Euthanasia di un amore aka Break Up (1978) – Enrico Maria Solerno

A beautiful, yet melancholy woman Sena (Ornella Mutti) suddenly exits her lover Paolo's (Tony Musante) car, apparently desperate to end their long and loving relationship, and his persistent attempts to discover why she left so abruptly painfully extends the inexorable rift between them. An intelligent, elegiac, and contemplative drama that is brought to exquisitely vivid life by two nuanced performances, fluid, expressive camerawork, and absolutely sublime-looking locations. Soleno's visually compelling, engagingly philosophic mise-en-scene does a refined job of capturing all of the wounding emotional malaise following a break up. When watching films featuring the captivating Ornella Mutti, one is all too often distracted by her uncommon beauty, but Mutti's performance is so complete, and the layered story is no less immaculately constructed, one becomes utterly beguiled, the emotionally complex narrative unerringly maintains its forceful grip, directly from the enigmatic title sequence until the moving, beautifully staged climax. An altogether humane, universally relatable, profoundly accessible film from an iconic actor who proves no less masterful behind the camera, than when in front of it. One of the film's greatest strengths resides in its expressive silences, as both the actors and director appreciate the potent cinematic eloquence of non-verbal communication.

 Kinder Der Nacht (2000) – Heiko Bender/Oliver Kuppers/Marcus Laibacher/Simone Schneider.

German Gothic S.O.V weirdy appears to concern the investigation into the death of a lavender haired Gothic dude that leads to macabre revelations of malign dope-peddlers, Satanic Blood cultists, Evil Deaded forestry, the nefarious production of a potent psychoactive substance, lava hot German Goth hotties, and a banging industrial EBM score. My German couldn't fully circumnavigate the beef with the increasingly brutal gangsters, so I simply let the oddness wash over me like an opiated electro-Goth fever dream! Much like the more insalubrious Jess Franco titles, the copious T&A, while a not unwelcome distraction, felt entirely arbitrary. The ruthless gangsters want the recipe for this demonized crack by any means necessary, so the Gothic crew tool up, leading bloodily to an inevitably bullet-blasted showdown.

As a Brucie bonus, one of the comic book villains eerily looks like the angriest love child borne of David Vincent and Pete Steel! For a lo-fi, no budget S.O.V schlocker, there are a number of gnarly ideas, namely this Lovecraftian designer drug that turns its abusers into excessively violent, devil-possessed berserkers. I can't state with absolutely surety whether Kinder Der Nacht is a cine-cult in the offing, or a bag of steaming schwantzes, perhaps a little of both? Either way, it strongly suggested to me that I am watching far too many sketchy genre films of late. I don't wish to end on a disparaging note, but even with subtitles, I'm not wholly convinced Kinder Der Nacht would make that much more sense!

 Seeds aka Seeds of Sin (1968) – Andy Milligan.

Along with fellow exploitation maestro Jack Hill's evergreen, darkly gag-laden Gothic grotesquery Spider Baby, Andy Milligan's skuzzball Gothica Seeds luridly remains a twisted, cruel, fascinatingly camp dissection of wickedly warped family values. Perhaps taking its cue from Hammer Horror's similarly skewed dabbling with hagsploitation, Seeds sordidly presents the precipitous decline of demented dipso matriarch Claris Manning (Maggie Rogers) during a majestically malign, ruthlessly mirthless Christmas family reunion. Like National Lampoons on weaponized DMT, the mercurial, maniacal Manning clan are a scintillatingly sinister troop of perversely scheming skells, and their nakedly sated lusts provide for oodles of rampant, sensationally skeevey WTFuckery!

Happily, at no point does Mr. Milligan approach verisimilitude, his debased caricatures of hyperbolic humanity are playfully distorted to the point of sublime absurdity. Like an especially brutally executed autopsy, Seeds is faintly taboo viewing, you know you really shouldn't, but you can't turn away, and, yet, deep, DEEP down, you fucking love it, and absolutely don't want it to stop! Seeds is a rabidly nihilistic anti-Forsyte Saga, luridly laden with additional vitriol, queasy incest, and biblical, downward-spiralling delirium. To any unmoved by Seeds of Sin, their funny bones must have fatally diminished to that of Stalin's conscience. A potently experiential work of agitprop exploitation, arguably in a league of its own, Seeds remains a mad, monochromatic, monolithically misanthropic midnight movie monstrosity.

 Zombel (2001) – Al Spicher.

