THE PROGRAM

The average moviegoer has likely never heard of "The Grand Duel" and even those with more of an interest in film, may likely be more familiar with it's masterfully composed title theme, through its usage in "Kill Bill Vol. 1." The truth about "The Grand Duel" though, is, it's a near masterpiece of the spaghetti western genre and until now, is a film that's never had a fair shake in terms of a proper home video treatment. Produced in 1972, "The Grand Duel" (also known under the title of "Storm Rider") gives perennial western icon, Lee Van Cleef as the steely eyed (honestly, would we expect any less from Van Cleef), Clayton, a sheriff turned bounty hunter who begins the film on the trail of outlaw Phillipp Wermeer.

The film itself is impressive en...Read the entire review

Not that I've been keeping track or anything, but it seems like two-thirds of the Westerns I've watched over the years have a gang of murderous brutes swarming in on a sleepy, hopelessly remote desert town. You know how

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the s...Read the entire review

Under the searing heat of the desert sun, a train screeches to a halt, coming to a stop just a couple dozen feet from the beaten, bloodied Mexican commander that's been chained to the tracks. The soldiers on the train who leap off to free him are picked off by some unseen gunman far off in the distance, who cackles and pounds on a small drum between shots. It comes down to the life of the man in front of them

Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=54770 Fri, 06 Apr 2012 21:01:03 PDT Skip It [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] "Sister Gertrude is dying to get laid!" Well, I'll say this about Killer Nun: there's definitely a nun running around and killing people. If you'r...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=54175 Sat, 10 Mar 2012 23:22:37 PST Rent It So, the movie's titled Strip Nude for Your Killer, and printed in big, bold letters on the top of the cover is "Ultra Trashy Fun!" That...yeah, that's about the size of it. In its first fifteen minutes alone, [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] you...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=53613 Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:08:33 PST Rent It "Now look -- you meet an old lesbian, huh? And a friend of yours gets a headache. All of a sudden, it's sorcery and witches!" Part of what I love so much about Blue Underground is how wildly unpredictable their release slate can be. It seems like for every genre classic they issue on Blu-ray -- say, Fulci's Zombie, Argento's Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=52543 Sun, 15 Jan 2012 06:28:19 PST Recommended Turnabout's fair play, I guess. The Last House on the Left lifted the core of its story about rape, murder, and revenge from Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, and Last House... in turn spawned dozens of its own imitators. Most of those knockoffs were cheap, artless, shamelessly exploitative, and quickly forgotten. Aldo Lado's Night Train Murders, on the other hand, towers above not Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=50850 Mon, 07 Nov 2011 04:17:45 PST Highly Recommended Lucio Fulci fans, rejoice! If you like extravagantly gory Italian horror movies masquerading as extravagantly gory American ones, you'll probably love Blue Underground's latest, The House by the Cemetery (Quella villa accanto al cimitero, 1981). Though derivative and confused, the picture is a grand Grand Guignol, with many colorful vignettes along with a couple of impressively audacious ones. Better still, Blue Underground's excellent "blood-soaked" transfer (their words) is matched by the label's usual assortment of high-quality supplements, in this case most notably new HD interviews with most of the cast and much of the original crew. As was common with Italian exports of this type, The House by the Cemetery is set in America, with e...Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=51737 Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:19:51 PDT DVD Talk Collector Series Zombie 2-Disc Ultimate Edition: Zombie ranks up there with other seminal horror movies, in that it earns a new DVD release every few years. Is this one truly the ultimate? We'll have to check back in 2014. For now let's kick back with a new, startlingly fresh and beautiful transfer of the original Italian Gut-Muncher featuring numerous exploding craniums, feasts of intestinal fortitude, (literally) plodding putrescence, ocular endangerment and that scene - an almost backhanded gesture that's actually the greatest few minutes ever committed to celluloid. Shark versus Zombie; it's director Lucio Fulci's eternal calling card, and a sequence mentioned so often most will read it as a boilerplate description before forgetting it and moving on. To move back a tad, Zombie finds Dr. Menard (Richard Johnson) on the tropical island of Matool, enmeshed in a figurative bridge betwee...