Call it Il paese del sesso selvaggio (The Country of Savage Sex). Or refer to it as Deep River Savages and Sacrifice! Or just say it by the name most of the U.S. saw it as, Man from Deep River. Whatever title you see it as, you can claim to have seen the first movie in Italy’s cannibal cycle, which, like all filones, takes another, the mondo, and goes even further.

British photographer John Bradley (Ivan Rassimov, who was Serbian) has been photographing the Thai wildlife. A boxing match is more interesting to him than the woman he’s with and soon, he’s so drunk that he’s stabbing a man in a bar fight. Then, it’s time to go into the heart of darkness and go down the river. He wakes up, and his guide is dead, and he’s been taken, as the natives believe him to be a merman thanks to his wetsuit. 

After some torture, the chief Luhanà agrees to release John to Maraya (Burmese/British cannibal movie queen Me Me Lai), who has shown an interest in him. Her governess, Taima, speaks English and decides to help him escape. That night, a helicopter comes close, and John tries and fails to get away, killing Maraya’s fiancé, Karen. This, for some reason, makes him seem like he could be a member of the tribe, so they start to torture him all over again to see if he belongs. In case you’re wondering, yes, this would like you to think it’s A Man Called Horse.

By the end of the film, he’s had a child with Maraya, but she doesn’t make it. When the helicopter comes to rescue him again, he hides and goes deeper into the jungle, having left the world of civilization behind.

This film was a huge success in New York City’s grindhouses, but it ran into problems when it tried to cross the pond. Even though the BBFC took one look at the celluloid in ’75 and slammed the door on a theatrical release, the flick pulled a fast one, sneaking into UK homes under the title Deep River Savages. But you can’t keep a good exploitation film down for long without the moral crusaders noticing. By 1983, when the DPP was busy clutching their pearls and drafting the infamous Video Nasties list, Lenzi’s opus was right there in the crosshairs. Once the Video Recordings Act of 1984 became the law of the land, the UK government dropped the hammer. Deep River Savages wasn’t just trimmed. It was banned in its entirety until 2003, when three minutes were cut. In 2016, another release saw three more minutes chopped with the same disdain that animals are sliced to bits in this. In the U.S., this got an R rating.

Director Umberto Lenzi really hit almost every filone Italy had to offer, from peplum (Samson and the Slave Queen) and Eurospy (008: Operation Exterminate, SuperSeven Calling Cairo) to comic book movies (Kriminal, Tarzan In the Golden Grotto), giallo (Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, Eyeball, Spasmo), pliziotteschi (The Tough Ones), Conan rip-offs (Ironmaster), horror (Ghosthouse, Nightmare Beach) and even VHS era cash-ins (Primal Rage, Hitcher In the Dark). He also made two more cannibal films, Eaten Alive! (which takes scenes from this film) and Cannibal Ferox, which was released in the U.S. as Make Them Die Slowly. 

In case you’re wondering about that scene where Me Me Lai gets raw-dogged on the ashes of her dead fiancé, it’s based on truth and isn’t just the kind of transgressive imagery we expect in Italian movies. It’s based on a traditional African ritual known as widow cleansing. In the internal logic of the culture, a woman becomes dirty when her husband dies. She’s essentially a walking biohazard of bad luck and grief, supposedly possessed by the lingering spirit of the deceased. To stop this curse from spreading like a supernatural virus through the rest of the village, the widow has to be scrubbed clean and the only way to wash away the shadows of the dead is through a three-day marathon of unprotected sex with a purifier, who is usually the dead guy’s brother.

A warning: For many fans of cult and exploitation cinema, scenes of real animal death are often the ones that make the movie difficult to revisit. Here is the breakdown of the animals killed on screen in this film:

• A Crocodile: This is one of the film’s more protracted and famous scenes. The animal is dragged from the water, bound and then cut open and gutted while still alive.
• A Python/Large Snake: The snake is decapitated during a sequence intended to show the dangers of the jungle.
• A Monkey: In a scene that reflects the survival tropes of the genre, a monkey is killed and its brain is eaten by the characters.
• A Mongoose vs. Cobra: True to the mondo style that influenced Lenzi, there is a sequence featuring a fight between a mongoose and a cobra that ends with the snake’s death.

While Man from Deep River is often praised for its lush cinematography and for being more of a fish-out-of-water adventure than the later, more mean-spirited cannibal films like Cannibal Holocaust (intended as a Lenzi-directed sequel, but he turned it down twice), the inclusion of these non-simulated animal deaths remains its most controversial element.

The Florida-based director William Grefe has brought many swamp-tinged bits of exploitation goodness — or badness — to the screen, including Alligator Alley, The Wild Rebels, The Hooked Generation and many more. As one of the first films to capitalize on the shark craze in the wake of Spielberg’s success, this film’s sympathetic view of sharks as victims is a pretty unique take on the genre.

Marine salvager Sonny Stein (Richard Jaeckel, who pretty much had a one-man war against nature with him battling bats in Chosen Survivors, bears in Grizzly and, well, any and all beasts with a chip on their shoulder in Day of the Animals) is given a medallion that allows him to communicate with sharks. He becomes increasingly disconnected from humanity — easy to do, since everyone in this movie is scum — and uses his sharks to take out those who oppose his beliefs.

