, this would not be your best choice for this Friday night. If you just want to see as much violence as can be crammed into an hour, however, Demons 2 delivers exactly what’s been promised. It’s a silly, gory, over-the-top collection of demon-munching vignettes.” DVD Verdict

“While it’s not as good as the first picture, it’s very well-paced and Bava does a pretty good job of creating some tension in a few scenes, maximizing the claustrophobic environment that the apartment building setting can provide. There are a few decent action and stunt sequences here, highlighted by a sequence in which a series of demons leap through a roaring fire in front of a door they’re trying to enter in order to catch their prey. It may not be realistic or particularly plausible but it makes for fun popcorn movie style entertainment.” Rock! Shock! Pop!

“I’m sure that seeing Demons 2 mere moments after viewing the first one didn’t help its case in respect to my opinion, and maybe if I would’ve been really messed up on booze, I would’ve laughed at the stupidity that this flick had to offer… but on second thought, I don’t think so! The awful pace and lack of energy would have put me to sleep either way. At least then I could’ve dreamt about a better sequel. Stick with the original Demons and call me in the morning.” Arrow in the Head

Wikipedia | IMDb

WH

Dawn of the Dead (also known internationally as Zombies and Zombi) is a 1978 American horror film written and directed by George A. Romero. It was the second film made in Romero’s Living Dead series but contains no characters or settings from Night of the Living Dead, and shows in a larger scale the zombie plague’s apocalyptic effects on society. In the film, a plague of unknown origin has caused the reanimation of the dead, who prey on human flesh, which subsequently causes mass hysteria. The cast features David Emge (Basket Case 2, Hellmaster), Ken Foree (Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3, The Devil’s Rejects), Scott Reiniger (Knightriders) and Gaylen Ross (Creepshow) as survivors of the outbreak who barricade themselves inside a suburban shopping mall.

The chaotic WGON television newsroom is attempting to make sense of the evidently wide-spread phenomenon of the dead returning to life to eat the living. Their main efforts are being channelled into simply staying on air to act as a public information system for those still alive to find places to shelter. Outside tensions have erupted at a tenement building where the residents are refusing to hand over the dead bodies of their loved ones to the authorities for them to dispose of, resulting in a SWAT team assembling to resolve the issue by force. As both sides suffer casualties at their own hands and those of the reanimated corpses, four by-standers gravitate towards each other and plot to escape this madness; SWAT soldiers Roger (Reiniger) and Peter (Foree) and a couple who work at the station, Francine (Ross) and Stephen (Emge) – it is agreed that they will take the company’s helicopter and seek sanctuary.

With the helicopter liberated, they stop off for fuel, narrowly avoiding the attention of both zombie adults and children – on a human angle, it is clear the soldiers come from very different worlds to Fran and Stephen. Still short of fuel, they set off again and happen upon a shopping mall – though surrounded by the living dead, the opportunity presented by an abundance of food and provisions, as well as a place to the secrete themselves is irresistible. Devising a system of clearing the zombies already in the mall, during which Roger is bitten but survives, and creating their own living quarters behind a false wall, they learn (Stephen included) that Fran is four months pregnant. Roger and Peter are keen to look for other survivors but under the circumstances, the others feel that staying put and essentially quitting whilst they’re ahead would be the safest option.

The images they witness on their looted television give little hope but before a decision can be agreed upon, they realise that the mall has also attracted the attention of an army of local bikers, not looking for anything except target practise and goods. Their defences breached, the foursome face a seemingly impossible situation where both human and zombie foes have designs on their hides. Can they reclaim the mall or get to the helicopter before they find themselves wandering the mall for eternity?

Although in gestation for some years before making it to the screen, the follow-up to Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead appeared a full ten years later.  The slow-burn effect of this film, plus George’s notoriously poor grasp of finances led to producer Richard Rubinstein looking further afield for investment to get the project off the ground. Salvation came in the form of the genius Italian film director, Dario Argento (Suspiria, Bird With the Crystal Plumage) who had long admired Night and could see the value in producing a sequel of some kind.

And so began an arrangement whereby the funds were made available to make the film in exchange for international distribution rights and Argento’s option to make an entirely different cut of the film for a continental audience. Romero ensconced himself in a small apartment in Rome where he quickly wrote the screenplay, allowing for filming to begin in Pennsylvania in November 1977. Key to Romero’s vision for the film was the iconic mall setting, already firmly imprinted in his mind due to the owners of the Monroeville Mall, east of Pittsburgh, in existence since 1969 and one of the first really large out of town shopping districts. His connections were enough for the owners, Oxford Development, to allow out-of-hours filming. Romero had been given a private tour of the facility and was privy to sealed off areas which had been stocked with civil defence equipment in case of a National emergency – a fact fully exploited in the film.

Casting for the film was the responsibility of John Amplas (star of Martin and later Day of the Dead) who also has a small role of a Mexican, shot by the SWAT team in the early exchange of fire. The cast was made up of largely local actors who had featured in theatre rather than film roles – indeed few of them went on to have significant film careers but still trod the boards at provincial theatres. Friends and acquaintances were coerced into appearing, amongst their number, George’s wife and assistant director, Christine Forrest (also appearing in several other of his films in an acting capacity, including Martin and Monkey Shines) George himself (seated alongside her in the TV studio sequence), Pasquale Buba (later to edit the likes of Day of the Dead and Stepfather 2), effects guru Tom Savini and Joe Pilato (Day of the Dead‘s Rhodes). Such economy and camaraderie was to pay off spectacularly. Even minor characters are given hinted-at histories which are endlessly intriguing – an eye-patched Dr Millard Rausch (Richard France) opines thoughtfully on television: “These creatures cannot be considered human….they must be destroyed on sight! … Why don’t we drop bombs on all the big cities?”

Filming at the mall could hardly have commenced at a more inconvenient time, the freezing cold temperatures and busy festive season meaning that shooting times were extremely tight (between 10pm and 8am), resulting in several occasions when members of the public were forces to consider why their shopping trip looked more like an ghoul-invested abattoir. Exterior shots were even harder to come by, only half a day a week was allotted to get the shots of the swarms of zombies roaming the car park, without pesky customers getting in shot. Scenes such as mall breakers revelling in the local bank’s bundles of bank notes necessitated a great deal of care to ensure light-fingered crew members didn’t make off with the ‘props’. The most familiar location in the mall, JC Penney’s department store, has since closed, though the mall remains, in a surprisingly familiar state. Other locations employed, such as the abandoned airfield, the gun store and the quartet’s hideout, were shot locally too, the latter being constructed in Romero’s production offices, Laurel.

Make-up and special effects were the responsibility of Tom Savini and his team, also including Gary Zeller and Don Berry, who both worked on such films as Scanners and Visiting Hours. Having already worked on the likes of Martin and Deranged, Savini was far from an enthusiastic amateur, though it was this film and the free reign Romero gave him, that helped establish his name as the go-to for gore effects for many years to come. Signature effects on Dawn include the flat-headed zombie being semi-decapitated by helicopter blades (a ludicrously dangerous effect involving an admittedly obviously fake head-piece) and the exploding head in the tenement sequence (so redolent of a similar effect in Scanners) by shooting a fake heads packed with condoms filled with fake blood and scraps of food. One bone of contention with many is the unrealistic blue/grey make-up the zombies sport, a mile away from the decaying cadavers of, say, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters. Romero has ‘validated’ this by claiming it was always his aim to have a comic-book feel to the film, though this smacks slightly of convenience. What is true is that the never-redder blood is a real eye-opener and lends itself to large-screen viewing. What the zombies lack in biological realism, they certainly gain in back story (all walks of life are considered from bride, to Buddhist monk to nurse) and gait – the now familiar stagger now being the blueprint for the correct way for all animated corpses to adopt.

Buy Dawn of the Dead 4-disc DiviMax Special Edition from Amazon.com

DISC 1: The original unrated director’s cut. NOT THE EXTENDED EDITION, which is not truly Romero’s director’s cut. This disc includes commentary with George Romero, Tom Savini, and Chris Romero along with Theatrical trailers and radio spots.

