Skip to main content

The Blood Stained Shadow (1978) / Walk of the Dead (1972)




First up was The Blood Stained Shadow, an entertaining 1978 giallo about murders that plague a small community in Venice.













A professor named Stefano returns to his home to visit his older brother Don Paolo, who’s a local priest. One rainy night, Paolo witnesses a woman getting strangled outside. He begins to receive threatening notes warning him to keep quiet or he’ll be next. Soon enough, someone else is murdered, so Stefano takes it upon himself to help his brother by attempting to solve the mystery. He becomes convinced that these killings are somehow tied to an unsolved murder of a young girl years ago. Stefano also starts a romance with a woman named Sandra (Stefania Casini of Suspiria) that he met on a train, as well as experience strange spells where he recalls a hidden memory of seeing something as a child. There’s also an odd painting in Sandra’s house that’s somehow tied to the killer’s identity.











The film is well done, keeping you invested with all the classic giallo elements, including a killer who wears black gloves, scenes of the killer stalking his victims, the entertaining murders, and a cast of shady characters, including a medium, a pervert, and a mid wife who performs illegal abortions, and a few good jump scares. Despite the identity of the killer being easy to figure out, it still manages to be a fun flick. Those who enjoy Italian Giallo films will find plenty to enjoy here.











The next flick was 1972’s Walk Of The Dead, a cheesy and hilarious affair starring Paul Naschy.




A greedy couple decide to break into the tomb of a dead woman to steal the expensive jewelry from her body. A shady masked character locks them in and performs a black magic ritual that reanimates the dead woman’s corpse and she kills them. Turns out this masked person is responsible for a series of murders and disappearances throughout London. A woman named Elvira, who worships a guru named Krishna, is attacked one night by a zombie woman, who also kills her father. Elvira is invited by Krishna to stay at his place on the outskirts of town, while her friend Lawrence, who works for Scotland Yard, investigates the mysterious murders and disappearances.












It turns out that the murders and reanimation of corpses is being caused by a guy named Kantanka, who is the evil brother of Krishna. He's attempting to build his army of zombie women so that he can get vengeance on the families that wronged him the past and use his black magic to achieve ultimate power. Paul Naschy plays both roles, as well as the Devil in a brief nightmare sequence. Dubbed in English, the flick is quite hilarious and offbeat, filled with over-dramatic performances, zombie women, silly proclamations of love between Elvira and Krishna, jealousy, black magic rituals, and each time there's a murder, the words SHOCK NOTICE flash across the screen to warn the audience of the blood and carnage that's about to transpire; I found this unexpectedly hilarious. All of these elements make this an enjoyable b-movie, especially for lovers of z-grade cinema. 














Both The Blood Stained Shadow and Walk Of The Dead are available to stream on Tubi. Blood Stained is the more serious of the two, while Walk is a b-movie delight. Check them out if you enjoy 70's giallo and goofy horror.















Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Help Me… I’m Possessed (1974) / #Missingcouple (2024)

I've watched some weird, obscure horror movies throughout my life. I can now add this lurid 1974 schlockfest to that growing list. In a castle in the desert, Dr. Arthur Blackwood runs a sanitarium filled with mentally disturbed patients (as well as staff). He claims to be working on finding a way to cure people of any violent tendencies they have, and brags about his younger sister, innocent, child-like Melanie, as evidence that his treatment works. When she was a child, their parents had to keep her locked up and chained in the basement, to control her violent fits. Now that he's cured her, Arthur has his wife Diane come to the castle to meet Melanie, so that they can be one big, happy family. Diane begins to grow suspicious that something is amiss after a Sheriff shows up investigating the murder of 2 local teens, and sets about on her own investigation, hoping to uncover the sinister secrets that she feels her husband is hiding. Help Me... I'm Possessed is an outrageous,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Titanic Creations Yongary 1967

This figure was released in late December, and I got it about 2 days before the New Year, so I'm counting it as a 2025 release. It is the Titanic Creations version of the Korean kaiju Yongary, Monster From The Deep. The film was released in 1967 as a Godzilla ripoff, with several ideas copied from the Gamera series, such as his tusks, his ability to fire a stream of flames from his mouth, and even firing a laser beam from his horn, similar to the slicing one used by Gyaos. The film is pretty goofy, but Yongary, like most of those Asian monsters, was pretty cool (to me, at least), so I was psyched that someone finally made a figure of this lesser known kaiju. When Titanic Creations put it up for pre-order, they announced a series of tiers, where they would add accessories when a certain number of orders were met. Enough fans ordered him, so that Yongary ended up with a shit ton of stuff, making him absolutely worth the price. In addition to the kaiju, you get a flame breath effect, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

RicSan Custom Toys Kyōrū Kaiju (Titanosaurus)

My latest kaiju figure purchase is the Titanosaurus made by Ricsan Custom Toys. I own and love the Varan & Gabara, so of course I had to preorder this one when it was available. He was delivered earlier this week. This kaiju hails from the last Godzilla film of the Showa era, 1975's Terror of Mechagodzilla. The Black Hole aliens are back, rebuilding their robot in another effort to take over the planet. They enlist the help of an ostracized Earth scientist named Mafune and his daughter Katsura, who are able to control an aquatic dinosaur named Titanosaurus. They plan to use both kaiju and mecha to attack Japan. Titano was a cool monster, with his tail that opened into a fish fin, and he would use it to create whirlpools in the sea, and high winds on land. I'm hoping that S.H. Monsterarts makes one for the 50th anniversary of the film, but when I saw this Ricsan Custom version, I couldn't pass it up. Titanosaurus (called the Kyōrū Kaiju), comes in a white box, with its n...
Post a Comment
Read more