Filmed in Yogoslavia as For a Night of Love and is based on the novella Pour une nuit d’amour by Émile Zola, this was directed and written by Dušan Makavejev, who was infamous for making Sweet Movie.

The King’s security chief Avanti (Alfred Molina, quite early in his career) is in charge of what is, for the most part, an ineffectual police force. He has come to the village of Waldheim to protect the monarch while Svetlana (Camilla Søeberg) comes with murder and perhaps love in mind.

It’s also the second movie that Molina and Ronald Lacey would be in after Raiders of the Lost Ark, as both have memorably small roles in that blockbuster. The cast also includes Eric Stoltz, Simon Callow, Lindsay Duncan, Chris Haywood, Gabrielle Anwar  and more.

If you haven’t seen Makavejev’s other work, it’s just as horny and sex-obsessed (and frequently funny). This is just another example of Golan and Globus offering a filmmaker with a strong independent streak and a history of controversy and enabling them to make a film.

Look, if you have Diana Rigg play the evil stepmother in Snow White, there’s no way I’m going to be on the side of the heroes. Then again, how crazy is it that Sarah Patterson followed up playing Red Riding Hood in The Company of Wolves by playing Snow White*? And how amazing is it that Cannon had to rename all of the dwarves, so their names are Biddy, Kiddy, Diddy, Fiddy, Giddy, Liddy and Iddy, who is played by Billy Barty?

The King is played by Doug Sheldon, who charted with a cover of “Runaround Sue” and “Your Ma Said You Cried in Your Sleep Last Night” in 1963. He’s also in Some Girls Do and Cannon’s Appointment With Death. If you know the story of Snow White, you know that he remarries after the death of his wife and his daughter does not get along with her stepmother, who uses a poison apple to knock her out. Soon, a handsome stranger must head into the forest to bring her back to life. I mean, you know the story, right? Does Cannon? I say this because it is not a kiss that brings Snow White back from death, but her glass coffin getting knocked off a cart and the poisoned apple getting Heimlich maneuvered out of her mouth. Actually, that’s how it happens in the original book, so maybe — for once — Cannon does know more than Disney when it comes to making fairy tale movies.

This is the only Cannon Movie Tales to get a PG rating, so watch out parents! Director and writer Michael Berz also wrote Cannon’s version of Sleeping Beauty and appears in Hot Resort as Kenny, one of the many young adults trying to get laid, which one assumes is good training to be the creator of fairy tale movies.

*Nicola Stapleton from Cannon’s take on Hansel and Gretel is the young version of the heroine.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I live in the literal boondocks of Western Pennsylvania, so I have no need ever for a rideshare — I can walk to most of the places that I go to in my neighborhood — and if this movie is anything what it’s really like, I’ll keep on moving.

Directed by Nicholas Ryan — this is his first film — and written by Ruder Doupe, Dawson Doupé and Todd Tapper, Dawn is about what happens when Dawn (Jackie Moore) shows up to take Oliver (Jared Cohn) and Anna (Sarah French) somewhere. The real story is that she’s had a plan for the two all along. Once Oliver snaps at her early, you won’t care what happens to him.

As part of my pact with the devil for web traffic, I must watch every Eric Roberts movie, so I was pleased that he was in this and I would continue keeping my soul from the dark one for one more day, while having Michael Paré show up was icing on the infernal cake.

This film is filled with neon hues and takes advantage of the strange distance between driver and rider, as well as the tight quarters of being inside a stranger’s vehicle. The next time I’m tired from walking up the big hills around my house, I’ll just remember that things can be so much scarier. This film is a teachable moment for me.

You can find Dawn on digital from Uncork’d Entertainment.

Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley get together and things go quickly from philosophical discussions to a wild getaway filled with drugs, sex and mental gamesmanship. Are we talking about Ken Russell’s Gothic? No, this is Haunted Summer.

