Mar 26th Horror Trivia Watchlist

To all those who came here from the event or Storm Crow's FB page, welcome! I am Jay, one half of the horror trivia quizmasters and this is my humble blog. Here's a selected list of titles mentioned at the last event. Click on the titles to be redirected to their Imdb listing. Horror Trivia Night happens at Storm Crow Manor in Toronto. If you're in the area, come on down! Register here.

Starman (1984)

The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

Black Moon Rising (1986)

Dark Star (1974)

The Ward (2010)

Night of the Zoopocalypse (2025)

Let the Right One In (2008)

Alligator (1980)

Skinamarink (2022)

The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970)

Your Vice is A Locked Room and Only I Have The Key (1972)

Don't Torture A Duckling (1972)

The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963)

All The Colors of the Dark (1972)

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2013)

One on Top of the Other (1969)

Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971)

Blood and Black Lace (1964)

Brothers.

The next tape off the pile was Alberto De Martino's 1982 thriller Blood Link. This was a recent acquisition and it was probably my recollection of the coverbox that made me pick it up from the Vinegar Syndrome store. I always thought that was Doug Hutchinson on the cover, but it is in fact Michael Moriarty so big upgrade there for a number of reasons. Anyhoo, let's see what we have got here...

An American doctor named Craig (Moriarty) starts having visions of murders happening in Frankfurt. Realizing he is seeing through the eyes of his twin brother, whom he thought died when he was young, Craig sets out to stop him.

Having previously seen some of De Martino's work, namely the Montreal-set Strange Shadows In An Empty Room, I had good reason to think I would enjoy this one and for the most part I did. Shot mostly in Germany with an Italian crew, there are sections that do - especially the climax at the park - feel very giallo. Apart from that though, it becomes very clear that all involved in this project loved Brian De Palma. I mean, a lot of this movie feels like a gender swapped version of Sisters (right down to the fact Craig & Keith were Siamese twins) though there is a sprinkle of Eyes of Laura Mars in there, too. Blood Link is definitely one of those European knock-offs versions of stuff coming out across the pond at that time.

Michael Moriarty as Keith & Craig in Blood Link.

But that's not to say it is without merit. Moriarty, who would've just been starting his long tenure with Larry Cohen, is very good here. At first I thought he was being unusually reserved as Craig, but then I realized he was saving the crazy shit for the evil twin. I'm no doubt sure that the character's penchant for putting jam in his coffee (!) was Moriarty's idea on the day. You've also got an Ennio Morricone score as well as a welcome guest appearance from Cameron Mitchell.

As the movie goes on though, it starts to wear on you when the awkward and uncomfortable (even more than you'd expect) rape scenes start to mount up. I was quite taken with Craig's girlfriend Julie, played by Penelope Milford, to the point I was increasingly worried for her well being. When she took it upon herself to take down Keith, I was sure she was going to end up like Nancy Allen in Blowout. In retrospect it may have been better if she had because the ending she does get - pushed for by the producers apparently - was far more gross and disheartening.

Penelope Milford as Julie. She deserved better.

Blood Link is a more than serviceable thriller with good locales and interesting characters, but its subject matter descends into sleazier territory than one might expect.

W is for Watcher (2022)

For today's letter, I picked a new movie Chloe Okuno's Watcher starring Maika Monroe.

An American woman (Monroe) moves to Romania with her husband where she starts suspecting the man watching her from the building across the street may be a serial killer.

This movie was at first just one of many titles flooding my streaming service inbox, but after some positive feedback from some trusted sources I decided to give it a whirl one evening. I do love me some Maika after all, wish she was in more stuff.

Maika Monroe as Julia in Watcher

While it is true that on the surface it looks like an obvious Rear Window clone, it also does have some more going for it. Instead of being confined to her apartment, Monroe's character Julia has a language barrier to deal with that feels far more debilitating and alienating. She's left out of conversations with her husband's co-workers and calling for help as she encounters danger becomes increasingly more difficult.

The backdrop of Bucharest was also a very pleasing one visually. It made the movie feel much more like a giallo to me than anything from Hitchcock. Monroe really gets to perform in this one, harkening back to when I first saw her 2013's It Follows where paranoia and dread rested heavily on her shoulders in every scene. Worth a “watch“.

