'Dark City' (1998) – Alex Proyas.

Sadly, upon its initially all-too limited cinema release, Alex Proyas's visually enthralling, desperately doomy dystopian nightmare 'Dark City' was poorly received, largely due to crass studio revisions, and grossly inept marketing, but even in its truncated form, many of the impactful noirish eccentricities remained eerily intact, and the demonstratively improved director's cut is tantamount to a veritable revelation, as maestro Proyas's delectably labyrinthine, highly stylized, sky-high, super sinister Sci-fi mystery is now greatly improved, giving this reality-spinning cult classic an entirely new lease of cinematic life. The initially Kafkaesque nightmare of John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) groggily awakening in an unfamiliar body, with a wife he doesn't recognize in a constantly mutable shadow city very soon escalates to pure, unleavened existential terror, as he becomes ceaselessly hunted by pallid-looking, Noirish Cenobite-like alien enforcers, and in his desperate attempt to elude capture, the increasingly discombobulated John discovers that he might be the bizarre messianic catalyst in a morbidly-majestic metaphysical conspiracy that is quite literally out of this world! Before 'The Matrix' there was the really dark matter of 'Dark City'.

 

 'Face of a Stranger (1964) – John Llewellyn Moxy.

Directed in a bravura fashion by veteran film & TV director John Llewellyn Moxy, the greatly talented fellow behind Brit-Horror classic 'Horror Hotel' (1960). 'Face of a Stranger' is, perhaps, one of my favourite Edgar Wallace 60s crime thrillers, with an engaging, palm-tinglingly well-conceived plot over 'le crime passionelle', enjoying a terrifically vivid turn from sterling character actor Jeremy Kemp as the taciturn, charismatic, darkly duplicitous crim Vince, whose deeply nefarious plan to assume the identity of former cellmate John Bell (Philip Locke) in order to diabolically dupe John's beautiful blind wife Mary (Rosemary Leach) made for consistently exciting, twist-laden drama! With a far greater reliance on character, and narrative nuance than some of the more prosaic episodes of 'The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre', the strikingly erotic, steely-eyed Jeremy Kemp's ambivalent Vince being a singularly complex villain, not only remarkably multifaceted, but one with infinitely more sympathetic, relatable motives than one usually sees in the noisome, twin-fisted B&W Pulp fiction of the prolific, but not exactly varied oeuvre of the estimable crime writer Mr. Wallace, and it would prove entirely remiss if I didn't mention the no less fascinating performance from the extremely talented Rosemary Leach, her delightfully oblique Mary most certainly playing her cards close to her chest! 'Face of a Stranger' is, perhaps, one of Edgar Wallace's more refined and enduring mysteries'

 

'Bad Girls Go To Hell' (1966) - Doris Wishman.

 

Iconoclast indie film-maker Doris Wishman's darkly decadent B/W roughie 'Bad Girls Go To Hell' (1966) is a devilishly indecent descent into a luridly carousing cornucopia of steamy celluloid excess!!!! Slake your illicit hungers upon the sultry smorgasbord of the sinfully fornicating flesh so morbidly coveted by the joyfully hellbound, heroically humping hedonists herein! Prepare to wantonly experience an exquisite catharsis of sublime saturnalia beyond even your wildest screams!!!!!! 'Sometimes it's good to be bad, but Bad Girls are ALWAYS better than good!

 

 

'Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins' (1985) - Guy Hamilton.

Based on the successful series of action-packed 'Destroyer' novels by writers Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir, and brought to especially vivid Technicolor life by experienced action director guy Hamilton. Gruff, twin-fisted NYC cop (Fred Ward) has a violent altercation with some grubby-looking dockside skells, ending with being physically rammed into the ice-cold drink, and not after this ignominious dunking he awakens greatly disorientated in a private hospital room with handsome rugged features closely resembling that of muscular actor Fed Ward, a spiffy new name, and finds himself part of some deep cover, shadow agency, covertly set up to seek out and destroy any not so clear, but definitely present threat to 80s America! 'Remo Williams: The Adventure begins' is arguably one of the 1980s more playfully charismatic, action-packed adventures, with many heated, delightfully endearing exchanges between bluff proletariat Remo (Fred Ward) and his far more cultured Korean Martial Art mentor Chiun (Joel Grey),plentiful adrenaline-spiking spectacle, and an engaging boy's own plot concerning the imminent threat of terrorist agencies malign, with fleet-footed director Hamilton, and celebrated cinematographer Andrew Laszlo orchestrating a 'landmark' vertigo-inducing chase atop America's eternally vigilant first lady!

