Doctor Who - The Barbara Benedetti Years (1984 - 1988)

 (Given the title of this piece, it would be fitting, probably, to picture us beginning with a title sequence consisting of a cube - each facet of which contains an image of Barbara Benedetti - rendered in loving early 1990s Quantel; all the while Keff McCulloch's 'Latin version' of the theme batters your brain with it's sick Calypso beats)

We all remember when BBC TV's titular Time Lord regenerated into the form of a blonde-haired woman, right?  No, not Jodie Whittaker.  Before that.  Before Cybermen.  Before Iceworld.  Back, back to your beginnings!  Sorry, I managed to segue from Fenric into Morbius there.  I think I really must have an undiagnosed villain complex.  That explains so much...  Anyway, where were we?  Ah, yes.  There really was a female incarnation of the Doctor before Jodie Whittaker.  Not Jo Martin (though, both canonically and chronologically [chronologically in-fiction, that is, but I'm being Doylist here rather than Watsonian just for a change] that would be a right answer) - I'm talkin' 'bout Barbara Benedetti.  "Who?" you might ask.

"The Doctor - that's Who!" being my tiresomely predictable retort.  I can't help myself, it's an illness, probably.

In these days of part of Doctor Who fandom losing its shit (what, really?  That never happens!) over the upcoming brave new era of the show being produced with a distribution deal in place with - and input from - Disney+, the attendant angst over thoughts of the show being 'Americanised' and 'going Hollywood' have emerged to give me serious mid-Nineties flashbacks.  When the 1996 TV movie (which I still like to think is titled 'Starring Paul McGann', since that's the first caption appear onscreen after Doctor Who during the title sequence) was a thing that was happening, there were extremely similar 'concerns'.  Would the integral Britishness of the show be lost now that we were adventuring in a suspiciously Vancouver-looking San Francisco instead of a quarry in Gerrards Cross or a Victorian museum village in Shropshire?  Would the Doctor be stepping out of a Coke machine TARDIS with a cute furry robotic companion into a story that was unrecognisable, like some kind of X-Files meets Voyager meets Airwolf mash-up in a crack lounge?  What would a North American made Doctor Who be like?  Well, let's take a look, shall we?  Like the foundations of the series itself, let me take you on an educational (in true Reithian BBC style) and perhaps (?) entertaining adventure back trough space and time to a far and distant destination...

Early 1980s Seattle.

Independent outfit Seattle International Films, headed up by Anglophile Ryan K. Johnson, were already a going concern that had made 16 mm short films such as the one-minute parody Escape From Seattle (with lead character 'Slug Plissken' - can you tell what it is yet?) and were in the midst of what would become the 20 minute epic set in a men's toilet cubicle (?) Kill Roy when Johnson became a fan of Who through the PBS runs of the Tom Baker stories in 1983.  Discovering that the 1984 World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) was to have a film contest judged by a panel including Gary Kurtz of Star Wars fame (is he still of Star Wars fame these days, or has everyone forgotten who he is in these days of just slagging off Kathleen Kennedy as the Antichrist?), he made the decision to dive into the Whoniverse with an episode of his own, shot in sunny (ha!) Seattle.

The result of his toils was The Wrath of Eukor (written by Ryan K. Johnson, script edited by Cheryl Read [credited writer], Linda Bushyager and Deb Walsh, directed by Ryan K. Johnson, 1984).  Our adventures begin with a glimpse of the Seattle International Films logo over a nice vista of the city with the Space Needle prominently visible, before we are taken to a dark street with the caption 'London, 1911' explaining the need for all the fog machine-generated swirls of mist: we are in the American idea of an Edwardian pea souper.  We hear a voice singing the lyrics to the 19th century song 'Benny Havens, Oh' as a chirpy Cockernee chimney sweep emerges.  This jaunty singer and whistler is Carl Evans (played by Randy Rogel, who has gone on to have quite the writing career in the field of animation, with credits on Batman: the Animated Series, Animaniacs, and The Legend of Tarzan).

Carl stops as he hears a woman's voice in the darkness.  "Too soon... must get back... three times in as many years... it's too much."  He notices blood on the pavement and follows to trail to the newly-regenerated Doctor (Benedetti), dressed in the Sixth Doctor's outfit and obviously in a state of confusion - possibly at the fact that this is chronologically only the second ever pre-titles sequence in Doctor Who: three years after 'Castrovalva' and predating 'Time and the Rani', both of which were also regeneration sequences.  Carl offers assistance to this strange lady, who seems surprised to see her reflection in a shop window ("The DNA matrix must have failed!  The nose is an improvement.") and wants to get back to her 'ship' but - as he points out - is heading in the opposite direction to the harbour.  When they arrive at what Carl recognises to be "just an old police call box", despite the MacKenzie-Trench box design not coming in for another 18 years (foreshadowing of a Susan and Nyssa style incipient telepathy on Carl's part?  No.  To be fair, police boxes were around before 1911, just not this particular kind, so let's be charitable and put it down to Carl being able to read the signage [though I'm not sure of the literacy levels among early 20th century chimney sweeps] and being familiar enough with the concept) he asks the eccentric stranger worriedly "Did they just let you out?"

"No.  I escaped.  I barely got out.  Not alive, though."  I really want to know the circumstances of the Sixth Doctor's death in this particular time track; it certainly seems a damn sight more dramatic than banging his head on an exercise bike due to tumultuous buffeting.

They then enter the TARDIS together, Carl helping her through the doors to the swelling sound of  Paddy Kingsland's regeneration reprise theme from 'Castrovalva'.  I'm already pretty sure I love this.  We then crash into my childhood version of the opening titles and music - namely the Sid Sutton starfield (I'm glad I don't type with a lisp) accompanied by the Peter Howell rendition of the legendary Ron Grainer theme; the infinite universe opening up before us to the oo-ee-oos of a Jupiter 4 (my favourite Sharon Van Etten song, incidentally).  As we proceed past the new Doctor's face forming from the stars, the neon logo and the story title and writer's credit as standard - so far, so very 1980 to 1984 Doctor Who - we arrive in a leafy forest in Washington state, where Vince Wallace (Tom Lance), a reporter from the Seattle Times is attempting to get a story on a group of Vietnam war veterans (you don't get this sort of The Deer Hunter-cum-Born on the Fourth of July stuff from Eric Saward, do you?) who are holed up in the woods and living a life separate from the rest of humanity.  The group's leader, Grant (Jim Dean) and his shades-bedecked henchman Tate (Michael Smith) are quite keen on sending Wallace packing with knife-wielded death threats, whilst their cohort Harris (Keven McCauley) seems quite jumpy and nervous, claiming to sense some sort of malevolent presence all around them.

As this is occurring, the TARDIS arrives with its (her) customary vworp vworp wheezing groaning sound.  The Doctor - who has changed out of Colin Baker's Technicolor dreamcoat into a new outfit of  a vaguely military-looking beige getup replete with epaulettes - attempts to convince Carl that they have most certainly moved in time and space and are no longer in London Taaahhn: "Well, the foliage is greener", she says whilst examining the local flora, but thankfully not feeling the need to eat and of the soil.  Carl expresses the belief that 'old Mr Wells' would give a pretty penny to see the wonders of TARDIS travel, to which the Doctor replies that she "did show H.G. the TARDIS once - he said it would never work", canonising 'Timelash' before it was even broadcast.  Wibbly wobbly... No.  Stop that.  It's silly.

