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Future director Alex Cox moved from his native England to Los Angeles in 1977 because he found the British film scene to be lacking. While attending UCLA, he made his first short, "Edge City," a bitter, talky, semi-surrealist film about struggling artists wandering the uglier parts of the city, having conversations about the nature of artistic success. ("Edge City" is on YouTube.) That short led to a plum deal with Mike Nesmith (of the band The Monkees), who secured over a million dollars for Cox's first feature, 1984's "Repo Man," a seminal film of the punk rock scene and a legit cult phenomenon. "Repo Man" wasn't initially a hit, but its soundtrack (full of L.A. hardcore) sold so well that it was re-released, becoming a financial success. 

Cox came to love punk rock, already somewhat embodying its spirit in his outsider view of filmmaking. In 1986, the filmmaker made "Sid and Nancy,...

[This October is "Gialloween" on Daily Dead, as we celebrate the Halloween season by diving into the macabre mysteries, creepy kills, and eccentric characters found in some of our favorite giallo films! Keep checking back on Daily Dead this month for more retrospectives on classic, cult, and altogether unforgettable gialli, and visit our online hub to catch up on all of our Gialloween special features!]

When I think of giallo films, I think of killers lurking in the shadows on cobblestone streets in ancient cities, the collars of their coats turned up and their black-gloved hands reaching out for their next unsuspecting victim. What I don’t think of is a chicken farm, but that’s precisely the location of 1968’s Death Laid an Egg, aka La morte ha fatto l'uovo, and that unique locale for a giallo (combined with one hell of an eye-catching title), is precisely why I chose to watch this film for Daily Dead’s Gialloween retrospective series. A giallo set on a chicken farm? I had to see how director Giulio Questi pulled it off.

As it turns out, a chicken farm is not where all of the action takes place in Death Laid an Egg, as the film splits its time between the countryside where married couple Anna (Gina Lollobrigida...

The Spaghetti Western craze of the 1960's produced hundreds of films, the vast majority of which I haven't seen. However, even among those in the know, Giulio Questi's Django Kill (...If You Live Shoot!, ...Se Sei Vivo Spara!) is among the craziest, most violent, and balls out insane of the bunch. This film shares nothing with Sergio Corbucci's Django, apart from a distributor applied moniker, and manages to out crazy that film at every turn. If you've never seen Django, Kill, you owe yourself the pleasure, and Blue Underground's Blu-ray (out July 3rd), is the best way to do it!The Stranger (Tomas Milian) is killed after having been double crossed for stolen gold, but he won't be gone for long. Where there's gold, there...