Q is for A Quiet Place to Kill (1970)

Q's beyond The Winged Serpent and Quatemass are not abundant so I had to dig deep. Fortunately, due to Shudder's fairly large Euro-horror catalogue, I was able to pull this one out.

After recovering from a injury while racing, Helen (Carroll Baker) accepts an invitation to visit her ex-husband Maurice (Jean Sorel) in Majorca, only to be sucked into a murder plot.

This was my first giallo for Alphabet Slop and I'd almost forgotten how much fun they are. Everything is just amped up. The music is boppier, the locales are prettier, the clothes are flashier, and the women, hoo boy, the women are nuder. Now, I wouldn't call QP2K a horror persay, truth be told it's really only gialli adjacent - it has more in common with Diabolique than it does Deep Red - but with more treacherous seaside driving. Seriously that dash-cam made me very uncomfortable.

Carroll Baker & Jean Sorel in A Quiet Place To Kill

Cinephiles often equate director Umberto Lenzi with his cannibal films, but he was a very versatile director. Seven Bloodstained Orchids is an underseen gem and Nightmare City is terrific schlock. I talked about the endless superfluous dialogue scenes that sucked the life out of Open House. Well, QP2K has those same scenes, except Lenzi knows how to make them sing. He'll show some skin, have two men play chess who very clearly have NO IDEA how to play chess, or ahem.. .murder some pigeons. It is Lenzi, after all...

Yes, let's shock zoom over to the ladies. Lenzi mainstay Baker was stunning and rocked a mean leather jacket. Her rivals Anna Proclemer & Marina Coffa were no slouches either. I was surprised to see Coffa had little work after this movie because she had real presence and reminded me of someone I couldn't put my finger on. Margot Kidder? Jen Connolly? 

Anyway, this was a good bit of fun from Lenzi's catlalogue and I can see myself checking out the other two films in this apparent trilogy - Paranoia & So Sweet, So Perverse - at some point in the future.

L is for The Last Matinee (2020)

When I was at Fantasia this summer, this movie was a blind buy at one of the pop-up Blu-ray vendors. It has sat in “the pile” until I realized it was alphabetically fortuitous to watch it now.

Unsuspecting moviegoers at a cinema in Montevideo are stalked by a sadistic killer.

This is a well made movie. It has good composition, a good location, a good lead actress (Luciana Grasso), good kills and a good score. All the side stories are amusing, the kid who sneaks in, the loud teenagers, the first date couple... However, there just seems to be something missing for it to add up to the sum of its parts.

Perhaps The Last Matinee is just trying too hard to stand alongside its influences. It doesn't take long to see that director Maximiliano Contenti is a huge giallo fan, as well as Bigas Luna's 1987 flick Anguish. You take Zelda Rubinstein out of that movie and The Last Matinee is basically a remake. There's even an Anguish poster in the box office. 

Luciana Grasso as Ana in The Last Matinee

Maybe it's the little distractions that add up - the Uruguayan Jonah Hill, the fact the movie is called The Last Matinee, but it's clearly night out or maybe just that I kept remembering that little kid was sitting in his own piss for half the movie.

At first I thought the film playing in the theatre while all this was going on - Frankenstein: Day of the Beast - was shot alongside this movie. That would have been impressive, but when I looked it up I found it was a ten-year-old movie made by Ricardo Islas who plays the TLM's killer. Less impressive, but it is cool that they include the full movie on the disc as a special feature.

The Last Matinee was serviceable and slick, like most horrors are these days. Easily digestible, but not filling.

That Girl...

Darkside Releasing recently dropped a new trailer for Girl With A Straight Razor starring my old muse Ali Chappell.

As far as neo-giallos go, this looks spot on. GWASR hits Blu-ray and VOD on August 17th.

NYG.

Geez, I wish I lived in New York - at least in October - so I could catch this screening of Black Gloves and Razors at Brooklyn's Spectacle Theater. Once a legendary bootleg tape of the gialli's greatest hits cobbled together by musician Sam McKinlay, it has now been digitized and ready to stain the walls of the Spectacle red. Here's the sizzle reel.

