John Saxon plays Captain Hopper, whose unit wipes out a village in Vietnam. When he discovers a pit containing a couple of American POWs, one of the men viciously bites him on the arm. It turns out that the men have been kept in captivity so long, they’ve turned into ravenous cannibals. Fifteen or twenty years later, Hopper is suffering from PTSD back home. One of the men he rescued is being released from the mental institution, a man curiously named Charles Bukowski. Played by Giovanni Lombardo Radice, who you’ll recognize from a number of Italian horror films including two other cannibal flicks, Charlie wants to have a drink with the man who rescued him, but something he says triggers Hopper’s flashbacks, who turns the offer down.

In literally the same scene, the girl next door (Cinzia De Carolis from Argento’s The Cat o’ Nine Tails) is trying her hardest to seduce Hopper. Initially he shoots down her advances, but ultimately succumbs. Overtaken by an uncontrollable urge, Hopper goes down on the girl and bites her. Though it’s probably the last place anybody would want to be bitten, the girl enjoys it… because this is Italian cinema at its finest. Meanwhile, Charlie finds himself unable to contain his own cannibalistic tendencies when he sees a couple getting frisky in a movie theater. After taking a chunk out of the woman’s neck, a mob chases Charlie into a flea market where he gets into a standoff with the local police.

It turns out Charlie and Captain Hopper have a virus that turns anyone they bite into cannibals. Now, I wouldn’t say it’s apocalyptic levels of cannibalism, but it certainly spreads rapidly enough to thoroughly entertain. Eventually, the only group left to root for are the cannibals themselves, who Hopper leads into the sewers as the cops chase them with shotguns and a flamethrower. It’s a refreshingly different take on the cannibal movie, which usually cast stereotypical tribesmen as the cannibals. If the film were made today, hobbyless losers would probably accuse it of being woke for its diverse cast of cannibals and the fact that director Antonio Margheriti seems to sympathize with them.

And now for one of the most basic bitch opinions I have: One of the reasons there are so many Italian cannibal movies I wouldn’t watch a second time, much less review for this blog, is because of the unsimulated violence toward animals that was so common in them. Cannibal Apocalypse, unfortunately, has a two-second bit of animal abuse involving the aforementioned flamethrower and what appears to be a live rat. I can’t say for sure it was intentional… though it seems clear the filmmakers didn’t care if it happened, either, as you can plainly see there were no precautions guarding against it.

Other than that one blemish, Cannibal Apocalypse is possibly my favorite kind of movie to review. Italian horror (when it isn’t killing real animals) is simply my happy place. I don’t know how to defend this stance to the uninitiated and I don’t know how to make converts of those who don’t automatically get it. I cannot put into words why I love the run-and-gun nature of their economic filmmaking, which is admittedly fast, crude, but not at all artless. The strangely written (often dubbed) dialogue, the awkward cuts, the lingering shots of gore, the upbeat Italo disco music… they seem more like dreams than movies.

Cannibal Apocalypse has no ghosts, no monsters, no supernatural things that go bump in the night. Instead it offers a couple scenes of gobbledygook to explain why a cannibal virus is running amok, almost as an afterthought, and just runs with the idea. Like the similar but higher octane Nightmare City, it’s a zombie movie without the zombies, a mad scientist film without the boring mad scientists. Just pure action, a lot of gore, and very little filler. Okay, so it’s light on the logic, too, but that’s not an issue here. And it almost grazes the very surface of what Vietnam veterans must have faced upon reintegrating into American society, but that feels entirely accidental.

At any rate, I’m considering starting a new feature to catalogue all the Italian cannibal films that don’t feature actual cruelty to animals. So look forward to that sooner or never.

I’ve been staring at a blinking cursor, wondering how to construct this piece without giving too much away. Those of you who have seen the movie will know my dilemma. Those of you who haven’t may wonder why I phrase things a certain way. That’s what One Cut of the Dead is like: there’s a little bit of “wait, what?” going on in the beginning, but that’s only because you haven’t been initiated into the club yet.

