Good news for lovers of the late and sorely missed Godfather of Gore, Lucio Fulci. My Horror Squad colleague Scott Weinberg spotted a listing for a Blu-ray version of City of the Living Dead over at DVD Active.
Blue Underground is the company responsible for this new version of the intestine-spewing, drill bit-to-the-head Italian splatter epic. The film–also commonly known as The Gates of Hell–will be available on regular DVD, but the new Blu-ray is the version you’re going to want to grab. Extras for the Blu-ray disc include three brand new goodies: “Acting Among the Living Dead – Interview with Star Catriona MacColl”, “Entering the Gates of Hell – Interview with Star Giovanni Lombardo Radice”, “Memories of the Maestro”. I’d be all over that for those three things alone–if I owned a Blu-ray player.
The discs are scheduled to be in stores on May 25th. Check out the new cover art above.
It’s been a long time since we’ve had a great Italian horror flick–or any Italian horror flick, for that matter–so when these new stills from Gabriele Urbanesi’s In the Mouth of Ubaldo Terzani turned up online recently, they instantly caught my attention. I didn’t particularly enjoy Urbanesi’s last film (Last House in the Woods), but there were just enough positives to pique my interest in seeing what he’s up to in his latest outing.
The plot description for In the Mouth of Ubaldo Terzani sounds a lot like Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (and so does the title, when you look at it…). Check it out for yourself and see what you think:
Alessio Rinaldi, a 25-year-old director, gets the charge from a producer to write the script of his first movie with Ubaldo Terzani, a well-known writer of horror novels. Alessio moves into Terzani’s house to start this collaboration, and a strange relationship of psychological dependence grows between them: Ubaldo Terzani unveils his dark side, and Alessio fall in a desperate depth of craziness and nightmares. There is a reason why Terzani’s bestsellers are so frightening … Alessio will discover that reality can be unexpectedly more terrifying than every brainchild, and he will have to fight hard to escape Ubaldo Terzani’s jaws.
Urbanesi wrote the script for the film, which features the acting talents of Giuseppi Soleri, Paolo Sassanelli, and Laura Gigante. Special FX legend Sergio Stivaletti will be on hand to toss around the body parts.
The film is currently in post-production with no official release date. Swing by Dread Central for a full gallery of gory images from the flick (a few are NSFW). It remains to be seen if In the Mouth of Ubaldo Terzani will evoke memories of the heyday of Italian genre cinema, but at this point I’ll take what I can get.
If you read the site regularly, you know I not only run The Horror Geek, but I also write for HorrorSquad.com. I do this because I am insane, and when someone offers me money I’m too poor to say no.
Anyway, I’ve got a new installment in my series on Death Scenes We Love up this morning. Today we take a look at a clip from Ryuhei Kitamura’s Versus–a film very near and dear to my heart. So, if you have a moment to spare, please swing by and check it out. It’s good stuff.
Click here to be whisked away to the Forest of Resurrection.
I’ve been following Yannick Dahan’s The Horde since it first blipped onto my radar last year and in that time it’s become one of my more anticipated upcoming flicks. However, early reviews from the few festivals The Horde has played at have been overwhelmingly negative. I’m more shocked to hear this after watching the latest trailer, which makes the film look like a gory, action-packed good time. I’m holding off on making my own judgments until I’ve seen the finished movie, but until then, you can enjoy the cool (but entirely in French with no English subtitles) trailer below.
The boys over at Quiet Earth stumbled upon this new trailer for the movie, which finds cops and gangsters trapped inside an abandoned building when zombie Armageddon breaks out. Naturally, they form an uneasy alliance and lot of zombie slaughter ensues.
There’s still no set release date for The Horde here in America. I half suspected it might debut as part of After Dark’s HorrorFest, but with only one title left to reveal, I’m guessing it won’t be this one. I’ll keep you posted as details about a domestic release emerge.
