EDITOR’S NOTE: This Mexican senoritas in charge movie originally was on our site on June 23, 2020. It’s a fine example of how the trope of dominant matriarchal societies has reached so many countries beyond our own.

Rogelio A. Gonzalez made more than 70 movies, but I wonder if he ever made anything near as good as this movie, which is perhaps one of the strangest films I’ve ever had the delight to witness.

I was wondering how to even describe this movie. Basically, Gamma (Ana Bertha Lepe, Miss Mexico 1953 and a third-runner up for Miss Universe) and Beta (Lorena Velazquez, Miss Mexico 1960 and also Zorina queen of the vampires in Santo vs. Las Mujeres Vampiro) have come from Venus to find men to repopulate their planet. Of course, they can’t resist biting people or falling in love with Lauriano (Eulalio “Piporro” Gonzalez, one of the kings of golden age of Mexico comedy and the literal embodiment of Northern Mexican culture), a singing cowboy.

Sure, that would set up a great movie, but this is Mexico. Which means that the ship has a robot named Tor who is collecting a whole bunch of monsters — why, the title translates as Ship of Monsters, surprise! — and those monsters are about to go crazy. There’s Uk the cyclops, the many armed Carasus, Prince of Mars Tagual, Utirr the spider and the dinosaur skeleton named Zok. Also, Tor falls for a jukebox. And some of the special effects were ripped off from the Russian movie Road to the Stars.

Imagine if Ed Wood lived in Mexico, had a better budget, lucked out and had magnificent actresses willing to wear swimsuits and high heels, as well as a singing cowboy. Then we’d cut open slice open a peyote cactus and make him sit in a cave until he made this and it still might not this charming and odd.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Edward J. and Harry Lee Danziger may have come from America, but their films were all over UK screens through the 50’s and 60’s. Devil Girl from Mars is a great example of the kind of movies they made money with.

Patricia Laffan was Empress Poppaea in Quo Vadis — with costumes by Herschel McCoy, hairstyles by Sydney Guilaroff and jewelry by Joseff of Hollywood — before this movie and an international fashion impresario after this. She owns every single moment of screen time as Nyah, the title character.

Accompanied by one of the goofier robots ever — Chani is its name — she also has a raygun that she uses to kill anyone that gets in her way, seeking men to come back to help repopulate her planet, which has been dying off ever since a devastating battle between the sexes that one would assume that the women have won.

She can’t find a single man willing to go back to Mars with her. This is why this movie is science fiction, because Nyah — and Laffan herself — is absolutely stunning.

Maybe it’s because she’s landed right in the middle of a soap opera, because she’s outside a bar where a fashion model (Hazel Court, Dr. Blood’s Coffin) is running away from the runways of New York City and a relationship with a married man. And at the very same place, a convict who accidentally killed his wife has come to reunite with the barmaid (Adrienne Corri, Mrs. Alexander from A Clockwork Orange) who he really loves.

What’s even more interesting is that while The Day the Earth Stood Still presents Klaatu as Jesus, this movie pretty much presents Nyah as an evil Virgin Mary. Or seeing as how Laffan had dark reddish eyes and green eyes, perhaps we can see her as the Scarlet Woman, come to Earth to lead us to the End Times.

One final irony: Laffan was a lesbian and the last girlfriend of divorce lawyer Frances Blacket Gill, the first female lawyer in the UK. So how strange is it that she’s here on Earth ready to kill men to get them to copulate with her?

Sword and sorcery was a big part of the films that Roger Corman released in the 1980’s. To be fair, different sword and sorcery cycles — peblum to Conan ripoff — have always been part of Corman’s films.

Amazons is from Argentina and is based on the Charles R. Saunders story Agbewe’s Sword. Saunders was born in Elizabeth, PA, about fifteen minutes from where we live. He settled in Nova Scotia where he worked for a local newspaper and wrote several well-received short stories about the African-American community there. He also, in his spare time, created the world of Imaro and became one of the first writers to create African-American centric sword and sorcery stories*.

Based on the real-life female warriors of the West African Kingdom of Dahomey, Amazons tells the story of several female warriors, like Dyala (Mindi Miller, Caged Fury), Tashi (Penelope Reed), Tashinge (Danitza Kingsley, Blackout) and Vishiti (Maria Fournery, Deathstalker).

What is not based on reality is that there’s a woman in this movie who can transform into a lion. So know that going in. Neither is the Sword of Azundati, which the trailer seems to think is Excalibur. But hey, who cares about reality? There are Amazon fights galore, including one battle between one of the women and a giant snake. That’s really why I watch movies.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*He also wrote Stormquest, another movie that was made with Sessa directing. It’s all about a female-dominated society coming to realize that they may be wrong by excluding men. It’s one of the last of ten Argentinan barbarian movies that Corman would produce.

Rot taught me something. I never, ever want to be a graduate student. Seriously, this movie makes it seem like the kind of living hell that I’d rail against.

Madison (Kris Alexandrea) is one of those under pressure grad students, so part of the life of academics that the one thing she can leave behind is her boyfriend Jesse (Johnny Kostrey). But once he goes missing, someone or something else has taken his body over. And being busy with the demands of a doctorate will be easy compared to this.

Writer/director/editor Andrew Merrill has put together a story that could be a possession film or something akin to a body snatcher movie, but it never really explains much about the evil force that is inside Jesse. What’s more important is how his rage explodes and how it impacts everyone in his life.

The how is quite simple: Jesse is injured by an attack by one of the patients in the nursing home where he works. At first, he seems fine, but before long, he assaults both his roommate Aaron (Johnny Uhorchuk) and girlfriend Nora (Sara Young Chandler) and then disappears.

