Reviews

You're a young, intelligent, and of course, pretty blond post-doc medical student. You've got more than a bit of an Electra complex, as your silver fox, over-tanned daddy has always hugged you a little too tightly most of your life. This has, unfortunately, left you quite frigid in the sex department. Alas, it's the height of summer, and the heat is unbearable. Most people have vacationed to the cooler, milder beach towns and resorts. Sunspot activity is observed to be at an all-time high. Suddenly, there's a rash of violent murders and suicides sweeping the city – all without reasons or motives. You work as a pathologist in the central morgue. Besides that, you're also trying to finish up your thesis on the differentiations of psychological effects between suicide, natural deaths, and homicide. But the bodies are beginning to pile up. You're exhausted. But you're also incredibly passionate and invested in the work itself – cutting up body after body after body, dissecting and analyzing organ after organ, all the while dripping sweat inside your surgical gown. You begin to hallucinate from the exhaustion… the dead bodies are actually alive! They rise, stare at you, taunt you, force you to watch as the have zombie-sex with one another! Some awaken to the nightmare of being undead, and just scream and scream! But you snap out of it. It's just all that Freudian sexual frustration boiling up inside of you. Right?

Such is the case with Autopsy's Simona Sana, played by one of giallo's better actresses, Mimsy Farmer (Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Perfume of the Lady in Black, The Black Cat). Poor Simona. When one of her father's young playthings ends up on the slab, Simona realizes that not only was she one of the last to see this young beauty alive, but that her own father might be a murderer! All the evidence leads to suicide though, right? But the girl's Catholic priest brother sets out to prove that suicide is the very last thing his sister would ever have contemplated, let alone go through with. In between the balancing act of withholding evidence to protect her father, lying to the priest to keep him off the right track, keeping her perpetually horny boyfriend at bay, and fending off one of her terrorizing ex-stepmothers, Simona's got more than her hands full. The priest (who Simona is now sexually attracted to) demands that they work together, but how can she look for the real killer, and keep her father safe at the same time? And her brain can't take much more of this either – the hallucinations keep popping up under the most startling and often horrific circumstances. Are the sunspots responsible for all of this madness? Is her father really the killer after all? Is the priest? Is she herself the killer? Could Simona be that far gone?

Few Italian Horror films split the vote the way Autopsy does. Not really a giallo, and certainly not the zombie film most trailers, posters, and video art taken from it would lead you to believe. And just who the hell is the director of this hodgepodge, Armando Crispino? In a genre of filmmaking like Italian Horror, which is extremely and perhaps overly attached to auteur theory, why the hell should someone stop and notice a film made by a relative nobody? One time assistant director to the likes of Pietro Germi, Crispino directed nine films in nine years (1966-1975), and Autopsy is one of his last. In fact, besides this film and a previous giallo from 1972, The Dead are Alive (aka The Etruscan Kills Again), most of his own work is forgettable, forgotten, and not worth finding – although his last film, Frankenstein: Italian Style, sounds like it might at least be a hoot in the camp department.

So again, why Autopsy? Yes, its story is convoluted (see above). It's got its fair share of non sequiturs, deus ex machinas, and red herrings like all the rest. Yeah, in some ways Autopsy's just another Freudian Psych. 102 class-cum-thriller, but there's something else here. Autopsy has a risky, devil-may-care, je ne sais quoi that separates it from almost all the others in its genre. Crispino took a chance with this highly unusual story, and I think it pays off in spades. The film's deliberate, unorthodox pace is stimulating, and the absence of the usual 'insert murder every X-minutes' structure just makes it that much more suspenseful. Autopsy is audacious in that it is at least trying to be different from the rest – something extraordinary and marked by brilliance, but not completely tangible or so easy to explain, or therefore, to explain away. Simona's truly bizarre sexual hang-ups, the doom-laden sunspots, the morally ambiguous priest, the creepy father-daughter subtext, and the big blown-up photographs of real corpses – it all makes for an unclassifiable film. And as we all learned in Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling, people would just as soon kill you before taking time to try and understand you. Is this the case with Autopsy's mixed reputation?

Despite the always-shocking opening minutes, the delightfully uncomfortable hallucinations that pepper the film, the 'death museum' sequence (which is one of the most beautifully structured and impudently repellant set pieces in all of Italian Horror) and the obligatory yet nail-biting showdown at the end, perhaps the idea behind Autopsy is greater than the film itself. Such a statement is contrary to most Italian Horror, as many of the films attributed to this genre are supposedly lacking in the idea department, but prove their worth visually and stylistically. This is precisely why Autopsy is one of the 'must-see' films in Italian Horror, for although it stays more than true to the tenets of visual flair and graphic sex/violence, it attempts to transcend the weaknesses of its own genre. And despite, in some people's eyes, the failure of said attempt, Autopsy unarguably gets an'A' for effort.

Just when you thought you couldn't see a wackier film than Assignment Terror, along comes this little gem. Having taken two years off from portraying Waldemar Daninsky (last been seen in 1973's slick snooze-fest El Retorno de Warpugis / The Curse of the Devil), Naschy is back – wilder and woollier than ever. The plot is one of those day-dream plots of Naschy's, utilizing almost every possible archetype and genre cliché possible, combining them in a way that seems ludicrous but ultimately pays off through sheer audacity. La Maldicion is devoid of the romanticism and lyricism of some of the previous Waldemar outings, this time being all about sleaze, exploitation, garish lighting, outrageously ridiculous costumes, and budget- constrained effects. The plot concerns are nothing to take lightly, as Waldemar must battle not only his long-time nemesis Wandessa (yes, the bitch is back… again), but also a murderous Mongol chief, a pair of cannibalistic sorceresses, and a rampaging yeti. Shot by the more-than-capable Tomàs Pladevall, La Maldicion could be, arguably, the last, great gasp of campy Spanish horror. If true camp is accidental, achieved only through failure or lack of intent, then La Maldicion is camp in the truest sense of the word. Once again Naschy attempts to make his ultimate adult monster movie—and fails. Full of nudity, sex, graphic violence, and unpredictable plot twists, La Malaicion features Naschy's favorite gimmick – to put heretofore uncombined classic heroes and villains all in one script. The werewolf, the vampire, the adventurer, the witch, the monk, the Hun, and the yeti all conspire to make this one lively film, as preposterous as it is full of plot holes. Of course! Its very preposterousness proves Naschy's magic – no one else has ever made the ludicrous so watchable.

A Dragonfly For Each Corpse seems at first glance to be a by-the-numbers copy of the Italian type of giallo, incorporating most of its tropes, but there are enough deviations from the formula that make it one of the better films in its genre. At the center of this film lies the cliché of the puritan-killer, a negative altruist who believes he or she is making the world a better place by ridding it of the morally impure. Akin to the antagonist in Lucio Fulci's 1972 masterpiece Don't Torture a Duckling, the murderer in Dragonfly is even more vicious, although the psychological motivation ultimately isn't as rich, layered or political as in Duckling. Naschy portrays the police investigator assigned to the case, and his character is about as far from Waldemar Daninsky as you're ever likely to see. It's wonderful to see Naschy portraying the cop in one giallo immediately after playing the red herring in the previous one (Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll). Donning a big bushy mustache (hubba-hubba!) and perpetually puffing a fat cigar, Naschy plays Inspector Scaporella to the hilt; and as screenwriter, Naschy serves up a slice of Milanese life that runs the gamut from the posh high-end aristocrats to the low-life street scum, and the red light districts that they frequent. Even though it's a trope of the genre as a whole, Naschy and Klimovsky display a particularly strong contempt for humanity in this giallo – no strata of people are left unscathed, unlike in the films of uber-Marxist Fulci, whose compassion always lies with the salt of the earth. But what Naschy does that I've never seen in an Italian giallo is give so much life to the protagonist's love interest. Mrs. Scaporella, played by genre-icon Erika Blanc, decides to try and solve the murders on her own, but what's Mrs. Scaporella's motivation to solve the crimes before her husband does? Could she be involved in the murders in some way? Though certainly no Nick and Nora Charles, Inspector and Mrs. Scaporella make a great pair, and it's ultimately the performances of Naschy and Blanc that qualify Dragonfly as a good movie. They and their banter help elevate this bloody body count of a film to one of the best Naschy (and Klimovsky) ever made. Very hard to find a copy of this, but it's out there and worth searching for.

