Hearts and Armour (1983)

"Bradamante, a woman wearing an invincible suit of armour, is travelling the countryside at the time of the Crusades. After ending up in the middle of a web of romantic and cultural tangles, she finds herself in love with a Moor prince, while one of the Christian knights has fallen in love with a Moor princess. Others, however, are against the cross-cultural romance, and Bradamante's love is soon forced into a duel to the death. Will she ever be with her true love?"

Do you remember "Hearts and Armour" from the '80s? No? Nor do I much except that it was the second VHS tape that I ever bought after "Flesh + Blood" (1985). I'd never heard of it before, but the original VHS artwork looked similar so that was enough for me. I practically threw my pocket money at the guy in Blockbuster and ran home thinking that I'd found treasure.

Of course, once I put in in my VCR, I was very disappointed. Although "Hearts and Armour" promised lots of former "Charlie's Angels" star Tanya Roberts (who shows more than she ought to if you watch carefully), I wasn't so keen on Barbara De Rossi, the terrible dubbing, or the really jarring editing. Allegedly, "Hearts and Armour" was cut down from an Italian miniseries, but I've found no real evidence of that. Basically, it was a cheap piece of trash designed to cash in on "Excalibur" (1981).

Nearly thirty years on, I can't say that I've grown to love "Hearts and Armour". It's still horrible, Bradamante (Barbara De Rossi) looks very uncomfortable in her suit of armour, and the fight scenes are ridiculous. There are some nice gory bits with dismembered limbs flying about in the battles, but this isn't really my kind of thing at all. As much as I can appreciate the work that went into making the costumes as historically (in)accurate as possible, I couldn't care less about the Crusades.

Barbara De Rossi also played Helietta Canins in "Vampire in Venice" (1988) which is the sequel to the terrible remake of "Nosferatu" starring Klaus Kinski. That's much more my cup of tea although I can't honestly say that she's any better in it than in this. Let's face it, she was cast in these movies because of how she looks rather than for any other reason. Strangely, I don't have any problem with that at all. Barbara De Rossi was quite the hottie back in the day.

Because I don't pay attention to crap, I can't tell you who played any of the knights in "Hearts and Armour" except by grabbing their names from the IMDb. Ronn Moss plays Ruggero (the pony-tailed object of Bradamante's affections), Rick Edwards is Orlando, and Maurizio Nichetti is the scruffy, little magician called Atalante. As for the others, who cares? It's not like they've ever been in anything else anyway.

The cinematography isn't bad despite attempts to ruin it with the panned-and-scanned VHS transfer (as yet there is no DVD available), but the acting is so dreadful and the pacing so slow that the overall atmosphere is one of boredom rather than excitement. I nodded off several times during the epic ordeal of trying to rewatch "Hearts and Armour" and even had to have a proper sleep before my numbed brain would allow me to complete it.

Unintentional laughs are created by the pompousness of the dialogue and the inclusion of a Samurai warrior for no good reason at all other than he's another kind of sword-fighter. Some of the action scenes do indeed liven things up for a few seconds, but "Hearts and Armour" even makes the "Deathstalker" sequels look good in comparison.

If you've never seen "Hearts and Armour", I'm not going to recommend it to you. Just knowing that something this awful exists should be enough to satisfy your curiosity.

Cemetery Man (1994)

(AKA Dellamorte Dellamore)



"A cemetery man must kill the dead a second time when they become zombies."

Allegedly, there was a time when Rupert Everett was considered one of the hottest British actors. I assume that it was just after "Another Country" (1984) or "Dance with a Stranger" (1985) and not at any point after "Hearts of Fire" (1987) which is when I stopped caring about his acting career. I didn't even know about "Cemetery Man" until the horrible "Dylan Dog: Dead of Night" remake last year and, of course, I still don't own a copy of the Anchor Bay DVD because it's stupidly expensive. At nearly $50 for a new one, Amazon can keep it.

Thanks to YouTube and its multitude of VHS rips, I finally got to see what all the fuss over "Cemetery Man" was about. I would like to say that I was disappointed, but I was actually quite entertained by the whole mess.

