Ilona Staller was born in Hungary but came to Italy and found fame as a salacious radio hostess, taking the name Cicciolina or “Little Cuddly One.” Her show on Radio Luna, Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?, found her speaking on, well,mostly matters of sex and referring to her male fanbase as cicciolini or little tubby boys.

Cicciolina went out of her way to be sexually ahead of her time, appearing topless on regular TV in 1978 and doing her first adult film, Telefono Rosso (Red Telephone) in 1983 and then traveled to the United States to appear in The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empress, a movie that featured an HIV-positive John Holmes.

That’d be enough to be a pretty big star, but she also entered the world of politics, getting elected to the Italian parliament from 1987 to 1991. She also started a political party, Partito dell’Amore (Party of Love) with fellow porn star Moana Pozzi. Then, in 2012, she formed the he Democracy, Nature and Love Party (DNA), which advocated reopening brothels, a minimum wage for young citizens and the legalization of same-sex marriage.

She also released several albums and was famously married to pop artist Jeff Koons, which ended with her taking their son and him destroying all of the sexually explicit Made In Heaven sculptures of her.

In this film — directed by Bruno Mattei as Jimmy B. Matheus!* — Cicciolina makes fantasies come true through her radio show. One of her biggest fans, Riccardino, is obsessed with her and it begins to destroy his relationship with his girlfriend Gianna. However,Cicciolina decides to being all three of them together to fulfill everyone’s fantasies.

Nearly every time we see our heroine, she’s bathed in neon light or riding a horse nude or making love to men with no faces while some wonderful jazz plays. There’s also a scene where she’s nearly assaulted by three men, after which she says that rape is the fault of women who allow it to happen, which, well…woah. I mean, this movie has a very strange relationship with women who are forced to make love and then end up liking it.

Sure, we’ve had sex symbols in the United States, but we never had Cicciolina.

*With Amasi Damiani and Riccardo Schicchi.

If there’s something that all cannibal movies seem to have in common — beyond scenes where white people mistreat the native populace, real animal atrocities and copious levels of gore — it’s the idea that mass media is the root of most of the modern world’s issues. Italian exploitation filmmakers were several decades ahead of the mistrust of what many would call fake news today and their human beings devouring human beings offerings often placed documentary filmmakers or network television reporters as the reason why all of this chaos is taking place. The natives were just fine doing their rituals and eating random folks in the jungle. The white people bring cocaine and their modern perversions into the unspoiled green inferno, ruining everything.

Somehow, 24 years after Cannibal Holocaust, a 73-year-old Bruno Mattei — using his Vincent Dawn alter ego — would find himself in the jungle trying to bring back the sick feeling you get in your stomach when mass media goes to places that they should have known better to avoid.

Grace Forsyte (Helena Wagner in the only role of her career) was once a big deal in the world of television journalism, but the fickle whims of fate have cast her into the pile of the also-rans. She decides to reverse her fortunes by heading into the belly of the beast and capturing Amazon cannibals on video along with another once-famous telejournalist named Bob Manson (Claudio Morales, who was also in Mattei’s A Shudder on the Skin and Orient Escape).

The footage that they send back gets big ratings and makes them both stars again, but the TV news industry runs on blood, so they’re forced to get increasingly violent and horrifying images to continue getting those big numbers.

Look, this movie is also called Cannibal Holocaust: The Beginning and Cannibal Holocaust 2: The Beginning, so Mattei wasn’t even trying to hide what he was trying to do here. It’s a shot on digital video cover version of that film, along with a hilarious subtitle typo (some mouths later instead of some months) and a lot less real animal violence.

This was shot at the same time as In the Land of the Cannibals with much of the same crew. Is that one any better? Look for the review soon.

I think that I was completely unfair to Robowar the first time I reviewed it. Or maybe the fact that I’m doing an entire week of Bruno Mattei movies has caused me to reevaluate things. On second viewing, I loved every single moment of this film.

Vincent Dawn — my favorite Mattei alter ego — worked with Claudio Fragasso and Rosella Drudi to not only rip off Predator, but also The Terminator and Rambo while they were at it. Major Murphy Black (Reb Brown!) leads a squad of commandoes who have given themselves the name  The B.A.M. (Big Ass Motherfuckers).

The team includes Pvt. Larry Guarino (Massimo Vanni, Rats: The Night of Terror), Cpl. Neil Corey (Romano Puppo, who was Trash’s father in Escape from the Bronx), Quang (Max Laurel, Zuma himself!), Soony “Blood” Peel (Jim Gaines, who was in nearly every movie Mattei made in the Phillipines) and Arthur “Papa Doc” Bray (John P. Dulaney, Just a Damn Soldier).

