Dog Watch (1996) – John Langley.

This gritty 90s DTV crime thriller has beautiful Sam Elliott, and was released by Nuimage, so I'm all over it like shrill, knee-jerk reactions on social media. I would have sat through this rotten cop flick, even with Pauly Shore and Orlando Bloom in it, insightfully, they cast goodly Thespians Esai Morales, and Goombah supreme Paul Sorvino. Plaintive sax over prosaic title sequences is most righteous, and don't let anyone tell y'all any different! As a bonus, Dog Watchers offers the brief opportunity to play the 'Hey!!!! it's that cool-looking Asian guy from 'blah', what's his name again, dude!!!???' Nuimage always dictates a bloody convenience store shoot-out, narratively superfluous, but B-Movie lore, guy!!! Dog Watch ain't smart, and it's routinely dumb, but at no point was I bored watching the hyper-bellicose cop Charlie Falon (Elliot) TCB like a bloody boss!

The text is recycled wrong cop shinola, but Lennie Niehaus's moody score, and Mr Elliott's extraordinary charisma prove magnetic. I could have done without the mummified, mismatched May/December cop jazz, but, what the hey!!!!??? Hollyweird still has a major hard-on for it, so what can ya' do???? The abundance of bloody squibs, stabbings, and gnarly haymaker fisticuffs endows Dog Watch with additional chutzpah. One of Sam Elliott's more Promethean talents is his ability to rejuvenate stock dialogue, so whatever they paid him, it clearly wasn't enough! Dog Watch delivers enough B-Movie bite to maintain interest, but I can imagine those not so predisposed to schlocky crime pics may not share my positive reading. Dog Watch ain't no one's idea of a pedigree cop shoot 'em up, call me sentimental, but I still have a soft spot for mutts!

 Hauntedween (1991) – Douglas Robertson.

Any slasher that playfully commences with a masked nerd perusing a copy of Famous Monsters before committing his dastardly deed is sure to hook me, fortunately Hauntedween maintains its kitschy/creepy vibes throughout. This by-the-numbers collegiate blood-spiller proves winning despite its preponderance of formulaic fraternity fright gimmickry. The extraordinarily smug Kurt (Brien Blakely) is one squeaky clean Abercrombie mench, and while not the finest Thespian, he is a textbook A-1 frat dude archetype. While splatter in the horror house is certainly better exemplified by the likes of Funhouse, or Night of The Demons, Hauntedween gives it a darn good college try! And there won't be a dry ass in the house during Kurt & Mel's (Blake Pickett) touchy-feely reunion!

Hauntedween takes its sweet time getting to the fratboy culling, and when it does, it won't cause The Mutilator any sleepless nights, but there's a bodacious scene of T & (almost) A, the hectic hack n' slash in the horror house delivers a grisly array of outstanding kills, and the Kill Room shtick provides some quality grand Guignol. Hauntedween has pacing issues, and the performances are endearing, rather than compelling, but 'ween has beaucoup B-horror charm, an earwormingly gross theme, and some chewy gore gags. Far more entertaining than I imagined, and it might sound incongruous, appreciating a late-cycle slasher due to its innate wholesomeness, but the film's earnest D.I.Y ethic absolutely won me over.

'These Halloweenies don't have a ghost of a chance getting laid in anything but a grave this Hauntedween!'

 Tunnels aka Criminal Act. (1989) – Mark Myers.

While I cannot readily recall any specific box office bonanza set in a city sewer, there are a number of genre gems like C.H.U.D, Alligator, and schlock scion The Suckling aka Sewer Baby that provided some credible subterranean shocks! Not quite so lurid, playing out like an episode of The Equalizer, Tunnels finds our intrepid, conspicuously attractive heroines Pam (Barbara Bach) and Sharon (Charlene Dallas) investigate a suspicious death, that ultimately leads them to the shocking truth lurking malevolently below! Competent, though not enormously thrilling, Tunnels remains a passable 80s curiosity that has a capable supporting cast, bolstering our two saftig, especially picture perfect leading ladies.

While there are far greater numbers of obscure genre/B-titles being made available today, I'm not always convinced by their continued merit. Tunnels is worth reinvestigating, having an above average TV-Movie-of-The-week aesthetic, plus a disarming duo of pretty, wonderfully engaging female protagonists. John Saxon is always a joy, and Vic Tayback provides a brief, somewhat tangential comedic interlude. The only giant rats are the CEO's running amok in the sewers of big business, embodied by cynical property developer Lance Bellard (Victor Brant). The climax is glaringly goofy, but it didn't discolour my overall appreciation of this fun little B-thriller.

 Shallow Grave (1987) – Richard Styles.

During a rowdy road trip to Fort Lauderdale one of the 4 excitable college friends witnesses a sheriff coldly ice his squeeze, which escalates into a desperate race for survival in mostly watchable 80s backwoods thriller Shallow Grave. Once the girls hit the sweltering Georgia heat, the action boils over into horror cliché, but the lively lasses prove amiable enough, plus their vibrantly 80s fashions are delightful. Talking of visual delights, vampy, utterly scrumptious brunette bombshell Donna Baltron being one of the horny High School screamers ruthlessly pursued by the increasingly deranged cop is a MAJOR B-movie bonus.

