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Review by Spooky Sean

Directed by Kern Saxton, and written by Kern Saxton and Destin Pfaff, Sushi Girl is an interesting mish-mash of the crime and horror genres. It contains some powerful scene chewing from certain members of the cast, but the actors’ performances vary in gravitas widely. This, and certain plot developments keep it from rising above mediocrity.

The plot revolves around a meeting of six criminals who attempted to steal jewels, and failed. They are known collectively as Fish (Noah Hathaway), Crow (Mark Hamill), Max (Andy Mackenzie), Francis (James Duvall), and Duke (Tony Todd). They had a driver, but he isn’t there for the dinner meeting, though his name is Nelson (David Dastmalchian) if you’re curious. Duke has a boner for Asian culture, hence the Sushi Girl (Cortney Palm).

The Sushi Girl is very eye pleasing, as she’s naked and covered in sushi for most of this film. So, for staying nude and completely still on a table for most of the film, Cortney Palm easily has the most challenging role. Her performance once she speaks isn’t awful, but it’s hard to close a film that’s just been dominated by a several other actors for roughly an hour and a half. Tony Todd, Mark Hamill, and Andy Mackenzie are at the top when it comes to delivery. Tony Todd, as Duke the ringleader, with his booming authoritative demeanor, both intimidates and hypnotizes with his monologues about an abusive father and Asian culture. Hamill as Crow, a foppish, blonde-haired sicko is equally fantastic. He’s a very memorable character, and one almost wishes the film were just a crime/buddy comedy with Duke and Crow. Hell, they could call it Duke and Crow! Mackenzie as Max, a bruiser with an explosive temper, isn’t as good as Duke or Crow, but he has his moments. Max’s ferocity is certainly a thing to behold. No one else can match these three, nor their intensity. No one gives a terrible performance; it’s just hard to outdo Todd, Hamill, and Mackenzie once they get yelling at each other. This film is all about Tony, though. Not since Candyman has Todd delivered such a performance, and to be fair, it’s because he’s mainly only had bit parts since.

One thing that keeps this film from moving beyond the middle-of-the-road is how derivative it seems. Saxton channels Tarantino so hard, but I would rather not have to watch another knock-off. Yes, the concept of a whole film based around a human decoration which must stay quiet is somewhat unique, but not for the horror genre. A little film called Saw already did that. And, the twist ending, if you can even call it that, is extremely useless. Of course it has something to do with the Sushi Girl; why else would she be in the title of the movie! Not to give away the ending, but it also seems like it required a lot of factors to have occurred in order for things to have gone exactly as planned.

There are horror elements in the film, mainly in the level of violence and torture which occur. However, it seems to be one of those films where you wonder what the point of it all was. All I took from it was that it’s tough to be a Sushi Girl, and you shouldn’t get in a car accident after a robbery. And to not eat Fugu, the poisonous blowfish. But, come to think of it, I already learned not to eat Fugu from that Simpsons episode where Homer eats it and almost dies. So, I guess all I took from it, is that being a Sushi Girl must be annoying, don’t fuck over criminals, and don’t get in a car accident after a robbery.

It’s worth a watch, as the pacing, flashbacks, and set design are proficient. Still, it’s really just an exercise in giving Tony Todd and Mark Hamill a chance to yell and act like criminals, which is the film’s main selling point. If this film were just Mark Hamill and Tony Todd, with occasional inclusions of other actors, it would have been good – arguably no matter what the plot was. Fast food employees, call center workers, explorers of space or the ocean, professional mascots down on their luck: any of these would have worked with Todd and Hamill. So, you watch it for Candyman and Luke. Well, that and for the naked lady on the table. Must have been awkward as hell for her. You don’t watch it for the plot. It’s ridiculous. And I just wanted to watch either Jackie Brown, or Reservoir Dogs after finishing it. Dear every filmmaker, stop trying to do Quentin Tarantino. Just do you.

Sushi Girl is available on demand now in the US.

Review by Kit Rathenar

I went into British indie found-footage movie Hollow aware that it had previously managed to outrage my dear colleague Annie Riordan (read her review here), but hoping that I might have better luck with it. Maybe it would have more resonance for an English viewer. And indeed, at least I can’t fault its Brit credentials or the location, which is the gorgeous countryside around the Suffolk village of Dunwich; including a sinister tree, a ruined priory, and an assortment of cliffs, beach, fields and woods. For a shakycam flick, Hollow does do a surprisingly good job of showcasing its setting.

Into this rural idyll, enter the cast: Scott, a successful career asshole with a malicious sense of “fun”; his fiancee Emma, a bookish lass who should probably be in a convent just to protect her from her own taste in men; her awkward, geeky best friend James, who is apparently recovering from some kind of mental breakdown; and James’s new girlfriend Lynne, a single mum and party animal who’s more oblivious than ill-meaning. This odd quartet go to spend a weekend in the cottage that belonged to Emma’s dead grandfather, where they run into a legend about a creepy tree that’s supposedly haunted by a hooded figure and where an alarming number of young couples have hanged themselves. And of course someone decides they have to poke the ancient evil in the nose to see what happens, and from there… well, you know the drill.

While the cast are plausible and I did find myself sympathetic to them at least half the time, there’s almost too much realism to them and their interactions. An odd complaint, you might think, but characters who aren’t larger than life in any direction require really great direction to make them engaging, and Hollow bogs itself down by attempting profound human interest when it actually offers nothing that you couldn’t watch at a party or down the pub any night of the week. But it’s so determined to focus on the cast anyway that I’d almost think director Michael Axelgaard didn’t really want to make a horror movie at all. The horror elements here are formulaic, uninspired, and seem bolted on by rote to a film that’s actually trying to be a mildly depressing slice-of-life drama.

Hollow also spotlights the problem that found footage movies force a very specific affectation onto the cast. For the plot to be documented as required, somebody in the group has to accept the role of a maladapted misfit who can’t bear to switch off their camera no matter what’s going on. And the rest of the group have to allow this, instead of giving the offender a stern talking to/administering a swift beating/taking their camcorder and dropping it in the river, any of which might be a valid response to someone refusing to come out from behind their damn camera and interact with the rest of you like a human being. Hollow attempts a solution by having the characters dependent on the camera for a light source, and the light only functioning while the camera is recording – and James, in the aforementioned role of camera-waving sociopath, does sometimes outright lie to his friends about whether he’s filming or not – but the mere fact that such lengths were required highlights how pernicious a flaw of the genre this is.

But it’s the final twenty minutes or so that ultimately destroys this film. Not only does the climax portray all of the characters in an abysmally poor light – seeing two women argue for a good five minutes about whether the one man present should do something, without either of them once suggesting that they themselves could or should if he won’t, makes me want to spit nails – but the endless repetition of “let’s switch off the camera to save the battery”, only for it to promptly come back on again to capture another minute or so of pointless recrimination, is unendurable in all the wrong ways. By the close of the movie I was praying for the unknown evil to just hurry up and off everyone so I could go and get my dinner, and although I did get my wish, the ending is slipshod, relies on the crudest of jump scares and crying-women-mean-it’s-scary-honest cliche, and doesn’t even have the decency to be explicitly supernatural after all that. Weak everywhere it should be strong and without even the self-awareness to descend into redeeming trashiness, I can’t recommend this one.

Hollow is available on Region 2 DVD on 28th January, from Metrodome.

Review by Kayley Viteo

I still remember the first time I saw The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – I’m sure any horror fan worth their salt can. It has stood the test of time (now nearly 40 years later) to become one of the most frightening and disturbing films in the horror canon. I say this to illustrate how truly low the franchise has now sunk. Texas Chainsaw 3D is a trashy, awful mess of a film that is disappointing and aggravating in every single way. This review contains spoilers, so please read at your own risk.

Texas Chainsaw 3D is baffling in nearly everything it does or tries to do, but the plot and script are the worst offenders. It is a direct sequel to the original, ignoring everything else in the franchise, and begins immediately as its predecessor ends. (Let’s just take a moment and acknowledge the deep pain we must all feel at having to link these two films together in any way.) Just after Sally (Marilyn Burns) has gotten away from Leatherface, a single police officer is overrun by a crowd of rednecks hell bent on just killing everyone. This clusterfuck leaves all the Sawyers dead and one baby stolen. That baby is, of course, our lead character Heather (Alexandra Daddario), who is ultimately given a mansion from her serial killer-raising grandmother who apparently grew money on trees.

Heather and her “friends” travel to her new mansion, a group including her boyfriend Ryan (Tremaine Neverson, aka Trey Songz, who I can now confirm has no talent in music or film), her best friend Nikki (Tania Raymonde), Kenny (Keram Malicki-Sanchez) and hitchhiker Darryl (Shaun Sipos) because, of course, it’s not a road trip if you don’t pick up the stranger you just hit with your old-school van. It becomes apparent very quickly that everyone is an asshole except for Heather, and Texas Chainsaw 3D dooms itself by giving the audience zero characters to identify with. It suffers from a baffling array of crazy sub-plots, including a cheating boyfriend and best friend, a hitchhiker with the opposite of a heart of gold, and a Mayor that apparently has more power over the law than the local Sheriff. And then there’s Kenny, whose only character trait is that he is apparently a good cook – at least until he gets hacked into pieces and becomes the dinner. Is my disdain for this movie coming through yet?

