Element of Doubt (1996) – Christopher Morahan.

Gina McKee and Nigel Havers star in thrillingly above average 90s TV treat Element of Doubt, with notable character actor Michael Jayston being on splendidly chilling form! Morahan's tense, slickly fashioned psychodrama has an engaging text, steeled with sinisterly Patricia Highsmith'd, playfully nefarious Hitchcockian incident. I don't know if the entertaining What Lies Beneath-ish Element of Doubt is currently widely available for purchase, but it should be, since it ably provides lively distraction to avid thriller addicts! McKee and Havers have great chemistry as the increasingly adversarial married couple, with smoothly duplicitous rapscallion Havers being slippier than a Greek salad, and angsty McKee is distractingly beautiful, providing an exquisitely pale, enormously sympathetic, Clouzot-like heroine.

 The Last Vampire aka Blood Bath (1966) – Jack Hill.

Revered B-maestro Jack Hill's luridly expressionistic Gothic shocker remains an eminently watchable, terrifically toothsome 60s terror treat. With its Buckets of Blood, cobweb-creepy crypts, buxom beauties, and all frightful manner of Grand Guignol extremis, Hill's darkly voluptuous imagery proves no less seductive than the eerily hypnotic gaze of hateful hedonist, Rasputin himself! Vibrant performances, atmospheric chiaroscuro photography, jazzily pulped dialogue, and a sinisterly dreadful, Edgar Allan Poe'd climax, like, karma is a beach, man!!!! If boisterously beatnik'd buffoonery, dingy dungeon despotism, goof-ball repartee, Nosferatu'd nookie, and gore-splattered décolletage be your warmly clotted cup of plasma, then this is one Blood Bath any vintage horror fan should happily take a deeply satisfying soak in.

 The Ballad of Narayama (1983)- Shohei Imamura.

It is with an almost inexcusable tardiness that I finally got round to watching maestro Imamura's stunning, universally acclaimed period drama The Ballad of Narayama. This masterful, exquisite-looking film made a profound impression on me, with two especially impactful scenes that I shan't very soon forget!

 'The Girl who Leapt Through Time' (1983) - Nobuhiko Obayashi.

This may well sound like fanciful hyperbole, but The Girl who Leapt through time remains one of the loveliest, most expressly romantic teenage dreamscapes I have seen. Whenever I revisit it, Obayashi's smartly sci-fi'd, coming-of-age fantasy warmly expands my increasingly jaded middle-aged heart to bursting! This charming, perceptive, sweetly acted, timelessly time-warping adventure provides a compelling, singularly immersive experience that sadly concludes all too quickly. Magical cinema that miraculously evokes the tender, deliciously mad rapture of burgeoning young love are, frankly, no less rarefied than the experience itself. A uniquely uplifting experience, and exceptionally well crafted, The Girl who Leapt Through Time has manifestly retained all of its undiminished magical allure! With a gossamer wing sensitivity, The Girl who Leapt Through Time transports the viewer into an elegiac, beautifully humane world that is both wholly familiar and deliciously strange, mirroring life itself, maestro Obayashi's exquisite film proves to be a circuitous journey that is not altogether predictable.

 Hot Month of August (1966) – Doris Wishman/Sokrates Kapsaskis.

A naïve young drifter returns home from an unsuccessful trip to Athens, and unknowingly falls into a honey trap, which ultimately implicates him in stock murder-sex-shenanigans. Set in Greece, this sporadically saucy thriller, while often dull, is arguably more picturesque than most of its ilk. Lightweight soapy noir shtick and soft-core, indelicately inserted bonking scenes make for uneasy bedfellows in modestly saucy summer romp Hot Month of August. The dusky, fabulously feline female protagonists are quite luscious, Wishman's probing camera rigidly focuses our attentions on their increasingly not-so private parts with an exhilarating lack of restraint! The leaden dialogue is so trite that it almost makes it as camp, but to the film's credit, the bouncy/loungey score is proper righteous! Happily, the monotone dubbing greatly heightens the comedic content, lending the prosaic plot/text some hugely welcome unintentional levity. 

