Wax is a 2014 Spanish horror film co-written and directed by Víctor Matellano. It stars Jack Taylor (Count Dracula; Female Vampire; Horror of the Zombies), Geraldine Chaplin, Jimmy Shaw, Lone Fleming (Tombs of the Blind Dead; A Candle for the Devil; The Possessed) and the voice of the late horror icon Paul Naschy (as an automaton).

Plot teaser:

A young journalist is employed to spend a night at Barcelona’s Wax Museum, where paranormal activities are supposed to be taking place. He must record everything happening there. In the museum there are different wax figures including one of Dr. Knox, a sadist cannibal surgeon who loves dressing up as Vincent Price in House of Wax. Soon, the journalist begins to feel he is not alone….

IMDb | Facebook | Twitter | Image source: Bloody Disgusting

Mother’s Day is a 1980 American horror-thriller film, directed, co-written and produced by Charles Kaufman, brother of Troma Entertainment co-founder Lloyd Kaufman, who served as an associate producer for the film. It stars Nancy Hendrickson, Deborah Luce, Tiana Pierce, Holdem McGuire, Billy Ray McQuade and US TV star Rose Ross.

Plot teaser:

Abbey, Jackie, and Trina, who reunite every year to take a camping trip. Once while setting their vacation up in the woods, they find their trip turns into their worst nightmare when they are captured by a group of two partially insane punk/”hillbilly” hybrids: Ike  and Addley. The punks lead a comfortable life, living along with their mentally abnormal mother in an occult hovel situated amidst the wood. All through the movie, their mother goads her sons into acts of rape, violence, and murder…

The British film rating board (BBFC) rejected the film in 1980, banning it from distribution. Nevertheless, the film was shown several times on TV on the Horror Channel between 2006–08, with no cuts and is finally released on Blu-ray and DVD uncut in 2014 by 88 Films.

In Australia, the film was originally passed uncut with an R 18+ in 1983 by the Australian censors but was later banned when reviewed in 1985. Fourteen minutes of the film were cut in Germany in order to keep the film from an X-rating.

A remake came in 2010,

Buy on DVD or Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Reviews:

“Beautifully skuzzy and brazenly bizarre, Charles Kaufman’s original version of Mother’s Day is a deft mix of pitch black comedy and fairly effective and disturbing horror. The performances are wonderfully over the top and the locations amazingly filthy, giving this one a look and feel all its own.” Ian Jane, Rock! Shock! Pop!

“… Mother’s Day is not for everyone. It’s a demented and revolting exercise in sadism that makes you feel very uncomfortable, yet it’s done with such brains and heart that it stands tall above its many comparable knock-off’s. It’s tight, fast-paced, and very well done for its type. You become very concerned for the three heroines of the story, and for me this alone makes it a winner. These are characters with short but potent personal histories, and you CARE what happens to them.” DVD Drive-In

” … it’s similar to I Spit on Your Grave, but while that film was unflinching and sadistic in its depiction of rape and violence, Mother’s Day comes off as simply being cartoonish and weird. Yes, it’s unusual that Mother goads the boys into their strange shows for her entertainment, but the scenes are so weird that they become ludicrous. They are simply too odd to be disturbing.” DVD Sleuth

Wikipedia | IMDb

WH

“Snuff videos showing scenes of murder, mutilation and cannibalism were on sale alongside Disney films at a children’s comic fair… Trading Standards officers believe the video shows genuine footage of chanting, half-naked Amazon Indians butchering a white man depicted as a jungle explorer.”

THE DAILY MAIL, April 1992

“Many serial killers found an outlet for their vivid sexual fantasies in pornography. Ed Kemper scoured detective magazines for pictures of corpses and frequented ‘snuff movies’ in which intercourse is a prelude to murder.”

Newsweek, quoted in THE AGE OF SEX CRIME, Jane Caputi 1987

“There’s a lot of gay people there, gay men, so they have young boys. You get a lot of rent boys there, because they’re offered a load of money, and then they become snuff movies.”

‘Janet’, quoted in BLASPHEMOUS RUMOURS, Andrew Boyd 1991

It’s the darker side of the film business – the claims that someone, somewhere, is producing films which feature genuine murder and torture. Films which are then sold or screened for vast sums of money to wealthy decadents, who are so bored with life that they can only get their kicks from watching the final taboos being shattered… or videos which are circulated amongst underground networks of child molesters and rapists, ensuring that the violation of the victim continues long after their death. The term for these movies is at once shocking in its cynicism, and unforgettable in the horror of its implications: Snuff.

Nobody is entirely sure when the stories began. Some claim that rumours were circulating as far back as the Forties, but the modern fixation with the idea of the ‘snuff movie’ can be traced to that turbulent period as the Sixties crossed over into the Seventies, and long-held ideas of morality began to crumble. In 1961, a film-maker still risked prosecution for showing naked girls on film; a decade on, and cinemas across America were openly showing hardcore pornography. Nothing seemed taboo any more.

To moral campaigners, the idea of the snuff movie seemed both inevitable and useful. Inevitable, because after all, where else was there for the satiated pornographer and his audience to go? And useful, because it provided a potent weapon to use against the libertarians. Even the most liberal minded individual would, after all, consider freedom to murder a liberty too far, and might even be forced to rethink their deeply held beliefs about sexual freedom in the face of such material. And so began a mythology that has, if anything, grown in potency over the years, to the extent that even now, most people unquestioningly accept the existence of snuff movies as proven fact.

Which is odd. Because despite the hysteria, a single scrap of evidence confirming snuff movies has yet to be found.

What we do have are outright lies, assorted apocryphal tales, staggering cases of mistaken identity and several cases of genuine cinematic death which may seem to fit the bill at first, but don’t actually match the precise snuff movie definition.

The first recognised tales of snuff movie production emerged in Ed Sanders’ exhaustive book on Charles Manson, The Family. Manson was known to be fond of filming Family activity, including sex orgies which he supposedly sold. He is also known to have stolen a van full of NBC TV equipment. In The Family, Sanders interviews an anonymous Family associate who claims to have witnessed the filming of what he describes as “a snuff movie” in which a naked girl is decapitated during a pseudo-occult ritual. Although the video equipment was recovered when police raided the Spahn Ranch, no snuff footage has emerged (other Family films have been seen, but consist of nothing more sensational than skinny-dipping). It was claimed that remaining Family members squirreled the footage away; if true, they hid it well. More than a quarter of a decade on, it still remains a secret waiting to be revealed. Sanders also hints at rumours that various members of Hollywood’s smart set were dabbling in animal porn, torture and snuff movies. Again, such footage, if it exists, has never emerged. Years later, the Manson connection re-emerged when writer Maury Terry tied the Family and snuff production into his exhaustive investigation of satanic connections to the Son of Sam murders in New York. Yet again, no videotapes were ever found to back up these claims.

After years of similar unfounded rumours, the snuff movie was dragged screaming into the public consciousness in the mid-Seventies with the release of Snuff. Hyped as being shot “in South America…where life is CHEAP!”. The film implied – no, almost boasted – that it featured a genuine murder, carried out for the camera. Wherever it played, the film was attacked by feminists, anti-porn campaigners and journalists, who had not long before reported on the case of a so-called snuff movie being intercepted by U.S. Customs en route from – where else? – South America.

The protests were not, however, as spontaneous as they might have seemed. In fact, they were as phoney as the film itself. Grindhouse distributor Allan Shackleton was the warped genius behind the whole sorry scam. It was Shackleton who arranged the pickets and wrote the letters of outrage, Shackleton who planted the story of the Customs seizure (no such interception had in fact taken place), gambling that the negative publicity would ensure major box office returns before the film was run out of town. And it was Shackleton who created Snuff out of an unreleased movie called Slaughter.

Slaughter had been shot in 1971 by husband and wife exploitation movie veterans Michael and Roberta Findlay. Attempting to cash in on the Manson Family headlines, it told of the exploits of a hippy cult leader who leads his followers to murder. It was indeed shot in South America (Argentina, to be exact), where film crews, if not life, were certainly cheap. Filmed without sync sound, the resulting movie was a sorry mess, and sat unreleased until 1975, when Shackleton – a hardened showman distributor with an eye for a good scam – picked it up and decided to revamp it into something that could make money. Noting its incoherence, he figured that the only way audiences would sit through the film would be if they were given a reason to accept – even expect – the amateur style. As a snuff movie, Slaughter’s lack of technical skill became a positive boon.

The first thing Shackleton did was to remove the end of the film, presumably thinking that no-one would have bothered following the plot anyway. He also chopped off the opening and closing credits, giving the film a suitably anonymous appearance. He then hired Simon Nuchtern to shoot a new ending in a studio owned by hardcore adult movie director Carter Stevens, in which the cameras pull back from the action to show the studio set. The “actress” starts to get it on with the “director”, but is then assaulted by him. He reaches for a knife, chops off one of her fingers, followed by the whole hand, then disembowels her. The fact that this footage is considerably better shot than the rest of the film, that the actress bears no resemblance to the woman seen in the earlier footage, and that the special effects are somewhat rubbery didn’t matter. Shackleton knew that, for varying reasons, people would want to believe it was real. And they did. Many still do, despite the truth about Snuff being widely reported. Some believe out of ignorance; others out of cynicism. Anti-Pornography groups are certainly aware of the reality behind Snuff, but still hold it up as proof that women are being routinely murdered for the camera. It’s in their interests for people to believe that the porn industry routinely murders people for profit.

In fact, Snuff was roundly condemned as a tasteless stunt by America’s pornographers. Producer David F. Friedman, who headed the Adult Film Association of America, begged Shackleton not to release the film. Sex film veteran Friedman, in David Hebditch and Nick Anning’s book Porn Gold, traced the snuff hysteria to early Seventies group called the Campaign for Decency in Literature, headed by Charles Keating, who claimed on TV to have evidence that X-rated film-makers were murdering their stars on film. The producer claims that he contacted the CDL and asked them to hand their evidence to the authorities, and, when nothing happened, contacted the FBI himself, who dismissed the claims.

Friedman also offered a $25,000 reward to anyone supplying evidence of snuff movies. It remains uncollected.

Snuff made Shackleton his expected bundle, and faded into history. But it provided new ammunition for pro-censorship groups and moral campaigners. Now, everyone knew that snuff wasn’t just something old men snorted instead of cocaine.

Years later in Britain, where the film had – naturally – never been seen, it emerged on video with spectacularly bad timing. At the beginning of 1982, the first rumblings of what would become the Video Nasty tidal-wave of hysteria were appearing in the press. As the storm over the availability of uncensored video grew, Astra Video – already prime targets for prosecution after releasing the grossly misunderstood I Spit on Your Grave and David Friedman’s early Sixties splatter movie Blood Feast – added Snuff to their roster of titles, featuring the rather ill-conceived (if somewhat accurate) cover blurb “the original legendary atrocity shot and banned in New York… the actors and actresses who dedicated their lives to making this film were never seen or heard from again.” After an outraged Sunday Times article, Astra rapidly withdrew the film from sale, but not before a reasonable quantity had made it to the shops. Tabloid reporters invariably took the film at face value, and the circulation of a “real snuff movie” helped fuel calls for controls over violent videos.

Ironically, slipping out unnoticed on video in Britain a couple of years earlier was a West German rip-off , entitled Confessions of a Blue Movie Star… although the original English language title, The Evolution of Snuff, was far less equivocal. This film was an uneasy mixture of soft porn, documentary and curious moral campaigning – it’s notable as one of the few anti-porn sex films ever made. Supposedly following the career of a German sex starlet who later took her own life, the film suggests that snuff movies are an inevitable symptom of liberal attitudes towards sex. Opening with interviews with various people (including Roman Polanski) who are convinced of the existence of snuff movies, the film reveals its true cynicism and lack of credibility at the end, when it features an interview with a masked “Snuff Movie maker” and then presents an extract from his film. This footage is shocking – grainy, shaky images of a woman seemingly being disembowelled. It looks far more authentic that the footage in Snuff. But it’s also far more recognisable. In fact, it has been lifted from Wes Craven’s brutal 1972 production The Last House on the Left. And although Craven’s movie was condemned by many critics for excessive violence, nobody would suggest that the killings were real…

Although snuff movies would become a standard plot device for film-makers in the Seventies, providing the central or incidental themes in a number of films. Hardcore saw George C. Scott wallowing in the seedy world of pornography, trying to locate his estranged daughter, who he has seen in a porno flick and who, of course, ends up in a snuff movie. Coming from the religiously tortured mind of Paul Schrader, it was a decent film that sadly perpetuated the myth that the porn industry routinely kills its stars.

Similarly, Joe D’Amato’s outrageous Emanuelle in America sees the titular character, played as always by Laura Gemser, investigating corruption and white slavery, at one point watching a ‘snuff movie’ as part of her investigations. The snuff footage in this film is remarkably brutal and realistic – quite what audiences expecting a softcore romp made of it is anyone’s guess.

