Again, kinda covered my reaction to this in the Dolls review, though that was admittedly before this one’s halfway mark, at which stage I have to admit, it gets quite a bit better. I wouldn’t rule out returning to this one purely for Ken Foree’s wild performance – the sight of him bursting into the basement in red Y-fronts shouting “you been messin’ with that damn machine again?”, then later running in simply wailing is certainly a highlight, and the movie doesn’t dip much after that point (his red football shirt later got almost as big a laugh out of me). It’s very much Re-Animator all over again but everything’s just a little better … the music and the visuals most of all. Fun as it was though, it’s got nothing on Dolls ... and more than anything, it felt to me like a cheap and silly Altered States.

Mm-hmm. Crazy. I kinda covered this and From Beyond in the Dolls review but for the sake of completion, here goes. This has its humourous moments, but I really found it pretty boring in the end. I literally can’t think of much more to say about it. The music is okay – especially the main theme … but it’s so obviously a barely modified version of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho theme (and the shower scene string stings appear towards the end also), even that’s not really a good reason to watch the movie. If there is a good reason it’s maybe Jeffrey Combs in the lead. While not up there with The Tall Man, Freddy, Jason, Leatherface, etc (I always forget about him, anyway), Combs definitely made something out of Herbert West that’s really worth seeing at least once – though, I hate to say, even that for me tired towards the end here.

I’m very glad I finally decided to watch this one before Halloween, not least because I’m sure I’ve actually been disappointed by it before. It’s mostly fun … kind of as funny and competent as the couple of family-friendly “spoofs” I’ve watched recently … only with added tacky Peter Jackson gore – just … not as funny, not as gory, and far from as interesting in the story department.

“A jaywalking iguana! That’s all we need now!”

This is essentially a replica of Holocaust with a bunch of hapless idiots venturing into the jungle to disprove the existence of cannibalism (place your bets on the outcome of that) intercut with a New York story which in this case does nothing but help make the movie feature-length. Where Holocaust, I found to my surprise, ultimately had something pretty heavy to say, however, this one is more interested in getting to the 10 minutes or so of gore in the finale.

The heroine staring into the camera at the end having denied the whole thing ever happened hints at the way Holocaust implicated the entire audience in the ordeal by virtue of their mere watching; and yes, that final gore is pretty nasty (I’m sure the movie makers were glad that girl had bigger boobs than Francesca Ciardi, lol …) ... but overall it’s all pretty pointless. Hmm … let me clarify that, since most of these movies are overall pretty pointless lol; I mean in a bad way here.

Boooooohhhhh-bies! LOL This one has to be seen to be believed. I actually watched it because any movie from 1965 with a title like that has got to be of some kind of interest. What I hadn’t realised was that not only is it from a screenplay by Edward D. Wood (adapted from his own novel – one can only imagine what text is left when you take the tits out lol – literally, the story is: sexy dead chicks dance in a graveyard wearing nought but t-strings), but it also stars the actual Criswell.

If, like me, you pretty much first heard of Ed Wood via Tim Burton’s movie, this should certainly hold some fleeting interest factor. But let’s not beat about the bush (so to speak, there’s none to see here, that’s for sure – small mercy) ... really it’s just soft porn. But as such, I’ll be honest, I found it actually quite effective – you’ve got to admire the fact that this is one movie that actually delivers on its promise of flesh (the tagline apparently being, “A masterpiece of erotic horror!” something with which I find it hard to argue). You actually get to dwell on the occasional body part – mostly, astonishingly wobbly Sixties breasts … I sure hope this one wasn’t financed by the Baptists, lol! – for a good while longer than Hammer or Carry On movies ever let you

If there’s a problem it’s that all of this is narrated by, well … Criswell ... who kind of saps any semblance of sexiness conjured by what’s on display, lol. Let’s just say I’m glad I didn’t save it for the Halloween marathon. But there is definitely just a little something here that even 40 years on feels that kinky kind of wrong, naughty, hypnotic and, well, just a little sexy – even if it’s simply the fact that Criswell is at turns so dirty-old-man-ish that he totally absolves the audience of the usual guilt that comes with staring at boobs for the sake of boobs, lol. But I’m a horny little devil, so what do I know?

I can’t really do better than the stock TV guide summary for this one – it is, indeed, a “sleazy Italian horror”, lol. Switching on midway, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for a far better Dario Argento movie – the camera style, the music, the disembodied dubbed voices, are all very familiar – but if you stuck it out you’d find yourself incredibly disappointed. The story makes little sense, if any; and if you’re looking for gore, you’d be better off with an episode of E.R. Of course, if you’re drawn in by the title (and what 13-year-old boy wouldn’t be?), you certainly won’t be disappointed by the nudity – the movie opens with an inexplicable shot of a woman running naked through a forest, a kinky scene where the heroine’s clothes disappear, and even what has been described recently on the IMDb message board as, “Seventies-style porn!” towards the end. That may or may not be enough to take your mind off the god-awful fake spider effect. I almost want to give this 2 stars ‘cos even I don’t mind seeing boobies every now and then … but then, even The Wicker Man has those, so I’m going to be sensible and give it 1 … I mean, it’s at least unique …

Watched this for the obvious reason, can’t resist anything with a good gender swap lol. The tagline to this movie (according to the IMDb) read: “The sexual transformation of a man into a woman will actually take place before your very eyes!” which led me to expect something a lot more trashy than what I got. The whole thing is told surprisingly straight – straighter than any other Hammer movie I’ve seen, I think, in fact. The first transformation, when it finally occurs, is fairly mesmerising without being as graphic (pity :-P) as I’d expected, and the subsequent ones are pretty interesting too (like the homage to the classic version of the story with Fredric March, done in a mirror). I like the integration of the Jack the Ripper murders, and the ending is pretty out there too. I’m not sure if I’d bother with it again, but it’s worth watching and better than I expected, I’m still waiting for the movie gender transformation to end all movie gender transformations though

This is an almost shot-for-shot remake of the classic, and one of my favourite movies of all time, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, in Turkish, with very very bad visual effects. Most people will have the pleasure of never even hearing this movie (apologies for bringing it to your attention if you’re reading this review), but, being such a fan of the original, I couldn’t help but track down a copy of Seytan.

Most of all, it’s cute. For some reason you can’t help imagining these little Turkish men behind the camera, genuinely excited to be using the equipment. I imagined a crew behind the camera not unlike that seen in Frank Oz and Steve Martin’s Bowfinger. This is just bizarre speculation by me and likely nowhere near the truth, but it’s the only way of seeing past how badly made this movie is.

The weird thing is, although the movie is really really bad, there are actually at least a couple of sparks of near-great invention. Though I’m almost certain nobody had seen the original ending of the real Exorcist movie in 1973 (except the film makers) – the “happy ending” which has now been tagged onto the end of The Version You’ve Never Seen, my preferred cut of the movie – here in the Turkish remake, made just a year later, they go for such a happy ending, no hurling the audience out with a haunting “but is it really over?” hint. For this reason, I really couldn’t entirely put the movie down, because it really took me by surprise.

What I did like about Seytan was that watching it almost reminded me of watching The Exorcist for the first time. The quality of the copy I managed to find was a dirty VHS duplicate or something, and because the movie has perhaps the lowest budget of all time, the movie, too, looks filthy. It looks like something you’re not supposed to be watching, just like The Exorcist was in the UK when I first saw it. This has nothing to do with the cinematic value of the movie, of course, but it’s worth mentioning because the only people who will really get anything out of Seytan will be the die-hard Exorcist fans like myself.