Nucleus Films: Video Nasties - The Definitive Guides

[knives]

That one plus Bay of Blood, Blood Feast, Don't look in the Basement (lots of don't based titles), The Funhouse, House on the Edge of the Park, Inferno, Last House on the Left, Nightmares in a Deranged Mind, and Visiting Hours. I've managed significantly more from the almost Nasties list though. Maybe we should use this thread to also list the best editions of some of the home video releases. Like I was wondering if this release of Night of the Bloody Apes is any good?

[manicsounds]

Video Nasties part 2, coming July 14th, the 30th anniversary of the recording act

[domino harvey]

Awesome, very exciting news. The first volume was highly entertaining and informative and quite a help for my work with the Horror List

[salad]

Video Nasties part 2, coming July 14th, the 30th anniversary of the recording act

Huh. I just discovered days ago that Part 1 is finally getting a US release in a few days, alongside standalone special edition DVDs of a couple of the nazisploitation movies.

Since Father's Day is nearly upon us:

Bundles of all three (VIDEO NASTIES — THE ULTIMATE COLLECTION, GESTAPO’S LAST ORGY & DEPORTED WOMEN OF THE SS) pur­chased through the Severin Films store will come with a free VHS replica of the GESTAPO’S LAST ORGY video nasty orig­i­nal release as well as a post­card of the orig­i­nal art designed by noto­ri­ous nasty cover artist Graham Humphreys signed by Jake West and Marc Morris.

I'm looking forward to Part 2 even though I don't think I've yet watched the "main feature" of the Part 1 set.

[colinr0380]

Very interesting, although this could potentially be showcasing a much more mainstream set of films than the earlier one. But there should be some potential for surprises along the way! It looks as if this set of trailers is going to answer manicsounds' question from a while back about where The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was, as it will probably be on this set, along with the missing titles from the See No Evil book Cain's Cutthroats and Xtro (which is definitely there as Alan Jones talks about it in that trailer). I would bet that we are probably going to see the Shogun Assassin trailer (with its wonderfully cheesy music) too.

The documentary sounds great too, sounding as if it is going to cover 1985-1998 or so(?), which would bring in a lot of the more modern moral panic scares such as the Hungerford shooting being linked with Rambo, the James Bulger incident with Child's Play 3, the Daily Mail versus Crash (the Lolita, then Kissed) situation, the knee-jerk attempt to tighten up classification in 1993 only being staved off by the idea that Schindler's List would also potentially get banned under the too tight rules(!), the imitable object violence period (i.e. the Home Alone films, the string of sausages used as nunchakus cut from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the fate of Boy Meets Girl which tackled the BBFC restrictions against using household implements violently head on), the mid-90s situation when issues around Natural Born Killers, Reservoir Dogs, Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction tested the BBFC, and so on.

[kindaikun]

I was thinking of ordering both volumes together and I was just wondering if anyone could tell me what the difference is between the Limited Edition and the Standard Edition of the first one. Is it worth trying to track down one of the limited edition copies?
Cheers.

[Adam X]

There's not really much difference.
The Ltd edition has as extra, a limitation number (of x000) on the back cover, and 5 postcards w/ video cover art for 5 'video nasties' (Well, 6 cards if you include the one with an ad for the Marc Morris co-authored book on the same subject matter - thereby extending one of my main dislikes of the original doco to its packaging.).

[JamesF]

I saw the premiere of the second documentary last week at the Prince Charles Cinema in London, and while it's somewhat bloated (with a tendency to repeat itself; 10-15 minutes could easily have been cut out) and not nearly as essential as the first volume, it's still very insightful and often hilarious. It doesn't cover every moral panic in its 15-year span - the controversy over Crash goes unspoken, for example - but paints a vivid a picture of James Ferman's heavy-handed, often tyrannical reign post-VRA that's well worth remembering even in these more "relaxed" times. (I was especially pleased that the Q&A afterwards briefly alluded to a recent bit of controversy I've been dealing with at Soda.) The second half discusses the exploits of dedicated horror fans importing uncut versions from overseas pre-Internet, which often resulted in police raids on their own homes.

