P - Pretty Women
For low budget film making, the Video Nasties sure do come up with some prize crumpet. This entry is dedicated to the finest honeys who took part in our favourite Nasties - often losing their lives to a maniac with a big knife or a hungry cannibal. First off, we have the delectable Me Me Lai starring as Ivan Rassimov's romantic interest in Deep River Savages. Me Me Lai is a half-Burmese actress who starred in a number of cannibal films in the 1970s including Eaten Alive. In Britain she is known for being co hostess of Golden Shot alongside Bob Monkhouse and also for her work on Sale of the Century. Ursula Andress, the stunning Bond Girl, takes the lead female role in Mountain of the Cannibal God in which the natives worship her as a goddess. Expose aka The House on Straw Hill featured British sex pot Fiona Richmond and much of the advertising for the film capitalised on the fact that she wrote a column in a sex magazine. A very young looking B-Movie Queen Linnea Quigley has a shower scene in Don't Go Near the Park. There are oodles of pretty ladies in Video Nasties. Scream queens about to be killed in gory but inventive ways.
Q - Quiver
Whenever a Nasty lives up to the hype, it is a truly marvellous thing. And Q should stand for quiver. The viewer should be a quivering wreck, watching the film behind a cushion, rooted to the sofa in terror. Several nasties achieve this state of being scared witless. For me, Last House on the Left manages to attain what the Texas Chainsaw Massacre did. A sustained level of high terror and tension in the viewer - with a 'we know that truly terrible things are going to endlessly happen' pit of horror feeling in the stomach. Cannibal Holocaust similarly produces quivering in the viewer. The threat of graphic violence is implicit in the movie from the very beginning. Driller Killer promises the relentless crumbling of Reno's sanity and the correlation of rising disturbing violent acts. Obviously everyone is scared by different things and what makes one person quiver in fear may not make another person similarly scared. But whenever you find that Nasty that pushes your buttons, then you know you are on to a good thing.