I’ve spent years staring at the iconography of this film, specifically that haunting, colossal sculpture of a woman whose thighs form a gateway to a rolling skeleton. You worry, after seeing imagery that potent, that the film itself will be a hollow vessel. But The Laughing Woman isn’t just a movie; it’s a vibrant, pop-art masterwork that actually manages to be even stranger and better than that one bravura moment.

Maria (Dagmar Lassander) works in the office of Dr. Sayer (Philippe Leroy), who claims to be working in philanthropy but really believes in an increasingly wild series of conspiracies like how every woman in the world is against him and they’re all collecting the sperm of men so they can get rid of them after harvesting their life-giving sperm and that governments are planning on making men obsolete.

After having a drink with Sayer, Maria wakes up chained to a bed and his prisoner, being told that he can make her do anything he wants, and when he’s done, like so many other women, he will just get rid of her, move on and do it all over again.

Directed and written by Piero Schivazappa, this movie takes the expected BDSM idea that an independent woman is going to enjoy pushing her boundaries and fall for her captor and instead flips it like a kink-friendly Arabian Nights, as Maria keeps talking and pushing and prodding Sayer, making him question who he is and what he’s doing.

The world that this happens inside is the kind of future that we were promised and never got, a push-button retro tomorrow that never got here, filled with starkness, strange human forms and swimming pools that are either havens for torture or passion. There’s also a strange bed that Maria soon learns allows Sayer to sleep next to her even when she thinks she’s all alone. And then he makes her make love — with his direction — to his exact mannequin duplicate.

How strange it is that there’s a major inversion before the end of this movie, between who is in charge and who controls who and the traditional top and bottom roles and wow, when Maria pulls off her short wig — Sayer had previously chopped all of her hair — to reveal her flowing locks again, it’s beyond perfect. I was ready for what would happen, but somehow still so happy that it all played out this way, because yes, it had to play out this way.

Sometimes, style and substance fight it out, argue, and no one wins. And other times, they just decide to stop fighting and start fucking, and the results are glorious. This would be that time.

If you think you’ve seen it all, “Lady Terminator” (originally Pembalasan Ratu Laut Selatan or Revenge of the South Sea Queen) is here to rearrange your brain chemistry. On paper, it’s a beat-for-beat tribute to James Cameron’s 1984 classic, a film famously rooted in the DNA of Harlan Ellison’s “Demon with a Glass Hand” and “Soldier.” But in the hands of Indonesian visionary H. Tjut Djalil (operating under the pseudonym Jalil Jackson), the cold, metallic logic of Skynet is replaced by ancient, saltwater sorcery. While this may not have been the first film in which mankind battled Nyi Roro Kidul, the Queen of the South Sea, it is definitely the only time that she repeatedly shoots men in the penis with an M16.

Djalil is no stranger to the bizarre; this is the same director who gave us the floating-head-and-entrails nightmare of Mystics In Bali. As Ed Glaser points out in How the World Remade Hollywood, Djalil had a knack for remaking Western hits like A Nightmare on Elm Street through a regional lens. Here, he trades the T-800’s endoskeleton for the wrath of Nyi Roro Kidul, the Queen of the South Sea. The result? Instead of a robot from the future, we get a mystical cycle of vengeance that begins with a legendary sex-and-death sequence involving a literal vagina dentata snake that is eventually forged into a dagger. It’s a mythology that puts the cold efficiency of a microchip to shame.

Barbara Anne Constable plays Tania Wilson, an anthropologist whose investigation into the tomb of the queen leads to being impregnated by a snake and then possessed by Nyi Roro Kidul herself, who we’ve already met via an opening that shows her repeatedly making love to men and killing them when they can’t satisfy her needs until one man is able to pull the snake from her womb, transform it into a dagger and make her cycle of death end for a hundred years.

The queen has a target, pop singer Erica (Claudia Angelique Rademaker), whom she chases for the entire film before she’s saved by NY cop Max McNeil (Christopher J. Hart), a police officer who somehow found himself in Indonesia just in time to shout, “Come with me if you want to live.”

Constable was told that this movie would be for Indonesia only, but it’s played all over the world. A dancer whose leg injury led her to arrive in Hong Kong to pursue a career in modeling and fashion reporting — she was also a Pet of the Month for the Australian Penthouse — she performed her own stunts in this film. At one point, her ankle was skewered by a large shard of glass, and the filmmakers paid her for an entire month while she relearned how to walk.

There’s a morgue scene in this where numerous men are under sheets with blood all over where their privates are, and they discuss if a serial killer is cutting off their wangs. It’s amazing and so much more memorable than any movie I’ll see for the next year. This is the kind of movie I make people watch when they come to my house, a mindblowing assault on the senses, a film where instead of a robot eye the Lady Terminator simply takes out her own, but every other scene is nearly shot-for-shot taken from the American film, but mystic instead of technological, which I can more than get behind.

