What gets confusing about the world of Jess Franco is wondering if you’ve seen a movie before. Could it be the ones that have multiple edits, both mainstream and adult? The similar plotlines? Or how about when he remakes his films more than a few times?

This is Elles Font Tout but less adult but no less filthy. Much like that adult film, three couples come to a resort hoping to work through their sexual issues. What they get is Lina Romay — sorry Candy Coster — as Eva Bombón, a porn star ready to show them how to do it right. And sing songs. And have more than enough energy for like three movies like this yet because everything else is so sluggish, she alone is the reason to keep watching.

There’s also a scene where Candy looks directly at the camera and confesses that she has nymphomania and I wonder, was this for the benefit of the audience, Jess, her or all of the above? Because moments later, she’s under a table at breakfest, satisfying every single one of the hapless couples and fluffing them enough that they can all go back upstairs and make decent love, but of course, not the shining sex that she always has.

Jess Frank is, of course, Jess Franco and this movie feels like absolute sadness as it was once to star Soledad Miranda except that she died a few months before shooting. One assumes that Franco was destroyed by this.

Bank president Alberto Rupprecht (Siegfried Schürenberg) has run from his job along with millions in jewels, but like that lottery ticket winner from a Canadian singer’s song, the plane is taken hostage, then crashes and soon, everyone that survives is on the run through the jungles of Brazil and being following by Pedro’s (Howard Vernon, who else?) revolutionaries and — yes, this is a Franco movie — some headhunters.

Along for the ride are Miss Stefi (Gila von Weitershausen), who has a teddy bear and that won’t help much; the pneumatic Anna Maria Vidal (Esperanza Roy, Return of the Blind Dead); a man (Antonio de Cabo) and his small dog and a rich American beauty named Mrs. Wilson (Ewa Strömberg, The Devil Came from Akasava, Vampyros Lesbos) and it should surprise no one that Franco shot a lesbian scene amongst all this death in the jungle.

Franco must have really been depressed because this is filled with hardly any zoom and none of the outright sinful insanity I expect. He’d be back on his game — in fact, outdoing himself — before too long.

As a global war begins to burn itself out, a young filmmaker named Diane (Alexandra Slade) is trapped in a military bunker with the increasingly unhinged General Gore (Nick Young). That’s a simple explanation for this film’s plot but it gets much stranger than that sentence.

Director and writer Brian Patrick Butler has made something that lives up to its prophetic tagline: Just because you are saved, doesn’t mean you’re safe. This is neither all comedy or all horror or all political but all those things jammed into a cocktail of so many more ingredients, like body horror and the stated influences of Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg.

What starts in a bunker filled with dead bodies and ends up with the two diametrically opposed characters finally engaging in conflict, this movie gets absolutely wild and does so in a black and white look that is positively jarring and, of course, causes one to think of the Twilight Zone but here it’s a positive connection. Or propaganda films, which this movie goes out of its way to show the two sides of.

In just fifty minutes, this gets some big ideas out there and has two leads who are more than up to the task of the heavy dialogue they’ve been given. This is definitely worth watching, as is where Butler takes his career next.

You can watch Friend of the World on Troma Now and Tubi.

Set in 1934 Japanese occupied Korea, Hapkido starts with Yu Ying (Angela Mao), Kao Chang (Cater Wong) and Fan Wei (Sammo Hung, graduating from getting his ass kicked by Mao and being on the same side; he also choreographed the fights) trying to start a school where they can teach hapkido, a martial art that uses joint locks, grapples, throws, kicks and punches. Unfortunately, the Black Bear Gang — Japanese toughs — want to run them out of town and keep trying to trick them into fighting. This goes against the will of their master but eventually, enough is enough.

Released in the U.S. as Lady Kung Fu — and even replacing Enter the Dragon as the top film of the week during the week of September 19, 1972 and using the tagline “Here comes the unbreakable China doll who gives you the licking of your life!” — Hapkido also features early appearances by Biao Yuen, Corey Yuen and Jackie Chan. Ji Han-Je, who appears as the teacher, was the man that many consider the founder of hapkido. He also is in Game of Death with Lee.

As for the music — which is always a fun thing for me in Hong Kong cinema, as I love to see where it takes songs from — Emerson Lake and Palmer’s “Eruption” is the theme song!