So… do you like Japanese horror movies? Here’s one that ultimately does something so unexpected, it will likely become a part of the subgenre’s conversation forever. What starts out looking like nothing special eventually reveals itself to be layered in a thrilling way. There were parts of it that made me think, “What the fuck is this shit?” And by the end, I was happily won over. I think most will be, too, even if they’re not fans of horror. It’s the rarest kind of movie that begs to be seen again as soon as possible.

Here’s the premise: a small crew of filmmakers are shooting a low budget zombie movie when they’re attacked by actual zombies. It turns out the director of the movie-within-the-movie has summoned the real zombies to get a better performance from his lead actress. Now he runs around with a handheld camera, popping out of nowhere to enthusiastically yell “Action!” whenever she’s being attacked by the flesh eaters. Never mind the fact that none of the director’s footage would be usable. The dude has completely lost it.

Thankfully we’re not watching the movie through the lens of the erratic movie director, who drops in and out of the mayhem as his insanity deems fit. Instead we’re watching the events as captured by a silent camera operator who, in real life, would be screaming their head off. Yes, everything I described is captured in one continuous shot, hence the terrible title. The end credits say it’s based on a stage play (no surprise there) with a much better title: Ghost in the Box… though there aren’t any ghosts in the movie so I suppose it’s a very loose adaptation. (I wouldn’t know because I’ve never seen the play as I don’t live in Japan.)

I digress. There have been several such movies designed to look as if they were captured in one take. The result is often impressive, but the more it’s done, the more it becomes a gimmick. One Cut of the Dead is very much a gimmick, but that’s clearly by design. It’s a gimmick with a purpose. Shot on location at an abandoned water treatment facility (standing in for a top secret military installation), the scenery offers a dynamic playground for the performers to run around in. At one point an actor almost falls through the railing of a second floor balcony for real, but the movie, as it must, goes on. When you’re shooting like this, you only get one shot, no resets, so cut it some slack, will ya?

This is like professional wrestling: not everything is sold well, but it’s extremely entertaining, more so in its second half than its peculiar first. It’s so wild, I kept thinking: Wouldn’t it be great to see the behind-the-scenes footage? I have a feeling that stuff would make the movie, and what it accomplishes, even more impressive. So that’s all I’m gonna say about this one, which is one of the more exciting movies I’ve seen all month. What a blast.

Norman Bates has just been released from the mental institution, twenty-two years after the events of the Hitchcock film. Not only is Norman’s psychiatrist (Robert Logia) optimistic about his rehabilitation, a number of the locals are surprisingly friendly to the murderer, including the sheriff (Hugh Gillan). One of the people who isn’t supportive is the sister of Marion Crane, who has Vera Miles reprising the role. Also returning is Anthony Perkins, playing the infamous mama’s boy with charm and affability.

While Norman was away, the state took care of his property, installing a crooked manager (Dennis Franz) who’s turned the Bates Motel into a flophouse. Norman is shocked to discover drugs and prostitution are now the motel’s most desired amenities, so he fires the manager, turning the man into an enemy. Meanwhile, prank calls and nasty notes pile up in an attempt to make Norman snap. Perkins plays the role so well, you don’t wait for the excitement that comes from his inevitable backsliding into psychosis. Instead, you find yourself rooting for him to keep it together.

Enter Mary (Meg Tilly), the troubled young woman who moves in with Norman. The script takes care to establish that her character is an idiot (she even refers to herself as stupid), presumably to suspend the audience’s disbelief that anyone would be dumb enough to move in with a convicted murderer. While the gambit might have paid off in a better movie, the script has many more characters whose stupidity isn’t explained. The dumbest of them all is Marion’s sister, whose complicated revenge plot hinges on putting another one of her family members in danger. This is some wildly stupid stuff, but it’s entertaining as hell. You get the feeling that everyone involved is well aware it isn’t Shakespeare (or Hitchcock for that matter) and that’s alright.

