Arturo (Alfredo Landa) and Paco (Vincenzo Crocitti) have arrived at the castle where Paco’s wedding to Sulfurina (Carmen Villani) is to be held, but it turns out that she’s a witch.

Imagine The Fearless Vampire Killers with tons more sex and you get this movie, directed and co-written (with Mauro Ivaldi, who directed and wrote Emmanuelle’s Silver Tongue) by José Ramón Larraz.

This has some Italian in it — the Stelvio Cipriani score is quite nice. And there’s an attractive cast with Eliza Montes (99 Women), María Vico (The Legend of Blood Castle), Carmen de Lirio (Mata-Hari from Operation Mata-Hari and Jess Franco’s Marquis de Sade’s Justine), Trini Alonso (The Killer Is One of 13) and Assumpta Serna, who would one day play Lirio, the shop owner from The Craft.

There’s plenty of sex — it’s Larraz — often in this one near coffins or inside them.

It’s not the director’s final hour, but not necessarily his nadir. It’s more Satanic hijinks presented as a farce where Black Candles is much more serious; between the foggy homes of London and the castles of Spain, Larras sees the devil and hot sweaty lovemaking everywhere he looks.

And check out the posters for the alternate title, Lady Lucifera.

Also known as …And Give Us Our Daily Sex, this film finds director and co-writer (with Sergio Garrone, who also directed and wrote Django the Bastard, SS Experiment Love Camp and If You Want to Live… Shoot!) José Ramón Larraz making a Commedia Sexy All’ Italiana except in Spain, but you’ll forgive him as he was smart enough to get Laura Gemser as the lead and really, most of the movie has a good chance of me liking it.

She plays the unnamed friend of Veronica (Bárbara Rey, The Ghost Galleon) and the two live upstairs from a couple and their teenage son Albert, who is driven near-mad by the fact that two gorgeous lesbian nurses live upstairs. That’s why he builds a periscope — it’s there in the original name — all while the parents basically lead their own sex lives outside their marriage.

That’s what leads to Albert getting pains in the groin that Ms. Gemser correctly diagnoses as blue balls and then jerks the kid off with his parents in the room. Her husband Gabriele Tinti is also in this and why not? I loved that they used their movie careers to basically travel the world for free.

The porn inserts in this cheapen the film somewhat; it’s certainly erotic enough what with Laura Gemser in garters (I get it, I feel like Evelyn Quince) but you know, much like how Bava only worked once with Vincent Price and it’s Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, I can’t even imagine if Larraz made one of his trademark houses in the London countryside and women who murder with Gemser. More people would be talking about it than me writing a few hundred words about a softcore movie that only had a VHS release and is not known all that much in the U.S. Oh well.

The one thing you may recognize as Larraz is that the mother is using her lover to buy a mink coat that her husband refuses to purchase as most of their money goes to improving his balding hair. The fact that the nurses end up with it and the son’s virginity just sticks it to the upper class even more. But seriously, if you were to lose it to Gemser and Rey, would you even need to be alive any longer? Your life will not improve.

Walter Hochbrueckner directed, wrote and appears in this film which tells the story of Nikki Travis (Dawna Lee Heising), who has left her abusive husband Eric (Hochbrueckner) and while she doesn’t follow the lyrics of Tom Waits (“gonna drive all night / Take some speed”) as she goes out west, she sure finds plenty of weirdness.

She soon meets Misty (Llenelle Gibson) and Crystal (Angel Princess), two other women who are running from something too. Their three paths converge at a town called Paradise and Jackie’s (Vera R. Taylor) diner.

Paradise is a misnomer, as masked killers roam the streets, salarymen disappear regularly, Raymond Taylor (Mel Novak) seems to have the taxidermy skills and mommy issues of another hotel owner we know and fear and Nikki’s ex is still hunting for her, demanding the money she stole from him.

There are moments in this film that seem like they’re repeating, like you’re stuck in a dream where time moves like heavy mercury beneathe the waves, as you attempt to figure out why everyone has found this town, who left that knife just sitting out and why no one thinks it’s al that strange that Nikki wants to be known as Joan Crawford now. Also: a perfect amount of cheetah print.

The Paradise Motel is a quirky movie that succeeds because of its oddball nature. It’s not trying to be weird; it just is naturally. And isn’t that the best?

