Liverleaf (2018) – Eisuke Naito.

Relentlessly bullied by callous classmates, desperately beleaguered Nozaki (Anna Yamada) is understandably pushed to breaking point after both of her parents are killed in an arson attack, she then steels herself for righteously bloody revenge! An engaging, credibly acted, beautifully twisted drama, generously spiked with savage bursts of visceral ultra-splatter. The small town, increasingly enshrouded in bitter squalls of snow, provides an atmospheric backdrop for Nozaki's thrillingly gory reprisals, perhaps a sly reference to the hyper-sanguineous, snowbound slayings of Lady Snowblood. Nozaki is not only a hugely sympathetic protagonist, she's also a complex antagonist, making Naito's wintry Liverleaf an altogether memorable, snow-burning terror treat! What begins as a deceptively linear tale of bloody vengeance in an insular Japanese backwater, culminates in an extraordinarily layered, gore-sotted tragedy of nigh on Biblical proportions! My advice to those contemplating a move to the country...DON'T!!! as is so often suggested in backwoods horror lore, small towns are frequently toxic hives of homicidal Borgias! While much of contemporary horror is no better than refried baloney, every now and again, my faith in the genre is restored by the inventively gruesome likes of Liverleaf.

 Death File 1 (1989) – Susumu Saegusa (Kaoru Adachi)

Both Tru-Gore cognoscenti and Gore-slop newbies should find a modest amount of sinister grist for their prurient mills in Saegusa's grisly cheapnis anthology of frequently explicit physiological carnage. Initially released on Mad Video, and long-since resurrected on the internet for the edification of morbidly curious Mondo mentalists, those who get their skeevey kicks observing the majesty of the human temple in multifarious states of gruesome disarray. The most prevalent footage in these works is graphic video of shredded victims of catastrophic vehicular misfortune. One often hears the claim of 'Cars being a far more perilous mode of transport than aeroplanes, and Death File 1 provides ample gory evidence to support this. I'm always keen on cinematic firsts, and Death File 1 unexpectedly provided the darkly whimsical moment when a curious cockroach enjoys an exploratory nibble from a succulent node of human brain tissue! Lacking any form, or harmony, Death File 1 crudely compiles a sordid selection of the gracelessly exploited death scenes of grossly unfortunate human beings. Visceral, but ultimately vapid, and is manifestly NOT suitable for dog lovers! High point is a brutalist post-mortem, wherein the good doctor violently bisects the cadaver's skull with a wood saw in this tawdry travelogue of terminal travesties!

 Engineering Red (1993) aka Konstruktor Krasnogo Tsveta. - Audrey Yi/Armen Petrosyan.

An elegiac mondo melange of archival material featuring gory eviscerations, surgical procedures on human extremities, graphic harvesting of flesh/epidermal tissues, Siamese twins, clinical observations of  microscopic/bacteriological organisms, mechanized bloodlettings, and brain surgery, spliced with openly surrealistic content. Unusual, grisly, and thrillingly voyeuristic material, mondo fans, or any with a pronounced interest in the more outré iterations of art-house extremity are unlikely to be disappointed by Engineering Red's striking cornucopia of anthropomorphic/cellular/entomological curiosities. In the same way that Boyd Rice, or Stockhausen won't appeal to everyone, the more openly feral mise-en-scene of transgressive cinema is demonstratively NOT for all tastes. Bodily invasive content like Engineering Red will have a select audience, for the very little it is worth, I found this contemplative, darkly aesthetic piece to be grotesquely compelling. Eerie and hypnotic, the singularly discombobulating effect of witnessing so much alien imagery in C/U/extreme C/U draws you uncomfortably deep into quite another realm altogether! I'll openly admit to wussy-ness here, the creepy crawlies, and the brutalist scene of a poor young girl enduring an excruciating seizure skeeved me out. Engineering Red has an appealingly surrealistic, almost Bunuellian quality; exploratory, rather than gratuitous, philosophic, rather than prurient.

 Traces of Death 1 (1993) – Damon Fox.

