Let’s face it: there are some films you watch primarily if not entirely just so you can say “I saw that film with… that title”. This is surely one of those films, I will confess the title was certainly what drew me at first… director Atsushi Yamatoya had been a screenwriter at Nikkatsu before he went independent, and one of his efforts had been Seijun Suzuki’s infamous Branded to Kill just a few months earlier; this fact made sense while watching ISDW (let’s just abbreviate it), cos on some level you can kind of see this one as being like that except more fucked. It’s considered an early pink film, a genre with no real Western equivalent but this particular example could probably be compared to the “roughies” being made in the US at the same time, but sex isn’t really what drives this film (unlike what I’ve always assumed about the pink genre, with which I’m only really theoretically familiar)… plot revolves around a hitman, Sho, who’s been hired by a real estate developer, Naka, to take out a yakuza gang who have kidnapped his mistress; the leader of said gang also killed Sho’s girlfriend years earlier. Beyond that broad outline… I’m not 100% sure, to be honest; Yamatoya is frankly uninterested is making things easy for the viewer, and I often found myself confused by the timeline being presented. The longer it goes on, the harder it gets to tell what’s happening now, what’s a flashback, and what might just be imaginary (it’s clearer by the end, but the last half hour or so is kind of hard going). ISDW is nothing if not wilfully difficult, but it’s also fascinating and compelling enough to keep watching, and I think it’ll reward rewatches in future.
Before he was the king of gimmick horror, William Castle was doing this sort of thing, quickly turned-out mysteries (quite a few Westerns too) made on what I’m guessing were middling budgets… like this film, I’m guessing they were probably generally of no great distinction, but I had a decent time with this nonetheless. Hollywood Story is inspired by a real Hollywood story, the 1922 murder of director 
Given that I’ve watched pretty much all the main Universal Monsters films before now, it seemed like the time was finally upon me to finish them off (I know the Gill-man was still to come, but because he only came about a few years later I don’t really consider him and his adventures part of the main series)… much like Universal itself had finally decided to, after a few years of “monster rally” films, they decided to pair Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr. and Glenn Strange with the ultimate monsters, i.e. their flagging comedy duo Abbott and Costello… By this point, the studio was now Universal-International and the new management was trying to build the studio’s prestige again by killing off their B-films and serials and horror, but they were also near bankruptcy, so despite all that William Goetz agreed to the combination of horror and comedy in case it worked… which, indeed, it did, being quite a hit and reviving A&C’s failing fortunes. I’m not sure how well it worked for me, though… I’m less sniffy about it than Wm. Everson seems to have been, but equally I wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as a lot of critics are; per the film’s 
I have kept up the Century of Cinema challenge (this film will indeed be number 45), though most of the films I’ve been watching for it are rewatches I previously covered on my old film blog that I didn’t think needed new reviews (I think I’ve only done 32 new ones, though I will get back onto some previously unseen stuff soon). Also, most of these have been films I liked before and still do (hi Mad Foxes, you magnificent piece of hyper-Eurotrash); Angst, on the other hand, I hated on first viewing in 2012. I have, mind you, learned a couple of things about it since then: one, the astounding cinematography is by 
There’s always a potential issue with films (or stories in general, really) that rely on a significant revelation or plot twist, etc, which is, obviously, can you still watch the film when you know what said twist is. Psycho, for example. What must it have been like for its early readers/viewers who didn’t know about “Mother”? How does that foreknowledge change your viewing, your experience of the film? How does knowing the answer to a mystery affect a film? Cos obviously there must be cases where it doesn’t, otherwise no film would be rewatchable, a good film has to be good even when you know how it all ends… but it can’t work all the time, I suppose, and alas, I think tonight’s viewing was one of the latter cases.
To be honest I’m not au fait enough with Hong Kong cinema to really understand what the HK new wave was about, other than that it mainly heralded a new crop of rising filmmakers rather than a big stylistic shift. I do know, however, that Patrick Tam’s The Sword is widely considered one of the chief examples of it, and that I’ve wanted to rewatch it for a very long time… I remember seeing it on SBS in the late ’90s when I was discovering HK cinema for the first time, but that’s pretty much all I remembered about it other than the shot of the villain flying at the camera during the last fight, so I’ve had quite some desire to see it again. I never taped it (that I remember) at the time for some reason even though I did that with almost all the other HK films I saw on SBS back then, and in any case I haven’t had a functioning VCR for 15 years, so Eureka’s recent blu-ray edition was welcome.
Well that was something, wasn’t it? I’ve been accruing a fair bit of Hong Kong cinema in recent months, a lot of it Shaw Brothers stuff, and in today’s mail was the new Shaw-Shock box from Imprint… my only prior engagement with Shaws horror was the similarly special Black Magic, also from director Ho Meng Hua, but I shall soon have a few more under my belt. Despite apparently being set in the mid-60s, Oily Maniac just screams mid-70s in much the same way that film does; our hero is a disabled young man (Danny Lee, later of The Killer among lots more) working for a somewhat dodgy law firm who takes his own action against criminals by using a magic spell that turns him into a thing made of oil. This is pretty unrepentant trash (as the title may indicate) on multiple levels, especially the effects, with the titular maniac manifesting as a ridiculous-looking liquid slick; I kept wondering how the film fared with censors at the time, too, cos I also discovered tonight Hong Kong cinema had no ratings cinema until 1988… were kids able to see this monstrosity with all that sex and violence? I imagine this would be Category III these days without much trouble…
Ah, few things were better than those old Italian film posters for films like this; fairly sure that some of the posters were better than the films they were promoting… though I hesitate to say that about this film, which I do think is well made, and the recent blu-ray restoration shows it off to good effect. Director Riccardo Freda had basically invented Italian gothic cinema in the late 50s with I vampiri; by this time, the genre was well established but, as Tim Lucas’ commentary notes, Italian audiences only really went to see Italian films that pretended they weren’t homegrown… hence why almost everyone here is given an Anglo pseudonym of varying degrees of ludicrousness (“Frank Smokecocks“? And I thought “Anthony Daisies” was an unfortunate attempt to translate a name literally…). Also, scriptwriter Ernesto Gastaldi was give the instruction to come up with something in the vein of Roger Corman’s Poe films, and I daresay he gave the producers that… with an additional twist, that being the titular doctor’s necrophilia kink. AIP wouldn’t go that far, hence why they refused to distribute it, and also why star Robert Flemyng tried to get out of it; the first script he read didn’t have the necrophilia angle, and it was too late to back out once he got the later version that did have it… Anyway, while Flemyng’s lack of enthusiasm doesn’t exactly help things, Hichcock is nonetheless worth watching for its visuals if nothing else; the narrative is maybe a bit thin and prone to moments of making no sense that Lucio Fulci might’ve considered bold, but the visual telling of events is often extraordinary. I offer some examples that you can click to enlarge:
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