Mill Creek has released this DVD set of three 2000s comedies that is totally worth your money. You can get it from Deep Discount.

Incredibly loosely based on the novel Headlong by Emlyn Williams, King Ralph supposes what would happen if the entire royal family of England was electrocuted and an heir needed to be found, which ends up being Ralph Hampton Gainsworth Jones (John Goodman), a Vegas lounge singer who must be groomed by Sir Cedric Charles Willingham (Peter O’Toole).

Directed and written by David S. Ward, who wrote stuff like The Sting and Sleepless In Seattle and directed other perhaps not so prestige stuff as Major League and Down Periscope, it also has John Hurt as Lord Percival Graves, another upper crust snob who wants the House of Stuart take over for the House of Wyndham after all the controversy of an American king, much less one dating a commoner.

Bill Murray was going to do this — makes sense with the lounge singer character — and so was John Candy, who picked Nothing But Trouble instead. As for Goodman, he even said in an interview, “I don’t think anybody’s ready to pay good money to see me get the girl in the movie. I know I wouldn’t go see something like that.”

The movie is better than he thinks it is.

You can get King Ralph in retro VHS packaging from Mill Creek at Deep Discount.

Adolf Eichmann (Peter J. Donnelly) has been captured and brought to Israel to stand trial. Without enough evidence to prosecute him, the job of getting a conviction falls to Israeli Mossad agent Avner Less (Richard Cotter).

The first full-length film directed and written by Vir Srinivas, this is a big concept: two men in one room discussing why the Holocaust happened, all shot in black and white.

At one point, after learning why Eichmann joined the German cause, Avner makes him stare at the direct result of his evil, as he plays graphic — and real — documentary footage of the mass burials within the extermination camps.

Where Eichmann claims that he was only following orders, saying “I was a small cog in the gigantic machine of the Third Reich,” Avner is his opposite, a man of convictions who stands in the way of execution until he the proper evidence to viewed.

What Avner finds is worse than he believed it could be: Eichmann is not some horror movie villain. Instead, he’s just a bureaucrat that coldly filed the paperwork to order at least six million people to die. That’s more frightening than someone baring their teeth and threatening you outright.

This feels like a stage play, but it works for film and takes advantage of the talents of its leads. Sure, it’s odd to hear both speak in Australian accents, but you get past it as the quality of the script is that good.

Post-Moonraker, there seemed to be an interest in creating new Eurospy ripoff movies like The Nude Bomb; No. 1 of the Secret Service (I realize it came out in 1977) and its sequels Licensed to Love and Kill and Number One Gun. The Golden Lady literally says in its ads that it’s a female James Bond; most curiously it was directed by horror and sex film fiend José Ramón Larraz from a script by Joshua Sinclair, who went from working in Calcutta with Mother Teresa to making Marlene Dietrich’s last movie Just a Gigolo, writing Keoma and making 1985’s Shaka Zulu.

Julia Hemingway (Ina Skriver using the name Christina World, already famous from her love scene with Koo Stark in The Awakening of Emily; she was also in episodes of Space: 1999 and The New Avengers)  has been hired by a millionaire named Charlie Whitlock (Patrick Newell, the Mother spymaster of The Avengers) to destroy his competition in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.

The film also decides to up its Eurospy cast by having Q himself, Desmond Llewelyn, appear as a mentor to our heroine and, you knew it, give her a few gadgets.

Julia is helped by three agents who in every way are to remind us of Charlie’s Angels: the tech-savvy Lucy (June Chadwick, Lydia from V and Dolby mispronouncing Jeanine Pettibone in This Is Spinal Tap), military superwoman Dahlia (Suzanne Danielle, who shows up in The Wild Geese and Carry On Emmannuelle as Emmannuelle) and supermodel and nymphomaniac — it says so right on her file! — Carol (Anika Pave, who had a cameo in The Spy That Loved Me and was also in Confessions of a Window Cleaner). They’re joined by a pneumatic lady of the evening named Anita (Ava Cadell, who is in the Andy Sidaris films Do or Die, Hard Hunted, Fit to Kill and Return to Savage Beach as Ava, who goes from an evil hitwoman to a good agent of L.E.T.H.A.L. and a DJ/sex therapist who does her radio show from her hot tub; she is literally a woman made for Andy Sidaris films) who uses her orgasmic yelps and gyrations to flummox their enemies.

