The Cut-Throats (1971) – John Hayes.

This engagingly smutty example of skuzzball, howlingly cheapnis warsploitation presents a risibly inauthentic US Commando unit, tasked to infiltrate, destroy, and liberate all the salient documents within an isolated German barracks. Expect strong, lo-fi'd ultra-violence, splendidly goofy 'rat-a-tat!' action, Full-Frontal nudity, mild horseplay, wretched production design, and excremental dialogue. Much of this is a malodorous bag of greasy monkey fingers, but the relentless crudity of film-making, playfully engenders the palpable aesthetic of kids boisterously playing war during their school lunch break. One of the true glories of grotty exploitation cinema is the fact you can believe that you have experienced the nadir of Grindhouse drossage, and then a splendiferous pile of munge like The Cut-Throats comes along. A rare treat for hardened masochists and super-tweaked bad movie completists, but in its GREAT favour, the feisty Fräuleins are beguilingly luscious, and explosively bodacious bombshell Ushi Digard expresses her prodigious talents quite magnificently! Without belabouring the point, the searing inauthenticity of The Cut-Throats must truly be seen to be disbelieved!

 Melvin, Son of Alvin (1984) – John Eastway.

'If things get rough, you may have to use sex!!!!!'

Legendary Aussie cocksman Alvin Purple's angsty teenage son Melvin (Gerry Sont) has an equally magnetic effect on women, but he is a timid, painfully shy virgin, aggressively pursued by hordes of libidinous lovelies, he is unable, or unwilling to consummate, Melvin hopes his infamously priapic father can remedy his mounting frustrations! While unapologetically crude, frequently salacious, and triumphantly silly, the bawdy comedy Melvin, Son of Melvin proved to be an amiable enough coming of age romp, with the onus on 'coming'. Will poor Melvin finally pop his cherry with his gorgeous Greek paramour? (Lenita Psillakis) Will his sexually depleted father Alvin (Graeham Blundell) get his monolithic Mojo back, and will the frisky Purple People cult orgasmically reach their Alvin-obsessed, nookie-fied Nirvana? All this, and a lurid preponderance of gratuitously jiggly T&A shall be naughtily exposed in Eastway's zesty 80s time-capsule of crudely slap n' tickled Aussie humour. As an additional bonus for Dr. Who fans, the blissfully bouncy cast includes the delicious Katy Manning, one of Jon Pertwee's more memorably luscious companions.

 The Great Alligator (1979) – Sergio Martino.

'The Great God of the river has been roused!!!!!'

Ever since hyperbolic Drive-In gems like The Giant Claw, captivatingly schlocky horrors about enraged, elephantine man-slaying beasties have captured the hearts, minds, and bloody gizzards of cinematic thrill-seekers far and wide. Gnarly Creature Features continue to beguile horror fans, as since time immemorial man has been acutely aware of his mutable place in the food chain, take away his knife, gun and missiles and he is rendered terribly fragile, fatally susceptible to any number of mammalian/insectoid/amphibian aggressors. In this instance, Italian action/Giallo maestro Sergio Martino places his quality cast in the ravening jaws of a predatory, monstrously outsized alligator, and thus another snappy Creature Feature is gruesomely born! Not for the first time handsome, altogether classy Claudio Cassinelli provides additional depth, plus Stelvio Cipriani's funky score is pretty sweet, and you certainly wouldn't kick blistering bombshell Barbara Bach out of bed for eating monkey nuts! Admittedly, it's somewhat naïve, but I'd like to believe at the core of every righteous monster-fest there beats the liberal heart of a socially conscious eco-warrior. Euro-cult fans will no doubt appreciate the fine contributions from Romano Puppo, Silvia Collatina, Demons icon Bobby Rhodes, and a brilliantly twitchy cameo by the Bond that got away Richard Johnson.

 Tammy and the T-Rex (1994) – Stuart Raffill.

'True love never fails, honey!'

One of the more observable truths of living within someone else's universe is the untenable fact that Fast and Furious became a franchise, while Tammy and the T-Rex was relegated to midnight movie cultdom. Granted, on paper, the premise may appear astronomically absurd, but if one cared to dig a little deeper, Tammy and the T-Rex is ultimately about the indomitable objectivity of true love. Via accepted B-Movie machinations, Paul Walker's living brain is transposed into an ambulatory facsimile dinosaur, facilitated by the advanced bio-mechanical technologies of amiable crackpot scientist Terry Kiser. Inevitably played for gallopingly goofy, Godzuki-inflected laffs, one may, not unjustifiably, fail to see that Denise Richards love for her young beau is quite genuine, his wholly alien transformation, while undeniably unprecedented, provides her with the experiential opportunity to accept that love is born, not from what is seen, but from what is so deep, and profoundly felt.