Although born from Italian pulp novels of the '30s, the giallo genre now seems to refer to cinema before referring to literature. And though Italians have the corner on giallo movies, French and Spanish filmmakers also took part in the craze during its heyday (1969-1982). It should come as no surprise that the two best Spanish gialli were written by and starred Paul Naschy, and directed by Klimovksy and Aured. The first in this pair of Freudian nightmares is Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, directed by the latter. Instead of leaning on giallo plot descriptions to charm you into seeing this film (I'll save that for the next entry), I'd like to point out an entertaining facet of Naschy's oeuvre that is always overlooked, or at least only hinted at. More so than in any other Naschy film, Blue Eyes… shows you just how much Naschy loved his own body, or, shows you just how much he enjoyed sexually objectifying himself for the sake of his own movies. I can think of no other filmmaker, save for Woody Allen, who so reduces himself within his own work. With Allen the objectification is almost purely intellectual, maintaining that his superior intelligence, artistic talent, and neurotic charm should (and often does) result in his "getting the girl" by film's end. Naschy, however, takes every opportunity available to get naked (usually from the waist-up) in order to flex his superiority and his weakness at the same time. His superiority stems from his supporting cast finding his physique so irresistible; his weakness arises from the fact that he's almost always scarred, bruised, lacerated and beaten on or around his chest and torso, which allows many a woman to apply their apparently innate skills at wound dressing. It's fascinating to find a male filmmaker as comfortable as Naschy was with baring his body not for its own sake, but for the sake of all those who want to see it – one need only observe the angles at which Naschy shoots his nakedness once it hits the screen to know that it's all quite calculated. Perhaps due to the limitations forced upon him and other filmmakers by the censors of the time, Naschy took it upon himself to bear the brunt of a film's sensual/sexual quotient. Or maybe, Naschy was just an equal opportunity employer, who felt that there's no reason to lay the burden of sex-content solely on the female form. Either reason is fine by me, Señor Lobo! Aside from being a solidly entertaining and bloody thriller with a great plot and excellent acting across the board, Blue Eyes… provides an excellent introduction to the unique subject of Naschy's self-love.

The Hunchback of the Morgue is a wonderful film with a great pace, an engaging story, some outrageous gore, and real scares. As the doomed and misbegotten Gotho, Naschy gives one of his finest dramatic performances – it earned him a well-deserved prize at Sitges, and I think it would've even made Karloff or Chaney, Sr. proud. Naschy is able to make Gotho, an utterly clueless and abused hunchback/morgue-janitor, a sympathetic character despite possessing a nasty, vicious temper, and being both an accomplice to serious crime, and a latent necrophiliac. Naturally, I think he's quite adorable, and with Naschy writing the script, so does the leading lady, regular co-star Rosanna Yanni. The real villain of the film is one Dr. Orla (homage/rip at Jess Franco or Generalissimo Franco?) who takes full and horrible advantage of Gotho's hardships; Orla (excellently portrayed by genre-veteran Alberto Dalbes) leads Gotho down a truly sickening path involving corpse robbing (or corpse-creating) and some absolutely ungodly experiments. The film's climax shocked me when I first saw it – I wasn't expecting it to be so frightening. There's a build-up throughout the film as to what the experiment-generated monster actually looks like, and unlike most cases of this device, it ultimately pays off in spades. The gore and make-up is fabulous, as is the sound effect for the monster (it still sends chills down my spine to think of it). The Hunchback of the Morgue is a real benchmark of Spanish Horror, and certainly one of Naschy's career. But be warned, this film does contain a scene (it's most notorious) where real rats were burned alive.

Though all the available prints pretty much suck, and Naschy's dubbed voice is one of the worst in his oeuvre, I can still make out a truly fine film underneath all the muck (the whole film is on YouTube, but with commercials). Naschy had a very specific body type, so it's great to see those films where he didn't let his shorter, stockier physique get in the way of playing characters that are traditionally tall and/or gaunt. And this is a great little spin on the Dracula story too, with an ending even I did not see coming. The plot of Count Dracula's Great Love concerns ye olde sanguine's attempts to procure the blood of virgins and innocents so as to revive his dead daughter (which is a great twist from the usual lost-love pining). Rosanna Yanni is simply fantastic as the lusty Senta, and in fact, all four of the female co-stars really shine here. This film has atmosphere in spades, much like Aguirre's previous film with Naschy, The Hunchback of the Morgue. Dracula still lives in an old Gothic castle, and the surrounding area is fog-shrouded, but the art direction is so superb that it elevates the film far beyond the assumed banal. And Naschy proves that he can play a romantic lead without the crutch of Waldemar, though his Count Dracula is more akin to Barnabas Collins than the manic blood-junkies one normally has to endure in a vampire film (though there's nothing wrong with the occasional manic blood-junkie). Unfortunately Dracula's heart is too big to fit through the needle of his immoral deeds, and so we're left with one of the most striking and shocking endings in the entire canon of vampire movies. What can I say? Like Naschy's Dracula, I'm a sucker for a/the romantic.

Bava is the personification of Italian Horror, and perhaps nowhere is the central axiom of this genre more apparent than in the highly personal Hatchet for the Honeymoon. A seemingly run-of-the-mill story involving one John Harrington (a wedding-dress only transvestite designer who murders his own luscious models), Hatchet for the Honeymoon is, on close inspection, both the thesis and antithesis of Italian Horror. Thesis, because the film is highly stylized and stays true to many genre tropes. But this film is often derided by Italian Horror fans for what on the surface seems to be a complete lack of originality – the banality of this particular plot seems like too much re-treading to most. The only diagetic mysteries in Hatchet for the Honeymoon are reasons and motivations. Identity and morality (two of the most common themes in the genre up until this film, if not the only themes) have no place here, hence antithesis.

Not since Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much had an Italian Horror film focused so much on the psychology of just one character. John Harrington's psychology is in fact the main 'character' of the film. Each grisly murder unlocks a room in John's demented brain. Each room reveals a piece of his haunted past that might help him figure out why he kills, and always while wearing a wedding dress. His wife Mildred (played to the snarky hilt by Laura Betti, a legendary muse of Pier Paolo Pasolini) is a nagging, unsympathetic, infuriatingly fickle harpy, who we long for John to zero in on, but not before she gets out a few more fierce barbs. But contrary to the traditional fashions of Italian Horror, the murders are never really shown. Instead the viewer is lead to believe that each murder is a necessary, hallucinogenic, somatic, and almost innocent catharsis, simply leading John Harrington (and us) towards his cure, and towards the credits' final roll.

In Blood & Black Lace, despite its intoxicating and never-seen-before palette of sanguine lushness, Bava was still quite reliant on script and plot to further his movies toward their inevitable conclusions. Suspense and the obligatory who-and-how-done-its were still vital to the resolution of the plots to Kill Baby, Kill and Bava's 1965 sci-fi touchstone Planet of the Vampires. Although each of those three films carefully nicked away at the singular stranglehold that 'dialogue and plot' had on the viewer's emotional involvement, a pure cinema of horror as yet eluded Maestro Bava. And by this notion of 'pure cinema', I'm referring to the aesthetics and visuals – the arguable responsibility of film to be more akin to photographic rather than theatrical devices. Whether or not Bava ever achieved a cinema of pure horror is something left to individual tastes, although I'd like to think that with Black Sunday he accomplished that goal right out of the gate.

In Hatchet for the Honeymoon there's simply the subjective situation, needs and mystery of one man involved and at stake. There are no innocent villagers to save, no planet Earth to rescue from vampiric destruction, no revenge or morality play to push to its inevitable end. Just one ego. One psyche. One lens, if you will. In fact, is all of what we see on the screen even really happening to John Harrington in the world of the film itself? As Laura Betti has pointed out, having a script be nothing of importance to the filmmaker "is something that is not considered normal in America, yet I must tell you that all Italian directors do this. Even Fellini, Pasolini, and Bertolucci." In America it's an anomaly to have more than one screenwriter on a single film; in Italy almost the opposite is true. It's not unheard of for an entire production to have been shot from a few pages of notes, suggestions of dialogue if you will. Films via the set & camera, not via the page.

I believe this is paramount in understanding Italian Horror and also perhaps why it is a genre often considered the 'gateway drug' between high-art film aficionados and lowbrow genre geeks. Art snobs appreciate the notion of visuals furthering a plot, the medium of film being self-reliant and self-referential, mood as the main, or rather most relevant, character, etc. And genre-philes often leap to "art films" after seeing Italian Horror, as they realize having to 'think' about movies isn't such a dumb/un-cool idea after all. Hatchet for the Honeymoon is Bava's tone poem – the film where he finally puts the script aside, consciously making the movie's atmosphere and theme the true main character. Incredibly enough, Bava also found the time to turn the giallo on its head in the process. In Hatchet, we know who the murderer is from the start of the picture. We know murders will have to continue. We can even securely guess the impetus for what John Harrington's doing; it's John himself who's having the hard time figuring it all out. Despite this being a film full of death, mayhem, insanity, psychoses, and perhaps even guilt, Bava had finally discovered a way to divorce sympathy and empathy from it all. Is this dehumanizing or even morally criminal? Most likely, yes. But is it fascinating, beautiful, striking, even downright funny? Without a doubt. Everything we've come to love about Bava up to this film is here, and in spades. With Bava trapped in an unhappy marriage himself, but being a good catholic never divorcing or even supposedly cheating on his wife, his passion towards Hatchet for the Honeymoon makes it among his most personal of works.

