You’d be forgiven if you think Venetian Capriccio is Desire, another Bruno Mattei — Vincent Dawn this time — softcore romp in which an American girl comes to Italy to learn the art of music and spends more time learning the language of the aardvark.

Our lady this time is Roberta (Emily Crawford, an adult actress whose mainstream acting career consists of this movie and another Mattei film, Belle de Moirre), who has come to Venice to teach music when she runs into an artist named Lorenzo (Gualberto Parmeggiani). Before you can say “Cinemax After Dark” he’s taking her to nightclub orgies and having her genderbend and make some tourists nervous.

But is it love? Or just cazzo?

This movie also has a very 60s attitude toward relationships, with Roberta giving her boyfriend Riccardo to another teacher named Luisa as well as her also making some horizontal music with her female friends Anna and Letizi.

With a name that literally means go with the flow, this is pretty much Mattei doing that, finding a genre that he can make some money in. His heart never feels in these gauzy romantic films, as if he sadly wants everyone to devour one another and not just as part of foreplay.

The third time Brent Huff would work with Bruno Mattei — there’s also Strike Commando 2 and Cop Game — this time finds the actor playing Sam Wood, a survivor of a vicious Vietnamese prison camp who is talked into going back into hell with reporter Maryline Kane (Mary Stavin, the 1977 Miss World who is also in Mattei’s Born to Fight, as well as Open House, House, Octopussy, A View to a Kill, Caddyshack II, Top Line and Howling V: The Rebirth, proving that I have seen many of her movies), who really just wants our hero to help her free her father from the prison camp.

Things get more complicated when Wood learns that Duan Loc (Werner Pochath, Colonel Magnum from Thunder 3) is still in charge. Yet instead of being a film that explores the root causes and treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder, Mattei and writer Claudio Fragasso gives everyone watching what they really want: violence, glorious violence.

The beauty of this film is that Mattei references Casablanca while featuring a hero who is so bored with life that he mixes snake venom into the beer he drinks all day long to escape the pain of his past.

Made pretty much hours after pretty much the same crew finished Strike Commando 2, Born to FIght has everything I look for in a Mattei Philippines war movie, which is totally a genre, thank you for asking. There’s nothing quite like a slow-motion Brent Huff unloading millions of rounds of ammunition into bamboo huts while screaming and repeatedly saying his catchphrase, “It can be done.” Maybe he was a Bud Spencer fan?

As for Ms. Stavin, she also dated Manchester United football hero George Best, who was voted the sixth for the FIFA Player of the Century and one of GQ’s fifty most stylish men of the last fifty years in 2007. One of the first celebrity football players, he was nicknamed El Beatle and owned restaurants, fashion boutiques and a nightclub called Slack Alice. Of his life, he said, “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars – the rest I just squandered.”

Between 1982 and 1984, the fitness craze swept the UK. Lifestyle Records released a series of celebrity albums in which different somewhat famous folks sang cover songs and discussed what working out meant to them. The first two albums, which featured Felicity Kendal and Angela Rippon, sold well. Later releases, well…not so much. Beyond Isla St. Clair, Suzanne Danielle, Christina Brookes, Jay Aston, Suzanna Dando and Patti Boulaye, Stavin and Best released their album, which even had their cover of “It Takes Two” cut as a single. They also covered The Eurythmics “Love Is a Stranger!”

An elite group of commando assassins — Cobra Squad! — are murdering high ranking U.S. soldiers in the closing days of Vietnam. To stop them, Morgan (Brent Huff, Gwendoline, Nine Deaths of the Ninja) and Hawk (Max Laurel, who played Zuma in two films and Quang in Robowar) must have one another’s back against a massive conspiracy.

Yes, Bruno Mattei — Bob Hunter! — has united with Rossella Drudi and Claudio Fragrasso, heading to the Phillipines and made a movie that makes little to no sense whatsoever. I don’t say this as an insult. Few of the man’s movies have anything approaching a coherent plot. Yet every single one of them wants to entertain you to the point that you are rolling on the floor in incredulity and laughter. They are everything you want them to be.

This is the kind of movie with dialogue like “When you go home, you will forget about me. But I will still be here, drowning in a sea of shit.” and “Ah, Jesus Christ, cocksucker motherfucking sonofabitch.”  Nearly every line is screamed as loudly as possible, as if a twelve year old boy has just been allowed to stay home by himself while his parents go out and he takes advantage of the freedom by repeatedly saying combinations of swear words and never getting tired of using them until he’s hoarse by the time mom and dad come back.

It’s also the kind of film that says that it takes place in 1975 Vietnam but also has plenty of Miami Vice and 80’s buddy cop vibes, along with stolen footage from The Ark of the Sun God, both Strike Commando movies and Double Target. I guess since Mattei made most of those, he’s really just cutting and pasting. You can’t steal from yourself, right? This isn’t a John Fogerty getting sued because his song “The Old Man Down the Road” sounds exactly like Creedence Clearwater Revival situation!

