For 14 years, the murder of a maid in the home of a woman named Miyako (Aya Sugimoto, Flower & Snake II) has been a cold case. With the statue of limitations about to kick in, the young and not-yet-disillusioned Detective Hoshino (Kanji Tsuda, Ju-on: The Grudge) makes one last-ditch investigation effort for the sake of the victim’s still-grieving family.
Hoshino finds himself captivated by Miyako, and hell, no wonder: Asian actresses rarely arrive as sultry and curvy. (The Naked Killer herself, Chingmy Yau, is another of this rare breed.) Unbeknownst to Hoshino, a portion of his attraction is not under his control, because she’s not merely a vamp, but a genuine vampire. Practically deflecting questions about her maid’s death, the cunning Miyako points blame on a hedge fund manager (Jun Kaname, Casshern). Jealousy between the two men quickly breaks out, as do the eventual swords.
Immediately, Shinobi: Heart Under Blade director Ten Shimoyama establishes a look for Blood that is dark and seductive. Peppered with bursts that action that incorporate a proper amount of martial arts without going full chopsocky, the story moves slower than it should. When the Japanese film starts to drag — and it does, inevitably — Shimoyama injects passion through several sex scenes, which are actually erotic. Certainly uninhibited in her dead-sexy performance, the gorgeous Sugimoto gets — how you say? — kneaded like bread dough. Call it gratuitous if you must, but the vampire, as it was created in literature centuries ago, was intended as a sexual creature. —Rod Lott
What’s in Hong Kong’s The Cave of Silken Web? Try seven spider demons, in the shapely form of sisters clad in eveningwear from the Roy G. Biv collection, with color-coordinated webs to match. Still, I could not tell them apart — a difficult task made all the more taxing by the insistence of director Ho Meng-Hua (The Mighty Peking Man) to cram the entire septet into the frame at once and as often as possible.
Based on Chinese folklore, this kiddie-matinee fantasy pits these vixens as eager to feast on human flesh, which is why they get so worked up when they see a monk (Ho Fan, reprising his role from 1966’s Monkey Goes West) approaching with three travel buddies-cum-bodyguards: a fairly worthless friar (Tien Shun, also back from West), a massively titted pig man (Peng Peng, ditto) and the ever-acrobatic Monkey King (Chou Lung-Chang, who was not returning, but came back for the next sequel, 1968’s The Land of Many Perfumes). From there, the simple story points are placed on a virtual carousel as the spider women try to capture and consume the men, while the men try to evade capture and save those not as fortunate, while also not becoming breakfast. With trick spells on both sides cast as fast as spittle flies, misunderstandings are used for strategic purposes, as if an episode of Three’s Company were infiltrated by magic.
For example, the sisters initially attempt to lure the men into their cavernous death trap by giving it a proto-HGTV makeover — the first of the film’s musical numbers. (Oh, I didn’t mention the flick is also a musical? Well, it is.) As optical effects do their best to suspend our disbelief, the ladies sing about their dastardly plan. Here, check out the lyrics that begin this sick beat:
I’ve turned the cave into a gorgeous hall
With all these splendid decorations
Luxurious furniture
And all types of antiques
The garden is adorned with rare plants
There are boys and girls waiting to serve
It’s taken on a whole new look
It’s a deadly trap to kill them
To kill them
Game, set, match, Kanye.
Many of the effects — like the friar leaping from ground to mountaintop or Pigsy’s fruit turning into a rock mid-chomp — are achieved through the ol’ freeze-now-and-edit-later method. In rare instances, this works really well, with no moment better than the Monkey King being electrocuted into a skeleton as he tries to bust through a giant web. (Incidentally, this occurs 34 seconds into the trailer and 34 minutes into the movie. Hashtag congruence!) This being a Shaw Brothers production, a fair share of martial-arts battles breaks out, with our heroes and villainesses sparring with swords on a stick — a war of weapons the soundtrack depicts with the cacophony of your kids banging pots and pans.
Still, the sets are a marvel and the pervading wackiness translates into the near-irresistible. As arachnid chick numero whatever says, “Don’t dismiss this monkey, sister.” —Rod Lott
Just as Hellhole is not your average women-in-prison picture, the Ashland Sanitarium for Women is not your average nuthouse. It’s where Susan (Judy Landers, Stewardess School) is sent after her mother is murdered before her eyes and she suffers a head injury while escaping the killer’s nicotine-stained clutches. Susan awakens in the asylum with a classic case of amnesia, which is convenient for Landers, who always seems absent-minded in her roles. Bless her buxom heart, but she’s all puffy hair and vacant stare.
