'Microwave Massacre' (1983) – Wayne Berwick. 

No Guts! No Gory!!! 'Microwave Massacre is a luridly low budget, triumphantly tasteless treat that is guaranteed to upset your finer sensibilities!!! It is a heroically half-baked 'TV Sinner' that you won't want to skip! The 'Microwave Massacre' remains one sardonically slathered 'Boil-in-the-mad', foul-mouthed fear-feast that is twice as 'rice' as the Texan chainsaw variety! And is 'egg-bound' to have your terror-soaked taste-buds screaming for gore!!! Hey!! It's ALL about that queasy livin', and all it takes is one quick 'cook' and you're ALL done, dude! 

 

 'Ex Drummer' (2007) – Koen Mortier.

 

'Ex Drummer' is an strikingly vivid, excellently off-beat, darkly comedic drama about a singularly disturbed, diabolically dysfunctional band of Belgian musical misfits that will leave your sensibilities battered and bruised! 'It's a wrong way to the top if ya' wanna rock n' Roll!' - 'Punk's not dead, it's a film in Belgium, mayte!'

 

 

 

 

 'In The Eye of the Hurricane' (1971) - José María Forqué.

Fabulously flamboyant Spanish filmmaker José María Forqué conjurors up one of the more luridly louche offerings of the perkily permissive 1970s, with his divinely duplicitous thriller 'In The Eye of the Hurricane' which boisterously remains a sublimely salacious, diabolically devious, superbly slinky, seriously salty, seaside-set, psycho-psychedelic, skin-drenched, teasingly twist-laden, Groovy Giallo diorama for refined film hedonists of all ages!

The serially-sinful, sensationally sun-slathered, tremulously titillating, fleshly endowed, dreamy-delicious Giallo 'In The Eye of the Hurricane' is also known by the far more mellifluous-sounding 'La Volpe dalla coda di velluto' (1971) and is gorgeously replete with abundant sultry 1970s B-cinema sexiness is now finally all gussied up in fashionably freakadelic High Definition. Director Forqué's deadly-decadent document of juicily jet-setting, frivolously aqua-netting, 'Martini-minxes-gone-mad' sly-jinks certainly makes for a Giallo good time, baby! This exquisitely playful 'Costa-del-death' celluloid curiosity has an outrageously camp 'swans-in-the-bathtub' nuttiness that endows 'In The Eye of the Hurricane' with an arrestingly perverse quality, making handsome devil Jean Sorel misbegotten machinations all the more fascinating to behold! Those estimable cult aficionados at 88 Films have once again lovingly restored yet another exotic, little-seen 70s grindhouse gem to a remarkably pristine quality!

 

 'Marquis' (1989) - Henri Xhonneux. 

Plainly gifted film-maker Henri Xhonneux has made an entertainingly bawdy animatronic yarn wherein the unashamedly sinful, Bastille incarcerated Marquis colourfully ruminates upon life's more fleshly pursuits with his remarkably cogent, and uncommonly outspoken reproductive organ! This deliciously deviant and impeccably playful fantasy about the dastardly double-dealing, internecine intrigues, illicit social intercourse and perfectly perfidious peccadilloes of the great and the good are wittily observed and whimsically realised in director Xhonneux's frequently fabulous, literately lewd phantasmagoria. While the ribald, lushly costumed drama is set within the murky, Draconian confines of a misbegotten jail, the joyful film itself is a luminously liberating affair, perhaps even able to uplift more than a viewer's flagging spirits! 

 

'The Abandoned' (2006) - Nacho Cerdà.

'The Abandoned' is a profoundly gloomy supernatural marrow-chiller by noted Spanish splatter mad hatter Nacho 'Aftermath' Cerdà. Aiming his delectably skewed view upon the more conventional tropes of one especially desolated haunted house, replete with its exquisite lighting flourishes, creepy, diabolically dilapidated set design, and committed performances by the terrorized siblings Marie (Anastasia Hille) and estranged brother Nicolai (Karel Roden). Their desperate search for any information concerning their birth mother's inexplicably brutal slaying augers an altogether gut-knotting, reality-twisting terror trip deep into the labyrinthine murder house's increasingly disturbing mysteries. The Abandoned grimly suggests that the terrible secret of their uncommonly grisly family history is, perhaps, destined to repeat itself! Not altogether unique, yet the visually astute director's sinister shocker has a number of palpably disquieting scares! The macabre, white-eyed spectres are skin-crawlingly grim entities, with the ever encroaching sense of suffocating doom morbidly maintained until the nihilistic narrative's stiflingly depressing conclusion!

 

 

 

 

'Blood Tide' (1982) – Richard Jeffries.

The eerily atmospheric horror Blood Tide is set within the isolated, faintly macabre-looking medieval town of Monemvasia. This unfairly neglected 80s creature feature begins with Greek Island hopping newly-weds, Neil (Martin Kove) and Sherry Grice (Mary Louise Weller) somewhat unwelcome arrival on the island. The eccentric, amusingly bizarre locals appear reluctant to grant Neil's earnest request for any assistance that might help locate his missing sister Madeline, played deliciously by spaced-out glamourpuss Deborah 'Nemesis' Shelton. During the Grice's first actively unsettling night they meet bodacious bikini blond bombshell, Barbara (Lydia Cornell), a heroically hot beach bunny caught up in a delightfully ditsy world of her own, and bubble-headed Barbara's charismatically bluff, illegally treasure hunting boyfriend, Frye (James Earl Jones). A rabidly scene-stealing, fascinatingly ambivalent character, Frye is the catalyst that unknowingly invokes the monstrous Blood Tide which gushes forth grimly from the barnacled bowels of hell, threatening to engulf them all!

Boldly contradicting the enticingly sanguineous title, this almost creature-less feature proves itself to be a weirdly entertaining, outlandishly off-beat B-horror mélange of mythically macabre, Mediterranean-set Lovecraftian wyrd! 'Blood Tide' remains so much more than a creepily esoteric, sun-baked 80s folk horror curiosity. This sinisterly subaquatic, cod-Peter Benchley 'what-done-it' has its skewed dynamics increased by the flawless performances of a profoundly gifted cast. The naive presence of dreamily beautiful, Deborah Shelton not only manifests a distractingly strange aura, she also provides the sympathetic voice and lyrics to the jaunty, if singularly unmenacing title music! The bulk of the spooky score composed by Jerry Mosely, who also did equally fine work on cult classic 'Frightmare' (1983). Light on gore, this fear-frothed Lovecraftian eccentricity remains an exotic, rewardingly unconventional 80s folk horror oddity that eerily beguiles due to its abundant strangeness, and moodily malign maritime atmosphere.