However Martin is living a lie and that lie is about to catch up with him. Having lost his job some time ago he has been desperately trying to keep up the same lifestyle slowly getting himself deeper and deeper into debt and now that debt must be paid.

When one night the threatening and uncompromising Pecco turns up at Martin’s door demanding money, it seems his lies will be revealed as he has nothing to offer as payment. But Pecco has an offer for Martin, an offer he can’t refuse. And so begins a night of discovery and destruction as Martin does all he can to stop his glass house coming crashing down round him.

Comparable to Falling Down or Fight Club, The Glass Man follows one man on a journey to the edge and beyond dealing along the way with ideas of masculinity and gender stereotypes all brought about by the pressures and strains of modern living.

Written and directed by actor Cristian Solimeno, who also takes a role as Martin’s friend who is now a famous actor, the film blends genre’s part psychological horror part gangster thriller part domestic drama and part jet black comedy all parts working well together to form a fantastic film.

The Glass Man himself is played brilliantly by Andy Nyman, better known for writing, directing and staring in the smash hit horror show Ghost Stories. He has played bit parts in movies such as Severance and Black Death but here Nyman proves his worth ten times over as a leading man.

An emotionally demanding and draining role, Nyman plays Martin perfectly moving from a weasley wimp to an unhinged everyman never letting him slip into a pitiful parody.

As the title suggests The Glass Man is not only a crack away from shattering but also a see through loser, unrecognised by the world and un-helped by those around him and Nyman captures this completely and convincingly.

James Cosmo is also very good as Pecco, the man propelling Martin into another dark foreboding world against his will. And Scream queen Neve Campbell adopts a convincing English accent as Martin’s wife the love of his life who he will do anything to keep and protect.

At times hilarious, at times heartbreaking The Glass Man remains riveting all the way through. Taught with tension from start to finish and moving more towards horror the further along the film gets, you will be captivated ’til the credits role.

The Glass Man is a great film with an amazing central performance, which speaks straight to the souls of all of us – trying our hardest not to crack under the strain of the times we live in.

Movie Rating: ★★★½☆ 

Trailer:

During the video nasties scandal (so brilliantly discussed in Jake West’s documentary) many great films where banned and unseen by the public purely because of moral panic. Ironically one of the major effects of the banning of these films was to amp up the audience interest.

Movies on the banned list became like rare collectors items and people desperately deliberately sought them out to see what all the fuss was about, uncaring about the quality of the film both in its content or the grainy copied VHS format most of them saw it in.

The effect this had at the time was to elevate certain completely undeserving films to a supreme sick status as must see movies a trend still taking place today and a major reason why censorship in many cases benefits a movie rather than hindering it (stand up Human Centipede 2, if you can you multi legged freak you!)

The House on the Edge of the Park is such a film; a pointless, plotless, gratuitous mess of a movie who’s biggest failing is that it’s ultimately not any good.

David Hess plays Alex a psychopath who we see raping and murdering an innocent girl in the opening titles of the movie just so we know the tone of the movie from the outset. When Alex and his best friend an inane simpleton named Ricky (Giovanni Lombardo Radice from City of the Living Dead) are invited to a swanky party by a couple way above their social standing they jump at the chance and head off with on what will be a night none of them will ever forget.

Once at the party, taking place at the titular plush and secluded house on the edge of the park, Alex realizes that his hosts only invited the pair to mock and ridicule them. Whipping out his switchblade knife he takes over turning the festivities into fear as he forces his prisoners to act out his every perverted whim and desire from sex games to vicious torture.

Initially rejected by the BBFC in 1981 The House on the Edge of the Park was put onto the fabled video nasties list when it transpired that uncut versions where easily available in the UK this prompting every teenage terror and hardcore horror fan to seek it out and see what all the fuss was about.

Let’s be honest here though The House on the Edge of the Park is a crappy exploitation movie that lucked out by gaining notoriety through being banned and what makes it even worse is it is directed by Ruggero Deodato the man behind one of the greatest, most gruesome, intellectually and morally challenging banned movers of all time Cannibal Holocaust except on every level where Cannibal Holocaust succeeded The House on the Edge of the Park fails.

Like Cannibal Holocaust and much later movies such as Funny Games and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer it seems Deodato wants to challenge the audience and there expectations testing the limits of the viewers repulsion at the scenes they are forced to see.

By filling the film with hateful characters Deodato obviously wants Alex to become the hero, twisting the watcher’s will by forcing them to root for this psychopath in the same way Stanley Kubrick, a decade earlier in A Clockwork Orange, transformed his central character (also named Alex) from a villain to a victim and back again.