I don't often succumb to FOMO - because frankly my own city has an embarrassment of riches - but DAYAMMMMM. Black Gloves and Razors plays the Spectacle Theater Oct 5th and 31st.

Sleaze in the 6ix

This week's VHS is my recently acquired copy of 1983's American Nightmare.

Eric (Lawrence Day) travels into the city's underbelly to find his missing sister.

Hey, you know you've been doing this a long time when you start duplicating movie posts. I remembered I watched American Nightmare a few years back at Trash Palace, but didn't think I'd actually done a review. But I did. And now it's Thursday night and I'm already committed so now you can compare and contrast.

Lora Staley as Louise in American Nightmare.

So first off, I have to reiterate that American Nightmare is basically the closest thing that exists to a Canuck giallo. I was once again surprised by how grimy this movie was for a Canadian joint. Practically every female character gets naked and a good chunk of the movie is padded with strip tease performances – some by actual Toronto peelers. I feel like this would make a good double bill with Strange Shadows as they both exude – save for their less than stellar treatment of transvestites – the best traits of the grindhouse era.

Hey, even though my first review might have had an exceedingly witty jab at the NDP, this one has Gifs!

The biggest laugh about this movie still remains that though it is called American Nightmare, it couldn't possibly be more Canadian. You've pretty much got every familiar face of the time, including Michael “Mike” Ironside, Tom Harvey and Lenore Zann, actors drop a-boot's at will and there was a driving scene where shops like Color Your World and Bi-Way streamed by. I mean, the climax takes place on the roof of Channel 47/Cable 4 with the CN Tower in the background for Christ's sake!

So what have we learned here? Well first, Toronto can be pretty greasy when it wants to be and second... I should really double check my database before picking my posts. Anyhoo, happy Simcoe weekend everyone!

Lucio's Eyes.

This week, I decided to start out 2019 with some Lucio Fulci and my VHS of his 1977 giallo, The Psychic.

When a vision leads her to a body inside the walls of her husband's former home, Virginia (Jennifer O'Neill) goes about trying to solve the crime.

The Psychic was made right before Fulci's extended foray into the supernatural – for which many consider to have been his best period – with titles that included Zombie, The Beyond, House By The Cemetery and City of the Living Dead. With this one being on the cusp of that era, I actually found myself surprised by how understated this movie was.

With the body count standing at an anemic three – with only one happening onscreen – I would go so far as to say The Psychic was downright restrained. It also didn't help that the aforementioned death scene was an almost shot-for-shot lift from Fulci's earlier film Don't Torture A Duckling.

The Psychic at its heart was a giallo with all the usual misdirects, visual queues and star Jennifer O'Neill put in a solid performance and she wandered from shock zoom to shock zoom. Seriously, there were so many, it would've made Mario Bava blush.

The story owed most of its DNA to Edgar Allan Poe, namely The Black Cat, but with the furry object of its climax switched out for a watch alarm. A pair of things struck me about that, first was how much the final moments mirrored Denis Villeneuve's 2013 film Prisoners and also that Fulci felt the need to revisit this Poe classic less than five years later in 1981, albeit with a better cast and more grandeur.

Though The Psychic may be the weakest of Fulci's giallos, it was still super watchable on the strengths of tried and true formula and a solid score by Fabio Frizzi.

I Thought Canadians Were Supposed To Be Friendly!

This week’s VHS was my recently acquired tape of Alberto De Martino’s 1976 Euro-crime joint Strange Shadows in an Empty Room.

A grizzled Ottawa police captain (Stuart Whitman) travels to Montreal to investigate the death of his sister.

I first saw this film at Trash Palace many years ago, but likely due to the PBR-induced haze remembered almost none of it. Strange Shadows is a fascinating anomaly as it was shot in Montreal by an Italian (known for spaghetti westerns & sword of sandal pictures) aping the gritty American cop efforts of this era. If you then throw in some giallo elements you have yourself quite a stew.

