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Dr. Hackenstein

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Dr. Hackenstein is a 1988 comedy horror film written and directed by Richard Clark and distributed by Troma Entertainment. The film’s obvious influences include Young Frankenstein, Murder by Death and Re-Animator. Comedienne Phyllis Diller has a small part in the movie.

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In 1909, after the death of his wife, Dr. Elliot Hackenstein (David Muir) concocts the seemingly fiendish perfect plan: with the help of two useless graverobbers and a three lost girls, he can use the spare parts to reanimate the disembodied head of his dead spouse Sheila and build a better woman. His supervisor, Dean Schlesinger, is appalled and soon offed by Hackenstein. Meanwhile, three attractive young sisters become stranded and therefore would-be victims of Hackenstein…

Dr. Hackenstein has production values that are better than many of its cheap counterparts. Initially, it’s a passable 80s take on Young Frankenstein with some titillation but the feeble humour soon becomes risible. It’s ok for free — as Troma — seem to have decided (with ads) if you are in a charitable mood but don’t pay for this. Adrian Smith, Horrorpedia

“Well, points for trying, but about 12% of the movie is actually intentionally funny and not nearly enough is unintentionally funny. The film plays more like a zany romp, especially as Dr. Hackenstein pursues the girls. The cheesy music plays and he’s sneaking up behind the one girl with his syringe and just before he plunges it into her neck she turns and he hides the needle and smiles sheepishly, as if to say “Oh! Hi, how you doing?” That kind of stuff. Clark includes some breasts, mainly because I think he felt he absolutely had to, and the gore—primarily Dr. Hackenstein operating off camera as blood is squirted into his face—is minimal (except for a jarring eye-ripping scene toward the end.) … Dr. Hackenstein is a horror comedy that’s neither gory nor terribly funny.” DVD Verdict

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Wikipedia | IMDb

We are once again grateful to the recently reanimated Wrong Side of the Art! Go visit.



Clovis Trouille (artist)

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Clovis Trouille was born on 24 October 1889, in La Fère, France. He worked as a restorer and decorator of department store mannequins, but is remembered as a Sunday painter who trained at the École des Beaux-Arts of Amiens from 1905 to 1910.

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After his work was seen by Louis Aragon and Salvador Dalí, Trouille was declared a Surrealist by André Breton - a label Trouille accepted only as a way of gaining exposure, not having any real sympathy with that movement.

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The simple style and lurid colouring of Trouille’s paintings echo the lithographic posters used in advertising in the first half of the 20th century. His understandable utter contempt for the Church as a corrupt institution provided Trouille with the inspiration for decades of work:

Dialogue at the Carmel (1944) shows a skull wearing a crown of thorns being used as an ornament.

The Mummy shows a mummified woman coming to life as a result of a shaft of light falling on a large bust of André Breton.

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The Magician (1944) has a self-portrait satisfying a group of swooning women with a wave of his magician’s wand.

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My Tomb (1947) shows Trouille’s tomb as a focal point of corruption and depravity in a graveyard.

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Wikipedia | Related: Nosferatu (1921)


Screaming in High Heels: The Rise and Fall of the Scream Queen Era

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Screaming in High Heels: The Rise and Fall of the Scream Queen Era is a 2011 American documentary directed by Jason Paul Collum and featuring Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer. Key 80s “Scream Queen” moviemakers David DeCoteau, Richard Gabai, Ken Hall, Ted Newsom, Jay Richardson and Fred Olen Ray are also featured.

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Three girls living in Los Angeles in the 1980s found cult fame when they “accidentally” transitioned from models to B-movie actresses, coinciding with the major direct-to-video horror film boom of the era. Known as “The Terrifying Trio,” Linnea Quigley (The Return of the Living Dead), Brinke Stevens (The Slumber Party Massacre) and Michelle Bauer (Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers), headlined upwards of ten films per year, fending off men in rubber monster suits, pubescent teenage boys, and deadly showers. They worked together in campy cult films like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama (1988) and Nightmare Sisters (1987). They traveled all over the world, met President Ronald Reagan, and built mini-empires of trading cards, comic books, and model kits. Then it all came crashing down.

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“Hardcore splatter fans, and worshipers or schlocky horror will dig this. If nothing else, you’ll spend most of the run time compiling a mental list of movies that you need to track down and watch. Even though it’s fun, in the end, Screaming in High Heels is a little light. Beyond Hollywood

Buy Screaming in High Heels: The Rise & Fall of the Scream Queen Era from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

“While Screaming in High Heels: The Rise and Fall of the Scream Queen Era certainly concentrates on the women that made that name a household term, it effortlessly lives up to its title, too. From beginning to end, it’s a wonderful watch even for those who may not be a fan of the ’80s low-budget horror / sci fi / exploitation genres.” Horror Talk

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The Devil in Miss Jones series

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Devil_in_miss_jones_posterIn 1972, director Gerard Damiano changed the face of modern cinema forever with Deep Throat. This low budget porn quickie became a surprise hit, raking in millions of dollars and bringing hardcore sex into the mainstream consciousness for the first time. For Damiano, the success of the film would lead to bigger and better things. Throughout the Seventies, he was responsible for some of the most innovative and often most disturbing adult movies ever made, effectively blurring the line between art and porn. It all began shortly after the release of Deep Throat, when the hairdresser-turned-pornographer shot his follow-up movie – The Devil in Miss Jones.

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On the strength of Deep Throat, no-one really expected much from Damiano. Whilst Throat had been popular with the public and found some critical success, in reality it was a pretty poor film – a technically inept, lightweight sex comedy that appealed simply because it showed scenes that most people had never seen before. So when The Devil in Miss Jones was released, it was a genuine revelation. Gone was the juvenile humour, the hammy acting and the crude cinematography. Instead, the film offered a bleak, disturbing and – paradoxically – extraordinarily erotic voyage of discovery and damnation.

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Miss Jones is a middle-aged virgin, tired of her loveless life, who we first see slitting her wrists in the bathtub. Everything about this opening scene is remarkable, perhaps moreso now that we’ve all used to so much production-line porno. The age of the performer, the grubbiness of the location (even the bathtub is dirty), the act of suicide – a crude but cringingly effective effect – and the haunting song by Linda September are far removed from what we think of as adult movie entertainment. This is cold, stark reality, fully in keeping with the feel of early Seventies independent cinema, but a million miles away from mindless masturbation-material.

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After death, Miss Jones finds herself in a large country house, and has her fate explained by the seemingly sympathetic Mr Abaca. Because she has taken her own life, Miss Jones cannot got to Heaven; however, her life has been so free from sin, Hell hardly seems appropriate either. Aware that she is damned for eternity, Miss Jones begs for a chance to at least experience the pleasures of life, and Abaca ‘reluctantly’ agrees. For a short time, Miss Jones is unleashed to explore every sexual pleasure imaginable, and it is this exploration which forms the bulk of the movie. When her time is finally up, the now insatiable Miss Jones is finally sent to Hell. But Hell for her is not a place of fire and brimstone. Instead, she is locked in a room with a man (played by Damiano himself) who is obsessed with a non-existent fly. Miss Jones attempts to seduce him, but he continues to ignore her. As she frigs herself furiously, crying out “I can’t do it by myself”, the reality of her Hell is revealed. Having been given something to miss, she will now miss it for all eternity. Always that one step away from orgasm, Miss Jones is doomed to Forever Frustration.

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It’s a gut-punch ending to the film, particularly given the heat of the sexual encounters seen previously, and sets the scene for several other Damiano Catholic guilt trips to come. Like Miss Jones, the viewer has been enjoying her sexual adventures, and to end with a message that such pleasure might only be the set-up for eternal damnation is pretty devastating.

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Unlike Deep ThroatThe Devil in Miss Jones benefits from some remarkable performances. Harry Reems shows himself to be a more-than-capable actor, but it is Georgina Spelvin who amazes. She makes the transition from frumpy spinster to wanton whore seem believable – something few other porn stars have managed. Her sexual insatiability is remarkable, and her desperation at the end wholly credible. Her performance is the highpoint of a genuine cinematic masterpiece. It might not work as porn (especially for modern audiences), but as an example of just how good the genre can be if it tries, The Devil in Miss Jones remains unsurpassed.

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It would be nine years before the film spawned a sequel. Although still working in the adult industry at the time, Damiano was not involved in 1981′s The Devil in Miss Jones Part 2. Instead, the film was directed by Henri Pachard, who at that time was one of the leading lights in the industry.

Pachard realised that there was no way to match the quality of the first film, and also that audience tastes had moved on considerably in the preceding decade. So in place of the existential angst of the first film, Pachard opted for frothy comedy. In fact, there is little connection between the two movies at all, other than the title and the return of Georgina Spelvin.

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This latter connection was in itself rather tenuous, as Spelvin – in one of her final adult film roles – is only briefly seen in the film. The sequel takes the ending of the first film, and extends it into a joke. The Hell on display here is the more traditional concept, with the Devil presiding over various ‘sinners’ from history (in an early example of prosthetic porn, we see a dick-nosed Cyrano de Bergerac). Hell seems to be a pretty swinging place, but there is one rule: no orgasms. When Miss Jones finally gets Satan to break his own rule, she is rewarded with a return to Earth in various guises – thus offering Pachard the chance to replace Spelvin with several younger perfomers. It’s pretty insulting to the porn veteran, but possibly a sound commercial choice, as Miss Jones now occupies the bodies of four of the hottest starlets around.

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At first, she is placed in the body of call girl Jacqueline Lorians, but the Devil finds himself growing jealous of her antics, having now fallen in love with Miss Jones. Much of the humour comes from his attempts to place her in bodies where she can’t succumb to temptation – soldier girl Joanna Storm, salesgirl Anna Ventura and nun Samantha Fox. Eventually he admits defeat, abdicates his throne and heads to Earth to join Miss Jones as her mortal lover. Like I said, a little different from the first film. But if you accept that, The Devil in Miss Jones Part 2 is a great film – one of the best looking porn films you’ll ever see, genuinely horny (Ventura is particular just oozes sex) and truly amusing. It was the last (edited) hardcore film to be released in British cinemas, and even this soft version is very entertaining.

