I Drink Your Blood:
To say Grindhouse Releasing puts out the hands-down, bar-none best Blu-ray releases of genre cinema is like saying: "water is wet", "the sky is blue" or whatever weak cliché your little mind can come up with. I'll jump on Carly Simon's James Bond theme song instead. "Nobody does it better."

Is I Drink Your Blood a "good" movie? Is it "scary" or "revolutionary"? Hell no! What it represents is the tenuous link between the late, beloved Herschell Gordon Lewis and 'movies'; a way to fool a larger handful of punters into the drive-in for some of that good old ultra-violence. So, while I Drink Your Blood might give you the movie-going equivalent of an inadvertent rug-burn, rather than the soul-scarring of, say Cannibal Holocaust, it deserves a look for historical significance, if not for the fact that Grindhouse Releasing is basically throwing the goddamn...Read the entire review

Cat In The Brain:
Il Maestro Lucio Fulci starts to go crazy in the coconut, and Grindhouse Releasing brings us the results in inimitably perfect fashion. Touted as 'the most violent movie ever made' and starring Fulci himself as his fictional self, Cat In The Brain has never been noted as one of the director's best horror efforts, but as an entertaining, blood-soaked diversion it deserves this stellar Blu-ray edition anyway. If you're a Fulci completist or enthusiastic horror collector, you'll find this release quite worth the money.

Beating Wes Craven (New Nightmare) to the punch by a long shot, Cat In The Brain finds Fulci overwhelmed by the horrors he films. He's so rattled, in fact, he begins to think he's committing the murders in his films, or something. We're thrown into the filth early on, as an effete weird-beard cooks a juicy steak sourced from a human corpse,...Read the entire review

Pieces:
You can't fault the marketing geniuses that picked up this grindhouse classic, packaging it for audiences on The Deuce. Originally titled Mil Gritos Tiene La Noche, (loosely: The Night Has 1000 Screams) the movie might have struggled to find an audience thinking it was just another naff giallo flick of uncertain parentage. Call it Pieces, however, and tag it; "It's exactly what you think it is!" and let stunted imaginations run wild. Apocryphal accounts cite the movie as one of the few to stymie grindhouse habitues, but then again, that's been said of countless gore classics. Did Pieces have the goods to shock jaded gore hounds back then, and does it now? Or does it even matter?

Depends where you're sitting, I guess. If I recall correctly, this little stinker is one I picked up back when you'd rent Betas by pulling an identifying tag off the pegboard, in ...Read the entire review

Cannibal Ferox:
Umberto Lenzi and Ruggero Deodato got into a big pissing match over who officially started the Italian Cannibal Movie genre. (A brief blip as far as exploitation movies go, one termed a 'cycle' by scholars flapping their gums in the extras on this release.) It was Lenzi who was first to the gut munching, with Man From Deep River, but it was Deodato who 'legitimized' the genre with Cannibal Holocaust in 1980. Not to be outdone, Lenzi roared back with Cannibal Ferox in 1981. His very nearly literal chunk blower, also known as Make Them Die Slowly, turned into the more lurid shelf-space grabber on your Mom-And-Pop video rental shelf, but will always rightly be Holocaust's red-headed stepchild; blunt, artless, and somehow more reprehensible, which is why we're pretty pleased t...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Italian horror has its hardcore fans, and at the risk of pissing them off, I have to admit that I'm not a big fan of them. They are usually style-over-substance horror flicks that focus on a macabre atmosphere while pushing the boundaries of how much gore can be shown in popular entertainment.

Let's do one of those SAT word comparison thingamajigs: If we were to compare Spaghetti Westerns to Italian horror flicks, then I don't think it's far fetched to say that if Dario Angento is Italian horror's version of Sergio Leone, then Lucio Fulci is definitely its version of Sergio Corbucci. I adore Leone, and barely tolerate Corbucci. If I barely tolerate Argento, then what do I think of Fulci?

The screenplays for these films, and I'm using the term very loosely, are usually reverse engineered from original or interesting ideas for horror set pieces. The filmmakers basic...Read the entire review

"Then God said 'let there be man', and he fucked the whole thing up."

It's one of the absolute greatest premises of all time: a couple of hoods kidnap the Pope, and the ransom is one dollar for every Catholic in the world. Wait, that's something like $850 million even before adjusting for inflation. Paul (Duke Mitchell) and his gang aren't that greedy; eh, make it fifty cents for every Catholic instead.

The story behind Gone with the Pope, impossibly, may be even better. Duke Mitchell was a successful lounge singer in Palm Springs who, inspired-slash-incensed by The Godfather, decided to make his own Italian crime drama. Duke dove headfirst into the deep end of the pool, wearing just about every hat imaginable on Read the entire review

"Tonight we eat, tomorrow we shoot!"

Okay, so it's no "leave the gun; take the cannoli". They do eat, though, and as far as shooting goes...yeah:

Cannibal Holocaust:

Holocaust chops a smart and simple story into pieces, with gorgeous flyover shots of the Amazon river ...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
Cheever's short masterpiece becomes a cult classic

The Movie
The first time I really connected with something I was assigned to read for school, it was John Cheever's short story The Swimmer. Perhaps it's my love for Twilight Zone-style tales of morality with twists you don't see coming, but this brief tale really hooked me. The story of Ned Merrill, a man who gets the odd idea to travel home across a Connecticut county by swimming through his neighbors' po...Read the entire review

Conventional wisdom used to be that the only good Spaghetti Westerns were the five directed by Sergio Leone: Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and Duck, You Sucker! (1971). But over the last several decades, film historians including Sir Christopher Frayling began pointing to other unusually good Euro-Westerns made, often but not always, by Italian filmmakers.

One of these is The Big Gundown (La resa dei conti, or "The Settling of Scores," 1966), directed by Sergio Sollima and starring "Mr. Ugly" himself (though actually "The Bad" in Leone's film), American character star Lee Van Cleef. Fans and critics often use the word "epic" to describe it, but what sets The Big Gundown apart from the reportedly 600 Euro-Westerns made between 1960 and 1980 i...Read the entire review

THE PROGRAM

I wasn't sure what to expect of the late Sage Stallone's 2006 short film "Vic," finally arriving on DVD seven years after its initial release (considering the death of one of the film's supporting stars, Miriam Byrd Nethery in 2003, I'd wager the film is more than a decade old now). The film has always been on my distant radar for the sheer curiosity of its star Clu Gulager, whose own career hasn't seen much life apart form appearances in the film's of his son John (the film's cinematographer) since the mid 90's. All that said, "Vic" is a stunning piece of work, due to equal parts effort by director/writer Sage Stallone, writer Will Huston, and star Clu Gulager. Running an efficient 30-minutes, in which not a second of screen time is wasted, "Vic" chronicles a few days in the life of Vic Reeves (Gulager), a once prominent actor decades earlier whose days as a powerful name a...Read the entire review

A fiftysomething-year-old Peter Cushing, knife in hand, wrestles with a topless hooker in this British proto-slasher from the class of 1968. I can -- and I will! -- write a long, rambling review about Corruption, but that one, singular sentence really does tell you everything you need to know.

Cushing stars as Sir John Rowan, an impossibly wealthy surgeon fortunate enough to have a fashion model (Sue Lloyd) hanging off his arm. With models come photographers, and when an impromptu shoot at

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