'Count Yorga' (1970) – Bob Kelljan.

Any wine-denying, Graveyard digging, cellar creepin', vintage horror fan can always Count on the diabolically dapper 'Death Master' Yorga (Robert Quarry) to be one of the more aggressively antisocial, arterially astute, jugular jacking, carotid crimping, femoral flushing bloodsucking fiends of the sin-scintillated silver scream! 'Count Yorga' is an elegantly eerie, righteously turned on, fright-sized, B-Movie night bite that'll turn your fear-flocked fleshly protuberances bone white! While eternally temperate, the murderously bad tempered, morbidly moonlit, tomb-trashing tyrant Yorga remains a terrifyingly toothsome nocturnal neck-nipper with a terrible thirst for the more lurid libation that warmly flows so freely in your veins!!! A strikingly studly, skin-prickingly sinister, plasma purloining savage who silently stalks his blackened nocturnal domain in order to cruelly administer his profane acts of bestial blood-letting! A magisterially menacing midnight movie madman whose rabidly transfixing animal magnetism shall draw you inexorably to your bloody doom!!! Bravura B-Movie maestro Bob Kelljan's groovy-booby, Grisly-Gothic, cobweb creepy, blissfully batty, regally wrong-headed 'Count Yorga' just might be tomb much Vampire for your timorous throat to bare!

 

 

 

'Jail Bait' (1954) – Ed Wood, Jr. 

If Ed Wood Jr. is the Otto Preminger of D.I.Y cinema then the cordite-sharp, back alley blood-spiller 'Jail Bait' is arguably Ed Wood's greatly descended 'Fallen Angel'. After privileged rich kid on the make Don Gregor (Clancy Malone) is readily tempted by greasy-looking, smack-talkin' sack of small time potatoes, micro-moustachioed, half-baked hoodlum called Vic Brady (Timothy Farrell), being hyped into working a misbegotten heist, the bloody, inevitably bungled aftermath ends up with draughty flatfoots clumping lugubriously on their fearfully absconding, double-crossing tails. While buff, boil-in-the bag beefcake Steve Reeves, and sugar sweet, perky peroxide cream puff Dolores Fuller are both squeezey on the eyes, they stodgily make a TV Dinner of Ed Wood, Jr and Alex Gordon's triumphant, thrift-store trashy, rat-a-tat-tat syntax!

'Jail Bait' is a matchstick mean, corkscrew twisted, poverty-row potboiler, loosely held together with little more than a lurid smear of lipstick, used gum ball wrappers, and a shoebox-stuffed full of unpaid IOUs. Ed Wood, Jr's earnest attempt at directing a more mainstream B-Thriller is a deadpan, drop-dead delight, scuzzier than a stevedore's spittoon, blacker than a royally busted toenail, 'Jail Bait' remains a seamy, turgid trawl through the wilder side of midnight movie noir. While it frequently looks cheaper than a carny stag reel, moving slower than pig in aspic,'Jail Bait' nonetheless remains a spine-tinglingly spirted tribute to the maverick, low budget film-making chutzpah of Ed Wood, Jr, wherein low-brow bar-room substances triumph over glitzy, high-blown Hollywood schmear that mysteriously maintains rigorous interest due to having oodles of naive, cornball charm. 'Jail Bait' boisterously remains a beloved psychotronic classic that deliriously delivers a dizzy-doozy double take in its wickedly warped WTF finale!

 

 

 

 

 

'Nightmares Come at Night' (1970) – Jesús Franco.

The marvellously macabre Midnight Movie magician Jesús Franco once again luridly entices his more fleshly-inclined, sensation-seeking fans to totter timorously upon the fearfully frayed edges of this supernaturally salacious, theatrically twisted, terror-tinted tightrope of sinfully-singed, sumptuously subversive celluloid insanity! Like some dementedly DMT-dazed, audaciously unfiltered, hyper-eroticised Hitchcock, Franco's hysterical, palm-sweatingly sinister psychodrama 'Nightmares Come at Night' (1970) thrillingly proves itself to be yet another fabulously febrile, panic-drenched, lividly downbeat Grindhouse delirium! A brilliantly batso-bonkers B-Movie bacchanal, wherein the fiendishly inventive Iberian iconoclast Franco coaxes another bravura performance from sinuously sublime, raven-haired shiny dancer Soledad Miranda who makes for a truly mesmerically maniacal protagonist! Regarded by some as the tyrannically tasteless auteur of cheapjack, five-fingered filth, yet hailed by many as being a visionary avatar of audaciously left-field exotica, Franco was an uncommonly vivid visual artist whose almost heroic lack of cinematic refinement, impish predilection for hyperbolic crudity, and super-charged sensuality frequently engendered the most deliciously diverting, outrageously outré, darkly dreamt, filmically far-out fare! For me, maestro Jesús Franco's sordidly sweat-slathered, hypnotically hateful 'Nightmares Come at Night' arguably remains one of his more misunderstood, intoxicatingly insane, flank-poundingly perverse, ferociously enticing, fear-festooned fantasies!'

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 'King Boxer' (1972) – Jeong Chang-hwa.

Master Jeong Chang-hwa's iconic, super-kinetic Kung Fu phenomenon was one of the earliest films I saw as a kid that truly started my rabid interest in Asian cinema. This mythically majestic Mandarin martial arts masterpiece remains the righteously reigning, bloodied yet unbowed king of eye-gougingly intense, skull-shatteringly savage, serotonin-slaked Shaw Bros action! This exquisitely fashioned, sensation-stacked, gleefully gravity-flaunting adventure about one righteous martial artist's extraordinarily courageous, gore-spattered quest for love, honour, and vengeance has an indestructibly 'Iron Fisted' grip right until its internationally celebrated, scintillatingly cathartic, dazzlingly destructive, fatally fleet-footed, crimson-fisted finale!

King Boxer's supremely bellicose nature, gruesome balletic grace, fearsome fight scenes, teeth-grindingly tense training sequences, rousing blood n' thunder dramatics, and jaw-dropping, rib-cracking, body-rocking revenge makes for an uncommonly fascinating fight flick! So don't let anyone palm you off with cheapjack imitations; forget the limp-sabred whelp in the white pyjamas!!! as there's only ONE true hero's journey and that's master Lo Lieh's ecstatic ascent to Kung Fu supremacy! Director Jeong Chang-hwa's heroic, blood-crowned 'King Boxer' sits tall and imperious upon The Shaw Brothers triumphant throne, as both inventive instigator, esteemed scholar, and indomitable master of his gloriously mystical martial arts dominion! While many dishonourable Kung Fools have feloniously attempted a calamitous Kung Fu coup, none have ever been replete with the mythic mettle to successfully wrest his sanctified sceptre from King Boxer's terrible, titanium-tough grip!