Luigi Scattini’s directing career is all over the place, hitting all the various genres of the 60’s and 70’s. There’s comedy — War Italian Style, which unites silent film legend Buston Keaton with the Italian comedian duo of Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia (more on them in a bit). There’s mondo — Sweden Heaven and Hell, narrated by Edmund Purdom and featuring Piero Umiliani’s “Mah Nà Mah Nà, which would be used by Benny Hill and The Muppets. And more mondo — the magical Witchcraft ’70, as well as Questo Sporco Mondo Meraviglioso (This Dirty Wonderful World) and Sexy Magico. There’s Eurospy — the Richard Harrison-starring Ring Around the World. And plenty of sexual themed films like La Ragazza dalla Pelle di Luna (The Girl with the Moon Skin), La Ragazza Fuoristrada (The Off-Road Girl), The Body, La Notte dell’alta Marea (The Night of High Tide, which has Pam Grier) and Blue Nude. He’s also the father of Monica Scattini, the only actress I know who could be in both One from the Heart and Ruggero Deodato’s Concorde Affaire ’79.

Saying this is an uneven film is being generous to uneven films. The moronic antics of Franchi and Ingrassia, who play bellhops, play out around Mansfield lounging about and gradually getting undressed. Her husband at the time, Mickey Hargitay, also shows up.

Yes, a movie where Jayne is a doctor — of sexual relations — whose film of mating rituals around the world is an excuse to show mondo footage. These are the movies I fill my life with and bring to you.

Credit — or blame — goes to Massimo Pupillo, who would make Bloody Pit of Horror with Hargitay, and Amedeo Sollazzo, who worked with Franchi and Ingrassia throughout their long careers.

If Jayne Mansfield lived long enough, she most assuredly would have been in Italian western, giallos, slashers and any other films that would have had her. She even made this film, a Eurospy takeoff, not long before her sad demise.

Some young people are on a scavenger hunt which brings them to an island close to Cape Coral, Florida, where the fountain of youth supposedly exists. The rich owner of the island gets his daughter (Mansfield) to kick them all out, but she only wants to see her chubby lover Irving, who somehow is the second person I’ve seen in a film with the trope of being completely uninterested in aardvarking with Jayne. Somehow, Irving has an evil twin named Herman and he has an evil woman in his life named Camille Salamander, played by Phyllis Diller.

Director Joseph Cates also made the sleazy Who Killed Teddy Bear? and somehow went on to produce the Tony Awards. This movie is so threadbare that when they ran out of money, instead of shooting the last scenes, they literally filmed the script.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is now streaming on Shudder!

OMFG Vinegar Syndrome is releasing Ladrones de Tumbas, or Grave Robbers, for the first time ever on blu ray complete with an interview with director Rubén Galindo Jr.! Here’s hoping that this is the first of a series of Mexican VHS era premium releases! All those rituals and all that blood — it finally pays off!

I am a complete fanboy for Ruben Galindo Jr. who made Don’t Panic and Cemetery of Terror. I’ve never been let down by any of his films so far and I am getting the idea that I may never be disappointed by them after reading the description of this film on IMDB — “Teenagers accidentally resurrect a Satanic killer who targets the local police captain’s daughter to birth the Antichrist.”

It’s like people are making the exact movies I want right now, except they made them in Mexico 31 years ago.

Like all great Satanic movies — I’m looking at you Black Sunday and Evilspeak — this movie starts in the past, as the executioner of the Mexican town of San Ramon throws in with the devil instead of God, assaults a virgin and battles the other monks of his order before he’s stopped with an axe right to the chest. He then says, “Some day someone will come and wrench the ax out. Then I’ll return with more power to father Satan’s son in one of your descendants.”

If you’re not all in, get out.