[kindaikun]

There's not really much difference.

Thanks, I think I'll stick with the standard edition then.
Looking forward to seeing both of them.

[manicsounds]

Digital Fix on part 2, they give it a 9 out of 10

[domino harvey]

No idea what allotment Amazon's gotten of this "Limited to 6666" DVD set, but my number was 5777, which is kind of cool even though I don't care about it any more than is necessary for me to finish this sentence. Oh, and my set came with the same postcards as those mentioned in the review, so I'm assuming they're not randomly distributed.

I've made my way through the 97 minute doc and the first two hours of the second disc (which clocks in at just under five hours total-- and there's still a third disc after that!). It was an interesting doc, focusing quite a bit on the censorship process in Britain and how the improbable furor over Childs Play 3 led to some politicians suggesting with a straight face that any adult films rated "18" should be banned from home video (including Schindler's List and the Godfather). The doc makes a pretty strong case that the censoring of titles was pretty arbitrary to the whims of the head, and one of the most eye-opening moments of the doc is when the required cuts for Rambo III are supered over the image and quickly scrolled past and we can see one of the cuts made was for a scene where Rambo just threw his knife into the ground! Fun facts were imparted, like how the head of the censorship board made new censors sit through I Spit On Your Grave to get a feel for what they'd be doing, or the description from one of the more liberal censors on a very unchill reception to Fulci's the New York Ripper (everyone just started crying!) eventually resulted in the film being banned and the film print being escorted out of Britain by police!

But, really, as with the previous set, the real meat here are the trailer introductions, which so far are just as good (and maybe a little better) than the previous round's. Lots of great background and general enthusiasm and insight so far. Kim Newman in particular has some hilarious comments about the villains of one of the films ("Even if the heroine hadn't killed them, they're so stupid they probably would only have lasted twenty minutes after the film ended."), although I kept getting distracted at the fact that he has a vintage Tenebrae poster just hanging from his wall with thumbtacks!

[MarcM]

Thanks for the feedback Domino. It's been a very well received set, making all our hard work worthwhile. :)

[domino harvey]

It's definitely a venture I'd love to see more of-- maybe y'all could do an annotated guide to 80s slashers or something, because I want to see more of these kind of sets and now (presumably) you've exhausted the possibilities!

I did finally finish making my way through the just under ten hours of intros and trailers after spreading the wealth over a couple of days (though these discs are extremely easy to binge watch). There are more films I've seen before than in the last one, and I mostly agreed with the assessments offered though I have far more affection for Home Sweet Home than Kim Newman, a film which at the very least is anything but the generic product he writes it off as being. But that's nitpicking, really, in a wide swath program like this. My list of titles to check out (sometimes in spite of the advice of the commentators) is not particularly long, but there are definitely some apparent gems I'd never heard of. As far as the trailers go, there's one here that is absolutely fantastic-- one of the best I've ever seen, really-- for a Godfather-inspired Sicilian mob flick called Massacre Mafia Style. We follow two mobsters as they walk through a white-collar office building and as the Steadicam follows behind them through the corridors they shoot up dozens of innocents while a jaunty lounge lizard song plays over all the gory action. I'm pretty jaded with operatic violence at this point, but this trailer is surprisingly effective, even though I know there's no possible way the film could ever live up to it.

[Adam X]

Massacre Mafia Style has long been a forthcoming title from Grindhouse Releasing, though they have been suggestively teasing lately that it and its even more enjoyable looking sequel Gone With the Pope, are finally coming sometime soon amongst their handful of HD reissues.

[manicsounds]

Yup, love Kim Newman's comments. Hilarious at times. I'm finished with disc 2, now on to disc 3.

