Thank goodness for Wikipedia! Had the entry for Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970) not included a lengthy synopsis of the plot, I would have been unclear about the goings on. It’s not that it’s incoherent in any way, but there are a lot of characters that get killed one by one, for no…

Two things struck me during my first-time watch of Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971.) First was how stylish it is. That may sound silly since it was directed by Dario Argento (Suspiria, 1977), but I don’t mean “stylish” as in gloriously bloody set pieces, but as in the camerawork itself. The fact that it’s…

Prior to his untimely death in a helicopter crash at the age of 30, writer-producer-director-composer William Girdler had a promising film trajectory. Four years after his inauspicious beginnings with two drive-in quickies in 1972 (Asylum of Satan, Three on a Meathook), he made the most successful independent feature of 1976, Grizzly. Sprinkled among his nine…

Doomwatch (1972) is not the movie I thought I would be watching. The title has appeared in my research so many times over the years, that I did a blind-buy of the Blu-ray a while back. IMDb describes it as a “Horror, Mystery.” If anything, it’s science-fiction, but it’s barely even that. It’s more like…

There’s a fun bonus feature on the Severin Films Blu-ray of The Beast in the Cellar (1971.) It provides a high level look at the genre output of Tigon Films, the distant third of the trio of British production companies in the 1960s and 1970s, behind Hammer Films and Amicus Productions. However, it spends most…

Few movies capture a sense of authenticity with their setting as does The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971.) Of course, we don’t know what it was really like living in the 18th century, but after watching this film, I’d swear this was it… a gloomy countryside where the sun never shines, stone buildings that look…

After emerging from a string of movies in the mid-1950s to late 1960s that earned him the nickname, “Mr. BIG,” Bert I. Gordon branched out a little with the comedy, How to Succeed with Sex (1970), and the crime thriller, The Mad Bomber (1973.) When I read the synopsis for the recent Severin Films blu-ray…

In Night of the Walking Dead (1975), director Leon Klimovsky borrows one of the techniques he used in The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman (1971), but for only one scene. It’s a type of slow-motion effect that doesn’t look like slow-motion, but like vampires eerily moving in their own unique way. Night of the Walking…

John Gilling directed what, on some days, is my favorite Hammer film: The Plague of the Zombies (1966.) Nearly a decade later, he directed his final film in Spain: Cross of the Devil, or The Devil’s Cross,aka La cruz del diablo (1975.) The subject matter of Cross of the Devil is also zombies, but different…