VideoXploiter The choppy editing made this jarring to watch at times. Within a split-second of a character finishing their line of dialogue we cut to another scene. There is also a waste of a rather distinguished actor - Donald Pleasance, while a legend, seemed to old for this role. The plot left me unimpressed as well - by the end of the movie the rapidly-aging killer was so decrepit, his ability to physically harm anyone seemed implausible. At least we get Edwige Fenech, who was still ravishing by this point. You also get to see some sort-of ninjas, which later leads to an always welcome decapitation. I'd skip this one, and watch some giallo from the golden-age, like 'Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key' or 'The Case of the Bloody Iris'.

adriangr A successful pianist, surrounded by beautiful female admirers, is dogged by a string of murders that seem to follow him around. The movie follows him as his life begins to unravel. I admire Shameless for bringing these movies out for us to experience, but this is not a good film. It's badly made, and it looks AND sounds horrible. The sound quality is really bad, the volume leaps between low muffled spoken dialogue one minute, to heavy, blaring orchestral music the next. I was playing with the TV remote to whole time to compensate for this. And when stars Michael York and Donald Pleasance speak their lines, the audio quality is appalling - totally different to the person they are having a conversation with. Donald Pleasance in particular speaks in every scene (no matter where he is) with the tonal quality of being in an echoey, tiled chamber, while everyone else's vocals sound really close and flat. There's no way to get immersed in the performances with sloppy dubbing like this.The editing and flow of the various scenes is also really bad. Case in point, the scene when one victim is knifed at a train station, the scene carries through her death scene to the police arriving, body being covered up and Michael York watching in anguish, with the same intense score, as though these thing are all happening at the same time. That's not artistic, thats bad movie crafting. Michael York (as the main character) seems to dash all over the place with no sense of any real time passing. You'd think that with the experience that director Deodato has under his belt, there would be a bit more polish than this. So what are we left with? Some splashy but cheap gore (who has a bedroom lampshade with a 2ft spike on it?), some attractive ladies who's appeal is sadly ruined by terrible late 1980's fashion disasters. The acting is dire. The killer seems to have no motive for the way he is behaving. Donald Pleasance looks troubled and unwell the entire time. Michael York is shrill and hammy. Sorry, but I'd give this one a miss. You are very likely to lose interest before the whole sorry thing limps to a close.

Coventry Unusual giallo, directed by one of Italy's finest horror filmmakers, and revolving on a truly ingenious and original topic, namely a murderer who commits his crimes because he can't accept the extremely rare disease that is destroying him physically and emotionally. Robert Dominici is a genius pianist, also practicing an eminent oriental fighting sport, suddenly stricken with a terrible illness that causes him to age rapidly. Leaving a trail of frustrated and extremely gore murders in the city, inspector Tati (Donald Pleasance pretending to be Italian, again!) has tremendous difficulties, as the forensic lab tests indicate a gradually older culprit each time. "Phantom of Death" is not Deodato's best film (that honor unquestionably goes to "Cannibal Holocaust") but it's a well-made and occasionally very tense thriller with good special effects and loads of streaming red liquid. It wouldn't be an Italian flick if the murders weren't extraordinary gross, right? We've got a couple of slit throats and one poor girl is violently thrown through a window. The acting performances are rather impressive, with Michael York being the personification of pure agony. Even more impressive are Edwige Fenech's looks! This giallo was made 18 years after her initial successes in the genre ("All the Colors of the Dark", "The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh"), but she still looks exactly as gorgeous as she did back then. I guess she's definitely NOT suffering from the rapid-ageing virus...

Woodyanders The usually insipid and unexceptional Michael York gives a surprisingly good performance -- intense, anguished, severely tormented and even fairly touching -- as a melancholy pianist suffering from a rare ailment which causes him to age at an alarmingly accelerated rate, making poor Mikey transform into an increasingly ugly, balding, rot-toothed, wizened old pruneface ghoul. Mike subsequently goes lethally batty nuts and starts viciously killing beautiful young ladies who possess the youthful vitality and pulchritude he's rapidly losing. Late, great fright flick favorite Donald Pleasence, who often gave feverishly wired, riveting, fabulously idiosyncratic performances in almost every last movie he acted in, proves to be curiously phlegmatic and underwhelming as the concerned homicide detective investigating the brutal murders York commits.While the killings are nastily satisfying (women have their throats cut wide open so blood can spew forth in a thick arterial crimson torrent), there are a few fairly steamy and explicit sex scenes, and the production values are both solid and polished, "Phantom of Death" fails to make the cut as a total success due to draggy pacing, uninteresting characters (although York is rather pitiable, he's overall far too arrogant to be wholly sympathetic and Pleasence's obsessive policeman never rises above the level of a flat one-note cipher), so-so make-up f/x, and a grindingly predictable by-the-numbers plot. Ruggero Deodato's direction manages to be competent throughout, but never amounts to anything more than merely acceptable and surprisingly unremarkable; the distinctly mean, unrelenting kick-you-in-the-teeth potent ferocity which distinguished such previous pictures as "Jungle Holocaust," "Cannibal Holocaust" and "The House on the Edge of the Park" is largely absent here. The gorgeous Edwige Fenich looks positively smashing as York's caring French girlfriend, plus there are nifty cameos by legendary spaghetti splatter whipping boy John Morghen as a priest and Deodato himself as a creepy dude at a train station. To sum up, this one's strictly decent and diverting, but nothing terribly special or noteworthy.