Shakma (1990) – Hugh Parks/Tom Logan.

'Shakma is one severely sanguineous simian!'

'When mega-dosed beasts go bonkers!' has a proven track record in B-Horror/schlock, with Link, Monkey Shines, Dogs, and Killing Birds' being personal faves. I would have given Shakma a shot based solely on the innate prettiness of stars Amanda Wyss and Christopher Atkins, with icon Roddy McDowell making it a no-brainer. During an elaborate evening's live-action role-playing game, an activity teens enjoyed pre-memes, synthetic drugs, and sleazy dating aps, Sam's (Christopher Atkins) baboon goes ballistic, reacting super-murderously to a procedure by Professor Sorensen (Roddy McDowell). According to the text baboons are the most brutal primate next to man, thereby suggesting the protagonists have nothing to worry about, since the odds must surely be in their favour as earth's most destructive predator?

Happily, Shakma ignores its own rationale, and let's the bellicose baboon go absolutely monkey ape nuts! If Shakma were made today, it would, perhaps, be an Asylum dirge, starring Eric Roberts as the game master, with a CGI'd travesty as Shakma, which makes the 90s Shakma objectively more cherishable. In my psychotronically distorted mind, I'll always make room for batso B-horror baboon! Even as a wee one, I always thought Baboon's looked pretty bad-ass, sorry, red ass, and Shakma boisterously provides some old school monkey magic! I can readily see why Shakma has maintained a fanbase over the years, as I had a blast rewatching this feral, awesomely teed off primate tear up the joint! It might simply be wishful thinking, but I'm sure that Shakma momentarily had a simian stiffy? In conclusion, Shakma remains a fun time-killer, but I can't help think Sam's exceedingly bloody ordeal might set him up for a serious case of PTSD?

 Alison's Birthday (1981) – Ian Coughlin.

'It can't hurt you, everybody does it!'

Reluctantly coming home to celebrate her 19^th birthday, Alison (Joanne Samuel) is drawn into the malefic machinations of a Celtic devil cult in Aussie occult horror gem Alison's Birthday. I think it's fair to say that horror films produced down under have a singular kink that separates them from the mainstream, Thirst, and Body Melt provide excellent examples of Australian's unique take on horror cinema, with Ian Coughlin's Folk Horror creeper, arguably one of its more neglected antipodean classics. The arcane blarney of The Occult has ably provided enough nightmare fuel to power many great, and not so great fright-flicks, with Coughlin's eerie pagan shocker being one of the more memorable examples of suburbanised deviltry. While the text is of the common or garden variety pulp, the cast's performances, and atmospheric soundtrack are especially fine, with Alison providing for a sweetly sympathetic protagonist, and I still have a penchant for vintage, sinisterly Stone-Henged chillers. Alison's Birthday often has a TV movie-of-the-week aesthetic, but it remains hugely entertaining, especially with its white bread coven of dotty celebrants, looking spiffy in their natty ritualistic robes of obeisance. While Alison's Birthday is not one of your expressly lurid, sexy Satan shag-fests, it nonetheless provides a suitably macabre, Dennis Wheatley'd climax.

 Brotherhood of Blood (2007) – Peter Scheerer/Michael Roesch.

'we're vampire hunters, not fucking accountants!'

Vampire Hunters undertake a deadly mission to extract a fallen colleague from a terrifying nest of monstrous bloodsuckers in tasty vampire romp Brotherhood of Blood. I have no shame in admitting that I watched this solely due to the presence of genre maestros Sid Haig and Ken Foree, my reasoning, while obviously flawed, is that the combined charismatic heft of Haig & Foree would, at the very least, make it a serviceable oner! That being said, I do quite often judge a book by its cover, my flawed methodology often leads me into the murkier depths of B-Movie waters! Oh! I forgot, one of the vamp hunters is Jason Connery, an actor I've come to admire following his underappreciated reading of Macbeth. Tough cookie vamp slayer Carrie Rieger's (Victoria Pratt) statement that 'You can't trust a vampire!' rings a little false, as you always know a Vampire craves your blood for restorative num-nums, whereas regular folk are known for being untrustworthy, as y'all can't ever truly know what they're about. In Brotherhood of Blood's favour Victoria provides a scintillatingly sinewy vampire slayer, considerably more buff than Buffy, and Foree has the sizeable talent and outsized dentistry to chew up the rather frail looking scenery, which he does with winning gusto! While Brotherhood of Blood is a wee bit studio bound, with very few exterior shots, the enigma of evil vampire despot Vlad Kossei, and Mr. Foree's estimable acting chops maintained my interest until its bullet-blasted climax.

 Grind (2025) – Mark Cantu.

Beleaguered employees, and organisers of a low-fi'd Grindhouse festival suddenly find themselves in a desperate battle for survival against a somewhat implausible, celluloid-inspired cosmic despot in spotty, retro horror spoof-a-rama Grind. This zeitgeisty B-movie trash compactor indelicately regurgitates musty Drive-in tropes and laboured badinage with ever diminishing results. Grind's episodic nature soon becomes wearing, while the retrograded parodies are zestily amusing, they unfortunately provide a stark contrast to the shrill, low wattage Lovecraftian shenanigans in the cinema. There are vestiges of interest for midnight movie fans, the savoury snippets of Subway Samurai, and preternaturally masculine super cop 'McQueen' are palpably choice, plus Grind may be the first contemporary horror that borrows heavily from Popcorn's demon-possessed film-within-a-film 'POSSESSOR'. Grind fizzled out pretty rapidly, the proliferation of digital FX, and the inexcusably hokey invocation of Lovecraft proved numbing.

