Twitch Of The Death Nerve - Lisa's Review

*** SPOILERS ***

My flabber is well and truely gast this week!  2 movies worthy of a 'Recommends' tag from me in 2 weeks!! What is the world coming to?  I really enjoyed this weeks movie, on pretty much every level.  I knew from the opening scene, it was very likely that this was a good 'un.   The cinematography in this movie is cracking! I loved how they used the camera, lighting and staging.  In the opening scene alone, the filming of our first victims home (from inside and outside) is just stunning.

The first person we see on screen is an elderly Countess who happens to be in a wheelchair.  After a view around her beautiful home and a staging of a peaceful if perhaps lonely evening, the peace is disturbed by our first murderer (you'll see why I say that later) as he drapes a noose around her neck and kicks her wheelchair away from under her.  Inevitably she chokes... what's it called when someone kills you by hanging?  Choking? Strangling? Hmmm I don't know.   The acting here is very believable, no need for over dramatics.  I also liked how they had her breathe her last at the same time the wheels on her wheelchair stopped spinning, everything stops.  The killer also leaves a fake suicide note.

So we're pretty shocked for a murder to happen so fast, even moreso when the camera pans up and shows us the murderer!! What is this I think?  While my brain in trying to comprehend what they may be trying to do, an unknown person sneaks in and stabs our murderer to death!  A whole can of worms spilleth forth!
So whats going on?  Well it seems our Countess has refused to sell her property which has put an end to plans for the bay on which her property sits to be redeveloped.  Very early on we are let in on the fact that the Countesses killer is in fact her husband (Donati), who is plotting along with a creepy, sleazy property developer (Frank Ventura) to bump her off so he can pocket the cash and Frank can go ahead with the redeveolpment.   He has no idea that Donati has been murdered, so our first whodunnit is presented.

We have numerous characters who have a motive, but as the movie progresses they all seem to be killing one other off narrowing down the possibilities.  The Countess has an illegitimate son, Simon who is a rough and ready sort who likes biting live Squid (Yick!),  she also has a daughter, Renata who has no knowledge of Simons existence, Renata has a weary willy of a husband Albert.  We also have Venturas partner Laura.  A local entomologist, Paolo who wants to protect the bay and his very odd wife Anna (who bears more than a passing resemlance to Marc Bolan).

Intermingled within the story 4 teenagers (2 couples) are thrown into the mix.  We don't get to know them and they seem to be there purely as murder victims as they all meet their end rather dramatically.  One skinny-dipping girl comes across the body of Donati in the bay (A special mention has to go to a later scene of the body with a live octopus squirming around it... HORRID!).  As she runs in terror, she is followed and killed rather impressively with a large machete type weapon.  This was the least impressive death however as when she was supposed to be dead, you can clearly see her breathing (I hate that).  Next her boyfriend is dispatched in the most impressive kill (imho) of the movie by way of the same machete to the face. Great effect here.  It even shows the removal of the machete.  One thing I was really impressed with in this movie was the quality of the effects and makeup for a movie make in 1971.  The blood was a bit off in its colour, but apart from that, the effects were pretty spot on.  Lastly for these 4, the other couple who have retired to a bedroom in a house they have broken into, they are victim to a double impaling while enjoying themselves.... Hmmm I wonder where Friday the 13th got the idea.  So pretty pointless really, but entertaining I suppose.

So the movie goes on twisting and turning through all the remaining characters doing away with them all and proving an amusing moment when one murderer gets all queasy because some blood splashes onto his hand from a victim who is being impaled on the end of a spear.

I liked how this movie had numerous killers and you knew what people were bound to be guilty but didn't know exactly who did what and who would be left.  As we are left with our survivor(s), we are even treated to a last twist (which I won't give away).  I'm not sure what I made to this, it seemed a bit daft, maybe it was poorly executed.  Interesting and ironic but not perhaps how I would have ended things.

In conclusion, superbly shot, great effects, good acting, solid storyline, held my attention.  One of my favourites on the list definately.

Gets my 'Recommended' rating.

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Night of the Bloody Apes - Lisa's Review

*** SPOILERS ***

I read the title of this one and thought 'oh gawd, here we go.  How can this possibly be any good?'.  I slightly shame myself however to admit that I enjoyed this one, BUT for all the wrong reasons.  For me, this one was a 'So bad its good' movie.  I found myself tittering all the way through.  Just when you were getting over the humor of the last cheesy line, terrible peace of acting, awful effect or desperately flawed storyline, lo and behold, something else happens to amuse you!

