In Corpore is “a sensual, sex-positive exploration of contemporary relationships, shown through four anthological stories set in Melbourne, Berlin, Malta and New York.” It’s all about relationships, specifically what happens when love gives way to lust and commitment deals with infidelity.
Directed by Sarah Jayne and Ivan Malekin, this Australian film tells the stories of four couples who must deal with the consequences of suppressing desire or throwing caution to the wind. They made this movie when they were newly married as a way to openly discuss the definition of marriage and the boundaries of relationships.
I’ve never seen a sex-positive anthology before, so there you go. It’s a pretty interesting film that shows that no matter the label on a relationship, we often find ourselves dealing with the same issues. While there’s plenty of nudity and love making scenes, this isn’t explicit, if that’s a concern. It will, however, make you question the ways that we use love and sex in our lives and with the ones that are part of them.
After being released from prison, Ted and his associates decide to rob Coven National Bank, later to find out that even more than a mob front, it’s really owned by Lucifer. Oh yeah — and all of the employees are witches who take the souls of the people who owe them money.
This is told through flashback from Ted, who is dead, as he deals with a young couple who mess everything up, as well as the devil (Mike Ferguson), who keeps having threeways and upsetting his wife Lilith. It’s kind of like a Satanic Pulp Fiction, I guess, with more of a silly sense of humor.
So yeah. The devil has a bank. He has marital problems. And he looks like a biker. So there’s a lot to come to grips with, I guess, but I feel like you can handle it.
“Nothing, but nothing, is left to the imagination!” Yes, this section 1 Video Nasty* is also known as Trauma and Expose. It’s all about Paul Martin (an incredibly young and dubbed Udo Kier) is a writer who has rented a home in the country to finish his latest book. Writer’s block hits him hard, as does a fight with his girlfriend Suzanne (Fiona Richmond, Eat the Rich). That’s when he hires a new secretary named Linda (Linda Hayden**, The Blood on Satan’s Claw). And that’s where everything goes to hell.
From their first meeting, where Linda is intimidated by several men who eventually assault her — and she also eventually shotgun blasts them — our protagonist is obsessed with her, despite her constantly resisting her advances. She replaces the housekeeper — who is soon murdered — and when Suzanne comes back, Linda seduces her, just in time for Paul to crash his car into a river and his ex-girlfriend to be killed in the shower.
Director James Kenelm Clarke also made two soft core films, Hardcore and Let’s Get Laid, which also star Richmond. They’re much less scummy than this one, which pretty much the definition of the word. The alternate title that we reviewed this under sets up this being a takeoff of Straw Dogs, but it’s closer to a straight-up sex movie — minus all the murder.
This was remade by Martin Kemp in 2010 as Stalker, with Hayden appearing as Mrs. Brown.
Honestly, the fact that it’s taken me so long to get this movie up on our site is a major failure that I’d like to personally apologize for to each of you.
Dear reader, I am sorry.
Even a teenage Sam, looking furtively for prurient content late night on HBO and Cinemax knew that this movie, also known as Gwendoline, is one strange movie. It’s one part comic book adaption of the Bizarre BDSM comic strip Sweet Gwendoline by John Willie, one part old movie serial, one part softcore nudie and another part Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoff. A lot of that mixture adds up and even when the movie starts to sputter, you still have to admire it for what it is.
If you haven’t seen it, well…you pretty much must.
After being captured by thieves and sold into white slavery, Gwendoline (Tawny Kitaen, as if you need another reason to watch this) is rescued by Willard (Brent Huff, Nine Deaths of the Ninja) and reunited with her maid Beth (French actress Zabou Breitman). It turns out that she is in China searching for the butterfly that her father spent his whole life looking for. And now, she has offered Willard money to take her to the land of Yik-Yak, which is filled with cannibals and a tribe of Amazon warriors who ride each other like horses and engage in gladiator battles.
That’s because the last time the volcano went off, all the men died and somehow, the women have survived by capturing men and having those violent battles to determine which woman gets to procreate with their prisoners of war, as decided by their queen (Bernadette Lafont, who was the face of French New Wave).
Oh yeah — and there’s also the villainous D’Arcy (whose likeness was based on creator Willie and is played here by Jean Rougerie, who was in A View to a Kill) who keeps tormenting our heroine and the fact that she has to make love to Willard while the queen watches and a volcano goes off. You know, just another ordinary day.
This was the last film made by Just Jaeckin, who fogged up the screen with 1974’s Emmanuelle and 1981’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, two movies that would play infinitely on Cinemax on Friday nights at 1:10 AM and made a legion of teenage boys get weak in the knees at the very mention of the name Sylvia Kristel.
