During my teen years (which weren’t too terribly long ago by my recollections, but are hopeless out of reach nonetheless), I was one of the world’s biggest fans of cheesy Italian horror films (it’s how I earned my Luigi Bastardo alias, actually). Whenever my friends would come over to my tiny basement apartment adorned with original horror movie posters, they could always expect two things: funky imported beer (courtesy of a source that shall remain undisclosed) and ever funkier films (courtesy of a mail-order service that believed I was of age). The combination of alcohol, cheesy Italian horror movie, and my cynical sense of humor (yes, I’ve always been like this) always made for a thrilling experience for us (or me, if I was flying solo — an event that happened far-too often).
Unfortunately, all of those thrills have long since disappeared. Occasionally, I find myself missing either the company of my old friends (most of whom have moved on or finally figured out that I’m sort of a strange guy) and the short-lived effects of funky beer (I’m lucky to get through an entire 12oz bottle of light beer these days without feeling tired). But moreover, I miss the thrill of sitting down and beholding a previously-unseen cheesy Italian horror film for the first time.
And then, I watched Joe D’Amato’s Horrible: a goofily groovy Italian horror film starring the great George Eastman as a large lumbering killer loose in a small American town. An escaped lunatic from a Greek laboratory (don‘t ask — just nod), Mikos Stenopolis (Eastman) has a rare blood type that automatically repairs any injuries (fatal or otherwise), making him an unstoppable killing machine.
When the movie opens, Mikos is being pursued by a priest (Edmund Purdom, a once-respected actor whose career was long gone by this point in time) through a small unnamed American town (which looks suspiciously like a small Italian village). As to how a murdering maniac like Mikos managed to board a plane and sit idly for the duration of his 13-hour flight without even so much as a passport is beyond anyone’s comprehension.
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