They’ve been sent to the jungle to rescue civilians like Virgin (Catherine Hickland, Witchery) from a guerrilla force, but after wiping out the bad guys, a robot named Omega-1 begins picking them off one after the other. Soon, one of their men named Mascher (Mel Davidson, Strike Commando 2) tells Black that he’s only there to view the battle between Murphy and the killer bot, it’s final field test before it becomes government issue.

And yes, that’s Claudio Fragasso as the killer robot.

Just when you think you’ve kept track of all the ripoffs, Mattei and Fragasso confront you with one more: Omega-1 the Hunter is a human/machine hybrid with organic parts that include the brain of Black’s old friend, Lt. Martin Woodrie. Yes, they went even further and used RoboCop!

I was wrong and apologize for the prior review. After further study, this just may be the third best Predator movie ever made. It’s certainly better than the AVP films. I mean, it starts with a helicopter blowing up real good and that’s where most movies end. All it wants to do is entertain you.

You can get this from Severin or watch it on Tubi.

Also known as Blade Violent, Emmanuelle in Prison and Emmanuelle Escapes from Hell, this movie was shot at the same time as Violence In a Women’s Prison and let me tell you, it’s a race as to which one of the two is more sordid.

Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) is sent to a violent women’s prison — just like in Violence In a Women’s Prison* — and before you know it, she’s battling for top dog status with Albina (Ursula Flores, who was Consuelo in Mattei’s other aforementioned prison epic), which leads to Albina getting knifed in the leg, her arm broken and her wig torn clean off. But soon, four male prisoners — Victor “Geronimo” Brain (Raul Cabrera, Nero and Poppea – An Orgy of Power), Helmut “Blade” von Bauer (Pierangelo Pozzato, Adam and Eve vs. the Cannibals), Brett O’Hara (Robert Mura, Seven Magnificent Gladiators) and their leader “Crazy Boy” Henderson (Gabriele Tinti) — break in to the prison and start assaulting and killing everyone in sight.

From there on out, the movie is an endless attack on the senses, with SWAT troopers invading the prison and killing one of the convicts, a riff on the Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter and one of the girls inserting a vagina in a very private place before a man enters her. Plus, you get Lorraine de Selle from House on the Edge of the Park as the warden and guards screaming things like “I’d like to bite your nipples off…and I’ll do it!”

By the end of the movie, “Crazy Boy” uses Emanuelle and a sheriff as human shields in a desperate attempt to escape. This is the kind of movie where no one may make it out alive.

But seriously, the beginning of this movie — where Emanuelle and fellow prisoners Laura (Maria Romano, The Final Executioner) and Irene (Antonella Giacomini, Seven Magnificent Gladiators) have a stage play in prison where they paint their faces and speak on emasculating men, being loose women and how only love can save them that’s interrupted by Albina throwing tomatoes in Emanuelle’s face — is like something straight out of John Waters.

According to IMDB, Laura Gemser has stated unequivocally that Claudio Fragasso actually directed this movie. She also strangely stays clothed, which is a bold choice for a movie that has razor blades slicing schlongs in half.

*In that movie, she was investigating the prison on behalf of Amnesty International. This one, she’s had drugs planted on her by a high-ranking politician. I bet she caught him and his wife loading the clown in the cannon while watching a snuff tape.

The seventh film in the Black Emanuelle series — and the first to be directed by Bruno Mattei — finds our heroine, still played by Laura Gemser, investigating the Santa Catarina Women’s Penitentiary for Amnesty International.

Wow. You might think that’s pretty woke for an Italian exploitation film. I am here to assure you — or upset you — and reveal that it’s the very last woke or progressive thing that will happen in this movie.

Released as Caged Women in the U.S., this film has Emanuelle pretending to be a drug dealer as she learns all about the horrific conditions within the prison, which consist of all the tropes of the women in prison genre as filtered through the demented minds of husband and wife writing dup Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi.

Of course, our heroine falls for a kindly prison doctor — it’s her husband in real life, Gabriele Tinti — who is there because he euthanized his cancer-stricken wife. What you may not expect are catfights atop mounds of feces or a traumatic scene where Gemser is attacked by numerous rats. If this was an SAT answer it would be: Bruno Mattei is to rats with red glowing eyes as Lucio Fulci is to eyeballs.

Obviously, this movie used the Italian filmmaking trick of shooting two similar films at the same time on the same set with the same crew and actors. The other one would be Women’s Prison Massacre, which is just as demented.

Lorraine De Selle plays the brutal warden. If you’re like me, you’ll recognize her from The House on the Edge of the Park and Cannibal Ferox. Other recognizable performers include Maria Romano (Thor the Conqueror, The Final Executioner) and Franca Stoppi (The Other Hell).

