Acceleration (2019) – Michael Marino / Daniel Zerilli.

'I don't want loser DNA in my house!!!!!!!'

A determined, physically capable woman (Nathalie Burn) is coerced by phoned-in Villain (Dolph Lundgren) to expedite certain tasks, in order to reclaim her kidnapped son in brisk DTV actioner Acceleration. Having to endure increasingly severe trials for personal gain/freedom goes back to Homer, so y'all don't need to be a Delphic oracle to predict Acceleration's outcome. Acceleration is a professionally mounted, formulaic B-crime actioner with a decent cast, so-so action, and a pedestrian text, so raddled by cliché, even the steely, monolithic presence of Dolph can't sweeten the ride. At this point, mainstream action, and especially horror, is left pretty much flogging a dead horse, any vestiges of relevance, or genuine excitement in genre cinema is being solely maintained by Asia. While it has become common practice to witness bloater Steven Seagal sitting/whispering throughout his execrable oeuvre, diminishing Dolph like this is a catastrophic miscalculation, like using a McLaren Artura for the midnight 7-Eleven snackky run! Sean Patrick Flanery is a usually reliable B-Action presence, but no actor is wholly immune to pony dialogue, and dour, rent-a-thug Liddell's slab-like persona has all the appreciable charisma of raw shellac. Like weirdo religious sects who must copulate through gauze, it ain't nothing like the real thang, and, sadly, Acceleration ain't even close to the real deal.

 Night Screams (1987) – Allen Plone.

I like saying the director's name aloud...ALLEN PLONE!!! ALLEN PLONE!!!! The 'Plone' part is strangely satisfying, much more so than his muddled/fuddled 80s slasher. I believe PLONE done PHONEd in his torpid Night Screams, bit of a dog's dinner, this one, the bloody parts are surely meaty enough, but it's put together sans finesse, doable if y'all are drunk/blazed enough, and the fridge is barren. Elucidating upon the dopey plot is an exercise in futility; angsty, emotionally unstable, med-skipping jock has a house party with largely unlovely friends, and they are fragged by folk, or folks unseen. The End! That being said, as lowest common denominator slashers go, it's not the nadir, Night Screams is notably less reekingly poo-slaked than 90s% of contemporary horror films. Happily, it's not all shocking mediocrity, the two jug-headed loons that bust out of Leavenworth are pretty live wired skells, and if Night Screams has focussed more on their freakazoidal home invasion antics, the experience may have proved duckier for this particular viewer.

Absolutely worth boggling if y'all are an obsessively list-making, see-every-slasher-ever-made demographic, but even with my increasingly compulsive issues, I struggled enormously with the film's desperate dearth of creativity. To recap, Night Screams is proper pony, but the moderate, pseudo-psychotronic elements arguably include an objectively bangin' dance sequence, we enjoy a tantalizing snatch of the brillo Graduation Day at the start, the squirrelly red head is one lava hot honey pot, and two of the more insipid party goers are enlivened by their watching a vintage John Holmes stag flick; observing lingeringly, and gratuitously soapy jubblies is no quality individual's idea of dead space! Now that I've royally slagged Night Screams, my initial negativity has tempered somewhat, it remains a schlock sandwich, with extra cheese, but, upon reflection, other Slasher fans may well find it far less irksome than I did.

 Teenage Gang Debs (1966) – Sande M, Johnsen.

'Nuts! To you, Buster! No one's gonna cut me up!!!!'

Any twitchy low-fi B/W roughie that commences with a Tempest Storm reference, and some douchey flop-haired cads slapping the tar outta some smart mouth strumpet can only get better, or much worse? Scheming hot tamale from Manhattan (Diane Conti) makes a righteous play for Rebel prez Johnny, who I assume is leader material due to his spiffy-looking 4-button, Bing Crosby cardigan? While the dishy Debs are feistier than a hornet highball, their dude's are a milky mess of button-down goofs, not one looking like he could make a dent in a day-old rice pudding? Presenting itself like a cheapnis, back-alley Macbeth, tough broad Terry connives and cat-fights her way to the big-time, but, perhaps, she has bitten off more than she can screw?

The plenitude of soft-boiled beatnik banter is no small part of Teenage Gang Debs skeezicks charm, and the bongo-happy, jazzoid score nails this quickie gang-flick indelibly to the era it was shot. I'd like to think that Coppola saw this, and made a concerted effort that nothing of it should influence his Rumblefish! I have absolutely no doubt Teenage Gang Debs would have been perceived as being squaresville at the time, seen today, it camply offers a nostalgic look at 60s fashions, ephemeral dancing fads, and a delectably down and dirty NYC. I wasn't hugely surprised that the first dude to get iced wore a cardigan, even back in the day Marlon knew no one was gonna make a poster boy rebel out of some schmendrick in a cardigan!

 Shock 'em Dead (1991) – Mark Reed.

'Rock me, Asmodeus! Rock, Rock me, Asmodeus! Asmodeus, Asmodeus! Rock me Asmodeus!'

