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JEFFREY DOLLMER: THE DOLL, THE DAHMER AND THE DEATH OF GOOD TASTE

04 Sunday Oct 2026

Posted by in MonsterFest, Movie review

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When the killer-doll movie crawls out of the video-store bargain bin

There are films that arrive at a festival demanding to be taken seriously.

There are films that arrive hoping to be discovered.

And then there are films like Jeffrey Dollmer, which seem to arrive carrying a petrol can, a fake moustache and absolutely no intention of apologising for themselves.

A possessed doll.

The spirit of Jeffrey Dahmer.

A remote photo shoot.

A collection of models.

Murder, exploitation and a title that sounds like somebody ran a serial killer’s name through a children’s toy catalogue.

You could spend an enormous amount of time asking whether Jeffrey Dollmer is in good taste.

The film would probably prefer you didn’t.

Monster Fest’s own program copy essentially throws the gauntlet down before the screening even begins, describing the film as “cheap, nasty, ridiculous” and openly celebrating its capacity to offend. That is not an accidental side effect of the film’s identity. It is the sales pitch.

And perhaps that is the most interesting thing about Jeffrey Dollmer.

It feels like a movie from a parallel universe in which the video store never died.

WELCOME TO THE WRONG SHELF

There is a particular kind of horror movie that used to be everywhere.

You would walk into a video shop and find it lurking beneath the more respectable releases. The artwork promised something outrageous. The title promised something worse. The synopsis seemed to have been written by somebody who had been dared to make it sound as filthy and violent as possible.

You picked it up.

You read the back.

You knew absolutely nothing about it.

And that was precisely the point.

Jeffrey Dollmer feels like it belongs in that ecosystem.

Not because it resembles a lost 1980s film in any literal sense, but because it understands the ancient exploitation-movie equation that a sufficiently outrageous premise is itself an invitation.

This is not “a film about a possessed doll.”

It is Jeffrey Dollmer.

The title is already the trailer.

THE FULL MOON CONNECTION

The obvious comparison is Charles Band’s Full Moon Pictures.

That comparison is not intended as an insult.

Quite the opposite.

Full Moon built an entire cottage industry around the idea that horror did not have to be respectable to be entertaining. The company understood the peculiar alchemy of killer toys, demonic objects, mad scientists, miniature monsters, erotic nightmares and concepts that would probably sound insane if explained outside the context of a video-store shelf.

Puppet Master is perhaps the obvious reference point, but the larger Full Moon tradition is what matters here.

The concept comes first.

The spectacle follows.

Logic can take the evening off.

The viewer is not necessarily being promised prestige.

They are being promised something.

A hook.

A monster.

A ridiculous premise.

A reason to press play.

Jeffrey Dollmer appears to understand that tradition instinctively.

It does not seem interested in asking how a possessed serial killer doll could function within a rigorously constructed supernatural mythology.

It asks a much more important exploitation question:

Wouldn’t it be insane if this happened?

And then it goes ahead and makes the movie.

MARK SAVAGE’S HOUSE OF BAD TASTE

At the centre of this particular descent is Australian filmmaker Mark Savage, a director whose career has never suggested an overwhelming interest in staying safely inside the boundaries of good taste.

Monster Fest describes Savage as a fiercely independent filmmaker responsible for titles including Marauders, Sensitive New Age Killer and The Masturbating Gunman.

Those titles alone should tell you something about the cinematic neighbourhood in which Jeffrey Dollmer has chosen to build its house.

Savage is not approaching the material as though somebody has accidentally handed an arthouse director the wrong script.

The premise is the destination.

The bad taste is part of the architecture.

And that places Jeffrey Dollmer in an increasingly interesting corner of contemporary genre filmmaking: movies made with the awareness that there is still an audience for horror that does not need to justify its existence through seriousness.

THE KILLER DOLL THAT SHOULD NOT EXIST

The killer doll is one of horror’s most enduring ideas because the concept itself contains a contradiction.

A doll is supposed to be an object of childhood affection.

It is small.

It is harmless.

It sits where you leave it.

Until it doesn’t.

From The Twilight Zone to Child’s Play and beyond, the killer doll works because it turns an object designed to be controlled into something that controls the room instead.

Jeffrey Dollmer takes that familiar mechanism and pours something considerably uglier into it.

Jeffrey Dahmer.

The historical Dahmer was a real serial killer whose crimes involved the murder and dismemberment of seventeen males between 1978 and 1991. Turning his identity into a killer-doll premise is therefore considerably more provocative than simply inventing another fictional psychopath.

The film’s outrageousness depends upon that collision between the recognisable and the absurd.

The name carries real-world horror.

The doll carries fantasy.

The film slams them together.

And the result is deliberately uncomfortable.

EXPLOITATION KNOWS IT IS EXPLOITATION

This is where the film’s relationship with exploitation cinema becomes particularly useful.

Exploitation has always understood that controversy can function as currency.

The title gets you to stop.

The poster gets you to look.

The premise gets you to wonder whether the filmmakers can possibly pull it off.

And then the movie has to deliver enough of the promised excess to justify the journey.

Jeffrey Dollmer is practically engineered around that principle.

The Monster Fest program doesn’t disguise the film’s intentions. It practically shouts them through a megaphone. A group of models arrive at a photo shoot and encounter a doll possessed by the spirit of Dahmer. The language itself becomes part of the experience.

There is no elaborate mystery box.

No twelve-minute prologue designed to establish an expansive mythology.

No solemn announcement that this is “a meditation on trauma.”

There is a doll.

There is Dahmer.

Things go badly.

Sometimes horror knows exactly how much explanation it needs.

THE PHOTO SHOOT FROM HELL

The choice of a photo shoot is also perfectly suited to this kind of cinema.

The setting already contains an element of artificiality.

Models.

Cameras.

Posing.

Performance.

Bodies being arranged for consumption.

Everyone is already participating in a manufactured spectacle before the supernatural horror arrives.

That creates an interesting secondary layer beneath the exploitation.

The characters are being photographed.

The audience is watching them.

The doll is watching them.

And the film itself is turning the whole situation into entertainment.

It is a hall of mirrors made out of bodies, cameras and voyeurism.

That is not necessarily a reason to suddenly transform Jeffrey Dollmer into a dissertation on the gaze.

Sometimes a killer doll is just a killer doll.

But exploitation cinema has always understood that looking is part of the bargain.

The audience comes to see something they probably shouldn’t.

The movie knows it.

CHEAP ISN’T ALWAYS A CRITICISM

There is a tendency to use words such as “cheap” and “low-budget” as though they automatically represent failures.

They don’t.

Sometimes they represent freedom.

A large studio production has committees.

Insurance requirements.

Brand concerns.

Marketing departments.

Executives asking whether the premise is appropriate for the company’s image.

A film like Jeffrey Dollmer does not appear to have suffered from an excess of corporate supervision.

And thank God for that.