[colinr0380]

I realise that this is a post and a half, so I'll split the different sections with a short line to help people move from one section to the other. Think of the line as sort of chapter headings!

domino, the Rambo cuts were very amusing. I think during that era there was some kind of unofficial policy on the 'pornographic fetishisation of violence' in which just playing around with weapons in an overly-causal or threatening manner would be as bad as actually attacking someone with them! One weapon that this documentary does not mention is butterfly knives, which the BBFC apparently hated as they could be concealed and then flicked out and played with in a 'cool' manner. Face/Off had quite a number of brief edits to scenes of Travolta showing his daughter how to use one properly. And one of the last films to be edited for this kind of 'pornographically violent' material was The Matrix in which a number of seconds of spent catridges tinkling to the ground or falling through the air in slow motion were removed. Though The Matrix is now uncut.

______

The Draconian Days documentary was very interesting and more than anything helped capture the tone of the James Ferman BBFC regime at the time. I liked that the interviewees are a mix of familar faces from the previous film and new personalities (something which also extends to the introductions), and think that Carol Topolski's candid insider perspective on the BBFC is the highlight of the film. Though I would also highly recommend anyone interested in the history of the BBFC to also check out the 1995 BBC documentary Empire of the Censors which is currently up on YouTube in two parts. Much of the Ferman material from this documentary appears sourced from the BBC one.

I also agree with domino that Topolski's description of the screening of New York Ripper is very powerful, and an understandable reaction to being confronted with that film, but then from a counter-perspective against censorship I would argue that a film about a misogynist slashing-up women in a sexualised manner perhaps should succeed in provoking those reactions of absolute disgust and horror. I see New York Ripper in a similar way to the Urotsukidoji films in that they have pretty extensive scenes of obvious revelling in the sexualised degradation of women, yet they are also situated within a wider context of a completely nihilistic, utterly depraved absolute cesspool of an uncaring, disinterested, amoral society (in Urotsukidoji post-demon invaded destroyed Tokyo as society devolves into an endless rondelay of ironised demonic violations; in New York Ripper the scuzziest version of New York that you could imagine) in which everyone is being exploited. That sexualised torture scene itself involves the killer calling up the police inspector 'hero' to let him listen in impotently as his prostitute girlfriend, who he has been having an affair with, gets ripped apart. The female character in that scene was at least in her third cycle of being used and abused by men for her body, incluidng our 'hero', before she gets to that horrific end, the murder itself done not because the killer was excited by her in particular but by her proxy value to get at the inspector himself. The entire point of that scene is that she is treated both in a sexualised manner and as nothing in and of herself, which is an extremely difficult thing for any audience to wrestle with, but I do think it is a little more nuanced than just Fulci giving the audience the material portraying violent violation that they want. Although it is also an exploitation film, so it does do that too, and that is something that always has to be acknowledged as well!

______

There were a few things that I would throw into the documentary: during the "Fuck for 15" section in which Topolski talks about the way that just one instance of the word would immediately cause that classification, there did seem to be an amusing unofficial trend of anime companies during the early 90s releasing their English language dubs full of bad language (even if it would not have been present in the original language track) in what was called "fifteening". This seemed to be done in order to ensure that tamer or borderline material would get the higher 15 or 18 adult ratings, presumably in order both to appeal to their audience wanting Urotsukidoji-level extreme animations, and also perhaps to bolster a self image that anime was 'not a kid's medium' despite being animated. Really until Miyazaki's films started getting proper UK distribution in the early 2000s, most anime companies seemed to be fighting that anti-Disney stance by going after mostly the action and horror titles and then if they were tamer examples trying to artificially inflate the BBFC logo through techniques such as the English language dubbed track. Now we are living in a much better time for anime in general, in which the horrors (albeit not the most extreme examples!) and action titles can exist alongside the Miyazakis and more gentle dramatic series such as Kids On The Slope or Waiting In The Summer, which would likely not have been seen to have much commercial potential for the narrowly defined demographic a couple of decades ago.

