Hailing from Japan, director Kinji Fukasaku’s BATTLE ROYALE is a high-octane thriller, a combination of LORD OF THE FLIES and THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME. Under orders from the authoritarian government, 42 teenaged students are given weapons and forced to play a deadly game of survival.

Chuck Connors never asked for your pity. That said, one can’t help but catch the simplest whiff of off-camera tragedy surrounding his star turn in 1979’s TOURIST TRAP today. The headliner of such ’60s television Westerns as BRANDED had gone on record saying he accepted the role of demented Mr. Slausen in hopes of becoming the “Boris Karloff of the 80’s.” Watching Connors rave and rage through the film is to see a leading-man-in-decline struggling to reinvent himself on screen, a Tinseltown phoenix fighting to rise up from his own celluloid ashes.

A few weeks ago, I was meandering through a vintage store when I happened upon a videocassette of the movie GIRL SLAVES OF MORGANA LE FAY. With its cover stating that the film is “a classic of erotic horror,” I couldn’t pass up this potential Eurosleaze gem.

Mother knows best. Especially if you’re gawky Ronald Wilby (Scott Jacoby)—who, on his 16th birthday, accidentally crushes a little girl’s skull on a cinderblock and hastily buries her body in the shallowest of graves. Mom’s solution? Wall Ronald off in the spare bathroom of their house, sealing him in with plaster and gaudy floral-print wallpaper so that the police will never find him.