Cop Game also has an all-star cast and by that, I mean actors that ony I care about like Romano Puppo (Trash’s dad in Escape from the Bronx), Candice Daly (After Death), Werner Pochath (Colonel Magnum in Thunder III), Robert Marius (Mad Warrior), Massimo Vanni (Robowar), Ottaviano Dell’Acqua (who is the “We are going to eat you” undead face on the poster for Zombie), Roberto Dell’Acqua (Nightmare City), Jim Gaines (Zombies: The Beginning) and a Brett Halsey cameo.

Mattei made movies in nearly every junk film genre. I can honestly say that I have loved every single one of them and if you want to hear me ramble on about something, ask me about them.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally talked about this Bruno Mattei film back on February 1, 2019. Let’s bring it back and celebrate the barbarian films of Mattei!

What happens when Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragrasso ripoff — remake — The Magnificent Seven/The Seven Samurai with gladiators and barbarians instead of cowboys and, well, samurai? This was originally going to be Hercules, according to Variety, but Luigi Cozzi took over that one and supposedly was brought in to save this one.

The plot here — again, it’s the same movie as the other two films that gather seven heroes — is about Nicerote (Dan Vadis, a former member of the Mae West Muscle Review who played Hercules in Hercules the Invincible, Roccia in The Ten Gladiators movies and appeared in several Clint Eastwood movies), a bandit leader and his sorceress mother who makes yearly raids on a peasant village. But this year, Pandora (Carla Ferrigno, who was Athena in Hercules and also in Black Roses) and the women of the village have found a magic sword and go off to hire a hero who can use it and anyone else who can finally end the annual destruction of their homes.

Now, the mighty barbarian Han (Lou Ferrigno) wields the mystical Sword of Achilles and soon assembles a team of gladiators to help him win the day. There’s Scipio (Brad Harris, who played Goliath, Hercules and Samson in past peblum films, as well as Durango and Sabata), Julia (Sybil Danning, the real draw of this film, playing the Harry Luck Magnificent Seven character), Goliath (Emilio Messina, Lepto from The Ten Gladiators), Festo (Giovanni Cianfriglia, who played Superargo in two movies) and more.

However, you may wonder how a movie with Lou Ferrigno throwing rocks at people and Sybil Danning being, well, Sybil Danning, is so boring. It’s an amazing feat. I’ve tried to watch this twice and both times barely made it. It’s a great idea with poor execution, sadly.

You can get this from Revok.

This movie is quite literally the Batman and Superman of Italian sleaze filmmaking uniting to create some art. Those two men have many, many names, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll use the names that they used most often: Joe D’Amato and Bruno Mattei.

Producer Franco Gaudenzi wanted to bring the movie The Wild Pussycat to Italy, but it would have never made it past the Italian censors. For some reason, if the movie was made in Italy, it would pass. This is the country where it’s legal to call your movie Zombi 2, but illegal to use Mrs. Ward’s name. Let’s forget the complexities of law when it comes to exploitation cinema and move on.

D’Amato and Mattei took up the challenge of remaking this movie for Italian audiences with both writing the script and co-directing the picture, even if only D’Amato got directing credit. What was important for the producers was that the film could play theaters and it passed the Italian censorship board on November 5, 1975 after some lesbian elements and scenes with sodomy were removed.

Ironically, when this was brought to Switzerland by Erwin C. Dietrich, he added in actual hardcore scenes with French actress Brigitte Lahaie (who is in Fascination) and dubbed it into German, releasing it as Foltergarten der Sinnlichkeit (Torture Garden of Sensuality) and Die Lady mit der Pussycat (The Lady with the Pussycat).

Truly, scumbag pictures bring all the nations of the world together, do they not?

Francoise (Patrizia Gori, The Return of the Exorcist) has had enough of the abuse from her gambler cad of a husband Carlo (George Eastman!), so she jumps in front of a train. Her sister Emanuelle — no, not Laura Gemser just yet, she’s played here by Rosemarie Lindt from Salon Kitty — gets revenge by drugging Carlo and restraining him in a soundproof room. There, she teases him through two-way mirrored glass as he’s forced to watch her make love to numerous men and women, all while he’s repeatedly dosed with LSD.

Finally, Emanuelle enters the room and attempts to castrate Carlo, who has been repeatedly fantasizing about killing her and finally does so for real. His joy is short-lived as while he’s hiding in the secret room, he gets locked in and the police closed down the crime scene for thirty days, basically leaving him to die.

Also known as Emanuelle’s Revenge, Blood Vengeance and Demon Rage, this is exactly the kind of movie that you’d imagine D’Amato and Mattei would make together, filled with numerous sex scenes, frequently spinning and zooming camera angles and a cannibalistic feast sequence.

