A Black Veil for Lisa is a 1968 Italian-German co-production directed by Massimo Dallamano and Dallamano’s name in the credits was more than sufficient to make me want to see this one. I had assumed that it was going to be a giallo or a proto-giallo but despite the presence of a black-gloved killer assigning this movie to a particular genre is rather tricky. The setting is Hamburg. John Mills plays Inspector Franz Bulov (different sources offer different spellings of his surname) is a senior Interpol narcotics investigator. He’s working on a very big case involving a major drug racket but ..read more

Sliver is a 1993 erotic thriller directed by Phillip Noyce and scripted by Joe Eszterhas from a novel by Ira Levin. Sharon Stone, at that time just about the hottest property in Hollywood, stars. Carly Norris (Sharon Stone) is a book editor who has just moved into a luxury high-rise New York apartment building, known as the Sliver Building. She finds out that the girl who had the apartment before her, a girl named Naomi, jumped to her death from the window. Carly isn’t too disturbed by this, even when people keep telling her that she bears an uncanny resemblance to Naomi. Eventually Carly wi ..read more

Death by Invitation, released in 1971, starts with a young girl on trial for witchcraft. So do countless horror movies but in this case it’s done in a particularly disturbing way with a real edge of terror and fanaticism. It gets the movie away to a very promising start. Then we jump forward a few hundred years to the present day (or in this case the 1970s) and we encounter the same people (or at least the same actors) and we assume that they are destined to relive those events of the distant past. A young woman named Lise (Shelby Leverington) has worked her way into the Vroot family. Lise ..read more

Westworld had been a major hit in 1973 but the 1976 sequel Futureworld is a less ambitious affair. Rather than being a major studio production Futureworld is an AIP picture and when you see Peter Fonda (at best a second-tier star) getting top billing you know you’re dealing with a fairly low-rent production. Westworld had been written and directed by Michael Crichton but he was not involved in this sequel. Westworld is of course a “technology gets out of control and becomes a menace” movie and it also belongs to the evil robot/malevolent computer science fiction sub-genre. It’s also a disas ..read more

Adrian Hoven’s Castle of the Creeping Flesh (original title Im Schloß der blutigen Begierde) is a German eurohorror movie which falls into the gothic horror in a contemporary setting sub-category, with a bit of added weirdness. We start with a party with a very high decadence factor. Baron Brack (Michel Lemoine) is trying to persuade Vera Lagrange (Janine Reynaud) to go to bed with him. He persuades her to accompany him to his isolated hunting lodge. She is more than willing. There is however some confusion, three other guests turn up at the ledge as well and Brack ends up at the lodge with ..read more

I’m not quite sure what I expected from The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. I guess I expected an evil child horror movie, and while it is a horror movie of sorts it’s not really that sort of horror movie. It’s also a thriller of sorts, with some interesting quirky touches. It’s one of those really interesting movies Jodie Foster made early in her career. This was a Canadian-French co-production. Jodie Foster plays Rynn Jacobs, a thirteen-year-old girl who lives in a house in a seaside village (and Foster was thirteen when she made this film). Rynn lives there with her father. They’ve ..read more

Giulio Questi’s Death Laid an Egg (AKA Plucked AKA A Curious Way to Love, original Italian title La morte ha fatto l’uovo) is an attempt to combine the giallo and the art film. It’s an attempt that mostly fails but the movie is not a total loss. We start with a strange scene of the murder of a woman. It’s strange because it reveals the identity of the psycho killer right from the start. The killer is Marco (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and he runs a high-tech poultry farm with his wife Anna (Gina Lollobrigida). Very high-tech. It’s completely automated. The farm requires no other human workers w ..read more

The Long Hair of Death is a 1964 Italian gothic horror film directed by Antonio Margheriti and starring Barbara Steele. The main story takes place in the year 1499 but there is a prologue dealing with important events a few years earlier. Count Franz had been murdered. The murderer had diverted suspicion on to an innocent woman, Adele Karnstein. Adele was accused of being a witch and burnt. Another young woman had in her possession important evidence. This young woman also came to an untimely end. Both Count Franz’s brother Humboldt and Humboldt’s son Kurt (George Ardisson) were involved in ..read more

That Kind of Girl forms part of an interesting 1960s British film sub-genre, the serious-minded didactic sex melodrama. These movies were sexploitation movies. The sexual subject matter was certainly the selling point and that’s definitely the case with this movie with its “ripped from the headlines” sensationalistic posters and promotional material. But given the draconian British censorship of the 60s these movies are ludicrously tame. It was quite common for sexploitation movies to try to head off censorship problems by posing as important social documents warning society of the dangers ..read more

The Adventures of Barry McKenzie was released in 1972. It was torn to shreds by Australian film critics (who wanted worthy earnest Australian films) and proceeded to make a fortune at the box office. It was the newly revived Australian film industry’s first smash hit. The Adventures of Barry McKenzie was shot partly in Australia and partly in London. Barry McKenzie (Barry Crocker) is a young Australian who has just inherited some money, but the condition is that he has to use it to travel to Britain. His aunt Mrs Edna Everage (Barry Humphries) decides to accompany him. Bazza’s problems (he ..read more