Last House on Dead End Street is a more impressively disturbing film about a porn producer who moves into snuff movie production. A weird hybrid of sleaze and art, the film for years was the height of cinematic obscurity, only available as fuzzy bootlegs and with no information available about director Viktor Janos. But in 2001, porn director Roger Watkins was revealed as both the director and the star, and the film – which began life as a three hour movie called The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell in 1972 before winding up in the current, thankfully shorter, version in 1977 – is now readily available on DVD. It’s quite unlike anything else you’ll ever see.

1980’s Effects is considerably less interesting. Shot in Pittsburgh by Dusty Nelson and featuring several George Romero collaborators (Tom Savini, Joe Pilato, John Harrison), this is the tale of a horror film maker who decided real death will be cheaper than special effects. It’s a nice idea, but the film is unfortunately very dull and clumsily produced.

Even worse is Australian film Final Cut, made the same year, in which a pair of journalists gain access to a reclusive media mogul who might be producing snuff movies for his own pleasure. Very little happens and the best thing about the film is the video cover.

Snuff movies – or, rather, snuff TV – also featured in David Cronenberg’s hallucinatory Videodrome, in which the director played with a ‘what if’ idea – in this case, ‘what if the fears of the censors were true/’ in a tale of video-induced hallucinations via a signal hidden inside brutal torture and murder videos being beamed from (where else?) South America.

While these films all explored the idea of the snuff movie, it wasn’t until the Eighties that the phrase and the hysteria would fully explode into mainstream consciousness. As the Seventies wave of liberalism gave way to the Eighties Thatcherite New Morality and hard-line feminism, it somehow became easier to accept that pornographers – evil, corrupt exploiters of women, every one of them – would cheerfully kill for the cameras. And by the 1990s, British newspaper hacks, bored with the term ‘video nasty’ were starting to use ‘snuff’ as a description for just about any violent movie, culminating in one tabloid notoriously referring to Japanese amine film Akira as ‘Manga snuff’. Now, apparently, even cartoon characters were being murdered for real, despite never having actually existed in the first place!

Feminist writers and moral campaigners both routinely told tales of snuff movies which were dressed up as proven fact, but which were always vague enough to avoid scrutiny. No names, no evidence. Films that the authorities had been unable to see were apparently easily accessed by anti-porn fanatics. And invariably, the public followed suit. Everyone these days, it seems, knows someone who’s mate has seen a snuff movie.

In many cases, these snuff movies turn out to be more indicative of the gullibility of the viewer – or, perhaps, their desire to believe. The Amazon snuff movie reported (in a cynically racist manner) by The Daily Mail, and quoted at the top of this article, turned out to be Ruggero Deodato’s 1979 production Cannibal Holocaust, a film which has been mistaken for the Real Thing in Britain more than once. At least that film, with it’s powerfully authentic pseudo-documentary style, looks the part; more ludicrous was the insistence by zealous staff from Liverpool Trading Standards and various media (including Channel Four News) that Joe D’Amato’s Anthropophagous (a generally tedious horror movie about a cannibal killer lurking on a Greek island), seized during video nasty raids in 1993 was a snuff movie. Similarly, a scurrilous Channel 4 documentary series ran an episode on ‘satanic abuse’, claiming to show footage of killings in occult rituals – in reality, it was performance art footage by Genesis P. Orridge’s Temple of Psychik Youth.

Flower of Flesh and Blood, an episode from the Japanese  film series Guinea Pig, has also convinced many people – including actor Charlie Sheen, who reported it to the authorities after watching aghast. In Britain, a National Film Theatre employee was taken to court after customs seized a tape of the film, and only narrowly escaped a jail sentence when experts declared the film to be a clever simulation. And indeed it is. Catering to the Japanese audience’s blood lust, the film is a carefully constructed fake snuff movie – devoid of any narrative structure, it simply shows a woman being killed and hacked apart by a man dressed as a Samurai. However, the film still features standard cinematic devices and full credits, which one would hardly expect to find on evidence of crime, and the DVD edition also comes with ‘behind the scenes’ footage exposing the whole artifice.

In more recent years, the scuzzier end of US shot-on-video sleaze has seen similar ‘recreation’ movies. The likes of Snuff Kill and Snuff Perversions are virtually plotless collections of faked snuff movies, designed to look as real as possible – deliberately crude, basic and often minimalist, these films exist only to appeal to the warped tastes of ghouls who really want to see the real thing but who will, in its absence, settle for these reconstructions instead. There’s certainly no entertainment value to be had from such movies, but one can easily imagine them being taken for the real thing by newspaper hacks, politicians and censorial groups.

Meanwhile, the improbably titled Very Very Sexy Snuff Movie is a low budget French addition to the continuing slew of ‘snuff’ titles. This anthology offering includes “a tale of three young East European women who are kidnapped by a sick producer of snuff movies and held prisoners on the movie set”. Its torpid tagline is: ‘Sexier dead than alive’. And, Sonrie – Snuff Inc from Argentina (‘where life is cheap” perhaps? Certainly where FILMS are cheap, given the $600 budget of this movie) is an alleged ‘snuff comedy’, though you might struggle to see where the humour is.

Of course, a long-standing tradition of the snuff movie mythology was that such films were made in South America, where “Life Is Cheap!”. Unsubstantiated stories of prostitutes and children being smuggled over the border into the US, where they would be raped and murdered by organised rings of snuff film-makers, had circulated throughout the Seventies. By the Eighties, however, the mythology had developed to the extent where these films were happening anywhere and everywhere and were. One of the most insistent claims made regarding snuff movies relates to paedophile rings and satanic cults.

In both instances, the evidence remains non-existent, but has been so widely distorted and exaggerated that most people genuinely believe it. The most recurrent individual tale concerns footage of the murder of Jason Swift and several other children at the hands of a group of paedophiles in the early Eighties. At the start of the Nineties, newspapers reported that the deaths of several children had been videotaped, although there was no evidence to support this. The reports would subsequently resurface with remarkable frequency; the raids which netted Anthropophagous were reported as possibly having found such footage. Not true. And the Powers That Be conveniently float the rumour whenever calls for stricter censorship are made. So it’s worth re-stating for the record: there is no evidence whatsoever that the killings were filmed for any reason, let alone for commercial purposes. No tapes found. No cameras found. No statements from the convicted killers. Nothing.

Buy Snuff 102 from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Various cases in which murderers have filmed their activities have been held up as proof of snuff movie production. In 1985, Californian police found videotapes of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng torturing and murdering several women. Many people took these as final confirmation of the existence of snuff movies, but they were wrong. These tapes, shot for the killer’s own personal gratification (much as the Moors Murderers audio-taped and photographed their victims) don’t fit the definition of films being produced for commercial reasons; of people dying on camera for the profit of shadowy underworld figures; of movies which sell to rich, jaded degenerates for thousands of dollars a time. And despite rumours, there is no evidence to suggest that the tapes had ever been seen by anyone other than the two killers.

And tasteless documentary films such as Executions, Faces of Death, True Gore, Death – The Ultimate Horror, Death Scenes, Snuff – A Documentary About Killing and others don’t qualify either, featuring as they do news footage (or, in the case of the Faces of Death series, rather unconvincing reconstructions) of accidents and crime scenes. Salacious they may be; offensive, probably; but hardly snuff movies. The same is true of war atrocity videos (such as the Bosnian propaganda tape that was being sold on the streets of London at the height of the Balkan war), or various medical studies, ranging from surgical operations to post-mortem footage, that have entered into general underground circulation.

Arguably, the closest we’ve come to real snuff movies are the shocking murder videos posted to the internet – be they jihadist executions, murderous drug gangs in Mexico – where life really DOES seem cheap – slaughtering those who have crossed them or Russian murderers filming their killings and then posting them online, these are very, very real. But snuff movies in the accepted sense? They are not being shot to order for money, so no. And tellingly, no-one seems to be calling these clips ‘snuff movies’. Perhaps it’s too trivial a term to be used for such obviously real atrocities.

Despite the overwhelming lack of evidence to support it though, the snuff myth will never die. There are too many people with a vested interest in keeping it alive. Feminists see snuff as proof of the dehumanising effect of pornography – another level of the abuse of women. Moral campaigners cite snuff as proof that we need stronger censorship. Fundamentalist Christians use snuff as a way of backing their claims of widespread satanic abuse, which could only be stopped by outlawing Satanism. Yet all these groups seem to miss the point. Because even if snuff movies do exist, they exist beyond the law of every nation in the world, and no legal changes will alter that fact. Murder is already a criminal offence.

In almost thirty years of hysteria, there has yet to be a single ‘commercially’ produced snuff movie found anywhere on the planet. And yet TV programmes like The Knock and CSI still feature storylines about the cracking of a snuff movie ring by customs, or the police, as if such events are common occurrences. The first episode of vigilante serial killer series Dexter showed him disposing of a snuff movie maker who posted his murders on a bondage/torture website.

Mainstream thriller 8mm perpetuated the myth further (the very title of Joel Schumaker’s film shows the lack of intelligence at work – would actual snuff movie makers shoot on film, given the expense, difficulty and risks involved, when video cameras are widely available?) and has been at the forefront of a new generation of movies playing with the myth.

Preceding it was Mute Witness, made in 1994 and set in Russia, where a make-up artist (Marina Zudina) who can’t speak finds herself seeing what appears to be a porno shoot taking place after hours in the film studio where she works, only for the shoot to turn nasty as the lead actress is murdered on screen. The authorities don’t believe her, but the snuff film crew (led by Alec Guinness, in scenes shot a decade before the rest of the film!) decide she must be silenced anyway…

Possibly the interesting movie treatment of the subject is Tesis, made in 1996 by Alejandro Amenábar, a thriller that uses snuff movies as a way of examining our fascination with violence and murder, with Ana Torrent as a film student who finds a videotape featuring a snuff movie and decides to investigate its origins. It’s a solid thriller that is smarter than most.

The ever opportunist Bruno Mattei (as ‘Pierre Le Blanc’) climbed on what little bandwagon 8mm spawned with 2003’s Snuff Trap, though the plot – a mother searches for her daughter who might have been involved in porno snuff movie production – is closer to Hardcore. As with most of Mattei’s later, shot-on-video films, this is barely watchable.

Bernard Rose, director of Candyman, made Snuff Movie in 2005, where a horror film director exorcises the demons of his wife’s murder at the hands of a hippy cult in the 1960s (a neat tie-in to Manson) by shooting snuff movies, killing off auditioning actors. Grubbier than you might expect from the director, but fairly mainstream in its approach, Snuff Movie is a decent film but hardly innovative.

Still, it’s better than the likes of The Great American Snuff Film or The Cohasset Snuff Film, all of which are throwaway SOV splatter movies that are frankly best avoided. None of these films offer any new insight and instead attempt to trade on the notoriety of the ‘S’ word.

The Snuff mythology has crept into more mainstream movies recently too. 2007’s Vacancy saw Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson as a bickering couple who find themselves staying at a run down motel, only to find that the video tapes left on top of the TV are actually snuff movies. Worse still, they are snuff movies filmed in the very room that they are staying in! This begins a better-than-expected cat and mouse thriller, with the couple trying to escape from the snuff movie makers who run the motel and lure hapless guests to their on screen death. Vacancy 2: The First Cut follows the origin of the snuff movie ring and is less effective.

The snuff movie myth also informs films like V/H/S and its sequels, which blur the line between found footage – which of course tries to pass itself off as an authentic document – and snuff movie mythology. Several other films have also touched on the subject, including The Brave, Urban Legends: Final Cut and Sinister, while the idea of internet snuff via live feeds – often tied to ideas of reality TV – have appeared in Live Feed, My Little Eye, ICU and Halloween: Resurrection amongst others.

But let’s remember that these films, good or bad, are simply exploiting a public fear for profit. Like alien autopsy videos, they give a salivating public what it wants. The truth wouldn’t sell tickets at the box office or online rentals. And in the end, the truth doesn’t matter. Snuff movies will continue to make headlines because they make great headlines, and people will continue to believe in their existence, because people need to believe. It’s a sick idea that’s simply seems too good not to be true.

David Flint, Horrorpedia

Women’s Camp 119 – Italian title K.Z.9 Lager di Sterminio – is a 1977 Italian exploitation film directed by Bruno Mattei. It was released in Italy two months after Mattei’s first Nazi-themed film SS Girls (aka Private House of the SS), with which it shares numerous cast members, and stars Ivano Staccioli, Lorraine de Salle, Nello Riviè and Gabriele Carrara.

