'The Red Queen Kills Seven Times' (1972) Emilio P. Miraglia.

Consistently stylish thriller director Emilio P. Miraglia made a considerably sinister splash with his blood-lashed gothic-grisly Giallo 'The Night Evelyn Came out of The Grave' (1971) and promptly followed it with the no less sanguineous, higher-budgeted blood-spiller 'The Red Queen Kills Seven Times' which boisterously proved to be s 'model' example of modish Italian mayhem, a bravura bespoke nightmare of an uncommonly savage sibling rivalry, murderous greed, and the terrible ancestral curse of the psychotically cackling Red Queen, a hysterically hacking, haemoglobin harvesting,knife-wielding banshee, somewhat strikingly attired in a forbidding crimson cowl, aggressively making the once-glamorous, upwardly mobile life of beautiful fashion photographer Kitty Wildenbrück (Barbara Bouchet) a downwardly spiralling nightmare!

'The Red Queen Kills Seven Times' is arguably one of the more spry and prototypically stylish examples of a Giallo, being generously replete with an abundance of glamorously garbed Giallo Vixens serially stalked by a mercilessly malevolent, black-gloved horror harpy, her hysterically shrill slayings immaculately framed by talented DOP Alberto Spagnoli, the unholy terror befalling the murderously beleaguered Wildenbrück clan in their bucolic Bavarian environs is greatly heightened by yet another dazzling, deeply sensuous score by mercurial musical mastermind Bruno Nicolai. Emilio P. Miraglia's diabolically well-heeled, wickedly warped sibling slaying slasher, which like its exquisitely scintillating star Barbara Bouchet has a singularly refined lustre that time has not diminished.

 

 'The Whip and The Body' (1963) – Mario Bava.

It could be argued that one of maestro Mario Bava's most visually sumptuous and preternaturally perverse horror films is the deliciously deviant Ernesto Gastaldi scripted Sado-Gothic classic 'The Whip and The Body', a sinfully sublime crepuscular creep-fest wherein towering terror titan Christopher Lee, is at his sinister subdued best as the beastly, eminently degenerated errant son Kurt Menliff who doomily returns to shadow-slaked Castle Menliff in order to reclaim patrimonial rights and catastrophically re-ignite dangerously incandescent passions of his dusky-haired paramour Nevenka (Daliah Lavi), now in a lukewarm marriage to his rather pallid brother Christian (Tony Kendall) which very soon heralds a multitude of macabre murders, lashings of morbid terror trysts, deep-seated diabolical familial discords, eerie masochistic ministrations from beyond the grave, mood-master Mario Bava's ghostly Gothic Giallo is a beautifully illuminated, scintillatingly sadistic phantasmagoria heightened with a truly mesmeric performance from sultry siren Daliah Lavi. A criminally underrated celluloid nightmare, certainly no less haunting than Jack Clayton's 'The Innocents' (1961) or Roger Corman's similarly necromantic 'The Tomb of Ligeia' (1964).

 

'Virgin Witch' (1972) - Ray Austin.

This titillatingly twisted and divinely sleazy British Folk Horror 'Virgin Witch' (1972) shall creepily cast a sinister spell upon thee! Directed with great zest and a malevolently malingering eye for erotic detail by former actor/stuntman Ray Austin. This red-lit midnight orgy of devilish terror is a 'model' example of gut-spillingly groovy 70s eerily exploitative B-horror, and proves itself to be occult above the rest! And the delectably raven-haired, sinfully sensuous siblings Ann & Vicki Michelle most certainly make for an irresistible pair of wrong-headed witches! A perfectly perfidious, terrifically tawdry terror-treat with those with a wickedly-warped penchant for vintage Slap N' Blood-Trickle!

 

'Der Ruf der blonden Göttin' (1977) - Jess Franco.

Master film fabulist Jess Franco's sensually overheated 'Voodoo Passion' aka 'Der Ruf der blonden Göttin' (1977)  has it all, Sinister black magic rituals! Potently Psychedelic love madness! Glamorous alfresco gropings!  Salaciously sapphic soakings! Murderous love trysts!!! Majestically monotonous dubbing! and non-stop ecstatic dancing!!! and that's JUST the title sequence!!! Maestro filmmaker Franco ALWAYS knew how to get a perfectly perverse party started! 'Voodoo Passion' might just get more than your mojo workin'.