'October Moth' (1960) – John Kruse.

A hugely talented, and versatile writer, maestro scrivener John Kruse is, perhaps, a name some thriller fans may not be all that familiar with, having had a great many successes on TV, writing many fine scripts for 'The Saint', 'The Avengers', 'The Zoo Gang, 'The Persuaders', and the excellently robust screenplay for 'Hell Drivers', Kruse, somewhat curiously, only directed one feature film, and considering how uncommonly thrilling it is, this remains an entirely baffling anomaly. His sole directing credit is the darkly menacing, unnervingly claustrophobic psychodrama 'October Moth', while a sadly neglected work remains a terrifically tense, immaculately performed British B-Picture, wherein the gimlet-eyed, persistently paranoid Finlay (Lee Patterson) zealously, and wholly misguidedly guards an injured middle-aged woman he obsessively maintains is his dead mother, Finlay's protective, increasingly anxious sister Molly (Lana Morris) is desperate to protect her mentally disturbed sibling while attempting, somewhat dangerously, to get the ailing woman out of their isolated farm and to safety. For its lean running time Kruse's doomy 'October Moth' ably provides ample distraction, and along with its palpably oppressive atmosphere, one of the film's most impressive qualities is the stark, moody chiaroscuro photography by the gifted director of photography Michael Reed, being better known for his equally sterling work on 'The Gorgon' (1964), and 'Rasputin: The Mad Monk' (1966). When the forlorn Molly stands mercilessly buffeted by a chill, spectral wind, dejectedly stating the bleak maxim, 'When no one needs you, you're nothing!', it certainly struck a rather uncomfortable chord with me. 

 

 

'Cold Blooded Beast' (1971) – Fernando Di Leo.

As lurid exploitation concepts go, Maestro Fernando Di Leo's ominously oneiric, One screw over the Cuckoo's Nest, grisly-gorgeous, glamour girl-garlanded Giallo remains a dazzlingly demented, floozie-flaying, midnight movie doozie! Within a vast, luxuriously plush clinic for nubile-neurotic, frequently frisky, uncommonly quixotic, lividly libidinous, mentally muddled women, a darkly-garbed, kaleidoscopically cruel killer silently stalks the weapon-festooned hallways, and for reasons obscure proceeds to get gruesomely medieval on these delectably displayed derrières! The world renowned master of the pulse-pounding Poliziotteschi clearly has little difficulty smoothly shifting gears from bellicose, bullet-shredded, gearbox-thrashing Euro-crime tropes to the more scurrilous stalk and gash mania of a gore-soaked Gialli!

While 'Cold Blooded Beast' is rather more fleshy-fantastic Jess Franco than moodily macabre Mario Bava, boisterously eschewing artisan set-pieces for remarkably explicit rumpy-pumpy, and grisly blunt force trauma! Di Leo's deliciously degenerated vintage blood-spiller is a ferociously fun grindhouse Giallo, its lack of cinematic subtlety, and the director's explicitly voyeuristic camera allows for penetrating illicit thrills, and plentiful audacious kills, and excluding Kinski's bafflingly sedate performance, there's much gruesome grist for the true blue, grue-seeking Gialli aficionado to enjoy, not least being the sympathetically slinky, mesmerizingly marvellous, sensually savage performance from raven-haired beauty Rosalba Neri, all this sublimely sinister slashing energized by an especially scintillating score by maestro Silvano Spadaccino.

 

'Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay' (1971) - Bruno Gantillon.

'Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay' (1971) Exquisitely erotic, vampishly villainous, diaphanously garbed succubi, and sadistically tormented, raven-haired, lustfully hate-fuelled harlots abound disgracefully in this deliciously dubious divertissement of eerily exotic, fruit loop lurid Euro-Horror lunacy! A triumphantly titillating, sensually sick-headed nightmare about about all manner of majestically malevolent maidens that frequently go rumpy bumpy in the blackened, subterranean glooms of night! Wherein the shrill abject screams of pain very soon become the needful cries of illicit pleasure! Don't be a slave to mediocrity, disencumber yourself from the stultifying shackles of sinless sinema, and take a hungry fleshly bite out of this bodaciously buxom, bonking mad boudoir B-horror classic by audacious Gallic smut scion Bruno Gantillon! The grisly-minded, spectrally sordid, ethereally explicit, ominously outré, luridly languorous, carnally carnivorous, delectably dancing, oestrogen-soaked sirens within 'Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay' eagerly await your pleasure! Take it from this scurrilous splatter Mad Hatter, perfidiously permissive, sapphically scintillating 70s Euro-Cult sinema still matters! And with the sole exception of the wildest sensual phantasmagoria of maestro Jean Rollin, very few midnight movies enjoy the exotically eldritch range of darkly deporting degeneracy as Gantillon's 'Morgane Et Ses Nymphes'(1971) Starring a dazzlingly delicious harem of hellaciously hot horror hotties, the unusually enticing Dominique Delpierre, Mireille Saunin, Michelle Perelo!