I can’t believe that this actually played U.S. theaters and drive-ins, while being unable to fathom the feeling people had when they wandered into the wrong theater and were confronted by the excesses of Bruno Mattei. One doubts they ever could eat popcorn again.

You can get this from Severin, who really can be depended on for releasing the best-looking versions of movies that most people would wish would just go away. I love them with all my heart.

The Dark Hobby follows conservationists and scientists who will stop at nothing to protect what’s underwater, which as always comes down to the battle between commerce and conservation. Aquarium trade extraction is an industry worth billions that has devastated reef species and habitats globally.

In early 2021, a  Hawaii Circuit court upheld the Supreme Court ruling that the aquarium trade must end. The relentless ten-year legal battle unravels and weaves through this film, showing that while so many animals are protected, those underwater are regularly abused.

“In Hawaii, the reefs, turtles, whales and dolphins are all protected, but everyone forgot the fish” is the tagline for this movie and it really speaks to what this is all about. Director Paula Fouce really captures the subject well and kept my mind quite open to the things I may have never known before, such as how cyanide is used to knock out fish and bring them to pet stores.

The Dark Hobby is available on iTunes, AppleTV, YouTube, GooglePlay, Vudu and Vimeo

Pierre Le Blanc — also known as Bruno Mattei — is back with another journey into the world of modeling. Much like Sparkles once said, “Well I guess I just my first taste of the filthy side of this business.”

Also, only Bruno Mattei could get away with taking a big chunk of his movie Body and Soul, then adding new character names and redubbing the dialogue, then remixing it all as a brand new movie, much less a sequel to another of his films! Or maybe I’ve watched forty of Bruno’s movies in one week and they’re all starting to congeal together.

There are also scenes taken directly from Belle Da Morire and Snuff Trap, so at least this time, it’s only Perre Le Blanc stealing from Vincent Dawn. Which is, as you may have figured out by now, Bruno taking from Bruno to get me to watch another of his movies.

The really amazing thing is that Bruno was still making softcore movies in 2005, long after people had started renting actual pornography, much less being able to download it. You have to give the old master credit for that. Somewhere out there — well, there’s me at least — there are people who prefer the gymnastic and unrealistic wriggling that passes for aardvarking in the mondo de Mattei.

Vincent Dawn is the name Bruno Mattei used to make this movie, which is seemingly shot all in the same two or three rooms and feels like an even lower rent Showgirls, which is exactly the kind of movie that I want to watch Mattei make.

How do you know it’s Bruno Mattei? Because there’s an entire suicide scene from Lethal Weapon  cut and pasted into this film! Not an inspired shot or a copied scene, I mean he took the actual footage and put it into his movie.

That suicide scene goes in when one of Bruno’s (Hugo Baret, who is also in Mattei’s Privé and The Tomb) many women catches him in bed with another girl, does some coke he gives her and swan dives to her doom. One of her friends, Damy (Emily Crawford, also in Mattei’s Capriccio Veneziano), starts dancing in his club to get revenge.

I don’t know who this movie is for, because it’s packed with strip scenes that aren’t all that sexy and lovemaking scenes that are edited in strobing way that could give you a seizure but not an erection. Yet you know, I love that when some people retire and live quiet lives, Mattei was making movies pretty much up until the point that he died from brain cancer.

There’s also a sequel to this and with my level of obsessive-compulsive disorder, you know that I’m going to have to track it down.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Herbert P. Caine is the pseudonym of a frustrated academic and genre movie fan in Pennsylvania. You can read his blog at https://imaginaryuniverseshpc.blogspot.com.

Shocking Dark, also known as Terminator 2, is a mockbuster that can’t even decide what it is ripping off. The film was advertised in many countries as a Terminator sequel, yet it’s basically a remake of another James Cameron film, Aliens, with identical plot points and even characters. The whole thing is so derivative that the film was not even allowed a release in the United States until nearly thirty years after it was made. Although Bruno Mattei manages to eke out a few good scenes, the film as a whole is a waste of his talents.

Shocking Dark follows a rescue mission into the heart of near future Venice, which has been abandoned in the wake of an environmental disaster. A scientific expedition by the totally Tubular Corporation has gone missing, and the “Megaforce” is sent in to retrieve them, unfortunately without the help of Barry Bostwick on a flying motorcycle. The soldiers, accompanied by a female scientist and a corporate apparatchik, soon find that the scientists were wiped out by Venice’s new inhabitants, a race of mutants.

