Terminal Velocity (1994) – Deran Sarafian.

'I'm more than a walking penis, I'm a flying penis!

Hunky maverick skydive instructor with notably good hair (Charlie Sheen) gets dangerously entangled with a beautiful skydiving soviet spy with even better hair (Nastassja Kinski), in glossy 90s thrill-spiller Terminal Velocity. Before I continue, I wanted to take a wee digression, and once again savour Sheen's stridently male moniker in Sarafian's entertainingly slick, full-throttled, sky-borne spy shenanigans...'Ditch Brodie'!!!???? I had sincerely hoped Mr. Sheen, the actor, not cleaning product, would have ditched his given name and appropriated Ditch Brodie for real, alas, he did not. Terminal Velocity provides an amiable bounty of suspense, snappy badinage, adrenalized aeronautical acrobatics, with Bad Boy Sheen's glib, FU attitude being no small part of Terminal Velocity's evergreen watchability. Alongside the charismatic pairing of Sheen and alluring Ms Kinski, Sarafian assembled a quality cast of energetic supporting players, with menacing James Gandolfini providing a more than credible nemesis! I still appreciate it when an alpha dude's gravity-defying heroics are noisily telegraphed by histrionic guitar shreddage, yet another bullseye from Terminal Velocity! When esteemed character actor Rance Howard turns up in a picture, he is frequently given little to do, whereas in Terminal Velocity Rance is the equally derring-do facilitator of grandstanding sky-master Ditch's dizzying display of daredevil heroism! Way-ta-go Rance!!!!!!

 Caterpillar (1988) – Shozin Fukui.

Shozin Fukui's fascinating, low-budget experimental art-core horror/weird short has a great band, striking visuals, and a frequently disorientating, pleasingly surrealistic bent. Haunting, imaginative, obtuse, and strangely hypnotic, I royally dug it, but I'm an obscurantist, botty-obsessed shut-in with an increasingly tenuous grasp on reality! Caterpillar features a heady kaleidoscope of frenzied Super-8 captured imagery, and Fukui's dynamic use of stop-motion effects often recalls Tsukamoto's iconic Tetsuo. I also appreciated the eerie live band inserts, and dissonant, overtly masticatory soundtrack. It is clear that the shambling, mentally pixelated characters in Caterpillar are suffering from some sickening urban malaise, and it is left entirely to the dazed viewer to surmise their agony. Creepy and kawaii, weirdy and kawaii, trippy and Kawaii, just like I.

 Blowback (2022) – Tibor Takacs.

Bank heist operator Nick's (Cam Gigandet) plans of executing a slickly orchestrated score are scuppered by members of his crew leaving him for dead, forcing him to enact his bloody revenge upon them! While undeniably formulaic, experienced genre director Takacs delivers a stolid, mostly doable DTV actioner. Surly pugilist Couture is a suitably bellicose thug, Mandylor is often cast as a cop, and Gigandet's Nick provides a handsome, sinewy, if somewhat lightweight hammer of vengeance. I gave Blowback a shot since I am a huge fan of Takacs's The Gate and Armageddon, and, to be fair, it proved to be an amiable enough tea & biscuits time-killer. I think it's a trifle unjust to disparage a boisterous B-picture for steadfastly adhering to a tried and true formula, since that's kinda like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's competently made, and as an occasional sentimentalist, I was more than satisfied with how the greatly beleaguered Nick resolved his crisis. Negative elements are the routine plotting, but I must say I did enjoy Ego Mikitas's icy portrayal of charismatic mob enforcer Pete, expressing the same cool, diffident intensity that made Michael Madsen such a wickedly compelling Alpha Reservoir Dog!

 Deliberalize - The Allure of Deceit. (2025) Iron Fortress Records.

'A sinister salvo of morbidly efficient, thrillingly intense Chuck Shuldiner-inflected skull battery! Absolutely alluring, evilly riff-centric metal mayhem, US DM berserkers Deliberalize The Allure of Deceit album ably provides Death Metal maniacs a ferociously unfiltered thrash grenade of neck-rupturing euphoria!'

 Gruesome - 'Silent Echoes'  Relapse. (2025)

'Silent Echoes is certainly no less emphatic a mortal head-crusher than a sky-plummeting safe, brutally decimating your skull into ruinous clots of shattered bone and grisly-looking goo!'

 Repligator (1996) – Bret McCormick.

It is not unfeasible to imagine that a micro-budgeted 90s creature feature, concerning a fubar'd experiment in teleportation/brain washing, producing the unexpectedly voluptuous effect of transmuting G.I.s into hyper-sexual reptoids might yield a lark, or two? Repligator is a brilliantly inane, triumphantly silly Sci-schlocker, and only the most callow oaf might refute the innate value of a divinely doofoid B-Flick with Gunnar Hansen, Brinke Stevens, and a bouncing bevvy of bikini'd babegators gone berserk! If a competent film-maker had gone through the replicator, they shall return with all logic and subtle reasoning excised, their refried cerebrum now terrifyingly engorged to an elephantine, Ed Woodized lizard brain, capable of little more than crudely exaggerating the lowest denominators of B-Movie lore, lewdly fixating upon gratuitous, but not entirely unwelcome shots of silicone-stuffed breasts! Like some poor, unthinking mackerel, I was dumbly hooked in by the titillatingly transhumanist cover art, and, quite frankly, by watching Repligator in its entirety, I frequently got precisely what I deserved! I do think it's fair to say, should you be in the wrong frame of mind (sober), Repligator might often appear asinine, but viewed in the right frame of mind (loaded), the plentifully exposed chests, retro rayguns, cheapnis sets, and a weirdly replicated scene with Dr. Goodbody (Brinke Stevens) MAY seem pretty darn righteous!

 Curse, Death & Spirit (1992) - Hideo Nakata.

Curse, Death & Spirit is a well-made, 65min. J-Horror trilogy by macabre maestro Nakata that I was hitherto unfamiliar with. While the supernatural content is mostly subtle, the youthful cast's performances are uniformly excellent, and these ghostly, slowly-creeping tales of restless, darkly disembodied spirits proved to be a compelling watch. While I found spine-tingling interest in all three softly spooky stories, the palpably eerie 'The Haunted Inn' instalment was the most impactful, at times genuinely chilling, it arguably acts as a sinister primer for the resolutely game-changing, epoch defining grimness of The Ring. In closing, horror fans who especially favour the mayhem engendered of diabolically distempered dolls should certainly appreciate the first story entitled 'The Cursed Doll'.