Wallace emerges from the trees and tries to warn the time travelers off before the 'Nam dudes find them and become unfriendly to strangers in finest rural pub tradition, but the Doctor remains jauntily defiant and prescribes a brisk walk through the undergrowth to the synth strains of Peter Howell's score for 'The Leisure Hive'.  When Vince panics and runs off, he drops a metallic object that the Doctor quickly studies and finds maddeningly familiar but can't recall from where ("The body's fit, but the mind isn't"); dashing after him the Doctor and Carl find him lying dead and are surrounded by the army dudes who want to know why they "greased" him.  The Doctor swiftly establishes her authority, tapping Grant some blows with her umbrella and deducing that Wallace was killed by a massive electrical shock and that whatever did it is out there in the forest and might strike again.

While this is going on, we cut to another member of the Vietnam vets, Francis (George Catalano), fishing in the river.  Hearing a noise, he gets up and calls out to his comrades, only for something unseen to rush towards him from the underbrush in an Evil Dead-style P.O.V. shot.  Tate splits off from the group to have a scout around, and comes across a clearing in which stand some strange alien obelisks of such a shape and design that one expects a culturally appropriating William Shatner to emerge from one shouting "KIROK!"  He too is soon pursued and killed by the free-floating Evil Force, and the rest of the group - now down to just Grant and the jittery Harris, led by the Doctor and Carl - follow in his footsteps to the obelisks.  Harris can feel an intense energy in the air, but Grant puts it down to the presence of the power plant nearby.  The Doctor recognises the writing on the obelisks as Darnian, and informs us that the inhabitants of the planet Darnia were beings of conscious energy who at one time made it to Earth and imprisoned one of their own here.  As she is imparting this information, Carl feels compelled to hold the metal object dropped by Vince against the block where it is revealed to be a key, opening the Darnian prison and releasing the otherworldy convict ensconced within.

This act of foolishness leads to Harris [? I think.  Frankly, the whisky was kicking in by this point] immediate possession as the unleashed being - Eukor - gets all up inside him and wears him like a glove (to quote the Spirit of Jazz from The Mighty Boosh)

When Eukor arrives at the power station: they can hear it through the wires, they can hear it through the lines

The Barbara Benedetti Doctor returns in Visions of Utomu (written by Ryan K. Johnson with input from Linda Bushyager, directed by Ryan K. Johnson, 1986), Pentagon West: A Doctor in the House (written by Ryan K. Johnson, directed by Howard Carson, 1987), and Broken Doors (written by T. Brian Wagner, directed by Steve Hauge [not a typo, rhymes with "howdy"],1988) - which I will doubtless get round to covering in the future.  Or was it the past...?

Oh, and incidentally, a very happy 60th Doctor Who anniversary to all of you at home!

Dr Hackenstein (Richard Clark, 1988)

 I couldn't quite decide which quote to open this with - it was a tie between "We don't care about live people - we only fool around with people who are dead!" and "He wants your body for his wife... he wants to bring her back to life!", the latter being from the rather extraordinary theme tune by Claude LeHanaff and the Hard Roaders.  I should like a band name like that.

Well, my 'Ten Days of Halloween' plan (to review a horror movie a day for the last ten days of October) got well and truly scuppered - as do most of my damn fine plans - by poxy real world concerns.  Never mind, though, I'm still going to do all of the films I had planned.  Maybe eked out over the run up to Christmas.  Hey, if the celebration of the birth of a man that millions genuinely believe dies and then rose from his tomb like Dracula and the Blind Dead isn't spooky, I don't know what is.  So - on and on, and on to the next one, as Dave Grohl so wisely sang.

Mary Shelley's tale of Frankenstein has gone through many cinematic permutations over the last century or so (113 years since the first silver screen version, if we're being pedantic [and I'm in that sort of mood, so I am]), from James Whale's legendary Boris Karloff-starring Universal classic through Gary Conway's 'teenage' monster to Toho's gigantic Baragon-battling kaiju version and many many others.  One variation on the Frankie theme that I was intrigued by as a youth was Dr Hackenstein, the VHS box for which I often saw on the video shop shelf but never saw.  I think I tried once, and when the store owner pointed out that I couldn't rent it because it was rated 18 and I was clearly under ten I angrily protested that I'd been getting 18 certificate films from his shop since I was six - which prompted a shushing that I shouldn't say that when there were other people in the shop and I was palmed off with a free lend of American Rabbit or somesuch.  Anyway, here we finally are.

Not really worth the 30-plus year wait is the short review.  But it was a laugh so we'll try like the good doctor himself to stitch a bit more flesh on the bones than that.

Helmed by first time director Richard Clark (and his only directing credit until the short Bookworms a decade later, which was his last), our story opens in 1909, at what the captions helpfully inform us was the 'dawn of modern science', where our eponymous antagonist/protagonist Dr Elliot Hackenstein (David Muir) is getting up to some very Herbert Westian shenanigans reviving a stitched together hairless rat.  To briefly address the Lovecraftian nightmarish elephantine beast from beyond the limits of fragile human understanding in the room: this film is obviously inspired by Stuart Gordon's masterful rendition of Reanimator of a few years earlier (seriously, why aren't I reviewing that instead?  Maybe in the new year I'll do a piece on the whole trilogy), but in timey-wimey (stop that at once! - Ed.) fashion is more similar to Bride of Reanimator which wouldn't emerge until two years later.

Skipping ahead to 1912, we meet the awful Trilling siblings Wendy (Dyanne DiRosario), Leslie (Catherine Davis Cox) and Alex (John Alexis) who with their likable cousin Melanie Victor (Stacey Travis, who two years later would go on to star in Richard Stanley's brilliant Hardware [no really, why aren't I reviewing that instead? (Because you actually like that film and would have to do more than make some crap jokes?)]) are drunkenly tooling around the country lanes in a sprightly vintage roadster (copyright Terrance Dicks, like so much of my standard phraseology) just like McCulloch, Carlson, Bastedo et al at the outset of 1975's The Ghoul.  Just like that party of passengers, vehicular bother leads to them seeking shelter in the nearest Old Dark House.

This is of course the rural residence of the hack-happy doctor, who welcomes in the trio of nubile young ladies - and the unfunny injured comedy stooge they're bearing - without mentioning the preserved head of his late wife (who he claims lost her life and the rest of her by falling into the sea during the maiden voyage of the Lusitania and getting minced in the ship's propeller, whereas she very much lost her head at her husband's hands) kept in cold storage in his upstairs laboratory with which he frequently has conversations like a cross between Baghead Jason from Friday the 13th Part II and Ed Gein (or Ezra Cobb from Alan Ormsby's Deranged, to continue the movie comparison).  Elliot is very soon eyeing up the young ladies - and who can blame him? - for parts to stitch together a new body for Sheila's bonce: he sets out to take Wendy's legs, Leslie's arms and has his eye on Melanie Victor's eyes.  I guess because Bette Davis' and Gary Gilmore's weren't available.

Whilst all off this is going on, we have comedy from Logan and Anne Ramsay (yes, she of The Goonies and Throw Momma From the Train fame, sadly in her final performance - the film being released posthumously and carrying a dedication to her [I'm sure she'd be thrilled]) as a comedy graverobbing / bodysnatching couple, similar to the characters played by Dennis Price and Joan Rice in Hammer's 1970 The Horror of Frankenstein, silent comedy-style slapstick with Hackenstein's deaf and mute maid (Cathy Cahn) and a shrill turn from Phyllis Diller as the Trillings' overbearing mother.  I mean, I say "comedy" but the quotation marks are appropriate.

All of it - basic plot, gore effects, humour - were done far better in Bride of Reanimator, frankly.  Still, at least I've finally seen it.  One more off the list.

