Tunnels aka Criminal Act. (1989) – Mark Myers.

While I cannot readily recall any specific box office bonanza set in a city sewer, there are a number of genre gems like C.H.U.D, Alligator, and schlock scion The Suckling aka Sewer Baby that provided some credible subterranean shocks! Not quite so lurid, playing out like an episode of The Equalizer, Tunnels finds our intrepid, conspicuously attractive heroines Pam (Barbara Bach) and Sharon (Charlene Dallas) investigate a suspicious death, that ultimately leads them to the shocking truth lurking malevolently below! Competent, though not enormously thrilling, Tunnels remains a passable 80s curiosity that has a capable supporting cast, bolstering our two saftig, especially picture perfect leading ladies.

While there are far greater numbers of obscure genre/B-titles being made available today, I'm not always convinced by their continued merit. Tunnels is worth reinvestigating, having an above average TV-Movie-of-The-week aesthetic, plus a disarming duo of pretty, wonderfully engaging female protagonists. John Saxon is always a joy, and Vic Tayback provides a brief, somewhat tangential comedic interlude. The only giant rats are the CEO's running amok in the sewers of big business, embodied by cynical property developer Lance Bellard (Victor Brant). The climax is glaringly goofy, but it didn't discolour my overall appreciation of this fun little B-thriller.

 Shallow Grave (1987) – Richard Styles.

During a rowdy road trip to Fort Lauderdale one of the 4 excitable college friends witnesses a sheriff coldly ice his squeeze, which escalates into a desperate race for survival in mostly watchable 80s backwoods thriller Shallow Grave. Once the girls hit the sweltering Georgia heat, the action boils over into horror cliché, but the lively lasses prove amiable enough, plus their vibrantly 80s fashions are delightful. Talking of visual delights, vampy, utterly scrumptious brunette bombshell Donna Baltron being one of the horny High School screamers ruthlessly pursued by the increasingly deranged cop is a MAJOR B-movie bonus.

A largely routine pseudo-slasher, but certainly proficient, Shallow Grave's relative obscurity is understandable, but not entirely deserved. As a great admirer of Baltron I was more than happy to check it out, as she brought her signature sauciness to the first act, but shallow Grave is an apt moniker, since the thrills lack depth, and just once, it would have been exhilarating if the snarky cop actually believed the protagonists story right off the bat! Psycho cop Dean (Tony March) was crudely erotic in his conspicuously sweaty Chest Rockwell stylings, and the director noticeably picks up the slasher slack in the final act.

 Slaughtered Vomit Dolls (2006) – Lucifer Valentine.

'I don't know what's left of me, but you can fuck it if you want!!!'

Lucifer Valentine's deliberately confrontational Slaughtered Vomit Dolls is moistly as good as it sounds! Hyperbolically trashy Grindhouse flicks with visually brusque, graphically transgressive approaches to the old in-out are surely to be cherished. No one truly cares about Pretty Woman or Ghost, in future, I believe the art of cinema will be validated by the caustic eruptions of Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, and that's not just because I enjoy repeatedly saying Slaughtered Vomit Dolls out loud!!!! Well, okay, I kinda do, but I'm certainly not gonna give myself a hard time about it! Aggressively haggish, sordidly Self-destructive women slathered in a cheapnis video aesthetic, with slow-mo devil vox are absolutely hotter than the brimstoned pitch forks they'd clearly appreciate being stuck up their botties.

It would be delightful if more features employed an additional 'deep soiling process', wherein the viewer enjoys more of a participatory response, experiencing a genuine frisson of moral grubbiness. It is actually quite remarkable how utterly compelling the grottish admixture of nudity, thickened clots of graphic gore, unexpurgated vomiting, and boozy exhibitionism can be. Sometimes I can happily wallow in dissonant music, and numbing myself with equally discordant imagery often provides a refreshing antidote to the stifling mediocrities of standard splatter movie cliches. It might just be me, but the Bloodsucking Freaked scene, whereby a disturbed guy repeatedly regurgitates into another dude's bloodily excavated skull proved morbidly fascinating, and, sadly, won't ever become a Hollyweird trope.

 Horror of The Hungry Humongous Hungan. (1991) – Randall Dininni.

