Nico Mastorakis may have released Island of Death first, but he made this before that film.

So first off, wow. This movie that defies categorization. Is it a giallo? A science fiction movie? A sleazy caper about two guys who really should just have sex with one another and instead have threeways because they’re all weird about coming out to one another? Who can say?

This just came out from Arrow, presented for the very first time in a new HD master in both widescreen and full-frame versions, and I have to say, “Where has this movie been all my life?” I say this and by all my life, I mean after puberty, because wow. This film is not shy at all about its love scenes.

Ches (Chris Nomikos, The Ceremony) is a hustling gigolo who picks up Bob Kovalski (Peter Winter) at the Athens airport, immediately hooks him up with a girl he’s sleeping with and then they all get kicked out of a place that doesn’t belong to him.

After some hijinks — which lead into the story instead of the story being the reason for said hijinks, an inversion of my typical explanation of “This happens and hijinks ensure” — the two meet the wealthy Geraldine Steinwetz (Jessica Dublin, who was in everything from The Toxic Avenger movies to Trinity Is Still My Name, Sex of the Witch and Troma’s War) and her psychic daughter Christine (Maria Aliferi).

The whole thing is yet another scam, but this time on the two leads, and numerous people want Christine dead and our heroes go from guys out to get laid — probably by one another — to being caught in the middle of an international incident. That’s because Geraldine is really a medium herself as well as an East-German agent who is using the young girl to try to kill a Russian leader.

Also known as The Para Psychics, this is without a doubt the only movie I’ve ever seen where psychic abilities are used to stop an erection.

This movie is really unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, a mix of Confessions of a Window Cleaner with early 70’s dark conspiracy thriller and a little bit of occult/psychic action to spice things up. It’s a cocktail that should not by any rights taste as good as it does, but it’s refreshingly delectable.

The Arrow release also has exclusive new interviews with Mastorakis and Aliferi. You can get this from MVD, who were kind enough to send us a review copy.

The difference between pre-Max Rockatansky armageddon movies and post is that the end of times is a thing to be celebrated in the 80’s. It was seen as the next step in evolution and place we’d all have to emerge from, wearing facepaint and shoulder pads. Not so in the 50’s and 60’s, where sure nuclear war was inevitable, but so was the bleak death of the human race. No one would survive to roam the wastelands and build it all over again in these films.

In this film, a group of young women roam the fallout forests, led by an older woman in military fatigues who has to keep control, especially because these women seem to be obsessed with torturing animals. Seriously, they are the wet dream of 70’s Italian filmmakers and the nightmare of any rational person watching this movie. They then find an old hotel where only one old man lives.

Yes, a depressing Czech end of the world movie with no subtitles and people killing one another over polka records. Do I know how to pick movies to watch during a global pandemic or what?

The Italians get post-apocalyptic movies better than anyone else, because they realize that at best, they are just Western movies remade with cars instead of horses. The costumes, the dirt, the violence are all the same. They can even use the same sets — now rundown with age — from the 60’s and 70’s heights of the Italian cowboy era to become the Xerox Bartertown of their low budget epic.

Romolo Guerrieri had been around as a director for years, working in all manner of genres like the giallo (The Sweet Body of Deborah, La Controfigura), poliziotteschi (The Police Serve the Citizens?, Young, Violent, Dangerous) and, you guessed it, Westerns (he wrote Any Gun Can Play and wrote and directed Johnny Yuma).

In a film also known as The Final Executioner during its U.S. video shelf life, after a nuclear war, society has been broken into two groups: the clean, uncontaminated elites and those they hunt, the people left behind who have been contaminated by radiation. At least 80 million have been killed for sport as this movie begins.

Alan Tanner tries to put a stop to this, as his wife has been selected to be hunted. He pays for it by getting shot and left for dead before being rescued and trained by ex-cop Sam (Woody Strode, who is pretty much playing the same role he played in Keoma). Together, they go against the system.

Footage from this was used in Giuseppe Vari’s Urban Warriors and Vanio Amici’s The Bronx Executioner, which should please you that even after the end of the world, some folks try to keep it green. In fact, Woody Strode’s character is renamed Warren and is in the latter, with new footage shot for Margit Evelyn Newton’s character.

Speaking of Margit, she was shooting this and The Adventures of Hercules at the same time, which she claims exhausted her and made her lose ten pounds.

Look, this isn’t great, but a dude rides around on a motorcycle and has a samurai sword in an Italian wasteland. That’s enough to get me to watch. And they’re all different . . . but the same, none the less.

With most of Earth destroyed by an asteroid, only one small military base has survived. New America, located in the Arctic, is our last best hope of repopulating the Earth. Luckily, it’s staffed by 1990’s TV stars like Richard Grieco, Nick Spano, Jaime Pressly and most importantly, Mario Lopez.

If you’re wondering, “WIll I see Mario without a shirt in this movie?” allow me to set your mind at ease. David DeCoteau directed this. So yes, the fact that he even wears a shirt in the cold permafrost of the Arctic should amaze you.

This movie posits that a murder has happened on the base and that Lopez is there to investigate why Grieco’s character is abusing his soldiers. But really it’s about dudes just hanging and banging in their boxers or briefs while burning each other with cigars, hugging it out and sipping steroids out of a giant goblet, because look, DeCoteay has an audience and they — and he — demand such actions.

You can watch this on Tubi. There’s also a Rifftrax version which I’d watch instead of the original.

Another movie that I didn’t watch for a long time so that I could be ready for it, Der Fan totally paid off. Man, this is one dark journey into the abyss.