The U.S. theatrical version of this movie clocks in at around 87 minutes, while the more libertine French cut is 105 minutes long. As for what is in those 28 exorcised minutes, I invited you to use your imagination, or better, just order the Severin blu ray, which also has interviews with creators Jackin and Willie.
It’s way better than it has any right to be and is one of the few sexy movies to be both a complete story, a rip-roaring adventure yarn and have actual palpable sexual tension. I’m so glad that I was finally able to get it up here on the site — pardon the obvious pun — and recommend that if you’re an open-minded grown-up that you check it out for yourself.
Join us as we pay tribute to the late Tawny Kitaen’s career with our exploration of her films.
A police officer becomes obsessed with The Zebra Killer, who has kidnapped his girlfriend and has kept on murdering people. The Get-Man of the title refers to this cop, who goes by Lt. Frank Savage and is played by Austin Stoker.
In real life, the zebra murders — called that because of the police frequency used to communicate the crimes — were a string of racially motivated murders committed by a small group of Black Muslims in San Francisco.
Some thing that the Death Angels, which is what the killers wanted to be known as, may have killed more people — up to 73 — than all other 1970’s serial killers put together.
This movie, however, has the killer appear as a white man in blackface and afro wig, killing in random ways, much like the Zodiac Killer, who inspired Scorpio in Dirty Harry, which therefore is ripped off by this film.
If you’re making a blacksploitation version of a Hollywood film, go with the best. Go with William Girdler, who also made Abby, which is one of my favorite Xeroxorcist films. You can also find this movie as Combat Cops, which is not anywhere near as good of a title.
When they call this an 80s throwback, they mean it. Beast Mode stars C Thomas Howell (The Hitcher), Leslie Easterbrook (Police Academy), Ray Wise (Twin Peaks), James Hong (Big Trouble in Little China) and James Duval (Gone in 60 Seconds).
This one’s all about a has-been Hollywood producer who accidentally kills the lead in his next movie, which means that — of course — he must use an ancient herbal elixir and ends up releasing shapeshifting beasts onto the streets of Los Angeles.
This is directed by Chris W. Freeman, who made 2012’s Sorority Party Massacre, and Spain Willingham, who also acts in this movie. The effects are pretty solid, so it has that going for it. A Hollywood insider werewolf-ish movie. The last one I saw like that was Howling 3: The Marsupials, which this would pair well with.
Beast Mode is available on demand and on DVD from Devilworks Pictures.
Filmed in both English and Spanish at Churubusco Studios in Mexico City, the American version of this Willis O’Brien (the animator of King Kong) was called The Beast of Hollow Mountain while the Mexican one was named La Bestia de la Montaña.
Cowboys and dinosaurs seem like a pretty natural combination. In this one, Jimmy Ryan (Guy Madison, who played Wild Bill Hickock on TV’s The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok) finds out that some real life giant lizards are eating all his cattle.
You know how I always complain about movies showing the monster too soon? This waits nearly an hour before you see the dinosaur. That’s having patience. Oh yeah — don’t get attached to the little kid who has an abusive father.
O’Brien also wrote another unproduced script from this concept called The Valley of the Mists, which would later be made as The Valley of Gwangi by Ray Harryhausen, in case you can’t get enough stop motion monsters.
Tor Johnson is one of those actors who was a special effect without any help. Just by showing up on screen, he’s thrilling. In this one, he’s Joseph Jaworsky, a Russian scientist who runs from the Iron Curtain and finds his way to Yucca Flats, where radiation turns him into a mute beast. All he wanted to do was give the Americans the secrets to the Russian moon landing!
American actor, writer, producer and director Coleman Francis made this, casting his sons and himself in the movie. His oeuvre, as it were, is made up of films like The Skydivers and Red Zone Cuba. People don’t just smoke in his movies. The smoking becomes central to the entire film. Kevin Murphy of Mystery Science Theater 3000 said that the themes of his movies are ” death, hatefulness, death, pain, and death.”
The police, for no real reason or trial, shoot the irradiated Tor Johnson over and over, but he lives just enough to hug a jackalope* before he dies. The police officers in Francis’ films, which often end his stories by brutally blowing away the bad guys, may be the most realistic ones in the history of movies.
Everything in this movie is dubbed. Nobody speaks on camera. Even guns are fired off-camera and then b-roll of guns being shot is cut in. The editing is such that some characters appear to have been shot to death and then arise and come back in later scenes. There’s also a murder scene in the beginning with a naked woman in the shower being choked. That scene is only in this because Francis likes shooting nude scenes.