The result may be rough around the edges. It may occasionally feel like it was constructed with whatever was available. It may possess the visual fingerprints of independent exploitation rather than polished studio horror.

But that can be part of the pleasure.

There is something perversely liberating about a film that looks as though somebody simply decided:

We can make a movie about a serial killer doll.

And then did.

THE RETURN OF THE VIDEO-STORE MOVIE

This is where the Full Moon comparison becomes more than a convenient reference.

There was a time when the direct-to-video market provided a vast parallel cinema.

Films could be strange.

Films could be cheap.

Films could be derivative.

Films could be glorious.

Films could be terrible.

Sometimes they could be all five simultaneously.

But they existed.

The video store gave these films a physical geography.

You could wander through the horror section and discover something you had never heard of.

You could judge a movie by its cover.

You could rent it because the title made you laugh.

You could rent it because the artwork frightened you.

You could rent it because your friends dared you.

Streaming has made enormous amounts of cinema available, but it has also changed the nature of discovery. The algorithm wants to know what you already like.

The video store wanted to know what you were willing to risk.

Jeffrey Dollmer feels like a film made for that older form of cinematic gambling.

THE PROBLEM WITH TASTE

Good taste has its uses.

It stops us from making terrible decisions.

It also stops people from making interesting ones.

Horror has always benefited from filmmakers willing to step outside respectable boundaries. Some of the genre’s most memorable films emerged precisely because somebody thought an idea was too ridiculous, too grotesque or too tasteless to work.

Sometimes they were right.

Sometimes they were gloriously wrong.

The important thing is that somebody tried.

Monster Fest has always understood this part of genre culture. Its program is deliberately broad enough to accommodate serious genre filmmaking alongside movies that appear to have been assembled from the contents of a deranged filmmaker’s garage.

That is why Jeffrey Dollmer makes sense here.

It is not an interruption.

It is part of the ecosystem.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE TITLE

Of course, there is one unavoidable problem with the film.

Jeffrey Dahmer was real.

There is an ethical difference between a fictional serial killer and a real person whose crimes destroyed actual lives.

That makes the film’s premise more complicated than something like Puppet Master or Child’s Play.

The exploitation of notorious killers has become a familiar part of contemporary horror and true-crime culture, but familiarity does not make the ethical question disappear.

What does it mean to turn a real killer into entertainment?

Where is the line between grotesque fantasy and commercial exploitation?

And when the killer is transformed into a ridiculous object like a doll, does that distance us from the reality of the crimes—or simply make the spectacle easier to consume?

Those questions sit uncomfortably underneath the film.

Perhaps that discomfort is unavoidable.

Perhaps it is part of what happens when horror takes real-world evil and turns it into genre material.

Either way, Jeffrey Dollmer is not something that can be discussed entirely outside that context.

BUT THEN THERE’S THE TITLE AGAIN

And yet.

There is also the sheer absurdity of the concept.

This is a film called Jeffrey Dollmer.

That name alone tells you that the filmmakers are not trying to disguise the exploitation.

The title is a punchline.

It is a dare.

It is the sort of title that exists specifically to make somebody say:

“Wait. What is that?”

And if your response to that question is to immediately want to see it, then the film has already done its job.

THE ART OF THE RIDICULOUS

The best exploitation cinema has always understood one simple truth:

Ridiculous does not necessarily mean worthless.

Sometimes ridiculous is a legitimate aesthetic.

It allows filmmakers to take ideas that would collapse under the weight of seriousness and turn them into something energetic, strange and entertaining.

Jeffrey Dollmer appears to belong to that tradition.

The film is not asking to be mistaken for The Silence of the Lambs.

It is not competing with prestige psychological horror.

It is not trying to make you forget that you are watching a movie about a serial killer’s spirit inhabiting a doll.

It is making sure you never forget.

And perhaps that is exactly the point.

THE FULL MOON OF IT ALL

Imagine finding this on a video-store shelf thirty years ago.

You have already watched Puppet Master.

You’ve exhausted the obvious Ghoulies.

You’ve seen Demonic Toys.

You’ve wandered through the Full Moon catalogue far enough that the phrase “possessed object” no longer sounds like a warning.

Then you see Jeffrey Dollmer.

You pick it up.

You read the back.

You laugh.

You grimace.

You wonder whether the film can possibly be as outrageous as the title suggests.

Then you rent it.

That is the cinematic experience Jeffrey Dollmer seems determined to resurrect.

Not prestige.

Not cultural respectability.

Not awards-season seriousness.

Discovery.

The glorious possibility that somebody, somewhere, has made a movie so completely bonkers that you simply have to see what happens.

THE MONSTER FEST FACTOR

That is why Jeffrey Dollmer feels particularly well placed at Monster Fest.

The 2026 festival is already presenting films ranging from Australian premieres and world premieres to retrospectives and documentaries about genre filmmakers, including Full Moon Rising: The Charles Band Story.

That makes the Full Moon comparison almost impossible to ignore.

There is something beautifully appropriate about having a film that appears to belong to the same extended cinematic bloodline sitting within a festival program that is also examining Charles Band’s career and the machinery of cult filmmaking.

One film looks back at the man who helped make low-budget genre excess into an international cottage industry.

The other seems determined to remind us that the disease is still alive.

The video store may have disappeared.

The spirit remains.

And apparently it has possessed a doll.

SO, WHAT DO WE DO WITH JEFFREY DOLLMER?

The answer may depend entirely on what you want from horror.

If you want subtlety, this probably isn’t the address.

If you want restrained psychological terror, there are other doors.

If you want a meticulously constructed meditation on the nature of evil, perhaps keep walking.

But if you want a film that looks you directly in the eye and says, “You know what would be funny? A Jeffrey Dahmer killer doll,” then congratulations.

You’ve found your movie.

And there is something oddly refreshing about that.

Horror does not always need to be tasteful.

It does not always need to be important.

It does not always need to justify itself.

Sometimes it can simply be outrageous.

Sometimes the title really is the premise.

Sometimes the premise really is the movie.

And sometimes the best thing you can do with a film this ridiculous is stop asking whether it should exist and start asking the far more important question:

Did they have the guts to actually make it?

Mark Savage did.

The Prognosis:

Jeffrey Dollmer looks like the kind of movie that might have been discovered on a battered VHS cassette after midnight, somewhere between the killer dolls and the films whose titles you were embarrassed to admit you’d rented.

And that may be its greatest virtue.

In an era increasingly dominated by polished horror, elevated horror, franchise horror and algorithmically assembled horror, there is still something gloriously defiant about a film that simply embraces the exploitation impulse.

A serial killer.

A doll.

A photo shoot.

A terrible idea.

A feature-length commitment to that terrible idea.

Maybe that’s not the death of good taste.

Maybe it’s a reminder that horror has always needed a place where good taste can be left outside.

