Gobblefoot (2025) – Matt Jaissle.

Latterly a figment of regional folklore, this monstrous carrion-chomping cryptid is now rumoured to be the perpetrator of a grisly slew of gruesome deaths, and it is down to Crypto-biologist Dr Holden to discover the truth. I don't believe the opportunistic B-Movie blending of Big Foot with an elephantine Turkey was inevitable, but it is somehow appropriate that the creator of cult 90s schlock-grenade The Necro-Files gave it a shot! In addition to the goofy-looking CGI misshape, the idea of mixing in a hokey Salem Witch curse merely increases the psychotronic potentialities for Gobblefoot. Once in historic Salem's Bluff, Dr. Holden's initially bird-brained hypothesis proves harrowingly real, discovering that these brutal Thankskillings are manifestly down to the monstrous Turkey/Big Foot hybrid of ancient legend. While the potently absurd premise, and hooky trailer suggests the possibility of a goofy good time, sadly, the tepid final product provides vastly undercooked B-Schlock fare. The fundamental flaws are the dishwater dull characters, equally listless text, and you get the palpable sense that the film-makers chickened-out on the levels of gore. Granted, the Turkey content is absolutely undeniable, while the 'Foot' impact remained conspicuously slight! In truth, B-Fans are, perhaps, better off rewatching The Giant Claw and Night of The Demon, as, sadly, excluding the righteous-sounding title, Jaissle's Gobblefoot is beak sauce. DANG!!! I REALLY wanted to dig this one, but there's scant evidence herein to suggest this was produced by the very same innovatively tweaked no-budget misfit behind heroic sleaze-feast The Necro-Files.

 MOTHER (2006) – Michael P. DiPaolo.

Oedipus Hex!!!!

A bleak, nightmarishly doom-centric B/W excursion into unchecked, escalating insanity, oppressively set within an isolated farmhouse, taking grisly inspiration from the hateful crimes of iconic cannibal freak Ed Gein. Sans dialogue, Mother is a nihilistic mood piece, glumly presenting an entirely distasteful milieu with a bravura lack of empathy for the viewer's sensibilities. Much like reading the unexpurgated journals of a prisoner tortured to death in a Soviet Gulag, Mother is a glacial, pitiless, top-to-bloody-bottom black acid downer! Absolutely suffused in cruelty, and runaway morbid psychopathy, with a dissonant sound design, and lurid depictions of aberrant human behaviour, DiPaolo's Mother is an unflinchingly gross dissection of a malign matriarch, and the perverse peccadilloes of her no less repellent progeny.

To the director's great credit, from the depressive opening, right until its macabre conclusion, the film's desolated tone is monochromatically maintained throughout. One of my all-time favourite scenes of cinematic horror is the truly grotesque deathbed feed in Deranged, which gets a muted reference here. I believe it's my obsession with Deranged which ultimately endeared me to Mother's stifling melancholia, monomaniacal misanthropy, and sordid digressions in necromantic ideation. Michael P. DiPaolo operates in the same negatively compulsive space as Grief's Miserably Ever After album,it ain't fucking pretty, the anguish never stops, and even in death, the ravening conqueror worm, perpetuates our miseries forever more. Depending on your world view, Mother is the best Christmas movie no one ever talks about!! While Cronenberg proposed the equalitarian maxim that 'all flesh is erotic flesh', the invidious machinations of terror tubby here powerfully suggests otherwise!

 Son of Ingagi (1940) – Richard C. Kahn.

A handsome pair of newly weds unexpectedly inherit the storied, treasure bearing estate of infamous scientist/explorer Helen Jackson (Laura Bowman), and not long after they unsettlingly settle into this spooky abode, their hoped-for Honeymooning domesticity is crudely interrupted by an attempted burglary, and the alarming discovery of an increasingly distempered Ape-Man lurking in the basement! Lively creature feature Son of Ingagi proves quite the compelling Sci-fried schlock curiosity, having an engaging, all-African American cast, and featuring one of all-too few female, monster-meddling scientists of the period. Son of Ingagi is played mostly for pretty broad laughs, with amiable Slapstick interludes, but the shambling, outsized Sasquatchian behemoth ominously provides B-Horror pathos, proving to be an effectively sinister cellar dweller! While Richard C. Kahn's vintage shocker's climax felt rather abrupt, this entertaining 40s relic still has much to recommend it, a blissfully buffoonish cop, memorable monster, likeable cast, and a couple of excellent musical interludes. I thought Son of Ingagi would merely be interesting from an historical perspective, but it almost immediately captured my imagination, and one hopes that there are other knockabout genre pictures featuring members of Ingagi's winning cast. In conclusion, Son of Ingagi remains a vintage B-horror comedy treat, an easy going, fun watch, and the neat-o, Laurel & Hardy-esque 'disappearing' sandwich business genuinely tickled me!

 Tales From Deep Hell (2018) – Davide Pesca.

'Like a triple-espresso mega-dosed with rabid kangaroo blood, Pesca's body-shocker has quite a kick!'

