Sure, it translates as Diabolically… Letizia, but Sex, Demons and Death is a way better title.

Marcello (Gabriele Tinti, one-time husband of Laura Gemser; he’s in Endgame) and Micaela (Magda Konopka, Blindman) haven’t been able to have children. While Marcello wants to go to Switzerland, she decides to just have her niece Letizia (Franca Gonella, Revelations of a Psychiatrist on the World of Sexual Perversion) stay with them instead. This sounds like a bad idea even without the possession part of the deal.

Before you know it, she’s frightening their servant Giovanni (Gianni Dei, Patrick Still Lives) by appearing as a red demon, making out with the maid Luisella (Karen Fiedler, Last Harem) starting with psychically rubbing her face with toast and getting biblical with her own aunt. She’s also nearly a thirty-something teenager.

So imagine — some parts giallo, some parts The Exorcist and all the sleaze that Italy can sweat up.

Director Salvatore Bugnatelli only made seven movies, five from 1975-1989 — Excuse Me Padre, Are You Horny; Mizzzzica… ma che è proibitissimo?  (Mizzzzica…But What Is Prohibited?), Racconto immorale (Immoral Tale); Intimo profondo (Deep Underwear) and this movie — before coming back in 2006 to direct 80 Italian sexy models and Diario segreto di un feticista (Secret Diary of a Fetishist). It was co-written with Lorenzo Artale, who also did the dialogue for The Beast In Heat, which is the part where I said, “Oh, this makes sense.”

Dr. Johns (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Emanuelle in Bangkok, War of the Planets) has spent 78 days in a hole and set a record, but now he’s claiming that everyone will die if they come down to rescue him.

Umberto Lenzi directed five movies in 1989 and of those, this is the weakest (in case you want to know, I’d rank the others in this order: Nightmare Beach, Hitcher In the Dark, House of Witchcraft AKA Ghosthouse 4 and House of Lost Souls/AKA Ghosthouse 3). Maybe he was beyond busy, so busy that he thought no one would noticed if this movie was endless cave exploration and the end from Nightmare City.

Maybe he really loved his wife Olga Pehar and wanted to encourage her as this was her first script. She’d go on to write Hitcher In the Dark, After the Condor, Karate Rock, Black Demons, Hunt for the Golden Scorpion, Navigators of the Space and Karate Warrior 3 – 5.

I really wanted to love this movie. It has caves, it has gore, it has Lenzi. That said, he made some other movies that I’d totally recommend, such as Orgasmo, So Sweet…So Perverse, A Quiet Place to Kill, Spasmo, Ghosthouse, Cannibal Ferox, Seven Blood-Stained Orchids and Oasis of Fear.

Whether you call it Apocalypse domani, Cannibals In the Streets, Invasion of the Fleshhunters or another of the many titles this movie has been given, you have to respect the vision of Antonio Margheriti who continually brings something amazing to each of his movie, no matter if they’re in science fiction (Assignment: Outer Space, The War of the Planets, The Wild, Wild Planet, Battle of the Worlds), horror (The Long Hair of Death), giallo (Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eyes), westerns (And God Said to Cain), war (Jungle Raiders, Code Name: Wild Geese) and whatever magical genre Yor Hunter from the Future is from.

In an interview with The Flashback Files, star John Saxon said, “It was talking about the Vietnam war like it was a virus you could bring home. I thought it was a great metaphor for a psychological condition.”

But then he started making the movie.

“At one point we were shooting a scene and a guy brings in this tray of meat. I asked what it was for and they explained to me it was supposed to be body parts, even genitals, and we were supposed to gnaw on them. I asked Margheriti to take me out of the scene and I went to my hotel room. Once I found out what the true nature of the film was I got so depressed.”

Yet no matter how wild this movie gets, Saxon is the glue that holds it together, adding energy and emotion to every scene he’s in.

Saxon plays Norman Hopper, a man haunted by his experiences in Vietnam, remembering one night when he was bitten by Charlie Bukowski (John Morghen AKA Giovanni Lombardo Radice, who had quite the year, also appearing in 1980s City of the Living Dead and The House on the Edge of the Park), a POV that he rescued.

He hears from Bukowski, who wants to meet him for a drink, but he’s late as he’s giving in to the charms of his young next door neighbor Mary (Cindy Hamilton AKA Cinzia De Carolis, Lori from The Cat O’Nine Tails). In the middle of them starting to make love, he bites her. And she likes it, because yes, this is an Italian horror movie.

Just then, Norman discovers that Charlie has barricaded himself in the mall and is threatening to kill civilians. Norman convinces him to surrender, but as they’re taking him away, he bites a cop. When he returns home, he confesses to giving in to his sexual impulses and feeling the need to bite Mary. His wife Jane (Elizabeth Turner, Beyond the Door, The Psychic) struggles to understand. Meanwhile, Bukowski and another vet named Tom (Tony King, who is now Malik Farrakhan and the head of security for Public Enemy; he’s also in The Last Hunter, The Toy, Atlantis Interceptors and Hell Up In Harlem) battle guards; Bukowski tops that by biting a nurse named Helen (May Heatherly, Pieces, Edge of the Axe).

