Cult Clip: Frightmare (1974) trailer

Ok, we've done the review, here's the trailer of Pete Walker's Frightmare.

Enjoy!

DVD Review: Frightmare (1974)

We have raved about Pete Walker and indeed Frightmare before (via a big screen showing), so excuse is if we repeat ourselves with the review of this newly-reissued DVD.

As you'll no doubt be aware, Pete Walker is a British exploitation director whose work has really started to be given the appreciation it deserves in recent years and if we're looking for his most famous/infamous movie, Frightmare is it. It's a British film about cannibalism. But a very British kind of cannibalism.

Reviewed: Peter Walker presents Frightmare and House of the Long Shadows at the NFT

The double bill of Frightmare and House of the Long Shadows would have been enough, but the appearance of the UK’s best exploitation film director for a Q & A session ensured my presence at the South Bank for a very special evening. Yes, those top fellas at the Flip Side had come up with another winner and I braved Eurostar-lag to attend.

To anyone who isn’t familiar with the work of this Brighton-born auteur, Peter Walker’s film career was remarkably similar to that of his contemporary, Michael Winner. Both started out making ‘nudie-cutie’ films (i.e. not exactly ‘stag’, but enough to ensure an ‘adults only’ rating) in the early 60s, both made ripped-from-the-headlines-thrillers, crime capers, anything that sold a seat to the young thrill-seekers who spent more time than was considered healthy at their local flea-pit cinemas. However, whereas Winner got lucky with the hugely successful ‘Death Wish’ in the 70s, Walker got out of the industry when the going was good, and has, to date, not played an old buffoon in any insurance commercials. Along the way, he turned out some of the most starkly malicious, disturbing and terrifying crime thrillers ever made in the UK, and the first up of these, was ‘Frightmare’.

DVD Review: Society (1989)

It is appropriate that Brian Yuzna’s barmy, marvellous debut feature took three years after completion to be released in the US, while enjoying critical and popular success in Europe and elsewhere. Into the decade that mythologised hidebound family values, plugged its ears to social injustice and made heroes out of beancounters, the plunging of this splendidly over-the-top nightmarish satire of America’s social elite must have felt like the herald of the Apocalypse. Albeit a deeply silly, psychedelic Apocalypse. With rivers of prosthetic latex instead of blood.

To all outward appearances, Bill Whitney (Baywatch’s Billy Warlock) is living the (American) dream. Son of Beverley Hills WASP socialites, he drives a Jeep, dates a cheerleader, is a star basketball player and frontrunner for Class President. But all is not as it seems. Bill has paranoid fantasies that he is adopted, that his surrogate parents and platinum-blonde sister secretly hate him.

Free Online Viewing!

The American Movie Classic television network is currently offering free online screenings of two great American thrillers from the sixties as part of their annual Halloween Monster Fest. You can watch Francis Ford Coppola's Dementia 13 (1963) and Jack Hill's Spider Baby (1968) on their site just by visiting the links posted below:

Watch: Dementia 13 (1963)

Watch: Spider Baby (1968)

- Kimberly Lindbergs