One thing I can say about Texas Chainsaw 3D is that it doesn’t make you wait for anything – it moves quickly, which is probably the only reason why I didn’t walk out of the theater. That isn’t to say that it doesn’t have boring moments, the pinnacle of which is a truly unnecessary scene of a cop moving through the mansion’s sub-levels with a gun and an iPhone. Its use of 3D, a medium I have no affection for, is remarkably limited, so if the use of 3D is a plus for you normally it won’t be here. Other than a few jump-scares (almost all of which have nothing to do with the 3D), Texas Chainsaw 3D hardly deserves its horror label except for the level of gore.

But, in the end, what we’ll truly remember from this movie is the way in which it ends, and the way in which it struggles to reinvent Leatherface and the Sawyer clan as a sympathetic, struggling family. Trouble is, it just doesn’t work – and I don’t know anyone who would really want it to. Heather, who apparently can’t button a shirt properly, reveals to Leatherface through a burn mark right above her breast (again, of course), that she is family. Leatherface releases her, and disturbing family bonding ensues, despite the fact that he has killed her friends and her lover. This sequence gives rise to one of the dumbest lines in horror history, which I won’t spoil for you here because that would ruin the laughter – one of the few pleasures this movie inspires, albeit unintentionally. Finally, the film ends with Heather embracing her past and now future as Edith Sawyer, caretaker of Leatherface.

Texas Chainsaw 3D is the lowest of the low, a shitty movie that should be forgotten immediately. Unfortunately, it probably won’t be, and because of success at the box office we may well see a sequel. If you’re a fan of this franchise (or a fan of good movies), I would highly suggest ignoring this tragedy of a movie completely.

Texas Chainsaw 3D is currently open just about everywhere getting way more exposure and making infinitely more money in a fortnight than a thousand considerably more deserving movies will in the entirety of 2013.

Review by Ben Bussey

“Stop all the rapin’ and killin’! You can’t run around rapin’ and killin’ everythin’ in fuckin’ sight!”

Given that Dear God No! has only been granted an 18 certificate from the BBFC after 1 minute 37 seconds of cuts, it’s fair to say this line from early in the movie is a sentiment shared by some. And given that the guy who says this to the belligerent biker gang The Impalers winds up stabbed to death not long thereafter, we can safely assume it’s not a sentiment the makers of Dear God No! have much time for. From the opening seconds it’s immediately apparent that this is a movie determined to be as deliberately offensive as possible; if it’s politically incorrect, it’s fair game. However, it’s all handled with such self-conscious, cartoonish excess that I should hope any reasonable person would be hard pushed to be genuinely offended. Just how reasonable most of us are these days is another matter…

Marc gave Dear God No! a storming write-up back in November 2011, in which he emphasised the mindset one must enter in approaching the film: set aside critical faculty, down a couple of beers and just enjoy. I must admit straight away, this is a mindset I often struggle to get into with these neo-grindhouse films. I appreciate director James Bickert’s desire was for the film to play, in Marc’s words, “like a lost film from that era, not a modern film paying homage,” but I’m not sure the film is entirely successful in this – or even if such a thing is really possible. Even though they shot it on Super 16mm rather than digital, and cast it with real bikers and strippers rather than professional actors, that doesn’t mean that Dear God No! is completely free from the artifice that plagues (yet defines?) this new wave of exploitation. I don’t hold Bickert or any of his team at fault for this; I just don’t think it’s entirely possible to recapture that same 70s vibe. Any attempt to recreate the mood of a past era is invariably going to have a degree of fakery about it, particularly when trying to evoke an era as genuinely bizarre as the golden age of grindhouse. The neo-grindhouse movies can’t help but carry a distinct whiff of quirky, ironic hipster humour about them, and to my mind Dear God No! is no exception, I’m afraid.

Still with me? Good. Because so long as you can accept the film on those terms, then there’s no reason Dear God No! shouldn’t still show you a great time.

As with all the best censor-baiters, Dear God No! is all about excess. Sex and violence are the sales points, and – unlike many of its contemporaries – this is one film that definitely can’t be accused of false advertising. There’s none of that blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nudity here: when someone takes their clothes off, you can rest assured you’ll know they’re naked, for a good long while. The early strip club scene starring the already iconic Nixon-masked go-go girls spends so long focusing on the strippers, you’ll wonder if Bickert has forgotten about the film completely for a few minutes. Indeed, perhaps he did. Storytelling and character building are fairly low on the agenda here, after all. If something gory or raunchy occurs, you can be sure it’ll carry on occuring for some time, possibly longer than you really want it to. Of course, much the same attitude is brought to the rape scenes, which will inevitably rub some up the wrong way, even after the BBFC-imposed cuts. Still, Irreversible this ain’t. It’s bad taste comedy contrived to push beyond the comfort zone of most, not unlike the breakthrough films of Sam Raimi, Stuart Gordon and Peter Jackson. And yes, as that statement might imply, Dear God No! does veer from biker movie madness into full-blown horror territory; at this point it probably wouldn’t be a spoiler to detail quite how, but I’ll avoid the specifics here anyway. Just rest assured the last twenty minutes or so are the most absurd of all, and all those bad folk get their comeuppance. As to whether seeing the rapists die horribly justifies rape as horror spectacle – that’s a question we can (and I’ve no doubt will) carry on debating at length elsewhere…

Fans of the film should be pleased with this 2 disc ‘Impaler’ edition from Monster Pictures. It’s got an exclusive alternate ‘grindhouse’ cut of the film; i.e. the exact same film, but with some of those superimposed scratchy, battered print effects (which I rather think goes against the director’s desire for period naturalism, but hey), plus a buttload of extras including commentaries, behind the scenes footage and loads more, plus – another exclusive – a supplementary booklet written by Bickert and illustrator Tom ‘The Dude Designs’ Hodge.