______

It was great to see Nigel Wingrove interviewed here but, while it gets alluded to a few times, it never really gets officially mentioned that he ran Redemption Video. Someone really needed to interrogate him about his naughty nun obsession, as Redemption Video's catalogue was full of all the 70s nunsploitation titles! From The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine and Flavia The Heretic to Behind Convent Walls! Maybe it was a way to keep needling the BBFC by submitting naughty nuns to them in the wake of the rejection of Visions of Ecstasy? I think more likely it was just a particular subgenre that Wingrove liked!

This documentary doesn't get into it too much, although it alludes to it, but there was apparently a culture in the BBFC that if you did not provoke them you could often sail through the classification process relatively unscathed. But if you continually provoked them, as it seems that Wingrove did with the kind of titles that Redemption Video were putting up for classificiation, then they would get heavier cuts and even outright rejection. I still have the Shivers horror magazine from 1996 which did a four issue feature running through all of Redemption's video titles up to that point and detailing all of the cuts made to them, which would range from minor (three seconds from Cannibal Man) to major (three or four minutes from Requiem For A Vampire and The Living Dead Girl). I didn't really follow Redemption into the porn titles that they released that get discussed in the documentary (in the early 2000s I was moving much more into beginning to import films from the US and getting into Criterion. My first Criterion being Flesh For Frankenstein! So horror fandom can lead you into whole new worlds of foreign language and arthouse cinema!), and wasn't particularly interested in their 70s sex film line under the Jezebel label, but do remember that one of the major events in 1996-7 was Redemption having Jess Franco's women in prison movie Bare Behind Bars totally rejected by the BBFC, and then appealing that decision. I don't think it worked but they were at least trying.

On that note, another lesser known company that might be worth bringing up is the sad fate of the Exploited label, run by David Gregory, which had the unfortunate timing of turning up in the late 90s and being successful in the VHS arena just when everything was shifting over to DVD. Their label had very ambitious plans and indeed released only slightly edited versions of Deranged, and completely unedited and correct aspect ratio versions of Bill Lustig's Vigilante and Bob Clark's Dead of Night and Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (the latter even including DVD-style interviews with Alan Ormsby after the feature), editions that I still treasure to this day. They also tried moving into documentaries with The Killing of America and Hated: GG Allin And The Murder Junkies. However they had major troubles with Ferman and the BBFC when they wanted to put out The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and were told that it was impossible and had their plans completely rejected. Even contextualising documentaries to help the release were rejected. And then a year or so later, Ferman was gone and another company got The Texas Chain Saw Massacre through the BBFC completely unedited for DVD release, which completely nullified their plans. So it seems that David Gregory's Exploited label got unfairly messed up by the Ferman issues and the changing policies of the BBFC.

Anyway, back to Redemption. Lest you think that Redemption Video just put out 70s nunsploitation and gory horrors, they also released Witchfinder General (albeit with a couple of scenes in an alternate 'topless' European version), Fritz Lang's M, Victor Sjostrom's The Phantom Carriage and The Monastry of Sendormir, White Zombie and Haxan. Not to mention Clive Barker's avant garde shorts to celebrate their 50th release (yes, they numbered their VHS tapes, Criterion-style!) So there were a few genuine novelties and older classics together with the 70s exploitation. That was actually something that their video covers, often composed photographic shots of models doing something vaguely related to the movies in question, helped to disguise. All the covers were done in Redemption's house-style, so it would only be a quick check of the stills and text on the back that would distinguish a 20s Sjostrom from a 70s Jean Rollin!

I wasn't cool enough, or hip to that world enough, for the fanzine culture that gets described later in the film but in the mid to late 90s living in the middle of nowhere (where I still am!) I began buying mail order videos through companies who would send printed catalogues of available titles out through the post in a similar way described. I credit an interest in wanting to see weird and strange horror films that would never show up in my local store or on television as my gateway into the wider world of cinema as a whole. I was familiar with a lot of the arthouse titles from television screenings, but to see evocative titles such as Orphee jostling against titles such as Killer Nun, as the Redemption catalogue jostled against labels releasing blacksploitation or anime or Hong Kong action, or the BFIs and Artificial Eye's releases, there seemed like a whole range of diverse cinema out there to dip into an explore.