Jeffrey Dollmer is playing at Monster Fest 2026 as a World Premiere, with Mark Savage behind the camera. The Melbourne screening is at Cinema Nova on Tuesday 6 October at 8:45pm.

Bring your sense of humour.

Leave your dignity at the door.

The doll is waiting.

  • Saul Muerte

BLOODLUST: The Australian Revenge Western at the End of the World

30 Wednesday Sep 2026

Posted by in MonsterFest, Movie review

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The Western has always been a genre about what happens when civilisation runs out of road. Take away the courthouse, the sheriff, the town square and the comforting fiction that justice can be administered by somebody wearing a badge, and you are left with a man, a gun and a very personal understanding of what constitutes a reckoning. Bloodlust takes that ancient machinery of revenge and drives it into the wreckage of a post-apocalyptic Australia, where the world has already ended but the oldest human impulse apparently missed the memo.

Keith and Becca are survivors in more ways than one. They have managed to carve out something resembling companionship in the remains of a world where almost everything else has disappeared. Their existence is stripped back to the essentials: movement, survival and each other. Then a chance encounter with four other survivors turns violently catastrophic. Becca is murdered, Keith is left for dead, and the few possessions they possess are taken from them. Six months later, Keith emerges from the wreckage with a singular purpose. He has found the men responsible, and whatever remains of the man they once encountered on the road is about to be buried beneath something considerably colder.

This is where Bloodlust finds its most compelling territory. Revenge stories traditionally begin with a moral equation: someone has been wronged, therefore somebody must pay. It is the cinematic equivalent of an eye for an eye, except that cinema has always been fascinated by what happens when the eye is finally collected. The closer the avenger gets to his target, the more complicated that original equation becomes. Bloodlust understands this tension and allows Keith’s pursuit to become something more unsettling than a straightforward exercise in settling scores.

Because what exactly is Keith trying to restore?

Becca cannot be brought back. The old world cannot be reconstructed. There is no functioning justice system waiting for Keith to deliver the perpetrators into its hands. There isn’t even much of a civilisation left to protect. His revenge therefore exists in a moral vacuum. He is not restoring order so much as creating his own version of it, one corpse at a time.

That makes Bloodlust feel like an Australian Western that has somehow wandered through the apocalypse and forgotten to change its clothes.

There is the lone figure moving across hostile terrain. There is the murdered woman whose death becomes the catalyst for violence. There is the hunt. There are the men who have done the wronging and the man who intends to make them answer for it. Yet instead of Monument Valley or the dusty frontier towns of classical Western mythology, Michalik and Evans give us the decaying remains of Australia. The frontier has not merely been pushed further west. The entire country has become the frontier.

And that gives the film a wonderfully strange identity.

The post-apocalyptic setting could easily have become an excuse for generic wasteland imagery, but Bloodlust uses its limited resources to create something much more intimate. This isn’t a world populated by armies of mutants, elaborate settlements or armies of marauding survivors. It is a reduced landscape in which the absence of civilisation becomes part of the horror. The emptiness matters. The spaces between people matter. Every encounter carries the possibility of violence because there are so few structures left to prevent it.

In that respect, Bloodlust belongs to a long tradition of Australian cinema that understands landscape as something more psychologically complicated than scenery. The Australian bush has frequently been represented as a place where familiar rules become unreliable, where isolation can turn ordinary human behaviour into something primal. Here, the landscape has been stripped even further. The civilisation that once gave the environment context has disappeared, leaving only the terrain and the people who remain trapped inside it.

And Keith is very much a product of that landscape.

His transformation is central to the film’s power. Revenge cinema has always loved the metamorphosis of the victim into the avenger, but Bloodlust isn’t interested in pretending that this transformation is clean. Violence changes the person who administers it. Every act of vengeance carries the possibility that the distinction between justice and brutality will become increasingly academic.

The film’s title consequently becomes more revealing the further we travel into Keith’s story. Bloodlust isn’t simply describing the violence surrounding him. It suggests something more fundamental: that revenge can become an appetite.

Once the first blood has been spilled, how much is enough?

That is the question hanging over Keith’s journey.

Matt Michalik and Rupert Evans approach this material with a remarkable degree of economy. The pair wrote, directed, shot and edited the film themselves, while also appearing in front of the camera, expanding what began as a ten-minute action short made during their university years into a 70-minute feature. The film was shot over four months with a crew of just four people.

That context is worth knowing, not because Bloodlust needs excuses made for it, but because it explains something important about the film’s physicality. There is a stripped-down quality to the filmmaking that suits the material. The movie doesn’t feel like an enormous production pretending to be small. It feels like a group of filmmakers who understood the resources available to them and built the film around movement, landscape, bodies and violence.

And when Bloodlust gets violent, it doesn’t treat brutality as decorative seasoning.

The violence has consequence. It is ugly, physical and deliberately uncomfortable, which gives the revenge sequences an interesting tension. We understand why Keith wants vengeance. We understand the enormity of what has been taken from him. But understanding the motivation doesn’t necessarily mean we can comfortably inhabit the morality of what follows.

That distinction is crucial.

The easiest revenge films allow us to cheer because the villains are so thoroughly monstrous that their destruction becomes a form of audience wish fulfilment. Bloodlust operates in murkier territory. Its central figure has been wronged beyond comprehension, yet his response increasingly forces us to question whether vengeance is capable of remaining proportional once there is nobody left to enforce the boundaries.

It is the old Western problem dressed in post-apocalyptic clothing.

Who watches the watcher when there is nobody left?

And perhaps more importantly: who judges the man who has decided that he alone is qualified to deliver justice?

There is something almost primitive about Bloodlust in this regard. Beneath its post-apocalyptic surface lies an ancient story. A loved one is taken. A survivor swears vengeance. The road stretches ahead. The enemies wait somewhere beyond the horizon. The avenger walks towards them carrying grief that gradually hardens into purpose.

The difference is that this particular frontier has already burned down.

That collision between old and new is where the film derives much of its character. The Western is one of cinema’s oldest mythologies, while post-apocalyptic fiction is one of its most persistent modern anxieties. Put the two together and you get a strange hybrid in which the past and future appear to have crashed into each other somewhere in the Australian wilderness.

The result is lean, brutal and occasionally twisted in ways that feel distinctly its own.

Bloodlust isn’t interested in building an elaborate mythology around the apocalypse. It doesn’t need to tell us every detail of what happened to the world. The absence of information becomes part of the atmosphere. What matters is what remains: a handful of people, a hostile environment, old grievances and the increasingly fragile boundary between being the victim and becoming the monster.

That makes it a particularly fitting addition to Monster Fest’s Homegrown Horrors program. The festival describes it as a stripped-back piece of independent Australian filmmaking that punches above its weight, and there is something satisfying about watching a film whose production circumstances seem almost perversely appropriate to its story: a tiny crew creating a film about people trying to survive in a world where almost everything has already been stripped away.

There is no cavalry coming for Keith.

No sheriff.

