Network First ITV (1994) UFO.

I love finding vintage documentaries on crypto-facto phenomena like our alien forebuddies, Frightful Floridian Lizardmen, and stink-footed sasquatches! This unusually measured piece of far-flung telly journalism provides more detailed information on the Rendlesham incident than hysteria-laden contemporary productions. There's footage herein which absolutely proves that a great many sky-bound images are merely distortions of the video camera's auto-iris. Telly-makers today will show the very same footage, and not mention it was empirically debunked in 94'????? The media disinformationists need to replace 'made for entertainment purposes' with 'FU!!! we're Blue Book bullshit artists!!!'

 Granny of The Dead (2017) – Tudley James.

A small, sleepy Welsh village is suddenly cursed by an ancient malediction that evilly possesses the equally sleepy octogenarian population, turning them into magnificently creepy, arthritically slow attack zombies in playful indie Zom-com 'Granny of The Dead'. Horribly jaded by the ubiquity of attack zombies on the small screen, I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly I warmed to this Zimmer Winner. Grisly, and intentionally funny, Granny of The Dead proved to be anything but a toothless terror flick! The splatter is prodigious, and well-done, there's quality banter, likeable characters, and a few palpable belly laughs. It's usually the self-proclaimed cognoscenti, or privileged elite that arbitrarily 'decide' what is, or isn't a cult film, but I abhor hierarchies, and I strongly believe Tudley James's lively, lavender-hued Granny of The Dead is wholly deserving of cult status. One of the old bill enthuses about watching 'Hobo With a Shotgun', and I couldn't help but think, the world might in fact be a far groovier place to live in, if more members of the King's constabulary were avid fans of exploitation horror! I think it's entirely fair to claim that by producing a legitimately fun, low-budget zombie horror at this late stage of the game, the film-makers are objectively ticking all the right B-Horror boxes. For me, the true acid test of a quality horror film is whether I am strongly compelled to rewind the gorier elements, and Granny of The Dead has a choice amount of eminently rewindable splatter! I found the absurdly overhyped Shaun of The Dead moderately amusing for 20 minutes, whereas Granny zombie kept me chuckling throughout!

 Fantacide (2007) – Shane Mather.

Enchantingly gory, Mather's 1hr 50 min S.O.V schlocker about chavvy, occultist Neo-Nasties, and their lunatic yen for the infamous spear of longinus is skeevily overpopulated with hapless nerks sans acting ability, manifesting the misanthropic, grotty, and unrepentantly psychotronic skuzz-bomb Fantacide!!!! Some viewers may regard a micro-budgeted travesty that so indelicately conjoins gratuitous ultra-violence, toilet humour, livid misogyny, hirsute homosexual henchmen, sordidly Satanic Shitlerians, and diabolically deviated degenerates to be an altogether unholy admixture. Like some miraculous B-movie alchemist, Shane Mather transforms sado-schlock into guffaw-laden, salaciously gland-goring gold! The towering absurdity, profoundly entrenched cheapnis, and sublime idiot savantism of the performances coalesce into Fantacide's singularly asinine appeal! Like some lizard-brained, Peter Sutcliffe wet dream, Mather's madman mise-en-scene rudely eschews all vestiges of good taste, luridly assaulting the viewer with a plasma-packed panoply of graphic gore, outrageously bloody body-squibs, unleavened crudity, boorish badinage, and all manner of generously gore-blasted buffoonery! Contrary to expectation, my initial pessimism over the film's seemingly protracted running time proved unwarranted, since I would have happily wallowed in Fantacide's tawdry terror trough for another hour. I should like to conclude by openly stating that for my many misdeeds, I remain hugely deserving of Oppenheimer's degenerate 'Special Treatment'.

 The Occult: An Echo From Darkness (1970) – Tom Doades.

Some primo 70s satanic Panic! The fabulously furry hippie cat in the comfy dress and pipe ensemble is manifestly my new god, I just hope baba gee will forgive me!

