Movieline Online

When it comes to the giallo genre, fans can be just as obsessive in their pursuit of obscure titles as the hyper-violent, sexually deviant killers that feature in them so prominently. Death Smiles on a Murderer (1973) actually straddles the line between a typical over-the-top giallo mystery and a supernatural story straight out of the Italian Gothic tradition. Arriving with no memory at the home of a pair of wealthy landowners, Greta (Ewa Aulin) seems content to bounce between affairs with both husband and wife, covering her mysterious backstory with a trail of dead bodies, including an overly curious doctor (Klaus Kinski) convinced she holds the key to his scientific research. Directed by sleaze-maestro Joe D'Amato (using his real name for the first time) the film is a kitchen-sink conglomeration of incest, murder, sex and super-science crafted with a sloppy sort of style. The period setting makes the film feel like a better-made cousin to some of Jess Franco's output...

After the death of the slasher genre in the late '80s (and before its rebirth as a series of self-aware inside jokes in the late '90s) the horror genre found a comfortable groove on home video. All that was required was a splashy title and eye-catching artwork to lure in the 2 for 1 rental audience. But, quite often, the freedom afforded filmmakers at this level produced some legitimate classics. Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) isn't one of them. But it is a well-meaning tribute to classic sci-fi schlock like The Blob and Invaders from Mars that is far cleverer that its title suggests. Setting up camp under their extraterrestrial big top, a clown-car full of pasty-faced antagonists hunt down the residents of a small town, imprisoning them in cotton candy cocoons and drinking their blood through crazy straws. Written and directed by the Chiodo brothers, who pitched in on the Critters series among others, there's certainly no lack of effort expended o...

As captured on film, 1970-something New York City has an almost tactile quality: gritty, grey and dangerous. It's the perfect backdrop for a movie like The Seven Ups (1973), a crime drama with several ties to The French Connection , including star Roy Scheider, technical advisor Sonny Grosso and stunt coordinator Bill Hickman who stages a mid-film thrill ride through crowded city streets that deserves to be on the all-time car chase top ten list! Heading up an elite unit of supercops who specialize in crimes worth at least a seven-year sentence (hence the title), Buddy Manucci (Scheider) has been getting inside information on the local bad guys from his childhood pal, Vito (Tony Lo Bianco). But Vito has been playing both sides, and now a string on mafia kidnappings throws suspicion on Buddy's team as dirty cops. The Seven Ups has so many things going for it - including a passionate performance from Scheider, an ominously epic musical score and the aforementioned chase ...

The follow-up release to Arrow Video's voluminous collection of early films from Japanese genre director Seijun Suzuki is actually more entertaining and approachable than the first installment. Once again, the set contains five films that have never even premiered on DVD in their native country, let alone Blu-ray, marking Suzuki's transition into gangster / thriller program films designed to support higher-profile releases. Two titles - The Sleeping Be a st Within and Smashing the O-Line - feature a pair of journalists determined to expose the drug and human trafficking business. Eight Hours of Terror uses a disaster-film story structure as bank robbers hijack a bus full of eclectic passengers. The Man with a Shotgun transposes the Hollywood western scenario with a remote logging camp as a lone wolf seeking his fiancée’s killers winds up hired as the local sheriff. While Tokyo Knights brings up the rear as the most unusual film of the lot, turning the story of a young...

Hailed as a pioneering piece of sci-fi television or dismissed as a monster-of-the-week rip-off of The Twilight Zone , depending on who you ask, The Outer Limits , which premiered on ABC in 1963 is still a veritable goldmine of outré ideas and low budget execution. Built around an hour-long format, the stories often focused on alien intelligences, sometimes benign and misunderstood, other times intent on mankind's destruction. While it doesn't have the cache of Rod Serling's creation, the series, which ran for two seasons, nevertheless lodged in an entire generation's subconscious with a string of episodes attempting things never before seen on network television, introducing some of the most outrageous costumed creations outside of a Roger Corman film along with a parade of soon-to-be high profile guest stars like Robert Culp, Martin Sheen, Leonard Nimoy and Bruce Dern. Kino Lorber's box set packages the entire first in high-definition for the very first tim...