In the last months of World War 2, at the Rosenhausen Experimental Camp in Germany, Dr. Franz Wieker (Ivano Staccioli) conducts ghastly medical experiments on unfortunate women imported from Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. When not being operated upon, the victims must cope with the attentions of sadistic Oberleutnant Otto Ohlendorf (Gabriele Carrara) and Chief ‘Kapo’ Martha (Gota Gobert), a predatory lesbian. Meanwhile Wieker’s unwilling assistant Dr. David Meisel (Nello Riviè), and Maria Black (Lorraine de Salle), a Jewish medical student forced to participate in the running of the experiments, try to maintain their humanity and to seek a chance to escape…

Women’s Camp 119 contains all the staple ingredients of the Nazisploitation cycle; maniacal ‘Dick Dastardly’ Nazi officers, sadistic lesbian warders, a couple of unwilling doctors plagued with guilt at their involvement, along with sundry beatings, mutilation and torture. In other words, it’s disgusting, exploitative trash wallowing in the worst of human history. What could one possibly say in its favour? Well, I imagine the reason most horror fans watch the Italian ‘Nazisploitation’ films is to gawp at their outrageous violence and gasp in disbelief at their sheer bad taste. That certainly covers it for me. Seen from such a vantage point, Women’s Camp 119 undoubtedly delivers the goods. The gruesome scenes are really quite disgusting, and Mattei creates some truly pathological images of brutality. An early scene depicting a room full of women being killed with Zyklon-B nerve gas achieves a revolting intensity by showing the dead bodies streaked with excrement (victims of Zyklon-B would defecate uncontrollably as they died). Elsewhere, we witness gory uterus transplants, hideously smashed limbs left to heal without treatment, and plentiful flagellation, interspersed with extensive nudity. An atmosphere of madness and degeneracy takes hold here and there, something which Mattei may genuinely have striven for rather than being merely accidental, although it doesn’t prevent other scenes from descending into absurdity. The monstrous Lieutenant Ohlendorff (Carrara, over-the-top star of Mattei’s SS Girls) spits irony-free howlers like “Lick my boots forever, dog!” or “You’ll wipe the asses of every one of us until you turn purple with fatigue!” One ridiculous moment has Riviè and de Salle flicking through repellent colour photographs of skin diseases in a medical textbook while exchanging over-acted ‘significant’ glances. Then there’s the fate of two homosexual prisoners, seen knitting in their cell, who are forced to undergo ‘treatment’ for their ‘condition’, which involves three women diving onto the horrified queens’ beds where they squirm around in a miserable attempt at coitus.

So there’s plenty to laugh at, if you’re in that sort of a mood. If you’re not, then Women’s Camp 119 is just a reprehensible piece of trash from beginning to end, nowhere more so than when Commander Wieker watches real newsreel footage of the death camps, images we’re all familiar with from such programmes as The World at War. It may be splitting hairs when dealing with such a morally bankrupt sub-genre, but for my money this inclusion is altogether the sickest tactic employed in the so-called Nazi cycle (and considering that the footage in question was filmed by Allied forces, it’s not only morally objectionable but historically ludicrous as well.) One is tempted to drive a judgemental tank over Mattei and classify him as the lowest sort of scumbag, though it’s better to try and understand what he was thinking. Perhaps he got carried away trying to outdo Don Edmonds (Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS), Sergio Garrone (SS Experiment Camp) and Mario Caiano (Nazi Love Camp 27)? Maybe he thought he was just joining in with the spirit of provocation, trying to play the game of nihilism for fun and profit harder and better than the others? Or maybe, with a distributor breathing down his neck demanding more nastiness for the Japanese market, he was ‘just obeying orders’?

The offensiveness of Women’s Camp 119 is compounded rather than alleviated by its gestures toward moral seriousness. Despite decent Dr. Meisel and cool-headed med-student Maria acting as crude pontificatory avatars for decency and kindness, one never believes the film’s pose of integrity. The character of Kurt, a deranged slobbering servant of the Nazis whom they allow to molest female prisoners, is presented in the film as the epitome of sick deranged lust. However, for his scenes to be valid Kurt should be less comedic, and the camera much less eager to share his pleasure; instead Mattei presses the lens against the quivering breasts of Kurt’s victims with the same gluttonous glee as the character we’re invited to despise, suggesting perhaps a degree of unconscious self-hatred on the director’s part. Random inconsistencies abound, such as why a cure for sterility should matter to a regime obsessed with genetic purity (surely the genes of the sterile are unworthy of propagation?) and as the final credits roll, a gallery of real-life Nazis still at large after the war founders on careless research: Karl Silberbauer, described onscreen as “the torturer of Anna Frank [sic]” was in fact merely the arresting officer who took Anne Frank into custody. He was not the one who first betrayed her whereabouts to the police, nor was he her ‘torturer’. The brief information presented onscreen about Franz Murer, Josef Mengele and Walter Rauff is broadly accurate, although it erroneously states that Rauff went to live in America in 1949, when in fact he lived briefly in Ecuador before settling in Chile in 1958.

The current absence of a decent digital transfer makes it hard to gauge the cinematography, by Mattei’s frequent collaborator Luigi Ciccarese. Musically, the film benefits from a ponderously dark and doomy score by Alessandro Alessandroni (strangely one of the more memorable cues here pops up uncredited in the Franco De Masi score for The New York Ripper five years later). From a dramaturgical standpoint the film lacks vitality; there is no sense of accumulation to the horrors, and no formal structure to the material. Everything just plods along until the Allied bombings bring the story to a close; within the narrative there is no exploration of tensions between the captors, and only the most cursory of relationships between the prisoners. Yes, there is the usual escape and capture element, which occupies the last reel or two, but as per usual with these films there’s little energy invested in making us care.

It may seem a tad hypocritical of me to attack a film like this for immorality while at the same time enjoying its tastelessness, but it’s difficult to avoid when the film itself is so inherently confused and contradictory. If a director styles his work as a cartoon ‘for mature audiences only’, a live action version of the Italian fumetti (adult comics which often featured Nazi sex-and-horror tales), it’s easy to go with the flow and let the shocking imagery tickle your jaded sensibilities. I would put something like The Beast in Heat in this category. But if there’s an attempt to ‘get serious’, it seems to me right that we should take a more critical position. Women’s Camp 119, with its use of real-life Auschwitz imagery*, and its sententious coda about the Nazis who got away, falls into the latter category, making it a difficult film to defend without falling into contradiction.

*Note: Sergio Garrone pulled the same stunt by using photographs from the death camps in the credits sequence of SS Camp 5, Women’s Hell (1976), his companion-piece to the more notorious SS Experiment Camp (1976).

Stephen Thrower, Horrorpedia

IMDb

Sadismo – also known as Mondo Sadismo – is a 1967 American ‘shockumentary’ film produced by Salvatore Billitteri (whose production duties included work on Black Sabbath; Yog: Monster from Space; The Amityville Horror) from a screenplay by ‘Philip Marx’.

The Trans American Films release features narration by Burt Topper, director of Victor Buono starrer The Strangler (1964). The soundtrack was composed by Les Baxter whose work is profiled here.

We can find no director credit so Sadismo its is probably a compilation of footage from previous ‘mondo’ movies? Please comment below if you know more…

IMDb

Image credits: Scenes from the Morgue | Wrong Side of the Art!

Territories (original title: Territoires) is a 2010 Franco – Canadian horror film co-written and directed by Olivier Abbou and starring Roc LaFortune, Michael Mando and Cristina Rosato.

Plot teaser:

Five friends returning from a marriage in Canada return home to the United States. Not far from the border, two customs officers stop them to check their identity. Suspicious, they take their time especially with Jalil, a man of Arab origin. The situation worsens when a customs officer finds a small bag of marijuana in the luggage. Then things degenerate rapidly: a customs officer grabs the little dog that’s part of the group and slits open its belly to be sure it’s not a mule. When Gab makes a move, he’s shot. The customs officer orders the surviving friends to undress and put on orange coveralls. Gradually, it dawns on the four tourists that they are in the hands of former torturers from Guantanamo…

Buy Territories on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Reviews:

“Territories isn’t as violent as you might expect, and it even manages to throw in some unsettlingly cruel humour, but it is a deeply upsetting experience that transcends simple ‘torture porn’ pigeonholing as well as predictable politicized posturing. A difficult watch but a worthwhile one.” Eye For Film

“Horror fans will delight in a handful of impressive gore scenes by make-up artist C.J. Goldman (Orphan), captured with handheld verve by cinematographer Karim Hussain (Hobo with a Shotgun). But Territories is ultimately less about the bloodletting than about revealing torture (and torture porn) to be a by-product of Bush-era extremism – an idea that seems worn out following Hostel and its many rehashes.” Hollywood Reporter

“The film is beautifully shot and the acting is fantastic all around. A creepy tension slowly builds and once it has taken hold it doesn’t let go. I found the final act of the film unrelenting and at times surreal. This is a film that stands very clear of others and will grip you to the very end. It will also leave you with something to think about for a long time afterwards.” Screen Jabber

IMDb

WH

The Dentist 2 (also known as The Dentist 2: Brace Yourself) is a 1998 American horror film, and sequel to the 1996 film The Dentist. It was directed by Brian Yuzna (Society; Return of the Living Dead III; Rottweiler). The film stars Corbin Bernsen (Raptor; Raging Sharks), Jillian McWhirter, Jeff Doucette, and Susanne Wright.

Plot teaser:

Dr. Alan Feinstone is in the maximum security mental hospital he was sentenced to at the end of the first film. While talking to the facility’s psychiatrist, he remembers the murders he committed, while convincing the doctor that it was another man who did those things. His remorseful story distracts her from seeing him pull a sharpened tool that he stitched into his own leg, and he uses her as a hostage to escape the hospital. Alan’s ex-wife Brooke is alive despite her missing tongue and inability to speak (She has since had new dental implants put in to replace all the teeth that Alan pulled out in the first film); she hires an investigator to find out where Alan has escaped to, believing that he had been putting away money before he went crazy. Brooke has in her possession some postcards that Alan had left behind, and she believes he is in one of those places.

Alan winds up in the small town of Paradise, Missouri, pretending that he had grown upset at life in the big city. He uses a previously established false identity of Dr. Lawrence “Larry” Caine, and has a bank account where he had been sending the money he skimmed off from his practice to hide from the IRS. The bank officer Mr. Wilkes introduces Alan to his niece Jamie, hoping that she can rent out her small cottage for “Larry” to live in so she could collect money from it.

Jamie, who physically resembles Brooke, becomes a target of Alan’s affections. When he has problems with a cap on one of his teeth, Alan visits the inept town dentist, Dr. Burns, whom he takes an instant disliking to. Alan threatens Dr. Burns with a golf club, causing him to accidentally fall down the stairs to his death. Mr. Wilkes convinces Alan that he should take over as the new dentist for Paradise; Alan soon resumes his murderous ways with a passing tourist (Clint Howard, also in Evilspeak and Ice Cream Man) who recognises him from Los Angeles…

Reviews:

” … alas, the sequel is practically a remake at times, hitting a lot of the same beats while offering even LESS carnage. Plus now the novelty factor has worn off, so there’s really not much here to offer anyone who didn’t love the original. It IS more streamlined, with only 1-2 major “hallucination” type scenes, but it’s still overlong and lacking any sort of suspense or even much in terms of black humor, which you’d think would be a given. Say what you will about Dr. Giggles, but at least that movie’s screenwriters had the good sense to keep the body count high (something like 17, as opposed to this movie’s 4, two of which occur in the final 10 minutes), not to mention give its “hero” some sense of warped purpose.” Horror Movie a Day

“Thankfully, the second half is more entertaining than the first half with a few more nasty moments reminiscent of the stuff that made you pale while watching the first movie. Unfortunately, the best bits here all feel far too similar to the best bits in that first film (there aren’t many different ways to film something appearing to be taking place in someone’s mouth) and that lessens the impact while just adding to the feeling of laziness. It’s still enjoyable enough, intermittently, but it definitely suffers from many of the same flaws that many other, inferior sequels have.” Kevin Matthews, flickfeast

” … tries to play it straight and somewhat legitimize itself beyond its B movie trappings, but as a result it takes too long to dig into the juicy stuff that a viewer is just waiting to see. There are some flashing scenes when he hallucinates that attempt to lend a hand to atmosphere. Though for a good chunk of the picture it seems somewhat reserved and the tone feels more a drama. By the time he goes full throttle with the carnage, the level of anticipation is through the roof, which makes everything detrimental to having to sit through him find his place in the town.” From Black to Red

Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (French pronunciation: ​[ɡʁɑ̃ ɡiɲɔl]: “The Theatre of the Big Puppet”) – known as the Grand Guignol – was a theatre in the Pigalle area of Paris (at 20 bis, rue Chaptal). From its opening in 1897 until its closing in 1962, it specialized in naturalistic, usually shocking, horror shows. Its name is often used as a general term for graphic, amoral horror entertainment, a genre popular from Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre (for instance Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil), to today’s splatter films. The influence has even spread to television shows such as Penny Dreadful.

Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was founded in 1894 by the playwright and novelist, Oscar Méténier, who planned it as a space for naturalist performance. Méténier, who in his other job had been a chien de commisaire (a person who accompanied prisoners on a death row), created the theatre in a former chapel, the design keeping many of the original features, such as neo-Gothic wooden panelling, iron-barred boxes and two large angels positioned above the orchestra – the space was embellished with further Gothic adornments to create an atmosphere of unease and gloom. With 293 seats, the venue was the smallest in Paris, the distance between audience and actors being minimal and adding to the claustrophobic nature of the venue. The lack of space also influenced the productions themselves, the closeness of the audience meaning there was little point in attempting to create fantastical environments, the illusion shattered immediately by the actors breathing down their necks – not that there was any room on the 7 metre by 7 metre space for anything much in the way of backdrops.

The Guignol from which the theatre and movement took its name was originally a Mr Punch-like character who, in the relative safety of puppet-form, commentated on social issues of the day. On occasion, so cutting were the views that Napoleon III’s police force were employed to ensure the rhetoric did not sway the masses. Initially, the theatre produced plays about a class of people who were not considered appropriate subjects in other venues: prostitutes, criminals, street urchins, con artists and others at the lower end of Paris society, all of whom spoke in the vernacular of the streets. Méténier’s plays were influenced by the likes of Maupassant and featured previously forbidden portrayals of whores and criminality as a way of life, prompting the police to temporarily close the theatre.

André de Lorde

By 1898, the theatre was already a huge success but it was also time for Méténier to stand to one side as artistic director, a place taken by Max Maurey, a relative unknown but one who had much experience in the world of theatre and public performance. Maurey saw his job to build on the reputation the theatre already had for boundary pushing and take it to another level entirely. He saw the answer as horror, not just the tales of the supernatural but of the realistic, gory and terrifying re-enactments of brutality exacted on the actors, with such believability that many audience members took the plays as acts of torture and murder. Maurey judged the success of his shows by the number of audience members who fainted, a pretend doctor always on-hand to add to the pretence.

The writer of the majority of the plays during this period was André de Latour (later de Lorde), spending his days as an unassuming librarian, his evenings writing upwards of 150 plays, all of them strewn with torture, murder and what we would now associate with splatter films. He often worked with the psychologist, Alfred Binet (the inventor of the I.Q. test) to ensure his depictions of madness (a common theme) were as accurate as possible.

Also crucial to the play’s success was the stage manager, Paul Ratineau, who, as part of his job, was responsible was the many gory special effects. This was some challenge, with the audience close enough to shake hands with the actors, Ratineau had to develop techniques from scratch, ensuring that not only were devices well-hidden but that the actors could employ them in a realistic manner, without detection. A local butcher supplied as much in the way of animal intestines as were required, whilst skilfully using lighting helped to make the scenes believable as well as aiding the sinister atmosphere. Rubber appliances made suitable spewing innards when animal’s were not available and several concoctions were devised to simulate blood, ranging from cellulose solutions to red currant jelly. Actual beast’s eyeballs were coated in aspic to allow for re-use, confectioner’s skills employed to enable the eating of the orbs where required. Rubber tubes, bladders, fake blades and false limbs were also used to create gruesome scenes, though on occasion these did prove hazardous – reports detail instances where one actor was set on fire, one was nearly hanged and yet another was victim to some enthusiastic beating from her co-star, resulting in cuts, bruises and a nervous breakdown.

The actors themselves were not especially unusual – they were performers taking work wherever it came. There were a few stars of note – Paula Maxa (born Marie-Therese Beau)  became known as “the Sarah Bernhardt of the impasse Chaptal” or, if you prefer, “the most assassinated woman in the world”, an appropriate claim for an actress who, during her career at the Grand Guignol, had her characters murdered more than 10,000 times in at least 60 different ways and raped at least 3,000 times. Maxa was shot, scalped, strangled, disemboweled, flattened by a steamroller, guillotined, hanged, quartered, burned, cut apart with surgical tools and lancets, cut into eighty-three pieces by an invisible Spanish dagger, had her innards stolen,  stung by a scorpion, poisoned with arsenic, devoured by a puma, strangled by a pearl necklace, crucified and whipped; she was also put to sleep by a bouquet of roses and kissed by a leper, amongst other treats. Another actor, L.Paulais (real name, Georges) portrayed both victim and villain with equal skill and opposite Maxa in every one of their many performances.  He once commented that the secret to the realistic performances was their shared fear. The actress Rafaela Ottiano was one of the few, perhaps even only, original actors in the theatre to transfer to the Big Screen, appearing in Tod Browning’s Devil Doll (1936).

At the Grand Guignol, patrons would see five or six plays, all in a style that attempted to be brutally true to the theatre’s naturalistic ideals. These plays often explored the altered states, like insanity, hypnosis, panic, under which uncontrolled horror could happen. Some of the horror came from the nature of the crimes shown, which often had very little reason behind them and in which the evildoers were rarely punished or defeated. To heighten the effect, the horror plays were often alternated with comedies. Under the new theatre director, Camille Choisy, special effects continued to be an important part of the performances. Many of the attendees would barely be able to control themselves – if they weren’t fainting, they were quite possibly reaching something approaching orgasmic fervour, private booths being extremely popular to allow some privacy for their heightened emotions. On occasion the actors were forced to come out of character to reprimand more excitable audience members. Some particularly salacious examples of plays performed include:

Le Laboratoire des Hallucinations, by André de Lorde: When a doctor finds his wife’s lover in his operating room, he performs a graphic brain surgery rendering the adulterer a hallucinating semi-zombie. Now insane, the lover/patient hammers a chisel into the doctor’s brain.

Un Crime dans une Maison de Fous, by André de Lorde: Two hags in an insane asylum use scissors to blind a young, pretty fellow inmate out of jealousy.

L’Horrible Passion, by André de Lorde: A nanny strangles the children in her care.

Le Baiser dans la nuit by Maurice Level: A young woman visits the man whose face she horribly disfigured with acid, where he obtains his revenge.

Jack Jouvin served as director from 1930 to 1937. He shifted the theatre’s subject matter, focusing performances not on gory horror but psychological drama. Under his leadership the theatre’s popularity waned; and after World War II, it was not well-attended. Grand Guignol flourished briefly in London in the early 1920s under the direction of Jose Levy, where it attracted the talents of Sybil Thorndike and Noël Coward, and a series of short English “Grand Guignol” films (using original screenplays, not play adaptations) was made at the same time, directed by Fred Paul. Meanwhile in France, audiences had sunk to such low numbers that the theatre had no option but to close its doors in 1962. The building still remains but is used by a theatre group performing plays in sign language. Modern revivals in the tradition of Grand Guignol have surfaced both in England and in America.

Grand Guignol was hugely influential on film-making both in subject and style. Obvious examples include Prince of Terror De Lorde’s works being used as the basis for D.W. Griffith’s Lonely Villa (1909), Maurice Tourneur’s The Lunatics (1913)  and Jean Renoir’s Diary of a Chambermaid (1946). Others clearly influenced include the Peter Lorre-starring Mad Love (1935), Samuel Gallu’s Theatre of Death (1967), H.G. Lewis’ Wizard of Gore (1970) and Joel M. Reed’s notorious Blood Sucking Freaks (1975). More recently, More recently, Grand Guignol has featured in the hit television series, Penny Dreadful. The 1963 mondo film Ecco includes a scene which may have been filmed at the Grand Guignol theatre during its final years – as such, it would be the only footage known to exist.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

We are grateful to Life Magazine for some images and Grand Guignol website for some of the information.

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José Mojica Marins is a Brazilian film-maker, actor, composer, screenwriter, and television and media personality. Marins is most famous for his alter ego, Coffin Joe (translated from Zé do Caixão). Although Marins is known primarily as a horror film director, his earlier works were westerns, dramas and adventure films.

Marins was born in São Paulo in Brazil on Friday 13th 1936, at a farm in the Vila Mariana, to Antônio and Carmem Marins. His father was born in Brazil but journeyed to Spain where, for a time, he became a bullfighter. On returning to Brazil, he met his future wife who made a living travelling around Brazil singing and dancing at various events. His parents tired of the endless travelling necessitated by the lifestyle and they elected to run a cinema owned by his father’s cousin. In a retrospectively unlikely parallel to the events of the film, Cinema Paradiso, Marins junior spent much of his childhood watching films at his parents place of employment, soaking up all genres of film – on the occasion a film would be deemed unsuitable for his innocent eyes, he would sneak into the projection booth and watch from there. During the 1940’s and 1950’s, it was common for cinemas in Brazil to have days dedicated to screenings solely for women or men, the subjects for the latter, inevitably, occasionally drifting towards below the waist – Marins recalled with horror once sneaking in to a men-only event to be assailed by images from a documentary warning about the dangers of sexual diseases.

At the age of 8, José was given his first camera, a pre-Super 8 model, by his parents, sealing his fate to be involved in the world of cinema for the rest of his life. Marins was afforded the luxury of being able to show his early efforts to the local community on the big screen of his parents’ cinema, great for the young film-maker, less so for the audience which included priests and nuns who were alarmed at the child’s already alarming imagery and disregard for convention and decorum. The adult José made his earliest efforts in Cinemascope, the first being a western, banned by priests in many cities for being pornographic, showing a distant shot of nude women bathing in a waterfall. Despite this modest set-back, the film still achieved wide distribution around Brazil. In a final attempt at mainstream acceptance, he approached an influential priest for advice, and agreed to make a film in which religion was seen as a healing and welcoming force. The result, 1963’s Meu Destino em Tuas Mãos, was an abject failure – so ended Marin’s attempts at appeasing the Church and diluting his own vision. It was such a vision that led to his appropriation of a disused synagogue to turn into a temple for film, both studio and school for actors and film-makers.

In 1963, Marins was scheduled to make a film called Generation Curse, examining the activities of disaffected youths. Three days before filming, Marins had a dream, or more accurately, nightmare, where he became the victim of a black-clad figure who led him through cobwebbed caves until they reached a grave which had Marins’ name and dates and both birth and death. So vivid was the dream, that the following morning he instructed his secretary to take down the details he recalled. He contacted the other contributors to the planned film and announced that there was a change of plan – the film was now to be a horror film featuring the character who had so filled him with dread. The co-backers of the film were not impressed and abandoned the project, leaving Marins to to finance the film himself, a decision which involved both he and his father selling most of their possessions.

Lacking an actor to play the evil tormentor of the film, Marins had little option but to put himself forward – his existing beard and two long finger nails were supplemented by a further eight fake nails (later to be replaced by his own). His costume was entirely black, a top hat inspired by the logo on a cigarette packet, a black suit and cape completing the desired look. This then was Zé do Caixão or Coffin Joe, destined to become one of horror’s most distinctive characters and the star of many classic films (and several less so!). Although rarely mentioned in the films, Coffin Joe’s true name is Josefel Zanatas. Marins gives an explanation for the name in an interview for Portal Brasileiro de Cinema:

“I was thinking a name: Josefel: “fel” (“gall”) for being bitter — and also Zanatas as a last name, because backward reads Satanaz”.

His central belief is that (self) imposed superstitious beliefs tend to prevent individual development, inhibit positive social change. Those who do not accept his central belief are considered to be weak, lack power, and limited in their ability to rationalise objectively. Those who share with him similar beliefs are considered to have power and intelligence above the ‘normal’ person.

The eventual film, regarded as Brazil’s first horror, was entitled, At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul, a creation still as chilling and inventive over fifty years later. Though working on a small set, the film encompasses several impressive scenes, all featuring the truly evil undertaker, Coffin Joe, scourge of priests, families, children and society as a whole as he stalks an unnamed town for a ‘superior’ woman to sire an appropriately majestic son. Both this film and the follow-up, 1967’s This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, proved highly inflammatory, the censors severely reprimanding Marins for scenes such as eye-gouging, snake and tarantula attacks, sexualised imagery and most especially, mockery of organised religion.

These, combined with Marins’ studio, writhing the the aforementioned creatures and his general appearance, raised suspicion amongst the Brazilian dictatorship government that the director was a threat to National pride and public behaviour. He was arrested and briefly imprisoned, a hero to his fans upon release but left penniless and with the Brazilian film industry fearful of working with such a notorious director and actor.

Marins became known for his peculiar castings for actors. He would challenge them to lay in coffins filled with scorpions and tarantulas to see how they would react – if they passed this test, he would push them even further, tying them up and covering them with honey, only to let ants pour upon them like a medieval torture. One actress told the director of the problems she was having at home, her husband’s regular beatings visible on her body. He filmed a scene involving an actor with only one eye – in his empty eye socket, he placed some crumbled gorgonzola cheese and wriggling worms, the actress instructed to lick the charming gunk from the cavity… remarkably she obliged and showed the footage to her husband. The abuse ceased. In fact, this was not the first time the director had employed someone who was missing a body part, the absent ‘item’ allowing for entirely believable scenes of limb removal and similar morbid trickery.