Ubiquitously insane scientist inexplicably unleashes a voodoo curse, thereby enabling his recently reanimated creature to rampage gruesomely upon humanity with his monstrously elephantine death claw!!! I kinda dug the sound of that schlocky premise, but it doesn't mean that HoTHHH isn't still a reeking sump of Z-Movie silage. Palance's interminable narration is made palatable by the innate fact that he quite patently doesn't believe a world of it, but I can massively relate to the Hungan coyly playing Patty Cake, Patty Cake with his victim's runny-looking tummy snakes, rather than eating any of it! Hungan engages only partially with the most retrograded coils of the viewers brain, but it does communicate directly with the murky mechanism that reacts extremely positively to magisterially poor acting.

The inertia-inducing 'dramatic' interludes are spectacularly turgid, and some maverick misfit needs to release a fan-edit of all the non-Hungan material herein! Insipid hair-lords Cry Wolf shrilly perform an unduly optimistic track entitled 'It's getting Better!', while Dininni's soggy schlocker becomes increasingly infirm. The only truly shocking fact is that it took two people to write it!!??? Surely, a vivisected chimpanzee, and a well-worn copy of Troma's 'Movie Crapola for Dummies' would have yielded more credible results!? I dug HotHHH unreservedly, and not just because the Hungan looked like a failed gene splicing of a bad dream Dave Franco, and David Ike! I assume the good doctor Henry gave his Hungan one regular-sized hand, just so he could take care of his solo sexy business!? While I'm absolutely certain your Aunt Fanny's fanny could fart a better film than this, but until that benighted day, we shall just have to make do with this one!

 Mai-Chan's Daily Life : The Movie (2014) – Sade Sato.

'Today im going to take your delicious eyeball!!!'

A beautiful young woman (An Koshi) takes a job as a maid at an isolated, apparently dilapidated domicile, and becomes cruelly embroiled in her new master's (Shogo Maruyama) cannibalistic eccentricities. Mai-Chan's Daily Life is definitely the kind of Moorish Grindhouse treat that would have made Ed Gein cut momma's apron strings that much earlier! A darkly sexy, prodigiously gory, deliciously fetishistic J-Horror gem for unrepentant perverts of all ages! No drama was ever made worse by including a scintillating interlude of attractive Asian women hungrily lapping milk from a silver dish! It's also fortunate that up-skirting is practically considered an art-form in Japan, if this had been produced in the UK, the film makers would have been publicly birched for its ruthlessly intrusive P.O.V. Not that I have any nutritional axe to grind, make merry while the sun still burns etc., but I believe that the slinkily sinister head maid's consumption of a lackey's eyeball might be more for show than its negligible vitamin content.

In my many film enthusings, I frequently overuse words like 'elegiac', and while its certainly merited here, I believe 'wholesomely perverse' would better suit Sato's immaculately twisted Mai-Chan's Daily Life : The Movie. 'It's delicious, but it hurts my tongue!!!' not quite sure why this line tickled me so robustly, but it did, so there!!! Part of me didn't want Mai to go into the Red Room, but most of me REALLY did, the director reading the viewer's peccadilloes with unerring accuracy here. Mai also does a really big wee in front of everyone, this fact certainly bares mentioning, as like many other children, I was unequivocally told that this was VERY bad, that I should ALWAYS use my potty when I wanted to do a la-la. One of the grislier sequences is spectacularly nauseating, and I shall never think of a young lady's gizzards in quite the same way ever again!

 The Convent (2000) – Mike Mendez.

I dig religion, I really do, without it I'd own far less music, and I'd lose 80% of my trashy horror movie collection. Nuns inspired maestro Ken Russell, and multitudes of lurid European schlock-makers to exploitation greatness. God has been good to us, and without habit-forming horror trash like The Convent, I'd have no fucking religion at all. There's a monstrous scene at the beginning, wherein a self-consciously cool chick gratuitously wastes 2rds of a bottle of JD!!!??? While Jesus won't sweat it, the devil ain't down with that, baby. Unfortunately, splatter addicts still don't earn a gratuity whenever the sonority prank/haunted house shenanigans rears its ugly head, otherwise, I'd be up to my beautiful botty in beaucoup gratuities, guy!

The Convent wisely dispenses with the snooze of a plot, and gets hectically creative with groovy-gloopy day-glow carnage! The amusingly boorish badinage, and witnessing those collegiate doofoids violently demonized proved hugely satisfying. Boozer, the dog, was another bonus, as I had somebody to really root for! Go, Boozer! Go!!!! The Convent is tiny taters next to Demons, but it is marginally better than Witchboard, but Spookies absolutely smokes its ass backwards, Hey!!!! NOTHING trumps farting mudmen, dude!!!! Final act is a Squib-tastic banger, Adrienne Barbeau rocks super-hard, single-handedly making me forget about the unwelcome disappearance of Boozer. Due to the plenitude of gory practical FX, The Convent still looks proper tasty, and the belated return of Boozer was vastly appreciated. Go, Boozer! Go!!!!

