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9/10
Golden shower and other pleasantries for the better half of humankind
25 July 2019
Warning: Spoilers
Summary: A big, fat, bespectacled guy fantasizes about murdering a neighborhood gal and violating her dead body. One day he makes his fantasies real and then goes on a killing spree.

Made for sick-minded misogynists, this video offers an impressive assortment of verbal and physical abuse directed at the better half of humankind. The gore is restrained, but the overall extent of on-screen nastiness is shocking and disturbing. Director Ryan Nicholson, of "Gutterballs" and "Hanger" fame, obviously revels in being able to shock his audience to the utmost.

This movie is something of a cross between European splatter and extreme Japanese stuff such as Hideshi Hino's "Flower of Flesh and Blood" or Tamakichi Anaru's "Tumbling Doll of Flesh." Very little does it have from the US slasher genre. Here, we don't have physically and mentally strong final girls who single-handedly take out the bad guy(s) and save the world. Instead, we have tough but unfortunate women whom the big, fat, bespectacled guy with a sharp knife reduces to a whimpering mess begging for mercy. The eternal battle is won by the male through the humiliation and subsequent physical destruction of his female adversary.

If you liked Lucio Fulci's "The New York Ripper" or David Schwartz's "Las Vegas Bloodbath," then you'll probably like this one, too. The gore effects are decent, if not outstanding. My vote is 9.
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5/10
Disappointing
18 July 2019
Much as I love Hammer's horror output, this one disappointed me. The kung fu fights are very spectacular, but what horror there is, is bleak and boring. John Forbes-Robertson is very good as Dracula, but he is out of place in this movie. The great Peter Cushing, too, looks out of place. He doesn't know kung fu, so most of the time his role is reduced to that of an observer. He does attempt to fight the vampires with a torch, though.

I think the main problem with this movie is that Dracula and kung fu is a combination of the uncombinable. I recall having read that Sir James Carreras once said that horror films shouldn't be spiced up too much with explicit lovemaking because the viewers wouldn't accept them. Time has shown that he was wrong. But a horror film whose strongest element is Chinese martial arts is even less acceptable. It's like sprinkling a birthday cake with ketchup just because you want to be original.

I am unsure how many stars "The Seven Golden Vampires" deserves. I am giving it a 5, if only out of respect for the legendary Hammer. Watch "Horror of Dracula," "The Brides of Dracula," or "Dracula Has Risen from the Grave" instead.
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Little Vera (1988)
1/10
Not worth the celluloid it's printed on
8 June 2017
I hate this film. I saw it in a Russian theater at a late-night premiere back in 1988 and has never since then had an impulse to see it again. There is absolutely nothing about it to "understand" or appreciate. It is pure kitchen-sink trash disguised as a serious social study. You really think that the Soviets were all prostitutes, drunks, delinquents, and no-goods living off their parents? You believe that life in the USSR was hopelessly drab and that literally everything was so bad it's hard to see now how people still managed to survive in such a gutter of a country? Come on! As someone who was born and raised in the Soviet Union, I can swear on the Bible that nothing can be as remote from the truth as this portrayal of everyday Soviet life.

It looks like "Little Vera" was made with two goals in mind: to defame everything Soviet and to make a big buck out of showing some insipid soft-core sex, nudity, and drug use. Admittedly, it achieved both goals. The only reason that anyone may still be interested in seeing this garbage is that it seems to have been the first of what would become a wave of similarly themed films in the late 1980s–early 1990s. Those films offered increasingly graphic depictions of nudity, sexuality, rape, and violence mixed with zoological anti-Communism and peddled sluts and mafia soldiers as role models. Don't get me wrong – I'm a big fan of Western sleaze and all things exploitation (what else one would want to watch in post-Soviet Russia?), but "Little Vera" is different. I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.
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7/10
Worth a look, but don't expect much
8 November 2016
"Anthropophagous 2000" is the first Schnaas film I've seen. As a huge Joe D'Amato fan, I couldn't but give it a try. Well, I wasn't totally displeased, but I wasn't overly excited either. When Andreas Schnaas is good, he is very good, but when he's bad, he's rotten.

The film has its strong points: (1) The atmosphere is creepy and suspenseful. (2) The violence is brutal and plentiful. (3) There are enough surprises to keep viewers interested (especially if you are familiar with the original Joe D'Amato classic). (4) Andreas Schnaas is very good as the Grim Reaper (at least he tries his best to make a solid performance).

But there are also weak points. To name the most important ones:

(1) The major letdown is the lack of realistic gore. The gore effects in "Anthropophagous 2000" are of very uneven quality: some are quite impressive, while others are cheesy to the point of offense to the viewer. Was Schnaas distracted by other projects while he was making this, or did he run out of money, or did he simply lose interest?

(2) The sex scenes are laughable. How people are supposed to have sex with their under- and outerwear on (and how we are supposed to believe they're having sex) is beyond me. I'm not asking for Andreas Bethmann- type explicitness, but those scenes just don't work.

These drawbacks aside, "Anthropophagous 2000" is a nice effort. It's brutal, it's gory, and it's definitely worth a look – or maybe two. But it could have been better.
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