Ive noticed, especially with this new blog, that my grumpiness has come right up to the surface when it comes to things that annoy the fuck out of me about cinema, the whole point of starting this new blog away from my main site was to review bad movies but seeing as I’ve written three posts so far and not one of them is an actual review, Ive decided that this blog will be a place for me to air my grievances with modern film culture and the cinema landscape in general. Sure I’ll still be talking about bad movies, still making fun of stuff and having fun and trying to go more in depth on certain subjects like I did with my DTV post, but call me a grumpy old fart if you want but over the years Ive come to kind of despise film fan culture. Maybe it’s something to do with the abundance of YouTube channels or the absolutely disgusting toxic fandoms that ruin what was once a great community to be part of.
So here is the tale of how an interaction with the coolest of hipsters one day while working behind the counter of a Blockbuster Video store, lead me on a path down the cobblestoned road of Italian exploitation cinema. Now I’m no expert on Italian cinema and I’ll try to cover as much as possible but there are only so many films I can mention before it becomes Leonard Maltin’s Film Guide.
Unfortunately I got roped into what could be considered a cult, it’s not really a cult but a group dedicated to worshipping a certain set of sub-genres of cinema, that ultimately found me following the pack and not really giving a thought to my financial situation at the time. Now I have nothing against any of the people I met online in this, at the time, extremely small community, people I’m still friends with and still communicate with via Facebook and Instagram. And for the time I spent there, Cult-Labs.com was actually a very very inclusive forum to be a member of. This was right at the start of Arrow Video’s inception, only a handful of films had been released under their Masters Of Giallo collection, back when Arrow released their products in the white window box slipcases. This would have been around 2010 maybe even earlier, I can’t quite remember, but like I said, at the time, Cult labs was a great little community, everyone’s opinion mattered and was listened to even if that opinion was agreed or disagreed with. For me it was an eye opening experience when it came to educating myself on movies, especially cult movies as I’d grown up in the 80s and 90s and far too young to experience any of the cult films that were talked about. Being the inquisitive person I am, this fascinated me. I love learning about movies, discovering new films, forgotten films and films that only a small percentage of people really knew about. Now that’s not to say every single one of these films was good, far from it, the majority of these “cult” films were in fact utter trash but you never really know unless you watch them for your self. That’s what I did, I bought up everything I could get my hands on, immersed myself in the works of Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and Ruggero Deodato, from Mario Bava to Armando De Ossorio, Japanese filmmakers such as Kinji Fukusaku, Takeshi Kitano, Sion Sono and Seijin Suzuki. Cult Labs took me out of my Spielberg and Lucas wonderland and showed me a world of cinema I never knew existed.
Sure, a lot of those movies were awful and gratuitous to the point of parody, however, amongst the legitimate trash, a fair few gems shone in the dark. The majority of Argento’s pre 90s work is absolutely phenomenal with the obvious Suspiria (1974) and Tenebrae (1982) being stand outs but it was his The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970) that really struck a cord with me. I’d never really seen a Giallo before and Crystal Plumage was my introduction. Lucio Fulci on the other hand was less of a visionary in my opinion with only two films in his filmography standing out to me, Dawn of The Dead cash-in Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) and The Beyond (1981) which had this cool and creepy visual style and atmosphere that I can’t really describe. I watched a few of his other films such as The House By The Cemetary (1981), Manhattan Baby (1982), City Of The Living Dead (1980) and The New York Ripper (1981), but none of those films ever really left an impression on me. There are some films, still in my collection, that I kept because they affected me in a way the others didn’t. At one point in time I think I had a near complete collection of Shameless releases, the other label that was predominantly promoted on Cult labs. They came in a yellow case with a yellow slip and the original artwork on the cover. I’d say out of the collection I had, I now only have maybe about two them left, Escape From The Bronx (1983) directed by Enzo G. Castellari, famous as the director of the “original” Inglorious Bastards (1978) (which is actually pretty good) and The House At The Edge Of The Park (1980) from director Ruggero Deodato. I think the latter was made to capitalize on lead actor David Hess’ notorious role in Wes Craven’s The Last House On The Left (1972). I actually still own a few of Deodato’s flicks, I don’t know why but I feel, personally out of the sort of shock Italian directors, not including Argento because he brought a more arthouse aesthetic to his films, Deodato stood out as a fairly good film maker. As everyone who is aware of Deodato knows, his masterpiece is the brutal cannibal film, Cannibal Holocaust (1980) a film which considering the style in which he filmed the first half in, would essentially go on to create a horror sub-genre of its own, the found footage style. Cannibal Holocaust was way way way ahead of its time.