That descendent is Olivia, the lovely young daughter of Captain Lopez and she is the lone virgin amongst her slasher victim friends. Woe be to them, as they’re camping next to a cemetery that’s beset by — get this — grave robbers. That foursome includes Manolo, his psychic girlfriend Rebeca (trust me, Mexican films are not content to stay within one genre, they’re going to toss in every ingredient) Armando and Diana.

You may wonder if they’re about to find an abandoned church and tear the axe out of the body of the villain, setting this all in motion. Wonder no more. And when the first villagers die, of course the grave robbers are blamed by Olivia’s dad. So he does what any real cop would: he tells them to go find the axe killer themselves. Yes, two people are dead, they’ve been blamed and he asks them to be junior detectives.

I love this movie.

Nearly everyone dies — by axe, by magic, by getting mashed into a pulp, bye bye and adios — until a priest explains that a Satanic idol and the axe itself, not to mention a whole bunch of TNT, are what it takes to kill off the executioner. This being Mexico, the action is intercut with Padre Jeronimo conducting a midnight mass while the cop uses a machine gun to continually blast the undead killer.

This may not be the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s edging closer to that space every time I watch it, just by sheer force of will and my belief that if Fulci lived in Mexico, this is the kind of lunacy that he’d have made. As Mexican Nicholas Cage might say, “Eso es un gran elogio.”

Released in the U.S. as It Takes a Thief, this U.K. film has Jayne Mansfield as Billie, who acts demure by day but leads a gang of robbers at night. One of their old members, Maxton, went to jail and they think he knows where the big score they made got hidden. They take his son, despite the ending which lets everyone know that the money had been found three years ago.

The cast includes Anthony Quayle (The Guns of Navarone), Peter Reynolds (Devil Girl from Mars) and Robert Brown (who was M in the Bond films from Octopussy to Licence to Kill).

Director John Gilling has a pretty good resume of films in his history, like The Flesh and the Fiends, The Plague of the Zombies and The Mummy’s Shroud. This isn’t the best interesting movie you’ll see, but as always, Mansfield rises above the material.

With a $90,000 budget, a noir sensibility and no small amount of grit, some have seen this film as the last b-movie made by Columbia Pictures. It’s all about professional burglar Nat Harbin (character actor Dan Duryea) trying to justify his life and how it keeps involving his adoptive daughter Gladden (Jane Mansfield).

Directed by Paul Wendko, whose career was mostly in TV (Secrets, Good Against Evil, The Legend of Lizzie Borden, The Death of Richie, Haunts of the Very Rich, The Brotherhood of the Bell) with some films (three Gidget movies and The Mephisto Waltz, strange bedfellows if there ever were) mixed in.

Mansfield was cast after producer Louis W. Kellman saw the crew lose their minds over her during the making of Pete Kelly’s Blues. She cast into a world here where everyone has their own angle, even their mark, a fake spirtualist.

This was remade as The Burglars with Omar Sharrif and Dyan Cannon in 1971.

Frank Tashlin wrote, produced and directed this film, taking only the title and the character of Rita Marlowe from the successful Broadway play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? He also made the smart move of hiring Jayne Mansfield to reprise her role as Rita. It’s an anarchic movie for a big studio film, taking shots at television, popular fan culture, Hollywood hype and advertising.

Much like The Girl Can’t Help It, the movie begins with its lead — Tony Randall — talking about the movie we’re about to see, pretty much talking down on much of it. He plays the 20th Century Fox theme, saying it was in his contract to do so, before forgetting the name of the movie that he is in.

That’s followed by a series of fake TV commercials that obviously fall short of their promises. This opening is different for today. I can only imagine how strange it seemed in 1957.

Rockwell P. Hunter (Tony Randall) is trying to move up at the La Salle agency. He gets a brainstorm to save the agency’s biggest account, Stay-Put Lipstick, by getting sex bomb Rita Marlowe (Mansfield) to be the spokeswoman.