Right of the bat I noticed the fantastic cast assembled for this movie. In addition to Whitman, you also have Martin Landau, Tisa Farrow and Italian production staple John Saxon, among others. While the cover may have you believe you're in for a Wait Until Dark-style thriller, the blind girl only briefly factors into the story. It’s actually more of an ensemble murder mystery that in true Italian genre fashion features a revolving door of quirky characters that come fast and furious throughout the run time.

Stuart Whitman (left), John Saxon & Martin Landau in Strange Shadows...

In some markets this movie was known as Blazing Magnum, but more apt might have been Excessive Force based on main character Tony Siatta’s policing methods. He was Dirty Harry on crack, as literally every interaction with a suspect concluded with him pulling his badge after an obligatory chase or fisticuffs. Perhaps the most problematic bit was when he brawled a group of transvestites during which I’m pretty sure Siatta went all Sleepaway Camp and shoved a curling iron where the sun don’t shine.

It was this behaviour that led to the car chase scene that this movie is best known for. It’s pretty awesome and definitely De Martino’s attempt to one-up Bill Friedkin's The French Connection. They even did a three-car stunt that’s so cool they showed it FOUR times!

Hilariously though, the suspect Siatti was chasing had barely any useful information and was basically one of a bunch of guys he shook down looking for a stolen necklace.

I’m not going to lie though, the fact this was shot in Canada was of endless amusement to me. For some reason, half of Montreal looked like it was under construction and the Toronto police crime re-enactment video was a real gut-buster. And I have to must admit the climax at the hospital was pretty satisfying.

Shoot first...

So yeah, get past the fact that Siatta was a pretty terrible person and this was some solid Euro-crime featuring a lot of familiar faces.

That Worked Out Well.

This week's VHS is Alfred Sole's 1976 thriller Alice Sweet Alice.

After a young girl is murdered at her communion ceremony, her sister Alice (Paula Sheppard) becomes the prime suspect. But is she guilty?

No sooner had I picked this VHS up from Rue Morgue's yard sale last month when The Royal announced they would be screening it as part of their No Future series. Perfect!

Alice Sweet Alice was a solid film, but also a strange one for many reasons that I'll get into shortly. The evening's host (I didn't catch his name and the website was no help) made a very valid point that due to being made in the mid-seventies, the film treads a very fine line between giallo and what would become the most popular horror of the next decade – the American slasher. Alice Sweet Alice was much more conscious of its visual style and many other tropes – The Don't Look Now-inspired costume was a striking image in itself – appeared as well.

However, for all its genre leanings there were also several irregularities. Firstly, the inevitable reveal happens very early on at the end of the second act. We then stay with them for a while as they try to cover up their crimes, which leads me into my next point. Alice Sweet Alice oddly has no clear protagonist. As a viewer, we spend time with Alice, her sister Karen (Brooke Shields in her first role), the mother (Linda Miller), the father (Niles McMaster) and even the family priest (Rudolph Willrick). It can be a bit erratic at times.

Though the acting could be a tad melodramatic (Jane Lowry really cranks it to eleven as the suspicious Aunt Ann), the story kept me engaged. A highlight for me was Sheppard as the title character. Nineteen when she took the role, yet somehow managing to pull off playing a twelve-year-old, she sadly only made one other film, Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky. She comes off as apologetically devilish regardless of whether or not she's the culprit. At one point, she actually avoids being molested by murdering a kitten. So many emotions!

Paula Sheppard in Alice Sweet Alice.

Alice Sweet Alice was not at all what I was expecting, but I was still pleasantly surprised. Instead of a generic slasher (I initially thought it to be about five years newer than it was), I got a competently executed mystery that contains more than a few jabs at Catholicism. I can get behind that. With all their kneeling and chanting, church services never cease to creep me out. Oh well, whatever gets you through the day I guess.

Hells Yeah!

Moving now to across the pond, I checked out Cold Hell, the new thriller from German director Stefan Ruzowitzky.

A Muslim taxi driver named Özge (Violetta Schurawlow) becomes the target of a serial killer after she witnesses him disposing of his latest victim.

I loved this film. Thrillers are a dime-a-dozen, but it is rare where all of its components come together as well as they did here. Cold Hell was the perhaps the closest thing to a giallo I've seen in quite some time. It has several elements, including the mysterious serial killer, a protagonist that is unwittingly brought into the investigation and the cat-and-mouse game that ensues.