Oh, and for the benefit of the female staff of BaH, may I just emphasise – mighty beards aplenty. Enjoy.

Dear God No! is released to Region 2 DVD on 14th January, from Monster Pictures.

Review by Annie Riordan

Things I Learned from the Movie V/H/S:
#1 – All men are stupid.
#2 – All women are evil.
#3 – Public Enemy was right. The hype should not be believed.

I’d heard nothing but positive things about this movie, a found footage horror anthology which debuted at Sundance, boasted segments by Ti (The Innkeepers) West and David (The Signal) Bruckner, and found itself included in many a horror critics “Best Of” roundup list for 2012. Frankly, I was bored comatose by The Innkeepers, but I loved The Signal and am one of the only horror fans I know who actually enjoys – and admits to enjoying – found footage flicks. I had no reason to believe that I would be anything but entertained by V/H/S, which is currently streaming on Netflix and which I eagerly sat down to watch. Instead, within half an hour, I was annoyed, disgusted and itching to stab the entire movie right in the fucking pancreas.

I wanted to like you, movie. I tried. However, you were like the blind date who belched his dinner, stuck me with the check and couldn’t fathom why I wouldn’t fuck you afterwards.

V/H/S is the story of a gang of lowlife scumbags who earn a living by documenting their assaults on random women in parking garages and uploading the footage as “reality porn.” However, the $50 they get for every boob shot isn’t stretching as far as it used to, and one of the guys claims to know a way to make a mint for one night’s easy work. Apparently, a fan of their films is aware of the existence of a tape full of footage which makes the gang’s homemade rape tapes look like Disney bootlegs by comparison. Said fan is willing to pay them all an assload of cash if they break into the house where the tape is hidden and steal it. The guys, all being incredibly disgusting fucksocks with the morals of a used condom and the combined intelligence of a hungover Kardashian, immediately head out for a little B&E.

Turns out the homeowner is dead, which should make their excursion all the easier, right? Except for the fact that the house is stuffed with VHS tapes, hundreds upon thousands of VHS tapes. Which one is the one they want? As the inept douchecanoes set about loading up the bootleg booty, the stupidest one of the herd sits himself down in the living room at the dead man’s feet and starts playing the tape already sitting in the player. Guess which one it is?

What follows is a mishmash of mismatched segments, all of the found footage variety, all featuring other equally idiotic shitsnacks bumbling about, trying to outdo one another in the reprehensible asshole department.

First up is “Amateur Night” in which a pair of horn-rimmed nerd glasses are equipped with secret recording equipment, enabling the wearer to record everything he sees. Off to a bar he goes with his douchy compadres, hoping to pick up some drunk sluts, bring them back to their hotel room and star in their own little porno. And indeed they do find a couple of female vodka vacuums who are willing to accompany the Crusty Jockstrap Brigade back to the fleabag. Except one of the girls is kinda weird. Not to be put off by her strangeness, the guys paw the girls for a while, the most cretinous of the crew cackles incessantly on the couch until I longed to put my hands into his mouth and yank it open until he could lick his own spinal cord, and just as it seems that gang rape is imminent, shit goes seriously south. In the words of fellow reviewer girl Kayley Viteo: “They literally embodied the madonna/whore dichotomy and gave it velociraptor teeth.” I could not have put it any better than that.

Moving right along, we get the weakest installment entitled “Second Honeymoon” directed by Ti West, which details the longest, most drawn out and convoluted murder plot ever imagined. Next up is a straightforward slasher called “Tuesday the 17th” about a bitch named Wendy who is more than willing to use her friends as bait just so she can prove that there is, indeed, a killer in the woods. “The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger” is basically a rip off of Cronenberg’s “The Brood.” And finally, the last segment entitled “10/31/98” presents us with a Halloween party gone horribly wrong, as a small group of friends literally stumble upon an exorcism in progress. This is the best segment of the bunch, directed by a group of guys calling themselves “Radio Silence.” I’d seriously be interested in seeing more from this group, as their offering was the only one which did not reek of misogyny or make my colon spasm with disdain.