One of those people is an incredibly chubby club owner who is using high-frequency sound to train his sharks and kind of pimping out his wife, Karen (Jennifer Bishop, Bigfoot), to get Sonny on their side. Have you ever seen a movie where strippers have been trained to swim with sharks? Who would want to see that? This movie provides the what, if not the why.

Another is a shady shark researcher, Whitney, who murders a shark and her pups for “science.” You will stare, unbelievingly, at the screen as Jaeckel overemotes, clutching a dead baby shark in his mitts. Oh yeah — Harold “Oddjob” Sakata is also in this, playing a character named Pete who ends up on the wrong side of a shark’s teeth while trying to poach Sonny’s friends.

The stunt footage is pretty amazing and even gets a mention before the movie even begins, boasting that no mechanical sharks were used. Other than the weird premise and a few good scenes, you can nap through most of this and not feel bad, though you might wake up when Sonny tells his shark buddy Sammy that he can’t help it if he was born a man.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Much like The Wizard of Oz, The Magic Christmas Tree believes reality is in black and white, while dreams are in color. Both films have a witch. Both movies have wishes. But only one of them had a budget. And only one of them is a classic beloved by families for generations.

Sorry, Richard C. Parish. Your one-and-done directorial effort isn’t getting a 4K re-release this year. Or any year, really.

In the black-and-white real world, three boys are walking home from school on Halloween. One of them, Mark, helps a witch get her cat Lucifer out of a tree. The moment someone told me I had to climb a tree to save a demonic cat, I would honestly be out of there, but Mark instead falls out of the tree and gets knocked out.

When he wakes up, the witch gives him a magic ring, as well as some magic seeds that need to be planted. On Thanksgiving, while everyone else is sleeping off the turkey, Mark is combining the turkey wishbone with the magic seeds, the magic words and the magic ring to grow the magic Christmas tree. His turtle Ichabod just watches in terror as Mark engages in a rite of eroto-comatose lucidity.

This tree that grows is unkillable, even when Mark’s dad cuts the grass in the middle of November. I guess we should assume that they live in California. Also — Mark’s dad is played by the director, and his dialogue appears to appear as if by magic. In fact, this entire film appears dubbed even when it isn’t.

While Ichabod the turtle eats the grass, Dad has a wacky grass-cutting session that ends with the mower in flames and him acting drunk. The way he talks to his wife gives you a good idea of how he really treats her. This film cuts deeply into the dark underbelly of post-war America. The dream is dead. The power mower is in flames. The Christmas tree is alive.

That’s right. On Christmas Eve, the Magic Tree comes to life and can talk. It grants Mark three wishes. The Magic Christmas Tree also speaks with all the snark and pomp of Charles Nelson Reilly. Seriously, it’s as if the tree has seen it all and is bored with this charade. He’s merely indulging Mark.

Now, Mark’s a smart kid, so he wishes for an hour of absolute power, which he promptly is corrupted by absolutely. That said, he’s not that smart, because why wish for only an hour? Just wish for absolute power. Don’t put any limits on it, Mark. And don’t talk to trees.

What does Mark do with all that power? He makes flowers appear and disappear. Mark has obviously not gone through puberty, because if I had a magic power in 1964, I would have used the entire hour with Barbara Steele. Or Mamie Van Doren. Or Bardeau. Ah, you get the picture, even if Mark doesn’t.

Instead, he makes people run all over the place and throw pies in one another’s faces, but the camera is so far away you may wonder exactly what’s happening. It’s all kind of like Benny Hill, but terrifying instead of madcap. Firemen get pies in their faces while their antique engines careen out of control. Happy holidays, La Verne, California. Hope you survive the experience.

Yes, the same town where the wedding scene in The Graduate was shot (and Wayne’s World 2) is subject to the Magic Christmas Tree, gifting Mark with the power to be a complete jerk.

Mark’s second wish is to have Santa Claus all to himself. He couldn’t think of any other wishes. I mean, you have any power in the world, and you can’t think of a wish?

Santa really seems like he’s senile. He also seems like he can’t stand up from the chair he’s stuck in.

This wish makes every other child in the world very sad, so Mark uses his third wish to send Santa back to the children. That’s because he’s sent to a pocket dimension where his selfishness leads him to meet the very embodiment of Greed. The giant man yells, “You are my little boy!” and offers him a mountain of cake and toys to stay.

Greed is played by Pittsburgh native Robert “Big Buck” Maffei, who uses his 7’1″ frame to his advantage, playing monsters and aliens in a ton of television shows and movies, including a creature (actually a Taurus II anthropoid) in “The Galileo Seven” episode of Star Trek and the giant cyclops on Lost In Space. His last movie appearance was in Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams.

Mark gives Santa back to the children. But of course, it was all a dream. A horrible, horrible dream. Mark may have learned something. Maybe we all did.

