The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Italian Cinema has been with us since fairly much the beginnings of cinema itself. The first major wave that can be considered a purely Italian one was the neo-realist movement of the 1940s/50s that featured films shot away from studio confines often using non-professional actors. None of this concerns us here but this did bring to attention names like Federico Fellini.
The first major wave of Italian genre films was the Peplum cycle, colloquially known as the Sword and Sandal film, that began with the international success of Hercules (1958). There were numerous Hercules, Samson, Ulysses and Goliath films, as well as the original Italian creation of Maciste, produced throughout the 1960s, all featuring a series of brawny muscle-builders as various mythological heroes in a series of mostly mundane quasi-historical adventures.
The late 1950s gave birth to the Italian horror film, which gained its own identity with Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960), an incredibly moody black-and-white work that spawned its own genre of Gothic films – for which see Continental Gothic. Mario Bava also created the Giallo film that focused on garish colour schemes, sado-sexual elements and extravagant deaths, all wound an improbably contorted psycho-thriller plot.
The 1960s saw Italy spawning a massive industry of exploitation films copying Hollywood models, including the Space Opera and Spy Film. Some of these copies – in particular the Italian Western colloquially called the Spaghetti Western – became their own genre.
The 1970s brought the notorious Italian cannibal film and various other works that sought to push on-screen sadism, torture and dismemberment to perhaps the greatest extreme it has ever been. Many of these works were banned around the world.
The late 1970s brought the occult giallo with Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), which used the same extravagant deaths but with supernatural and occult focuses. The 1990s saw Italy readily copying the success of George Romero’s zombie films in a series of gore-drenched efforts. The same period also saw a number of low-budget copies of Mad Max 2 (1981), along with assorted Action Films.
The Italian exploitation genre largely died away by the mid-1990s. Sporadic genre works have been produced since but nowhere near the prolific output the came out during the heyday between the 1960s-80s.
A bizarre Italian film that recounts the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and then follows on from their banishment from Eden and into the wilderness where they encounter dinosaurs, cavemen and wild beasts
Sequel to the bad movie classic of Cannon Films’ Hercules starring Lou Ferrigno and only a marginally less terrible film that its predecessor
Lucio Fulci attained a cult following for his horror films. This reads like a tatty copy of Dario Argento’s Suspiria that has been bizarrely married to the psychic coma patient premise from Patrick
Luigi Cozzi directed quickie designed to copy the success of Alien. As with many Italian films of this era, it has largely been conceived around plentiful provision of gore and little else
In his second to last film, Italian B-budget director Antonio Margheriti makes a cheap and not very good Alien copy that feels like a throwback to the 1950s monster movie
An Italian-made homage to/parody of Fantasia offering an anthology of animated tales. This is witty and more adult in tone, yet perfectly charming and delightful in its own way
A group of people whose memories have been blanked wake up in a mysterious labyrinth and have to survive death traps and each other. A promising mix of Cube and The Hunger Games killed by clumsy storytelling
Companion piece to Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, a duo of horror films sold with Andy Warhol’s name for some reason. Dracula is revamped with a good deal of sex and gore but not uninterestingly so.
An outrageous gore-drenched version of the Frankenstein story that frequently ventures into bad taste. Despite his name in the title, Andy Warhol had nothing to do with the film
A small masterpiece of 1960s Italian Gothic cinema. Exquisitely moody black-and-white photography with Barbara Steele as the ideal of a Gothic dominatrix twisting men around her finger and setting a town against itself
From the notorious 1970s/80s period of Italian cinema, this was listed as one of the notorious Video Nasties. This features a lone cannibal killer amok on a Greek island amid plentiful gore
An Italian-made ripoff of The Exorcist. Probably the most lavishly produced of all Exorcist ripoffs, this soon slips into lurid shock theatrics. Star Carla Gravina should get full marks for going beyond the call of duty
Controversial director Pier Paolo Pasolini offers up a far more adult telling of the Arabian Nights than we are used to, not to mention one that goes on location in the real Arabia
Despite the possibilities set up by the title, this features no vampires nor atomic monsters but is an Italian film influenced by Eyes Without a Face about a mad surgeon trying to restore a woman’s disfigured face
Italian thriller that attained some censorship controversy when it came out. Minsy Farmer is an assistant coroner haunted and obsessed by the corpses she tends
A possession film that takes the Found Footage approach. This takes the traditional approach of Catholic priests intoning exorcism rituals etc and fails to do anything interesting
Charmingly capricious and silly adaptation of the comic-strip with a wide-eyed Jane Fonda as the spacegoing heroine. Filled with some wonderfully naughty gags and a production and costume design scheme that goes to a gorgeously deranged excess
Mario Bava essentially created Italian Gothic cinema and returns to it again here in the story of a sadistic nobleman who is resurrected and begins killing people anew
The success of Star Wars saw a host of copies made over the next few years. This was one of several low-budget Italian space opera knockoffs of this period, featuring invading aliens from Ganymede
Early 1960s Italian space opera from Antonio Margheriti about a rogue planet on a course towards Earth. Not nearly as interesting as it suggests it is going to be.