Even if it is an uneven mess, Psycho II isn’t as blasphemous as Gus Van Idiot’s masturbatory remake of the original. It’s clear that Perkins took the assignment seriously, rather than looking for an easy paycheck. Even as the plot concocts one excuse after another to separate the delusional man from more reliable narrators (and witnesses), he’s a blast to watch… which is to say until the script calls for his full blown insanity, giving him little more to do than stare blankly while he monologues about murders he may or may not have committed. Fret not because there’s a wonderful sequence of events waiting for you at the end of this film, which knows it can’t top the original’s ending and goes for macabre humor instead.

One could pick at the plot holes for hours, but I won’t fault the logic in a movie that has none. This is the kind of picture in which people can be murdered in dusty basements and the perpetrator can scrub away all traces of blood, change into clean clothes, and establish an alibi before the cops investigate the scene of the crime only minutes later. There are moments when someone watches Mary through a hole in the bathroom wall and I still don’t know who was actually doing the peeping. And there are so many people sneaking into Norman’s home, I have to wonder: Where the hell are they parking? The Bates Motel is supposed to be in the middle of nowhere.

There are a few moments of gore, which feel like an intentional hybrid between Hays Code sensibilities of the 60s and 80s slasher trends, landing somewhere in between the two eras in terms of gruesomeness. At one point, a character falls down the very stairs where Martin Balsam died in the first film, only this fall is much more kinetic and ends with a self-inflicted wound, which is captured in a nasty close-up with grizzly sound effects. Even so, none of the imagery is quite as visceral as the moment when the very tip of the killer’s knife dimpled Janet Leigh’s skin in the first film… I don’t know why that bloodless image is so much more effective than anything in this film, which literally shows a wound spreading open on a victim’s face (which is a pretty good effect, by the way).

By the end, it’s clear that the entire film was just an excuse to get Norman out of prison and back in the motel so they could turn the character into an 80s movie slasher in future installments. I can think of dozens of slashers I like much less than Anthony Perkins in this role so I’ll take it.

In order to understand how Hard Rock Zombies exists, it helps to know about director Krishna Shah’s American Drive-In, a screwball comedy along the lines of Lloyd Kaufman’s Squeeze Play and Stuck On You. Shot on location at an actual drive-in, the movie eschewed a traditional plot for a string of unconnected comedy scenes. It contained the kind of “boys will be boys” humor in which the majority of the jokes were essentially “Look at how fat/gay/horny this character is!”

Rather than license an existing film, Shah set out to shoot key scenes of a fake movie that American Drive-In’s characters could watch whenever he needed a cutaway of the screen. As with most movies-within-a-movie, Shah’s would be a heightened parody, jampacked with a laundry list of horror tropes. Zombies? You got it. Werewolves? Why the hell not. Incredibly shitty rock music? We gotchu, fam. Then someone on the production had a brilliant idea: Why not make the movie-within-a-movie a feature length film? And so Hard Rock Zombies was born, somehow beating its parent film to release.

And if you thought my description of American Drive-In indicated questionable content, you’ve seen nothing yet. The heroes of Hard Rock Zombies are a sleazy rock band who make numerous comments about their underage roadies. One of their songs, written about a ~13 year old who the hero meets on the road, is as follows: “I’m so in love, but you’re so young. When you touch my hand, does that mean we’re in love?” I point this out not because it contains such content, but because the film seemingly endorses it. These are the heroes of the film, after all, and while I’m no stranger to movies featuring challenging characters for a good reason, this one plays out like an Anthony Kiedis documentary as directed by Brett Ratner.

