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Screambox has revealed the new films joining the horror streaming service in January, including Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast (and its remake), the Pet Sematary-inspired Lizzie Lazarus, and several Giallo movies. They join the newly added and incredibly timely Street Trash remake alongside the nightmarish exorcism drama Deus Irae.

Here’s a breakdown:

The people in Hell are starving while the people in Heaven feast in Lizzie Lazarus. Drawing comparisons to Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, the twisted psychological horror film will be resurrected January 14 exclusively on Screambox.

Gorehounds will eat well with Screambox’s double helping of Blood Feast. Herschell Gordon Lewis’s landmark splatter film drops on January 31, while the recent remake starring stars Robert Rusler (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2) and Caroline Williams (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) streams on January 17.

Screambox celebrates January Giallo with four stylish Italian murder mysteries: Strip Nude for Your Killer...

September marks Marcello Mastroianni’s centennial, and the Criterion Channel pays respect with a retrospective that puts the expected alongside some lesser-knowns: Monicelli’s The Organizer, Jacques Demy’s A Slightly Pregnant Man, and two by Ettore Scola. There’s also the welcome return of “Adventures In Moviegoing” with Rachel Kushner’s formidable selections, among them Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, Pialat’s L’enfance nue, and Jean Eustache’s Le cochon. In the lead-up to His Three Daughters, a four-film Azazel Jacobs program arrives.

Theme-wise, a set of courtroom dramas runs from 12 Angry Men and Anatomy of a Murder to My Cousin Vinny and Philadelphia; a look at ’30s female screenwriters includes Fritz Lang’s You and Me, McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow, and Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? There’s also a giallo series if you want to watch an Argento movie and ask yourself,...

Hello, everyone! We’re back with a brand new batch of home media releases, and this week’s assortment is an eclectic group. Code Red is showing some love to The Dead Pit and Arrow Video is keeping busy with their latest Giallo Essentials set and the 2-disc limited edition release of Mill of the Stone Women. Other titles headed home on December 14th include Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Amityville Vampire, Alone in the Woods, The Spanish Chainsaw Massacre, and Chicken’s Blood.

The Dead Pit

Dr. Ramzi (Danny Gochnauer), a deviant who enjoys torturing his patients, is killed by a fellow doctor and buried in the basement of a mental health facility. Twenty years later, the hospital is up and running again and a “Jane Doe” (Cheryl Lawson) arrives at the institute with amnesia. Upon her arrival, a major earthquake rocks the building and unearths the now undead Dr.

Most gialli are focused on the aesthetic, making sure all the black boxes are checked - black gloves, black hat, black, black, black – and that the tropes are trotted out in a fairly predictable (yet entertaining) fashion. Stemming from procedurals, it makes sense for a strong structure to support the weight of red herrings and redder victims. And then there’s The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972), a giallo that loves the form so much it can’t help but be affectionate towards it, resulting in something closer to comedy than horror. The result is surprising and wholly entertaining.

Released in Italy in August, The Case of the Bloody Iris (Original Italian title: Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? Aka What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood Doing on Jennifer's Body? – a very giallo title if there ever was one) was met with positive reviews, especially...

It is truly amazing how crowded the zombie market was in the early ‘80s, at least in Europe; after the success of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) begat Lucio Fulci’s unofficial “sequel” Zombie (’79), the floodgates were opened and the undead made their (slow and shuffling) move at the box office. Amidst the barrage was one Burial Ground (1981), a film that boils down a zombie flick to its very essence: people get munched, and they get munched good. Forget social subtext; Burial Ground barely has text.

Aka The Night of Terrors, Burial Ground was released on its home turf of Italy in the summer, with the U.S. not receiving a release until late ’85 before dropping on video in early ’86. There’s really no need to mention reviews from the mainstream: what do you think they would say that would in any way add to the discourse beyond...

When reminiscing about ’70s exploitation cinema and its multitude of subgenres, it’s easy to skip over giallo. The gory Italian crime films, full of switchblade stabbings and gratuitous sex, are pure fun with an artful touch. With their stylized nature and refusal to shy away from violence, these movies are often thought of as the thriller equivalent of spaghetti westerns. Adapted from pulpy paperback books (the term “giallo” is a reference to the yellow color of their pages), their over-the-top titles are often just as fun as the films they describe.

Giallo may not dominate the zeitgeist these days, but somebody had to recognize their artistic significance. Lately, Quad Cinema has been stepping up to do just that. Last year, the New York theater brought six newly-restored giallo films to the big screen. The series was a success, so they’re back for more. Starting this Friday, six more giallo restorations will be screening,...

The UK's Shameless Films seem to have a particular fondness for the torture and torment of Italian film siren Edwige Fenech at the hands of giallo legend Sergio Martino; but then again, I can't really blame them. Fenech became one of the most recognizable - and indisputably beautiful - faces of the '70s giallo boom in Italy when she arrived on the scene. She starred in many a classic from this underground subgenre that has only recently begun to receive the kind of notice it deserved. While she worked with some of the most notorious filmmakers in the business in films that went on to become cult classics, like Andrea Bianchi's Strip Nude for Your Killer and Mario Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon,...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Matteiofthedead returns with Malabimba: The Malicious Whore, some good old fashioned Italian sleaze from the infamous Andrea Bianchi (Strip Nude For Your Killer, Burial Ground). This effort is his take on the possession genre. The film in question is Malabimba, a tale of a young (oh yes folks) girl possessed by an evil and and horny spirit.

