[EXPRESSO] Ferine (2026) | A Raora Panthera Ate My Baby!

The other italian horror film to debut in theathers here (the other being The Nameless Ballad), Ferine, which goes in an interesting direction, even if it tackles a common theme for horror, especially modern horror, as in: maternity.

Irene is a rich fine art collector that, after picking up her baby from her surrogate mother, suffers a street accident due to a loose panther (which was being shipped to a rich huntress), losing even the child, and afterwards she start to become more feral, regressing to a mostly mute animal, rejecting any food that isn’t raw meat, while the surrogate mother and the huntress are forced to eventually intervene since Irene was never gonna make the incident or the surrogate baby public…

It’s actually quite interesting, as there is the influence of the old Italian horror classics, but also a bit of Raw, there’s the ambition of the “elevated horror” but also a strong identity of its own, a confidence in its own vision, as it curiously opts to imply more than show the gore and blood, to focus on Irene psychological regression into a feral, like a modern take on Cat People, thanks to Bracken’s very good performance as Irene.

The main issues lay in how the script does ultimately not properly depict Irene as a character proper, and the final act, instead of escalating to its extremes the themes… it just kinda potters about to restate stuff already more than established, almost as if we needed to put it genre clichès leading to a more stock resolution to pad the runtime.

It’s a shame, because it’s a very good debut film for Andrea Corsini, a flawed one that mostly tumbles towards the end due to the script, but regardless i do wanna see what he cooks up next.

The Spooktacular Eight #17: Anthrophophagus (1980)

Somehow, we live in a world where not only Joe “Aristide Massaccesi” D’Amato’s Anthrophophagus has been remade but also received a “sequel” (after his “spiritual sequel”, Absurd). How lucky are we?

Yep, indeed, the infamous gore flick that had George Eastman as an amphibious cannibal going around a deserted and isolated Greek island, in this occasion stumbling upon a pregnant women, his equivalent of a double combo fast food menù, but after all, it’s called Anthrophophagus, the latin term for “cannibal”… unless it’s the theatherical US release, called Savage Island.

Or the very cut down UK home video release as “The Grim Reaper”, which also contains a different score, using music from Kingdom Of The Spiders.

I’d recommend looking for the Severin Blu-Ray release of the film, as it has a lot of extras, it’s a 2K restoration that improves the video quality from previous releases notably, a previously unseen deleted scenes, if you can/want.

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Shriek of The Mutilated (1974) [REVIEW] | Have you ever had… a Yeti feast?

I teased it a couple of times, so why not, let’s go down deep into the yeti hole by fishing out cult exploitation crapfest Shriek of The Mutilated, a classic go-to for fans of the cinematic abysmal, a common territory for most movies about the legendary humanoid cryptid Bigfoot/Sasquatch/Yeti, as the poor bastard it’s quite popular fodder for bad movies regardless of decade.

This is some primo shlock, coming from Michael Findlay and his wife Roberta Finlay, both infamous exploitation directors and producers behind many erotic and horror films, but i’d wager you most likely know them for the rather infamous Snuff from 1975, aka them riding the rumors around the existence of actual snuff films, marketing Snuff itself as a real snuff movie and making it about non-Charles Manson guiding around his cult followers into a killing spree.

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Zombi Holocaust (1980) [REVIEW] | With Extra Falernum

Let me take you back the days of italian zombie movies, with one of the slightly more obscure films, even if we’re still in the familiar territory of italian directors credited with laughable american pseudonyms and a plethora of alternate titles, it wouldn’t be an italian zombie from that era if it somehow got the alternate title of Zombie 3 (yes, with an extra “e”), others trying to link it to the “Zombi non-series” or the cannibal subgenre, one that happens to have been mostly dominated by italian genre directors.

Zombi Holocaust does have 2 recognized alternative titles, Queen Of The Cannibals and Dr. Butcher: M.D., and to be honest they’re not too that outrageous or mystifying, because this one decide to go ahead and combine a cannibal and zombie movie together, throwing in a mad scientist that created his own zombie army, as an expedition to the Eastern Indies finds out more than they bargained for, as this group of doctors and journalist went there to investigate, after episodes of cannibalism by immigrants of that particular island started happening in various city hospitals.

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