Fried Barry (2020) – Ryan Kruger.

A dazzlingly psychedelic, South African Sci-fried odyssey of a misanthropic junkie's random alien abduction and his subsequent surrealistic rebirth as a very strange cunt indeed! Expect heavily opiated kaleidoscopic weirdness from the get-go, hyper-accelerated births, Ghetto douchers, animalistic coitus, and exquisitely bizarro interludes with one of the more captivatingly nutbag protagonists since Bad Boy Bubby! Sexy, deliciously fucked-up, blackly funny, hallucinatory, and frequently bonkers, I loved it, and I'm certain many other unrepentant freaks will feel the same way! With wayward flights of creative lunacy, Fried Barry provides ideal midnight movie fare to any that appreciate Xtro, Under The Skin, Come To Daddy, and heroic abuses of psychedelic fungi! Initially, his astringent personality type proved obnoxious, but Barry's alien-hosted personality had a sympathetically naïve, super-tweaked 'Starman' quality that I found hugely appealing.

 Women's Flesh: My Red Guts (1999) – Tamakichi Anaru.

With a grisly title like Women's Flesh: My Red Guts you can be damn sure it's NOT going to be about some chinless Hippie melt talking about the rejuvenating benefits of a macrobiotic diet, with madman Anaru at the helm, shit's gonna get real asap!!!! Following the anguish of a break-up, a profoundly depressed young woman (Ayaha Tomozawa) begins a sick regimen of brutalizing self-harm, commencing with wholly injudicious usages of a toothbrush, and escalating to sharper objects better suited for more efficient pain-inducing. Ruthlessly vicious, there's a surrealistic aesthetic to this poor tormented woman's savage destruction. Women's Flesh: My Red Guts is disturbingly voyeuristic, while it is distressing to blithely witness such a beautiful young woman destroy herself so gruesomely, for better, or worse, at no point was I compelled to do anything more than keep watching to the exceedingly bitter end!!! Some may well feel differently, but I believe Anaru's macabre cinema has a transgressive quality, visceral, and fucking nasty, the bloody grossness proves morbidly compelling. Low-fi S.O.V J-Splatter nihilism at its very finest! Lots and lots of lovely bloody knife licky-licky too!!

 The New Rose Hotel (1998) – Abel Ferrara.

Two conniving hoods orchestrate an old school honey trap (Asia Argento) to parlay lofty bio-tech billionaire Hiroshi(Yoshitaka Amano) for an equally lofty 100 million large, and things turn fatally south in Ferrara's exhilarating 90s cyber noir classic New Rose Hotel. While the quotient of ballistic violence is unusually restrained for Ferrara, The New Rose Hotel is a hugely atmospheric tech-nor thriller with exemplary performances, a midnight-moody score, and scintillating sequences of electrifying eroticism throughout! Not unduly hampered by its modest budget, notably gritty NY film-maker Ferrara ably constructs a cerebral, consistently robust futurist thriller that excitingly maintains its fascination, from acting maestro Christopher Walken's flamboyant intro, until the bleak, raven dark, emotionally complex finale. It will have been noted MANY times before, while the film remains a taut ensemble piece, Christopher Walken's openly adrenalin-craving, charismatically philosophical con man puts his nefarious gifts to quicksilver use, and effectively steals the entire film! As a long-time fan of 40s/50s film-noir, with its stark chiaroscuro photography, emblematically smoky sin sirens, desperately doomed lovers, and cruelly thwarted schemes, The New Rose Rose Hotel remains a blazingly authentic revisionist crime thriller, that I am sure shall only improve with time.

And God Created Woman. (1988) – Roger Vadim.

A mostly fatuous 80s remake by Vadim. Langella looks a little embarrassed being there, Spano is clearly happy to be anywhere, and De Mornay is WAY too Godlike a woman to be there.

 Tumbling Doll of Flesh (1998) – Tamakichi Anaru.

'You have a cute anus!'