The girls come up against industrialists like Dietmar Schuster (comedian Dave King) and his bisexual henchman Wayne Bentley (Richard Oldfield, who shows up as one of the rebels in Empire Strikes Back) as well as Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle…I mean Yorgo Praxis (Edward De Souza, who is also in The Spy That Loved Me) and finally, Julia’s ex-lover Max Rowlands (Stephan Chase).

Also, Hot Gossip —  a British dance group who backed Sarah Brightman on her single “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper” and also sang “Making Love on a Phone” — appear. They were also on The Kenny Everett Video Show and even recorded a second album — Geisha Boys and Temple Girls — that was produced by Martyn Ware (Human League/Heaven 17) with one song, “I Burn for You,” written by Sting. Several of the members of this dance band went on to bigger things, like video queen Bunty Bailey (who is also in Spellcaster and Dolls), Bruno Tonioli of Dancing with the Stars, Perri Lister (who sang the French parts in Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face” and part of the Blitz Kids with Boy George, Steve Strange, Spandau Ballet and Marilyn; she’s also the mother of Idol’s son Willem Wolf Broad) and the aforementioned Brightman.

Girl group Blonde on Blonde —  made up of Page 3 girls Nina Carter (who was married to Rick Wakeman for a while) and Jilly Johnson — also are in this and on the soundtrack. They were big in Japan and best known for their disco cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.”

Somehow, despite glitz, fashion, disco and spying, this movie makes me wonder how and why this movie’s producers — Sinclair, Keith Cavele (he produced Queen Kong), Paul Cowan (The Crying Game) and Jean Ubaud (who moved on to make The Burning, Tag: The Assassination Game and Terminal Choice after this) — picked Larraz to make an action movie, a genre he’d never attempted before nor will he try again. The Spanish Eurosex and horror standout would later say that Sinclair “couldn’t write a letter home to his mother let alone a script.”

Pablo (Javier Escrivá) and and Anna (Teresa Gimpera, Lucky the Inscrutable, The People Who Own the Dark and quite literally Hannah Queen of the Vampires) have come back to their fancy beach home to discover that someone has broken in. That means that he decides to go all Straw Dogs on the hippies or at least calling the cops on them and getting everyone but one man — the leader of the group (Ángel Alcázar, Bearkiller from Adam and Eve vs. the Cannibals) — arrested.

He soon pays them a visit and takes what he wants from both of them. This being a movie by José Ramón Larraz, you can guess what he wants from the wife.

There’s an astounding scene where Gimpera slowly disrobes in front of an odd painting of the devil on the wall and man, you can tell when a scene in a movie wakes up Larraz.

This is from the era when hippies went from being the heroes of movies to being the villains. In The Occasion, they even live on a Spahn ranch-esque farm next door to the couple and their very presence drives Pablo to madness. Obviously, his wife is in no way all as upset by the intrusion into their lives; she’s even less disturbed by the intrusion in her bed.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on September 7, 2020 but now with the blu ray release of this movie from Kino Lorber, this gives me a chance to update it and expand on it.

You can get the new Kino Lorber blu ray directly from the Kino Lorber site. In addition to a new 2K master, there’s new commentary by Kim Newman and Barry Forshaw, as well as another commentary by Tim Lucas. You also get alternate music score highlights, the original Italian opening credits, two Trailers from Hell episodes (Joe Dante and Josh Olson) and the original theatrical trailer.

American-International Pictures had made some money in the U.S. with Mario Bava’s Black Sunday and Black Sabbath. It just made sene for Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson to gain more control by producing the films themselves instead of just buying the rights.

Working with Italian International Film and Spain’s Castilla Cooperativa Cinematográfica, AIP provided the services of writer Ib Melchior (The Angry Red Planet) to create the American version of this movie, which was based on Renato Pestriniero’s short story “One Night of 21 Hours.”

This movie was quite literally the Tower of Babel, as each major cast member performed in their respective languages: Barry Sullivan spoke English, Norma Bengell spoke Portuguese, Ángel Aranda Spanish and Evi Marandi Italian. And the low budget would have made a cheap-looking movie with any other director, but Bava was the master of in-camera effects and flooding his sets with color and fog. In a Fangoria article, he would say, “Do you know what that unknown planet was made of? A couple of plastic rocks — yes, two: one and one! — left over from a mythological movie made at Cinecittà! To assist the illusion, I filled the set with smoke.”

