The Giant Spider Invasion (1976) – Bill Rebane.

Luridly lo-fi Indie horror hero Bill Rebane's cult 70s creature feature has lost none of its power to envelop B-monster fans within its scintillatingly wonky web of upliftingly creepy crawly celluloid. Briskly paced, with a playful text, The Giant Spider Invasion is a lively throwback to Atomically agitated, paranoid, madly mutated, midnight movie delirium! Like many equally bugged-out B-shlockers produced in the 70s, the entertainment value of The Giant Spider Invasion remains remarkably undiminished, due largely to the absolutely joyous tactility of analogue FX, all of these amiable small town Sci-fried shenanigans being infused with an unfiltered goofiness. I have a pronounced fascination for markedly non-Hollywood, earnestly made horror/sci-fi, as the content quite often provides a folksy, appealingly homespun aesthetic, and Rebane's wacky Wisconsin wonders all remain enormously appealing examples of D.I.Y terror. Boasting a credible cast, the technical aspects prove no less solid, the rampaging cyclopean arachnid is utterly glorious to behold, with rubicund Alan Hale stealing the show as the avuncular, no-nonsense, prune-scoffing sheriff. If one were playing a round of horror Top Trumps, Rebane's ambulatory arachnid would decisively trounce Spielberg's water-logged shark by quite some margin!

“More freaky Stuff from the north of Wisconsin!”

 We're All Going to World's Fair' (2021) – Jane Schoenbrun.

A fragile, isolated, almost mournful young woman (Anna Cobb) uploads the singular experiences of her spooky World's Fair Challenge, and it is not long into her increasingly odd shenanigans when a middle-aged, patently skeevey observer begins to play his very own profoundly unsettling game. Immediately after viewing WAGTW, I felt a tad unmoved, since it initially failed to deliver much in the way of palpable horror weirdness, but, unexpectedly, I spent much of the evening ruminating about Casey's murky online misadventures. Gamine Anna Cobb is truly delightful as the anxious, Manga-eyed, horror-loving Casey, and her lively performance proved compelling. Withdrawn in her insular, laptop-hued Attic world, estranged from an aggressive patriarch, Casey is a somewhat piteous creature, a disenfranchised, blithely weirdness-seeking teenager groomed by an equally internet-fixated middle-aged fiend. My reading of Schoenbrun's oblique film as a moodily surrealistic treatise on web-lurking abusers might be off, but this disquieting narrative, real, or wholly imagined, kinda stuck with me more than I thought it would. The terse, starkly silent scenes of the disturbed man prowling angstily through his blandly palatial, conspicuously family-less family home is sinisterly suggestive of an altogether malign backstory.

 Firepower (1993) – Richard Pepin.

Set in a future dystopian L.A, two persistently wise ass, Kung Fu crazy cops, Gary Daniels and Chad McQueen, go undercover in off-grid, sleaze-sodden Hellzone to bust drug kingpin Drexal's (Joseph Ruskin) misanthropic machinations. Pepin's righteously fight-packed Firepower is busily replete with an explosive admixture of blammo vehicular carnage, bullet-shredded bellicosity, gutsy gladiatorial cage fights, and moorishly cheezoid alpha badinage. The delirious double-whammy of Gary Daniels monolithic smugness, and Ultimate Warrior's relentlessly Roid-raged dramatics is arguably worth the price of admittance alone! Featuring bravura mano a mano beat-downs, Firepower compellingly delivers 90s DTV goodness of the highest caliber. While PM Entertainment's top tag team will manifestly remain Billy Blanks and Roddy Piper, for me, macho man-biscuits Chad McQueen and Gary Daniels, are arguably hewn from equally robust B-Movie clay. Long-time fans of PM Entertainment are no doubt greatly aware of Firepower's majestic manliness, and I'm reasonably hopeful that many 1^st time experiencers shall appreciate Pepin's enjoyably Brodacious bash 'em up. Closing with a more personal peccadillo, I greatly welcomed Chad McQueen swarthily channelling his inner Mickey Rourke, Motorcycle Boi lives!!! (ish).

 The Dog Lovers Guide To Dating (2023) – Craig Pryce.

