'Requiem For a Vampire' (1972) – Jean Rollin.

Jean Rollin's oneiric 'Requiem For a Vampire' boasts many of his most indelibly evocative imagery. Playful and exotic, his unconventional, eerily off-beat phantasmagoria begins surrealistically with a cartoonish vehicular shoot-out. Now lost in the desolate countryside, our distractingly nubile protagonists, Marie-Pierre Castel and, Mireille Dargent fatefully shelter in a horror haunted chateaux. Once lured inside this doom-laden domicile, the innocent clown-faced reform school absconders are forced to endure unimaginable travails! Playing out teasingly like a hallucinatory, vibrantly hued fever dream,'Requiem For a Vampire' is another sublimely haunting example of macabre mood master, Jean Rollin's morbidly fascinating, thrillingly voluptuous take on Vampire lore.

Melancholy, erotic and profoundly mysterious, 'Requiem For a Vampire' has a lustrous painterly quality that enthrals in ways few genre films can. Corrupted by an ancient evil, cruelly bound to this nightmarish castle, our delectable duo are fearfully enveloped in a series of soul-stripping, skin-stripping, sensually surreal shocks! The weird, crepuscular domain of a dying master vampire and his craven acolytes is steeped in a bizarre atmosphere. If you treasure baroque, visually refined, sinfully stimulating Gothic horror, Jean Rollin's iconoclastic film remains a uniquely captivating experience. This masterfully composed terror tableau is both sensuous and sinister, the depthless shadows eerily suggest the presence of unimaginable wickedness! 'Requiem For a Vampire' is a lusty, colourful, compellingly strange vision of eldritch erotica, rarely has the cinematic Danse Macabre been captured so exquisitely. 

 

 

'Witch House: The Legend of Petronel Haxley' (2008) - Mike McCarthy.

Middlesborough filmmaker, Mike McCarthy's low budget occult shocker 'Witch House: The Legend of Petronel Haxley' is both intentionally and unintentionally funny. After a series of amusingly contrived mishaps, a bus load of querulous female students and a libidinous trio of likely lads fatefully find themselves trapped inside an isolated medieval barn. Increasingly disturbed, their desperate attempts to escape the clutches of vengeful, grot-faced witch, Petronel Haxley conjures up a creepy cauldron of 'familiar' frights. Granted, the gore quotient is negligible, and the effects are far from special, but there's a winningly plucky, can-do quality to this wonky witch-fest that held me under its singularly shonky spell!

While the cast clearly features non-actors, they are all certainly game enough, and the bleak, doom-laden atmosphere on the barren, witch-haunted moors engenders some agreeably Wuthering Frights! Mike McCarthy is to be congratulated on making a modestly engaging feature on such a limited budget. While the film's overall appeal might prove selective, I still predict future B-cult status for this earnest, weirdly endearing, not especially frightful, Northern-set indie horror film. If the idea of a roughshod Blair Witch meets Biker Grove B-Horror film tweaks your terror gland, Witch House: The Legend of Petronel Haxley is arguably worth a shot.

 

 

 

'Dracula's Daughter' (1972) – Jesús Franco.

Arguably one of the most prolific genre filmmakers maestro, Jesús Franco's prodigious output didn't always allow for conspicuous visual quality. The inimitable Grindhouse god's luridly girl-stuffed Gothic concoctions always held a powerful fascination, Franco's innate facility to fervidly fuse sex and horror remains unrivalled. While 'Vampyres Lesbos' & 'Female Vampire' are quite rightly cherished, 'Dracula's Daughter' is rarely mentioned without pronounced sarcasm. Flawed, but still fitfully fabulous, Dracula's Daughter's headier ingredients do much to successfully distract one from the narrative incongruities! Ostensibly a scintillating admixture of, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker and the more outre qualities of Italian Horror comics (Fumetti), the very breast of 'Dracula's Daughter' is 100% unfiltered, Jesús Franco genius! 

The ravishingly beautiful, Luisa Karlstein(Carmen Yazalde) returns to her lavish ancestral home at the behest of her dying mother, only to eerily discover that the Karlstein family are vampires, and that his bloody nibs himself, Count Dracula (Howard Vernon) remains dankly ensconced in the family crypt! Deftly melding garish Giallo tropes and fleshly Gothic exotica, Jesús Franco wastes little time getting buxom, Luisa sensually entwined with her exquisite beau, the no less delectable, Karine (Anne Libert). An uncommonly vivid beauty, Libert's sublime slender figure, luxuriously plentiful dark tresses and hypnotic, deep-almond eyes prove wholly irresistible. A beguilingly strange, splendidly salacious symphony of sapphic saturnalia, Franco's hot-blooded 'Dracula's Daughter' remains one of the Spanish sensualist's most satisfyingly voyeuristic vampire treats!