I can stomach a lot. I’ve been a horror fan for 40+ years and it’s almost impossible to shock, offend or disgust me. V/H/S did all three. Not because it was horrifically frightening or grittily disturbing, but rather because it was so unlikable, reveling in its own filth like a pig in a mud puddle. Save for the final segment, this is a movie which hates itself. It hates men, portraying all of them as stupid, conscienceless penis-slaves whose own mothers should have aborted them in the first trimester. It hates women, portraying the majority of them as backstabbing, scheming whores who apparently learned the facts of life from a NatGeo video about the mating habits of the female praying mantis. It hates its own audience, seeming to think that most of us actually want to watch this kind of hateful shit, and that we might even enjoy it to boot.

This is not entertainment. It’s masturbatory porn. It’s on par with a slobbering pervert frantically fapping away at his own pucker and filming it, honestly believing that what he is doing is art and that he’s equipped with just enough street cred to convince others that what he is doing is art.

All I have to say is: Don’t believe the hype.

V/H/S is out now on Region 1 DVD, Blu-ray and VOD in the US, from Magnolia Home Entertainment. It comes to UK cinemas on 18th January, then Region 2 DVD and Blu-ray from 28th January, from Momentum.

Review by Nia Edwards-Behi

I jumped at the chance to review Jackpot, marketed heavily as ‘Jo Nesbø’s Jackpot’, having thoroughly enjoyed Headhunters (‘Jo Nesbø’s Headhunters’), both film and book. I’m intending on reading more of Nesbø’s work – I would have already if I wasn’t so slow at reading – given my nascent interest in that massive Scandinavian crime thing that’s so popular at the moment. Naturally, I thought I was in for a film not dissimilar to Headhunters (a story that stands alone from the rest of Nesbø’s body of work), a twisty thriller with an undertone of black humour. What I got was… not quite that. Jackpot seems to want to be a sort of Guy Ritchie crime caper, only with an extra layer of added ‘humour’ that either I didn’t get or didn’t work in translation. This desire to be a Guy Ritchie movie seems to be so strong that the film’s score bizarrely and blatantly rips off Hans Zimmer’s scores for Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films. I found this to be particularly distracting but I suspect this won’t bother most people as much as it bothered me, being that I suspect most people haven’t listened to those two scores quite as much as I have.

The story of the film is quite simple, and entertaining enough. The police find a man beneath the body of a stripper, her colleagues and several men lie dead around him. Oscar (Kyrre Hellum) is the lone survivor of a massive shoot-out, and he must recount his sorry tale of petty crime to the detective tasked with working out just what happened to result in such a bloody massacre. It all begins, when he and his down-and-out friends somehow manage to win 1.7 million betting on horses. An elaborate tale is woven and it leads to a relatively satisfying ending, though the film is neither as funny nor as gory as it seems to wish it was. Ultimately, that’s the problem with it – it’s so very middle-of-the-road that there ends up being very little to actually say about it. Is it well-acted? Well enough. Is it interestingly directed? Not really, but it’s not incompetent. Are the action scenes exciting and gory? Yeah? Kind of? It’s all a bit *meh*. It makes for an entertaining and distracting enough film to watch, though, and doesn’t come wholly unrecommended. Kyrre Hellum’s performance does, importantly, get you onside with Oscar, which very much carries the film. He has some nice interactions with the rest of the cast, most of all with Detective Solør, played with effective bluster and bluff by Henrik Mestad. And heck, if you like the soundtracks to the Sherlock Holmes films (I do!), the music’s quite good too.

I feel I can explain away my fairly ambivalent response to the film, however, and that is that I was expecting something completely different from the film – something that makes it a little unfair to then go on and criticise it for. I was completely suckered by a few glances at a fairly misleading poster (right) way back when the film was in cinemas, and a close association with a novelist. This isn’t a Jo Nesbø adaptation, he came up with the story on which the script is based – but boy that’s a good selling point. My expectations for the film were very much based on the theatrical poster, having seen it a few times on the London Underground. Very much in the same vein as the Headhunters poster, it screamed, to me at least, dark thriller – and all the generic associations with Scandinavian crime dramas to boot. ‘I want to see this film,’ I thought to myself. Having then read Headhunters – itself quite different from the usual Scandinavian crime drama – and enjoyed the film, my preconception of what Jackpot would be like was truly cemented. And, as I’ve laid out, Jackpot was nothing like the film I expected. To what degree this impacted upon my response to it, I can’t be fully sure, but I’d happily wager that it made quite a difference. I look at the DVD cover (above left) and think ‘not interested’, but then again, it’s recently become increasingly clear just how unreliable DVD cover design can be. Having said that, for once, it’s a better representation of the film than the original poster. Whodathunkit.

So, by all means, give Jackpot a go. I imagine it might be a lot of fun if what you’re after is fast-paced, almost-funny petty-crime shenanigans.

Jackpot is out on Region 2 DVD on 7th January, from Metrodome.

Review by Ben Bussey

“Oh please… make it stop! Make this throbbing stop!”