I want ten sequels to this.

Roger Corman told writer John Sayles just one sentence: He wanted “a female Godfather story about the woman who was with John Dillinger when he was shot.” 

The real Lady In Red was Anna Sage, who had come to America from Romania and became a brothel owner. As she faced deportation for her criminal activities, she betrayed public enemy number one, John Dillinger.

On July 22, 1934, Sage, along with Dillinger and his girlfriend Polly Hamilton, went to see the movie Manhattan Melodrama at the Biograph Theater in Chicago. Sage had informed the FBI that she would be wearing a red dress to help identify Dillinger, although she actually wore an orange skirt and white blouse. As they left the theater, federal agents surrounded Dillinger, shooting and killing him in an alley next to the theater. Sage received only half of the promised reward money and was ultimately deported to Romania, despite the promises of the FBI.

Polly (Pamela Sue Martin) is the heroine of this story. She starts out as a simple farm girl who is nearly killed during a bank robbery. If I’m ever in a bank and Mary Woronov busts in, I would let her shoot me and take all my money. Afterward, as Polly is interviewed by reporter Jake Lingle (Robert Hogan), he seduces her. By the time she gets home, her preacher father beats her, sending her on the road to Chicago, where she gets a job at a sweatshop run by Patek (Dick Miller). There, she becomes friends with Rose Shimkus (Laurie Heineman), who is arrested for aborting a baby that Patek fathered. In turn, Polly leads the workers against the man. Looking for work, she finally becomes a taxi dancer, gets arrested for being a sex worker and goes to prison.

There, she finds Rose, and they get a job in the laundry, where they battle a guard named Tiny Alice (Nancy Parsons, who would go on to be Coach Balbricker in Porky’s), who eventually sends her to work in Anna Sage’s (Louise Fletcher) brothel. She’s sold as a virgin and a farmer’s daughter, which means every man wants her, including the reporter, the scarred mobster Frognose (Christopher Lloyd), and the one lone decent man, a gangster named Turk (Robert Forester), who gives her her first orgasm. At the same time, Alice kills Rose and the entire prison riots. As if that isn’t enough sadness, Frognose beats another friend, Satin (Chip Fields), to death.

Along with Pops Geissler (Peter Hobbs) and piano player Eddie (Glenn Withrow), they all work in Anna’s restaurant. Polly starts dating Dillinger, whom Anna recognizes and sells out to Melvin Purvis (Alan Vint). Just like in real life, Polly and Anna go to the movies with Dillinger, who is killed by the FBI as he walks out of the theater. People all walk up to the body and dip things into his blood to sell in the streets.

Polly is devastated by Dillinger’s death, and as if that isn’t bad enough, the reporter who was with her from the beginning writes an article falsely accusing her of betraying Dillinger. Eddie, Pops and Pinetop (Rod Gist) work with her to get revenge, as she evades a hit by Frognose, who is killed by Pinetop. However, as they knock over a mafia bank, everyone is killed but Polly, including Eddie sacrificing himself — but not before finally kissing Polly — and Pops begging Polly to put him out of his misery. Turk returns to kill the reporter, but Polly survives and gets a ride to California.

Sayles said of this film: “I wanted to do more than I knew Roger Corman wanted to do with that script. He basically wanted Bloody Mama Part Three; I wanted to get into other things about the thirties. So I said, “Roger, I will not write you a treatment; I’ll write you a full draft.” And that way I was able to show him things that, if I had just said, “I wanna go into this area, I wanna take her to jail, take her to a sweatshop,” he’d say, “Oh no, that’s beside the point”; whereas when I put it in the script he sort of got to liking the story. So I was able to campaign for the script that I wanted, and get him to agree that he liked that, too.”

It was one of the few scripts he wrote that he wished he had directed. Instead, Lewis Teague was in the chair; he also directed Alligator, Navy SEALs, Cat’s Eye and more. Teague was paid $11,000, but because the film was made non-union, he had to pay his entire salary as a fine to the Director’s Guild.

This movie is so much better than it has any right to be. Quentin Tarantino said: “The John Sayles-scripted, Julie Corman-produced, Lewis Teague-directed 1978 gangster opus The Lady in Red (AKA Touch Me and Die) is my candidate for most ambitious film ever made at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. Not only do I think this thirties era epic about Polly Franklin (Pamela Sue Martin), the fictional brothel prostitute who inadvertently leads John Dillinger to his death in front of the Biograph Theatre, is Sayles’ best screenplay, I also think it’s the best script ever written for an exploitation movie.” In his novel Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he directed a 1999 remake of the film in an alternate history.

By the way: Jake Lingle, who is killed at the end of the film, was a real person. Lingle was gunned down in 1930, four years before the setting of this film, shot while tons of people walked by and watched every moment.

