Devil’s Possessed (El mariscal del infierno) was written by Paul Naschy (who also starred) and directed by León Klimovsky. It’s a story of horrific crimes committed in 15th century France by the king’s marshal Barón Gilles de Lancré (Naschy). It was released in 1974. This movie is either a swashbuckling adventure with quite a few horror elements or a horror film with quite a few swashbuckling adventure elements. It’s based very loosely on the real-life case of Gilles de Rais (1405-1440), notorious as one of the most prolific mass murderers in history although at various times since then dou ..read more

Scream of the Demon Lover (Il castello dalle porte di fuoco) was also released under various other titles including Killers of the Castle of Blood. It’s a 1970 Spanish-Italian co-production directed by José Luis Merino. It’s a gothic horror movie set presumably in the late 19th century but with so many anachronistic elements that it would probably have been better to have given it a contemporary setting. Of course all movies with period settings are riddled with anachronisms, it’s just a bit more noticeable in this film. The heroine Ivanna Rakowsky (Erna Schurer) is a 1970s independent amb ..read more

Colt 38 Special Squad was the last movie directed by Massimo Dallamano before his death in a car accident in 1976. It belongs to the poliziotteschi genre, as does his earlier Super Bitch. To understand the poliziotteschi genre you have to understand that these were violent times in western Europe with widespread terrorist activity by groups such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy as well as organised crime due to the boom in the drug trade. There was an air of paranoia, and a certain sympathy for the idea that the police sometimes needed to be ruthless. There ..read more

A Dragonfly for Each Corpse (Una libélula para cada muerto) is a 1975 Spanish giallo directed by León Klimovsky and starring Paul Naschy. As so often Naschy also contributed the screenplay, under his real name Jacinto Molina. Some purists consider the giallo to be a purely Italian genre but there are a number of Spanish films which tick all the right boxes and it’s hard to see how they can be considered to be anything but giallos (or gialli if you prefer). I’ve always enjoyed Paul Naschy’s performances but I probably have been guilty of thinking of him as a somewhat limited actor. In this f ..read more

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