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

Psychos in Love (1986)

Dir: Gorman Bechard

I first saw this on a bad quality VHS bootleg about fifteen years ago and, when I found out it was finally out on DVD, a part of me expected to be disappointed. I wasn't. One of the genuine gems of the early direct-to-video boom, "Psychos in Love" is a low-budget splatter comedy about a bartender and a manicurist who fall in love. The only problem is that they're both psychotic serial killers who murder people at random because they feel they can't fit in with society's "norms". The story is somehow tender, absurd, grotesque and hilarious all at the same time and it has depth far beyond the "bad jokes", near-constant nudity and copious bargain basement gore effects (although that's not to say all of that isn't enjoyable too!). The humour, if anything, seems very ahead of its time and it's well delivered by the two fantastic leads (Carmine Capobianco and Debi Thibeault). 24 years on and there's a lot of cheap and strange movies out there but none quite like this one. ***1/2

Dellamore Dellamore (1994)

Dir: Michele Soavi

Absurdist horror stuck somewhere between genius and madness, this one involves a cemetery keeper called Francisco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett, in a genuine star turn) who (along with his assistant, Gnaghi) handles the nasty business of disposing of returners - dead people who come back to life a week after being buried. The film crosses the genres skillfully, weaving goofball splatter with stony-faced nuggets of philosophy and even a smattering of romance into its artfully surreal tapestry. Taken scene by scene, this is a beautiful piece of work. The photography is magnificent, the direction assured, the dialogue fantastic. It's perhaps too abstract to work entirely as a whole but it has admirable ambitions and, if you're looking for something different, you really can't get much weirder than this one. ***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. ****