What better kind of cinema to evoke the decadent universe of Oscar Wilde and the depravation of Dorian Gray? Why Italian B-cinema, of course! Where eroticism, sadism, and the lives of amoral, dubious characters are typical ingredients, captured full-frontal and with a total disregard for prudishness. In the (extremely rare) Dorian Gray, Massimo Dallamano –cinematographer for Sergio Leone's first Westerns and director of the cult giallo What...

After a brief glory period in the 1940's, werewolves (of which the quintessential example would be George Waggner's The Wolf Man) seemed condemned to forever growl in the shadow of other classic horror cinema monsters. While the success of vampires and other ghouls proved to be immortal, werewolves waited patiently for their time, tails wagging.It wasn't until the 1980s...

Nothing says forever like a diamond... heist! Such is the case in La Morte Cammina con i Tachi Alti ("Death Walks on High Heels") by Luciano Ercoli. The strip-teasing daughter of a jewel thief is tracked by a mysterious killer looking to get his hands on the precious stones. Susan Scott, an icon of the genre, dances naked beneath...

Between 1916 and 1937, the year of his death, American author Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote an entire series of pulp stories that rapidly became legendary. His specialty: horror with a twist of humor and psych, a genre which he used to describe humanity as an ignorant species trapped on a small island, plunged into a darkness inhabited by strange...

Family... if you look at nearly every American movie, family values are supreme values! And careful now, family is no laughing matter. This month's program features two films that prove just how far parents will go to protect their precious daughter from the Big Bad! In Commando, daddy Schwarzenegger goes on a destructive massacre. This 80s flick features Arnie as just a regular guy...

A lost group of young people, a killer out to massacre them one by one: Tourist Trap offers one of the most classic slasher plotlines. The screenplay's simplicity, which in other cases might reflect a lack of imagination, creates a tense build-up of one suspenseful scene after another without a single rhythmic lull. Aside from this efficiency (a trait...

Is there anyone who doesn't know these famous movie monsters? From the 1920s to the end of the 50s, Universal horrified audiences with films like Dracula, Bride of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London, The Mummy or Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Hollywood studio specialized in horror cinema, launching the careers of actors like Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr. by putting them...

The 70s were truly the Golden Age of Porn. At the height of the sexual revolution, X-rated films came out of hiding, leaving their isolated private theaters behind to penetrate the big, downtown screens. Pornos were finally legit. Moms and dads waited in line to see Linda Lovelace, Marylin Chamber, Brigitte Lahaie and their male partners revel in their own debauchery. But despite its...

Hippies, hallucinations, surrealism… Two films, two genres imbued and twisted by a dreamlike atmosphere… or nightmarish in the case of Let's Scare Jessica to Death, a forgotten gem of 70s-era American horror that plunges viewers into the interior universe of a little girl lost between fantasy and reality. One of the best horror movies, according to Stephen King, and one of the most freaky...

Female zombie victims and women slaughtered by sadistic murderers are a regular sight in Lucio Fulci's films... but in The Devil's Honey / Dangerous Obsession, roles are reversed: Blanca Brasillac (sister of Cristina Brasillac, the singer in Dario Argento's Opera) isolates and tortures a somewhat strange doctor. The penultimate Fulci film for some fans and a quintessential example of...