Directed by Ivan Passer, written by Lewis John Carlino (who wrote The Mechanic, A Reflection of Fear and Where Have All the People Gone? and directed The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea, The Great Santini and Class) and based on Haunted Summer by Anne Edwards, this stars Philip Anglim as Lord Byron, Eric Stoltz as Percy Shelley, Alice Krige as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin — soon to be Shelley, Alex Winter (!) as their drug supplier Dr. John William Polidori and Laura Dern as Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister. By the end of the Villa Diodati Writer’s Workshop, Mary will write Frankenstein. By the end of this movie, you’ll want to punch Lord Byron in the balls after watching him insult nearly everyone and fire a peashooter into a crowd of commoner diners.

This was originally going to be directed by John Huston, which had to have thrilled Cannon at the chance to work with Hollywood royalty.

If you want to see another take on this movie, Frankenstein Unbound, Mary Shelley and Remando al Viento also use the real life story to tell their own yarns.

Hansel (Hugh Pollard) and Gretel (Nicola Stapelton) — Pollard and Stapelton were both on the British show Simon and the Witch — have discovered the gingerbread house of Griselda (Cloris Leachman) and if you know the original Brothers Grimm story, you know that things won’t be easy for them.

With David Warner and Emily Richard as the parents of our child hero duo, this at least has some talented British actors in the cast. It was directed by Len Talan, who had written Cannon’s The Emperor’s New Clothes and had a script by Nancy Weems, who never wrote a thing before or sense at least as far as IMDB is willing to tell me.

Hansel and Gretel also uses songs from the Engelbert Humperdinck opera Hänsel und Gretel. Yes, at one point, the world had an Engelbert Humperdinck version of this fairy tale.

I love that Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus created these Cannon Movie Tales so that their Cannon Theater chain wouldn’t have to show Disney movies as matinees, but after Cannon went out of business, they all aired on the Disney Channel as part of the Storybook Cinema series of films. Cannon had at one point planned sixteen of these and stopped at nine. Much like my insane — and self-abusive — need to watch every Lemon Popsicle movie, I will someday have watched every single one of these films.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Based on The Diaries of Hanna Senesh and the biographical novel A Great Wind Cometh by Yoel Palgi, this movie tells the true story of Hannah Szenes, a Hungarian woman who was one of 37 Jewish soldiers who parachuted into Yugoslavia during the World War II to rescue Hungarian Jews about to be sent to Auschwitz. She was arrested, imprisoned and tortured, but refused to reveal details of her mission even when her mother was arrested and threatened. She didn’t reveal any information about her fellow soldiers even when she was about to be killed by firing squad. She is considered a national hero in Israel, as her poetry is well-known and several streets are named for her.

Helena Bonham Carter was originally going to play Hanna and Peter Weir was going to direct before delays caused them to leave the film.

Instead, Dutch actress Maruschka Detmers was Hanna and Cannon boss Menahem Golan directed and co-wrote this movie with Stanley Mann (Meteor, Circle of Iron). Playing the man who would torture her for days, Captain Thomas Rosza, is Donald Pleasence. Ellen Burstyn plays her mother and the cast also includes Ingrid Pitt and David Warner.

And yes, Yehuda Efroni is in this.

Remember when Family Guy did Dingo and the Baby? Well, this is the movie about the real story. How does Cannon figure in? While  Roadshow Entertainment distributed this film in Austalia and Warner Brothers handled this in the U.S., Cannon had the worldwide rights. You may have seen this under its international title, A Cry In the Dark.

Directed by Fred Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Roxanne, Iceman and Six Degrees of Separation), who co-wrote the movie with Robert Caswell, and based on the book Evil Angels by John Bryson, this movie stars Meryl Streep and Sam Neill as Lindy and Michael Chamberlain.

During a barbecue, their two-month-old daughter Azaria was sleeping in a tent when a dingo stole her and devoured her. Even when the couple are cleared of any crime, public opinion turns against them and rumors of them being Satanists — they were Seventh-day Adventists — and sacrificing their daughter begin to spread.

This court of public outrage ends up turning into an actual trial and Lindsay goes to jail, only to be later cleared when the police find the jacket that her daughter had been wearing with teeth holes all over it. Lindsay was seen as unlikeable, which doesn’t mean guilty, but feelings too often are more important than empirical evidence.

