Behind the Couch

1985 Dir. Stuart Gordon When the eccentric Herbert West (a manic Jeffrey Combs) arrives at Miskatonic University, Arkham, he and a fellow medical student become embroiled in strange experiments to reanimate dead tissue. With horrific consequences. Based on H.P. Lovecraft’s short story Herbert West – Reanimator , Stuart Gordon’s film is perhaps one of the most successful adaptations of the author’s work, and it triggered a resurgence of cinematic interest in the work of Lovecraft throughout the 80s and 90s. The film is an outrageous blend of splattery special effects, pseudo-sci-fi concepts, comic violence, pitch black humour and vivid horror. At times it boasts a similar madcap tone to Sam Raimi’s earlier splat-stick classic, Evil Dead , as Dr West’s increasingly desperate and ludicrous attempts to reanimate corpses reach feverish intensity. The idea to make Re-Animator stemmed from Gordon’s belief that there were not enough Frankensteinian stories. He believed pop-culture had...

2010 Dirs. Jen & Sylvia Soska Four friends set out on an errand and end up in a fight for their lives when they discover the body of a prostitute in the trunk of their car. The ragtag group must put aside their differences to dispose of the body and evade attempts on their lives by shadowy underworld figures, corrupt police, a sleazy motel manager, chainsaw wielding triads, and a brutal serial killer. Energetic, oddball and effortlessly cool, the luridly titled Dead Hooker In A Trunk is one of a few current films boasting exploitative monikers that hark back to sleazy grindhouse flicks of the past. Unfolding as a love letter to exploitation movies, the feature debut from Canadian twin sisters Jen and Sylvia Soska is an anarchic and eccentric road movie that subverts expectations and doesn’t stop for breath until its surprisingly poignant ending. That it has an unexpectedly big heart, and is a statement about the dynamics and importance of friendship, is an added bonus. A...

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 ...

2003 Dir. Brian Yuzna Surviving the collapse of the crypt he was cornered in by a horde of his reanimated corpses, Dr Hebert West continues to conduct his grisly experiments. He is eventually arrested and imprisoned but continues his research. When a young doctor named Howard Phillips begins work at the prison, he teams up with West to help bring his experiments to the next level. Hell breaks loose and copious blood is spilled when several of the reanimated corpses break free and wreck havoc in the prison. Creative carnage and grisly mutations ensue. Stuart Gordon’s transgressive and splattery adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Re-Animator was one of the defining horror films of the Eighties. Fiercely independent, unconventional, awash with splashy effects and boasting the darkest, severed tongue-in-cheek humour imaginable, Re-Animator still wields its grisly power and effectiveness today. It was followed by the Brian Yuzna directed sequel Bride of Re-Animator , which...

Writer and director Tim Sullivan splattered onto the scene in 2005 with 2001 Maniacs , his satirical remake of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s drive-in splatter classic, Two Thousand Maniacs!  (1964). His follow up,  Driftwood (2006), was about a traumatised teenager sent to a summer camp for troubled young people after he claims his dead brother is haunting him. The filmmaker will soon be seen venturing in front of cameras to portray murderous cross-dressing nun, Sister Mary Chopper, in the forthcoming Bloody Bloody Bible Camp .  Tim very kindly took some time out from pre-production on his dream project, the vampire horror Brothers of the Blood , to chat to me about his latest film - the gruesome sequel 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams , which has just been unleashed on DVD - as well as his fondness for 'splatstick' comedy-horror, and the importance of gay representation in horror films...   What ingredients did Two Thousand Maniacs! possess that made it so ripe for a...