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The film was released on video in America by VCA, then still best known as a duplication and distribution company. The success of the film saw them rapidly move into full time porn production, and it would not be long before further sequels were required. In 1984, their top director Gregory Dark helmed The Devil in Miss Jones 3: A New Beginning and 4: The Final Outrage, which were in reality one epic film, split into two in order to recoup the higher-than-usual budget. Shot on film, the story disregards the previous movies, and – as the title suggests – comes up with an entirely new story. This time, Justine Jones is punkette Lois Ayres, who is killed mid-fuck and finds herself in a typically Dark Brothers vision of Hell. As a stand alone story, 3 and 4 are great films, with amazing performances by the likes of Vanessa Del Rio and plenty of interracial action. You can now buy both films on one DVD.

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When Greg Dark took a hiatus from porn shortly after shooting these films, VCA left the Miss Jones series alone (Arrow productions shot The Devil in Miss Jones II: The Devil’s Agenda in 1991, but this was more a rip-off than a genuine sequel). However, his return to hardcore in the early Nineties saw sequels to his notorious New Wave Hookers and a new Devil in Miss Jones. In keeping with the sprit of the time, the title was reduced to DMJ 5: Inferno, and alongside the innovative work of Michael Ninn and John Leslie, was at the forefront of porn’s spiritual revival in the middle of the Nineties. Inferno stars Juli Ashton as Miss Jones, once again a virginal figure in a surreal Hellscape. With a star-studded cast, a witty script by former sleaze-zine editor Selwyn Harris and Dark at his very best, the film is a freaked out classic, and showed that the surprising run of quality that this series had experienced was to continue.

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However, Dark was to leave VCA shortly after shooting this film, in order to run his own label. As VCA owned both the The Devil in Miss Jones and New Wave Hookers series, a new director was required. Initially, both series were to be taken over by Michael Ninn. Eventually though, Ninn took on New Wave Hookers 5, whilst DMJ 6 was handed to Antonio Passolini, who had recently made his directorial debut with the long-awaited Cafe Flesh 2. Passolini was the logical choice, given that, as Johnny Jump-Up, he’d written DMJ 3 and 4 for Greg Dark, and shared many of that director’s stylistic tastes.

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In this 1999 production, Stacy Valentine takes over the title role, recruited by Satan (now in the more agreeable form of Tina Tyler) to track down two escaped sex demons. Another wonderful production, the film combines steaming sexual performance with Passolini’s trademark humour and dayglo kitsch set design to great effect.

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In the early part of the 21st century, VCA was sold to Larry Flynt’s Hustler, and parted ways with many of its more successful directors and producers. The company also lost the rights to the Devil In Miss Jones title, which was picked up by long-time rivals Vivid. In 2005, the company made a high profile reboot of the series, called The New Devil in Miss Jones. With a reputed budget of $250,000 it was the company’s most expensive production – and possibly the end of an era with free internet porn soon to be eating into the profits and ambitions of most producers. Starring Savanna Samson in the lead role and directed by veteran actor turned director Paul Thomas, the film was glossy, slick but notably lacking in either a strong story of the camp / punk rock aesthetics of the previous sequels. It felt, in fact, rather ordinary. It did, however, feature a cameo by the now 70 year old Georgina Spelvin to tie it to the original film.

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The New Devil in Miss Jones was successful enough to spawn a sequel in 2010 – The Devil in Miss Jones: The Ressurection again teamed Thomas and Samson, along with porn icon Belladonna, but was less popular and more anonymous.

Changing times might mean that we’ve seen the last of the Devil in Miss Jones films. But the series has been, for the most part, an impressive one, seen as a prestige title and treated accordingly. The first six films are all worth seeking out for different reasons and the original movie has now seen special edition DVD release (produced by Media Blasters for VCX) that is available from mainstream outlets, cementing its place as one of the most important films of the 1970s.

Posted by DF


The Transplant (aka Night of the Bloody Transplant)

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The Transplant (released on VHS as Night of the Bloody Transplant) is an obscure 1970 American horror film produced, directed and co-written by David W. Hanson (who also made crime/psycho drama Judy the same year). It features Dick Grimm, Ann Antell, David Haller, Carl Williams, Elizabeth Rawlings and Cal Seeley. Not to be confused with Mexican gore movie Night of the Bloody Apes.

“Heart transplants are almost routine these days. But when Dr. James Arnold tries to get approval to perform a heart transplanr for his elderly benefactor, the medical society turns him down. However, when his ne’er do well brother accidentally kills a young woman, the doctor takes matters into his own hands. Threatened by a cutoff of fund, his benefactor gets a new heart.

Dr. Arnold has achieved his dream, but because of the young girl’s death can’t tell anyone about his triumph. Meanwhile, his brother goes on a killing rampage and, in the bizarre turn of events that follow, Dr. Arnold also is killed and his heart is transplanted to save a policeman the brother has shot…” United Home Video sleeve synopsis

“A late entry in the H.G. Lewis look-alike sweepstakes, this one from Flint, Michigan … With real heart surgery and some lame strippers.” Brian Albright, Regional Horror Films 1958-1990: A State-by-State Guide with Interviews (McFarlane, 2012)

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Buy Regional Horror Films, 1958-1990 from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

The Blood Trilogy Blood Feast Two Thousand Maniacs! Color Me Blood Red Blu-ray

Buy H.G. Lewis’ The Blood Trilogy on Blu-ray from Amazon.com

IMDb | We are most grateful to Critical Condition for the VHS sleeve image above.


Relatos de Presidio (Mexican comic)

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Relatos de Presidio (‘Tales from Prison’) is a popular “sensacionales” Mexican comic with horror and crime themes aimed at adults. Published by Editorial Toukan (and running to over 800 issues), the far from politically correct artwork and stories in Relatos de Presidio feature gory scenes of death and torture involving victims from both sexes.

‘Sensacionales’ or ‘La revisit vaquero’ are very low quality black and white comics printed in tones of sepia featuring about four panels per page in a four square diagram. The pocket size books generally have approximately one hundred pages and are famous for portraying voluptuous women on their covers. Most are sold cheaply at newsstands, either new or second-hand (similar to Italian fumetti).

Adult comics have a unique place in Mexican culture. Sensacionales are trashy and exploitative, but they also represent a genuinely popular indigenous medium. The dominant role of adult comics in Mexico is relatively new. From the 1930s through the 1970s, Mexico had a thriving comic-book industry with many genres. Titles such as Pepín, Fantomas, and Memín Penguín sold millions of copies during this era. But in the 1980s, American superhero comics poured into Mexico. That, combined with the perception that comics were only for kids, nearly wiped out indigenous comic books in Mexico. The only genre to survive, and even thrive, was a unique form of adult pulp comics.

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Wikipedia | Comic Vine | Related: JaculaSecrets of Haunted House | Vampirella


Horror (aka The Blancheville Monster)

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Horror (aka The Blancheville Monster) is a 1963 Italian/Spanish horror film directed by Alberto De Martino from a screenplay by Bruno and Sergio Corbucci, Giovanni Grimaldi based upon an (uncredited) story by Edgar Allan Poe. The cast includes: Helga Liné (Horror Express, The Dracula Saga, The Lorely’s Grasp), Gérard Tichy (Pieces), Leo Anchóriz and Ombretta Colli. On November 19th 2013 it was released in the US by Retromedia as a 50th Anniversary DVD in 1:66:1 widescreen and in high definition.

Brittany in France, 1884: Emily De Blancheville returns to her ancestral home from finishing school to find that her brother has sacked the entire staff and all the new servants act suspiciously. Her father – whom she had believed to be killed in a fire – is discovered to be alive but ‘horribly disfigured’ and having been driven insane. The family keep him locked up in the tower. It transpires that there is a curse on the De Blancheville line, and their father believes that the curse can only be broken if Emily is killed before her 21st birthday…

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“Fun aspects here include: Roderick’s great harpsichord playing; some fantastic sets including the old manor house and the ruined abbey nearby; a great spookshow sequence with Lady Blancheville’s friend wandering through the darkened manor and finding her way to the tower with some genuinely creepy moments; and the Scooby-doo mystery of the scar-faced man, which wasn’t too hard to figure out but still fun … And for the b-movie perv in all of us, some extended moonlight sleepwalks by Lady Blancheville with the backlit-gossamer gown shot in full effect. Rowr!” Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies

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The Blancheville Monster is quite atmospheric and it benefits a lot from the amazing, spooky castle and the fetching ladies. A few scenes are really good. But as a whole, well, this is nothing special.” Pidde Andersson, Xomba.com

” …solid midnight viewing thanks to its dank theatrics and comforting adherence to genre conventions. Best scene: the Blancheville family and friends bury poor Emily… unfortunately, they don’t realize she’s still alive.” The Terror Trap

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Belgian poster image courtesy of Poster Perversion. We recommend their great site.


Vampire Hookers

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Vampire Hookers (aka Vampire Graveyard, Sensuous Vampires and Night of the Bloodsuckers) is a 1978 Filipino comedy horror film directed by the prolific Cirio H. Santiago (Demon of Paradise) from a screenplay by Howard Cohen. It features John Carradine, Bruce Fairbarn, Trey Wilson, Karen Stride, Lenka Novak, Katie Dolan, Lex Winter and Vic Diaz. Post production supervisor Emmett Alston laster directed New Year’s Evil and Demonwarp.

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After their commanding officer goes missing, two American sailors discover a group of female vampires who pose as prostitutes to lure men into their secret lair…

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Buy Vampire Hookers from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

“Not in the least bit scary though packed with horror movie clichés, Vampire Hookers isn’t a particularly good movie but it is at least stupid enough to make for a fun time killer.” Rock! Shock! Pop!

