'Island of The Fishmen' (1979) – Sergio Martino.

Menacingly marooned upon this desolated isle of multitudinous madness, malevolently manhandled by increasingly malign mermen, and tormented by a tyrannical toffee nosed toff (Richard Johnson), these ragged, starveling, long-suffering sailors fatefully discover that its gill or be killed in genre maestro, Sergio Martino's small scale, sinisterly subaquatic shocker 'Island of The Fishmen'. Luridly Lovecraftian, and teasingly exotic, this unfathomably fabulous, successfully genre-bending 70s creature feature is certain to get its hooks deep into you long before the final reel! 

Handsomely shot, with an engagingly boy's own text, beloved Euro-cult icons, Richard Johnson, Claudio Cassinelli, and the exquisitely beautiful Barbara Bach provide the weighty dramatic ballast that keeps this far from waterlogged, frequently fin-tastic Italian fright-flick afloat! No mere B-Movie minnow, this leviathan of diabolical dentistry proves to be kinkier than Jules Verne, delves deeper into twisted animalistic terror than H.G. Wells, and delivers more shocks than a startled stingray! Long neglected, Sergio Martino's far-flung fright-fest now sparkles on remastered HD, revealing a dazzlingly toothsome treasure chest of tantalizing terror for future horror fans to discover! Not only is Martino's rip roaring, high seas adventure enormously fun to watch, the sinfully scrumptious, brine-soaked Barbara Bach is quite ravishing to behold, and the beguilingly boggle-eyed mermen make for uncommonly striking protagonists.

'No merman is an island!' - Weirdlingwolf.

 

 

'Skinned Deep' (2004) – Gabe Bartalos.

Weirdly overlooked, generously over-spooked, splatter scientist Gabe Bartalos's creepily creative, spiritedly splatter-slathered, 'Skinned Alive' remains a grossly underappreciated, blackly funny, strikingly surrealistic chunkblower, featuring one of the more monstrously mutated, man-mutilating maniacs in Wide-scream history! Struck off for sordid surgical savagery, the monomaniacal, medically malign machinations of this unlicensed spastic surgeon makes highly regarded FX supremo Gabe Bartalos's haemoglobin heavy horror phantasmagoria, 'Skinned Deep' one of the more gruesomely gratifying, boisterously bonkers, fiendishly funny, unfairly bargain binned B-Movie bloodbaths of the noughties, and any tweaked Splatter Mad Hatters who feel peaked by jump-scare juvenilia should make an appointment to get fatally freaked by the Surgeon General! 

'With his gruesome-looking grill, and sinister scalpel skill, this psychopathic surgeon General uses more than his looks to kill!!!' - Weirdlingwolf.

'This sadistic, saw-jawed, backalley butcher is a real cut-up!' - Tor Bronson / The Heroic Blood Shed.

 

 

'The Bird With The Crystal Plumage' (1970) – Dario Argento.

Tastier than catsu curry, masterful mood maestro, Dario Argento's refined, razor-edged thriller 'The Bird With The Crystal Plumage' soars majestically above the crowd! The fledgling fearmaster exploded on the 70s scream scene with his fiendishly gripping, gloriously glamorous Giallo classic that is sure to make vintage thriller fans go beak at the knees! More peacock than Hitchcock, there's no mystery why this beguilingly sinister, stylishly orchestrated shocker shredded the competition! Dario's dazzling debut deservedly make him a star, and, rapturously, his eternally scintillating 'The Bird With Crystal Plumage' has lost none of its lustre, not only visually exquisite, the legendary Ennio Morricone's iconic, sonically sumptuous score will make your heart soar! In one fateful stroke, Argento black-handedly transformed terror sinema with his immortal masterpiece, and the film's immaculate HD restoration guarantees that future generations of salaciously sin-seeking cinephiles will be darkly mesmerized by its bravura, blood-burnished allure!

 

 

'A Cry in The Night' (1992) – Robert Spry.

The deliciously diverting, compellingly edge-of-seat Mary Higgins Clark psychodrama, 'A Cry in The Night' has an engaging plot, credible performances, with the picturesque locale providing a suitably isolated backdrop for this memorably macabre emotional meltdown. This competently written thriller also has a tantalizingly tweaked William Castle quality, adding a pleasing eccentricity to Mary Higgins Clark's turbulent tale of diabolical duplicity, and the dashingly handsome, immaculately coiffed Perry King is a sheer delight as the initially suave, seemingly family orientated Erich Krueger, whose increasingly toxic jealousies torments his wife Jenny (Carol Higgins Clark) to breaking point! Occasionally camp, yet divinely melodramatic, this lively, rewardingly creepy, conspicuously Canadian TV movie concludes in a wickedly warped climax that has far more to offer psychotronic fans than you might initially think possible! My main interest in the undeniably spry 90s thriller, 'A Cry in The Night' was Perry King's intense, masterfully menacing persona, plus the film's strident theatricality!   

 

 

'The Laughing Dead' (1989) – S.P Somtow.

This mesmerizingly mental, membrane mastacatingly macabre freakshow remains a mandatory, audaciously visceral experience, no true 80s horror fan should miss! A dispirited, faithless, nun-plugging priest leads a colourfully kooky coachload of disparate misfits on their sightseeing visit to a historically hateful Aztec burial ground, hoping to enjoy the local exotic festivities, only to fatefully discover that evilly lurking beneath this increasingly unholy site, these ancient Mayan dead rest anything but peacefully! Rabid, splatter-seeking gore hounds are sure to lap up the lurid eviscerations, dastardly decapitations, and amusing assemblage of eccentric nutballs in Somtow's beguilingly bizarro B-Movie Bloodbath! If you haven't got the heart to watch the gleefully gruesome 'The Laughing Dead', it's only because some murderous Mayan death god has just bloodily torn it out of your chest!!! 

S.P Somtow's delightfully sardonic 80s Schlock-fest is arguably one of the moist hysterically cassock-spoiling carnage classics since Peter Jackson's intestinally inventive 'Brain Dead'! About as subtle as a shark's tooth enema, the gloriously gut-shredding antics of these apocalyptically antisocial Aztecs makes for a frightfully fascinating festival of phantasmagorical, flesh flaying fun! If the 'Video Dead' gave you 'pause for thought', then the fabulously FX-heavy, head-spinning savagery of 80s splatter sensation 'The Laughing Dead' will send you straight to the funny farm!!!! With its Tromatizingly theatrical thesping, gallows humour, and generously gloopy gore, only the most twisted terrornauts should mark a date on their Mayan calendar to watch the grossly under-celebrated, gallopingly grisly, splendidly shock-saturated, corpse-clotted celluloid chunkblower, 'The Laughing Dead'.

'If you haven't got the heart to watch the gleefully gruesome 'The Laughing Dead', it's only because a murderous Mayan death god has just bloodily torn it out of your chest!!! - Weirdlingwolf.