That’s it. End of review. If those two lines of dialogue alone (and the photograph above) don’t sell Vampire Ecstasy to you, then there’s really nothing more to be said. Bye-bye.

Okay, okay, I’ll let you in on a bit of the plot. Okay. Er… wait, it’ll come back to me. Something about… tits. Wait, no. Well, yes, there are tits involved, lots and lots of them, but that’s not all that happens in the film, obviously. There’s… er… characters and stuff. Who show their tits a lot. But I digress. So, there’s this medieval castle that was once home to a crazy randy queen of the undead type, whose reign of terror involved much ravaging of the local virgins, and baring of tits and so forth. Her terrifying, tit-fondling ways were ended when she was burned at the stake: but crucially, as is emphasised, not with a wooden stake through the heart. Therefore, though her fabulous tit-weilding body may have been destroyed, her undead soul was not vanquished. 

Fast forward to the 1970s, and some guests arrive at the castle, most of them young ladies, as one of them is in line to inherit the old place. However, whoever this young lady is, she’s also the reincarnation of the vampire queen, although she doesn’t know it. And the housekeeping staff of the castle, while they may appear very stern in their black, matronly outfits, are in fact a coven of saucy witches who head down to their dungeon every evening to dance around with their tits out covered in body paint. Their primary objective, aside from shaking their paint-spattered tits about (as evidenced by the photo above), is to bring back their undead mistress, in the body of the aforementioned young lady. But which young lady could it be? There’s only one way to find out – for absolutely everybody to show their tits.

Oh alright, alright. Vampire Ecstasy has more to it than just tits. There’s a lot of full-frontal and rear nudity as well. This was 1974, after all.

You get the general idea. Directed by prolific skin flick maetro Joseph Sarno, Vampire Ecstasy – AKA Veil of Blood, AKA The Devil’s Plaything (once again, this was 1974) – is your classic Eurotrash ‘horrotica’ midnight movie. While gothic-tinged soft porn movies weren’t thin on the ground in 70s Europe, this one is fairly unusual in that it isn’t dubbed; the German cast deliver all their dialogue on camera in English, though it seems safe to assume none of them were native English speakers. The brief interview with the late Sarno on the disc makes for fairly amusing viewing, as he talks in very respectful tones about the professionalism of his cast and the artistry of his crew, waxing lyrical on just about everything but the fact that his film is overflowing with tits. But, credit where it’s due, he comes off genuine, and there’s no denying the film’s aesthetic pleasures are not limited to the abundance of tits. It’s a well shot, well lit film, with that distinct atmosphere of 70s Gothic horror, making good use of the real castle location. Although, obviously, the abundance of tits certainly doesn’t hurt.

On top of which, there’s at least one bona fide iconic performance here in the form of Nadia Henkowa as Wanda Krock, both chief housekeeper and high priestess of the saucy tits-out coven. What makes her so surprisingly effective an antagonist is that she’s every bit as convincing as a schoolmarmish ice maiden as she is an unbridled sex maniac witch. S&M types should be in hog heaven, as she’s a harsh mistress indeed, and her punishments are of a sexual kind, replete with plentiful malevolent murmurings about magic that makes your juices burn hotter than hell and sets your nipples on fire – hence the plea of the suffering young woman quoted earlier. Yep, there’s much writhing around in exquisite agony here, and the bouyant Marie Forså and Ulrike Butz make for jolly good butt-naked writher-arounders. And if things weren’t already kinky enough, we’ve got the brother and sister parapsychologists Anke Syring and Nico Wolf, who struggle to divide their attention between their mission to stop the reincarnation of the vampire queen, and their underlying incestuous desire for one another. Wow, the only way things could get pervier would be if the witches had candles shaped exactly like erect penises. Oh wait, they do.

YES, THAT’S A CANDLE.

Seriously this time – end of review.

Simply put, if you like Euro, 70s, Gothic and – oh yeah – tits, then you’d do well to give Vampire Ecstasy a spin in the wee small hours. And if I still haven’t persauded you, this magnificent appraisal does a far better job than I ever could; read that and see if you’re not finally sold. 

Oh, and I did mention there were tits…?

Vampire Ecstasy will be released on Region 2 DVD on 21st January, from Mediumrare Entertainment. (And I sincerely hope they fix the spelling on the cover…)

Review by Tristan Bishop

I’ll admit it straight off the bat – I found it really hard to review Gut. It took me a few attempts to sit through the entire film – although one of these was due to a mysterious technical failure – and when I finally finished viewing it all the way through without succumbing to sleep, I struggled to find anything to say about the film. This may imply that I thought Gut was a bad, or uninteresting, film, but I certainly don’t think it is. It’s certainly massively flawed, but it displays enough originality of approach to win the respect of this viewer, at least.

