Emilio Paolo Miraglia created two gialli — this film and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times. This one goes deeper into the horror realm than the genre’s typical themes. For example, instead of a modern city or a fashion house, we get a crumbling, mist-shrouded estate filled with secret passages and family curses.

Lord Alan Cunningham starts this movie off by running away from an insane asylum, a place he’s been since the death of his redheaded wife, Evelyn, whom he caught having sex with another man. To deal with his grief, Alan does what any of us would do — pick up redhead prostitutes and strippers, tie them up, then kill them.

A seance freaks Alan out so badly he passes out, so his cousin — and only living heir — Farley moves in to take care of him, which basically means going to strip clubs and playing with foxes. Alan nearly kills another stripper before Farley gives him some advice — to get over Evelyn, he should marry someone who looks just like her. Alan selects Gladys (Marina Malfatti, All the Colors of the Dark) as his new wife and comes back home.

Sure, you meet someone one night and marry them the next. But nothing could compare to the weirdness of living in an ancient mansion with a staff of identical waitresses, Evelyn’s brother, and Alan’s wheelchair-bound aunt. Our heroine is convinced that Evelyn is not dead. And the other family members get killed off — Albert with a snake, and Agatha is eaten by foxes!

Gladys even looks at the body in the tomb before Alan catches her and slaps the shit out of her, as he is going crazier and crazier. Finally, Evelyn rises from her grave, which sends him back to a mental institution.

The big reveal? Gladys and Farley were in on it all along. But wait, there’s more! Susan, the stripper who survived Alan’s attack, was the one who was really Evely, and Gladyshads had been poisoned! Before she dies, the lady who we thought was our heroine wipes out the stripper, and Farley gets away with the perfect crime.

But wait! There’s more! Alan had faked his breakdown and did it all so that he could learn that it was Farley who was making love to his wife and killed her when she refused to run away with him. A fight breaks out, and Farley gets burned by acid. He’s arrested, and Alan — who up until now was pretty much the villain of this movie — gets away with all of his crimes!

This is a decent thriller, but it really feels padded in parts and tends to crawl. That said, it has some great music, incredibly decorated sets and some twists. Not my favorite giallo, but well worth a Saturday afternoon watch. There are moments of sheer beauty here, such as the rainstorm in which Alan sees Evelyn’s ghost rise.

The ending remains one of the most cynical in the genre. Usually, the killer is caught, and justice is served; here, Alan—a man who spent the first forty minutes of the movie torturing and murdering innocent women—is essentially framed as the hero because he outsmarted his even greedier cousin. It’s a dark, twisted piece of Euro-cult cinema that prioritizes style and shock over moral resolution.

Oh René Cardona. Here you are remaking the lucha libre movie you did back in 1962, Las Luchadoras Contra el Medico Asesino, or The Wrestling Women vs. the Killer Doctor or Doctor of Doom, as it was called in the U.S.

While this was made in 1969 as La Horripilante Bestia Humana, or The Horrible Man-Beast, this one didn’t play in the U.S. until 1972. With alternate titles like Horror y Sexo and Gomar – The Human Gorilla, this is a fine blend of ladies wrestling with apes and, well, human heart surgery footage.

Rene is also known for his films Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy, the incredibly baffling Santa Claus and Survive!, a movie all about plane crashes and cannibalism.

Female masked wrestler, Lucy, dresses like the devil and wrestles at the arena — dare we say Arena Mexico? — every Friday, where she often knocks out other girls who dress like cat girls. She wants to retire for a life of leisure — and less stress — with her cop boyfriend.

However, Dr. Krellman (Jose Elias Moreno, who was Santa Claus in the aforementioned film in which he battled Patch the demon) wants to cure his son of leukemia. So he does what doctors have always said would work—puts a gorilla heart inside his boy. As we all know from health class, this turns his son into a deformed and murderous man-ape with the craziness of the organ donor to boot.

The inclusion of actual, grainy footage of a human heart transplant was a common shocker tactic in Latin American and European exploitation of the time. It provides a stomach-churning realism that clashes wildly with the rubbery, sweaty Gorilla-Man makeup.

You won’t be bored, what with the nudity, real open heart surgery and rampant murders. A monkey man that rips off dudes’ faces and the clothes of girls? Si, muchacho.

This made the Section 1 video nasties list, probably because its VHS cover art had a bloody surgeon’s hands holding a scalpel with the words “Warning: this film contains scenes of extreme and explicit violence.”

Night of the Bloody Apes is a bizarre cocktail of genres that shouldn’t work, yet remains endlessly watchable. It manages to be a sports movie, a medical thriller, a monster flick and a procedural all at once.

You can watch this for free on Tubi.

If you want to see what Donald Pleasence movies I’ve seen, here’s the Letterboxd list. I love him because he was a working actor. Like John Carradine, he was there when you needed him. And at times, he’d show just how good he was. But he’s a workmanlike — in a good way — presence in so many movies.

