‘Wake Up & Kill’ (1966) - Carlo Lizzani.

Gifted Director, Carlo Lizzani’s audacious, adrenaline-fuelled, greatly influential poliziotteschi classic ‘Wake Up & Kill’ (1966) is the ceaselessly locomotive true crime classic that so energetically dramatizes the frantic, media-hyped rise, and subsequent ignominious fall of photogenic smash-and-grab merchant, Luciano Lutring. While filmed a good few years before the hyperbolic, bullet-blasted, road-carnage heyday of poliziotteschi mayhem masterminded by exploitation titans, Lenzi/Martino/Massi et al., Lizzani's no less thrilling 'Wake Up & Kill' expresses its very own unique personality! The dynamic, cinema verite style, the director cannily utilized, allowed for considerably more intimacy, pathos and emotional gravitas over the grievous, downward spiralling plight of infamous jewel thief, Lutring (Robert Hoffman) and his ravishing songbird paramour, Angela (Lisa Gastoni).

This consistently exhilarating 60s true crime drama forcefully grabs you from the explosive intro, as screenwriter, Ugo Pirro’s cogent script keeps the viewer wholly immersed in misguided misfit, Lutring’s cavalier, hubristic, whiskey-soaked Riviera crime spree that inexorably attracts the mercenary attentions of the over-mythologizing press, hyperbolically dubbing him the ‘machine gun soloist’; a glib moniker that wily inspector, Moroni (Gian Maria Volonté) ardently hopes he might be able to stop becoming a statistical fact! The autobiographical film’s vivid action sequences are no less dynamically rendered than the morbidly fascinating, increasingly desperate relationship between steadfastly loyal, Angela, and her fractious, machine gun-toting hoodlum husband, ostensibly leading them both to an inevitably destructive climax! ‘Wake Up & Kill’ might still be highly regarded as an influential true-crime masterpiece even without its scintillating score by, Ennio Morricone, yet sonorously endowed with such an enthralling theme, Carlo Lizzani’s muscular, torn-from-the-headlines true crime thriller is vertiginously elevated to that of a minor genre masterpiece!  The beautifully restored Arrow Video Blu-ray is a fantastic addition to any avid film fan's Euro-Cult collection. 

 

 

  

'L'amour fou'

'Gunning for Euro-crime glory!'

 

 

'Dead Heat' (1988) - Mark Goldblatt.

Even during the bloodiest wave of the 80s terror-tripping video-rage, hellaciously hysterical horror hybrids were no less of a rarity than today, therefore making, mercurial movie-maker Mark Goldblatt’s morbidly-macabre, mega-mental, monster-makin’ mash-up a veritable gore-laden goldmine for acid-eating aficionados of sensationally sick-headed, special FX-loaded, midnight movie splatter madness! 

A singularly confounding series of violent robberies erupt in downtown L.A., wherein twice-dead bodies turn up at the morgue! And malevolently melt-faced, unkillable skells raise all manner of bloody hells in the temporarily demonized city of angels! With the body bags mountin’, it’s gonna’ take 2 especially kooky cops to arrest this criminal rot, as only the scream of the crop can stop this rum plot, dead-bang in its bloody tracks! Mortis (Treat Williams) & Bigelow (Joe Piscopo) are a pair of heroically hard-assed, reality-wrecking, scumbag-body-baggin’, not-long-dead, wiseacre cops who are not only beyond the pale...they are quite literally beyond the boundaries of life itself!!!!!! As a bodaciously bellicose, hard rockin’, body rotten B-Movie,Goldblatt’s cult 80s splatter classic ‘Dead Heat’ is hard to beat!!!! Two ice-cool, dead-eyed L.A. cops working a dead-end beat in the explosive heat of a savage street-war against an Illuminati elite of zombie-making dead beats! ‘Stab ‘em in the guts! Shoot ‘em in the head! You can even blow ‘em up dead! Detectives Mortis & Bigelow eat re-fried death for breakfast! So, if you can’t stand this kinda’ ‘Dead Heat’, stay the hell outta’ the city morgue!’

 

'Vince Neil really let himself go, dude!'

'Hooking up with my ex went better than expected!'

'You're a stand-up guy, Piscopo!'

'That's the last time I party with Harry Knowles!'

    

'Livid' (2011) - Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo.

Deliriously deviant directors of inventive in Utero insanity, 'Inside', Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo, take a toothsome bite out of a ripe Clockwork Blood Orange, and evilly concoct an especially Grimm-natured, balletically bloody, far-out Fairy tale phantasmagoria, fearfully replete with excessively nightmarish nocturnal necromancies, profane blood rituals, and a stark grisly-Gothic, kaleidoscopically weird creepiness! In a somnolent seaside town there have long been illicitly whispered tales about the ostensibly deserted, ostentatiously grand mansion of infamous, despotic dance teacher, Madame Jessel (Marie-Claude Pietragalla); now apparently reduced to little more than a dreadful living corpse, her pallid, desiccated remains are given the faintest semblance of life by regular transfusions of fresh blood, and the persistently eerie, mechanized wheezing of a respirator that robotically inflates her terminally ailing lungs....But just how physically incapable is this prone, impossibly gaunt, bed-ridden crone?

But just how physically incapable is this prone, impossibly gaunt, bed-ridden crone? And what of this rumoured treasure that so inexorably drew the young, pale, pixie-esque beauty of trainee care assistant Lucy (Chloé Coulloud), and her two blithely larcenous friends to so foolhardily break into the labyrinthine, oppressively vast Jessel property? 'Livide' (2011) is a perfectly perverse cinematic puzzle box, part Guillermo del Toro's macabre, mould-cracking 'Cronos', part super-charged Mario Bava Gothic delirium, plus an additionally flesh-crawling flourish of deliciously dark fabulist E.T.A Hoffman, while the insidious influences to Maury's & Bustillo's skin-prickingly sinister, morbidly majestic horror film are sublimely numerous, their maniacal melange of midnight movie madness coalesces into something uniquely monstrous indeed! And their witty reference to the 'Slaughtered lamb' pub certainly wasn't lost on me! Jolly good show, chaps!

'Many of us fear death...but the true nightmare is what comes after!'

 

 

'Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?'