Poor lycanthrope Waldemar has learned that the only way he can die is to be pierced through the heart with the same relic that was used to kill Wandessa—but to retrieve the relic would mean having to bring the bitch back to life. To make matters worse, Wandessa must be destroyed before the onset of Walpurgis Night or else her powers will maximize, and her destruction be practically impossible (For those who don't know, Walpurgis Night is the evening of April 30th, when according to the majority of European folklore witches are at their most powerful). Aye dios mio… what's a hombre lobo to do? This film is a contender for one of the greatest Spanish Horror films of its time. Many of the tropes of Spanish Horror start right here, already utilized for maximum enjoyment. There's a groovy score (eat your heart out Hübler and Schwab), lots of groovy gore (more throats ripped open than ever before), and some groovy chicks (Barbara Capell as Genevieve is a lesbo-riot in scantily clad slo-mo). And of course there's the delectably bi-polar Daninsky. If you enjoy this film, the fifth in the Waldemar series, then chances are you're game for all that Spanish Horror has to offer – Werewolf Shadow is one of the gateway drugs to the world of Naschy, his Suspiria if you will. And for you fans of auteur theory: Klimovsky started his work with Naschy here. Considered one of the top Spanish Horror directors, Klimovsky certainly helmed some of Señor Lobo's best.

Yes… it's bad in that "special" way. Assignment Terror is House of Dracula, Plan 9 From Outer Space, and "Monster Bash Pinball" all rolled into one movie! But boy oh boy is it loads of fun! One of things I love about Naschy, aside from that barrel-chest of his, is that you know he'd probably been daydreaming since childhood about how to fit every Universal Horror monster into a single film – and with Assignment Terror he almost succeeded. His fabulously ludicrous premise falls victim to its own ambition: aliens from a dying world set their sights on Earth and plan its conquest by bringing to life Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, Waldemar Daninsky, and some Mummy named Tao-Tet. The monsters, however, are ludicrously fabulous in their roles, with Naschy portraying both Waldemar and (I believe) Frankenstein's monster. But the real stars in this one (again, aside from Naschy's script) are Manuel de Blas as Dracula, and the Mummy's truly wonderful make-up: both are very, very creepy, but for very different reasons. This movie is utterly unabashed - I highly recommend it.

What's your Jekyll doing in my Wolfman? Hey! Get your Wolfman out of my Jekyll! Naschy found a way to bring these classic characters together for a film that's a hoot from start to finish. After saving a woman from being raped, Daninsky travels with her back to London, where she hopes to cure him of his lobo-curse via her connection to the grandson of Dr. Jekyll. Unfortunately (but fortunately for us), not everything goes as planned with the cure, and Waldemar is now additionally burdened with a split personality, giving him a final MPD count of 3. The added persona's traits are that of a sadistic beast, though unlike the curse of the werewolf, Waldemar's Mr. Hyde has the sexual appetite of a Spring Break Co-Ed on amphetamines. Being both Hyde and the werewolf pretty much doubles the violence in this film, and the gore is fantastic. Naschy is having a glorious time playing the three roles, and that fact alone is enough to make this film fabulous. Mirta Miller, veteran of several Naschy films, is just marvelous here as a beautifully (and beautiful) sinister nurse.

This macabre movie is a great highlight of Spanish Horror. Helmed by Carlos Aured, assistant director on Werewolf Shadow, Horror Rises From the Tomb is the first of two vehicles in which Naschy portrays one of his favorite creations: the vicious Alaric de Marnac. Inspired by Gilles de Rais (a 15th century serial killer) and the 1958 B-movie classic The Thing That Couldn't Die, Naschy has written a film that contains some of the most indelible moments in his canon. From the opening scene's upside-down decapitation, to the heart-ripping murders of the young innocents by Alaric's malignant companion Mabille de Lancre, who is played to the scrumptious hilt by the great unsung queen of Euro-Horror, Helga Liné (above), Horror Rises From the Tomb is an utter delight. Naschy again plays multiple parts in this film, but it's very easy to tell that he relishes playing Alaric the most, especially when he's just a talking severed head. The scene of Mabille's rebirth is truly disturbing, and one wonders if Clive Barker was thinking of it when he wrote the notorious mattress scene in Hellraiser II. Naschy's sequel, 1983's Panic Beats, is a good film in its own right, though it ultimately didn't make this list.

This is the first Waldemar Daninsky film – the kick start of Spanish Horror's Golden Age. It's shot in 70mm, and every corner of the frame pops with confident art direction, however naive some of it may seem now. A wonderful homage to Universal Horror's heyday, but updated with Bava- esque lighting more garish than Gothic. Right out of the gate, Naschy portrays a truly ferocious monster, knocking down and chewing up everything in sight, stopping short of the film loaded in the camera. Had audiences ever seen an actor portray a monster, let alone a werewolf, with such utter physical abandon? I'm thinking of the scene in which Waldemar the werewolf smashes into a villager's hut and attacks the unsuspecting residents. Spanish audiences had certainly never seen anything so phantasmagorical, and so bloody. Most surprising to many contemporary viewers is the fact that there are several moments of real fright and suspense. The colors are ludicrously bold, as is Naschy's performance when he's howling it up. Includes swarthy gypsies, cape-clad satanists and a beautiful but deadly witch/vampire: Wandessa. Added bonus: Naschy often stripped to the waist. Not much else to say. Just sit back, enjoy, and escape!

Whereas Black Sunday may be one of the most influential films for the discerning Gothic horror artiste, Bava's 1971 'tour de snuff', Twitch of the Death Nerve, is unarguably the most influential toward the genre's eventual turn to bloodlust. Whether you like it or not, the definition of a horror film hasn't been the same since Twitch, and chances of its influence ever completely receding are next to nil. The first film to exploit its body-count as the main reason for viewing, Twitch of the Death Nerve even hits the ground running (or wheeling rather), with the first two of its thirteen ghastly murders occurring in the first scene alone. Besides the high mortality rate of the characters, and Bava's diabolical tunnel vision of the carnage, another not so easily noticeable (yet perhaps most lasting) influence of Twitch is the complete reliance on set pieces to reach its sadistic goal. Every murder is methodically, systematically designed for optimum shock, and the film's cameraman (Bava himself), art director, actors, writers, editors, FX men, etc., all play their crucial and individual parts to perfection each time, thereby making each piece stand alone like masochistic movements in a sadistic symphony.

Said actors run the gamut from fallen icons of World Cinema (like Isa Miranda), and ex-Bond Girls (Thunderball's Claudine Auger), to Laura Betti, and a Brechtian spaghetti western star (Luigi Pistilli). The writers include none other than Dardano Sacchetti, who had just recently penned Argento's Cat O' Nine Tails, and would go on to give Lucio Fulci one of the finest scripts of his career - The Beyond. Carlo Rambaldi, who would go on to win two Oscars for Alien and E.T., created the then-state-of-the-art special effects. I suppose I should mention the story line, which is often attacked for being inconsequential, illogical, irrational, impossible to sort out, or simply the odious ex machina to simply get from one murder to another. I find it all pretty simple to explain myself - I don't see what's so difficult to understand. Bava's penchant for cynicism and his fascination with humanity's dark side has never been more apparent than in Twitch of the Death Nerve, whose plot concerns greed, real estate, the raping of the environment, and revenge.

All the action transpires around a beautiful, undeveloped bay and its surrounding picturesque landscape/acreage, whose owner (Isa Miranda) has been murdered. Those who wish to convert the entire area into a fashionable resort now threaten the forests and natural life. But just who is the real heir to this potential fortune now? And who won't stop at nothing to own it all, or to preserve the land's natural state. Throw in some sex-crazed teenagers who stumble and wander where they shouldn't belong, and you've got the makings for wholesale slaughter. Beheadings, faces cleaved in two, necks gouged apart, bodies run through with spears & tridents, flying pots of boiling water, hangings, strangulations, bodies being blown to shotgun bits - Twitch of the Death Nerve's got it all! Video Watchdog's Tim Lucas said it best, "the horror genre had seen nothing quite like it before - and it's seen very little unlike it ever since." Touché. As with his work on I Vampiri and Black Sunday, Bava likely had no idea that what he was making would change the course of horror film history. Twitch of the Death Nerve was a film for which Bava was especially proud - the body count, the blatantly offensive amorality, the over-indulgent carnality, and the ludicrous lump of unlikable characters.

All these things were purposeful commentary on Bava's part - to take a stab at the industry, the genre; to see what he could do with a little bit of money; to push the envelope; to push the buttons and watch people's reactions. Such are valid and fun reasons for doing what he did. Little did Bava know that Twitch's genius would be singularly responsible for a whole bevy of '80s crap, including Friday the 13th, Part II's blatant theft of two of Twitch's death scenes. Argento's Bird and Bava's Twitch were the nails in the coffin for the first half of Italian Horror's heyday. The dark, alluring fantasies were now gone. No longer would the plots be semi-innocent, or quasi-Victorian. No more wandering through fogged graveyards and abandoned castles. Though Bava continued to make some work of merit in the '70s (Baron Blood, Lisa and the Devil), never again would he find himself at the forefront of the genre he almost single-handedly created. The future belonged to perversion, degeneracy, gore, hysteria, cannibalism, Teutonic witches, zombies and Goblins. Lots and lots of Goblins.