Between the direction by Huang Feng and Hung’s skills at showing unarmed combat in movie form, Hapkido is absolutely stunning, filled with intense fights and high drama as Mao stands — almost — alone by the end of the film. She’s amazing and you completely buy every strike she unleashes on her hapless and outmatched foes, even if I wish she’d been the lone warrior to protect the honor of her fighting style.

Hapkido has been released by Arrow Video in a set with Lady Whirlwind. Both movies have brand new 2K restorations by Fortune Star, an illustrated collectors’ booklet featuring new writing on the films by critic James Oliver and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Ilan Sheady.

There are two commentary tracks, one by Frank Djeng and Robert “Bobby” Samuels and one by Frank Djeng and Michael Worth, a new interview with Mao, archival interviews with Mao, Carter Wong, Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao, a vintage featurette showing Ji Hanjae teaching the lead actors hapkido, three alternate opening credits, the Hong Kong theatrical trailer, the U.S. trailer, a TV commercial and an image gallery.

You can get this from MVD.

You can also stream this movie on the Arrow player. Visit ARROW to start your 30-day free trial. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Android TV and mobile devices, Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc), and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.

Angela Mao worked with director Huang Feng to create a series of martial arts films that are well-considered like Deadly China Doll, When Taekwondo Strikes, Hapkido and this movie. She’s best known for her appearance in Enter the Dragon as Bruce Lee’s doomed sister. After a career as a hard-fighting star, she moved to New York City in 1993 where her family runs several restaurants.

When Ling Shih-hua (Chang Yi) is left for dead by Yakuza attackers, he vows revenge as he is nursed back to health. His problems aren’t anywhere near over because Tien Li-Chun (Mao) is here, demanding that he take his own life for leaving his sister and causing her suicide. He begs her for a favor. He must have his revenge before he dies. Of course, he gets beaten down again and she has to save him after he gets buried in the sand up to his neck. That means that she has to save him and help him to defeat his enemies, all so that she can be the person who gets the pleasure of killing him.

In our country, this was given a sexy ad campaign and called Deep Thrust — wink wink nudge nudge — and the tagline “the deadly stroke of bare-handed combat.” It has no sexual content, so don’t be fooled. It’s about kicking some ass.

Besides that title, you know what else gets stolen? John Barry’s score from Diamonds Are Forever. Georges Garvarentz’s song “The Bulldozer Leads the Dance” is also in this, which doesn’t seem like music for martial arts mayhem, yet there it is, right?

This movie inspired me. I must find more movies where Mao, who looks so prim, proper and ladylike, unleashes hell and decimates ten or more human beings at once. This also has a wise old man who teaches the male protagonist the Tai Chi Palm and the bad guys have a villainess who uses a whip, which is all I ask for in a movie.

Lady Whirlwind has been released by Arrow Video in a set with Hapkido. Both movies have brand new 2K restorations by Fortune Star, an illustrated collectors’ booklet featuring new writing on the films by critic James Oliver and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Ilan Sheady.

There are three commentary tracks: one by Frank Djeng and Robert “Bobby” Samuels, another with Frank Djeng and Michael Worth, and another with Samm Deighan. There are also newly filmed interviews with Angela Mao and her son Thomas King, as well as alternate English credits, a Hong Kong theatrical trailer, U.S. theatrical trailer, radio ad and an image gallery.

You can get this from MVD.

You can also stream this movie on the Arrow player. Visit ARROW to start your 30-day free trial. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Android TV and mobile devices, Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc), and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.

Around the World In 80 Beds is a collaboration between Erwin C. Dietrich (who took all the credit; he also made Secrets of a French Maid, Six Swedish Girls in a Boarding School, She Devils of the SS and you can get a feel for what he specialized in by those titles; Franco made 17 movies for him) and Jess Franco (no credit, but hey, I’m not doing a month of just any director’s films, much less for the second year in a room), this is not Mondo Erotico except in Germany, so don’t get it confused with the 1973 Filippo Walter Ratti-directed Mondo Erotico; nor the Joe D’Amato-directed, Amanda Lear-starring Crazy Nights which is also called Mondo Erotico and certainly not the Osvaldo Civirani-directed Tentazioni proibite, which also played in Germany as Mondo Erotico.

