Paula (Amber Newman, who just showed up in The Last of the Grads and is in everything from Night Calls: The Movie, Part 2 to several of the Sex Files movies) snorts coke and dances on stage in a private club before she’s noticed by Mr. and Mrs. Radeck (Alain Petit and, of course, Lina Romay), who ask her to come to their island palace and to bring her lover (who wears a Fangoria shirt) and enjoy a treasure hunt.

Of course, that treasure hunt is really a cosplay of The Most Dangerous Game and seeing Lina with a bow and arrow and short-cropped haircut is the kind of cinema that I am completely a supporter of. I mean, can Paula be surprised that things go this wrong when dinner consists of a kink-filled encounter with the Radeck’s slave Furia (Analia Ivars, who is a Franco veteran with appearances in Bahía blanca, Vampire Blues, Dr. Wong’s Virtual Hell and so many more; she also was the makeup department for this film), who urinates on everyone’s Michelin three-star meals, then goes down on both Baroness Irina (Monique Parent, who did this movie for no money and the chance to have a vacation to Spain with her husband; her resume has magical movies like Night Eyes Three, Gregory Dark’s Body of Influence and Secret Games, Blood Scarab and many, many more) and her husband before tasting Lina’s heels. Bon appetit.

To make that even wilder, the rich folks intend to eat the poor, which is about as subtle as a Jess Franco movie.

Sure, it’s like Franco is playing a rib fest, playing just his hits — hey look, parts of Succubus! Do you kids remember Eugenie? The encore — The Perverse Countess followed by a jam-length Macumba Sexual — are you ready to rock? That said, it works.

This was produced by Hugh Gallagher, who made the SOV insanity that is Gorgasm. He also was behind Franco’s movies Mari-Cookie and the Killer Tarantula, Lust for Frankenstein, Vampire Blues and Dr. Wong’s Virtual Hell. This is the height — probably — of the last section of Franco’s career. Or if you think he’s a hack, this won’t change your mind.

Shinya Tsukamoto made this after Tetsuo and instead of the monochromatic cyrber punk madness of that movie, he’s somehow taken a manga by Daijiro Morohoshi and made a movie that is at once horrifying and charming, as if Spielberg wanted to make a Fulci movie and decided that it should be as cartoony as possible while having nightmare fuel embedded insie every frame.

Archaelogist Reijiro Hieda (Kenji Sawada, the only Japanese person other than Yoko Ono to be on the cover of Rolling Stone) has some out there supernatural ideas that get him almost disbarred. Yet his brother-in-law Takashi Yabe (Naoto Takenaka) has discovered an ancient tomb built to seal in a yokai behind the school that he teaches at, but has disappeared along with a student named Reiko Tsukishima (Megumi Ueno).

Tabe’s son Masao (Masaki Kudou) is searching for his father when he sees Reiko at the school, but several people he knows get murdered and each of their faces appear on his back as smoke rises off it. The culprit? Her singing head, floating around the building.

Yeah, Hiruko the Goblin has just started and it’s already beyond wild.

It turns out the Masao’s grandfather had the same faces on his body sixty years ago and he had promised to keep the school sealed, as it contains a demon named Hiruko, who has turned all of her victims into spiders with human heads that chase our heroes through a system of caves as monstrous mouths come out of the ground and scream for them.

Monster hunting homemade technology, fighting demons with bug spray, demons that crawl on the floor and come shooting at your throat, incantations and rituals, plus slapstick? Man, they don’t make movies like this ever. Get this now — it’s really and truly unique and wonderful.

The Mondo Macabro release of Hiruko the Goblin has a 1080p presentation of a 2K restoration from the original camera negative, plus a new and old interview with Tsukamoto, an intro to the film by the director and videos on the special effects, a trailer and an audio commentary by Tsukamoto expert Tom Mes. You can get it from Mondo Macabro.

Lina Romay directed 13 movies in between starring in 123 films, most of them with the man for whom she became a muse, Jess Franco.