The reasons for her mom’s death? Purely unimportant, other than to keep Susan in peril even within the institution’s walls, because the killer (Ray Sharkey, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills) disguises himself as an orderly in hopes of finding her alone so he can finish the job; if he happens to bangs a nurse and/or resident along the way, so be it. Ironically, all the Ashland patients are endangered, because within the bowels of the place, the evil Dr. Fletcher (Mary Woronov, Eating Raoul) and Dr. Dane (Marjoe Gortner, Starcrash) conduct their experimental research toward creating the world’s first chemical lobotomy. Any patient who misbehaves unwittingly serves as a guinea pig.
To paraphrase Spinal Tap’s “Hell Hole,” the window’s dirty, the mattress stinks, the floor is filthy, the walls are thin, the nudity is plentiful. Per the WIP template, toplessness is a must of its caged coquettes, yet Savannah Smiles (!) director Pierre De Moro throws bottomlessness in there, too, to give his flick a bonus layer of ’80s sleaze. More than eager to please in the bared-breast department is Edy Williams (Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), delivering her lines in a breathy, cue-cardy voice that makes everything sound suggestive, down to an offer of sharing soap: “Use mine. It’s hypoallergenic.” Despite her efforts to steal the show, that honor is taken by Sharkey as Silk, the chain-smoking heavy in black leather who looks like he arrived from a failed audition for Can’t Stop the Music. To continue that analogy, Nancy Walker’s loss is De Moro’s gain. —Rod Lott
Curiously, two new books are about the idiosyncratic and ill-mannered German cult actor Klaus Kinski. The one to get is Klaus Kinski, Beast of Cinema: Critical Essays and Fellow Filmmaker Interviews, edited by Matthew Edwards and including the perspectives and talents of several others. (It takes a village, people!) Edwards — whose excellent 2007 collection, Film Out of Bounds, also was published by McFarland & Company — separates the book into thematic thirds: essays, interviews and reviews. In doing so, he and his contributors approach their subject from a variety of angles and points of accessibility. Covering everything from his iconic collaborations with Werner Herzog to his late-in-life residency in B-moviehell, the essay portion finds Beast of Cinema at its most buttoned-up, whereas the book loosens up considerably for Edwards’ Q&As with those who worked with Kinski and lived to tell about it — most notably, Schizoid director David Paulsen and actress Flo Lawrence, both rife with tales of the actor’s bad behavior, physical and sexual. By the time Beast hits the section of approximately 50 reviews, it has its shirt unbuttoned and feet on the table. Pour yourself two fingers of your hard liquor of choice and peruse the reviews, heavy on spaghetti Westerns, sexploitation, spy adventures and scary fare — unsurprisingly the reason I’ll return to this text in years to come.
Having written the history of American International Pictures in 1984’s Fast and Furious, it makes sense the ridiculously knowledgeable Mark Thomas McGee would be the one to write Katzman, Nicholson, Corman: Shaping Hollywood’s Future. Available from BearManor Media, the book spotlights the careers of “three pioneers in bargain basement entertainment,” primarily in the 1950s: producer Sam Katzman, AIP co-founder James Nicholson and multihyphenate content machine Roger Corman. Rather than tie them together in one narrative — which would make sense, given their crossed paths — he handles each man separately. In his usual easygoing style, McGee is less interested in sharing their stories than he is leaping from one anecdote to another, not always stopping to ensure transitions for smooth sail-through. The result is highly conversational, as if you’re seated at the corner of a bar with the author, but he’s a good drink or two ahead of you, so forgive him if and when he rambles. While I would have preferred a tighter-told work — or at least one with consistency in presentation among its thirds — fans of the AIP era should find enough behind-the-scenes nuggets to chew on, not to mention capsule reviews of select films and a smattering of photographs. KNC is not bad, but it’s not essential, either.