No one is innocent, as Jane has been making time with Dr. Mendez (Ray Williams AKA Ramiro Oliveros, The Swamp of the Ravens, The Pyjama Girl Case), who takes her on a date to a piano bar where he tells her that the virus causes a mutation that causes human beings to crave flesh. Norman goes to get tested by the doctor, but he really wants to find out what the man’s intentions are with his wife.

Everything gets bad fast. Nurse Helen bites a doctor’s tongue clean off, just as the infected cop goes wild, tearing through several of his fellow officers. Captain McCoy (Wallace Wilkinson, Invasion U.S.A., The Visitor) resolves to end the outbreak and sends his men into the sewers to stop the outbreak, which finds Norman, Helen, Bukowski and Tony battling a biker gang and slicing a man apart with a disc grinder. Despite battling cops armed with a flamethrower and being shot, Norman survives and makes his way back to his home just in time to save his wife from an infected Mendez. As he expires in his dress uniform, she kills herself. As for the disease, perhaps Mary and her brother might know something as well.

It would take several websites to contain everything that Dardano Sacchetti wrote. I love that this film is a cannibal movie and a zombie film together, yet the infected retain their intelligence. It looks gorgeous as well, as the Italian film crew uses Atlanta — and De Paolis Studios back in Italy — to its fullest. It definitely earns being a video nasty, making its way to the section 1 list of prosecuted movies.

Purificata (Daliah Lavi, The Whip and the Body, Some Girls Do) is a young girl in Southern Italy who is obsessed with Antonion (Frank Wolff, Once Upon a Time In the West, Death Walks on High Heels) to the point that she gets him to drink her blood and nearly murders a cat outside his home as he attempts to consummate his marriage. That night, she’s bound and assaulted by a shepherd and the first person that finds her, a young boy, soon dies after being near her.

Purificata is on record saying that she is a witch who speaks to Satan, so her family tries to heal her by having Zio Giuseppe exorcise her. He also assaults her, after which she finds Antonio plowing his fields. She begs for him to save her and he violently throws her to the ground. After, she begins to become possessed and the villagers try to set her ablaze. Her family rescues her for a time by burying her underground, but she escapes and is found by nuns as she hugs a tree.

The nuns seem to calm her until one says, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” and Purificata strangles her. All manner of welts appear on Antonio’s body, who is told to burn an old tree in the middle of the village. He is met by Purificata and the two make love in the dirt. As the sun rises, he stabs her.

Directed by Brunello Rondi, who also made Black Emmanuelle, White Emmanuelle, and written by Luciano Martino and Ugo Guerra, who followed this with The Whip and the Body, this folk horror film feels brutally able to happen in the world we live in today. It shocked me numerous times and it’s one I’ve thought about several times since I watched it. It’s on the Severin All the Haunts Be Ours box set.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I mean, if you made a movie just for me, this would be it.

This had to be sent to the Italian censorship board twice, as they said that the film “consists of a rambling series of sadistic sequences, meant to urge, through extreme cruelty mixed with degenerate eroticism, the lowest sexual instincts.”

Also called Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel Trecento…(Rites, Black Magic and Secret Orgies in the Fourteenth Century…) and The Reincarnation of Isabel, this was written and directed by Renato Polselli, who also made Delirio Caldo, The Vampire and the Ballerina and Revelations of a Psychiatrist on the World of Sexual Perversion.

Hundreds of years ago, Isabella (Rita Calderoni, Nude for Satan) was tortured and burned for being a witch as her lover swore revenge. Then we meet Jack Nelson (Mickey Hargitay, making some wild movies as always) and his stepdaughter Laureen (also Calderoni) who are celebrating her engagement in a castle without knowing that the cellar is host to the black magic rites of the title. And if they get seven sets of eyes and the blood of virgins, they can bring back Isabella.

Any time this movie feels like it’s getting boring or starting to make sense, it cuts to either sex scenes or murder or Satanic rituals and you know, more movies could learn from what it was all about. I can only imagine the kind of parties that Polselli used to host.

There are also vampires, because this movie is also known as The Ghastly Orgies of Count Dracula.

You know, I never dated many girls who wore makeup before my wife. But there was one that was taking her time putting on makeup and she was putting on false eyelashes and I was trying to say that she didn’t need all that makeup and lashes and she said, “I’m doing it for me. And you. So let me get hot for you.” I wish I had seen this movie before I dated her, because man, the fake eyelashes in this are doing something to me.

I find it incredibly humorous that after Alan Moore, Stephen Bisette and John Totleben reinvented comic books with Saga of the Swamp Thing, director Jim Wynorski and writers Neil Cuthbert and Grant Morris were making this sequel to the original Swamp Thing and went nearly full camp.

