Behind the Couch

When surgical nurse Jan Compton is tragically killed in a car crash, her fiancé Dr Bill Cortner retrieves her severed head and keeps it alive by means of highly unorthodox (!) and ethically iffy experiments. Despite Jan's protestations, he then sets out to find a suitable body for her, by any bloody means necessary… With its low budget, outrageous premise, and a lurid title promising all manner of exploitative thrills, the most shocking thing about The Brain That Wouldn’t Die is that it’s actually a deceptively thoughtful B-movie. Opening with a woman’s disembodied voice pleading ‘let me die, let me die’, the screenplay by Rex Carlton and director Joseph Green ruminates on some big and interesting ideas. While it can’t claim to be a feminist film, The Brain nonetheless has some feminist themes throughout it - such as bodily autonomy, patriarchal oppression, societal beauty standards and, perhaps most pointedly, the literal objectification of women. Other ideas thrown into the mix...

Dormant alien parasites are unleashed in a small Australian town after an earthquake. They begin infecting and possessing susceptible locals, including a group of incels, intensifying their hatred and aggression, turning them into violent, zombie-like creatures hellbent on eliminating anyone who isn’t like them. Young trans filmmaker Sophie finds herself caught up in the horror when she and her friends are targeted by the possessed mob. Written and directed by Alice Maio Mackay, T-Blockers is an ultralow-budget horror and a spirited pastiche of B-movie tropes. It utilises an Invasion of the Body Snatchers -style narrative to explore contemporaneous prejudice and transphobia. What she lacks in budget, Mackay makes up for with a striking sense of style (it’s all neon lighting and retro-wave inspired aesthetics), incisive social observations and scathing humour. Her third feature, T-Blockers exudes a real punk sensibility: anarchic, rebellious, and reminiscent of Gregg Araki and early J...

2014 Dir. Lowell Dean When small town, alcoholic cop Lou Garrou is cursed by a mysterious cult beneath a full moon, he transforms into a werewolf. Director Lowell Dean subsequently has a lot of fun with traditional werewolf film conventions while creating some interesting and original lore of his own. An energetic and highly entertaining romp, Dean's sophomore offering features a surprising amount of character development and back-story behind all the B-movie bravado and, in case you were in any doubt, WolfCop is as much fun as it sounds. And then some. Head over to Exquisite Terror to read my full review.

2010 Dir. Paul Ziller When Jacob Glaser (Misha Collins), a renegade astrophysicist and underground radio host, is alerted to unusual electromagnetic energy fields occurring throughout the globe, his initial investigations lead him to Stonehenge. Somehow, the stones have begun to move independently and are building up enough energy to vaporise anyone who comes within a certain range. Jacob’s theory is that Stonehenge is a key part of a massive alien terraforming machine connected to other historical sites around the world...  Meanwhile, in the US state of Maine, a former colleague of Jacob’s has discovered an underground pyramid linked to the ongoing events at Stonehenge and is actively working towards the destruction of mankind in the hopes that he and his followers can survive the coming apocalypse and be the rulers of the next era of life on earth. When Jacob discovers the existence of a key that he believes is capable of switching off the doomsday machine, he sets about ...

2001 Dir. Jack Sholder A man with mysterious bite marks on him is taken to a hospital in Guam. This sparks a search for what could have caused such wounds. A small group of doctors and scientists are flown to the island where he lived to investigate. Needing to make an emergency landing due to technical difficulties, the group become stranded and a brief exploration reveals the island is strangely deserted. Before long the group realise, to their horror, what caused the bites… Strange new breeds of killer arachnids! From outer space! Or something.  On the surface, Arachnid has everything a great B-movie should have (checklist includes CGI aliens, giant spiders from outer space, cheesy dialogue, and loads of macho posturing with big guns), and one could be forgiven for expecting a tongue-in-cheek irreverent romp. What becomes apparent though is that  Arachnid   takes itself quite seriously. Which, of course, is fine, except director Sholder never manages to muster ...

1987 Dir. Michael J. Muro A dodgy liquor store owner flogs bottles of out of date ‘Viper’ at discount rate to the local homeless community, unaware of its true properties: it causes its consumers to melt. Very graphically. Fred and his brother Kevin, two young drifters, find themselves up against the effects of the toxic brew, as well as having to contend with the junkyard overlord Bronson, an unhinged war vet… When a film opens with a slapstick chase scene in which a tramp steals liquor and money from various people, full frontal nudity, fart gags, a man falling out of his wheelchair and some completely random and absurd violence when a man is pulled from his car by a hulking shell-shocked hermit and hurled through his own windshield, you just know you’re in for an utterly depraved splurge of a treat. Dearest reader, may I present to you the gloriously perverted and truly outrageous schlock-fest Wes Craven once said made John Waters look like Mary Poppins: Street Trash ! Leave y...

1968 Dir. Jack Hill AKA The Maddest Story Ever Told Cannibal Orgy After the death of their father, the three Merrye siblings Virginia (Jill Banner), Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn) and Ralph (Sid Haig) find themselves in the care of their ailing butler Bruno (Lon Chaney Jnr.). Suffering from a hereditary mental illness as a direct result of an overabundance of inbreeding, dubbed the Merrye Syndrome - due to its exclusivity to their family line - the three siblings are undergoing a startling mental regression, becoming increasingly childlike. They spend their days playing macabre games around their crumbling mansion as Bruno tries, to varying degrees of success, to keep their existence hidden from the outside world. Those unfortunate enough to stumble onto the grounds of the secluded house meet with gruesome deaths at the hands of the 'children', who just want to ‘play.’ Their solitary lives are impinged upon when distant relatives Emily (Carol Ohmart) and Peter (Quinn R...