 

 'Sauvage' (2018) Camille Vidal-Naquet.

Camille Vidal-Naquet's uncompromisingly visceral docudrama about the increasingly frank, downwardly spiralling sexual misadventures of handsome young male prostitute Leo (Félix Maritaud), proved to a remarkably raw, singularly scintillating, frequently upsetting, sympathetic, and witheringly intimate view of a disenfranchised, seemingly self-annihilating 20-year-old sex worker whose calamitously unstable existence on the grimly unwelcoming fringes of Strasbourg's impolite society is alarmingly fraught with multitudinous dangers, wherein each of Leo's frenzied encounters teeter on the very knife's edge of impending violence! While Leo frequently acts blasé, seemingly indifferent to his itinerant existence, dingily drifting from one insalubrious coupling to another in a debilitating dope-fogged delirium, while enduring a sordid shadow life in a near-somnolent state of disgrace, he still desperately craves genuine human affection with the same burning persistent need of his increasingly life-threatening crack addiction. Not a pretty film by any means, since Leo's apparently cavalier approach to his altogether feral existence is distressing to behold, and yet, for all its trenchant, Fassbinder doom and gloom, Camille Vidal-Naquet's grievously beautiful backstreets drama 'Sauvage' is not without mordant flashes of humour, humanity, and romantic love. This is uncommonly rigorous, refreshingly bold cinema which almost miraculously turns the basest elements of humanity into rare celluloid gold! And it would be greatly remiss of me if I didn't validate the earthy, wholly relatable performances of love-lorn Félix Maritaud and his bellicose Platonic partner in grime Ahd (Éric Bernard), their evermore fractious relationship invests a singular vibrancy to Vidal-Naquet's unflinchingly raw, consistently forthright, yet warmly humane narrative, and witnessing Leo's inert, pitifully rumpled body sprawled out so ignominiously across the pavement like cruelly discarded human detritus I couldn't help but recollect Oscar Wilde's immortal quote “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” and, perhaps, Sauvage's sublimely evocative final scene may suggest that the beleaguered Leo is once again free to look up at the stars through optimistic eyes.

 

'Blood Relatives' (1978) aka 'Laberinto Mortal'.

This oppressively creepy, sinisterly slashing, bone-fizzingly grim, Canadian-set murder mystery remains a darkly fascinating delight, so be sure to check it out if you dare to descend deep into the diabolically degenerated mind of one especially deviant killer!!! And nae bad it is too! (Personally, I'm rarely bored by murder maestro Claude!) Alongside the uber-talented character actor Donald Sutherland it also stars terror icon Donald Pleasence, sublimely gifted Gallic dream Stéphane Audran, and Deep Red's stilleto cool David Hemmings! Based on a popular crime novel by Ed McBain, Claude Chabrol's finely wrought, consistently engaging, impressively acted thriller is regarded by many cult film fans to be one of the very best McBain adaptations! 

 

 

'Warning From Space' (1956) - Koji Shima.

Absolutely stellar vintage Sci-fi from 1950s Japan. Beautifully written by Hideo Oguni, and masterfully directed by Koji Shima, this truly is astronomically good, spookily spaced-out cinema! Trippy aliens, fiery apocalyptic planetoids, and meticulously manufactured miniatures are merely two of the more gorgeously glittering facets of this stunningly fashioned, far-flung cinematic jewel!! (I must confess to having a wicked yen for miniatures!) 'Warning From Space' (1956) is a fabulously fissionary freak-out!!! A Van Allen belter of a B-Movie!!! This scintillating comet's tale is well worth watching! Highly, highly recommended Sci-fi!