This time however, the formula was cleverly subverted by flipping the gender roles. Usually, the female is a companion to the main character that helps to a certain degree, but often ends up needing to be rescued (Daria Nicolodi in some of Dario Argento's films for instance). In Cold Hell, Özge was the main character who was not only strong, but also took no shit and never let herself be a victim. It's also important for me to point out that her strength felt well established and organic. It wasn't an empty plot device, her actions were spurred on by years of being trodden on by the world.

Which brings me to Schurawlow, who was just fantastic. I could see the weight of the rage she carried around inside her quiet demeanor. It was almost as if she had been waiting for someone to come along she could unleash all her anger onto. I never once thought Özge couldn't do all of the kick-ass stuff Schurawlow did in this film. On top of that though, there were a lot of other moments like altercations with her estranged family and the socio-political hurdles of xenophobia that really added to her character. Ruzowitzky made a perfect casting choice here I can only hope that Schurawlow's career skyrockets like Franke Potente's did after he put her in his 2000 flick, Anatomy.

Violetta Schurawlow as Özge in Cold Hell.

Cold Hell was a well paced thriller, but it also had its share of really kinetic action sequences. Özge was a trained Thai boxer and I really liked the true-to-life nature of the fight sequences. They were not the highly choreographed bouts we see from Hollywood and the Far East, but realistic get-them-down-and-hit-them-in-the-face-as-many-times-as-possible affairs. It was extremely visceral and I was super pumped after the credits rolled.

Cold Hell will likely be my favourite film at the festival this year. It was a very well executed thriller anchored by a complex and spirited female lead. We need more thrillers (and lead characters) like this one.

Blu Bird Fly.

It took me a few weeks, but I finally got a chance to dig into my Arrow Blu-ray of Dario Argento's 1970 film The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.

Bird has special significance to me, as it was the first Argento I ever saw (followed closely by Suspiria and Phenomena in its US incarnation Creepers). I was barely sixteen and just beginning my video store tenure. My horror diet up until that point had consisted mainly of slashers and creature features and it was films like Bird that opened my eyes to the fact that horror could be more than mere entertainment. It could also be artistic.

I adore this film with its quirky characters and meandering tour of the Rome less travelled. Bird was not the first giallo, but it set the template (in much the same way Halloween would kick off the American slasher boom almost a decade later) for what would come later not only in Argento's career, but also that of his contemporaries in Lucio Fulci, Sergio Martino and many others.

Someway, somehow, I will own that painting.

Based on the fourties pulp novel The Screaming Mimi, Argento took the nugget of the story and made it his own. I've always found his exploration of memory (where the protagonist is always chasing that one important detail) fascinating, not only how well he executes it, but also how many times he was able to successfully mine it throughout his career.

As for the Blu-ray, I’ll let the experts talk about the transfer, all I know is it looked as good as it ever has, and I’ve seen it projected on 35mm. Arrow really went to town on the presentation though. I posted Industrial Blue's unboxing video before, but even that doesn’t do justice to how stunning this set is. Perhaps most impressive is the gorgeous sixty-page booklet that dissects the film in many different ways as well as gives a good rundown of the gialli as a whole.

The set includes these six lobby cards.

I was also really impressed with the special features. There are two lengthy talks on the film with scholars Alexandra Heller-Nicolas & Kat Ellinger that were very informative, even for those well versed in the subject. I was not aware that there was another adaptation of The Screaming Mimi out there from 1958! I'll have to track that down. There is also a great commentary by Troy Howarth, as well as a new half-hour interview with Dario Argento himself. It was really refreshing to see him just sit down and talk extensively about his debut.

Big ups to Arrow for this one. There are few horrors that I always get the same amount of enjoyment with each viewing as I do with Argento’s ouevre. A good chunk of his catalogue are masterworks as far as I'm concerned, whether they be of the nail-biting thriller or supernatural fever dream variety.

Trailer Tuesdays: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

Arrow Films' new limited edition release of Dario Argento's 1970 debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage comes out today. Here's the release trailer.