When 1979’s Alien came out, those that had been exposed to Bava’s work would let people know that many of the ideas in that film came directly from this modest film with its $200,000 budget — I know Joe Bob, everyone lies about budgets. While Ridley Scott and Dan O’Bannon would claim for years that they had never seen this movie before, the writer would later say, “I stole the giant skeleton from the Planet of the Vampires.”

Want to know how I know those claims are true? From the very start of this film, two large ships — the Galliott and the Argos — in deep space respond to an SOS call and are lured to a planet where alien beings either take their bodies over or murder them. The crew of the Argos instantly begins murdering one another — with only Captain Markary (Sullivan) able to pull his crew out of madness. When they arrive at the other ship, everyone is already dead, including Markary’s brother.

Soon, the bodies of the dead are walking as if alive, the ships are damaged beyond repair, and crew members are getting wiped out (look for a young Ivan Rassimov — later of the giallos The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and All the Colors of the Dark, and the Star Wars clone The Humanoid — as one of them!).

While this film is 55 years old, I have no interest in ruining the ending for you. Instead, I want you to sit and bask in its colorful glow, awash in fog and mystery, with pulpy science fiction heroes running around in fetishy costumes and discovering skeletons that could in no way be human. It is everything that is magic about film.

Atlas — the comic company that tried to challenge Marvel and DC in the 1970’s — combined I Am Legend with this film to create the comic Planet of the Vampires. Much like all of their books, it only ran three issues, but the first one boasts a cover with pencils by Pat Broderick with Neal Adams-inks and other issues have great work by Russ Heath. The first issue was also written by future G.I. Joe mastermind Larry Hama. I have no doubt that Atlas did not pay AIP for the rights to this.

Check out these pieces on Ten films that rip off Alien and Ten Bava Films for more.

I think the strain of making a few softcore movies got to José Ramón Larraz. He was known somewhat for his haunted London series of films and the last few movies he made after returning to Spain were technically fine, but didn’t have the hint of berserk weirdness that he’d shown in England. And then he made The Coming of Sin.

Triana (Lidia Zuazo, using the name Lydia Stern; she only acted in one other movie, José Antonio Villalba’s Consultorio sexológico) is a quiet young girl consumed by her dreams, like one where she’s nude and running from a man on horseback. As the couple she works for is going on an extended vacation without her, she’s loaned to Lorna Western (Patricia Granada, billed as Patrice Grant), an artist who has created her own female-centric world that she remains in firm control of. It’s so powerful that men find themselves either upset by it or even unable to enter the grounds.

Of course, seeing as how this is a piece of Eurosleaze strangeness, the two women must have a relationship of a sapphic nature, but it feels earned and not just because we’re in a movie and these things need done to please the audience. Even when they leave the grounds for their date, it never seems strange or otherworldly, other than the fact that Lorna possesses an air of authority that challenges men.

But then Chico (Rafael Machado, billed as Ralph Margulis) invades their world and the two women find themselves upended by him. He’s charmed Triana away from her soulmate and now the dreams that the two women shared have been taken away and replaced by a woman who is willing to do whatever it takes to make her man succeed.

At one point, someone tells Triana, “Even though you’re one of us, you come from a dark corner.” It’s true — she’s another of Larraz’s haunted heroines, a woman who holds multitudes if those multitudes are most often expressed as a smoldering sensuality, an intense fantasy life and perhaps a propensity for violence. Instead of an English country manor in the midst of the fog, she’s just living in a rich woman’s world, a place created for her that once she gives in to the traditional roles society demands of her must be destroyed.

Is Triana a child of the devil, obsessed with fate and dreams filled with symbols? Is her future truly to include her bringing an end to someone she holds most dear? Is Chico even real of some kind of vampiric notion out to destroy the perfection of the world that Lorna has carefully constructed? And how does Larraz make a movie that thematically feels like it could have come from the cameras of Jess Franco but infused it with a dreamy logic that makes it more sumptuous and just plain hot?

Sure, characters shift motivations and it all gets rather talky at times, but a movie where a woman finds herself nude and trapped inside a gigantic gold horse is the kind of surreal madness that this oddball mind demands and Larraz finally figures out how to combine his horror style with the kind of S cinema that was the rage in a newly free Spain.