Buio Omega (1980)

Dir: Joe D'amato

(aka Beyond The Darkness, The Final Darkness, Buried Alive)

Millionaire playboy Frank (an unforgettable turn by Kieran Kanter) is consumed by grief and decides to keep his beautiful girlfriend (Cinzia Monreale) around after she dies. He steals her corpse, embalms it and keeps it in bed with him at his isolated villa, convinced that nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan... and how could it, right? "Buio Omega" is a wild original. A film so unutterably barmy that it plays almost like an extreme Horace Walpole novel, blending high camp soap plotting and gothic melodrama with genuinely disgusting, graphic gore and sex. It's hard to take the latter elements seriously when the story hits its most absurd highs and yet still somehow the combination of gorgeous location photography, a fantastic Goblin score (one of their best ever) and the sheer grimness of the ideas leaves an unsettling feeling behind. It's illogical, uneven and ludicrous but you'll never see another film like it and for that it's kind of brilliant. ***1/2

Anthropophagus (1980)

Dir: Joe D'Amato

Even the makers admit to being a little embarrassed about this extremely dark exploitation flick but I'd have to argue its virtues with them. It may seem like standard fare as a crazed cannibal (played by the film's screenwriter, George Eastman!) stalks a group of hapless tourists around a remote Greek island, and it may be pretty gross and sleazy in parts (I mean, yeah, homeboy eats a foetus) but I think it's been done a disservice by those who regard it as just trash. Maybe it's time and nostalgia that have improved it but I actually think "Anthropophagus" is a damn fine, slow-burning slasher. The atmosphere is moody and although the gore doesn't really start in force until some 70+ minutes into the movie, there's a feeling of dread constructed perfectly by the cast, locations, photography and yes, even the script. It's pretty tight and the killer's back story is original and weird enough to work. The truly stunning Tisa Farrow stars as the terrified but headstrong heroine and her performance is emotional and greatly underrated. Even Eastman, as the killer, is seriously scary in his weird face make-up and bald wig, and the ending he writes for himself is as black as they come. Still shocking some 30 years on. ***1/2

Ravenous (1999)

Dir: Antonia Bird

Boring, pretentious twaddle about a party of travelers in 1840s California who run out of food and resort to cannibalism. A similar story is presented in a far more believable, moving and interesting way in Trey Parker's "Alferd Packer : The Musical!" and that should tell you all you need to know. For one, this film expects the viewer - without sufficient set-up - to swallow the fact that eating human flesh turns you into an invincible superhuman. Even if you can deal with that ol' chestnut, the total lack of characterisation or emotional core remains tough to digest. It's just one of those insufferable movies that thinks it's being awfully clever but fails to even spell "Nietzsche" correctly when quoting him on the film's epigram. Nice going, guys. The occasional attempt at black comedy also fails to satisfy. You'll just feel empty inside after this one. See? It's so depressingly bad, I can't even be bothered to make decent food puns.

Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1990)

Dir: Jeff Burr

The family that slays together stays together in this grim, sadistic entry in the notorious cannibal slasher series. Plot doesn't really add much to the set formula; yet more hapless travellers get hunted, tortured and killed by the insane Sawyer family in the usual bloody fashion. That said, the first half of film is surprisingly creepy. Jeff Burr's direction is taut, assured and stylish, and the screenplay ticks along nicely. It's only in the second half that it all falls to bits and becomes generic stalk'n'slash fodder, symptomatic of everything wrong with the subgenre in the late 80s; a howlingly inappropriate heavy metal soundtrack, half-cocked wisecracks every other line, endless footage of people fleeing through darkened woods, etc. You know the drill (or, in this case, the saw). It's a damn shame. All the misguided black comedy attempts (a gold-plated chainsaw? puh-lease!) throw a wet blanket over the spooky atmosphere and the plot simply isn't strong enough to sustain itself. The tacked-on ending sequence (thanks, New Line studio bosses!) makes absolutely no sense at all. A shame. There are some nice touches here but, like much from its era, the film smacks of wasted potential. **

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Dir: Tobe Hooper

Although aped a few zillion times since (not least of all by some of its own sequels), the original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" still somehow retains its scare factor, despite the familiarity of the material. It's your standard 'mad rednecks' story; bunch of kids driving through Texas run low on gas and get themselves caught by a family of inbred cannibal killers. What sets it apart is hard to place, but the film possesses an unusual power that few of its successors have captured. The skilled photography makes for an incredibly eerie atmosphere, as do the filthy, horrific set designs. The edgy musical score sets you on the edge right from the start and the final final third is quite insane; essentially just 20 minutes of non-stop screaming, it's an interesting experiment in how far you can push cinematic terror. A strange, disquieting and original little film that richly deserves its place in horror history. Never what I'd deem a 'nice' experience though. ***1/2

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

Dir: Tobe Hooper

Superior sequel which reunites the crazy cannibal family from the original for an infinitely gorier exercise in pure delirium. Caroline Williams stars as a supercute rockabilly DJ who inadvertantly broadcasts a live chainsaw killing on air (two college kids phoning in a request before being hacked to pieces). This attracts some unwanted attention from the killers, who decide to put her out of business once and for all. L.M. Kit Carson's multi-faceted screenplay is a fiendishly clever slice of Texan grand guignol; daring, disturbing, surreal and deeply, darkly funny. The gruesome set design, manic performances and unrestrained, MPAA-baiting bloodshed (courtesy of Tom Savini) all make for a truly feverish one-of-a-kind experience and, for my money, Hooper's masterpiece. Spectacular stuff, if you've the stomach for it. ****

