The Film:

Cult Epics
Comprehensive Guide to Cult Cinema
Edited by Nico B
Review by Micah Gallo

Watching films used to be a more tangible experience. First by goingto cinemas, the sights and experience of having to go to a theaterand seek out these films. For those who recall or are interested ina bygone era of film as a physical experience the Cult Epics bookwill make a beautiful addition to your coffee table or book shelf.

Nico B (curator of Cult Epics label and editor of this book) speaksin his introduction about growing up in Holland, having a choice ofonly two tv channels and riding a motorbike 10 miles to the nearesttheater. To see movies, especially to discover something new, wasonce a literal pilgrimage. My version of that was driving an hour toDVD Planet during the DVD revolution. I would walk the aisles, notknowing what I would find. I'd open a package with feveredanticipation, ho...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Director Marco Ferreri is known for provocative and absurd films like Dillinger Is Dead and La Grande Bouffe, so it comes as no surprise that his 1991 film The Flesh (La Carne) is very odd indeed. Like his better known work, The Flesh deals with the male appetite for food and sex -- and not subtly.

Sergio Castellitto stars as Paolo, a nightclub piano player whose chance encounter with the curvy and somewhat spacey Francesca (Francesca Dellera), leads to a bizarre, gluttonous, sex-filled, seaside excursion that stretches what sho...Read the entire review

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese went to Amsterdam and Brussels to show one of his short films in 1968, and fell in with some Dutch filmmakers just as obsessed with classic thrillers as was he. The American did a dialogue polish on Pim de la Parra's sex & murder thriller, a low-budget item by our standards but upper-class commercial art filmed in English but aimed at the continental market. Scorsese's contribution is easy to spot: at one point the heroine can't get the young hero to kiss him, because he's watching The Big Sleep on Television. Some scolding is in order: "What's your problem? I'm alive -- that's a celluloid shadow."

De la Parra's Obsessions is called Bezeten - Het gat in de muur in its original Dutch, with the additional title translating as 'the hole in the wall.' Proving that great minds think alike...Read the entire review

It doesn't take long to sort out 100 Girls by Bunny Yeager, a new Blu-ray release from Cult Epics. Miss Yeager passed away in 2014. She is remembered as a cheerful overachiever, an instinctive glamour photographer best known for pretty images of fresh-faced nude models, taken mostly on the beach near her Florida home. Sort of the Erin Brockovich of nude photography, Bunny kept it clean and honest and did not put on airs of artistic sophistication. She sold to girlie magazines in the 1950s, and then scored a major comeback when quality skin art began receiving serious critical attention. In everything I've ever read about her, she comes off as an earnest girl making a living on the cultural margins. An ex-beauty contest winner and model, Yeager found herself more interested in what her photographers were doing than actually posing for pict...Read the entire review

Although the pin-up girls of the 1950s and 1960s are a phenomenon many are aware of through pop culture, few pin-up stars gained as much fame as Bettie Page. Having graduated college with an arts degree, she traveled to New York City hoping to become an actress, but instead found bountiful work in the world of erotic photography, which at the time was restricted by the city's obscenity laws. She became famous as a bondage model working with Irving Klaw, who distributed the photos by mail. He also created a number of short films starring Page, 16mm shorts of her dancing, like a pin-up come to life. She found religion and retired in 1959, but her legacy lived on, gaining cult traction in the 1970s, and then bursting out of even cult fame in the 2000s.

On this Blu-ray, "The Exotic Films of Bettie Page", Cult Epics founder Nico B is upgrading a VHS tape his label originally put out in 1991, having manage...Read the entire review

Juxtaposed against the seen-it-before variety of "safe" remakes, homages directly referential of better films and gutless technical exercises full of phony jumps scares that sometimes pass for real horror these days, Sex Murder Art: The Films of Jorg Buttgereit is a breath of pungent air.

Jorg Buttgereit looks like if an Ubermensch dressed as a punk rock fan. He is tall, good looking, strong and wears black t-shirts with various bands on them. His persona comes off completely different still: he's intelligent, serious about cinema as an art form while also being a goofy, self-effacing boy next door who just likes making movies and having fun with his friends. Similarly, his films are a conundrum, blending elements without regard to cinematic laws. Instead his films have full intention to break almost every enforced rule, like a disobedient child who does the opposite of what he is told...Read the entire review

Schramm:
German Cult auteur Jorg Buttgereit concludes his post-facto-named 'Sex Murder Art' film cycle with 1993 shocker Schramm. I'm breaking my lazy-writer rule to call Schramm a 'meditation' on the lonely life and death of a serial killer because that's exactly what it is, a meditation, despite its more gratuitous elements (without which it wouldn't be a Buttgereit joint). Like other movies in this grouping, Schramm's brief run-time (66 minutes) in no way diminishes its power to demoralize while gleefully entertaining. Experienced Buttgereit fans might find the shocks tempered a bit, but the movie's power to send viewers off in discomfiting fashion is quite intact.

