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A Bay of Blood (1971)

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There are numerous movies that almost fit the slasher genre way before Halloween hit the theater.  Often Black Christmas   is cited as one of the earliest and most influential, while The Abominable Dr. Phibes and its sequel have many elements of this style of film.  The true granddaddy of all slasher films, though, would be Mario Bava's 1971 A Bay of Blood . Countess Federica Donati (Isa Miranda) is murdered one night by her husband (Giovanni Nuvoletti), who tries to make it look like suicide.  However, just as he is putting the finishing touches on his work, he is dispatched by an unknown killer.  With the count's body nowhere to be found and everything looking like suicide the property is set to pass on to an heir, and Renata Donati (Claudine Auger), the daughter of the Count, expects that to be her.  She arrives at the property with her husband Alberto (Luigi Pistilli) and their children to stake their claim. Problem is, they learn from fortune teller A...
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You'll Die at Midnight (1986)

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Unlike his father Lamberto Bava is not a fan of the giallo films.  While he seems comfortable with the wild, anything goes style of something like Demons  he has admitted to being uncomfortable with movies featuring women getting stabbed.  I think a good part of that is the reason You'll Die at Midnight, the movie he made between the two Demons films, is pretty much forgotten, as despite its lurid poster art it is quite tame and a rote exercise in formula. Nicola (Leonardo Treviglio) is a police officer who finds out his wife (Barbara Scoppa) is cheating on him.  After the two have a violent argument in which he almost kills her an actual murderer enters the house and does the job.  Since Nicola is nowhere to be found he becomes the prime suspect for Inspector Piero Terzi (Paolo Malco).  Where Nicola did go was to his former lover Anna (Valeria D'Obici), a criminal psychologist that assists the police.   Anna believes that Nicola is innocent while...
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Captain America: Brave New World (2025)

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It used to be that I looked forward to the Captain America films.  The First Avenger was a welcome surprise, while The Winter Soldier was a nice throwback to the old '70s espionage thrillers with Robert Redford, a veteran of those films, showing up in a major role.  It was pretty much a series of movies that couldn't miss. But then the original Captain finished what he had to do and, finally growing old and passing away, gifted his shield to Sam Wilson.  A million fanboys whined about a black Captain America, and the introduction to the character was dragged through the so-so limited series of Captain America and the Falcon .  Still, I head some hope that the movie version would put things to right.  What I forgot is that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has long overstayed its welcome. Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford) has managed to redeem himself in the eyes of the nation and become President.  Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) pretty much toes the line for him, he...
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The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984)

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After Conan the Barbarian made it obvious that sword and sorcery films could turn a buck in the United States if taken seriously numerous producers and directors spent the rest of the 1980s churning out bad knockoffs that no one could take seriously.  Most of those came from Roger Corman's New World Pictures, but there were others that popped up here and there.  The Warrior and the Sorceress just happened to have David Carradine, once again earning a paycheck on a low-budget production.  This time around it's yet another knockoff of Yojimbo .  Kain (Carradine) arrives in a town suffering a water crisis.  The one well is disputed by rival warlords, Zeg the Tyrant (Luke Askew) and Bal Caz (Guillermo Marín).  Kain is recognized by the local prelate (Harry Townes) as one of his order, but the world has made the warrior weary to the point to where he now fights only to win coin.  He sees the opportunity in the town of playing both factions against each oth...
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Deathstalker (1983)

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I often see these games advertised for cell phones.  I have been around long enough that I didn't have to learn my lesson by downloading one of them.  I just read the comments and find out that, without exception, the interesting game in the advertisement has nothing to do with the actual product.  That bait and switch is one of the oldest in the book and Roger Corman definitely knew how to take advantage of it.  Many producers of low budget films did.  In fact, it was often a regular practice to come up with a title and poster long before there was even a script merely for the purpose of getting someone to invest money in the movie.  Unfortunately, that is most likely what happened with this one.  Boris Vallejo did some amazing artwork on the poster and Corman or someone on his team came up with a great name.  There are plenty of bosoms, there is a musclebound blonde guy in a loincloth, but beyond that this poster is not the movie one will see....
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Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995)

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Unlike the Showa era of Godzilla, which kind of petered out at the end of its run, the end of the Heisei era was planned.  Godzilla vs. Destoroyah was meant to bring the latest Toho series to an end as they had given permission for a series of movies to be made in the U.S. starting in 1999.  Although this movie, like most of the ones before it, remained unreleased in the United States, Toho still did not want competing franchises.  What the team of writers did this time was make sure to connect everything with the original Godzilla from 1954, which The Return of Godzilla followed, ignoring all the original sequels.  To sum it up, the original Godzilla that attacked Japan was killed by the oxygen destroyer.  The creature that attacked 30 years later, and which would go on to fight Biollante, was a dinosaur living on an isolated Pacific island that had helped defend a Japanese battalion smf was later mutated by American hydrogen bomb tests.  That creature, ...
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V/H/S: Viral (2014)

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The V/H/S series is spotty in quality from segment to segment in the best of times, and the best was definitely V/H/S/2 .  While V/H/S did have some good segments from known or up-and-coming directors, the second pared things down to just three segments and a wraparound.  The contributions were of fairly high quality as well.   Then came V/H/S: Viral .  Just the name seems to disappoint, hinting at the idea of viral videos instead of old video tapes, the latter of which seemed to add a bit of a creep factor to the first two films.  While it still tries to maintain some of the feel of old-school recording it does go beyond that in numerous segments and, unlike the first two, the wraparound doesn't add much to the proceedings.  It is a significant drop in quality, although it's not all a waste. Kev (Patrick Lawrie) is obsessed with taping about everything, something his girlfriend Iris (Emilia Ares) initially is fine with but later comes to find quite a...
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