Vengeance of The Dead (2001) – Adams & Picardi.

Moody, low budget supernatural indie feature finds sensitive young man Eric (Michael Galvin) visiting gramps (Mark Vollmers) at his isolated Wisconsin smallholding, suffering increasingly intense visions of a young girl, which escalate into a series of sinister nocturnal peregrinations. Performances are fine, and the slow-building supernatural content is competently realised, with an engagingly quirky aesthetic throughout. I enjoyed the somnambulist content, quite unusual, the chilling concept of a vengeful spirit utilizing a living host to brutally enact her righteous revenge certainly maintained my interest. The film-makers, and cast all did a credible job of bringing a spectral eeriness to haunting rural horror treat Vengeance of The Dead. My low expectations were greatly exceeded, it felt like a neo-Gothic downer mood piece with some nastily hell-fired exterminations.

 Teen Alien aka The Varrow Mission (1978) – Peter Semelka.

Not the first to utilize the frequent '20 Years Later' title card, and certainly not the last, but is it the best? Amiable Teens organizing a spooky Halloween event in a historically 'haunted' mill, disturbingly encounter an authentically weird alien being in no less authentically camp, 70s Sci-fried creature feature Teen Alien. Shot in picturesque Utah, this playful indie feature is a mostly fun experience, one that should prove especially edifying to those having an unusually pronounced interest in bygone B-features, replete with a generous quotient of kitsch, intended/unintended humour, D.I.Y practical FX, and affable folksy goofiness! It might be entirely fanciful on my part, but I would like to think that the opening scene with the inebriate Hillbilly making his 'Squeeze' influenced Stephen King's acting choices in Creepshow.

Clearly made to appease a younger, spooky Sci-fi appreciating demographic,it is, perhaps, Teen Alien's innate naivete, and wholesome approach to Sci-horror that has given it such an extended shelf-life? On the whole, the cast's performances prove surprisingly credible, and the film's lively, disco-dusted synth score is effective and, for me, provides a genuine highlight! I picked up on some strong Don Dohler/Bill Rebane vibrations in Semelka's spooksome Sci-romp, which is why it made such a positive impression. The bouncy scenes with the Scooby Gang preparing their Spook Alley are pretty neat, and the righteous-looking Alien is a keeper! Did the film-makers intend to make socio-political messages about 'aliens' squatting in wastefully derelict properties? Additionally, when the hottie disco Dolly aggressively proffers our young hero a pill, he seemed greatly reluctant to take it, but was it a RED, or BLUE one?????

 Bone Sickness (2004) – Brian Paulin.

'You turned me into a Necro-junkie!'

A remarkably dutiful, deliciously pulchritudinous blonde wife cares for her bed-ridden husband, mortally stricken by some pernicious bone malady. Seeking homeopathic relief, her bizarre readiness to administer decayed human bone marrow, not unsurprisingly, precipitates projective expulsion of parasites, a rare appetite for gory mayhem, and the creepy manifestation of a Bruno Mattei/Burial Ground-looking gut-ripping zombie horde! If one can mostly ignore the bravura avoidance of logic herein, the low-fi Bone Sickness enjoys a morbid, uniquely nauseating charm all of its very own. Violently defecating bloody parasites is unlikely to become a standard terror trope, and queasily suggests that Brian Paulin's no-budget, aggressively necrophagous shocker is partially infected with a mote of iconoclasm.

Throw in arbitrary nudity, gruesomely cannibalistic gross-outs, bloody eviscerations, righteous buzz saw carnage, and no degenerated S.O.V gore-hound can have a legitimate beef over the voluminously plasmic content of Bone Sickness. There are far worse examples of rudimentary acting, but the quotient of female eye-candy is qualitative, and their apparent willingness to disrobe leads me to believe that Paulin hired some team players. Like the old adage of bringing a knife to a gunfight, Paulin playfully posits his own rationale, that bringing an off-the-peg S.W.A.T team to a sinisterly slow-moving Zombie Holocaust is certainly no less futile! The Necrobiotic premise is harder to swallow than the protagonists worm-centric diet, I nonetheless remain demonstratively impressed by the gruesome, spaghetti-splatter milieu, and Bone Sickness's frequently heroic levels of old-school chunk-blowing.

 The Evil Clergyman (1988/2012) – Charles Band.

Based on a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, the once lost The Evil Clergyman is a short, sharp shock of compelling eroto-Gothica. Featuring expectedly exemplary performances from Re-Animator alumni, David Gale, luscious Barbara Crampton, and Jeffrey Combs, plus another electric turn from British icon David Warner, scintillated by Richard Band's atmospheric score. Grieving Mrs. Brady's (Barbara Crampton) emotional return to the fateful room, wherein her charismatic lover Jonathan (Combs) killed himself proves darkly eventful. Sensually reunited by means supernatural, their fleshly union heralds a truly sinister revelation, as the honourable padre was, in reality, a malign sorcerer, evilly coveting her sweetly voluptuous body for desires more monstrous than she could ever have foreseen! As always, Barbara Crampton is a living dream, not only uncommonly beauteous, she delivers a bravura performance, with full-blooded character actor David Gale's diminutive demon rodent providing for a magnificently verminous nemesis! While brief, The Evil Clergyman is stirringly cinematic, dramatically presenting Lovecraft fans with a vividly macabre evocation of phantasmagorical perversity, which, I'm sure, the infamously misanthropic author would have (black) heartily approved of!

