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!

 The Convent (2000) – Mike Mendez.

I dig religion, I really do, without it I'd own far less music, and I'd lose 80% of my trashy horror movie collection. Nuns inspired maestro Ken Russell, and multitudes of lurid European schlock-makers to exploitation greatness. God has been good to us, and without habit-forming horror trash like The Convent, I'd have no fucking religion at all. There's a monstrous scene at the beginning, wherein a self-consciously cool chick gratuitously wastes 2rds of a bottle of JD!!!??? While Jesus won't sweat it, the devil ain't down with that, baby. Unfortunately, splatter addicts still don't earn a gratuity whenever the sonority prank/haunted house shenanigans rears its ugly head, otherwise, I'd be up to my beautiful botty in beaucoup gratuities, guy!

The Convent wisely dispenses with the snooze of a plot, and gets hectically creative with groovy-gloopy day-glow carnage! The amusingly boorish badinage, and witnessing those collegiate doofoids violently demonized proved hugely satisfying. Boozer, the dog, was another bonus, as I had somebody to really root for! Go, Boozer! Go!!!! The Convent is tiny taters next to Demons, but it is marginally better than Witchboard, but Spookies absolutely smokes its ass backwards, Hey!!!! NOTHING trumps farting mudmen, dude!!!! Final act is a Squib-tastic banger, Adrienne Barbeau rocks super-hard, single-handedly making me forget about the unwelcome disappearance of Boozer. Due to the plenitude of gory practical FX, The Convent still looks proper tasty, and the belated return of Boozer was vastly appreciated. Go, Boozer! Go!!!!

 Wicked Ways aka Table for One. (1999) - Ron Senkowski.

I'd happily watch a half-eaten jar of marmalade if it had Rebecca De Mornay's delicious face on it. Neglected, highly strung wife Ruth (De Mornay) and her bigamist husband's (Rooker)marriage is dysfunctional in the way Vlad the Impaler enjoyed a quirky way of alfresco dining. De Mornay's compelling allure is undiminished by her escalating eccentricities, she's John Water's kooky, giving off more searing heat than a hot rock massage in Death Valley. Gotta love Hollyweird, as their manifestations of crazy are often hyperbolically sexed-up, and mirrors reality no less falsely than Hubbard's Dianetics. Real crazies smell bad, look worse, and make an uncommon nuisance of themselves in public libraries, whereas De Mornay's hot-panted wife Ruth is never once ever less than eminently boffable!

The dramatic lure of things going catastrophically south for her duplicitous husband are quirkily telegraphed by Ruth's mountingly bizarre behaviour. Most women make do with erogenous zones, whereas Ruth has equally multitudinous 'Danger Zones', a series of inventive, Home Alone, husband annihilating booby traps! The sublimely farcical scene with the forgivably horny delivery dude was absolutely laugh out loud funny. I don't wish to be discourteous to Michael Rooker, who is more than fine, but he is resolutely outgunned on all levels by De Mornay, and I fell unashamedly in love with these fifty sultry shades of De Mornay. Endings are tricky, sequelitus has precluded anything but a goofy climax to a horror film, but the whimsical last shot in Wicked Ways suggests hope for the hugely beleaguered Kate.