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.

 Forest of the Damned (2005) – Johannes Roberts.

'You're all gonna Die!!!'

A ubiquitously querulous van-load of young folk take an ill-fated trip into an isolated forest, freakishly inhabited by angelic, rabidly lustful succubi, these deliciously hot nubiles are obligingly nude for your erotic edifications! Naked, uninhibited, hyper-libidinous Bi-curious sin sirens are a heaven sent blessing, and if I had to be violently gored to death in an amiable British B-Schlocker, one could a lot worse than being gruesomely mauled by fuck-hungry, forest-dwelling hell vixens! While the dialogue is excruciatingly prosaic, populated by equally inane, eminently snuff-able B-Movie prototypes, I couldn't help but enjoy the prodigious goofiness herein!

Technically, Forest of the Damned proves competent enough, Tom Savini is in it, Slugs impresario Shaun Hutson provides a fun cameo, and I can't be too harsh on a low-budget backwoods Blood-spiller with such sinisterly slinky antagonists! Not excessively gory, but there's bloody bludgeoning, close quarters shot-gunning, moderate neck-rippage, grisly face trauma, overly forceful lip nibbling, and a rigorously administered decapitation! Our tall, red-headed hero is bland, yet handsome, and his attractively willowy squeeze is suitably spunky, with distractingly beautiful eyes. In spite of being so poorly written, the photography is decent, providing one, or two credible spook-outs, making Forest of the Damned a decent watch for less uppity B-Horror fans.

 Cthulhu Mansion (1992) – Juan Piquer Simon.

Successful illusionist Chandu's (Frank Finlay) foolish attempts to incorporate black magic into his act cause the grisly occult death of his beloved wife (Marcia Layton), these activated dark forces, once unleashed, turn the grand family abode into the diabolical realm of...Cthulhu Mansion!!!!!!! The respected creator of celebrated Satanic smut classic Satan's Blood attempt at Lovecraftian wyrd is a watchable, unfairly dismissed 90s occult horror oddity. Plot is hyped-up haunted house schlock, wherein the ambivalent Chandu falls foul of opportunist, thrill-seeking delinquents, absconding after a royally fubar'd drug deal, holed up in this enigmatic magician's demonized domicile, it is not long before all manner of Lovecraftian hells are unleashed! Credible performances from Frank Finlay, Melanie Shatner, and Iberian henchman Frank Brana, with the remaining cast's theatrical deficiencies exaggerating Cthulhu Mansion's enjoyably goofy Euro-horror eccentricities!

The home invasion elements are somewhat tepidly presented, the more boisterous schlock horror material is energetically provided by the engaging creature feature hi jinks, which remain punchy, and luridly entertaining! Finlay's commanding presence can't distract from Cthulhu Mansions pervasively B-Horror milieu, yet it is only rarely dull, suggestive of the fact that helmsman J.P Simon is one of the more reliable purveyors of big-boxed, Video rented schlock! Cthulhu Mansions remains about as far removed from an undiscovered classic, as a partially regurgitated chicken shop bargain bucket is from haute cuisine, trashy horror and junk food both temporarily fill a hole, but the satisfaction is frustratingly short-lived. Prodigiously psychotronic midnight movie lunacy, Cthulhu Mansion would be a fun pairing with Lenzi's Ghost House, or Laurenti's Witchcraft aka La Casa 4.