Back when we reviewed Emanuelle In America, the guys at Severin said, “If you thought that was rough, watch this one.” Their release has a great George Eastman interview in which he says that  D’Amato had the ability to do bigger and better things, but preferred doing ten B movies a year than one A film. You can get the Severin edition of this film and see just how good-looking a completely irredeemable piece of trash — I say that with love — can look.

When most Italian men get to be 75 years of age, they become kindly older men, their rough edges filed down and replaced with good humor and happiness. Bruno Mattei was not one of those men, because if you think his return to the women in prison genre would start pulling punches, you don’t know Vincent Dawn. Or David Hunt. Or Werner Knox.

The first moment in this movie would be the roughest in anyone else’s film. The warden of the prison hell on an Adian island asks for a woman to be released from the hole that she’s been in for a month. When the guards take her out, she’s already dead. She orders her to take twenty lashes anyway to the shock of everyone, even the hardened people guarding the prisoners. In another director’s hands, this would be enough. But we’re in the world of Mr. Mattei and that means we have to watch a dead body literally get the deceased horse treatment.

Three new fish — prisoners 50-52 — are coming to this jungle hell. They’re Carol, who killed her pimp. Lisa, who was part of the wrong crowd. And finally, our heroine Jennifer (Yvette Yzon, who was in two other late Mattei films, Island of the Living Dead and Zombies: The Beginning), who we know won’t crack under pressure. Or high pressure hoses. Or whatever other horrifying things the mind of Mattei can bring.

Jim Gaines — who shows up in plenty of Mattei movies like Zombies: The Beginning, Island of the Living Dead, RoboWar, both Strike Commando movies — plays the Governor of the island who runs a strip club, because I guess that’s the kind of business that thrives in a hellhole, and uses the girls as talent. If you don’t play along, they make you stand in a bamboo cage filled with corpses, so most of the ladies get on the pole.

During a huge party at the Governor’s club, the girls make a break for it, turning the film into The Most Dangerous Game slasher territory, yet it’s somehow some of the best-lensed stuff Bruno did. Life’s funny that way. Somehow, the Philippines were just made for the director.

That said — this movie is 100% not for anyone. Really, it’s filled with such repellant imagery that it goes into near parody territory. The House of the Lost Souls is not a place that anyone wants to go to and the film shows you all of it.

Somehow, someway, Bruno didn’t rip anything off in this other than every women in prison movie ever.

Remember when there were a whole bunch of Brendan Fraser mummy movies? What if Bruno Mattei made his own version of those movies — using the name David Hunt — and filled it with all of the wonderful things that his movies are known for? Well, he did. He sure did.

Over the last few years of his career, Mattei began working with Giovanni “Gianni” Paolucci, who wrote and produced his films Dangerous Attraction, Snuff Killer, Mondo Cannibal, In the Land of the Cannibals, The Jail: The Women’s Hell, Island of the Living Dead, Zombies: The Beginning, Capriccio Veneziano, Privé, Belle da Morire and the sequel to that film. Before working with Mattei, he also wrote and produced Antonio Margheriti’s The Ark of the Sun God and was the producer of Argento’s Dracula 3D (as well as the upcoming Antropophagus II, which will be directed by Dario Germani).

The amazing thing is that now that Bruno has moved on to digital video, he’s able to completely not just rip off movies — this is The Mummy right down to the bad guy who looks kinda sorta like Arnold Vosloo — he’s now able to even more easily copy and paste footage from other films directly into his own. Now, when a major Hollywood film takes a plot point, I get apoplectic. Yet when Matti outright takes entire scenes from other movies, I get overjoyed. Such are the weird ways of how I enjoy film.

That means that while Bruno takes the Titty Twister scenes that were a major part of From Dusk Till Dawn and films his own version, he is just as comfortable with directly taking footage from Army of Darkness and The Mummy and inserting them into The Tomb.

Somehow, the guide that a group of students is using to get through the Aztec pyramids is the reincarnation of an evil priestess and one of those students is the reincarnation of the girl who her lover never got to sacrifice because movie logic demands these things occur. Again, in any other movie, I’d roll my eyes, but I kind of demand these kinds of things from the Italian masters of beyond basement value movies.

Then, to show us all that Mattei does not care at all about the world of Hollywood, he outright takes footage from Raiders of the Lost Ark. I doubt Spielberg had any idea who Bruno Mattei was, but just the sheer “Che palle!” of Mattei brings a tear to my eye. Then, to top that, he also ripped off footage from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom!

This isn’t the best movie Bruno ever made — I cannot and will not answer that impossible inquiry — but damn if it isn’t a million times better than any mummy movie Hollywood has made said the black and white Universal days.