Few things have influenced the horror film more than the Grand Guignol, aka that theater in France in which characters were rather graphically tortured and killed onstage; it’s not uncommon to see “Grand Guignol” used as a descriptive adjective in film criticism today. Short of catching some brave local theater troupe in your area staging a tribute show, Mel Gordon’s Theatre of Fear and Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris, 1897-1962 is as close as we can get to experiencing this late, great art form. (And having sat through one of those tribute shows, I much prefer this book.) Gordon quickly but satisfyingly dispenses with the origins and history of the place so he can dig into the real meat of the piece: single-paragraph descriptions of 100 Grand Guignol classics, supplemented with a more-than-generous helping of photos, playbills and revealed tricks. Originally published in 1988, this expanded edition from Feral House arrives with an additional script (“Orgy in the Lighthouse”) and, in the trade paperback’s center, 14 color pages, all but the last of which reproduces the original illustrated posters, both lavish and ghoulish. Thriving on visual stimulation throughout, the volume is a gorgeous package of garish content. Following Sin-a-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks and It’s a Man’s World: Men’s Adventure Magazines, Feral House continues to knock these new-and-improved reissues out of the park.
The genre of the giallo is so voluminous by now, it is all too easy to fire off a bad book in search of a quick buck. Mind you, Michael Sevastakis’ Giallo Cinema and Its Folktale Roots: A Critical Study of 10 Films, 1962-1987 is not that book. (This is.) With each chapter devoted to a particular film, the McFarland book makes the case for the giallo’s artistic merit — an idea most mainstream critics scoff at once the blood runs running. Rather than focus on the usual suspects (in titles and directors), Sevastakis spreads the wealth, with no filmmaker repped more than once; while the names you expect are indeed here (Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, etc.), the work chosen for each is not necessarily the anticipated default selection — for instance, Umberto Lenzi is featured by neither Eyeball nor Spasmo, but Seven Blood-Stained Orchids — and damn, does the author break it all down with aplomb. His discussion is detailed, insightful and intelligent — perhaps a deeper dive than you’d like for leisurely reading, but hey, it backs up his point that there’s much more to these films than meets the (gouged) eye. —Rod Lott
So deep is my love for 1982’s Creepshow that, although I already had paid $20 for a brand-new VHS of it back in the day, I happily parted with a similar amount once the George A. Romero film debuted on DVD. Only one problem existed with that disc, as well as the eventual Blu-ray: It was bare-bones, featuring a trailer and nothing else. (Chapter selections and interactive menus do not count, Warner Bros.)
In the category of Better Late Than Never comes Michael Felsher’s Just Desserts: The Making of Creepshow, a feature-length documentary previously available only in the UK. Remarkably, it’s worth the decadelong wait. Even if Stephen King declined to participate, Romero is all aboard, as are FX wizard Tom Savini, actress Adrienne Barbeau, actor Tom Atkins, comic artist Bernie Wrightson — hell, even that noted ray of sunshine Ed Harris! (And yes, thank the Lord, he does discuss his improvised disco-dancing skills.)
No stranger to the world of documentaries for genre pictures, Red Shirt Pictures head Felsher doesn’t waste time with reiterating EC Comics history lessons, because, really, if you do not already possess at least a primer-level understanding of the once-controversial Tales from the Crypt and its companiontitles, would Just Desserts even be up your alley? Topics of relevant discussion instead include Romero’s approach to coaxing King in his first acting role, how they faked Ted Danson’s drowning and the in-camera methods used to give Creepshow its unique, comic-book look. Best of all, however, are the anecdotes — and they number many — surrounding the challenges of cockroach wrangling … and the unavoidable mishaps.
The highest praise one can give such a thorough behind-the-scenes undertaking is that he or she could have sat through another half-hour or more. With Just Desserts, the Creepshow superfan in me says, “Duh, you lunkhead.” —Rod Lott
For 14 years, the murder of a maid in the home of a woman named Miyako (Aya Sugimoto, Flower & Snake II) has been a cold case. With the statue of limitations about to kick in, the young and not-yet-disillusioned Detective Hoshino (Kanji Tsuda, Ju-on: The Grudge) makes one last-ditch investigation effort for the sake of the victim’s still-grieving family. 
Immediately, Shinobi: Heart Under Blade director Ten Shimoyama establishes a look for Blood that is dark and seductive. Peppered with bursts that action that incorporate a proper amount of martial arts without going full chopsocky, the story moves slower than it should. When the Japanese film starts to drag — and it does, inevitably — Shimoyama injects passion through several sex scenes, which are actually erotic. Certainly uninhibited in her dead-sexy performance, the gorgeous Sugimoto gets — how you say? — kneaded like bread dough. Call it gratuitous if you must, but the vampire, as it was created in literature centuries ago, was intended as a sexual creature. —Rod Lott
What’s in Hong Kong’s 
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So deep is my love for 1982’s 