There was potential here, but it was stymied by disposable dialogue, prototypical characters, WAY too many layers of conspicuously digitised post-production gimmickry, and a frustratingly fake-@ss looking cosmic monster! If voiced by Obituary's vocalist, and designed by a young protégé of Screaming Mad George, who knows? There were too many poor creative choices, and much of Grind is busily shot using generic Found Footage shaky-cam, which wasn't a good look. A clunky, uninviting hodgepodge of cosmic horror clichés and admittedly superior Grindhouse pastiches, sadly, does not a complete B-film make. In conclusion, I kinda just wish I'd binged on Andy Sidaris and watched In The Mouth of Madness for the zillionth time. At the film's conclusion, I wanted to jump through my own portal and alight in a time when every 2nd genre flick didn't have some schmingus wearing an eyepatch!

 Seekers (2016) – Michael Effenberger.

Seek and ye shall find (footage!).

Four film-making buddies, along with cameraman Martin plan to capture their 'Geocaching' escapades in a documentary, hoping to locate all the 'caches' hidden deep within remote locations in doable Teutonic Found Footage Horror Seekers. The intrepid German Geocachers vanish without trace, their fates digitally documented on twitchy-cam. At this point the genre should be hereby known as Familiar Footage, especially since director Effenberger adheres so dogmatically to the expected schematic norms. I maintain a fondness for German-speaking Indie horror, and the said Found Footage is only ever as credible as the spooksome quality of fear footage captured herein. In Seekers favour, the youthful protagonists prove affable enough, and I greatly enjoy films that feature train journeys, and the vast magisterial splendour of the forest ably provides for an appealing, naturally atmospheric backdrop. The shock tropes do take a wee while to percolate, but the director's winning choice of location proves to be a suitably eerie canvas to frantically unleash his formalised terror tactics. For me, Seekers is a watchable Found Footage oner, but my positive take may, perhaps, not mirror the general consensus.

 Gobblefoot (2025) – Matt Jaissle.

Latterly a figment of regional folklore, this monstrous carrion-chomping cryptid is now rumoured to be the perpetrator of a grisly slew of gruesome deaths, and it is down to Crypto-biologist Dr Holden to discover the truth. I don't believe the opportunistic B-Movie blending of Big Foot with an elephantine Turkey was inevitable, but it is somehow appropriate that the creator of cult 90s schlock-grenade The Necro-Files gave it a shot! In addition to the goofy-looking CGI misshape, the idea of mixing in a hokey Salem Witch curse merely increases the psychotronic potentialities for Gobblefoot. Once in historic Salem's Bluff, Dr. Holden's initially bird-brained hypothesis proves harrowingly real, discovering that these brutal Thankskillings are manifestly down to the monstrous Turkey/Big Foot hybrid of ancient legend. While the potently absurd premise, and hooky trailer suggests the possibility of a goofy good time, sadly, the tepid final product provides vastly undercooked B-Schlock fare. The fundamental flaws are the dishwater dull characters, equally listless text, and you get the palpable sense that the film-makers chickened-out on the levels of gore. Granted, the Turkey content is absolutely undeniable, while the 'Foot' impact remained conspicuously slight! In truth, B-Fans are, perhaps, better off rewatching The Giant Claw and Night of The Demon, as, sadly, excluding the righteous-sounding title, Jaissle's Gobblefoot is beak sauce. DANG!!! I REALLY wanted to dig this one, but there's scant evidence herein to suggest this was produced by the very same innovatively tweaked no-budget misfit behind heroic sleaze-feast The Necro-Files.

 MOTHER (2006) – Michael P. DiPaolo.

Oedipus Hex!!!!

A bleak, nightmarishly doom-centric B/W excursion into unchecked, escalating insanity, oppressively set within an isolated farmhouse, taking grisly inspiration from the hateful crimes of iconic cannibal freak Ed Gein. Sans dialogue, Mother is a nihilistic mood piece, glumly presenting an entirely distasteful milieu with a bravura lack of empathy for the viewer's sensibilities. Much like reading the unexpurgated journals of a prisoner tortured to death in a Soviet Gulag, Mother is a glacial, pitiless, top-to-bloody-bottom black acid downer! Absolutely suffused in cruelty, and runaway morbid psychopathy, with a dissonant sound design, and lurid depictions of aberrant human behaviour, DiPaolo's Mother is an unflinchingly gross dissection of a malign matriarch, and the perverse peccadilloes of her no less repellent progeny.

To the director's great credit, from the depressive opening, right until its macabre conclusion, the film's desolated tone is monochromatically maintained throughout. One of my all-time favourite scenes of cinematic horror is the truly grotesque deathbed feed in Deranged, which gets a muted reference here. I believe it's my obsession with Deranged which ultimately endeared me to Mother's stifling melancholia, monomaniacal misanthropy, and sordid digressions in necromantic ideation. Michael P. DiPaolo operates in the same negatively compulsive space as Grief's Miserably Ever After album,it ain't fucking pretty, the anguish never stops, and even in death, the ravening conqueror worm, perpetuates our miseries forever more. Depending on your world view, Mother is the best Christmas movie no one ever talks about!! While Cronenberg proposed the equalitarian maxim that 'all flesh is erotic flesh', the invidious machinations of terror tubby here powerfully suggests otherwise!