The Hidan of Maukbeiangjow aka Invasion of the girl snatchers (1973) – Lee Jones.

'Stay away from any Heavy Metal!'

During a seemingly routine investigation of a nefarious drug and kidnapping ring, private dick Sam Trowel (Hugh Smith) and stoner partner Kaspar (Ele Grigsby) discover the outlandish extraterrestrial plot of alien souls transmuted into their recently slain, and then evilly resurrected prey!!!! This ditzy D.I.Y Sci-schlocker takes the tabloid hot-topic of alien abduction, and infusing it generously with hazing clouds of hashish smoke. The Hidan of Maukbeiangjow goofily provides Ed Wood/Don Dohler/Robert Emenegger/Fat Freddy's Cat fiends with a low-fi'd, sky-highed cheapnis presentation of alien occultic skulduggery, dopey line readings, wing and a prayer FX, and a whole mess of bargain-binned B-Movie ballyhoo!

Most who go out of their way to catch an (almost) forgotten regional freak-scene with the admittedly flavoursome moniker of The Hidan of Maukbeiangjow will have more than an inkling of what they are in for, and, happily, Lee Jones certainly doesn't disappoint! The more stoned-immaculate schlock-seekers can expect a lively rudimentary concoction of grainy Grindhouse goof-a-rama, bad hair, cloddish acting, bong-blasted repartee, batso Ufoccult fanatics, and cathode ray oscilloscopes. If one vibes with the sluggish pace, Lee Jones's 1973, heroically spaced out oddity remains a backwoods bonkers, body snatching treat! This is a whole buncha dime store pulp hooey, but I got a boner the size of Christmas for dime store pulp hooey, and besides, lines like 'Yeah!!! Nice Glyphs!' don't just fall out of a party cracker everyday, dude!!!

 Salvage (2008) – Lawrence Gough.

Christmas Eve goes off with a bang as a sleepy, middle-class suburban cul-de-sac is suddenly quarantined by heavily armed special forces, and not long thereafter, the tense situation takes a grisly turn for the worse. You can definitively file Salvage as a Crimbo Chunk-blower, as once the turkey hits the bloody fan, it's gory giblets and gooey cranberry sauce all over the gaff!!!! Siege horror is a popular trope, beleaguered suburbanites, maniacal monsters, and a shadowy, gun-happy military are soothingly familiar horror archetypes, while Salvage wasn't especially novel in its approach, it provides familiar ground for bloody carnage and some robust final girl action. The main problem with much of noughties horror is the over reliance on shaky-cam, which I always found distracting, an irksome aesthetic Salvage failed to avoid. Weirdly, Salvage also recalled Euro-schlock oddity Bakterion aka Panic, which shared a similarly rampaging, melt-faced monstrosity, and manifestly remains much more of a goofily entertaining watch. UK indie horror Salvage is a mostly doable oner, but it kinda vibed like a feature-length, Halloween edition of Brookside, a sinking feeling reinforced by the prosaic dialogue. I didn't exactly dislike Salvage, but it needed additional blood-spurty monster-mashing, and a lot less stoic redemptive mummy shtick. Hey! I don't have anything personal against stoic redemptive mummy shtick, but less is more, guy!

 3 Days of a Blind Girl (1993) – Wing Chiu-Chan.

Angstily home alone, convalescing from an eye op that renders her temporarily sightless, Mrs Ng (Veronica Yip) experiences escalating terror after a stranger (Anthony Wong) arrives unannounced, and not long thereafter, it is disturbingly revealed that his agenda is altogether malign! I would happily watch a film about a dude jumping up and down in a puddle, if said dude was Anthony Wong, fortunately 3 Days of a Blind Girl finds him in signature skeevey form, nastily portraying a monumental creep,the very last type of man you would want sleazing around your loved-one, temporarily blind, or otherwise! Firebrand Wong has a truly unique gift of expressing all the most degenerate aspects of man with aggressive fluency, to whit, he can even make eating a bag of Maltesers appear palpably threatening! Morbidly voyeuristic, deliciously macabre, suspenseful, and not just a little bit perverse, Wing Chiu-Chan's 3 Days of a Blind Girl remains a wickedly compelling, tantalisingly tweaked, er, must-see Cat III shocker. In the sadly modest pantheon of imperilled blind women horror, the electrifying 3 Days of a Blind Girl stands lofty, and the exquisite Veronica Yip is truly a sight for sore eyes!!!!!!

 Las Vegas Strangler aka No Tears For The Damned (1968) – William Collins.

'Mother's never wrong!'

This crisply monochromatic, scintillatingly sleazy 60s psychotronic-inflected psycho-slasher luridly presents the escalating insanity of a mentally twisted, murderously misogynist maniac with deleterious mommy issues. Following a catastrophic break from sanity, trophy-hunting loony-bird Jeff (Robert Dix) rampantly indulges all his more sordidly female-flaying fantasies by eerily eyeballing, creepily stalking, and brutally slaying a sinisterly selected selection of sultry sirens. All the denizens of the dingily downcast The Las Vegas Strangler prove anything but sympathetic, but the camera's mostly in focus, and no swinging 60s roughie is ALL bad if it lingers upon a carousel fabulously festooned with a fleshly diorama of tantalizingly topless doxies!