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=51210 Sat, 22 Oct 2011 20:34:09 PDT Highly Recommended "We are going to eat you!" A sailboat bobs around aimlessly in New York Harbor, stumbling in the path of seemingly every ship and ferry that tries to cut its way across. Attempts to raise the crew fail. A helicopter circling overhead Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=49438 Mon, 17 Oct 2011 07:10:36 PDT Rent It THE FILM: "Torso: It Saturates the Screen with Terror!" The marketing for this Italian import boldly promises nonstop bloodletting and titillation, but the final product remains stuck in neutral. Director Sergio Martino is a giallo legend, but Torso lacks the suspense of superior genre efforts. There is plenty of flesh on display, but the film never makes good on its promise to explore the annals of the psychosexual mind. Without suspense or much in the way of plot, Torso is a fleeting bore. Several brutal murders rock a college campus in Perugia, where a group of Americans has come to study alongside the Italians. The majority of the victims are young, attractive females from the university, ...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=49439 Sun, 02 Oct 2011 08:20:02 PDT Recommended I've been a big fan of Italian thrillers ever since viewing Anchor Bay's The Giallo Collection (released to DVD in 2002) but Torso (1973), a genre hybrid mixing giallo and slasher film elements, is a bit too unfocused and lacking in interesting characters for my tastes. It does, however, have a clever final act that's very suspenseful and imaginative. Known in its native Italy as I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale ("The Bodies Show Signs of Rape"), Torso was first released to DVD in America back in 2000, and throughout much of the rest of the world in the years since. Blue Underground's new Blu-ray has a problematic transfer (discussed below) though it's good overall and includes new and, typical for the label, excellent extra features. Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=50097 Mon, 19 Sep 2011 18:37:50 PDT Recommended Reviewed by Glenn Erickson At one time a cult film difficult to see, The 10th Victim was made famous by a provocative still of Ursula Andress in a spiky silver bikini symbolically cutting a necktie from her prey amid applauding nightclub patrons. The show is actually a clever and insightful satire on modern morality and Western culture's fascination for violence. American patrons in 1965 saw the film only in its English language re-dub; the ability to hear it in the original Italian elevates a clever script a few notches upward in the science fiction genre of dysfunctional futures. Ennio Flaiano (Nights of Cabiria, Otto e mezzo) and Tonino Guerra (L'Avventura, Blow-Up) contributed to the fanciful screenplay...Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=48846 Sun, 10 Jul 2011 06:23:18 PDT Rent It The Nesting: I blame Stephen King. I don't really know who started it, but The Shining is a pretty good place to start with The Titling Convention that Plagued the Late '70s and Early '80s. That's the one wherein if you wanted to make your book or movie sound scary, you'd just slap an 'ing' on the end of a word. The Burning, The Howling, and on and on. The Nesting, one of those forgotten horrors, is one of the weirder sounding iterations of this type of nomenclature, though the movie itself doesn't really live up to the weirdness, or the scariness for that matter. You might ask, "what's the point of releasing a forgotten, not-very-g...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=48840 Thu, 23 Jun 2011 07:41:12 PDT Rent It "Troubled, uptight writer goes to small, sleepy town in search of peace and inspiration. Instead she finds an erupting volcano of lust and passion." Well, at least that's what Lauren Cochran (Robin Groves) thinks the headlines might read. If it's a slow news day or whatever, maybe the press'll bite on a story about an agoraphobic horror novelist trying to stamp out her mental hiccups by renting an octagonal old house in the middle of nowhere. 'Course, Lauren doesn't know that she just signed a lease on a haunted WWII-era brothel, and what with the whole "if it bleeds, it leads" deal, I think the papers might have a different angle in mind: Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=48229 Tue, 07 Jun 2011 05:04:31 PDT DVD Talk Collector Series An Italian-West German-French thriller with American stars, The Cat O' Nine Tails (Il gatto a nove code, 1971) was Dario Argento's second film as director and, for my money, still his best, though a few others are nearly as good. (Ironically, Argento regards it as his least favorite.) Despite several splendid set pieces it's not the visual orgy of later films like Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980) but it has a stronger, more richly developed story and interesting characters. The picture is further buttressed by a creepy musical score by Ennio Morricone, a good performance by James Franciscus and an outstanding one by Karl Malden. The title was first released to DVD in July 2001 by Anchor Bay, and then reissued in September 2007 by Blue Underground. The extra features are the same, with a great international trailer bumped to high-def, but this is still worth the ...Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=47844 Wed, 18 May 2011 04:53:31 PDT Highly Recommended Deep Red might the most beautifully shot horror film ever made. The whole movie floats amid an array of rich color, sweeping camera movements, and lovingly designed sets that recall scenes from the devil's version of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Deep Red is hardly the only film by Dario Argento to share these qualities, but it might be the most confident and seamlessly executed. For all his visual gifts, Argento's films often suffer from uncomfortable editorial quirks and overly-jarring musical stings - things that take us out of an otherwise hermetic environment that only a visual perfectionist could have created. But Deep Red captivates from frame one, and I was never jostled out of the film's world by technical imperfections. The mood is consistently ...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=47780 Mon, 02 May 2011 12:31:24 PDT Highly Recommended The Movie: Directed by Dario Argento in 1975, Deep Red was the director's fifth feature and remains one of his most popular films. The story begins at a 'parapsychology' conference in Rome, Italy where a psychic named Helga Ulman (Macha Meri) detects that someone in the audience is intending to commit murder. When Helga goes home for the night, she's attacked by an unseen assailant with a hatchet, her screams coming to the attention of a pianist named Marcus Daly (David Hemmings) who lives in the same apartment building and happens to be walking home with his friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia) as the murder is occurring. He runs to her apartment hoping to stop the murder before it's too late, but he doesn't make it in time. The cops show up and talk to Marcus, as does a reporter named Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi). After a talk they go their separate ways but meet again at Hel...Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=47417 Mon, 11 Apr 2011 04:38:21 PDT Rent It Dario Argento is a filmmaker whose work is easy to appreciate but difficult to love. He is easy to appreciate because his movies are the product of a specific vision and a unique, influential aesthetic. Argento's neon-lit sets and moody, Lovecraft-infused plots have atmosphere to spare. Yet he is difficult to love because his brand of horror, although suspenseful and engaging, is devoid of emotional content. His characters are often types - innocent virginal women and na ve, confused men - cast merely as the vulnerable targets of evil predators. There is little psychology or personality driving Argento's films - other than the director's own. Inferno starts out strongly, with a voice intoning the mythological premise of an ancient book known as "The Three...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=47353 Wed, 23 Mar 2011 01:14:39 PDT Highly Recommended Dario Argento's follow-up to his internationally successful and influential Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980) was the second-part of a trilogy that belatedly concluded with The Mother of Tears (2007). Inferno is a frustrating but worthwhile viewing experience, incredibly stylish throughout although this stylishness comes at the expense of coherence. At its best the movie's major set pieces capture the hypnotic sensations of dreams and nightmares better than just about any movie ever made, but first-time viewers will find it confusing when the plot and its particulars can be discerned at all. The end result is a movie that is both a unique, impressive achievement but because of its underlying incoherence is as taxing as it is mesmerizing. Blue Underground's Blu-ray presentation is outstanding, not surprising as it was "freshly transferred from the uncut and uncensored origin...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=45689 Sat, 26 Feb 2011 04:49:26 PST Highly Recommended Nineteen seventy-one was a busy year for horror cinema. According to the Phil Hardy-edited Encyclopedia of Horror Movies more than five-dozen new horror movies were in release that year. One in five were vampire stories, most of those taking advantage of newfound permissiveness brought by changes to the BBFC in Britain and the recently established MPAA in America. Competing in a dwindling, increasingly marginal horror film market, producers around the world upped the ante in both sex and violence. In the midst of all this came Daughters of Darkness (Le Rouge aux l vres), a Belgian-French-West German co-production whose understated stylization - this despite its constant undercurrent of sadism, domination-submission, and flashes of graphic violence - is the source of its appeal. The author of the entry in Phil Hardy's book likens star Delphine Seyrig's character to Marlene Dietri...