pumaye

Well, I'm too big a fan of slasher movies to be a fair judge of this one: is totally derivative, without any real new ideas, but it is also very well photographed, with a really good cast for a B-movie, with a lot of blonds really nice to look at - and this is always a big plus in my criteria for a judgment - and enough action and good lines to keep watching it till the end. It is a total rehash of Scream, with a touch of Cut and of the Italian giallo Deliria (aka Stagefright): all those movies were better - far better - than this one, but Scared is still a movie that you want to watch if you are a slasher movies fan. The only negative mark that you may note is that there are no nudities at all: come on guys!! This is a slasher!! We wants blood and T&A and in both these departments this movie sucks! Be aware of this and if you don't care you'll find that watching Scared is not a total waste of time.

Gaining from five more years of CGI technology advancements, this movie is far superior than the original Dungeons & Dragons, even if still lacking the blockbuster status. The story is a good one, for D&D standards, and most of the peculiarities of the game are well inserted in the plot. From the choosing of the five heroes to return the orb, each with his/her skills put in evidence during the course of the story, to the villains - a lich, a necromancer, an undead skeletal dragon - to the use of D&D deities - Obadai. All the choices in the movies are well done, the casting is very good, with a good mix of races and male and female heroes, and the total effect is a good cinematic adventure, better than a more publicized effort like the infamous Earthsea.

This is an excellent translation to the big screen of the very first Italian erotic comic book, dated 1966, by Sandro Angiolini, narrating the adventures of the young and beautiful Isabella and her path of vengeance against the evil Baron who killed her parents a few years before. The movie is a very good mix of the elements that made the success for this kind of adult comics books, part eroticism - often with sadistic overtones - part fighting, part torture, part laughs. The movie is a good rendition of the comic books feeling, with several nude and erotic scenes - it could be considered almost hardcore in 1969 !! - but for today standard is almost tame, but for the sadistic scenes.

This is a very funny, often witty, always crude parody of the breaking Quentin Tarantino duology Kill Bill. Debbie Rochon is perfectly cast as Mulva, the woman in search of vengeance after a 5 years coma inducted by a gang of special characters, lead by the eponymous Teen Ape. The movie is of course a really low budget one, but it is full of clever ideas on how to make a good satire of such a couple of blockbuster movies and repeat several sequences made famous by Tarantino and his wonderful cast. Here we have a mostly amatorial cast, but Debbie Rochon is a really fun, fine, beautiful actress, able to tie you to the screen even without baring her really big assets, if you know what i mean. And for her fans out there - and we are many scores, perhaps hundreds of thousands - seeing her in this new part of her career - and she has a full schedule as you can see here on IMDb - is still good and i'm really very happy for her demonstrating that a good actress may emerge even without resorting to her last weapon: baring her breasts (even if a part of me is crying saying this words... o my Debbie...) All in all, a really good effort, short and still full of surprises. Thanks to all the people involved in the project for a good hour of fun.

Loosely based on the Italian comic book character Isabella - the first of the long series of erotic comic books that were published in Italy during the late Sixties - this is a so-so adventure-comedy, full of naked women, showing mostly their breasts, and full of clownish fight scenes, bad jokes and bad music. Zenabel discovers that she is the heiress of a duke killed by the evil Don Alonso and so she forms an army of women - a mix between Brancaleone's army and the women from Aristoteles comedy Lisistrata - to claim back her title. She will get what she wants, gaining also the love of a brigand in the meantime. Almost potable, for what is worth, and a good rendition of the original comic book on which it is based.

This is a non-typical example of a slasher movie from the Golden era of that genre, with a great cast of wanna-be stars (from Darryl Hannah and Rachel Ward to Adrian Zmed and especially Joe Pantoliano, almost impossible to recognize), a usual wooden scenario, a couple of interesting scenes - like the night attack against the bus by the prowler of this movie that will be re-enacted in Jeepers Creepers 2 and the very good finale - but also with several choices that are unusual in a movie of this kind. For example, there are no female nudities, only a sex scene - very tame for today standards and even for the slashers' standards - and way too many survivor at the end. For the rest, the movie is a little slow paced and definitely too dark for a great slasher, but it is still a must for the fans.

