Mario Bava was an Italian filmmaker who worked variously as a director, cinematographer, special effects artist and screenwriter. His low-budget genre films, known for their distinctive visual flair and stylish technical ingenuity, feature recurring themes and imagery concerning the conflict between illusion and reality, as well as the destructive capacity of human nature. Widely regarded as a pioneer of Italian genre cinema and one of the most influential auteurs of the horror film genre, he is popularly referred to as the "Master of Italian Horror" and the "Master of the Macabre".
Michael Sopkiw is an American former actor who starred in four Italian B movies in two years. He was born in 1954 in Connecticut.
Blastfighter is a 1984 action film directed by Lamberto Bava starring Michael Sopkiw and George Eastman.
Lamberto Bava is an Italian film director. Born in Rome, Bava began working as an assistant director for his director father Mario Bava. Lamberto co-directed the 1979 television film La Venere d'Ille with his father and in 1980 directed his first solo feature film Macabre.
The Zuiyo-maru carcass was a corpse, caught by the Japanese fishing trawler Zuiyō Maru (瑞洋丸) off the coast of New Zealand in 1977. The carcass's peculiar appearance resulted in speculation that it might be the remains of a sea serpent or prehistoric plesiosaur.
Demons is a 1985 Italian supernatural horror film directed by Lamberto Bava, produced by Dario Argento, and starring Urbano Barberini and Natasha Hovey. The plot follows two female university students who, along with a number of random people, are given complimentary tickets to a mysterious movie screening, where they soon find themselves trapped in the theater with a horde of ravenous demons.
Dardano Sacchetti is an Italian screenwriter who often worked with Italian directors Lamberto Bava and Lucio Fulci.
Caltiki – The Immortal Monster is a 1959 black-and-white science fiction-horror film with similarities to The Blob that was released in the previous year. The film's storyline concerns a team of archaeologists investigating Mayan ruins, who come across a creature that is a shapeless, amorphous blob. They manage to defeat it using fire, while keeping a sample of the creature. Meanwhile, a comet, which previously passed near the Earth around the time of the collapse of the Mayan civilization, is due to return, raising the possibility of a connection between the creature and the comet.
Nightmare Castle is a 1965 Italian horror film directed by Mario Caiano. The film stars Paul Muller, Helga Liné and Barbara Steele in a dual role.
The Giant Behemoth is a 1959 British-American science fiction action horror film directed by Eugène Lourié, with special effects by Willis H. O'Brien, Pete Peterson, Irving Block, Jack Rabin, and Louis de Witt. The film stars Gene Evans and André Morell. The screenplay was written by blacklisted author Daniel Lewis James with director Lourié.
The She-Creature, or The She Creature, is a 1956 American black-and-white science fiction horror film, released by American International Pictures from a script by Lou Rusoff. It was produced by Alex Gordon, directed by Edward L. Cahn, and stars Chester Morris, Marla English and Tom Conway, and casting Frieda Inescort and El Brendel in smaller roles. The producers hired Marla English because they thought she bore a strong resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor.
Lisa and the Devil is a 1974 horror film directed by Mario Bava. The film was first released in Spain as El diablo se lleva a los muertos and stars Elke Sommer as a young tourist named Lisa who loses her way in Toledo and spends the night at a villa belonging to a mysterious countess and her son.
The Devil Commands is a 1941 American horror film directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Boris Karloff, Amanda Duff and Richard Fiske. The working title of the film was The Devil Said No. In it, a man obsessed with contacting his dead wife falls in with a sinister phony medium. The Devil Commands is one of the many films from the 1930s and 1940s in which Karloff was cast as a mad scientist with a good heart. It was one of the last in line of the low-budget horror films that were produced before Universal Studios' The Wolf Man. The story was adapted from the novel The Edge of Running Water by William Sloane.
Luigi Cozzi is an Italian film director and screenwriter. At a young age, Cozzi became a fan of science fiction and began his career as an overseas correspondent for Western film magazines. After directing his first film The Tunnel Under the World, Cozzi befriended director Dario Argento and began working with him in film and television as well as directing his own features including Hercules as well as continuing work with Argento. In the 2010s, he returned to directing with the film Blood on Méliès' Moon.
Shock is a 1977 Italian supernatural horror film directed by Mario Bava and starring Daria Nicolodi, John Steiner, and David Colin, Jr. Its plot focuses on a woman who moves into the home she shared with her deceased former husband, where she finds herself tormented by supernatural occurrences. It was Bava's last theatrical feature before he died of a heart attack in 1980.
Dagmar Lassander is a German actress.
The Ogre is a 1989 Italian television horror film directed by Lamberto Bava and written by Dardano Sacchetti. It was among four films made for the Italian television series Brivido Giallo. The film released outside of Italy as Demons III: The Ogre, where it was promoted as a sequel to Bava's films Demons and Demons 2.
Curse of the Swamp Creature is a 1968 American-made for television horror science fiction film directed by Larry Buchanan. Although Buchanan was producing low-budget 16mm color remakes of American International Pictures sci-fi movies for television distribution around this time, he claimed this was an original even though it bears more than a few striking similarities to the 1957 AIP film Voodoo Woman.
Rabid Dogs is an Italian thriller-noir film directed by Mario Bava, starring Riccardo Cucciolla, Don Backy, Lea Lander, Maurice Poli, George Eastman and Erika Dario. Taking place largely in real time, the film follows a trio of payroll robbers who kidnap a young woman and force a man with a sick child to be their getaway driver, all while trying to avoid being caught by the police.
Valentine Monnier is a French actress, model and photographer. She appeared on the September 1977 cover of Cosmopolitan magazine, and on the cover art of the album Chic, also in 1977. Monnier had an acting career in the 1980s: she played supporting roles in several French productions and had starring roles in two Italian B-movies. In the mid-1980s, she left acting to work primarily as a photographer. In a November 2019 interview, she accused film director Roman Polanski of violently raping her in Switzerland in 1975 when she was 18.