No courtroom.

No final appeal.

Just the road.

And somewhere at the end of it, somebody is going to pay.

The Prognosis:

Bloodlust takes the familiar anatomy of the revenge film and performs an interesting autopsy on it. By transplanting the Western’s moral landscape into a post-apocalyptic Australia, Matt Michalik and Rupert Evans create a film that is simultaneously familiar and strangely alien. Its brutality is considerable, but its more interesting wounds are psychological: what happens when grief becomes vengeance, vengeance becomes purpose, and purpose begins to consume the person pursuing it?

This is Australian genre filmmaking stripped to the bone, but the skeleton underneath is an old one.

The frontier.

The outlaw.

The wronged man.

The reckoning.

Only this time, there isn’t a civilisation waiting on the other side of the dust.

BLOODLUST screens as an Australian Premiere at Monster Fest 2026 on Saturday 3 October at 7:30pm at Cinema Nova, Melbourne, with a Q&A following the screening.

If revenge is an eye for an eye, Bloodlust asks a much nastier question:

What happens when there is nobody left to close their eyes?

  • Saul Muerte

Underground Horrors: Geisha War

09 Wednesday Sep 2026

Posted by in Sydney Underground Film Festival

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There are filmmakers who make films, and then there are filmmakers who seem to have wandered into a film laboratory, knocked over several shelves of chemicals and decided to see what happened.

Yoshihiro Nishimura was very much the latter.

With Geisha War, the Japanese cult filmmaker delivers one final eruption of blood, absurdity, political provocation and gloriously impractical visual effects. It is a film that frequently appears less interested in whether its story makes sense than in whether the next image can possibly be more outrageous than the last.

The answer, more often than not, is yes.

Set in the historic pleasure district of Yoshiwara, Geisha War pits an American gangster and his associates against the local community, led by Kiki, a ramen vendor who finds herself caught up in the struggle to protect the district from outside control. The basic premise provides Nishimura with an excuse to stage a collision between American gangster mythology, Japanese popular culture and his own particular brand of cinematic insanity.

And insanity is certainly the operative word.

Nishimura’s cinema has never been particularly interested in restraint. From Tokyo Gore Police to Helldriver, his films transform bodies into weapons, flesh into sculpture and practical effects into a kind of gleeful visual assault. Geisha War carries that tradition forward with an arsenal of bizarre weaponry, outrageous transformations and fountains of artificial blood. FilmInk describes the film’s visual approach as a combination of solid practical gore and cartoonish digital effects, with everything from chainsaw weaponry to giant scissors entering the fray.

It is less a film than a fever dream with a production budget.

Yet beneath the carnage is something considerably more pointed.

The conflict between Carmine and the residents of Yoshiwara is essentially a battle over cultural ownership. The American gangster sees the district as something to acquire, exploit and reshape for his own purposes. Nishimura responds by turning that clash into an exaggerated piece of exploitation spectacle, where cultural imperialism is answered with severed limbs, weaponised geisha and enough blood to repaint the streets.

Subtle it isn’t.

But subtlety was never particularly high on Nishimura’s list of priorities.

The film’s greatest strength is its willingness to embrace the ridiculous. A conventional action film might introduce a weapon and expect us to accept it as part of the world. Nishimura introduces something completely absurd and then seems determined to make it even more absurd. The result is a cinematic universe in which rickshaws become vehicles of lunacy, weapons emerge from unexpected places and characters can transform into things that would be difficult to describe without sounding like the result of a particularly feverish drinking session.

This is Gallows Horror stripped of the gallows and given a flamethrower.

There is also something strangely poignant about watching Geisha War as Nishimura’s final film. The director died in May 2026, making this an unintentional farewell from one of Japanese genre cinema’s great visual anarchists.

It is certainly an appropriate final statement.

Nishimura never seemed particularly interested in behaving himself. His cinema was messy, confrontational, juvenile, political, horny, grotesque and frequently hilarious. He understood that practical effects could be more than technical achievements: they could be jokes, provocations and punctuation marks. A severed limb wasn’t merely a piece of gore. It was a punchline.

Geisha War occasionally struggles beneath the weight of its own excess. The narrative is skeletal, characterisation is largely functional and the film’s relentless barrage of ideas can become exhausting. For all the visual invention, there are moments when it feels as though Nishimura has several films fighting for space inside the same one.

But perhaps that is part of its charm.

This isn’t polished underground cinema. It isn’t attempting to disguise its seams or convince us that its world is realistic. It is handmade, excessive and proudly artificial. The practical effects have weight; the digital effects deliberately flirt with cartoonishness; the action seems designed around the question of what could possibly make an audience yell what the hell was that?

And then, just when the film seems incapable of slowing down, it finds an unexpectedly reflective note beneath all the bloodshed.

That contradiction is what makes Geisha War work.

For all its ridiculousness, there is a genuine sense of resistance running through the film. Its grotesque spectacle becomes a weapon against the forces attempting to commodify and control its world. Nishimura takes the familiar machinery of exploitation cinema and turns it back upon itself, producing something that is simultaneously crude, playful and politically mischievous.

It is not his most accomplished film.

It may not even be his most outrageous.

But it is unmistakably his.

And as the final film from a director who spent decades proving that there was still room for strange, handmade, bloody and completely unclassifiable cinema, Geisha War makes for one hell of a final curtain call.

Underground Horrors is a series of reviews exploring the strange, confrontational and boundary-pushing films emerging from the underground of contemporary horror cinema.

  • Saul Muerte

DEAD-END DRIVE-IN AT 40: WELCOME TO THE END OF THE WORLD

28 Friday Aug 2026

Posted by in retrospective

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There are Australian films that attempt to explain Australia. There are Australian films that attempt to romanticise it. Then there is Dead-End Drive-In, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s magnificent, deranged vision of a country that has looked at its own future, shrugged, and decided the best thing to do is throw everyone into a drive-in, feed them cheeseburgers, give them drugs and make sure they never leave.

Forty years on, Dead-End Drive-In remains one of the strangest and most exhilarating films to emerge from the great Australian exploitation boom. Released in 1986, it is ostensibly a dystopian science-fiction thriller, but that description hardly begins to contain the thing. It is a car movie, a punk movie, a prison movie, a satire of consumer culture, a portrait of youth alienation, a social nightmare and, inevitably for a Brian Trenchard-Smith film, an excuse to launch increasingly large pieces of machinery through the air.

It is also one of those rare films that becomes more interesting the more seriously you take it.

Because beneath the outrageous costumes, the spectacular stunt work, the burnt-out cars and the general sensation that someone has spiked the national cinema with amphetamines, Dead-End Drive-In is asking an unnervingly serious question: what happens when a society decides that its unwanted people are easier to contain than to help?

The answer, according to Trenchard-Smith, is apparently to build a prison that looks exactly like a Saturday night at the movies.