Spectacularly gory, sordid, and bracingly nihilistic, Tamakichi Anaru's infamously sicko Tumbling Doll of Flesh remains a deliciously psychotic fever dream of hyper-visceral S.O.V grimness. Before I continue, I'd just like to highlight a wee snippet of expository dialogue, if I may. 'We will start with normal sex scenes, and then we will do some S&M.' 'Ok!!!!' Call me Billy Basic, but I'm always mustard keen to see if anything occurs following the S&M scenes, since there's quite frequently some genuinely juicy content after the S&M/rope bondage scenes, and by Jove!!!!! Tumbling Doll of Flesh manifestly doesn't skimp on the bodacious WTFuckery!!!! Many of the more nakedly sadistic examples of batso J-splatter are frequently set upon low-fi, grungy-looking porno shoots, wherein standard pixelated in-out, culminates brutally in a raging tsunami of graphically rendered ultra-violence. Hey!!! if it 'ain't broke, guy!!!! I understand many fans of this macabre material have an especially acute appreciation for the noisome reactions of its female protagonists, and the tantalisingly tumbling terror doll Kana (Hanako Ooba) certainly delivers!!!! In this uncompromisingly cruel arena coitus is merely the appetising prelude to brutalising squalls of hardcore eroticized carnage.

The Burning Baby (2020) – Paul Kindersley.

Eerily set within an isolated, breathtakingly picturesque Scottish island, the director presents a colourfully twisted family unit, a deliciously mentalist matriarch (Jenny Runacre), two wickedly twisted sisters, and a man-sized, blithely mistreated, allegedly two year old baby. While narratively oblique, this terrifically tweaked, visually sumptuous psychodrama is a playfully idiosyncratic, strangely erotic, occasionally maddeningly obscure folk horror-inflected psychodrama. If artistes Ken Russell, George Kuchar, and Alistair Crowley had performed a prohibited magick ritual that had manifested a mystic-fleshly Burning Baby, should it have waxed to its 2 year old maturity, it may well have created a work not entirely dissimilar to this winning kaleidoscope of freaked-out Freudian misanthropy! The giddy film's greatest strengths reside in its eccentricity, lunatic couture, patent cruelty, scenes of outre erotica, and frequently skewed flights into delirious phantasmagoria!

Some of The Burning Baby's most arresting sequences are non-verbal, the sublime silhouetted scenes of these misfit nymphs cavorting rapturously in the trees, their orgiastic dancing, and crying out in staccato alien tongues proved undeniably fabulous. I think it is entirely fair to say that The Burning Baby is more of a freakishly far-flung fable than standard cookie-cutter shocker. That being said, it has a frustratingly meandering quality, which dilutes the more visually striking interludes. The painterly photography is absolutely exquisite, the hyper-real personalities are energetically performed, with the stunning sound design/score providing an additional highlight. Like marmite on raisin bagels, or stinky wee fishies on Hawaiian pizzas, for all its creativity, The Burning Baby's appeal is arguably not universal.

 French Blood 1: Mr Pig (2020) – Rodolphe Bonnet.

Splendidly gory French anthology horror, expect gratuitous splatter, naked, hard-bodied French hotties, refried horror tropes, and bloody eviscerations, all atmospherically rendered with a modicum of Gallic style. An exhilarating, super-grisly pick n' mix of gnarly, graphic splatter-a-rama with some heavy 80s backwoods slasher/torture porn vibes, plus a generosity of tantalisingly trim poonany!!! French Blood 1: Mr. Pig is a stylish confection of eroticized ultra-violence, bejewelled with a distractingly beauteous bevvy of nubile young women. I think it's fair to say some of the terror themes herein are familiar, but there's a tendency towards raven black humour that I really enjoyed. Performances and technical elements are top-notch, and some of the butchery is satisfyingly meaty. If I had to choose a favourite bit, it would manifestly be the mean-spirited backwoods slasher homage, being a winning melange of Mother's Day and TCM, but, as a personal preference, I wish they had eased up a tad on the shaky-cam. I dug this, and I am quite keen to see part II.