It all begins rather nonchalantly – with a semi-rugged, handsome and solitary man (visiting American writer Sam Dalmas) calmly walking along a dark and empty Roman side street. Across the way, inside what appears to be a high-end contemporary art gallery, Sam witnesses a struggle between an obscured, shadowy man and a woman dressed in white. The mysterious black-gloved man appears to be attacking the woman with a large knife or razor. Shocked, Sam runs over to help, banging on the fiberglass partition that shields the gallery from the street, but it's all in vain. Without warning, the gallery's alarm goes off and another invulnerable partition quickly slides into place from behind, thereby trapping Sam between the two. He has no choice but to watch helplessly as the woman is repeatedly and mercilessly stabbed by her masked, leather-clad attacker. And we have no choice but to sit and watch along with him.

Although there's great danger in store for Sam if he remains in Rome (being the only eyewitness to a still unsolved crime), he's determined to assist however he can. The only way he really can help is by forcing himself to confront the memories of what he saw that night. And we are forced to do the same. Argento gave us almost all the clues to solve the movie's mystery right up front, film title included (something the character of Sam doesn't even get to consider). We saw exactly the same things Sam did. Can we recall those initial images we shouldn't have taken for granted, and with them, guess the killer's identity? Can Sam figure it out before he's next on the killer's list? Throughout Bird, Sam is haunted by what he saw, or rather, what he didn't see, and only by immersing himself in the horror of the memory (and the future danger that comes with it) can he free himself from its ghost; like John Harrington in Bava's Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Sam Dalmas must go on. One of the most auspicious directorial debuts in genre cinema history (if not in all of cinema), Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage took the world film markets (and critics) by complete surprise upon its initial releases throughout '70-'71.

Dario Argento was an already accomplished screenwriter, having co-written Sergio Leone's epic, unsurpassable masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West, but Argento's directorial debut was neither greatly anticipated nor expected to be of much note. Today Argento is considered to be among the most influential genre filmmakers alive, and the roots of so much that we take for granted in the world of cinematic thrills and suspense first took seed in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Despite Bava's originating the giallo sub-genre with 1962's The Girl Who Knew Too Much and 1964's Blood & Black Lace, it took Argento's Bird to kick-start the craze, which ran for a further twelve blood-riddled years. This nail-biting interim include great works by Lucio Fulci (Lizard in a Woman's Skin; Don't Torture a Duckling) and Sergio Martino (Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key; Torso), but Argento himself brought the giallo's glorious run to its end with his overtly self-referential 1982 film Tenebrae, in which, again like Hatchet for the Honeymoon, the protagonist and antagonist are one and the same.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage however, keeps first-time viewers guessing in addictive frustration, and shaking in their seats until its final sadistic scenes. Unlike Bava, the dialogue and plot matter a great deal to Argento, and few if any other giallos can match Bird's inventive narrative. Aided by intelligent, imaginative and disquieting camera-work by future Oscar-winner Vittorio Storaro (who like Argento was a prior relative unknown), and a gorgeously arid percussive score by Ennio Morricone, Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was the start of an ingenious and daring career that has seen many highs, and many unfortunate lows. Even though Bava will always be the Renaissance Man to lovers of Italian Horror, Argento should be remembered as the Mannerist, the Expressionist. He took it to the next obvious yet intelligent level, away from Bava's bold, entertaining experiments in style, contrast, perspective and otherworldly lighting, and instead into a darker, morally-contrarian realm. One where the feelings and intentions of the artist's images, and the audience's reaction to them, may not be in sync; where a world of fever-dreams and waking-nightmares is ruled by Freudian panic; and where the word 'primal' may lose its definition, for it could be all there is. Most amazing of all, Argento's best works were yet to come.

A zombie-maned sailboat wanders into New York Harbor. Once the on-board walking dead is disposed of (or is it?), the search begins for the boat's origin. Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow, sister to Mia), the daughter of its owner, travels with journalist Peter West (Fulci regular Ian McCulloch) to Matul Island in the Antilles, in search of not only her father but also answers concerning the homicidal yet trance-like behavior of the man that was on the sailboat. With the help of Caribbean expatriates Brian (Italian B-movie icon Al 'hubba-hubba' Ciner) and his lady-friend Susan, the four of them eventually find their way to Matul - a cursed place according to all who live on neighboring islands. It turns out that Anne's father is now dead (along with most of the island's inhabitants), and that the remaining 'whities' (a Dr. Mernard, his wife Paola, a nurse, and a handyman), are all desperately trying to hold out until a cure is found for the disease that is killing everyone and turning them into flesh-eating zombies. Needless to say, panic ensues. Up till 1979, Italian Horror had its more than fair share of satanic witches, deformed murderers, luscious murderesses, old vampires, vengeful ghosts, mad doctors, deranged lunatics, very bad mommies, and loony priests. But where are the zombies?

According to many 'zombiphiles', Italian Horror is the apocalyptic apogee when it comes to the many worlds of the walking dead. Well, the sub-genre pretty much started right here, with Fulci's 1979 gore fest, Zombie. Italian cinema had yet to fully embrace the zombie film, as 1974's Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, though an Italian/Spanish co-production and chiefly made on the lira, is aesthetically really a Spanish Horror film, with the director, writers, and most of the crew and supporting cast hailing from Barcelona (Spanish Horror is a whole other netherworld of wonders that flourished throughout the 1970's). So just where does Fulci's film come from? Popular consensus would have us believe that Zombie was made so as to be an unofficial sequel to the 1978 Romero/Argento co-creation Dawn of the Dead. The truth is that Zombie was written, and began pre-production, before Dawn of the Dead was even released in Italy. The New York City sequences that bookend Zombie were added after the producers demanded their presence - an attempt to cash in on Dawn's phenomenal success in Italy. In the end, these changes make Zombie appear to be a prequel to Dawn, with the film's plot trying to explain how Romero's zombies came to be. Unfortunately, many people decry Zombie for this fact alone, and perhaps rightfully so. But if you can get past this greedy little capitalist piece of information, Fulci's Zombie contains many wonderful treasures, both campy and earnest.

Though Fulci had tinkered with gore effects in previous films (chiefly Don't Torture a Duckling and Four of the Apocalypse), it was in Zombie that it blossomed into a heaping, steaming, slippery pile of guts and goo. Containing what is one of the most infamous kill scenes in all of Italian Horror (the eye-gouging of Paola Menard via walking corpse and a really big splinter), Zombie opened the floodgates to on screen viscera, the influence of which is still with us to this day. And the films has its far share of scares too, in particular the rising of the long-dead conquistadors, and the pot luck organ-fest after Paola's demise. Mrs. Menard is portrayed by shapely and buxom love goddess Olga Karlatos (most of us know her as Prince's mom in Purple Rain). Olga delivers a truly naked performance, in that not only is she nude for almost her entire time on screen, but that she also acts with such utter Method-abandon. Unlike Tisa Farrow, whom you could actually mistake for one of the living dead if she didn't open her mouth to speak occasionally. Hence the two campy elements to Zombie. One - the potential Ed Wood/Andy Milligan-like cult that could rise out of the perpetually wooden Italian Horror performances of Tisa Farrow (see also Anthropophagus). And two - Zombie is, without a doubt, the only film that dares to ask the all-important question, which would win the ultimate death match: zombie or shark?

And as for the living dead themselves, these aren't Romero's or the fast-paced killers of Lenzi's abominable Nightmare City. Fulci's zombies are slow moving, still-decomposing, worm-infested, voodoo sloths. And the voodoo is a key element here, for in all likelihood, Dr. Menard's science-driven work was in vain. These zombies are not radioactive killers, or virus- laden maniacs; if anything, Fulci owes more of a debt to Jacques Tourneur's 1943 classic I Walked With a Zombie, whose living dead were the simple, nightmarish personification of slave-trade revenge and anger. There was an era of nihilism, hedonism, and bleakness on the horizon, for not just Italian Horror, but for all in the Western World who would dwelled under the dark cloud of the Reagan and Thatcher Era. With Zombie, Fulci not only kick started a craze of flesh-eating, cannibalism, and barf bag gore, but a whole slew of films that purposefully presented only hopelessness, decay, oblivion, and the unavoidable self-devouring of mankind.

Frequently lauded and cited as a strong influence by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Federico Fellini and David Lynch, Kill Baby, Kill is, along with the 1963 Bronte/Sade opus Whip & the Body, the most oft-mentioned crowning achievement of Mario Bava. Those who saw Kill Baby, Kill upon its initial release (as is the case with the three auteur mentioned above) witnessed something heretofore unseen in Italian Horror, if not in cinema as a whole. Never before had a low-budget, commercial and studio film been obviously and primarily concerned with its style, perhaps purposefully to the sacrifice of all else. The producers ran out of money two weeks into shooting, but Bava and the entire cast/crew decided to keep working for free. I'd like to think that this explains the film's aesthetic – the idea that the producers (out of shame for having no money) left the artists alone to do whatever they wanted. Who would they be to demand re-shoots with no money to pay anyone?

