Naked…You Die (AKA The Young, the Evil and the Savage) is a pretty fun early giallo with good direction by Antonio Margheriti.

Yet it was very nearly was a Mario Bava movie.

According to Tim Lucas’ Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark, Bava was hired by Lawrence Woolner — the distributor of Hercules in the Haunted World and Blood and Black Lace in America — to direct a movie about a killer stalking a school. Cry Nightmare was going to be the title and Bava wrote the script with Brian Degas and Tudor Gates (Barbarella, Danger: Diabolik).

Lamberto Bava told Lucas that “Just a short time before the filming was to begin, Mario Bava had an argument with the producers and he abandoned the film.” As for Margheriti, who met Woolner when he distributed Castle of Blood, he said “I think Mario was busy at that time, working on Diabolik or something.”

Either way, locations were already secured, cast and crew had been hired and a theme song had already been recorded.

The drowned body of a woman is placed in a truck going to St. Hilda College. There, only seven students, two teachers — Mrs. Clay (Ludmilla Lvova) and Mr. Barrett (Mark Damon — Headmistress Transfield (Vivian Stapleton) and gardener La Foret (Luciano Pigozzi) are present.

Soon, the killing begins with Betty Ann being strangled and found by Lucille (Eleonora Brown in her last film until coming out of retirement in 2018), who is having an affair with Barrett. When she tells him to come see the body, it’s already gone, so they decide to leave the school.

The killings kick into gear with Cynthia (Malisa Longo, Ricco the Mean Machine) being killed in front of the gardener, who is soon killed as well and Denise (Patrizia Valturri) too. There’s also amateur detective Gillie (Sally Smith) on the case and Inspector Durand (Michael Renne from The Day the Earth Stood Still) trying to stop the killings.

All the girls wear similar uniforms — and outfits that change scene by scene — and nobody wonders why an older teacher can play Big Bad Wolf with Little Red Riding Hood and get away with it.

The aforementioned theme song “Nightmare” by Powell and Savina (Don Powell, who played Emanuelle’s father in Black Emanuelle 2 and did that film’s soundtrack, along with Carlo Savina, who composed the music for The Killer Reserved Nine Seats, Lisa and the Devil, Fangs of the Living Dead and so many more) and performed by Rose Brennan owes royalties to Neal Hefti.

Perhaps even wilder is the fact that the movie informs us that Gillie may be the daughter of James Bond.

Giallo would change in a few years to be bloody, sleazier and stranger. That said, this is a great example of an early version of this style of movie.

You know how some people based their entire personality on Fight Club and it was incredibly annoying and you knew they were eventually going to start getting banking jobs like their rich parents and turn into the bosses they supposedly were against and all of their practiced cynicism and white knighting betrayed the fact that they had no identity beyond a film that really was a pose?

Don’t turn your back on those people.

But also, this is about Fight Club – Members Only, a Bollywood movie that takes the title and logo from that movie and well, that’s about it. These dudes named Vicky, Karan, Somil and Diku have started a Fight Club but it’s just for fun, you see, and when people make it not fun — and gangsters get involved — then they need to make it fun all over again.

There is no soap made from human fat nor any Meatloaf appearances or songs.

You can watch this on Tubi.

An elite group of Cuban intelligence agents — recruited and trained in the U.S. — are released in America in this film that shows what it’s really like to be a spy. Using never seen before footage from the Cuban Film Institute’s archive and first-hand testimony from the people who actually lived to tell, Castro’s Spies is an intriguing doc about the era of Cold War espionage.

This film tells the true story of the Cuban Five — Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González and René Gonzále — agents who were given new identities and sent to Miami to watch over people of interest for the Cuban government.

Meanwhile, their families were told they were deserters and traitors.

In September 1998, the Five were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, conspiracy to commit murder, acting as an agent of a foreign government and other illegal activities — including failure to register as a foreign agent, which seems like a strange crime when you’re a spy. Three years later, the Cuban government admitted that they were intelligence agents looking at the Cuban exile community, not the U.S. government.

The Five appealed their convictions, which were overturned in 2005, then reinstated shortly afterward. The Supreme Court refused to review their case and it wasn’t until 2014 that the last of the Five was able to return to Cuba.

