Savage Sisters - one of the favourite films of Quentin Tarantino, who also takes care of both an intro (which I only watched after seeing the film, lol) and an outro in the extras on the DVD. The film itself is about ganglife where the Silver Daggers are the gang to be feared and their female counterpart the Dagger Debs are the focuspoint of the film. When they enter a diner and demand "their" table, one girl is not impressed, moreover, she fights back! When the police come, they get all taken in and some WIP-like scenes follow. After they all have been released, Maggie, the girl who fought back, is becoming the newest member of the gang. Soon however, it looks like she is planning to take over the gang. Amidst a war against both the police and other gangs, this battle for leadership unfolds and forms the main plot in this juicy exploitation flick. Apart from the previously mentioned WIP scenes, there are gangfights with some Mad Max-like vehicles, there is a huge shootout in a skating rink and a nod to racial tension. I had lots of fun, acting is subpar from time to time, as sometimes you can see actors smile at what they see before them while it isn't appropriate for the scene. Some lines are delivered staccato and some characters are pretty unbelievable. Doesn't matter most of the time because this is just how you like 'em: straight and dirty. Recommended for bad moviefans.

Purana Mandir - this film is a bonus feature on the Bollywood Collection vol. 1, because as the guys at Mondo Macabro say, this is not a film "to show off your new 72 inch HD screen", in other words: the quality is not top notch, but who cares? Another Indian horror, this time about a ruler in Mogol times who loses his daughter to a demon (pretty much her own fault if you see the footage) after which he has the demon decapitated and the head and the body buried separately. His descendants keep living with the curse, and when this curse stands between Suman and Sanjay's love, they decide to travel to the palace of their great grandfather and get rid of the curse. In this Bollywood they start singing much sooner than in the previous Bollywood I watched and there is a very annoying and unfunny "comical note" in the character of Machar Singh: everything he did made my skin crawl. In regard to the demon, it was a pretty failsafe plan to have head and body buried separately, but it didn't take the utter stupidity of people into account: what follows is a string of events, one even dumber than the other, and the result is that the demon is resurrected. Now they have to fight the demon in order to be safe, and it will take some sacrifices to reach that. The length of these films amaze me, and I have trouble keeping focus for so long, especially because the story could have been told in 90 minutes. But happily skipping the songs does save some time at least. The film itself is a lovestory with some horror added into the mix, much like the first Bollywood film I saw (Bandh Darwaza). The effects are mostly OK but sometimes pretty funny to see, like a jump supposedly from the second floor being only one meter, or flying glass never cutting anyone. Curious films these, not really sure if I actually like them but it is different for sure.

Devil's Island Lovers - aka Los Amantes de la Isla del Diablo aka Quartier des Femmes. A Franco WIP but not very sleazy. The plot is pretty good: a very strict governor confesses on his deathbed that he had two innocent youngsters convicted for a murder he committed himself. We see these things happening looking back in the memories of the dying governor. There is some violence (guards shoot at running prisoners in some kind of arena, for example) but this film didn't come across to me as yet another Franco, I almost didn't believe it was one until I saw Howard Vernon (playing a colonel in a prison). Yes, there is some sexual activity in the prisons, but it's not shown that much and it's all very tidy. My DVD version supposedly is cut, but I'm not sure what was cut and how much. Imdb states a running time of 97 minutes, but imdb has been wrong in running times before. Both melonfarmers and dvdcompare state a running time of a little over 80 minutes, which is the same as mine. Dvdcompare also says "Cuts: yes" but no details, since I'm so used to sleaze in Franco films I presume there could be a longer version somewhere out there but it's not released on any disc afaik. This film therefore focuses more on the drama of the innocently convicted youngsters, which can hardly be seen as anything else than Franco criticizing his namesake in contemporary Spain. The ending is gritty as is the rest of the story, so expect a different film than most of his work. Still recommended though, for Franco fans and others.