Surprisingly, this film — despite a title that means The Girls In Thong — is nowhere near as racy as the other movies Franco made on this end of his career, feeling more like a comedy than anything else.

The men are stupid, the women are attractive, there’s no translation and no awkward anatomy zoom lenses. That said, this is quite obviously for people that have created their own Letterboxd lists to track how many Franco movies they’ve watched.

Maybe it’s so chaste — well, for Franco — because Antonio Mayans had his wife Juana de la Morena and both of his daughters, Ivana and Flavia, in the cast (actually, that’s BS because Flavia was also in Emanuelle Exposed and Bahía blanca). Speaking of that Emanuelle Franco movie, its lead Muriel Montossé is also in this, as are Eva León (Voodoo Black Exorcist, Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll) and Analía Ivars (Gold Temple Amazons, Lust for Frankenstein).

You know how you know this is a Jess Franco movie? Because he plays the father of Maria (Lina Romay), a man that has been trying to assault her, so she kills him and ends up in the prison that forms the setting for this film, a place where The Wardress (Monica Swinn, Female Vampire, Hitler’s Last Train and a woman who said of Franco’s movies, “I’d mull over the previous scenes and think to myself, “This can’t be the same character. How many films am I really making here?”) rules with a velvet glove cast in iron, a woman who reads Third Reich books for fun.

The real boss is Dr. Carlos Costa (Paul Muller) who is not really a doctor and just a man trying to make a living by creating a living hell on earth for his female inmates. He’s an innovator, a man who creates metal beds that electrically shock prisoners, so I guess he’d do well in today’s America where 0.7% of our population is behind the wall.

Look, this is pretty much a scumfest, so you’re either going to get offended or learn how to wallow. It’s also the kind of movie that has a budget so low that a slow motion scene has to be acted out at actual speed, meaning that everyone has to pretend that it’s in slow motion and if you don’t love that, why are you even watching movies like this?

At one point, audiences had to pay to see Mom and Dad in a tent or a four-walled theater just so they could see a woman’s lady business, albeit one with a baby coming out of it. Thirty years later and there’s Jess Franco repeatedly zooming his camera and jump cutting right to mossy clefts like it’s nothing and I guess that’s progress.

Look for Martine Stedil (who Franco put in prison once before in Women Behind Bars), Peggy Markoff (who went to the big house twice for Franco in Ilsa the Wicked Warden and Wicked Women), Beni Cardoso (whose career took her from Franco’s The Girl from Rio to the krimi Der Todesrächer von Soho, the Conan ripoff The Throne of Fire, the double Bruno Mattei Western madness of White Apache and Scalps and then the Umberto Lenzi TV movie House of Lost Souls) and a few other ladies who had one Franco movie and then never did a film again.

If you want to watch it for yourself, it’s on the Internet Archive.

So what if Jess Franco made a giallo? Or a takeoff on Ten Little Indians for that matter? And what if it concerned an actress named Annette Lamark (Glenda Allen, Confessions of a Window Cleaner) who invites her friends to an island that she’s just bought — obviously her movies are doing well — that’s home to the secret child she had with director Jean-Paul (Francisco Acosta, Sinner: The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac) who is being raised by her sister — and the movie’s narrator — Valeria (Montserrat Prous, The Fish with the Eyes of Gold).

The kid gets kindnapped and anyone on the island could have done it. Well, anyone, that is, who isn’t murdered.

Based on a book by Enrique Jarnes, who also wrote multiple Spanish TV series, this might be the most restrained I’ve seen Franco, but there’s still something boiling under the surface. Made in the same location as The Sinister Eyes of Dr. Orloff, it may not be as good as that movie. That said, there are some reasons to watch this, if only to imagine that this could have been a soap opera directed by Jess that went on for several years and man, I would have to buy a gigantic box of it like that Dark Shadows set that has Barnabas Collins lying in a coffin on every slipcase.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Way back during the week of Bruno Mattei, we covered this movie. All the way back on May 16, 2021 and now it’s back with some edits.