“A hammy Carradine still manages to act circles around his co-stars, though, even if that comes off as something of a backhanded compliment when one suffers through the film itself.” AV Maniacs

“With its non-existent plot, bad sight gags and relentless toilet  humour, Vampire Hookers can hardly sustain 78 minutes and is only watchable for those who appreciate enduring really bad movies, especially really bad movies with John Carradine, and we know how many of those exist.” DVD Drive-In

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Jungle Holocaust: Cannibal Tribes in Exploitation Cinema

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The 1970s saw old taboos falling away in the cinema, and few horror film sub-genres benefited from the relaxation in censorship more than the cannibal film. In fact, this is a genre that scarcely existed prior to the Seventies. Sure, horror films had long hinted at cannibalism as a plot device – movies like Doctor X (1932) and others portrayed it as an element of psychosis without ever being overly explicit, and this would continue into the 1970s with films such as Cannibal Girls Frightmare and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – but no one had really explored the idea explicitly. Some things were just too tasteless, and cannibalism was something of a no-no with assorted censor boards around the world.

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Yet the idea that remote tribes in the Amazon or on islands like Papua New Guinea were still practising cannibalism was a common one at the time, thanks to a conflation of suspicion, colonialist ideas, misunderstanding of tribal rituals (such as head hunting / shrinking) and old-fashioned racism. And, if we are to be fair, these beliefs were not entirely without validity, as some cultures still did practice cannibalism, albeit not as determinedly as was often made out. Certainly, the subject was exploited – 1956 roadshow movie Cannibal Island promised much in its sensationalist promotional art, even if the film itself was Gaw the Killer, an anthropological documentary from the 1931, re-edited and re-dubbed, that was notably lacking in anthropophagy, despite the best efforts of the narrator to suggest otherwise.

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Buy Cannibal Island on DVD from Amazon.com

Elsewhere, cartoons and comic books perpetuated the idea that any great white hunter who was captured by natives was bound to end up in a cooking pot, and Tarzan movies hinted that he bones the natives wore as decoration were not all from animals. 1954′s Cannibal Attack saw Johnny Weissmuller playing Johnny Weissmuller, fighting off enemy agents in a cannibal-filled jungle.

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Hell Night director Tom De Simone’s terrible movie Terror in the Jungle (1968) had a small boy captured by a cannibal tribe and only saved by his ‘glowing’ blonde hair. Worship of blonde white people would be a theme in later, trashier cannibal movies too). Even the children’s big game hunting Adventure novel series by Willard Price had a Cannibal Adventure entry. But notably, none of these early efforts actually went the extra mile – the natives in these films may have been cannibals, but we had to take the filmmakers and writers word for that – no cannibalism actually took place on screen.

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In the 1960s, the Mondo documentary would also take an interest in bizarre tribal rituals, and these mostly Italian films would subsequently come to inform the style of the cannibal films that emerged later. Certainly, later shockumentaries such as Savage Man, Savage BeastThis Violent World and Shocking Africa were closely related to contemporary films like Man from Deep River and Last Cannibal World, with their lurid mix of anthropological studies and sensationalism.

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One such mondo movie was the 1974 Italian/Japanese Nuova Guinea, l’isola dei cannibali. Tribal scenes from this production – which also includes footage of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip on a Royal visit to the island (!) – were inserted into the zombie film Hell of the Living Dead (1981) to add verisimilitude. It was  later opportunistically released on DVD in the USA as The Real Cannibal Holocaust.

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Buy The Real Cannibal Holocaust on DVD from Amazon.com

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The cannibal film as we know it now began in 1972, with Il paese del sesso selvaggio, also known as Deep River SavagesThe Man from Deep River and Sacrifice!  It was directed by Umberto Lenzi, who would spend the next decade playing catch-up in a genre he pretty much invented with scriptwriters Francesco Barilli and Massimo D’Avak. This film essentially set many of the templates for the genre – graphic violence, extensive nudity, real animal slaughter and the culture clash between ‘civilised’ Westerners and ‘primitive’ tribes.

The film is, essentially, a rip-off of American western A Man Called Horse, with Italian exploitation icon Ivan Rassimov as a British photographer who finds himself stranded in the jungles of Thailand and captured by a native tribe. Eventually, after undergoing assorted humiliations and initiation rituals, he is accepted within the community, who are at war with a fierce, more primitive cannibal tribe.

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Co-starring Mei Mei Lai (who would become one of the sub-genre’s stock players), the film is set up more as an adventure story than a horror film, but the look and feel of the story would subsequently inform other cannibal movies, and the scene where the cannibal tribe kill and eat a native certainly sets the scene for what is to come.

Buy The Man from Deep River + Warlock Moon + Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat on DVD from Amazon.com

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Made in 1976, Ruggero Deodato’s Ultimo mondo cannibale (Last Cannibal World; Cannibal; Jungle Holocaust) also had the feel of an old-school jungle adventure, though Deodato expanded on what Lenzi had started – this tale of an explorer (played by Massimo Foschi) who is captured by a cannibal tribe features a remarkable amount of nudity (Foschi is kept naked in a cage for much of the film, teased and tormented by the tribe) and sex – including an animalistic sex scene between Foschi and Mei Mei Lai (Rassimov also co-stars). It also featured more graphic gore and real animal killing – the latter would become the achilles heel of the genre, something that even its admirers would find hard to defend. Even if the slaughtered animals were eaten by the filmmakers, showing such scenes for entertainment still left a bad taste with many, and over and above the sex and violence, would be the major cause of censorship for these films.

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The Last Cannibal World proved to be a popular hit around the world (it even played UK cinemas after BBFC cuts) and sparked a mini-boom in cannibal film production. In 1977, Joe D’Amato continued his bizarre mutation of the Black Emanuelle series – which, under his guidance, had evolved from soft porn travelogue to featuring white slavery, rape, snuff movies, hardcore sex and even bestiality – with Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (aka Trap Them and Kill Them), a strange and uniquely 1970s mixture of of softcore sex and hardcore gore, as Laura Gemser goes in search of a lost cannibal tribe. Quite what audiences expecting sexy thrills thought when they were confronted with graphic castration scenes is anyone’s guess, but the film played successfully across Europe and America, albeit often in a cut form.

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D’Amato returned to the genre in 1978 with Papaya – Love Goddess of the Cannibals, with Sirpa Lane which, despite its title features no cannibals, in a film that again mixed gore and softcore yet still managed to be rather dull.

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Also in 1978, we had the only cannibal film with a big name cast. Mountain of the Cannibal God (aka Slave of the Cannibal God; Prisoner of the Cannibal God) saw former Bond girl Ursula Andress stripped and fondled by a cannibal tribe as she and Stacey Keach search for her missing husband. The starry cast didn’t mean that director Sergio Martino wasn’t going to include some particularly unnecessary animal cruelty and a bizarre (faked) scene of a man fucking a pig though, as well as graphic gore. At heart an old fashioned jungle adventure spiced up with 1970s sex ‘n’ violence, the most remarkable part of the film is how Martino managed to persuade Andress to appear completely naked. Perhaps she just wanted to show off how good her body was 16 years after Dr No!

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Buy The Mountain of the Cannibal God on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

That same year saw an Indonesian entry in the genre with Primitives, also known as Savage Terror. This was essentially a rehash of The Last Cannibal World, but with less gore and no nudity, which resulted in a rather plodding jungle drama. This one is definitely for genre completists only, and proved to be a major disappointment when released on VHS to a cannibal-hungry public by Go Video in the UK as a follow-up to Cannibal Holocaust.

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Ahh yes, Cannibal Holocaust. The Citizen Kane of cannibal movies, and the genre’s only undisputed masterpiece, the film would also become the most notorious film in the genre, shocking audiences and censors alike and even now seen as being about as extreme as cinema can go.

The film began life as just another cannibal film, Deodato hired to make something to follow up The Last Cannibal World. But with the relative freedom granted to him (all his backers wanted was a gory cannibal film), he came up with a movie that critiqued the sensationalism of the Mondo movie makers and the audience’s lust for blood, with his tale of an exploitative documentary crew who set out to film cannibal tribes but through their own arrogance and cruelty bring about their own demise.

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Deodato’s film effectively invents the Found Footage style of filmmaking, his fake documentary approach being so effective that he found himself facing a trial, accused of actually murdering his actors! Given that the film mixes real animal killing with worryingly effective scenes of violence, all shot in shaky, hand-held style, it’s perhaps no surprise that people thought it was real – even into the 1990s, the film was reported as being a ‘snuff movie’ by the British press.

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But there is more going on here than mere sensationalism and sadism – Deodato’s film fizzes with a righteous anger and passion, and makes absolutely no concession to moral restraint. There’s a level of intensity here that is beyond fiction – certainly, the story of the film’s production and reception would make for a remarkable movie in its own right. Almost imprisoned and seeing his film banned in Italy and elsewhere (in Britain, it was one of the first video nasties), Deodato was suitably chastened, and never made anything like it again.

Cannibal Holocaust

Buy Cannibal Holocaust on DVD from Amazon.com

But despite the bans, the legal issues and the outrage, Cannibal Holocaust was enough of a sensation to spawn imitators. Umberto Lenzi returned to the genre he’s more or less invented in 1980 with Eaten Alive (Magiati Vivi; The Emerald Jungle; Doomed to Die), which managed to mix cannibal tribes, nudity and gore with a story that exploits the recent Guyana massacre led by Jim Jones. This tale of a fanatical religious cult leader had an cannibal movie all-star cast – Ivan Rassimov, Mei Mei Lai and Robert Kerman (aka porn star R. Bolla) who had starred in Cannibal Holocaust were joined by Janet Agren and Mel Ferrer in what is a textbook example of a cheap knock-off. Not only does the film cash in on earlier movies and recent news events, it actually ‘cannibalises’ whole scenes from other films, Lenzi’s own Man from Deep River amongst them. Yet despite this, it’s fairly entertaining stuff.

