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Directors like Mario Bava are the reason cult movie fans exist. Working under miniscule budgets with fly-by-night foreign producers who distributed the final product under a seemingly endless amount of alternative titles, often just tracking down the muddy lineage of Bava’s work is a genealogical case study unto itself. But it’s the thrill of the chase that fans enjoy most, sifting through the pseudonyms and cinematic dead-ends to unearth something truly special from a man who was 40 years ahead of his time. Well, Kino Classics has done most of the work for you in the form of The Mario Bava Collection, three titles (with more presumably to come) including one of Bava’s most notable and celebrated works: Black Sunday. The director’s most complete vision, Black Sunday (1960) was relatively uncompromised by creative interference or budget troubles, something that would wreak havoc on later productions. And the film’s gothic setting, still in favor at the time by rival filmmakers at Hammer...

There’s an art to making a really good creature feature. You can’t be too silly (like Piranha 3DD or recent Roger Corman / SyFy Channel dreck such as Sharktopus ) or too depressing (like recent remakes of Thing and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark ). It’s a fine line between ludicrous and ludicrously amusing. And even when a film hits the nail on the head, the best it can hope for is pleasing an audience of like-minded weirdos. For those searching for that kind of entertainment, Bait is just such a movie. It starts with a premise so preposterous you have to read it twice. After a tsunami hits a seaside Australian resort, a few lucky survivors stay above water in a flooded supermarket. Yet the underwater aisles are now patrolled by a pair of great white sharks who have their eyes on something fresher than whatever’s left in the deli case! So, just to review, that’s great white sharks eating people in a supermarket. If that synopsis alone makes you want to watch, then you won’t b...

Although Mother’s Day (1980) pre-dates the creative peak of Troma Films - which fans would probably target as 1984’s The Toxic Avenger - it firmly establishes producer Lloyd Kaufman’s sick sense of humor, anything-for-a-buck mentality and all-in-good-fun attitude. And that’s no mean feat considering Mother’s Day , directed by Lloyd’s brother, Charlie Kaufman, features equal amounts of rape, dismemberments and random violence. This ain’t no knock-knock joke, people. Holed up in the New Jersey wilderness, Mother and her two sons – Ike and Addley – take great pride in their murderous pastime. And when three sorority sisters on a reunion vacation fall right into their laps, they proceed with their usual routine of torture, torment and eventual death with great enthusiasm. All with Mother’s seal of approval, of course. The only question is, who will survive…and what will be left of them? If you didn’t catch the reference, that last bit is a tagline from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre...

Prior to the current trend of adapting graphic novels, self-help books and board games into major motion pictures, literary masterpieces used to be Hollywood’s bread-and-butter. One might choose to interpret that as a condemnation of today’s movie-going society as unsophisticated, bottom-feeders. But in all honesty, it’s tough to “do-right” by the classics. And one would be hard-pressed to find a producer today who would take on the challenge of adapting William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury , a multi-layered, multiple narrative monstrosity that had to be practically rewritten from the ground up to make it to the screen – even in 1959. The focus here is on Quentin Compson (Joanne Woodward), the illegitimate daughter of a once-proud Southern family. Although only a small part of the novel’s structure (as liner notes by Julie Kirgo point out), the filmmakers chose a more direct coming of age route as Quentin rebels against small-town life and her controlling step-uncle, Jason, p...

It’s seems redundant and more than a little tiresome to provide a brief history of Hammer Studios yet again, and the impact they had on horror cinema worldwide from around 1957 until the company fell apart during the late ‘70s. Especially considering that from a technical standpoint, most of the creative personnel responsible that success were long gone by the time Hammer House of Horror aired as a British television series in 1980. A classic anthology series featuring a different hour-long story each week, House did feature a few notable appearances from Hammer vets like Peter Cushing, director Alan Gibson ( Dracula A.D. 1972 ) and soon-to-be-famous British actors like Pierce Brosnan and Brian Cox. As is usually the case with shows of this type, the quality of each episode varies depending on the talent involved. Cushing’s role in The Silent Scream is sure to attract the most fan attention as a pet-shop owner who keeps a dangerous menagerie in the back room. But The House th...

Sometime around 1986 (perhaps when Emilio Estevez was shooting a Green Goblin semi-truck with a rocket launcher in Maximum Overdrive ) having Stephen King’s name above a movie title stopped being a good thing. A prolific writer, King’s work has a about a 50/50 failure-to-success ratio. Films adapted from the work: perhaps around 80/20. So that fact that 1991’s Sleepwalkers , based on King’s original screenplay, came and went without much cultural impact is probably to be expected. Yet the fun thing about home video is rediscovering titles you missed, slept through or flat-out ignored. And while Sleepwalkers is certainly no lost classic, there’s more to appreciate than you might think in this story about mother-son shape shifters who share an Oedipal relationship and a strange fear of housecats. The new kid in town, Charles (Brian Krause), pursues a relationship with the cute girl next door ( Twin Peaks ’ Madchen Amick). But his intentions are much more mysterious, involving ...