Marins was forced to abandon his own scripts and become a director for hire, whether the project was a low-budget westerns, science fiction or traditional Brazilian comedy/drama. As the 1970’s wore on, he drifted into soft-core pornography, sometimes under the pseudonym J. Avelar – some of his work in this field was even more extreme, to the point of bestiality. Even when these opportunities eluded him, he worked as a master of ceremonies at parties and dances, often in his now distinctive Coffin Joe persona and regalia. Coffin Joe as a Brazilian phenomenon rest somewhat with the concept of the character, although existing in familiar horror surroundings of misty graveyards, his appearance and raison d’etre were unique, challenging the status quo of Brazilian society and ideals. Coffin Joe represents evil itself, evidenced throughout grotesquely sadistic acts but is not afraid to show that the behaviour of those he finds abhorrent are not above reproach themselves. It was not until the early 1990’s that Marins found true success beyond his home country, the bootlegged videos of his releases finally gaining official releases.

Buy the Coffin Joe Collection on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

The appeal of an already fully-formed horror icon with his own carefully scripted back-story (Marins had concocted a whole Coffin Joe mythology, complete with details of his parents and ideology) was great, America becoming the first to feast upon his back catalogue of depravity, though in truth, Europe had always had an underground fraternity of fans watching his films on the festival circuit. Marins was invited to film conventions worldwide, the exotic Brazilian and his bizarre appearance thrilling a brand new, welcoming audience. Marins found that rock musicians in particular found an affinity with his work; Faith No More/Fantomas singer, Mike Patton being ‘instrumental’ in releasing his films on DVD. He has been referenced in song by bands as diverse as 60’s psych/tropicalia pioneers, Os Mutantes, Brazilian metal heroes, Sepultura and death metal band, Necrophagia.

Read Coffin Joe’s official ‘biography’ here

Marins’ fingernails had over the years grown to outlandish lengths, at their longest over a yard long. These weren’t permanently attached but glued on when filming or making public appearances. It was only in 2008 that the director was able to conclude his original concept of Coffin Joe’s search for a bride, the eventual film being Embodiment of Evil, the $2 million budget being 100 times that of the previous two films. It’s not a completely satisfying end to the character but still has some antics with a pig and some 3000 cockroaches.

When not making films, Marins has also regularly appeared on Brazilian television, hosting a monthly interview program O Estranho Mundo de José Mojica Marins (“The Strange World of José Mojica Marins”) on the Brazilian television station Canal Brasil, in which he discusses Brazilian media and culture with other contemporary figures, such as actors and musicians. From 1967 to 1988, Marins hosted the program Além, Muito Além do Além (“Beyond, Much Beyond the Beyond”) on TV Bandeirantes, in character as Coffin Joe, presenting short horror tales written by author and screenwriter Rubens Luchetti. Some scripts were later adapted as Coffin Joe comic books. The show’s tapes were reused and currently there are no known intact recordings of this program. Off-screen, Marins has been married seven times and is said to be father to no fewer than 23 children.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

José Mojica Marins is featured in Fear Without Frontiers. Buy from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Selected Filmography:

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1963)
This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967)
The Strange World of Coffin Joe (1968)
Awakening of the Beast (1970)
The End of Man (1970)
The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe (1974)
The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures (1976)
Hellish Flesh (1977)
Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind (1978)
Perversion (1979)
Embodiment of Evil (2008) (Encarnação do Demônio)

It’s hardly surprising that the most notorious, indefensible, loathsome and reprehensible movies ever made are those that exploring nasty Nazi sex and violence fantasies. Even the most liberal of critics seem reluctant to defend these goose-stepping abominations, and they sit at the top of that sorry list known as the Video Nasties.

In fact, the pulp fiction and cinema industry had been exploiting the Nazi nightmare since the war ended. Cheesy B-movies like Hitler’s Madman, They Saved Hitler’s Brain; She Demons and The Flesh Eaters exploited the idea that mad Nazi scientists were up to mischief in remote South American jungles and on desert islands, attempting to revive the fortunes of the Third Reich by somehow resurrecting Adolf Hitler or his marching minions. These movies played on knowledge of the very real mad scientist experiments of Joseph Mengele, which reached levels of atrocity that no fictional mad doctor could hope to match.

The theme ran through to the end of the 1960s with films like Search for the Evil One, and was still potent enough to turn up late into the 1970s – The Boys from Brazil had Mengele and a Jewish Nazi hunter racing to track down clones of Hitler and influence them to their way of thinking before they reached adulthood – the question perhaps being was Hitler a result of nature or nurture – while an episode of The New Avengers TV series saw Peter Cushing (also involved with Nazi zombies in Shock Waves) being forced to bring a preserved Hitler back to life on a remote Scottish island!

However, the grubbiest Naziploitation boom began when the 1960s saw the loosening of censorship rules.

Unable to show much actual sex, mid Sixties adult films would fill the gaps with violence, often S&M tinged. Showing a disregard for any sense of taste or decency, it was clearly only going to be a matter of time before some enterprising producer realised the – ahem – ‘erotic’ potential of the Nazi concentration camp. That man was Bob Cresse, and his film was the notorious Love Camp 7, a worryingly personal movie.

Directed by Lee Frost, the film sets the ground rules for the flood of titles which came almost a decade later. It tells the story of two American female spies who are sent to a Nazi ‘love camp’ in order to help another informant escape. This they do, but only after an hour of unrelenting torture and abuse. Women are depicted as being sexually abused, whipped, strapped to unspeakable devices and generally treated badly throughout the movie.

Cresse played the Commandant himself with a barely disguised gloating glee. He was, to a large extent, living out his own sado-masochistic fantasies in the nasty narrative, and stories abound about how he would insist on take after take of the torture scenes, until the suffering on screen was seemingly matched in reality by the actress.

After this pioneering effort, the genre was suspiciously quiet until 1973. It was then that sleaze producer David Friedman decided that the time was right to revive the dubious concept. He went to Canada and produced Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS under the pseudonym Herman Traegar, a name that remained shrouded in mystery until Friedman finally owned up a couple of decades later. Why the false name? Perhaps some things were just too sleazy for even ‘The Mighty Monarch of the Exploitation Film World’ to admit to.

And Ilsa is very sleazy. The title role was taken by busty nightclub performer Dyanne Thorne, who attacked the part with relish. She’s a cold, heartless sadist who is first seen castrating a male prisoner who is of no further sexual use. During the rest of the film, she tortures women, takes part in appalling experiments, and has sex with the only male inmate (American, of course) who can satisfy her.

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is a breathtakingly tasteless affair, yet it does have a (warped) sense of humour. Much of the action is so OTT, it teeters the film into the realms of ‘camp’, and it’s this which saves the film. Two sequels followed, though neither had Nazi themed story lines, instead having Ilsa as entirely separate characters in each.

While Ilsa was shaking the drive-ins, the art house theatres were rocking to The Night Porter, in which Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling indulged in assorted sexual antics that stopped short of the atrocities performed by Ilsa, yet still dwelled indulgently in uniform fetishism and Nazi decadence. The film was another box office success, and suddenly, the Italians – never slow to spot a trend – began to sit up and pay attention. Or stand to attention, perhaps?

The floodgates were opened in 1976 by Salon Kitty, which managed to combine the sleaze of Ilsa with the artiness of The Night Porter. The masterpiece of Nazi sleaze cinema, Tinto Brass’ twisted epic switches from making serious political points about the impotence of fascism (often with heavy handed political symbolism) to lip-smacking scenes of sexual perversion with alarming ease. It also established another great Nazi sexploitation plot-line: Salon Kitty is a brothel with an ulterior motive. SS officers use hidden microphones to listen out for any soldiers who might be less committed to the Third Reich cause than they should be.

The same year saw Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, one of the most notorious films ever made. Based on De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini transposed the story to Fascist Italy, and the parade of atrocities committed by the ‘libertines’ – all fascist big wigs – would become as significant a factor in several Naziploitation films as the uniforms, the prison camps and the soft porn.

The popularity of Salon Kitty ensured it would be followed by a frenzy of titles, mostly emerging from Italy and France. Best known of these in Britain is SS Experiment Camp, which was one of the original ‘video nasties’, thanks in no small part to Go Video’s enthusiastic advertising campaign. The enterprising label took full page adverts in the top video magazines, showing the film’s cover – a topless girl, crucified upside-down. Some magazines found the image offensive, so Go supplied a version that had the breasts covered by a bra… this version was, apparently, considered perfectly acceptable.

After all that, Sergio Garrone’s film is quite ordinary, more softcore melodrama than anything… but there is at least one stand-out moment. The evil camp Commandant is devoid of testicles, and so decides to take those belonging to the one nice-guy guard who, in the great tradition of the ‘good Nazi’, hates what is going on. This is done via some gruesome medical stock footage. Our hero is then seen having sex with his girlfriend, at first blissfully unaware that anything is amiss. Once the awful truth emerges, however, he rushes into the Commandant’s office and screams the immortal line, “You bastard, what have you done with my balls?”…

As for the rest of the movies: all have moments of outrageous bad taste, but are mainly dull, with mind-numbing footage of partisans and battle-field stock footage padding out the moments between softcore groping and limp flagellation. Garrone returned to the genre in the somewhat sleazier SS Camp 5 – Women’s Hell, which saw Sirpa Lane – more used to arthouse Euro sleaze like La Bete and Charlotte – subjected to assorted indignities in a concentration camp. Without the ‘camp’ (no pun intended) aspect of SS Experiment Camp, it proved even less fun to watch.

The Beast In Heat is noteworthy as one of the rarest video nasties, but is also one of the dullest Naziploitation movies out there because the tasteless footage was appended to an already existing war movie. Thus, we have to endure seemingly endless footage of partisans fighting off their German oppressors interspersed with occasional torture scenes that would be repulsive if they weren’t so amateurish.

The infamous scene where Sal Boris (also in the aforementioned Salon Kitty), the titular beast who is the result of fiendish experiments overseen by the Ilsa-like camp commandant, bites off a woman’s pubic hair is fairly outrageous, but it’s a brief moment of bad taste respite from the general tedium. The attention to detail in the film is perhaps summed up by the clumsy on-screen title – Horrifing (sic) Experiments of the SS, Last Days. [Read Daz Lawrence's review on Horrorpedia]

Hack director Luigi Batzella – using the pseudonym Ivan Kathansky (or Katansky, depending on how much attention the credits producer was paying) – also made Kaput Lager: Gli ultimi giorni delle SS, released on video in the UK as The Desert Tigers (amusingly, The Dessert Tigers on a Dutch video sleeve mispelling). This was an even more ham-fisted effort, with exploitative prison camp footage grafted onto the end of a dull war movie starring Richard Harrison.

The Deported Women of the SS Special Section has a certain gritty authenticity to it that makes it stand out from the other films, but is otherwise rather average. It’s one of the more downbeat Naziploitation movies, despite the best efforts of director Rino Di Silvestro (Werewolf Woman) to crank up the sleaze factor, but its saving grace is the presence of Euro cult favourite John Steiner (Shock), who refuses to take it at all seriously and instead delivers a fantastic, eye-rolling, ranting and raving performance. It’s worth seeing the film for this alone, as he flits from obsessing over an inmate he’s known in the pre-war years and buggering his faithful servant Doberman.

The Gestapo’s Last Orgy also uses the ‘camp commandant obsessed with a prisoner’ plot, and becomes a curious hybrid of The Night Porter, Salon Kitty and the Nazi atrocity film. It’s a classier production that most examples of the genre, at least visually – a fait amount of money was obviously lavished here. This, the stylish direction and decent performances goes to make the atrocities seem all the more unsavoury – There are moments of such astonishing repulsiveness that you can barely credit them being in such a handsome film – the throwing of a menstruating woman to a pack of dogs, the burning alive of a woman during the cannibal orgy and the dipping of another woman in a pit of lime. The female cast are naked for much of the film and of course there are numerous sexual assault scenes. It’s so shamelessly horrible that you have to admire its audacity, especially as none of it seems to be pandering to the audience – this isn’t soft porn by any stretch of the imagination, and it seems designed to repulse. In the end, the film is perhaps best seen as a prime example of 1970s Italian excess, where restraint was for wussies. It’s from the same mindset that brought us films as diverse as Cannibal Holocaust and Suspiria, the notion that too much is never enough and that everything should be shown. It’s not on the same level as those two films, of course, but it is strangely admirable within its own perimeters.

Less ambiguous was the particularly unpleasant Women’s Camp 119, directed by Bruno Mattei (Hell of the Living Dead; Rats – Night of Terror). This unpleasant film seems designed to leave a bad taste in the mouth, even managing to work actual concentration camp footage into the credits sequence (an all-time low in filmmaking?). Yet it doesn’t have the style, the audacity, or the intelligence to get away with its parade of grim atrocities. (Read Stephen Thrower’s review on Horrorpedia)

As well as the films exploiting concentration camp atrocities, there were also a number of less brutal films exploiting the uniform fetish. SS Girls was another blatant imitation of Salon Kitty and The Night Porter while The Red Nights of the Gestapo was a fairly sumptuous affair that tended to concentrate on the decadence of the SS top brass. Elsa – Fraulein SS, on the other hand, was cheap and deliciously tacky, and despite the title similarity to Ilsa She Wolf of the SS (coincidence I’m sure!), was more of a T&A romp than a parade of atrocities, following the Salon Kitty theme of prostitutes being used to spy on Nazi officers who might be slipping in their love for the Third Reich. Many of the same cast and crew returned in Special Train for Hitler and Helga, She Wolf of Spilberg, which utilised the same sets and much the same plot.

Erwin C.Dietrich’s Frauleins in Uniform is a softcore movie that is notable for the strange normalising of the Nazis. While it briefly deals with the horrors of war, it does so from the point of view of the German army recruits – female German army recruits – and while there are hints at a totalitarian state, much of the film is surprisingly uncritical of the Nazi war machine. There’s little in the way of dramatic threat (though one deserter is caught and told “we have ways of making you talk”!), but the constant stream of bare flesh and dialogue like “cleanliness is next to Naziness” ensure that it passes by quite painlessly.

Meanwhile, American porno producers were dabbling in the concept with Prisoner in Paradise and Hitler’s Harlots. But for whatever reasons, the theme didn’t catch on in the adult movie theatres. In Hong Kong, film-makers replaced Nazis with Japanese invaders and unleashed the likes of Concentration Camp for Girls and Bamboo House of Dolls, the latter of which was used as an example of the worst excesses of cinema by British BBFC censor James Ferman during lectures about censorship. This sub-genre eventually led to the notoriously nasty Men Behind the Sun series.

By 1978, the Nazi sexploitation genre was all but dead. Perhaps the moral outrage and censorship problems which greeted such films proved to be too much trouble for producers only interested in profit. Who knows? Whatever the reason, there hasn’t been a single significant addition to the cycle since, making it one of cinema’s most short-lived genres. The only films to dabble in the genre now are zero budget affairs aimed squarely at the cult horror audience.

Keith Crocker’s Blitzkreig: Escape from Stalag 69 (2008) attempts to channel the spirit of the Italian films, but despite star Tatyana Kot spending the whole film naked, either gunning down Nazis or (more frequently) being tortured, plentiful nudity – male and female – throughout, two castrations, tongue pulling, eye stabbing, throat slitting and plenty more gory mayhem, all delivered with bargain basement FX, the film still manages to be the dullest Naziploitation film since The Beast in Heat. Why it needed to be 135 minutes long is anyone’s guess.

More interesting, but still unrealised beyond being a fake trailer in Grindhouse, is Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS, which has Sybil Danning taking on the Ilsa role and Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu. The trailer was, by far, the best thing about the whole Grindhouse project and hopefully Zombie will eventually get around the making the complete film.

It’s understandable that many people will be upset at the idea of Nazi fantasies. But I’ve never yet come across a genuine fascist amongst fans of this grubby sub-genre, and even the worst of the films doesn’t attempt to portray the Third Reich as being remotely admirable. If we can laugh at sit-coms like Allo Allo (okay, no-one should laugh at Allo Allo, but you know what I mean…), then surely we can be amused by these cheesy, high camp exercises in bad taste without feeling guilty about it? In fact, it’s probably our duty to do so, reminding ourselves that Nazis are little more than a bad joke in a good uniform…

Heinz Von Sticklegruber

Nazis on Horrorpedia: BloodRayne: The Third Reich | Cataclym aka The Nightmare Never Ends | Dead Snow: Red vs Dead | The Flesh Eaters | Frankenstein’s Army | Night of the Zombies | Night Train to Terror | Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz | She Demons | Women’s Camp 119

House of the Witchdoctor is a 2013 American horror film directed by Devon Mikolas, his first feature film. It stars newer names such as Callie Stephens (When the Lights Go Out) and Summer Bills as well as actors who have appeared in many horror and genre films over the past few decades, in particular Dyanne Thorne (the Ilsa series, Blood Sabbath) and Bill Moseley (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2; House of 1000 Corpses; The Devil’s Rejects). The plot sees a group of typical American teens offering consolation to their bereaved friend at her parent’s plush residence, only to find themselves stalked… and even worse.

Serial nutcase Cliff Rifton (Allan Kayser, Night of the Creeps) has been released from prison and immediately hooks up with his old sidekick, Buzz Schenk (David Willis), both of them eager to pick up where they left off and terrorise as many people as possibly whilst taking as many drugs as possible. After killing his mother, raping a drug dealer’s girlfriend and then torturing and murdering him, new opportunities are sought and their new target is white, middle-class Leslie Van Hooten (Stephens) and her four friends, who manage to evade them on their way to her parent’s well-appointed pad on the outskirts of town, primarily for them all to help her come to terms with the anniversary of the death of her boyfriend.

An unfortunate series of Last House on the Left-like coincidences lead the criminals to the Van Hooten residence, a stroke of luck they are unwilling to let pass. With her parents away (Mosely and Leslie Easterbrook from The Devil’s Rejects and many Police Academy films) the teens are terrorised by a distinctly 1970’s-style home invasion; rape, torture and dehumanisation all getting a run-out. Before the plot becomes too predictable, the parents return, accompanied by neighbours, Rose (Thorne) and  Emmett (Howard Maurer, Thorne’s real-life spouse and star of two Ilsa films himself, Tigress of Siberia and Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks), as well as assorted locals, all of whom are equipped with a wide array of garden tools and more traditional weapons.

Down in the basement of the house, true identities are revealed and voodoo wrong-doings require sacrifice and rites, volunteers both unwilling and otherwise already assembled. Will the local deities be appeased or will help arrive in time?

The home invasion angle of approach doesn’t really date and, if played correctly, is always an unnerving experience, the defiling of both body and property an eternally horrific thought. In this respect, the film doesn’t do a bad job, let down only by idiotic, dislikeable teens behaving in the most sickeningly forehead-slapping daft manner imaginable. The diabolical duo of Buzz and Cliff are played with eyeball-spinning glee and the enthusiasm and appalling satisfaction they gain from their crimes are demented and unhinged enough to be attributed by drugs and society – backstories are left to a minimum.

Do people still watch horror films just for nudity? Well, those who do won’t be disappointed, though Dyanne remains mercifully clothed. Her role is minimal, as is that of Mosely, despite the pivotal part he plays in the story. As such we are left with the curse of Rob Zombie – a parade of old faces, used poorly, to disguise flimsy plot under the guise of “I know my stuff, me!”. Though a twist is necessary in the film to prevent stale, though graphic sexually violent thrills, the notion of introducing voodoo and spell casting is so ridiculous that it feels like two half ideas half executed.

The net result is a film which would play well on late-night cable television, particularly for an audience with low expectations, low I.Q. and a penchant for low-necklines.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

M is a 1931 German drama-thriller film directed by Fritz Lang (Metropolis, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse) and starring Peter Lorre (The Beast with Five Fingers; The Raven; Tales of Terror). It was written by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou and was the director’s first sound film. The plot shows one of cinema’s first serial-killer hunts and was a shift in horror from monsters to real-life horrors.

In early 30’s Berlin, despite a serial killer being on the loose, families are trying to carry on with their lives as normal. We see a six year-old girl named Elsie Beckmann playing with a ball alone on a street having left her friends. She is approached by a relatively nondescript man, Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), whistling as he walks, who buys her a balloon from a blind peddler. This innocent act is soon to be revealed as something far more sinister as, although the crime goes unseen, her empty place at the dinner table and abandoned toys suggest at the horror which has been committed.

Beckert, in common with several real-life murderers, taunts the Berliners by boasting details of his crimes, which are printed in the local newspapers. The police, with no leads to go on, comb over every possible detail looking for clues but despite using the very latest techniques, including fingerprint analysis, they struggle to make a breakthrough. Under the leadership of Inspector Karl Lohmann (Otto Wernicke; The Testament of Dr. Mabuse), his forces forensically check every detail they have and scour their archives for potential suspects, whilst the troops on the ground raid countless criminal gangs in a fruitless attempt to catch the killer.

The criminal fraternity are equally appalled at the crimes but, at the same time, object to their nefarious activities being regularly interrupted. As such, they gather themselves together and throw allegiances out of the window to seek out the serial killer themselves, led by the notorious, Der Schränker (“The Safecracker”, played by Gustaf Gründgens; Faust). Despite their reputations, they ensure the safety of the city’s youth by employing the many beggars to keep watch on every street corner.

The police finally make a breakthrough and lie in wait at his rented accommodation. Meanwhile, the unaware killer stalks another young victim but is thwarted by an attentive mother. His distinctive whistle is recognised by the blind beggar we met earlier, who quickly informs members of the underworld as to his fears. Beckert is trailed by the informant, who ensures the suspect doesn’t get lost in the crowd by pretending to bump into him, giving him the opportunity to transfer a large letter “M” from his palm to the back of his coat.

Initially unaware, the symbol alerts other members of the criminal vigilantes who begin to appear en masse. Realising he is being trailed, Beckert flees into a large office building but it isn’t long before he is trapped and ‘arrested’, not by the police but by the criminals. A court is hastily assembled in an abandoned distillery, from judge (a murderer himself) to defence. It isn’t long before Beckert is found guilty, his pleas that he is unable to control his urges falling on deaf ears. It now becomes a game of morals and justice as a three-way tug-of-war decides whether Beckert can make his pleas heard by the courts of the land rather than the trial by The People.

Fritz Lang, known for his close attention to detail, soaked up numerous accounts of real-life serial killers (comparisons are regularly drawn with Peter Kürten, the so-called \Vampire of Düsseldorf’) to ensure his depiction was not only chilling but unnervingly believable. His intention was not only to cast some light on what would motivate a child-killer to commit such heinous acts but also to examine the roles of parents, society and the perpetual question as to the validity of capital punishment.

Contrarily, though M is Lang’s first film utilising sound, the film is almost entirely devoid of a soundtrack as such, the only ‘music’ of any real significance being the tune whistled by the killer, “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 1. This is one of the very earliest uses of a musical device known as a ‘leitmotif’ – a short melody which denotes a particular character or action. In this instance, any time we here the piece, even if Beckert isn’t on-screen, we know he is nearby. The film regularly omits diegetic street sound, putting even more focus on the theme of sight and sound and how closely we actually pay attention to what is going on around us. In actual fact, Lorre couldn’t whistle and the musical theme comes from the lips of Lang’s wife.

Originally titled, Mörder unter uns (“Murderer Among Us”) the film immediately courted controversy, even before release, raising the heckles of both German studios and the Nazi Party. Other early titles for the film included Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (A City searches for a Murderer) and Dein Mörder sieht Dich An (Your Killer Looks At You). Interestingly, despite the role of the murderer being so pivotal to the film, the strength and motivations of many of the characters shine through, achieving the aims of the director for the film to be a social commentary on all members of society, not just the most obvious.

This was Lorre’s first major role and one he was essentially able to play twice, both in his native tongue and in English when the film was re-shot. Despite his previous roles largely being in comedy, M led to Lorre being cast as a villain for many years after. In fact, none of the crimes are ever shown on-screen, though rather like many of the most important works of cinema, you would swear you see more than is actually presented. Beckert’s internal turmoil may be very real to him but we are left with no doubt as to his crimes or the threat he poses.

It wasn’t until the 1990’s that the existence of foreign language versions of the film (English and French) were uncovered; the sets and plot the same but the language and even several scenes, quite different. The various versions run to anything from 105 minutes to 117. Even then, a missing scene remains undiscovered, approximately 7 extra minutes, further examining the bizarre practice of murderers almost giving themselves up in an attempt to publicly proclaim their crimes and the inefficiencies of the police force.

M remains a deeply unsettling and challenging film and which, alas, deals with themes and events which are still very present with us today. It regularly appears in the loftier areas of critics’ favourite films, one of the few to transcend language to feature in both general and world lists.
Daz Lawrence

Knock Knock is a 2014 U.S./Chilean horror thriller directed by Eli Roth (Hostel and its sequel; The Green Inferno) from a screenplay he co-wrote with Guillermo Amoedo and Nicolás López. It stars Keanu Reeves, Lorenza Izzo, Ana de Armas, Ignacia Allamand and Aaron Burns. 

The film, which is currently in post-production, is a loose remake of co-executive producer Peter S. Traynor’s Death Game (1977). Sondra Locke, who starred in the original, is a co-executive producer, whilst co-producer Colleen Camp, who also starred in the original, has a cameo role in Roth’s movie. It will premiere in the Midnight Section at The Sundance Film Festival in January 2015.

Confusingly, before shooting began, Roth told IGN that his inspiration for Knock Knock came from the early work of “Roman Polanski or Paul Verhoeven” and that he wants to make “a classic psychosexual thriller that’s not a horror movie, but would have everyone on the edge of their seats.”