There are admirable qualities to be found, too, provided you like DIY movies such as Video Violence and Rock N’ Roll Nightmare. The rock band is invited to stay at a secluded mansion where they are murdered by a family of ghouls and later resurrected through the power of rock. What’s most interesting about the film is it doesn’t seem to have a script at all. It appears they’re just dragging a camera crew out and winging it. No, the end result is nowhere near as good as This Is Spinal Tap, but it keeps the kill-to-fluff ratio surprisingly balanced. Even the fluff is entertaining in a gloriously stupid way. At one point the head patriarch of the family randomly removes a mask, revealing that he has been Adolf Hitler in disguise all along. Frankly, if you’re going to put Hitler in your movie, you should give him a much nastier death than the one seen here.

The hard rock zombies exact their revenge and return to LA where they audition for a hot shot record producer. Unfortunately, they’ve left a trail of non-rock zombies in their wake, which are now wreaking havoc on a small town of morons. At one point the morons hypothesize that, because zombies are the antithesis of intellectualism, zombies must be scared of human heads the way vampires fear crucifixes. So a group of survivors take to the streets, hiding behind giant faces of Elvis, John Lennon, and Marylin Monroe, only to get themselves predictably killed. This gag might have worked if the film didn’t have such terrible comedic timing. Much like American Drive-In, the whole thing devolves into one unconnected scene after another.

Like the extended cut of Underworld, which I featured last Saturday, the relatively new Blu-Ray edition of this film restores some of its censored content in the form of VHS quality footage. Unlike Underworld, the film quality is so janky to begin with, the VHS footage doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb. In fact, I suspect many viewers may not even notice it. There is so little of this restored content, however, that the runtime of both versions clocks in at at 97 minutes. Even so, the vast majority of the gore is contained in that scant footage.

Knowing what I know now, I would probably skip it if I were you… but I’m not you. Because I’m me, I’d watch it anyway. Not great. Barely good.

Martyrs hits differently after the Epstein revelations. Now its depiction of a secret society of wealthy sickos getting away with horrifying crimes hits too close to home. Yes, there have been several such films dealing with underground organizations, usually as mere plot devices. Almost all were labeled “tortured porn” to dismiss their value. Martyrs, however, is more in the vein of Funny Games than a Saw film. More Straw Dogs than The Human Centipede. It’s such an electric piece of entertainment, I wonder how its director ultimately ended up making a film starring Jessica Biel, the Avril Lavinge of cinema.

First, a disclaimer: some may call shenanigans on my praise here due to my distaste for movies such as Haute Tension, a similar “New French Extremity” (a classification I find nearly as idiotic as “torture porn”). I’ve also made it known that I prefer fun gore to the realistic kind. That’s a preference, not the law. I don’t mind a dour movie if it doesn’t take itself more seriously than it deserves. Martyrs is as serious as a heart attack, but it’s well-made and thoughtful enough to earn it. If I had any complaints about its style, it’s that the kinetic camerawork stays so close to its subjects that it’s right on the edge of losing readability. Which is obviously intentional.

In the prologue, little Lucie escapes her kidnappers and ends up in an orphanage where she befriends Anna, a girl roughly the same age. Suffering from extreme PTSD and depression, Lucie finds herself incapable of telling the authorities anything useful. Fifteen years later, an adult Lucie invades the secluded home of the people she believes kidnapped her, armed with a double-barrel shotgun. The result is bloody and unflinchingly brutal. She calls Anna, who secretly loves Lucie, to help her in the aftermath. When it’s revealed there’s an additional threat in the house, you may be thinking to yourself, “Why don’t they just get the hell out of there? Why do they keep going back in?” But the reasons are complex and, halfway through the movie, become utterly obvious. A lesser movie would have saved this explanation as the big twist at the end. This film knows modern audiences are savvy and doesn’t try to hide it.

This is not a film in which women are abused just to exact their revenge for entertainment reasons, à la I Spit On Your Grave (which I would argue is great in its own right). It’s a film in which abuse becomes cyclical and violence begets violence. None of that violence is fantastical. None of it is easy to look at. None of it is fun. Yet the gore never feels gratuitous even though there’s a boatload of it. At any rate, there is a sickness on the screen and it is certainly not for the faint of heart.

