The Beyond

Lucio Fulci is a great Italian horror director who prefers to assault the reader with surreal moments of intense violence or beauty rather than create any sort of narrative. In The Beyond, one of his most beloved (?) films, there's, like, a house in Louisiana with a door to the titular the beyond? I'm not entirely sure and I've seen it a few times. Well, some spiders eat an eyeball out of somebody's face and there's some zombies and etc, what more do you want?

RATING: 79%

Atom Age Vampire

Don't let the title fool you - there's no actual vampire in this movie (plenty of atoms though). This is a not-so-great film about a doctor who murders for science/horniness. One interesting (insensitive) thing is that the Doc murders people near the port, where hundreds of refugees from Hiroshima are arriving. It's the oldest Western movie that I know of to reference the real human horror of the atomic bombings of Japan. Too bad it's in such a shitty movie.

RATING: 31%

New Tale of Zatoichi

This is the third Zatoichi movie and the first one in color. Here our pudgy blind samurai friend returns home to find out his old mentor has turned into a bad guy! Zatoichi considers retiring with the woman he loves and having a nice life where he doesn't slice up evildoers but there are, like, twenty movies left in this series so I'll let you guess what he decides.

RATING: 76%

V/H/S/2

So I didn't really like the first movie in this anthology series, but then a few different people told me the sequel was worth it because there was one great segment included. Unfortunately, every person forgot which number segment it was so I was doomed to watch this whole movie. Like the first one, some people are compelled for some reason to watch a bunch of snuff films, which, despite the fact that this takes place in modern times and every individual short film was shown in context to be shot digitally, have all been transferred down to big ol' unreliable VHS copies. Anyway, there's a boring ghost one, a boring zombie one, A TOTALLY BONKERS AMAZING SHORT HORROR FILM THAT DOES NOT DESERVE TO BE PACKAGED IN THIS SHITTY DEAL, and a boring alien one. Just watch the third segment and you'll be fine.

RATING: 85% (Third segment)
RATING: 26% (Whole movie)

The Crusade

Early Doctor Who serials are divided up pretty evenly between those with historical premises and those based in science fiction. It's my understanding that the historical serials were never particularly popular and were eventually abandoned after the first few seasons. Having seen about a half dozen of these historical serials, it's easy to see that they often follow a basic formula. One or more of the travelers get captured and those remaining find themselves rubbing elbows with a famous historical figure while the rest of the plot unfolds. The Crusade definitely has some of this formula working for it/against it, but for the first time you get a sense that the characters have learned from their previous experiences. Barbara is captured in the first few minutes of the story and yet she never despairs and never stops trying to escape. Having survived more than a dozen impossible scenarios by this point, she remains unfazed in the face of certain death.

Rating: You ask for the impossible very lightly%

(Image from aintitcool.com)