Shameless Self Expression

Stephen Forsyth plays a charming lady killer – literally, he kills beautiful young women, a task made easier by his bridal fashion business. Will pretty young Dagmar Lassander be yet another of this man’s victims? Laura Betti plays Forsyth’s harpy wife, whose constant berating and complaining are starting to form cracks in Forsyth’s outwardly seemingly fairly ‘normal’ persona that hides the monster within him.   Highly underrated mixture of giallo and “Peeping Tom” , this 1970 flick from Mario Bava ( “Kill, Baby…Kill” , “Black Sunday” , “Black Sabbath” ) is one of his most enjoyable. Interesting and seriously twisted, it offers up a really good lead performance by Canadian-born Stephen Forsyth, who is like a more charismatic, psycho John Philip Law or something. It was actually his last of 10 films (all in Italy) before he quit the business and went back to Canada to work in music and photography, apparently. His killer in this film is a mixture of handsome Ted Bundy-type and t...

Aliens (Tina Louise, John Carradine, and Julie Newmar) have landed on Earth and seem to have some connection to a couple of backwoods creeps (Neville Brand and Aldo Ray) killing young men and kidnapping their nubile female companions.   An all-star schlock cast is put to cheapjack use. This 1985 sci-fi/horror nonsense from director Mardi Rustam (writer-producer of Tobe Hooper’s bizarre and fun “Eaten Alive” ) and co-writer Phillip D. Connors (unsurprisingly a fairly prolific porno screenwriter) plays like the kind of inept T&A crap Fred Olen Ray churned out in the 80s and 90s ( “Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers” , “Evil Spawn” , “The Tomb” , etc). We even get appearances by regular Fred Olen Ray alum John Carradine and Dawn Wildsmith.   The T&A is nice and frequent for at least the first half, but that’s about all you’re gonna get from this one. A dishevelled-looking Neville Brand and slumming Aldo Ray are somewhat decent (Brand’s years of heavy drinking are clearly ...

Set in both France and England in the late 18 th Century, sullen and frequently drunk lawyer Sydney Carton (Dirk Bogarde) gets involved in the plight of Lucie Manette (Dorothy Tutin), whose father (Stephen Murray) was imprisoned in the Bastille by the cold-blooded Marquis St. Evremonde (Sir Christopher Lee). Carton has obvious feelings for Lucie, but complications arise with the Marquis’ nephew Charles Darnay (Paul Guers), who is Lucie’s new husband in London, and no fan of his black-hearted aristocratic uncle. In fact, masquerading as an Englishman, he has fled Paris for London to escape the Revolution that his uncle’s actions pretty much set in motion. Carton, who supposedly looks the spitting image of Darnay, had previously helped Darnay out of a legal jam as well. Unfortunately, after receiving a distress message requesting he return home to Paris, Darnay is promptly arrested and imprisoned as the Revolution rages all round him. With Darnay set for the guillotine to essentially pa...

Priest Donald Pleasence investigates a colleague’s death and comes across a secret religious sect known as the Brotherhood of Sleep (an off-shoot of the Catholic Church), and a strange, giant glowing canister housed in the basement of St Goddard’s church. He calls Victor Wong, a quantum physics professor who brings along several students (all of different scientific and language disciplines) to investigate. What they uncover will change what Pleasence and everyone else had believed about that little ‘ol book called The Bible. It’s not long before the liquid (essentially Satan in liquefied form, or an ‘Anti-God’ as Wong posits) inside the canister has gotten out and starts infecting everyone. Meanwhile, a horde or derelicts (who I like to refer to as Satan’s Bums, a perfect title for the film- what?) is amassing outside eerily, with Alice Cooper among them. Jameson Parker and Lisa Blount play two of the students who are an item, whilst Dennis Dun is the resident horny smart-arse, and Pe...

Set in 1830s Edinburgh, Scotland with Russell Wade as Donald Fettes, a financially strapped med student whose instructor Dr. MacFarlane (Henry Daniell) allows him to continue his studies whilst becoming his assistant. This brings Fettes into contact with cabman John Gray (Boris Karloff, never better) a seemingly kindly sort who nonetheless makes money by nicking dead bodies from the graveyard and supplying them to Dr. MacFarlane for his medical experiments. MacFarlane insists that this is a necessary ugly part of the job and that it’s all for a scientific cause. However, cabman Gray is actually an evil man who needles Dr. MacFarlane over their past association with noted grave robbers Burke and Hare, using it to blackmail the upstanding medical practitioner to keep him in his life (Dr. MacFarlane would very much wish he didn’t need the services of cabman Gray). When Dr. MacFarlane needs a body to examine in preparation for a very difficult spinal operation on a disabled young girl, cab...