A recently zombified male introduces Al Spicher's boundlessly gory D.I.Y zombie chunkblower Zombel, kindly informing viewers that his murderer, a prototypically cracked scientist plans to weaponize the dead as his very own zombie army. This specific S.O.V milieu is a familiar one, actor chums in rudimentary make-up, gratuitous, home-made gore, cursory plot, patently unlicensed usage of heavy metal, and lurch-core attack zombies lumbering murderously through a forest. By all rights this should be utterly dreadful, but any generously gore-laden horror film that makes the effort to provide a memorable sequence wherein a zombie wanks his own cock off has,perhaps, appreciable depths. A drunk dude fatefully relives himself upon a zombie's head, thereby leading our reluctant hero to discover that urine is the only viable antidote to this unexpectedly winning Euro-schlock zombie outbreak. Wholly deserving of rediscovery, Zombel is a splendidly splattery, Swiss cheesy S.O.V splatter treat. In the mindlessly amusing, crudely constructed pantheon of unsophisticated Zombie carnage, Spicher's analogue bloodbath stands tall as one of home-made horror's more goofily entertaining works! Zombel's obscurity resides solely in the fact that they will never be able to afford the music licensing for a non-bootlegged edition. Happily, I still maintain a childlike glee witnessing cheapnis zombies hungrily chowing down on gloopy tummy gubbins!

 Mangue Negro aka Mud Zombies. (2008) – Rodrigo Aragao.

Deep in a moldering Brazilian mangrove, long rumoured to be haunted, starving fishermen fatefully catch something that will consume them! Not long thereafter, the villains who eke out their meagre existence in this swampy hell are gorily besieged by unspeakably foul, especially putrescent-looking bog-zombies. The spectacularly grotesque practical FX, lively performances, and its eerie mangrove setting raises mud zombies high above the mire of mediocre zombie splatter. Raquel and Louis are engaging protagonists, the grimly festering attack zombies prove to be legitimately menacing, and the beleaguered couple's increasing sense of dread is palpable. A dankly rotting backwater full of rampaging, disgustingly decayed living dead is certainly no place I'd care to tarry! I really must commend director Aragao for his gruesome creativity, thrillingly rejuvenating the wormy carcass of low budget attack zombie horror with his kinetic, prodigiously gory, unusually haunting Zombie Mudbath! (sorry, couldn't quite resist that!) Along with its exemplary score, Mud Zombies is refreshingly free of humour, these menacing mangrove monsters mean business, so there's absolutely no time to fanny about with irony, homages, or wiseass shenanigans, trapped in the hellish black bogs of these treacherous, tar black tributaries...it's fight or die!!!

 Tough and Deadly (1995) – Steve Cohen.

There are two revered instigators of action-centric DTV mayhem, PM Entertainment and Shapiro Glickenhaus entertainment, and both frequently stinted little on their bellicose 'entertainment' quotient, ably providing prodigious levels of kinetically macho mayhem, and the outstanding buddy actioner Tough and Deadly remains some primo SGE rewardingly fight-packed fodder. As previously seen in roustabout classic Back in Action (1994) the charismatic Roddy Piper and formidable pugilist Billy Blanks enjoy boffo alpha dude chemistry, and Cohen's thunderous, bountifully action-centric Tough and Deadly is a legitimately hot ticket! Familiar B-action tropes cause Piper & Blanks to reluctantly join muscular forces against all manner of scum and villainy, thereby allowing for a satisfyingly prolific display of explosive, sharply executed combat, and noisome, bravura gunfights to bedazzle all but the most finicky action junkies. It's not at all common to discover a Berretta blazing 90s DTV actioner that pretty much hauls ass directly from the Gung-ho get-go, and much like the coelacanth, Steve Cohen's testosterone-soaked shoot 'em up is a truly rare B-Movie banger indeed. The unapologetically bare-chested actioner Tough and Deadly remains a nigh on immaculate example of macho-mansploitation!

 Night Eyes (1990) – Jag Mundhra.

Supremely glamorous, recent divorcee (Tanya Roberts) has her luxurious Malibu property monitored by security firm Night Eyes, consisting of brothers Andrew Stevens and Cooper Huckerbee, and somewhat indelicately, one of their cameras fatefully records the exceptionally frolicsome activities within her sumptuous boudoir. Night Eyes is an enjoyably trashy, crudely voyeuristic erotic thriller given additional oomph with the handsomely decorative presences of a virile-looking Andrew Stevens and scintillating seductress Tanya Roberts. Jag Mundhra's superficially slick thriller Night Eyes has a De Palma-lite veneer, gaudily augmented with squalling saxophones and a mawkish sentimentality. Come to think of it, Night Eyes plays out glossily like a latter day Mastorakis, providing a derivative, blandly efficient genre peep-show with momentary flashes of lingerie-lurid incident. There's steamy, Zalman Kinged in-out, brusingly boisterous fisticuffs, and a serviceable twist, making Night Eyes a seductive enough midnight romp to those amenable to such.