Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

'Absurd' is Joe D'Amato's follow-up to the notorious 'Antropophagus' and it often referred to as its sequel. However, apart from the same director and having the looming George Eastman once again wandering around killing people, there is very little similarity save the fact they are both poor films…with 'Absurd' definitely trumping its predecessor in the low quality stakes. Gone is the setting on a remote and eerily empty Greek island which characterised 'Antropohagus ', instead supplanting the (so-called) action to a small American town. In doing this, 'Absurd' is clearly going for a 'Halloween' nightmare-in-suburbia vibe…but in lacking any of the character development, script, or technical craft of Carpenter's flick, 'Absurd' flails about limply with a lame premise, zero suspense, and only manages to glimpse redemption (albeit unattained) with the make-up effects on the kills…which is no doubt why is got on the DPP's list of Video Nasties.The plot (as some would have it) is that Eastman has undergone a scientific procedure which has enabled his body to regenerate itself quickly (a la Wolverine) and consequently can only be killed with a shot to the head. Oh, and he's insane. As such, a killing spree ensues and the Priest-cum-scientist who "created" him hooks up with the town Sheriff to hunt him down. The showdown takes place in a house with a girl (for some reason) recovering from a spinal operation, her nurse, and a really annoying kid. I've always found a house to be a great setting for a suspenseful horror movie (e.g. 'Last House on the Left' (1972), 'Black Christmas' (1974), 'Halloween' (1978)) but the pacing of 'Absurd' is so slow and the acting so bad on all counts that none of the suspense and tension which is so abundantly present in these other movies even threatens to show its head…let alone eviscerate you.Okay, putting on my positive cap: some of the kills are pretty cool e.g. the buzzsaw-in-the-head scene as well as the oven scene, and the soundtrack has its moments…but even in a 90 minute film with competent acting and a decent story this wouldn't cut it, let alone a movie as deplorable as this. The film is quite hard to come by as it hasn't been reissued in the UK, which maybe adds a mystique to it but, as far as video nasties go, it's clear that boredom more than moral outrage is the reason why.

D'Amato's 1981 Rosse Sangue is a retread/rehash/remake-come-sequel to his previous year's cannibal classic Anthropophagus, again with George Eastman starring as a great, lumbering, murdering maniac, this time terrorising a small American town. The beast's penchant for munching on human flesh seems to have abated, replaced by a mechanical desire to kill everyone he comes into contact with. As usual with D'Amato, the magpie instinct leads him to not only rip-off his own work but also liberally steal from the work of others – with its seemingly supernatural beast-man haunting smalltown America, stalking babysitters and pursued by an "expert" who knows what he is and what he's capable of, Rosso Sangue aka Horrible aka Absurd aka Anthropophagus 2 is a dead ringer for the first two Halloween films. The festival of All Hallows Night is replaced here by that most American of ritual traditions, the televised event football game.The beast here bears some affinities with a zombie – he is dead, and the only way to kill him is to attack his cerebral cortex – go for the brain. He is pursued by a priest (played by that lovely old ham Edmund Purdom) who fulfils the same dramatic function as Pleasance's Dr Sam Loomis in the Halloween films. We first see the beast being pursued through a park by the padre, and our creature only manages to escape his clutches by leaping over a gate guarding the house of a wealthy family, ripping his beastly stomach open in the process. Imagine the family's surprise when Eastman comes ringing on their doorbell with his intestines hanging from his gut! Various twists and turns ensue, with the beast taken to hospital and then escaping to rampage, all ending up in the predictable stalking of the same house whilst the parents are out and the babysitter looks after the kids (in this case a Hair Bear-haired boy and a paraplegic young woman).The family and their house is worth commenting on. The house is slap bang in the middle of America, yet it is filled with the accoutrements of old Europe – antique furniture, a decorative suit of armour, a grand piano, figurative art. This brings to mind Franz Fanon's mid-twentieth century comment that "Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions." The family who live in the house would seem to bear this out – the parents have a loveless marriage, the father is a callous businessman who drives away from a hit and run, the son is a strange little brute given to throwing tantrums when not allowed to get his own way; his father appropriately greets him with "hello, monster!" As with Anthropophagus, it appears that D'Amato is encouraging us to see the rampaging beast as the truth about his victims. But he also doesn't let us off the hook – we get a long, cold shot of the son sat writhing on his sofa as he watches a Joe D'Amato film! The final contrasts the parents sitting, guilt-ridden and anxious, watching the football game with neighbours as the monster turns their children's and employees' lives into a Darwinian struggle for survival. The pampered, cared-for paraplegic daughter is forced to get up from her bed and not merely walk but fight for her life; the final shot shows us that, in order to survive, the decadent bourgeoisie of American will find the same solutions as old Testament-inspired old Europe, as having beheaded the monster in medieval fashion, the daughter holds his severed head, standing as mad, proud and strident as Judith with the head of Holofernes.The padre has confessed that the monster is the product of an unlikely alliance between modern genetic science and old time religion. This monster is America itself. Despite the film's longueurs and incessant cinematic theft, D'Amato does manage to come up with another provocative, in-yer-face insult to the self-image of so-called civilised contemporary mankind.