Directors and writers Ollie Aslin and Gary Lennon have taken footage from the past and mixed it with interviews with the Five, their compatriots and their enemies. This is a story I’d never heard before and I was so interested to learn more about this secret tale.

You can see Castro’s Spies at the following theaters:
Icon San Angelo (San Angelo, TX)
2020 N. Bryant St.
San Angelo, TX 76903

ICON 15 Colorado Springs with ICONIC (Colorado Springs, CO)
1818 Spring Water Place
Colorado Springs, CO 80921

Apex Cinema Roswell (Roswell, NM)
900 West Hobbs St.
Roswell, NM 88203

This documentary is also available digitally from Gravitas Ventures.

Obscene Desire is the story of Amanda (Marisa Mell, a goddess if there ever were one and someone who immediately changes any movie from maybe to definitely; my favorite of her films are Marta, Danger: Diabolik and Perversion Story, a film in which she has one of the greatest outfits not only in the history of Italian film but perhaps all movies ever), an American woman ready to marry the rich Andrea (Chris Avram, Enter the Devil) and move into his huge mansion.

Within the walls of that gothic expanse lies something evil, something that has possessed Amanda’s soon-to-be husband to indulge in black magic and ritual murder. In fact, the only way that he can keep his soul from being taken by his domicile is to keep killing prostitutes.

This movie should teach you to never trust a gardener (Victor Israel) and that the Italian film industry would keep on making Rosemary’s Baby ripoffs ten years after that movie was unleashed. Or The Exorcist five years later. Or The Omen two years later.

Look, I’m a simple man. Marisa Mell with short dark hair, not unlike Mariska Hargitay, possessed by the devil and writhing on a bed and revealing that her tongue is superhumanly long. Do I even care that this movie has no real story and really goes nowhere?

No, not at all.

What were we talking about?

Laura Trotter (Dr. Anna Miller from Nightmare City) and Paola Maiolini (Cuginetta, amore mio!) are also in the cast for this film directed by Giulio Petroni (Death Rides a Horse) and written by Joaquín Domínguez and Piero Regnoli (the director of The Playgirls and the Vampire and writer of 117 movies including Demonia, Voices from Beyond, Burial Ground and Patrick Still Lives).

I have no idea what category to place Madelaine: Anatomy of a Nightmare of a nightmare into and that’s great. It resists buckets, it avoids categories, it detests convention.

Madeleine (Camille Keaton) is a young American woman who is vacationing for the summer at one of the many homes of her much older, much richer an much Frencher husband Dr. Franz Shuman (Silvano Tranquilli, So Sweet, So Dead). Every night, she dreams the same dream, one of women with multiple colored hair chasing her through the woods and demanding to live through her, which may be a manifestation of the miscarriage she’s just suffered. Then, they lead her to the wrecked car with her husband’s charred body inside and then the coven throws the a child’s coffin into the inferno.

Franz permits his wife to do whatever she wishes, including bringing home a college student named Thomas (Pier Maria Rossi) home to seduce (while he watches, his eye inside the eye of a portrait of his son Luis, who is played by Riccardo Salvino). She mentions that Franz studies both psychology and the occult; Franz mentions that she’s probably schitzophrenic, to which she adds that she feels as if someone else controls her.

Thomas confesses that he has a girlfriend and can no longer see Madeleine. She coldly invites im to a gathering at their home to celebrate Luis returning from America. Thomas’s girlfriend Mary (Paola Senatore, Eaten Alive!, Emanuelle in America) who proceeds to gets drunk, strip in front of the assembled guests and writhe like a possessed animal. Both Mary and Franz take turns seducing her, followed by Thomas discovering Franz just as he’s finished. In response, he walks into the swimming pool and drowns.

In response, Madeleine leaves Franz and meets with her other lover Antonio (Gualtiero Rispoli) and their canoodling is interrupted by her husband, who makes her confess her many affairs, causing Antonio to abandon her and Franz to shoot her.

If a giallo/possession/art/ghost/demonic movie can have a Wizard of Oz twist, why not? Luis, Thomas and Franz are all watching over Madeleine in a hospital. Luis is truly her husband, Mary was her nurse and Franz and Thomas are the psychiatrists who have been trying to help her.

