Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (aka Zombi 3) (1988)

The boom in low budget Italian horror that occurred during the 70s and 80s didn’t exactly produce a vast number of classics, but at least in Lucio Fulci it yielded a director of considerable originality and visual flair. Fulci made his horror debut with the 1979 classic Zombie Flesh Eaters, inauspiciously released in Europe under the title Zombi 2 and posited as an unofficial sequel to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (European title: Zombi). On paper this may scream “cash-in”, but in practice, although bearing little or no relation to Romero’s film, Flesh Eaters is a pacey and stylish film, paying homage to the ‘voodoo zombie’ films of the 1930s whilst adding buckets of beautifully framed gore and dismemberment. Fulci subsequently directed another three zombie movies, developing his own rather baffling mythology around the undead. The stories verged on the incomprehensible, but Fulci’s inventive direction means they have at least some worth. Read more

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Roger Corman was nearing the end of his Edgar Allen Poe adaptations when he made The Masque of the Red Death, perhaps the most vividly interpreted and original of his offerings. That’s not to say that he takes artistic licence with it as he did with some of the earlier offerings (I’m thinking particularly of The Raven here). In fact it stays pretty faithful to the original text and the viewer will forgive Corman’s occasional flights of fancy as they tend to enhance rather than detract from the final product. Corman had intended this to be his second Poe picture following the success of House of Usher in 1960, but he passed it over because of the release of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal in 1957, which he held to be too similar in places. Read more

Season of the Witch (1973)

Or: George Romero does feminism. This might not seem like the most obvious conceit for a movie, but Romero’s at his happiest (and best) when exploring social themes and concerns under horror / supernatural premises, and this rarely-seen feature, recently exhumed on DVD in the US, is a flawed but worthwhile addition to the director’s canon. Season of the Witch was Romero’s third film, following the epochal Night of the Living Dead and the scarcely-mentioned romantic comedy There’s Always Vanilla, and tells the story of Joan, a bored and repressed middle-aged housewife who finds release and fulfillment through the occult. Her confidence grows as she begins to identify herself as a witch, even though she finds a new lease of life, she also takes on a whole range of new problems… Read more

Alien (1979)

When you come from a crappy region like mine you tend to hold onto the merest sources of civic pride with a pronounced vigour and trumpet them for the world to hear. With such thoughts in mind it is my honour to announce that Ridley Scott was not only educated here but also drew inspiration for the stunning opening in ‘Blade Runner’ from the surrounding industries. Not much you might retort if you managed to get through an entire sitting of ‘G.I. Jane’, but you’d have to concede that for the awe-inspiring Alien we should at least have named a library after him or something similar. Read more

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)

When I was thinking of how good Alien was my mind turned to a film which might be placed somewhat closer towards the other end of the science-fiction/horror quality spectrum. With its premise readily apparent from the title I have to confess that I do hold Killer Klowns in something approaching genuine affection. It’s probably because it’s one of the first films I can remember watching as a child (I had very negligent parents) but with a few years growth under my belt I can still identify one or two redeeming features for any Black Lagoon readers who might happen across a copy to look out for. Read more

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