 

 

'The Deep' (1977) – Peter Yates.

A mesmerizing underwater sequence introduces our sub-aqua, thrill-seeking lovers, David (Nick Nolte) and the sleekly sinuous, Gail (Jacqueline Bisset) enjoying Bermuda's dazzling underwater vistas. Their barnacled booty fatefully includes an ampoule of morphine and a thickly encrusted silver amulet of unknown provenance. With an agreeable alacrity our likeable protagonists are plunged into increasingly stormy waters. The menacing, Morphine coveting Haitian drug lord, Henri Cloche (Lou Gossett) sinisterly makes for one of the more magnetic screen villains. David & Gail's deadly travails include a monstrously oversized Moray Eel, macabre Voodoo hexes, Cloche's muscle-bound henchmen, and the multifarious terrors lurking silently below the sea's surface. 

Belatedly restored on HD, 'The Deep' excitingly offers the discerning cult movie fan a stylish squall of tempestuous, exotically picturesque excitement. The exemplary cast provides additional buoyancy to maestro, Peter Yates exhilarating, beautifully shot oceanic treasure hunt. While notorious scene stealer, Robert Shaw's charismatic Sea Dog, Romer Treece is a salty delight, the main attraction of The Deep is the spectacularly beauteous, dynamically captured underwater action. Factor in another immersive score by, John Barry and the viewer is pleasurably submerged into one of the more visually arresting action-thrillers of the 70s. The exquisitely erotic vision of Jacqueline Bisset in a snugly wet T-shirt reveals a priceless treasure chest of iconic pulchritude!

'With a wealth of dazzling underwater spectacle, The Deep's plentiful thrills are anything but shallow!' - Weirdlingwolf. 

 

 

 

'Burning' (2018) - Lee Chang-Dong.

This nuanced, beautifully acted, consistently intriguing Korean thriller certainly merits its many five-star testimonials, since the beguiling, deliciously elusive mystery at the heart of 'Burning' proved to be exquisitely enigmatic! Achingly lovely at times, there's an additionally haunting atmosphere throughout, and director, Lee Chang-Dong masterfully orchestrates some tense, palpably Hitchcockian levels of suspense. 

The increasingly uneasy union of our three fascinatingly divergent protagonists suffused with an existential melancholy that I found enormously appealing! Superbly visual, Lee Chang-Dong's captivating mise-en-scène has a rich literary quality which beguiles the viewer no less absolutely than an engrossing novel. Imbued with a tantalizing opacity, partially exposing its dark secrets in an immaculately composed slow burn, this profoundly aesthetic thriller also has a rigorously humane core. Not unlike the uniquely soothing balm of completely losing oneself in music, the two hundred and twenty spellbinding minutes of 'Burning' provides an equally immersive experience!   

 

 

 

'The Jigsaw Man' (1983) - Terence Young.

Frequently castigated, unjustly condemned to bargain bin DVD hell, I wish to plead for clemency, since, Terence Young's stolid cold war espionage yarn is certainly not without modest value. The workmanlike, le Carré-lite text is greatly enlivened by, John 'Psychomania' Cameron's funky, propulsive score and the cast's colourful performances. While many of The Jigsaw Man's pieces fit, Michael Caine's risible Russian Accent provided some unintentional hilarity! I adored, Laurence Olivier's irascible, deliciously expletive, Admirable John Scaith, and, Charles Grey is on urbanely menacing form, oozing his signature reptilian charm as duplicitous Sir James Chorley. No lost classic, at best, Terence Young's watchable time killer is a guilty pleasure, but a demonstrative pleasure nonetheless! It would be remiss of me if I failed to mention the conspicuously jocular training montage, wherein a stout-looking, Michael Caine is unconvincingly turned into deadly Karate Chopping KGB double agent,Kuzminsky!  

 

 

'The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein' (1973) - Jess Franco.

Exuberantly maintaining its weird fascination, 'The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein' is arguably one of prolific filmmaker, Jess Franco's most eminently watchable midnight movies. Mischievous, audaciously macabre, and memorably demented,this kaleidoscopically kooky creepshow ventures boldly into bizarre cinematic realms all too rarely travelled! Very few staid creature features can ever hope to match this lurid level of hysteria! 'The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein' finds maestro, Jess Franco on bravura form, unleashing his own inimitable brand of psychotronic insanity! This visually exquisite, strikingly sensual, psychedelically perverse 70s shocker is a fleshy-fabulous Gothic fever dream you may not care to awaken from!!! 

'A majestically mad admixture of Mary Shelley, Jorge Luis Borges and the hyperbolic sex-horror excesses of vintage Fumetti, a no less intoxicating experience than bossing a triple shot of Absinth!' - Weirdlingwolf.