Sex With the Stars (1981) – Anwar Kawadri.

A naïve, sexually inexperienced astrologist undertakes the far from disagreeable assignment of sleeping with a group of women with differing star signs and documenting his fleshly experiences! 80s curio Sex With the Stars features a bouncing bevvy of bonnie British lassies, plentiful soft-core romp-age, questionable humour, and a prodigious lack of political correctness. With an expectedly ribald text by iconic smut-slinger Tudor Gates, Sex With the Stars certainly doesn't lack for juicily jiggle-some jackanapes and deliciously dubious double entendres! Not often seen, and rarely, if at all hailed by film cultists, the demographic for Anwar Kawadri's Sex With The stars remains, perhaps, an obscure one. A frequently Capricorny, moderately titillating time-capsule, Sex With The Stars slow-mo slap n' tickle may not get your Scorpio rising, but the funky Saturday Night Libra score just might! As a final note, I must just add that a great many of the celestial bodies on display proved to be suitably stellar!

In a Violent Nature (2024) – Chris Nash.

Lacking the layered finesse of a single malt, In a Violent Nature is a moonshine shocker, a blisteringly raw, but certainly no less intoxicating blend of grisly slasher tropes. A lumbering simpleton was cruelly tormented to his accidental death, and according to local folk legend, wilfully disturbing his grave will unleash a most gruesome reckoning! Following ubiquitous fireside blarney, this relentless backwoods behemoth proceeds to remorselessly dispatch his prey with increasingly inventive brutality. While points are deducted for a prosaic text and blandly uninteresting characters, the unfiltered nastiness of the graphic executions proved sordidly compelling. Fans of 80s splatter classics The Mutilator and Madman Marz may appreciate this basic Canadian blood-spiller. While ultimately a somewhat hollow exercise in nihilistic B-movie butchery, I must openly admit to unapologetically blissing out to the gratuitous carnage herein!

 Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot (1976) - Ed Ragozzino.

Take a warmly fuzzy nostalgic trip deep into Sasquatch country, Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot remains highly regarded amongst the Yeti cognoscenti, and most definitely gets my personal stamp of approval. For me, this picturesque mockumentary milestone is a breathtaking feet of ingenious 70s cryptid cinematography. Frequently imitated, often satirised, but never once bettered, Ed Ragozzino's epic off-grid adventure Sasquatch The Legend of Bigfoot remains an utterly essential late-night Sasquatch! Happily, the prodigious entertainment quotient of this folksy, nature-lovin' Drive-In classic proves far less elusive than the forest-dwelling, frustratingly camera-shy backwoods behemoth himself. The appealing admixture of homespun humour, spectacular scenery, merry myth making and mother nature's ornery critters remains compelling. Observed through overly critical eyes Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot might appear contrived, yet I sincerely believe it to be an upbeat, gloriously goofy, wonderfully warm-hearted example of earnestly made exploitation cinema. Captured on film, shot on location, and the adult protagonists lend an authenticity to Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot entirely lacking in the cheapnis, artlessly CGI'd creature features of today.

 Monster (2023) – Kore-eda Hirokazu.

This beguiling, immaculately constructed drama by maestro Kore-eda Hirokazu is no less perfect than the very best of Clouzot and Ozu. Exquisitely acted, Monster frequently explores emotional depths and human fragilities with a deftness that you don't often see in cinema. Writer Sakamoto Yuji's luminous, delicately nuanced screenplay impactfully presents a captivating, finely wrought mystery which ultimately proves no less sublimely tumultuous than life itself. The dazzling, wholly humane way in which Kore-eda masterfully obscures the film's truth proved unusually compelling to me, and the utterly glorious final sequence is surely destined to become iconic. As an avid, life-long film fan, there is something uniquely edifying about discovering such an extraordinarily well-made contemporary film, from the very first playful exchange between loving mother and son, I instinctively knew Monster would be pure magic! 

 'The Guard From Underground' (1992) – Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

The acclaimed Japanese horror maestro inaugurated an extraordinary filmography with the smart, ironic, thrillingly nasty noirish horror gem 'The Guard From Underground'. Referencing both Crime, and menacing B-slasher tropes, Kurosawa's fiendishly compelling examination of a former sumo wrestler, turned security guard's brutal murder spree provides a wealth of tantalizing depravity! Made with consummate skill, with superb performances, gripping plot and memorably sinister set-pieces, The Guard From Underground has much to recommend it to those who appreciate a more twisted alternative to the prosaic masked maniac formula. For such a low budget feature it looks remarkably polished, having oodles of tense atmosphere, and the looming killer's bludgeoning kills are disturbingly inventive! While there are a number of eccentric slashers I genuinely admire, it isn't my favourite genre, yet Kurosawa's idiosyncratic take on 80s slice n' dice remains a spectacularly muscular exercise in sheer bloody terror!

 Bull (2021) – Paul Andrew Williams.

Bull bloodily expands upon the age-old concept of an unstoppable force Bull (Neil Maskell) meeting an equally immovable object Norm ( David Hayman ) with predictably catastrophic results. Set anonymously within a saccharine English suburb, brutal enforcer Bull's desperate hopes of taking custody of his beloved son Aiden are quite demonstratively destroyed by the murderous machinations of his immoral, drug-sotted wife and equally loveless gang boss father-in-law Norm. Bull is a stark, unapologetically nihilistic, beautifully acted, thrillingly visceral gangster thriller with all the ersatz, jazz mag glamour excised, luridly exposing the sordid morass within. It is a glowing testament to the film-makers Promethean talents, having appropriated one of the more mildewed tropes of British genre cinema and robustly constructing a film of such astonishing vitality. While it is absolutely nothing more than my own projection, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if 20 years from now, Bull might still be regarded as the very quintessence of Neil Maskell's masterly gift of playing gorgeously foul-mouthed villains. In closing, while the first act is ably set up with a glacial proficiency, it was roughly midway when things really started heating up, with the final cathartic act proving to be nothing less than a religious experience!

 Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) – Val Guest.

Notoriously randy window scrubber Timothy Lea is always on the job with his mop and bucket, he's become so dangerously oversexed, if you accidentally left your backdoor open, he'd be more than likely to fuck it!'