Told in flashbacks as nominal protagonist Lothar Schramm lies bleeding in a pool of white paint, the movie flits back and forth between varying incidents either banal or brutal. Here, Schramm converses wit...Read the entire review

Cult Epics brings another Tinto Brass opus onto Blu-Ray in the US, with front cover art so hot it has to be censored on most sites. Loosely based on the 18th century British novel "Fanny Hill" (giggle) but set in 1950s Italy, Paprika is the "professional" name given to young Mimma (Debora Caprioglio) by her "boss" Madame Collette (Martine Brochard) after she starts working in her brothel. Mimma intends to work here for fifteen days to earn enough money for her fiancé Nino (Luigi Laezza) to buy out and take over his current employer, after which they'll get married, become rich and "all problems will be over." She's quite willing to do the "work" required here for just a few days, though she's soon warned that she'll never be able to get out of the profession. She learns the ropes rather quickly, becoming aware that most of the girls' talents are based on where they're from, that she shouldn'...Read the entire review

Based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, The Voyeur follows Eduardo, aka "Dodo", a local college professor in Italy who is obsessed with being an observer. His lessons revolve around it, and his love life is built around it. Until recently, his gaze was focused on his beautiful wife, Silvia (Katarina Vasillisa, aka Katarzyna Kozaczyk), but they have recently separated, leaving him restless and yearning. He lives with his father, Alberto (Franco Branciaroli), a former professor himself, and Alberto's nurse Fausta (Cristina Garavaglia). Between his father's lusting for Fausta, Fausta's advances toward Dodo himself, and an amorous student (Raffaella Offidani), Dodo remains surrounded by people to observe, but he remains obsessed with his wife -- and discovering who her new lover is.

Early in the film, Dodo delivers a lecture to his classroom about the nature of observation. He argues that a viewer...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Shot in Austria in 1983 by a first (And it turns out, only) time filmmaker, Angst immediately disappeared before it could even make a minor splash in any box office. This is not surprising, since the film is an extremely disturbing and raw look inside the mind of a serial killer. The closest similarity one can find will of course be John McNaughton's sickeningly realistic horror masterpiece Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Angst takes another step forward into the abyss and takes us directly inside the thoughts of the killer via voice-over as he commits his horrid acts.

It must have been an impossible film to market in 1983, and it's not an easy sell e...Read the entire review

Der Todesking:
Cult Epics brings us finally the second installment in German horror auteur Jorg Buttgereit's 'Corpse F*cking Art' trilogy. Released in 1990, Der Todesking (The Death King) is sandwiched between Nekromantik and Nekromantik 2 in release order. Despite its full-frontal focus on death and decay, from your average horror viewer's standpoint Todesking couldn't be a more different experience. This sharp looking transfer is best approached cautiously. Considered Buttgereit's masterpiece, it's a harrowing and possibly demoralizing ride.

Running a brief 76 minutes, Todesking presents itself as a series of vignettes based on days of the week. On each day, we meet a poignantly sketched-in character that commits suicide. As a framing device, Buttgereit films a corpse, decaying, through time-lapse photography. That's about the size of it. Individual stor...Read the entire review

The Movie

William S. Burroughs in the Dreamachine is Jon Aes-Nihil's experimental documentary about iconic Beat author William S. Burroughs' experiences using a stroboscopic device, known as the dreamachine, which simulates the electric pulses of the human brain to elicit hallucinations and dream-like imagery while the user's eyes are closed. Narrator Dr. David Woodard explains that Burroughs used the dream machine for inspiration as a writer. People familiar with Burroughs' writing style may understand the seemingly fragmented, sometimes incomprehensible style of the film, while those unfamiliar with the cut and paste nature of the author's work may be put off by its non-narrative structure and lo-fi aesthetic.

The film, shot on color and black and white video between 1996 and 1997, and using still images, switches locations between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Burroughs'...Read the entire review

I will make this brief.

Following the example of fellow DVD Talk writer Paul Mavis, who refuses to review DVDs that are still pan-and-scanned at this late date, I feel like such an incomplete release gets only a capsulized review.