DISC 2: The extended edition, often mistaken for a ‘director’s cut.’ This disc includes an additional 12 minutes of glorious footage. Also includes commentary by producer Richard Rubinstein. The disc has a commercial for the Monroeville Mall and a memorabilia gallery.

DISC 3: The Dario Argento cut. This version of the film has less humor and more drama, released in Europe with additional music from Goblin. This version includes commentary by all four stars of the film.

DISC 4: This disc contains several documentaries including the all new ‘The Dead Walk’ (75 min) and the classic ‘Document of the Dead'; a feature-length documentary shot during the making of Dawn of the Dead. This disc also includes home movies from the set and a tour of the Monroeville Mall with actor Ken Foree.

To complement the garish visuals, Romero favoured library music, a technique he used to good effect in Night of the Living Dead. The De Wolfe library, still in regular use, was employed for this task and a variety of styles from the waltzy muzak of the shopping centre to atmospheric electronic drones to a song by The Pretty Things, “I’m a Man”, a song co-written by one Peter Reno, better known as Mancunian zero-budget film legend, Cliff Twemlow and his working partner, Peter Taylor. The most famous piece, unavailable until relatively recently, is The Gonk, by Harry Chappell (who had his own library business), written in 1965.This trumpet/xylophone led polka-like march is deliciously out of place and yet completely in keeping with the absurdity of the situation. Argento’s vision of the film as a fast-paced action movie with geysers of blood throughout required a different approach and he used the Italian-based band Goblin (incorrectly credited as “The Goblins”) extensively. Goblin was a four-piece Italian/Brazilian band that did mostly contract work for film soundtracks. Argento, who received a credit for original music alongside Goblin, collaborated with the group to get songs for his cut of the film.

A completely different ending was originally planned and, rather like its predecessor, had a resolutely unhappy ending with Peter shooting himself and Fran either purposely or accidentally stepping into the helicopter blades, only for the blades to stop spinning at the conclusion to the end credits, an indicator that they were doomed any way. These are both hinted at in the filmed version though all signs point to them being ultimately only existing on the page.

Dawn of the Dead has received a number of re-cuts and re-edits, due mostly to Argento’s rights to edit the film for international foreign language release. Romero controlled the final cut of the film for English-language territories. In addition, the film was edited further by censors or distributors in certain countries. Romero, acting as the editor for his film, completed a hasty 139-minute version of the film (now known as the Extended, or Director’s, Cut) for premier at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival. This was later pared down to 126 minutes for the U.S. theatrical release. In an era before the NC-17 rating was available from the Motion Picture Association of America, the US theatrical cut of the film earned the taboo rating of X from the association because of its graphic violence. Rejecting this rating, Romero and the producers chose to release the film un-rated so as to help the film’s commercial success. United Film Distribution Company eventually agreed to release it domestically in the United States. It eventually premiered in the US in New York City on April 20, 1979, fortunately beating Alien by a month. The film was refused classification in Australia twice: in its theatrical release in 1978 and once again in 1979. The cuts presented to the Australian Classification Board were Argento’s cut and Romero’s cut, respectively. Dawn of the Dead was finally passed in the country cut with an R18+ rating in February 1980. It was banned in Queensland until at least 1986.

Dawn Of The Dead was submitted to the BBFC in Britain for classification in June 1979 and was viewed by six examiners including the then Director of the BBFC, James Ferman.

The examiners unanimously disliked the film, though acknowledged that the film did have its merits in terms of the film-making art. The main bone of contention were the zombies themselves – were they shells without feelings or dead people with families? One examiner felt so strongly that the film glorified violence that he excluded himself from any further screenings or discussions surrounding the work.

It was agreed that cuts to the film were necessary, Ferman as self-appointed editor extraordinaire, stating that the film featured violence perpetrated against people which was “to a degree never before passed by the Board” and subsequently issued a cuts list that amounted to approximately 55 separate cuts (two minutes 17 seconds). These included images of zombie dismemberment, the machine gunning of a child zombie, a machete cutting open a zombie’s head (one of the most famous scenes!) and the shot of a zombie’s head exploding.

The following month a cut version of the film was re-submitted for re-examination and this time another team of examiners viewed the film. All of the examiners still disliked the film and some were convinced that cutting was not the solution to alleviating the possible desensitising effect that the film might have on vulnerable audiences. Despite this view, the suggestion of further extensive cuts was made and the film was once again seen by James Ferman, who subsequently issued a further one minute 29 seconds of cuts to more scenes of gory detail. At this point the distributor (Target International Pictures) was worried that the film would not be ready in time to be screened at the London Film Festival, so James Ferman suggested that the BBFC’s in-house editor create a version that would be acceptable within the guidelines of the X certificate.

In September 1979 Ferman wrote to the distributor exclaiming that “a tour de force of virtuoso editing has transformed this potential reject from a disgusting and desensitising wallow in the ghoulish details of violence and horror to a strong, but more conventional action piece…The cutting is not only skilful, but creative, and I think it has actually improved a number of the sequences by making the audience notice the emotions of the characters and the horror of the situation instead of being deadened by blood and gore”.

When the work was first submitted for classification for video in 1989 it arrived in its post-BBFC censored version, now clocking in at 120 minutes 20 seconds. However, under the Video Recordings Act 1984 (VRA) , the film was to be subjected to another 12 seconds of cuts to scenes of zombie dismemberment and cannibalism. In 1997 Dawn Of The Dead was picked up by a new distributor (BMG) who took the decision to submit the film in its original uncensored state, with a running time of 139 minutes.

This time the BBFC only insisted on six seconds of cuts. However, it was in 2003 that the film was finally passed at 18 uncut by the BBFC, with the examiners feeling that under the 2000 BBFC Guidelines it was impossible to justify cutting the work.

Internationally, Argento controlled the Euro cut for non-English speaking countries. The version he created clocked in at 119 minutes. It included changes such as more music from Goblin than the two cuts completed by Romero, removal of some expository scenes, and a faster cutting pace. Released in Italy in September 1978, it actually debuted nearly nine months before the US theatrical cut. In Italy it was released under the full title Zombi: L’alba dei Morti Viventi, followed in March 1979 by France as Zombie: Le Crépuscule des Morts Vivants, in Spain as Zombi: El Regreso de los Muertos Vivientes, in the Netherlands as Zombie: In De Greep van de Zombies, by Germany’s Constantin Film as Zombie, and in Denmark as Zombie: Rædslernes Morgen.

Despite the various alternate versions of the film available, Dawn of the Dead was successful internationally. Its success in the then-West Germany earned it the Golden Screen Award, given to films that have at least 3 million admissions within 18 months of release.

Recently, Romero has claimed that to be successful artistically, all horror films must be either political or satirical. Such a ludicrous statement may explain the director’s poor run of recent films but here it is rarely more apposite. The consumer-angle to the zombies mindless wandering is difficult to argue, though has now been stated so many times it’s in danger of overtaking the fact that the film is a magnificent piece of work; multi-layered in both character and plot (whatever became of the soldiers taking their boat down the river?) and influential to a generation of film-makers, as a horror film there are few better, a view echoed many, even the notoriously fickle Roger Ebert who gave it a great many thumbs up. The film has also spawned a range of spoofs, copycat films, a 2004 remake by Zack Snyder, toys, games and merchandise. In 1985, Romero temporarily concluded his zombie fascination with Day of the Dead.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

With thanks to the BBFC for details about the film’s UK release and Nick Richmond for his recent snaps of Monroeville Mall.

Monroeville Mall – then and now:

Nick takes the easier route.

Zombie-fleer or lift vandal, you decide.

Thai Poster

Natura contro – English: ‘Against Nature’ – also known as The Green Inferno and Cannibal Holocaust II, is a 1988 Italian cannibal film directed by mondo director Antonio Climati. It stars Mario Merlo, Fabrizio Merlo, May Deseligny, Pio Maria Federici and Bruno Corazzari. Climati had no intention of making a sequel to Cannibal Holocaust, and the title was used by distributors of the film to cash in on the success and notoriety of the earlier film.

