EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on January 10, 2020.

Roger Corman wasn’t happy with the end results of this film, which was shot in the Philippines, but man, he has no idea. This is my kind of insane movie, where a movie leaves his woman for, well, a cobra woman who keeps him alive by pimping out his native lover who draws venom from the men that she kills.

Andrew Meyer only wrote and directed one other film, The Sky Pirate, which is a shame because this movie is pretty much insane. It has snake murders, an air of filth and women ruining lives. Is there anything else you can put in a movie?

How about Joy Bang? You know and love her from Messiah of Evil and she’s here, looking gorgeous. She’s the former girlfriend of Stan Duff (Roger Garrett, who got a poultry infection while making this movie!), who has now found love in the arms of Lena (Marlene Clark from Ganja & Hess, Beware the Blob and Switchblade Sisters), the cobra woman herself.

Vic Diaz, who was Satan in Beast of the Yellow Night, also shows up. Quentin Tarantino would refer to Vic as the Peter Lorre of the Philippines, a title he earned in appearances in movies like Beyond Atlantis, Black Mama White Mama, Superbeast, Daughters of Satan and Raw Force.

Julian May sold her first professional fiction, a short story called “Dune Roller,” to Astounding Science Fiction where appeared in 1951. The name J. C. May was listed as the author and it was accompanied by her original illustrations. May was unique in that not many women participated in science fiction fandom; she was also the first woman to chair a worldcon, the Tenth World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago in 1952. Over her lifetime, she wrote thousands of science encyclopedia articles and more than 250 books for children and young adults. These non-fiction, under her own name and a variety of pen names covered the worlds of history, science and pop culture.

One of her pseudonyms changed my life. As Ian Thorne, she was responsible for writing ten orange hardcovered books for Crestwood. Once you see these covers, if you read them, you will be transported back in time.

Under her married name Judy Dikty — they spelled it incorrectly in the credits as Ditky — she is credited for the story in this movie. The good news is that after years of writing as a job, she got back into science fiction by attending a convention after moving to the west coast. After creating an alien costume for a con party, she got so many ideas of what that creature would be like she started her Galactic Milieu Series, which was a series of eight books published between 1981 and 1996.

Harry Essex is credited as the director and writer of this movie. He’s probably better known for writing It Came from Outer Space, The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Sons of Katie Elder, but by this time in his career, he was directing. I, The Jury; Mad at the World and, yes, Octaman are the other three that he helmed.

Originally released as The Dune Rollers, what emerges is a movie that’s, well, disjointed at best. A giant ball of fire has dropped from space and it slowly, ever so slowly rolls over people and gets bigger, kind of like Katamari Damacy. Except nowhere near as interesting, as Dr. Iane Thorne (Marvin Howard) sleepwalks though solving this. Is that where May got her pen name from?

His love interest Jeanne doesn’t get much to do either. She’s played by Maria De Aragon who shows up in plenty of 70s exploitation like Wonder Women, Teenager and Blood Mania. Perhaps her best known role is one that she was not credited for: she was Greedo in Star Wars.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Reggae singer Jimmy Cliff plays Ivanhoe Martin, who was based on the real-life Jamaican criminal Rhyging, who may not have been a musician or a drug dealer but was the “original rude boy” and a folk hero in that country. Cliff said, “Rhygin was very much on the side of the people; he was a kind of Robin Hood, I guess you could call him.”

Director Perry Henzell believed that this movie was a success in Jamaica because people there had never seen themselves on the screen nor heard their native dialect, which may be English but still needs subtitles.

Cliff’s character moves to the big city, where he’s wowed by a screening of Django and just wants to make music, like the song which gives this movie its name. But the record producer he records it for controls the world of Jamaica’s music and even if it is a hit, he’ll probably never see the money. After falling into a life of crime, he becomes the kind of Hollywood gangster of his young dreams, sending photos to the press holding machine guns like some kind of Jamaican Dillinger. He’s doomed to die in the streets, riddled with bullets, but he’s going to grab every moment of glory that he can before the inevitable strikes him down.

New Line released this in February 1973 in the U.S. but it took over a year before midnight showings started building an audience. The soundtrack would introduce reggae to American listeners while Ivan was referenced in The Clash’s “Guns of Brixton” with the lyrics, “You see he feels like Ivan, born under the Brixton sun. His game is called surviving, at the end of The Harder They Come.”

After the success of The Big Doll House, Roger Corman and John Ashley would have to work together again. However, this would be the last movie Eddie Romero would make for the producer. It’s a Jack Hill-written remake, remix and ripoff of The Most Dangerous Game with mercenaries Tony (John Ashley), Silas (Sid Haig) and Karp (Ken Metcalfe) kidnapping gorgeous women for the pleasure of Spyros (Eddie Garcia), who places them on his island and conducts hunting parties.

When Tony finds a conscience — more to the point he gets turned on by one of the women he’s taken, McGee (Pat Woodell, The Twilight People) — and decides to help her and her friends Billie (Charlene Jones, Unholy Rollers) and Lori (Laurie Rose, Policewomen) to escape Spyros and his brutal henchwoman Madga (Lisa Todd, Wonder Women and Sunshine Cornsilk from Hee-Haw).