 The Swap and How they make it (1965) – Joe Sarno.

Some monochromatic, sizzlingly melodramatic wife-swapping exotica from one of the smartest, inventively stylised purveyors of higher brow bedroom bacchanalia! It's interesting to note that all of the frisky female swingers are quite strikingly beautiful, whereas the anonymously Brooks-Brothered menfolk are, like, cubesville, man!!! These cardboard cats are such lightweight squares you could use 'em as disposable napkins, but the score includes some dynamite fuzz guitar that frequently amps up the voltage in Sarno's salty suburban swap-a-rama. Once the wantonly wondering wives have salaciously sated their extra marital itches, the angst kicks in heavier than a Chernobyl-sized hangover. It is not absolutely beyond the realm of plausibility to suggest that Joe Sarno's finest erotic dramas share the same intimate qualities as Cassavetes, since the filmmaking is often equally compelling, vivid and freewheeling, yet capturing tender intimacies with remarkable sensitivity.

 A Clock Work Blue (1972) – Eric J. Haims.

This goofy, sporadically chucklesome 70s cheekiness features exceedingly broad comedy elements, time-travelling titillation, and a luscious bevy of bonnily bouncing babes, lustfully indulging in satirical sequences of soft-core schtupping. While A Clockwork Blue's ribald comedy shenanigans haven't aged especially gracefully, Haims's historical hump-fest might prove a decent-ish one-time watch for the more avid consumer of period peek-a-boo buffoonery. This silly selection of Quantum Bed-leapings is mostly duff fare, but I must admit to finding the Scarlet Pimpernel skit camply amusing, and no fleshly comedy confection that includes the sublime utterance of 'Thy manhood climeth!' is entirely without merit!

 The Asian Connection (2016) – Daniel Zirilli.

'I want his head, put on this tray!!!!!'

A pair of opportunistic ex-cons commit the egregious error of ripping off a Cambodian Bank holding Gang Boss Seagal's loot, leading to duplicity, and bloody, bullet-blasted retribution. Shot against an especially picturesque backdrop, The Asian Connection benefits greatly from its exotic, sun-slaked location, happily providing a distractingly glossy sheen to these stock, one-heist-too-many shenanigans. Featuring ubiquitous double-dealing, a lunkheaded, trigger happy sidekick, a slinky Thai siren (Avalon), noisome, but somewhat synthetic-looking action, with bubble-butt Seagal making for more of a glumly constipated villain than usual. I'm not saying that okay-ish DTV actioner The Asian Connection benefits from Seagal's prolonged absences, but it would be fair to say, that it didn't hurt! As a fan of vintage Seagal, and his more gloriously goofy noughties misfires, I must confess that it proved to be more watchable fare than I thought. Happy Jack (John Edward Lee) and his beautiful beau Avalon (Pim Bubear) are sympathetically doomed, Seagal-crossed lovers, there's appealingly exotic scenery, and it's all over before any guilt about watching yet another formulaic Seagal flick kicks in!

 London Heist (2016) – Mark McQueen.

'He's a no good, dog cunt wrong 'un!!!!'

Charismatic man-cake Craig Fairbrass plays formidable blag artist Jack Cregan, the brawny brains behind a successful series of high profile heists in Mark McQueen's pacey gangland thriller London Heist. While the serviceable plot and dialogue aren't too lively, they are given additional pep by a fine cast of familiar faces, with national treasure James Cosmo being on chillingly understated, especially menacing form. With a couple of enjoyably boisterous set-pieces, London Heist proved far more compelling that I had imagined, and to the director's credit, the lairy, lad-tastic shenanigans climaxes bloodily in a thrillingly muscular manner. If you're going to hire someone to repeatedly snarl 'Slimy Cunt!', and other equally savoury epithets, you certainly can't do much better than Steven Berkoff! I must hereby confess to being an avid fan/collector of the Brit-Thug milieu, so in many instances I tend to be a trifle overgenerous with my praise, so I think fellow fans will appreciate London Heist more than those who wouldn't know a Long Boat from a cushty portion of Salmon Rushdie.