One of the key films of cult Italian director Lucio Fulci, a gore-drenched but plotlessly incoherent mishmash about zombies emerging as the gates of Hell are opened
A blatant Italian copy of The Exorcist. An exploitation film made with almost zero directorial style that only has the schlock amusements of its attempts to outdo The Exorcist going for it
Italy’s Dario Argento laid out the essence of the style – the arty murder set-pieces; flamboyant camerawork; the stylish music scores; and the psycho-thriller plots – in his first giallo film here
Film from cult Italian director Lucio Fulci. This has almost nothing to do with the Edgar Allan Poe story. With Fulci’s trademark gore sequences tamed, there is not much else for the film to fall back on
This has next-to-nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe. Instead, Luigi Cozzi makes a giallo thriller that makes claims to be the unofficial third chapter of Dario Argento’s at that point unfinished Three Mothers trilogy.
Dario Argento makes a highly anticipated return to the director’s chair after a decade’s silence, once again revisiting the giallo film, but the results are a major letdown
The great Mario Bava directs a horror anthology of three tales, delivering each with considerable spooky atmosphere. The standout among these is The Wurdulak with Boris Karloff as a vampire preying on his family.
Classic work that defined the Italian Gothic cycle of the 1960s and turned Barbara Steele into a cult actress. Mario Bava shoots vivid, incredibly atmospheric scenes in black-and-white in ways that no other director does
One of the entries from the Italian Gothic cycle featuring a big decaying castle, lurking disfigured figures, sinister hypnotists and moodily atmospheric black-and-white photography
The film that formulated giallo cinema. Drawing inspiration from the success of Psycho, Mario Bava strips the psycho-thriller down to a parade of killings amid extravagantly arty surroundings and with a gorgeous colour palette
Luigi Cozzi’s return to screens after 26 years, a head-scratchingly bizarre effort overloaded with ideas about parallel worlds, cosmic journeys and homage to the early cinema of Georges Melies and others
Not a Marquis de Sade adaptation as this was sold as but an Italian giallo film. Mickey Hargitay (aka Mr Jayne Mansfield) has a ball as a mad bodybuilder aristocrat in red tights devising entertainingly lurid tortures.
Italian horror cinema of the 1970s/80s had some of the most extreme material put on screen. Here Joe D’Amato directs a film about a young man with a necrophile obsession and pushes the material to extremes that take you back
The fairytale about a multiple wife murderer is given the lavish costume drama treatment. Featuring Richard Burton at the height of his Bad Actor period in a series of increasingly absurd softcore romps
The director of the notorious Cannibal Holocaust, Ruggero Deodato, takes on making a slasher film. This seems full of possibilities but the results treads familiar ground
A giallo from Lamberto Bava, whose father Mario formulated the essentials of the genre. Joanna Pacula finds a killer leaving body parts in her home, along with notes signed by her dead husband
Suspiria director Luca Guadagnino sinks his teeth into making a film about cannibalism. Forget the Young Adult label the film was sold with, this is quite an impressive work
Enzo G. Castellari’s sequel to his Escape from New York ripoff 1990: The Bronx Warriors and a most more polished and entertaining B action movie
Horror film in which a group of LARPers (live-action role-players) use a wartime bunker as a location and are trapped where the bunker appears to be haunted
An entry from Italian exploitation cinema’s early 1980s fad for zombie films, this has been put together with no other intent than providing a progression of extremely gory set-pieces
Entry in the notorious Italian cannibal genre of the late 70s/early 80s. Here the recent hits of Dawn of the Dead and Apocalypse Now are merged in a plot involving zombified Vietnam veterans
Along with Cannibal Holocaust, this was the most notorious and extreme of the Italian cannibal film fad of the 70s/early 80s. The film becomes a catalogue of violent savageries that are not recommended for the faint of heart
THE most extreme film covered on this site. The defining work of the notorious Italian cannibal genre, a pseudo-documentary work that features stomach churning tortures, guttings and actual animal mutilations
A disappointingly tame giallo thriller from Dario Argento about a poker-playing serial killer. Disappointingly, Argento has cut back on all his customary extravagantly arty and sadistic murder set-pieces
From the heyday of the disaster movie, an all-star cast head up a big scale drama about a train where a passenger is carrying a deadly plague, only for the train to be shunted all across Europe
Classic work of 1960s Italian Gothic cinema. Director Antonio Margheriti rises above himself to create a vividly spooky atmosphere, while at the centre of the show is the haunted otherworldly looks of Barbara Steele