The found footage style would make a big impact in 1999 with the release of The Blair Witch Project, spawning an almost never ending stream of copycat films, again, much like the Italian cannibal boom of the 80s and like Mad Max with the Italian Post-apocalypse boom of the same decade, most of which, and lets be honest are fucking crap, take it from someone who’s entire main website was based around watching and reviewing post apocalypse movies. Cannibal Holocaust had a terrifying beauty to it. The film opens with a soft, beautiful and almost gentle theme from composer Riz Ortolani, setting up a film that was pretty much banned across the globe for the violence, animal cruelty and sexual violence that runs throughout the film, but the film, while being very hard to watch, feels like a statement movie. A more recent film which could be compared to Cannibal Holocaust, even though the don’t share the same themes, could be A Serbian Film (2010). Both feature extreme bloody violence and sexual violence throughout but where as CH actually feels like a film made to make a statement, A Serbian Film, while trying to make a statement, comes across more like a reason to do nasty shit on camera. Now I’m not saying ASF is a snuff movie or anything and it’s actually a very well made film but whatever it was trying to say, got lost amongst the torture porn and sexual violence. I’ve seen that film four times. I never want to see it again. I love a splatter movie as much as the next guy but the gore has to be either there to push the plot along or it has to be so over the top and ridiculous that it goes past the point of being offensive and hits the realm of parody. Peter Jackson’s brilliant 1992 zombie opus Braindead (or Dead Alive in the U.S) is one of those examples that goes from “eeww, thats gross” to rolling on the floor in stitches because it’s so unbelievable. Another good example of a gore movie twisting the splatter genre is Eli Craig’s absolutely fantastic Tucker & Dale Vs Evil (2010) which turns the backwoods killer trope on its head by making the creepy rednecks the heroes and the collage kids the villains. Seek it out, its fucking brilliant.
Shameless Releasing and Arrow released their fair share of shitty horror movies over the years and while Shameless seems to have gone the way of the dodo, Arrow has grown and grown, releasing some of the best cult films but still some of the shittiest movies at premium prices. But I’m not here to ramble about specific boutique labels, I’m here to talk about my rise and eventual fall from the world of cult cinema.
Shameless Screen Entertainment focused primarily on Italian exploitation of the 60s and 70s, releasing quite a few films once banned in the UK. A lot of them were pretty bad films, I say bad but that’s just how they seemed to me, a lot of people eat this stuff up but for me, I found a lot of them to be either badly made or just not of any interest to me but, I had to have them in the collection because I needed the spines to line up as each release was numbered. I stopped collecting and sold most of my Shameless DVDs around 2017-2018 just to clear out the stuff I didn’t didn’t really want. However, at this time, Shameless started releasing some great films, films that I passed on as my focus was no longer on Italian exploitation movies. Some of the titles I passed up were a crime thriller called Almost Human (1974) Directed by Umberto Lenzi, who incidentally actually directed one of my favourite Italian zombie films, Nightmare City (1980) and my least favourite cannibal movie, Cannibal Ferox (1981). The other titles were the 3 Michele Soavi films, Stage Fright (1987), The Church (1989) and one of the most underrated zombie films of the 90s and a very early comic book adaptation, Dellamorte Dellamore (1994) aka Cemetery Man which starred a young Rupert Everett and was an adaptation of Dylan Dog, an old Italian comic book about a detective who battles demons. It was adapted again in 2010 from Kevin Monroe, director of the CGI animated movie, TMNT (2007) and starred Brandon Routh as Dylan Dog. That films title was Dylan Dog: Dead Of Night (2010). It’s not a bad film and Routh is pretty good. There were a few other stand outs on the Shameless label for me, The Bronx Warriors trilogy comprised of 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982), Escape From The Bronx (1983) and The New Barbarians (1983), three post-Apocalpyse movies directed by Enzo G.Castallari and Night Train Murders (1975) which was a sort of re-imagining of Craven’s Last House On The Left which I previously mentioned. Directed by Aldo Lado and was initially banned as video nasty prior to the 1984 Video Recordings Act. Some of the absolute trash put out by Shameless includes Ratman (1988), Love Goddess Of The Cannibals (1978) from smut peddler Joe D’Amato and The Beast In Space (1980) from Alfonso Brescia who sometimes used the pseudonym Al Bradley. It wasn’t just Shameless that dragged me head long into Italian exploitation cinema. Anchor Bay and Blue Underground helped, as well as dodgy European and Korean dvds from Ebay. The best Ebay pick-up was Ilsa: She Wolf Of The S.S (1975), an odd mix of women in prison, nazisploitation and sexsploitation rolled into one mad as box of frogs movie. Now i was always under the impression that Ilsa was an Italian movie, bit has all the style and sleaze of an Italian exploitation movie but, as it turns out is a fully American picture. Directed Don Edmonds, who would go on to co-produce Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993). Some times blind buys really do lead to some gems.
