Walking the Edge (1985) - Norbert Meisel.

Versatile, ruggedly charismatic Robert Forster is pitch perfect as tough, wiseacre L.A cabbie Jason Walk, in downbeat, live-wire 80s crime classic Walking The Edge. Jason's stoic attempt to aid grieving mother Nancy Kwan, leading him precipitously into grievous conflict with sinister hood Brusstar(Joe Spinell). Pure dynamite from the get-go, the undiminished excellence of the sublime cast wholly justifies a purchase, and excitingly, Meisel's sinewy, Noirish narrative proves equally compelling! While the plot is familiar, well-meaning Rube discovers that no good deed goes unpunished, it is rarely executed with such dazzling rigour as this hard-boiled, beautifully crafted, visceral crime thriller! Without belabouring the point, having an exceptional cast, gifted with such a thrilling text and able director, it must come as little surprise how extraordinarily well it still holds up today! Muscular, kinetic, and breathlessly entertaining, Walking The Edge is another burnished Blu-ray jewel in boutique label, Fun City Edition's eminently collectable, lovingly restored library of exemplary cult classics.

 Hot Nights on Campus (1966) – Tony Orlando.

Hyperbolic blather introduces this seamy monochromatic hotbed of extrovert, boozily licentious coed shenanigans, wherein a naïve, distractingly voluptuous Indiana blonde (Gigi Darlene)distressingly discovers that her zealous experimentation with promiscuity is not without risk. The relentlessly pedantic narration and near-constant lounge jazz score becomes wearing, they needed to ixnay the dreary chat, mix it up with some burning fuzz guitar nuggets, and flash more of the gash, baby! The more avid connoisseurs of dingy 60s smut, arguably the perverted to whom Hot Nights on Campus so ardently preaches, might dig on this the most, but the dearth of weird digressions ultimately proved disappointing. In truth, I found it all a tad fatuous, strongly suggesting to me that 'Tony Orlando' is, perhaps, another one of Andy Warhol's flaccid factory acolytes. In the film's great, GREAT favour, the juicily pneumatic blonde provides some exquisitely LOVELY eye candy, like, instant diabetes! Many of her equally scrumptious co-starlets thrillingly favour big knickers, and fearless foot freaks may appreciate the plentiful footage of permissive hotties coquettishly exposing their grubby-soled tootsies! Num-nums!!!!

 Take me Naked (1966) Michael & Roberta Findlay.

'She is a living tomb of flesh, in her nothing will grow!'

Some might say purple prose and Skid row Slap n' tickle makes for an inharmonious coupling, and it is, perhaps, this startling incongruity that makes 60s fartsy artsy flesh phantasmagoria 'Take me Naked' so uniquely fascinating. If Warhol had been a true artist, he would have made Take me Naked, but he wasn't, so he didn't, thank Satan for the Findlays, fervid purveyors of distractingly voluptuous Sinema. I find it to be a teasingly tactile experience, softly, and strangely alluring, as though being tenderly enveloped in a filigree gauze of the finest silk. Watching these divinely uninhibited creatures cavorting sensually amongst a sumptuous confluence of female fecundity remains an intoxicating experience, especially since Take Me Naked has an elegiac, deliriously hashish-hazed quality. This enthusing might be somewhat overripe, but we can't all be F. Scott Fitzgerald, some of us have to make the best of existing as a crawlspace-dwelling nullity. In summation, or, in completion, I have composed a beatnik love ode, a lode, if you will, my heartfelt tribute to a smutty Grindhouse feature I'm really rather fond of.

'some may call it rude, to so wantonly wallow in such creamy-dreamy pulchritude, but, dude!!! I ain't no rube, turn off that boob tube, and pass me the lube, Ermintrude!'

 Skinned Alive (1990) – Jon Killough.

Sexy Sister scumbag Violet, grotty brother scumbag Phink, and granny super-scumbag Crawldaddy drive their skeezicks van around bumphuck U.S.A, picking up vastly unfortunate hitch-hikers, brutally rendering them into exotic leather goods! There is, perhaps, some argument that delightfully sleazy slasher Skinned Alive is one of the first horror films to pillage the gruesomest excesses of 70s Grindhouse splatter, bringing it kicking and screaming into the 90s! As Peter Jackson's audacious Brain Dead threw down the gauntlet for grandiose gore gags, so Skinned Alive gleefully upped the ante in nihilism, since there's enough dime store depravity herein to assuage the most rabidly desensitised Gorehound! The technical aspects of Skinned Alive are incredibly decent, electric performances are compellingly grungy, the practical FX are appreciably grisly, and there's a winning streak of raven black humour throughout. Charlie Manson never made any features, yet his egregious crimes continue to inspire film-makers to this very day, but if that mental midget HAD made a film, I'd very much like to think it would be a teensy weeny bit like Skinned Alive!