So I have to credit Wingrove's Redemption Video label (along with the book Immoral Tales by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs) for fostering my interest in cinema whilst simultaneously catering to my horror needs! Even if I wasn't particularly intested in too many of the nunsploitation titles outside of a couple of the major titles!

______

Back to the documentary - I'm ambivalent to Ferman's tenure. He obviously was far too controlling and autocratic in his censorship, his dealings within the Board, and with the little personal foibles that seemed to creep into his decision making process (there is a great, though possibly apocryphal, story I think in the BBC Empire of the Censors documentary from 1995 about Ferman, whipped up into a pro-active position regarding sexual violence in film, cutting the rape scene from the original Emmanuelle film and then describing himself to the female examiner recounting the story that he was "more Feminist than the Feminists". Rosemary Stark, the lady recounting this story said, "Sorry James, you don't get to be!", but it is unclear whether she told Ferman this at the time or could just finally express herself in the documentary). Yet those kind of frustrating qualities are probably also what helped him to bull-headedly stand up strong against all of the whipped up media panics over Hungerford, James Bulger, the David Alton proposed amendment, the Crash situation, and so on. It takes someone paternalistically and/or moralistically convinced that they know best to be able to shout down other people who similarly think they know best!

But his time does show in no uncertain terms the need for continual rotation in these kinds of high level positions, to stop personal taste or ingrained methods of thinking from becoming too ingrained within an organisation (sadly though we live in a world in which the high level positions in most organisations mostly stay the same whilst the lower level staff are continually rotated, which seems topsy-turvy management practice to me!)

The documentary also doesn't mention that huge grenade that Ferman lobbed into the censorship debate as he retired, as he gave an interview to the tabloid press in which he said that in his opinion he was too lenient on the material he passed relating to the drug imagery in Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting. Something which annoyed both pro and anti-censorship sides of the debate as the horse had long bolted from that particular stable by that time, as both had been shown on UK television too!

It is also a bit of a shame that the documentary doesn't get into the Crash tabloid furore, or the issue with the BBFC sitting on a video release of Natural Born Killers for years. Although the fuzzy footage of the table of tapes in the bootleg video section of the documentary actually comes from a TV piece in which an investigative reporter wired up a 14 year old boy with a camera and microphone and got him to go up to these street vendors in bootlegs and ask for Natural Born Killers, then unreleased in the UK! There is a great response from one vendor that "I'll put that in a bag for you, as you're not 18 are you?" to the boy! I hope nothing bad happened to that guy after he was caught on camera saying that!

______

I also want to go into a little more detail on the briefly mentioned BBFC re-edits to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. This is well documented on the current DVD and in the BBC Empire of the Censors documentary, but it really was a jaw-dropping example of a censorship board getting involved in manipulating the entire meaning of a scene consciously rather than inadvertently by snipping a few frames here and there. Here is the section from Empire of the Censors describing the manipulations to that scene, manipulations which ironically turn the scene from uncomfortably confonting the viewer with their own participation in the action to simply viewing the material in a more distanced manner. In a problematic way it is trying to make the murders play more untroublingly!

______

I was very pleasantly surprised by the number of films in the Section 3 list that I'd just never heard of at all. I did a quick count and I think I was introduced to 30 films by this set. Most of which look terrible, but it is good to know that they exist! I'd certainly quite like to see The Aftermath, The Black Room, The Child, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, The Last Hunter (I'm glad there is another film starring David Warbeck and Tisa Farrow out there!), Suicide Cult (though it looks a mess) and Street Killers. Maybe The Toy Box and The Killing Hour too. Though it looks from that trailer that The Killing Hour is just an Eyes of Laura Mars copy, I like the implication from the trailer that the killer keeps handcuffing people to deadly contraptions!