Stay As You Are (Così come sei), the 1978 drama by Alberto Lattuada (Mafioso), is an OK execution of a terrific premise: 50-something architect Giulio (Marcello Mastroianni) sleeps with a much younger woman named Francesca (Nastassja Kinski), then ...Read the entire review

William S. Burroughs In The Dreamachine:
Jon Aes-Nihil presents this maddening collection of images and sounds featuring the elder statesman of junkie letters. The movie hinges somewhat on David Woodward, who reintroduced Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville's '60s invention, the Dreamachine, to heavy heads in the 1990s. The Dreamachine stimulates brainwaves and produces hallucinogenic effects in users, without the use of drugs, only rhythmic pulsations of light. Burroughs was fascinated with the device, delivering it to a wider audience in the '80s (around the time when I heard about it) and now this film will introduce it to you, if you don't know of it already. The question is whether you will be rendered into a hypnagogic state, or merely emerge with a hangover.

Famed director Kenneth Anger provides a quote for the DVD box, which I will helpfully transcribe, to help you with your appreciati...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Yes, yes, clearly I am one sick puppy. I had a frickin' ball during most of Nekromantik 2, Jörg Buttgereit's gory, button-pushing horror-romance from 1991 that was briefly banned in its home country of Germany. It helps to have a taste shaped not only by trash masterpieces like the works of John Waters, Frank Henenlotter, or Troma, but also European art cinema like Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman... or the many provocations of Michael Haneke, because the film manages to tap into both of those modes of filmmaking. While Nekromantik 2 is noteworthy for its stomach-churning body horror ...Read the entire review

Nekromantik 2:
If watching Nekromantik was a red badge of courage for gorehounds in the 1990s, going back for seconds was simply a sign that you were truly insane. Now, with the weight of years, (and director Jorg Buttgeriet's helpful included extras on these releases) I realize that the Nekromantik movies aren't so much shock machines, as they are warped love stories. I also realize that in revisiting them 25 years later, I am truly insane after all. Won't you join me in enjoying this fairly pristine Blu-ray depicting one woman's quest for love and sexual fulfillment, complete with dead seals, putrescence, and one of the most convincing decapitations ever committed to film?

Seriously, for all its transgressions, for its slightly more mature take on the hopeless nature of love, and its once-again languid approach ...Read the entire review

Nekromantik:
It's hard to fathom how desensitized I've become in the last 20-plus years. Way back in 1991 a little video store opened up in SE Portland, Oregon. It's since become an institution, but in those days Mike Clark's Movie Madness had the movies you couldn't find ANYWHERE. Sweet numbers like Lucker: The Necrophagous and Nekromantik, on dodgy VHS tapes. Back then, low-budget horror films about necrophiliacs were something shocking. Now you can hardly turn on TVLand without watching some reality sit-com about folks shagging putrescent corpses (let alone scanning CNN to watch the latest beheading in the Middle East). Yep, Nekromantik is now on Blu-ray, albeit in a limited edition of 10,000 copies. Snatch up your copy NOW to see what all the fuss was about.

Poor Rob ca...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Before watching Black Angel, also called Senso '45, I had not experienced a film by Italian filmmaker Tinto Brass. This maestro of erotic cinema is best known for Caligula, the salacious biopic of the Roman Emperor that was funded by Penthouse. His Black Angel captures a torrid love affair between the wife of a fascist politician and a young Nazi officer in WWII-era Italy. I understand...Read the entire review

Tinto Brass: Maestro of Erotic Cinema:
Semi-legendary sleaze-meister Tinto Brass (Caligula, Salon Kitty) has aged gracefully and gently into a stylish director of softcore erotica, with a deft touch and a real eye for the ladies. As his output (nyuk nyuk) makes its way into the HD arena he garners the laurel represented by this massive 5-disc set, featuring four of his most recent movies, (collected from their previous single-disc releases) plus a feature-length documentary.

Latter-era Tinto Brass movies are not for everyone. They're for lonely guys, mostly, or perhaps semi-adventurous couples in relationships that are on solid ground. As such, they are harmless, gorgeous things - except for Black Angel, which looks at power dynamics in sexual relations through the lens of Fascist Italy. That should not stop viewers who wish to OD on serious eye-candy from picking up t...Read the entire review

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

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]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/58680 Wed, 05 Mar 2014 12:36:47 UTC Rent It

Dr. Samuel Fry (Michael Maloney) has reached an impasse in his treatment of Veronica Bloom (Emmanuelle Vaugier). She's a former psychotic whose failure to progress without the heavy use of drugs prompts Dr. Fry's superiors to dismiss her from hospital care. Fueled by his attraction to her. Dr. Fry takes her on a trip across the countryside to an obscure, eccentric asylum run by Dr. Langston (Patrick McGoohan). Dr. Fry hopes that Dr. Langston's new techniques will be the solution he's looking for, but he's dragged down a rabbit hole of the extreme and bizarre, led by paraplegic patient Myrna (Amanda Plummer), who exerts a psychological command over the other patients.