Night of the Beast ([a.k.a. Lukas' Child] Eric Louzil, 1993)

When trying to figure out what horror film one should select from their vast collection of genre cinema that mostly remains unseen to watch for the very first time with the fresh eyes of a newborn babe, I find that the best approach is to ask oneself "Do any of these feature a porn star trying some 'straight' acting within the genre?"  And you know, it's surprising how many times that comes back with a "yes".  My review of David DeCoteau's Creepozoids - which co-starred Ashlyn Gere - is one that springs to mind (as an M. R. James-style warning to the curious, that review can be found here).  And so it follows, quite naturally enough if you're mental, that I asked myself if I had to hand a horror movie that I had yet to view that also starred a classic '80s American porn star.  No, not Jeff Stryker - I've seen Zombie Flesh Eaters 3 more than enough (at least twice: the second time was to check that it was as bad as I thought it was [note: it definitely is]).  No, not Amber Lynn - I don't actually own a copy of Things, and judging by every review I've seen it might be awful enough to jeapardise my already fragile mental health.

Shanna McCullough it is then!  Now, obviously my appreciation for vintage 1980s pornography is retrospective - but only because the internet wasn't around then - so my coming across / discovering the lovely flame-haired Ms McCullough was comparatively recent, and I found myself quite enchanted and intrigued.  Not just because she almost has the same surname as me; I mean, same surname, alternate spelling.  Obviously her porn star name isn't her actual name.  Not that any of this matters one iota.

Probably best we move on from this.

Night of the Beast - also known under it's shooting title (shooting title?  Are you implying that actual work, thought, and the normal filmmaking process were involved in the creation of this?!?) of Lukas' Child (no, it isn't a sequel, even in name only, to the 1986 Corey Haim classic Lucas)  - opens with a gathering of a Satanic cult, the members of which dress in regulation hooded cloaks and skeleton masks and as a result look highly reminiscent of the supernatural army from Jess Franco's The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein.  Their leader, Lukas Armand (Robert May), is to be charitable a portly older gentleman who sits smoking a cigar like a bored businessman in a strip club whilst an 'exotically' dressed (breast-baring fetish wear, thigh high boots and a rather fetching diaphanous cape) dancer terpsichores for him and his minions in their neon bulb and candle-lit dungeon lair.  Neon and candlelight?  Surely a faux pas?

A nubile young scantily-dressed sacrifice is brought in, and Lukas informs her that "You have broken the Code of Conduct, and cannot be forgiven!"  I wouldn't mind if she violated my CoC.  Anyway, the young lady, dressed in some lovely lingerie, is swiftly dispatched.  Which seems a shame.  Is that what 'pantywaist' means?  Lukas cackles with his stripper henchwoman, who seems very much the Evil Lyn to his Skeletor.  This young woman isn't the first victim to have been captured by Lukas' cult, of course, and Detective Steve Anderson (Gene LeBrock, in the penultimate role of his thankfully brief career) is on the case, ably assisted by Detective Susan Wesley (Shanna McCu... oh, wait... Marcia Gray.  Because what a piece of cinema to go legit in).  Susan has discovered a medallion bearing a five pointed star in the home of the most recent missing girl.

"It's a pentacle, it's used in witchcraft... to ward off evil spirits" she helpfully informs plank of wood Steve and the thicker members of the audience, whilst proving her credentials from the Slaughtered Lamb Police Academy.  And so Steve is hot on the trail of the missing aspiring actresses who have all mysteriously vanished after auditioning for a part in a horror movie - auditions which always seem to end with the bookcase of the room sliding back to reveal Lukas sitting in his wheelchair like a Satanic cross between Ironside and Nero Wolfe, and deciding to sacrifice these nubile twentysomething clothes-allergic ladies to his 'son' - a behorned and bewinged daemonic monstrosity whose prosthetics are quite good to be fair.  If you can imagine the Unnameable's cheaper cousin, you're there.

When two more girls go missing, one whom's father is, according to Susan, "a cop in the Hill Street division" (boy, he must be feeling pretty blue) Steve gets right on the case by sleeping with two of the witnesses.  In his defence one of them if played by fetish wresting starlet Tori Sinclair, but still - unethical, right?  But by gritty determination... no, outright luck, and the assistance of two random boys straight out of either The Goonies or The Return of Swamp Thing (more the latter, really.  And Monique Gabrielle probably should have shown up in this film, too) he manages to solve the case, rescue the surviving scantily-clad captives, and defeat the bad guys.  Just like a proper hero cop on a mission who lives his life on the edge (who sleeps with every woman he meets apart from his far more attractive partner) should.

I can't in any form of honesty pretend this is a good film or recommend it to anyone.

As spurious reasons for T & A packages as horror films go, I think I preferred Burial of the Rats in all honesty.  Maria Ford's no Shanna, but at least she had the common decency to wear a sexy outfit.  Seriously, who hires a genuine porn star and AVN Award winner and she's the only actress in the entire movie to keep her clothes on throughout?  Looks like I'm going to have to get round to watching Pornogothic after all.  Don't expect a review of that one though, because Shanna + goth = I'll probably be blind by the end of it.

Slugs (Juan Piquer Simon, 1988)

 'Tis the season to be spooky, as they say (whoever 'they' are), and so I thought it might be an idea to spend the last ten days of October watching and reviewing horror movies - a deadly and deathly delight for the last decade of the month.  Ideally, of course, it would have been Thirteen Days of Halloween, but I've been ill the past few days and I never plan ahead, so ten it is.  These will probably be slightly shorter, more off the cuff reviews than I usually attempt - yes, believe it or not, I do mostly try and put effort into this stuff - and so may even be an improvement.  Mind you, when I just go with my instincts, it can lead to terrible things happening.  Not that I'm likely to spontaneously ask any of you dear readers to marry me or anything.

Probably.

True story: in recent months, the changeable weather up here in the sunny (ha!) North East of That There England has led to a surfeit of slugs (I assume that's the correct collective noun) appearing in our front and back gardens.  Real big buggers in all sorts of disgusting hues of brown, grey, sickly off-white... you name it.  The bit that really freaked me out, though, was seeing a particularly large and menacing specimen in the cat's bowl, actually eating a piece of cat food.  The thought that we were somehow breeding a species of carnivorous slugs in our garden naturally turned my mind to Shaun Hutson's schlocky '80s  horror paperback (of which my childhood self owned a few, including the extremely icky and maybe not to be read by eight year olds Spawn), but more particularly the film version,  Having not seen it since its BBFC truncated UK VHS release, it seemed as good a time as any for a revisit.

Helmed by Spain's Juan Piquer Simon - probably best known for the 1982 slasher classic Pieces, and possibly 1990s Abyss / Leviathan / Deep Star Six a like The Rift, but also tragically for the dreadful 1981 Jules Verne's Mystery on Monster Island (which not only wastes the talents of genre stars Peter Cushing, Terence Stamp and Paul Naschy, but is as Jules Verne as the horrendous Canadian movie H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come is Wells) and MST3K trash classic 1983's Pod People - the film transposes Hutson's grimy little tale from Merton. England, to Ashton, U.S.A. - doubtless the kind of summer town where the authorities won't close the sewer system during the season.

We open with Wayne (Eric Swanson) and his girlfriend (Karen Landberg) messing about in a boat on the Ashton reservoir.  The young lady wishes to go for a swim but Wayne demurs, having spotted a sewage outlet pipe (he should try living in 2023 Britain - our rivers are all made of faeces).  He does, however, dangle a foot off the boat into the water and is soon pulled in by "something slimy" and very shortly is reduced to a bubbling crimson cataract of blood.  Cue credits.

