QUEEN KONG (1976) movie review

Queen Kong (1976) d. Frank Agrama (UK)

With all the ballyhoo leading up to the release of Dino De Laurentiis’ King Kong in late 1976, it was no surprise that other studios decided to ride the wave of free publicity, with numerous low-budget giant primate movies hitting screens beforehand, including Hong Kong’s Mighty Peking Man, South Korea’s A*P*E, and this bizarre mishmash of British sex comedy, parody, and monster flick. (News of the innocuous UK trifle raised the ire of Laurentiis, who sought to stop the film’s release by claiming it infringed upon his intellectual property. Money talks, the injunction was granted, and Queen Kong went largely unseen for many years until Fred Olen Ray’s Retromedia released it to DVD in 2003.)

THE HOUSE ON STRAW HILL (1976) Blu-ray Review

The House on Straw Hill (aka Exposé aka Trauma) (1976) d. James Kenelm Clarke (UK)

A curiously dubbed Udo Kier plays a high-strung novelist working out the sophomore jitters in his country hideaway (when he’s not donning rubber gloves to do the horizontal mambo with bouncy playmate Fiona Richmond, that is), with Linda Hayden as the typist hired to take dictation. One of the infamous “video nasties” banned in Britain in the ’80s, writer/director James Kenelm Clarke presents a hallucinatory and twisted portrait of sex and violence, and while his presentation has a decided confidence of conviction, his narrative is absolute loopy claptrap...which is not necessarily a bad thing.

MADHOUSE (1974) movie review

Madhouse (1974) d. Clark, Jim (UK)

Vincent Price takes center stage as a hammy horror star sidelined when someone lops off his fiancée’s head at a fancy dinner party (rude, that), resulting in a decade-long rest in the booby hatch. When sleazy producer Robert Quarry decides to resurrect Price’s “Dr. Death” character in a new series of films, the aging icon returns…only to encounter his cast and crew being mysteriously murdered one by one – with himself the prime suspect.