Another in the list of infamous banned Video Nasties, Absurd(or whatever you wish to call it) is in many ways similar to Halloween and Halloween 2(the originals--not the Rob Zombie visual abortions). Of course, you could say Halloween is a rip-off of Fright(1971) with more of the "babysitter-in-peril" theme being explored. However, Absurd only involves the babysitter(s) to any serious degree more than halfway through the film. In the meantime, we get a few of the best kills of the film, with hulking George Eastman sort-of reprising his role as an indestructible Greek man with rather unusual healing abilities.I enjoyed the score, though it got annoying at times. Something like Carpenter's score for Halloween, it was more akin to the intro music to the Incredible Hulk TV show with a repeating piano tidbit. The direction was adequate. I enjoy a lot of Joe D'Amato's work. Compared to it's sort-of predecessor, Anthropophagus, this film is actually tame. There are no scenes of fetus ripping or self-mastication. On that front, Anthropophagus really excels, but as story lines and pacing go, I feel Absurd was better. Oh, there are a few gratuitous scenes of a televised football game(and I was rather surprised they used the actual game's announcers instead of dubbing something else) that kill some time between scenes.Really, I only have a few beefs with this movie, overall. First, I didn't much care for the oven scene. It took forever! And it was a very sloppy way for a maniac to dispose of someone. And when she was stabbed with the shears, you don't get to see anything good. I was expecting a little more from Eastman's fight with the priest.The best moments, besides the kills, are during the "chase" sequence at the finale. This is probably the best part of the film.If you like Italian splatter films, hunt down this gem which has only just now become available on DVD under the title Horrible(one of many confusing titles, I assure you).

A monster (read - Homicidal Man) with regenerative powers that are 'absurd' - IE stab him and it won't stop him, you have to completely mash his brain to do that - goes on a minor rampage in a small American town.This film almost sent me to sleep at times. I don't believe that Joe D'Amato was much of a director, just prolific. When he does make films I like (EG - Buio Omega, Anthrophagus), I'm tempted to thank mostly his persistence with exploitatively gory subject matter. For every half-decent film he's made, he's also made two more that sucked, and that isn't a good batting average. There's not even much consensus on his good films. I'm a fan of Anthropophagus, but I know for a fact that it bores a lot of people, and I can understand why. In any case, Absurd is just too obnoxiously stupid and uneven to earn much of a place in my heart, no matter how blitzkriegy its violence.D'Amato seems to have had no overview of his films before piecing them together. In Absurd, soporific longeurs are broken up by overblown murder set-pieces. The killings are undoubtedly nasty (bandsaw through the head, axe in the head, head in the oven, etc.) but the director offers so little explanation as to why/how these killings occur that the film doesn't feel horrifying, just ridiculous. George Eastman is competently creepy as the monster, but we know almost nothing about his character, and he goes out of his way to kill each victim in the gruesomest way he can, no matter how impractical that course of action might be. My main reaction to this approach was laughter. Every now and then I caught myself liking the film's brutality, but so often it's just boring, stupid or silly, limply structured - annoying.The film may end up being memorable for not very good reasons, but the reality is that it's pretty crap.