All of the Corman Philippines-shot films seem like they’re setting up sex and the hint of violence until they realize their running time is getting close, so they go all Shakespeare and by that, I mean they kill nearly everyone off. This is no different, but I kind of like how — spoilers for a fifty year old movie — Spyros could kill the survivors but misses Magda so much he blows his brains out. Who said love is dead?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on November 12, 2018.

Imagine a Hammer movie where instead of implied nudity and strange sexuality, everything is laid, well, bare. It’s not hardcore, but compared to where horror was pre-1971, Lady Frankenstein is a somewhat audacious concept: the man is no longer in charge and it turns out that the heroine (or villain, there’s no real hero in this movie though) is even more warped and insatiable than those that have come before. If you listen to Rob Zombie, you may know the sample from the trailer for this film: “Who is this irresistible creature who has an insatiable love for the dead?”

Three graverobbers deliver a body to Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten!) and his assistant Dr. Marshall (Paul Muller, Barbed Wire Dolls) to bring back to life. The twist is that Tania Frankenstein (Rosalba Neri, Lucifera: Demon Lover, Amuck!) has completed her studies in medicine and is eager to help her father with his secret work.

The next day, the Frankensteins and Marshall watch a criminal be hung and run into Captain Harris (Mickey Hargitay, the former husband of Jayne Mansfield and father of actress Mariska Hargitay, who was played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1980 made-for-TV movie The Jayne Mansfield Story), who already suspects them of graverobbing.

That night, Frankenstein brings the man back to life — a scarred, weird headed, giant-eyed beast — who pretty much instantly hugs the Baron to death. Tania and Marshall report the murder as a burglar, but Harris calls their facts into question.

If you thought that killers going after people as they have sex was something that was invented in 1980’s slashers, the creature in Lady Frankenstein is here to show you the error of your ways as he comes upon (no, not like that, get your mind out of the gutter) numerous frolicking couples and eviscerates them.

Meanwhile, Tania makes Marshall confess that he’s always loved her, but his old body can’t satisfy her. This is a polite way to say that the dude has erectile dysfunction and if Viagra had existed in the 1800s, there would be no need for the movie to continue the way that it does. Tania does find the mildly mentally challenged servant Thomas (Marino Masé, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times) attractive, so she has sex with him while Marshall watches. Thus cuckolded, he snuffs the young man out with a pillow.

Things get better for him, as she puts his brain in the young man’s body, making him superhumanly strong for some reason. While all that’s going on, the creature keeps on terrorizing people until they remember that they’re supposed to pick up pitchforks and torches and take him out.

The monster makes its way back to the castle, where it attacks Marshall, who rips off its arm, allowing Tania to stab it before he smashes its head open. As the castle burns down around them, Marshall and Tania make love as Harris and Thomas’ sister Julia (Renate Kasché, Devil in the Flesh) watches. The flames consume them as Marshall begins to choke out Tania.

Lady Frankenstein has a great lead who can do anything a man can do, if a man wants to bring the dead back to life and have sex with their reanimated corpses. That’s progress, I think.

Further progress is that every time I watch this movie, I love it more and more. I’m so excited that it’s part of Severin‘s Danza Macabra box set along with The Monster of the Opera, The Seventh Grave and Scream of the Demon Lover.

How important is this movie to Quentin Tarantino? Well, it’s the movie his character is watching in Planet Terror and he referred to it as “harsh, harsh, harsh.” He also took the name of Pam Grier’s character Alabama for his first published script, True Romance.

Director Gerry de Leon is a force of exploitation nature, making movies like The Blood Drinkers, Curse of the Vampires and the two efforts he co-directed with Eddie Romero, Brides of Blood and The Mad Doctor of Blood Island. They’re not fancy efforts but they’re sure entertaining.

Carol “Jeff” Jeffries (Jennifer Gan) is in love with Rudy (Charlie Davao), but little does she know that her lover is running an empire of sex, drugs and gambling on the seas. Once he realizes the cops are closing in, he uses her to stash his drugs and she takes the heat.

In the horrifying prison where most of this movie takes place, Jeff finds herself at odds with, well, everyone.

There’s Pam Grier moving beyond prisoner victim to guard abuser as Alabama, spouting off incendiary dialogue like this as she tortures Jeff inside a room she calls The Playpen:

Jeff: “What kind of hell did you crawl out of?”

Alabama: “It was called Harlem, baby. I learned to survive, never have pity. This game is called survival. Let’s see how well you can play it. I was strung-out behind smack at ten and worked in the streets when I was twelve. You’ve got a long way to go.”

Even the other prisoners can’t get along with her, like Alabama’s claimed woman Theresa (Sofia Moran), Sandy (Judy Brown, already a veteran of The Big Doll House) and heroin-loving Stoke (Roberta Collins, who also spent time in The Big Doll House and Caged Heat) who thinks she can get more heroin from Jeff’s man Rudy.

After taking abuse the entire movie, Jeff decides to head out into the jungles, which is filled with even more horrible people than inside the prison. Things get, well, horrifying for all concerned with an assault/drowning sequence that had to be really uncomfortable for viewers. Or maybe they whooped it up at the grindhouses during that sequence. Who can say?

As for me, I loved Collins in this. She wants her next fix so badly that she’ll poison a sandwich, unleash a snake on someone and then throw acid in someone’s face. Most girls will just ruin your life. She’ll kill everyone you know. Marriage material.