The home of cult movies and genre cinema: from grindhouse to schlock, sexploitation to blaxploitation, kung fu to samurai, manga to J-horror, monster movies, mondo, spaghetti westerns and space operas. With added Steven Seagal.
Meet the last generation of the Merrye family. There are the three children – Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn), who has a basilisk stare; Ralph (Sid Haig), who barks like a dog and rides around in a dumbwaiter; and Virginia (Jill Banner), who thinks she's a spider and who, early on in the film, captures and kills a postman, then keeps his ear in a marquetry box. Then there's the older generation, Uncle Ned, Aunt Martha and Aunt Clara, who live down in the basement and only come out of the shadows to feed.
Sergio Corbucci's Django (1966) spawned any number of unofficial sequels, but you can count the decent ones on the fingers of one crushed and bloodied hand. Ferdinando Baldi's Django, Prepare a Coffin (1968) is one of these.
If you have as little care for the quality of the films you watch as the makers of Kill 'em All seem to have for human life, attention spans and their own movie, you might just enjoy this 'film'. Anyone else unfortunate enough to see it should pray they can imagine it as a spoof.
“Vigilante justice?” queries Foxy Brown's boyfriend Michael (Terry Carter) at one point. “It's as American as apple piece,” she replies. And we see the proof of the pudding when Michael – who happens to be an undercover vice cop – is fingered by Foxy's brother Link (Antonio Fargas) to a crime cartel and promptly murdered. A quick change of wigs, and Foxy is infiltrating the organization as a would-be call girl, name of Misty Cotton, and throwing a spanner in its works by sexually humiliating a judge whom it had hoped to co-opt. And that's only the beginning of her vengeance. Right on, sista!
Following on from their splendid release of Southern Comfort, Second Sight bring us another Walter Hill classic, 1980's The Long Riders. It's Missouri after the Civil War. The Jesse James/Cole Younger gang are a bunch of veterans who have stumbled into becoming robbers for want of anything better to do in peacetime. Putting it to the man 1860s-style, they snatch payrolls from trains, banks and stagecoaches but don't mess with ordinary folks (unless they get in the way, of course). When they're not grafting, they blend in seamlessly with their tight-knit rural community. But the idyll can't last, and in due course Pinkerton men arrive and accidentally torch the James matriarch's shack. Reprisals inevitably ensue, the stakes are raised, and soon the country boys are the subject of a full-fledged manhunt.