Hysteria is a film that can't quite find the right balance between the bizarre and the intriguing. It's the kind of film that opens with a man fleeing Dr. Langston's asylum in his car, screaming as he barrels down the road at 10...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/60274 Sun, 14 Jul 2013 13:20:22 UTC Rent It

When considering the Italian sex film, Tinto Brass' name is one of the biggest. Best known for the Nazi brothel film Salon Kitty and part of Caligula, the epic adult film produced by Penthouse founder Bob Guccione, Brass continues to work to this day, with a new production titled Who Killed Caligula? currently in production. In 2003, he made this film, Fallo!, which has the on-screen title of Do It! but goes by Private on the packaging, an anthology of short films all about sex.

Comprised of six segments, Private delves into the lives of several men and women on a number of erotic adventures. "Alibi" follows a couple (Sara Cosmi and Massimiliano Caroletti), who enlist the help of a handsome bellhop (William De Vito) in spicing up their seventh anniversary. Double Trouble jumps up to two unfaithful couples who happen to be cheatin...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/59999 Fri, 08 Mar 2013 03:14:34 UTC Rent It

THE FILM:

I have previously expressed how much I appreciate the wide variety of films I've been exposed to while writing for DVD Talk. Some of my favorite reviews to write have been for films I was not expecting to be great. I have come to realize that art means different things to different people. What entertains or repulses a viewer is subjective, and films impact people based on their backgrounds and moods. It was with great interest that I popped in the Blu-ray for Pig/1334 from Cult Epics. I knew nothing about either film before beginning this review, but recognized from the snake, skull and swastika-adorned cover that I was in for something intense. Both short films are by Dutch director Nico B., who founded Cult Epics, and Pig is a collaboration with late musician Rozz Williams. Both are confounding, horrific and experimental, and intentionally provok...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/57439 Sun, 10 Feb 2013 01:09:59 UTC Recommended

This release consists of two short, black and white films directed by Nico B., whose company Cult Epics has issued the disc. The first is titled "Pig" from 1998, a 22-minute collaboration between Nico B. and Rozz Williams of the gothic band Christian Death. Williams portrays a man wearing a pig mask who drives a Jaguar out into the desert, picks up without any apparent resistance a man whose head is wrapped in gauze (James Hollan), drives him to an abandoned house and tortures him. He uses several tools in the torture and consults a book of collages titled "Why God Permits Evil" whose front cover is recreated on the disc's slipcover. The seemingly willing victim eventually appears to panic by this point, as he starts being cut and pierced among other things.

Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/58382 Sun, 07 Oct 2012 03:39:30 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

Confusing part out of the way first: although this movie has been titled Cheeky! on the covers of this and previous video releases, the official title that appears onscreen is Transgressing, which is the English-dubbed version of the Italian film Transgredire. With me so far? While there's certainly a lot of cheeks (nudge nudge wink wink) in this film, I don't know why this title was used other than to appeal to those looking specifically for that and little else.

The only Tinto Brass film I had seen previously was Caligula, which is his most well-known but he has also disowned that one due to the external meddling that went on with that. This one is much more light-hearted and fun. The plot is rather simple: Carla (Yuliya Mayarchuk) moves from Venice to London, to be joined later by her boyfriend Matteo (Jarno Berardi). In London looking for a plac...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/56976 Fri, 14 Sep 2012 01:36:54 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

While probably best known to most people for darker fare like Caligula and Salon Kitty, Tinto Brass has pumped out some lighter material as well, and 2000's Cheeky! is a shining example of just how well he can combine comedy with eroticism. All the heat you'd expect from some of his better films like Frivolous Lola is present, and it mixes with some clever and very humane humor to make for a thoroughly enjoyable film that doesn't in the least skimp on what Brass is known for (and that would be beautifully shot booty).

