In a small town in 1950s Italy, a girl named Lola (Anna Ammirati, who director Tinto Brass met when he crashed his car into her as she was on her bicycle; she told him as a joke that if she wasn’t his next leading lady, she would sue him) rules the libido of every boy and man in town, riding her bike with her rear showing and acting as inappropriate as possible. She may be a virgin, but she doesn’t want to be. Her fiance Masetto (Max Parodi), however, is a traditional Italian man who wants to take a pure woman on his wedding night.
Her mother, Zaïra (Serena Grandi), has married Andre (Patrick Mower), a man who has raised Lola as her stepfather, yet she takes every opportunity to try to seduce him. That’s how Lola is with almost everyone, pushing men to their limits and then shocked when they want to be inside her. As for Masetto, he blows up and screams at her just about any time he’s angry, then goes and makes love to sex workers. He has different rules than his bride but she’s unwilling to embrace the past and looks to the future of how women will be treated in Italy.
There’s a great essay that comes with the Cult Epics 4K, “A Committed Brat: The Career of Anna Ammirati” by Eugenio Ercolani and Domenico Monetti. It explains who Ammirati was at the time and the actress she grew to be. I love that she says that she is the opposite of the “bionic blondes” at the time this movie was made; she looks real, feels real and even the song that she sings on the film’s soundtrack, “Mona Monella,” has an edge that you would not expect from someone who is trying with this film to be a sex symbol.
Along with a strong Pino Donaggio score, this soundtrack features plenty of era-appropriate songs, such as Carla Boni’s “Mambo Italiano,” Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” and Curtis King Jr.’s “Let’s Twist Again,” a song that plays on a sweaty night with our couple and three American soldiers all interacting in a small bar.
Cult Epics is doing amazing things with these Tinto Brass releases. They’re like my Criterion collection, as they release the movies that I truly care about. The 4K UHD release of this movie has new audio commentary by Eugenio Ercolani and Nathaniel Thompson, trailers, an interview with Tinto Brass, a photo gallery, a double-sided sleeve with the original Italian art, a 20-page illustrated booklet with liner notes by Eugenio Ercolani and Domenico Monetti, a slipcase and lobby cards. You can get this from MVD.
23. FOR PEAT’S SAKE: Log one that takes place in a swamp or a bog.
Danny (John White, who would become the direct to video Stifler in the American Pie sequels), Phil (Dan Warry-Smith) and Angel (Charlotte Sullivan) live in a swamp where every kid talks about Gator Face. After a summer of having to behave, they decide to make a costume, dress up as the monster and prank the entire neighborhood. Then the National Guard gets called in. That’s when the friends learn that Gator Face is real and a part of the swamp.
Directed by Vic Sarin and written by David Covell, Alan Mruvka and Sahara Riley, this aired on Showtime and if I was the right age for it, I would have been obsessed by this movie. At the end, when Gator Face gives his life up to save Danny? I would have cried my eyes out. When the swamp saves Gator Face? I don’t know if I had that many years as a child.
This may be the most innocent swamp horror film that I’ve ever watched. I mean, I’m used to humanoids rising up during salmon festivals and violently assaulted women who later give birth to their clammy children.
Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.
Today’s theme: Hail Satan
Teresita (Imma de Santis) may be a Catholic schoolgirl, but that doesn’t mean that she can’t be obsessed by a statue of a man in a dark suit, a man (José Lifante) that soon begins to follow her through her dreams. Her father (Luis Prendes) decides that she needs the help of psychologist Dr. Liza Greene (Maria del Puy), who tries to work with her but starts to lose control as Teresita becomes more violent, all while Dr. Greene’s secret lover Dr. Jack Morris (Jack Taylor) begins to abuse her.
That said, nothing will prepare you for how deranged Teresita becomes. She sneaks into a child’s hospital room and turns off his oxygen, kills her mother (Alicia Altabella) by shoving her off a balcony, murders the butler’s dog and then watches as he has a heart attack.
Of course Dr. Greene should adopt her.
There is no exorcism or religion in this. Just possession and people trying to deal with their lives because everyone in this treats one another horribly. And then, hands come out of the walls and grab young girls.
Also: How strange is it that this movie has a Tall Man in it who constantly appears well-dressed and surrounded by fog? You may known the actor who played him as the photographer in Let Sleeping Corpses Lie.
I want to know how Dr. Greene is a psychologist when we see her experimenting with electric eels and how a doctor could suddenly adopt one of their patients. I know it’s a movie, much less a Spanish ripoff, but man, these are the things that I worry about. Another question is why does Teresita have such weird stuffed animals that look like piranha?
By the end, the demon has transferred to the healer, who is frothing at the mouth and holding scissors. We don’t get any resolution, but for a film that is about a young girl and a woman unable to connect to others emotionally (and sexually, if we are to believe the things that Morris says to our doctor protagonist), ending with the idea that they’re about to use scissors on Teresita’s father makes it seem like the demon has helped at least one of them work through their problems. And look, even after being burned, those weird stuffed fish have come back.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.