 Wicked Ways aka Table for One. (1999) - Ron Senkowski.

I'd happily watch a half-eaten jar of marmalade if it had Rebecca De Mornay's delicious face on it. Neglected, highly strung wife Ruth (De Mornay) and her bigamist husband's (Rooker)marriage is dysfunctional in the way Vlad the Impaler enjoyed a quirky way of alfresco dining. De Mornay's compelling allure is undiminished by her escalating eccentricities, she's John Water's kooky, giving off more searing heat than a hot rock massage in Death Valley. Gotta love Hollyweird, as their manifestations of crazy are often hyperbolically sexed-up, and mirrors reality no less falsely than Hubbard's Dianetics. Real crazies smell bad, look worse, and make an uncommon nuisance of themselves in public libraries, whereas De Mornay's hot-panted wife Ruth is never once ever less than eminently boffable!

The dramatic lure of things going catastrophically south for her duplicitous husband are quirkily telegraphed by Ruth's mountingly bizarre behaviour. Most women make do with erogenous zones, whereas Ruth has equally multitudinous 'Danger Zones', a series of inventive, Home Alone, husband annihilating booby traps! The sublimely farcical scene with the forgivably horny delivery dude was absolutely laugh out loud funny. I don't wish to be discourteous to Michael Rooker, who is more than fine, but he is resolutely outgunned on all levels by De Mornay, and I fell unashamedly in love with these fifty sultry shades of De Mornay. Endings are tricky, sequelitus has precluded anything but a goofy climax to a horror film, but the whimsical last shot in Wicked Ways suggests hope for the hugely beleaguered Kate.

L.A. Vice (1989) – Joseph Merhi.

I feel that it is entirely just to claim that no true blue B-movie cultist can remain oblivious to the hyper-ballistic, generously pyromaniacal charms of indie-action impresarios PM Entertainment Inc. Det. Chance (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) investigates a mob-curated kidnapping, which leads to the expectedly explosive conflagration of bloody bullet-hits, cliched Goombah blarney, fisticuffs, alpha cop repartee, and the obligatory scene of convenience store carnage. PM Entertainment are mostly consistent purveyors of above-average DTV goodness, and hiring gravel-voiced icon William Smith, albeit briefly, provides additional value. Det. Chance is a charismatic, shoot first, Miranda rights later cop, he eats bullets for breakfast, pisses napalm, has a dynamite right hook, and is no less adept at kicking ass, than tapping it!

Merhi's grungier L.A. Vice enjoys a flintier edge, in addition to the plentiful blood-squibs, someone is cruelly immolated, and a wise guy is gorily disseminated into family-sized chunks of Ravioli! L.A. Vice culminates in a wholesomely gee-whizz fashion, blithely suggesting that no amount of gratuitous violence can't be wholly redeemed by an act of God-fearin' charity. The DNA to Chance's roughneck cop, like many others, can be directly linked to Harry Callahan, his volatile admixture of might is right, street smarts, and straight-shooting morality means Chance sho' nuff gets the job done! L.A Vice is conspicuously less polished than PM Entertainment's later, slicker productions, but, for me, that works eminently in its favour!

 Apology (1986) – Robert Bierman.

This HBO/Cannon co-production has Peter Weller and Lesley Ann Warren providing a touch of class to so-so serial killer potboiler Apology. The hook is a new one to me, conceptual artist Lily(Warren) invites randoms to leave messages on her answerphone, pertaining to past crimes/misdemeanours/regrets, fatally attracting the macabre confessions of 'Claude' (Jimmy Ray Weeks), a homophobic maniac with an exceptionally grisly MO. While never straying from its conspicuously TV Movie-of-the-week aesthetic, Apology mostly held my interest, and not just because I wanted to know what the grandstanding skeeve was planning to do with all those severed peni!

Handsome pair, Weller & Warren are engaging, and appear well-suited, expressing a tangible chemistry, making the inevitable will-they-won't-they shtick appear less contrived than usual. Thriller fans might regard Apology more appreciatively than those looking for an especially bloody Psycho-shocker. Without belabouring the point, the exemplary leads are what prevent this from mediocrity, but even they can't quite revivify the formulaic final act. While Apology is well-made, employing an almost Giallo-esque audio trope, it spiels inexorably to its pallid conclusion, only briefly enlivened by some inspired Macgyver-esque shenanigans. Not wishing to end on a bum note, Maurice Jarre's inventive score has nothing to apologise for, being really rather splendid.

