And Your Bird Can Sing (2018) – Sho Miyake.

This lively, ethanol-spiked drama presents three friends who fatefully become amorously love- triangled during a sultry, happy-go-lucky, increasingly boozy summer. As an eternally melancholic loner, I maintain an especial fondness for romantic drama, since it examines an experience I have had little success with. I remain eternally on the outside, looking in, making me an ideal, somewhat relentless consumer of cinema. While And Your Bird Can Sing's plot covers familiar territory, it does so with considerable charm, and the amiable lovestruck protagonists proved wholly engaging. A great many films deal with the chilling existential angst of youthful vitality slipping inexorably into the turgid miasma of middle-age, and, thus far, the only viable momentary antidote is strong drink, opioids, and extreme heavy metal. I'm manifestly at the age when I can allow myself a wee bit of a nostalgic wallow in the blithely hedonistic, emotional, summer-singed tumult within Sho Miyake's frothy And Your Bird Can Sing. While the themes presented herein are universally relatable, my personal experiences were somewhat darker than these cats, but I certainly won't hold that against 'em! I very much enjoyed how the narrative allowed space for the trio's differing personality traits to be unhurriedly revealed, and there's some palpable truth in the film's blunt conclusion.

 Crickets aka Korogi. (2006) – Shinji Aoyama.

A delectably pale, rather singular woman (Kyoka Suzuki) cares for a mute, blind old man (Tsutomu Yamazaki) and Aoyama's contemplative, surrealist-adjacent, occasionally eerie drama examines the increasingly strange dynamic between this appealingly odd couple. Flawlessly acted, with stunning visuals, Crickets aka Korogi remains a gorgeous example of immersive, hugely atmospheric, low key cinema. A richly hued tone poem, with an exquisite score, providing film fans with a wealth of oblique wonders to contemplate upon, long after the credits have rolled; one may even recall some of the film's more beautifully languid moments days later. Korogi is a fascinatingly original presentation of the etheric ties that mysteriously bind people to one another, set against an exceptionally pretty rural backdrop. Both Kaoru and her aged blind companion prove themselves to be unusually compelling characters, while some of the narrative proved enigmatic, it remains elegiac, having an almost soothingly lilting quality, drawing you deeply into its mysteries like a dimly recalled childhood lullaby. There are some films that entertain, and others like the inspirational Crickets kinda makes you want to pick up a camera and make your own film!

 Dance of The Pumpkin Head aka Tanz Der Kurbiskopfe. (1997) – Andreas Bethmann.

According to folk legend, on Halloween night, the monstrous figure of Pumpkin Head will once again stalk the earth, lustfully seeking victims to sate his befouled hunger for blood! There is some valid argument to the suggestion that Bethmann's Dance of The Pumpkin Head remains one of the most criminally undervalued, pagan-themed homegrown Halloween slashers. Set around a haunted graveyard, this largely hand-held S.O.V slasher's pacing is a tad unhurried, and the technical aspects, are, as one might suspect, strictly D.I.Y, and yet, Dance of The Pumpkin Head proves itself to be an unexpectedly fun splatter-fest. Heroin is bad m'kay!!!!! but if y'all partake of of The 'Horse' in Pumpkin Head's patch, it rilly BAD m'kay!!!! The graphic gore FX are deliciously unsophisticated, a kind of anti-Bottin, syringes, and plentiful red sauce, Baden Powell would appreciate Bethmann's can-do, no-budget optimism, and I feel he would have awarded Dance of The Pumpkin Head a merit badge!There's a skeevey door-to-door salesman herein providing super-skeevoid animal antics, along with out-sized dildos, and it almost pains me to note that this never became a thing! The dissonant electronic score proves surprisingly excellent, recalling the work of Carlo Mario Corda, and his many fine contributions to Filmirage. Dance of The Pumpkin Head is a niche slasher, but I believe it deserves a bigger audience than it currently enjoys. Bethmann even creates a modest amount of cheapnis pathos over Stephan's remorse, and an especially choice-looking head squib!!!!

 There is a Secret in my Soup (2001) – Yeung Chi Kin.