Plot teaser:

Four friends head into the jungle to locate a lost professor but instead face off against treasure hunters who are torturing and killing natives…

This was the last film directed by Climati, who had gained notoriety as a major player in the mondo ‘shockumentary’ film genre. Although fictional, this film deals with many common tropes of mondo films, including exotic customs and locales, and cruel violence. Strangely, however, the film appears to show compassion towards animals, while a main staple of mondo films is often real violence towards animals.

Reviews:

“On paper an Italian jungle adventure film directed by someone of Climati’s exploitation pedigree sounds like a truly tantalising prospect, but for whatever reason his heart just doesn’t seem to have been in the project and as a result the Italian jungle picture subgenre draws to a close with a whimper as opposed to a roar. So rest assured that The Green Inferno is a thoroughly feeble, lifeless and tiresome Italian led trek up the Amazon, which even the most dedicated of Italian exploitation completists could probably live without embarking on.” Cult Movie Forums

“This film is surprisingly bad. Natura Contro came out after the cannibal genre had already lost its popularity, so it seems by this point Italians have completely forgotten how to make a cannibal film. The film is filled with countless subplots and idiotic characters.” Who The Real Cannibals Are

Buy DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Wikipedia | IMDb

WH

The Bloodstained Lawn – Italian: Il prato macchiato di rosso - is a 1973 Italian horror film written and directed by Riccardo Ghione. It stars Marina Malfatti (Seven Blood-stained Orchids; They’re Coming to Get You; The Red Queen Kills 7 Times), Enzo Tarascio (The Designated Victim; The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave; The Dead Are Alive), Nino Castelnuovo, Daniela Caroli, George Willing (Necropolis; Who Saw Her Die?), Claudio Biava, Barbara Marzano (Torso; The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance), Dominique Boschero (Libido; The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire; They’re Coming to Get You) and Lucio Dalla. The film’s working title was apparently Vampiro 2000.

Plot teaser:

A couple of wandering hippies meet a man by the name of Antonio who takes them to the home where he lives with his sister and brother-in-law. There they meet several strange characters: a gypsy woman, a prostitute and a disturbing drunk. The host tells them that he is a producer of wines and loves to entertain strange people. In fact he is a madman who has created a mechanism that can suck blood from human bodies…

Reviews:

“The underlying concepts are watered down by the ample scenes of nonsensical behaviour – like our hippy lovebirds showering in wine, and skipping hand in hand to some groovy hipster music playing in the background. All this aside, The Bloodstained Lawn is a decent romp, far more interesting than it really deserves to be, and well worth checking out if you like your Euro-thriller/horrors with a curious edge.” The Gore Splattered Corner

“Sometimes a film uses tropes that are recognisable from the vampire genre and it is enough to see it as a take on the genre. I felt that this did, but it is entirely up for debate and I expect that many will disagree. The film is also very surreal – and I don’t just mean the flamboyant ties, tied as bowties, worn by Enzo Tarascio’s character Dr. Antonio Genovese.” Taliesin Meets The Vampires

“Unbridled kitsch dominates every shot, putting it in the same category as Ed D. Wood’s or Ted V. Mikels’ most staggering works. To find other films of this ilk you have to seek out Cesare Canevari’s ‘opera omnia’ or the rarest Renato Polselli films. This is not your usual so-bad-its-good film; in fact it’s not that bad… it’s simply the UGLIEST! Every aspect of Il prato from dialogue to photography, from costumes to sets, is the epitome of Seventies ribaldry. The script is decidedly delirious and the actors all appear to be high on drugs. Never mind the clumsy social message – the wealthy bourgeoisie draining the blood of the homeless to get richer – just enjoy the mind-boggling experience.” Simone Romano, Delirium fanzine

Wikipedia | IMDb

WH

Wallestein il mostro – English: “Wallestein the Monster” – is an Italian fumetti adult comic character who appeared in five series of comics published by Edifumetto from 1972. For the first series, Edifumetto published nine issues; for the second series, nineteen issues in 1973; for the third series, fifteen issues in 1974; for the fourth series, eighty issues from 1975 to 1980; the fifth series (“Nuova Serie”) started in 1981. Over the years, the series has been designed by Cubbino, Romanini, Magnus (co-creator of Diabolik and Kriminal) and anonymous artists.

As with most Italian fumetti, the visuals feature abundant female nudity and gore. Between 1977 and 1980 the comic was also published in France by Elvifrance.

Wallestein is an horrible monster whom, having avenged the murder of the Count of Wallestein, adopts the Count’s identity by donning a rubber mask.

Image credits: Comic Vine | And Everything Else Too | Pinterest

Contamination .7 – also known as Creepers, Troll 3, Troll III: Contamination Point 7, and The Crawlers - is a 1993 Canadian-Italian horror film directed by Joe D’Amato and Fabrizio Laurenti, produced by Filmirage. It stars Mary Sellers, Jason Saucier, Bubba Reeves and Chelsi Stahr. Costumes were designed by former Black Emanuelle star Laura Gemser.

Plot teaser:

After a small town nuclear power plant dumps hazardous waste into a forest surrounding the small town, people begin dying in increasingly gruesome ways. People cannot pinpoint the source of the deaths, until the EPA investigates, proving that the forests’ roots had mutated due to the waste, beginning to kill and eat people. The plants attempt to break loose, however the EPA arrives again and bulldozes the plants, killing them, leaving the possibility that some more plants may have survived…

Like Troll 2, Troll 3 has no plot connection to the original Troll, features no trolls, and is also a horror film, not fantasy-comedy. The film has none of the original cast, nor storyline continuation, from either Troll film. An early script was made with the original cast in mind. In one scene in a bar, a banjo-centric song from Troll 2 can be heard in the background.

Buy on DVD from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Reviews:

“If you’ve got some like minded friends that love to make fun of bad movies, then order up a pizza, get the beer flowing and have fun with this one.  Or if you’re like me and you can count the amount of friends willing to subject themselves to this level of cinematic cheese on one finger, then order that pizza (get extra cheese… treat yourself!) and your favorite beverage and make it a bad movie night. Don’t miss it!” Midnight Cinephile

“Attacking the performances is pointless — these people know how bad they are, and given the script their forced to work with, I can’t exactly blame them. The special effects, meanwhile, are almost nonexistent; watching the villainous roots in action is quite a sight to see, particularly during the film’s chaotic, nonsensical finale. However, any movie that features a town banding together to dispose of several dozen barrels of dangerously radioactive toxic waste shouldn’t be taken seriously, especially when someone like D’Amato is driving the bus. As awful as the picture is, it would probably be more fun to criticize the filmmakers for what they actually got right. When I figure out what that is, I’ll let you know.” Bloody Good Horror

“To put it simply: There is nothing fun here. The movie has no nudity, no gore (apart from a quick scene where a character gets a root into his mouth and having it exit through his eye but it is so poorly made that it doesn’t really matter), no exploitative materials at all. It is just… Dull. I can’t even see it working when watching it with friends over a case of beer. It is that bad. A major avoid.” Rubber Monster Fetishism

Wikipedia | IMDb

WH

Stage Fright  – aka StageFright: Aquarius, Bloody Bird, Deliria - is a 1987 Italian horror film directed by Michele Soavi. The film stars Barbara Cupisti, David Brandon and Giovanni Lombardo Radice. Written by George Eastman (writing as Lew Cooper), the story combines elements of the giallo and slasher film genres. Joe D’Amato served as the film’s producer. It was Soavi’s first feature film as director; he had previously worked as an assistant director for Joe D’Amato, Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava and had previously directed the music video “The Valley” for Argento’s Phenomena as well as the documentary Dario Argento’s World of Horror.

Plot teaser

A group of young dancers rehearsing in an old theatre is accidentally locked-in for the night – but not alone. In the shadows, someone is watching, waiting and selecting victims at his demented leisure… tonight, deranged serial killer Irving Wallace has escaped and is about to put on his own real-life horror show!

