The Loners (1972) – Sutton Roley.

'I never scalp on St. Patrick's Day!'

This goofier example of 70s bikersploitation boasts a far stronger cast than it needs, Scott Brady, Pat Stich, Gloria Graham, and the always absurdly charismatic Dean Stockwell, plus some amiable schmendrick (Tod Sussman) who acts like a proto-Ted Raimi!?! I can readily imagine that the premise for The Loners was woozily written on a Rizla paper, and absent-mindedly smoked up later, since there's a palpable haze of fragmented THCeed thinking throughout! The Loners is a stoner Biker Flick with mild T&A, generic redneck cops, a dishy Blonde ditz (Pat Stich) goggly-eyed for hard-luck half-Navajo/Irish reluctant biker outlaw Stine (Stockwell), culminating bloodily in a Pseudo-Peckinpah climax, Badlands it 'aint! Slight Taco Bell fare, watchable enough at the time, but almost immediately forgotten. Not for the first time, Dean's performance (almost) makes it a real film, as without him its nothing more than a dingy counter culture cash-in with delusions of Drive-in grandeur. They never fail to mention easy Rider with reverence, failing to mention the largely unwatchable backwash it inspired in it's boffo box office wake. The trailer cherry picks all the best bits, leaving one to wearily wade through all the grot that didn't cut it. The Loner's only rarely gets out of 1^st gear, but one scene that registered was the deliciously hyperbolic exchange between boozy shrew mother (Graham) and her foofy-headed daughter Julio (Stich).

Video Demons Do Psychotown (1988) – Alessandro daGaetano.

The Truck's got a short?', 'The Truck's gotta short what?'

Hey! While the director's got a 100 $ name, he made a 2cent movie!

The massively clunky intro, and excruciating acting/dialogue sets the scene beautifully for neglected Supernatural Troma schlocker Video Demons Do Psychotown. Bickering young couple shoot video at a spooky old building with a generic chequered past, leading monotonously to muddled horror hokum. Plus points earned for casting B-fox Donna Baltron, as she's hotter than a Venusian BBQ! Troma, visual Junk Food, mostly delivers what y'all expect, goofy chat, flat lighting, happy hour acting, generous portions of T&A, and equally plentiful emissions of day-glow goo! If it wasn't for the dynamite presence of delicious Donna, Video the stinky Demons Do Psychotown would be soggier than a fully loaded diaper. I wouldn't say this sucked outright, but is is frequently prone to suckage, and the lack of luminous goo didn't much help! The buff, plastic dude playing doof-master dingus Eric (Ron Arragon) dully read his lines like an only just revived coma victim, exuding all the charisma of a doughnut hole! Video Demons Do Psychotown has a truly bodacious title, but it's slow, and not good Saint Vitus slow, BAD slow, like a Joe Rogan podcast. The score is deliciously annoying, and really accentuates the leaden film-making, and strikingly shock-less slasher tropes. I still adore aggressively dopey B-Horror, so, as much as I loathe to admit it, I still kinda dark parts of it, but any blessed with a cogent brain should approach Video Demons Do Psychotown with due caution.

 Blood Money (1996) – John Shippard.

'A slinky DTV crime thriller with Traci Lords, Billy Drago, and James Brolin???? Dip my nuts in chocolate, and call me a cab, things are sure to get juicy real quick!!!'

As is so often the case, money is the root of all DTV evils in predictable, cookie cutter crime flex Blood Money. Bad guys squabble, cops quibble, and the blonde femme fatale got some righteous sizzle! Slicker than Pm Entertainment fare, with conspicuously superior performances, especially from veteran Brolin, and sultry blonde siren Traci lords. Due to the fact Drago is listed as 'With Billy Drago', he, unfortunately, isn't given all that much to do. Blood Money is mostly routine stuff, gussied up with bloody gun violence, fisticuffs, and a decent home invasion/torture sequence. While arguably a doable one-timer for true Traci Lords completists, I kinda zoned in and out of this one, and I couldn't help but feel that the stock plot development, and character's names fell out of the same cracker jack box.

 Instant Death (2017) – Ara Paiaya.

'How do we handle this?' ' Instant Death!!!!' “BLAMMO” etc.