 Double Tap (1997) - Greg Yaitanes.

'Mowing helps me relax!!!!'

This satisfyingly violent Stephen Rea/Heather Locklear crime thriller enjoys some heft, namely being produced by Joel Silver and Richard Donner, but I still don't know exactly who to blame for hiring Moby to do the score! Only kidding, guy! Vegans are almost people too, m'kay!!! For the very first time I was able to fully appreciate the schmendrick line 'My Ass is on the line!!!!??', since, of course, Locklear's preternaturally perky botty MUST be protected all ALL costs!!!! The stolid cat and mousing herein isn't continually fascinating, but Locklear and Rea are consistently fun to watch, with hard-smoking, flint-edged Locklear proving especially magnetic. Double Tap remains a serviceable 90s Cop v. Hitman shoot 'em up, and the mostly prosaic text is embiggened by the quality of its exceptionally fine supporting cast.

The major dramatic surprise is the fact that I didn't hate the Moby score as much as I had initially thought. An energized Locklear is arguably at the height of her deliciously drop-dead dazzling-ness, and her willingness to assist killer Cypher (Rea) is credibly dramatized, since his righteous modus operandi is an eminently sympathetic one. Often brief, I have always relished legendary stuntman/wrestler Gene LeBell's playful cameos, and his skeevey appearance in Double Tap is a doozie!!!!! This is strictly Hot Dog and a Pepsi fare, and sometimes that hits just the right spot, but it never lasts. Heather's resourceful FBI agent is a real Live Wire, sorry, I couldn't resist at least one Crue reference!

 Ultimate Desire (1993) – Rodney McDonald.

A ritualistic killer douses a specific perfume over each victim, and it's mostly down to tough, sexy undercover ex-cop Lauren (Kate Hodge) to sniff out the malign perpetrator. Routine DTV thriller is largely a slinky cat and mouse between handsome perfumer Gordon's (Martin Kemp) prodigiously gifted olfactory bulb, and Lauren's heaven scent sleuthing, as they both attempt to out foxy one another. Glamorous vixen Deborah Shelton is no less glamorously vulpine as usual, she's bold, sassy, bi-curious, and wants us to think she might be the musky marauder! Is she? Pfft!!!! with all that toilet water under the bridge, who's gonna care now!?? As a permanently crawlspaced man, I can numbly watch cheaply voyeuristic trash like this, and if you extracted the slasher elements, you'd barely notice, but sans T&A, the lurid entertainment quotient would drop well below watchability. Regarding as to any artistic merit Ultimate Desire, may, or may not have, Kate Hodge is absolutely charming, undeniably beautiful and really rather good. I've always thought the prosaic cop backstory needs to be gussied up, the slow-motion/rain/partner/death/guilt is limper than Madolf's dead noodle. Ultimate Desire is ultimately a bit niffy, but features some appealing shots of L.A., and McDonald delivers an unexpectedly satisfying climax.

 All-American Murder (1991) – Anson Williams.

Normally I would rather incubate mosquito larva in my eye ducts than rewatch anything starring Charlie Schlatter, but I hold Christopher Walken in such high esteem, I stoically overlooked my prejudice. Coolly enigmatic detective Walken attempts to solve the brutal murder of high echelon WASP Tally (Josie Bisset), while all circumstantial evidence points glaringly at ex-pyromaniac loner Artie (Charlie Schlatter), the sordid reality of this crime proves far more unsettling. Disturbingly, I didn't dislike Schlatter's tousled, love-struck tearaway Artie, I sympathized with the beleaguered misfit as he desperately tried to clear his name.

All-American Murder is a sardonic, splendidly engaging admixture of angsty Brat-packer melodramatics, and zesty high school slasher. The showy introduction of detective P.J Decker (Walken) is utterly delicious film-making, wholly meritorious of an immediate rewind! Decker's wry sleuthing skills are consistently joyous to behold, frequently expressing empathy with the younger, snarkier Schlatter. As a collegiate murder mystery, it still has much to offer thriller addicts, and the oafish panty-huffing caretaker Forbes (J.C. Quinn) raising that especially beloved slasher archetype to a giddy level of purest kitsch, and the frantic final act proves thrillingly mayhemic, boasting a number of juicy kills! It wouldn't be entirely preposterous to suggest that All-American Murder might be labelled as 'A John Hughes version of an All-American Giallo'.