Plot teaser:

A pair of femme fatales (Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas) wreak havoc on the life of a seemingly happily married man (Keanu Reeves)…

IMDb

Hellraiser: Revelations is an American horror film written by Gary Tunnicliffe and directed by Víctor García (30 Days of Night: Blood Trails; Return to House on Haunted Hill; Mirrors 2). It is the ninth film in the Hellraiser film series, and the first entry in the series since Hellraiser: Bloodline to be based on an original script, instead of incorporating series antagonist Pinhead into an unrelated horror story.

The film was produced in a matter of weeks due to an obligation on Dimension Films‘ part to release another Hellraiser film or risk losing the rights to the franchise. Due to the quick turnaround time, series star Doug Bradley declined to participate, making this the first entry in the series in which he does not play Pinhead. Instead, Pinhead was played by Stephan Smith Collins.

It was released in a single theatre in California for a crew screening that was ostensibly open to the public, then released to DVD in October 2011.

Buy Hellraiser: Revelations on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Plot teaser:

Best friends Steven Craven and Nico Bradley run away from home and travel to Mexico. They film themselves engaging in several days’ worth of drunken partying. The boys later disappear. The Mexican authorities return their belongings to their parents, including a videotape made by Steven that apparently documents their final moments.

A year later, the families of the two missing boys gather for dinner. Tensions rise when Emma, Steven’s sister and Nico’s girlfriend, expresses frustration with their lack of closure. She demands that her mother reveal the contents of Steven’s videotape, which she has been obsessively watching in private.

Later, Emma sneaks a look at the tape, which documents Steven and Nico picking up a girl in a bar. A flashback reveals that Nico casually murdered the girl while having sex in the bar’s restroom, and later threatened to implicate Steven in the killing to force him to continue their “vacation” together…

Hellraiser films on Horrorpedia: Hellraiser | Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth | Hellraiser: Hellseeker | Hellraiser: Deader | Hellraiser: Hellworld | Hellraiser: Revelations

Reviews:

“All of the ideas and themes to back up the film are there, but are so thread-bare, nothing resonates. Furthermore, the characters are ill-defined; they’re nothing but weak shadows of the archetypes one would find in a Hellraiser story. It also certainly doesn’t help that Pinhead is so insultingly portrayed (Doug Bradley wanted no part of this) that any time he’s on screen, you’re either chuckling or slapped into silence by the silliness of it all.” Ryan Turek, Shock Till You Drop

Despite what Clive Barker might say about Revelations not being his Hellraiser, the reality of it is that it follows the original far closer than any of the other Hellraiser sequels ever did … Hellraiser: Revelations eventually almost becomes a Hellraiser film that feels like it has been rewritten by way of a Brett Easton Ellis novel about the children of privilege taking an anarchic pleasure in attacking the world they come from. All of which makes for something undeniably original and entertaining.” Richard Scheib, Moria

“At its core, the movie is just a really poorly redone version of the first movie, following most of the same plot points, but beefing up the original Uncle Frank plot into something much larger and less sense making. The movie was rushed with not any time to re-write or tighten the script or to make it coherent. Doug Bradley, the actor who played Pinhead in all eight Hellraiser movies leading up to this shot it down because he didn’t think the movie was up to par with the rest of the franchise. In a franchise with the last four movies being direct to video sequels that rival any SyFy Original Pictures, this was the one he said “No” to. That’s how bad this movie is.” Dane Sager, Under the Gun

Wikipedia | IMDb | Facebook

Hellraiser: Deader is a 2005 American horror film directed by Rick Bota. It is the seventh instalment in the Hellraiser series. Like the previous two entries in the series, Hellraiser: Inferno and Hellraiser: Hellseeker, it began as an unrelated horror spec script owned by Dimension, which was rewritten as a Hellraiser film. The original script was written by Neal Marshall Stevens who also wrote the script for the 2001 remake of Thir13en Ghosts.

Hellraiser: Deader was released straight to DVD in the United States on June 7, 2005.

Plot teaser:

Investigative reporter Amy Klein (Kari Wührer) is sent to Bucharest to investigate the origins of a video tape apparently depicting the ritualistic murder—and subsequent resurrection—of a member of a cult calling themselves “The Deaders”. In Bucharest, Amy tracks down the return address of the VHS and discovers the corpse of a girl holding a puzzle box, the Lament Configuration.

Solving the box causes Pinhead (Doug Bradley) to appear and warns Amy that she is in danger. Amy pursues leads, ultimately tracking down Winter LeMarchand, (Paul Rhys) the leader of the cult. Winter is the descendant of the toymaker who designed the puzzle box, which can open a portal to a realm populated by the Cenobites, hedonistic entities that experiment in forms of extreme sadomasochism. Winter believes that as the heir to the LeMarchand name, it is his birthright to access the realm of the Cenobites and become their master.

However, Winter has been unable to open the box himself. Believing that it takes an individual whose life circumstances have brought them to a nihilistic point beyond life-or-death, Winter founded the Deaders, attracting emotionally vulnerable individuals, murdering them, and resurrecting them with necromancy in the hopes of creating someone who can open the box…

Buy first eight Hellraiser films on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Hellraiser films on Horrorpedia: Hellraiser | Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth | Hellraiser: Hellseeker | Hellraiser: Deader | Hellraiser: Hellworld | Hellraiser: Revelations

Reviews:

” … not so much a scary story as it is glum and grungy story about an investigate reporter and the gory goth gang she’s itchin’ to track down. The Hellraiser-ish material is just kind of wedged in here and there with little sense, rhythm, or excitement. And, of course, it all takes place in Romania, land of the planet’s least expensive production services … Basically, Amy’s search (and the numerous scenes that focus upon it) are deadly dull and entirely yawn-worthy. And when the “one size fits all”Hellraiser conceits finally hit the screen, well, it all seems like woefully too late — way too late.” Scott Weinberg, DVD Talk

“With a Hellraiser film I at least expect extreme…extreme gore, extreme monsters, extreme images. It doesn’t really seem to happen. There is gore, but it isn’t anything revolutionary or different from otherHellraiser and with less monsters, that means less fun.” JP Roscoe, Basement Rejects

Cast:

• Doug Bradley as Pinhead
• Kari Wührer as Amy Klein
• Paul Rhys as Winter LeMarchand
• Simon Kunz as Charles Richmond
• Marc Warren as Joey
• Georgina Rylance as Marla
• Ionut Chermenski as Group Leader
• Hugh Jorgin as The Arrogant Reporter
• Linda Marlowe as Betty
• Madalina Constantin as Anna
• Ioana Abur as Katia
• Constantin Barbulescu as The Landlord (as Costi Barbulescu)
• Daniel Chirea as Amy’s Father
• Maria Pintea as Young Amy

Choice dialogue:

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”

Wikipedia | IMDb

‘Evil. Deadly. Immortal.’

Hellraiser: Hellseeker is a 2002 horror film, directed by Rick Bota (Hellraiser: Deader; Hellraiser: Hellworld) from a screenplay by Carl V. Dupré and Tim Day. It is the sixth film in the Hellraiser series. It also features the return of Kirsty Cotton, the heroine from the first film and its sequel. The film was released straight to DVD by Dimension Home Video on 15 October 2002.

It stars Doug Bradley, Ashley Laurence, Dean Winters, William S. Taylor, Michael Rogers, Rachel Hayward and Trevor White.

Plot teaser:

Trevor Gooden (Dean Winters) survives a car accident that apparently kills his wife Kirsty Cotton-Gooden (Ashley Laurence) when their car plunges off a bridge into the river below. Trevor manages to escape with his life, but even though police divers find both car doors open there is no sign of Kirsty.

A month later, Trevor wakes up in a hospital and realises that his wife is missing, but because of a head injury his memory is uncertain and he cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality. Trevor finds himself the prime suspect in a murder case, and has two homicide detectives on his tail.

Many strange events befall him, until the Cenobite Pinhead shows him reality. The reality is that Kirsty is in fact still alive…

Buy on Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Hellraiser films on Horrorpedia: Hellraiser | Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth | Hellraiser: Hellseeker | Hellraiser: Deader | Hellraiser: Hellworld | Hellraiser: Revelations

Reviews:

“The film is not excessively gory like the first four instalments were. There’s enough to make us recoil (including a cranium drilling aided with a horrific sound effect) but nothing like the Grand Guignol when Barker was involved.

Also, those looking forward to Laurence’s return may be disappointed that she isn’t on screen more. But when she is on screen is important. She’s not shoved out of the way. She is merely asked to step aside as the story progresses.” Scott W. Davis, Horror Express

“… the movie could have shifted into Act III the moment after Trevor wakes up from the car crash. The body of Hellseeker is a narrative void, which is extremely irksome once we hit the twist and realize there was a whole other interesting story going on that we didn’t get to see because we were focusing on the wrong character.” Joshua Miller, CHUD.com

Buy first eight Hellraiser films on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

“Hellraiser Hellseeker sets to accomplish two things…a reflection of the seedy life Trevor lived and the slow torment of Hell’s effects on him while reflecting on this. The film may have a bit of that…”what’s going on” aspect to it, but I think most viewers will quickly get with the realization that Trevor is in fact experiencing one of those “end of life flashbacks’. This is reaffirmed thru the choking of water, eels coming out of his mouth and this silently narrated path of showing Trevor the events of his life before hand.” HorrorNews.net

“The Se7en-esque look kicks in again with the colors being washed out and the tone being all grim. It still works although it’s starting to get a little tired. Bota handles his directorial duties well by slapping in potent slow motion, giving the images an effective bluish tint, using the occasional blurry cam and delivering stylish camera angles.” The Arrow, Joblo.com

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Buy Miramax Hellraiser series from Amazon.com

Cast:

• Doug Bradley as Pinhead / Merchant (as Charles Stead)
• Ashley Laurence as Kirsty Cotton-Gooden
• Dean Winters as Trevor Gooden
• William S. Taylor as Det. Mike Lange
• Michael Rogers as Detective Givens
• Rachel Hayward as Dr. Allison Dormer
• Trevor White as Bret
• Sarah-Jane Redmond as Gwen Stevens
• Jody Thompson as Tawny
• Kaaren de Zilva as Sage
• Dale Wilson as Chief Surgeon / Surgeon Cenobite
• Ken Camroux as Dr. Ambrose
• Brenda McDonald as Angular Nurse

Choice dialogue:

“You look like Hell warmed over.”

Wikipedia | IMDb

The Manson Family is a 2003 American true crime horror film written and directed by Jim Van Bebber. The film covers the lives of Charles Manson and his “family” of followers. The film had a long and troubled production history. Director Jim Van Bebber personally financed the production starting in 1988, and then continued to shoot it sporadically on weekends and off days. In 1998, Creation Books published Charlie’s Family: An Illustrated Screenplay, in the UK.

Despite support from various people, including members of the band Skinny Puppy, who provided a musical score (in the form of Download‘s Charlie’s Family album) that was released separately years before the film itself, the film remained incomplete. It screened on video as a work-in-progress at a number of film festivals during that time. Phil Anselmo of Pantera, Down, and Superjoint Ritual provided his voice as Satan.

The Manson Family is a cross between fictional story and documentary, overseeing the crimes of The Manson Family as led by Charlie Manson. The fictional story centers on a Crime Scene-esque TV series of the same name and its host, Jack Wilson (Carl Day). It is filmed in semi-experimental style and focuses on the early days of the Spahn Ranch including Manson’s attempts to record a music album, and the Manson family crimes, with little emphasis on courtroom drama regarding the trial, although some scenes depict Manson’s follower’s outside the courthouse.