The bastards at Goodtimes released this on VHS in 1992, pairing it with Rene Cardona’s Santa Claus. I can’t imagine a more horrifying double feature ever — the battle of Santa and Patch directed by the man who brought you Night of the Bloody Apes, paired with this film that feels like it was shot on one of those Price Is Right Showcase Showdown sets with all of the lights turned out.

You can watch this for free on The Internet Archive and Tubi. I would advise you to avoid it and ensure that your Christmas Day isn’t filled with relentless horror.

Before he made The Beast Within and Howling II, Philipe Mora made this movie about Dan Morgan, who roamed the New South Wales bush under a revolving door of aliases, including Billy the Native, Warrigal and Down-the-River Jack.

Dan Morgan didn’t just walk through the New South Wales bush; he haunted it. Operating under a revolving door of aliases like Billy the Native, Warrigal and Down-the-River Jack, he was less a man with a grudge and more a one-man insurgency against the Crown.

By August 1863, the authorities had reached their breaking point after Morgan plugged police magistrate Henry Baylis during a high-stakes shootout. As his rap sheet grew longer and his methods bloodier, the government placed a bounty on his head that eventually ballooned to £1,000, which was a fortune at the time. By March 1865, he was officially declared an outlaw under the Felons Apprehension Act, making him “fair game” for any citizen with a rifle.

His reign of terror ended abruptly a month later at Peechelba Station in Victoria. While Morgan was busy holding up the homestead, a stockman crept through the shadows and shot him in the back.

History has painted Morgan as a Mad Dog, a bloodthirsty, erratic lunatic who probably didn’t need much of a reason to pull the trigger. But here’s the thing that makes for a great movie: despite being a total headcase, he was a wizard in the woods. His bushcraft skills and horsemanship were legendary and he had a network of sympathizers who kept him hidden from the law for two years. He was a folk hero to some and a monster to others, which is exactly why he fits right in here.

Based on the book Morgan: The Bold Bushranger by Margaret Frances Carnegie, the film drips with authenticity. Carnegie actually assisted Mora in scouting the real-life locations where Morgan’s crimes took place, lending the movie a haunting, topographical realism.

The narrative kicks off with Dan Morgan (played with unhinged intensity by Dennis Hopper) witnessing a horrific massacre of Chinese immigrants on the goldfields. This trauma, followed by a brutal prison sentence where he is victimized and broken, serves as the catalyst for his transformation. He doesn’t just decide to rob people; he decides to declare war on a world that offered him no mercy.

If the onscreen performance feels volatile, it’s because the offscreen reality was just as chaotic. Dennis Hopper was at the height of his lost years, fueled by substances and a total commitment to the role.

At teh end of the shoot, Mora claims that Hopper lived up to being, well, Dennis Hopper: “Rode off in costume, poured a bottle of O.P. rum into the real Morgan’s grave in front of my mother Mirka Mora, drank one himself, got arrested and deported the next day, with a blood-alcohol reading that said he should have been clinically dead, according to the judge studying his alcohol tests.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

What was in the water in the late 70s and early 80s that we got so many movies about attractive women upsetting the balance of power in the food truck, gas station and restaurant industries? See: Swap Meet, Starhops, The Car Hops, Gas Pump Girls….

Directed by Ernest Pintoff (the director of Jaguar Lives!) and written by Marshall Harvey, Terrie Frankel and Leon Phillips, this has three ladies — Marcy (Pamela Jean Bryant, Don’t Answer the Phone), Shannon (Rosanne Katon, The Swinging Cheerleaders) and Diedre (Candy Moore) — working at Andy’s (George Memmoli) gas station. He’s a peeper, he’s a creep, and soon they inherit a food truck from Dick Van Patten, uncredited as Bernie Simmons, but he’s probably there to see his kids, Nels and James, who were in the cast. They rename it Love Bites, and hijinks ensue.

This has horrible stand-up and the Missing Persons (who are also U.S. Drag on the soundtrack, which has “Mental Hopscotch” and “I Like Boys”) showing up throughout. Rose Marie from Dick Van Dyke? She’s here, too. So is Louisa Moritz, who was Myra in Death Race 2000, Carmela in The Last American Virgin, Chi Chi in Hot Chili and Bubbles in Chained Heat. 

In honor of the film’s opening, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley proclaimed September 11, 1981, to be Lunch Wagon Day, which included a parade of eighty lunch wagons. But it was more than just trucks; it was a full-scale Hollywood event. Starting at Hollywood and La Brea, the parade featured the Hollywood High School cheerleaders, stuntmen, the film’s star  and even Playboy Bunnies riding in a Mercedes 450 SL, handing out t-shirts. 

The gimmicks didn’t stop there. During the premiere, promoters reportedly gave out Smell-O-Vision cards to crowds waiting in line.

Also known as Come and Get It, this fits into a very specific window where independent producers realized that scrappy women vs. the system was a goldmine. It takes the male-dominated, grease-stained environment, adds a trio of charismatic leads and lets them outsmart everyone while upbeat synth-pop plays. I’m not sad for the time I spent watching.

You can watch this on YouTube.