Movie of the Week: Lady Terminator

 

I wouldn't steer you wrong, this is some good stuff yo. I haven't been this delighted with a newly discovered film since "Hausu" a few years back. Maybe the gratuitous nudity, extreme violence and ostentatious dubbing isn't your bag, and you might dismiss it as incompetent or prurient or lowbrow, but I guarantee, to all ye without faith, no matter how bourgeois your sensibilities, you will not be bored by this movie. You cannot help but to be entertained, for it brings the crazy.

Featurette of the Week: Toby Dammit

(cribbed from wikipedia)
Histoires extraordinaires (1968) dubbed Spirits of the Dead for English, is a horror anthology film featuring three stories by Edgar Allan Poe directed by European directors Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini. The film received a mixed critical reception, with the Fellini segment widely regarded as the best of the three.

Toby Dammit, which shares so little with its source in Poe that it could almost be considered an original piece, is notable for its visual and thematic similarities to three earlier Fellini masterworks. The disintegrating protagonist and the hellish celebrity demimonde he inhabits are reminiscent of both La Dolce Vita and 8½, while the interweaving of dreams and hallucinations into the plotline and the use of highly artificial art direction to reflect inner states resemble similar techniques used in 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits.

In 2008, Toby Dammit was separately restored under the personal supervision of its renowned cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno (who, after this short, went on to collaborate with Fellini in seven of his 11 remaining films). A new 35mm print was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it was widely acclaimed by the press as a lost Fellini masterpiece.



part two
part three
part four
part five

The Best of Amicus: Part Nine

Here's "The Man Who Collected Poe", the fourth and final story from 1967's Torture Garden. Written by Robert Bloch, starring Pete Cushing and Jack Palance. The story starts at the 1:19:00 mark, but I'm embedding the entire feature because it's available (and also because Burgess Meredith's wraparound segments are the best thing about the movie).

Movie of the Week: Common Law Cabin (1967)