Monster from Green Hell - a spaceship returning to earth crashlands somewhere in Africa. It contained animal lifeforms, in this case a wasp's nest (earlier a guinea pig and a caiman had been sent up into space). Some time later, there is turmoil in that part of Africa and an expedition is set up in order to find the cause for it and maybe track down the remains of the spaceship. Upon arriving in Africa they learn that several natives have been disappearing, with an unclear cause of death. They hear strange noises and see wildlife on the run, even lions and elephants. It doesn't take long (fortunately, sometimes these black and white drive-in flicks take ages to show you the monster) before they visit the area called "the green hell" and they see the monstrous wasps which have grown to enormous sizes. The wasps make the strange noises and they kill everything in their path. Now the expedition has to find a way to destroy them and save the world! The wasps look ridiculously fake, they are plastic models which are enlarged on camera. The scenes where you see people and wasps in the same frame are rare and they look really bad. The noise is annoying (and loud! Much louder than the dialogue which always irritates me). A good thing in this film is that you don't have to wait too long like I mentioned before you can see the monsters. Acting, the retarded position of women and the wildlife are bad things: I mean, since when do herds of Asian elephants live in West Africa? All in all a nice drive in flick, not the best not the worst I have seen.

She Demons - you take a shipwreck that you didn't get to see, a blonde spoiled woman, a brave guy, two sidekicks, a cage of beautiful women and some leftover nazis and you put all of this together in a tropical island setting and voila: this film is the result. It's all very flat and simple but enough stuff happens to keep you entertained for just over an hour and by that time the film is almost over so why not sit it out right? Acting is somewhat exaggerated sometimes, especially between the two main characters. The sidekicks and the nazis are almost satire but it surely wasn't meant like that. The women in the cage are part of an experiment executed by one of the nazis, of course. While the shipwrecked crew tries to liberate the women, there is also the impending doom of the AMerican Airforce bombing the island to smithereens. Laughable nonsense, so it's for a brainless hour. One of the better options if you check out other drive-ins from the 50s.

Veerana, vengeance of the vampire - a witch is being captured by a local landlord and subsequently killed. The followers of the witch's cult take revenge by having his daughter possessed. Her body is destined to be the vessel of the witch's spirit and in this form she returns home. She grows up still being possessed by the witch, having fits from time to time. No doctor can heal her and in the meantime she seduces several men. The cult of the witch is unreal: there is a huge Baal-like statue called Mahakal (it's a humanoid figure with glowing eyes and horns) and a table with five weird creatures around it: they have treetrunks for heads and it's totally unclear what they are doing or what their function is. Unfortunately there is a comical note again, this time in the form of a scared horror director wannabe: very cringe. One doctor tries a psychiatric approach and he finds out that Jasmine, the daughter, is now a witch. Her father still doesn't believe it (he has never done so against all the evidence which was until then circumstantial) but he eventually has to when even the doctor dies to her hands. Acting is mediocre, we again see sometimes castmembers inadvertently laugh at scenes they are in. Effects are OKish, except for the lightning which looks very fake. There isn't much blood, the witch looks cool but since it's a mask there aren't any expressions on her scary face. Although the English title has a vampire mentioned, there aren't any vampires in this film. Some (supposed) nudity, where in one scene you can see the actress wearing a bra even though she is supposedly naked in a bathtub. Nice Bollywood, not as much singing (only three songs and pretty short too) but again too long as this story could have been told in one hour less too. 

Private Parts - this title sounds like it's for a pornmovie, and otherwise you might think of that Howard Stern flick, but this film is from 1972 and is actually quite a classic slasher from before the golden era. The main character is Cheryl, a somewhat shy teenager growing up, having trouble first at home, then also with her sister and she ends up in a sleazy hotel run by a more distant relative, Aunt Martha. At first she is amazed and shocked by what she sees and hears and that is not very strange because the hotel has very weird inhabitants: a demented old lady, a gay priest, a drunk and an introverted photographer. Aunt Martha seems to be the only normal person around, but she also has a peculiar hobby: taking pictures at funerals. When she is out to a funeral again, Cheryl takes the opportunity to scout out the hotel, but this brings her into a world she can hardly grasp and it might even swallow her... Great film this, not only is the atmosphere in the hotel giving you the creeps (not because of it being scary but because of it being so very strange), Ayn Rumen, whom I had never heard of nor had seen any film with her in it, perfectly plays the innocent teenager slowly but steadily getting in contact with the real world. There are only a few kills, but this is made up by the plot which has an ending which might be cliche now, but was certainly original back then. It's also well executed, I had a great time watching this, recommended!