This didn’t do well in theaters. I saw it on HBO many, many times and always loved it, even when I was too young to watch it. Corman re-released it as Guns, Sin and Bathtub Gin, but it still didn’t turn a profit. The title comes from the tagline of The Lady In Red: “She’s made of bullets, sin and bathtub gin.”

At least he got to recycle scenes from this in Big Bad Mama II, which starred the woman he wanted in the lead of this, Angie Dickinson.

According to Temple of Schlock, it was also released as the title Tarantino referenced, Touch Me and Die: “For some reason, when the film played Chicago — where Dillinger was set up by Sage and killed outside the Biograph Theater on July 22nd, 1934 — New World changed the title to Touch Me and Die and erased all references to Dillinger and the period setting. Even worse, the film was relegated to second feature status under Escape from Death Row (a shady re-release of Mean Frank and Crazy Tont) during its week-long run beginning on July 24th, 1981.”

What makes The Lady in Red stand out among the endless WIP and gangster moll Corman movies is Sayles’ screenplay.  Corman wanted a spiritual successor to Bloody Mama; Sayles gave him a Marxist critique of the Great Depression wrapped in a blood-soaked bodice ripper. Unlike most exploitation leads who are born bad, Polly is systematically dismantled by 1930s America. 

You can watch this on Tubi.

While it might look like a standard witness protection thriller on paper, Lady Cocoa is a masterclass in 70s aesthetic. It trades the typical urban grime of the genre for the icy, high-altitude isolation of Nevada, making for a sleek, atmospheric watch that feels like a chilly companion piece to a Bond film.

The film belongs entirely to Lola Falana. Known primarily as a singing sensation and a protégé of Sammy Davis Jr., Falana brings a magnetic, world-weary energy to Coco. Fresh out of the Nevada prison system after flipping on her boyfriend Eddie (James A. Watson Jr.), she isn’t just a damsel in distress; she’s a woman navigating a get out of jail free card that feels more like a death sentence.

Watching her bounce between the protection of Ramsey (Alex Drier) and that of the local law officer, Doug (Gene Washington), you get a real sense of her internal conflict. Is she actually falling for the badge, or is she just playing the hand she was dealt?

She’s being hunted by Arthur (director Matt Cimber, who made The Witch Who Came from the Sea after this) and Big Joe (“Mean” Joe Greene). There are also some newlyweds, Arthur (Gary Harper) and Marie (Millie Perkins), who aren’t who they seem.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a true cult classic without the ubiquitous George “Buck” Flower. His turn as a drunken gambler isn’t just a cameo; it’s the soul of the film’s grimy casino backdrop. Nobody played disheveled and desperate with quite the same charm.

Cimber handles the tension well. He uses the Lake Tahoe locations to great effect, contrasting the neon warmth of the casinos with the bleak, dangerous mountains surrounding them. It’s a slow-burn thriller that pays off with a climax that reminds you exactly why Eddie was a man worth snitching on.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Krull should have been a blockbuster.

But seriously, it’s a mess. A glorious mess.

It’s like the craziest game of Dungeons & Dragons you ever played, filled with info about magic and strange lands that feel like they were invented five minutes before the camera started rolling. It has the most awesome weapon ever seen in probably any movie ever, the Glaive, a five-pointed, spinning death boomerang that looks like something a metal band would put on the cover of an album about slaying dragons. It has monsters that look amazing.

But it also has a somewhat boring hero and heroine surrounded by much more interesting friends. And it’s long and nonsensical.

Yet I love it. I’ve watched it so many times, and with every viewing I love it more and more, while remaining fully aware of its faults. It’s that kind of movie, I guess — the kind where every problem becomes part of the charm. The pacing is weird. The tone shifts all over the place. Characters appear, get a cool weapon, deliver one line and die. But the movie is so earnest about its insanity that you can’t help but admire it. It’s a movie that believes completely in itself, even when it absolutely shouldn’t.

Director Peter Yates (Bullit; Mother, Jugs and Speed; The Deep; Breaking Away; The Dresser) described making Krull as “complicated” and “enormous.” Special effects artist Brian Johnson took that even further, saying that Yates hated working on the film so much that in the middle of shooting, he took a vacation to the Caribbean for three weeks.

Which, honestly, is the most relatable thing anyone has ever done while making a giant fantasy epic.

Yet when Yates first took on the project, he was excited. His previous films were grounded in reality, and he considered Krull a challenge since he would have to rely on imagination and experimentation. That’s admirable, but it also means the movie sometimes feels like a very serious British filmmaker trying to wrangle a script written by someone who had just discovered heavy-metal album covers and pulp science-fiction paperbacks at the same time.

