1980s
Plot: aunt Marta will kill to see her estranged family – or are they already dead? Don't Be Afraid Of Aunt Marta (released domestically as Non aver paura della zia Marta and for some reason released in North America as either The Murder Secret or The Broken Mirror) is
2010s
Plot: scholar falls in love with a beautiful girl who might, or might not, be human. It’s obvious that Mural (画壁) was supposed to be the next logical step in epochal Sino filmmaking on a big budget. A grand and sweeping ghost romance set against the backdrop of ancient
1960s
Plot: secret agent investigates disappearances in Scotland. Hilarity ensues! Hailed as the ultimate in 60s kitsch and camp Zeta One had disaster written all over it. Produced by Tigon on an estimated budget of £60,000 Zeta One was a genre hybrid that could only have materialized in the late
1980s
Plot: tourists are stalked by cannibalistic killer on remote Greek island. The nineteen-eighties were an interesting time for American cinema. The old fashioned terror and suspense films were given a new coat of paint and updated for the new decade. Halloween (1978) was instrumental in that regard. John Carpenter’s
1990s
Plot: criminals and hostages end up in bar somewhere on the Mexican border…. There’s no contesting that the ‘90s were pretty dark and abysmal time for the horror genre. Much of it had devolved into thrillers, self-aware or otherwise, on the one hand and comedy on the other. Hollywood
1970s
Plot: two teen girls, one hot summer, a lifetime of blasphemy and heresy. It was really Jean Rollin who paved the way for the French fantastique. Not by some grand design or clever promotion but rather the accident of circumstance. When The Rape of the Vampire (1968) hit cineplexes across
1990s
Plot: federal agents and mercenaries wage war over Civil War gold treasure. In 1993 Malibu Bay Films mascot Dona Speir uttered the prophetic words, “my work here is done” at the conclusion of Fit to Kill, the closing chapter to Andy Sidaris’ multi-decade spanning LETHAL Ladies franchise, a series he
2020s
Plot: lone officer stands between terrorists and apocalyptic annihilation. Interceptor makes exactly zero qualms about what it is. Described by director Matthew Reilly as a throwback to the late 1980s/early 1990s American action movie Interceptor replaces the retrograde and regressive machismo of the 1980s with progressive and socially conscious
1980s
Plot: who or what is prowling and killing in the Amsterdam canals? After the box office success of De Lift (1983) the sky was the limit for producer/director Dick Maas – or at least insofar something like that was possible in Dutch cinema. The only real competition he had regionally
1970s
Plot: businessman gets lost in the Yugoslavian wilds and encounters vampires. The Night Of the Devils (or La notte dei diavoli back at home in Italy) is a minor entry in the continental European vampire horror canon at the dawn of the wicked and wild seventies. The basis for the
1990s
Plot: vampire recounts his life, losses and regrets over the centuries. There’s no contesting that the nineties were a trying time for horror at large. The genre had been reduced to broad comedy, toyed with science fiction with things like The Lawnmower Man (1992) and Brainscan (1994) and was
2010s
Plot: young tech employee meets a girl who might, or might not, be a cyborg. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, wrote English writer Charles Caleb Colton famously in 1820. It’s an old adage that rings true across various spectrums of the art world but none illustrates it