Sadly Deodato and the film fail to do any of this as The House on the Edge of the Park has no depth whatsoever leaving the audience watching a series of rapes, chases, fights and torture which seem to be on a never ending loop until the film abruptly ends with one of the most unbelievable and ridiculous twist conclusions ever running any reality the movie hoped to have created.

Hess (better known for Last House on the Left and Smash Cut) dressed like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, can’t seem to decide whether to play Alex for real or for laughs and crafts a character devoid of any likability.

The other cast are just as bad with Radice’s portrayal of someone with mental health issues bordering on the offensive and the rest of the high class clichés might as well be made of cardboard.

Added to the awful action, boring and unbelievable situations and nonexistent character development is the fact that the transfer itself is pretty shoddy with unsynched sound and a low quality image making the viewing experience feel even more dirty and unpleasant or more like the original banned VHS whichever way you want to look at it.

A pointless film and a giant disappointment from Deodato it’s only merit is perhaps as a forefather to torture porn The House on the Edge of the Park is only worth watching if you are pursuing a Pokemon like quest to watch all the films from the banned list (and if you are then I salute you!)

For anyone else who sees this movie by accident they may wish it had stayed banned altogether.

Movie Rating: ½☆☆☆☆ 

Trailer:

The madman’s menacing onslaught on the metropolis sends the city spiralling into chaos, with citizens in fear of anyone wearing a badge. It is left to wizened and world weary Detective Frank McCrae (Tom Atkins from My Bloody Valentine (2009), The Fog (1980) and Escape from New York) to hunt the murderer down and clear the name of a young cop named Jack Forrest (played by the all mighty Bruce Campbell), who has found himself somehow accused of the killings.

As McCrae, Forrest and his girlfriend a fellow cop attempt to work out what drives this Maniac Cop to murder the story that unravels sends them on a journey into the past and the realms of the supernatural desperate to stop the killer cop before he claims any more victims.

So that’s the first expectation covered I hear you cry, but what of the second?

Well although there is no denying that Maniac Cop is both gory and entertaining, it is also surprisingly a lot less ridiculous than one might imagine. It takes in some interesting issues and some fine serious performances along its well plotted course, to a conclusion which delivers all the madness and mayhem you would expect.

Directed by William Lustig, Maniac Cop is also written by Larry Cohen, the man behind the original It’s Alive, the torture-porn-tastic Captivity and the surprisingly intellectual phone-related action movies Cellular and Phone Booth. Lustig and Cohen both do a great job crafting a coherent and gripping script and story out of such a contrived and preposterous concept.

The actors achieve the same, especially Campbell who made this after Evil Dead II and looks almost unrecognisable as the clean cut very serious victim who turns the tables on the maniac cop after being framed for the crimes he didn’t commit.

Atkins is as excellent as ever, and the rest of the supporting players which includes the excellent Richard Roundtree do a fine job. There are even some celebrity cameos to look out for from Sam Raimi and the Raging Bull himself Jake LaMotta.

Well directed with some excellent shots, Lustig and Cohen cleverly keep us in the dark not only about the identity of the Maniac Cop (or whether he is in fact human at all or something more sinisterly supernatural) but literally in the dark by refusing to show the killer fully until late on in the film.

With a slow build from the start, it takes a while for the film to settle into its stride. However this means we have time to fully appreciate both the characters and the climate of fear created by the blood letting going on in the streets of NY.

This mass hysteria which we see and which is expanded upon via a news report of concerned citizens and most shockingly a cop killing by a seemingly normal woman in her car, is an interesting and very realistic added element to what would have been a cheesy horror. And the ideas of law and order breaking down through fear and mistrust of authority figures raises a variety of comparisons with real life events throughout our social history, such as the Rodney King beating or the death of Charles de Mendez.

Luckily for the audience Maniac Cop’s social comment doesn’t infringed on the fundamental fun that is found in the graphic and great deaths. The excellent story and the fact that the film is packed with action to keep you entertained right up until the somewhat silly ending.

With two sequels after it, Manic Cop became a franchise – albeit a short lived one. It is easy to see why with the first film creating an iconic killer and a classic horror hook. However underneath the cheesy title and outlandish idea is a great storyline with some intellectually stimulating themes which well deserves not only your attention but the excellent reissue packed with extras that Arrow have given it.

Movie Rating: ★★★½☆ 

Trailer:

Writer Director John McNaughton would have to work extremely hard to convince me that I am, not merely witnessing a sensationalised reconstruction of the events, but that I can identify with it and vicariously live the ordeal as I did with Zodiac. Already possessing a media-tinged familiarity of Henry’s crimes and the timeline in which they transpired, I had every digit and limb crossed hoping for the best but unsure what to expect.

The premise is simple: It is the fact-inspired retelling of the life of infamous drifter Henry Lee Lucas (Michael Rooker), his partner in crime, Ottis Toole and Ottis’s little sister, Becky. It sets about making its intentions clear early on. We witness a flurry of murders but not distastefully enacted.

Are you talking to me?

This is not a horror film with some masked maniac and McNaughton knows that. His method of displaying the imagery of the carnage coupled with the imposition of audio from the victim’s struggle insinuates ferocity and garishness whilst allowing you to fill in the middle parts. It’s something right out of the John Carpenter handbook of subtlety – we don’t have to actually see the acts of violence in order to visualise it. It’s all about utilising several techniques to garner the desired effect – imagery, sound and implication. It was a great instance of the director working hard to make the cinematic techniques perform for the story rather than the other way around.

We were off to a great start when things were done as cunningly as that. My hopes blossomed that this was a film fascinated by narrative substance. Alas, this short-lived high was juxtaposed by the short sharp shock of reality as Henry and Ottis drop a TV set onto the head of a fence. Suddenly, it was as if Sean Cunningham was pulling the production strings. I’ve checked the records shallowly; at no point do they mention that Henry embarks on a cartoonish killing spree, so I never expected to see it.

Soon, there are electrical shocks and sharp instruments through eyes. The blood literally starts flying everywhere. The film ultimately made the unnervingly early decision to surrender its accuracy in favour of splatter entertainment values and because of this it never becomes the film it could have been.

Who in their right mind would attempt to better David Fincher’s Zodiac? Conversely, I can see a number of production teams attempting to resuscitate the Lucas story till it is done appropriately – and they have. Contrary to opinion, the educated audience don’t want to watch a true-life tragedy that is graphic more than it is biographic.

Consequently, the random acts of violence consume the screen time and the film invests little revelation into the psychology of these characters. The furthest it ventures into their psychoses is a short scene in which Henry explains to Ottis the particulars of optimising operations so to speak. They discuss methods of becoming more efficient murderers and Henry seems artistically invested into what he has learned. That’s genuine insight that develops our understanding of him as a person and not merely a programmed killing machine.

Other than that, there is nothing…unless you count the blood-tainted still frame of Henry staring passively through himself in a mirror that you only get on the menu of the DVD. In essence, there is just not enough story; instead it’s a chronicle of kills that may or may not have happened in the way that they were shown.

Read up just a little on Lucas and you find out just how many deviances have been made to the actuality of the thing. It’s about as far away from the truth as you can get whilst still maintaining biopic status. Even worse is the fact that, substituting this for what McNaughton believed was more entertaining, backfired.

Movie Rating: ★★½☆☆ 

Trailer:

As politically incorrect as the above paragraphs are, Alex Chandon’s Brit, hick-filled horror goes far further, using every stereotype in the bigoted book and taking Inbred into the realms of gross-out gore and comedy horror while still remaining entertaining and slightly disturbing.

The film revolves around a fractured group of young offenders, who have been taken by their mentors Kate and Jeff (played with aplomb by Jo Hartley and James Doherty) to the remote Yorkshire village of Mortlake for some team building – a fate the kids fear is worse than death.

They soon find out how wrong they are, as a minor incident with some local’s escalates into a full on, demented, rural roller coaster ride of rage and blood soaked strangeness.

Writer and director Alex Chandon whose previous work includes the brilliantly named Pervirella is no stranger to sick horror. And Inbred is a gross out journey into the warped ways of country folk played for humour as much as horror all the way through.

Un-PC and full of gruesome and unusual torture, this bad taste British horror surprisingly also has depth and some great performances by the English cast. Not only from the unlikely heroes Hartley and Doherty but from the urban youths who manage to keep their characters on the right side of cliché while still being strangely likable in the same way Attack the Block did.

The inbred’s themselves are also excellent especially Seamus O’Neill as the local landlord Jim who takes the lead both in the community and in the persecution of the outsiders. The rest of the barmy blood thirsty bumpkins are bucked toothed, ferret keeping weirdo’s all strange and scary and exactly as you would expect them to be.

With some excellent low budget but high impact effects a solid story and script which is well acted Inbred is a welcome and original English twist on a sub genre of horror over populated by terrible American Hicksploitation films like The Hills Have Eyes, Wrong Turn and Red Canyon.

Receiving its world premiere at this year’s FrightFest where the audience absolutely loved it Inbred is very British with tons of gore some great laughs but enough true frights and nasty moments to make it well worth a watch even for those unfamiliar with the English eccentricities it excellently and excruciatingly parodies.

Movie Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

Trailer: