Monday 25 June 2012

Are you artistic? Do you like free stuff? Well then ...

Our friends at Rock!Shock!Pop! are generously giving away free copies of the lastest and greatest from Mondo Macabro, COUNTESS PERVERSE!

RSP's President-for-Life Ian Jane explains:

This movie is awesome and you can win your very own copy, free of charge.
How?
Well, it's simple really. Submit your best drawing or Photoshop image inspired by the movie. If you haven't seen it, that's ok - you already know enough about it to come up with something.
If you can't draw, don't worry, what counts the most is effort and creativity.
Even if you just draw a cool picture of Jess Franco smoking it still counts.
Contest ends in at the end of the month, no entires submitted after midnight on 6/30 will be accepted and winners will be announced when I wake up and have my coffree on 7/1/12.
Get to it!

So that's not too far away, so ya better get crackin'! Submit your entry here to become immortal.

Our pal and Cinema Sewer producing genius Robin Boughie has set the bar quite high with this initial entry:



You've got your work cut out for ya, dudes!

If it's any incentive, I will post all entries as an exclusive feature on this site after the contest is over. Get your work seen by literally dozens of movie nerds!

Wednesday 20 June 2012

Nadia ul-Gindy: Egyptian Cinema's Queen of Violence, Sexuality & Raw Emotion!

We here at the MM Blog are proud to present this exclusive "video essay" by Arabic film expert Robert J. Kiss, who you may remember as the mastermind behind the complete 60s Arabic language filmography of shlock film director Frank Agrama. Here he illuminates an obscure corner of the cult film world little seen by even the most die-hard collectors of international exploitation oddities. Take it away Dr. Kiss!

When Jared offered me this opportunity to come up with a guest blog entry about Egyptian popular cinema for Mondo Macabro DVD, I knew immediately that I wanted to seize the chance to introduce the incredible Nadia ul-Gindy to his (no doubt equally incredible) readers. And since I feel that moving images can tell the tale far more effectively than a gazillion words... below is my 15-minute 'video essay' charting Nadia ul-Gindy's career and presenting clips and images from around thirty of her movies. Please take some time out of your day to watch this if you have even a passing interest in Egyptian cinema, because that cinema is simply unthinkable without the many delicious excesses of Nadia ul-Gindy.




During the 1980s and 1990s, few sights on an Egyptian cinema screen could get me more excited than the bombastic logo of producer Muhammad Mukhtar, signaling that another movie starring his wife, Nadia ul-Gindy, was about to hit the screen in an orgy of sex, violence, heavy melodrama and bright red stage blood! At that time, Nadia ul-Gindy was akin to a 'guilty pleasure on a national scale': her movies received little advance promotion, articles on her in the celebrity press were scant, to say the least, and yet her popularity with urban audiences was almost unrivaled, with her flicks not uncommonly occupying theaters for thirty or forty consecutive weeks. From 1981, she has been billed in all her movies as 'nagmat ul-gamahir Nadia ul-Gindy' ('the audiences' star, Nadia ul-Gindy'), an epithet intended to foreground the fact that her career was founded primarily on audience popularity rather than on marketing and publicity.


Nadia ul-Gindy's name has echoed through half a century of Egyptian popular cinema, with her back-catalog of 55 features and 5 television series including action movies, pouting melodramas, psycho horror thrillers, drug dramas and wild exploitation pictures, in all of which she might just as easily be playing a diabolical villainess or a blood-soaked victim. Her movies consistently pushed at the boundaries of what local censorship would allow, and on more than one occasion were banned outright or made the subject of vocal campaigns urging their withdrawal from circulation. Prominent critics – such as Duriyya Sharaf id-Din in her 1992 study Cinema and Politics in Egypt, 1961-1981 – would denounce ul-Gindy's works as 'low-grade' and 'indistinguishable from one other', while at the same time tucking away in a footnote the information that these unspeakable movies 'are the most highly attended, being held over in theaters for tens of weeks'.

Thursday 7 June 2012

Coming Soon!

The Next DVD: The Late 80s South African pyscho-thriller THE SHADOWED MIND!


























From Tamlin-4's review at the IMDB:

"Stephanie, a young girl with an overwhelming desire to bare her breasts arrives as a patient at a private clinic for those suffering from sexual dysfunction ... Other patients include the inhibited Paul, the sinister Kurt,the neurotic Julia, the teddy-bear fixated Matthew and the radically deluded General. Stephanie and Paul begin a tentative affair while a killer stalks the institution, knifing (a) blonde sex-addict ... before the shocking conclusion where sexual appetite and necrophilia merge.

Banned for several years in South Africa, this intriguing confection of sex and horror takes place in a private clinic for the sexually disturbed where the staff are more disturbed than anybody else. Composed with the stateliest of camera movements by director Sundstrom (Suffer Little Children, Saxman) who turns on the screws as the killings and sexual couplings proliferate. With a climax reminiscent of Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses and a scenario that is clearly inspired by the Citizen Kane of South African films, Jans Rautenbach's Jannie Totsiens, this is a very strange film indeed."


















Specs and release date TBC.

Monday 4 June 2012

The Reviews are in! COUNTESS PERVERSE is a hit!



Our latest DVD, Jess Franco's wondefully odd and sleazy COUNTESS PERVERSE will be officially released soon and is available now from a few online sources, inlcuding TLA Cult and Diabolik DVD.
If you're still on the fence about this one, let the following reviews help sway you in one direction or the other.

Mondo Digital
Rock!Shock!Pop!
DVD Beaver
Dr. Terror's Blog of Horrors
DVD Drive-In
Video Dungeon
I'm in a Jess Franco State of Mind
Schlockmania! (Part One)
Schlockmania! (Part Two)
Cinezilla
Twitch
Brutal As Hell
Cinesploitation
Lair of Filth

I'll add more as they come in. If you have a review you'd like me to link to email me at jaredaunerATyahooDOTcom.