You see the big problem I had when I first started going to Cult-Labs.com, was that I was only working part-time. My income would be about £500 a month, which was split paid every 2 weeks. So every other friday, my money would go in and by Saturday, it was practically gone because my addiction to buying movies would eat it all up. Thats when I had the bright idea to get a credit card. In 2003 I took out a credit card with a £500 limit. It’s 2023 now and that £500 is finally paid off. It’s taken me 20 years to pay off £500 which is, lets be honest, fucking pathetic. I Was 19 or 20 back then, I lived at home (I still do but we won’t talk about that) and didn’t pay rent. I had a pay as you go mobile phone and cigarettes cost waaaaay less back then so my money, any money I got went on DVDs. I’m 39 now and while I still do buy the occasional blu-ray, I’m way more selective now on what I spend my money on. The other problem I had and still have to this day is that DVDs aren’t worth anything these days. Films which were considered Out of Print are now available in 2K or 4K remasters and widely available. Sure I might have one or two that I’d get a couple of quid for but most places including CEX, only give 1p a DVD and when you consider the amount of money you spent on a DVD 12 years ago is only worth the price of a gummy cola bottle, it’s not worth parting with it.
Cult labs was, when I first started frequenting the forum, a brilliant place. I mentioned that it opened my eyes to the a world of cinema I’d probably never have known about and some I wish I hadn’t known about. My deep dive into cult cinema brought not only a mass of Italian exploitation but also more of what is considered “world cinema”, Asian cinema to be exact. From Hong Kong action and Category III movies to Japanese Samurai cinema and Yakuza movies. I’m not going to say my knowledge of Hong Kong action and Japanese cinema was non existent back in 2010, I had some knowledge. I’d worked in a video rental store since 2003 so I was well aware of some of the more modern films and being a big Quentin Tarantino fan, I did the research to get the film references, so I wasn’t a complete noob to Asian cinema back then. I was however ignorant to the other types of cinema coming from Asia. I was tuned to the J-Horror and John Woo action area of Asian cinema so I was well versed in the Heroic Bloodshed sub genre with Woo’s masterpieces like Hard Boiled (1993), The Killer (1989) and A Better Tomorrow (1985) and also, it helped to have a brother obsessed with Japanese culture and Anime to introduce me to certain films. But that’s a story for another day.
I eventually started to drift away from Cult Labs when I decided to take film reviewing a bit more seriously as the review thread on the forum was limited by what I could post, not content wise but, I wanted to go more in-depth into a review that maybe one or two paragraphs. I eventually decided to leave the forum because I’d seen a change over the years where some people were getting a bit elitist about up their own ass using the original Italian titles and found myself getting bored of having to use Google translate to find out what film certain posters were talking about. Another reason for leaving was that I’d grown tired of the badly dubbed, low quality movies people were praising as the second coming. I’d spent years amassing a collection of films I just didn’t like. I’ve found myself disillusioned with horror as a genre on the whole to be perfectly honest, don’t get me wrong I still fucking love a horror film but not in the same way I did years ago. I went through the extreme horror phase, not as far as watching those shot on VHS sick flicks like the August Underground movies but just the repetitive nature of torture porn and gratuitous violence that was only there to shock and not further the plot. These days I prefer to sit and watch a horror comedy or a well made zombie movie but those days of obsessively seeking out anything and everything has subsided and I mainly watch Action or whatever the new film on Disney+ or Netflix is.
So this is a very lengthy post, apologies for writing so much but I hope you enjoyed reading it, learning something new and finding it informative. My plan is to try and detail my film education over the last 39 years with as much detail as my mind can remember. I’ve had a blast writing my adventure in Italian cinema and I look back fondly on the memories of sitting in my room on a Sunday afternoon watching Lamberto Bava’s Demons (1985) or Deodato’s Raiders Of Atlantis (1983). I plan to go over Asian cinema, Sci-fi, Horror, the films I grew up with and of course Post-Apocalyse movies. So If you enjoyed reading this then please stay tuned for more.
Cheers
Pete
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