I’m in the minority, but I liked Rob Schmidt’s Wrong Turn. It didn’t reinvent the wheel when it came to the “suburbanites hunted by cannibal hillbillies” subgenre of horror cinema, but it was gory and mostly fun and it had Eliza Dushku in it—who I seem to like for some reason I can’t quite quantify. I liked Joe Lynch’s follow up, Wrong Turn 2: Dead End slightly less, but I’ve come to appreciate more with repeated viewings. As I sat watching Declan O’Brien’s Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead I repeatedly found myself thinking “there aren’t enough subsequent viewings in the world to make this film good”. If that doesn’t clue you in as to what I thought of this movie, allow me to spend another few hundred words going at in detail.
Fangoria broke some news earlier this week–and it’s pretty exciting stuff. FX guru Tom Savini will be directing a new zombie film entitled Death Island.
Savini hasn’t helmed a zombie flick since his 1990 remake of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (one of the better, often underappreciated, horror film remakes), claiming he’d only return to the director’s chair if he could make a walking dead flick that was scary. Apparently, he feels that’s an attainable goal with this new project (which he co-wrote).
Here’s the film’s official plot synopsis:
“A B-movie director sets off with his cast and crew for some location shooting on a small island just off the coast of Haiti. The locals call it Il Du Mort—Death Island. The place provides the perfect scenery for the shots they need. But when some of the cast begin to go missing, those remaining find themselves in a battle for their very lives against an island of the undead.”
The logline makes me think of films like Zombie and Zombie Holocaust–which is always a good thing. No official word on a release date yet, but I’ll be following the project as it comes to fruition.
Back in February (Christ, this year is flying by…) I posted some photos and a teaser trailer for John Lechago’s Bio-Slime. I thought it looked really good for a low budget flick–the special FX work, in particular. A newer trailer has turned up on Youtube, so check it out below–I think gore fans are going to be pleased with this film. It reminds me of a low-budget version of John Carpenter’s The Thing.
Here’s the synopsis, in case this is your first time hearing about the movie–there’s a longer one back on the original story if you want even more info about this flick.
Seven people are trapped in a room with only one door and no windows. Their cell phones do not work and no one outside of the building can hear their calls for help. The group is under siege as a shape shifting creature tries to seep inside. They are picked off one by one until it is obvious that they cannot out wait this predator. A plan is hatched to retrieve the case that the creature came in to see if it holds any clue to control it or destroy it.
Still no release date for this one, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for any new information.
Of all the modern throwback slasher films I’ve seen (and I think I’ve caught almost all of them by this point), Ryan Nicholson’s Gutterballs is the one that most perfectly encapsulates why I love stalk-and-kill movies from that era. Where movies like Hatchet ape the aesthetics of the golden era of slasher movies (while modernizing them in the process), Gutterballs revels in not only the style that defined these films, but the gore, sleaze, and over-the-top excess. To the uninitiated viewer, Gutterballs could very well have been made when Reagan was still president. It’s the kind of flick you expect to see on VHS-in a giant cardboard box with the logo of a company like Wizard or Gorgon on the label.
I posted some of the recent gory set photos (courtesy of Fangoria) from Alex Aja’s Piranha 3D a few days ago. Turns out there were even more lurking about.
Brutal As Hell (another horror site I highly recommend checking out–it’s chock full of good shit) did some digging and found some more disturbing shots (apparently they came along a day after the first batch) from Fangoria/Gorezone.
The new stills are every bit as gross as the last batch (the floating severed leg is a nice touch), but just to keep things interesting, they’ve mixed in shots of lots of women in bikinis as well. Clearly, the photographer realizes that all horror fans love a little T&A with their blood and guts.
Piranha 3D is due out on March 19th of next year. Based on the stills alone, I’m getting pretty excited to see just what Aja has in store for us with his latest remake.
With his feature film Header, director Archibald Flancranstin has done the impossible-he’s managed to bring one of extreme horror author Ed Lee’s most infamous and shocking works to the big screen without losing any of the things that made the novella so repulsive and beloved in the first place. Fans worried that a cinematic adaptation of Lee’s “Redneck Greek Tragedy” would be a neutered and spineless affair can rest easy-this is the same Header those of us fortunate enough to own a copy of the long out of print novella remember. It’s a rip-roaring, over-the-top, insane redneck splatterfest with subject matter so bizarre and offensive that most people would flee the room screaming if you played a scene or read a few sequences aloud. Seeing it recreated in front of a camera is both incredibly cool and very shocking.