THE MAN WHO NEVER KNEW HOW TO BEHAVE

To understand Dead-End Drive-In, you have to understand Brian Trenchard-Smith. Not because the film is some carefully controlled expression of auteurist intent, but because his career represents almost the exact opposite of the respectable model of Australian filmmaking. Trenchard-Smith has always seemed happiest when genre conventions are being thrown into the air and collided together at considerable velocity.

He could make martial-arts exploitation, horror, science fiction, children’s adventure, action cinema and television, often with the same gleeful disregard for the boundaries separating them. The Man from Hong Kong, Turkey Shoot, BMX Bandits and Dead-End Drive-In may appear to belong to entirely different cinematic universes, yet they share an unmistakable physicality. Trenchard-Smith likes movement. He likes spectacle. He likes bodies being thrown around spaces. He likes machinery being pushed beyond its sensible limits. Most importantly, he understands that exploitation cinema does not have to choose between being entertaining and being about something.

Dead-End Drive-In might be the clearest expression of that philosophy.

It is ridiculous, but it is not stupid. It is politically charged without ever becoming a lecture. It is visually extravagant despite its relatively modest resources. It is adolescent, lurid and occasionally uncomfortable, but beneath all that noise is a remarkably clear understanding of the social anxieties of the Australia that produced it.

Trenchard-Smith simply refuses to deliver those ideas politely.

He gives them a chainsaw.

WELCOME TO THE STAR

The premise is brutally simple. Jimmy “Crabs” Rossini and his girlfriend Carmen arrive at the Star Drive-In after suffering car trouble. They expect an evening at the movies. Instead, they discover that the drive-in has effectively become a detention centre for unemployed and socially unwanted young people.

The government does not need to execute them. It does not even need to rehabilitate them. It simply needs to remove them from the functioning parts of society and make their confinement sufficiently comfortable that they stop asking questions.

The Star provides food, entertainment, drugs and companionship. It becomes a world within a world, a brightly illuminated enclosure where the inmates are encouraged to consume themselves into submission.

This is where Dead-End Drive-In becomes considerably more sophisticated than its lurid surface suggests. The prison does not look like a prison. There are no obvious dungeon walls or endless corridors of concrete. There is a snack bar. There are cars. There is music. There are movies playing on a huge screen.

The inmates are not simply denied freedom. They are given enough distractions that freedom begins to seem unnecessary.

THE PERFECT PRISON IS ONE YOU DON’T WANT TO ESCAPE

That remains the film’s most disturbing idea.

The authorities have not created a traditional authoritarian nightmare. They have created a lifestyle. The inmates are surrounded by the very things that a consumer society tells them should make them happy. Food, television, entertainment, drugs, sex and material possessions become substitutes for employment, purpose and political agency.

The genius of the Star is that it doesn’t have to convince its inhabitants that they are free. It only has to convince them that freedom is inconvenient.

Why leave when there is food?

Why work when there is television?

Why build a future when the present is entertaining?

Why protest when you can get high?

The film’s dystopia therefore operates through distraction as much as repression. The system has discovered that the easiest way to control a population is not necessarily to terrify it, but to keep it occupied.

That makes Dead-End Drive-In feel remarkably prescient. Its junk food, consumerism and endless entertainment are not simply background details. They are the architecture of the prison.

THE DRIVE-IN AS AUSTRALIA

The choice of the drive-in is particularly inspired because the drive-in was itself such a recognisable part of Australian popular culture. It was a place associated with freedom, leisure, adolescence and the ability to temporarily escape the routines of everyday life.

Trenchard-Smith takes that cultural memory and turns it inside out.

The drive-in is no longer somewhere you visit to escape society.

It is somewhere society sends you when it has decided that you are no longer useful.

That reversal gives the film’s central location a strange melancholy. The Star feels simultaneously futuristic and nostalgic, like a discarded piece of Australian culture that has been repurposed as a holding pen for the future.

The cars remain. The screen remains. The food remains. The entertainment continues.

Only the audience has become the prisoner.

AND THEN THERE ARE THE CARS

Of course, this is Brian Trenchard-Smith, so the automobile cannot merely be symbolic.

The car in Dead-End Drive-In is a status symbol, a shelter, a weapon, an object of desire and, most importantly, an expression of mobility. Yet the film takes particular pleasure in turning that symbolism against itself. Cars are everywhere, but nobody is actually going anywhere.

The inhabitants of the Star sleep in their vehicles. They decorate them. They identify with them. They use them to establish status within the enclosed society. The automobile, traditionally one of the great symbols of freedom, has become another part of the prison.

That contradiction is everywhere in the film. The people have cars but no roads to freedom. They have entertainment but no meaningful future. They have food but no purpose. They have choices, provided those choices remain within the boundaries established for them.

The whole film can almost be understood as a gigantic metaphor for having the accelerator pressed firmly against the floor while the vehicle remains stationary.

Naturally, Trenchard-Smith eventually decides that the metaphor requires an actual vehicle to fly through the air.

THE GONZO AUSTRALIA OF BRIAN TRENCHARD-SMITH

There is something gloriously Australian about the film’s refusal to be subtle. Economic collapse becomes a wasteland of burnt-out vehicles. Youth alienation becomes a sea of punk costumes and leather. Government oppression becomes an electrified fence around a drive-in. Consumerism becomes junk food and television. Social exclusion becomes a population of young people deliberately abandoned inside a recreational complex.

The apocalypse is not presented as some distant future catastrophe.

It is the present turned up to eleven.

This is one of Trenchard-Smith’s great gifts. He understands that exploitation cinema can exaggerate reality until the exaggeration becomes a form of truth. Dead-End Drive-In does not seriously attempt to predict what Australia will look like. Instead, it takes the anxieties already present in Australian society and magnifies them until they become almost absurd.

The result is a kind of gonzo social realism.

Everything is too loud. Everything is too colourful. Everyone is slightly too grotesque. The cars are too damaged. The violence is too spectacular. The costumes are too outrageous.

And yet you can recognise the world underneath it.

That is where the satire bites.

A WORLD BUILT FROM JUNK

The Star itself looks as though civilisation has been put through a meat grinder and then handed over to a gang of teenagers with a spray can. Burnt-out cars, graffiti, concrete, rubbish, punk fashion and industrial decay transform the location into a junkyard version of the future.

The film’s production design is crucial because Trenchard-Smith does not need to build some enormous futuristic metropolis. He can find the apocalypse in the Australian landscape that already exists.

The apocalypse is a car park.

The apocalypse is a takeaway counter.

The apocalypse is an abandoned industrial space.

The apocalypse is a generation of young people who have been told that there is no future and have consequently stopped behaving as though one exists.

Most disturbingly, the apocalypse is brightly lit.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE POLITICS OF THE STAR

It would be easy to celebrate Dead-End Drive-In entirely on the basis of its aesthetic pleasures, but doing so would ignore some of the film’s more uncomfortable dimensions.