And what style is this movie? Rural rococo? Barnyard baroque? Not since the heyday of Sternberg and Murnau had a film director been so obvious about his single-minded conveyance of artifice über alles. Ahem… I'd go so far as to call it The Scarlet Empress of Italian Horror. (Hopefully Marlene Dietrich and Jack Smith aren't rolling over in their graves from that one.) It's as if Bava were contractually obligated to tell a story or have a plot in this film (he's one of the three screenwriters on this one by the way), but all he really wanted to do was perfect using his purple and green fill lights, maybe show off his exquisite low-key techniques, and go zoom-shot reverse zoom-shot 'til one's head is spinning. Oh yeah, and that new industrial-sized dry ice machine – don't forget to leave that on full blast.

The plot, which is amusingly influential in its own right, concerns the giggly, ball-bouncing ghost of an accidentally killed little girl who, through the vengeful psyche of her psychotic albeit medium mother, is terrorizing all the villagers into guilt-ridden suicide, one at a time. Though the mayor and his good-witch girlfriend-on-the-side are trying their best to outdo the nasty matron and her brat, all is so far for naught. All this is happening because the debauched and ignorant villagers were busy partying and sinning during an all-night drunken holiday, and they didn't notice that the girl (little Melissa), the Baroness Graps' daughter, was in danger. For poor Melissa got trampled by horses, and her attempt to call attention to her not-yet mortal wounds via the ringing of the town bell, fell upon gin-soaked eyes and ears. The mournful Baroness seeks revenge, and, with the help of her spectral spawn, her plan is succeeding nicely. Friday the 13th anyone…?

The Villa Graps, where the delightfully paranoid Baroness resides, is (along with William Burroughs) a clear influence on Twin Peaks' Black Lodge, with the Baroness herself (as was pointed out to me by a Kill Baby, Kill obsessed friend) the undeniable source of Grace Zabriske's genius performance as Laura Palmer's mother. Like the Black Lodge, the Villa Graps is a maddening character in its own right. And as for the banal screenwriters of the already mentioned Friday the 13th, after seeing Kill Baby, Kill and Bava's later Twitch of the Death Nerve you too may wonder why a lawsuit was never filed against them. The stunning visuals, the beautiful tracking shots, the creepy laugh of Melissa, the Baroness' hair, the pure and absurd phantasmagoria of it all – Kill Baby, Kill is Bava's ultimate proof that style could attempt to be substance all by itself. And though he denied the identity of 'artist' his whole life (he preferred 'craftsman' or 'artisan'), with this film Bava proved that his instincts and impulses were in line with the greatest attribute an artist can ever hope to have: that of risk-taker.

Don't torture a what? I know, I thought the same thing when I first saw the title. But thanks to the phenomenal success of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, almost every giallo released in Bird's wake had an animal in its name – The Cat o' Nine Tails, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Lizard in a Woman's Skin, Tail of the Scorpion, Black Belly of the Tarantula, Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye, ad infinitum. I suppose one could wax philosophic about the use of animals as reflections of the giallo's cold brutality, man being just another animal himself, 'man as meat', etc., but in truth many of these titles were unessential to the film's plot, and simply attempts to jump on the commercial bandwagon pushed into motion by Bird.

However, such is not the case with Don't Torture a Duckling, which next to Bird with the Crystal Plumage is one of the most intelligent, if not historically important giallos ever made. Duckling's title is not a red herring, but is rather a guarded and integral shell for the film's story – a perverse tale of child murder, pedophilia, good mommies, bad mommies, black magic, and ultimately the agony (and the ecstasy) of Catholicism.

The plot: Young boys in a small, remote community are turning up brutally murdered. The local villagers are so appalled by the crimes that they're out for blood – anyone's blood. Every arrest the police make ends up being the wrong person. The big-city reporter (Spaghetti Western icon, Thomas Milian, who atypically underplays his part) is running down one dead end after another, and few people in the town trust him to begin with. Another boy is killed. Everyone is terrified and suspicious. Anyone 'not normal' is suspect. What about Patrizia (the rich daughter of the villa's owner)? Her criminal, drug-taking past is coming back to haunt her. Not only is Patrizia a liar, but she also likes to show her naked body to young boys whenever she gets a chance. And what about Magiara (the jealous and spiteful witch)? Her talents in voodoo and black magic could be used to take revenge against those she holds responsible for her own infant's death years before. Then of course there's Dona Aurelia Avallone, the mother of the town's priest. She's hates anyone who takes time away from her and her son, even if it's his own parishioners – and who does a Catholic priest spend more time with than the boys in his community, right? Jaw-dropping beauties Barbara Bouchet, Florinda Bolkan, and Irene Papas, respectively, play the three female leads, and all to the glorious hilt.

It would not only be foolish, but disingenuous to ignore the influence of Catholicism on Italian Horror. Ninety percent of the entire population, roughly 52 million people, identify as Roman Catholic, though with only a third actually practicing the religion there's obviously many who now feel antipathy towards Catholicism's sordid past. And few filmmakers were filled with as much ardent hatred towards the Catholic Church as life-long Marxist, Lucio Fulci. His first stab at singling out the hypocrisy of the Church, 1969's Beatrice Cenci (aka The Conspiracy of Torture), was met with great contempt by the powers that be; Fulci's career was almost completely derailed, but today Beatrice Cenci is often cited among his greatest works. After the graphic perversion of Don't Torture a Duckling, Fulci was even blacklisted for a time from the Italian Film Industry. No surprise of course, as Duckling is rife with fearful, violent zealotry, and grisly, controversial murder scenes.

For along with his also-excellent giallo that preceded Duckling, 1971's Lizard in a Woman's Skin, Fulci laid the foundation for real gore in Italian Horror. The vigilante justice-cum-chain beating scene in Duckling presages the similar brutalizing of Schweick in 1981's The Beyond, perhaps Fulci's greatest film. Despite that film's deserved reputation as being one of the goriest films in I-Horror, the beating in Duckling is even nastier, and ultimately, much, much meaner. So in the end, Lucio Fulci helped kick start a new era in Italian Horror with a scathing indictment of not only xenophobia, but also what he believed was the unavoidable and always-damaging perversion that is Catholicism. If the innocent must be annihilated in order to save them from the eventual corruption of man, and the guilty must be brutalized and beaten to death to pay for their sins, who's left? Via his films, Fulci often ponders the consequences of such beliefs, and with Don't Torture a Duckling he comes pretty close to finding some truths, albeit ones we almost never want to confront.

Along with what is arguably Argento's other greatest film, Suspiria, Phenomena is a fairy tale re-envisioned. Though what separates Phenomena from Suspiria, and perhaps from every other film Argento's made, is that it is perfect not just in style and execution, but also in its logic and narrative – something uncommon in this genre.

After the release of 1982's Tenebre, which was full of elaborate shots, inventive music, and some truly grotesque set pieces, Argento returned to the world of the supernatural. For Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connely), the protagonist of Phenomena, is in possession of some extraordinary telepathic powers – she's able to empathize with insects. Although Argento is smart: he makes it more akin to the insects picking up on Jennifer's pain and them doing their best to make her feel better – it's more symbiotic and less a master/servant relationship. Throughout the course of the film the insects help Jennifer find her way through darkness (lightning bugs), bring her evidence of crime (larva), lead her to more evidence (flesh-flies), enact some revenge on one of the bad guys (bees), and threaten those who have been cruel to her (a monstrous swarm of god-only-knows).

As with Susie Bannon from Suspiria, Jennifer Corvino finds herself a 'Stranger in a Strange Land', a common trope for a fairy tale, and both Suspiria and Phenomena are chock full of these recurring themes. Jennifer finds herself at an all-girl Swiss boarding school – much like Susie being holed-up in a strictly segregated dancing school in Suspiria. The main difference between the two, however, is that this time we're dealing with actual girls, teenagers, whereas in Suspiria it was late 20-somethings acting like little girls. If the art direction, the music, the performances, and the Technicolor are all a bit muted from Suspiria to Phenomena, it's clearly for the better. Instead of amping up the style of a film so that it also becomes its substance, Argento finally found the right balance. The acting, the script, the design, the music, the editing, the effects – all are executed perfectly.

Finding herself thrust into the middle of a series of murders either involving girls from her school, or taking place near or on the school property, our Jennifer Corvino has suspicion laid on her by the strict, puritanical and quasi-Christian adults who run the boarding school. After witnessing her powers over insects, and remembering that one of Satan's monikers is Beelzebub (The Lord of the Flies), Jennifer is immediately accused of witchcraft by the nastiest of the teachers. Aside from this, Jennifer walks in her sleep, and it is during these nightly sojourns that Jennifer witnesses one of the murders. Not sure what is truth and what is dream, Jennifer later finds herself rescued from certain nighttime harm by Inga, a friendly chimpanzee who is caretaker for a nearby forensic entomologist, Dr. John McGregor. Taking Inga's hand, Jennifer is lead back to the home of Dr. McGregor, and after he learns of Jennifer's affinity and powers towards insects they become quick friends. Dr. McGregor had already been approached by the police in regards to the murders, as via his own skills McGregor is able to determine the age of the crime based upon the decomposition on the body (parts). And with Jennifer personally involved in the murders (aside from the accusations, her roommate eventually being a victim) it's only natural that the two of them should gang up together and track the killer, of course darling Inga will help too.