Cutesy, but not unbearably so, The Dog Lovers Guide To Dating has two affable, exceptionally well-groomed leads, and their inevitably glutinous will-they-won't-they shtick is of a far higher pedigree than expected. This cosily fluffy tail of workaholic, love-shy dog trainer Alex (Rebecca Dalton) and slick, big-hearted ad exec Simon's (Corey Sevier) puppy love is certainly no dog's dinner, perhaps, being a surefire candidate for Best in Show. For reasons I have never cared to examine too closely, I have long had a singular penchant for wallowing unthinkingly in gloopy Hallmark pap, my tolerance for syrupy sentimentality remains disturbingly high. Geared with a ruthless efficiency to appease canine-loving romantics, even as more of a cat person, I wasn't wholly immune to the adorable doggies warmly fuzzy charms!

 The Nudist Story (1960) – Ramsey Herrington.

A beautiful, altogether proper business lady (Shelly Martin) inherits a nudist colony following the death of her philanthropic Grandfather, and rather than selling it to clear hefty death duties, she becomes amorously entwined with the affable manager Bob (Brian Cobby). Featuring a pleasantly jaunty score, The Nudist Story is a charmingly frothy romantic drama with capable, terribly nice, if somewhat clipped, prodigiously middle-class performances. Herrington's modestly titillating oddity has tasteful scenes of prettified, sun-dappled nudity, mostly bots and tops, governed by an amusingly ingenious methodology of obscuring most of the male and female pudenda! As ribald exploitation, The Nudist Story is tame, but taken as a cinematic singularity, a blisteringly technicolor, early 60s time-capsule, it remains utterly fascinating, the luminous Shelly Martin and stolid suitor Brian Cobby make for wholesome lovebirds. A dramatically slight piece, the prosaic dialogue delivered by the mostly nude cast is so bizarrely incongruous for the time period, The Nudist Story distractingly exudes an almost fever-dream-like quality, and, frankly, I can't readily think of another British film with the same proto-Lynchian vibe. The karaoke musical interludes and fleshly flourish of a lithe nude male arbitrarily doing somersaults suggested to me that The Nudist Story might well prove to be something quite special!

 Bikini Bandits Experience (2002) – Steven Grasse.

The boisterously incoherent, stridently crude B-Movie bacchanal Bikini Bandits Experience pulchritudinously provides a lusty barrage of boorish buffoonery, synapse-stupefying smuttiness, and noisome Beavis and Butt-headed hedonism. With no salacious stone left unturned, BBE remains an inglorious descent into meth-addled, attention deficited, mercilessly MT Veed mega-mong! What Bikini Bandits Experience knows about good taste wouldn't fill a Hobbit's posing pouch, but like the man said, you can spray a turd gold, and it'll still stink; while he makes a cogent point, I earnestly believe that a world without golden turds would be a palpably duller one! Some, perhaps, may find this jarringly episodic freak-fest to be an incorrigible shambles, I moistly enjoyed it, but, I'm absolutely no sane man's idea of a viable demographic! One of the more inalienably meritorious aspects of Bikini Bandits Experience is the fact that should the viewer nod off, they shall always pleasingly awaken to the edifying vision of bountifully bouncing boobage! While faded pop culture peen Corey Feldman's presence is undeniably slight, his increasing awkwardness is not altogether horrible to behold.

 Dark Heritage (1989) – David McCormick.

Amiable investigative journalist (Mark LaCour) and two goofy companions gamely overnight at the dilapidated, ill-fated Dansen estate, hoping to find a positive link to a series of brutal local murders, only to disturb vile, subterranean horrors, worthy of Lovecraft himself! In my opinion, unjustly obscure, Low budget indie horror Dark Heritage has much to recommend it to deep-digging, schlock-savvy 80s horror freaks. While the moth-balled text is creakier than a waxworks guillotine, the lively performances are, by and large, competent, and director McCormick ably peppers the prosaic chatter with some atmospheric, palpably eerie escapades. A watchable, mostly credible, if somewhat undernourished adaptation of of H.P Lovecraft's 'The Lurking Fear', Dark Heritage's failings are, perhaps, largely due to meagre funding, rather than a paucity of earnest film-making ambition. With a greater SPFX budget, and a more robust score, this stolid attempt at lurid Southern Gothic may have been a tad more monstrous. In closing, Dark Heritage delivered more than I expected it to, the dopey dialogue and deliciously cheapnis evocations of Lovecraftian wyrd proved strangely compelling, and due to the persistently dim lighting, they 'almost' got away with the dime store Halloween masks! In an era when all too many contemporary horror films are so patently recycled as to be wholly redundant, I can't think of a more opportune time to worthily gussie up largely forgotten midnight features like 'Dark Heritage'.