Don’t let me down Andrea!

One of the most fondly remembered eras in fright-film history is the golden age of Italian gore – a prolific period that brought such directors as Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava and Lucio Fulci to international attention and acclaim. Spawning all number of surreal sub-genres, including black-gloved killer-thrillers and stomach-churning cannibal adventures, this is a time that continues to crib a fresh generation of fascinated fans.

As such, 88 Italian have announced the UK Blu-ray release Zombi Holocaust (1980) and Burial Ground aka Nights of Terror (1981) – a pair of plasma-packed pot-boilers that could only have been dreamt up during the bygone boom in Euro-terror eccentricity.

In Burial Ground, the carcass-crunching action comes thick and fast as veteran director Andrea Bianchi (Strip Nude For Your Killer) evokes the sinister spirit of Lucio Fulci and George Romero. Also known as The Zombie Dead, Bianchi’s bout of bloodstained brilliance has a pack of ghoulish predators entrap...

Euro Cult cinema probably wouldn’t be all that interesting had it not been populated by the genre queens I have listed below in what I hope is a rather comprehensive overview of the best actresses renowned for their work in this particular area of filmmaking. Each and every one of the actresses gathered here are deliriously beautiful – but beyond that, they all have a strong presence and natural charisma that makes it easy for them to light up the screen.

Of course, mainstream cinema is populated with fine-looking women, but Euro Cult babes have a certain je ne sais quoi. Maybe it is their ready willingness to shed all of their clothes and get down to it at a moment’s notice. Or maybe it’s because they always appear to be entwined in a web of sleaze and depravity. Whatever it is, give me Dagmar Lassander in her...

The Giallo is a subgenre of film that is almost exclusively Italian. Giallo means ‘yellow’ in Italian and it refers to the yellow covers of the pulp fiction paperbooks that were in Italian culture and which many of these films are based upon.

Gialli are usually violent and gory murder mysteries that flirt with horror and also contain a large dollop of sexual behaviour – especially sleazy sexual behaviour. There are certain motifs of the genre – a black clad, black gloved assassin and beautiful Euro babes running around in their scanties. They seem manufactured to inspire horror, disgust and arousal in the viewer simultaneously.

Most Gialli have awesome titles – The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, Crazy Desires of a Murderer, What Have They Done to Your Daughters? The titles are extremely titillating. They promise horrible violence and at the same time delicious filth. I have compiled my list based on my...

For the week of March 27th, sleaze fans are fortunate to have two gialli hitting store shelves from amazing companies Blue Underground and Mondo Macabro. The more notorious of the two is Blue Underground's Blu-ray upgrade of Andrea Bianchi's (Burial Ground) Strip Nude for Your Killer, which is among the more depraved of the higher profile gialli available. A bit lower on the notoriety scale is Mondo Macabro's DVD debut of the uncut William Rose giallo The Girl in Room 2A (Casa Della Paura). Both films promise a lot in their marketing, but don't quite manage to accomplish the mania hinted at in their trailers or their posters, but they are exploitation films, so some of that is to be expected.I don't think anyone has...

Toronto-based writer Mike Pereira went hog wild this past weekend diving into not 1, not 2, but 8(!) new Blu-ray titles. By readin on you'll find his thoughts on everything from Andrea Bianchi's 1975 Strip Nude For Your Killer to the new doc Corman's World, Camel Spiders, Monster Brawl, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Skin I Live In, Dead Silence and even the new Battle Royale box set. If anything, I highly recommend checking out the twisted The Skin I Live In, while also diving into Saw creator James Wan's Dead Silence once again (it ages pretty well). Watch for more soon.

DVD Playhouse—March 2012

By Allen Gardner

J. Edgar (Warner Bros.) Director Clint Eastwood provides a rock-solid, albeit rather flat portrait of polarizing FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, covering his life from late teens to his death. Leonardo DiCaprio does an impressive turn as Hoover, never crossing the line into caricature, and creating a Hoover that is all too human, making for an all the more unsettling look at absolute power run amuck. Where the film stumbles is the love story at its core: Hoover’s relationship with longtime aide Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). In the hands of an openly-gay director like Gus Van Sant, this could have been a heartbreaking, tender story of forbidden (unrequited?) love, but Eastwood seems to tiptoe around their romance, with far too much delicacy and deference. The film works well when recreating the famous crimes and investigations which Hoover made his name on (the Lindbergh kidnapping,...

The term “giallo” initially referred to cheap yellow paperbacks (printed American mysteries from writers such as Agatha Christie), that were distributed in post-fascist Italy. Applied to cinema, the genre is comprised of equal parts early pulp thrillers, mystery novels, with a willingness to gleefully explore onscreen sex and violence in provocative, innovative ways. Giallos are strikingly different from American crime films: they value style and plot over characterization, and tend towards unapologetic displays of violence, sexual content, and taboo exploration. The genre is known for stylistic excess, characterized by unnatural yet intriguing lighting techniques, convoluted plots, red herrings, extended murder sequences, excessive bloodletting, stylish camerawork and unusual musical arrangements. Amidst the ‘creative kill’ set-pieces are thematic undercurrents along with a whodunit element, usually some sort of twist ending. Here is my list of the best giallo films – made strictly by Italian directors, so don’t expect Black Swan, Amer or...