Basically, it's an Italian zombie movie, slightly comedic, and either way past its sell by date or too ahead of its time. It's a cult movie for sure, but it's such a particularly odd one that I can't pigeonhole it or even decide if I really liked it or not.

"Cemetery Man" looked a bit cheap, Rupert Everett's performance as Francesco Dellamorte was all over the place, and I was very confused about why Anna Falchi appeared three times in three different roles. I assumed that all these things were due to some artsy-fartsy contrivances which I'm too stupid to understand so I let them go. I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to Italian filmmaking or recognising the parodies and metaphors.

I honestly know nothing about the comic book or graphic novel which "Cemetery Man" is supposed to be based on either. It may even be a real book for all the research that I bothered to put into it. I'm a grown man who stopped reading papery media a very long time ago although I did read the "Vamps" series around the same time as this movie came out. Not that it has anything to do with it really, but I'm in no position to say whether anything on screen matched the original story.

One thing which I liked was the romantic story struggling underneath all the surrealism. Call me soft, but I've always thought that Rupert Everett excelled in the romantic leading man roles in spite of his sexual preferences in real life. Hey, it's acting and that's what he does. All the romantic scenes between Rupert Everett and Anna Falchi worked really well. It was all the other weird stuff which I wasn't too keen on.

François Hadji-Lazaro as Gnaghi provided a lot of disgusting comic relief although there wasn't that much to be taken seriously in the first place. I think he did a very good job and the bizarre ending of the film changed everything which I thought about his character.

Although you would think that it was the bad zombie make-up and gory kills which would stand out the most, it was actually Anna Falchi's breasts which were the most memorable part of the movie for me. She's one of the most beautiful women who I've ever seen, but, since she's nearly the same age as me, I doubt that she's quite so special now and I've got no desire to track down any more of her Italian movies to find out. She was obviously cast as eyecandy as her acting really wasn't that great.

If I was to rate "Cemetery Man" as average, I'm sure that I'd be doing it a disservice in terms of Italian horror movies. It was a lot better than 99% of the ones I've seen. Compared to even its American counterparts from the same year though, it was pretty dreadful and, of course, it wasn't scary in any way either.

I was going to post the full movie from YouTube at the top of this review, but it's easy enough to find for yourself. There's a dubbed English language version and an Italian version with subtitles available which runs slightly longer due to some extended sex scenes. I'm going to recommend that you watch the former because hearing Rupert Everett dubbed into Italian really doesn't work so well.

Black Sunday (1960)

(AKA La maschera del demonio)



"A vengeful witch and her fiendish servant return from the grave and begin a bloody campaign to possess the body of the witch's beautiful look-alike descendant."

I remember when BBC2 first showed "Black Sunday" (or "The Mask of Satan" as it was known in Britain) back in the early '90s. I also remember how it was kind of a big deal for this film to actually be shown uncut on television since it had once been banned.

After the hyped-up introduction suggesting that this was the most terrifying movie ever made, I'm sure that I wasn't the only one who was a little bit disappointed by what really amounted to little more than a black and white Italian version of a Hammer horror.

I would like to say that my opinion of "Black Sunday" has changed over the years and through repeated viewings but, alas, it hasn't. As much as I can appreciate how controversial it must have been in 1960, it just doesn't have enough scares to satisfy me.

Also, as much as I've always wanted to find something attractive about Barbara Steele, I can't. Finding one still image where she looks pretty rather than harsh or intimidating seems to be impossible. The best I could come up with is the one below and, if you look at it long enough, she still looks as if she's crazy.

Of course, it was Barbara Steele's iconic looks which gave her such a successful career in Italian horror movies. She even proved that she could act in most of them although, outside of today's $1 bargain DVDs, none of the movies she starred in were ever as famous (or infamous) as "Black Sunday".

So what made "Black Sunday" so special? I'd guess that it was the level of violence in the opening scene which went way beyond what anyone was used to. Although people knew about all the horrific tortures and brutal deaths of witches in the history books, nobody until Mario Bava actually dared to show one in a theatrical experience that you could almost feel.