The benign surrogate father. The animal helper(s). Being ostracized for difference. The evil surrogate mother(s). Having to enter a dream world/state. To run a gauntlet. A "magic wand". These are all conditions and events within Phenomena and also classic themes of the fairy tale; Argento utilizes them brilliantly. This is one of the best fairy-tale films ever made, next to Donkey Skin, Breilliat's Bluebeard, The Company of Wolves, Princess Mononoke, and the movies of Michel Ocelot. Of course, it's Italian Horror at its core, so Phenomena certainly is not a film for children, but neither, really, are any of the films I just mentioned. Argento actually created an atmosphere in the film where one cheers along with bugs. Where else is there a film where The Great Sarcophagus fly (see magic wand above) is a film hero? Flesh- eaters are supposed to be the enemy, right? Although he does eventually enter his usual world of Freudian psychosis, Argento keeps it, if not to a minimum, than relegated to the film's denouement. But even this is forgotten, if not forgiven, because he makes the character of Jennifer Corvino such a kick-ass, fighting back not just out of a survival instinct and/or being cornered, but because Jennifer refuses to accept the lot and conditions she finds herself in. Jennifer fights back immediately, and her fear (though constant) never gets the better of her – she's one of the great, unsung heroines of Horror films. Just who the bad guy/gal is in all this I'll leave a mystery, as I know this is one of the Argento films a lot of people skip over, and perhaps many of you out there haven't seen it yet. Needless to say, it's a bit of a nasty commentary on the part of Argento. Though the actor who gets to play the bad guy part plays it to such a scary and crazy hilt, that it's obviously an attempted spit in the eye to Dario for creating the role to begin with.

All in all, Phenomena is Argento's finest hour. One knows when watching a film whether or not he or she is experiencing something exactly as the writer/director originally intended; whether or not the final product is just how it was envisioned in the mind and on paper. Phenomena is one of those films. Yes it's horrific, relentless, squally, and almost harebrained, but that's what makes it successful Italian Horror, and that's what makes it a must-see.

Before going deep into describing the glories and details of Demons, let it be said right off the bat (1) just how incredibly fun this film is, and (2) that its greatness has nothing to do with Lamberto Bava. There's a frivolity, joy and quasi-anarchy to Demons that was missing in a lot of Italian Horror since the overnight success of The Bird with the Crystal Plummage 15 years prior. That landmark in giallo ushered in a more adult-themed era within the Italian Horror industry, with the majority of films in the 1970s having less to do with evil, revenge, greed or fate, and more to do with psychological and sexual aberrations, and trauma, in particular of the Freudian kind. This is neither good nor bad, and there are certainly exceptions (Suspiria, Zombie), but even when Argento enters the world of the supernatural, he finds it difficult to let go completely of the psychological tether, going so far as to refer to the head witch of Suspiria, Helena Markos being not just an embodiment of evil, but mentally unhinged, insane. Demons, produced and co-written by Argento, is a return to not just a more pure form of Horror, but also of entertainment.

Demons is directed by Lamberto Bava, the son of Mario, who had spent the first 15 years of his time in the industry (1965-1980) being an assistant director and screenwriter for not just his father, but for Argento and Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust, Jungle Holocaust). Nothing L. Bava did up to Demons, or after for that matter, appeals to me very much. As is the case with Armando Crispino's Autopsy, I love Demons for what it is as a whole – the parts that make it up don't warrant as much individual, intellectual dissection as many of the other great Italian Horror films do. There's an interesting, if not fascinating, argument here that if one has a pristine script (Argento, Franco Ferrini, Dardano Sacchetti) and an excellent helmsman/producer (again Argento), then perhaps a director of optimal powers isn't necessary to pull off a superior piece of work.

The plot of Demons is a delightful one indeed and will appeal to the legion of Zombie Film fans out in the world, although as with more contemporary films like 28 Days Later these aren't the living dead, or even the 'infected'. Instead they are exactly as the title of the film states – demons.

The film begins with a music-major university student, Cheryl, riding the Berlin subway. The opening credits roll as she, and us, take a gander at the other occupants of the subway car – this firmly places the film in the 1980s, as the car is full of all the New Wave and punk rock denizens one comes to expect from a lot of Euro-horror at this time. Handed a free ticket for a new movie by a mute man in a metallic demon mask, Cheryl convinces her friend Kathy to go with her. Once at the movie theatre (named the Metrol), which is full of patrons who also received mysterious tickets, Cheryl and Kathy find some cute boys to sit with. In the lobby of the theatre, I should mention, is a sculpture that has hanging from it the same demon mask from before. One of the patrons, a fierce Apollonia 6-inspired hooker named Rosemary, teases her pimp by putting the mask to her face to try and scare him. Unfortunately for her, but fortunately for us, the inside of the mask cuts her face and causes her to bleed. At this point, anyone with even the slightest semblance of knowledge of Horror films, and Italian Horror in particular (see Black Sunday) knows that Rosemary has just become patient zero for something truly abyssal.

Within 10 minutes (during which time the movie within the movie has already started, a movie that involves a gaggle of teens coming across a decrepit ruin, a ruin which has the same demon mask buried in a shallow pit) Rosemary feels ill and has to excuse herself to the ladies room (she has a meeting… with Satan!) Where the mask cut her face, Rosemary now has a large pustule, pregnant with demonic semen. Within moments it bursts forth, and the now hellishly infected Rosemary carries the Devil's contagion inside her. Soon, several more become infected (via a scratch or bite from Rosemary), and the theatre is eventually crawling with rabid demons. Meanwhile, one of the characters in the movie playing on the Metrol screen has also cut himself on the mask, and becomes infected with demon juice – the meta- fiction runs wild in this film.

By Demons' climax, most of the patrons are Satan's converts (save Cheryl and her boy-toy), including some truly crazy young punks who entered the theatre by the back way. Without giving away the ending completely, let's just say that mankind's future doesn't look too bright in Demons.

What sets this film apart is the quick pace, the truly horrific and terrifying special effects (including a particular demon-birth involving someone on all fours that still freaks me out to this day), the legitimate scares, the velocity of the demons themselves, the phantasmagorical lighting and ambiance, the heavy metal score (Saxon and Accept being the highlights), and one of my personal favorites in a horror film – the notion of apocalypse. In this way its influence is still with us to this day. But more than anything Demons is a truly wild, wild ride, and one of the most purely shocking films of its time.

Zombies. Love 'em or hate 'em, but they're here to stay. That's something every living man and/or woman in a zombie film has to learn to deal with. Most folks fight and almost always lose, but occasionally there's the bold soul who gambles, trying an alternative and non- violent approach. Take Lionel, for instance - the hero of Dead Alive. Lionel uses a weapon against zombies that few have dared to use before – denial. And at first it's quite effective, albeit in a disturbing yet hilarious way, but only at first. Unfortunately, Lionel, like most pacifists, must learn the hard way that violence is the only way out of a zombie holocaust— besides death. If Lionel had been braver earlier on, perhaps the eventual massacre of innocents would never have happened, but how many of you could kill your own mother to prevent such a thing?

Dead Alive has everything that a solid piece of entertainment should: side-splitting comedy, tear-jerking drama, heart-pounding romance, tarot cards, custard, hot glue, necrophilia, a homicidal toddler, farting, barfing, dismemberment, a lawnmower, undead hordes, a disturbing Oedipal complex, and more blood & gore than any other film ever made, before or since.

Dead Alive was the third feature directed by Peter "My Precious…" Jackson, after his debut film, the alien invasion shockfest Bad Taste, and the all-animal Muppet/puppet porno/musical Meet the Feebles. Yes, I said porno/musical. If you haven't seen it, put aside whatever you're doing tomorrow and rent it. Any film whose tagline is "Hell hath no fury like a hippo with a machine-gun!" must be a classic, and it is. In my previous existence as a video store clerk, I can't tell you how many times I'd leave my store's cover-misleading copy of Feebles in the children's section just to see if any parents would rent it, and they often did.

The final blow-out in Dead Alive belongs to that cinematic echelon of gross-fests occupied only by those similarly gut-wrenching scenes in Evil Dead, Re-Animator, Romero's Dawn and Day (of the Dead), Scarface, The Beyond, etc. However, it is Dead Alive that holds the record for most blood spilled in a film: 300 liters in the ending alone. At one point in the film the blood spews forth at 5 gallons/second. If this fact alone does entice you to see Dead Alive then I'm fairly certain you won't enjoy it. Better watch The Reader instead.

Rosemary's Baby is one of the best horror movies of all time.

Whenever I say this to someone I'm often barraged by a flurry of "What?! How!? Why?! But it's not even scary! Rosemary's Baby is not a horror film! There's like barely any blood! The movie doesn't even have an on-screen death!" (If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that Hell hath no fury like a contradicted, overly invested genre-lover.)