Simone (Désirée Nosbusch, who recorded “Kann es Liebe sein?” with Falco) is in love with a new wave singer named R. Love is such an easy word for how she really feels, as her adoration for him replaces eating and sleeping and school. Now, all she wants to do is wait and wait for a letter for him that never comes. She is nothing without him and becomes nothingness.

When she finally meets him in the flesh, she freezes and he takes advantage of her, making love to her and then coldly rejecting her. In any other film, this would be the life lesson, but instead, Simone kills him with a statue, then consumes his flesh before turning his bones to ash and shaving her head.

The movie ends with one last fan letter, as a pregnant Simone claims that R will always be a part of her. Well, in one way or another, right?

This is yet another film that stands on the side of arthouse versus grindhouse, but that only depends on what theater is showing it. Eckhart Schmidt wrote the book that this was based on and directed this film, as well as Alpha City, which will be on our site in a few weeks.

So often, glam stars seemed to come from another planet. In this one, the fan seems as if she does not exist on the same level of existence as us, a ghost that walks among us, ready at any moment to unleash violence. She is an angel of death walking amongst mortals, which rock stars most assuredly are.

You can get this on blu ray from Mondo Macabro.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This review originally ran in Drive-In Asylum #21. You should buy it!

The film that dares to explain what most parents can’t…

SEE life begin!

SEE the actual birth of a baby!

There are some movies that I can’t wait to watch. And then there are others that I keep from watching, waiting for the right moment so that they achieve maximum viewing velocity and impact. 

For years I’ve thrilled to the trailer for Teenage Mother, with its barking voice basically shouting to no one in particular, “It happens 250,000 times a year. Where is your daughter tonight? This is the story of a girl who wasn’t careful.”

I can word for word perform this trailer for you – go ahead, ask me next time you see me in person – so I was concerned. How could the movie live up to a ballyhoo build that promises a girl who turns brother against brother, a wanton lass so scandalous that roadshow presentations of her story would come complete with split audiences for the boys and the girls, as well as a nurse to explain “the real facts of life” with a “brief lecture about how we use our bodies.” The voiceover shrilly lays it all on the line, “every parent should bring our child. It explains things you can’t” in color and Cinemascope.

Also known as The Hygiene Story, a lesser title if there ever was one, this was produced by Jerry Gross. Obviously, he learned and applied the square up reel instructional angle that the legendary Kroger Babb employed when he roadshow four-walled Mom and Dad across America for decades. While Gross only directed two other movies – Female Animal and Girl On a Chain Gang – he also produced everything from All the Kind Strangers to Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and The Black Godfather.

More than that, Gross was the genius who bought a movie called Caribbean Adventure, retitled it I Eat Your Skin and like some mad genius, had the vision to pair it with a movie that is literally LSD on filmstock, I Drink Your Blood.

Gross brought both of the Mondo Cane films to American theaters, complete with actors hired to play natives that would dance through the aisles. He also had a hand in getting Fulci’s Zombie, Fritz the Cat, Blood Beach, Johnny Got His Gun and The Boogeyman on screens. And he possessed the carny intelligence it took to rename Day of the Woman to the much more titillating – and money-making – nom de plume I Spit On Your Grave. 

Nobody could title a movie like Jerry. He once said, “I guarantee that all these are selling titles. The public just cannot resist a film if the title drags them in. Stars don’t matter. Titles do!”

Jerry pulls a fast one here, as our heroine Arlene (Arlene Farber, the at-the-time wife of Gross, who appears in the film as a seedy truck driver) never even gets knocked up. She’s just lying to her boyfriend to get attention. So yeah – the movie Teenage Mother doesn’t even have a teenage mother in it, but is really about Ms. Peterson, a teacher who has angered all the parents with her sex education class. 

Beyond all that, Teenage Mother provides an odd place for several stars to get their first on-screen credit. Earl Hindman, Wilson from Home Improvement, is here, as are Lynne Lipton (the voice of Cheetara on Thundercats), Alex Mann (who appeared in movies by Joe Sarno, Barry Mahon, Doris Wishman and Michael Findlay) and most surprising, Fred Willard. In his brief moment on screen, he breaks up an attack on Ms. Peterson, an act that the future star of Fernwood 2 Night said caused boos in some of the rougher showings of this opus.

But back to the story. Our heroine being mock pregnant has the town in an uproar and the hygiene class is the culprit. 

“Teaching that stuff in school is like talking about the Devil right in church,” screams the matronly librarian – who should really speak in a hush, if you think about it – at one point. But for all the bluster of the trailer about how “this is a film about a girl who went all the way” and how this “may very well be the most important film that you will ever see,” the sleaze mostly resides in that five-minute get butts in the seats masterpiece.

I say mostly because Teenage Mother ends with the actual birth of a child – forceps and all – with the same voice as the aforementioned trailer, which I like to believe is Gross. It’s the most clinical and mechanical description of the miracle of birth you’ve ever seen, using words like Universal Joint, interior birth canal and minimal compression of the fetal head.

You have to love a movie whose climax is predicated on stock footage being shown, much less stock footage that Gross slipped some doctor fifty bucks for. 

Never let anyone tell you that this world is bereft of magic. At one point, Jerry Gross walked the Earth and instead of using his genius for the kind of things that normal humans celebrate like inventing consumer products or running for political office, he blessed us all with mind-melting reels of cinema. He taught us so many things, foremost among them the knowledge that Satan is an acidhead and that Teenage Mother means nine months of trouble.