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Buy Eaten Alive on DVD from Amazon.com

Lenzi followed this with Cannibal Ferox (aka Make Them Die Slowly; Let Them Die Slowly), a more blatant imitation of Cannibal Holocaust. Kerman again makes an appearance (albeit a brief one), while Italian cult icon John Morghen (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) headlines a fairly ham fisted tale of an anthropology student who sets out to prove that cannibalism is a myth, only to find she’s very, very wrong. Directed with indifference by Lenzi (who clearly had no interest in theses films beyond a pay check), the film features more gratuitous animal killing and some remarkably sadistic scenes (two castrations and a woman hung with hooks through her breasts), which invariably ensured that the film would be “banned in 31 countries”.

Cannibal Ferox

Buy Cannibal Ferox on DVD from Amazon.com

1980 also brought us Zombie Holocaust (aka Doctor Butcher M.D.) in which Marino Girolami opportunistically livened up his Zombie Flesh Eaters imitation by adding a mad doctor, cannibals and nudity to the mix, and Cannibal Apocalypse, where Vietnam vets John Saxon and John Morghen were driven to cannibalism in Vietnam and then go on the rampage in the USA.

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Jess Franco entered the genre in 1980 with Cannibals (aka The White Cannibal Queen) and Devil Hunter (aka Man Hunter), but the crudity of the cannibal movie was unsuited to a director more at home with surreal, erotic gothic fantasies. Cannibals was the more interesting of the two – Franco’s intense close-ups and slow motion during the cannibalism scenes add a bizarre, almost dream-like edge to the proceedings, in a tale that mixes a one-armed Al Cliver and a naked Sabrina Siani as the blonde goddess worshipped by the ‘cannibal tribe’. Devil Hunter is a ridiculous mishmash with a kidnapped movie star, a bug-eyed, big-dicked monster and cannibals. Franco himself was dismissive of both films, and they are recommended only for the completist.

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Devil Hunter

Similar to the Franco films (coming from the same producers and featuring footage from Cannibals) is the tedious Cannibal Terror, a French effort that sees a bunch of kidnappers hanging out in a cannibal-infested jungle. It’s pretty hard work to sit through even for the most ardent admirer of Eurotrash. Meanwhile, cannibalistic monks cropped up in the 1981 US movie Raw Force (later retitled) Kung Fu Cannibals but they were only one of the smorgasbord element in this exploitation trash and being a ‘religious order’ rather than a tribe merit just a brief mention here.

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After this flurry of activity, the genre began to fizzle out, exploitation filmmakers moving on to the next big thing (i.e. knock offs of Conan and Mad Max). It wasn’t until 1985 that we saw a revival of the jungle cannibal film with Amazonia (aka White Slave), directed by Mario Gariazzo. A strange mix of revenge drama and cannibal film, the movie is a gender-reversal of Man from Deep River, with Elvire Audray as Catherine Miles, brought up by a cannibal tribe after her parents are murdered in the Amazon. Despite some gore and nudity, it’s a rather plodding affair. It should not be confused with Ruggero Deodato’s Cut and Run, also sometimes called Amazonia but which – despite the setting and some gruesome moments – was not a return to the cannibal genre for the director.

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More fun was Massacre in Dinosaur Valley (aka Naked and Savage), a cheerfully trashy affair directed by Michele Massimo Tarantini, with the survivors of a plane crash – including nubile young models and Indiana Jones like palaeontologist Michael Sopkiw battling slave traders, nature and cannibal tribes (but not dinosaurs) in the Amazon. Gratuitous nudity, splashy gore, bad acting and a ludicrous series of events ensure that this one is a lot of fun.

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Natura Contro, retitled Cannibal Holocaust II but unconnected to the earlier film, is possibly the most obscure of the films in the sub-genre. Made in 1988, it is the final film by Antonio Climati, best known for his uncompromising Mondo movies of the 1970s. It’s surprising then that this is fairly tame stuff by cannibal movie standards, telling the story of a group of people who head to the Amazon to find a missing professor. By 1988, both the Italian exploitation film and the cannibal genre were breathing their last, and the excesses of a decade earlier were no longer commercially viable – the mainstream audience for such films had dwindled considerably, while censorship had tightened up.

Natura Contro

Natura Contro

It would be another fifteen years before we saw the return of the jungle holocaust film, and then it was hardly worth it. Bruno Mattei, a prolific hack since the 1970s, had someone managed to keep making films, and in 2003 knocked out a pair of ultra-low budget, almost unwatchably bad cannibal films. In the Land of the Cannibals (aka Cannibal Ferox 3) and Cannibal World (aka Cannibal Holocaust 2) were slow, clumsy and boring attempts to cash in on the cult reputation of Mattei (a couple of years later, he’d make two similarly dismal zombie films) and the reputation of the earlier cannibal movies (needless to say, these are not official sequels to either Holocaust or Ferox). These two films seemed to be the final nail in the genre’s coffin.

But with the reputation of Cannibal Holocaust continuing to increase, and a general return to ‘hard core horror’ in the new century with films like Saw and Hostel, the cannibal film has seen a slight revival. But although Deodato has talked about making a sequel to Cannibal Holocaust, the new films have been American productions, even though they are informed by the Italian films of the past.

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Jonathan Hensleigh’s Welcome to the Jungle , made in 2007, channels Holocaust with its found footage format as a group of remarkably annoying treasure hunters head to New Guinea in search of the missing Michael Rockerfeller, hoping to cash in on his discovery. Instead, their bickering attracts the attention of local cannibal tribes, who stalk and slaughter them. There;s an interesting idea at play here, but the characters are all so utterly loathsome that you’ll struggle to make it to the point where they start getting killed.

Green Inferno

The latest attempt to revive the genre comes from Eli Roth, who’s Green Inferno is about to be released. The film takes its title from Cannibal Holocaust (one of Roth’s favourite films) and the plot – student activists travel to the Amazon to protect a tribe but find themselves captured by cannibals – sounds like a copy of Cannibal Ferox. Having received positive reviews at festivals, we hope the film is able to capture the spirit of the original movies, if not their frenzied style.

Certainly, we are unlikely to see anyone making a film quite like Cannibal Holocaust again – there are laws in place to stop it, if nothing else. But we can now look back at this most controversial of horror sub-genres and see that they represent a time when cinema was without restraint. As such, they are more than simply films, they are historical time capsules, and for those with strong stomachs, well worth investigating.

Article by David Flint

Related: Cannibal Holocaust | Devil HunterThe Man from Deep River | The Mountain of the Cannibal God

Offline reading:

eaten alive italian cannibal and zombie movies

Buy Eaten Alive! Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

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Queens of Evil

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Queens of Evil (aka Le Regine, Il Delitto del Diavolo) is a 1970 Italian erotic horror film directed by Tonino Cervi and starring Ray Lovelock (The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue), Haidee Politoff, Silvia Monti and Ewelyn Stuart.

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A young hippie kills a man, and seeks refuge at the lakeside house of three beautiful sisters, who seem to be hiding a dark secret…

queens of evil dvd

Buy Queens of Evil from Amazon.co.uk

“A fairy tale for grown ups Queens of Evil is like some kind of far out hybrid of Hansel and Gretel, Rosemary’s Baby and The Wicker Man all shot with the unmistakable panache and style of the best of 70’s Italian cinema. With excellent period sets, a typically 70’s soundtrack, gorgeous women, a handsome leading man and weird supernatural shenanigans this is a gem of a movie.” Italian Film Review

Filmbar trailer:

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Nurse 3D

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Nurse 3D is a 2012 3D thriller/horror film directed by Doug Aarniokoski and written by David Loughery. It stars Paz de la HuertaKatrina BowdenCorbin Bleu. Dita Von Teese, Adam Herschman, Neal McDonough, Niecy Nash, and Nick Turturro. The film was inspired by the photography of Lionsgate’s chief marketing officer, Tim Palen.

The film will be released on various VOD platforms and limited theatres on February 7, 2014.

By day, nurse Abby Russell (de la Huerta) lovingly attends to the patients at All Saints Memorial Hospital; by night, Abby prowls nightclubs, luring unfaithful men into dangerous liaisons. After Danni, a young, sensitive nurse, joins the hospital staff, Abby pursues her friendship. But when the friendship turns to obsession, Danni spurns Abby, unleashing Abby’s fury and a rampage of terror…

Wikipedia | IMDb

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Zora la Vampira (comic book)

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Zora, the vampire, better known as Zora la Vampira is an Italian comic book erotic character. The first comic book was published in 1972. Her physical appearance is partly inspired by Catherine Deneuve. The comic book artists who created the character are Giuseppe Pederiali and Balzano Biraghi. The comics were published from 1972 until 1985. A film, also named Zora la Vampira, was released in 2000, directed by the Manetti Brothers.

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Her real name is Zora Pabst and is shown as an aristocrat of nineteenth century, possessed by spirit of Dracula, where she becomes her servant to satisfy her lust and blood-lust. Her adventures are a mixture of horror and eroticism.

Zora la Vampira is one of many such characters from the Italian ‘fumetti‘ tradition. Other figures from the same era, and with similarly violent or erotic preoccupations, include Maghella, Lucifera, Biancaneve, Vartan, JaculaSukia, Jolanda de Almaviva, and Yra.

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Related: Jacula | Les Spéciaux EFRelatos de PresidioSukia | Terror BluVampirella

Wikipedia | We are grateful to Comic Vine for these images


Supervixens

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Supervixens was something of a comeback film for legendary director Russ Meyer, who had floundered in the wake of his dalliance with mainstream Hollywood at the end of the 1960s. Whilst Beyond the Valley of the Dolls had been a box office success, mainstream critics hated the film and were appalled that 20th Century Fox was employing a ‘pornographer’ to shoot X-rated films. When his follow-up The Seven Minutes bombed, Fox were quick to give him the boot. Since then, he’d managed a lively exploitation film, Blacksnake! (a satire of slaveploitation that actually preceded the genre) but that film too hadn’t really connected with his fan base – it was short on sex and Anouska Hempel was no buxotic.

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Throughout the 1960s, Meyer had led the way in the fast-growing sexploitation industry. His 1960 film The Immoral Mr Teas effectively invented the nudie film, and a few years later he’d pioneered the ‘roughie’ with black and white melodramas like Lorna, Mudhoney and Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill!, before producing more overtly sexy softcore movies like Vixen. But in the years he’s been away, the genre had expanded further – Deep Throat had opened up the market for hardcore porn.