Big Meat Eater (1982)

Dir: Chris Windsor

A no-budget musical horror in which a small town butcher hires a large, fez-wearing weirdo (the titular character) as his assistant. From here, everything goes to pot. Dogs end up in the sausages, townsfolk get fed to one another, the mayor ends up as a zombie, a troupe of Turkish dancing girls are taught how to "boogie to the front, boogie to the back", alien robots hide a rare fuel (balonium!) underneath the shop, then both the butcher and a local boy genius are temporarily mutated into paper-maché green-skinned monsters! This is all punctuated with clumsy, tune-barren song and dance numbers, execrable dialogue and zero production values. It sounds almost fun but it's painfully slow (endless padding shots) and so ludicrous as to actually achieve almost 100% incoherence. There's certainly little attempt at a linear storyline and the jokes, while pleasingly absurd at first, soon get excruciating. The rhyming couplet, "I'm a big meat eater, yes I am / I'm a big meat eater, pass the ham" is about the best thing about this movie. It makes Plan 9 look like Plan 1. EL BOMBA!

Feed (2005)

Dir: Brett Leonard

This relentlessly extreme Australian thriller is a tough one to grade. It opens with a castrated man, sat in a bathtub and being fed his own penis. It then proceeds to get worse! A Sydney cop assigned to surfing internet porn sites in search of illegal activity flies to Ohio in search of a webmaster he believes to be responsible for some rather unusual serial killings. I won't give any more away as it would ruin the many grotesque, shocking twists that fly thick and fast at the viewer throughout the film, but I will give this film the accolade of being the only one I've ever seen that has actually put me off my dinner! On one hand, the movie plays like a fresh-out-of-film-school debut with its bad Digital Video photography, over-flashy editing and empassioned polemic, so it was a surprise to find that director Brett Leonard is something of a genre veteran (previous efforts include "The Lawnmower Man" and "The Dead Pit"). Still, on the other hand, it's actually a bit smarter than it looks. The pervading unpleasantry of the film aside, it's a well-paced, gripping, original storyline and has an ingeniously sick final twist. Plus, the chap who plays the villain is really good at it. Very creepy indeed. I'm not sure I'd quite 'recommend' it as such but if you reckon your stomach can handle it, there's ample merit to be found beneath the grue. ***

Raw Meat (1972)

Dir: Gary Sherman

Mind the doors! This one's a gory old Brit-horror about a cannibal ghoul living in the London Underground system. The ever-wonderful Donald Pleasance excels himself with a star turn as a no-nonsense (or all-nonsense, depending on how you look at it) cockney copper hot on the cannibal's sticky trail. This fairly straightforward police/slasher story is made hugely enjoyable thanks to some great acting, an unusual setting, eerie photography and one almighty streak of black humour (Pleasance is side-splitting). Also it's super-cool to see the shot-on-location footage of early-70s London in all its sleazy, sordid splendour. Watching "Raw Meat" makes you wonder why any idiot would've put up money for a big piece of poo like (the verrrrry similarly themed) "Creep" 20+ years later. This one's just fine as it is, thanks. An underrated diamond. ***

The Boy From Hell (2005)

Dir: Mari Asato

A demented Japanese gore film, based on a manga by the ever-crazy Hideshi Hino, tells the twisted story of a doctor (Mirai Yamamoto) who loses her son in a car accident (he is decapitated by a passing lorry while leaning out the window!). On the advice of a witch, she kidnaps a terminally ill child from the hospital and slits his throat with a giant fang over the grave of her own dead lad. This, of course, brings her beloved back as a hideously deformed zombie boy who develops a habit for eating his peers alive. Although loaded with inventively surreal imagery, as expected for a Hino adaptation, "The Boy From Hell" never quite takes off. It seems to strive for a blackly comic poignancy, kind of like a sick "Frankenstein" retelling, but the lack of substance (and occasionally even sense) lets it down. It's fast paced enough, with sufficient cartoon gore to hold the attention throughout some of the more derivative plot devices, but by the time it finished, I was left wondering what the point was. By Hino's standards, this is astonishingly tame too. **

Gore-Met Zombie Chef From Hell (1986)

Dir: Don Swan

High-camp, no-budget gorefest from the 80s that enlightens viewers on the legend of 'Goza' (Theo Depuay), rebel member of an ancient sect called The Righteous Brotherhood. Seems Goza has "lost that loving feeling" (geddit?), so in 1386, his fellow cultists curse him to live eternally. The catch is that his body will deteriorate horribly if he doesn't eat human flesh every day. Flash-forward 600 years and Goza is a Hawaiian-shirt-wearing dandy, running a beach-side restaurant that serves up blood in the cocktails, surfer chicks in the burgers and health inspectors in the soup! You can probably guess the rest. Especially if you've seen "Blood Feast". Made-up rituals, nonsense dialogue and gratuitous cannibalism abound but, on a technical level, "Gore-Met.." makes even "Orgy of the Dead" seem like "Apocalypse Now". The photography is one step lower than home-movie standard, the acting is so bad and miscast it's actually surreal (priests in hoodies?) and the choppings, slicings, heart-rippings, drillings and decapitations are laughably unconvincing. On the other hand, the spontaneous blues jams (!), over-abundance of loud shirts, constant beer-drinking and frequent dance eruptions give the impression that the filmmakers were having a party rather than making a movie. This sense of fun is, against all better judgement, surprisingly contagious and undeniably genuine. As a result, it's with the greatest affection that I award this rating: EL BOMBA!