Herculean pop culture legend Lou Ferrigno plays the damaged special ops father of estranged daughter and grandchild, cruelly slain by London mobsters, needless to say, this makes him very, VERY ANGRY, and swiftly thereafter much of London's gangland gets righteously smashed in B-vengeance actioner Instant Death. Bemoaning the generic text is largely pointless, as all the good folk really want to know is whether man mountain Ferrigno delivers some brutal beat-downs, and he most certainly does! Not the most polished of low budget shoot 'em ups, arguably level-leading with a 2^nd tier beered-up Dyer/Fairbrass hooligun-fest. I had a proper blast watching big bad Lou Taken care of business, my admittedly low expectations were greatly exceeded, since Lou steps up like a boss, pile-driving through Razor's sleazy lackeys like an out of control armoured truck! The script's lack of invention is woefully apparent, yet there's a tangible nastiness to Razor's blood-thirsty thuggery which dramatically provides for a serviceably malevolent nemesis. While Instant Death is practically indivisible from Danny Dyer's winningly Death Wish'd Vendetta, it is also wholly fair to claim that Lou's unique persona proves irresistible, his sledgehammer-styled justice is awesome, and I sincerely hope this isn't the last we see of the heroically hulking head-knocker!

 Kill The Moonlight (1994) – Steven Hanft.

Amiably ambling indie comedy drama about increasingly frustrated dude Chance's (Thomas Hendrix) desperate attempts to raise the lofty 2.500 bucks to get his beloved stock car back on track, and the myriad pitfalls he experiences upon said boozy mission. Kill The Moonlight has a low-fi, appealingly meandering quality, the music herein having no less of a meandering, fuzzily low-fi appeal, tonally matched by the cast's oddball, equally Ghost Town'd performances. Not expressly similar, but Hanft's progressively THCeed, loosey-goosey mise-en-scene frequently vibes with early Solondz, Hartley, and Linklater. For my money, the director did a credible job building a relatable proletariat diorama for his aspirational protagonist to goof off in. I would happily watch this again with company, as I believe the quirkier comedic elements would be greatly enhanced when shared. While you can't truly escape the impression that Chance is on an inexorably downward slide, but y'all still want the cat to get his shambolic life, and stock car in higher gear. Yo! Any film that boldly claims Henry Winkler is the greatest of all movie stars is all good in my book, but what do I know, I'm just a schmuck living in a room the size of a walnut casing. Now that Hanft's film has percolated in my celluloid-clotted mind for a few hours, I think I can say without fear of hyperbole that Kill The Moon is utterly righteous!

'Hope is good breakfast!'

 Death Scenes (1989) – Nick Bougas.

'one of the witnesses would describe the crime scene as a slaughterhouse!'

Explicit, grotesque, and morbidly compelling, this spectacularly lurid compendium of graphic photography, collects many of the most unexpurgated examples of period, monochromatically memorialized murder, mayhem, and unalloyed cruelty. The grislier tableaus of self-annihilation, while often bloody, prove innately melancholic, the B/W imagery only slightly tempers the carnality of the more despicable crimes. Magnetically macabre material, and it is extremely just to suggest that Death Scenes is absolutely NOT for the squeamish, a relentlessly grim experience, remaining a ghastly, ghoulish,  uncommonly fascinating VHS-era Necronomicon. The tantalizingly Tabloid-y sections of famed outlaws, gangsters, sadistic killers, and Hollywood malfeasance remain especially delicious! The inconceivably gruesome, utterly vile crimes of Otto Steven Wilson aka Steve 'The Ripper' Wilson have such a patently nauseating ferocity, only the equally insane would question his state legislated extermination. Vintage mechanized death, ballistic bloodbaths, sordid strangulations, cut-throat carnage, and the bludgeoning brutality of cold-blooded murder, Death Scenes offers a traumatizing insight into the multitudinous misadventures of man's decent into abject degeneracy. Of all the outré material that shaped, or distorted my teenaged mind, gloriously gruesome mondo films have maintained their 'strictly Taboo' allure, and Bougas's chilling Death Scenes can now be regarded as a growing cult among fellow mondo-maniacs.

 Faces of Death 5 aka Gesichte des Totes.