Directed by Lee Madden (The Night God Screamed, the Alan Smithee who made Ghost Fever) and written by Hugh Smith (second unit director of Abby, writer of The Glove), Night Creature has Pleasence as Axel MacGregor, a writer and big game hunter who has unleashed a deadly black panther and doomed everyone around him which is a real problem as his daughters Leslie (Nancy Kwan, Wonder Women) and Georgia (Jennifer Rhodes) have just come to town along with Ross (Ross Hagen, who also produced this movie), a guide who seems pretty sleazy.

All this movie should be about is Pleasence hunting the animal that already hurt him, and he’s brought it to his turf for one last battle. You have the great thespian monologuing and trying to imitate the big beast and man, his eyes bugging out, and him snarling, and that’s the best.

At times, I’m given to just yelling out Pleasence line reads, like “The evil is gone” and “I shot him six times.” I celebrate him eating at a salad bar in 90s giallo. I’ve read that he drank through this entire movie, and I in no way want to judge him for that. My memories of the actor are always wonderful, and he lives again every time someone watches one of his films, whether he’s playing a President, the devil or a preacher who turns into a warthog.

You know those movies that feel like a cold, damp fog rolling off the English Channel? The ones where everyone wears thick knit sweaters and looks like they haven’t seen a sunbeam since the late sixties? That’s Neither the Sea Nor the Sand. It’s a romance from beyond the grave flick that treats romance with the bleak, grey reality of a rotting corpse that just won’t quit you.

Anna Robinson (Susan Hampshire) is having a rough go of it. She’s ditched her husband and fled to the island of Jersey to get her head straight. While wandering the dunes, she meets Hugh Debernon (Michael Jayston). They fall into that kind of intense, us-against-the-world love that usually ends in a double suicide or a very awkward Thanksgiving. Speaking of awkward, Hugh’s brother George is a religious zealot who thinks Anna is basically the Whore of Babylon in a trench coat.

The lovers head to Scotland for some “Is this just an affair?” soul-searching. Hugh promises it’s the real deal, but then—boom—he drops dead on a beach while playing tag. The local doc checks the pulse, signs the papers and calls it a day. Anna, understandably, loses her mind with grief.

But then Hugh just… gets up and walks back into the house that night.

Anna is thrilled and thinks the doctor was a quack. The audience, however, sees Hugh’s thousand-yard stare and realizes he’s basically a flesh-puppet for Anna’s sheer willpower. The trip back to Jersey marks the end of the honeymoon. Hugh has stopped talking entirely. He just sits there, staring at Anna with eyes that say, “I’m currently decomposing.“

George isn’t buying the miracle story. He’s convinced Anna is a witch who conjured an evil spirit to pilot his brother’s meat-suit. To prove it, he literally burns Hugh’s hand to see if he flinches. (Spoiler: He doesn’t. Hugh starts “talking” to Anna in her head. He pretends to go along with George’s plan for an exorcism, but during the car ride to see the priest, Hugh uses his zombie-psychic powers to run George’s car off a cliff. There’s even some Bewitched sound effects!

The cops show up to tell Hugh his brother is dead, leading to a truly bizarre scene where Anna hands over Hugh’s own death certificate from Scotland while he sits in the corner acting like a very aggressive mannequin. Eventually, the reality of the situation—and the smell?—becomes too much. Anna realizes that if she wants to be with her man, she’s gotta go where he’s going. The film ends with the two of them walking hand in hand into the freezing ocean, while their friend Collie watches from the shore, probably wondering whether he should have called a mental health professional three weeks ago.

Directed by Fred Burnley and written by Rosemary Davies, based on a book by Gordon Honeycombe, this is the kind of romance movie for people who like the fog and the grave. You know who you are.

You can get it from Vinegar Syndrome.

Can director and writer Joe Sarno do a title or what?

The story begins with Marcia (Tamara Glynn), a young woman from the country, hitchhiking her way to the city. She isn’t the typical wide-eyed waif; she is acutely aware of the power of her appearance. When a driver picks her up, she essentially trades sex for a safe ride and a bit of cash, viewing it as a simple transaction to reach her goal. She is headed toward a roadhouse where her sister, Vicky, works as a hostess and has promised her a job.

Upon arriving at the roadhouse, Marcia learns the dark truth: Vicky has been murdered. The method was particularly brutal. She was strangled with her own silk garter belt.

Rather than fleeing in terror or going to the police, who are largely in the pocket of the local elite, Marcia decides to step directly into her sister’s shoes. She takes the hostess job at the roadhouse, moving into the same room where Vicky lived, effectively becoming the new Vicky to draw the killer out of the shadows.

As Marcia works the floor, she discovers that the roadhouse is a front for the secret desires of the town’s most respectable citizens. She begins a dangerous game of manipulation with all of them. And as for the Garterbelt Strangler, it isn’t just a random maniac; the motive is tied to the corruption and secret lifestyles of these powerful men. Marcia finds herself increasingly imperiled as she realizes that her sister was murdered because she knew too much about a specific civic leader’s proclivities.

The film culminates in a claustrophobic confrontation where Marcia’s life is threatened by the same lace instrument that killed her sister. In true Sarno fashion, the resolution is less about justice and more about the survival of the craftiest person in the room, leaving the viewer with a bleak look at the hunger that drives both the powerful and the desperate.