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=46319 Sun, 16 Jan 2011 09:16:40 PST Rent It "Take it easy, Joey. There's a girl for you too. I'm not sure if she's a whore or not, but does that matter?" Bill Lustig once said that of all the titles he'd put out through Blue Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=45293 Sat, 13 Nov 2010 05:11:43 PST Recommended At one [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] point in Salon Kitty, an androgynous whore who looks disturbingly like Ziggy Stardust is decked out in swastika garters and stretches out on a bed. Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=44813 Fri, 15 Oct 2010 03:53:22 PDT Rent It Despite some good direction and a sincere, even daring performance by character actor Joe Spinell (Rocky), who also co-produced and co-wrote its screenplay, Maniac (1980) is alternately repellent and boring, despite the obvious intelligence that went into its making. A low-budget slasher film notable for its extremely graphic splatter effects by Tom Savini - who also appears in the picture - Maniac is mostly a character study, anticipating the much superior (if no less unpleasant) Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986). Each tells its story chiefly from the point-of-view of its serial killer protagonist; Maniac is more graphic and exploitative but also less powerful and disturbing, though Spinell is impressively, authentically repugnant. As with Vigilante, Maniac was directed and co-prod...Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=44892 Wed, 13 Oct 2010 04:30:16 PDT Highly Recommended Maniac - 30th Anniversary Edition: I remember the horridly lurid poster for this movie. It shocked and fascinated me no end: the burly man holding a bloody knife and a woman's severed head. "I warned you not to go out tonight." Can't get more incendiary than that; and the movie sparked a firestorm of controversy simply due to that poster, as clearly none of the protestors had actually seen the film. Had they ventured into one of the sleazy grindhouse theaters that dared show it, they would have found a more-misogynistic-than-usual slasher, with a few bits of serious gore book-ending very little preposterous and pointless plot. Maybe I'm just jaded by 35 years of horror consumption, but I've got to say I do believe Maniac has lost some of its power to shock. Director Bill Lustig's spit in the eye to habitu s of The Deuce is certainly single-minded and effective in its way, but years ...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=44250 Tue, 21 Sep 2010 07:04:08 PDT Recommended Vigilante (1983) is a generally uninspired if well made Death Wish knock-off, the kind of film where its cast and crew are doing good work but with a script beneath their abilities. Star Robert Forster gives an excellent, subtle performance, the great Woody Strode makes a welcome appearance, and both William Lustig's direction and the film's general approach is, all things considered, surprisingly restrained. But it's an undistinguished, forgettable throwaway, neither as thought provoking and morally ambiguous as the first Death Wish movie (released in 1974) or as enjoyably stupid and over-the-top as that film's four sequels. Blue Underground nevertheless hits another one out of the park transfer-wise. Filmed in Panavision on a very modest budget, Vigilante looks outstanding in high-def, striking the perfect balance of film grain and 1080p/2K clarity. The extra features ...Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=43856 Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:11:50 PDT Recommended The Movie: It seems like it should be the happiest day of his life. After years in prison, Hank McCain is unexpectedly pardoned. Alas, it is not destined to last. The resulting tragedy of Hank's life is told with flair and bombast by Italian director Giuliano Montaldo McCain (John Cassavetes) soon finds out his adult son whom he barely knows secured the pardon through bribery, and wants some help with a casino robbery in return. McCain is happy to oblige, though he's suspicious that his not too bright son could have come up with either the money or the wherewithal to plan the operation. And he's right to be chary, as his son was put up to it by middle management mobster Charlie Adamo (Peter Falk), who is trying to muscle in on the Royal Casino in Las Vegas, against direct orders from the mobster higher ups, even though he does not yet know that his target casino is actually owned by hi...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=43812 Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:36:46 PDT Recommended Reviewed by Glenn Erickson The years immediately prior to the genre-shaking success of The Godfather saw the gangster movie attempting to reassert itself from under the weight of the waning SuperSpy phenomenon. The big studios became interested in European gangland epics (The Sicilian Clan, 1968) and the occasional European co-production. Director Giuliano Montaldo had begun as an actor in postwar Italian crime pictures with political themes, and broke through to international success with 1967's Ad ogni costo (a.k.a. Grand Slam), a Rio-set caper film that placed Edward G. Robinson and Janet Leigh at the head of a mostly Italian cast. For 1969's Gli intoccabili (translated, "The Untouchables") Montaldo assembled another all-star cast and filmed with an Italian crew in...