'FOD 5!!??? Phook yaaaaaaaaaaaaasss!!!! I'm all over this gratuitous rot-fest like silky creamed herring on buttery smorgasbord, baby!'

While I prefer the more blackly sardonic tone featured in the previous instalments of the infamously schlocky FOD series, Part 5 sheds a grisly light upon the viler machinations of drug traffickers. Heroin and cocaine transported in the hollows of cadavers, and most distressingly, a mother killed her own child to smuggle contraband in its tiny body. As Death Docs go, this maintains a delicate of skein of respectability that partially obscures much of the wholly exploitative material herein. The strong footage, while often bloody, is never less than fascinating, but true to form, it is ultimately a crudely episodic affair, with some hugely suspect choices of clumsily purloined music cues! I have a fascination for especially gruesome vintage crime scene photos, an utterly prurient yen that was splendidly sated by this macabre mondo-montage of man's misfortunes. The frequency of child cadavers is almost unbearable, and about as far removed from light entertainment as one could possibly imagine. Undeniably satisfying on a profoundly base level, all recidivist Death Doc dabblers are not likely to feel underwhelmed with FOD 5, since the body count is conspicuously high. To be blunt, some of the explicit crime stills of brutally eviscerated women remain hugely shocking to witness. Cannibal cults, maniacal mob violence, genocide, sectarian savagery, vehicular decapitation, catastrophic accidents, and the bestialities of war provide the expressly bloodier parts of this boorishly be-rotted shockumentary.

 Living to Die (1990) – Wings Hauser.

'They all feel the same when the lights go off!'

A PM Entertainment DTV crime thriller with Wings Hauser, directed by Wings Hauser? I'm all over this like sweet mustard on a salty Polish sausage, dude! The routine bubblegum noir shtick is given additional savour by the magnetic pull of Arnold Vosloo and darkly charismatic hunk Wings Hauser. The familiar plot unfurls comfortably like a well worn sleeping bag, being a somewhat cosy, though far from disagreeable affair. Living To Die is a solid once only for Hauser, PM Entertainment addicts, and some of the banter proved sharper than expected, I can't be certain, but the juicier ripostes certainly felt ad-libbed? Less histrionic gun-play and slow-mo vehicular mayhem than usual, but the dynamic Hauser ably kept this watchable Vegas potboiler afloat almost single-handed. Keeping expectations low, Living To Die certainly remains a decent enough DTV time-killer. For the sake of full disclosure, I remain a huge admirer of Mr. Hauser's work, and own a large number of PM entertainment titles on DVD, so my positive impression is, perhaps, not altogether objective! (NOT) spoiler alert: Wing's gets to boink the bodacious-looking broad (Darcy DeMoss). T & A cognoscenti will greatly relish the exquisite vision of the distractingly delectable DeMoss in the blissful buff.

 Junk Films (2007) – Tsurisaki Kyotaka.

The famed creator of Orozoko The Embalmer unleashes another unflinchingly bloody shockumentary, one that generously provides a quite literally eye-popping preponderance of expressly mortal, frequently gruesome, real-life, video-immortalized death. While the contents can be intimately graphic, this largely unfiltered view of man's terrible fragility has always maintained a macabre, if occasionally inexplicable fascination for me. Junk Films is a vivid, morbidly voyeuristic compendium of internationally curated outré material, often sad, unexpectedly bizarre, with brutal, blood-spattered crime scenes, grisly road accidents, revered ancient burial rites, and random gory incident. I have no qualms over my undeniably adolescent appreciation of Faces of Death'd corpse-porn, in all of its notoriously suspect, mostly grim, trashy, crudely prurient, and often wholly exploitative guises. The myriad ills of our world are not the fault of extreme horror/gore/shockumentaries, it is simply because the human animal is a base creature, and has been foolhardily allowed to propagate unchecked. I found the material collected at the Thai vegetarian festival to be the most compelling, as the stultifying repetition of human roadside carnage proved somewhat numbing. There is a briefly amusing moment when you can see fat-bellied tourists gawking at the blazing riverside funeral pyres, the lurid camera's eye making sure we had a good long look at the melancholic sight of a jutting, partially charcoaled human leg.