CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM ADDICT

CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM ADDICT Production: USA, 1962 Director: Albert Zugsmith Category: Drugs/Slavery/Freaks Vincent Price is a sailor who falls into the clutches of Chinese drug-pushers. An exploitation film, mostly unrelated to Thomas De Quincey’s original book, but full of sleazy imagery. Zugsmith was something of a pulp visionary, producing Orson Welles’ Touch Of Continue Reading

LA GRANDE FROUSSE

LA GRANDE FROUSSE (“The Big Fright”) Production: France, 1964 Director: Jean-Pierre Mocky Category: Crime/Terror One of only two features to be based on the novels of Jean Ray (the other being Harry Kumel’s Malpertuis), La Grande Frousse is based on Ray’s La Cité De L’Indicible Peur (“City Of Unspeakable Fear”), written in Continue Reading

UNTITLED [THE TORTURE VIDEOS OF LEONARD LAKE & CHARLES NG]

UNTITLED [THE TORTURE VIDEOS OF LEONARD LAKE & CHARLES NG] Production: USA, c.1983-85 Director: Lake & Ng Category: Atrocity There is no doubt that numerous sadists, paedophiles and serial killers have filmed or videotaped their crimes – not for profit, but for their own personal gratification (a perversion so vividly depicted in Continue Reading

NIHON BOKO ANKOKUSHI: IJOSHA NO CHI

NIHON BOKO ANKOKUSHI: IJOSHA NO CHI (“Japanese Rape Horror: History Of Bloody Perversion”) Production: Japan, 1967 Director: Wakamatsu Koji Category: Sex-Violence As with his classic Okasareta Hakui, (“Violated Nurses”), released the same year, Wakamatsu based this film on a true sex-crime, loosely reprising – with typical embellishments of sadism and political Continue Reading

KUROTOKAGE

KUROTOKAGE (“Black Lizard”) Production: Japan, 1968 Director: Fukasaku Kinji Category: Crime Based on a novella of the criminal underbelly by Edogawa Rampo, and starring fascist author Yukio Mishima with transvestite Akihiro Maruyama. An earlier version of Kurotokage, starring the glamorous Machiko Kyo, was a more straightforward but still stylized “crime Continue Reading