We are shortly introduced to the town's health inspector Mike Brady (Michael Garfield, in his first credit since 1979 cult classic The Warriors) who is having drinks with his lovely wife Kim (the lovely Kim Terry), the local schoolteacher known to her wretched pupils - seriously, unlikable youths were a staple of '80s horror, weren't they, but were they always this bad? - as "the wicked bitch of the North", who manifests her wicked side by donning sexy black lingerie for fun bedtimes with her husband.  If only they'd invested in some green body paint for a truly Wicked session.  Sorry, there's my Elphaba fetish poking out.  I'll just tuck that discreetly away.  Mike and Kim are out with their friends David (Emilio Linder) and Maureen (Alicia Moro) Watson and trying to politely ignore lush (in more than one sense) Maureen's alcohol-induced misbehaviour.  Excusing themselves for an early (sexytimes) night, on their way out they bump into Don Palmer (Philip MacHale) the town's sewage inspector who apparently now earns half the salary working for the civic authorities as he did as a plumber.

 Mike is working with the truculent Sheriff Reese (John Battaglia, who I could have sworn was the same guy that played Tex in Robot Jox but apparently not.  I swear I've seen him elsewhere though, despite what IMDB says) to evict local drunk Ron Bell (Stan Schwartz) from his condemned home, only to find that the unfortunate down and out gentleman has been consumed by flesh eating slugs - something that the sheriff, with his cry of "What next... demented crickets?!?" (look dude, don't give the 'when nature attacks' genre ideas.  Plus, hasn't that been done?) fails to fully believe at first.

We get a series of great gory kills, such as when Maureen doesn't notice the overgrown slug in the lettuce she's slicing for the dinner salad, leading to David being internally consumed by slug blood parasites and his face exploding during a lunch meeting with clients; one of which is played by doyenne of '70s Euro horror Patty Shepard in her penultimate role before her sad early death from cancer.  Then we have two of Kim's students: there's the brunette Donna (Kari Rose), who is enjoying some illicit sexy times with her douchebag boyfriend Bobby (Kris Mann) whilst her parents are out when the bedroom becomes rife with ravenous gastropods that strip the flesh from their naked bodies, in a scene that was cut from the '80s UK release but can now be enjoyed in all its gory glory.  Bobby had earlier been introduced taunting the unfortunate Ron before his demise, so fuck him anyway.  Then there's the blonde Pam (Tammy Reger), who has to escape the clutches of a jealous classmate-cum-skull masked attempted rapist by jumping down a sewer outlet only to be consumed by the vicious molluscs.  The rapist dude never gets held to account either.  Fucksake.

But the best bit of the film, for me, is when Brady goes to the town authorities and tells them to disconnect the water supply or he'll declare a health emergency and is told by the officious Phillips (Frank Brana) "YOU AIN'T GOT THE AUTHORITY TO DECLARE 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY'!  NOT IN THIS TOWN!"  Magnificent.  Anyway, obviously Mike and Don have to team up to rescue the town from these slugs transformed from the norm by the nuclear goop.  With some degree of sacrifice involved.  I would and do highly recommend Slugs, both book and film, to any and all connoisseurs of the exploitative and goopy.  You'll have a great time.  I did, at both eight and forty four.  I should probably grow up one of these days.

Sexangle (John Jesnor Lindsay, 1975) [NSFW]

(NOTE: This concerns a 1970s grot loop and as such will contain NSFW elements such as sexual references and - in the words of Simon Bates - sexual swear words.  Such as "fucknut" and "arsecandle".  Probably.)

From Hull it came.

One of two short (under half an hour) grimy porn loops made back-to-back (or, as Stanley B. Herman's legendary Uncle Hank would yell in Darren Aronofsky's 2000 soul-gnawing mindfuck Requiem for a Dream, "Ass to ass!") in 1975, along with Health Farm - both movies featuring the character of Lady Samantha as played by attractive but elusive performer 'Debbie', this twin-spin of sin being her only two known roles - this would be a point of interest in director John Lindsay's celebrated grot career for one reason that I shall express in three words.

Cosey. Fanni. Tutti.

Yes, you read that right.  The sometime singer and guitarist from post-punk industrial noiseniks Throbbing Gristle (birthed into this sick world as Christine Newby in the Kingston-upon-Hull of 1951) has an unashamedly extensive resume in the pornographic sphere if you didn't already know: her decidedly feminist and empowered take on the male-ruled heteronormative realm of the patriarchal porn of the '70s included COUM Transmissions' 1976 art installation-cum-exhibition (cum exhibition?) entitled Pornography at the London Institute of Contemporary Art displaying many of her jazz mag photoshoots framed as museum artworks.

Not called Tessa.  Not from Sunderland.

Director John Lindsay was by this time well underway in his smut career, having started in 1970 with a series of 8mm shorts beginning with Miss Bohrloch starring future star of the sex scene bombshell Mary Millington in her debut performance.  After graduating to series of 'nymphette' or 'Lolita' scenarios - loops featuring grown women dressed in schoolgirl outfits - such as 1974's Jolly Hockey Sticks (starring future therapist and doctor of sexology Ava Cadell - also star of Norman J. Warren's Spaced Out [a.k.a. Outer Touch] and at least four of Andy Sidaris' frankly mind-boggling 'Bullets, Bombs and Babes' movies) Lindsay graduated to not-quite feature length (just over 20 minutes apiece) with the double feature of Sexangle and Health Farm in 1975.

We open with Lady Samantha Huntingdon (the aforementioned Debbie) looking lovely in a green dress as she makes a telephone call from her stately manor to the 'international design centre' where she confirms to the receptionist (Suzette Sangallo, whose only other credit is in the George Harrison Marks joint 'Come Play With Me' alongside the lovely Mary Millington, a flick that ran continuously in a West End cinema from 1977 to 1981 - that's a lot of stained macs stickying up those seats) that it's fine for the appointment to take place at Huntingdon Towers today (actually, it's called Uplands House according to the signage).  When the girl confirms that both she and Mr Purkiss (I think that's the name - the sound quality on the copy I tracked down isn't exactly the best), Lady Sam hangs up the phone and we see her friend Suzie (Cosi herself) finishing removing her clothes and announcing "Sorry, darling - I'm having a shower now".  Just as we begin to enjoy her soaping her very nice mammaries beneath the cascading waters, Lady S. has to descend the stairs to answer the door (you just can't get the help these days) to Mr Purkiss (?) (Timothy Blackstone, who amidst a career in suspect '70s fare like Confessions of a Driving Instructor and The Hot Girls made appearances in legit stuff such as Colditz and as a Thal soldier in the classic Doctor Who story 'Genesis of the Daleks') and his assistant.  

Showing them up to the master bedroom, the stately Lady states that her boudoir is the room that she would like decorated first.  One assumes she means 'decorated' as in 'festooned with bodily fluids' considering the events that are obviously about to unfold.  Suzie really should have waited to have that shower, she'll just need another one shortly along with the other three.  Mr We're Just Going With Purkiss says that he will have to "take some measurements, first" - I bet you will, my son - and so his assistant Miss Waugh (I'm pretty sure on that one: they pronounce it like people say Evelyn Waugh, which really annoys me as they always say 'Evil-Lyn War' and I reckon it should be pronounced 'Evellin Woff') accompanies Lady Samantha, who tells her "I want to show you the bathroom".

Of course, Suzie is still showering, but the blithe and spirited Samantha merely introduces her as her "friend" before leaving Miss Waugh to take notes on the renovations even though her gaze seems more fixed towards Cosi's cosy looking muff than her notepad.  As Suzie emerges all dripping wet nature takes its course as it surely must when two sexy brunettes are left alone together, and when Lady S. pokes her head round the door to show them Purkiss' designs she is greeted by the sight of them indulging in their designs on each other with their tongues down each others' throats.  Other orifices shall doubtless soon also get a lingual lashing as we progress.  But I digress.  Clearly delighted with developments, Our Lady of the Immaculate Wide-On returns to Mr Purkiss and offers to help him with the measuring, but first "I'll just take orff [she's very posh] my dress - mustn't get it creased" and removes her smashing frock to reveal an even more cracking green satin corset and sheer stockings.