Another enjoyably grim and nihilistic Cat III shocker based upon the infamous Hong Kong Hello Kitty murder that also inspired Human Pork Chop. Down on her luck, fatally light-fingered sex worker Maggie (Cherry Chan Chiu-chiu) steals money from her friend's skell boyfriend, and is cruelly held captive, abused, tortured/brutalized, until her tweaked-out killers appropriate an especially indigestible mode of body disposal! Sordid, cruel, violent, and darkly compelling, Yeung Chi Kin's There is a Secret in my Soup plays pretty rough! I have a morbid fascination about grisly exploitation features based on explicitly horrible crimes, and while this might prove unpalatable to some, it certainly provides enough meaty Cat III grotesquery to satisfy those with an interest in the case, and sleazoid Asian WTFuckery! While Human Pork Chop is a mite grottier, There is a Secret in my Soup remains a flavoursome HK body-shocker with solid film-making, and queasy elements of unbridled nastiness. Structurally, there are similarities to Human Pork Chop, but I don't believe that impinges upon its credibility as a viable alternate reading of this grisly tale exploring man's seemingly limitless propensity for evil. Kudos to the director for his titillatingly incongruous nookie extravaganza in the garage, Zalman King, eat yer' heart out, guy!!!! Cat III sleaze-a-thon There is a Secret in my Soup can be filed under exploitation cinema featuring Gory interludes, mild cannibalism, and murderously meth-inspired misanthropy!

The Abomination (1988) – Bret McCormick.

A handsome young buck (Scott Davis) fearfully relates the horrific tale of his shut-in religious mother's blind obsession over repellent TV evangelist Brother Fogg, who miraculously exorcises a carnivorous growth, and once free from her lung, it monstrously metastasizes into a ravenous, kitchen unit-dwelling, insidiously spawning Abomination!!!! Long unavailable on domestic physical media, low-fi splatter Impresario McCormick's legendarily lurid, intestinally fortified Super-8 creature feature The Abomination is bloodily brought to crimson-hued technicolour life on Visual Vengeance's absolutely cherishable Blu-ray restoration. The Abomination is a Bible Belted, cheapnis admixture of Deadly Spawn, Little Shop of Horrors, and David Cronenberg's body-shocker masterpiece 'Shivers', a loopy-Lou Lovecraftian bloodbath that gorily provides anything but abominable entertainment. While I slightly favour McCormick's Ozone : The Attack of The Redneck Mutants for its winningly goofy content, The Abomination is a bona fide D.I.Y gore-blaster wholly deserving of its ever expanding fanbase.

 Blind Love (2005) – Daisuke Goto.

The acclaimed director of Pink classic 'A Lonely Cow weeps at Dawn' presents the enjoyably tweaked Rom-com Blind Love that follows the amorous misadventures of the blind, dazzlingly beautiful acupuncturist Hikari (Konatsu), who falls deeply for the entirely wrong ventriloquist! While one often hears the phrase love is blind, but only rarely do we see it dramatised so succinctly than in maestro Daisuke Goto's often whimsical, compellingly dark eroto-drama 'Blind Love'. For reasons I have never quite fully understood, I have always been able to identify more fully with the weird-beard antagonists in Japanese pink cinema, than with the fatuous archetypes in routinely recycled US product. I've long been fascinated by the seemingly effortless way some Japanese Film-makers are able to put so much more depth, intrigue, and inventive playfulness into an hour, whereas their American counterparts waffle inanely on-and-on through film after film without ever once truly hitting the sweet spot. Blind Love is undeniably erotic, yet the emotive dramatic content, and winning strangeness proved entirely complimentary. It goes without saying, Hikari is an absolute doll, and I must confess, the final scene unexpectedly choked me up a bit.

 Gore Whore (1994) – Hugh Gallagher.

Coming penis hard at you like a mongrelized 90s Michael Findlay scrubber nasty, hybridized with H.G. Lewis, lysergically reimagined by Butthole Surfer Gibby Haynes. There's just no way a gonzo exploitation howler with a lean, hot-looking skeezer biting off a dude's schwantz can ever be seen as bad art!!!! I'm super-glad Gore Whore stole the documents, I fucking hate documents, and I fucking hate Ivy League stink funnels even more!!!! Gore Whore remains a thrillingly forward-stinking film, created for future deadbeats, and it's lava hot, in a dime-store creeper, armpit fetid, pornoid way. I cannot substantiate this, but I earnestly believe that Gore Whore is doing God's work, God being Grindhouse splatter, 'natch! GAH!!!!!!! A tweaked lesbian assistant that needfully consumes blood? Such a righteously lurid premise could not fail, and it manifestly did not!!!! The skinny Satanic slay siren in Gore Whore inspires more evil boners than Kathleen Turner did in Serial Mom!!! Gore Whore remains the finest genre film Kristen Stewart never made, tiny part greasy-Grisly crime-noir, big part blood wank, all wrapped up in a billion dollar's worth of snarkiness!!!!