Its treatment of race, immigration and Australian identity deserves scrutiny. The film emerges from a period when anxieties surrounding immigration, economic decline and the changing nature of Australian society were deeply embedded in political and popular culture. Those anxieties find their way into the Star, where displaced populations are effectively contained and removed from the mainstream.

This is one of the reasons Dead-End Drive-In is more interesting than simply being an anarchic Ozploitation spectacle. The film does not merely show us a dystopian Australia. It shows us what that Australia is afraid of.

It is afraid of unemployment.

It is afraid of youth.

It is afraid of social disorder.

It is afraid of outsiders.

It is afraid of economic collapse.

It is afraid that the institutions supposedly responsible for maintaining order might themselves be incapable of solving the problems they have created.

Those fears do not necessarily make the film politically progressive. Some of its imagery remains troubling. But that does not make it irrelevant. Quite the opposite. The discomfort is part of what makes the film worth revisiting.

Dystopian cinema can reveal a culture’s anxieties as clearly as it reveals its aspirations.

JIMMY CRABS AND THE REFUSAL TO STAY PUT

Ned Manning’s Jimmy is therefore crucial because he refuses the bargain.

Everyone else has adapted to the Star. Jimmy hasn’t.

His rebellion is not particularly intellectual. He doesn’t deliver great political speeches. He simply refuses to accept that this is all there is.

That makes him strangely radical.

In a world where the system has convinced people to accept captivity as comfort, the simple desire to leave becomes an act of resistance.

Jimmy still believes that there is something beyond the fence.

That belief is the most dangerous thing about him.

CARMEN AND THE HORROR OF ADAPTATION

Natalie McCurry’s Carmen complicates the film’s simplistic notion of resistance. She begins to adapt to the Star, and that adaptation is both understandable and disturbing.

Because people do adapt.

They adapt to poverty. They adapt to confinement. They adapt to political instability. They adapt to bad conditions. They adapt because sometimes adaptation is the only available survival mechanism.

The Star does not need everyone to love it.

It simply needs people to stop imagining anything else.

Jimmy wants to escape.

Carmen learns how to survive inside.

Neither response is entirely comfortable.

THE MOVIES WITHIN THE MOVIE

The films being screened inside the Star provide another layer to Trenchard-Smith’s satire. The inmates watch exploitation movies while simultaneously living inside one.

Violence is entertainment.

Violence is fantasy.

Violence is spectacle.

Then violence spills beyond the screen.

The audience watches people watching movies, and those people are themselves watching images that reflect the world they inhabit. It creates an endless feedback loop between screen violence and social violence.

Trenchard-Smith’s answer to this complicated observation is, naturally, not to stop making violent movies.

He makes the violence bigger.

That is part of the joke.

Dead-End Drive-In is itself an exploitation movie critiquing a culture of exploitation.

It knows exactly what it is doing.

THE TRUCK JUMP

Eventually, all of this social commentary has to give way to the inevitable.

The truck jumps.

The climactic stunt remains one of the film’s great moments because it encapsulates Trenchard-Smith’s entire filmmaking philosophy. The film has spent all this time talking about captivity, consumerism, social control and the collapse of Australian society, and then suddenly a vehicle is flying through the air.

There is something almost philosophically perfect about that.

The truck is not merely escaping the Star.

It is escaping the limitations of the film itself.

After all the political anxiety, the satire and the symbolism, Trenchard-Smith simply says: enough.

Make it bigger.

Make it faster.

Make it fly.

That is not a failure of seriousness.

It is Trenchard-Smith’s definition of seriousness.

OZPLOITATION WITH A BRAIN

This is perhaps the mistake people make when discussing Australian exploitation cinema. They assume a film must either be trash or a masterpiece.

Dead-End Drive-In is both.

It is trashy.

It is intelligent.

It is adolescent.

It is politically loaded.

It is visually sophisticated.

It is exploitative.

It is genuinely interested in Australian society.

The contradiction is precisely what makes it work.

Trenchard-Smith understands that audiences might come for the cars, the punk costumes, the violence and the dystopian spectacle. So he gives them all of it.

Then he hides the political argument inside the popcorn.

A FILM THAT ARRIVED TOO EARLY

Perhaps Dead-End Drive-In was simply released at the wrong moment.

Australian audiences were still being encouraged to think of Australian genre cinema as something inferior to Hollywood. A film this strange, this aggressively Australian and this unwilling to behave itself was never going to fit comfortably into the mainstream.

Its initial commercial failure is therefore one of cinema’s more satisfying ironies.

The film depicts a society that has failed to recognise the value of its own discarded population.

Australian cinema subsequently spent years doing something similar to Dead-End Drive-In itself.

It was sitting there.

Covered in graffiti.

Surrounded by wrecked cars.

Waiting for someone to realise what they were looking at.

Eventually, the audience arrived.

THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN ANARCHIST

Forty years later, perhaps the best way to celebrate Dead-End Drive-In is not to pretend that it is perfect.

It isn’t.

Some of its politics are uncomfortable. Some of its ideas are more fully developed than others. Its aesthetic is unmistakably tied to the decade that produced it.

But perfection would almost miss the point.

Brian Trenchard-Smith has never been a filmmaker of polite surfaces. His cinema is physical. It is interested in impact, movement and spectacle. The machinery matters. The bodies matter. The stunt matters.

His films want you to feel the physicality of cinema.

The car hits the barrier.

The engine screams.

The body flies.

The gate electrifies.

The world collapses.

And Dead-End Drive-In might be his purest expression of that sensibility.

It is a dystopian science-fiction film, a punk film, a car movie, a prison movie, a social satire, a romance, an exploitation picture and an Australian nightmare.

And somehow, against all reason, it is also enormous fun.

THE PRICE OF ADMISSION

The title is perfect.

Dead-End Drive-In is not merely a description of the place in which Jimmy finds himself trapped. It is a description of the society surrounding him.

Everyone has arrived at the end of the road.

There is no future.

So consume.

There is no meaningful employment.

So entertain yourself.

There is no escape.

So decorate the prison.

There is no hope.

So turn the music up.

And if anyone complains, give them another cheeseburger.

That is the genius of Trenchard-Smith’s dystopia. It is not controlled by some grand totalitarian mastermind. It is maintained by administrative indifference and the quiet acceptance of everyone who has decided that resistance is too much trouble.

The system does not need to explain itself.

It simply keeps operating.

People disappear into the Star.

The movies continue playing.

The food keeps coming.

The cars keep burning.

And outside the fence, everybody else carries on.

FORTY YEARS IN THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR

Forty years later, Dead-End Drive-In feels less like a relic than a warning that has become increasingly difficult to ignore.

Its anxieties about unemployment, consumerism, youth alienation, social exclusion and institutional neglect remain remarkably potent. Its punk aesthetic has become retro. Its cars have become objects of affection. Its drive-in has disappeared.

Its future, meanwhile, has arrived in fragments.