This put Meyer in a quandary. He had no interest in hardcore, but he was aware that these films were now his competition. If he couldn’t – or wouldn’t – compete in terms of explicitness, then he would instead go all out for excess. Meyer’s final three films were his most outrageous – cartoonishly over the top, high camp and excessive, they featured more busty babes than ever and more explicit sex (which never crossed to hardcore but certainly featured more graphic close ups than he would’ve dared five years earlier). In the case of Supervixens, the film also ramped up the violence.

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Supervixens chronicles the adventures of hapless ‘superstud’ Clint (Charles Pitt), who gets into a bust-up with possessive and bitchy girlfriend Super Angel (Shari Eubank), who kicks him out of their apartment, imagining infidelity. Their fight attracts the police, in the form of Harry Sledge (Meyer regular Charles Napier). Harry and Angel get together, but the cop is unable to get his (prosthetic) cock to rise to the occasion. Mocked by the man eating sex kitten, he flips out and in the film’s most notorious scene, attacks her, smashing down the bathroom door where she is sheltering, and then throws her in the bath, jumps up and down on her and tosses her electric radio into the tub for an electrifying finale.

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This is one of the most extreme moments of cinematic violence of the 1970s, made more shocking because it’s unexpected in what has seemed to be a light sex comedy until this point. It was, unsurprisingly, one of the scenes cut by the British censors, who rendered the film incomprehensible. And yet it’s also cartoonishly excessive. Harry Sledge is a movie psycho par excellence and his crimes are shocking, but Meyer takes the sting out by making it more Tom and Jerry than H.G. Lewis. This, of course, just made it worse in the eyes of some people – reducing an act of shocking sexual violence to a joke. Meyer certainly felt stung by the criticism of the violence in this and his follow-up movie, Up – in his final film, Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, the blood was blue, green or yellow – anything but red, to emphasise the unreality of it. Here though, the gore flies as Harry stomps Angel to death and we see one final shot of her battered face before she dies. It’s subversive stuff to find in a sex comedy.

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Clint, of course, is blamed for the murder, and so goes on the run. Things don’t go too smoothly for him, as he finds himself getting into one scrape after another at the hands (or other parts) of assorted buxotic temptresses who are determined to have their way with him. Meyer’s films always featured sexually aggressive women who took what they wanted, and this is no exception.

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Clint finally finds happiness with Super Vixen, a diner owner who is a reincarnation of Super Angel, but kind and loving where her past incarnation had been cruel. But this idyllic situation is shattered by the reappearance of Harry, determined to carry on where he left off. Before long, harry has Vixen captive in the hills, a stick of dynamite jammed between her legs, her only hope of salvation the wounded Clint.

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Supervixens is Meyer spoofing himself. He emphasises the cartoonish nature of the film (it even has Roadrunner sound effects) and heightens the melodrama with knowingly ridiculous dialogue. The editing is faster, the acting more deranged – Napier is amazing as Harry, one of the great unsung monsters of 1970s cinema. He’s scary and funny, often at the same time. Shari Eubank is great too – switching from astonishingly sexy and maneating to sweet and sympathetic in her two roles. Meyer regulars Haji and Uschi Digard get supporting roles, as does softcore actress turned porn star Colleen Brennan.

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Supervixens often gets overlooked compared to Meyer’s bigger cult titles like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! – it’s X-rated, if softcore, content making it more a challenge for some audiences. But it’s definitely one of his best films, and one of the few that can be considered a borderline ‘horror’ movie.

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David Flint, Horrorpedia

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Lynn Lowry (actress)

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Lynn Lowry is an American actress, best known for her appearances in cult horror and exploitation films during the 1970s.

Born Linda Kay Lowry on October 15th, 1947, she made her first film appearance in 1970 as part of the cast of ultra-gory shocker I Drink Your Blood, a tale of satanist hippies who become crazed after being infected with rabies. Although she only had a small part (and wasn’t even credited), she did appear in what has since become one of the film’s most iconic moment, brandishing a severed hand.

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I Drink Your Blood was the first of three ‘infection’ films that Lowry made over the next few years, and these movies remain her best known and best loved work. After I Drink Your Blood, she had a pivotal role in George Romero’s The Crazies in 1973. This film rejigged the concept of Night of the Living Dead into a more plausible concept – a plane carrying a government bio weapon crashes, infecting the water supply in a small town and causing an outbreak of madness in the local population.

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Lowry followed this with David Cronenberg’s Shivers (aka They Came from Within / The Parasite Murders), which again saw an infection – in this case a phallic sex parasite – running rampant, spreading through the self-contained residents of a soulless tower block. In this film, Lowry was effectively the female lead.

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In all three of these films, Lowry proved to be an effective presence. Her unusual beauty and hippy chick style helped to create a certain unease, as the viewer was unsure if she was infected or not. In The Crazies, she featured in a controversial incest rape scene, while in Shivers, her character helps show how emotionally dead the characters are before infection (she memorably strips in from of her boss, who shows no reaction) and how sexually liberated they are by the infection.

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In each of these films, Lowry has arguably the most memorable scenes – her startling death in The Crazies is an iconic moment, and her “even dying is an act of eroticism” speech in Shivers, along with her appearance at the climax, both erotic and unnerving, remain both unforgettable sequences and the point where the film’s controversial philosophy of liberation through sexual disease is made most clear.

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Between these films, she appeared in Lloyd Kaufman’s directorial debut, the sex comedy Battle of Love’s Return, alongside cult movie queen Mary Woronov in Theodore Gershuny’s arthouse sexploitation drama Sugar Cookies, and Radley Metzger’s impressive erotic film Score. These films all took advantage of her willingness to undress and perform softcore sex scenes, and usually featured her as a naïve hippy type who gets caught up in a world of decadence and deviation. But she often turns out to be less the victim than she initially appears.

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She also appeared in short-lived TV show How to Survive a Marriage in 1974.

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In 1976, she appeared in the vengeance thriller Fighting Mad, and in 1982 had a role in the remake of Cat People. There were a handful of small part TV appearances in the 1980s and 1990s, but for the most part, her screen career was replaced with theatre and a singing work, with Lowry performing with a band playing show tunes, jazz and folk music.

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However, in the last decade, she has made a screen comeback, starting in 2005. Her cult status has seen her called upon by a number of horror film makers, keen to have her appear in their movies. The highest profile of these is The Theatre Bizarre, where she appeared in David Gregory’s segment Sweets.

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Other films of the last few years include Splatter Disco, Beyond the Dunwich Horror, Schism, Psychosomatika, I Spill Your Guts, The Legend of Six Fingers, Torture Chamber, Cannibals, Night of the Sea Monkey: A Disturbing Tale and several more. She also made a cameo appearance in the 2010 remake of The Crazies.

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IMDb | Official website

Bio by David Flint


Supervixens

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Supervixens was something of a comeback film for legendary director Russ Meyer, who had floundered in the wake of his dalliance with mainstream Hollywood at the end of the 1960s. Whilst Beyond the Valley of the Dolls had been a box office success, mainstream critics hated the film and were appalled that 20th Century Fox was employing a ‘pornographer’ to shoot X-rated films. When his follow-up The Seven Minutes bombed, Fox were quick to give him the boot. Since then, he’d managed a lively exploitation film, Blacksnake! (a satire of slaveploitation that actually preceded the genre) but that film too hadn’t really connected with his fan base – it was short on sex and Anouska Hempel was no buxotic.

supervixensSupervixens_3

Throughout the 1960s, Meyer had led the way in the fast-growing sexploitation industry. His 1960 film The Immoral Mr Teas effectively invented the nudie film, and a few years later he’d pioneered the ‘roughie’ with black and white melodramas like Lorna, Mudhoney and Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill!, before producing more overtly sexy softcore movies like Vixen. But in the years he’s been away, the genre had expanded further – Deep Throat had opened up the market for hardcore porn.

shari-eubank-sheer-top

This put Meyer in a quandary. He had no interest in hardcore, but he was aware that these films were now his competition. If he couldn’t – or wouldn’t – compete in terms of explicitness, then he would instead go all out for excess. Meyer’s final three films were his most outrageous – cartoonishly over the top, high camp and excessive, they featured more busty babes than ever and more explicit sex (which never crossed to hardcore but certainly featured more graphic close ups than he would’ve dared five years earlier). In the case of Supervixens, the film also ramped up the violence.

combqow6.2023

Supervixens chronicles the adventures of hapless ‘superstud’ Clint (Charles Pitt), who gets into a bust-up with possessive and bitchy girlfriend Super Angel (Shari Eubank), who kicks him out of their apartment, imagining infidelity. Their fight attracts the police, in the form of Harry Sledge (Meyer regular Charles Napier). Harry and Angel get together, but the cop is unable to get his (prosthetic) cock to rise to the occasion. Mocked by the man eating sex kitten, he flips out and in the film’s most notorious scene, attacks her, smashing down the bathroom door where she is sheltering, and then throws her in the bath, jumps up and down on her and tosses her electric radio into the tub for an electrifying finale.

SupervixesYBpC4LAl0B08KlAs5+OoZ3mg1v7zmM6FT4OEYIxHQ

This is one of the most extreme moments of cinematic violence of the 1970s, made more shocking because it’s unexpected in what has seemed to be a light sex comedy until this point. It was, unsurprisingly, one of the scenes cut by the British censors, who rendered the film incomprehensible. And yet it’s also cartoonishly excessive. Harry Sledge is a movie psycho par excellence and his crimes are shocking, but Meyer takes the sting out by making it more Tom and Jerry than H.G. Lewis. This, of course, just made it worse in the eyes of some people – reducing an act of shocking sexual violence to a joke. Meyer certainly felt stung by the criticism of the violence in this and his follow-up movie, Up – in his final film, Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, the blood was blue, green or yellow – anything but red, to emphasise the unreality of it. Here though, the gore flies as Harry stomps Angel to death and we see one final shot of her battered face before she dies. It’s subversive stuff to find in a sex comedy.