Declaring "Mr Branson," - oh, he's called Branson now?  Definitely didn't sound like that earlier - "come over here" she literally reels him in with the tape measure to her bed where he immediately begins feasting on her baps: "Oooh, that's super!  I love my tits being sucked!".  Meanwhile, Suzie and Miss Waugh have made their way from the bathroom to the corner of the bedroom, where Suzie sits in a chair legs akimbo whilst Miss Waugh proves herself a very cunning linguist eliciting the deathless line "Please, please, stick your tongue right up!" in a voice that I strongly suspect isn't Cosi's own.  The ADR / looping on this is absolutely, hilariously terrible by the way - dialogue often coming in when people's mouths aren't even moving.  It's genius.  Some of the extreme close-ups of the labial lapping are positively gynaecological.  Branson or Purkiss or whatever the hell he's called has by now progressed, like an excited teeneger, to the stage of some light fingering of which the Lady approves but she soon hoiks his trousers down with a "Now let's see what you've got... Oh, super!  Just what I want" and begins slurping on his sausage.

Suzie (well, whoever's providing her voice) declares "I want to kiss you now!" and snogs her own pussy juices out of Miss Waugh's mouth before laying her down on the floor and stating that she wants "to kiss your slim body all over".  Brankiss or whoever seems to soon tire of being fellated by a beautiful lady - the silly sod - and declares "What lovely big tits.  I want to fuck them." in a voiceover with all the unbridled passion of the bored voice at the other end of the drive-through speaker.  Still, he gets his wish for a titwank - the jammy sod - and the accommodating Samantha continues to lap at the tip of his glans with each upward thrust.  Suzie and Waugh are still literally munching on the rug, but have progressed into a 69 by this point.

"Stick your big hard prick right up my juicy cunt.  Oh, lovely.  Super.  Harder.  Put it right up." There's something quite odd (and profoundly arousing) about hearing a line like that in a plummy cut-glass accent.  Clearly I don't move in the right circles, unlike Mr Whomever, who is indeed right up the lady as she shifts from cowgirl to reverse cowgirl and does indeed seem to be enjoying herself definitely creaming (you can't fake that) before taking his load over her face and wabs in glorious slow motion, accompanied by a cacophonous wall of noise of wails that sounds like something off a Goblin soundtrack.

We then suddenly cut to what is clearly a different day as a chauffeur (performer unknown, name not listed on any credits I could find) who is loading the Lady's baggage into the back of the car (licence plate 'Sexy 1' of course)as she and Suzie come down the stairs and kiss each other goodbye.  Giving Suzie the keys to look after the house, Lady S. climbs into the open-topped vehicle and is pretty much open-topped herself, her diaphanous blouse blowing open in the wind and displaying her decolletage.  After she has been dropped off at wherever she was going, the driver heads down a country lane where he encounters a girl (wait, is this Suzette Sangallo?  She's credited as 'Girl', rather than Miss Waugh and only she, Cosi, Debbie and Blackstone are actually listed as credits.  I'm so confused) walking down the road in very short hotpants and knee-high boots.  This causes an exclamation of "What a lovely bit of cunt.  This is too good to be missed" as he sets off in pursuit, which isn't very MeeToo is it?  Removing his chauffeur regalia, he picks her up and asks her back to "my place" for drinks, arriving at the Lady's manor as if he owns the place.  It's under these false pretences that he lures her inside and asks her if she's a student.  "No, you silly boy, I'm a dancer" she declares, which does explain the hotpants and go-go boots, and gives him a brief demonstration of her moves, prompting an "Ooh, you sexy bitch, come here!"

The hotpants are soon off and the cunnilingus begins when Suzie enters and after a surprised "What's this?" swiftly sheds her dress and in just panties and high heels declares "Off!" and bundles away the hired help to kneel between the legs of the hitchhiking hottie and take over tonguing duties.herself.  Not to be deterred, the driver slides down Suzie's lingerie and his a bit of a lick and a finger himself.  Very soon, he's the one on the receiving end of Suzie's oral action, the girl swiftly joining in to make it a double BJ,  "OK lovers, let's see what you can do" sayeth Suzie, and the lucky bastard of a chauffeur gets to shag first the hitchhiker and then Suzie herself, banging away at her and ejaculating over her stomach while she and the girl indulge in some passionate deep French kissing before like him the film swiftly ends.

Very much a game of two halves; I think I enjoyed the first scene a little more despite Cosi doing boy-girl in the second part. Recommended to anyone interested in the adventures of Ms Fan Tutti (who I discovered whilst writing this has a small role in Ken Russell's Gothic, which gives me an excuse to watch that film again  Not that I need an excuse.  I love that movie) or the 1970s porn scene in general.  It was absurdly poorly done in places, but it did succeed in getting my gristle throbbing.

The Legend of El Hombre Lobo (Dorian Cleavenger, 2019)

Having grown up as a fan of Eurotrash, Euro-slash and all things Euro-sleaze (I'm fairly sure I was the only person at my school with a VHS copy of Jess Franco's Vampyros Lesbos, as evidenced by the amount of my fellow pupils who asked to borrow it) I've always had a soft spot for the horror emanations of the Iberian peninsula; whether it be the works of Franco, Amando de Ossorio, Leon Klimovsky or Jorge Grau. I was so there for it as I'm sure the youths still say.  That being the case, the works of Paul Naschy (or Jacinto Molina Alvarez to his mum) hold a very special place in my blackened heart as Naschy's name conjures so many joyfully ghoulish images to my mind, whether it be Morgue-dwelling hunchbacks, headless mediaeval sorcerers or (and especially) the tragic Polish lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky (a.k.a. El Hombre Lobo).  Naschy's most famous role of the many he essayed in his multi-decade career, Daninsky partook of his carnivorous lunar activities over eleven - or twelve if we are to believe in the mythic 'lost' 1968 entry Les Noches del Hombre Lobo (The Nights of the Werewolf) - movies between 1968 and 2004

And so it was a happy surprise of serendipitous proportions when one evening roaming about the byways and highways of the interwebs I stumbled across the Youtube channel of Eric Yoder, a make up effects guy and short film maker.  Among the lovingly-crafted brief but brilliant tributes to classics such as William Lustig's Maniac (Night of the Maniac), Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case (Belial), Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper (The Los Angeles Ripper), Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (a spot-on trailer titled Within the Woods) and John Carpenter's The Thing (Who Goes There) I found, to my delight, a 40-minute tribute to Naschy's lupine alter ego and his adventures: the appropriately reverently-titled The Legend of El Hombre Lobo.

As someone who finds joy in retro minutiae such as "They got the font right!" or recognising a familiar musical cue or even film stock/grain, whether real or digitally achieved (as you can imagine, things like Tarantino & Rodriguez' Grindhouse project or even the Stranger Things opening titles moistened my eager gusset), I was almost clapping with glee as the film opened with appropriately applied film scratches and the caption 'Baliavasta, Transylvania - 1972'.  Baliavasta is, I guess, to Naschy's wolfman what Vasaria was to Lon Chaney and the Universal monsters.  Opening with a sequence of grave robbers in a moonlit, fog-shrouded cemetery who inadvertently revive the werewolf (just like in the 1943 Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man as well as Naschy's 1970 Assignment Terror) by removing the silver cross of the Mayenza chalice from his heart and get appropriately slaughtered for their troubles, we cut to a daylight drive through the rural Romanian woodlands where Paul (Matthew Thomas Stallings, also of other Yoder vids such as the aforementioned The Los Angeles Ripper), Jasmine (Anna Townsend) and Anna (Reese Gizzarelli) are searching for the last resting place of Jasmine's late parents.