The virus, if you will, has begun to spread all over town, with the very center of it being the nursing home. With a title like Rot, you can rest assured that things will get messy.

You can buy Rot right here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Originally posted during our Turkish movie blowout — this one was originally on the site on September 13, 2020 — Uçan Daireler Istanbulda is a great example of alien women descending on our planet and fits in so well this week. Enjoy!

It’s 7,296 miles from Ankara to Mexico City, but you’d never guess it by this film, known in our tongue as Flying Saucers Over Istanbul.

In the same way that Mexican films like La Nave de los Monstruos and Conquistador de la Luna see the worlds beyond ours, this movie feels like it very well be a primo de Turquía of that psychotronic film familia.

Perhaps we can lay the blame or the thanks at the feet of Kenneth Arnold, who made the first publicized — well, you know, unless you count the Bible — sighting of what he called flying saucers on June 24, 1947. Before you could say B movie, they were the de facto villains of nearly every black and white science fiction movie coming out of Hollywood, which meant that other nations would not be far behind.

Much like so many of my favorite movies — Cat-Women of the Moon, Fire Maidens from Outer Space, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, Missile to the Moon, Amazon Women on the Moon, Queen of Outer Space and El Planeta De Las Mujeres Invasoras — a planet full of women have decided that human men would be the best way to repopulate their dead mudball.

There’s also a secret club of old women that two of the men want to sell the Fountain of Youth that the aliens just so happen to possess, as well as a Marilyn Monroe impersonator played by Mirella Monro, a robot that makes the el Roboto Humano look like a James Cameron-directed piece of gleaming tech and more belly dancing than I’ve ever seen in one movie before. In short, this movie is everything you never knew you wanted and then even more of that.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Gregg G. Tallas started his career working with Fritz Lang, which does not explain how his career took him to some crazy places, such as Espionage in Tangiers, Assignment Skybolt and the movie he’d make 12 years later, Cataclysm, which is, of course, “The Case of Claire Hansen” in Night Train to Terror.

So yeah. He made this bit of insanity too, which stars 1950’s tabloid star Laurette Luez, who was also in D.O.A. She’s Tigri in this film, one of the Amazons who hate all men. That said, they still need to kidnap them and use them to get pregnant, but otherwise, they hate the gender.

You know who wins them over? Engor.

He’s played by Allan Nixon, speaking of tabloid stars. He became an informant for Confidential magazine after years of being out of control, getting arrested for drunk driving and getting in fights. And, well, pure crazy stuff. That’s because in 1958, he got in a heck of a battle with his third wife Velda May Paulsen after she visited her ex-boyfriend Burt Lancaster in the hospital. He hit her, she stabbed him with the kitchen knives he gave her for Christmas. He didn’t press charges, they got back together and she died before the year was over because of burns she suffered in an explosion. Nixon — a Ron Ormond star — would eventually become a writer under his own name and using the pen names Nick Allen and Don Romano for the Shaft paperbacks.

Engor is such a man here that not only does he figure out fire — screw you Prometheus — he also kills a big lizard. After that, all the ladies — who include Joan Shawlee from The Apartment and Brian Keith’s life and the vamp in Singin’ In the Rain Judy Landon — decide that it’s time to get married.

There’s also a commentator who says inane things like, “And Engor called it Firee, which was his word for Fire.” He’s really the best thing in this whole movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This movie looked like absolute junk, a tale of white colonialism that would be dated even a few years after it was made.

But then I realized that the jungle girl was played by Edwige Fenech and here we go.

Director Guido Malatesta made Colossus and the Headhunters and Maciste il vendicatore dei Maya, so I’m going to stop being mean and just say that he made simple films that were probably crown pleasers in their time.

Roger Browne, who would one day be the Senator in Emanuelle in America, is looking for a diamond mine and finds Samoa (Fenech), he has to decide between being a criminal and leaving with her tribes holy stones or settling down in the jungle with the queen of all giallo. Dude, how is this even a choice?

Come for the comically long bar fight, stay for Ms. Fenech and enjoy the appearance by Femi Benussi, who was in The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance; So Sweet, So Dead and The Killer Must Kill Again.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Louis Malle’s Black Moon is one of those movies that I’ll be watching and Becca comes in and gets mad about.

“What the hell is that unicorn in this movie for?” she asked.

“It’s art” is always my answer. She doesn’t care that Malle made stuff like Pretty Baby, Atlantic City and My Dinner with André. No, she just sees someone breast feeding a goat.

Lily (Cathryn Harrison, Images, Eat the Rich) escapes a gender on gender civil war*, barely avoiding getting murdered by a firing squad, as well as encountering a flock of sheep standing around their lynched shepherd, militarized women torturing a boy and falling asleep on flowers that scream out in pain.

She then finds a château that is filled with animals and a strange woman who lies in bed, yelling at her pet rat Humphrey. She then begins making fun of Lily to someone on the other side of the shortwave radio before trying to strangle our heroine, who promptly slaps her so hard that she dies.

Then, she meets Lily (Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro) and Lily (Alexandra Stewart, The Uncanny), who breast feeds the old woman back to life. For some reason, they all share names and communicate telepathically. Then, a bunch of nude children run into the house and the unicorn tells her that the old woman is not real.

This is also a movie that goes on to feature male Lily beheading a hawk, a chorus of naked kids singing Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and a woman attempting to give a unicorn her mother’s milk.

Black Moon was shot in Malle’s own 200-year-old manor house and considered it a sexual awakening inspired by Alice In Wonderland. He called it his “mythological fairy tale taking place in the near future.” It failed at the box office and went unseen for many years.

*Malle referred to this battle as “the ultimate civil war…the war between men and women…the climax and great moment of women’s liberation.”

You can get this as part of the Criterion Collection.