Dumb trailer Park Nerd (Stephen Quadros)sells his soul to play stunt guitar like vapid shredder Michael Angelo Batio in triumphal 90s trash disasterpiece Shock 'em Dead. Arguably the worst comedy horror Troma never made, Traci Lords-starring Shock 'em Dead is a fascinatingly awful, fearlessly facile, torpor-inducing hair metalled horror absurdity that remains an excruciating voodoo rite of (anal) passage for generations of bad movie masochists! I sincerely believe that Freed's deliciously doofoid Shock 'em Dead is some kind of tweaked Steel Panther fever dream, since fleet-fingered Satchel, creepily, hasn't aged a minim since '91, either an excess of Aqua Net has miraculously preserved his party hard life-force, or somewhere on Sunset Strip resides the ugly truth, his silently suppurating portrait lies rotting, horribly consumed by syphilis! My only beef with Shock 'em Dead is that once seen, it can't ever be truly unseen, like acid reflux, the mind is unable to fully digest it, forced to expel the more indigestible elements in a caustic, green-hued torrent of B-Movie bile! I can imagine that the 'music' written for Shock 'em Dead was intentionally awful, immaculately doubled by soulless speed-freak Batio, and therefore, was it also deliberate to replace the film's 'fake' bad guitarist, with a legitimately terrible 'real' guitarist????? I await confirmation with basted breasts.

 The Wedding Cottage (2023) – Terry Ingram.

Cutesy wedding planner romcom finds marital impresario Vanessa's (Erin Krakow) meticulous plans of organising a dream wedding for cutesy competition winning couple going south, as the cottage's grouchy owner (Brendan Penny) vetoes the idea, yet, their initially fractious relations, inevitably turn all gooey, coalescing into a cinnamon bun sweet romance. The make-over/renovation trope is mother's milk to Hallmark, and The Wedding Cottage is one of the more watchable fix-it-up & fall-in-love schmaltz-fests. While the sentiment is ladled on no less heavy-handedly than usual, the handsome couple are genuinely appealing, the Vermont setting has an ersatz folksy charm, the ubiquitous 'temporary relationship schism' remains predictably clumsy, and it all ends up peachy dreamy, which is why Hallmark are still in business. While absolutely jaded in reality, I can still appreciate the warmly-fuzzed fantasy of The Wedding Cottage, as it provides a codified wallow in a ingratiatingly rose-tinted world, wherein all of life's emotional jigsaw pieces fit snugly together. Any film, no matter how formulaic, that champions kindness, empathy, and the lasting value of altruistic endeavour is not without some integrity.

 Unsatisfied Love (1968) aka Love After Death. – Glauco Del Mar.

An impotent cataleptic is hurriedly buried alive, and when he awakens from his not-so eternal slumber, he discovers, to his horror, that his body effects the semblance of life, yet his regenerative organ remains frustratingly quite dead!!! Seeing the grossly discombobulated Mr. Montell (Guillermo De Cordova) stumbling dazedly through the desolate graveyard, one can't help but recall Night of The Living Dead Penis. Part cheapjack Poe, part roughie Peep Show, Del Mar's necromantic revenge schlocker should come with a full colour decal of 'If y'all see this coffin's rockin', don't come a Knockin! The basic premise is sound, a lurid amalgam of Freudian nightmares, a sexually incapacitated male, once preternaturally aroused from death, would, quite naturally, seek out a cosy cupboard to covertly observe couples making whoopee, it also follows that he would inevitably become aroused, attempt to participate, and upon doing so, he remedies his impotency, supernaturally revenging himself upon all those that profited so eagerly from his death! Intellectually more probing than comparably mucky fare by Findlay and Wishman, I believe there is some argument that suggests Glauco Del Mar's Peek-a-boo oeuvre owes more to Kinsey than 42^nd Street. Unsatisfied Love is an unheralded titan of progressive 60s erotica, unrecognised in his lifetime, this gin-soaked scribe hopes B-Icon Del Mar is deservedly canonized during mine!

 Point Blank (1998) – Matt Earl Beesley.

A Death Row-bound bus of mostly hardened villainy effect a violently orchestrated escape, but their plan of hijacking a mall, before absconding by helicopter to freedom is royally fubar'd by internecine squabbling, and a thrillingly burly Mickey Rourke going full metal jackanapes in boisterously live-wired 90s DTV actioner Point Blank. While the pulpy text is another guileless iteration if Die Hard, director Beeseley maintains a bruising pace, galvanizing his action-centric Point Blank with an exceptionally qualitative ensemble cast. Featuring notable performances from Michael Wright, Paul Ben-Victor, Kevin Gage, and a surly, impressively heroic turn from a juicily jacked Rourke, with Danny Trejo's blistering berserker Wallace's hellfire grin, bullet-happy bellicosity, and exquisite disdain for all human life pretty much stealing the whole shebang, right down to the wet wipes, used earplugs, and stale doughnuts!

Point Blank's strengths reside not in originality, but with its energized performances, noisome frequency of blitzkrieg action, and jaw crackingly ferocious fisticuffs! Granted, Point Blank certainly doesn't reinvent the action wheel, but director Beesley demonstratively keeps it spinning faster than most, and I would subjectively argue that Rourke's beefy, hugely gratifying 90s actioner has been unfairly overlooked, greatly deserving of some belated TLC in the guise a worthy HD restoration. In my eclectic, and multifarious B-movie positive noodling, I have often highly praised Danny Trejo's charismatic performances in genre films of increasingly dubious virtue, and I would like to do so again, as Trejo's luridly coked-up, nuclear-fissioned nutjob Wallace is a memorable, monumentally mental maniac!!!!