The scene where Brett bows in front of the mirror to reveal Wallace standing directly behind him is a homage to Dario Argento’s film Tenebre (1982), which Michele Soavi was an assistant director on.

During a screening at the Fantasia Film Festival fans threw white feathers from the theater balcony which showered down on the audience in a homage to the haunting finale of the film.

Stage Fright is showing at the 2014 Mayhem Film Festival in Nottingham.

Buy Stage Fright on Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Reviews

“Soavi’s direction is solid, displaying a keen visual eye for audacious giallo-styled frissons that bolster the production with a classy elegance all its own. In true Italian style, Soavi pulls no punches either when it comes to his marvelously gruesome murder setpieces, even managing to generate some well-handled tension along the way to the obligatory twist ending. Clearly derivative, but eminently unforgettable.” Sex Gore Mutants

“Here’s a maniac that finally seems to be having a grand old time, without disrupting scenes with endless one-liners (like that Krueger guy). All in all,Stage Fright is the last truly great slasher, maintaining the integrity of the form while making it leaner and even more cinematic, and spinning it with a self-reflexive twist.” Cinema Gonzo

“The first two acts of the movie has some very stylish shots, but there’s no doubt that the pedestrian nature of the story (killer chases people) keeps things a tad neutral. However, the last 30 minutes are the movie’s saving grace, as the production design and Soavi’s interesting set-ups combine to create a slasher film with a very unique look. Also, the movie is able to create some actual suspense, which is actually rare for a movie of this genre.” DVD Sleuth

Wikipedia |  IMDb

WH

Morituris is a 2011 Italian horror film directed by Raffaele Picchio and starring Valentina D’Andrea, Andrea De Bruyn, Désirée Giorgetti, Francesco Malcom, Giuseppe Nitti and Simone Ripanti.The film had its world premiere on July 30, 2011, at the Fantasia Festival. As a result of its graphic content, the film has apparently been banned in Italy. Synapse Films are rumoured to have the US rights.

Plot teaser:

While out driving, three young men meet two beautiful women and convince them to go with them to a rave out in a remote location. Once there, the women realize that there is no rave and that the men lied to them in order to beat and rape them. The women try to escape, only to accidentally unleash a pack of zombie gladiators that proceed to attack the group as a whole…

The film was partly inspired by true events known as the “Circeo Massacre” – in Italian: “Massacro del Circeo” –  which occurred primarily in the commune of San Felice Circeo, Italy at the end of September of 1975. Three young men raped and tortured a 19-year-old woman and a 17-year-old girl for two days, then murdered the woman; the girl avoided being murdered by pretending to be dead.

Reviews:

“Morituris is definitely not what you expect. I’ll leave it at that. But in the end, it offers what you want out of a film about gladiator zombies: brutal kills and evil people. The less known about Morituris the better before going into it, but once in, gore and horror fans are not going to want this film to end!” Aint It Cool News

“Picchio, (screenplay) writers Gianluigi Perrone and Tiziano Martella created a film that takes a little while to get up to speed and sets you on the wrong foot at first half but then becomes a relentless piece of horror cinema with scenes (of abuse) that would make even some avid fans cringe. If you think you can handle that, Morituris comes highly recommended.” Slashing Through

“Morituris taps into everything I used to love about the gore, horror and sleaze of old-school Italian genre cinema. Violent sexploitation, gothic horror and old school survival horror is served up here, but with a modern approach. Goddamn, this may well be one of the most provocative movies to come out of Italy in the last twenty years, and definitely a delightful step towards the magic of Italian horror of yesteryear! It would undeniably have put a smile on Lucio Fulci’s face!” CiNEZiLLA

Wikipedia | IMDb

WH

The Sandman is a 2015 Canadian/German horror film project to be directed by Italian director Dario Argento (Deep Red; Inferno; Trauma) from a screenplay by David Tully (The Village; Djinn). The ‘Godfather of Punk’ Iggy Pop (Hardware; Suck) will play a serial killer dubbed “The Sandman“. Claudio Simonetti, Argento‘s longtime musical collaborator, will score the movie and a theme tune has been donated by Scott Weiland. 

The film is currently seeking funding via Indiegogo, the world‘s largest crowdfunding platform. The Canadian and German film production team lead by producers Daniela Tully, Jeff Rogers and Rob Heydon, is looking to raise $250,000. The campaign is part of Indiegogo‘s horror month. 

Press release:

Maybe other places, you’ve heard about other kinds of Sandmen — forget everything you’ve heard. This guy doesn’t put sand in your eyes so you drift peacefully to sleep — don’t you wish! This Sandman is the real deal, going back to the dark, original German legend: the REAL Sandman was someone who stole the eyes of any children that wouldn’t just close them and go to sleep… then he’d go feed them to his hungry children on the moon. Try telling that version to the kiddies next time they won’t go to bed, and see where it gets you! While you’re at it, show them a copy of this image!

Our film tells the story of Nathan, a young (and dashingly handsome, natch) student in the city who struggles to forget his childhood trauma at the hands of the serial killer dubbed “The Sandman”: a masked killer who murders his victims with a lethally jagged melon spoon (yes, you read that right!), and claims their eyes as trophies (hey, everybody needs a hobby!). Nathan killed The Sandman years ago, on Christmas Eve, after he witnessed the murder of his mother (and you think YOU’VE got childhood hangups!)…until he sees the beautiful (again, natch) woman who lives in the apartment across the way dying at the hands of that same masked killer (don’t you hate when that happens?). This brutal murder plunges Nathan into an odyssey into the night country of his past, his dreams…and the buried secrets of… you guessed it!… The Sandman, who’s on the hunt for plenty more eye candy!

IMDb

It’s hardly surprising that the most notorious, indefensible, loathsome and reprehensible movies ever made are those that exploring nasty Nazi sex and violence fantasies. Even the most liberal of critics seem reluctant to defend these goose-stepping abominations, and they sit at the top of that sorry list known as the Video Nasties.

In fact, the pulp fiction and cinema industry had been exploiting the Nazi nightmare since the war ended. Cheesy B-movies like Hitler’s Madman, They Saved Hitler’s Brain; She Demons and The Flesh Eaters exploited the idea that mad Nazi scientists were up to mischief in remote South American jungles and on desert islands, attempting to revive the fortunes of the Third Reich by somehow resurrecting Adolf Hitler or his marching minions. These movies played on knowledge of the very real mad scientist experiments of Joseph Mengele, which reached levels of atrocity that no fictional mad doctor could hope to match.

The theme ran through to the end of the 1960s with films like Search for the Evil One, and was still potent enough to turn up late into the 1970s – The Boys from Brazil had Mengele and a Jewish Nazi hunter racing to track down clones of Hitler and influence them to their way of thinking before they reached adulthood – the question perhaps being was Hitler a result of nature or nurture – while an episode of The New Avengers TV series saw Peter Cushing (also involved with Nazi zombies in Shock Waves) being forced to bring a preserved Hitler back to life on a remote Scottish island!

However, the grubbiest Naziploitation boom began when the 1960s saw the loosening of censorship rules.

Unable to show much actual sex, mid Sixties adult films would fill the gaps with violence, often S&M tinged. Showing a disregard for any sense of taste or decency, it was clearly only going to be a matter of time before some enterprising producer realised the – ahem – ‘erotic’ potential of the Nazi concentration camp. That man was Bob Cresse, and his film was the notorious Love Camp 7, a worryingly personal movie.

Directed by Lee Frost, the film sets the ground rules for the flood of titles which came almost a decade later. It tells the story of two American female spies who are sent to a Nazi ‘love camp’ in order to help another informant escape. This they do, but only after an hour of unrelenting torture and abuse. Women are depicted as being sexually abused, whipped, strapped to unspeakable devices and generally treated badly throughout the movie.

Cresse played the Commandant himself with a barely disguised gloating glee. He was, to a large extent, living out his own sado-masochistic fantasies in the nasty narrative, and stories abound about how he would insist on take after take of the torture scenes, until the suffering on screen was seemingly matched in reality by the actress.