Like many of his films, this one tells the story of a woman with a taste for the carnal. This time around her name is Carla (played by the lovely and ever so curvy Yuliya Mayarchuk), a young woman who has just arrived in London where she'll be working as an intern for a month much to the dismay of her boyfriend, Matteo (Jarno Berar...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/51292 Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:23:47 UTC Recommended

THE FILM:

Agusti Villaronga's In a Glass Cage belongs to a tradition of European art films that is as unpleasant as it is (arguably) artistically vital and morally necessary. These movies aim to provoke a visceral sense of disgust and outrage by getting us far too close-in to the cruel, rancid, inhuman decadence represented by the ultra-right regimes (the Nazis in Germany, the Fascists in Italy) under which the Continent suffered during World War II, as well as the shameful history and lurid, sickly fascination/"nostalgia" that are their legacy. Some salient points on this tradition's timeline are Visconti's The Damned, Liliani Caviani's Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/50095 Tue, 06 Sep 2011 20:50:39 UTC Highly Recommended

THE MOVIES:

On-screen eroticism is, so often, such a drab and joyless affair, so utterly free of real color and actual pleasure, that those who inject sexual cinema with genuine wit and fun tend to stand out from the pack. Such is the case with Radley Metzger, the incomparable New York distributor-turned-filmmaker who had not one, but two careers in adult cinema: under his own name, directing smart and tastefully "softcore" adult films, often shot in exquisite international locations with impeccable production values, and under the pseudonym of "Henry Paris," working the other side of the softcore/hardcore divide, yet still bothering to inject those pictures with humor and style. Cult Epics' new Blu-ray box set Radley Metzger's Erotica Psychadelica collects three of his finest efforts from the former career, while providing some hint of his metamorphosis into the latter.

Fi...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/48420 Tue, 26 Jul 2011 21:00:44 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

Tinto Brass' 2005 ode to promiscuity and ladies' asses begins with a nice opening shot of a painting on display in the city of Mantua where we are soon introduced to a beautiful young woman named Marta (Anna Jimskaia) whose marriage to husband Dario (Max Parodi) isn't going so well. When we met this couple he's just finished himself off in bed, leaving her unfulfilled and having to take matters into her own hands - which is exactly what she does when she heads out for the day to visit an art gallery. Here she meets Leon (Riccardo Marino), a suave Frenchman who shows and instant attraction to her, something she doesn't get with her husband. They talk and she learns that he's a writer in town for a festival of erotic literature (presided over by the director himself!) and then go at it right there in the gallery. After the pair attend, she gives into Leon's charms and sleeps wi...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/49560 Tue, 05 Jul 2011 21:42:40 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

Radley Metzger's 1969 adaptation of Alexandre Dumas Fils' novel Lady of the Camellias, alternately known as Forbidden Love is a lush, Technicolor fever dream of sex and drugs set some time in the Rome of the future where we meet a man named Armand (Nino Castelnuovo) who lives under the domineering control of his wealthy father. Armand likes the ladies, and more or less has his pick - he's a handsome guy with a fat bank account and this makes him attractive to a lot of people. His friend Gastion (Roberto Bisacco), warns him against the beautiful Marguerite (Daniele Gaubert), a woman he meets who has a penchant for sleeping around and for drug use, but Armand will have none of Gastion's warnings, he knows what he wants and he wants Marguerite, even if Olympe (Silvana Venturelli) would be more than happy to take her place.

As luck would have it, the feeling i...Read the entire review

]]> Blu-ray https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/46898 Fri, 13 May 2011 11:36:22 UTC Recommended

Radley Metzger's The Lickerish Quartet (1970) belongs in that tiny window of movie-going that lasted from roughly 1969-1975, when both art house movies were chic focal points among the cultured classes and sexually-explicit movies aspired to click with those audiences and gain critical acceptance. Today this West German-Italian co-production in English seems almost quaint, a proto-Emmanuelle type of pretentious if earnest would-be art film, part Twilight Zone-type fantasy (complete with twist ending), part giallo-like Italian psychological thriller.

Few will find it as erotic as audiences certainly did when it was new, though co-star Silvano Venturelli has an undeniably sensational body. Instead, the picture is best enjoyed as a cultural artifact of its era. This review can't explain its time-specific impact any better than the film's original trailer (included on the dis...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/39293 Sat, 02 Jan 2010 22:07:25 UTC Skip It

THE MOVIE:

I must admit, I am completely flummoxed by this one. Where do I even begin writing about Italian director Tinto Brass' Attraction? Watching it was a chore, and to give this 1969 film much consideration at all seems like too much effort wasted on the undeserving; yet, I am charged with writing a review. Punished once watching the movie, punished twice having to relive it.

There is nothing as bourgeois as a "plot" in Attraction, so there is not much to summarize. In short, it is a psychedelic pop-art experiment (or "experience," as the DVD cover informs us), one long music video love letter to the most laughable parts of the 1960s. It stars Anita Sanders as Barbara, a married white woman who gets dropped off in a rather safe wilderness by he...Read the entire review

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