Supervixens Shari Eurbank naked on bed

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Clint, of course, is blamed for the murder, and so goes on the run. Things don’t go too smoothly for him, as he finds himself getting into one scrape after another at the hands (or other parts) of assorted buxotic temptresses who are determined to have their way with him. Meyer’s films always featured sexually aggressive women who took what they wanted, and this is no exception.

Charles-Pitt-in-Supervixens-ray-monty-charles-and-harrison-12108865-800-626

Clint finally finds happiness with Super Vixen, a diner owner who is a reincarnation of Super Angel, but kind and loving where her past incarnation had been cruel. But this idyllic situation is shattered by the reappearance of Harry, determined to carry on where he left off. Before long, harry has Vixen captive in the hills, a stick of dynamite jammed between her legs, her only hope of salvation the wounded Clint.

Charles-napier-in-Supervixens-fans-of-charles-napier-18137146-704-480

Supervixens is Meyer spoofing himself. He emphasises the cartoonish nature of the film (it even has Roadrunner sound effects) and heightens the melodrama with knowingly ridiculous dialogue. The editing is faster, the acting more deranged – Napier is amazing as Harry, one of the great unsung monsters of 1970s cinema. He’s scary and funny, often at the same time. Shari Eubank is great too – switching from astonishingly sexy and maneating to sweet and sympathetic in her two roles. Meyer regulars Haji and Uschi Digard get supporting roles, as does softcore actress turned porn star Colleen Brennan.

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Supervixens often gets overlooked compared to Meyer’s bigger cult titles like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! – it’s X-rated, if softcore, content making it more a challenge for some audiences. But it’s definitely one of his best films, and one of the few that can be considered a borderline ‘horror’ movie.

David Flint, Horrorpedia

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Mike Vraney (founder of Something Weird video)

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Mike Vraney was the founder of Something Weird Video, an American film distributor company based in Seattle, Washington. On January 2, 2014, he died after a lengthy battle with lung cancer. He was fifty-six years old. His sterling efforts to dig out and release masses of horror and exploitation films have undoubtedly been a major boon to the world of cult cinema, especially as his iconic label — which started out as basically a fan operation — had moved into legitimacy long ago via officially sanctioned DVD releases in conjunction with Image Entertainment and had recently been releasing Blu-rays and their own documentaries. Mike’s passion for trash cinema will be sorely missed.

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Something Weird Video specialise in exploitation films, particularly the works of Harry Novak, Doris Wishman, David F. Friedman and Herschell Gordon Lewis. The company is named after Lewis’ 1967 film Something Weird, and the logo is taken from that film’s original poster art. Something Weird has distributed well over 2,500 films to date. Even when the movies themselves were pretty awful, Vraney ensured fans got their money’s worth by making up themed triple-bills and loading DVDs with masses of ultra-obscure and head-shaking extras.

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Vraney was inspired by his teenage job as a theater projectionist. His love for the obscure films that never made it to video prompted him to transfer hundreds of ancient reels of film to VHS and DVD. On the company website, he explained the label’s genesis:

‘In my mind, the last great genre to be scavenged were the exploitation/sexploitation films of the ’30s through the ’70s. After looking into this further, I realized that there were nearly 2,000 movies out there yet to be discovered. So with this for inspiration, my quest began and wouldn’t you know, just out of the blue I fell into a large collection of 16mm girlie arcade loops (which became the first compilation videos we put together). Around the same time I received an unexpected phone call that suddenly made all this real: my future and hands-down the king of sexploitation Dave Friedman was on the other end of the line. This would be the beginning of a long and fruitful friendship for both of us. Dave’s films became the building blocks for our film collection and he has taught and guided me through the wonderful world of sexploitation, introducing me to his colleagues (Dan Sonney, Harry Novak, H. G. Lewis, Bob Cresse and all the other colourful characters who were involved during his heyday) and they’ve been eager to dive into the business again.’

Adrian J Smith

 

 


The Transplant (aka Night of the Bloody Transplant)

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The Transplant (released on VHS as Night of the Bloody Transplant) is an obscure 1970 American horror film produced, directed and co-written by David W. Hanson (who also made crime/psycho drama Judy the same year). It features Dick Grimm, Ann Antell, David Haller, Carl Williams, Elizabeth Rawlings and Cal Seeley. Not to be confused with Mexican gore movie Night of the Bloody Apes.

“Heart transplants are almost routine these days. But when Dr. James Arnold tries to get approval to perform a heart transplanr for his elderly benefactor, the medical society turns him down. However, when his ne’er do well brother accidentally kills a young woman, the doctor takes matters into his own hands. Threatened by a cutoff of fund, his benefactor gets a new heart.

Dr. Arnold has achieved his dream, but because of the young girl’s death can’t tell anyone about his triumph. Meanwhile, his brother goes on a killing rampage and, in the bizarre turn of events that follow, Dr. Arnold also is killed and his heart is transplanted to save a policeman the brother has shot…” United Home Video sleeve synopsis

“A late entry in the H.G. Lewis look-alike sweepstakes, this one from Flint, Michigan … With real heart surgery and some lame strippers.” Brian Albright, Regional Horror Films 1958-1990: A State-by-State Guide with Interviews (McFarlane, 2012)

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The Blood Trilogy Blood Feast Two Thousand Maniacs! Color Me Blood Red Blu-ray

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IMDb | We are most grateful to Critical Condition for the VHS sleeve image above.


Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931 film)

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a 1931 American Pre-Code horror film directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Fredric March. The film is an adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the Robert Louis Stevenson tale of a man who takes a potion which turns him from a mild-mannered man of science into a homicidal maniac. March’s performance has been much lauded, and earned him his first Academy Award.

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In a London of fog and gas lamps, capes and canes, kindly Dr Henry Jekyll (pronounced by the entire cast to rhyme with ‘treacle’, correctly according to Stevenson) attends a lecture to his adoring contemporaries where he announces that he has discovered that Man’s very soul is split between the good, the desire to love and perform good deeds and the bad, where Man succumbs to his baser instincts. Whilst walking home through Soho with his colleague, Dr. John Lanyon (Holmes Herbert, The Invisible Man), Jekyll spots a bar singer, Ivy Pearson (Miriam Hopkins), being attacked by a man outside her boarding house. Jekyll drives the man away and carries Ivy up to her room to attend to her. Ivy begins flirting with Jekyll and feigning injury, but Jekyll fights temptation and leaves with Lanyon.

Unable to convince his beloved Muriel’s (Rose Hobart, later seen in Tower of London) father Brigadier General Sir Danvers Carew (the equally splendidly monickered Halliwell Hobbes) that a quick wedding would be preferable to the year he insists upon, Jekyll continues his experiments in his personal lab, waited upon by his faithful servant, Poole (Edgar Norton from Dracula’s Daughter and Son of Frankenstein), eventually developing a potion which he elects to test on himself. Transforming into a quasi-Neanderthal, dubbed Mr Hyde, he continues to swagger around the upper class haunts of Victorian London but with unabashed bravado and bestial relish, gatecrashing the club Ivy frequents and seducing her in an extremely unsubtle manner.

Imprisoning her in her own room at a boarding house, Hyde torments and abuses Ivy but as the potion’s effects wear off, Jekyll realises hid absence has done his chances of marrying Murial no favours, he leaves Ivy temporarily, vowing to teach her a lesson if she attempts anything silly. Convincing his future father-in-law that his absence is completely out of character, the marriage finally receives his blessing and a large party is organised to make the announcement public. He sends Ivy £50 by way of apology, prompting her to visit the mystery benefactor and falling for him once again. Alas, Jekyll has been taking increasingly large doses of the potion and upon having a momentary ‘dark thought’, he again transforms into his alter-ego, against his will, even more hideous than before.

Returning to Ivy’s lodgings, he reveals he and Jekyll are one and the same and after some more brutality, he goes the whole hog and murders her. With Lanyon now wise to what is going on, Hyde inevitably ends up at Murial’s house, attacking her and the rest of the household, killing her father in the process. With the police on his tale, Hyde and Jekyll struggle to come to terms with who holds the upper hand – is it too late for Jekyll to make amends?

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The film was made prior to the full enforcement of the Hay’s Production Code and this should come as no surprise. The film bristles with sexuality, with barely veiled nods to rape and sexual violence and with the two leading ladies revealing plenty of leg and not a little cleavage. When it was re-released in 1936, the Code required 8 minutes to be removed before the film could be distributed to cinemas. This footage was restored for the VHS and DVD releases.

The secret of the transformation scenes was not revealed for decades (Mamoulian himself revealed it in a volume of interviews with Hollywood directors published under the title The Celluloid Muse). Make-up was applied in contrasting colors. A series of coloured filters that matched the make-up was then used which enabled the make-up to be gradually exposed or made invisible. The change in color was not visible on the black-and-white film. The effects are not advanced as those of 1940′s The Wolf Man, nor as ageless as 1932′s The Invisible Man but they are nevertheless remarkable.

A disgracefully uncredited Wally Westmore’s make-up for Hyde — simian and hairy with large canine teeth — influenced greatly the popular image of Hyde in media and comic books. In part this reflected the novella’s implication of Hyde as embodying repressed evil, and hence being semi-evolved or simian in appearance. The make-up came close to permanently disfiguring March’s own face. Westmore later helped create the similarly beast-like inhabitants of Island of Lost Souls.  The characters of Muriel Carew and Ivy Pearson do not appear in Stevenson’s original story but do appear in the 1887 stage version by playwright Thomas Russell Sullivan.

John Barrymore was originally asked by Paramount to play the lead role, in an attempt to recreate his role from the 1920 version of Jekyll and Hyde, but he was already under a new contract withMetro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Paramount then gave the part to March, who was under contract and who strongly resembled Barrymore. March had played a John Barrymore-like character in the Paramount film The Royal Family of Broadway (1930), a story about an acting family like the Barrymores. March would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance of the role.