Sadism, sinister bodily abuses, gratuitous Gore-blasting, perversely administered eviscerations, blood-basted breasts, and all-manner of close-quartered carnage is luridly exploited in teasingly gruesome torture anthology Tales From Deep Hell. Italian Gore-blaster Davide Pesca wastes precious time with expository blarney, and gets straight to the meat with pleasing frequency, and should viewers appreciate gorily palpating lady flesh, Tales From Deep Hell won't prove wanting. I must applaud Pesca's macabre, darkly voyeuristic mise-en-scene, all pinky vectors of the sublime female physiognomy are ruthlessly exposed, brutally flayed, savagely sliced and diced for the sordid delectation of those who favour spicy spaghetti splatter with additionally generous portions of gooey ragu! I can state with relative surety that the expressly sanguineous segment exploring extreme beauty hacks would surely meat with the approval of bloody countess Erzsebet Bathory! Foot freaks and grisly eyeball fetishists will not be disappointed, some of the anthology's more compellingly bloody content might be filed under body horror. Avid Tru-Gore aficionados are sure to relish the spooky-loopy body mod sequence, as these outré images are sure to get right under their skin! In conclusion, I must absolutely commend the film-makers on producing such a visceral example of perversely artsy-fartsy Gore-mongery that plays out sans dialogue, with the 'Two Sisters' proving especially memorable, having a schlocky Rollin/H.G Lewis vibe!

 Cape Cod Cthulhu (2025) – Mark Polonia.

Rehearsing Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven takes an inauthentic gambol into camp Gothica, after a beach discarded beach initiates a risibly cheapnis, Cthulhu-inspired end of days. Gotta be honest here, not a fan of super-clean digital video, and find cheapnis CGI absolutely lacking in the pleasing tactility, and boundless charm of low-fi practical FX. Manifesting Cthulhu on a micro-budget is asking more of the audience than the film-makers, just how much of a penuriously pixelated protagonist can one stand in one film? Analogue video is not without technical problems, but one of its greatest strengths is that it often obfuscates budgetary/FX shortfalls, whereas HD video glaringly puts it all, front and centre, and, sadly, this is not always beneficial to a credible suspension of disbelief. I may have missed something, but why does the pale stabby dude in the graveyard pointedly resemble Biff from Back To The Future? One of the film's grislier elements is the aimlessly prolonged sequence wherein the lassies butcher Poe's immortal prose, and as much as this genuinely pains me, Cape Cod Cthulhu should have remained inert, continuing its abyssal slumbering undisturbed. Episodic, anodyne, and dully written, with bafflingly tepid protagonists, possessing absolutely nothing that made 'Hallucinations' such a singular D.I.Y treat. To be fair, the location is utterly lovely, but Cape Cod Cthulhu is to Lovecraft's mythos, what Fentanyl is to continued bodily wellness. In conclusion, snarky Levi is a cutey, but the maddening mystery over Mad Axeman Biff's bloody spree remains frustratingly unresolved. The only good ending viable to Cape Cod Cthulhu is by having no beginning.

 Boltneck aka Teen Monster (2000) – Mitch Marcus.

Playing fast n' loose with the Frankenstein mythos, Teen Monster is an affably camp iteration of Mary Shelley's Gothic opus, wherein the grislier discords are replaced with zany, ghoulish knockabout humour, and hormonal High School hi-jinks. While Wes Craven's cult fave Deadly Friend has moments of palpable horror, Boltneck aims squarely for a comedic jugular vein, and, happily, more often than not, it hits the sweet spot, boisterously evoking the fuzzier frolics of Teen Wolf, or a campy vampier Real Genius. The one thing I never quite understood about oft purloined Frankensteinian lore, if you pump major volts into a skell on Death Row, he's turned crispy critter, hook up a dead guy to a Universal doohickey, greatly increase the voltage, and you get a shambling icon of the resurrected dead? Digression aside, I surprisingly enjoyed Teen Monster more than I thought possible, which I put down to premature senility, induced from injudiciously prodigious exposure to doltish DTV pulp. I could never be hugely down on a goofy Gothic teen romp that featured a Cramps track, and provided decent comedy shtick from Charles Fleischer, Richard Moll, Judge Reinhold and Shelley Long. Hey! Teen Monster sure ain't rocket science, but, for me, it mostly remains a cutesy Happy Halloween spoof-a-rama, suitable for goofs of all ages!

 Bad Magic (1997) – Polonia Bros.

'It squashed Calico's head like a melon!!!!!???'

Renny's (Vincent Simmons) brother is slain during a robbery by local gang-bangers The Red Claws, desperate for revenge he is schooled in the eldritch power of Hoodoo Voodoo by Voodoo guru Doctor Topanga (Bruce Hardy), summoning the demonic Blahkeeblahkay, acting as a preternatural proxy to bring unholy doom upon those ill-prepared hood rats. Unsurprisingly, this lively supernatural S.O.V demon-fest is another compellingly lurid tribute to the tenacity, and no-budget chutzpah of these beloved S.O.V siblings. Bad Magic proves to be an ambitious D.I.Y gem, with the Polonia brother's singular facility for producing gonzo B-horror gold from only the most base elements, suggests they may be in cahoots with dark forces themselves, aiding them on their inexorable ascent to worldwide, Schlock & Awe, S.O.V supremacy! This heroically home-brewed, hocus pocus-inflected creature feature remains a garishly analogue testament to the strange wonders of non-professional acting, crudimentary practical FX, dopey dialogue, judicious usage of fright wigs, murderous mummification by Loo Roll, and a hypnotic largess of low-fried, dime-store delirious, in-camera chicanery. While the revenging demon Blahkeeblahkay sounds like a Beatles song, this netherworldly entity is pretty metal! It seems entirely appropriate to conclude with a line from Bad Magic itself : 'Amos!? You can't be killing everyone, it's impossible!!!!' Implausible? Absolutely, but I don't believe anything is truly impossible in the inspirationally can-do S.O.V mythos of the Polonia Bros.