The film deals with two long-time friends and workmates, Tom (played by Jason Vail), and Dan (Nicholas Wilder). Tom balances his work with a wife and young daughter, whilst Dan appears to be still stuck in his youth, and jealous that Tom’s home life impacts on their friendship. Dan invites Tom round to his house for an evening of horror films – trying to entice him with Return Of The Living Dead Part 3 (“Mindy Claaaaarke”) – but Dan has something more disturbing on the menu – a DVD he claims to have purchased from an online source specialising in grey-market films. (I’m sure most of us who have been cult film fans for long enough will have been familiar with those at some point). The DVD contains what could possibly be a snuff movie – one that focusses on trauma being inflicted on a woman’s midriff (hence the ‘Gut’ of the title). Both men are fascinated by the film, and it seems to hold power over them both long after the viewing – and subsequent discs and viewings only serve to exacerbate the problems.

I mentioned at the start of the review that I had difficulty ordering my thoughts about Gut, and the manner in which I found myself finally writing the review was a rather extreme one: at the time of writing I am in the cabin of a ferry boat during a force eight gale on a nine hour plus journey to France, with, due to a silly oversight, no access to phone or laptop. (In fact this review was originally written on a pad of A4 paper, prior to my typing it up!) I am also suffering from the effects of nicotine withdrawal after just under a week of quitting smoking. Somehow this unpleasant set of circumstances is precisely the right combination of elements required for me to finally express my ‘Gut’ feelings. (Sorry.)

I can only assume it has something to do with the creeping sense of unease that pervades the film. The performances are just a small step above amateur hour, and shatter any believability that the film may have aspired to, but somehow this doesn’t seem to matter too much, and perhaps adds to the overall queasiness of the venture. Likewise the plot is simplistic, and you will see the end coming from, ooh, about fifteen minutes in, but again, this does not seem to detract from the atmosphere of the film at all.

Instead Gut achieves what it does via two factors: it feels intensely personal and individual. The two main characters have hugely unlikeable personality traits – we are being asked to identify with guys who seem to be ordering and enjoying what are probably snuff films – but they resonate with an honesty that you just wouldn’t get in a big budget production. The film also is, at times, seriously dull, and seems to be played out mostly at meal tables. For most of the first hour you might be tempted to give your TV a good kick to see if you can’t jostle it along a bit, maybe advance some plot, but Gut plays by its own rules, and the tension does indeed build, and possibly more effectively for making you assume that it won’t.

The closest I can come comparing Gut to anything would be the work of David Cronenberg – the somewhat detached but individual characters, moral questionability of their actions and the occasional rather eye-opening sexual perversions all conspire to remind of Cronenberg’s horror period, or maybe even the debut feature of his son Brandon, Antiviral (incidentally one of my favourite films of 2012). Whilst comparing Gut directly to the Cronenbergian genius would leave the former looking more than a little lacking, I would rather see first time film-makers taking this path rather than jumping on the next serial killer, found footage or torture porn bandwagon.

To close, then, Gut will alternately bore you, intrigue you, turn your stomach and make you question your own and the film-makers’ intentions. It’s not really a pleasant or fun ride, but it does eventually get to where it’s going. Much like a nine hour trip on a choppy ferry suffering from nicotine withdrawal.

Gut is available now on VOD in the US and Canada.

Review by Tristan Bishop

“This is not a horror film.”

This line from Berberian Sound Studio leapt out at me on viewing, firstly because one of the themes of this year for me is the question of what actually makes a horror film, and secondly because of the nature of the film itself. The line is being spoken by a character in relation to the film-with-a-film (more on which later), but it comes across a key line – Berberian Sound Studio wants you to question what it is doing, what it is portraying and how you feel about it. Make no mistake, this is not horror-by-numbers; we are dealing with something far more interesting here.

The plot of the film is a very simple one – in fact, in many ways, it is almost not a plot at all, but a scenario. It is the 1970s, and Gilderoy (played by Toby Jones) is an English sound engineer who has travelled to Italy to work on a film called The Equestrian Vortex for the producer Giancarlo Santini. The job at first seems to be fairly straightforward – recording dialogue (as all Italian films were shot without sound during this period), screams and sound effects – most of which are achieved by mistreating a never-ending stream of vegetables. However, the culture clash between the reserved Englishman and the flamboyant, sometimes aloof, sometimes intimidating Italians, mixed up with the disturbing nature of the film they are working on, serve to unsettle Gilderoy and possibly to fragment his psyche altogether.

I say ‘possibly’ because, as I have hinted above, this is not a film which spoon-feeds you. In fact, it jettisons traditional plot structure entirely. Second-time director Peter Strickland has stated in interview that the film is structured like a tape-loop (similar to the analogue technology used in the film to achieve effects which warp sounds into new shapes). Things repeat, but are changed as events occur. Time seems elastic and non-linear – an effect heightened by the wonderful editing, which occasionally makes it seem like Gilderoy’s apartment is actually an extension of the studio (we never see anything outside the apartment or the studio).

