Classic ’70s Italian softcore ‘n gore and a one time “video nasty”.

When an apparently abandoned yacht drifts into New York harbour, the Police who board it are attacked by a gruesome, decaying man locked in one of the cabins. After tearing out the throat of one of the cops, the bald monster is taken down, eventually, by multiple shots from his partner.

The daughter of the boat’s owner goes looking for answers and, after teaming up with a reporter, heads off to the uncharted island which was the last placed mentioned in the ship’s log. For the last leg of the journey they hitch a lift on a boat with an ethnologist and his girlfriend and the four find themselves on an island overrun by reanimated corpses. Why the zombies exist is never worked out, even though one slightly crazy doctor has been researching them since the outbreak started. But, really, we don’t need to know, it’s all about the gore.

It wouldn’t be an Italian film without a bit of skin on show, including a topless scuba diving scene which segues into a classic confrontation- zombie vs shark. I think the shark wins- it makes off with the zombie’s arm, after all- but what happens to a fish that eats zombie bits?

I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a zombie classic, but it is one of the more inventive entries into the genre, with gruesome makeup and some brutal battles. And, of course, a shark fighting a zombie.

Buy Zombie Flesh Eaters from Amazon uk.

I really enjoyed this film, but if I tell you some of the reasons why I liked it I’ll spoiler it for you.

The Cabin In The Woods is about a trip to a cabin. In some woods. Five friends- a jock, a stoner, a geek, a bimbo and a chaste good girl, take a trip to the holiday cabin the jock’s cousin has just bought. Despite meeting a creepy stranger on the road to the forest, they’re soon enjoying the lake, discovering one way mirrors in the bedroom and finding creepy secrets in the basement.

Obviously, it all starts to go horribly wrong from here on. I just can’t tell you how or why.

If you enjoyed The Evil Dead or any slasher movies then you’ll find loats of nods and in-jokes in a very clever homage/pastiche/reimagining combo.

Burt Reynolds returns as Gator MCKlusky in the sequel to White Lightning.

Fresh out of jail (again) Gator McKlusky is press-ganged into helping the Governor and the Feds clean up Dunston County because the kingpin of Dunston crime is an old schoolfriend called Bama McCall. After giving the authorities the run-around in his jet boat, McKlusky reluctantly agrees to dig up the dirt on McCall just to keep his family from being harrassed.

McCall’s not a very convincing crimelord, and his chief henchmen- camp and creepy Smiler and big, dumb Bones- don’t help his image much. But he runs protection rackets, drugs and underage prostitutes and, it’s eventually revealed, has the local mayor in his pocket. With the help of a local reporter with great ambitions, and despite the presence of bumbling Fed Greenfield, Gator finds the secret ledgers that incriminate his old friend. Which is when McCall turns murderous.

The tone of this film feels wrong, with the violence of the last fifteen minutes or so being completely out of place. Where White Lightning managed an air of seedy threat, too much of this movie felt like a jape, an attempt to make bit of box office revenue riding on the success of the first film without putting in much effort. The jet boat chase is the big set piece of the film, but it comes at the start of the movie when it doesn’t feel like there’s anything at stake.

Overall, a disappointing follow up to a piece of Southern Fried noir.

Buy Gator from Amazon UK.

Machete Maidens Unleashed is currently only available in Region 1 format, so you’ll need a machine you can hack to read it.

This dvd was a birthday present to myself. It’s by the same director as Not Quite Hollywood, which covered Australian exploitation cinema, and follows a similar formula. Talking heads recount tales from the set cut between clips from the films they’re referring to, all put together in a roughly chronological history of the industry.

Where Ozsploitation grew out of Australian culture and found an eager audience outside the country, the Philippine version documented in this film (Flipsploitation?) was driven by American producers looking for cheap content. A lot of this documentary could just be a chapter in the Roger Corman story (Corman’s World is on my to-view list), as he was king of the Yankee producers for a long time from the sixties through to the seventies. He tries, though his tongue could be deep in his cheek, to claim films like The Big Doll House were all about female empowerment. Whilst some of the actresses involved echo the sentiment, the argument is undermined a bit by clips from the feminist opuses. For all the grand claims made for the art of Flipsploitation, there is always John Landis ready to play the amiable nay-sayer.

Most of the contributors have horror stories about conditions- on set and off- to spice their recollections. Stunt performers were cheap and could just be set on fire or thrown through windows (real glass, the Philippine movie makers hadn’t heard of sugar glass). More impressively, the Marcos regime was eager to let the army act as extras, lending scope to battle scenes far beyond the usually tiny budget. Though sometimes the helicopters were late on set because they’d been off firing live rounds at rebels. Apocalypse Now is most famous for using Marcos’ military for its grand action scenes, but the realism was added to many less well known films as well.

The dvd is packed with extra features, including extended interviews, a selection of trailers (from which I will be adding films to my to-view list) and commentary, so I’ll keep coming back to it whenever I want a bit of exploitation movie inspiration.