What’s funny is that this movie predates The Incredible Hulk and seems very much like the same origin story. Maybe that’s a coincidence. As for Tor Johnson, he would only make one more movie, appearing without credit in Head.
Known in Italy as I tre volti della paura (The Three Faces of Fear), Mario Bava’s seminal film plays differently in other countries of the world. Here in the United States, American-International Pictures suggested changes to Bava during filming so that the film would play better in America, where it underperformed. Those changes include replacing the original dialogue, changing Roberto Nicolosi’s score to music by Les Baxter and censoring much of the film’s violence. The first story, “The Telephone,” was changed the most, as it was given a supernatural element missing from the Italian version and all references to prostitution and lesbianism were exorcised.
Bava wanted to create a story about how terror can strike in different time periods and looked to books for inspiration. The first tale, “The Telephone,” is based on F.G. Snyder’s story and has Bava trying to match the lurid covers of giallo detective books. The whole name giallo had no been codified yet, so this is a take between The Girl Who Knew Too Muchand Blood and Black Lace.
In that story, a French call girl named Rosy (Michèle Mercier) returns home to receive a series of strange phone calls from her pimp Frank, who has just escaped from prison. A prison that she sent him to, no less.
Rosy calls her ex-girlfriend Mary (Lydia Alfonsi) as she is sure that she is the only person who can help her. She gives her a large knife and while Rosy sleeps, Mary writes to confess that she was the one who made the calls, hoping that she could bring their relationship back. As she finishes, Frank (Milo Quesada)really does break in and kills her. Realizing he murdered the wrong woman, he moves to Rosy’s bed, but the knife does end up saving her.
In “The Wurdulak,” Vladimir Durfe (Mark Damon) is a young nobleman who finds a headless corpse with a knife in its heart. Taking the blade, he leaves for a small cottage where a man tells him that the knife belongs to his missing father Gorca (Boris Karloff, who also hosts the movie), who has gone to fight the wurdulak.
Now, however, the old man has become what he was fighting and even transforms their son into another undead creature that demands to feed on humans, predating Salem’s Lot. One by one, the family becomes these creatures, leaving only Vladimir and his love, Sdenka (Susy Andersen).
That story was loosely based on The Family of the Vourdalak by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, along with the story “The Wurdulak” from the anthology I vampiri tra noi, Guy de Maupassant’s “Fear” and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Finally, “The Drop of Water” was based a Chekov story and “Dalle tre alle tre e mezzo” (“Between Three and Three-thirty”) from an anthology book called Storie di fantasmi (Ghost Stories). Nurse Helen Chester (Jacqueline Pierreux) is called by the maid (Milly Monti) of an elderly medium to prepare her body for burial. She can’t help but steal a ring from the dead woman, which leads to bussing flies, drips of water and even the dead woman coming back for her.
Even the color of this film is different between the American and Italian versions. It may seem crazy to us today, but AIP recut, re-edited and recolored a Mario Bava movie. This would be seen as ridiculous today, but in 1963, horror films were hardly seen as art.
There were additional scenes filmed with Boris Karloff introducing the segments, just like he did on the TV sho Thriller, but AIP decided they were unnecessary and cut them. Karloff went on record saying that these introductions were some of the most fun he’d ever had on a film set, which led to him praising Bava to his contemporaries Christopher Lee and Vincent Price. Plans were made to make an adaption of The Dunwich Horror called Scarlet Friday with Karloff and Lee, but after the failure of Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, AIP gave up on Bava.
A peaceful California town goes bonkers when a punk gang kills the owner of a diner who was just defending his daughter. Now, she and the entire town want revenge, but they’ve taken her hostage, leading to a battle of redneck vs. punks.
If you’re like me and you love movie punks who are the furthest thing from actual punk rockers, then good news. Punk Vacation is ready to give you the goods.
Director Stanley Lewis — not his real name — was a graduate from the American Film Institute who didn’t want his career tainted by this film. Come on, man. There are plenty of art films that have disappeared since 1990 and I’m not writing about any of those movies.
Like I said, the main issue is that the punks are anything but. They’re in their thirties and more of a biker gang from a 1960’s message movie than a bunch of guys who hang out at crust bars. Are they the heroes? Or are the horrible people in the town who we should cheer for? Or should we be all for the cop who is pretty bad at his job? I can’t tell.
None of the punks on this art are in the movie, in case you’re wondering. That doesn’t mean this is a bad movie. It just feels like the kind of movie that’s better for having John Rambo or Thunder or Indio or Billy Jack come to town than an all over place gang who sit on rocks and discuss the merits of stewardess school versus computer repair.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.