1961 Dir. Roger Corman Renzo Capetto (Antony Carbone) seizes the opportunity to get his hands on some dosh when civil unrest breaks out in Cuba. He agrees to help General Tostada and a group of exiled Cuban nationals escape on his boat with a sizeable portion of the Cuban treasury. He then plots to kill the men and blame their deaths on a legendary sea monster. So far, so good. Capetto is joined by his faithful, if rather dim-witted motley crew. What Capetto doesn’t count on is an actual sea monster turning up to throw a major spanner in the works. The stage is set for shenanigans on the high seas, quirky beatnik characters, shoestring budgets, ludicrous acting and one of the best bargain-basement monsters ever committed to celluloid. Dear reader, I give you Roger Corman’s sublime  Creature from the Haunted Sea ! Creature from the Haunted Sea belongs to a group of Corman films collectively referred to as the ‘Puerto Rico Trilogy.’ The other two are The Last Woman on Earth an...

1933 Dir. Frank Strayer A small German village is plagued by a number of mysterious deaths, all of which leave the victims drained of blood. The town elders suspect the work of vampires and a number of large vampire bats are spotted in the area. Sceptical Police Inspector Karl Brettschneider (Melvyn Douglas) suspects the work of a psychotic serial killer who needs the blood drained from his victims for some sort of bizarre experiment… Is he right? Well, he’s not wrong. The Vampire Bat is a surprisingly entertaining piece of schlock that also stars Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray. Aside from the big names attached to it, the film’s only other notable trait is that is was one of the first films to attempt to capitalise on the success of Universal’s horror epics Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931). It mixes elements from both these films (and a slew of others) to intriguing, but arguably unmemorable effect. The somewhat loose story ambles along briskly enough and there are a couple...

1946 Dir. Alfred L. Werker After witnessing a brutal murder from her hotel room window, Janet Stewart (Anabel Shaw) falls into a state of catatonic shock. When she awakens, she discovers she is being held in a private hospital and treated by the sinister Dr Cross (Vincent Price), who she realises is the man she saw commit the heinous murder! Shock is not just an ‘old dark house’ type thriller with a creepy psychiatric hospital and conniving villain. It's a twisted and slyly subversive story, in which a perfectly sane woman is made out to be insane so her accusations of murder are not taken seriously. It unravels as a tightly constructed and provocative chiller. Janet seems quite frantic and preoccupied from the moment we meet her. She forgets to pay her taxi driver as she rushes into the hotel where she is to meet with her estranged husband. We learn that she was wrongly informed of his death in the war, and that he is actually still very much alive but had been a prisone...

1974 Dir. Larry Cohen Larry Cohen is renowned for his low budget, high octane and surprisingly thought provoking B thrillers laced with social and political commentary. After penning and directing the blaxploitation movie Black Caesar (1973) and its sequel Hell Up in Harlem (1973), Cohen returned with his outrageous and highly satirical shocker It’s Alive , a cult hit that crossed over into Seventies mainstream cinema and highlighted the sly wit and subversive bite of the filmmaker. Frank (John P Ryan) and Lenore Davis (Sharon Farrell) are plunged into a nightmarish world after the birth of their second child: a monstrously mutated toddler with an insatiable appetite for blood! With quite a startling premise, Cohen really wastes no time in cutting to the chase and evoking surprising emotional depth from the outset. Sociological and environmental issues are addressed throughout the film. The over-prescription of drugs to expectant mothers, like Thalidomide in the 50s and 60s, an...

1986 Dir. Fred Dekker ‘What is this? A homicide, or a bad B Movie?’ – Det. Cameron Night of the Creeps wears its B-Movie status proudly on its sleeve. It plays out like a homage to 50s style sci-fi films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers , with elements of Night of the Living Dead , Shivers and various slasher movies thrown in for good measure. And Tom Atkins as a hard-boiled and cynical detective!  The opening scenes really succeed in setting the tone of the film as an outrageous comedy horror. Bizarre miniature aliens are battling onboard a spaceship. They eventually flush their unseen enemy out of an air-hatch and into space. It crash lands on earth in the 1950s near a university campus. On what looks distinctly like a Lover’s Lane, two teenagers make out in a parked car. The guy notices the comet and goes to see where it landed leaving the girl waiting in the car. On the radio is an announcement that a psychotic lunatic has just escaped from a nearby asylum. Sure...

1959 Dir. Ed Wood Whilst investigating reports of dubious activities and ghost sightings at an old house in the middle of nowhere, Lt. Dan Bradford, a specialist in supernatural crimes and lover of opera, encounters the rather odd and obviously phony physic Dr. Acula. It turns out Dr. Acula has been conducting fake séances and ripping off bereaved families desperate to contact their dead loved ones. However, it turns out that Acula’s dabbling in the occult may actually have summoned forth a few bewildered and vengeful spirits and as the night unravels, it won’t just be his collection of skeletons that are going bump in the night. No. It will also be the rickety sets, plodding pace, terrible acting and the unnecessarily overlong exposition throughout Night of the Ghouls . This is after all an Ed Wood production, so what do you expect? Director Edward D. Wood Jnr. has (posthumously) garnered a cult following as the worst director to ever work in cinema. Harsh, but this is not ne...