And maybe Grievous Bodily Harm as, while it looks pretty awful shot-on-video stuff, it got a glowing write up in the recent book Offbeat: British Cinema's Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems, which made a good case for it. If nothing else it shows shows off those wonderfully blunt Mancunian women, the terrible chat up lines, and that kicking someone in the bollocks over and over is a perfectly legitimate fighting tactic!

I think I could live without needing to see those slasher films like Final Exam though (though I agree with domino on Home Sweet Home, if only for the scene in which somebody fixing their car has the killer exuberantly do a powerslam move on the open hood whilst laughing insanely!). While I love this compliation disc and like domino I hope that we get more (maybe just an exploration of the enticing obscurities in the video tape collection in the background? Or an anime focused one?) we are really getting into the films here which are either so mainstream or so uninteresting I couldn't really recommend them even as curiosities. Even just the trailer for Prom Night almost sent me to sleep! And I totally agree with Stephen Thrower on Oasis of the Zombies - it is oddly compelling while being utterly soporific. The Rollin directed Eurocine companion piece Zombie Lake is also very slow and inept (watch the two minute long version instead!) and it is a shame that Rollin's worst film is his only representative here.

But there are also some truly great films peppered through the list. We really need Criterion or somebody to get The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (and The Devil's Playground) out, and Thrower's disecction of Rabid is one of the best examinations of that film I've encountered.

And I still sneakily suspect that Inseminoid is the true sequel-prequel to Ridley Scott's Prometheus!

Anyway I'm off to sacrifice some garden furniture to the great God Gazebo in the hopes that he will hear my prayer and release Hugo The Hippo on Blu-ray!

[GaryC]

I also agree with domino that Topolski's description of the screening of New York Ripper is very powerful, and an understandable reaction to being confronted with that film, but then from a counter-perspective against censorship I would argue that a film about a misogynist slashing-up women in a sexualised manner perhaps should succeed in provoking those reactions of absolute disgust and horror. I see New York Ripper in a similar way to the Urotsukidoji films in that they have pretty extensive scenes of obvious revelling in the sexualised degradation of women, yet they are also situated within a wider context of a completely nihilistic, utterly depraved absolute cesspool of an uncaring, disinterested, amoral society (in Urotsukidoji post-demon invaded destroyed Tokyo as society devolves into an endless rondelay of ironised demonic violations; in New York Ripper the scuzziest version of New York that you could imagine) in which everyone is being exploited. That sexualised torture scene itself involves the killer calling up the police inspector 'hero' to let him listen in impotently as his prostitute girlfriend, who he has been having an affair with, gets ripped apart. The female character in that scene was at least in her third cycle of being used and abused by men for her body, incluidng our 'hero', before she gets to that horrific end, the murder itself done not because the killer was excited by her in particular but by her proxy value to get at the inspector himself. The entire point of that scene is that she is treated both in a sexualised manner and as nothing in and of herself, which is an extremely difficult thing for any audience to wrestle with, but I do think it is a little more nuanced than just Fulci giving the audience the material portraying violent violation that they want. Although it is also an exploitation film, so it does do that too, and that is something that always has to be acknowledged as well!

It's worth mentioning in passing that one of the contributors to Discs 2 and 3, Karen Oughton, listed New York Ripper in her Top Ten for the 2012 Sight & Sound poll. Her full list is here.

[domino harvey]

I think I could live without needing to see those slasher films like Final Exam though (though I agree with domino on Home Sweet Home, if only for the scene in which somebody fixing their car has the killer exuberantly do a powerslam move on the open hood whilst laughing insanely!).

That scene in Home Sweet Home is still the most hilarious death scene in any slasher, especially thanks to its misdirection, and it's so good that one of the Friday the 13th movies stole it outright (I think it's the sixth but who can be sure, they all run together). And Kim Newman is 100% right on the dull beyond reason Final Exam, which inexplicably just came out on Blu-ray. The Horror market on home video truly has no bottom!