I adore this film. It was my introduction to the gialli and still remains one of my absolute favourites. I received this set in the mail last Friday and it is absolutely gorgeous. I entertained the thought of doing an un-boxing video, but it would never be as good as Industrial Blue's so just take a gander at his below.

I can't wait to dig into this set.

April Showers IV: Day Six

Needing titles for the back-end of this edition of April Showers, I decided to knock off another entry from my giallo deck, as Shudder is currently streaming Luciano Ercoli's 1971 film Death Walks on High Heels.

Nicole (Nieves Navarro as Susan Scott), the daughter of a murdered jewel thief gets caught in the middle as his partners try to track down the missing loot.

I have now seen enough of Italian thrillers to recognize there are actually different subsets within the dozens that were made. The most popular were the hyper-stylized efforts drenched in operatic gore by the likes of Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci & Sergio Martino, but there were also those that were decidedly low-key and more like straight-up crime mysteries. They still shared a lot of the same traits involving masked killers, wonderful scores and sexual overtones, but overall they were a little more restrained.

Death Walks on High Heels, in addition to titles like Martino's Case of the Scorpion's Tail, Forbidden Photos of a Woman Above Suspicion (also by Ercoli) and Bava's proto-giallo The Girl Who Knew Too Much, are of this latter category. And while it might have not been as flashy as your average giallo, I still enjoyed this quite a bit. It had a nice flow and despite the large number of characters, it only got momentarily confusing when Claudie Lange showed up due to her passing resemblance to Scott. Quirky constables were also a touchstone of the genre and this pair (played by Carlo Gentili & Fabrizio Moresco) were among the best I've seen.

Susan Scott (left) & Claudie Lange in Death Walks on High Heels.

I really like the setting of this one, as there were smatterings of London and Paris in with usual Italian and Spanish locales. I was chuckling to myself about what Ercoli seemed to find sexy in this movie, whether it be close-ups of Susan Scott (who was no slouch, but not quite as striking as mainstays Edwige Fenech or Barbara Bouchet) endlessly eating bits of fish, or her confounding blackface striptease. That was a thing I guess.

And those are not the only things I will take away from this movie. I mean, that eye surgery scene! Why would an actor agree to do that? It could've been a fake head, but it was pretty convincing. Somehow it seemed worse than the treatment Malcolm McDowell received in A Clockwork Orange. Also, this movie must have a record number of backhands to the face. Nobody punched anybody in the seventies?

makeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstop

What Death Walks On High Heels lacked in gore, it made up for in personality and a thoroughly enjoyable narrative. In the near future, I'll definitely be checking out Shudder's other Ercoli offering, Death Walks At Midnight.

Sergio & Edwige, Together Again.

I knocked off another title from my giallo deck this week in Sergio Martino's Next Victim starring Edwige Fenech.

Like most giallos, this film was retitled for different markets with names like Blade of the Ripper, Next! and The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, all I suspect with varying levels of censorship if my severely cropped VHS copy was any indication. It's okay, I fled to YouTube after to see what I missed.

The movie itself is a bit of an oddball. It almost seemed like a relationship drama with a slasher going on behind the scenes. And considering Martino's work to come like Torso two years later, the kill scenes were downright restrained. I also feel like this movie was very similar to at least a few of Martino's other projects. It's been a while since I've seen Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, but I'm pretty sure it shared a lot of the same beats.

Fenech is as always a vision to behold. There are very few actresses that hypnotize me like she does when she's onscreen, but you've heard me prattle on at length about this before. Her character's “blood fetish” wasn't really well articulated and apart from cringe-inducing scene where she has sex amid shards of broken glass, it's rarely touched upon.

As is often the case with these pictures, the scenery in this was particularly breathtaking. Martino used the locales of Austria and Spain to the fullest. I mean, how the fuck does THIS park even exist in the world???

Palmenhaus, in Vienna, Austria.

Next Victim wouldn't be in the top list of giallos, or even ones from Martino for that matter, but it still has a lot of stuff that I love about this genre -- beautiful locales, lovely ladies and snappy dialogue that is often inappropriate by today's standards. Have a great weekend, kiddies!