Rosemary's Baby was not just a jolt to the horror genre upon its initial release, but it permeated popular culture in a way not seen since Psycho eight years earlier. Based on the 1967 Ira Levin novel of the same name, Rosemary's Baby is an almost verbatim recreation of its source text. Ira Levin was also the man behind The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil, so something tells me Mr. Levin had a thing for conspiracy theories.

In Rosemary's Baby the conspiracy's ringleader is supposedly none other than Satan himself, out to plant his anti-Christ seed into a ripe field, i.e. the as-of-yet-unused womb of some docile, domestic, husband-trusting, innocent-enough, almost ex-Catholic girl. Rosemary Woodhouse is the lady in question. Her husband, Guy, may or may not have sold her drugged-up body one night to the maybe-Satanic Castevets, the neighbors with whom the Woodhouse's share a wall, in order for her to be raped by the Devil and become a vessel for said demon seed (or was Rosemary just having a bad dream that night?) You see, Guy's a struggling actor, so you know he'd sell his soul in a heartbeat for success, so what's his wife's womb to him, right? After all, Guy is getting pretty chummy with those nosy, old, childless Castevets. Their chanting and flute-playing coming from next door, their nomadic, theatrical background, and those scathing remarks against the Pope – something just isn't right with the Castevets.

Rosemary soon finds herself pregnant (but with whose baby?), cut-off from her young friends (associating only with the Castevets and their sect of elders), and getting rather unorthodox Ob-Gyn treatment from a Dr. Abraham Sapirstein (raw egg & fresh herb smoothies constitute Rosemary's diet under his care, also something called Tanas Root…hmmm, what's THAT an anagram for I wonder?) Her first trimester is nothing but pain, weight loss, anemia, vomiting, and a fondness for raw liver (yuck!) And those who come in contact with her from outside 'the group' often meet bad ends. Poor Rosemary. Is there a plot against her baby? Or is it all being done FOR the baby?

With every viewing (and there have been scores of them), I see a little more, hear a little more, and understand a little more – continually revealing itself and affecting me anew like any great work of art should. I guess one could call Rosemary's Baby the horror movie that keeps on giving. All the acting is excellent too, especially, of course, the Oscar-winning performance by Ruth Gordon as the meddlesome minion of Satan, Minnie Castevet. Even Mia Farrow, whom I normally don't equate with great acting, except Broadway Danny Rose, actually holds her own in scenes with the indomitable John Cassavetes. Her finest moment in the film, if not in her whole career, is arguably the phone booth scene.

Rosemary's Baby is an extraordinary picture in that it conveys so much information, it illustrates so much of its motive, and makes privy its truths long before Rosemary knows them herself, but yet somehow it can fill a viewer with constant and complete suspense. And Rosemary's predicament isn't exactly something new in the realm of storytelling; in fact it's formulaic in many ways. When you go into a film knowing it's supposed to be horrific, but are not given any strong shocks or scares for almost the first hour – that alone creates tension to me. But it is this particular fact about Rosemary's Baby that makes many question its 'horror movie' standing.

So what makes a horror movie then? Is it any film whose plot attempts to elicit fright, fear or terror from its audience? Or does a horror film just need to have actual scares – something that'll make you jump in your seat, or at least make you squirmy? Does a horror movie have to be a symphony of blood, gore, constant score, and speed-of-light editing these days, a 'gruesical' if you will? Has genre, if not the entire definition of what makes a "good" movie, been kidnapped by technique? Less than three second shot lengths are the mean for a horror film today. Faster and faster pacing. Build-up. Viscera! The visceral. Splatter! Build-up. Gore! Build-up. Murder! Build-up. Big Splatter! Conclusion. One more scare! Lights up. Yawn.

The time when Rosemary's Baby is seen as a genuine horror movie might be dead, but is that our loss? Yes. Most often, I hear Rosemary's Baby referred to as not a horror film, but rather a suspense film, and that any horror it may contain is strictly psychological, and therefore not truly scary. All I know is that Poe, Henry James, Lovecraft, de Maupassant, and Jacques Tourneur are the real forefathers of Rosemary's Baby, not Universal Monsters, Hammer Horror's bat-bitten boobies, Corman's explicitness or H.G. Lewis' gore. I believe what has come to be called "psychological-horror", is in fact the purest form of horror - a majority of violence, blood, gore, and brutality does not a horror movie make.

The autonomy created by city living transformed into a nightmarish, hell-on-earth conspiracy scenario is as relevant today as 1968, if not more so. The daily questioning of one's sanity. To find yourself constantly analyzing the motivations of others. Suspicion towards a loved one. To feel completely isolated and alone, yet surrounded by millions. Immersing myself into these ideas for 136 minutes is far scarier to me than any of the zombies, slashers, torturers or mutants of today.

SEE THIS MOVIE!

St. Patrick's Day... what movie should you watch to celebrate this all-important holiday. There are just so many to choose from: Michael Collins – no, too serious. The Wind That Shakes the Barley – nope, too good. My Left Foot – who wants to read subtitles? Rattle & Hum – I'd sooner shoot myself. What else but Leprechaun! Any movie in which a perpetually rhyming, 600-year old, malevolent green dwarf threatens to make a boot out of someone's ear unless he gets his gold back is, in my book anyway, destined for (bad)greatness.

The year was 1993, and the big horror movie icons were still Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, and then-newcomer Chucky. The first three were really winding down in the originality department. I found myself renting the old Friday, Nightmare, and Halloween movies instead of going out to see the new ones. And I was never into Chucky honestly; I always found him rather predictable, almost boring – possession, homicidal maniac, but a doll… big deal. Enter Leprechaun. I remember first hearing about it and thinking that mainstream cinema had reached an all-time-low indeed. But, of course, I went to go see it out of curiosity. Once Lep was let out of the box though, or crate if you will, and began his doggerel-rampage of death I knew I was in for something quite unique. I mean a friggin' Leprechaun! I never knew what he'd do next. What film template did I have to base my emotional reactions on? Here was a movie-monster with revenge on his mind like all the others, yes—but no one's really done anything to him. He just wants his money back.

Being half-Irish myself, and a capitalist (however regretfully), I was left dumbstruck by the blatant racism of Leprechaun, in which the central character is Irish, mean, green, money- grubbing, seemingly drunk, violently-tempered, and always-rhyming; the movie actually equates wanting money with releasing great evil unto the world. But then I thought about it for a few minutes and eventually calmed down. I realized it was all actually true, and that I had witnessed an incredibly terrifying horror movie cum Irish neo-realist film that contained some of the most hysterically quotable dialogue I'd come across since Dream Warriors: "This thing is a Leprechaun and we've GOTTA figure out how to stop it!"

Mark Jones—the same man who also directed the first, and best, one in the Leprechaun series—has written all six films as well. (By the way, the immediate sequels are all right, but you haven't lived a proper I-love-bad-movies existence until you've seen Leprechaun 4: In Space, and Leprechaun in the Hood.) Mr. Jones first made a name for himself writing and story-editing many episodes of The A-Team, so you know the man has a talent, not just for genius dialogue, but also for keeping you and yours on the edge of your leather love-seat. He also wrote and directed the 1996 guffaw-your-ass-off-or-this-other-midget-monster- will-get-you classic Rumpelstiltskin.

The known galaxy has been peaceful for centuries. The word 'weapon' is an archaic expression referring to a time long ago when we still practiced war and "neurotic irresponsibility". But of course, the potential to have great power over others still corrupts, and a mad-genius/scientist named Duran Duran develops a killer-ray, a Positronic ray to be precise, capable of great destruction, upsetting the ebb & flow of tranquility which prevails among our stars. Who can save us before Duran Duran and his immoral patron, The Great Tyrant, enslave the entire galaxy?… Barbarella, that's who. And she'll do it with love, and only love.

Barbarella is the 5-Star Astro-Navigatrix assigned to demoralize the evil-doers, and she's determined not to let anything stop her. She's a space-age hippie version of Emma Peel, though unlike Emma, Barbarella has difficulty not losing part of her outfit all the time… oh well, all the better for us. Along with her blind, and amazingly useless companion, the Angel Pygar, she'll fight off lumbering, leather robots, nasty monsters, sex-crazed perverts, lecherous lesbians, homicidal children, and even briefly join a bumbling insurgency, all to save us from becoming a violent society once again. Oh, Barbarella… how can we ever thank you enough? (But what part of herself will Barbarella use to save us when the darkest hour is nigh? Hmmmm… I'll let you find out.)

Produced and released in 1968, the film Barbarella was first an incredibly successful '60s French comic-strip written by Jean-Claude Forest. Like the Barbarella character in the movie, the Barbarella of print is equal parts resourceful and naïve, sexy and unaware, determined and self-doubting, which all make for a wonderful character. And even though Jane Fonda was a replacement for Italian sex-kitten Virna Lisi, she obviously relishes this colorful part. She didn't want to make another film with her then husband, Roger Vadim, having already made two, but she stepped in and saved the day… thank you Jane! Over the previous eight years, Jane had done her handful of body-centric performances, and some serious work too, but she wanted to start excluding the sexy stuff and concentrate on serious roles only. Thankfully she squeezed out one more camptastic film before getting all political… (her next film after Barbarella was the brilliant, Depression-era downer They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, for which she was awarded her first Oscar nod.)