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When Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer remade the film ten years later with Spencer Tracy in the lead, the studio bought the rights to the 1931 Mamoulian version. They then recalled every print of the film that they could locate and for decades most of the film was believed lost. Ironically, the Tracy version was much less well received and March jokingly sent Tracy a telegram thanking him for the greatest boost to his reputation of his entire career.

The film also makes better use of music than most other horror films of the 1930′s, including the celebrated studio of Universal. Beginning with the portent of Bach’s Fugue in D Minor, it shows Jekyll as an accomplished organist, the soundtrack making use of this diegetic tool. Miriam too plays the piano, whilst Ivy, of course, sings, the musical world of the good in contrast with the guttural grunts and hissing of Hyde. There is also a rare use of song in an early horror film, Ivy’s ‘theme tune’ “Champagne Ivy”, actually being an adaptation of the 19th Century music hall song “Champagne Charley”.

It was to be March’s only role in a horror film, though it was enough for him to claim the Oscar for best actor (tying with Wallace Beerey in The Champ). Though his slightly simpering Jekyll make grate somewhat, his Hyde is a miraculous performance, energetic, twitching and frothing at the mouth with lust and vigour. His almost gymnastic feats in the film’s finale are a thing of wonder. As Hyde once taunts Ivy: ” I’ll show you what horror means!”

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

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BFI Poster for Rouben Mamoulian's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931)

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Jungle Holocaust: Cannibal Tribes in Exploitation Cinema [updated]

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The 1970s saw old taboos falling away in the cinema, and few horror film sub-genres benefited from the relaxation in censorship more than the cannibal film. In fact, this is a genre that scarcely existed prior to the Seventies. Sure, horror films had long hinted at cannibalism as a plot device – movies like Doctor X (1932) and others portrayed it as an element of psychosis without ever being overly explicit, and this would continue into the 1970s with films such as Cannibal Girls Frightmare and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – but no one had really explored the idea explicitly. Some things were just too tasteless, and cannibalism was something of a no-no with assorted censor boards around the world.

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Yet the idea that remote tribes in the Amazon or on islands like Papua New Guinea were still practising cannibalism was a common one at the time, thanks to a conflation of suspicion, colonialist ideas, misunderstanding of tribal rituals (such as head hunting / shrinking) and old-fashioned racism. And, if we are to be fair, these beliefs were not entirely without validity, as some cultures still did practice cannibalism, albeit not as determinedly as was often made out. Certainly, the subject was exploited – 1956 roadshow movie Cannibal Island promised much in its sensationalist promotional art, even if the film itself was Gaw the Killer, an anthropological documentary from the 1931, re-edited and re-dubbed, that was notably lacking in anthropophagy, despite the best efforts of the narrator to suggest otherwise.

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Elsewhere, cartoons and comic books perpetuated the idea that any great white hunter who was captured by natives was bound to end up in a cooking pot, and Tarzan movies hinted that he bones the natives wore as decoration were not all from animals. 1954′s Cannibal Attack saw Johnny Weissmuller playing Johnny Weissmuller, fighting off enemy agents in a cannibal-filled jungle.

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Hell Night director Tom De Simone’s terrible movie Terror in the Jungle (1968) had a small boy captured by a cannibal tribe and only saved by his ‘glowing’ blonde hair. Worship of blonde white people would be a theme in later, trashier cannibal movies too). Even the children’s big game hunting Adventure novel series by Willard Price had a Cannibal Adventure entry. But notably, none of these early efforts actually went the extra mile – the natives in these films may have been cannibals, but we had to take the filmmakers and writers word for that – no cannibalism actually took place on screen.

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In the 1960s, the Mondo documentary would also take an interest in bizarre tribal rituals, and these mostly Italian films would subsequently come to inform the style of the cannibal films that emerged later. Certainly, later shockumentaries such as Savage Man, Savage BeastThis Violent World and Shocking Africa were closely related to contemporary films like Man from Deep River and Last Cannibal World, with their lurid mix of anthropological studies and sensationalism.

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One such mondo movie was the 1974 Italian/Japanese Nuova Guinea, l’isola dei cannibali. Tribal scenes from this production – which also includes footage of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip on a Royal visit to the island (!) – were inserted into the zombie film Hell of the Living Dead (1981) to add verisimilitude. It was  later opportunistically released on DVD in the USA as The Real Cannibal Holocaust.

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The cannibal film as we know it now began in 1972, with Il paese del sesso selvaggio, also known as Deep River SavagesThe Man from Deep River and Sacrifice!  It was directed by Umberto Lenzi, who would spend the next decade playing catch-up in a genre he pretty much invented with scriptwriters Francesco Barilli and Massimo D’Avak. This film essentially set many of the templates for the genre – graphic violence, extensive nudity, real animal slaughter and the culture clash between ‘civilised’ Westerners and ‘primitive’ tribes.

The film is, essentially, a rip-off of American western A Man Called Horse, with Italian exploitation icon Ivan Rassimov as a British photographer who finds himself stranded in the jungles of Thailand and captured by a native tribe. Eventually, after undergoing assorted humiliations and initiation rituals, he is accepted within the community, who are at war with a fierce, more primitive cannibal tribe.

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Co-starring Mei Mei Lai (who would become one of the sub-genre’s stock players), the film is set up more as an adventure story than a horror film, but the look and feel of the story would subsequently inform other cannibal movies, and the scene where the cannibal tribe kill and eat a native certainly sets the scene for what is to come.

Buy The Man from Deep River + Warlock Moon + Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat on DVD from Amazon.com

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Made in 1976, Ruggero Deodato’s Ultimo mondo cannibale (Last Cannibal World; Cannibal; Jungle Holocaust) also had the feel of an old-school jungle adventure, though Deodato expanded on what Lenzi had started – this tale of an explorer (played by Massimo Foschi) who is captured by a cannibal tribe features a remarkable amount of nudity (Foschi is kept naked in a cage for much of the film, teased and tormented by the tribe) and sex – including an animalistic sex scene between Foschi and Mei Mei Lai (Rassimov also co-stars). It also featured more graphic gore and real animal killing – the latter would become the achilles heel of the genre, something that even its admirers would find hard to defend. Even if the slaughtered animals were eaten by the filmmakers, showing such scenes for entertainment still left a bad taste with many, and over and above the sex and violence, would be the major cause of censorship for these films.

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The Last Cannibal World proved to be a popular hit around the world (it even played UK cinemas after BBFC cuts) and sparked a mini-boom in cannibal film production. In 1977, Joe D’Amato continued his bizarre mutation of the Black Emanuelle series – which, under his guidance, had evolved from soft porn travelogue to featuring white slavery, rape, snuff movies, hardcore sex and even bestiality – with Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (aka Trap Them and Kill Them), a strange and uniquely 1970s mixture of of softcore sex and hardcore gore, as Laura Gemser goes in search of a lost cannibal tribe. Quite what audiences expecting sexy thrills thought when they were confronted with graphic castration scenes is anyone’s guess, but the film played successfully across Europe and America, albeit often in a cut form.

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D’Amato returned to the genre in 1978 with Papaya – Love Goddess of the Cannibals, with Sirpa Lane which, despite its title features no cannibals, in a film that again mixed gore and softcore yet still managed to be rather dull.

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Also in 1978, we had the only cannibal film with a big name cast. Mountain of the Cannibal God (aka Slave of the Cannibal God; Prisoner of the Cannibal God) saw former Bond girl Ursula Andress stripped and fondled by a cannibal tribe as she and Stacey Keach search for her missing husband. The starry cast didn’t mean that director Sergio Martino wasn’t going to include some particularly unnecessary animal cruelty and a bizarre (faked) scene of a man fucking a pig though, as well as graphic gore. At heart an old fashioned jungle adventure spiced up with 1970s sex ‘n’ violence, the most remarkable part of the film is how Martino managed to persuade Andress to appear completely naked. Perhaps she just wanted to show off how good her body was 16 years after Dr No!

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Buy The Mountain of the Cannibal God on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

That same year saw an Indonesian entry in the genre with Primitives, also known as Savage Terror. This was essentially a rehash of The Last Cannibal World, but with less gore and no nudity, which resulted in a rather plodding jungle drama. This one is definitely for genre completists only, and proved to be a major disappointment when released on VHS to a cannibal-hungry public by Go Video in the UK as a follow-up to Cannibal Holocaust.

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Ahh yes, Cannibal Holocaust. The Citizen Kane of cannibal movies, and the genre’s only undisputed masterpiece, the film would also become the most notorious film in the genre, shocking audiences and censors alike and even now seen as being about as extreme as cinema can go.

The film began life as just another cannibal film, Deodato hired to make something to follow up The Last Cannibal World. But with the relative freedom granted to him (all his backers wanted was a gory cannibal film), he came up with a movie that critiqued the sensationalism of the Mondo movie makers and the audience’s lust for blood, with his tale of an exploitative documentary crew who set out to film cannibal tribes but through their own arrogance and cruelty bring about their own demise.

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Deodato’s film effectively invents the Found Footage style of filmmaking, his fake documentary approach being so effective that he found himself facing a trial, accused of actually murdering his actors! Given that the film mixes real animal killing with worryingly effective scenes of violence, all shot in shaky, hand-held style, it’s perhaps no surprise that people thought it was real – even into the 1990s, the film was reported as being a ‘snuff movie’ by the British press.

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But there is more going on here than mere sensationalism and sadism – Deodato’s film fizzes with a righteous anger and passion, and makes absolutely no concession to moral restraint. There’s a level of intensity here that is beyond fiction – certainly, the story of the film’s production and reception would make for a remarkable movie in its own right. Almost imprisoned and seeing his film banned in Italy and elsewhere (in Britain, it was one of the first video nasties), Deodato was suitably chastened, and never made anything like it again.

