Trash Menagerie

Dir. Andrea Bianchi Bimba’s in trouble. In a gothic castle, her family has conducted a seance to try to contact her dead mother, accidentally releasing the spirit of a dead relative that finds its way into Bimba’s body. As Bimba begins to act out in a series of escalating naughty behaviors, it’s up to Sister Sofia, the family’s resident nun-in-training to free Bimba from the curse and save her soul from eternal damnation. Maybe. You’d be forgiven for concluding that Malabimba is a horror film based on the above description. Centered around a young girl being possessed by a spirit in an old gothic castle, the premise is ripe for all the sorts of Exorcist style shenanigans that only Italian rip-off artists can deliver. But director Andrea Bianchi and writer Piero Regnoli have something more important on the mind; lots of sleazy sex. This is much more a psychosexual soap opera than it is a horror film. If you’re looking for blood and gore, or ghosts and ghouls and goblins, you’l...

Dir. Glenn Danzig Modern “so-bad-it’s-good” movies are hard to come by in 2019. The market is almost hilariously oversaturated with Direct-to-Streaming crap that’s either expectedly boring and inept, or so winking and ironically self-aware that it becomes painfully cringe inducing. Shielding one's eyes from the screen should be induced by horror or tension, not embarrassment by proxy. The point is that when filmmakers set out with the intention of making a movie that’s “so-bad-it’s good”, they are doomed to failure from the start because they are missing the fundamental point; sincerity and delusion. The joke is not that the filmmakers are playing dumb and trying to make the audience laugh, it’s that they’re not even in on the joke. People don’t like The Room , Birdemic , Troll 2 , Manos , Neil Breen, Ed Wood etc. because they give they represent misunderstood, independent, outsider art; it’s because they find it amusing that the visionaries behind these films set out with b...

aka Blue Passion Dir. Niko Mastorakis If Alfred Hitchcock and Brian DePalma teamed up to produce a film for a Pay-Per-View softcore channel, but only had a small fraction of their combined skill, and an even smaller fraction of their normal budget, the result might look something like In the Cold of the Night , a bonkers neon-noir thriller with more skin than sense. Our protagonist, Scott Bruin is living the coke-fueled, late 80’s/early 90’s American West Coast dream. He’s got a successful fashion photography studio/loft in L.A., swaths of conventionally attractive women ready to throw themselves at him, and a glowing waterbed on which to sleep with said women. The only trouble is he’s having recurring nightmares in which he murders the same woman in the same house by different means, causing him to question his own sanity and setting him on a search for this mysterious dream woman. In the Cold of the Night’s biggest issue is pacing. The running time is 113 minutes, generally...

aka Alien Prey, The Destructer Dir. Norman J. Warren What if the alien from Under the Skin walked out of that movie and into a Lifetime Original about a dysfunctional lesbian couple? And was also a handsome British man instead of Scarlett Johansson. Prey (aka Alien Prey), that’s what if. A carnivorous alien being named Kator lands in the English countryside on some sort of reconnaissance mission from his home planet and assumes the identity of an unfortunate lug called Anders. Very shortly after he is taken into the home of the naive, free-spirited Jessica and her domineering, jealousy-prone partner Josephine, who assume the man to be lost and injured. Jessica welcomes the prospect of a new man in her isolated life while Jo is immediately wary and hostile toward the stranger, because all lesbians either just a). need a good dicking, or b). hate all men entirely.  Soon Anders/Kator’s presence begins drive a wedge between the two lovers, as Jo becomes more and more angr...