Some say that nakedness was just Jane's natural state though. For there exists a fabulous urban legend that while attending then-ultra-conservative Vassar College, Jane refused to follow the ages-old tradition of having to wear white gloves and pearls in the tearoom on campus. When asked to leave for not doing so, she obliged, but returned a short time later wearing the gloves and pearls, but nothing else. This behavior was said to be the beginning of 25 years of pushing buttons and challenging authority. Even if the story is untrue, you have to admit, it's fierce; it also sounds like something Barbarella would do under the influence of the Matmos…

Roger Vadim, the Hugh Hefner of cinema if there ever was one, is a much under-appreciated filmmaker. He had been married to or at least romantically linked to not only Jane, but also Brigitte Bardot, and Catherine Denevue. He'd been directing films since 1956, writing films since even before that, and kept making movies up until his death 5 years ago, although his best work is from 1956-72. He followed Barbarella with Pretty Maids All in a Row, an unfortunately forgotten film that you should see, that is if you want to see Rock Hudson be a serial killer mutilating young girls, and I bet you do.

Terry Southern, despite writing the immortal films Dr.Strangelove, The Loved One, The Cincinnati Kid, and Easy Rider, may have written some of his wittiest dialogue in Barbarella; the discourse between Barbarella and the President alone is worth your price of admission, as is every word uttered by Anita Pallenberg.

How can I forget Miss Pallenberg? For those of you who aren't aware, Anita Pallenberg was the dark, feminine energy behind the chaos that was Swinging London. A then-practicing witch, and supposedly not always from the North, Anita Pallenberg was the muse for some of the most powerful songs and films of the whole last half of the Sixties. She was the lover of Brian Jones, Keith Richards, and for a short spell, Mick Jagger; many Stones songs are about her. She co-wrote Performance with Donald Cammell, and inspired Kenneth Anger to create his opus, Lucifer Rising.

So all these people came together and helped to make the film you're about to see. This film truly belongs to Jane Fonda though, as it was meant to I'm sure. I wish there were more films about beautiful, lusty, and brainy dames from outer-space, saving the world from destruction by evil forces. And doing it not with muscle, guns, yelling & screaming, or having to be a man in a man's world, but instead using love, and her insatiable capacity for truly orgasmic sex.

Barbarella wants to teach you the way of the future. She wants you to drop your weapons, get naked, roll around on faux-fur, and learn to embrace your mane of disheveled hair. Barbarella thinks war is stupid, and that lucite is the only thing ever worth fighting for, that and maybe a pair of green thigh-highs.

Why should you see a twenty-four year-old Sylvester Stallone in an X-rated film? Geesh…talk about a self-defeating question. Of all the famous instances of Hollywood superstars and icons probing into the underbelly of blue-movie making, none are as actual as Stallone's 1970 foray into porn – The Party at Kitty and Stud's. I'm sorry, but the stills I've seen of Joan Crawford's, Sophia Loren's, Marilyn Monroe's and Marlon Brando's supposed ventures into the XXX are not convincing; OK, maybe Monroe's really does look like her, but the big black 'member' in her mouth looks nothing like Arthur Miller's. And as for Streisand's, don't make me laugh – the goy in that blurry footage looks nothing like my Babs.

Shelved after filming was completed, The Party at Kitty and Stud's was edited and released in 1976 as The Italian Stallion, so as to cash in on Sylvester Stallone's recent catapulting into the upper-strata of stardom. The version that will be shown this night is in fact this very 1976 cut, as edited and presented by Gail Palmer, legendary porn star and filmmaker in her own right (see The Erotic Adventures of Candy and Nazi Love Island). The new title was seen as a marketing ploy on the part of Palmer to cash in on Stallone's new moniker at the time, but if you pay attention closely to the striking Henrietta Holm, who portrays Kitty in the film, at one point she tells Sly, "Someday you'll be known as the Italian Stallion." Apparently Miss Holm missed her true calling as a psychic.

Any attempts on my part to offer a "synopsis" of The Italian Stallion would likely end in dry disaster. Except for a winter wonderland-ish park scene in the beginning where Sly gets flashed by a wild-eyed chick, the majority of the movie transpires in a single, though at times crowded apartment. And the dialogue is dense with drug-riddled diatribes, although they are most often highly amusing. Nevertheless, if you're a fan of the Dallesandro-era films of Paul Morrissey, then The Italian Stallion is the movie for you. The dialogue is, as I noted, quite riotous – "Be careful, you bit me last time…" / "I'll be velvet-mouthed on your shank of love." The acting isn't half-bad, considering the kind of crap Stallone ended up making after this, and Henrietta Holm is at least charismatic (think of a cross between Holly Woodlawn and Cat Power). You get to watch Stallone ogling his hot not-yet-gross overly-muscled bod in mirrors, flexing, trying to be all Method-esquire, which in itself will keep you chuckling.

This film was made back when porno-making was still done by sleazy people, with sleazy people, and for sleazy people. Long before pornography tried to gain any sort of respectability as an art form – boring – the blue-movies were quite verité, almost slice-of- life if you will. And in 1970 all anyone in New York City was doing was having orgies, getting high, and beating up on his or her junkie-partner, right? I wouldn't go so far as to call The Italian Stallion a documentary, but chances are, between takes and after the three (yes, three) days of filming, the people in front of the camera didn't know the difference. This realization alone makes The Italian Stallion more than a worthwhile experience.

(contains spoilers)

'80s Horror Movies – you've seen them, you're an expert even. You've seen them again and again. A few of you may even remember when many first came out, or when you first rented them on video when you were in junior hell school. I'm sure a few of you even lived through your own personal '80s horror film: (Topsiders w/ no socks, flat-tops, Vuarnet, Kajagoogoo cassettes, etc.) And how many times did you watch Evil Dead II, The Lost Boys, Fright Night, Return of the Living Dead, The Howling, Re-Animator? Or what about all that (yeah, I'm saying it) over-rated crap from Carpenter and Landis? Well, I bet there's one '80s horror film a few of you may not have seen; back in the day, it slipped right in between Fright Night and Evil Dead II. Its name is Night of the Creeps, and no joke, it's the best of its kind.

The complete brainchild of one Fred Dekker, (someone give this man millions to make more movies… please!) Night of the Creeps creates a perfect balance between the pseudo- escapist, xenophobic scare-fare of the 1950s (i.e. The Blob, It Came From Outer Space, It! The Terror From Beyond Space, etc.) and the in-your-face splatter-gore of the 1980s. Hence the film itself begins in the '50s…

1959 to be exact, and something mysterious has crashed down to our peaceful Earth. Investigated by a hearty frat member, he pays a nasty price for his snooping, becoming impregnated/infected by something long, black and slithery…hot! Oh yeah – subplot – his girlfriend, who was left in the car, gets hacked to bits by an asylum escapee. Forced cryogenic entrapment helps secure the pristine Eisenhower-world from alien apocalypse. Fast-forward to 1986, and two frat-wannabe geeks, quite homely I might add, are trying to impress the hot girl on campus. They find themselves agreeing to steal a corpse in order to get into her boyfriend's fraternity, thereby impressing the young lovely. Of course, said corpse ends up not being a corpse at all, but the iced-stiff jock from the prologue, which comes back alive and begins to infect the whole campus. You see, that "something long, black and slithery" was in fact a parasitic brain-eating slug that turns its host into a killer zombie. Once the slugs are done feeding and gestating, the zombie head will explode sending forth scores of more newborn slugs, that all have one purpose – find a mouth. Hmmm…sounds like a few dates I've been on.

No one in Night of the Creeps gives a half-assed performance either. I tip my hat to the delightful Jill Whitlow, who plays the girl-to-impress, Cynthia Cronenberg. Cynthia's the kind of girl we all want to have at our side when we're fighting aliens, not afraid to get a little dirty, which I imagine is the kind of girl a lot us want for other reasons as well. Also impressive is Tom Atkins as Detective "thrill me" Cameron (hubba-hubba), who has a personal score to settle connected to the aliens (see 'subplot' above). The script is one of the smartest of its genre, giving respectful nods to all its influences (pay attention to everyone's last names), and creating some genuinely wonderful and original dialogue in its own right. The editing is as tight as can be, allowing this film to be just as enjoyable after the thirtieth viewing as it is during the first. And the special effects are still excellent, proving that the passing of time is no lazy, fallback excuse for more recent films whose own CG-effects now look bland or campy.

Few carnage-ridden films are as fun and stylish as this, and in every frame you can tell that Fred Dekker truly loves what he does. So sell all your copies of Carpenter and Landis movies, and send the money to Mr. Dekker. Then get yourself a copy of Night of the Creeps and celebrate the gruesome deaths of many-a-jock, and be witness to perhaps the last, great unheralded horror film of the 1980s.