Perhaps that is why the film has endured.

It never really predicted Australia.

It exaggerated Australia.

It took existing anxieties and turned the volume knob until the speakers exploded.

That is what Brian Trenchard-Smith does.

He does not whisper.

He does not gently suggest.

He kicks the door in, sets the car on fire, throws the television through the window and then asks whether you’ve noticed what is happening.

THE GATES ARE STILL CLOSED

There is a moment in Dead-End Drive-In when the absurdity finally becomes clear. The prison isn’t simply the electrified fence. It isn’t the guards. It isn’t the government. It isn’t even the Star.

The prison is the idea that there is nowhere else to go.

That is why Jimmy has to escape. Not simply because he wants freedom, but because he still believes freedom exists.

And perhaps that is the film’s most enduring act of rebellion.

In a genre packed with nihilism, Dead-End Drive-In still believes that someone can look at the wreckage and say no. No, I don’t want this. No, I don’t accept this. No, this isn’t the future.

I’m getting in the car.

I’m hitting the accelerator.

I’m going through the fence.

And if Brian Trenchard-Smith is directing, there will probably be a truck flying overhead when you do it.

That is Dead-End Drive-In at 40: a film about a country staring into the abyss and deciding to install a snack bar; a film about capitalism, captivity and consumption disguised as a car chase; a film about a generation being told that the future has already been cancelled.

And a filmmaker who responded to that bleak proposition with the only reasonable answer he could think of.

Make it louder.

Make it stranger.

Make it faster.

And, for God’s sake, make the truck jump.

  • Saul Muerte

Playtime Turns Predatory: Dolly

23 Thursday Apr 2026

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There is a familiar rhythm to Dolly, a film that arrives wrapped in the well-worn trappings of captivity horror and slasher sensibilities, yet occasionally hints at something more psychologically curious beneath its surface. Premiering as a Shudder original, it treads a precarious line between formula and subversion — rarely straying too far from the former, but not entirely devoid of the latter.

A Familiar Game of Survival

At its core, Dolly is disarmingly simple. A young woman, Macy — played with a grounded resilience by Fabianne Therese — is abducted by a grotesque, childlike figure intent on “raising” her. The premise is unsettling in theory, tapping into distorted notions of family, control, and psychological regression.

In execution, however, the film largely adheres to a paint-by-numbers structure. The beats are recognisable: capture, resistance, escalation, and survival. Tension rises and falls in expected intervals, rarely deviating from the genre’s established blueprint.

Flashes Beneath the Surface

And yet, it would be reductive to dismiss Dolly entirely.

There are fleeting moments — brief, almost intrusive — where the film gestures toward a more complex identity. The central antagonist, portrayed with unnerving physicality by Max the Impaler, carries a disquieting blend of menace and arrested development. The idea of imposed infantilisation, of forced dependency, lingers as an underexplored but compelling thematic thread.

Similarly, the inclusion of dark humour — often abrupt, sometimes jarring — suggests a film aware of its own absurdity, even if it struggles to fully integrate that awareness into a cohesive tone.

Violence as Punctuation

Where Dolly finds its most immediate impact is in its bursts of gore. These moments arrive sporadically, punctuating the narrative with flashes of brutality that momentarily jolt the film to life.

They are effective, if fleeting — less a sustained atmosphere of dread than intermittent reminders of the stakes. In this sense, the film operates more as a sequence of peaks and valleys than a steadily mounting crescendo.

The Weight of Simplicity

The film’s greatest strength — its simplicity — ultimately becomes its limitation.

By adhering so closely to familiar genre mechanics, Dolly never quite earns the psychological depth it gestures toward. Its exploration of trauma, control, and identity remains surface-level, hinted at rather than interrogated.

Even performances from recognisable faces like Seann William Scott and Ethan Suplee feel underutilised, existing more as texture than as integral components of the narrative.

The Prognosis:

Dolly is a film caught between impulses — the desire to deliver straightforward genre thrills and the ambition to probe something darker, more psychological. It succeeds intermittently on both fronts, but never fully commits to either.

A serviceable slasher with flashes of twisted promise, where moments of gore and uneasy humour briefly break through an otherwise familiar and simplistic framework.

  • Saul Muerte

Dolly streams on Shudder from Fri 24th April.

Bad Taste as Baptism: Fuck My Son! (2026)

04 Saturday Apr 2026

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There are films that provoke… and then there are films that weaponise provocation as their entire identity.
Fuck My Son!, directed by Todd Rohal, firmly belongs in the latter camp — a grotesque, confrontational descent into taboo that feels less like storytelling and more like an endurance test.

Adapted from the underground comic by Johnny Ryan, the film embraces its origins with unapologetic aggression. Narrative coherence is secondary. Characterisation is almost incidental. What matters here is impact — how far it can push, how hard it can hit, and how long an audience can withstand the onslaught before recoiling.

The Aesthetics of Offence

Rohal’s approach is not without craft. In fact, what makes Fuck My Son! so confronting is how deliberately constructed it is. This is not chaos by accident — it is chaos curated.

The practical creature effects, in particular, demand attention. There is a tactile, squirm-inducing quality to the film’s physical grotesqueries that places it in lineage with boundary-pushing auteurs who understand that revulsion is most effective when it feels real. Flesh stretches. Fluids flow. The body becomes both canvas and battleground.

In an age of digital sanitisation, this commitment to the physical image is perversely admirable.

Taboo as Currency

But provocation, when used as currency, quickly devalues itself.

The film’s central conceit — deliberately offensive, aggressively transgressive — initially shocks, then unsettles, and eventually… numbs. Without thematic grounding or emotional counterpoint, the transgression begins to feel repetitive rather than revelatory.

This is where Fuck My Son! falters.

The most effective works of extreme cinema often use taboo as a gateway to deeper commentary — on society, morality, repression. Here, the suggestion of meaning is fleeting at best. The film gestures toward satire, but rarely commits to it.

Know Your Audience

And yet, to dismiss the film outright would be to misunderstand its purpose.

There is an audience for this. A dedicated, discerning subset of genre fans who seek out the extreme not for narrative satisfaction, but for experiential confrontation. For them, Fuck My Son! is not a failure — it is a badge of honour. A film to be survived, debated, and worn like a scar.

It is cinema as dare.

The Prognosis:

Fuck My Son! is not interested in pleasing you. It barely cares if you understand it. It exists to provoke, to repel, and to challenge the limits of what can be put on screen.

A technically committed but narratively hollow exercise in taboo, elevated by its practical effects and sustained only by the endurance of its audience.

  • Saul Muerte

Fuck My Son will be screening at select cinemas from Apr 9 for a limited time.