 Family Enforcer (1976) – Ralph De Vito.

This surprisingly robust example of violent 70s Mobsploitation has an exceptionally charismatic cast of actors, featuring absolutely credible performances from Joe Pesci, Frank Vincent and, to my mind, the somewhat underrated Joseph Cortese. Family Enforcer's gratuitously body-strewn narrative treads the very same goombah gored path as Mean Streets, ambitious thug Joe's (Joseph Cortese) hopes of rising through the ranks of his boss's crew are thwarted by hubris, misfortune, and murderous duplicity. Fans of conspicuously bloodthirsty Mafiosi shoot 'em ups will find much to enjoy in Family Enforcer, since director Ralph De Vito has been especially generous with the film's frequently bloody scenes of shot-gunning Mafiosi mayhem! Originally released on the grey market 23^rd century DVD label, I earnestly believe that this boisterously bloody 70s gangster flick is entirely deserving of a restoration.

 Grave Robbers aka Dead Mate (1988) – Straw Weisman.

'Slave to the grave!!!!'

Seductively creepy undertaker (David Gregory) rapidly beguiles, and no less hurriedly weds a beautiful, hard-luck waitress (Elizabeth Mannino), who intimately discovers that all the grisliest rumours concerning a mortician's morbid proclivities are disturbingly valid! While the necromantic narrative owes much to cult cadaver classic Dead & Buried, Grave Robbers is blackly funny, with lively performances that recalls the very breast, or very worst of Troma. Highpoints include lava hot leading lady Mannino, the eyeball-popping practical FX, and there's a palpably sordid quality to the extra curricular activities undertaken within the Cox Funeral Home! While Grave Robbers is no unearthed horror gem, it sho' nuff 'ain't no stiff, and, happily, the epithet 'you couldn't get laid in a morgue!' can not be applied to Weisman's sexy Grave Robbers!

 Death Kiss (2018) – Rene Perez.

If the bemusing concept of a craggy Bronson lookalike serially annihilating skeevey street thugs in a bullet-blasted haze of ultra-bloody squib mess sounds sexy, Death Kiss is arguably worth puckering up for! To atone for the evil this moustachioed man must do, aided by vitriolic radio jock (Daniel Baldwin), pseudo Bronson (Robert Kovacs) unleashes his recycled rite of brutal justice. The film's routine text and technical aspects are mostly competent, Death Kiss pretty much stands or falls upon whether, or not, Kovacs can cut the mustard, and I feel Grey Poupon better watch his deliciously aromatic back! One sincerely hopes Death Kiss inspires an action trend, I'd personally relish the reality of seeing a retrograded, Nico-slender Seagal clone kill-fest. After a chutney ferret/Tiktok terrorist/CrossFit Cro-Magnon executes his greatly beloved Korean sensei, slinky Seagal seeks the bloodiest vengeance; his cruel Ford Fairlane lookalike nemesis ruing the day he fatefully vexed this pony-tailed, psychopathically bone-snapping savage!

School in the Crosshairs (1981) – Nobuhiko Obayashi.

Plucky heroine Yuko (Hiroku Yakushimaru) teams up with amiable, Kendo-savvy buddy Kouji (Ryouichi Takayanagi) to courageously battle fascist alien oppressors in Obayashi's cult Sci-actioner School in the Crosshairs. A deliriously inventive, neon-hued admixture of pulp Sci-fi spectacle, telekinetic action teens, and synapse-sizzling psychedelic interludes! With assured genre maestro Obayashi at the helm, this compelling, hugely likeable, zestily entertaining feature provides uproariously escapist fare! The kinetic, whimsical, beguilingly eccentric, high school showdown remains a patently joyous viewing experience, concluding thunderously in a kaleidoscopically colourful, memorably mental finale! 

 Another day, Another Man (1969) – Doris Wishman.

'Do we ever know who we really are?'

The high-priestess of goofy suburban sin-o-rama creates another monochromatically mucky foray into fabulously flesh-centric sinema with Another Day, Another Man! Naïve, strawberries and cream newly-weds soon run into financial difficulties, descending ingloriously unto a dismal denouement, sleazily facilitated by a brutishly opportunistic pimp and his sordid machinations. As expected, the dialogue is of the purest, unleavened tripe, but the scintillatingly curvy cast remain sensuously diverting, and there's a low-wattage, curiously sexless cat fight that provides some winningly camp hi-jinks! My continued appreciation of Wishman's fleshly folly are the distractingly high quotient of enjoyable incidental weirdness therein. Novel editing choices, pre-Bridget Jones objectification of voluminous knickers, stock melodramatics, and the frequent twitchy close-ups of bodacious-looking décolletage being a major highlight!

 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!