No doubt, many, if not all, will vociferously refute my overtly romanticized interpretation of Tammy and the Teenage T-Rex, and yet, be it a film, a specific piece of music, work of art, or people, NONE is seen with a universal eye, it is singularly experienced through that said individual's absolutely unique lens. I always liked to think that Dinosaurs happily sacrificed themselves en-masse to provide finite, combustible energies for cars, motorbikes, power plants, and those sleek aeronautical tubes, that so noisily transport millions of pallid holidaymakers to exotic, sun-kissed locales, but I believe we have excessively abused the privilege. Would Tammy & The T-Rex work today, perhaps not, as Paul Walker's brain would inevitably be digitally inserted into a CGI 'Rex, thereby demonstratively losing all the sublime tactility of practical special FX.

 BloodMania (2016) – H.G. Lewis/Melanie Reinboldt/Kevin Littlelight.

Low budget, super-splattery S.O.V horror anthology from the greatly revered gorefather of vintage Gore-blasting Herschell Gordon Lewis. This especially Gruesome Foursome is sardonically hosted by maestro Lewis, and has additional contributions from film-makers Kevin Littlelight and Melanie Reinboldt. Much like an assorted bag of sweeties, compendium horror can be a mixed bag, since the odd indigestible stick of licorice is inevitable. Patently flawed, and frequently sloppy, the goofily gory BloodMania is unable to belie its exceedingly modest budget, but Reinboldt's thrillingly gruesome contribution proves winning. I can't bring myself to be too critical of the veteran Wizard of Gore's final splatter statement, it just wouldn't sit right with me. There's some goodly grisly stuff here, a few lurid laffs, but it looks VERY cheap, the text isn't great, and the sound mix is truly wretched. I simply can't imagine a horror pantheon without H.G. Lewis, the abyss would simply be too awful to comprehend, so my okay-ish take on the episodic chunkblower BloodMania is filtered HEAVILY through a profound love and admiration for his indelible contributions to Grindhouse cinema.

 Spaced Out (1979) – Norman J. Warren.

A snugly spandexed trio of slinky space sirens alight upon earth and proceed to abduct 4 ill prepared locals, 3 disparate men, and a rather prim woman in softly smutty intergalactic romp Spaced Out. Happily, British B-Movie iconoclast Norman J. Warren had the good sense to generously provide the fleshly elements pointedly absent in Spielberg's Close Encounters...nookie, and splendidly saucy space trollops! The comedy content remains strictly below the Van Allen Belt, and the amusingly rudimentary production design is a glowing testament to Blue Peter's credo that there's very you can't make with creative recycling of milk bottle tops, empty squeazy bottles, and used egg cartons. It is a little known fact that at the end of the 70s, with the latterly flourishing British film industry in decline, the minister of culture desperately passed an edict declaring that every 2^nd adult feature absolutely MUST star Barry Stokes, or failing that, Robin Askwith! While the corny dialogue is mostly sub-Carry On prattling, delivered in a broad Sitcom vernacular, Spaced Out remains an amiable enough low budget lark, voluptuously replete with exceptionally delectable looking aliens!

 Murder-Set-Pieces (2004) – Nick Palumbo.

'In my mind's eye, I set fires in your cities!'

Handsome, prodigiously muscular narcissist photographer (Sven Garrett) hungrily prowls the garishly illuminated streets of Las Vegas procuring beautiful female prey for his increasingly perverse edifications. To the director's credit, his degenerate, wholly unsympathetic antagonist appears authentically pitiless, a cruel, sadistically torturing misogynist without the merest vestige of humanity. Brutal, kinky, and ruthlessly mean-spirited, Nick Palumbo's controversially lurid excursion through the darkest interstices of a twisted mind has lost little of its power to beguile/divide horror fans. Virulently voyeuristic, undeniably visceral, and frequently far from subtle, appreciated as a gruesomely reverent tone poem to Grindhouse cinema's more gratuitous excesses, Murder-Set-Pieces remains a grimly effective terror treat. When watching similar fare, it is often hard to divorce oneself entirely from recollections of Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer, but, for better, or worse, Murder-Set-Pieces gorily proves to be its very own animal. While the cumulative effect of watching this self-aggrandising sociopath ultimately becomes a trifle numbing, it is a more than competent psycho-slasher, and Palumbo's chunkblowing climax resolutely delivers some deliciously perverse, Gialli-inflected mayhem. Concluding on a more personal note, the winning inclusion of beloved TCM alumni, and horror's reigning dark prince Tony Todd proved altogether welcome.