 The Lady Avenger (1981) aka Feng huang nu sha xing – Yang Chia-Yun.

A pretty model is sexually assaulted following a dispute on a shoot, and during the following, absolutely biased trial, the wealthy, privileged abuser is corruptly pronounced innocent of any wrong doing, and the aggrieved, dogged crime reporter (Lu Hsiao-Fen) later suffers a similar fate, but eschews the elite-run system, ruthlessly seeking out her own justice in a heroically brutal fashion. While the often sordid rape/revenge milieu has inspired a number of unwatchable dirges, The Lady Avenger remains one of the more exhilaratingly exploitative, grittily violent, and gruesomely executed examples of unleavened female wrath. Unlike the mostly turgid 'I Spit on your Grave', The Lady Avenger is kinetic, compellingly acted, and remarkably well-made, with many rewardingly inventive executions, and providing one of the most stunning man slayers in Cat III history!

The dramatic/expository elements are credible, lending additional gravitas to the carnage, that our sympathetic heroine righteously unleashes! While it is upsetting witnessing the brutal mistreatment of such an intelligent, charismatic, and exquisitely beautiful young woman, I don't believe director Yang's visceral Mise-en-scene was in any way gratuitous. Not long after her terrible ordeal, our bruised phoenix, while cruelly bloodied, remains resolutely unbowed, arising nobly from her despair, vengefully taking flight as a truly indomitable angel of death! It is not altogether frequent that a wholly unfamiliar exploitation title explodes so vividly on my radar, memorably providing such exceptionally WTFuckable content, The Lady Avenger is ripe for rediscovery!

 Hotel St. Pauli (1988) – Svend Wam.

After an expressly bleak title sequence, portents of existential doom heightened by a morose theme, we see the isolated, melancholic existence of young farmer Morgens (Oyvin Bang Berven) rural travails, contrasted by some voyeuristically metropolitan nookie, energetically performed by the equally handsome, actively bohemian participants of this ill-fated ménage à trois. Curiously, once the nervy country lad arrived at the train station, he hurriedly avails himself of the W.C, and proceeds to craftily knock one out? Is he an extrovert? Or does he simply have a perverse yen for the inglorious pen and ink of a public loo? His motivations remain unclear, as I don't Parlez vous a word of Swedish? The no longer amorous couple appear to have a fractious relationship, as Gerda (Amanda Ooms) didn't appear keen on her mullet-ed lover's (John Ege) persistent bedside scribbling? The Elvis-loving bumpkin Morgens then picks Gerda up, thinking she was a prostitute, and they return to the couple's studio apartment for a bit of the old in-out, but the naïve lad gets far more than he bargained for. I can't imagine the text being especially nuanced, since I question the rapidity of Morgens almost complete mental collapse, following a little rough sex, and one and a half spliffs? Perhaps Scandinavian home-grown has a prodigiously high THC content?

Singularly traumatized by the evenings events, a wan-looking Gerda has absconded to a dingy locale in Germany, presumably to wallow in nihilistic, opiated despair, rather than enjoying the country's renowned beer, and delicately spiced, pork-based delicacies. Even without he benefit of subbies, Hotel St. Pauli is sleazy, and pessimistic, being a somewhat shrill, melodramatic downward spiral, concluding brusquely in a pointedly hopeless fashion. I have always been a tad cynical about overly angsty yarns that include the ubiquitous anguished-in-a-church trope, I myself have been battered quite severely by life, and, as yet, I have never once been compelled to seek momentary succour in a draughty old church; I must still have too much heathen in me for that! I don't wish to disparage the actor playing Morgens performance, but there were one or two moments when he appeared to be over-egging it somewhat!?! With one part Fassbinder Sturm und Drang, a minim of Bergman, plus a major of Joe D'Amato, the intermittently erotic drama Hotel St. Pauli remains a hysteric, yet absolutely watchable example of noisome Scandi-gloom.