Following in the mucky footprints of Faces of Death and Death Scenes, Traces of Death provided armchair anatomists with a lurid plenitude of fuzzily unexpurgated footage of human mortality. There are but a few things of which we can be absolutely certain, inflation never decreases, life sucks, we are all going to expire, and splattery road accidents draw huge crowds. Traces of Death pruriently caters to this morbid interest, providing explicit human carnage, observed from the myriad comforts of your cosy, centrally heated domicile. While cheap and tawdry, like undiscovered roadkill, Traces of Death's innate tawdriness fermenting horribly over time. Opportunistically produced without the merest vestige of sophistication, an all you can stomach, gore-sotted buffet of purloined medical procedures, twisted roadside carnage, gruesomely uncensored news footage, lingering autopsies, and multitudinous examples of brutal sudden death.

Wholly dependent upon the individual's tolerance for graphically exposed human giblets, the unrepentantly miasmic Traces of Death series sordidly maintains its purulent position amongst the gross pantheon of compellingly cheapnis snuff-gore compendia. Contrary to its undeservedly extreme reputation, Traces of Death would make an ideal date flick, as they so often claim, being aware of your own mortality often acts as an aphrodisiac, fuelled by mankind's selfish need to unthinkingly reproduce itself. It would be entirely remiss of me if I failed to mention the one barbarous scene of gratuitous animal cruelty at the beginning, I fast-forward through it, like most folk, I abhor the abuse of animals, evolution's most noble creations.

 Far From Home (1989) – Meiert Avis.

This sultry 80s dust bowl thriller is blessed with an exemplary cast, headed by Matt Frewer and a precociously provocative Drew Barrymore. The dingy denizens of the ghost town they become stranded in being colourfully populated by B-titan Susan Tyrell, Corman alumnus Dick Miller, busty bombshell Jennifer Tilly, and beloved character actor Richard Masur, outstanding as a grizzly throwback Vietnam vet. This trashy trailer park noir is thematically pretty heavy handed, the sinisterly stalking P.O.V camera leers oppressively through the grubby windows like a zillion slasher goofs of yore!!! Teen dream Drew falls hard for dark n' broody redneck Romeo who may, or may not be a homicidal maniac, and matters boisterously boil over to an enjoyably hysteric conclusion. As an boffo example of vintage Drewsploitation, Far From Home is pretty choice, and would make a sweet double-thrill with Tamra Davis's Gun Crazy. I must admit, this proved to be far more entertaining than I remember, Frewer and Barrymore have great chemistry, and powerhouse Thespian Tyrell steals all her scenes like an Acme bandit.

 Satsu satsu (1999) – Tamakichi Anaru.

S.O.V J-Splatter extremist Tamakichi Anaru provides ravenous misanthropes with 4 profoundly morbid tales, this witheringly glum quartet of bleakness prises open a grimy window upon the crushing despair of disparate lives absolutely shorn of light. With Anaru's singular attention to grotesque detail, the viewer becomes the intimate voyeur to four desperate individuals self-administered annihilation. Arguably NOT a date flick, and not one to be seen by those sensitive to such consistently morose subject matter, as one of Anaru's great strengths as a cinematic shock-trooper is the sheer dispassionate brutalism of his sinisterly low-fi mise-en-scene. Nihilistic, bloody, and absolutely perverse, but like the proverbial car crash, one can't help but stare. I have no idea what a guilty pleasure is, you either dig it, or you don't, my tastes have always been inexcusably prurient, so my subjective admiration for Tamakichi Anaru's Pseudo-snuff Gorenucopia is more elevated that it might be to others. Expect unleavened grimness for just shy of an hour, hey!!!! it's a monolithic bummer, but so is real life; for me, Satsu satsu is infinitely more truthful than the multitudes of indentikill, goofball slashers. I don't wish to sound callous, but the copious blood spillage in the especially stark hara-kiri sequence was compellingly genuine, and the hardcore/gabber track blasting over the darkly whimsical finale proved exhilarating!

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.