The Man and the Monster - aka El Hombre y el Monstruo. Mexican black and white horror from the 1950s about a pianist being the best in the world but also carrying a curse. Whenever he plays, he gets the urge to play the piece which made him famous and if he does so, he slowly turns into a hairy monster. This monster looks rather ridiculous, a bit like Wolfman but funnier: its face gave me clown vibes. Because of this curse the pianist only plays at night, as a result he can't perform in public anymore which prompts a music journalist to start a search for him. This leads him to the house where the pianist is both living, and teaching a new talent to become the new "best pianist in the world". His mother watches over him as some kind of a guardian and she tries to chase off the journalist, but he is pretty stubborn as he witnessed a woman dying close to this house and he wants to know why that happened. This leads to a nice detective-like story in which the oanist changes into the monster from time to time. This was a tad confusing in the beginning but while watching everything becomes very clear. The whole story is a take on Jekyll & Hyde and it's pretty nicely done: the finale is a dramatic climax. Music is nice if you like piano concertos (especially Tchaikovsky), acting is OK (some castmembers are overacting a lot). I've got another few classic Mexican horrors lying around so I'm curious as to how they relate to this one. This one is pretty classic and a safe bet if you like classic horror like Wolfman, Frankenstein, etc.

Purani Haveli - the fourth Bollywood horror I have been watching. Anita, who lost her parents, lives with her aunt and uncle who want to set her up to marry Vikram, the aunt's brother and a guy she hates. Instead, she loves Sunil, but this "cheap photographer" is of course gonna "shame the family" so they put pressure on Anita to go with their wedding plans. In the meantime, her uncle died at the hands of a demon in a mansion he wanted to buy for Anita. A subplot which has literally nothing to do with the main plot takes up time and takes focus off the main story line: in this subplot the sidekick of SUnil turns out to be the twinbrother of a gangster roaming the countryside. Of course the bad guy (Vikram) releases the demon which already killed the uncle (this is about as dumb as the people resurrecting the demon in Purana Mandir) and a killing spree follows. Acting is mediocre, the fights are ridiculous, the goons hired to stop Sunil take the cake: they have very few braincells and almost give their weapons to Sunil five seconds into the fight. It was interesting to see that the demon got defeated by christian iconography only this time, while in the other films so far it was always a mix between hinduism, islam and christianity. The singing was less obnoxious this time, or maybe I'm getting used to it. Lots of similarities between this one and Purana Mandir, I think this one was a tad better.

Human Beasts - aka El Carnaval de las Bestias. Spanish film with Paul Naschy, and the word "beasts" in the title made me think I was gonna sit down for another Naschy werewolf-like film, but I have been watching something entirely different! It starts out with Bruno (Naschy) and a Japanese girl, Meiko: she is related to a Yakuza member who is kind of peaceful, but wants to hire Bruno to steal a bag of diamonds. He is also set to marry Meiko after the heist is complete. Bruno however, kills everyone and runs off with the diamonds, abandoning the girl. The yakuza chases him back to Spain, where he gets shot up pretty badly and is found by a family who takes care of him. The father is a medic, and his beautiful daughters not only tend to Bruno's wounds but also want to have sex with him. While recovering, Bruno notices that the family is quite peculiar: they have pigs for slaughter which are being inspected by a veterinarian who is in love with the African servant of the family (who, by the way, gets flogged by her master if she is disobedient - and she loves it!). Meiko is still on the hunt for Bruno, but while he is recovering the film changes from being a crime thriller to a giallo-esque thriller: a gloved killer is roaming the house, feeding the vet to the pigs and killing Meiko in the process. When Bruno is ready to leave, it seems too late, and the family turns on him in a way he didn't expect at all! Scriptwise this film is a bit of a mess, because it doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. The kills are violent but especially in the beginning they have nothing to do with horror and would better fit an action flick. The twist is nice but the ending is very sudden. If you like Eurotrash you will enjoy it, but if you are looking for a good film or a nice horror, then you can easily skip this one.

