Usually in a movie when someone wrecks a car staring at someone I usually think, “Well, that’s pretty ridiculous.” Then again, if it’s Edwige Fenech, that makes more sense to me.

In this film, she plays Dottoressa Elena Dogliozzi, a doctor busty doctor who believes that all of the sick men in her military hospital are just trying to postpone being sent off to war.

Director Nando Cicero also made Due volte Giuda and isn’t someone whose films I’ve sought out. It’s hard to judge someone’s abilities within the commedia sexy all’italiana genre. Cicero wrote the script with Franco Milizia and Marino Onorati who wrote a movie with one of my favorite titles of all time, Metti lo diavolo tuo ne lo mio inferno (Put Your Devil Into My Hell).

This would be followed by several sequels and connected movies, including the Karin Shubert-starring La dottoressa sotto il lenzuolo (Under the Sheets); the Fenech-starring La soldatessa alla visita militare (The Soldier On the MIlitary Visit) and La soldatessa alle grandi manovre (The Solder With Great Maneuvers); Nadia Cassini in L’infermiera nella corsia dei militari (The Nurse In the Military Madhouse) and La dottoressa ci sta col colonnello (The Doctor Is There with the Colonel); and Paola Senatore in La dottoressa preferisce i marinai (The Doctor Prefers Sailors). There’s also Che dottoressa ragazzi! (What a Doctor You Guys!) which is pretty much this same movie with Femi Benussi, Gloria Guida in L’infermiera di notte (Night Nurse) and Laura Gemser in Messo comunale praticamente spione (Communal Messenger Practically a Spy). Seeing as how that last film is also known as Emanuelle In the Country you can bet that I’ve already seen it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie appeared on the site on September 26, 2021 as part of Fantastic Fest. 

You think the pandemic we’ve had has been strange? Well, in the world of Glasshouse, an airborne dementia known as The Shred has left humanity adrift with no memories left inside their brains, unable to even remember who they are. Meanwhile, a family has remained inside their airtight glasshouse until a stranger arrives who changes — and maybe ruins — everything they’ve worked so hard to build.

Director Kelsey Egan said, “I’ve been working towards directing features since I made my first short back in 2008, so to end up directing my first film in 2020 of all years feels like some form of dramatic irony. To shoot this intimate post-apocalyptic fable during the pandemic was a surreal experience.”

Even the location for this movie is strange and eerie. The Pearson Conservatory is a Victorian glasshouse marooned in the Eastern Cape of South Africa since 1881.

The occupants of this glasshouse are  Mother, her three daughters and one son. Their days are spent tilling the garden that keeps them fed, protecting one another from the outside world, conducting story rituals and creating stained glass windows to remind them of the past. But when one of the daughters, Bee, takes in an injured man, his manipulative ways may spell the end of this idyll.

Yet the girls are not without the ability to protect their family, as we see them murder an interloper and use the body to fertilize their crops. And their brother has begun to lose control, as exposure to The Shred has destroyed his mind.

At once post-apocalyptic, folk horror and even a riff on The Beguiled, there hasn’t been a film quite like Glasshouse ever. It’s a future without the need to show massive effects or change. Instead, it traps us inside the walls of the home as those very walls close in around its characters.

By the loosest of categorization, we can call this movie a giallo; it’s also an example of just how scummy an Italian exploitation movie can get.

Also known as The Seducers, Sensations and Swinging Young Seductresses, this movie has quite the plot: Mudy (French author Maud de Belleroche in her only movie) is the mother of a shy and mentally disturbed manchild named Tony (Ruggero Miti) who isn’t interested in women and really only cares about setting things on fire. Her plan? A sea cruise where she’s hired a prostitute named Ulla (Edwige Fenech!) to take her son’s virginity and if that doesn’t work, she also has her married lovers Paula (Rosalba Neri!) and her husband Aldo (Maurizio Bonuglia, The Perfume of the Lady in Black) aboard.

