Five minutes into The Freakmaker (1974), aka The Mutations, time lapse photography creates an illusion that flowers opening their petals is a burst of fireworks. The opening credits end and I was grateful that the entirety of what I’d seen thus far, nothing but time lapse photography of plants growing, was over. Nope; it’s another…

For all intents and purposes, this was the first time I watched The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1977), the name of the movie on the Synapse Films Blu-ray. (It’s been known by many others, including Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, which is what IMDb calls it.) I have history showing that I awarded it six…

Before watching even one second of Tintorera: Killer Shark (1977), I could have guessed that a two-hour and six-minute running time was going to be too long. Considering the “killer shark” story plays like merely a subplot, I’m also guessing that, in the wake of Jaws, it was added to a film already in production.…

For some reason, I’ve been anticipating a decline in quality of the Gamera films, but it doesn’t arrive with Gamera vs. Zigra (1971.) I may like it slightly less than its predecessor; however, that’s a personal preference. In general, it maintains the level that I’ve come to expect, and I have yet to be disappointed.…

When I watched Gamera vs. Guiron (1969) 11 months ago and paused my exploration of the Arrow Video box set, Gamera: The Complete Collection, I would have thought we were at the peak of the series. I remember rating it highly and commenting that the crazier the movies got, the more entertaining they were. Imagine…

You don’t know me at all if you thought I wouldn’t turn right around and watch Blood for Dracula (1974) after Flesh for Frankenstein. While the two are similar, and I like them for the same reasons, this one feels more like a revelation because I didn’t first listen to Rod and Mark talk about…

Thanks to Rod Barnett and his podcast, The Bloody Pit, I finally took a plunge into the gory guts of Flesh for Frankenstein (1973.) Both it and its companion film, Blood for Dracula (1974), have always hidden deep in my watch list, mostly due to fear of what I might find. If I found them.…

What do I know? My persistent thought about The Comeback (1978) was that, for a supposedly popular pop singer, the character of Nick Cooper, as played by Jack Jones, didn’t seem like a very dynamic musical performer. I learned only afterwards that Jones’s primary career was as a Grammy Award-winning singer. Then again, I’m the…

Hoping to enjoy Grizzly (1976) more than I ever have, which hasn’t been much, I recently loaded the Blu-ray into the machine and leaned back in my recliner to watch it. For a little more than half the film, I had two thoughts. First, it was better than I remembered. Second, it’s not as much…