A horror movie testing two approaches to running an insane asylum – absolute freedom versus control and punishment – within the context of a world that combines the worst of both. Jean Berlot, a young man subject to a nightmare of being forced into a straitjacket by two orderlies, is befriended by a marquis. At the marquis’s estate, Jean witnesses a black Mass, buries someone alive, and is invited to try preventive therapy. He’s willing to enter a sanatorium because he believes he can rescue a young woman from there who has told him that the real director and staff of the clinic are locked in the basement. Jean conspires with her to set them free: the horrors have only begun.Read More »

The film stars Mabel Karr as Irma Zimmer, a surgeon who creates a machine that turns people into zombified slaves. Ms. Zimmer is the daughter of a Professor Zimmer (a disciple of Dr. Orloff), who was hounded to his death several years earlier by four of his scientific associates. Zimmer uses the machine to control an erotic dancer named Miss Muerte (Estella Blain) who uses her long poison-tipped fingernails to murder the people Ms. Zimmer holds responsible for her father’s death.Read More »

A logging camp, deep in the Mexican jungle is the setting for this dark, cataclysmic drama. A man and his family go to work in a mahogany camp, only to find themselves and their coworkers treated as semi-slave laborers and the recipients of beatings and brutal punishments. Pushed to the brink of fury, the man decides the only way out for himself, and his coworkers, is for him to lead them in a violent and bloody revolt against their oppressors.Read More »

Robert Monell wrote:
Of the eight other films Franco made in 1985 (half of them hardcore porno features), this very low budget adventure stands out because of an absorbing, multi-layered script by ace Spanish screenwriter Santiago Moncada. Beside writing Mario Bava’s HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON, Claudio Guerin Hill’s THE BELL FROM HELL and Juan Antonio Bardem’s THE CORRUPTION OF CHRIS MILLER, Moncada has written and produced screenplays for a variety of European genre directors. Manuel Cano’s SWAMP OF THE RAVENS, TARZAN’S GREATEST CHALLENGE and VOODOO BLACK EXORCIST were all based on Moncada screenplays, not to mention the ultra-violent Spanish western CUTTHROATS NINE. This film was co-produced by Moncada and Franco’s Manacoa company.Read More »

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With a keen sense of visual beauty, director Markku Lehmuskallio has created a thought-provoking, aesthetic film about a married couple and an old man living in a remote part of Finland. The young husband goes out hunting but only to support himself and his wife, not to kill off hordes of animals. He sets traps, and that gets him in trouble with the police who proceed to ticket him for using the devices. The forest cycles themselves are intimated when an old tree is shown falling to earth — perhaps a reflection on the old man’s passing years. In contrast to these few people living off the land and basically keeping the ecological balance intact, a highway construction crew is shown at work felling trees. Soon the antagonism grows between encroaching civilization and the quiet life of the young couple and elderly man.Read More »

A tender young woman and her husband (a musician) attempt to eke out a living in the slums of New York City, but find themselves caught in the crossfires of gang violence.Read More »

Thieves decide to steal the money an old miser has hidden away. He refuses to open the safe for them, so they threaten to kill a girl who lives in his building.Read More »

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variety.com

There’s a symphonic rhythm to the aptly-titled Bolivian film “The Great Movement” (“El Gran Movimiento”). Kiro Russo’s portrait of La Paz is driven more by sensory cues than by any steady sense of narrative. Ostensibly following a trio of miners who arrive at the sprawling, Andean capital city with the hopes of getting jobs, “The Great Movement” emerges instead as a dissection of this highest of Latin American urban jungles.Read More »

Pop star Anna has been kidnapped. Kidnapper Jash uploads the video clip of Anna being tortured onto the internet, which instantly becomes the talk of Hong Kong. A week later, Jash contacts the police, asking not for a ransom but for retired police inspector Mo to be his police contact. Inspector Mo eventually discovers through a tabloid magazine that a self-proclaimed psychic named Shana had phoned a radio program on the day of the kidnapping to warn of the incident.Read More »