The Girl Who Wore Yellow Lace (2024) – Mark Polonia.

'Don't eat the Giallo snow!!!!!'

Excitingly signed up to a palpably shady model agency Ariana's (Alyssa Paige) future initially appears prosperous, until a sinister stalker casts a blackened shadow of fear over her sordidly overexposed 'model' life. Some of Gialli's more savoury ingredients are stylised lighting/fluidic camerawork, naked Euro-starlets, exhilarating soundtracks, and sensationally bloody kills are frustratingly absent in The Girl Who Wore Yellow Lace. While it is relatively simple to ape the artworks of the period, it is far less straight forward reimagining the sumptuous, prodigiously glamorous visual aesthetic of the late 60s/early 70s, and Polonia's modest budget proves a hindrance to making The Girl Who Wore Yellow Lace a credible neo-Giallo. I must hereby openly confess, Ariana's blatant inability to do but one convincing push-up got me feelin' a wee bit stabby myself!

Pretty Ariana is a saftig enough Fräulein, and the pablum text, amateurish performances, persistent lapses into goofiness, happily, provides unintentional jocularity. The Girl Who Wore Yellow Lace's overall tone is flat, and colourless, prosaically mounted on HD video, and curiously lacking any of the bravura sleaze, and scintillatingly sanguinary mayhem of the Gore-blasted Gialli of yore. The lugubrious 'Biff' lookalike turns up, and he proves good for a few smirk-some interludes, but it is entirely just to claim that the laboured Giallic content in The Girl Who Wore Yellow Lace felt contrived. Opting for a unique twist on a period Gialli, all the female protagonists herein keep their skimpies on, which wouldn't have made Lenzi or Fulci very happy, can't say it did much for me either. I did nonetheless enjoy the plug for a Home Essential Giallo-ready knife, which makes a winning change from J&B whiskey!

 Carnal Risk aka Sexual Roulette. (1997) – Gary Graver.

A sizeable gambling debt draws a young married couple into a sultry, smut-movie malaise of bad luck, bad decisions, and jackpot amounts of bouncy T & A! Aspirant body-beautiful Thespians Jed (Tim Abell) and Sally (Gabriella Hall) discover all too tardily that in Las Vegas the only sure thing you can really count on, is that there ain't no such thing! As a low rent, soft-core cheesecake flick Carnal Risk is pretty easy on the eye, and if y'all keep the ol' think sponge in neutral it's not too much of a gamble for those who like to boggle at conspicuously toned, silicon-enriched, Hollywood candy. As a boff-heavy Indecent Proposal knock-off Carnal Risk proves itself to be a sure thing! One additional, unexpected treat are the notable presences of lookalikes, banging bombshell Sherry (Tane McClure) enticingly resembles Shannon Tweed's evil twin, Jed is a buff Jed-ringer for a more rustic Crispin Glover, and Jed's voluptuous brunette wife Sally is a hotter version of Teri Hatcher! The silky score is painfully 90s, the director doesn't skimp on the pink, and it climaxes noisily with an almighty bang, or three! Another bonus is that the title is very suggestive of a spicier JCVD HK kick-fighter, he's a butch, sexy guy, an additionally sexed-up actioner could be money!

 Jodidos Kabrones (2012) -Manolito Motosierra.

'Motel Hell meets Home Cooking Hacks with Jeffrey Dahmer.'

Any splendidly skewed Spanish-speaking Gore-blaster that commences with a tantalising shot of a well-endowed, blood-spattered woman being dragged screamingly into a dingy-looking domicile deserves our undivided attention! Partners Richie (Ricardo Pastor) and Lucie (Miriam Larragay) get nefariously waylaid during their scenic hiking holiday, and they ill-fatedly end up at the Hostel from hell! Sleazy, trashy, and hella gory, Jodidos Kabrones boisterously delivers all the requisite backwoods Gore-blasting, featuring an especially brutal home birth, cruelly administered by the unutterably loathsome skell Guti (Manuel Rodriguez) that should greatly upset any midwives in the audience! Prodigiously splattery shockers that deliberately set out to provoke can frequently be a bore (Hostel), but Motosierra's unapologetically grisly mise-en-scene is often hilariously, if blackly laugh-out-loud funny. I believe overtly scatological shockers more effectively provide an additional patina of visceral disgust that other less poop-orientated cannibal chunk-blowers lack. I sympathised with Richie & Lucie's increasingly monstrous ordeal, although, truth be told, Lucie being a devilishly picante Latino hottie proved to be a deliciously distracting damsel in dementedly diabolical distress! For just shy of an hour, hardened vidiots are generously provided with a spectacularly gruesome display of bloodthirsty backwoods depravity. Final thoughts, where phook has the gloriously degenerated Jodidos Kabrones been all my life?

 Hellbender (2021) – John Adams.

'What Happens when we eat people?'

A controlling single-mother and her naïve teenage daughter live simply in their isolated woodland retreat, making music, messing with the occult, until strangers encroach, engendering an almighty Devil-accented schism in dark folk horror delight Hellbender. I don't have much of a vested interest in Witchcraft, or the oft purloined hocus pocus of Black Magic, but I do enjoy scenes of strong cannibalistic violence, and stoner doom vibes, so two out of three ain't bad! Religion/mysticism, in any form is a turn off, but I found the central premise of bodacious bass riffs, and the two central characters of the enigmatic mother and daughter absolutely compelling. Clearly, everything shall be rendered unto dust within a hundred years, but if not, what will future anthropoids make of horror film-makers predilection for old Nick/Judaeo Christian mythology? Hellbender is evilly atmospheric, moodily situated in a picturesque folkloric forest, and the music demonstratively Fucking rips!!!!

