Matt Blake – Page 10 – The Wild Eye

February 26, 2017

Esperienza

Although made for a preposterously small budget (just twenty thousand euros) and, well, nothing much happening for the entire running time, Francesco Vona’s Esperienza is one of the more effective Italian films that I have seen in recent years.

February 21, 2017

Fallen Soldiers

Considering that the world and it’s dog (and even the dogs favorite stick) are bored to tears with Nazi zombie films, Fallen Soldiers does a neat trick by giving us, well… Napoleonic zombies

February 15, 2017

Sandokan Fights Back

The short burst of 1960s ‘Sandokan’ films, based on Emilio Salgari’s most famous literary character, commenced with Umberto Lenzi’s Sandokan the Great (Sandokan, la tigre di Mompracem) in 1963. It proved enough of a moneymaker to spawn two unofficial sequels, produced by Ottavio Poggi for Liber Films and directed by Luigi Capuano, the first of which was Sandokan Fights Back.

January 25, 2017

Darkest Day

Darkest Day answers one of those burning questions that’s at the heart of so many horror films today: what could possibly be worse than a global apocalypse?

January 19, 2017

Neverlake

It’s not often you come across the Etruscans in Italian films. There were a couple of giallos (The Etruscan Kills Again (72) and Murder in the Etruscan Cemetery (82)), but considering they were a civilization with a very distinct – and often macabre – set of beliefs, it’s surprising that they haven’t been used as cinematic source material more than they have.

January 14, 2017

The Duke of Burgundy

At some point in the mid 1970s, narrative became king in cinema. The lyrical, semi-improvised and let’s be quite honest self-indulgent European art cinema made way for more muscular, focused productions from the likes of Scorsese and Coppola.

December 20, 2016

Reich of the Dead

Reich of the Dead is an Italian take on the nazi zombie format directed by genre specialists Luca Boni & Marco Ristori (their previous credits include Eaters and Zombie Massacre, to which this is sometimes marketed as a sequel despite having nothing to do with it at all).