Chopping Mall
Chopping Mall was my first blog, which I started way back in 2009. It was dedicated exlcusively to ridiculous and terrible films, which I watched a lot of back then. (So much time, so little work!)
I’ve resuced the posts from oblivion, to be preserved here for …uh… whatever.
It’s a pretty clunky process getting them out of blogspot (XML export, eww) and into here, so there may be a few formatting issues.
Death Line a.k.a. Raw Meat
This poster bears stunningly little resemblence to the film. How puzzling.
For a long while, the disused stations of the London Underground have interested me; despite being closed, many years out of service, they’re still…. there. They sit, lurking under city streets, completely forgotten by the people who walk past their once-entrances or sit on trains that rush past their once-platforms. Some of them can still be seen from trains, some of them were converted to war-time bunkers and still have propaganda posters on the walls, some them house plague-ridden cannibals, tucked well away from the city’s lights.
Help The Video Dead find it's way onto DVD!
A worthwhile project if ever there was one.
Copied wholesale from the myspace page:
On July 21st, 2009, I was browsing around and decided to check and see if one of my all time favorite cult films was scheduled for a DVD release this year as I had noticed a lot of catalog titles from various studios were being released on DVD for the first time this year. To my surprise, the film was indeed listed and was slated to be released on October 27, 2009!
Poster Hunt #2 - Frauleins In Uniform
Poster Hunt was going to be an exploration of the most incredible movie-posters. The sublime, the ridiculous and the wonderfully crass.
Following on from the last though, which scored higher in the crass stakes than I could have hoped for before I found it, I am sticking with the (deservedly) much maligned Nazisploitation genre…
Here, without further ado, is the poster for your new favourite film…
Wow.
Described on IMDb as “In the last days of WW2, women are volunteering from all over Germany to serve in the front lines by having sex with the brave Nazi soldiers…”
The Nights of Terror (Le Notti del Terrore)
Another day, another Spaghetti Zombie flick. Fresh from the prime years of Italia’s Zombie cycle comes Andrea Bianchi’s Nights of Terror.
This film has been called a lot of things. Good isn’t usually one of them. IMDb reviews run from a verdict of “unintentionally hilarious” to “unbearably awful” and, whilst there’s definitely elements of the latter, I must side with the former.
Like so many of the others (and indeed, most of the films I cover here…) it gets off to a bad start on paper.
Nightmare City (Incubo sulla città contaminata)
Ok. First off we’ll do a quick Zombie-Survival, multiple-choice quiz question:
You are on the run from vicious, fast, flesh-eating, blood-drinking ghouls. And your escape-vehicle is running out of petrol. When you stumble upon a deserted looking petrol station, do you…
a)Fill your van at the pump, taking advantage of how there appears to be no-one around, and continue fleeing, or…
b)Pop in, have a rummage through the (presumably deceased) owner’s clothes and make yourself a cup of coffee, whilst dicussing how man’s greed has triggered this crisis. Upon discovering one of the zombies in the back garden, rather than running away, you attack it, alerting others to your presence, allowing them to find your car which you then firebomb, before escaping on foot with only a flask of brandy.
What Have You Done To Solange? / Cosa avete fatto a Solange?
The Italian Giallo films are perhaps not best known for being the most sophisticated cinematic creations of all time. Characterised by murder, mystery and sex, they equate more or less with our idea of a thriller, pulp-fiction Euro-cine. But with more sex.
It came as a surprise then just how good What Have You Done To Solange? was. On paper, admittedly, it looks as smutty, crass and trashy as you could expect from a Giallo (or any low-budget offering from the trash-flick capital of Europe): it’s set in a Catholic girls school full of illicitly promiscuous teens, a teacher (the Italian professor, no less) is courting his pupils behind his wife’s back, girls are getting killed with knife-wounds in unpleasant places and an unknown girl -the Solange of the title- is the link…
Cemetery Without Crosses (Une Corde, Un Colt)
Westerns are in an odd place these days. The culture of the Western is so deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness that everyone is familiar with some, if not all, of the classic clichés and norms of the Western film. Goodies wear white hats, baddies wear black. They smoke. They shoot. They drink whisky. They fight in bars. They barge through saloon doors, chase each other on horses across the desert, dash over the border to Mexico when the heat’s on, have quick-draw shoot-outs at high noon, etc, etc.
Poster Hunt #1 - Last orgy of the Gestapo...
Poster Hunt #1 brings you a fantastically tasteless mix of sex and Nazis. Strangely unlisted on IMDb, here is… La Última Orgia de la Gestapo!
On IMDb here, albeit with a slightly different title. The reviews aren’t great…
Dead End Drive In
I’ve had this film hanging around for ages now and just hadn’t quite got round to watching it. In that time, I’d forgotten what little I knew about it and, in my head, it had become just some run of the mill slasher set in a drive-in cinema. I was wrong.
This is an Australian film from the 80s (and it really is very 80s…) that play on/cashes in on the popularity of Mad Max. Taking a similar kind of post-apocalyptic society as it’s base, this plays as a kind of Mad Max flavoured meeting of Escape from NY and The Cars That Ate Paris (If you haven’t seen either of those, go and do so. Now).They Came Back (Les Revenants)
Yes, this is technically a zombie movie. Yes, this involves the recently deceased emerging from their graves and returning to life. Yes, it is French.
Here, though, the comparisons to Jean Rollin’s godawful Zombie Lake end. Because Les Revenants isn’t your standard zombie movie, it isn’t really a horror film at all. It is however, very, very French.
In much the same way that the recent (and wonderful) Let The Right One In manages to be a vampire film without really being about the routine vampire-mythology horror clichés, Les Revenants takes a very different approach to the zombie film.
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