Filth, Flesh and Freedom: A Brief History of Trash Cinema

Blue Light Special on Mayhem: Revisiting Chopping Mall (1986)

23 Monday Mar 2026

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Few films capture the peculiar charm of 1980s B-movie excess quite like Chopping Mall, the gleefully silly sci-fi slasher directed by Jim Wynorski. Promising a blend of high-tech terror and consumerist satire, the film strands a group of teenagers in a shopping centre stalked by malfunctioning security robots. On paper, it’s a wonderfully ridiculous premise — Short Circuit by way of Dawn of the Dead — but the result is a somewhat uneven cult oddity that never quite lives up to its gleeful concept.

A Mall After Midnight

The setup is pure 1980s sci-fi pulp. The Park Plaza Mall installs a trio of sophisticated security robots — affectionately dubbed “Killbots” — designed to patrol the complex after hours. Naturally, the system works perfectly… until a lightning strike short-circuits the controls, turning the machines into lethal enforcers with a very loose definition of trespassing.

Meanwhile, a group of young mall employees decide to throw a secret after-hours party inside one of the stores. Predictably, their night of rebellious fun quickly transforms into a cat-and-mouse game as the robots begin hunting them through the darkened corridors.

It’s a premise that promises chaos and ingenuity, yet the film often settles for repetition. The Killbots trundle through the mall with mechanical persistence, firing lasers and delivering the occasional electrocution, while the teens scramble from store to store in search of escape.

Campy Energy, Limited Bite

To its credit, Chopping Mall embraces its B-movie identity with enthusiasm. Director Jim Wynorski, who would become a prolific figure in low-budget genre filmmaking, keeps the tone playful rather than frightening. The film operates firmly in the realm of camp rather than suspense.

Unfortunately, that playful spirit doesn’t always translate into momentum. Much of the middle section consists of characters hiding, running, or debating their next move while the robots slowly patrol the premises. The mechanical villains themselves — squat, boxy machines topped with blinking lights — look more like malfunctioning appliances than unstoppable killing machines.

The result is a film that feels more goofy than dangerous.

Barbara Crampton Brings Some Spark

One of the film’s more enjoyable elements is the presence of Barbara Crampton, who would soon become a beloved icon of 1980s horror thanks to films like Re-Animator and From Beyond. Even within the confines of a lightweight script, Crampton manages to bring charisma and a touch of sincerity to her role.

She stands out in a cast largely composed of archetypal 80s teens, providing moments of charm that briefly elevate the otherwise disposable proceedings.

Consumer Culture Meets Killer Robots

There’s also a faint whiff of satire running through the film’s premise. The idea of automated security systems turning on the very consumers they were designed to protect carries a subtle commentary about technological overreach and corporate obsession with efficiency.

Yet these ideas never develop beyond the surface level. Unlike Dawn of the Dead, which used the shopping mall as a biting critique of consumer culture, Chopping Mall seems more interested in using the setting as a convenient playground for laser blasts and exploding heads.

The film gestures toward satire but ultimately settles for spectacle.

A Mildly Amusing Cult Curio

Despite its shortcomings, Chopping Mall has endured as a minor cult favorite — and it’s easy to see why. The premise is delightfully absurd, the setting wonderfully nostalgic, and the film’s brisk runtime prevents the silliness from overstaying its welcome.

Still, nostalgia can only carry a film so far. While it offers a handful of entertaining moments and plenty of retro charm, the movie never quite capitalizes on the chaotic potential of its killer-robot-in-a-mall setup.

  • Saul Muetre

Link (1986) — When Intelligence Turns Hostile

08 Thursday Jan 2026

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Released in the mid-1980s, when natural horror and animal-attack films were enjoying a second life on VHS and late-night television, Link occupies an unusual and often overlooked position within the killer ape subgenre. Directed by Richard Franklin—best known for his Hitchcockian leanings and his brief but curious detour into franchise horror with Psycho II—the film is less interested in primal savagery than in the unnerving implications of intelligence, hierarchy, and control.

The setup flirts with eccentricity. Graduate student Jane Chase arrives at the isolated home of an ageing zoology professor, only to discover that the household hierarchy has already been rewritten. The professor’s chimpanzees operate with eerie autonomy, while Link, an elderly orangutan dressed and treated like a gentleman’s butler, observes quietly from the margins. When one chimp is found dead and the professor vanishes, Franklin slowly inverts the power dynamic. Jane is no longer studying behaviour—she is subject to it.

Franklin directs Link with a measured, classical restraint that sets it apart from the more exploitative entries in the killer ape cycle. There is little in the way of sensational gore or overt shock tactics. Instead, tension is built through framing, pacing, and a creeping sense of domestic invasion. The house becomes a laboratory, and Jane its most vulnerable test subject. The horror emerges not from sudden violence but from the dawning realisation that the apes understand far more than they should—and may be capable of resentment, planning, and cruelty.

Elisabeth Shue, still early in her career, delivers a performance that anchors the film’s escalating unease. Her Jane is intelligent and resourceful, but never impervious. Shue excels at conveying fear through restraint, allowing the terror to register in hesitation and watchfulness rather than outright hysteria. It’s a performance that would foreshadow her later genre credibility, grounding increasingly absurd situations in emotional reality.

Terence Stamp, meanwhile, brings an off-kilter gravitas to the role of the eccentric professor. Though his screen time is limited, his presence lingers over the film, lending it an air of intellectual arrogance and ethical negligence. Stamp embodies a familiar horror archetype: the man of science who mistakes authority for control, and curiosity for dominion. His disappearance feels less like a mystery than an inevitability.

Within the broader killer ape genre, Link sits closer to Monkey Shines than to more bombastic entries like Congo or Rampage. This is not a film about nature striking back in spectacular fashion, nor is it interested in giant monsters or environmental collapse. Instead, Link taps into a subtler fear—the idea that intelligence, once nurtured and confined, may turn possessive and violent when its boundaries are tested.

When Apes Strike Back: A Brief, Bloody History of Killer Ape Cinema

That said, the film is not without its shortcomings. The third act leans into melodrama, and the film’s central conceit occasionally strains credulity. The mechanics of ape behaviour are pushed beyond plausibility, and some of the symbolism—particularly around class, servitude, and dominance—remains underdeveloped. Franklin’s restraint, while admirable, sometimes blunts the film’s impact, leaving it hovering between psychological thriller and creature feature without fully committing to either.

Viewed in retrospect, Link is a solid, thoughtful entry in the killer ape canon—more curious than terrifying, more cerebral than visceral. It lacks the cultural weight of Planet of the Apes or the grindhouse audacity of exploitation-era ape horror, but it compensates with atmosphere, performance, and an unsettling moral undercurrent.

For readers interested in the broader lineage of killer ape cinema—where Link fits alongside films that interrogate humanity’s uneasy relationship with intelligence, dominance, and the natural world—this film acts as a quiet but essential connective tissue, bridging prestige thrillers and pulp horror traditions.

The Prognosis:

A restrained, intelligent thriller that favours implication over excess, Link remains a peculiar but worthwhile footnote in the long, uneasy history of killer apes on screen.

  • Saul Muerte