🔥The 9th Round of Easy Loan, Earn $40 Reward is in progress❗️ ⏰ Promotion Period: January 15th - Feburary 15th, 2025 👉 Register now and check more details at gate.io/campaigns/358

Carroll Baker’s Italian debut in Ferreri’s L’HAREM (1967) is a ditsy romp with a pasta loving baby cheetah, seaside theatrics, Morricone’s jazzy magic, & a polyamorous heroine putting suitors through their paces—that is, until a mean spirited finale provides a paradoxical sting.

Prefiguring the candy colored atmospherics of Bava’s stylishly gothic horrors, cozy classic Terence Fisher’s THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1959) abounds with mystery among misty moors & picturesque ruins, anchored by Cushing’s commitment to bringing the fictional Holmes to life!

The most narrative driven episode of Bava’s trio of terror I WURDALAK (1963) hides its subversive tale of melancholic repression behind a myriad of folkloric traditions, its chilling finale a glimpse of the grim inescapable windowed faces of cannibalizing familial love. #MarioMay

Raise a glass to my idol Carroll Baker on her birthday because she deserves it. #BOTD #HBDCarrollBaker #GialloQueen

Shot almost entirely in studio on sets leftover from other Cinecittà productions with a previously unheard of amount of in-camera effects, Bava’s HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD (1961) exudes a silent era sensibility packed with illusion, cleverly merging pepla & gothic. #MarioMay

Reasons Bava is goated: —the Hesperides is a backlit ink filled aquarium —magic ship? it’s Buitoni pasta —lava pit = polenta —Medea’s pool is a mirror with Bava waving Christmas tree garlands in front of camera —wide shots are glass mattes & cut outs —looks better than 95% of CGI

Päivi Hartzell's compulsively watchable, blindingly prismatic Peking Opera-esque Snow Queen LUMIKUNINGATAR (1986) is a Road Warrior edition of Disney's Frozen boardgame from some dimensional trinket shop behind a dive bar where Luigi Cozzi hosts disco night with Věra Chytilová.

Erstwhile curio & diverting portmanteau of perfidy PRAGUE NIGHTS (1969) is itself a golem of inexhaustible creativity cobbled together amidst the Prague Spring, its framed cautionary tales congruent with Amicus's incoming omnibus onslaught of witty, built to thrill ironies.

Paced like a doctor's appointment yet suitably nasty with style to burn, Tezuka's BLACK KISS (2004) is the kind of giallo Vanzina might've made with Fincher in an alternate slimy neon y2k where naive models witness murders perpetrated by cat-suited occultists from their windows.

Elemental chaos & a fated flute battle for earth's future are just some of the notes in Jamil Dehlavi's folk opus BORN OF FIRE (1987), its idiosyncratic blending of Koranic anatomy with Western nonsecular conceptualizations of evil orchestrating a visually unique genus of terror.

Directed by Andrzej Żuławski

#Junesploitation DAY 1: ITALIAN CRIME CALLING ALL POLICE CARS (1975) Mario Caiano Taking its cue from tv procedural Qui Squadra Mobile with which it shares characters, this slice of sleaze flavors its search for a wealthy teen's killer with satire & a final act of giallo chaos.

#Junesploitation DAY 2: ZOMBIES LITAN (1982), Jean-Pierre Mocky A couple fights for survival in a strange town during carnival where prophetic dreams hang in the air like smoke, everyone is a masked weirdo & the waters are infested with glowing protozoa that reanimate the dead.

#Junesploitation DAY 4: BLAXPLOITATION ABBY (1974), William Girdler A Yoruba sex demon unleashed by a Bishop rides a transatlantic whirlwind of chaos in a fit of demonic drool to possess his daughter-in-law with tumescent tumult so uncontainable it needs a dance floor exorcism.