Dark Sky Films stepped in with the funds to finish the film properly, and it has since been released theatrically and on home video. On June 11, 2013, Severin Films released a 10th Anniversary Blu-ray + DVD combo. This includes:

• Audio Commentary with Director Jim VanBebber
• Gator Green – Exclusive First Release of VanBebber’s latest short
• Exclusive New Interview With Phil Anselmo
• The VanBebber Family – Uncut Version of ‘Making Of’ Documentary Featuring Interviews with Cast and Crew
• In The Belly of The Beast – Documentary On the 1997 Fantasia Film Festival
• Interview With Charles Manson
• Deleted Scenes
• Theatrical Trailers

Read article: Coming Down Fast – Charles Manson on Screen

Reviews:

“The Manson Family pulls no punches in its handling of these gruesome events. Van Bebber’s only concession to restraint occurs when he cuts away from the mutilation about to be inflicted upon Sharon Tate and her unborn baby. All this excessive bloodshed has a point though; it’s never intended as gratuitous shock tactics. In a manner analogous to John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, the unsparing violence is meant to demystify and de-glamorize acts of carnal savagery that otherwise might register as little more than the routine slaughter found in your average slasher film. Violence, Van Bebber wants to say, is always ugly.” Budd Wilkins, Slant

“What Van Bebber does accomplish is to make a film true to its subject. It doesn’t bring reason, understanding, analysis or empathy to Manson; it wants only to evoke him. It is not pro-Manson, simply convinced of the power he had over those people at that time. In a paradoxical way, it exhibits sympathy for his victims by showing their deaths in such horrifying detail. In its technical roughness, its raw blatant crudeness, it finds a style suitable to the material; to the degree that it was more smooth and technically accomplished, to that degree it would distance itself from its subject and purpose.” Roger Ebert

“The greatest success of the film is actually that of the generally almost forgotten deaths of the LaBianca’s later that night (which have become almost an afterthought due to the ‘fame’ of the ‘Tate Murders’) which are covered in truly horrific detail and in fact their deaths are the hardest to watch of all, the brutal, sadisti, c multiple stab wound demise of Mrs LaBianca (even to the grotesque desecration of her body by uncovering, and then stabbing, her naked buttocks) is in fact by far the most explicit and uncomfortable death in the whole film. And that’s of course exactly as it should be, and it makes us feel exactly like we are meant to feel… shocked and sickened.” Beardy Freak

” … schizophrenic, bad-acid-trip of a movie retells the Manson legend from inside the family. The film actually looks like all of those terrible 60s grindhouse movies, with deliberately mismatched 16mm film stock, and drug scenes straight out of Alice in Acidland. However, this is a film with a deadly serious intent, sucking the viewer into the free love and drugs ethos of the 60s. We watch how this dream turns into a nightmare of grotesque violence, all at the hands of a very convincing Charlie Manson.” Tony O’Neill, The Guardian

Cast:

• Marcello Games as Charlie Manson
• Marc Pitman as Tex Watson
• Leslie Orr as Patty Krenwinkel
• Maureen Allisse as Sadie Atkins
• Amy Yates as Leslie Van Houten
• Jim Van Bebber as Bobby
• Tom Burns as Clem Watkins
• Michelle Briggs as Linda Kasabian
• Sherri Rickman as Snake
• Nate Pennington as Shorty
• Carl Day as Jack Wilson
• Corral Day as Franklin Riley

Wikipedia | IMDb | Official website

‘The dead shall rise and walk the Earth’

City of the Living Dead – Italian: Paura nella città dei morti viventi [translation: Fear in the City of the Living Dead], released in the US as The Gates of Hell – is a 1980 Italian horror film directed by Lucio Fulci (Zombie Flesh Eaters; The Beyond; The New York Ripper) from a screenplay co-written with Dardano Sacchetti. It is the first instalment of the unofficial Gates of Hell trilogy that also includes The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery. The film’s haunting score is by Fabio Frizzi and was issued again as a vinyl album in 2013 by Death Waltz Recording Company.

The film stars Christopher George, Catriona MacColl, Janet Agren, Antonella Interlenghi, Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Michele Soavi, Venantino Venantini. Director Fulci makes an uncredited cameo appearance as Dr. Joe Thompson.

Plot teaser:

In New York City, during a séance held in the apartment of medium Theresa, Mary Woodhouse (Catriona MacColl) experiences a traumatic vision of a priest, Father Thomas (Fabrizio Jovine), hanging himself from a tree branch in the cemetery of a remote village called Dunwich.

When the images overwhelm her, Mary goes into convolutions, and falls to the floor as if dead. The police interrogate Theresa, but fail to heed her warnings of an imminent evil. Outside the apartment building, Peter Bell (Christopher George), a journalist, tries to gain entry to the premises but is turned away.

The following day, Mary is buried in a local cemetery on Long Island overlooking Manhattan and Peter visits her grave site. The gravediggers (Perry Pirkanen and Michael Gaunt) leave Mary’s half-covered coffin at the end of their work shift and leave. Soon, Peter hears muffled screams as he reluctantly leaves the graveyard. Using a pickaxe, he frees the screaming woman from her premature burial, but with the axe coming dangerously close to her head as it smashes through the casket lid.

Peter and Mary visit Theresa where she warns them that according to the ancient book of Enoch, the events Mary has witnessed in her visions presage the eruption of the living dead into our world. The death of Father Thomas, a marked priest, has somehow opened a door through which the living dead can enter and the invasion will commence on All Saints Day, just a few days away…

Buy on Blu-ray | Instant Video from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Reviews:

” …with its nonsensical ‘plot’ randomly constructed according to the illogic of fear, and its grotesque emphasis on physical mutability, fragmentation and decay, it could just conceivably be the sort of disreputable movie the surrealists would have loved.” Time Out

” …City of the Living Dead’s narrative is bland and workmanlike, but it does at least plod along at a solid and continuous pace like the beating drum in Fabio Frizzi’s effective, minimalistic score. That score and every other aspect of the film really come into their own in the big finale; when the location of the portal into hell is discovered and Fulci’s direction is at its most stylish and lively, building up into a final shot that is perplexingly ambiguous.” Matt Shingleton, The Digital Fix

“While usual undead stylish Giannetto De Rossi isn’t along for the ride, these walking corpses are appropriately ghoulish and maggot infested. Their collective, grand rising occurs in one of Fulci’s best set-pieces: a dank, dark, cobwebbed crypt that exudes death. Whereas the barren wasteland of The Beyond is eerie in its vast emptiness, this is terrifying in its claustrophobia. Our characters here stumble into an eternal sea of visceral, violent death rather than a spiritual, soul-sucking demise.” Brett G., Oh, the Horror!

“What Fulci gives us is a collage of images, some of which fit into the film’s story arc, while others simply add to the overall atmosphere of apocalyptic doom. So, a shower of maggots appears out of nowhere, a boy’s head comes into contact with an industrial drill and a woman vomits up her intestines.” Jamie Russell, Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema

Buy Book of the Dead from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

“The story does verge on the incoherent at times and certainly isn’t as neatly tied together as The Beyond or The House By The Cemetery, but has a rather more dreamlike quality to it. The build up to the slightly anti-climactic ending is somewhat surreal… Andygeddon

Buy Lucio Fulci Collection on Blu-ray from Amazon.com

“City of the Living Dead is saturated with technical exaggeration, teeming with oddball performances and high on its own outrageous contrivances. Elegant cross-fades and superimpositions add beauty, as do a handful of judicious, painterly details, like the petal seen dropping silently from the rose held by the catatonic Mary in her coffin. All these factors coalesce, and the film survives its thin story thanks to the eccentricity of its detail.” Stephen Thrower, Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci

Buy Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Buy City of the Living Dead on Arrow Video Blu-ray | DVD from Amazon.co.uk

Special features:

• Original Theatrical trailer
• Dame of the Dead
• Live from the Glasgow Theatre
• The Many Lives And Deaths of Giovanni Lombardo Radice
• Penning Some Paura – Dardano Sacchetti Remembers COTLD
• The Audio Recollections of Giovanni Lombardo Radice
• Audio Commentary with Catriona Macoll and Jay Slater
• Profondo Luigi – A Colleague’s Memories of Lucio Fulci
• Fulci’s Daughter – Memories of the Italian Gore Maestro
• Carlo of the Living Dead – Surviving Fulci Fear
• Fulci in the House: The Italian Master of Splatter
• Gallery of the Living Dead

Choice dialogue:

Bar owner: “A few beers and you fellows start seeing ghouls and devils all over the place.”

Cast:

• Christopher George as Peter Bell
• Catriona MacColl as Mary Woodhouse (credited as Katriona MacColl)
• Carlo De Mejo as Gerry
• Janet Agren as Sandra
• Antonella Interlenghi as Emily Robbins
• Giovanni Lombardo Radice as Bob
• Daniela Doria as Rosie Kelvin
• Fabrizio Jovine as Father William Thomas
• Luca Venantini as John-John Robbins (credited as Luca Paisner)
• Michele Soavi as Tommy Fisher
• Venantino Venantini as Mr. Ross
• Enzo D’Ausilio as Sheriff Russell’s deputy
• Adelaide Aste as Theresa
• Luciano Rossi as Policeman #1 in Theresa’s apartment
• Robert Sampson as Sheriff Russell
• Lucio Fulci as Dr. Joe Thompson
• Michael Gaunt as the Gravedigger #1
• Perry Pirkanen as the Blonde Gravedigger
• James Sampson as James McLuhan; Séance Member
• Martin Sorrentino as Sgt. Clay
• Robert E. Warner as the Policeman Outside Theresa’s apartment building

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Wikipedia | IMDb

‘When play becomes slay’

A Darker Fifty Shades: The Fetish Set is a 2015 American horror thriller written and directed by Shane Wheeler. It stars Bill Oberst Jr. (Circus of the Dead, Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies), Sarah Nicklin (The Disco Exorcist, Sins of Dracula), Glenda Galeano, Tomiko, Julia McAlee, Angel Curran, Deauxma, The film’s original title was The Fetish Set.

The film is available on Wild Eye Releasing DVD from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk. The DVD Special Features include a commentary from Sarah Nicklin, cast audition tapes, and more.

Plot teaser:

Four beautiful women attend a fetish convention in San Antonio, Texas, hoping to make some easy money, but find themselves thrown into a dark, underground world of obsession and murder when a deformed, sadistic serial killer (Bill Oberst Jr.) sets his sights on the quartet. Now, their friendship and personal limits will be torn apart as they struggle to survive the most brutal weekend of their lives…

Filming locations:

San Antonio, Texas

IMDb

Eden Lake is a 2008 British horror thriller film written and directed by James Watkins (The Woman in Black). It stars Kelly Reilly, Michael Fassbender and Jack O’Connell.

Plot teaser:

Nursery school teacher, Jenny (Kelly Reilly), and her boyfriend, Steve (Michael Fassbender), escape their everyday life to an idyllic remote lake in the green English countryside. Attempting to relax by a lakeside, their trip is disrupted by the presence of delinquent teenagers and their dog, but Steve intends to stay and not be driven away from enjoying their vacation.

The following morning, as he is determined to report the unruly kids to their parents, Steve stops at a house hosting a group of bikes he thinks belongs to the kids. With zero response at the front door, he commits forcible entry, and he narrowly escapes out of a window before the homeowner, the father of one of the teenagers, returns.

The couple quickly head back to the lake. There, Steve goes scuba diving and Jenny sleeps on the beach shore. Unfortunately, Steve realises their beach bag containing his car keys, phone and wallet have gone missing. Instinctively, they check on the car, but it is gone. Returning to town on foot, they are nearly run over by their car that is being driven recklessly by the gang, only stopping for leader, Brett (Jack O’Connell), to smirk at them…

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Reviews [spoilers]:

‘ …while one doesn’t subscribe to the tenets of political correctness in such films, more care was surely required before playing so thoroughly to what looks like a massive dose of prejudice. Even so, it is impossible not to admire the way Watkins ratchets up the tension in his debut as director (he wrote My Little Eye) and keeps his tale strictly to 90 minutes. Beware that there are several scenes which will make you want to look away, and all the more scary because they seem uncomfortably real.’ Derek Malcolm, London Evening Standard

‘Watkins serves up an intense experience that will not be to everyone’s taste – Eden Lake is certainly not an entertaining watch, more a form of mental and emotion torture. Its climax does not even provide the expected catharsis, rather the threat of worse horrors to come. In this regard, it surely qualifies as one of the most frightening films ever made.’ David Tappenden, Fright Films

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‘It is as if Watkins has taken the famous news picture of the hoodie making the “gun” gesture behind David Cameron’s back – and photoshopped a real weapon into his hand. But it is believable in a way that does not depend on a neurotic attention to sensational newspaper stories: it has its own internal logic. And when Jenny finally gets some kind of violent revenge, and this goes horrendously wrong, it is, once again, all too believable. Watkins crushes the good guys’ last stand with a realist moment of despair and blundering horror to match Michael Haneke’s tape-rewind scene in his Funny Games.’ Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

‘Alas, all the cliché boxes have been marked too, with people doing the sort of stupid things they only do in horrors. There’s also a ham-fisted message here about how violence dehumanises us all, which might have been pertinent if Wes Craven hadn’t already made it his own about 40 years ago.’ Daily Mirror

‘Eden Lake benefits from superb cinematography by The Cottage‘s Christopher Ross, which perfectly contrasts the lush greens of nature with the bloody, muddy nightmare that unfolds, aided by David Julyan’s sympathetic, perfectly pitched score. The cast are uniformly good, including the kids, with simply amazing performances from Reilly and Fassbender.’ MJ Simpson, Urban Terrors

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‘This is not, however, a Daily Mail rant about feral chavs. Instead, Watkins uses stomach-knotting tension and tongue-slicing horror to explore the complex dynamics of anti-social violence. We identify with the victims throughout, but Watkins also depicts the complex peer-group pressures within the gang  and the pain and confusion behind its leader’s eyes. The film’s one major fault is that Reilly’s character repeatedly acts in ways that serve the plot, but which run contrary to rational human behaviour. By contrast, the shattering downbeat ending is well earned and genuinely shocking.’ Nigel Floyd, Time Out

Wikipedia | IMDb