WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Nun and the Devil

When the Mother Superior at the convent of Sant’Archangelo pegs it, the Roman Catholic equivalent of a bitch-fight kicks off as various parties vie for vacancy. The elderly Lavinia (Maria Cumani Quasimodo … yes, really) uses her age to pull rank and pretty much appoints herself Acting Mother Superior. Sister Carmela (Claudia Gravy … again, genuine surname) covets the position as lustfully as she covets the body of Pietro (Duilio Del Prete) who sneaks...

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Razor Blade Smile

“Fuck Bram Stoker.” Thus quoth vampire/hitwoman Lilith Silver (Eileen Daly) early on in Jake West’s sex, goths ‘n’ guns horror comedy. Statement of intent? Fuck, yeah! Here’s another of Lilith’s trenchant voiceover homilies: “I bet you think you know all about vampires, don’t you? You know fuck all!”The vampires in ‘Razor Blade Smile’ drink blood because they have to, not because they particularly enjoy it: Lilith can identify a blood type like a...

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SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: Eileen Daly in Razor Blade Smile

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: City of the Living Dead

The first of three horror movies Lucio Fulci made with Catriona MacCall in a two-year period, and something of a stepping stone to his flat-out masterpiece ‘The Beyond’, ‘City of the Living Dead’ is atmospheric, incoherent and tries to con you that is has something to do with H.P. Lovecraft.Like the two films that immediately followed it, the premise is basically: hero and heroine stumble upon piece of real estate that turns out to be one of the...

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Anthropophagus: The Beast

Watching exploitation movies, there’s always the risk of an anticipation/actuality disconnect. Sometimes the title sets up the false expectation. ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers’, anyone? I was expecting a movie about lesbians hunting vampires, Buffy gone muffy as it were. Sometimes the cover art suggests a lurid thrill-ride only for the viewer to realise, as the end credits roll, that the artist had given up on the piece of shit movie ten minutes in and...

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: A Virgin Among the Living Dead

Made in 1973 and, arguably, a consolidation of the aesthetic triumphs and bold narrative experimentalism of ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ (1971) and ‘The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein’ (1972), the transitional ‘A Virgin Among the Living Dead’ denotes a continued rejection of genre imperatives and a deeper, more profound embrace of the director’s own iconoclastic vision. Indeed, ‘A Virgin Among the Living Dead’ – or, to use the more appealingly poetic original...

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SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: Christina von Blanc in A Virgin Among the Living Dead

With the Winter of Discontent sweeping isobars of exploitation across the hitherto warm front of this blog, there didn't seem to be any excuse not to resurrect an eye-candylicious old tradition and raise the temperature over the next few weeken...

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Almost Human

The aficionado of trash movies gets used to his or her viewing fare of choice going by various aliases (pop quiz: how many alternative titles for Mario Bava’s ‘Reazione a catena’ can you name?), or being lumbered with English language titles that have sweet f.a. to do with the indigenous original. Example: you can tell that Sergio Martino’s ‘I corpi presentato tracce di violenza carnale’ doesn’t literally translate as ‘Torso’ based purely on the...

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5th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL: 13:11

On 13th November 2007, I posted my first article on The Agitation of the Mind. I acknowledged Werner Herzog as one of my favourite filmmakers and ’fessed up that I’d stolen the name of the blog from him. There followed, through the remainder of that month, a short Herzog season. Five years and approximately 1,100 posts later, we’re firmly entrenched in this year’s Winter of Discontent and trawling through all things sick and twisted. I guess it’s...

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