“Beast of Blood” is what happens when you let a hangover direct a movie. A direct sequel to The Mad Doctor of Blood Island, this fourth and final installment in the “Blood Island” series tries to pick up where its sweaty, green-blooded predecessor left off—and then promptly stumbles, spills its coconut rum, and sets its … Read More ““Beast of Blood” (1970): Chlorophyll Carnage and Tropical Trashfires” »
Some horror films sink their teeth into you. The Ancines Woods tries, but forgets where it left its dentures. Billed as a psychological horror drama and based on the chilling tale of Spanish werewolf-turned-serial-killer Manuel Blanco Romasanta, this 1970 slow-burn from Pedro Olea is more of a light simmer in dirty bathwater. It’s the kind … Read More “The Ancines Woods (1970): A Lycanthropic Snooze in the Key of Beige” »
Eye of the Cat is a movie where the biggest mystery isn’t who’s trying to kill Aunt Danny — it’s how this fever-dream of a furball thriller ever got greenlit in the first place. Think of it as a murder plot wrapped in a shampoo commercial, tied up in a ball of yarn, and left … Read More “Nightmare in Wax (1969): A Gooey Disaster with Less Bite Than a Wax Apple” »
Ah, The Mad Doctor of Blood Island — the kind of film that makes you question not only the choices of its characters, but your own as a viewer. One of the more infamous entries in the Filipino-American “Blood Island” tetralogy, this third installment is like Gilligan’s Island if Gilligan was a radioactive plant man … Read More “The Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1969): A Green-Blooded Disaster with a Body Count and a Brain Cell Count to Match” »
There are films that are misunderstood, others that are ahead of their time, and then there’s Horrors of Malformed Men — a movie that crawled out of a fever dream, swan-dived into a vat of LSD, and emerged squawking like a flamingo dipped in existential dread. Directed by the unholy ringmaster Teruo Ishii, this 1969 … Read More ““Horrors of Malformed Men” (1969): A Beautiful Freakshow You Should Probably Not Watch Sober” »
You’ve got to hand it to Martha Higareda. Born Martha Elba Guadalupe Higareda Cervantes in Villahermosa, Tabasco—sounds like the kind of name that belongs to a saint, or maybe a hurricane that eats villages whole. Instead, she grew up to become an actress, producer, screenwriter, the whole circus. And somewhere along the line, she took … Read More “Martha Higareda: Blood, Neon, and the Ghost of Ortega” »
Sometimes you read the press releases. All that factory-line garbage — beautiful, stunning, angelic. Words printed like coupons, meant to sell another face, another body, another bottle of perfume. You shrug. You’ve seen it before. But then there are women where even those words feel like loose change rattling in an empty tin can. Doesn’t … Read More “Chewed Up and Spat Out: The Short Life of Dorothy Stratten” »
“Beyond Desire,” a 1995 direct-to-video Vegas noir-thriller, is the cinematic equivalent of finding a pair of velvet Elvis paintings at a garage sale: faded, kind of tacky, but oddly charming if you squint hard enough and have a high tolerance for denim and bad decisions. Directed by Dominique Othenin-Girard, written by Dale Trevillion (whose typewriter … Read More ““Beyond Desire” (1995) Or: What Happens in Vegas Stays Mostly Forgotten” »
🎃 Swinging London Gets a Knife in the Back The Haunted House of Horror dares to ask the question: what if the Scooby-Doo gang were horny, British, and one of them was played by Frankie Avalon? This delightfully daft Hammer-adjacent whodunit is a psychedelic stab at the slasher genre before it was a genre, fusing … Read More “The Haunted House of Horror (1969) “Behind its forbidden doors, an evil secret hides!” …and so does the plot, logic, and any consistent use of lighting.” »
Some movies are subtle parables about hubris. Others are just Peter Cushing stabbing people in the name of science. Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed opts for the latter with gusto, class, and the sort of mad-scientist energy that would make even Elon Musk call security. This is Hammer Horror at its most refined — like a … Read More “Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) — When Scientific Ambition Meets a Body Count” »
