Sept 22-28 Chuck Vincent Week: No one did it like Chuck! He’s the unsung king of Up All Night comedy, a queer director making the straightest romcoms but throwing in muscle studs and drag queens. His films explore the concept of romance from almost every angle – he loved love!

A Chuck Vincent-directed barbarian movie — written by that maniac Harry Alan Towers (using the name Peter Welbeck), Rick Marx (Doom Asylum, Gor II, Tenement, so much adult) and S.C. Darcy — starring Donald Pleasence, Sybil Danning, adult star Samantha Fox (not the singer, but the one who went by Stasia Micula), J. J. Jones (Christine, Love Circles, Black Venus), David Brandon (Stagefright) and Tally Chanel (Hollywood Hot. Tubs 2: Educating Crystal) and I haven’t seen it?

And it’s shot by Gianlorenzo Battaglia, the cinematographer of Demons?

And it’s associate produced by Joe D’Amato?!?

The man who protected Haddonfield by sending cop cars into teenagers is Clodius Flaucus — not Claudius — the emperor of this porno peplum Rome, one that ends with a volcano killing almost everyone. But that’s not an effect, that’s footage stolen from Last Days of Pompeii, which D’Amato also ripped off for Diary of a Roman Virgin, and Bruno Mattei lifted in his movie Nerone e Poppea. Yet this is a film that begins with Berenice (Danning) killing a bunch of dudes with a sword, so if you aren’t into that, go look in the mirror and see if you have a soul or not.

Dudes armwrestle to the death as if this were the movie that my grade school fellow movie maniacs described as Caligula, but on a Joe D’Amato budget. Joe was probably like, “I already made this movie when it was called Caligula: The Untold Story in 1982.”

A gladiator who goes by Goliath (Marco Tullio Cau, the evil deity in Specters) wants to assault new female slave — and virgin — Vespa (Chanel), who is being inducted into the art of lovemaking by Chloe (Jones). Berenice protects her, but she’d better be ready, because this is one bad guy who doesn’t know the meaning of no. It almost happens again, one day later, but Marcus (Hill) saves her. She pledges her virginity to him, which is good, because he straight up murders Goliath in the gladiator battles just in time for the volcano to destroy Pompeii and kill everyone evil.

So basically, Sybil Danning and the Deathstalker (well, one of them, you know how that goes) team up, orgies happen all over the place, an insane Pleasence chases doves, a frisbee gets thrown into the audience and kills someone, slaves are hung upside down and stripped…yes, Vincent may have started in porn. Still, now he has Aristide Massaccesi and Harry Alan Towers on his side, which is seriously like being around The Avengers of sleaze.

And a Boris Vallejo poster?

Where was Laura Gemser in all this? Seriously, if she showed up, I probably could have died happy, never watching another movie, secure in this scum.

You can watch this on Tubi.