Everybody wants the oil project that the wealthy Mudy can give out. And somehow, Tony can resist both Fenech and Neri — this movie is science fiction — and only shows affection for Beba (Eva Thulin, who the New York Times misread as Ewa Aulin), the wife of goat herder Andro (Salvatore Puntillo). Also, someone has been strangling women everywhere the boat docks, someone that looks a lot like Tony.

Directed by Ottavio Alessi (who wrote Emanuelle In Bangkok and Emanuelle In America, so yes, he’s a maniac), who co-wrote the script with Nelda Minucci from a story by Lorenzo Ricciardi (who made Savage Man, Savage Beast and the cockfighting comedy — oh man, an Italian film about fighting cocks can’t be friendly to animals — Venere creola), everybody is having sex with anybody and everybody — and yes, there’s a scene with Fenech and Neri you filthy-minded reader — is doing it except for Tony, who Mudy thinks will break out of his lack of development if he can just get on top of Beba, who is rushed out of a Fenech and Neri sandwich into the young boy’s room so he can show off his slot cars while everyone keeps Beba’s husband busy.

Also: Neri shooting everything she can with a rifle, Fenech making out with a goat and a choking after a post-incestual makeout session? Oh Italy, you do know how to make a movie.

Just listen to the music from Sante Maria Romitelli in this and wonder why life can’t always be this good.

Oh man — I found a Pittsburgh Press review of this movie from when it played the Warner and it referred to it as “something dreadful” and said, “The Warner has brought forward some real doozies in recent months, but certainly nothing low enough to touch this number.” The best line? “Garbage is the best way to describe Seducers, which was apparently meant to be a poor man’s version of La Dolce Vita.”

That’s a rave review, dude.

Also: the movie ends with a Bible verse like some kind of demented apology for all the sin we’ve just witnessed.

The third of the trilogy that includes La Polizia fa Carriera (Confessions of a Lady Cop) and La Poliziotta Della Squadra del Buon Costume (A Policewoman on the Porno Squad), this Michele Massimo Tarantini (The Sword of the Barbarians, Massacre in Dinosaur Valley) film has one major reason to watch it: the always wonderful Edwige Fenech as Gianna Amicucci.

With a story by Fenech’s one-time husband Luciano Martino and Francesco Milizia along with a screenplay by Alberto Silvestri, this commedia sexy all’italiana beings Gianna and Alvaro (Alvaro Vitali) to America to aid FBI agent Maccarone (Renzo Montagnani) and his case against pizza shop owner and suspected crime boss Big John (Aldo Maccione). It turns out that Gianna looks just like his girlfriend and Alvaro looks like his bodyguard, which is the kind of coincidence that only happens in Italian sex comedies. However, Big John’s rival Turk (Giacomo Rizzo) has declared a gang war and also falls for Gianna.

This movie is sexy in the way that Benny Hill used to make shows and is literally chaste by today’s standards. It’s also problematic in the way it deals with race and homosexuality, but if you expect 1981 Italian sexploitation movie to be totally woke, I have no idea how to explain what Italian sexploitation is to you.

How — when movies have the opportunity to do reshoots and change angles and not be live — do films make wrestling look cheaper and worse than it is in real life?

Directed and written by Beverly and Ferd Sebastian (the makers of The Hitchhikers, ‘Gator Bait and Rocktober Blood), this movie stars Jan MacKenzie from ‘Gator Bait 2: Cajun Justice as Luscious Lisa, a rookie wrestler due to go up against Magnificent Mimi (Mimi Lesseos) after being trained by Pattie (Sue Sexton) for the very real world of pro wrestling.

MacKenzie is also Beverly and Fred’s daughter and their son Ben also wrote the script with them, so I wonder what exactly they were thinking when they had a scene inserted — pun intended — of their daughter’s character working a naked no holds barred post-match match with promoter Diamond Dave.

