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.

 Women's Flesh: My Red Guts (1999) – Tamakichi Anaru.

With a grisly title like Women's Flesh: My Red Guts you can be damn sure it's NOT going to be about some chinless Hippie melt talking about the rejuvenating benefits of a macrobiotic diet, with madman Anaru at the helm, shit's gonna get real asap!!!! Following the anguish of a break-up, a profoundly depressed young woman (Ayaha Tomozawa) begins a sick regimen of brutalizing self-harm, commencing with wholly injudicious usages of a toothbrush, and escalating to sharper objects better suited for more efficient pain-inducing. Ruthlessly vicious, there's a surrealistic aesthetic to this poor tormented woman's savage destruction. Women's Flesh: My Red Guts is disturbingly voyeuristic, while it is distressing to blithely witness such a beautiful young woman destroy herself so gruesomely, for better, or worse, at no point was I compelled to do anything more than keep watching to the exceedingly bitter end!!! Some may well feel differently, but I believe Anaru's macabre cinema has a transgressive quality, visceral, and fucking nasty, the bloody grossness proves morbidly compelling. Low-fi S.O.V J-Splatter nihilism at its very finest! Lots and lots of lovely bloody knife licky-licky too!!

 The New Rose Hotel (1998) – Abel Ferrara.

Two conniving hoods orchestrate an old school honey trap (Asia Argento) to parlay lofty bio-tech billionaire Hiroshi(Yoshitaka Amano) for an equally lofty 100 million large, and things turn fatally south in Ferrara's exhilarating 90s cyber noir classic New Rose Hotel. While the quotient of ballistic violence is unusually restrained for Ferrara, The New Rose Hotel is a hugely atmospheric tech-nor thriller with exemplary performances, a midnight-moody score, and scintillating sequences of electrifying eroticism throughout! Not unduly hampered by its modest budget, notably gritty NY film-maker Ferrara ably constructs a cerebral, consistently robust futurist thriller that excitingly maintains its fascination, from acting maestro Christopher Walken's flamboyant intro, until the bleak, raven dark, emotionally complex finale. It will have been noted MANY times before, while the film remains a taut ensemble piece, Christopher Walken's openly adrenalin-craving, charismatically philosophical con man puts his nefarious gifts to quicksilver use, and effectively steals the entire film! As a long-time fan of 40s/50s film-noir, with its stark chiaroscuro photography, emblematically smoky sin sirens, desperately doomed lovers, and cruelly thwarted schemes, The New Rose Rose Hotel remains a blazingly authentic revisionist crime thriller, that I am sure shall only improve with time.