You’ve gotta love a film that straight away states its intent (and understand a film which needs to sell its merits pretty damn quickly) and Nightmare (1981) does both of these things. We’re off with a dream of a dismembered body, a shrieking nightmare, a man in a straightjacket – and the immediate need to […]
There has, in recent years, been a modest resurgence in interest in the genre of folk horror, with directors such as Ari Aster and Robert Eggers putting their own spin on recognisable folk horror features such as closed communities, local belief systems and irrational devotion to the edicts of these systems. As such, the likes […]
The phenomenon of ‘folk horror’ has been with us for some considerable time – you might argue for as long as storytelling has existed – but, at least in terms of folk horror cinema, there does seem to have been a real explosion of interest in the last decade or so. This has found expression […]
A mid-80s comedy about the charming pastime of gaslighting, Overboard is, in retrospect, an extremely… odd Hollywood picture, whose more bizarre elements are carried by the charm of its lead performers, Hollywood golden couple Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn. It’s a film that seems an off-piste choice for Severin Films to release on Blu-ray, but […]
The Spanish director Eloy de la Iglesia is a mercurial, intriguing figure. His work has long been underappreciated, neglected, or simply misunderstood – amongst both Spanish audiences and English-speaking cinephiles. Severin Films are remedying this with several Blu-ray releases of de la Iglesia’s pictures, including his most (in)famous – and arguably, for many years, his […]
Chiefly circulated amongst fans of extreme cinema in a version culled from its US VHS release, under the tacky title Naked Massacre, the 1976 picture Born for Hell offers an intriguing look at the case of Richard Speck, who during a single night in 1966 murdered eight student nurses in a Chicago townhouse – through […]
The production of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in the Pagsanjan region of the Philippines left behind a local filmmaking infrastructure ripe for exploitation. During the 1980s, numerous filmmakers capitalised on this. Severin Films have released one such film, Alan Birkinshaw’s 1982 picture Invaders of the Lost Gold, on Blu-ray for the first time. Made […]
Motivated by the popularity of 1986’s Strike Commando, the first of a number of films they shot in the Philippines, Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso and producer Franco Gaudenzi sought to emulate its success by making a sequel, Strike Commando 2 (Trappola diabolica), released in 1988. Along with the first film, Strike Commando 2 has been […]
Starring former Captain America Reb Brown[i], the 1986 ‘macaroni combat’ picture Strike Commando, now available on an exemplary Blu-ray release from Severin Films, is one of a number of pictures that Italian film director Bruno Mattei – that auteur of so many awful-but-oh-so-watchable Italian exploitation films of the 1980s and 1990s – made in the […]
There’s a case for the poster for Horrors of Spider Island appearing under the dictionary definition of ‘exploitation film’, so perfectly does the movie encapsulate everything about the genre. On this basis, the only surprise about the new Severin blu-ray is why it has taken the label so long to release it, as perfect a […]