gorgeous gorga.

The kids are still on holiday and this is what they've chosen as todays viewing pleasure.


They must really hate me.

The Mighty Gorga (1969)
Dir: David L Hewitt.
Cast: Anthony Eisley, Megan Timothy, Scott Brady, Kent Taylor and a huge monkey.

"Oh, Mighty Gorga! I know your thirst for the blood of young maidens is great! But I pray you, leave our village in peace! Soon! Soon the invaders will be upon our plateau and you can destroy them! And then once again I will summon you to our Altar of Life and you can once again drink the blood of the maiden."

Our tale opens somewhere in a mysterious corner of the Congo where spooky music plays and scary plastic skulls sit jauntily atop a variety of odd sized sticks.


Did I say the Congo cos it sounds just like Dudley on a Friday night if I'm honest.

But unlike my home town it's soon revealed that the skulls aren't just there to scare away peg-selling gypsies but are actually part of a hastily constructed sacrificial altar to which a buxom 'native' girl is tied, wriggling and writhing to free herself as a huge hairy shadow looms overhead.

Which does indeed beg the question as to how a shadow can be hairy.

Must be dust on the print.

"Grraarrrr!!"

Meanwhile in the good ol' US of A, Mark Remington (Eisley - star of The Wasp Woman and Journey To The Centre Of Time amongst other classics, oh and Knots Landing) the devilishly handsome, hard drinking, chain smoking - but not too surprisingly with those vices skint - owner of a circus needs money quick if he's to save his business.

Believing that only a fantastic new exhibit will wow the kids back under his big top (sounds rude) he uses his remaining cash to finance a trip to Africa in the hopes of being able to 'hook up' with world famous trapper - and owner of the best porn name never used - Tonga Jack (Brides of Blood's Taylor).

You see Tonga has recently written to Mark regarding a legendary giant ape thing that lives in the Congo (but not on Um Bongo) reckoning that it might just be the attraction he's looking for.

Unsurprisingly Mark plans to capture the beast using a bag of bananas and a huge mousetrap and pop him in his circus clad in a top hat and revolving bowtie.

What could possibly go wrong with this plan?

On arrival in Africa Mark first decides to visit a local zoo - giving the director ample opportunity to pad out the film with grainy stock footage of wild animals - to 'study' apes in their natural habitat (because we all know that they really enjoy living in tiny concrete cells) before heading out into the jungle to meet up with Tonga so they can start the adventure - and by default the film - good and proper.

Tho' it makes you wonder what the animals, carnies and dwarves he's left back home are living on seeing as he's spent all the cash on what appears to be a holiday.

"Fiona where's mah lunch?"

Arriving at Tonga's jungle pad Mark is dismayed to learn that the trapper is missing following an ill-fated trip to Aldi for supplies and that his stuck up daughter April (busty Brit Bettie Page-alike and star of Confessions of A Sexy Super Vixen Timothy) is now in charge of the trapper empire.

Being a mere woman and not knowing anything about manly pursuits like trapping and the like it turns out that she's spent all the money on pink fizz, make-up and scratchcards so her business is in financial trouble too.

Arse.

"Meow!"

If that wasn't enough strife for one film it turns out that a rival trapper, Dan 'no nickname' Morgan (Sheriff Frank from Gremlins himself, Brady) is obsessed with getting his dirty-nailed sausage fingers not just on Tonga's compound but on - and in - poor April too and will stop at nothing to achieve these aims, including setting fire to the animals kept therein.

Which does beg the question as to why he'd want to buy a burnt out, animal-less building in the middle of the jungle but each to their own.

Mark, being a smooth talking kinda fella - and desperate for some lovin' -  offers to split the cash he'll get for capturing the massive monkey with April if she'll help him, subtly mentioning the huge bag of gold guarded by the ape during the conversation too.

What a guy.

Jumping for joy (luckily she's wearing a good bra) at the thought of all that cash  and no doubt at the thought of massive monkey cock - c'mon she has needs too - April decides to join the adventure so armed only with a cap gun, aided by three extras from the Black and White minstrel show and using a crayoned map made by her missing dad the dynamic duo head off into the jungle.

"Where are those fucking Chewits?"

Unbeknown to our heroes mental Morgan is in hot pursuit.

Making their way further and further into the dense jungle (OK, the park behind the directors house) Mark is - fairly - surprised when he stumbles across a towering plateau populated by dinosaurs.


Tho' to be honest how you can just 'stumble across a plateau' really confuses me.

We've no time to think about such trivialities tho' as April has come across some giant eggs and wanting to prove herself to be a real woman to Mark she's decided they'd be great boiled and served with toast.

Whilst attempting to find a pot big enough to pop them in Mark and April are shocked when the mummy dinosaur, returning from the shops after buying nappies decides to attack them.