Vegas has always struck me as a hole, but it must be said the garishly glitzy façade has provided a thrillingly gaudy backdrop to a number of sleazy winners. While lacking the weird digressions of a Wishman/Findlay, this recently resurrected psychotronic relic is a doable oner for those predisposed to rudimentary slasher tropes. Prone to monotony, the content is juicily Jushed with hot-flushes of in-out, frantically frugging beatniks, excitable surf guitar, and arguably one of the earliest examples of a stabbed-up titty. Grindhouse addicts might care to note that the cast briefly includes John 'Bud' Cardos, still deservedly infamous for his sci-schlocker miracle The Dark.

 Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (1989) – Sandor Stern.

'Why would a priest be calling about a lamp?'

The greatly diminishing Amityville franchise manifests itself in its fourth infernal incarnation by the schlockily entertaining guise of Sandor Stern's made-for-TV Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes. In one Amityville, the 'evil' hides in a kinky clock, and in part 4, this ceaselessly disruptive demonic entity is unknowingly brought into this cavernous Californian domicile in the ostensibly innocent guise of a chichi looking lamp. I, personally got no specific beef with lamps in cinema, in fact, they even made a decent oner called The Lamp, so horror lamps are all bright in my book! Like many, I regard the original Amityville to be a bona fide supernatural gem, but I also righteously dig the fact that the divinely downward-spiralling Amityville legacy amenably provided examples of primo goofball horror shenanigans. Amityville Four enjoys a conspicuously 80s aesthetic, which, for me, is usually the sticky cherry atop the tastily cliche-clotted cake.

Beautifully executed, or imperfectly presented, gloopily be-slimed, generously blood-basted practical FX are ALWAYS winning content, as in many ways CGI hurriedly rang the death-knell for tactile terror in the 90s, ultimately leading to the digital sloppiness of today's frustratingly fright-less nonentities. Digression done, A-4, has an A-1 (ish) cast, well, Patty Duke's legit, and there's the gumby-looking kid from Puppet Master 3. Some may accuse Amityville 4 of being a lightweight, even low-wattage fright-flick, but I regard it as a luminous, intermittently switched-on supernatural schlocker! I can't believe it wasn't intentional, but the lamp's singular design is almost identical to the malevolent tree stump featured in cult Brit anthology classic Tales That Witness Madness.

 Dying To Meet You aka Serial Killer Massacre. (1997) – Michael W. Johnson.

Two rapaciously bloodthirsty serial killers fatefully meet, and upon discovering they both enjoy a brutal peccadillo for mass murder, this evilly-entwined pair of perfectly aligned psychopaths bloodlessly embark upon a mutually beneficial spree of atypical, (almost) deathless domesticity. While this frequently violent, no-budget psycho-slasher has all the finesse of week-old, high-summer roadkill, it doesn't stink up the joint quite as bad, honest injun!!!! I am a beer-rotten, horribly maladjusted, trash-soaked anthropoid, so my ability to guiltlessly consume moronic murder grottage like Dying To Meet You often manifests itself in more favourable reviews than more highfalutin' folk will think as being entirely just. Hey!!! It's an imperfect world, so it would be absolute hypocrisy to decry the skeezicks entertainment value of a cheapnis, guerrilla-shot S.O.V schlocker solely due on its patent imperfections. My fellow mono-brows can expect hokey repartee, Tromatic sloppy seconds, greasy synth sludge, podunk acting, bloody bath-time frolics, cheapnis gore-blasting, and a botty-wateringly maternal climax. I can vaguely recall a schlock-stuffed DVD label called Brain Damage, and Michael W. Johnson's spunky S.O.V snuff-fest would've have been altogether cosily at home there.

 The Second Act (2024) – Quintin Dupieux.

Four querulous actors are somewhat reluctantly working on an indie, AI created Rom-com when their angsty analogue personal lives appear to permeate strangely into the wholly binary construct of the hokey Hallmark-esque feature. I am a great admirer of the director, Deerskin (2019) is a tweaked, absurdist triumph, and the almost Dadaist delirium engendered of whimsically reality-warping comedy The Second Act only reinforces my admiration of this inventive trope-twister! One of the narrative's more appealing conceits is the fact that, on occasion, one is never quite sure of the content, am I watching the cornball dramady, or the sardonic satire of egotistical actors providing a lively discourse over the subjective importance of art in a world hell-bent on its own destruction? The Second Act's playfully mutable, often hilarious digressions makes it so comedically compelling! Smart, surrealistic, and winningly cerebral, the immaculate ensemble cast are uniformly terrific, generously gifted with an especially sly, irreverent, deliciously bone-dry humorous text. Not only is The Second Act uproariously funny, I had a welcome grin affixed to my face right until its all-too swift conclusion. A genuine Gallic delight, and I couldn't help but recall 80s French comedy gem Le Paltoquet, as Dupieux's mise-en-scene shared a similar tonal quality. I absolutely ADORED this film, the shifting lines betwixt the AI-directed material, and the deliciously acidic, behind-the-scenes sniping proved thrillingly compulsive!