Viewings: July 2025

The International Olympic Committee got the wrong anthem, but I found the right Kazakh film. Steppenwolf is a violent, post-western which kept me completely engaged during the recent heatwave that melted my computer. Ought to appease both genre film enthusiasts and cinephiles alike.

Nicolas Cage hitting rock bottom in the Australian psychological thriller The Surfer was another favourite of mine this month. Cage's best film since Mandy (2018), in my opinion.

 

Film:

It Came from Beneath the Sea (Robert Gordon, 1955)

The Man Called Noon (Peter Collinson, 1973)*

Eyeball (Umberto Lenzi, 1975)

Zombie Flesh Eaters AKA Zombie (Lucio Fulci, 1979)

Lost Souls (Tun-Fei Mou, 1980)*

Stagefright (Michele Soavi, 1987) 

Red to Kill (Billy Tang, 1994)*

Dangerous Animals (Sean Byrne, 2025)*

Steppenwolf (Adilkhan Yerzhanov, 2024 / 2025)* 

The Surfer (Lorcan Finnegan, 2024 / 2025)* 

 

Television:

Mastermind - Episodes 1-3 (Bill Wright, 2025 / 2026)* 

 

*First time viewings.

 

Dada Debaser Notes:

• This is a remix! To what? It's a remix! To what? It's a remix! Had no idea until watching a feature on the recent 4K UHD of Zombie Flesh Eaters that its theme was a remix. The original being featured on a colourised and edited version of Godzilla (1954), released in 1977.
• Stagefright is one of the best slashers of the 1980s and it should be a punishable offence everytime it's mislabelled as a giallo, just because it’s from Italy.
• Ray Harryhausen's stop motion magic completely carries It Came from Beneath the Sea.
• Lost Souls is a shocking exploitation film about Chinese illegal immigrants held captive by a criminal Hong Kong gang. Utterly sadistic and lives up to its notorious reputation. A dress rehearsal for the director's infamous Men Behind the Sun (1988); the film responsible for the introduction of the Cat. III rating.
• Speaking of Cat. III, a jacked up, killer rapist is triggered into unspeakable acts every time he sees a woman wearing anything red, while a bunch of actors, who must have graduated from the Jack Douglas School of Acting, pretend to be mentally disabled and pulling faces in Billy Tang's thriller Red to Kill.
• Jai Courtney plays an Aussie serial killer obsessed with sharks in Dangerous Animals. The result is Mick Taylor meets Steve Irwin and one very entertaining bad guy; everything else about the film, however, is not. A shark repellent heroine, a tedious romance and multiple eye-rolling plot conveniences to fill the running time, hamper a potentially great horror film.
• Eyeball is a giallo revolving around tourists being bumped off in Barcelona. The victims are robbed of an eye. Why the tour is still allowed to continue as the body count rises is beyond me, but it makes for one of Lenzi's most entertaining gialli, regardless. Love the ghost train scene.
• Richard Crenna is an amnesiac gunslinger out for revenge and the gold in the European western The Man Called Noon. Was intrigued by this as it's helmed by the same director responsible for the kitchen sink drama Up the Junction (1968), the classic crime caper The Italian Job (1969) and the underrated Hammer film Straight on Till Morning (1972). Decent western, overall; Patty Shepard steals the show as the villainess in black: