Wednesday, 22 August 2012

MM Back-Catalog Spotlight Vol 2!!

Here's the second in our ongoing series of looks back in time to past DVD treasures, which were unearthed and then celebrated and then forgotten again. Here's a reminder. Blogger/film-maker Jeremy Riddle attempts to get to the heart of our wild double feature of FOR YOUR HEIGHT ONLY and CHALLENGE OF THE TIGER.


He's a sharp-dressed, kung-fu kicking man of action. With unshakeable courage, unbreachable cool, and an array of clever gadets, he battles dastardly supervillains in exotic locales with the fate of the free world itself at stake. He's clever, quick-witted, tough as nails, a smooth-talking smooth operator who always gets his man. Always gets the ladies, too. A hero for our age.

He's not that British guy, though.

He is, instead, the Philipines' finest.

He's 2 1/2 feet tall.

He's Weng Weng: Special Agent 00.

See this butt-biting, Moe-do'd moppet tackle the felonious forces of Mr. Giant in FOR YOUR HEIGHT ONLY, another of those fantastically fried flicks with which Mondo Macabro perpetually provides us.

"The forces of good are our sworn enemy, and... they must be exterminated, and I mean lethally."

Mr. Giant's right-hand thug, expressing, with typically inept hilarity, the heartless villainy our diminutive hero must face. Will the Weng-Wengster win out over this comic concoction of sinister slavers, deadly drug-runners, and the merciless miscreant masterminding their malevolent machinations? I guess you'll just have to watch and see.

And, hey, think it's hard to believe, from this description, that such a movie actually exists? Well, after you see it, you _still_ won't believe it.

Alongside Weng's way-off-the-beaten-track exploits comes a compelling chunk of chopsocky cheddar from the Brucesploitation bin. The under-epic CHALLENGE OF THE DRAGON features "Bruce Le"--only one "e"--and Richard Harrison in a silly stew of spies, teeth-grittin' kung fu fightin', and gloriously gratuitous bare breasts. The latter end up in the hands of Harrison, who, with his Burt Reynolds moustache, deals with the booty while "Le" takes on most of the booty-kicking.

CHALLENGE doesn't have as high a WTF Factor as HEIGHT, but it does have its moments--slo-mo topless tennis jumps immediately to mind--and, most importantly, it manages to be damn entertaining, which puts it a chop above most of the Brucesploitation bunko. Paired with HEIGHT, it makes for a fine double-feature for both those looking for something a little different and the seasoned connoisseur of the psychotronic alike.

Jeremy Riddle is a writer and would-be filmmaker who hails from a little place called Ringgold, Georgia, where he's busily building an embryonic indie film colony for no-doubt nefarious purposes. He hopes to have his first, as-yet-untitled feature in the can before the end of the year. Check out his writings on film at his blog The Dig.

If this has whetted your appetite for more, and I'm positive it has, then steal your parent's credit card and head on over to one of these reputable DVD pushers, TLA Cult or Diabolik DVD to pick up your very own copy!

Tuesday, 31 July 2012

HOW TO SEDUCE A VIRGIN!



















The beautiful Countess Martine de Bressac is released from the expensive asylum where she was incarcerated after castrating her former lover. She returns to her luxurious villa on the coast and goes at once down into her private underground dungeon. It’s here that she indulges herself in the perverse sexual practices that give her life meaning, surrounded by the bizarre human statues of her previous victims.

Her husband, Charles, feeds his wife’s sick fantasies, aware that she is his meal ticket to a life of luxury. He announces that he has a new game for her - they will befriend and seduce the young and virginal daughter of a rich neighbour. But things do not go exactly as planned...

Release Date and Specs TBA

Thursday, 12 July 2012

The Art of the PERVERSE!

As promised, here are the all the wonderful entries in Rock!Shock!Pop!'s recent PERVERSE COUNTESS contest! We'll start off with the three winning entries, then onto the ... well losers isn't really the right term, since they are all awesome in their own way. Which is your favorite?


    By Barry M.



    By Willem Claeys



    By Robin Boughie



    By Dom D.



    By Paul H.



    By Todd Jordan



    By Ryan K.

Big thanks to all the artists, and congrats to the winners!

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.