2010s
Plot: vacationers run afoul of escaped masked serial murderer. It’s been a strange and confusing journey going from the barely there slashing of Playing with Dolls (2015) to the functional competence of Playing with Dolls: Bloodlust (2016) only to arrive at the utterly minimalist and brutally utilitarian Playing with
1970s
Plot: busload of tourists is forced to stay overnight in a creepy castle. Compared to the rest of Europe, Belgium has always been something of a silent force within the cinematic landscape of cult and exploitation. Often overlooked and forgotten in favor of other countries in the Old World that
2010s
Plot: sleepy farming hamlet is terrorized by fierce spectral predator. As far as we’re aware Thailand never had much of a horror scene in spite their rich history in being a reliable provider of the most wickedly insane action exploitation. Whereas Indonesia had Suzzanna and Malaysia had Maria Menado
1990s
Plot: Wallachian warlord Vlad Tepes vows to find his love Elisabeta again. Informed by three decades worth of Spanish, and Latin American gothic horror tradition and bursting at the seams with all the expectant excesses Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Dracula hereafter) is Italian gothic horror kitsch on a Hollywood mega-budget
2010s
Plot: superhuman vigilante leads the rebellion against an oppressive regime. Twelve years removed from the first Cutie Honey (2004) there were bound to be some significant differences between the original and its eventual sequel. Cutie Honey: Tears (2016) takes more after Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Christopher Nolan’s
1980s
Plot: psychotic loner terrorizes New York City with nightly killing sprees. Amidst the deluge of cheap (and often, infuriatingly irritating) slashers it’s easy to forget that the subgenre could occasionally conjure up something halfway interesting when it traded the regressive for the psychological. Maniac is one such example. For
2000s
Plot: comrade Ivan will have you for breakfast… and today he’s very hungry. Back in the Golden Age of exploitation the bootleg remake, imitation or sequel was an art form mastered almost exclusively by the Italians and the Filipino. In times like these it’s nigh on criminal that
1960s
Plot: fair maiden is haunted by strange dreams and stranger occurrences. There wouldn’t much of a global gothic horror industry, especially in continental Europe, if it weren’t for the British house of Hammer reimagining the old Universal horror monsters for the new times in the fifties and sixties.
2010s
Plot: masseuses by day, sexy government spies by night. It’s party time! Filipino exploitation is alive and well. The old Charlie's Angels (1976-1981) recipe remains as popular and fertile as ever. Extra Service is both a straightforward action-comedy on the Charlie's Angels (1976-1981) (itself reimagined
1990s
Plot: brillant scientist is thrown in time and meets Dr. Victor Frankenstein… Frankenstein Unbound was part of a brief gothic horror revival with the likes of big budget features as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) as well as The Haunting (1999) and House on
2010s
Plot: two mermaids wash ashore in 1980s Poland. One is friendly, one is not. You have to commend Agnieszka Smoczyńska for attempting something like this on what couldn’t have been too much of a budget. Córki Dancingu (or Daughters Of Dancing, for some reason released on the international market
1970s
Plot: friends, family and other lovers - and heroin too. Sängkamrater (or Bedfellows, released for reasons unknown in the English-speaking world under the porntastic title Wide Open) reunited Christina Lindberg with Finnish director Gustav Wiklund for what was to be the last of her prime titles during her initial run.