Se’s left with crystal clear therapy, their Night Killer-level weird therapy session seemingly fixing her mental illness. As she leaves with Luis, she literally breaks the credits by loudly proclaiming that Franz is her husband.

Directed and written by Roberto Mauri and featuring gorgeous cinematography by Carlo Carlini (Enter the Devil, Street Law, Autopsy), it’s easy to see why this was Keaton’s favorite of the six films that she made in Italy. I may have a weakness for movies where women go mad, but this is a wonderful example of that story, told well, looking gorgeous and filled with moments of unexplained strangeness, such as when the butler sees something at the edge of the estate, recoils in horror and wanders back to the house.

Vinegar Syndrome included this movie in the box set Camille Keaton In Italy along with Tragic Ceremony and Sex of the Witch.

Leopoldo Savano also made Death Falls Lightly so he had experience with the giallo. This movie may be set in the 19th century yet seeing as how it’s about a series of murders and the investigation mentions a strange three-bladed weapon, it most definitely has strains of the giallo mixed in with the gothic.

Savona based the demonic part of the film on the demon Beleth, which he read about in the book Pseudomonarchia Daemonum. Beleth or Byleth is a king of Hell who has eighty-five legions of demons under his command. When he appears, he is usually riding a pale horse and his physical form is proceeded by music. He was first invoked by Noah’s son Ham, who wrote a math book with the help of this demon. Beleth appears as a fearsome demon and will test the magician who has invoked him, demanding respect and potentially even killing them if they can’t gain control over him. When they do, he will reveal his — its? — true form of a beautiful woman who can seduce anyone and bring them into the bed of its conjurer.

Lionello Shandell (Mark Damon, The Devil’s Wedding Night) has been in love with his sister Barbara (Claudia Gravy, Two Undercover Angels) since they were children. After a year away, he returns to find her married to Giordano (Aldo Bufi Landi).

Each night, he watches them make love and then takes off for the countryside, killing a series of women who have the same red tresses as his sister. Once the maid Gisella and Giordano’s cousin Floriana are killed in the same way, Lionello becomes the main suspect. We all know he’s found his warlock father’s occult library, we know he’s the killer but we’re still surprised by the end of this film.

Byleth is the kind of Eurohorror sleaze that I love to have on in the background to remind myself that life is more than just sitting in a room writing all day, never seeing the outside world. 1972 was a wild time to be making movies in Italy and I love that this film exists.

You can get this from Severin.

The joy of world cinema is when you learn of a film with an audacious premise. For example: what if there was a Bollywood Silence of the Lambs?

Well, director Tanuja Chandra and writers Mahesh Bhatt and Girish Dhamija claim that this movie is really based on an Indian police case. That’s true — the villain, Lajja Shankar Pandey (Ashutosh Rana) who takes over from Buffalo Bill — was based on a real criminal who believed that for each person he murdered, he would increase his lifespan.

Chandra is an anomaly in the world of Indian film, as female directors are rare and mainly make dramas, not blockbusters. Even though she was supported by her mentor Mahesh Bhatt, she once found herself ignored by male actors and crewmembers.

Her first movie Dushman was a remake of Eye from an Eye but failed as audiences in India need romance and a strong male hero, not a woman gaining revenge.

Pandey is behind the child abductions and murders that have confused the police and led to CBI trainee Reet Oberoi (Preity Zinta) — introduced just like Clarice Starling in a jogging scene — being part of the case. She’s haunted, not by the screams of sheep, but by the fact that her brother was killed for being a terrorist right in front of her eyes. Now, to help solve the case, she turns to the unjustly jailed Professor Aman Verma (Akshay Kumar). His bars may be iron instead of plexiglass, but Verma is definitely Hannibal Lecter. The romance that blooms between the two is similar to the novel Hannibal if not the film.

When a politician’s child is kidnapped for Pandey’s ultimate ritual — to be carried out during a solar eclipse — Oberoi must overcome the ghosts of her past and a male-dominated police force that doesn’t believe in her methods. While this also happens in the movie’s inspiration, it’s also something that Chandra actually experienced.

To learn more about Sangharsh, I recommend Ed Glaser’s How the World Remade Hollywood, which you can order from McFarland Books.

You can watch this on YouTube.