Our hero lets rip with his cap gun firing at what appears to be a child's toy held up close to the camera whilst a bored technician goes "Grrarrr!" a lot but all seems lost when they discover that plastic dinosaurs are impervious to bullets.

Luckily the Mighty Gorga arrives in the nick of time and in a scene as ludicrous as it is insane (especially on this budget) wrestles the scary Tyrannosaurus to death.

"Put it in me!"

Eying up the beast (as in Gorga not April) Mark formulates a plan.

He plans to drug - the 40 foot high - gorilla then roll him down the mountain on bumper sized discarded kitchen roll tubes onto a waiting airplane before flying him back to the States and his circus.

Let's be honest it really is a crap plan but a plan never the less.

Fuck me it's Fred Titmuss!

Will Mark's plan succeed?

Will a scary tribe turn up wanting to sacrifice April to the monkey?

And will she find her dad?*
There's only one way to find out cos if I had to sit thru' this then you can too.

Usually this is the bit where I go into the films background, it's director, cast etc. but I really don't have the words to adequately sum up the experience of watching The Mighty Gorgo, it's easier just to list five main reasons why it must be seen.

1. They could only afford the top half of a gorilla suit so you only see Gorgo from the waist up.

2. According to this movie there are only three real black people in Africa - everyone else is a white person covered in gravy browning.

3. A man in (the top half of) a gorilla suit fighting a kiddies toy dinosaur toy held shoddily close to the camera.

4. Anthony Eisley's quiff.

5. Megan Timothy's eyebrows and arse.


Buy it now or more realistically just watch the trailer on Youtube even tho' if I'm honest that requires way more effort than this film deserves.








































*In case you really can't be arsed the answer is yes and yes to the last two by the way.

the ghost man always rings twice.

Spent the majority of the holidays mixing visuals and making animations for a David Bowie tribute event (see? It's not all blood and boobs) so thought I'd celebrate their completion with a good movie

Unfortunately this was the first thing that came to hand.

Until Death (AKA The Changeling 2, Brivido Giallo: Per Sempre. 1987).Dir: Lamberto Bava.
Cast: Gioia Scola, David Brandon, Giuseppe Stefano De Sando, Roberto Pedicini, Marco Vivio and Urbano Barberini.

Professional brunette bad-lady Linda (Scola from the fantastic Raiders of Atlantis) has decided, along with her horse-cocked (yet scarily rodent faced) lover Carlo (Stagefright's Mr. Serious Brandon) to off her baw headed boring hubbie Luca (Pedicini best known for his voice work in Dellamorte Dellamore, looking like a human/frog hybrid and emptying our bins) and set up house together whilst running their homely seaside bed and breakfast cum restaurant cum boat business like some murderous Basil and Sybil Fawlty.

But obviously without a Spanish waiter with a pig ugly, attention seeking whore for a granddaughter.

And not just because he's sadly dead.

As in it's a shame he died not that he was sad about it.

Tho' he probably was.

Just checking the facts surrounding his death I've just discovered that he died of dementia so he was probably unaware of his impending demise anyway.

I'll admit tho' that any of these scenarios would have added a certain something to the movie.

Namely enjoyment.

But I digress.

Ballie's: more custard than cream.

Anyway, enough character background - and looking back at that paragraph butchery of the English language - let's get back to the story which begins good and proper with the aftermath of Luca's murder and the deadly duo about to dispose of his still fresh corpse in a nearby swamp.

But he's not properly dead and with his last vestige on strength tears one of Linda's huge market stall hoop earring out.

Of her ear not his own obviously.

Hitting the poor sod on the head with a large pizza tray to finish him off our loving couple head home to settle into their new (if rather fraught) lives; baking, shaking and raising Linda's muppet like poppet Alex (AS Roma fan Vivio, who seems to have had the biggest career out of anyone else on screen).

Aw, sweet.

Eight years down the line the couples idyllic - yet it has to be said, fairly paranoid - existence is disturbed by the unexpected arrival of ruggedly raffish traveler (OK, hobo), the hunk-tastic Marco (Sam J Jones alike Barberini from Opera, Demons, Casino Royale and your Aunties bed).

I'd get that seen to son.

After checking out his cooking skills - and it has to be said frankly magnificent arse - Linda and Carlo hire him on the spot to help out in the restaurant.

But it's not long before the pair begin to notice Marco’s frightening familiarity with their home-life, business affairs and even where Linda keeps her clean undies.

He also has an almost unhealthy fondness for lil' Alex but most disturbingly for Linda, he knows all of her secret family recipes.

Nice to see she's got her priorities right, no doubt she'll leave him babysitting next time her and Carlo pop out for tapas.

"Hey senorita! You fancy a little mooth shite-in?"