Cult Italian horror director Lucio Fulci plays himself, a horror director being driven to hallucinations and acts of murder by the violence he directs in his films
Dario Argento’s third film as director sees him firmly in giallo thriller territory, delivering a series of extravagantly arty and sadistic set-pieces as James Franciscus tries to find clues to a killer’s identity
An incredibly dreary Christmas film directed by actor Rosanno Brazzi where the South Pole in bought by a miser (played by Brazzi) and Santa ends up being evicted
Originally intended as a Demons sequel, director Michele Soavi decided to head in more arty directions. Imagine a Demons sequel mounted with the artistic ambitions of producer Dario Argento’s Three Mothers films
One of the key films in the cult of Lucio Fulci, a zombie film driven by a series of gore-drenched set-pieces. On the other hand, there is the complete lack of a plot holding everything together
Italian horror film that comes with many homages to classic horror films, wound together in a Folk Horror plot that satisfyingly delivers the goods
A Paul Schrader director psycho-sexual thriller set in a beautifully brooding Venice as a couple are befriended by menacing husband and wife Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren
Lucio Fulci departs from the splatter genre to make a venture into the Italian sword and sorcery film of the era. As with any Fulci film, this is expectedly plotless and incoherent but with occasional moments of imagination
From the heyday of the giallo film, an extravagantly colourful psycho-thriller involving the killing of models by a killer with a black cat. This works all the tropes of the genre with considerable style
A sequel entirely unrelated to The Curse only worth seeing for a series of entertaining entertainingly ridiculous effects where a man’s arm transforms into a mutant snake
A revival of the popular 1970s Blind Dead series about Knights Templar zombies. In this era of zombie films homages and remakes, it is a surprise nobody has thought to do so before
A comic-book adaptation about vampire wars in a modern East European war zone. A slick Underworld-styled vampire action film that has some interesting ideas going on inside it
Mario Bava directs a sublimely stylish and tongue-in-cheek adaptation of an Italian comic-book about a masked super-thief who delights in outwitting and taunting the bumbling authorities
An extraordinary find, the first ever feature film, a depiction of Dante’s Inferno and a descent down to visit the damned in Hell conducted with an incredible ambition for the time the film was made
A documentary that interviews Dario Argento, now in his early eighties, along with his family and those around him, where he discusses his life, films and career
By its very title, this is a mummy film that is trying to exploit Dawn of the Dead. Once the mummies are revived this is to all intents and purposes another in the fad for extremely gory Italian zombie films
Another of the giallo psycho-thrillers from Dario Argento in his heyday as David Hemmings is witness to a murder and tries to find the killer. As with Argento’s films of this period, focused around a series of stylish and sadistic dispatches
The first of the Italian cannibal films, which became the most extreme niche in the horror genre. This acts more as a cod-anthropological study about the natives but does come with its fair share of stomach-churning scenes
The great Mario Bava was the man who essentially created the giallo film. Here his son Lamberto makes an entry, which rehashes much of Mario’s seminal Blood and Black Lace, albeit more crudely
Cult Italian film with Rupert Everett as a cemetery keeper facing the resurrected dead. This has an hilariously off-the-wall mix of black, deadpan humour and artiness, plus Everett at his laconic best
Italian horror directed by Lamberto Bava and produced by Dario Argento, an Evil Dead-inspired work about the possessed dead taking over a cinema, all conducted with a ferocious enthusiasm
Cult Italian director Lucio Fulci makes an erotic thriller but fails to leave his horror background behind with deranged results quite unlike any other erotic film
One of the numerous European erotic vampire films made during the early 70s. This came out not long after The Exorcist and so the vampire countess is accompanied by a coven of Devil worshippers
A remake of the great and underrated film and Italian comic-book about a masked super-thief who constantly outwits the authorities, this comes with style and wit to spare and strikes the note perfectly
The third of the new series of films based on the cult Italian comic-book about a masked super-thief. This entry goes back to offer us a Diabolik origin story
The 2021 Diabolik was a witty and stylish revival of the cult Italian comic-book about a masked super-thief. This was the first of the sequels, albeit with a different actor playing the title role
