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