Reviews – Page 33 – The Wild Eye

February 10, 2009

The Seven Tasks of Ali Baba

Although Vulcan Son of Jupiter wasn’t a huge success, it did prove popular – and profitable – enough for Emimmo Salvi to return to similar territory with The Seven Tasks of Ali Baba, another film which took its inspiration from familiar tales of heroes, magic and romance.

February 5, 2009

Ratman

Ratman was essentially constructed as a vehicle for one Nelson de la Rosa. Nerver heard of him? Well, Sr. de la Rosa was the world”s smallest actor (he was in the Guinness Book of Records as the worlds smallest man, but that seems to be inaccurate), coming in at a whopping 2” 4¼”.

January 20, 2009

Vulcan, Son of Jupiter

For his first film, Vulcan Son of Jupiter, Emimmo Salvi was working from a script by himself and his usual writers Ambrogio Molteni and Benito Ilforte, and he started as he meant to go on: this is most unmistakeably a Salvi film, there’s simply nobody else who could have come up with anything quite like it.

January 8, 2009

Proteus

Proteus scores point for being one of the very few UK horror films – or, heck, low budget films of any kind – made before the arrival of lottery money and gangster chic in the late 90s. With the constant stream of modest, genre product that we currently have in this country, it’s easy to forget just how barren the 1980s and early 90s were for anyone whose taste ran to anything different from Merchant Ivory, Mike Leigh or Ken Loach

January 2, 2009

Man With the Severed Head, The

The plot of Crimson follows a botched robbery attempt at a jewellery store, which goes wrong when one of the gang members, Karl (Victor Israel), surreptitiousy tries to nab a pearl necklace from an alarmed display case. During the frantic escape, another of the robbers, Jack Surnett (Paul Naschy), is shot in the head, leaving their leader, Henry (Oliver Mathot), with a bit of a tricky situation.

December 4, 2008

Sword of the Conqueror

Sword of the Conqueror, by Carlo Campogaliani, was obviously intended to be something of a prestige production. It was made by Titanus films, whose other peplums of the time included Sodom and Gomorrah, The Thief of Baghdad and The Battle of Marathon; and as with them it seems to have had some decent money invested in it.

November 25, 2008

The End is Known

Cristina Comencini’s 1993 film The End is Known, a classy thriller based on Geofrrey Holiday Hall’s little-remembered 1950 novel of the same name, would appear to have never had a proper English language release, beyond a subtitled broadcast on the Australian TV channel SBS.