After this pioneering effort, the genre was suspiciously quiet until 1973. It was then that sleaze producer David Friedman decided that the time was right to revive the dubious concept. He went to Canada and produced Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS under the pseudonym Herman Traegar, a name that remained shrouded in mystery until Friedman finally owned up a couple of decades later. Why the false name? Perhaps some things were just too sleazy for even ‘The Mighty Monarch of the Exploitation Film World’ to admit to.

And Ilsa is very sleazy. The title role was taken by busty nightclub performer Dyanne Thorne, who attacked the part with relish. She’s a cold, heartless sadist who is first seen castrating a male prisoner who is of no further sexual use. During the rest of the film, she tortures women, takes part in appalling experiments, and has sex with the only male inmate (American, of course) who can satisfy her.

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is a breathtakingly tasteless affair, yet it does have a (warped) sense of humour. Much of the action is so OTT, it teeters the film into the realms of ‘camp’, and it’s this which saves the film. Two sequels followed, though neither had Nazi themed story lines, instead having Ilsa as entirely separate characters in each.

While Ilsa was shaking the drive-ins, the art house theatres were rocking to The Night Porter, in which Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling indulged in assorted sexual antics that stopped short of the atrocities performed by Ilsa, yet still dwelled indulgently in uniform fetishism and Nazi decadence. The film was another box office success, and suddenly, the Italians – never slow to spot a trend – began to sit up and pay attention. Or stand to attention, perhaps?

The floodgates were opened in 1976 by Salon Kitty, which managed to combine the sleaze of Ilsa with the artiness of The Night Porter. The masterpiece of Nazi sleaze cinema, Tinto Brass’ twisted epic switches from making serious political points about the impotence of fascism (often with heavy handed political symbolism) to lip-smacking scenes of sexual perversion with alarming ease. It also established another great Nazi sexploitation plot-line: Salon Kitty is a brothel with an ulterior motive. SS officers use hidden microphones to listen out for any soldiers who might be less committed to the Third Reich cause than they should be.

The same year saw Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, one of the most notorious films ever made. Based on De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini transposed the story to Fascist Italy, and the parade of atrocities committed by the ‘libertines’ – all fascist big wigs – would become as significant a factor in several Naziploitation films as the uniforms, the prison camps and the soft porn.

The popularity of Salon Kitty ensured it would be followed by a frenzy of titles, mostly emerging from Italy and France. Best known of these in Britain is SS Experiment Camp, which was one of the original ‘video nasties’, thanks in no small part to Go Video’s enthusiastic advertising campaign. The enterprising label took full page adverts in the top video magazines, showing the film’s cover – a topless girl, crucified upside-down. Some magazines found the image offensive, so Go supplied a version that had the breasts covered by a bra… this version was, apparently, considered perfectly acceptable.

After all that, Sergio Garrone’s film is quite ordinary, more softcore melodrama than anything… but there is at least one stand-out moment. The evil camp Commandant is devoid of testicles, and so decides to take those belonging to the one nice-guy guard who, in the great tradition of the ‘good Nazi’, hates what is going on. This is done via some gruesome medical stock footage. Our hero is then seen having sex with his girlfriend, at first blissfully unaware that anything is amiss. Once the awful truth emerges, however, he rushes into the Commandant’s office and screams the immortal line, “You bastard, what have you done with my balls?”…

As for the rest of the movies: all have moments of outrageous bad taste, but are mainly dull, with mind-numbing footage of partisans and battle-field stock footage padding out the moments between softcore groping and limp flagellation. Garrone returned to the genre in the somewhat sleazier SS Camp 5 – Women’s Hell, which saw Sirpa Lane – more used to arthouse Euro sleaze like La Bete and Charlotte – subjected to assorted indignities in a concentration camp. Without the ‘camp’ (no pun intended) aspect of SS Experiment Camp, it proved even less fun to watch.

The Beast In Heat is noteworthy as one of the rarest video nasties, but is also one of the dullest Naziploitation movies out there because the tasteless footage was appended to an already existing war movie. Thus, we have to endure seemingly endless footage of partisans fighting off their German oppressors interspersed with occasional torture scenes that would be repulsive if they weren’t so amateurish.

The infamous scene where Sal Boris (also in the aforementioned Salon Kitty), the titular beast who is the result of fiendish experiments overseen by the Ilsa-like camp commandant, bites off a woman’s pubic hair is fairly outrageous, but it’s a brief moment of bad taste respite from the general tedium. The attention to detail in the film is perhaps summed up by the clumsy on-screen title – Horrifing (sic) Experiments of the SS, Last Days. [Read Daz Lawrence's review on Horrorpedia]

Hack director Luigi Batzella – using the pseudonym Ivan Kathansky (or Katansky, depending on how much attention the credits producer was paying) – also made Kaput Lager: Gli ultimi giorni delle SS, released on video in the UK as The Desert Tigers (amusingly, The Dessert Tigers on a Dutch video sleeve mispelling). This was an even more ham-fisted effort, with exploitative prison camp footage grafted onto the end of a dull war movie starring Richard Harrison.

The Deported Women of the SS Special Section has a certain gritty authenticity to it that makes it stand out from the other films, but is otherwise rather average. It’s one of the more downbeat Naziploitation movies, despite the best efforts of director Rino Di Silvestro (Werewolf Woman) to crank up the sleaze factor, but its saving grace is the presence of Euro cult favourite John Steiner (Shock), who refuses to take it at all seriously and instead delivers a fantastic, eye-rolling, ranting and raving performance. It’s worth seeing the film for this alone, as he flits from obsessing over an inmate he’s known in the pre-war years and buggering his faithful servant Doberman.

The Gestapo’s Last Orgy also uses the ‘camp commandant obsessed with a prisoner’ plot, and becomes a curious hybrid of The Night Porter, Salon Kitty and the Nazi atrocity film. It’s a classier production that most examples of the genre, at least visually – a fait amount of money was obviously lavished here. This, the stylish direction and decent performances goes to make the atrocities seem all the more unsavoury – There are moments of such astonishing repulsiveness that you can barely credit them being in such a handsome film – the throwing of a menstruating woman to a pack of dogs, the burning alive of a woman during the cannibal orgy and the dipping of another woman in a pit of lime. The female cast are naked for much of the film and of course there are numerous sexual assault scenes. It’s so shamelessly horrible that you have to admire its audacity, especially as none of it seems to be pandering to the audience – this isn’t soft porn by any stretch of the imagination, and it seems designed to repulse. In the end, the film is perhaps best seen as a prime example of 1970s Italian excess, where restraint was for wussies. It’s from the same mindset that brought us films as diverse as Cannibal Holocaust and Suspiria, the notion that too much is never enough and that everything should be shown. It’s not on the same level as those two films, of course, but it is strangely admirable within its own perimeters.

Less ambiguous was the particularly unpleasant Women’s Camp 119, directed by Bruno Mattei (Hell of the Living Dead; Rats – Night of Terror). This unpleasant film seems designed to leave a bad taste in the mouth, even managing to work actual concentration camp footage into the credits sequence (an all-time low in filmmaking?). Yet it doesn’t have the style, the audacity, or the intelligence to get away with its parade of grim atrocities. (Read Stephen Thrower’s review on Horrorpedia)

As well as the films exploiting concentration camp atrocities, there were also a number of less brutal films exploiting the uniform fetish. SS Girls was another blatant imitation of Salon Kitty and The Night Porter while The Red Nights of the Gestapo was a fairly sumptuous affair that tended to concentrate on the decadence of the SS top brass. Elsa – Fraulein SS, on the other hand, was cheap and deliciously tacky, and despite the title similarity to Ilsa She Wolf of the SS (coincidence I’m sure!), was more of a T&A romp than a parade of atrocities, following the Salon Kitty theme of prostitutes being used to spy on Nazi officers who might be slipping in their love for the Third Reich. Many of the same cast and crew returned in Special Train for Hitler and Helga, She Wolf of Spilberg, which utilised the same sets and much the same plot.

