Retro Slashers

You are browsing the archives of 2011 February.

“Tenebrae is a sexist novel. Why do you despise women so much?” Perhaps the most self-reflective moment from Dario Argento’s entire career. Having constantly been accused of misogyny due to the excessive violence his films have often levelled at their female victims, Tenebrae was a chance for the Italian filmmaker to finally comment on the [...]

You could be forgiven for spending the first hour of Eric Weston’s horror drama Evilspeak wondering why on Earth it would have been included amongst the ‘video nasties’ during the mid-1980s. After all, it was relatively blood-free, inoffensive and the two brief moments of nudity were far less graphic than scenes that were included uncut [...]

Michael Myers had an axe, Leatherface had a chainsaw and Jason Voorhees had whatever was lying around – yet one of the most grizzly murder weapons used in the vintage days of exploitation was the flamethrower, the weapon of choice for Donny Kohler, the disturbed antagonist from Don’t Go in the House. Released amid the [...]

William Lustig’s Maniac has been getting a lot of renewed appreciation lately, centered on the seminal 1980 NY slasher’s new theatrical run – if the recent Stephen Romano poster wasn’t cool enough (it was!), here’s another by Ken Taylor for Mondo Tees in support of the Alamo Drafthouse’s recent showing. Not only that, but it [...]

The success of Blanche Knott’s Truly Tasteless Jokes spawned numerous rip-offs in the early 80s.  Julius Alvin cashed in on the raunchy joke book craze with the Gross Jokes series.   Gross Gifts, the entry from 1983, skips the usual dead baby material and focuses on “everything from gross cosmetics to gross movies to gross vacations.”  The “gross [...]