Posts Tagged ‘Torture’


Women in Cages Collection (The Big Doll House / The Big Bird Cage / Women in Cages)

July 25th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Disc company: Shout! Factory   Video: 480p / 1.78:1    Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 English
Subtitles: None   Disc: 2x DVD9   Release Date: 06/28/2011   Reviewed from a screener provided by Shout! Factory LLC (Thanks Mitzye!)  DVD available now at Amazon.com, Blu-ray available for pre-order.

Shout! Factory are at it again, with the latest in their continuing line of Roger Corman’s Cult Classics turning up the heat just in time for summer to hit its stride.  The Women in Cages Collection brings together a course trio of Philippines-produced ‘women in prison’ exploitationers from the early years of Corman’s New World Pictures, all of which center around blaxploitation megastar Pam Grier (Foxy Brown) and her considerable assets, professional and otherwise.  The Women in Cages collection offers just about everything fans of Corman productions could ever ask for – plenty of exposed flesh and wanton depravity balanced by a hefty dose of blistering woman-scorned revenge.

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SALÒ or the 120 Days of Sodom

July 7th, 2009 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. SALÒ o le 120 giornate di sodoma / Pasolini’s 120 Days of Sodom
company: United Artists
year: 1975
runtime: 116′
country: Italy
director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
cast: Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi,
Umberto P. Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti,
Caterina Boratto, Elsa De Giorgi,
Helene Surgere, Sonia Saviange
writers: Pier Paolo Passolini,
Sergio Citti and Pupi Avati
cinematographer: Torino Delli Colli
music: Ennio Morricone
Order this film from Amazon.com

The great Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film, which would not premiere until well after the director himself had been murdered under circumstances still being investigated today, seems as though it were ready made for courting  controversy.  Deeply political and disquietingly perverse, the film transposes Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom [written while he was imprisoned in the Bastille] upon a short-lived fascist Republic that existed in Italy towards the end of the second World War.  The narrative is a graphic rebellion against what Pasolini saw as a new fascism in his own time – the global consumerism the director felt was destroying Italian society before his very eyes.  SALÒ concerns the commodification of the body, the human capacity to conform, and the terrible consequences of un-restricted power.  It’s one of the only genuinely horrifying films I’ve ever seen.

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Last House on the Left

September 18th, 2008 | article by | No Comments »
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Lobster Enterprises [1972] 84′
country: United States
director: WES CRAVEN
cast: DAVID HESS, SANDRA CASSEL,
cast: JERAMIE RAIN, MARC SHEFFLER

Wes Craven’s freshman effort is, in a single word, notorious – when released theatrically in 1972 the film was subjected to all manner of censorship at the hands of theatre owners, projectionists, and seemingly anyone else who could get near it with a pair of shears. The original version, purported to have had a running time of 91 minutes, is lost forever to the sands of time. But MGM, seeing a market for one of the most infamous of American exploitation films, saw fit to release the most complete version of the film currently available (84 minutes) in 2002.

The story is basic: It’s Mari’s 17th birthday – to celebrate, she and her friend Phyllis drive to New York to see one of their favorite bands play. Along the way they get a hankering for weed and become entangled with a group of four homicidal delinquents, led by the monstrous Krug, who molest Phyllis before locking both in the trunk of a car and heading out into the countryside. When the car breaks down, Krug and company head into the nearby woods – ironically right across the street from Mari’s house – with their human catch and proceed to humiliate, assault, and, ultimately, kill them.

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Jigoku

August 6th, 2008 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. HELL / THE SINNERS OF HELL
Shintoho Co. Ltd [1960] 98′
country: Japan
director: NOBUO NAKAGAWA
cast: SHIGERU AMACHI, YOICHI NUMATA,
cast: UTAKO MITSUYA, KANJURO ARASHI

Contradictory to what a plethora of Chick Tracts and so-called “Hell Houses” (haunted houses featuring abortions instead of ax murders) may lead you to believe, the belief in hell by the various peoples of the world is in decline. A lot of that undoubtedly has to do with the dwindling popularity of a place of eternal damnation since the 18th century Enlightenment and the fact that people are, largely, becoming more tolerant of beliefs alternative to their own. Still, fictional representations of hell are quite popular in film and have been since the inception of the medium (George Melies offered early viewers a variety of amusing shorts on the subject, including 1903′s THE INFERNAL CAKE-WALK).

Produced in 1960 by the failing Shintoho Studios (it would rise again shortly thereafter as a producer predominantly of pink films), Nakagawa’s JIGOKU presents viewers with one of the most stylishly disturbing visages of the underbelly of the afterlife ever committed to film.

Shiro Shimizu (Amachi) seems to have a happy life ahead of him – he’s doing well in college and has just become engaged to one of his professor’s daughters. All of that changes after his supposed-friend Tamura (Numata) hits and kills a young yakuza while driving Shimizu’s car. Against his better judgment he says nothing of the accident to the police, but his guilt leads to a series of unfortunate incidents. First his fiance Yukiko is killed when her taxi, which Shimizu demanded she take, hits a tree. Her family is destroyed by the incident, which drives the mother mad and Shimizu to drink, leading to a fling with a stripper who just happens to be the lover of the yakuza killed in the earlier hit-and-run . . .

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