Erwin C.Dietrich’s Frauleins in Uniform is a softcore movie that is notable for the strange normalising of the Nazis. While it briefly deals with the horrors of war, it does so from the point of view of the German army recruits – female German army recruits – and while there are hints at a totalitarian state, much of the film is surprisingly uncritical of the Nazi war machine. There’s little in the way of dramatic threat (though one deserter is caught and told “we have ways of making you talk”!), but the constant stream of bare flesh and dialogue like “cleanliness is next to Naziness” ensure that it passes by quite painlessly.

Meanwhile, American porno producers were dabbling in the concept with Prisoner in Paradise and Hitler’s Harlots. But for whatever reasons, the theme didn’t catch on in the adult movie theatres. In Hong Kong, film-makers replaced Nazis with Japanese invaders and unleashed the likes of Concentration Camp for Girls and Bamboo House of Dolls, the latter of which was used as an example of the worst excesses of cinema by British BBFC censor James Ferman during lectures about censorship. This sub-genre eventually led to the notoriously nasty Men Behind the Sun series.

By 1978, the Nazi sexploitation genre was all but dead. Perhaps the moral outrage and censorship problems which greeted such films proved to be too much trouble for producers only interested in profit. Who knows? Whatever the reason, there hasn’t been a single significant addition to the cycle since, making it one of cinema’s most short-lived genres. The only films to dabble in the genre now are zero budget affairs aimed squarely at the cult horror audience.

Keith Crocker’s Blitzkreig: Escape from Stalag 69 (2008) attempts to channel the spirit of the Italian films, but despite star Tatyana Kot spending the whole film naked, either gunning down Nazis or (more frequently) being tortured, plentiful nudity – male and female – throughout, two castrations, tongue pulling, eye stabbing, throat slitting and plenty more gory mayhem, all delivered with bargain basement FX, the film still manages to be the dullest Naziploitation film since The Beast in Heat. Why it needed to be 135 minutes long is anyone’s guess.

More interesting, but still unrealised beyond being a fake trailer in Grindhouse, is Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS, which has Sybil Danning taking on the Ilsa role and Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu. The trailer was, by far, the best thing about the whole Grindhouse project and hopefully Zombie will eventually get around the making the complete film.

It’s understandable that many people will be upset at the idea of Nazi fantasies. But I’ve never yet come across a genuine fascist amongst fans of this grubby sub-genre, and even the worst of the films doesn’t attempt to portray the Third Reich as being remotely admirable. If we can laugh at sit-coms like Allo Allo (okay, no-one should laugh at Allo Allo, but you know what I mean…), then surely we can be amused by these cheesy, high camp exercises in bad taste without feeling guilty about it? In fact, it’s probably our duty to do so, reminding ourselves that Nazis are little more than a bad joke in a good uniform…

Heinz Von Sticklegruber

Nazis on Horrorpedia: BloodRayne: The Third Reich | Cataclym aka The Nightmare Never Ends | Dead Snow: Red vs Dead | The Flesh Eaters | Frankenstein’s Army | Night of the Zombies | Night Train to Terror | Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz | She Demons | Women’s Camp 119

Amazonia: The Catherine Miles Story is a 1985 Italian horror film directed by Mario Gariazzo (The Sexorcist; Play Motel; Madness) as Roy Garret. It was released in the US as White Slave and the Italian title is Schiave bianche: violenza in Amazzonia.

The film stars Elvire Audray (The Scorpion with Two Tails; Ironmaster; Vampire in Venice), Will Gonzales, Dick Campbell, Andrea Coppola, Dick Marshall, Alma Vernon, Grace Williams and Sara Fleszer.

Plot teaser:

An 18 year-old woman, Catherine Miles, graduates from her English boarding school and visits her parents in the Amazon. While on a boat trip, her parents are brutally murdered and she is taken prisoner by a local cannibal tribe.

In order to survive, she adopts the customs of the tribe with the help of a warrior who has fallen in love with her, all the while planning vengeance for her parents’ death.

She later escapes, and now free, she goes to find who exactly was behind the death of her parents…

Buy Amazonia: The Catherine Miles Story on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Buy White Slave on DVD from Amazon.com

Reviews:

“White Slave might be described as a kinder, gentler cannibal movie. Indeed, cannibalism itself rarely enters into the story … There’s still some fairly grisly violence on display here (after all, Katherine’s keepers are headhunters, even if they never go so far as to eat their victims), but the German audiences who saw this movie under the title Cannibal Holocaust 2 surely left the theater disappointed?

There is, however, one very conspicuous point of similarity between White Slave and Ruggero Deodato’s cannibal films. Like them, White Slave takes the natives’ side when it comes to the question of whether the white man or the Indio is the true savage.” 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting

“You wouldn’t expect it, or maybe you would, what do I know, but the gorgeous Elvire Audray and the handsome Will Gonzales have great chemistry together as the film’s cross cultural lovers. I’m always impressed when actresses are able to convey emotion while topless, and Elvire is no different in that regard, as she is able to maintain the dignity of her craft without the aid of a top. I mean, there are not many actresses out there who can look sexy while burying their parent’s badly decomposed heads in a muddy clearing.” House of Self Indulgence

“This film works almost despite itself. The characters are often vapid and Catherine can be aggravating at times, but they’re still likable characters. The death scenes in the film are shoddily made, but they are at least conceptually interesting, like a man’s face eaten by ants.” Who the Real Cannibals Are

Further reading: Jungle Holocaust: Cannibal Tribes in Exploitation Cinema (article)

Wikipedia | IMDb | Image thanks: House of Self Indulgence

Posted by Adrian J Smith using information via Wikipedia that is freely and legally available to share and remix under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Review quotes are attributed and links are provided to relevant sites or sources. Horrorpedia.com supports the sharing of information and opinions with the wider horror community.

Il cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco ovvero: Dracula in Brianza, internationally released as Dracula in the Provinces,  Bite Me, Count and Young Dracula, is a 1975 Italian horror-comedy film directed by Lucio Fulci. Several writers contributed to what is more sex comedy than outright horror; Pupi Avati (Macabre), Mario Amendola, Bruno Corbucci (Django), Enzo Jannacci and Giuseppe Viola.

Il Cavaliere Costante Nicosia (Lando Buzzanca) is the owner of Italy’s most successful toothpaste company and enjoys all the trappings there-in, including a beautiful wife, Mariu (Sylva Koscina, Lisa and the Devil), from whom he inherited the firm, and a mistress, Liu (Christa Linder, 1971’s Alien Terror). Though he adopts a bullying management style, he holds very superstitious beliefs, regularly rubbing the hump of his hunchbacked assistant, Peppino (Antonio Allocca) for good luck and coercing his virgin housemaid to urinate over the remains of a broken mirror to cancel out the impending bad luck. Events take an even more peculiar twist when on a business trip to Romania, he makes the acquaintance of Count Dragalescu (John Steiner, Tenebrae) who suggests a visit to his castle which is in the area. When Nicosia learns his meeting has been cancelled, he takes up the offer but after a sedate beginning, the weekend gets rather friskier, the Count preferring to dine in the nude alongside a bevy of similarly disrobed revellers.

A surfeit of booze leads to him passing out and, upon awakening, he finds himself in bed alongside the Count. Unclear what he has missed whilst out cold, he returns home but soon fears that the Count may have had his wicked way with him, leaving him ‘infected’ with homosexuality. After visiting his doctor for advice, he finds sucking the blood of his mistress controls his urges but he craves to return to his previous life and visits both his Great Aunt (whose earlier curse he now takes very seriously) and the Magician of Noto (Ciccio Ingrassia, The Exorcist: Italian Style) in Sicily for help. The obviously phony sage tells him the curse on him will be lifted only if he re-employs his brother-in-law. Nicosia leaves, where it’s revealed to the viewers that the whole thing was a deliberate stunt organised by his in-laws into tricking Nicosia into giving his brother-in-law’s job back. Returning home far from being cured, he responds to his needy wife’s sexual advances by plunging his fang-like teeth into her bare bottom during foreplay.