This is an embarrassing nth rehashing of the same plot in the nth bunch-of-idiots-young-adult-in-peril-because-they-are-idiots slasher movie of the early millennium: this time we get the story of a crazy miner who comes back from the dead to retake his gold from the hands of the usurpers. We have almost no thrills, almost no bare flesh (even if the girls are really hot only one of them goes showing her bare ass for a few seconds), the usual bunch of sunset boulevard horror stars in cameo roles (this time Karen Black, Richard Lynch, John Philip Law, Jeff Conaway), lots of fake blood, only the crazy miner resurrected as a zombie is cool enough to leave you stuck - well not exactly - to the screen till the end. Don't waste your time if you are not a completist.

One of the worst movies I've seen in the past few years, this is a sort of Secret Window gone bad (and Secret Window was definitely not so good, indeed!!). De Niro, who is collecting infamous roles in this era after the really bad Godsend, is a schizophrenic father of a sweet child (Dakota Fanning, the only good actress in this movie), who after the "suicide" of his wife is forced to grow up the child by himself. What follows is a very mediocre thriller, that is resolved at two third of the total time of the movie, so the last third is inane (with an ending that is called home way too long before). And, yes there is also Famke Jensen, in a minor - if decisive - role. She is still a beauty but doesn't save the movie - only the little girl.

This update of the classical Craven's movie The Hills have eyes emerges from the mass of the direct to video slasher road movies of the last few years for a very good use of colors in its cinematography. This is the only redeeming feature for a movie with a young cast that could be used with more reasons in a Playboy soft core movie (and one of the actress has indeed been in a Palyboy video), it is totally boring as a real horror movie, with ridiculous special effects (with running blood that is really colored water), almost no new ideas in the use of the killers or in the killings their-selves and an hysterical cast. Anyway, it could be enjoyed by the fans of the genre because the production values are really very high for such a blame.

A very creative independent movie from our friends the British, this direct to video experience is one of the most fascinating one I've seen in all of my life (and believe me, I've seen thousands of movies - more than 1.000 in the last eight years for sure): this is the charming story of a peculiar serial killer that videotape his victims and than put all of them on a video, to be exact over a video called "The last horror movie" - a by-the numbers American slasher movie - and put it into the shelves of a video rental store to follow the costumers who rent the movie till their home and then kill them after asking why they saw such a thing to the end. Full of the typical British humor that is almost always away from similar American productions - like the too often cited Henry portrait of a serial killer, that for me is inferior to this one - this one is a must.

A feeble, terrible try to renew the Italian giallo tradition, this one is one of the worst Italian movies of all time. The plot is really poor, the acting is abysmal, the death scenes are repetitive and not particularly well executed, the sex scenes are cut before they really start. It features a couple of old Italian giallo stars from the Seventies, like Florinda Bolkan (Non si sevizia un paperino, A lizard with woman skin, both by the great Fulci), and Eva Robbins (Dario Argento's Tenebre), also a cameo by Franco Nero (giornata nera per l'ariete, and the immortal character of the spaghetti-western genre, Django). It is not worth your time

This ludicrous piece of Italian early erotic cinema is a perfect exemplar of the movies of those years, with a naive will to be erotic without the dare to be really erotic. So this sort of historical drama around the sexual exploits of the young Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alexander Borgia and sister of the infamous Cesare Borgia - the hero of Italian historian Niccolò Machiavelli, his ideal prince in the homonymous political pamphlet - is more a comic book story than a real movie - and in fact inspired a sexy comic book the following year - a sort of mixture of secret sexual intrigues between the young and savage mid-European blonde beauty Olinka Berova - Ayesha in Hammer's Vengeance of She - and the not so young but equally reckless leader of the rebellion against the Pope Gianni Garko, and several sword fights and forest ambushes that seem to be taken by force from Robin Hood. Anyway, the movie is so bad that could be almost a cult for people who love such strange productions. For those only it could be worth a look.