[domino harvey]

I'd certainly quite like to see The Aftemath, The Black Room, The Child, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, The Last Hunter (I'm glad there is another film starring David Warbeck and Tisa Farrow out there!), Suicide Cult (though it looks a mess) and Street Killers. Maybe The Toy Box and The Killing Hour too.

I have unfortunately not seen any of those, so I can't steer you one way or the other, but here's my own To-Watch List from the 80+ intros: Blood Song / Dream Slayer, the Child, the Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, the Executioner / Massacre Mafia Style, the Killing Hour, New Adventures of Snow White / Grimm's Fairy Tales For Adults, Nightmare City, Pigs, Terror, Zombi Holocaust, Zombie Lake. I've already picked up Nightmare City and the Killing Hour, so it's too late to warn me in advance on those, but if anyone has words to say in favor or against any of the others, I'd love to hear 'em.

[colinr0380]

Terror is the best of the Norman J. Warren films trailered on this set. It's surprisingly gory and a bit funny too! While it is not on the set Satan's Slave is also worth checking out.

I'm not a big fan of Prey - you'd think that a plot about a cannibalistic alien ending up lodging with a bickering stereotypically butch and femme lesbian couple in a country house, both trying to use him to make the other jealous, would provide some fun dramatic tension, but it is pretty inert. I loved the description of Phantasm being about characters who actually like each other and being around each other. Prey is an example of a film where everyone is at each other's throats all of the time, and seems to so detest one another that the cannibal alien ends up being the most sympathetic character! It's an anti-Under The Skin!

Nightmare City is utterly nutty. My contention is that Robert Rodriguez clandestinely remade it (or at least remade that sense of total incoherent craziness characterised by Italian horror) as Planet Terror! Don't just watch out for an utterly baffled Mel Ferrer (in an authoritarian role that somehow always reminds me of Burt Lancaster's utterly pointless control room role in The Cassandra Crossing every time I see the film!), but also try and catch Francisco Rabal (Viridiana, Nazarin, the jilted boyfriend from the opening sequence of L'Eclisse) in there as some sort of General too!

[domino harvey]

Well, I loved Planet Terror (which for some reason I forgot to vote for in the Horror list, even though it's pretty high up there for me), so that bodes well for Nightmare City. I feel like Mel Ferrer was in a lot of these trailers even if he wasn't!

[Mr Sausage]

Nightmare City manages one virtue that eludes even many of the best Italian horrors: forward momentum. This movie doesn't stop for anything, logic especially. It's one baffling creative decision after another at a breakneck pace. Probably the only time I've ever had fun watching an Umberto Lenzi film. It is a total piece of shit, tho'.

[colinr0380]

The mention of Blood Song/Dream Slayer reminded me that it also sounded interesting too. I don't know if it would bear comparison but the description and trailer involving a psychic link between killer and hero made me think of that Dean Koontz novel Hideaway that got made into a film with Jeff Goldblum and Alicia Silverstone. It is weird that there might be a sub-subgenre of 'psychic link with killer' films which presumably all get inspired from the success of Eyes of Laura Mars. I wonder if they have their even earlier wellspring in the possessed transplanted body part subgenre of Mad Love and The Beast With Five Fingers?

[domino harvey]

The Ally Sheedy-starring Fear is also about a psychic who can see the murders a serial killer commits, and even though I have a strong anti-psychic bias, it's a pretty great little thriller than I managed to get absolutely no one else to watch during the Horror List

[GaryC]

The Ally Sheedy-starring Fear is also about a psychic who can see the murders a serial killer commits, and even though I have a strong anti-psychic bias, it's a pretty great little thriller than I managed to get absolutely no one else to watch during the Horror List

That played the London Film Festival (which is when I saw it). I remember enjoying it.