This movie is quite literally the Justice League — more like the Legion of Doom — of scumbag film superstars.

It was written and produced by Harry Alan Towers, who went from syndicating radio and TV shows to being arrested along with his girlfriend Mariella Novotny — who was played by Britt Eklund in Scandal — for operating a vice ring. He jumped bail and ran to Europe while his lover revealed that Towers was a Soviet agent using his girls to get info for the Russians. And Novotny, a high-class call girl, had already been linked to both John and Robert Kennedy, as well as having experience working for MI5.

Once he settled down in Europe, Towers married actress Maria Rohm — she’s in this, as well as several other Jess Franco movies — and started writing and producing movies based on the novels of Agatha Christie, the Marquis de Sade and giallo father — one of many, but a father nonetheless — Edgar Wallace.

Plus, he worked extensively with the second member of our rogue’s gallery: Jesus “Jess” Franco.  This may have been the first film that Jess and Towers worked on, but they would make The Girl from Rio, Venus in Furs, Justine, Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion, The Bloody Judge, Count Dracula, The Blood of Fu Manchu and The Castle of Fu Manchu.

Franco made at least 173 movies and took a gradual slide from horror, Eurospy and softcore films into grimier and grimier films. He’s an acquired taste that I’ve grown to enjoy, yet for every well-made movie like Bloody Moon, you’ll find one where you wonder if Franco had even seen a film before, much less made one.

The reason for that is often the funds that Franco had at his disposal. He’s the kind of filmmaker who would make ten bad movies instead of one good one, providing that he was getting the chance to make a movie.

He reminds me a lot of the third member of our exploitation army of evil and that would be the man that edited this movie — and from all accounts directed the pornographic insert (pun intended) scenes — Bruno Mattei..

The French version of this movie features eight minutes of fully adult footage, shot with body doubles in similar settings, all to give the illusion that this movie is way more hardcore than it really is.

To be perfectly frank, this movie is an aberrant work of absolute indecency even without seeing gynecological footage of the old in and out.

New inmate Marie (Rohm, yes, the producer’s wife, yet she endures so much that you really get the idea that this is not an example of nepotism) has arrived at Castillo de la Muerte, an island prison where she’s given the number — she no longer has a name — 99.

She’s joined by Helga, now known as 97. She’s played by Elisa Montes, who had appeared in several peplum and westerns before this. And Natalie Mendoz — 98 — is played by Luciana Paluzzi, who was SPECTRE assassin Fiona Volpa in Thunderball, as well as showing up in everything from The Green Slime to A Black Veil for Lisa, The Man Who Came from Hate and The Klansman.

They’re suffering under the oppressive sapphic rule of Thelma Diaz, a tough warden who is, shockingly, played by Oscar-winner Mercedes McCambridge, who won that award for All the King’s Men, was nominated for Giant and was also the voice of Pazuzu. She’s berserk in this movie, laying it all on the line, unafraid to go over the top and then keep her upward trajectory.

“From now on you have no name, only a number. You have no future, only the past. No hope, only regrets. You have no friends, only me,” she barks at them before they even get into the prison.

Eventually, Diaz takes things too far, but even the new warden Caroll (Maria Schell, who had an affair so memorable with Glenn Ford that she remembered it two decades later and gifted him with a dog named Bismarck who became his constant companion) can’t improve this hell on earth. So the women escape at the same time that several men break out from the similarly brutal rule of Governor Santos (Herbert Lom).

What happens when you have several damaged women on the run being followed by men who haven’t even seen a woman in decades? And what if that happens in a Jess Franco movie? Yeah, you can see where this is heading.

Rosalba Neri — Lady Frankenstein! — is also on hand to pretty much set the film on fire in every single frame that she shows up in.

Every Women In Prison movie that would follow in the slimy wake of this film would be based upon the path that it blazed, including Mattei’s own The Jail: Women’s Hell, which he waited nearly four decades to make and pretty much stuck pretty close to what Franco started. Well, he was also following the even more berserk template he’d established with Violence In a Women’s Prison and Women’s Prison Massacre. Man, if you want a WIP movie, call Bruno Mattei. Sadly, you can’t. He’s dead.