All this insider knowledge begins to play on Carlo's barely hidden paranoia, leading him to surmise that Marco is working with the police to trap the couple for murdering Luca.

Obviously Italy have a special 'head-fuck' department specially recruited to play with criminals minds.

Or something.

Linda however is way too busy fiddling with herself whilst lusting over Marco to  jump to such bizarre conclusions and poor Alex is too shot to fuck by his recurring dreams about arms bursting thru' his bedroom walls and trying to goose him whilst soggy tramps attempt to crawl out of swamps to care one way or t'other.

"Laugh now!"

Is Carlo reading too much into the situation?

Will Linda get her end away with the hunky bum?

Will Alex get touched up by the nightmarish ghouls?

Will the movie end with a blazing inferno?

But most importantly will Marco steal all of Linda's recipes and pass them off as his own, getting his own teevee show in the process?

If you really are what you eat then he must have eaten a warty testicle.

Only a director of Lamberto Bava's (albeit slightly tarnished) reputation could take the plot of The Postman Always Rings Twice and re-imagine it as a psychological horror tale before turning it into a cheaply made teevee movie and still make it moderately successful.

Under no circumstances to be confused with the 2007 Jean-Claude Van Damme cop caper of the same name (tho' if you did I reckon you deserve all you get), Until Death is, bizarrely enough one of Bava's most subtle and successful movies, returning to the promise he showed with his first feature Macabre then subsequently pissed up the wall with every movie since (Demons being the obvious exception).

"Ooh Alex come and have a wee nibble of your mums nice hot pie!"

It's nicely acted, stylishly shot and features the best line in denim fashion wear this side of Brokeback Mountain.

Or your dad going to one of his classic car weekends.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your alcohol levels) it has one of the most idiotic and shlocky twists ever committed to celluloid.

More fun than Graveyard Disturbance but nowhere near as sexy as Blade in The Dark (or your sister), Until Death is still worth owning.

Especially if you have a wobbly table that needs straightening.

stage shite.

New year, classic movies, same old catchphrases.

Welcome to 2017.

Finally caught up with this gem last night (yup we really know how to celebrate Hogmanay here in Unwell Towers) so thought I'd share.

I wont give to much away tho' seeing as from what I can gather only about six people have ever viewed it.

Yup it's that good.

The Killer Reserved Nine Seats (AKA L’ Assassino ha riservato nove poltrone, 1974).
Dir: Giuseppe Bennati.
Cast: Rosanna Schiaffino, Christea Avram, Eva Czemerys, Lucretia Love, Paola Senatore, Gaetano Russo, Andrea Scotti, Eduardo Filipone, Luigi Antonio Guerra, Howard Ross and Janet Agren.

"It looks like Dracula's Summer house!"

During a birthday bash for cheese-chested silver fox Patrick Davenant (Star Odyssey's Avram), one of the guests (doesn't matter who - it's all back story) suggests that it'd be a good laugh if they all drove to a deserted theatre in the middle of the English countryside (fantastically played by a country road somewhere outside Rome) for some reason or other that isn't worth mentioning.

I mean come on we've got killings and lipstick lesbianism to get to.

Accompanying the birthday boy on this merry jaunt is his harsh-faced fiancé Kim (genre regular Agren), his sister Rebecca (Czemerys who doesn't appear to be wearing any pants) and her lover Doris (evil pixie Love), his frighteningly ginger daughter Lynn (Senatore) alongside her creepily camp - tho' that just may be the dubbing - boyfriend Duncan (Russo), the sexily bearded Doctor Albert (Scotti) alongside his wife (and Patrick’s former flame) Vivian (council estate Faye Dunaway Schiaffino) and the big-haired bastard Russell (Werewolf Woman's Ross, looking for all the world like a childs photofit picture of Robert Davi).

But what would a giallo be without a mysterious man in a Nehru-collared suit  and a massive 'world of the strange' gold medallion?

Probably a wee bit more entertaining - and a lot less clichéd but heyho.

This nameless man (portrayed with all the charisma of a shoddily constructed wooden sex toy by the Lego-haired Eduardo Filipone) seems to have been to the theatre before, being as he is quite familiar with his surroundings.

And all this despite the fact that the place has been closed for a century.

The cast really should have figured out things were going to go tits up when he announces in that deadpan way reserved exclusively for cut-price Eurohorror actors "I spent a night here once.....100 years ago."

Being the way in these movies the rest of the cast just shrug their shoulders and cut daggers at each other.

Me?

I'd have given him a round of applause for delivering the line with such a straight face.

I didn't give him this....but I did give your mum a pearl necklace on Christmas Eve.

Tho' to be honest when he turns to camera and slyly announces that "The actors are present and now the play may start…" I was all set to punch him in his smug supercilious face.