Thriller, a cruel picture - as a young girl, Madeleine is raped in a park by an old man. This trauma renders her mute and growing up, she is being treated by a doctor in town. As a young adult, still being treated, she misses the bus and gets a ride to town by Tony. He treats her like a queen, but it turns out he reduces her to a whore addicted to heroin. After she fought off a client, he gauges one of her eyes out. Tragedy seems to hit her harder every day until she decides to take revenge. Swedish 70s rape revenge film of which I only found out it had Swedish audio and English subs after I had been watching for a while: the DVD menu is kind of mysterious: it just shows four words "death, destruction, mayhem, revenge". To see the film I simply selected the first word but this made me miss the audio options, weird. The film itself is quite gruesome and it contains graphic scenes both in pornographic ways (stuff you would nornally see in hardcore pron flicks) and in horror ways (the eye gauging is, well, convincing). Preparations for the revenge start about halfway in and they take some time which is of course more realistic than just one or two scenes with a little music under them: I liked it. The real revenge part starts 70 minutes in, the film takes its time and that's a good thing: everything gets hammered in more fiercely that way. What I didn't like was that some stuff was pretty unbelievable, like committing a murder or kidnapping someone in broad daylight and nobody seems to notice or react to it. The whole slowmo thing was getting annoying fast, especially in shootouts. The ending is a bit strange: a black screen and some esoteric music, no credits. Overall I thought this was a good example of a rape revenge film, it ticked most if not all boxes and I thought it was mostly well made. The exceptions I have written above don't take away the fact that this film is a gruesome piece of celluloid you must see if you're a fan of the subgenre. Recommended. 

Circus of Horrors - 1960s British horror about Dr Rossiter, a plastic surgeon. In 1947, he performs an operation on a woman which goes horribly wrong, but he himself thinks he is brilliant. Since the police are after him, he leaves the country for France. There he performs a similar operation on a child, and to express his gratitude, her father lets Rosseter run his circus. After the father died, Rossiter, now calling himself Schüler, is the boss of the circus, where his assistant and his sister do his biddings. One beautiful performer after another dies however, and everytime the performer is an ex-patient of the doctor, the assistant is involved and the death is being called an accident because of technical malfunction. This draws the attention of the police again, but Schüler is primed to make his circus a success. While his assistant and his sister, who is in love with Rossiter/Schüler are getting trouble with their conscience and the police are drawing in, it seems like the net is closing on the doctor... Nice film, clearly shows the time it was made in, although some of the female performers are scantily clad. The blood/gore is minimal and pretty fake too, as are the animals like the bear and the ape when they are attacking. Most deaths are portrayed nicely, like the one with the knives or the one with the rope: they looked pretty realistic. Acting is fine, it would have been great if the script didn't push so many gorgeous women with disfigured faces in the story, because that was pushing the boundaries a bit too much. Overall a nice classic horror with more gore than you usually see in the older films.

Kiss Me Monster - the sequel to Red Lips Sadisterotica, and this one is kind of unnecessary. We see the two female detectives travelling around again, meeting weird people and ending up drugged, tied up and between the sheets. What they are trying to unravel, is a plot to make superhumans by cloning, but they struggle more with retracing their steps from part one than anything else. It seems like both films were shot back to back and some stuff was simply rearranged to make it look like a new film while it actually isn't. From time to time people try to tell the Red Lips something but get shot right before they can actually do so, and they fall down unconvincingly like pudding. One of these characters is Franco himself, as a cameo. The English dub is horrible and I was continuously distracted by the mouths moving at times they didn't "speak" and the other way around. A film which doesn't make me tick, and is probably only for Franco completists.

The Astounding She-Monster - another black and white scifi drive in from the 1950s, this film is about two villains and the female alcoholic accomplice kidnapping a socialite. On the run for the police they end up in a cabin where the guy living there is not just the target for these crooks but also for a female alien being who just landed in a white sphere spaceship. This alien looks like a blonde in a spandex suit but as soon as she touches anyone, that person is getting radiated, so this is of course a product of the atomic age scifi film school. Acting is pretty wooden and nothing much happens except for the criminals discussing with their victims and among themselves, alternated by scenes in which the alien is touching someone. Of course brain activity has to be lowered to enjoy this film, just as the characters themselves have been doing by going out one by one to meet the alien for example. The ending is rather dumb: the alien gets disintegrated by some chemical substance and afterwards the survivors find a paper letter in English about earth being able to join the "Council of Planets". Kinda boring film overall, but not the worst I have seen.