I’d already reviewed everything from Roger Corman Tribute Night, but most of the Italian Horror Night program was new to me:

A Blade in the Dark (1983), which started out as a four-part TV miniseries, and might have been at least slightly better if it had remained one…

Cemetery Man (1993), which might be the Gen-Xiest movie ever made by a bunch of people born in the 50’s…

and…

Opera (1987), which I was all set to praise as Dario Argento’s best pure giallo until he went and got Dario Argento all over it.

Meanwhile, I also saw all these over the past month or so:

House of the Living Dead (1973), a strange and in some ways extremely old-fashioned gothic from South Africa, of all places…

The Substance (2024), in which regaining one’s youth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…

Sword of the Valiant (1983), in which Stephen Weeks’s second go-round with the legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight goes awry completely differently from his first…

and…

The Turn of the Screw (1989), in which I finally complete the set for Showtime’s old “Nightmare Classics” package of made-for-TV mini-movies.

I cast a somewhat wider net with this update than I’ve managed to do in a while:

Crippled Avengers (1978), which isn’t 12.5% as squirmy as that other kung fu movie with “crippled” in the title…

Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay (1971), in which King Arthur’s evil half-sister decides that collecting hot chicks is way more fun than thwarting Grail quests and tricking knights into betting each other their heads…

The Invincible Kung Fu Brothers (1976), in which Chang Cheh’s fourth Shaolin Temple movie looks remarkably like his second…

Shaolin Temple (1976), in which the fifth one, on the other hand, breaks quite a bit of new ground…

Mutant (1984), which isn’t about mutants so much as it is about acidic zombies and ornery rednecks…

The Red House (1947), which always gets awkwardly shoehorned into discussions about film noir and the most aridly fallow period of American horror cinema, even though it’s really a very well-disguised gothic mystery…

and…

Teenage Zombies (1959), in which I regret to inform you that Jerry Warren is at it again.

 El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.

Bigger update than usual this time, because I got blocked on two of the reviews I originally set out to write, and just kept throwing more movies on the pile in the hope that writing about one thing with the front of my brain would eventually enable the back of it to find weak points in the pieces that were fighting me:

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), which might sound like a typical copaganda flick when you boil it down to one sentence, but has a whole lot more going on beneath the surface…

The Bikeriders (2023), which, in contrast, is exactly, gloriously the movie it looks like from a distance…

El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.