Letterboxd — Your life in film

Following on from part five's surprisingly decent detour, enter Rick Bota for the first of three DTV Hellraiser sequels. Hellseeker features the triumphant return of Ashley Laurence in the role of Kirsty Cotten.....for all of about thirty seconds before she is killed in a car crash. We then follow her husband in the aftermath, as he descends into some sort of personal hell. The Hellraiser series is so far removed from what it was by this point. Hellseeker follows on…

Killer's Moon is a film about a bunch of maniacs on the loose in the countryside. This isn't just any bunch of maniacs - this is a bunch of maniacs on an experimental drug that makes them believe they are in a dream, and they're after a group of schoolgirls that are stranded in the vicinity. With a plot like this, it really should have been a hell of a lot more fun, but it feels like a film that…

Black Angel is based on the novella Senso by Camillo Boito. The action is updated to Italy at the end of World War 2; a fascist regime on its knees provides the backdrop for a lustful affair between the wife of a rich man and a Nazi SS officer. The film feels like Tinto Brass' attempt at making a "serious" movie. It's very much toned down compared to the rest of his filmography. The film is framed in black and…

Jack Hill's contribution to the brief seventies cheerleader movie fad. The Swinging Cheerleaders, is less exploitative than its title would suggest. It somewhat delivers on the expected sex, nudity and comedy - but alongside it we also get a shrewd critique of perceived stereotypes and a plotline involving powerful people taking advantage of the school football team for their own ends. In some ways, it feels like a parody of its own genre. The film features a number of plot…

The eyes are the window to the soul and the means of experiencing the outside world. Yasuzō Masumura's Blind Beast takes us on a depraved journey into pure self indulgence; touch and personal sensation the only route to individual pleasure. The film takes a real minimalist approach - just three characters, a mostly single location and clear presentation of the central themes. This is juxtaposed against some truly surreal and ornate set design - the titular character's world populated by…

Leave it to Tinto Brass to make an artistically shot erotic film with a deeper underlying point. The Voyeur introduces the central concept of scopophilia in a sequence that sees our lead character, a literary professor named Dodo, give a lecture on voyeurism in classic literature. Brass takes this concept and runs with it; the central theme is scattered across the narrative, with various characters engaging in the act of voyeurism and Brass' numerous zoom shots inviting the audience to…

Director Scott Derrickson insists that this film was originally written as a Hellraiser sequel, but I don't believe him. Hellraiser Inferno is very obviously a psychological horror film reconfigured as a Hellraiser sequel, and this is clear because all the common series elements feel so ancillary to the central plot, aswell as being entirely at odds with the lore of the previous films. That being said, this is something of an interesting journey in its own right as we follow…

A low budget zombie movie from the trashier end of Jess Franco's extensive filmography. The film actually gets off to a half decent start - a couple of young girls travelling through the desert come a cropper when they happen upon an oasis inhabited by a bunch of Nazi zombies protecting a load of gold. The desert setting is cool and the oasis has some atmosphere to it...but then the film goes off on a big tangent, meandering through flashbacks…

Terror of the Tongs plays out like a less interesting version of Hammer's earlier offering The Stranglers of Bombay. This time the action takes place in Hong Kong and focuses on a secret society, the Red Dragon Tong, a bunch of wrong'uns who are into slavery and drug trafficking. The film benefits from the usual array of lavish sets that Hammer were so famous for. The set is well realised; Bray Studios somewhat convincingly substituting for Hong Kong, though a…

A brutal and unflinching depiction of war told through the eyes of Japanese army nurse Sakura. This has to be one of the most horrendous portrayals of war ever put to screen. A battlefield sequence towards the start sees a doctor nonchalantly deciding what to do with patients on stretchers; a soldier holding his severed foot begs to have it put back on; numerous scenes of limbs being sawn off, a basket of severed body parts. There's no real story…

Foxy Brown runs very much along the same lines as Jack Hill's Coffy made a year earlier. Indeed Foxy Brown was initially conceived as a sequel, and once again features the amazing Pam Grier in another tale of slick afro powered vigilante justice. This time she's after some high powered dope pushers following the killing of her undercover cop boyfriend. This film has action a plenty - though it doesn't rattle off at quite the same breakneck pace as the…

This is the end of your rotten life you motherfucking dope pusher! Coffy is a superior blaxploitation film from director Jack Hill. The film gets off to an explosive start that sees the title character murder two bad guys, before moving into a story of vengeance as she tries to get even on the pushers that ruined her sister's life. The film is fast paced and quick witted; some absolutely great lines of dialogue and a runtime packed to the…