Possibly, it was a combination of the gruesome make-up effects and eroticism which also had the more timid audiences of the time complaining right, left and centre until some kind of action had to be taken. Seeing Christopher Lee bloodlessly biting pretty girls on the neck was one thing even in "technicolor" but letting re-animated female corpses do the same thing in monochrome was far too much.

Unfortunately, with the British laws about witchcraft having only been repealed in 1951, the overly moral "powers that were" must have found the rest of the film so Satanic and blasphemous that they banned it from cinemas until 1968. By this time, the make-up effects had become a little bit dated, and Hammer had beaten the vampire genre to death.

"Black Sunday" is a weird movie to place in a horror subgenre though because it's not a straightforward vampire story. To me, it's very much about the revenge of a witch, a family curse, and a lot of contrived coincidences designed to straddle as many other subgenres as possible. It has everything from gothic romance to zombies, and, to give it even more credit, it looks fantastic.

But, as I said at the beginning, where "Black Sunday" fails for a modern audience is that it just isn't scary anymore. In fact, it's so borderline "hammy" (because I loathe the word "cheesy") that it could almost be something that Elvira or the MST3K guys would have a great time tearing apart. I don't actually know if they did ever do a show about "Black Sunday", of course, because I've never had any interest in watching any of them.

For anyone watching the restored, uncut, super-duper, remastered DVD edition of "Black Sunday" alone in the dark with the wind and rain lashing at the windows, it might still have some life left in it. It doesn't work for me so I'm rating it as average.

Miami Horror (1985)

(AKA Miami Golem)

"A Miami TV reporter is sent to a local university to do a story on a professor who is cloning a cell from DNA found inside a meteorite."

Since I'm sure that a lot of you who read my previous post have wondered what "Miami Horror" is all about, here's a quick review.

Basically, it's a low-budget, sci-fi/action film with David Warbeck in it and it isn't a good one either.

As you can hear in the clip which I posted above, the theme music sounds a bit like Jan Hammer's "Miami Vice" and threatens to become even more like Harold Faltermeyer's "Axel F" from "Beverley Hills Cop" at any moment.

Obviously, the box artwork (right) also reflects the same style as "Miami Vice" just to fool stupid people (like me). Yes, I admit that I bought this because I thought it might be some kind of parody/horror version of that classic '80s TV show too. I was misled.

Other than being set in Miami, there was no similarity whatsoever between this and the antics of Crockett and Tubbs. Instead, it was all just a really crappy Italian produced and directed combination of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "E.T." (yes, even crappier than those two which are already utter crap themselves as far as I'm concerned).

The only horror came in the form of a telekinetic, pickled alien foetus in a jar which, of course, isn't scary at all unless you are actually a pickled alien foetus with claustrophobia. Somehow it was controlling people like some shrivelled-up Jedi and growing in power, but what it's ultimate goal was is anyone's guess. The whole story was so confusing and badly written that I really have no idea how to explain it to you.

Between all the terrible acting and dialogue, the rest of the film was nothing but chases, shoot outs, and more terrible acting. There was even a brief bit of nudity from David Warbeck's psychic sidekick, Laura Trotter, who wasn't all that hot to be brutally honest. She wasn't as horrible looking as some people might say but she just wasn't my type and I didn't like her character.

Since someone else has posted the only good part of the entire movie on YouTube, I'll include it below so you can say that you've seen this rubbish.



For some reason which I can't get my head around, a mint condition copy of this crapfest is worth $50 to some collectors. The box on mine isn't in the best condition (there's a bit of the top flap torn off) but the tape inside is perfect (just in case some nutter wants to buy it from me). I bought this for 50c and I deeply regret spending that 50c.

I don't recommend "Miami Horror" to anyone except those hipsters who try to make out that such lameness is cool. In fact, I encourage anyone who believes in their guff to watch this film and then come back to me and argue why they think it's good just so that I can call them a moron.