A largely routine pseudo-slasher, but certainly proficient, Shallow Grave's relative obscurity is understandable, but not entirely deserved. As a great admirer of Baltron I was more than happy to check it out, as she brought her signature sauciness to the first act, but shallow Grave is an apt moniker, since the thrills lack depth, and just once, it would have been exhilarating if the snarky cop actually believed the protagonists story right off the bat! Psycho cop Dean (Tony March) was crudely erotic in his conspicuously sweaty Chest Rockwell stylings, and the director noticeably picks up the slasher slack in the final act.

 Slaughtered Vomit Dolls (2006) – Lucifer Valentine.

'I don't know what's left of me, but you can fuck it if you want!!!'

Lucifer Valentine's deliberately confrontational Slaughtered Vomit Dolls is moistly as good as it sounds! Hyperbolically trashy Grindhouse flicks with visually brusque, graphically transgressive approaches to the old in-out are surely to be cherished. No one truly cares about Pretty Woman or Ghost, in future, I believe the art of cinema will be validated by the caustic eruptions of Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, and that's not just because I enjoy repeatedly saying Slaughtered Vomit Dolls out loud!!!! Well, okay, I kinda do, but I'm certainly not gonna give myself a hard time about it! Aggressively haggish, sordidly Self-destructive women slathered in a cheapnis video aesthetic, with slow-mo devil vox are absolutely hotter than the brimstoned pitch forks they'd clearly appreciate being stuck up their botties.

It would be delightful if more features employed an additional 'deep soiling process', wherein the viewer enjoys more of a participatory response, experiencing a genuine frisson of moral grubbiness. It is actually quite remarkable how utterly compelling the grottish admixture of nudity, thickened clots of graphic gore, unexpurgated vomiting, and boozy exhibitionism can be. Sometimes I can happily wallow in dissonant music, and numbing myself with equally discordant imagery often provides a refreshing antidote to the stifling mediocrities of standard splatter movie cliches. It might just be me, but the Bloodsucking Freaked scene, whereby a disturbed guy repeatedly regurgitates into another dude's bloodily excavated skull proved morbidly fascinating, and, sadly, won't ever become a Hollyweird trope.

 Horror of The Hungry Humongous Hungan. (1991) – Randall Dininni.

Ubiquitously insane scientist inexplicably unleashes a voodoo curse, thereby enabling his recently reanimated creature to rampage gruesomely upon humanity with his monstrously elephantine death claw!!! I kinda dug the sound of that schlocky premise, but it doesn't mean that HoTHHH isn't still a reeking sump of Z-Movie silage. Palance's interminable narration is made palatable by the innate fact that he quite patently doesn't believe a world of it, but I can massively relate to the Hungan coyly playing Patty Cake, Patty Cake with his victim's runny-looking tummy snakes, rather than eating any of it! Hungan engages only partially with the most retrograded coils of the viewers brain, but it does communicate directly with the murky mechanism that reacts extremely positively to magisterially poor acting.

The inertia-inducing 'dramatic' interludes are spectacularly turgid, and some maverick misfit needs to release a fan-edit of all the non-Hungan material herein! Insipid hair-lords Cry Wolf shrilly perform an unduly optimistic track entitled 'It's getting Better!', while Dininni's soggy schlocker becomes increasingly infirm. The only truly shocking fact is that it took two people to write it!!??? Surely, a vivisected chimpanzee, and a well-worn copy of Troma's 'Movie Crapola for Dummies' would have yielded more credible results!? I dug HotHHH unreservedly, and not just because the Hungan looked like a failed gene splicing of a bad dream Dave Franco, and David Ike! I assume the good doctor Henry gave his Hungan one regular-sized hand, just so he could take care of his solo sexy business!? While I'm absolutely certain your Aunt Fanny's fanny could fart a better film than this, but until that benighted day, we shall just have to make do with this one!

 Mai-Chan's Daily Life : The Movie (2014) – Sade Sato.

'Today im going to take your delicious eyeball!!!'

A beautiful young woman (An Koshi) takes a job as a maid at an isolated, apparently dilapidated domicile, and becomes cruelly embroiled in her new master's (Shogo Maruyama) cannibalistic eccentricities. Mai-Chan's Daily Life is definitely the kind of Moorish Grindhouse treat that would have made Ed Gein cut momma's apron strings that much earlier! A darkly sexy, prodigiously gory, deliciously fetishistic J-Horror gem for unrepentant perverts of all ages! No drama was ever made worse by including a scintillating interlude of attractive Asian women hungrily lapping milk from a silver dish! It's also fortunate that up-skirting is practically considered an art-form in Japan, if this had been produced in the UK, the film makers would have been publicly birched for its ruthlessly intrusive P.O.V. Not that I have any nutritional axe to grind, make merry while the sun still burns etc., but I believe that the slinkily sinister head maid's consumption of a lackey's eyeball might be more for show than its negligible vitamin content.

In my many film enthusings, I frequently overuse words like 'elegiac', and while its certainly merited here, I believe 'wholesomely perverse' would better suit Sato's immaculately twisted Mai-Chan's Daily Life : The Movie. 'It's delicious, but it hurts my tongue!!!' not quite sure why this line tickled me so robustly, but it did, so there!!! Part of me didn't want Mai to go into the Red Room, but most of me REALLY did, the director reading the viewer's peccadilloes with unerring accuracy here. Mai also does a really big wee in front of everyone, this fact certainly bares mentioning, as like many other children, I was unequivocally told that this was VERY bad, that I should ALWAYS use my potty when I wanted to do a la-la. One of the grislier sequences is spectacularly nauseating, and I shall never think of a young lady's gizzards in quite the same way ever again!