GHOSTHOUSE *** Italy 1988 Dir: Umberto Lenzi. 89 mins In the dying days of the Italian horror scene, Lenzi made this heavy-handed stew of haunted house clichés in America with U.S. actors and a slew of dialogue references to contemporary icons (Simon LeBon, Kim Basinger, Kelly Le Brock). Set to…
Browsing: Umberto Lenzi
NIGHTMARE BEACH (a.k.a. Welcome To Spring Break) *** Italy 1989 Dir: Umberto Lenzi. 90 mins Michael Parks is typically engaging as a hard-drinking Florida doctor in Lenzi’s Fort Laudedale-shot slasher, referring accurately to Spring Break as “the annual migration of the idiot”. It’s a standard 80’s American dead teenager movie…
ALMOST HUMAN **** Italy 1974 Dir: Umberto Lenzi 99 mins Arguably Lenzi’s best movie, this hard-edged policier boasts an appropriately edgy, diverse Ennio Morricone score, and sets its tone with a highly charged post-FRENCH CONNECTION opening sequence of vehicular carnage. During a bank robbery, the hot-headed getaway driver (Tomas Milian)…
THE MAN FROM DEEP RIVER *** Italy 1972 Dir: Umberto Lenzi. 93 mins A trend-setting movie in the Italian cannibal cycle and a career-making picture for Lenzi, this operates as both a cash-in on the American hit A MAN CALLED HORSE and a fictionalised extension of the earlier “Mondo” movies.…
CREATE & OBLITERATE : Remembering Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City As with his (more popular) contemporary Lucio Fulci, the reputation in horror circles of Italian director Umberto Lenzi hinges entirely on a small cluster of graphically gory movies he made very close together in the early 80’s while well into middle-age.…