One of the early films from Lucio Fulci – the film that he always insisted was his best – concerning a series of child killings in a small town. Quite different to the sort of film Fulci became known for
Italian-made sequel to the campy Vincent Price starring Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. Directed by the usually great Mario Bava and overrun by the buffoonish clowning of Italian comics Franco and Ciccio
Hard to describe what an utter disappointment Dario Argento’s take on the oft-filmed Bram Stoker work is. Argento seems to have entirely lost the mojo and visual flair that made him a cult name. Thomas Kretschmann makes for the screen’s mellowest Dracula
This conducts the interesting idea of updating Bram Stoker’s book to the present day with Patrick Bergin as Dracula. Ultimately, this suffers from low tv movie horizons
A bizarre cross between the softcore Emmanuelle films and the Italian cannibal film. It seems perverse to be watching beautiful bodies one minute and next showing their insides being spilled
Early variation on the giallo film with a frogman abducting people from the canals of Venice and then preserving their bodies as statues
Joe D’Amato directs one of the numerous 80s Italian Mad Max 2 copies. One of the very first films to depict televised human bloodsports later popularised by the likes of The Running Man and The Hunger Games
Excellent film based on the true life Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo who preyed upon children. Malcolm McDowell giving a standout performance in the title role
An Italian exploitation film that blatantly copies the plot of Mad Max 2. It offers the benefit of some vigorous action scenes and English-language dubbing that is out of this world
A giallo film from Umberto Lenzi, best known for creating the Italian cannibal film but Lenzi’s direction is crude and lacking style in comparison to the others working in this genre
The first film from Spanish director Amando de Ossorio, later known for the Blind Dead series. A Euro vampire film starring Anita Ekberg, this proves dreary on all counts
Federico Fellini conducts his version of the life of the great lover but turns it into a fantastical film of gorgeously surreal excess, filled with extravagant sets and costuming
This Italian exploitation film was one of the first attempts to try modernising the Frankenstein film. Thus Frankenstein is a doctor stealing corpses from the morgue at a modern hospital
Supposedly a modernised version of Frankenstein, although what a story about a woman in a coma who uses psychic powers to resurrect a slow-witted handyman to exact revenge has to do with Mary Shelley’s classic is anybody’s guess
A trashy European exploitation version of the Frankenstein story that involves Frankenstein reviving a cavemen, a perverted dwarf and plentiful nude bodies
A documentary about the life of cult Italian horror director Lucio Fulci that is a mix of talking heads interviews and scenes where an actor reenacts aspects of Fulci’s life
One of the notorious 1970s Nazisploitation films, this Italian-made entry is one work that crosses way over taboo lines and makes for extreme watching
From the notorious 1980s heyday of Italian horror, this reads as The Amityville Horror remade as a Lucio Fulci film with the addition of a series of gore-drenched dispatches
A lightweight Italian comedy of errors where Sophia Loren and husband move into a mansion being offered cheaply only to find it is haunted by the ghosts of the previous owners
Dario Argento makes a disappointing return to the giallo thriller where he made his name. With Argento’s characteristic murder set-pieces having been toned down, the results are nothing special
A belated Italian-made attempt to jump aboard the bandwagon and copy Jaws with a giant alligator hunting people on an island
Italian-made entry in the early 80s fantasy fad, a sometimes well made, sometimes sprawling Mediaeval saga about love between opposing sides of the conflict
This was one of the entries from the 1980s heyday of the Italian zombie film where people were copying Dawn of the Dead but pushing everything to a gore-drenched extreme
The hugely successful film that started the Italian peplum cycle featuring muscle-builder heroes in togas. This is rather stolid and strips much of the fantasy out of the Greek legends, nevertheless has its own pulp spectacle
One of the numerous Italian peplum films of the 1960s featuring assorted body builders as Hercules. This pits Hercules against invaders from the Moon
Known under a host of different titles, this is one of the better Italian Hercules films of the 1960s. The great Mario Bava adds vivid atmosphere. With Christopher Lee as the villain
Sequel to the Steve Reeves-starring Hercules where Hercules is wooed by an evil queen after drinking the Waters of Forgetfulness. Spectacular but stolid
An Italian exploitation copy of The Omen industrialist Kirk Douglas fighting the coming of the Anti-Christ. Here bizarrely enough The Beast manifests as a nuclear power plant