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Yet despite the bans, the legal issues and the outrage, Cannibal Holocaust was enough of a sensation to spawn imitators. Umberto Lenzi returned to the genre he’s more or less invented in 1980 with Eaten Alive (Magiati Vivi; The Emerald Jungle; Doomed to Die), which managed to mix cannibal tribes, nudity and gore with a story that exploits the recent Guyana massacre led by Jim Jones. This tale of a fanatical religious cult leader had an cannibal movie all-star cast – Ivan Rassimov, Mei Mei Lai and Robert Kerman (aka porn star R. Bolla) who had starred in Cannibal Holocaust were joined by Janet Agren and Mel Ferrer in what is a textbook example of a cheap knock-off. Not only does the film cash in on earlier movies and recent news events, it actually ‘cannibalises’ whole scenes from other films, Lenzi’s own Man from Deep River amongst them. Yet despite this, it’s fairly entertaining stuff.

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Lenzi followed this with Cannibal Ferox (aka Make Them Die Slowly; Let Them Die Slowly), a more blatant imitation of Cannibal Holocaust. Kerman again makes an appearance (albeit a brief one), while Italian cult icon John Morghen (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) headlines a fairly ham fisted tale of an anthropology student who sets out to prove that cannibalism is a myth, only to find she’s very, very wrong. Directed with indifference by Lenzi (who clearly had no interest in theses films beyond a pay check), the film features more gratuitous animal killing and some remarkably sadistic scenes (two castrations and a woman hung with hooks through her breasts), which invariably ensured that the film would be “banned in 31 countries”.

Cannibal Ferox

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1980 also brought us Zombie Holocaust (aka Doctor Butcher M.D.) in which Marino Girolami opportunistically livened up his Zombie Flesh Eaters imitation by adding a mad doctor, cannibals and nudity to the mix, and Cannibal Apocalypse, where Vietnam vets John Saxon and John Morghen were driven to cannibalism in Vietnam and then go on the rampage in the USA.

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Jess Franco entered the genre in 1980 with Cannibals (aka White Cannibal Queen) and Devil Hunter (aka Man Hunter), but the crudity of the cannibal movie was unsuited to a director more at home with surreal, erotic gothic fantasies. Cannibals was the more interesting of the two – Franco’s intense close-ups and slow motion during the cannibalism scenes add a bizarre, almost dream-like edge to the proceedings, in a tale that mixes a one-armed Al Cliver and an often naked Sabrina Siani as the blonde goddess worshipped by the ‘cannibal tribe’. Devil Hunter is a ridiculous mishmash with a kidnapped movie star, a bug-eyed, big-dicked monster and cannibals. Franco himself was dismissive of both films, and they are recommended only for trash cinema completists.

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Similar to the Franco films (coming from the same producers and featuring footage from Cannibals) is the tedious Cannibal Terror, a French effort that sees a bunch of kidnappers hanging out in a cannibal-infested jungle. It’s pretty hard work to sit through even for the most ardent admirer of Eurotrash. Meanwhile, cannibalistic monks cropped up in the 1981 US movie Raw Force (later retitled) Kung Fu Cannibals but they were only one of the smorgasbord element in this exploitation trash and being a ‘religious order’ rather than a tribe merit just a brief mention here.

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After this flurry of activity, the genre began to fizzle out, exploitation filmmakers moving on to the next big thing (i.e. knock offs of Conan and Mad Max). It wasn’t until 1985 that we saw a revival of the jungle cannibal film with Amazonia (aka White Slave), directed by Mario Gariazzo. A strange mix of revenge drama and cannibal film, the movie is a gender-reversal of Man from Deep River, with Elvire Audray as Catherine Miles, brought up by a cannibal tribe after her parents are murdered in the Amazon. Despite some gore and nudity, it’s a rather plodding affair. It should not be confused with Ruggero Deodato’s Cut and Run, also sometimes called Amazonia but which – despite the setting and some gruesome moments – was not a return to the cannibal genre for the director.

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More fun was Massacre in Dinosaur Valley (aka Naked and Savage), a cheerfully trashy affair directed by Michele Massimo Tarantini, with the survivors of a plane crash – including nubile young models and Indiana Jones like palaeontologist Michael Sopkiw battling slave traders, nature and cannibal tribes (but not dinosaurs) in the Amazon. Gratuitous nudity, splashy gore, bad acting and a ludicrous series of events ensure that this one is a lot of fun.

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Natura Contro, retitled Cannibal Holocaust II but unconnected to the earlier film, is possibly the most obscure of the films in the sub-genre. Made in 1988, it is the final film by Antonio Climati, best known for his uncompromising Mondo movies of the 1970s. It’s surprising then that this is fairly tame stuff by cannibal movie standards, telling the story of a group of people who head to the Amazon to find a missing professor. By 1988, both the Italian exploitation film and the cannibal genre were breathing their last, and the excesses of a decade earlier were no longer commercially viable – the mainstream audience for such films had dwindled considerably, while censorship had tightened up.

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It would be another fifteen years before we saw the return of the jungle holocaust film, and then it was hardly worth it. Bruno Mattei, a prolific hack since the 1970s, had someone managed to keep making films, and in 2003 knocked out a pair of ultra-low budget, almost unwatchably bad cannibal films. In the Land of the Cannibals (aka Cannibal Ferox 3) and Cannibal World (aka Cannibal Holocaust 2) were slow, clumsy and boring attempts to cash in on the cult reputation of Mattei (a couple of years later, he’d make two similarly dismal zombie films) and the reputation of the earlier cannibal movies (needless to say, these are not official sequels to either Holocaust or Ferox). These two films seemed to be the final nail in the genre’s coffin.

But with the reputation of Cannibal Holocaust continuing to increase, and a general return to ‘hard core horror’ in the new century with films like Saw and Hostel, the cannibal film has seen a slight revival. But although Deodato has talked about making a sequel to Cannibal Holocaust, the new films have been American productions, even though they are informed by the Italian films of the past.

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Jonathan Hensleigh’s Welcome to the Jungle , made in 2007, channels Holocaust with its found footage format as a group of remarkably annoying treasure hunters head to New Guinea in search of the missing Michael Rockerfeller, hoping to cash in on his discovery. Instead, their bickering attracts the attention of local cannibal tribes, who stalk and slaughter them. There;s an interesting idea at play here, but the characters are all so utterly loathsome that you’ll struggle to make it to the point where they start getting killed.

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The latest attempt to revive the genre comes from Eli Roth, who’s Green Inferno is about to be released. The film takes its title from Cannibal Holocaust (one of Roth’s favourite films) and the plot – student activists travel to the Amazon to protect a tribe but find themselves captured by cannibals – sounds like a copy of Cannibal Ferox. Having received positive reviews at festivals, we hope the film is able to capture the spirit of the original movies, if not their frenzied style.

Certainly, we are unlikely to see anyone making a film quite like Cannibal Holocaust again – there are laws in place to stop it, if nothing else. But we can now look back at this most controversial of horror sub-genres and see that they represent a time when cinema was without restraint. As such, they are more than simply films, they are historical time capsules, and for those with strong stomachs, well worth investigating.

Article by David Flint

Related: Cannibal Holocaust | Devil HunterThe Man from Deep River | The Mountain of the Cannibal God

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The Horrible Sexy Vampire

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The Horrible Sexy Vampire is a 1970 Spanish horror film (original title: El vampiro de la autopista “The Vampire of the Highway”) written and directed by José Luis Madrid (Seven Murders for Scotland Yard). It stars Waldemar Wohlfahrt [Wal Davis], Barta Barri, Anastasio Campoy, Susan Carvasal, Victor Davis, Kurt Esteban, Luis Induni and Patricia Loran.

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A rash of murders leads the local doctor to believe the person responsible is connected with a deceased excentric Baron. The manner in which the killings were performed indicates the murderer to be an inhuman sadist. The closer the doctor comes to the truth behind the murders brings him into greater danger.

‘There’s very little horror in The Horrible Sexy Vampire, and although the girls on display are a welcome sight (after all these are the days when women were shaped like women, rather than either skin-and-bones or plastic-on-bones), these scenes often feel awkward and voyeuristic at best. The invisibility and other special effects are done on the cheap and the whole film feels tired and languid. Acting is horrendous, with Wohlfahrt in particular coming off an uncomfortable.’ Octavio Ramos, Examiner.com

‘As a prime example of the boring and under-achieving co-produced European horror cinema of four decades past, 1970′s The Horrible Sexy Vampire is, well, boring and under-achieving.  Funded with pocket change forked forth by Spain’s Cinefilms and Italy’s Fida Cinematografica and filmed in Germany, Vampire is a pulse-free skin flick that tries to excuse itself with a tiresome Gothic horror framework.  The only noteworthy aspect of the production is its own inherent awfulness, for which the title gets things at least partly right – it’s certainly horrible.’ Kevin Pyrtle, Wtf-Film

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‘The pacing of The Horrible Sexy Vampire is on par with most European trash-horror films from the seventies. Meaning it is languid. It is slow. It is plodding. It doesn’t have enough character, violence, or plot to make it engaging. There are exactly zero twists. It even lacks atmosphere, which is a shame because this movie takes place in Stuttgart, which I imagine is a place that only has atmosphere and nothing else.’ Bleeding Skull

‘The film is awful, a little flesh and a story that drags on and on… but, strangely, it is Wohlfahrt’s performance – as bad as it is – that keeps you watching. He hasn’t the skill or presence to pull off one character, never mind two, but somehow he manages to keep an interest going in between the gratuitous booby shots.’ Taliesen Meets the Vampires

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‘ … the film is hamstrung by laborious direction and particularly dim-witted writing, the product of which is several almost static dialogue scenes elaborating on an already illogical plot. The sole redeeming feature is the lighting, which produces a suitably Gothic atmosphere.’ David McGillivray, BFI Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1976

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‘The action is restricted to the vampire’s endlessly repeated attacks on anonymous women as they come out of the shower, go to bed, and so on – in fact, as soon as a woman undresses, an attack can be expected. The castle’s atmosphere is largely provided by the repetition of a hollow-laughter track at regular intervals. The rest consists of static, overwritten dialogue scenes.’ The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror, edited by Phil Hardy, Aurum Press, 1993

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IMDb

Thanks to VHS Wasteland and Vampyres Online for some of the images above


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