After an encounter with a local villager who warns them away from the old cemetery as it is the cursed burial place of Count Vladislav (Cody Ruch) who was executed for witchcraft and vampirism - a sort of spear (as opposed to distaff) version of Patty Shepard's Countess Wandessa.  Of course they ignore him and go, where we find out from the tombstone that Jasmine's deceased mother's name was Elvira Shepard: after both Naschy's wife - and a frequent female moniker throughout his filmography - and Patty Shepard, the titular Vampire Woman of The Werewolf vs the Vampire Woman a.k.a. Werewolf Shadow, and her father's name was Leon: possibly a reference to Oliver Reed's Leon Corledo from Hammer's 1961 The Curse of the Werewolf - the pioneering Spanish werewolf.  Whilst Anna finds herself irresistably attracted the Count Vladislav's Black Castle on the hill, Paul and Jasmine find themselves victims of Imre and Justine's fate in Dr Jekyll and the Werewolf - Paul is murdered by robbers who then attempt to rape Jasmine, who is rescued by a bearded Waldemar Daninsky (Shane Ronzio, who was cinematographer on Yoder's Thing tribute Who Goes There, going from camera man to wolf man).  Anna finds the tomb of Vladislav and manages to cut her hand and bleed all over it, prompting a prompt resurrection for the vampiric villain who looks a little like Bruce Payne's Nosferatu-styled Harker from Howling VI: The Freaks in a monk's habit.  As she is baptised in blood to become a sexy vampiress, Jasmine awakes to find herself tended by Waldemar and his elderly housekeeper-cum-witch Uswika Bathory (Nicole Albert).

When the vampires hunt Jasmine and wolfy Waldemar goes on the prowl (complete with red tinted lycanthropic POV shots reminiscent of Freddie Francis' Legend of the Werewolf), obviously the undead and the lupine clash but I really don't want to go into detail on the last part and spoil the end.  Rather, I urge genre fans to seek it for themselves.  It's 40 minutes of your time well spent that you could have wasted on some copaganda or lame spin-off show.  Plenty of those about.  But if anyone has affection for Gothic Euro horror - and in particular Werewolf Shadow, Dr Jekyll and the Werewolf or Night of the Werewolf - I think you'll love this.  I wonder if Rod and Troy from the Naschycast know about it?

Oh, and I must mention Mr Yoder's short The Old Man in the Rocking Chair, probably in both versions. It hits all the right giallo notes, with characters called Dario, Daria, Lucio, Lenzi and Mr Bava.  Tres gialli.  I think I slightly prefer the original 2019 version to the - admittedly better made - 2022 remake, if only for the superior use of Fabio Frizzi's 'Voci dal Nulla' from The Beyond at the climax.  Though the remake does boast a brilliantly Fulci-esque eye trauma.  I wonder if Katie of the Night and Sweet 'N Spooky Celise know about these flicks?  Not that I internet stalk women who are into Euro horror.  What?  I  don't!)

And I look forward to Walpurgis Night, in the hopes that it sees release, still being credited as being in post production on imdb.  This looks like it sees Ronzio return as Daninsky in a full-blown Dr Jekyll and Werewolf remake.  I do hope it sees the light of day.  We need more Daninsky in the world.

Beckett on Film: Catastrophe (David Mamet, 2001)

The UK's Channel 4 - which thankfully at time of writing remains unscathed from the depredations of Conservative governments, despite the best (?) efforts of the spectacularly dim Nadine Dorries (how did that creature ever hold a remit that put her in charge of the country's culture?) to destroy it for her petty ideological reasons despite not understanding how it's funded - provided me with a lot of educational entertainment in my life, especially in the late '90s and early '00s.  No, I don't mean hungover university Sunday mornings watching Alexa Chung and Miquita Oliver introduce Hollyoaks through a foggy haze - well, that as well - I'm talking about things like the Eurotika! strand that introduced me to such fun as Jess Franco's Female Vampire (if anyone wants to know my thoughts on that gem, I think I did a review on We Are Cult), as well as slightly less prurient but just as great stuff like the Beckett on Film season - a well worthwhile collaboration between Channel 4 and the Irish Film Board.

It was timely, as I was at the time just familiarising myself with the works of Samuel Beckett (who, lest we forget, never made the leap home) through performing, if that's not too strong a word, in Waiting for Godot on my university drama course.  I can't in all conscience say it was any good, but since we'd convinced the proprietors of the nearest pub to the theatre to let us perform it in there - I think some guff about "placing and spacing" was invoked - it was at least amusing as most of the small cast got progressively smashed on Harp and Guinness between scenes.  Durty Nelly's is a nice looking hotel now.  I hope they got rid of the smell of vomit.

Anyway: just as I was plunged into the works of aforesaid Irish wordsmith, this season of the works of Beckett committed to celluloid became a thing that was happening.  The one that I clearly recall sitting down to watch was the brief (under seven minutes) piece 'Catastrophe'.

Our mise-en-scene is a theatre, in which an officious Director (the legendary Harold Pinter, who despite the rumours was not in the Doctor Who story 'The Abominable Snowmen' - though his The Caretaker was obviously far superior to that of Gareth bloody Roberts) barks orders to his Assistant (the lovely and talented Rebecca Pidgeon, no relation to either Forbidden Planet star and gas station blowjob aficionado Walter or to occasional 1970s Doctor Who guest star Frances, but married to playwright and director David Mamet - helmer of this piece.  She's in most of his stuff, before anyone cries nepotism.  Bloody good singer, too: her rendition of 'Wouldn't It Be Nice?' is my second favourite Beach Boys cover; only because Frank Black's 'Hang On To Your Ego' cannot be beaten) to continually rearrange the placing and spacing of the living art installation that stands upon the stage.  This is the Protagonist (legend of stage and screen [and Chelsea public conveniences, being fined £10 in 1953 for "persistent importuning" during the bad old days when men who loved men had to conceal their sexuality in the twilight world of toilet trading.  One hopes it was a tenner well spent - most people only spent a penny] Sir John Gielgud himself, star of Caligula and Arthur 2: On the Rocks and other stuff, in his final role  - dying mere weeks later), an elderly and infirm silent man who remains immobile with his eyes downcast as the Assistant continually adjusts his clothing, posture and stance upon the podium he occupies on the barked orders of the impatient Director who informs us that he has a caucus to attend.

"Sure he won't utter?" asks the Assistant.

"Not a squeak." growls the Director, certain that he has a submissive and acquiescent spectacle for whatever audience is to arrive.

After ordering the indignities of having the old man stripped down to his underclothes and continually posed like a mannequin, the tyrannical Director commands the the flesh be bleached before instructing the unseen Luke (a lighting assistant who - Godot-like - never appears) to show "just the head".

Luke drops the lights and lights only the old man's head on command, at which point the Assistant hesitantly dares to venture a suggestion of her own:

"What if we were to raise the head - just for an instant?  To show the face?  Just for an instant?"

"Raise his head?" roars the Director. "What next?  Where do you think we are -  Patagonia?!?  'Raise his head'...  For God's sake.  No, that's our catastrophe in the bag."

And in the darkness, the Protagonist - silent and unprotesting until now - shifts from the cowed and bowed position into which he has been manipulated by slowly lifting his head and defiantly meeting our gaze.

Beckett - Pinter - Mamet: a trifecta of titans of theatre; the Holy Trinity of 20th century drama, perhaps. 

And perhaps in these current times of the U.K. Conservative government giving increasingly dictatorial edicts and clamping down on such basic rights as the simple freedom to protest, it behoves us to take the message of Gielgud's enfeebled but unbowed Protagonist and defiantly raise our heads into the light and look our oppressors in the eye now and then.

