I Spit On Your Grave (1977)

It seems to have fallen to me to review many of the bloodier movies on this site, to the extent that it’s not uncommon for me to spend a couple of evenings a week watching eviscerations, disembowellments and other unpleasantness. For this reason, I occasionally wonder how desensitised I’m becoming to this sort of carnage, and whether I’m starting to lose objectivity - am I watching these films for their intellectual qualities or am I just bloodthirsty? It’s something of a relief, then, to report that I found I Spit On Your Grave pretty repugnant and gruelling, both for the film’s fairly sickening catalogue of violence, and for its total failure to put this violence into any sort of context. The plot - such as it is - tells the story of Jenny (Camille Keaton - Buster’s great-niece), an author who rents a house in some remote Connecticut woods in order to write her first novel. A city girl, she soon attracts the attention of four local rednecks, who gang rape and mutilate her and leave her for dead. Shellshocked, she plots her revenge, picking them off one by one. Read more

Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1982)

One of the films successfully prosecuted by the DPP in their crackdown on so-called ‘video nasties’, Romano Scavolini’s film (originally titled Nightmare - the lurid qualifier was added for the video release) isn’t actually nearly as bad as you might think. It falls just short of actually being a good film, but it’s sufficiently interesting and diverting to raise it above much of the other exploitation schlock that fell foul of the law in the mid 80s. Baird Stafford plays George Tatum, a test subject in an experiment to ‘rebuild’ mental patients with radical new medication. Successfully reformed, George is released, but when he is plagued by flashbacks to a particularly traumatic childhood event, he flips and goes on a killing rampage… Read more

Phenomena (aka Creepers) (1985)

Phenomena remains one of Dario Argento’s most controversial films. Arriving in 1985, it sits on the cusp of the period when most viewers feel his directorial career went into terminal decline, and yet it arrived only three years after the masterful Tenebrae, his elegant and stylish return to the giallo - the genre he helped to define more than any other director. Mainly remembered for featuring a very young Jennifer Connelly in the lead role, Phenomena remains something of a mixed bag, but generally scores more hits than misses. Read more

Saw (2004)

Saw was the surprise horror hit of 2004, seemingly coming out of nowhere to gross over $55 million - that’s fifty five times its meagre $1 million budget. Given the other genre smashes of the year were the limp remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn of the Dead, it was proof that there was still a public appetite for inventive, low-budget chills. Whilst Saw doesn’t offer much in the way of ideas for the audience to mull over, it’s an extremely well put-together series of scares and mind-bending plot twists that manage to sustain a sense of edge of the seat tension without resorting to cliche. Read more

Saw II (2005)

In much the same way that The Blair Witch Project capitalised on its unexpected success by immediately rushing out a sequel, fans of the diabolical ‘Jigsaw’ had to wait for less than a year for the follow-up to Saw. In light of this it shouldn’t be too surprising that Saw II offers up very little in the way of fresh ideas, but should we really have expected anything else? After all, the strength of the original was in watching helpless victims being psychologically and physically dissected in fiendishly cruel ways. Is this enough to carry a sequel though? Read more

Scream (1996)

With hindsight, can you blame a film for the poor imitations that followed? Received wisdom among horror aficionados states that Scream, Wes Craven’s 1996 mega-hit, is where it all went wrong for the genre, ushering in a series of sub-par slashers and refocusing major-studio horror almost exclusively on teenagers: nearly all the big horror hits of recent years have been neutered, 15-certificate fare or under. All legitimate charges, of course, and when faced with the prospect of Scary Movie 5 next year, it’s hard not to feel some degree of antipathy towards the film that started the ball rolling. Read more

Tenebrae (1982)

After the candy-coloured supernatural nightmares of Suspiria and Inferno, Tenebrae marked director Dario Argento’s return to the graphic murder mysteries with which he made his name as a director. It tells the story of American crime novelist Peter Neal, who comes to Rome to promote his latest book; soon after his arrival, however, he discovers that a murderer is on the rampage using his novels as inspiration and leaving pages from them at the crime scene. Along with his PA Anne, Neal is drawn into the investigation as the bodies start to pile up… Read more

The Driller Killer (1979)

With a title like Driller Killer it’s hardly surprising that Abel Ferrara’s directorial debut quickly found itself thrust into the centre of the ‘video nasty’ debate. To be fair to the Mary Whitehouses of the world, the promotional posters that accompanied the movie did more to inflame passions than to assuage them, and even now it’s difficult to find some of the more ‘graphic’ offerings on the internet. As is often the case with these ultra-nasties, the media attention is probably something of a mixed blessing. True, the stigma of being a tabloid outcast tends to end any dreams of commercial success that budding directors might once have harboured. Theirs is a future of horror convention walk-ons and the occasional appearance on documentaries exploring whether films are responsible for violence amongst teenagers. On the other hand, being branded a ‘nasty’ provides in its turn a measure of sinful credibility. No matter how rubbish a film is, if it was once banned then surely there must be something to it? Why else would it have provoked such a moral panic? Read more

Wolf Creek (2004)

If the opening credits are to be believed, Australian director Greg McLean’s debut feature Wolf Creek is based on a true story. It’s not, but the story of three backpacking friends who fall into the hands of a psychopath in the Australian bush derives much of its impact from echoing on a number of cases that have made the headlines in the past few years - most notably, the murder of British traveller Peter Falconio, along with the high-profile manhunts that have followed the killings of other backpackers and tourists. It’s not entirely clear whether McLean was intentionally riffing on real life events or not, but Wolf Creek feels pretty timely, and this helps overcome the film’s main flaw - the overfamiliarity of the story. There’s nothing here we haven’t seen before, and the theme of an innocent’s slow descent into hell at the hands of a maniac has been pretty definitively explored in films such as Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Misery. Wolf Creek is distinguished, however, by McLean’s skilful handling of this material; whether the film still stands up in ten years time remains to be seen, but it feels terrifyingly now, a slasher movie that feels entirely in tune with the age in which it was made. Read more