Nicosia returns to his bullish habits, re-firing his brother-in-law and surrounding himself with prostitutes, to keep himself availed of blood. This soon leads to even grander designs, essentially turning the toothpaste factory into a blood bank, into which all his employees must donate, willingly or otherwise. He is overjoyed when his wife arrives one day with his new-born son, which he takes to mean he is once again virile and heterosexual. However, when he peeks into the pram, he’s in for a surprise…

To put this into an even more perverse context, Fulci made this film straight after the ferocious violence of Four of the Apocalypse and Avati shortly before contributing his writing skills to Passolini’s Salo. Less surprising are the depths to which Italian comedy would stoop: most offendable groups are catered for. Fulci was no stranger to comedy, this film coming just three years after the better-known Eroticist and in typical fashion fills the film with rather more than the traditional low-level laughs, with nods at Marxism (Nicosia literally sucking the blood of his employees) and an actually quite effective take on the familiar vampire film traits. Ilona Staller appears in a small role, though there are no sightings of female names more readily associated with the genre, such as Edwige Fenech or Gloria Guida – the jaunty score comes courtesy of Bixio-Frizzi-Tempera. Not as knockabout or as crass as the plot or its contemporaries would suggest, this is indeed a curiosity for both vampire fans and followers of Fulci.

Daz Lawrence

Ulula (“Howl”) is an Italian erotic horror comic book, known as fumetti, launched in October 1981 by Milan-based Edifumetto, with a print run that ran to 76 issues. Two 228 page special editions were issued in 1983 and the Ulula character also appeared in a fumetto named 40 Grandi. Some of the cover artwork was by celebrated comic artist Emanuele Taglietti.

The lurid stories in Ulula involve model Ulula Von Hagen who becomes a werewolf when the moon is full, having been given the blood of a wolf in a transfusion by her mad doctor uncle! she travels all over the globe having sexual adventures and fighting other monsters, like an Italian lupine version of Vampirella. Only her gay male friend Jo (later Joe) knows her dark secret…

Ulula stories were also issued in Spain, often using the same cover artwork, as part of the Hembras Peligrosas (“Dangerous Females”) comic book series.

Molto grazie to Comic Vine for images and to Fumetti Etruschi and HorrorCrime.com for some background info.

Related: Vampirella

‘Satan is coming!’

The Devil’s Wedding Night is a 1973 Italian horror film originally known as Il Plenilunio delle Vergini (“Full Moon of the Virgins”). It was directed by Luigi Batzella (Nude for Satan; The Beast in Heat) and stars Rosalba Neri and Mark Damon.

In the USA, The Devil’s Wedding Night was released by Dimension Pictures (Kingdom of the Spiders; Werewolf Woman; Night Creature) with a typically lurid advertising campaign. After a number of pan-and-scan VHS releases, the film was finally released widescreen on DVD by Shout Factory in September 2006 with optional comments by Elvira although the print used has obvious wear.

Plot teaser:

The 1800s: scholarly Karl Schiller believes he’s found the ring of the Nibelungen, which holds great power. It’s at Castle Dracula. His twin, Franz, a gambler, asks if vampires frighten Karl; Karl shows him an Egyptian amulet, which may protect him. Franz takes the amulet and sets out ahead of his brother, arriving at the castle first. There he finds a countess who invites him to dine.

Later that night, Karl arrives. Coincidently, it’s the Night of the Virgin Moon, a night that falls every fifty years and draws five virgins from the surrounding village to the castle not be heard from again. Can Karl protect his brother, find the ring, and rescue the virgins?

Reviews:

” … a by the numbers vampire film with some serious T&A tossed into things to spice it up a bit. It’s formulaic, to be sure, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable particularly when it’s shot as well as it is here thanks to some slick cinematography from the late, great Joe D’Amato. The castle makes for a great and macabre set, the women are all lit quite seductively and while there isn’t as much atmosphere as, say, Castle of Blood or Black Sunday there are still some very memorable visuals and sets.” Ian Jane, DVD Talk

“Stealing the show as usual is the supremely sexy Rosalba Neri of Amuck! and Lady Frankenstein. Her over-the-top performance combined with her propensity for nude scenes make Neri’s presence a boon for this flick. There’s also Lara, the Contessa’s servant (and lesbian lover), who is played to perfection with a dichotomously somnambulistic and bug-eyed craziness by Brazilian actress Esmeralda Barros. The most pitiful roles are given to Xiro Papas (Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks) as the monstrous vampire thug and Gengher Gatti (Let Sleeping Corpses Lie) as the mysterious butler/coach driver.” Doomed Moviethon

“It’s no overlooked masterpiece of gothic horror; with its fits of pure silliness, but Damon doesn’t look down at the material, Neri is gorgeous (especially nude), and Joe D’Amato’s atmospheric cinematography is often stunning.” Basement of Ghoulish Decadence

“Rosalba Neri doesn’t get to have as much fun as she does in Lady Frankenstein but she still turns in a watchable performance. Mark Damon, who plays twins Karl and Franz, does so with equal commitment on both sides and in doing so pays tribute to Barbara Steele who played duo roles in Black Sunday, in which he also stars. They really do seem like two different people even though still playing with the good twin / bad twin cliché.” Sinful Celluloid

“It’s well-staged, beautifully shot and loaded with naked, lesbian vampires and curvy villager babes. Unlike films of this type made for today’s video market, it also takes its horror elements rather seriously and manages to have some fun along the way. It’s hard to dislike any movie in which one of the male leads seduces a peasant girl out of her knickers by slyly reminding her that Count Dracula is only interested in the blood of virgins. Though hardly a classic, it’s not bad, and it certainly delivers on the promises of its lurid U.S. ad campaign.” Bloody Disgusting

“… Batzella’s occasionally arresting imagery, as well as Neri’s sexy but commanding premise, make the film worth a look. While he’s certainly not cut from the same cloth as Mario Bava, Batzella manages to create an eerily erotic gothic atmosphere, highlighted by a fog-bound scene of undead women gathering for a blood orgy, and — especially — scenes of Rosalba Neri bathed in blood and rising naked from her crypt.” Tomb of the Headless Werewolf

Italian trailer:

Wikipedia | IMDb

‘5 playgirls walked innocently into his arms… only to meet the devil in the flesh!’

The Playgirls and the Vampire (Italian: L’ultima preda del vampiro – translation: “The Vampire’s Last Prey”) is a 1960 Italian horror film written and directed by Piero Regnoli. It stars Lyla Rocco, Walter Brandi (The Vampire and the Ballerina; Slaughter of the Vampires; Bloody Pit of Horror), Maria Giovannini, and Alfredo Rizzo (Slaughter of the Vampires; The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance).

Regnoli was a scriptwriter who also co-wrote Riccardo Freda’s I Vampiri, Nightmare City and Demonia. The 1963 US release was by Richard Gordon (Tower of Evil; Horror Hospital). A shortened American TV version was retitled Curse of the Vampire.

Plot teaser:

A feckless troupe of European exotic dancers and their piano player led by a bumbling manager stumble upon a castle after encountering a ferocious storm.

The castle, inhabited by Count Gabor, his assistant and a vampire, is little refuge for the traveling showgirls as they slowly fall under the spell of the un-dead demon.

Vera, one of the reluctant dancers and the living doppelgänger of the vampire’s dead wife, Margherita Kernassy—who has been dead nearly 200 years—becomes the object of affection for both Count Gabor and the vampire…

Buy on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Reviews:

The pseudo-scientific approach to curing vampirism is intriguing, the playful ‘comedy’ is self-deprecating and the “playgirls” are a lively distraction but, alas, Walter Brandi is a weak evil count and Aldo Piga’s score recalls the silent era rather than the 1960s. That said, there is an undoubted eroticism to Regnoli’s film that predates Rollin, Franco, Hammer and countless other vampiric ventures.