The Making of Monstrous Me: The Earliest Horror Films of My Formative Years (That I Remember, At Least...)

Right... deep breath.  Firstly... are you okay?

Well, hello there. It's been a long time since I've posted here in this crepuscular crypt of cinematic suffering. It's even longer since I had to think of a way to start a blog piece - the last few bits 'n' bobs that have gone up over the years since 2019 have been things I had saved as rough drafts because they had been started and written to a greater or lesser extent before then, and it was just a matter of finishing them off and posting them when I felt able to. Sorry if they weren't up to my usual standard. "Don't be silly," you reply in unison, "you don't have standards!" Quite right. I'm sure most of us have had a rough time of the last couple of years, so I'm not going to harp on about it and relay a litany of woes, but it has been more than a bit shit. So now the illness and grief is over (mostly), I find writer's block a thing. Weird that something you could once do without even thinking about it - even if that meant the results were crappy - can become so difficult and one finds oneself gripped with anxiety when faced with the tyranny of the blank white screen demanding to be filled with words. On which note, if the very nice James from We Are Cult sees this: I shouldn't have submitted the first part of a multiple part piece at the time I did. That Part One must be lonely, waiting all this time for its siblings to join it. Maybe I'll get in the Guinness book for the longest interval between an opening chapter and the rest appearing. 

Procrastination's what you need, if you want to be a record breaker.

So I was wracking my brains trying to think of something to write about to break myself back in to blogging, as well as getting back up to speed to be able to finish the longer pieces I'd been in the middle of before everything went heinous, when I stumbled upon a video on the HorrorHands Youtube channel titled 'The First Horror Movies I Ever Saw'.  A very good watch it was, too - but mostly the concept caught my eye.  Or my brain.  Or my MIND'S EYE, as M*ry Wh*t*h**s* might screech.  I thought "Nice idea.  I'm going to steal that".  Thanks for the inspiration, Bryn.  This is an homage, not a rip-off.

So I'm going to run with that concept and wrack my ailing brain for the earliest examples of the genre I recall beholding.  Since my parents were generally cool with me watching horror so long as it wasn't too extreme by their random standards (as we shall see, there was at least one occasion where a movie crossed their arbitrary line), I decided to make it a Top Eight - 'cause we like a list, us fans, don't we - and also make them all things I saw before the age of eight.  That might seem random in of itself, but I made 1987 the cut-off point for this list because I have very clear memories of a lot of the movies I saw that year and you never know, stuff like Hellraiser, The Lost Boys, Evil Dead II, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and The Monster Squad might get (a) blog post(s) of their own one day.  If I ever get my shit together.

So, if you're slitting comfortably, we'll begin:

In no particular order, we come firstly to The Burning.

Yeah, it's a shame that looking back at it from a modern perspective it's tainted by the involvement of Harvey Wankstain.  That aside, the tale of Cropsy the incinerated camp caretaker and his revenge wreaked upon the staff and inmates (wait - 'inmates' is the wrong word, and probably just me projecting harshly on unbeloved memories of a week at Thurston as a kid.  Attendees?) of a summer camp is an absolute classic of the slasher subgenre, and in my own opinion the absolute benchmark of the summer camp slasher sub-subgenre.  Sorry Friday the 13th: you might have won the race get to the screen first, but Tony Maylam's 1981 flick is the far superior for my money even if it didn't go on to spawn a litter of variable sequels.  And what a cast, with such 'will soon be too famous for this genre' faces as Holly Hunter, Fisher Stevens and Jason Alexander.  And I'm assuming it was lingering memories of this movie that made me find Leah Ayres so familiar when I saw Bloodsport at around ten, even though I couldn't quite place where I'd seen her before.  It's not like I'd have seen her in anything else.

There's not really a lot to say about The Burning that hasn't been said many times before and more eloquently by others, so I'll just mention the maggoty skull at the beginning that freaked me out, "Like a fucking Big Mac - overdone!", that scene with the canoe and the raft and what happens when secateurs meet fingers, and Rick Wakeman's haunting theme - right up there in my top horror music themes of all time.  We'll be getting to another of them later in the list.  I still have a pre-Video Recordings Act VHS of the movie (hopefully I'm not doxxing myself here as owning something illegal, since the film's now un-banned and available in all its unexpurgated gory glory on DVD and Blu-Ray).  It's not the one I saw before I was five or so, when it was banned; the only way I'd still have that is if my parents had failed to return it to the video shop.  No, it's a copy I bought from a gentleman named Brucie - no, not Forsyth, I'm not that old - at university for a curry and some cans.  Cheers, Brucie.  Less cheers for spiking my drink that night, leading to an incident in which only the fact I was friends with the barmaid meant that the bouncer was stopped from throwing me down a flight of stairs because I was apparently "chewing my face off".  Appreciate the video, didn't appreciate almost being killed.

Glad I got that off my chest.  Apologies for the slight segue.  Back to movies.

At number two we have a bit of a cheat with Wes Craven's 1972 grimy grindhouse grimfest The Last House on the Left.  I say a bit of a cheat because although I definitely saw some of it as a young kid - this being another work that fell foul of the Department of Public Persecution's 1984 'video nasties' banfest - I only saw it as far as the bit where Krug and the gang (they had some good tunes, that band) capture Mari and Phyllis, and the latter is instructed to piss her pants, at which point my dad leapt up and roared "Get this shit off!".  Interesting that although my parents were fine with me watching the other things on this list, enforced urination crossed some sort of line.  Perhaps he found it triggering or something.

And so it wasn't until about fifteen years later that I got the chance to actually watch the entire film.  I like to think of it as the longest intermission in film history.  Most people don't need a decade and a half to go for a wee or get a choc ice.  I understand if anyone thinks that should disqualify the movie from being here since I only initially saw the first... I dunno, twenty-five minutes (?) of it whilst an actual child (you know, if I was doing due diligence and being less lazy I'd actually check how far into the film the peeing bit is, but I'm guessing roughly half and hour-ish), but that scene and the whole incident meant it stayed with me for a long time.  Along with the resentment at not getting to see the rest of it.  My father had been dead for about seven years before I finally got to watch it the whole thing.  I'm not sulking anymore, Dad, we're OK.

Next up, probably the first film I watched enough times to commit the majority of the dialogue to memory: John Landis' 1981 legendary lycanthropic tale of carnivorous lunar activities An American Werewolf in London.  I was always intensely interested in change and transformation in film, making werewolves and shapeshifters in general probably my absolute favourite cinematic subjects.  Of course Rick Baker's groundbreaking and Oscar-winning (an accolade that the horror genre doesn't get to boast very often: off the top of my head the only other Academy Award winners in the genre that occur are Fredric March and Anthony Hopkins; both winning the Best Actor Oscar for 1932's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and 1990's The Silence of the Lambs respectively and showing the gulf of years betwixt the genre getting a nod in one of the big, non-technical categories) make-up has rightly been hailed and lauded; I wonder how much Rob Bottin regrets turning down the gig and letting his assistant do it?

Depicting the change from man to animal (a bit like Manimal, a TV show whose brief run I loved for much the same reasons.  I've still got the annual, somewhere) in visceral and eye-watering bone-crunching detail, the transition was so complete and convincing it allowed the viewer to still see David Naughton's doomed David Kessler in the puppetry-animated monstrous dire wolf that wreaks its carnivorous lunar activities upon the capital in the film's carnage-filled climax, and feel empathy in its unavoidably tragic conclusion.  That bit where the lovely Jenny Agutter tries to talk to the lupine beast in the darkened alley, getting in between the werewolf and the armed police team itching to destroy this thing that was the man she loves, fair broke my little heart.  Still does, every time. 

Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters is the only film on this list to have also ranked on Bryn's video, and for a moment I thought of missing it off but that moment of madness - akin to a politician caught "looking for badgers" on a heath - passed quite quickly when I realised there was no was I could honestly compile this docket of dread without it.  Emerging into the world in 1979 like myself, Zombie Flesh Eaters (or Zombie 2, or just plain Zombi depending upon your regional variations) upped the ante on the shambling cannibalistic undead template set by George A. Romero initial two - and best - entries in his own series by making the anthropophagous revenants truly foetid and putrescent, carrying the rank stench of mouldering burial vaults as they feast upon humanity's warm flesh and blood.  The opening sequence made me very trepidatious about setting foot aboard boats.  Not that we had a lot of cause for going on yachts when I was younger, but if offered I'd have refused lest a burly bald undead (like a cross between Tor Johnson, Quito from Strange Paradise, and Gluttony from Se7en [yes, I still insist on pronouncing it 'seh-seven-en' because I think it's funny]) come shambling at me out of the dark.

And a Fulci film wouldn't be a Fulci film without some eyeball trauma, 'cause Fulci gonna Fulci.  The scene where Olga Karlatos' Mrs Menard has her head slowly pulled towards a splintered piece of wood and the camera lovingly lingers, unflinching, on the shot of her eye being impaled gripped me was fascinated horror.  Movies could do that?  Truly, of all the things little me beheld, this may have been the single thing that warped my tiny mind and got me obsessed with cinema and how it was made.  Responsible for a lot, that shot.  Oh, and the film has an underwater fight between a zombie and a shark.  That short sequence would be the pitch for an entire film these days, though it would be made for SyFy and drenched with crappy CGI rather than drenched with Fabio Frizzi's evocative electronic score (though my absolute favourite of his scores has to be Voci dal Nulla from The Beyond).

Coming in at number five we have Curse of the Devil.  Another werewolf flick, this one if from 1973 and is the sixth (or seventh, depending on whether or not you believe The Nights of the Werewolf  ever existed) entry in the Waldemar Daninsky saga of Spanish horror star Paul Naschy.  Directed by Carlos Aured, who also directed Naschy joints such as the Gothic Horror Rises from the Tomb and the splendid giallo The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (a.k.a. House of Psychotic Women), this differs from the usual Daninsky entries in that it has a late 1890s period setting rather than the present day.  Oh, and in that it was the first of Naschy's films I ever saw.

Rented from the Video Centre rather than our usual EB Video, I distinctly recall choosing this film because I confusedly thought it was The Evil Dead due to their deceptively similar video covers (that, combined with a title and a trailer selected to play up a spurious link with The Exorcist, make it seem like the distributors were desperate to hide the fact that it was a werewolf movie.  I guess the loup-garou was out of fashion for a while until the early '80s double-team of American Werewolf and The Howling) and was a tad disappointed when the movie started and obviously wasn't Sam Raimi's famous video nasty.  In the words of Bob Mortimer, "I did it out of ignorance".  However, disappointment soon turned to joy as the film went on and it began to dawn on me that we had a wolfman on our hands.  Naschy's classic-style werewolf being a sort of Lon Chaney Wolf Man updated for '70s Euro horror with its attendant full colour gore was what I imagined Hammer would have done if they hadn't stopped at The Curse of the Werewolf and had a series of werewolf films to accompany their Dracula and Frankenstein sagas. It would be a few years before I would catch another Naschy film, but I've made up for it since, as I now own... (quickly counts on fingers) twenty nine of his oeuvre.  Still a lot to see, mind.

Baltimore's Don Dohler had already established himself as somewhat of a local cottage industry by the time of 1980's Fiend, after writing, producing and directing a number of shorts in Maryland before breaking into the feature-length scene with The Alien Factor in 1978.  Even though he would go on to make such lo-fi schlock classics as the 1982 Nightbeast (one of the first Troma releases I ever saw, not counting Belgian baffler Rabid Grannies) and yet another 'alien invades the Maryland countryside single handed' flick - Don not being most famous for his variations of storytelling/scenarios - in 1985 with the astonishing The Galaxy Invader, Fiend was the one my sister and I watched as kids and the one that stuck with both of us.

Being I suppose at least a slight spin on Dohler's favourite format, while Fiend deals with an evil entity that descend from the sky at the outset this is a supernatural creature rather than an extraterrestrial - a malevolent glowing thing this floats over a graveyard before inhabiting and reanimating the corpse of Mr Longfellow, who must replenish himself by feeding on the life force of others.  Remembered by Gaynor and myself chiefly for having a red glowing line around him "like an evil Ready Brek man" (boy, that's a dated reference - will anyone get that?), the Fiend himself troubled my imagination long after the tape had been returned to the shop.  Except I wrongly remembered him as having a beard and wearing a cape and top hat instead of a moustache and black suit.  Obviously I caught a glimpse of Jose Mojica Marins' Coffin Joe at some point and mashed them together in my head like a horror movie villain Build-a-Bear.

On second thoughts, it might have been the Hobgoblin from The Moomins.  Yeah, there's more of a chance of that spooky fucker being glimpsed by my child self in the UK of the early '80s than Coffin Joe, probably.

The Incredible Melting Man is a film that I remember far more from the 1978 novelisation by Phil Smith than from hazy recollections of William Sachs' 1977 gloopy grindhouse rendition of a 1950s atomic horror / man into monster movie.  It's amazing, in retrospect, what types of films would get an accompanying paperback novel - from Alan Dean Foster's adaptations of such things as Star Wars and the Alien trilogy to Shaun Hutson of Slugs and Erebus infamy doing his own spin on James Cameron's The Terminator (there was an alternate novelisation by Randall Frakes and Bill Wisher, but I preferred the Hutson, probably just because of the more familiar horror name).

Presumably picked up by my mother while browsing a second hand shop or market stall, said paperback opened with a great scene of a nurse being chased down a darkened corridor by our titular dissolving dude, which my imagination rendered as a kind of Halloween II if Michael Myers had consisted of glistening grisly gristle.  The corresponding scene in the movie was definitely a bit of a let down; the eternal problem of reading the book before seeing the film: it's almost always better lit and directed in the MIND'S EYE.  The photos on both the cover and the inset bunch of pages in the centre of the book (in FULL COLOR) were certainly evocative, detailing the tragic astronaut's gradual gory degradation like an American Victor Caroon.  The film itself couldn't help to be a slight disappointment, despite featuring a small role for the late and lovely Cheryl 'Rainbeaux' Smith - I was too young to appreciate that anyway though.

I definitely appreciated and retained memories of The Keep, though.  Michael Mann's 1983 Nazis versus even more malevolent ancient evil tale was another EB Videos rental just like The Incredible Melting Man (in fact, according to memory, they sat alongside each other on the shelf - along with The Stuff and Street Trash.  Likewise, I recall American Werewolf  being in the vicinity of Caravan of Courage: The Ewok Adventure of all things.  Possibly that was the furries special interest shelf).

Anyway, The Keep and its perils that lay within the tomb of Rasalom (or was that 'The Five Doctors'?) has its own review on this here blog, so I won't waffle on about it as anyone interested in my opinions and thoughts on the movie can see that entry here .  It makes this list mostly for the reason of standing in the video shop and looking at its box art being a particularly strong early memory of mine.

So, there we are: my very own hateful eight (I don't hate 'em, I loves 'em) horror films that I gleefully and ghoulishly reveled in and played no small part into making me the gruesome spectre of the macabre with a fascination for film that I am.  Wouldn't have it any other way.  I'm sure that most of us could recall a litany of the things in our formative years that had an impact on our lives.  This one is mine.