This Spanish early Seventies movie is really boring in his depiction of several murders made by a really strange vampire (for most of the movie he is invisible and he doesn't bite the neck or other bodily parts of his victims - both male and female - but he strangles them, uh?), a German baron presumed dead in 1896.

It comes to his debauched blond heir to kill him and permit him to rest in peace.

Lot of assorted female nudities, almost always unrelated to sexual acts - the ladies are killed or assaulted during their baths - but very mitigated for today standards - but probably I've seen an edited version, because it was on Satellite TV -, so in the end the movie is totally dull, with a boring plot, bad acting, bad effects, no blood at all - and this is really strange for a so called vampire movie.

This is another stunning, wonderful movie, full of exciting, exhilarating scenes, but with too much drama for its own good. Apart from the plot, too much Chinese for my tastes, the visuals are fantastic, probably a little worse than Hero, but still great for our occidental eyes. This time the emphasis is more on the sound than on the colors, as the lead female character is a blind one and still is able to fight better than any mortal may hope. And the quality of the battle scenes, aided by too generous CGI effects, especially the one inside the bamboo forest and the last one during a snowstorm, are as great as the better ones from Hero. To see at all cost

Z-movie of almost no-budget level, with the late Lana Clarkson as the beautiful heir to a kingdom that is forced to fight against an evil usurper and his spoiled child. Echoes of Robin Hood in female form for most of the movie - even if the subtitle parodies the second Star Wars movies. If you are in this movie for Clarkson's breast your are in for good surprises, as the actress shows her best asset several times - they are real, boys, no silicone in them! It is really a poor movie, with a modest plot, terrible acting, terrible stunts, cheap to say the least special effects, horrible fight scenes, but it is better than the first episode of this duology - in name only, as the two Barbarian Queen movies share only the lead actress and no other part.

Very poor late entry in the sword and sorcery genre, a late clone to the Conan clones of the early and mid-Eighties, with a couple of laughable twists (like the hero always shifting eye-patch... come on, guys, that could be fun with Igor in Young Frankenstein, but here is totally silly), several beautiful women (especially one of my favorite, Lisa Toothman, that here, alas, doesn't show the world her big assets, one of the wonder of the world, indeed), a really derivative plot, the worst swords-fights I have ever seen. This is so terrible that you have to see it before to put it in the back shelves of your heroic fantasy collection (and start searching for the much better Deathstalker series).

This is another of the dozens of xeroxed bad italian comedies of the period, full of recycled gags, good actors (like Banfi) wasted in sterotypical roles that limited their career to bottom of the barrel flicks till recently (or forever). The sex object of the movie was the blonde Anna Maria Rizzoli, starlet of such comedies for a really short period (about 5 years), then disappeared from the scenes. She gives the fans several moments of joy with her very sensous body, frequently naked (the final scene in the swimming pool is very good under this perspective), but she is not a good actress and we all can see it. All in all, almost a waste of time, to watch fast-forwarding to the good scenes (no more than a couple).

Terrible, terrible, terrible movie, that came out during the outburst of Conan clones of the early to mid Eighties, based on a no-plot or always the same plot situation and plethora of good looking women, possibly naked and often raped, that eventually get their revenge and won the day. This one shows the beauty that was the late Lana Clarkson, already cast in several other movies of that kind, as a very unfortunate bride to be that saw her village devastated the day of her marriage and her sister and spouse ransomed by savages. She will have them back in the end, but after several efforts. Stupid, bad acted, with not enough nudes to really satisfy a voyeur and too much cartoonish violence. It is without a single redeeming quality. Avoid at all cost

One of the worst, but probably more typical example of the late

Italian erotic comedies of the Seventies, which anticipate the

American college and T&A movies of the early Eighties. This one stars the beautiful Edwige Fenech - probably the better

actress and the most beautiful of the several starlets that have

made this kind of movies in the period - as a music teacher, a

piano player, involved in a farsesque relationship with an aspiring

mayor of an Italian small town, Renzo Montagnani (a very good

actor that was wasted in such abysmal roles), but who becomes

the attraction of the house she has rent, before falling for the young

son of the housekeeper. Fenech shows her breasts several times and she is involved even

in a couple of showers (a requisite of this kind of movies), but the

story sucks from start to finish and the jokes are so bad that they

hurt. For Fenech's fans only (and they will get eyeful of their favorite)