Adrian J Smith, Horrorpedia

“This is a fairly low-level mystery that plods through with some erotic undertones (for the time period anyway), minimal vampirism and only cheesecake variety gore. I liked it despite all of those shortcomings.” A Feast of the Ires

” … plodding and mediocre. On the plus side, it is very atmospherically photographed by Aldo Greci. The film also offers two nice scenes at the climax. In one, the now vampiric Katia comes toward the camera to claim a victim, only to be staked by her male vampire (Brandi in a dual role) counterpart.

The other notable scene is the male vampire’s staking, which leads to a dissolve of images as the 200-year-old vampire crumbles to a skeleton and then fades away.” Dennis Fischer, Cinefantastique

“Playgirls’ Regnoli only churned out five minor period films as a director before settling into a career as a screenwriter on zombie films like City of the Walking Dead and Burial Ground. He does a competent job here and probably could have been a notable player in the spooky-sexy European sweepstakes of the ’60s and ’70s had he chosen to pursue it. Anybody who could deliver naked girls with big fangs con gusto like this definitely deserved to have a longer career.” Mondo Digital

Cast:

• Walter Brandi as Count Gabor Kernassy / The Vampire
• Lyla Rocco as Vera
• Maria Giovannini as Katia, the victim
• Alfredo Rizzo as Lucas, the manager
• Marisa Quattrini
• Leonardo Botta as Fernand
• Antoine Nicos
• Corinne Fontaine
• Tilde Damiani
• Erika Dicenta
• Enrico Salvatore

Choice dialogue:

“The strength of love is miraculous, if you can believe it!”

Wikipedia | IMDb | Image credits: Chicago Ghouls

Baron Blood (original title: Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga “The Horror of Castle Nuremberg”) is a 1972 Italian/German horror film directed by Mario Bava from a screenplay by Vincent Fotre. It stars Joseph Cotten (Lady Frankenstein), Elke Sommer (Lisa and the Devil), Massimo Girotti, Rada Rassimov and Antonio Cantafora.

The Italian version was scored by Stelvio Cipriani (A Bay of Blood; Night Hair Child; Tentacles) whereas the US release by AIP was re-scored by Les Baxter (as were Bava’s earlier films Black Sunday and Black Sabbath).

Plot teaser:

American Peter Kleist travels to visit the castle of his Austrian ancestor Baron Otto Von Kleist who had a reputation that earned him the nickname “Baron Blood” and who was cursed by a witch, Elisabeth Holle, for his evil deeds against the villagers before he burned her at the stake.

Peter is shown a parchment with a spell reputed to have the power to bring Baron Blood back to life. As a lark with Eva, a female architect renovating the castle for a hotel project, he reads the invocation out loud in the castle. Frightened by an unseen presence, they read the spell to send him back. They later read the invocation again, only this time the parchment is burned before they can read the dismissal.

The revived corpse-like Baron goes into town and murders a doctor, starting a reign of terror against the villagers. With each murder victim he becomes more human yet can revert to his hideous appearance…

Arrow Video Blu-ray + DVD release:

• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentation of three versions of the film: Bava’s original version Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga with Italian audio, The European Export Version of Baron Blood with English audio, and, on home video for the first time, the re-edited and re-dubbed AIP Version of Baron Blood with alternate score by Les Baxter
• Three audio versions: Optional Italian, European English and AIP English re-dub and re-score
• English SDH subtitles and a new English subtitle translation of the Italian audio
• Audio Commentary with Bava biographer and expert Tim Lucas
• Introduction to Baron Blood by author and critic Alan Jones
• Delirium Italian-style: Ruggero Deodato on Mario Bava and the golden age of Italian genre films
• Mario Bava at work – a photo gallery of Bava behind the scenes on his films
• Trailers for Baron Blood
• Baron Blood Radio Spots
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Graham Humphreys
• Collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by critic James Oliver, illustrated with original archive stills and posters

Buy Baron Blood on Arrow Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk

Reviews:

“Baron Blood’s beautiful, atmospheric visuals render it, at the very least, an entertaining instalment in his later filmmaking period. A chase sequence in the fog-filled alley, the Baron’s resurrection, and the corpses around the castle all make for very fine set pieces. All the ingredients are present, and even though they don’t completely add up, a mediocre Bava film still plays better than even the best of most horror directors.” Samm Deighan, Diabolique

“Fortunately, the movie is buoyed a little by fun performances like Cotten, Sommer (who makes an excellent old-school horror actress—dumb, with screaming abilities that are practically operatic) and Rada Rassimov as a kooky witch who can channel the spirits of the dead. Despite its numerous issues, which include being not in the least scary, Baron Blood is kind of fun to watch. It’s cheesy, creepy enough to give you a fun shiver or two, and has a villain that at least looks scary, even if his acts aren’t.” Abby, No More Popcorn

“From a production stand point there are not that many areas in which this film does not hold really well. The visuals are first rate, pacing is never an issue as things move briskly from one revelation to the next and once again Mario Bava excels, when it comes to the murder set pieces. Outside of the deliriously over the top performance from Joseph Cotton (Citizen Kane, The Third Man) in not one, but two roles. None of this film’s other performance leave that strong of an impression and they tend to come off as to mechanical in their delivery.” Michael Den Boer, 10k Bullets

Buy Baron Blood on Kino Classics Blu-ray from Amazon.com

Cast:

• Joseph Cotten: Baron Otto von Kleist/Alfred Becker
• Elke Sommer: Eva Arnold
• Massimo Girotti: Dr. Karl Hummel
• Rada Rassimov: Christina Hoffmann
• Antonio Cantafora: Peter Kleist
• Umberto Raho: Inspector (as Humi Raho)
• Luciano Pigozzi: Fritz
• Nicoletta Elmi: Gretchen Hummel

Filming locations:

Burg Kreuzenstein, Austria

Wikipedia | IMDb | Image credits: Zontar of Venus

‘Death lies beneath’

Neverlake is a 2013 Italian horror film directed by Riccardo Paoletti from a screenplay by Manuela Cacciamani and Carlo Longo.

The film stars Daisy Keeping, David Brandon (StageFright; Delirium; Beyond Darkness), Joy Tanner, Martin Kashirokov, Lisa Ruth Andreozzi, Alice Belardi, Riccardo Bono, Claudio Ciabatti, Anna Dalton, Davide Frondaroli.

Plot teaser:

When Jenny, an English teenager who studies in New York, visits her father’s home in Tuscany, Italy, she expected it to be a time to see the world and bond with her father. She soon discovers that this is far from reality. When Jenny visits the Neverlake, a lake that legend calls “The Lake of Idols” for its healing powers in ancient times, Jenny meets a peculiar group of children.

As she digs further into the mystery of these missing children and their leader Peter, Jenny discovers a world of horrific medical experiments, secrets and lies. When Jenny is called upon by three thousand year old spirits of the Neverlake to help them retrieve ancient artifacts stolen from the lake she comes face to face with her greatest pain and possibly her greatest pleasure…

Reviews:

“The tight close-ups are quite memorable along with the visuals of opening (and shutting) doors. Paoletti’s filmmaking abilities are extraordinary, and his career will be enjoyable to follow, but unfortunately the plot of Neverlake has a slight tinge of predictability and the Peter character is a huge distraction. But then again — maybe it won’t be a distraction to millions of “Twilight” fanatics. Genius move?” Quinn Vincent Hough, Critical Movie Critics

” …solid tale that rarely drags, and the only thing that distinguishes this from a film made 30 years ago is the crispness of the digital video cinematography and the fact that certain tense scenes are lit not by flashlight, but by iPad, an odd idiosyncrasy that works better than you might expect mostly due to the little attention called to it.” Daily Grindhouse

“It ends as it begins—with Percy Bysshe Shelley—coming full circle, and committing to its Romantic horror.  Not a masterpiece, but worth a look for the sake of its intriguing hint of originality, an unfortunately rare trait in contemporary horror.” Caitlin Huggins, HorrorNews.com

IMDb | Facebook