The movie begins with a narrator (Freddie Jones, Goodbye Gemini, Son of Dracula) telling of a prophecy: “This, it was given to me to know…that many worlds have been enslaved by the Beast and his army, the Slayers. And this, too, was given me to know…that the Beast would come to our world, the world of Krull, and his Black Fortress would be seen in the land. That the smoke of burning villages would darken the sky, and the cries of the dying echo through deserted valleys. But one thing I cannot know, whether the prophecy be true, that a girl of ancient name shall become queen, that she shall choose a king, and that together they shall rule our world, and that their son shall rule the galaxy.”

Right away, the movie tips its hand: this isn’t just a fantasy movie. It’s a fantasy movie that suddenly remembers it’s also science fiction. The villain’s fortress is actually a spaceship. The bad guys are alien stormtroopers. There’s prophecy, lasers, medieval kingdoms, and cosmic destiny, all mashed together like someone tossed Star Wars, Excalibur, and a pile of fantasy novels into a blender and hit puree.

On the day of Prince Colwyn and Princess Lyssa’s wedding that will unite the warring kingdoms of Krull, the Beast and his army of demonic Slayers arrive in the Black Fortress, a mountain-shaped spacecraft that randomly teleports to a different location every day just to make the heroes’ quest even more annoying. They kill both kings, wipe out the armies and kidnap Lyssa before anyone can even finish the reception.

The injured Prince Colwyn is brought back by Ynyr, the Old One (also played by Freddie Jones), who tells him of the legend of the Glaive, a legendary weapon that can kill the Beast. Colwyn and Ynry form a party with the magician Ergo (David Battley, Mr. Turkentine from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory) and nine criminals who are undertaking the mission to clear their names: the multi-married axe-wielding Kegan (a super young Liam Neeson), Torquil, Rhun (Robbie Coltrane), dagger-loving Bardolph, bo staff user Oswyn, Menno and Darro, the whip users, net-throwing Nennog (stuntman Bronco McLoughlin) and Quain the archer. Soon they’re joined by Rell the cyclops Bernard Bresslaw, who is also in Hawk the Slayer, who belongs to a race cursed with the ability to see their own deaths in the future, which is a pretty bleak superpower. 

From here, the movie becomes a fantasy road trip full of weird encounters. They visit the Emerald Seer, who can magically locate the Black Fortress with a crystal. Unfortunately, the Beast can reach through magic Skype calls and crush people from afar, so that plan ends badly. The bad guys are tenacious, killing everyone they can, including Darro, Menno and the Seer, even taking on the scryer’s form before he’s uncovered. That evil Beast even tries to get a woman to seduce Colwyn, but our hero is a little too smart for that.

Meanwhile, Ynyr visits the Widow of the Web, one of the film’s most bizarre sequences. She lives in a web-covered lair guarded by a giant Crystal Spider that honestly looks like something out of a prog rock album cover. She tells Ynyr where the Black Fortress will appear and gives him enchanted sand that will allow him to travel back instantly.

But the moment he leaves the protective sand circle, the spider kills her, because Krull is a movie that absolutely refuses to let anyone have a happy ending. Honestly, this movie is exactly like playing D&D with a dungeon master who has way too many ideas and refuses to throw any of them away. There’s a world of adventure, and yet people keep getting killed left and right as the heroes stumble around trying to keep up with the plot.

Finally, Colwyn does what we wanted all along: he throws the Glaive into the Beast and then, to destroy its counterattack, he and Lyssa get married and shoot fire at the monster, sending the Black Fortress into space.

Only Colwyn, Lyssa, Torquil, Oswyn, Ergo and Titch survive. The newly married couple becomes king and queen, with Torquil being named Lord Marshal of their newly combined kingdom. As the survivors run through a field, the narrator repeats the prophecy that the son of the queen and her chosen king shall rule the galaxy.

Krull was shot on 23 sets, ten of them at Pinewood Studios, including the monstrous 007 Stage. 16 Clydesdales were trained for months to be Fire Mares. Hundreds of costumes were sewn. 40 stuntmen were on hand. You’ll marvel at just how much money was thrown at a movie that has a completely incomprehensible story.

And yet, despite all that money and effort, the story somehow still feels like it was invented by a teenager who got ridiculously high with all of his friends and attempted to be the dungeon master before having the giggles and passing out.

The posters said, “Beyond our time, beyond our universe . . . there is a planet besieged by alien invaders, where a young king must rescue his love from the clutches of the Beast. Or risk the death of his world. KRULL. A world light-years beyond your imagination.”

They weren’t kidding. Krull is a movie that throws absolutely everything it can at the screen: magic weapons, prophecy, aliens, cyclopes, giant spiders, teleporting fortresses, flaming horses and a hero who spends most of the movie trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

I agree with the poster, though. I love this movie in spite of itself. Maybe even because of itself. It’s big, dumb, ambitious, messy and completely sincere. It’s not afraid to be strange or ridiculous or wildly over the top.

And for that, I salute it.