The Frightened Woman (1969, Piero Schivazappa)

Dagmar Lassander plays Maria, a journalist writing an article on male sterilization and Philippe Leroy plays a cold robot-like sadistic villain who claims to like killing women at the point of climax. He detains her in his apartment and sexually, physically and psychologically abuses her. If Alejandro Jodorowsky or Dario Argento had directed The Collector it would have been something like this. A sadistic film but never even approaching torture-porn, it is more influenced by 60s experimentalism of films like Blow Up than horror and the dialogue is far more intelligent than a typical giallo film, overtly dealing with sexual politics. The most memorable element of the film is undoubtedly the visually arresting distinctly 60’s art deco production design somewhere between A Clockwork Orange and Barbarella. After a tense first hour the film suddenly descends into a cutesy love scene which even includes their car working as a boat and sailing across a lake. This last third of the film is whimsically absurd, with the woman undergoing what can be assumed to be Stockholm syndrome, and while this somewhat ruins the film, it is followed by a strong ending that further surprises. An entirely unique movie.
4/5

Secret Ceremony (1968, Joseph Losey)

It’s a wonder that 3 big name stars agreed to be in such a dementedly perverted film. Cenci (Mia Farrow) sees Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor) on a bus and due to an uncanny likeness to her deceased mother, adopts her. Leonora is a prostitute in mourning for her dead child and moves into the mansion of the psychologically disturbed child where the two develop a strained mother-daughter relationship with hints of lesbianism until the girls lecherous stepfather shows up. If the ridiculousness of the set-up doesn’t deter you, it’s an enjoyably bitchy, over-the-top camp film, though slightly slow paced. Taylor often borders on her shrieking insanity of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf and Robert Mitchum is great as Cenci’s paedophile stepfather but my favourite characters were the two evil aunts straight out of a Roald Dahl book. The opulent decadence strikes a resemblance to the director’s earlier film The Servant but this is far less restrained.
3.5/5

A Single Man (2009, Tom Ford)

A completely unimaginative story about a grieving Colin Firth who shares some desperately-trying-to-be-deep dialogue with a twink. Firth is stuck in a perpetual frown in a miserable and boring movie that screams Oscar-bait. It seems more like a classy advert for a fragrance or clothing line than a serious movie. If this had been about a heterosexual man it would have garnered zero interest from anybody.
0/5

The Time of the Wolf (2003, Michael Haneke)

I’m sure Haneke is far too supercilious to ever watch films like Romero’s Dead series or 28 Days Later, and to therefore realize how cliché this depressing, pretentious slow moving film is. The film doesn’t say anything that isn’t clear in any other post apocalypse film, even a Roland Emmerich movie, but insists on being po-faced while leading to an intended but still lazy and dissatisfying lack of resolution. The last scene is the most conceited piece of celluloid since Tarkovsky. The constant blackness is dreary to look at and the performances are the only saving grace but unfortunately there is little character development. While perhaps more realistic than most movies in this genre, it achieves this by excising plot and action or anything else that could be considered entertaining and has been done far better in both Threads and The Day After.
0/5

Caged Heat (1974, Jonathan Demme)

Roger Corman produced the early features of Martin Scorsese (Boxcar Bertha), Francis Ford Coppola (Dementia 13), Ron Howard (Grand Theft Auto), and James Cameron (Piranha II: The Spawning) and this debut of director Jonathan Demme and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto who would go on to make The Silence of the Lambs among other films. It’s a Women In Prison film involving electro shock-therapy, a doctor who drugs a patient, takes off her clothes, then touches her while taking Polaroids, some ridiculously lame dream sequences, a large amount of naked shower scenes and a catfight on shower floor. While that makes it sound rather exciting, it’s all so sloppily acted and low budget that it’s just a boring mess, though horror icon Barbara Steele is coldly effective as the warden. The directors’ future credits made me curious to see the film but it is a typical b-movie mish-mash of breasts and uninspired hokey action sequences. The film takes a tongue-in-cheek comedic approach to the genre but the comedy is cringe-worthy. Some reviewers seem to think that the script is laced with politics and feminism but in actuality it is a stupid apolitical film and Demme’s dialogue is abysmal. John Cale of the Velvet Underground provides a surprisingly average nondescript soundtrack.
2/5

I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998, Aris Iliopulos)

Based on Ed Wood final script which took him 10 years to write, the film opens as Billy Zane's character is injecting a nurse in the mental ward he is locked up in before stealing her clothes and escaping. He holds up a loan office, killing the manager but escaping with the loot. He comes across a funeral with an odd assortment of mourners and thinks that a coffin would be a good place to hide the money. The coffin lid slams shut, locking his money inside, and throwing him into an open grave, knocking him unconscious. Zane then tracks down the mourners and dispatches them in an attempt to find his money. While Billy Zane’s over acting is understandable for a silent film the childish slapstick humour and dodgy sound effects are annoying. The only things that makes the film vaguely interesting are the eclectic soundtrack spanning from drum and bass to punk and a cast including Ron Perlman, Christina Ricci, Tara Reid, Sandra Bernhard, Karen Black, Tippi Hedren, most of whom however are entirely wasted.

1.5/5

Rubber’s Lover (1996, Shozin Fukui)

A corporation is funding psychic experiments on human guinea pigs who are outfitted in rubber suits, given the drug ether and bombarded with intense sound and ‘Digital Direct Drive’. Though successful in unleashing psychic powers the experiments are graphically fatal for the test subjects. The corporation attempts to shut down the experiments and in desperation two researchers experiment on a third researcher, leading to all kinds of hard to follow chaos. The film is undoubtedly style over substance with no emotional involvement in characters. It’s somewhat like a Japanese cyberpunk version of Eraserhead with parallels in the body horror of David Cronenberg. Shot in Black and White, some of the visuals are pretty decent, including projectile vomiting, blood spray, and an overused rotating eyeball but the low budget is noticeable. It could have made a nice Nine Inch Nails music video circa Happiness in Slavery but it is never as striking as films like Begotten or the films clear influence Tetsuo and as a 90 minute film it gets tiresome rather quickly. The acting is uniformly awful and the amount of screaming in the film gets rather annoying. The industrial noise soundtrack by Tanizaki Tetora is undoubtedly the best thing about the film. The DVD from Unearthed films also includes the pathetic and pointless short film Gerorisuto and some awesome trailers.
2.5/5