So where do I start?  The movie is dubbed and is originally spanish.  I speak a bit of spanish (not much admittedly, but the script would have made more sense to me in its original language).  The dubbing is awful and the actual translation itself seems to have no consideration for how it might sound in english, but is rather a crude literal translation of the original language.  That did just add to the fun for me though.

The storyline here follows a surgeon, Dr Kralman and his hapless, limping, gormless side-kick Goyo.  The Dr's son Julio has leukemia and for reasons I could not understand needed gorilla blood to cure him.  This blood however would have been too strong for the human heart, so the gorilla heart had to be transplanted as well.  Sooo what do they do?  They go to a zoo and get themselves an ape of course!!  This is where the only good piece of gore in the movie takes place and that would be because it was real.  Actual footage of real open heart surgery was spliced into the movie.  What perplexed me about it however is how shaky and incompetant the hands of the real surgeon appeared!  I certainly wouldn't want his hands in my chest cavity, thats for sure!
So, the son comes around, but he now has a ridiculous ape face, that looks like its been put on by that brown window putty you used to get years ago (can you still get that?).  He also has an insatiable need to attempt to rape women (I say attempt as he never actually manages that) and murder them.  I think the rape part was just as excuse for the movie to get as many pairs of tits and arse cheeks out as they could as there need be no hint of an excuse for a pair to pop out and Oooops, out they come.  'Oh dear!  I'm running.  I'm not wearing a bra, my boobs seem to have mysteriously popped out of my dress.. dearie me'.   Later followed by 'I've just taken a shower, someone has come to the door.  I won't do what a normal person would and ignore it, or pull a dressing gown on... no, I think I shall wander to the door with a towel wrapped around my front so my arse is hanging out.  Nice look that'.  I also learned that women like to make mundane calls to their boyfriends when completely nude, with NO ulterior motive, Hmmmmmm.

Anyways Nudity covered (mwahahahaha) the next humorous thing was the effects.  We had an eyeball gouging (which would usually have me cringing, I'm not good with eyeballs) but if a pile of fatty looking mash is what's behind an eyeball, I have a lot to learn.  A toupe is pulled off a bald mans painted head (I loved that bit!) and a sellotaped piece of latex is torn away from someones neck.

We also manage to return to the start of the movie where we had 2 women wrestling (although it was clearly big men in the wrestling scenes and not the slim women shown before the fight started).  One was very badly injured and ended up in hospital in a coma.  When our surgeon dad realises what has happened to his son due to the gorilla heart, he decides to remove the female wrestlers heart and transplant it into him.  Here we have another excuse for boobs to come out.  Goyo disposes of her in the hospital furnace but sadly Julio still resorts back to his monkey-boy self.

Nearing the end of the movie, Julio runs wild at the hospital and captures a little girl.  His dad manages to convince him to hand the little girl over and in true King Kong Style, he is gunned down where is stands on top of the roof.  Finally as with werewolves, he then turns back to his normal self as he lies dying, we have some 'Walton-like' music and hey presto, its all over.

Little about this movie is good in the sense that it is meant to, but I still found I enjoyed it and would watch it again with friends.

Watch if you like a good laugh at 'So bad its good' movies!

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I Miss You, Hugs & Kisses - Lisa's Review

*** SPOILERS ***

This weeks movie seemed to be keeping with the trend of sedative viewing.

I found this one hard viewing.  It was so dull and I was so uninterested in it, getting to the end was a struggle.  I still feel I probably missed half of it through mind drifting.  It is a supposed true story, but how much of this has been kept close to the actual story is anyones guess.


The movie starts with a murder of a supposedly beautiful (I say supposed as I didn't think she was) model Magdalene.  All fingers are pointing at her husband, Charles.  The movie plays out as a court room drama with flashbacks to events leading up to the murder.  As it does, it introduces possible killer after killer and uncovers new motives.

As with last weeks movie, this one had an appearance of being made for TV.  There were a few scenes which would have raised a few eyebrows from the usual viewers of this kind of dross (and they were the reasons it made the DPP list) but asides from that, I can see this alongside Columbo or Murder she Wrote on a Sunday afternoon.

What else can I say about this movie without boring you even more than I was with regards to the plot... scenes in the movie that probably led to it being placed on the nasties list??