 

 'Sting of Death' (1966) - William Grefé

B-Movie miracle maker William Grefé's swampy sinister Floridian fright-fest 'Sting of Death' (1966) is anything but a 'bog' standard monster movie, and will paralyse your soul with tomb-cold tendrils of frost-bitten fear!!!. Rising fuliginously out of the maddening, miasmal depths of some brackish hell, this polymorphously perverse, biologically insane, jelly-brained, flesh-craving fiend will shatter your reeling mind into foul grots of oleaginous shrapnel, and monstrously pound your lifeless flesh into bloody bouillabaisse!!!!

 

 'Tiger Ninja Part 2' aka 'Ninja Death 2' (1987) - Joseph Kuo.

After a beautifully balletic Kung Fabulous title sequence which boisterously introduces our main preternaturally agile pugilists, we then soon discover that the handsome, aesthetically muscular Tiger (Alexander Rei Lo) was born under a bad sign, since his beleaguered mother was almost assassinated by ambushing Ninjas, and then cruelly driven into exile by this nihilistic mob of pyjama-wearing warlords, also being estranged from his unknown, mysteriously elusive father,thereby making tinky-tiny Tiger's turbulent childhood one of enormous privation, but eventually this plucky, hard-luck orphan is raised to martial arts manhood by one of the deadly, hush-hush 'Plum Ninjas', Aye!!! These 'Plum Ninjas' are an especially rum lot, a killer cadre of morally suspect, fist-fighting freaks, being the last practitioners of the ancient, long-forgotten, absolutely elite martial art of 'Royal Ninja Kung Fu'. While there's a pleasingly hectic quality to 'Ninja Tiger Part 2' it is, sadly, not quite on the same histrionic levels of a gonzo Cut N' Paste Joseph Lai Ninja mash-up, the frequently jarring narrative, and somewhat cavalier approach to film-making being further obfuscated by muffled, wildly variable sound levels, overly brusque editing, deliciously comedic dubbing, and hilariously incongruent music cues; a few stolen themes from 'You Only Live twice', and some joyfully jaunty, fabulously inappropriate library music, perhaps surreptitiously culled from an early 70s Bavarian sex comedy! While wholly absurd, 'Ninja Tiger part 2' is quite wonderfully mad, and the righteous fight scenes are aggressively choreographed with considerable elan, the fleet-limbed actors being clearly skilled, miraculously flexible, Kung Fu artisans, and there is even some wholly deranged, built like a brick-Khazi George Eastman-type in a wickedly ominous silver samurai mask, who gorily tears out the still-living guts of all the unfortunate kung Fools who have the fatal misfortune to cross his ceaselessly psychotic path! 'Tiger Ninja Part 2' is a gleefully bizarre, incandescently insane Kung Fu calamity, and I cannot recommend it highly enough!

 

'Curse of The Puppet Master' (1998) - David DeCoteau.

 

The sixth instalment in the hugely successful 'Puppet Master' franchise while somewhat uneven, is not without interest to more forgiving fans of the miniature, string-less slayers shenanigans, but the MAJOR downside is the palpable lack of grisly Puppet action, 'Blade',' leech Woman', 'Pinhead', and 'Six-Shooter' suffering the ignominy of having been re-inserted into 'Curse of The Puppet Master' from previous films!!! These altogether clumsy 'inserts' are not only awkward, they greatly distract from what is a fairly engrossing story of a young, talented, socially withdrawn woodcarver Robert 'Tank' Winsley coming to work for Dr. Magrew (George Peck), owner of a museum of antique curiosities, and secret dabbler in the occult. The naive woodcarver falls in love with the good doctor's beautiful, sweet-natured daughter Jane (Emily Harrison), their budding romance rudely interrupted by a sinister sinister series of macabre events that suggest Dr. Magrew might just have had an entirely unsavoury motive for hiring the gifted sculptor Josh! With more original puppet footage, and a considerably less abrupt ending 'Curse of The Puppet Master' might not be cursed with such a dire reputation, the diminutive stars deserve far better than this! 'Sadly, this so-so, frequently uninspired effort from the usually reliable DeCoteau suffers from the curse of recycled footage!'