Hellbender (2021) – John Adams.

'What Happens when we eat people?'

A controlling single-mother and her naïve teenage daughter live simply in their isolated woodland retreat, making music, messing with the occult, until strangers encroach, engendering an almighty Devil-accented schism in dark folk horror delight Hellbender. I don't have much of a vested interest in Witchcraft, or the oft purloined hocus pocus of Black Magic, but I do enjoy scenes of strong cannibalistic violence, and stoner doom vibes, so two out of three ain't bad! Religion/mysticism, in any form is a turn off, but I found the central premise of bodacious bass riffs, and the two central characters of the enigmatic mother and daughter absolutely compelling. Clearly, everything shall be rendered unto dust within a hundred years, but if not, what will future anthropoids make of horror film-makers predilection for old Nick/Judaeo Christian mythology? Hellbender is evilly atmospheric, moodily situated in a picturesque folkloric forest, and the music demonstratively Fucking rips!!!!

If, as the man once said, God is Dead, why does the other fella turn up so frequently in splatter fiction? If someone without an iota of interest in cod mysticism can get a kick out of Hellbender, others less burned-out on Satanic Panic should appreciate it that much more ardently. I believe that advocates of home-schooling might form part of the noisome demographic actively opposed to the film! One character playfully asks: 'Are you gonna be creepy, or come over?' I'd like to do both, if that's okay? While I largely prefer the Ken Russell'd mondo-mania of 'The Lords of Salem', Hellbender contains some beautifully composed imagery. The performances are strong, and horror fans who like to get their Witch on, should turn Hellbender up to 11, dude!!! There's one brilliantly hilarious line herein, which I have absolutely no intention of spoiling, kudos to whomever came up with it! Hellbender is The Craft after a negative portal breeching Cannibal Holocaust/DMT binge!

 Cat Sick Blues (2016) – Dave Jackson.

'An animalistic antipodean splatter-fest with real Meow factor!!!'

The near perfect synthesis of insane cat idolatry and livid Grindhouse gore, with every other shot providing for a truly epic screen grab! Following the death of his adored mog Patrick, towering Ted's (Matthew C. Vaughan) toxic depression soon manifests itself in increasingly aberrant behaviour, escalating to  especially inventive Gore-blasting, luridly showcasing some truly exquisite-looking practical FX! I have long admired the more eccentric iterations of Antipodean horror, which rewardingly take the road less travelled, and Ted's fearsome fetish for Feline-inspired cosplay fatefully erupts with increasingly feral acts of catastrophic ultra-violence. It is hard not to admire a darkly surrealist suburban splatter-fest that deliciously draws the viewer's admiring glances directly to Ted's elephantine, utterly magnificent bespoke cat cock! With the slasher film deader than fat Elvis, in order to remain relevant it desperately needs to massively reinvent itself, with Dave Jackson's Cat Sick Blues offering jaded Gore-mongers a more refined menu of sensationally skewed slaughter, replete with visceral, slow-motion carnage, tweaked body horror tangents, blackened synths, and a refreshingly warped sense of jet-black humour. In conclusion, I can't readily recall laughing so hard 'with' a horror film, from the hilarious head-lopping at the beginning, to the Tromatized climax, Cat Sick Blues is Fucking clawsome!!!!

 The Other Side of Madness (1971) – Frank Howard.

'The Stuff was going round pretty heavy, and we were ripped!!!!!!!!'

With scenes shot at the infamous Spahn Ranch, produced as the epoch-defining trail was ongoing, Frank Howard's Flashback-y exploitation classic is a Monochromatic Manson biopic that is arguably more authentic than most. Manson, with the exception of Ed Gein is one of True Crime's most popular boogeyman, their evil machinations proving influential upon the grislier iterations of contemporary horror/exploitation. I regard organised religion as being cults acceptable to the mainstream, whereas, the maniacal offshoots tend to provide stronger material for the creators of darker genre content. David Koresh and L. Ron Hubbard were demonstratively real nutballs, while Jesus's hocus pocus remains an unsubstantiated fantasy. Charlie Manson began as a monstrously flesh and blood historical villain, but is now more often luridly presented as the most fearsome figment of Manson's vainglorious self- mythologizing rhetoric. It is fascinating seeing the mad messiah of the psychedelic-era coldly captured on stark B/W film, the heady, mind-bending content is groovily provided by an especially far-out selection of heavy fuzz nuggets, including Manson's very own folk oddity 'Mechanical Man'. 

While the Manson Family's vile murder spree is abhorrent, this turbulent era's profoundly inspirational musical and cinematic evolutions remain enormously compelling. A quality film-maker can successfully recreate a 70s milieu, but The Other Side of Madness maintains a vibrancy, and authenticity that the passing of time has been unable to dilute. It is disturbing to note that Charlie was partially right, Helter Skelter is manifestly upon us, but he was wrong about the instigator of our doom, missing the callous ministrations of big business plutocrats, our imminent demise shall be comfortably Deliveroo'd directly to our front doors. Manson was a dismal, racist troglodyte, and if he had been around today, he would have been hungrily snapped up by the shady hedge-fund manipulators, hiding in plain sight at the very top of the pyramid. In conclusion, The Other Side of Madness holds up remarkably well, and the cat who delivered the chilling 'I'm the Devil, and I'm here to do the Devil's work!!!' did so with eerie verisimilitude.

Blood Freaks aka La Puta es Ciega. (2020) – Omar Jacobo.