Pretty much every character in this film is a carbon copy of a character from Aliens, only far less likable. For example, Geretta Geretta of Demons and Rats: Night of Terror plays a blatant knock-off of Vasquez, right down to similar-looking clothes and a headband. Even worse is the dime store version of Ripley who serves as our heroine. While actress Haven Tyler is dressed up to look like Ripley, the film removes everything that made Sigourney Weaver’s character entertaining – her compelling back story, her courage, and even her competence. At one point, the Ripley analogue gets several people killed because she keeps pushing the wrong button to open a door while the monsters are attacking. This lack of charm extends to the other characters, to the point that even the Burke analogue manages to be less likable than Paul Reiser’s sleazy executive (something of an accomplishment when you consider that Reiser’s own parents nodded with approval when first seeing their son’s character die in Aliens.)

The film also suffers from some major plot issues, starting with the fact that the origin of the mutants is not adequately explained. It’s stated that the corporation was behind the disaster that ruined Venice, but their role in creating the monsters is only implied. Furthermore, the writers paint themselves into such a corner at the end that they have to insert a deus ex machina to avoid a downer ending. It’s bad when your ending is the equivalent of Adam West Batman pulling some miracle gizmo out of his utility belt.

However, Mattei’s skills as a genre director allow him to pull a few good scenes out of this garbage. For instance, the opening credits give a convincing portrayal of an abandoned, decaying Venice, a rather impressive feat given that Mattei was obviously just shooting parts of Venice from a boat in these scenes. Furthermore, some scenes set in tunnels underneath the city have a genuine aura of dread and suspense, a product of Mattei’s skill at using lighting to create a somber mood previously displayed in Women’s Prison Massacre.

The film also boasts a one-scene wonder in Clive Riche, who plays the deranged scientist Drake, the lone survivor of the first expedition who is under the control of the mutants. Riche appears to recognize that he’s in a piece of crap and compensates for it by chewing every piece of scenery he can lay hands on. Unfortunately, he only appears in two scenes early in the film.

Shocking Dark is available for free on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We watched this back on June 11, 2018. It’s not as good as it could be, but still lots of fun.

Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi, our friends who brought Troll 2 to life, were the writing team behind this, setting the film in the Philippines as a cheap and convenient locale. Lucio Fulci claimed that the script was dreadful and that he tried to rewrite most of it, whereas the producers would contend that Fulci’s initial cut was a little over an hour yet felt much longer than that. They got Fragasso and Bruno Mattei to finish things up. And we’re left to watch the results.

There’s this formula called Death One, which brings back the dead. Why anyone would want to create this for the army is beyond me. But Dr. Holder realizes that this is all just a bad idea, so he resigns. As he goes to surrender his findings, criminals attack (if this movie starts to remind you of Nightmare City, you aren’t alone) and run away with Death One.

That criminal gets infected and even cutting off his own hand — oh that Fulci — can’t stop the outbreak. The hotel he ran to is condemned and General Morton orders everyone there killed and the criminal’s remains burned by his two right-hand men (played, of course, by Mattei and Fragasso).  But just like Return of the Living Dead, the ashes in the air just make things worse. The birds are infected and begin to spread the disease.

What follows is a group of victims gets introduced to us and one after another, they are wiped out with pure malice and utter glee. There are some American GI’s who mention how horny rock and roll music makes them and the girls on the bus they hook up with. There’s a tourist couple, too. No one will be spared when Death One achieves its full power.

Everyone heads to the now abandoned resort and is shocked to find so many weapons. As they are killed off, Dr. Holden looks for a cure while General Morton works on killing off every single person and animal he can find.

Soon, only five of our heroes — Kenny, Roger, Patricia, Nancy, and Joe — are still alive. As soon as I wrote this down, the soldiers kill Joe. Our survivors make their way to a hospital, where Nancy tries to help a woman deliver a baby — bad news, zombie baby — and gets killed. This scene is packed with the gore that you had hoped that this film would bring. Don’t eat while watching, trust me.

Who lives? Who dies? You should just buy this and watch it, right? Right. I will say that I loved Blue Heart, the DJ who talks throughout the film and adored how he keeps doing it even after he joins the ranks of the undead. It reminds me a lot of the DJ as narrator scenes in The New York Ripper.

I almost forgot! There’s an awesome scene where a zombie skull flies out of the freezer and attacks. It wasn’t in the script but instead came from Fulci. He would go on to say that it was one of the most clever things he had come up with and the only thing about this film that he was proud of.

If you’re hoping for the follow-up to Zombi, this isn’t it. It’s still fun and the last twenty minutes or so really pick up. I’d love to see what happens if they ever did a sequel to this.

Severin has released what will probably forever be the ultimate version of this movie, packed with interviews. You’ll hear from just about everyone, including Fragasso, Drudi, Mattei and several of the actors and crew. There’s a big bundle as well if you get this along with Zombi 4 and Shocking Dark. It’s well worth it — this is one company that knows how to make the most out of everything they release.