At this time in his career, it seemed like all Bruno Mattei was making — sorry, Vincent Dawn — was Cinemax After Dark fodder with interchangeable covers of women turning their backs to the camera.

This time, we’re dealing with the dangerous liaisons of the rich and famous. Francesca (Dana Ceci, in her one and only role) can’t get anything out of her husband’s lovemaking skills, so she starts a secret identity as adult star Bizou. Along the way, she falls for a male adult actor named Bingo (Hugo Baret, who was Bruno in Mattei’s Belle de Moirre and High Priest Tatamackly in his movie The Tomb, pretty much playing the role that Arnold Vosloo essayed in The Mummy).

What a ridiculous name, I thought, and then remembered that one of the most famous male European adult stars of all time is named Nacho Vidal.

This was written and produced by Giovanni Paolucci, who we have to thank for the late period burst of Mattei’s shot on video horror period in the 2000s, but also have to blame for funding Dracula 3D.

There’s also a full-on devil worshipping scenes that feels straight out of Tim Vigil’s Faust comic. You know, when they adapted that movie, they should have just asked Bruno to make it. Also, there’s some PS1 level CGI in this, which made me love it even more.

Vincent Dawn, in case you couldn’t guess, is Bruno Mattei and here, he’s making one of the several Caligulasploitation movies he’d churn out in his career. If you thought, “I liked Tinto Brass’ Caligula but I really wish it wasn’t so highbrow,” then Bruno — or Vincent — is your man.

Antonio Passalia, who co-directed this and Mattei’s other Romesplotation film, Nero and Poppea – An Orgy of Power, also appears in both of these movies as Cladius. But the real story revolves around Messalina (Betty Roland, who not to sound like a broken record, but also appeared in Nero and Poppea), who has one goal: to be Empress of Rome. If that takes fighting in the gladiator pits or literally blowing Claudius’ mind, so be it.

Meanwhile, Caligula’s sister Agrippina (Françoise Blanchard, The Living Dead Girl and, yes, both of these movies) sleeps with her own brother before eliminating him, all so that her son Nero can become Emperor. How will she make that move? Well, Messalina sleeps with everyone — even pulling off a surprise terzetto on her wedding night with a muscular man who is under 147 centimeters and somehow bedding a eunuch — and it comes back to haunt her when she becomes pregnant while her husband is fighting in a foreign war.

Agrippina is not to be stopped in her goals. She’s also a gladiator, albeit one that can do karate, and not shy when it comes to castrating her victims.

As if this movie couldn’t be any wilder, Mattei falls back to his tricks of, well, ripping off scenes from other movies, lifting from The Colossus of Rhodes, Pontius Pilate and The Beast.

To be honest, I’m shocked that there weren’t more of these Roman epics filtered through the nothing-held-back mania of Italian maniacs like Mattei. Maybe they didn’t sell as well as prison, cannibal and last days of the Third Reich films.

You can now order this from Severin, whether you want a Caligula Bundle that comes with a coin, foto-comic and a copy of Joe D’Amato’s Caligula…the Untold Story or you can order it all by itself. I’m ready for that cleaned up Italian extended cut. Alert the authorities.

Only the genius — or madness — of Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi could take a Rambo ripoff made in the Philippines and decide to add ninjas, the KGB and no small amount of inspiration from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Sgt. Michael Ransom’s (Brent Huff!) owes a debt of honor to his Vietnam squad leader Vic Jenkins (Richard Harris!), who has been captured by heroin-selling terrorists who want ten million dollars worth of diamonds. Now, everyone is going to pay.

How else can I sell this movie to you? Oh yeah, Vic Diaz is in it! Plus, the Strike Commando works with a girl he meets in a bar who is in the midst of a drinking contest named Rosanna Boom. Yes, that’s her name, but I’d forgive you if you called her Marion Ravenwood. She swears more than me, which is saying something, and is played by 1977 Miss World Mary Stavin, who was also in Mattei’s Born to Fight, A View to a Kill, House and Adam Ant’s video for “Strip.”

Italian stalwarts Ottaviano Dell’Acqua and Massimo Vanni also appear in this movie, which was shot concurrently with Zombie 4: After Death. And speaking of recycling, a lot of the jungle action here also shows up in Mattei’s Cop Game, which is also beloved in my world.

The movie has a great twist which I didn’t see coming. Then I realized that the movie had been missing one of the essential Rambo ingredients. We had not yet seen our hero get tortured. Yes, like a southern tag team babyface, he must sell and sell to build for his comeback on the man who has turned heel on him, then emerge from the mud and the blood and the filth and unleash unholy hell on people who only care about diamonds when the Strike Commando’s one true love is the unending thrill of bullets, brawls and blowing things up real good.

You have no idea how excited I am that Severin is releasing a 4K version of this movie.