2009 Dir. JT Seaton George's friends have all gathered for an intervention... George's intervention. You see, George is a zombie and his friends have come to realise that he has been snacking on his neighbours. They attempt to convince him to stop eating people and to enter 'zombie rehab'. But the intervention doesn't go quite as planned, and George’s monstrous appetite gets the better of him. Bloody mayhem ensues, as George’s friends, various gate-crashers, door-to-door salesmen, Mormons and strippers all end up on the menu. Ever wonder what happened to the likes of Ed from Shaun of the Dead , Bub from Day of the Dead or Colin from, well, Colin – zombies who somehow retained an element of what it was that made them human – after the credits rolled? What if a zombie was able to retain all of their personality, and everything that made them who they were as a person while they were alive? That is precisely the angle this satirical and bitingly witty comedy ap...

Isle of the Damned  (2008) wears its Video Nasty influences on its badly dubbed, deliberately amateurish and bloodily soiled sleeve, lovingly parodying the European exploitation flicks that inspired it. I recently had the pleasure of catching up with its director, the elusive Antonello Giallo (aka Mark Colegrove) to have a chat about his tongue-in-flayed-cheek movie, Italian gore cinema, and the challenges of low-budget filmmaking… How did the idea for Isle of the Damned come about? Had you always conceived it as a parody? What inspired it? It was definitely a parody from the get-go, inspired by all the old Italian cannibal films. We knew that if we were to try to do a serious Italian cannibal film on our budget it would have ended up unintentionally hilarious. A serious film really wouldn’t be our style anyhow. The script was written by Mark Leake, and we had done one previous film together called Pleasures of the Damned , which is the prequel to Isle… Jack Steele is the main ...

2009 Dirs. Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu When Keiko (Eri Otoguro) plummets to her death after arguing with vampiric rival Monami (Yukie Kawamura), her father turns all ‘Dr Frankenstein’ and resurrects her as part of a fiendish experiment. Bolting together a new body for her, he enables his daughter to return from the dead as Frankenstein Girl. The stage is now set for the most outlandish and elaborate showdown since Godzilla and Megalon. Part soapy melodrama, part monster movie mash-up, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl is highly imaginative, utterly bonkers and boasts the most wicked sense of humour since The Evil Dead . Amongst various scenes of blood-splattered mayhem, contemporary Japanese pop-culture is mined for twisted laughs by the director who brought us Tokyo Gore Police . Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl is as over-the-top, uber-kitsch and gorily twisted as you'd expect from a film with this title. Perhaps most surprising of all, is the fact that i...

2009 Dir. Tommy Wirkola AKA Død Snø A group of medical students on a skiing holiday in deepest, darkest Norway come face to face with marauding zombie Nazis… Yes. Zombie Nazis. Dead Snow is every bit as preposterous as it sounds. In a similar vein to Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland , Wirkola’s striking looking film is an outrageous comedy-horror that deftly mixes chills with chuckles and gore with guffaws. The film sets its tone in the opening scene as a young woman flees in terror across a desolate snowscape accompanied by the strains of Dukas’s mischievous symphony The Sorcerer’s Apprentice . Director Wirkola wisely keeps her pursuers to the shadows and we only catch the briefest glimpses of them before they set upon the unfortunate woman and tear her asunder. The film’s cine-literate characters are an amiable bunch and the script (by Wirkola and Stig Frode Henriksen) takes time to establish group dynamics and ease us into the company of the group before all hell break...

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...

2007 Dir. Kit Ryan Le pantomime du grand guignol… Botched is a rather fitting title for a film that seemingly revels in its own brand of absolute anarchy. Largely shot in Ireland and Eastern Europe, it boasts an eclectic cast who lick up their absurd characters with perverse relish.  Beginning as something of a slick heist-caper complete with Ocean’s Eleven style car chases, jewellery-thieving, a groovy David Holmes-like soundtrack and talk of ‘one last job.’ However, in a film called Botched , as its name may just suggest, you know that all will not go as planned. Sure enough, Richie (Stephen Dorff) is shipped off to Russia by his sadistic boss (Sean Pertwee) to retrieve a jewel-encrusted cross from a swish Moscow penthouse and compensate for messing up the last heist. However, events soon bleed into something else entirely ala From Dusk til Dawn . That ‘something else entirely’ is an incredibly gory slapstick film. Splat-stick, if you will. While the ‘one last job...