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=43470 Sat, 10 Jul 2010 16:28:19 PDT Recommended [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] Being shuttled off to Europe to square off against the Nazis is bad enough. When a soldier from the sleepy little town of Avalon Bay gets a 'Dear John...' letter from his best girl back home -- one that says she hope...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=42987 Fri, 18 Jun 2010 05:45:46 PDT Skip It [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] Yeah, so if you've been slogging through my reviews, you know I've been saying for a while now that there are two kinds of people in the world: those'd shell out twenty bucks for a flick starring an ass-ki...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=42045 Sun, 30 May 2010 23:54:00 PDT Highly Recommended Though curiously uninvolving and only sporadically scary, City of the Living Dead (Paura nella citt dei morti viventi, "Fear in the City of the Living Dead," 1980) is a Grand Guignol extravaganza positively dripping with scenes of outrageous, memorable gore. Despite American and British-born leads and some location filming in Savannah, Georgia (for exterior scenes), this Italian-made zombie film was mostly shot in Rome under the direction of genre master Lucio Fulci. Blue Underground's Blu-ray disc presents the film in high definition transferred from the uncensored original negative, along with gobs of extra features. The somewhat confused script introduces several unrelated characters and seemingly unrelated events which don't connect until re...Read the entire review ]]> DVD Video http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=42046 Mon, 17 May 2010 18:31:04 PDT Recommended City Of The Living Dead: How should I write about Lucio Fulci's gore classic, City Of The Living Dead? Approach it from today's seen, heard about and done everything standpoint? Or from that of the young teen discovering this movie for the first time on VHS in the mid-'80s? Well, no matter how you slice it, (or drill it, or rip its brains out) this delirious stream-of-consciousness horror is still an unnervingly fun must see for fans of international sleaze cinema. Back then, City Of The Living Dead (aka Gates Of Hell) stood proudly with other bits of transgressive cinema like Maniac and I Spit On Your Grave, as something almost whispered about in its gory power. It was the movie where That Girl literally pukes her guts out, and to be hunted down for a soda-fueled view...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=42044 Sun, 16 May 2010 13:30:54 PDT Highly Recommended [click on the thumbnail to enlarge] Django opens in the wake of the Civil War, just inches above the Mexican border. The only trace of civilization in this stark, muddy desolation is a town that seems to consist of nothing but a whorehouse...a h...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=41215 Sat, 13 Mar 2010 08:23:23 PST Recommended Surprisingly, Vampyres (1974) is held in high regard in some horror-fan circles, this despite an extremely low budget, probably not much more than $100,000. It came at the tail-end of a brief but torrid craze for lesbian-themed vampire films - especially adaptations and variations on J. Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla - a sub-genre that began with Hammer's excellent The Vampire Lovers in 1970. Sadly Vampyres, variously also known as Daughters of Dracula and Vampyres: Daughters of Darkness, among others, doesn't really warrant such praise. Having seen just about every other entry in this short-lived sweepstakes, for this reviewer Vampyres falls somewhere near the back of the pack, despite a couple of interesting ideas and attractive women. Blue Underground, bless them, likes to entice viewers with promises of lurid sex and gore, and their trademark...Read the entire review ]]> Blu-ray http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=40802 Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:55:14 PST Highly Recommended Blue Underground's high-definition debut of director George A. Romero's The Crazies (1973) is well-timed: a $20 million remake will be released almost simultaneously. The original film is quite ambitious, intelligent, and well crafted considering its low ($275,000) budget. It lacks the raw power of Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the polish of Dawn of the Dead (1978), but in many respects plays like a warm-up to the latter film; the breakdown of societal order into disturbing pandemonium in The Crazies anticipates the terrifying first act of Dawn of the Dead. It's an interesting film in other ways too, especially in its social commentary and editing. Romero has always been much more than a director of low-budget horror movies; his films are much too intelligent and unique, regardless of budget and genre demands. Blue Underground's region-free Blu-ray p...Read the entire review ]]>