She only has one clause. In order to do the job, he has to pretend to be her man, all to make her TV Tarzan boytoy (Mansfield’s real-life husband, Mickey Hargitay, jealous. Now the tabloids know Rock Hunter as the Lover Boy. Rita has no idea who she really loves, but we all do — it’s the man who discovered her, George Schmidlap (Groucho Marx!).

To take the love triangle — it has way more sides than that — Hunter already has a girlfriend, Jenny Wells (Betty Drake, the third wife of Cary Grant). And oh yeah — Hunter’s secretary Violet wants to teach Rita a lesson about using her sex for power (which is ironic, as she’s played by Joan Blondell, who constantly ran afoul of the Hayes Code in her youth).

Plus, a young Barabara Eden is in here, as is Dubois, PA native Ann McCrea (Midge from The Donna Reed Show). And look for Majel Barrett (Nurse Chappell from Star Trek) in one of the TV ads in the beginning.

This movie is a delight. I loved The Girl Can’t Help It and this feels like the natural evolution of Tashlin’s themes from that movie.

Raoul Walsh had an interesting career, going from acting as John Wilkes Booth in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation to directing High Sierra, They Died With Their Boots On and The Naked and the Dead. Here, he travels to Spain — and Pinewood Studios — to shoot a comedy western with Kenneth More and Jayne Mansfield.

Originally intended to be a movie with Clifton Webb and Marilyn Monroe, this ended up being part of a three-movie deal 20th Century Fox made to film three movies in England. The studio was pushing Mansfield to take over for the temperamental Marilyn Monroe, but she upset execs by getting pregnant with her second child and missed days of work.

There’s a decent supporting cast — Willaim Campbell (Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte), Robert Morley (Theater of Blood) and Bruce Cabot (King Kong) — and some great CinemaScope visuals. It’s a trifle about More playing a British man who ends up becoming a sheriff and Mansfield as a tough saloon owner.

Mansfield sings a few songs here, but that’s really the voice of Connie Francis.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Also known as Hercules vs. the Hydra, this Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia-directed peblum starts with Hercules’ (Mickey Hargitay) empire being invaded by the villainous Licos (Massimo Serato, Don’t Look Now, The Humanoid) and his bride killed by the army of Ecalia. Hercules goes wild and is only stopped when the king is murdered by an unseen hand and his daughter Queen Deianira (Jayne Mansfield!)

The rest of the film involves Hercules pining for the queen, who is already married, Licos trying to get with her and Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, turns all of her lovers into trees and makes herself look exactly like Deianira to try and get with our hero. Oh yeah — there are also battles with a hydra and a bigfoot looking beast.

Filmed on location in Italy during the height of the sword and sandal era, Mansfield was offered the film while she was shooting The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw in Spain. She agreed as long as Hargitay got the lead. She was four months pregnant while making this movie.

Look, any movie where Hercules saves Jayne Mansfield from a mad bull by wrestling it is going to win me over.

You can watch this on YouTube.

I liked Marc Meyers’ film My Friend Dahmer but you know, I was totally prepared, as a metalhead who is sick of movies worshipping the 80’s, to dislike this film. Yet there are enough twists and turns to keep this movie interesting and well above expectations. If you liked Satanic Panic, I’d say this movie would make a good partner feature for a double feature.

Alexis (Alexandra Daddario from the Baywatch remake), Val (Maddie Hasson, God Bless America) and Bev (Amy Forsyth from Channel Zero: No-End House) lure three metal-loving boys back home after a concert and things go to Hell. None of the guys — Mark (Keean Johnson, Alita: Battle Angel), Ivan (Austin Swift, Taylor’s brother) and Kovacs (Logan Miller, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) — know what’s coming.

I really don’t want to give away many of the twists that follow, but I really dug how the movie plays with religion and seems to have a pretty decent knowledge of metal. It was also interesting to see Johnny Knoxville play a very not Knoxville character.

You can get this movie on demand and on blu ray from Lionsgate Home Entertainment. You can also find it on Netflix.