After her mother’s mysterious death, Abigail Arcane (Heather Locklear) has come to confront her wicked stepfather Dr. Arcane (the returning Louis Jordan) who has somehow come back from the grave and is working to stop the aging proccess with Dr. Lana Zurrell (Sarah Douglas). Oh yeah, he’s also making an army of monsters.

Luckily, Swamp Thing is around and still played by stuntman Dick Durock, who wore a seventy plus pound suit in the humid swams so we’d have a movie to watch. This being a Wynorski movie, Monique Gabrielle shows up as well.

I love that in the midst of this wackiness — I mean, Swamp Thing drives a jeep at one point sending me into fits of laughter — the movie takes the time to recreate the love scene between its hero and Abby from “Rite of Spring,” which appeared in Swamp Thing #34. In the hands of the comic creative team, it’s poetic, gorgeous and full of deep meanings about man’s spiritual place in nature. In the hands of Wynorski, it’s Heather Locklear eating a cucumber out of a swamp person.

In my youth, I used to look down on the director’s movies as fluff. As I’ve grown older, I appreciate them for their entertainment value and how well made they are. Not everything has to be so deadly droll all the time.

You can watch this on Tubi.

As London was assaulted by the Blitz, writer John Wyndham was who witnessed the destruction of the city from the rooftops of Bloomsbury. Many of the scenes and incidents he saw, including a quiet Sunday morning after the bombs fell, were sent in letters to his long-term partner Grace Wilson and they are in his novel The Day of the Triffids. The book also suggests that while the plant-like triffids came from space, their ability to destroy our planet came from an over-reliance on technology.

Albert R. Broccoli and Irving Allen had purchased the film rights and hired Jimmy Sangster to write the script, which intimidated the screenwriter. He didn’t think that his script was good, but that version was never made. This version, written by Bernard Gordon, who had been blacklisted due to the testimony of producer William Alland. Through his friendship with Philip Yordan — and yes, Night Train to Terror does connect to everything — the writer found regular work as a writer and producer for Samuel Bronston Productions in Madrid, even if through the goodness of his heart Yordan received full credit on movies like Circus World, Battle of the Bulge, Custer of the West, The Thin Red Line, Cry of Battle and Horror Express.

Gordon was under FBI surveillance for twenty years and we wouldn’t know that he’d written many movies if it wasn’t for journalist Ted Newsom, who discovered that Gordon was the real name behind the kayfabe author credit Raymond T. Marcus. Gordon led all blacklisted creatives when the Writers Guild of America correctly credited pseudonymous screenwriters from this era.

As for Yordan, he once told his friend Gordon, “It’s Jews like you who ruined the motion picture industry with this anti-hero shit.”

As for Day of the Triffids, it’s loosely based on the book and doesn’t really get across the apocalyptic menace within its inspiration’s pages. It does, however, have giant plants spitting poison that kills at Janette Scott, so there’s that.

Directed by Steve Sekely and Freddie Francis*, it prefigures the way that zombies keep coming in waves that trap humans within increasingly smaller places to hide. Indeed, the hospital scenes in the book inspired 28 Days Later. The goofy inspiration is that the plants are turned back by seawater, a plot twist that would be used to ridiculous effect decades later in Signs.

*Kieron Moore and Janette Scott weren’t in the original cut of the film. It turns out that there were only 57 minutes of good usable footage available, so Francis directed the entire lighthouse sequence to pad the movie.

At the Explorers’ Club in London — yes, it’s all rich white dudes — Dr. Moran (George Coulouris) tells everyone that he’s going to the Amazon to get “a miracle-working JuJu that can bring the dead back to life.” While there, he watches Marpessa Dawn, a year removed from being in Black Orpheus — get eaten by a tree. Then he gets jungle fever and it takes five years for him to recover.

Dr. Moran has brought the tree and the drummer who controls it, Tanga (Jimmy Vaughan), to keep on working on bringing life to death, which starts with feeding Susan Curtis to the tree. I’m amused that Sara Leighton, who played the role, became a famous lady of British society known for her portrait painting.

Meanwhile, Sally Norton (Vera Day) is working at a sideshow dancing the hula-hula, because Hawaii was all mondo to British people in the late 50s. A local favorite named Jack Venner (Peter Wayn) ends up getting her fired and then hired by Moran, who must love Tanya Donelly because he can’t stop feeding that tree. And he starts falling for Sally, even strangling the woman who has loved him nearly forever, Margaret Santor (Joyce Gregg), all so she can start working in his lab.

The end of this movie gets all nihilist, as the drummer refuses to teach the secret of how to keep the brain alive after death and Moran realizes he loved Margaret and tries to bring her back to life, only to have her as a brainless zombie. Tanga tries to feed Sally to the tree, Moran sets it on fire and then gets killed by the drummer’s knife before Tanga kneels before the tree and lets it set him on fire.

What!?!

Director Charles Saunders and writer Brandon Fleming stopped making movies after 1963. That’s a shame because this movie is just…something.

You can watch this on Tubi.