 Her Father, My Lover (2015) – Kenji Yamauchi.

'Pure love is abnormal!'

The close relationship between two female companions is gradually put under increasing stress as one of them Maya (Wako Ando) begins to amorously obsess over bestie Taeko's (Yukino Kishi) father. (Mitsuro Fukikoshi) A richly layered, joyfully eccentric romantic drama with an exceptional text, compelling performances, and a deliciously twisted sense of humour. Mismatched lovers have frequently provided fertile cinematic grist, the avatar being Harold & Maude, and in this instance, Her Father, My Love is a winningly off-beat Maya to December romance! While Maya is often accused of being a sicko, she seems absolutely earnest, the fact that she acts so obliviously to the chaos unfolding around her singular choice of life partner was ultimately pretty adorable. The refined film-making, and wholly naturalistic performances are exquisite, the frequent awkwardness of life are acutely rendered with remarkable sensitivity, and director Yamauchi's choice to let the more emotionally salient moments play out in real-time allowed for greater emotional verisimilitude. I was fully expecting a left-handed climax, but it concluded dramatically in a considerably more skewed fashion than I could have predicted! While I overuse the term 'gem', Kenji Yamauchi's immersive Her Father, My Love truly is a burnished jewel of quirky Japanese cinema.

 Zombio 2: Chimarrao Zombies. (2013) – Petter Baiesdorf.

The gratuitously splatter-slathered sequel to Brazilian cult classic Zombio ecstatically ups the glutinous quotient of gore, and certainly doesn't stint on delivering Grindhouse-levels of scintillating sleaze and arbitrary nudity. Spectacularly lurid, audaciously be-slimed, gleefully amateurish, fabulously crude, and never once less than wonderful! Zombio 2 is so immaculately old school it should come with a super-8 mini-edition, manifestly not 28 Days Later, resolutely cut from the very same foully be-rotted funereal shrouds as Burial Ground, and Hell of The Living Dead, sinisterly slow-moving harbingers of righteously gut-ripping, luridly bile-barfing death! Even without the winningly Russ Meyer-esque sequence of weaponized pendulous breasts, the gruesomely oleaginous, lurch-core zombies won me over almost immediately. Baiesdorf's Zombio 2 is an uproariously entertaining, jungle-set gore-blaster, an unfiltered amphetamoid rush of intensely bloody, exhilaratingly retrograded sleazoid splatter epicness!

Hello Zombie aka Haisai Zonbi(2014) – Soichi Takayama.

Passionate, yet down on his luck indie director Domon's no-budget zombie flick takes a terrifying turn into reality after they closely encounter a bona fide, brain-munching denizen of the dead!!!! Takayama's consistently lively Zombie-com doesn't take itself too seriously, and bouncily provides many juicy, boisterously executed splatter-gags. Hello Zombie is a playful, entertainingly goofy example of super-jocular, J-Horror jackanapes, and if you keep your brain in a jar, a gorily good time will be had by all! I have absolutely no shame in admitting that I watched this solely based upon my zealous appreciation of the fabulously lurid poster art, which effectively captures the spirited energy of this indie gem. While it's clearly spoofing the innate absurdity of the genre, it does so with great charm, and a wholly infectious wit,and it packs a lot of engagingly blood-spattered buffoonery in its 60 min. running time! Hokey Hollywood horror is like a prodigiously watered down JD & coke in a club, whereas J-horror frequently delivers a roundhouse kick like the heroic doses of JD & coke you prepare at home. I'm not even that partial to Zombie horror, but I massively dug this, and Takayama deserves kudos for the righteous, sexy-freaky Geisha zombie, which, I must openly admit, got me feeling more than a tad sexified! Gorehounds may care to note that the bodaciously bloody FX are by madman Yoshihiro 'Tokyo Gore Police' Nishimura.