Michael Dudikoff as Lieutenant Jeffrey Knight, a new officer from the United States Military Academy who has been dropped off in Vietnam to try to become a leader of men. He proves two things: that yes, he can handle this order, and that Dudikoff is way better of an actor than Cannon’s other Vietnam leading man, Chuck Norris.

Speaking of the Molasses 2×4, his brother Aaron directed this from a script by Andrew Deutsch, Rick Marx and David L. Walker, all based on the book of the same name by James R. McDonough. Harry Alan Towers — yes, the same man who worked with Jess Franco — also worked on adapting the book for the movie.

Knight is helped by Sergeant Michael McNamara (Robert F. Lyons), who talks him through what it takes to succeed in the jungles of Southeast Asia. And proving my theory that all movies are better with William Smith, he plays an officer.

Originally called NAM, the title was changed to obviously be similar to Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Strangely, this is one of the few Cannon movies not produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. Instead, Harry Alan Towers is listed as the producer and Avi Lerner as the executive producer.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As part of Jess Franco Month, these movies were on the site on February 15 of this year. Now, Vinegar Syndrome is releasing them as only they can, newly scanned and restored in 4K from their 35mm original camera negatives. Beyond English and German langauge tracks, there;s also an alternate feature-length extended Spanish versions for both films (sourced from tape with newly translated English subtitles). Plus, Franco expert Stephen Thrower is interviewed about both movies, there are two archival Franco interviews and trailers and still galleries for both movies.

Also known as Sadist Erotica, The Case of the Two Beauties, Two Avenging Angels and Red Lips Sadisterotica, this mindblast from Jess Franco is kinda sorta a Eurospy movie, but you get the feeling that Mr. Franco just wants to get to the choking and nudity and whipping and forget whatever minor plot there is.

Basically: two lesbian detectives are trying to find criminals, so they themselves pose as a supercriminal named Red Lips (this goes back to Franco’s 1960 movie, Red Lips, which was before Bondmania). The police have no idea and the tone of the films go from swinging fun and humor to outright brutality with no warning whatsoever.

I have no idea if I can explain what happens in this movie, which starts with an attractive brunette — Franco loved his brunettes, so get ready — being ripped to shreds by a werewolf man while a rich guy named Klaus Thiller watches and paints it all.

Then Red Lips steals a painting and we learn that the two lesbians, the blonde Regina (Rosanna Yanni, Count Dracula’s Great Love) and redhead Diana (Janine Reynaud, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail) wear the mask and outfit when it suits them.

So yeah. The girls get hired to find someone that Thiller probably killed, they sleep with every man around them and yet still wind up with one another. Also: every few minutes, just when things threaten to get boring, there’s a go go dancing scene filled with nudity and blaring music.

This movie made no sense and I loved it for that reason.

Regina (Rosanna Yanni, Count Dracula’s Great Love) and Diana (Janine Reynaud, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail) are back again for the third Red Lips movie from Jess Franco.

If the last film — Two Undercover Angels — made no sense, guess what? This one doubles down, almost a stream of consciousness film made up of murders, jazz clubs, stripteases, our girls play saxophones and near-escapes.

The sell copy for this claims, “Stiffs, Satanists and Sapphic sadists all after a secret formula for human clones!”

Maybe it’s the fact that I watched Jess Franco movies one after another and pounded what’s left of my brain into putty, but I loved every single minute of this movie.

Also known as Castle of the Doomed, it feels like Franco ran out of ideas here and just decided to have more things happen to the point that continuity and plot became the contrivances that lesser people try to bring up as necessary elements for a movie.

Nope. Not to Jess Franco.

Knife throwing clones? Evil lesbians? Good lesbians? Satanic murderers? Yeah. It’s got all that and an ending that doesn’t solve anything.

The failure of this movie would bring an end to the girls’ adventures until 1999’s Red Silk, although you can perhaps consider Two Female Spies with Flowered Panties a spiritual side quest.

But I think you should only watch a few Jess Franco movies in a row if you want to survive. And my head is already throbbing.

Also note: Two Undercover Angels had a monster in it. Kiss Me Monster has no monster.

Somewhere in there is a koan that will change your life.