A Chicken Slaughterhouse (all been seen before so not surprising)
Head Bludgeoning (we see the victim being bludgeoned by every suspect leaving lots of unanswered questions for the viewer... if indeed they care)
A Stabbing followed by a suggestion of necrophilia (performed off screen - This was a bit disturbing as it seemed so out of place in the movie, something genuinely nasty)
A disgruntled husbands fantasies about killing his wife (this was more humorous than anything else)


This movie is all over the place in the court room.  We keep getting more and more information and just when you think you know 'who did it', we are presented with another would-be killer.  Thing is... I didn't care who did it.  Was it the husband Charles?  After all Magdalene won't sleep with him and he is in love with another woman.  He also talks at length with his best friend Gershen (I kept seeing Bobby Ewing when I looked at him!) about ways to kill his wife.  Was it Gershen, his confidant who was actually having an affair with the victim? (naughty boy!) Was it the escaped serial killer with the penchant for sex with corpses?  (On a side note, this character seemed to have no place in the movie.  I could see a movie about him working though.) Even cops are fingered as possible murderers.

After everything has played out in the court, the jury find Charles guilty.  They are then asked to stand up as their numbers are called 1 at a time, if they agreed with the verdict... was this ever the case in reality? (Will?)

We end the movie with Charles writing a letter to Paulie (not sure if that was his daughter or the woman he was having the affair with... I think it was the daughter).  He has been in prison for a couple of years and is appealing his conviction.  The things he seems most perturbed about are the fact he's had to have his head shaved and the food is crap (so much so its brought him out in boils, lol).

Rather dull ending to a very dull movie.  Not quite as bad as last week, it has to be said, but still... not something I'll ever watch again.

I wouldn't bother with this one folks.  Nothing particularly nasty or rivetting here.

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The House by the cemetery - Lisa's Review

A nice little movie this week! Another Fulci offering. This movie is apparently a part of an unofficial trilogy with The Beyond which we watched a few months ago when we were still on 'B' and City of the living dead.

*** SPOILERS ***

Although the movie is quite dated as you would expect and the poor dubbing is irritating, I still managed to enjoy this movie. Its a good little afternoon view. I didn't find anything particularly scary, but the makeup in places is very good. Its just in shame in some other places, its so bad.

The basic premis without going into too much detail is a family (Mum Lucy, Dad Norman and young boy Bob) moving to a town called New Whitby due to the the father (Norman) having to research some old houses. The house they move into however is not as innocent as it seems.

We 'the viewer' already have this information on board from the opening scene of a young woman (topless at that... why do women never wear bras in these movies?) who is murdered via a knife to the back of the head (which protrudes from her mouth) as she is looking for her boyfriend. Also Bob keeps seeing the ghost of a young girl Mae who warns him not to go to the house.

Of course they go anyway and the inevitable happens.

They have gravestones in the garden and even in the hallway, of a family called 'The Freudsteins (on a side note, this really bothered me as they were referred to as Freudsteens in the movie, but german pronunciation dictates that with an ie or ei, you pronounce the last letter, so they should have been referred to as Freudstine!) anyways I deviate. We find out that Dr Freudstein does what all historical doctors have done in movies like this....illegal experiements. He also ends up killing his family.

We find out Freudstein is in fact still alive and in the cellar of the house as he is using parts from his victims to regenerate his blood cells. The reveal is kind of disappointing. He looks kind of like a withered ET and a scene which shows only his eyes glowing in the cellar when young Bob comes across him is just laughable.

Nothing much more to the story really. Bad stuff happens, people die.

Points worth noting in the movie are the doggedly determined, haemophiliac bat (very amusing scene), the stabbing by poker (what a horrid way to go and very good effects) and the slow decapitation by knife (again good effects, but let down by the poor severed head rolling down the stairs later).

The movie has its faults, but on the whole, it was a fun watch and something I would watch again. This one gets a 'recommended' from me.

Something I've gained from watching these movies is an appreciation of Mr Fulci!

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Don't go into the woods - Lisa's Review

So here I sit on a Sunday morning before leaving for work getting last weeks 'nasty' fitted into my schedule and what monumental waste of time. Even reviewing it seems like minutes lost that will never be recaptured. I'm trying in vain to think of something positive to say about this movie, but the only teeny tiny positives are in fact accidental on the part of the film makers.


Firstly, I thought as with a lot of these movies, it may be foreign and had the actors voices dubbed on in english at a later date, but nooooooooo. This leaves me kind of inredulous as to how on earth the worst 'after dubbing' effect was achieved by this movie. I have seen and heard better acting at a school play. Every word is in slow motion, dragged and spaced out as if trying to fit in with the mouth movements rather than sound believable. How this has happened given the movie is anyones guess.