There’s nary a bad performance. Even the villains’ farfetched scheme (my least favorite aspect of the movie) is acceptable at best and negligible at worst. I could talk about Martyrs at length, but doing so would necessitate the need for spoilers. I have been very careful not to give away what this movie actually is. You can praise the mainstream appeal of “elevated horror” all you want, but horror will always be at its best when it’s as polarizing and unapologetic as this.

It’s nearly a perfect horror film. I have zero interest in the American remake.

Brain Dead was a film I wanted to feature during last year’s 31 Days of Gore, but the only copy I had available at the time was the same crappy 4:3 edition that’s currently playing on Tubi. Starring Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton, can you blame me for wanting to see it? George Kennedy, Bud Cort, and Patricia Charbonneau fulfill supporting roles in this Julie Corman production. That’s a good cast and a good producer so fuck it—I’m there, dude.

Bill Pullman plays a research scientist with a large collection of human brains. The extent of his studies, as far as I can tell, is prodding a brain that’s connected to a cadaver’s face. Pullman and his research assistant poke the brain’s wrinkles to see what expressions the face will make. Though the movie fails to convey the scientific value of such an endeavor, Bill Paxton, playing a corporate sleazeball, convinces Pullman to operate on a live human brain. The patient? Bud Cort’s character, a brilliant mathematician who was institutionalized before delivering a valuable equation to Paxton’s company.

<SPOILERS AHEAD>

Shortly after performing the surgery, Pullman is struck by a car while crossing the street. Spoilers, I guess, but I’m not ruining anything you won’t see coming from a mile away, anyway: everything that happens from that point forward takes place entirely in the hero’s head. You could show this movie to a child in an uncontacted tribe and they’d probably sigh and say, “It’s all just a dream, isn’t it?” I feel like the reason these movies were so popular at the time is because the filmmakers could do whatever they wanted, make no effort to give the film a coherent narrative, and end the movie wherever they wanted. None of this means anything. None of it is consequential. There’s zero suspense when you know exactly what it’s up to.

Movies like this can work when the character actively grows as he unravels the mystery, but Pullman is completely confused to the bitter end, having ultimately stumbled through one disconnected scene after another. In one scene his wife is cheating on him with Paxton. In the next, Pullman’s murdered them both. And in a scene shortly after that, Paxton has become an entirely different character. Don’t get me wrong: the actors are as good as they can possibly be in a movie like this. Bud Cort is particularly entertaining. Pullman’s performance, too, is noteworthy as always.

I’m not saying it’s a terrible movie. It’s mildly entertaining and I never got as bored with it as I did with yesterday’s Hellmaster. Frankly, I’m jazzed as all get-out that there’s a movie with my two favorite Bills sharing scenes. That alone is worth a look, but you really don’t have to finish the damn thing once you get a taste. With this cast and the inherited creepiness of humans poking around in brains, it should have been a whole helluva lot better. In fact, where are the good horror movies about brain surgery? I can’t think of a single one off the top of my head.

“20 years ago this place looked like a Nazi prison camp, but it wasn’t our fault. The program was young… things went astray. It was time for the superman. We dubbed it Project Nietzsche… after the philosopher. Back then, a lot of young minds were destroyed by something which, if used properly, could increase mental powers.”

—A mad scientist moments before getting punched in the face

Hellmaster opens with the Nietzsche quote “God is dead,” but if you’re expecting a thoughtful examination of the human condition in modern society, I must remind you that this is a blog in which, just yesterday, I praised a movie because it had a lot of boobies in it. The quote, conveniently truncated to remove all nuance, isn’t employed because Hellmaster is about to get philosophical on our asses. The film uses the quote because the filmmakers saw it in a magazine or something and went, “Huh-huh, cool….”