In a spectacularly lurid, sublimely sleazy fashion, Mexican film artiste Omar Jacobo boisterously presents his punk-shocked deep-dive into the morally murky interstices of Mexico City. By graphically pulling back the protective scab of society, viewers are privy to a bracingly unsavoury view of the morass of abject human virulence swarming beneath it. Jacobo's aggressively grotty underworld milieu is strongly suggestive of the more outré, sordidly salacious Grindhouse miasma from the late 60s/70s. These deliciously dingy, downward-spiralling degenerates all comport themselves in a divinely deplorable manner, colourfully providing vidiotic sleazehounds with a perverse plethora of exquisitely insalubrious content. Armchair misanthropes, recidivist wallowers in celluloid grotesquery, and jaded consumers of Grindhouse grottage are sure to experience electric jolts of darkly vicarious pleasures. I don't think an underground horror film is ever truly complete without an intense, blood-spattered mini-maniac measuring up a beautiful cadaver for ritualised dissection. Wholly unexpectedly, Blood Freaks not infrequently provided carnal thrills that proved altogether stimulating. Others may well feel differently, but I found the skuzzoid subject matter and musical choices to be hugely compelling.

 Emmanuelle V (1987) – Walerian Borowczyk / Steve Barnett.

'He's not a man, he's a photographer!'

The erotic adventures of mischievously mucky-minded mistress Emmanuelle (Monique Gabrielle) continues lustily in perky part V, wherein our Bi-curious, horned-up heroine finds herself in the despotic clutches of a dastardly dictator's harem, with only her wicked wits, and saucy bits to make her bid for freedom! Historically, genre films were fatuously doddering into redundancy by part V, even the once rigorous Michael Myers and Rocky were pretty geriatric at 5, and yet, lissome Emmanuelle's soft-core escapades still fitfully provides serial smut-bogglers with a sultry smattering of her hot-panted peregrinations. Demographically, exploitation cinema garishly replete with prodigious rumpy pumpy maintains a longer commercial shelf-life, often having a more lasting appeal than more chaste B-features, as, quite frankly, the allure of a beautiful woman in her delectable birthday suit remains eternal.

Maestro Walerian Borowczyk has stylishly authored some of the more creatively artistic examples of Euro-cult majesty, Emmanuelle V, sadly, offers fans little that made Immoral Tales and La Bete so exotically exhilarating. While the sexy scenarios, lighting, text, and film-making proves universally flat, the same manifestly CANNOT be said of the film's perfectly pulchritudinous star, whose scintillatingly curvaceous form proves absolutely magnetic! The amusingly crude Romancing The Bone elements are not without a frisson of entertainment value, as viewers are treated to a prison break, and a bullet-blasted interlude of hectic, jungle-set action. I'm sure Emmanuelle V has been ruthlessly disparaged over the years, but this schlocky iteration of our tantalizingly trashy temptress is not without flashes of psychotronic interest to connoisseurs of top-popping tosh.

 Shock 2000 aka Snuff Perversions 2 : more bizarre cases of Death. - Todd Russell.

'Heinz likes to squeeze things!!!!!'

Shock 2000 is grab-ass title, but it is milkily suggestive of the millennial computer meltdown that, until now, has yet to manifest, so I'll go with the far grab-assier Snuff Perversions 2 : more bizarre cases of Death!!! No one without an yard of muscular meat in their sinewy sit-upon should miss out on this scuzzy compilation of pseudo-snuff S.O.V carnality. Horndog papists, basement-smelling dingle-dippers, unrepentant gooch sniffers, and retrograde preverts will prove the ideal demographic for this deep-diving death-dirge of synthetically synthesized S.O.V slaughter. I once experienced unnatural relations with a partially narcotized coelacanth, a not unpleasantly queasy sensation, which only partially resembled the darker scintillations borne from exposure to Shock 2000 aka Snuff Perversions 2 : more bizarre cases of Death.

These strange, analogue captured facsimiles of unauthentically administered exterminations, gaudily auto-eroticised asphyxia, gruesome thrill killings, and sleazy bedroom brutalising is winningly distracting fare. There's one scintillatingly sordid segment of savage siren snuffing, wherein a skeevy dude, clad in uncomfortable-looking bleached jeans busts a terminal number of caps into a pair of saftig pop-tarts, a bravura, blood-squibbed scenario of exquisite trashiness! Snuff Perversions 2 : more bizarre cases of Death proved too much for one Hollywood actor, that he called the cops, who confiscated all the masters, allowing grey market opportunists to release grotty 3^rd gen copies of this fabulously fetid Found Footage farrago. Ideal viewing should you wish to sharpen yourself up for some especially sadistic in-out, and the absolute absence of any narrative connective tissue or music proved weirdly refreshing.

 Bikini Carwash Company II (1993) – Gary Orona.

They say lightning never strikes twice, but I'm sure human lightning rod, and ex-forest ranger Roy Sullivan would beg to differ, happily, the creamy-delicious cheesecake formula of bodaciously bouncy beach bunnies goofing-off in peek-a-boo bikinis doesn't appear all too troublesome to replicate. Distractingly busti Kristi Ducati and her luridly lingerie-clad clique have their Carwash franchise bought from right under their perfect 10 attributes; will our pneumatic pop-tarts be able to raise the 4 mill required to keep hold of their sizeable assets? Bikini Carwash Company II's frantically frolicsome antics raunchily does its level breast to flesh out its paltry premise. Ravishingly buxom brunette Melissa's statement 'that money isn't everything', while banal, proves unquestioningly true, as scandalously soap-slathered, prodigiously perky, arbitrarily top-popping, playfully cavorting starlets are far better! While this takes a less grindingly crass approach to bawdy, Bikinisploitation jackanapes, the goofy, Brady Bunched, soft-bonking buffoonery proved episodically amusing. There is a certain integrity to unapologetically exploitative fare like the generously babe-stuffed Bikini Carwash Company sequel, the garish, nudie-cutie artwork truthfully suggests punters will enjoy a squeegee-brained, relentlessly hair-metalled hootenanny of hard-bodied hooters!