Terry (John Savage, The Deer Hunter) was forced to participate in a gang assault and served two years in prison, losing his sanity. His mother Thelma (Ann Sothern, so many roles, but also the titular voice of My Mother the Car) runs a boarding house for old women who all gossip about the strange nature of their relationship; if you didn’t know the truth, you would think they were a married couple, not a son and his mother.

Thelma wishes that the victim of the assault, Tina (Sue Bernard, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) was dead. So Terry runs her off the road. He hears how his attorney Rhea Benson (Ruth Roman, whose slate of movies in the early 70s was absolutely wild between this, The Baby and Impulse) didn’t protect him enough, so he kills her too. He even kills new tenant Lori (Cindy Williams, who was commuting between the set of this film and The Conversation) and they move the body out in full view of their suspicious neighbor Lori (Luana Anders, Night Tide).

Speaking of that librarian next door, that same character shows up in 1980s The Attic, which was also written by Tony Crechales and George Edwards.

Also, to those that worry about cat murder, yes — a cat does die in this. It was a real cat in that scene, but it was sedated by a vet. The one in the dumpster is an actual euthanized cat, but it was not killed for this production.

Sadly, this movie had poor distribution and was lost for a few years. How exciting is it that we live in a world where films get found and we can find them ourselves so easily?

You can watch this on Tubi.

13 year old me didn’t care about any 80s starlet that you’d care to mention. I’d already discovered the forbidden fruit that was Eurosleaze and with it, probably one of its classier stars, Sylvia Kristel. You know who agreed with me? Well, at least in the theory that he could make money off of her? Menahem Golan of Cannon, who came up with this movie just for her.

Curtis Harrington directed and he wasn’t pleased with the end product, but this was Cannon. He didn’t have final cut. “I wish I could have been involved in preserving what I felt was the integrity of the film. There were moments I felt were unreasonably cut. I’m not entirely happy with the cut. But (the people at Cannon) don’t care what I think,” he said at the time.

Even as a teen watching this with no sound on Cinemax, I knew that it wasn’t historically accurate. It’s about a fictitious love triangle between Mata Hari and two officers, one French and one German, who end up on the opposite sides of World War I. Despite Mata Hari exposing a German plot, she’s still arrested as a double agent and executed, even though everyone knows that she’s innocent, which wasn’t what I was looking for at 1:47 AM on Cinemax After Dark, you know?

This movie was chopped up to avoid an X rating, Kristel was dubbed and she was deep in her addiction by this point. As much as I love Cannon, they were not the studio to make this, but had that ever stopped them before?

When Roger Corman bought the Russian movie Planet of Storms (Planeta Bur), he used that footage to make Peter Bogdanovich’s Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women and this film, which had to confuse filmgoers. Corman doubled down on that mind-altering sensation that audiences had seen this before by shooting new scenes at the same time that Harrington was making Queen of Blood, as Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue shot their scenes in half a day using the same costumes from that movie.

While Harrington considered Queen of Blood good enough to keep his name on, he used the name John Sebastian, inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach, from this remix. He told Psychotronic Video that the movie “was not even a film.”

Rathbone plays Professor Hartman and Domergue is Dr. Marsha Evans. They’re the only English speaking actors that show up, as everything else is dubbed from the Russian movie. Even the soundtrack is recycled from Dinosaurus! Even crazier, most of the credits were fake so that no one would realize this was made in Russia as it was released during the Cold War.

You can learn more about Russian science fiction in Exploring (Before “Star Wars”): The Russian Antecedents of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

We’ve been covering many of Yasuzo Masumura’s films — Giants and Toys, Irezumi, Black Test Car, The Black Report, Blind Beast — lately and that’s because Arrow Video has been putting them out on blu ray, sometimes for the first time in the U.S.

Sakura Nishi has been sent to a field hospital in Tientsin, the frontline of Japan’s war with the Chinese during the Second Sino-Japanese war.

It’s a losing battle filled with amputation after amputation, as well as soldiers that are emotionally and physically ruined, even going so far as to assault her when she’s one of the few people who can help them. Yet even in this hell — and with the Chinese troops coming to kill everyone — she finds herself giving herself to a man with no arms, trapped in a hospital as he can’t return to Japan and his wife and the public who can never know just how badly the war is actually faring and falling in love with head surgeon Dr. Okabe, who has found himself addicted to morphine.

Even when the man who attacked her comes back injured, Nishi begs Okabe to give him precious blood, but supplies are so low that hardly anyone can be given drugs or fluids. Everyone is chopped into pieces, with Nishi often holding them down so that the bonesaw can do its horrible work. Piles of severed appendages and bodies waiting to be burned prove that this field hospital is just slowing down the inevitable, just as the battles with the Chinese will soon destroy them all.

Red Angel is a brutal film. It’s a punch in the face, a kick to the stomach and a hit to the brain and the people that should see it and be moved and changed by it never will.

As for you, you can grab the new Arrow Video release of Red Angel, which has new audio commentary by Japanese cinema scholar David Desser, a new video essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, a newly filmed introduction by Japanese cinema expert Tony Rayns, a trailer and image gallery. You can get it from MVD.

“A climactic fragment from the existence of an adolescent Narcissus” and an “examination of youthful narcissism” are words that director Curtis Harrington used to describe this early sixteen-minute long movie.

A man catches a glimpse of a woman, becomes obsessed by her and then alternatively horrified by her when he sees her in a much more frightening way the closer he gets to her.

But under the surface, this film looks like Lynch before Lynch. Influenced by Maya Deren and somehow brave enough to confront being queer on film in 1946, Harrington explores the links between sex and fear and death and worry and angst and alienation.

As you can tell by this week of his movies I’m fascinated by Harrington, a man whose career goes from occult leanings to an appearance in Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of the Pleasure Dome, rescuing James Whales’ The Old Dark House, making psychobiddy films and finally finding something of a home making TV movies and episodes of mass population pleasing culture like Charlie’s Angels and Dynasty. He’s definitely all over the place and isn’t that how we like our creative people?