In the opening scene, David Emge (“Flyboy” from 1978’s Dawn of the Dead) is writing a letter to his wife, Lovecraft style, about horrors he has recently uncovered. A gaggle of zombie-ghouls shuffle into the room, one of whom is his wife. The man is presumably killed off screen and the film jumps forward six months, introducing the Kant Institute of Technology. The institute is a bare looking university (likely filmed during a real university’s Christmas break) in which the students don headsets and gather in a study hall to telecommute with their professor. The professor isn’t off campus or anything, he just prefers to do it this way.

When one of the students refers to a “mad man” living in the abandoned church on campus, it’s revealed that the so-called mad man is Robert, the character who was presumably killed in the opening scene. Robert is gathering the evidence to blow the whistle on the institute’s drug experiments, which turned a class of students into superhuman ghouls in the 1960s. The faculty faked a church fire as part of a coverup and… look, this is a pretty basic setup and I’m getting sick of explaining such things. All you need to know is that mad scientists create bad guys and good guys have to fight ’em.

And the bad guys, adorned in fun but merely decent prosthetics, are actually kind of interesting even though they seem heavily inspired by the cenobites in Hellraiser films. Led by John Saxon, who insists on being called Papa, the small group of mutant killers have recently wiped out a church camp group, hijacking their school bus which has a big creepy crucifix wired to the grille. Saxon himself is uncharacteristically weak here, though that seems more of a screenplay issue than an acting one, and his evil scheme is as routine as it can get. Emge, in his final film role, is quite good as the capable, crossbow-wielding hero. He seems to be having a blast, too, providing the film’s very best scenes.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with Hellmaster. For my money, the only thing it’s really lacking is an insane Italian director at the helm, who could have easily leveraged its dull moments into equal parts art and shock entertainment. It has all the makings of a supernatural giallo, but little of the fearless exploitation seen in those films. With its off-screen kills and premature cutaways, it just needs a little extra umph. Gnarly in concept, not so much execution. A cute picture, but not very good.

Psycho isn’t the type of movie I would normally feature on 31 Days of Gore. Don’t get me wrong: I love it, it’s a masterpiece, blah-blah-blah. Really, what more can I say about the film that hasn’t been said a million times before? The fact that it’s the first mainstream film to show a toilet is a bit of movie trivia so tired that kids know it (and it’s not even true). People who’ve never even seen the film already know that Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane is dead meat, just as everybody knows Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. I just want to watch Psycho sequels this month, which are the type of movies that belong here, but my OCD prevents me from starting with part 2.

So yeah, Marion dies early on. That shocking twist is why theaters were required to refuse entry to latecomers. In 1960, when movies were considered as disposable as a Readers Digest, people used to wander in and out of theaters whenever they damn well pleased. The rule allowed Hitchcock to pull off something far more interesting than the fact that he killed his lead actress off. He forced moviegoers to sympathize with a psycho.

Of course, first-time viewers would not have known they were rooting for the psycho. Until the end of the movie, they believed Norman’s mother had killed Marion. Hitchcock pulled a fast one, not just with a protagonist swap, but by leading viewers to believe Norman was taking care of a mentally ill woman. They would not have accepted a murderous protagonist, but a young man covering up the crime of his beloved mother? That they could accept. I can only wonder how many people, in an age when TV couples slept in separate beds, consciously examined why they felt a tinge of suspense when it seemed as though a car full of evidence wouldn’t sink into the swamp during Norman’s cover-up. And that’s what the best movies do: rewire an entire generation’s brains.

Like I said, the film has been analyzed to death. I have nothing new to offer on the subject. The fact of the matter is I just really like Anthony Perkins, especially in this role, so be sure to come back each Monday this month to see what I have to say about the sequels.

So why does this relatively tame slasher film score a 3 out of 4 on the gore rating? Because the way Hitchcock juxtaposes the knife against his actress’s tender flesh is the absolute high mark of an artist subverting the censorship of the time. You don’t see it cut her flesh, but you certainly feel it.