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!!!!

 Vampyre (1990) – Bruce. G. Hallenbeck.

'Everybody is going to enjoy the taste of blood tonight!'

The persistently wan David Gray (Randy Scott Holzer) is a self-confessed wanderer, and following the Vampirization of his younger sister, he piously adorns himself with a cumbrous, home-made crucifix, and avails himself of the stalwart business of righteous vampire slaying. Vampyre almost immediately divorces itself from any vestige of congruity, offering schlock-seekers a low-budget, dubiously acted, synth-heavy, intermittently hilarious, chaff-laden vampire romp. While the atmospherically wintry rural backdrop has a certain bucolic authenticity, the dime-store schmutter, turgid text, and wildly oscillating levels of acting credibility engenders a deliriously am-dram quality that I found strangely irresistible. Should anyone care to know what an Andy Milligan opus would look like sans his inimitable dialogue, and deliciously eccentric characters, Vampyre is watchable Milligan-lite bosh, but is tiny taters compared to the real megillah!

It must also be noted that the stridently synthetic, innately 80s score does its very best to accentuate the ultimately enjoyable goofiness of Vampyre. This earnest indie horror is raddled with anachronisms, stolid Vampire hunter Gray is garbed like a prototypical Roswell-era Man In Black, and the female cast members rock chic hair, make-up, and slinky lingerie is palpably more J.C Penney than E.A. Poe! While any sense of period verisimilitude, and suspension of disbelief is resolutely nil, it is Vamprye's prodigious inauthenticity that proves so bloody entertaining! Vampyre has an essentially kooky quality that distances itself greatly from many equally low budget indie horrors of the day. Perky plasma vamp Girl in Cape (Elisabeth Carstens)is a delectable minx to whom I would gladly donate a pint, or 3 of good claret to perpetuate her vulpine reign of terror!

 Nikos The Impaler(2003) Andreas Schnaas.

Unrepentantly Evil despot Nikos (Schnaas) is slain for his abominable crimes, and 1,000 years later he is bloodily resurrected in a New York art gallery, whereupon he dispatches all the gallery patrons in a zestily gruesome fashion. With a visibly increased budget, Nikos is a demonstratively slicker gore-blaster than Violent Shit III, but unapologetically delivers the ultra violence, with voluminous Goblets of Gore, exceedingly splattery head trauma, sanguinary sword slashing, and super-intense intestinal abuses! Not unlike splatter-cult Violent Shit III, Nikos is a supremely brutal amalgamation of visceral slasher tropes, gratuitous Grindhouse gore, and mindlessly medieval mayhem! Often blackly funny, with compellingly grisly content, Niko's The Impaler's spectacularly OTT New York kill-frenzy makes Jason Takes Manhattan look like My Dinner With Andre! Even with the increased budget/production value, Schnaas's monomaniacal predilection for medieval terror masks, and anthropophagous lookee-likee killers remains absolutely unchanged, making Nikos a more than viable entry-level splatter-overload for any interested Schnaas noob!

 Death Row Diner (1988) – B. Dennis Wood.

A 40s movie mogul (John Content) is executed without being granted his expected final meal, denied even the smallest wafer, his righteous anger, quite naturally, causes his supernatural return, and his hunger for revenge is absolutely insatiable! The low wattage admixture of Prison and Shocker is given an additional charge by the quality thesping of Jay Richardson and beautifully buxom bombshell Michelle Bauer. This DTV schlocker is played strictly for blood-splats and giggles, and I was pleasantly surprised by Death Row Diner's frequently winning boorish humour. This deliciously crass B-horror gag-fest remains no less nuanced than a headless chicken's last tango, the film-makers persuasively noisome bawdy humour, and garishly Tromatic assault on the senses proved so relentless, it gives the viewer nary a pause to question why he, or she, was still watching it! Death Row Diner is a trashy good time, and while you might well find more subtext on a bus ticket, it still ain't no crime wallowing unthinkingly in the shallower end of B-Horror's gene pool!

 Island Fury (1983) – Henri Charr.

Appetizingly lithe teenagers distressingly find themselves trapped upon an eerily isolated island, whose singular inhabitants are hilariously cliched inbred crazies! This anodyne 80s horror/hicksploitation oddity frequently feels as though it were shot by a Hallmark hack, one crippled by a severe brain injury, and upon his fitful recovery, he erroneously believed himself to be Jungle maestro Ruggero 'Cut & Run' Deodato! While the synthetically dramatic score encourages us to be anxious, the podunk acting, Taco Bell text, and rudimentary film-making strongly suggests that Island Fury is best appreciated on a more sardonic level!

The villains are about as scary as a Hello Kitty Bath Bomb, and almost distracted me from the lugubrious pacing, paltry gore, and persistent dearth of imagination. To the director's great credit, he keeps his sleekly hard-bodied cast in their skimpies. I'd like to believe helmsman Charr was actively striving for an auteur-like verisimilitude; terrorized teens in their tighties, what could be more authentically slasher chic than that? An inept, and largely fatuous exercise in hicksploitation horror, Island of Fury is frequently silly enough to provide cherishable scenes of unplanned for mirth. For any with a markedly low threshold for poorly executed genre cinema, this is one island they may not care to tarry upon.