If, as the man once said, God is Dead, why does the other fella turn up so frequently in splatter fiction? If someone without an iota of interest in cod mysticism can get a kick out of Hellbender, others less burned-out on Satanic Panic should appreciate it that much more ardently. I believe that advocates of home-schooling might form part of the noisome demographic actively opposed to the film! One character playfully asks: 'Are you gonna be creepy, or come over?' I'd like to do both, if that's okay? While I largely prefer the Ken Russell'd mondo-mania of 'The Lords of Salem', Hellbender contains some beautifully composed imagery. The performances are strong, and horror fans who like to get their Witch on, should turn Hellbender up to 11, dude!!! There's one brilliantly hilarious line herein, which I have absolutely no intention of spoiling, kudos to whomever came up with it! Hellbender is The Craft after a negative portal breeching Cannibal Holocaust/DMT binge!

 Cat Sick Blues (2016) – Dave Jackson.

'An animalistic antipodean splatter-fest with real Meow factor!!!'

The near perfect synthesis of insane cat idolatry and livid Grindhouse gore, with every other shot providing for a truly epic screen grab! Following the death of his adored mog Patrick, towering Ted's (Matthew C. Vaughan) toxic depression soon manifests itself in increasingly aberrant behaviour, escalating to  especially inventive Gore-blasting, luridly showcasing some truly exquisite-looking practical FX! I have long admired the more eccentric iterations of Antipodean horror, which rewardingly take the road less travelled, and Ted's fearsome fetish for Feline-inspired cosplay fatefully erupts with increasingly feral acts of catastrophic ultra-violence. It is hard not to admire a darkly surrealist suburban splatter-fest that deliciously draws the viewer's admiring glances directly to Ted's elephantine, utterly magnificent bespoke cat cock! With the slasher film deader than fat Elvis, in order to remain relevant it desperately needs to massively reinvent itself, with Dave Jackson's Cat Sick Blues offering jaded Gore-mongers a more refined menu of sensationally skewed slaughter, replete with visceral, slow-motion carnage, tweaked body horror tangents, blackened synths, and a refreshingly warped sense of jet-black humour. In conclusion, I can't readily recall laughing so hard 'with' a horror film, from the hilarious head-lopping at the beginning, to the Tromatized climax, Cat Sick Blues is Fucking clawsome!!!!

 The Other Side of Madness (1971) – Frank Howard.

'The Stuff was going round pretty heavy, and we were ripped!!!!!!!!'

With scenes shot at the infamous Spahn Ranch, produced as the epoch-defining trail was ongoing, Frank Howard's Flashback-y exploitation classic is a Monochromatic Manson biopic that is arguably more authentic than most. Manson, with the exception of Ed Gein is one of True Crime's most popular boogeyman, their evil machinations proving influential upon the grislier iterations of contemporary horror/exploitation. I regard organised religion as being cults acceptable to the mainstream, whereas, the maniacal offshoots tend to provide stronger material for the creators of darker genre content. David Koresh and L. Ron Hubbard were demonstratively real nutballs, while Jesus's hocus pocus remains an unsubstantiated fantasy. Charlie Manson began as a monstrously flesh and blood historical villain, but is now more often luridly presented as the most fearsome figment of Manson's vainglorious self- mythologizing rhetoric. It is fascinating seeing the mad messiah of the psychedelic-era coldly captured on stark B/W film, the heady, mind-bending content is groovily provided by an especially far-out selection of heavy fuzz nuggets, including Manson's very own folk oddity 'Mechanical Man'. 

While the Manson Family's vile murder spree is abhorrent, this turbulent era's profoundly inspirational musical and cinematic evolutions remain enormously compelling. A quality film-maker can successfully recreate a 70s milieu, but The Other Side of Madness maintains a vibrancy, and authenticity that the passing of time has been unable to dilute. It is disturbing to note that Charlie was partially right, Helter Skelter is manifestly upon us, but he was wrong about the instigator of our doom, missing the callous ministrations of big business plutocrats, our imminent demise shall be comfortably Deliveroo'd directly to our front doors. Manson was a dismal, racist troglodyte, and if he had been around today, he would have been hungrily snapped up by the shady hedge-fund manipulators, hiding in plain sight at the very top of the pyramid. In conclusion, The Other Side of Madness holds up remarkably well, and the cat who delivered the chilling 'I'm the Devil, and I'm here to do the Devil's work!!!' did so with eerie verisimilitude.

Blood Freaks aka La Puta es Ciega. (2020) – Omar Jacobo.

In a spectacularly lurid, sublimely sleazy fashion, Mexican film artiste Omar Jacobo boisterously presents his punk-shocked deep-dive into the morally murky interstices of Mexico City. By graphically pulling back the protective scab of society, viewers are privy to a bracingly unsavoury view of the morass of abject human virulence swarming beneath it. Jacobo's aggressively grotty underworld milieu is strongly suggestive of the more outré, sordidly salacious Grindhouse miasma from the late 60s/70s. These deliciously dingy, downward-spiralling degenerates all comport themselves in a divinely deplorable manner, colourfully providing vidiotic sleazehounds with a perverse plethora of exquisitely insalubrious content. Armchair misanthropes, recidivist wallowers in celluloid grotesquery, and jaded consumers of Grindhouse grottage are sure to experience electric jolts of darkly vicarious pleasures. I don't think an underground horror film is ever truly complete without an intense, blood-spattered mini-maniac measuring up a beautiful cadaver for ritualised dissection. Wholly unexpectedly, Blood Freaks not infrequently provided carnal thrills that proved altogether stimulating. Others may well feel differently, but I found the skuzzoid subject matter and musical choices to be hugely compelling.