 Blutnacht 2 (2202) – Jochen Stephan.

Not especially sinister, Satin-clad occultists seemingly invoke a grotesque-looking fiend who, quite typically, unleashes bloody mayhem in the not exactly undeservedly obscure German S.O.V splatter Blutnacht 2 aka Blood Night 2. Zero production value. Zero acting ability. Zero attempts to record audible sound. And ZERO chance of me tracking down the original, and only partially redeemed by prodigious levels of enjoyably sloppy H.G. Lewis-tastic gut-bucket GORE. Blutnacht 2 is fucking pony, and yet, like a melt, I kept on watching, and begrudgingly, kinda dug the bloodier/stoopider parts of it. Not a cheapnis horror title I can recommend, but that of itself, is certainly no good reason for anyone curious enough to not try out this seemingly unknown D.I.Y slasher.

One of the more bogus decisions by the film-makers are the uniformly unlikeable protagonists, it simply CANNOT be a coincidence that they are all so mindlessly wretched, but, then again, why deliberately alienate the audience with such unflinching rigor? Director Jochen's attempts to appease the audience with luridly repeated scenes of blow-jobbing stoner youths being violently destroyed in the blackened forest are not without a moderation of skeevey appeal. Nil budget Blutnacht 2 is the crudest slasher paradigm boiled down to a bloodied sludge of none-lowest common denominators, which, arguably, is why I foolhardily chose to write some words about it. The moral of Blutnacht 2 is that should one accept oral sex from an almost hot German Goth, you SHALL be horribly mutilated by said bog-faced shitter. The End. If y'all edited out all the REALLY bad scenes, there'd barely be enough viable film left to moisten a Sardine's anus.

 A Garden Without Birds (1991) – Akira Nobi.

A Garden Without Birds explicitly presents a grisly tale of an artist without inspiration. Socializing boozily in a hotel, his companions include excitable call girls, and in true Nikkatsu Porno tradition,a pair of conspicuously pilled-up, rubber-clad S&M sadists! For all its brevity, Nobi's outré A Garden Without Birds luridly provides recidivist smut-junkies a gruesome cornucopia of delicious degeneracy! An aggressively hedonistic trip, A Garden Without Birds comes atcha pretty gnarly, its savagely surrealistic cavalcade of sinister sex, and carnal depravity vibes twistedly like Un Chien Andalou on Beta-tested MKUltra hallucinogens! I'm surprised that Akira Nobi's memorably mad short didn't include a disclaimer warning patrons that the baby being barbecued was fat and ugly, therefore absolutely safe to eat! In closing, I've never been quite sure whether the usage of plaintive classical music over rampant scenes of bloodletting, softens, or increases the overall impact of thrillingly gratuitous, body-rupturing ecstasy!?

 Pola X (1999) – Leos Carax.

Leo Carax's vibrant, consistently intriguing, exquisitely French drama presents an effete, greatly privileged young author Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu), who dramatically rejects his bourgeois status, absconding to the city with Isabelle (Yekaterina Golubeva)a breathlessly beautiful, desperately pale, itinerant woman who claims to be his estranged sister. Pierre's urge to escape his overtly tactile, smothering older sister (Catherine Deneuve), and plainly neurotic fiance Lucie (Delphine Chulliot) is not only relatable, I believe it is nigh on essential, otherwise he would inevitably be absorbed into the vastly indolent corpus of the ruling elite. Like all works of anguished existentialist cinema, a series of tragedies fatefully befall the two isolated, increasingly intimate protagonists. The performances are really rather lovely, and Carax's visually compelling narrative proves cinematic, rather than literary, which is so often usually the case with French cinema.

The increasingly frantic final act, is, for me, absolutely compelling, the arrival of the fragile, waif-like Lucie certainly provides for a classically tragic ménage a trois. While I can see why many would find tousle-haired, neo-beatnik Pierre a spoiled, dilettantish character, perhaps, even a little vapid, I believe his drive to write something truly exemplary is quite genuine. His vagabond existence in this reclaimed industrial squat is not only sustaining, but may provide the galvanizing inspiration he previously lacked. Cinema, at its very best, should provide ambiguities, make space for ambivalence, thereby allowing the viewer to inform his, or her own views on the protagonists inner motivations, good, bad, or ugly! Tragic, sensual, hysteric, visually sumptuous, and surprisingly humane, Leos Carax's divinely immersive drama was a film I was more than happy to experience again!