If you loved 90s women’s wrestling, MacKenzie was really Luscious Lisa in GLOW, where Trudy Adams (Pam) also appeared as Amy the Farmer’s Daughter. Other GLOW favorites like California Doll, Tiffany Million, Envy and Big Bad Mama are also on hand, while Sexton and Black Venus were both long-time wresters. And if you watched WCW Nitro, you definitely recognize Lee Marshall’s voice.

Meanwhile, Lisa’s grandfather (Robert D. Bergen) was once a wrestler named Killer Kane whose finishing hold “The Snap” killed a man just like Ox Baker’s Heart Punch. So yeah, there’s a lot of drama in this and even more cheesecake, which the born-again Sebastians tried to square up reel by having a sermon at the end of the movie, which is quite a juxtaposition but God does move in very mysterious ways.

Speaking of mysterious things, who did the absolutely berserk audio mixing in this movie?

Directed by Joseph Merhi — oh man, that dude is my new obsession — and writer Stephen Smoke (who also wrote Street Crimes, Living to Die and Magic Kid), Final Impact is the very definition of tickling you with a feather.

See that shirtless Lorenzo Lamas playing kickboxing champion Nick Taylor? Well, Nick is a drunken mess who never recovered from losing his title and his wife to Jake Gerard (Jeff Langton, who often did stunts in movies like Cobra and Road House).

Speaking of his wife Roxy, that’s Mimi Lesseos who I just want to watch do dropkicks and pro wrestling moves in real fight situations instead of just being insulted by a drunken Nick.

So the real story of the movie is Danny Davis (Michael Worth), a young kickboxer from Ohio that has aways idolized Nick, whose life — remember? — is horrible despite having Maggie (Kathleen Kinmont, Kelly Meeker herself!) loving him no matter how horribly he treats her.

A Vegas kickboxing championship is the goal for the whole movie, but then Nick gets the idea that he can still beat Jake, who beats him to the point that he dies in a hospital bed and yeah, you realize that you rented this for Lorenzo Lamas and now he’s dead and having Danny beat Jake is kind of anticlimatic especialy when you realize that he’s probably going to end up horizontally dancing with his hero’s common law widow, but direct to video films are wild and you just roll with the punches. Or kicks.

Also: the best karate fighters in the world are all white. Sure, whatever you say.

You can watch this on Tubi.

When his family is murdered, Johnny (Erik Estrada) gets revenge on the ones who did it — his former biker gang The Slaves and the corrupt cops who lied and claimed Johnny sold out the gang.

So why would I watch this?

Mimi Lesseos.

As Feather, she starts this movie wearing a yellow bikini and strutting down Venice Beach with a boom box to deliver drugs from the aforementioned dirty cops to the biker gang inside a psychic bookstore, who all try and assault her because this is a biker exploitation movie, which goes one further by having her start throwing dropkicks in a street fight and taking the drugs and the cash before saying, “You guys wanted to get fucked? Well, you just did.”

Well, the Slavers need to make this right, so they break into the cop’s house and kill everyone — including Feather, so boo, I’m out of this now — and Johnny decides he needs to leave town until the heat dies down, working in the garage of his friend Hammer (William Smith!) and falling for Anna (Kathrin Lautner), who is taking her daughter Samantha across the country to also start a new life.

Everything is as nice as marrying an ex-con biker on the run in Las Vegas can be until the cops — led by Davis (Armando Silvestre, who was in a ton of awesome Mexican films) come back and shoot up their trailer home, killing both Anna and Samantha, so Johnny and Hammer set the whole thing — loved ones inside — on fire and watch it burn.

Johnny then kills every single Slaver and when we get to the final confrontation with their leader Rico (Angelo Tiffe) and once that guy finds out Johnny is innocent, all is forgiven. Really? What?!?

It ends with this dialogue:

Johnny: Here are my colors, Rico. Burn ’em. And piss on the ashes.

Rico: Stay in the wind, Johnny. In the wind.

I really need to dig deep into the films of PM Entertainment because this movie is wild.