With this movie the gorgeous brunette Edwige Fenech - here at the

top of her physical charme - passes from the Giallo movies that

started her career between the late Sixties and early Seventies -

several of whom are indeed very good and worth seeing - to the

cheap erotic pharce that delineate the better part of her career

before her retiring from the scenes and the start of a very fortunate

producing career - she has always been a bright and corageous

woman in her choices. This movie starts a franchise, made of a few movies with the

same title character, but not necessarily real follows up to the

ones before. Edwige is the wife of a gymnastic professor

(D'Angelo) that becomes involved in a torrid love passion with a

young student. Better forgive her for such performances: she has been better

This terrible movie series - that in the meantime has reached number twelwe, I don't understand why - reaches really the bottoms with this fourth entry, starring again warlock-lawyer Will Spanner against none other than the devil in a convoluted, bad lightened, worse acted sort of Mississipi Adventure gone wrong, with its story of bluesmen and pacts with the Lord of the Flies. More a mystery than a real horror movie - but it is really bad both ways you see it - this movie has the only reason to be watched in the presence of Julie Strain as stripper-singer extraordinaire Belladonna, that shows her bare and best assets, her wonderful breasts, but even she is totally wasted in the abomination that this movie is. Don't bother to rent nor to buy.

One of the strangest movie ever made, probably, an unbelievable mixture of horror and fantasy, with really cheap special effects, bad acting and a terrible scenario. The curse of a medieval warlock is cast upon generations of men and a young roleplayer of today is forced to become a sort of serial killer, unable to comprehend what is real and what is not. A few of the deaths are creative, at least, but nothing can save this movie from the depths of the charts, as it is too full of crap to be taken seriously, even simply as a late addiction to the slasher flu that took the horror scene like a tide in the first half of the Eighties

This is a strange movie, really strange: it tells the story of an alien invasion very similar to the one of Peter Jackson's debut film, Bad Taste, but possibly with more bad taste than the original. It is also almost a remake of Jackson gore masterpiece Dead Alive (aka Brain Dead), with a visceral humour, almost insane, made by blood, blood and more blood, with chainsaws, guns and blood all over the place. Not really original, but with that peculiar Spanish flavor that you may already have tasted and seen in other movies like Accion Mutante, El dia de la bestia and other similar to these. There is a cameo by the old Spanish horror icon Paul Naschy/Jacinto Molina. And... yes, the female lead actress is really tasty, but not as the stupid aliens in this movie think (boys, what a gorgeous woman she is!).

I don't know why the Americans make some childish, stupid, sophomoric movies, with idiot teens looking always, always for sex (sure, it's natural at that age, but for Christ'sake, this is really too much). This time they take four good looking teens, three male and a female (fresh of Buffy's fame) and send them to Europe, where they find all the most stupid, crassy, ubiquitous common jokes about us Europeans, from English hooligans, to Slovakia that seems Bosnia during the Balkan Wars of the Nineties, passing through an Italian gay man that stalk teens on the train!! This is too much to endure. If the Americans think that this is Europe, alas for all of us!! Avoid this movie at all costs

A very good B-movie from E.I. Indipendent, casting a couple of gorgeous looking girls (Theresa Lynn and my favorite J.J. North) as demented serial killers slashing all the men they may put their hands over - well, quite all. You may expect a cheap movie, full of breasts and buns, of horrible gags, similar to dozens of others. Well, it is not so: both the lead girls are far better actresses than you may think; the nudes are really, really limited - at least in the version I've seen, perhaps more in the unrated version - gore is a plenty, but not so diffuse. Still, you are able to enjoy this rape-revenge slasher from start to finish, with its simple, but workable plot, and when you reach the end you definitely have not added a remarkable opus in your collection, but still you are glad to have seen and enjoy it.