Of course such daring and uncommercial tactics could well sink the film in a mire of pretention from which it would be hard to crawl out of, were it not for the fact that every single element is crafted to perfection: the aforementioned editing, the direction, photography, music, sound (of course) and acting. Toby Jones is a revelation, and makes you identify with Gilderoy’s sensitive and impressionable character, and he works as the moral centre of the film without having to signpost this using dialogue.

In fact about half the dialogue in Berberian Sound Studio belongs to the film they are recording – but we never see any images from the film itself, other than an incredibly accurate and thrilling (especially to us fans of Italian horror) credits sequence, featuring spot-on music from retro-futurist Warp Records recording artists Broadcast (now sadly missed after the recent passing of one of their members). Many reviews have claimed that Gilderoy is affected by the violent images he is seeing, but I think the film is working at a deeper level here – it is a film about complicity, about how we can be forced into doing things we are not comfortable with, and how morals, and therefore our entire persona, can be malleable. I don’t want to spoiler anything here (quite difficult with a film of such unusual structure) but one sequence towards the end of the film makes this explicit.

Is Berberian Sound Studio a horror film, however? I don’t think there is a definitive answer to this. The director has stated that he doesn’t like to refer to it as a horror film, but, unlike the quote at the top of the page from the in-film director Santini, this is not from some conceited idea of his own importance, but rather due to some negative feedback that early screenings of the film received from horror audiences. I find this a real shame, as the horror scene can always do with directors of Strickland’s obvious abundance of talent, and more films which stretch the boundaries of the genre. Berberian certainly uses the tricks and techniques of the horror film, but the content is what seems to be the sticking point for some. Whichever way you look at it, however, Berberian is beautiful, intelligent, disturbing, impossible to ignore and certainly among the greatest British films (horror or not) of recent years.

Berberian Sound Studio is out now on Region 2 DVD and Blu-Ray, from Artificial Eye.

Review by Stephanie Scaife

This Irish creature feature is Jon Wright’s sophomore effort as a director, after the watchable if flawed teen zombie flick Tormented, and what an unexpected treat it is. Imagine if The Guard and Tremors had an oozy, tentacled love child, then what you’d end up with is Grabbers. It makes a welcome relief to the oh-so-serious horror films of late, and although not downright scary, it successfully treads the line of being both a laugh-out-loud comedy and an icky monster film with some decent squelchy moments of gross out horror.

Richard Coyle stars as workshy Garda Ciarán O’Shea, a burgeoning alcoholic on the isolated Erin Island off the coast of Ireland. Then one day a new supervisor turns up in the form of straight laced workaholic Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley), whose seemingly enforced sabbatical from Dublin has landed her with O’Shea. This unlikely paring, which we’ve all seen variations on time and time again, is surprisingly the film’s biggest success, thanks in large part to Coyle and Bradley, their convincing chemistry together, and to the well written screenplay from Kevin Lehane. It’s not long before our odd couple are put to the test when bloodthirsty aliens crash land into the ocean just off the coast of the island and start draining and decapitating the locals. With the help of forensic scientist Dr. Smith (Russell Tovey) and Paddy (Lalor Roddy), the local fisherman who first catches one of the creatures, they set out to rid the island of its inconvenient infestation.

As luck would have it these blood-sucking freaks can’t stomach alcohol; being that this is a film set in Ireland and half the characters are permanently sozzled, it doesn’t take them long to figure this handy little detail out. Although aliens allergic to alcohol crash landing in Ireland is about as clever as those water-allergic aliens from Signs coming to a planet that is 70% water… anyway this handy revelation leads the locals to stage an almighty lock-in at the local pub in a bid to stay as rat-arsed as possible, thus ensuring that they don’t become dinner for the island’s new extraterrestrial inhabitants. David Pearse and Bronagh Gallagher star as the pub landlords, Pearse as the reluctant host to this almighty piss-up and Gallagher under the rather tragic assumption that it’s all been organised to celebrate her birthday, and together with the rest of the locals they must endeavour to stay as bladdered as possible whilst battling it out against the aliens and their newly hatched squirmy offspring. This of course offers ample opportunity for humour, which we’re given in droves, particularly from Bradley as a teetotaler who must get drunk.

With great acting all round and a fantastic supporting cast of Ireland’s finest, combined with a great script and some decent camerawork that makes ample use of the surrounding scenery, Grabbers is a real breath of fresh air. The special effects used in creating what can only be described as very Lovecraftian beasties are surprisingly good too, particularly the baby aliens that offer ample opportunities for sight gags and knowing nods to other favourite b-movies such as the aforementioned Tremors, along with the likes of Gremlins and Critters. This really is the most fun you’re likely to have in front of your TV on a dreary January evening and it comes highly recommended.

Grabbers is out now on Region 2 DVD, from Sony Pictures.