There’s also a long scene where Mimi pro wrestles a dude in the backyard that feels very much like apartment wrestling in Sports Review Wrestling or The Wrestler. There’s also a Greek chorus provided by a Vixen-esque girl group called The Sheilas who comment on the action throughout, including a montage where Estrada throws cops off roofs and sets wrongdoers ablaze, accompanied by flute solos. And the guy Larkin in this movie is played by Gary Groomes, who was pretty much blacklisted from Hollywood after playing Dan Aykroyd in Wired.

Syria-born director Joseph Merhi owned a chain of pizzerias in Las Vegas before directing video store junk — in the best of ways — like L.A. Crackdown, L.A. Heat, L.A. Vice, L.A. Crackdown 2, L.A. Heat the TV series and Midnight Warrior. He co-wrote the script with Ray Garmond and Addison Randall, who wrote some movies I’ll definitely be tracking down like Shotgun, East L.A. Warriors, L.A. Wars and Da Vinci’s War.

Man, L.A. was on fire in the 80s and 90s.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Christopher Ray is, of course, the son of Fred Olen Ray. And Mercenaries is the female version of The Expendables starring Vivica A. Fox as former CIA operative Donna “Raven” Ravena, Zoë Bell as ex-Delta Force soldier Cassandra Clay, Kristanna Loken as one-time Marine Corps Scout Sniper Kat Morgan, Nicole Bilderback as Mei-Lin Fong the team’s explosives expert and pilot and Cynthia Rothrock as CIA Agent Mona Kendall. They’re going up against who else but Brigitte Nielsen as Ulrika, who has kidnapped the President’s daughter Elise and is holding her in a former Soviet prison known as The Citadel.

Speaking of prison — and The A-Team — all of Kendall’s ops were once in U.S. prisons, a place with a population of 2 million people — a 500% increase over the last 40 years — making America the world’s leader in incarceration according to The Sentencing Project.

Originally, Rothrock was going to play the Brigitte Nielsen role, but had a scheduling conflict. Her part was to originally to have been played by Rebecca DeMornay. She had just one day to get ready for filming.

Also known as Prison Raid and the wonderfully titled Expendabelles 3.0, this is about as good as you would expect it to be, whatever your expectations.

There was also another female Expendables in the works starring the women of the Andy Sidaris universe and how could that not have been made? There was also an official female version that would have had Sigourney Weaver play Stallone’s ex-wife.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Back in 1959, Penny (Alfre Woodard) a hardworking single mother, a singer with stage fright named Harrison (Charles Grodin), the lovelorn Julia (Kyra Sedgwick) and a small-time con named Milo (Tom Sizemore) all die when their driver Hal (David Paymer) drives off an overpass. Meanwhile, Thomas Reilly (Robert Downey Jr.) is born at the same time as the four passengers’ souls must stay on Earth and take on Thomas as their friend, which eventually makes him think that he’s insane.

Thirty-four years later, Hal returns to use his bus to take the four souls to heaven, as long as they finally achieve their goals. Penny must find out what happened to her kids, Harrison must sing in public, Julia must find her ex-boyfriend John and confess her feelings, and Milo must return the stamp book he stole. They need Thomas’ help but now he’s a driven banker who doesn’t care about people and keeps himself closed off from his girlfriend Anne (Elisabeth Shue).

Of course it all works out, but the real surprise is that director Ron Underwood was the first assistant director on Tourist Trap and would go on to make Tremors. This had four people working on the story — Gregory and Erik Hansen (whose short film was adapted to make this full-length version) and S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock, the team who wrote Tremors.

I love that Julia is a waitress at The Purple Onion, a real San Francisco club where so many comedians performed. When Bob Newhart is seen on stage, that’s his son Robert William Newhart.

This is one of Becca’s favorite movies and we’ve watched it so many times on bad quality VHS rips and on DVD. It’s so great to have the Mill Creek blu ray of this with really fun retro VHS packaging. You can get it from Deep Discount.

You can listen to Becca and me discuss this on our old podcast.