Or you could call Jess Franco, were he alive. He made nine WIP movies in his career, including Isla the Wicked Warden, Justine, The Lovers of Devil’s Island, Barbed Wire Dolls, Women Behind Bars, Love Camp, Sadomania and this movie.

This is one of the Franco films where he’s making not just a movie, but a good movie. The focus is soft, the feel is surreal and the interplay with the Bruno Nicolai score is fabulous.

Sukkubus – den Teufel im Leib (Sukkubus – The Devil In the Body) is a Swiss/German co-production that takes you into the snow and ice-covered mountains as three men — Senn the leader (Peter Simonischek), Hirt (Giovanni Früh) and teenage Handrbub (Andy Voß) — as they drive their herd through the treacherous Swiss Alps, starting the story by finding the ravaged and frozen bodies of a past team of farmers just like them that didn’t make it. As they melt in the sun, birds land on them and begin feasting on them.

The three men pray for protection as their journey continues.

This journey has no women and all work, which leads Hirt to non-stop obsession about pleasure, starting with bothering young Handrbub, which is dealt with swiftly by Senn. Then, after a day in which the boy finds a piece of wood that looks like a face, Hirt and Senn get drunk and assemble a body around the face, conducting rituals through their words as Hirt mounts the straw doll they have made and basically thrusts it into life, revealing the titular Sukkubus nearly halfway through the film.

Played by Pamela Prati (Lith in Ironmaster and Aracne in The Adventures of Hercules, as well as Transformations, another film in which she plays a succubus) the doll becomes a bright blue eyed living creature in front of the men’s eyes, ominously inching toward Handrbub who can only scream in horror. And while he and Senn want to avoid this demon as she appears in their weakest moments, Hirt wants to feel her touch.

Mondo Macabro, who keeps putting out movies that shock and surprise me, says, “This film is the real deal, based on a gruesome and ancient story, much retold by people who live in the Alps – the huge mountain range that spans six European countries.”

I agree. This just feels odd in the best of ways, showing the isolation and madness of the men while they face death every single step of their journey, all while living in lust, fear and some sadistic combination of the two as the epitome of male desire stalks their every move.

Based on the fable The Guschg Herdsmen’s Doll, which was also filmed in 2010 as Sennentuntschi: Curse of the Alps, this Mondo Macabro release features a 1080p presentation from a 4K restoration of the original camera negative, a German audio track with optional English subtitles, an exclusive interview with actor Peter Simonischek and the film’s trailer. You can get it from Mondo Macabro.

Writer/director duo Naomi McDougall Jones and Meredith Edwards made 2014’s Imagine I’m Beautiful and this is the follow-up, with Jones starring as Sarah, a real-life vampire who finds herself getting audited.

I never saw that in any of the Hammer movies.

She’s soon helped by IRS agent James (Christian Coulson, who played Tom Riddle in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and gets in a cute line about muggles in this), who is incredibly understanding of the secret world of bloodsuckers, who in this movie ave very ordinary origins, being born with a condition that requires regular blood consumption.

Sara once was married to a vampire king and the man who inked her face at age sixteen — and who claims to be the social media voice of vampires — and now lives in a house of female vamps that she hopes to turn into a church, the House of Twilight, with roommate Chrissy going on reality TV to explain how the vampires aren’t fiction. They also have another roommate named Lily, who as a Muslim vampire really breaks stereotypes.

Bite Me isn’t a horror movie, unless you’re afraid of romcoms. It’s a quick and breezy film, with much of its humor perhaps better done by What We Do in the Shadows, but the leads are so likable that this is a rewarding film. It’s not going to replace any of the vampire films that you love most — Near Dark remains the best vampire movie ever — but it’ll pass the time and may even make you laugh a few times.

Bite Me is available as a digital download from Adventure Kid and Blue Firefly Films.