To be very politically incorrect for a moment, the lead characters (4 of them, 2 girls and 2 guys) is almost like a group of special needs kids out for a jolly in the woods. It took me some time to actually accept none of them were meant to be retarded.

We interrupt this review for competition news: the third word you will need to enter to win a copy of "Don't Look in the Basement" is "BEING". and now, back to the review...

The plotline... very loosely speaking, is several groups of people in the woods.. twitchers, swingers, hikers etc all being killed by an off screen assailant, who is later revealed and just looks like another retarded grizzly adams. The kills are all pretty standard, nothing new... impaling, stabbing, slashing, amputation, beating to death in a sleeping bag, burning in a van. There is absolutely no suspense at all and rather than care about the characters so you actually look forward to a death for something to happen and then are generally left disappointed by how crap it was. Another point about the actual kills... the screaming never changes while any character is being killed, its the same volume and pitch all the way through. I never thought a woman burning in a van would scream loudly at exactly the same pitch and then just stop.

Another point, was why they kept repeating parts of the script over' and over again... 'no, no, no, no, no', 'give me key, give me the keys, give me the keys', 'we got to keep moving, we got to keep moving, we got to keep moving'... you get the message.

The men are f*ckwits, the women are stupid (whats new there about an 80's horror) and I just couldn't wait to get to the end. It was almost like this movie was filmed as a comedy, but sadly it doesn't even have that excuse. There were a few unintentional mildly amusing bits but my lurgy is getting in the way of my sense of humour this morning so they just irritated me in their crapness.

There is no reason to watch this movie, other than to see possibly the worst acting and witness the worst script I have ever seen/heard. AVOID at all costs would be my advice!

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SHOCKTOBER SPECIAL: A cat in the brain - Lisa's Review

NOTE: In honour of Halloween, We're taking a break from the DPP list.

This weeks movie was selected for 2 reasons:

1. Although it was too recent to make the DPP list, it was banned on release in the UK, and only passed in 2003 after extensive cuts.

2. It was Written and Directed by, and stars (as Himself) prolific Video Nasty Director Lucio Fulci (The Beyond, Zombie Flesh Eaters)

So to the penultimate Shocktober Special, the very strange 'A Cat in the brain'. Having heard other peoples viewpoints on this, I wasn't expecting much, in fact I was expecting it to be one of the worst so far, in fact I found I really enjoyed this. As flawed a movie as it is in many respects, I'll tell you why I liked it.

For anyone not in the know, Lucio Fulci is a very famous Italian horror director famous for the goriest of movies. In this movie, he brings together the best examples of gore from his other movies. He manages to re-use these as he plays himself in the movie and we see how his involvement with such despicable material in his movies, slowly starts contributing to his mental breakdown. He eventually starts imagining brutal deaths and thinks he is responsible for these. So thats the premise... how did it pan out?

Ok, so the acting is dire. It says something that the best performance comes from Fulci himself and he is far from an actor. The gore isn't believable in a lot of places, the script is laughable and some of the gore is so obscene, all you can do is laugh open mouthed.. I suppose that's why we get the phrase 'Eyeball Gag' with reference to all means of horrid things happening to eyeballs... a Fulci favourite.

The good points? If you're a fan of gore, this movie has it in spades. Its like taking out all of the boring, slow bits from other movies and just letting loose with gore, obscenity and general rudeness. There are boobs a plenty in this one it has to be said, which is no doubt a plus point for the majority of male viewers. I also found that even though there are several violent scenes involving women, that have an overtly sexual nature, they didn't come across as titillating or exploitative to me at all.

This movie will appeal to some and not at all to others. I don't think its going to be one of those 'It was ok' movies. It certainly doesn't hold back, that's for sure. Among delights contained therein are: Decapitation, Disembowelling, Dismemberment, Chainsaws aplenty, Knife Stabbings, Several nasty Eyeball moments, A few horrendous beatings (very realistic too!), A psycho style shower murder (but this one is much more graphic) and cannibalism for good measure.

I won't go into detail about scenes from the movie, or give away the storyline, but I will say I really enjoyed this one. I have a penchant for nasty movies though, so if you're of a weak disposition and consider movies like 'Sixth Sense' and 'Final Destination' horror movies, then probably best avoid this one.

Deffo one for the die hard gore fan. BIG thumbs up!

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