Right on cue a pair of black gloved hands drop a large piece of wood from the rafters that almost kills Patrick setting in motion a series of terrifying events and random breast shots as the cast of almost-weres and has beens are bitching, kissing and cursing their way thru a variety of more and more elaborately style murder set pieces.

In between bouts of uncomfortable lesbianism, big panted perving and - thanks to an impromptu performance by Kim - a wee bit of Romeo and Juliet as she acts out the heroine's death scene.

Who says horror movies can't be educational too?

Decked out in a handy Edwardian bodice Kim gives it her all during Juliet's death scene before slumping to the ground with a dagger in her back.

Which makes a change from her usual habit of taking it up the arse from all comers.

Allegedly.

As our frightened friends crowd round Kim's prone body (obviously hoping for a wee bit of boob spillage) dykey Doris spots a black-clad figure running  backstage and heads off in hot pursuit.

Well as hot as a 70's style middle-aged, polyester clad secretary can be I guess but each to their own.

...And there it is.

Whilst Doris plays Nancy Drew the rest of the of the cast are beginning to panic.

Not only have they discovered that no-one save the director is getting paid but also that the theatre's doors have all mysteriously locked from the outside leaving them trapped.

And in Lynn and Duncan's case desperate for a quick shag.

Tho' given the choice Lynn would rather it be her dad sticking it in her.



Cue ten minutes of uncomfortable nipple nibbling and scary stroke faces as Rebecca gazes lustfully at her niece from a nearby cupboard.

Meanwhile Doris has caught up with the killer and in an attempt to stop him killing her decides to flash her tits at him whilst purring like a cat.

Temporarily blinded by the glare from her milky white chest the killer stumbles giving our man-haired maiden time to escape.

Unfortunately she soon trips over one of her nipples and is  quickly dispatched by the mysterious mentalist via a sliding door cum storage box.

With the surviving cast - and let's face it the audience - at a loss to what the fuck is going on Patrick helpfully explains that the theatre is cursed.

Which is nice.

You see exactly a hundred years ago this very night a group of party-goers visited this very spot for a wee bout of shits and giggles only to find themselves locked in and, when the doors were finally opened they were all found dead.

And mutilated.

And covered in egg, blood, sweat and semen.

Well probably not the last bit.

Dog blanket.

As the body count rises our groovy group realise that there may be more to the curse than meets the eye and that a painting found in the theatre library (?) depicting the horrific events of the night before they happen - and in glorious Crayola colour to boot - may hold the key to the mystery at hand.

Tho' not the mystery of how the fuck this thing got greenlit with such a threadbare and nonsensical script.

Don't worry too much dear readers as the fairly graphic killings (well one of them) and the copious amounts of flesh on show more than make up for it. 

Probably.

From Writer/director Giuseppe Bennati - the man who directed the TV movie adaptation of Italo Calvino's BattleToads and the teen temptress teasing Red Lips, The Killer Reserved Nine Seats is an oft overlooked late entry into the Giallo cycle that blatantly steals the basic plot of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians before hitting the bottle and introducing more and more wildly bizarre plot twists and turns -  everything from spooky ghosts, family curses to incest and luscious lesbians are randomly throw into the mix in the hope that some of it will stick to the (paper thin) walls of the plot and cover the cracks.

And scarily it almost succeeds.

Let's be honest you know a film is doing something right when you're more concerned whether Eva Czemerys is wearing underwear beneath her frankly terrifying togs than if the plot makes sense.

And for this alone we salute your courage Mr Bennati.

If not your sanity.

Eva Czemerys - Feeling a little horse.

And what the film (admittedly) lacks in logic, cohesive plotting and convincing performances it more than makes up for with its fantastic location and set pieces which no doubt went some way to influence the setting of Dario Argento's Opera and at least one of the kills is copied wholesale inMichele Soavi’s Stagefright.

Sure on reflection the films plot makes absolutely no sense but who cares when it looks as lovely as it does thanks to Giuseppe Aquari's lush cinematography.

Kudos too to composer Carlo Savina for his groovy score that bravely replaces normally expected shock cues with a rumba beat and wah-wah chase music.

As an aside it was Savina's - stock - scores that were used for the majority (79 episodes) of The Phil Silvers Show which is bizarre in itself.

See? You wont find nuggets like that on the BFI site.

But their well written articles about films that folk actually care about probably makes up for it.

Pants.

Worth looking out for just to impress girls with the knowledge that you've seen it, The Killer Reserved Nine Seats deserves to find a wider audience than it currently has.

As a bonus I've set 2017's bar so low that I'll be surprised if I'm disappointed by any movie this year.

carrie on regardless.

A quick tribute to everyones favorite Princess.

Fucking gutted here.