Esther Moser is the host of this film and just in the year 1977 she’d appear in Franco’s Ilsa, the Wicked Warden; Die Sklavinnen; Blue Rita and Die teuflischen Schwestern. Instead of eighty beds, as promised, the viewer instead is given several stories in an anthology-style film, starting with a black mass in Greenwich Village — yes, five people can be a black mass, one figures, one for each point of the pentagram — and then jet sets us if not all over the world then at least to different small sets to show what the naughty are doing in San Francisco (where an eighty-year-old Elisabeth Bathory claims she stays young by bathing in male-made fluids), Copenhagen (for incest live on stage and you thought this was a  new thing the weird kids that search Pornhub are into), Hamburg (where a dominatrix known as the Bride of Satan does her dastardly work), Agoa (where the elders of a tribe take a new bride before her husband; yes, remember that all mondo movies must have a jungle scene that defines racism); Amsterdam (where a sex class experiments with toys, including a man being penetrated, so this is ahead of time at least sexually) and Istanbul (for yet another live sex show).

Who knew all this sex could be so boring?

I guess sometimes, Franco needed money, but this is a rough one to get through. At least there’s one funny moment when a love doll looks bored by sex, if an inanimate toy can be turned off. You may also notice Eric Falk (Stiletto from one of Dietrich’s wilder movies Mad Foxes) plus several of the girls who show up in Franco’s movies from his time with Dietrich, like Esther Studer, Pilar Coll, Lorli Bucher and Yvonne Eduser .

But seriously, unless you’re someone whose ADD demands that you see every Jess Franco film and have a Letterboxd list and a whole month on your site devoted to him, you may not need to see this.

Ah, welcome to the part of watching Jess Franco movies where there are just rumors and hints of films unfinished or finished, screening once and never showing up again. Then again, with as many movies as Franco was part of and the fact that things keep showing up, I know that so much of his lost work won’t stay that way.

Juliette from 1970 is a 40-minute film and that’s because that’s all that was filmed before Soledad Miranda, Franco’s muse and the actress playing Juliette, was killed in a car crash. The story had her seducing and killing men, then confessing in church, a place where one of the devout falls for her.

Franco had the existing footage and often discussed using it to make a tribute to Miranda. With his death, that won’t happen.

De Sade’s Juliette (1975) is just as intriguing, as this story about the BDSM relationship between a young woman (Lina Romay) and a poet (Alain Petit), plus murder, Lina fellating a hanged man and her ending the film by shooting herself between the thighs. They even took the time to make an English dub of this yet it was unreleased, other than in Italy, where Joe D’Amato heavily re-edited the existing footage to create Justine and the Whip (also sold as Justine; this has nothing to do with Franco’s 1969 movie Marquis de Sade: Justine), also using Franco’s Midnight Party and Shining Sex and taking the music from Nico Fidenco’s Black Emanuelle theme. How confusing can Italian — and Spanish — exploitation get? I think the answer is in this article.

This is also a good place to sneak in Entre pitos anda el juego (Between Dicks Is Where the Game Is). This 1986 Franco adult film has Lina — I mean Candy Coster, as she does have her blonde wig on. In this story, her husband Evaristo has no interest in making love to her any longer, even when she wakes up in the middle of the night bareassed and begging and man, Evaristo, what gives? She decides to play the field and if you ever wanted to watch Lina between two men giving a combination soliloquy and siphoning the swimmers in stereo, well, this would be the movie for you to watch. It’s also an opportunity for you to see Lina with her friend Lola before winning her husband over and then a scene with the entire cast.

Maybe I’m strange, but I prefer the softer side of Jess and not the need to see it all, but then again, I end up feeling like Evelyn Quince. I go from “Oh, it’s high rrrribaldry at its best!” to “Oh, I don’t like this! This is becoming less randy and more sexually explicit at every moment! Our once bawdy tale is turning into a tawdry tale of pornography!”

But then I realize that when I said I’d watch every Jess Franco movie, I meant it.

I also realize that someday my weird brain is going to make me do the same with Joe D’Amato.

Alden Rockwell (Tom Wopat) used to be a sheriff but now he’s taking life easy. One day, he takes his friend played by Clint Thorne (Jeff Fahey), a sheriff in a neighboring county, out to lunch only to watch him get shot and killed. Sheriff Preston (Grant Goodeve) promises to investigate but as the case grows cold, Alden wonders if there’s some kind of conspiracy in his little town.

Directed by Shea Sizemore, who wrote it along with Jon Nappa and Jason White, this is a solid action film that seems like it would be something your grandfather would put on at 8 PM on a Sunday night.

Wopat plays a role outside what you may expect. His daughter is going off to war, his wife has just died and without them and his job, as well as the loss of his friend, he feels hopeless. Figuring out the conspiracy keeps him feeling normal and also leads him down to yes, an actual plot that he has to solve.

Fahey is always great and I kind of wish they’d not killed him off so soon. If you’re into this, there’s also a sequel, County Line: All In and a third movie coming out this year, County Line: No Fear, which adds Casper Van Dien, so you know I’ll watch that. Was Eric Roberts busy?

You can buy this from Deep Discount.

I missed this when it first came out and I’ve always had it on my list, wondering what it was about. Once the sequel, Becky 2: The Wrath of Becky, I figured it was time to see a movie I lost track of during the pandemic.

I’ve gone on record saying that I’ve overcome all manner of violence in my life and never thought twice about it, but still remember mean things preteen girls would say decades ago. Becky (Lulu Wilson, who is great in everything she’s been in, including The Haunting of Hill House, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Annabelle: Creation and Deliver Us From Evil) is a young woman bullied in school and still struggling to get over the loss of her mother. Somehow, all that pain doesn’t come out as mean words but as the kind of violence usually reserved for male action stars.

Her father Jeff (Joel McHale) takes her to his cabin for the weekend in the hopes of reconnecting and getting her to like his new fiancee — well, that’s a surprise for her — Kayla (Amanda Brugel, Jason X) and her son Ty (Isaiah Rockcliffe). That doesn’t last long, as a gang of Neo-Nazis led by Dominick Lewis (an incredible Kevin James; the role was meant for Simon Pegg but wow, James is astounding) that includes Roman Hammond (James McDougall), Sonny Cole (Ryan McDonald) and the monstrous Wallace “Apex” Landham (Robert Maillet, who wrestled in WWE as Kurrgan) come to the home, kill one of the family’s two dogs and demand a key that Becky keeps in her treehouse fort. This McGuffin is said by Lewis to be part of his master plan that he’s spent a decade in jail putting together and that it will unlock everything for him and his people. He even has it tattooed on his body. And no, that key is never explained. It’s just the device that starts a 13-year-old girl on the path of bloody vengeance against a gang of men larger, tougher and more frightening — well, not for long — than her.

I was shocked by how hard this movie goes and loved every minute of it. I mean, did I think that I’d see a movie where a young girl goes Fulci on the King of Queens when it started? No, I was not. This movie is packed with grisly and imaginative doses of pure violence and kept me in the whole time, even if the opening and closing police moments are pointless. Yet when the movie gets to Wilson cosplaying First Blood, this movie doesn’t just sing. It screams its head off.

Co-directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion also made Cooties together, while writers Ruckus and Lane Skye were also behind The Devil to Pay and Rattle the Cage. Nick Morris, an executive producer, also worked on the script.

The Ronin Flix blu ray release of Becky has introductions from directors Jonathan Millet and Cary Murnion, a featurette about directing the film, interviews with McHale and Wilson, fan art, behind the scenes photos and commentary with Wilson and screenwriters Ruckus and Lane Skye. You can get it from Ronin Flix and MVD.

Directed by Pierre Chevalier (using the name Peter Knight, the same he’d use for Panther Squad) who co-wrote this with A.L. Mariaux — but come on, we all know that that’s Jess Franco — this Eurocine film is a cut and paste marvel that uses footage from a movie made seven years before, Agente Sigma 3 – Missione Goldwather, so that explains why this starts as a sleaze film all about a house of, well, cruel dolls, and ends up a spy movie. Eurocine did it one better by taking these leftovers, warming them up and re-releasing them eight years later as Police Destination Oasis, also adding in some of Agente Sigma 3 – Missione Goldwather and a pinch of Franco’s Two Female Spies In Flowered Panties.

In those first few moments, a regular customer falls in love with cruel doll Yvette (Magda Mundari) and helps her escape. They go to the police and…cue the Jack Taylor Eurospy footage.

Speaking of cobbling together multiple movies to make a new narrative, this was released on blu ray in the U.S. by Full Moon, the same company who often edits shortened narrative destroyed versions of their films into make no sense anthologies and had the absolute gall to rip off Bruno Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead and turn it into Corona Zombies. Yes, Full Moon ripped off a movie that ripped off Zombie which was ripping off Dawn of the Dead and also stole footage from Yeti Giant of the 20th Century and the mondo films Des morts and Nuova Guinea, l’isola dei cannibali while also ripping off music from Buio Omega and Blood and Diamonds.

Notice how my morals are: I am perfectly fine with Franco and Mattei robbing other movies but I draw the line at Charles Band.