I worry about AI a lot, because you know, I work as a writer in my non-constantly watching movies and writing about them time. I’ve been in this field for twenty-five years or more — this gets relevant for this movie as well, I promise — and I feel like I’ve been fighting Skynet since 1984 and now I’m being asked to embrace it.
This is all being confided in you, dear reader, because I feel like Amityville Emanuelle has been concocted by that very same AI that I’ve been asked to use for my work and not director Louis DeStefano (who also plays Detective James and is directing his first movie) and Geno McGahee (producer of Call Me Emanuelle, The Awakening of Emanuelle and the writer and producer of Amityville Cop and the writer, director and producer of Amityville: The Final Chapter, which was originally known as Sickle).
How else can we explain a movie that has Amityville, a spirit board and namechecks the character invented by Emmanuelle Arsan that has become a brand in itself, remixed remade and ripped off into so many different characters, whether black, white or in space?
How long did it take before someone realized that Emanuelle and Amityville are both available to put together and lure me into watching 65 minutes of the results?
That’s why I blame AI.
If you have watched any of the post-relevant Amityville movies by now — you can stop after the Canadian ones, if you’re like most people, or after the In the Hood ones if you’re like me — you should never look at the poster and decide to watch these movies. I promise you that hardly anything on this art happens in the movie or even gets close to it and looking at it will only spoil you for visuals that its creators and budget are unable to deliver.
As you know — you must know — on November 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot and killed six members of his family at 112 Ocean Avenue in the suburban neighborhood in Amityville, located somewhere on the south shore of Long Island, New York.
This movie accepts that and even starts with a quick cut version of it to set up what we see next.
Twenty-some years later, Laura Lutz (Dawn Church) is working in marketing, of which she says, “I market things. I get people to buy things. It’s like advertising” as I screamed at the screen while I actually did marketing inches away from this prompt-created attempt to finally destroy my Amityville obsessed black soul. She’s also trying to date and hasn’t gotten any for a year because of, yes, marketing and good Lord, this movie is trying my soul because it’s hitting so close to home my dog is trembling as the house shakes this way and that.
She ends up going on a double date with her friend Allie (Linda S. Wong) and hooking up with a nebbish teacher named Evan (Chris Spinelli) who seems to be acting for the back rows of a theater that no longer exists. Oh — I nearly forgot. Some lady brought over a box of objects from her father — George Lutz, who was played by James Brolin and Ryan Reynolds once long before Amityville movies were made on a daily basis and I had to search Tubi every morning at 3:15 AM to see which ones had possessed my smart TV, forcing me to watch them eyes sleepily open, simply through just a touch of Lucifer’s burning hand.
One of the objects in the box of occult stuff her dad kept all these years looks like a cocktail shaker but the filmmakers assure us that it’s an urn. Well, that urn has the ashes of Ronald DeFeo Jr. in it, the father of this movie’s other lead, Gordon (Shane Ryan-Reid), who has been seeing visions of his murderous father more and more since he died in jail. And when his girlfriend Gena (Allie Perez) gets a Ouija board as a housewarming gift from Scott (Johnny Avila)and May (Joycelyne Lew)…I mean, who does this kind of thing? What kind of gift is that? Don’t you know what happens?
Well, they’re lucky because Gena’s cousin Janet (Saint Heart) is a medium. They need her pretty bad right now — she’s sure she’s going to die so she makes Gena promise to take care of her cat Roman — because Laura gets possessed by the spirit and it makes her hook up with two dudes at a bar and shows up inside her bed while she’s jilling off. Worse of all, Evan has gone murderous, killing everyone that comes close to her.
I fear that in all these words, I’ve somehow made Amityville Emanuelle more exciting than it is. It’s an Amityville movie with no real Amityville, not even a shot of the house, just connected to real people whose real lives were destroyed by the case. And I can handle exploitation — I wallow in it, let’s be honest — but when you go nowhere deeper than saying, “These are the kids of Amityville” and then just have them sit in a living room, this underwhelms even when I barely expected it to whelm. But adding to that ennui is the fact that they’ve somehow made an Emanuelle movie with no nudity and some of the most boring lovemaking scenes you’ll see outside of an afternoon soap opera. In fact, in one, the guy pulls a blanket over Laura’s shoulders while she’s on top of him. This is an Emanuelle movie, with one m, and that means that Joe D’Amato is practically spinning so fast in his grave now that he’s about to burst forth from the Earth at the utter gaul of making even a softcore sex movie the unsexiest sex you’ve seen since you found your parent’s hardback of Dr. Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex. Children of the seventies, remember when the only nudity you could find was the Sears catalog bra pages? That was volcanic compared to this flaccid nonsense.
Nearly everyone that acted in this either produced or also worked behind the camera, no one is blameless. You do it to yourself, you do and that’s what really hurts, as they say. Or sing.
You know, if Joe D’Amato was alive, he’d be making movies with titles a lot like this, but they’d also have half the cast torn to shreds and sitting bloody and congealing in an acid bathtub while a schoolmarmish maid gave her adopted child of a master a furtive handjob, because that’s how you really make a scummy movie. Please learn from the masters.
EDITOR’S NOTE: She-Wolf of London was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 19, 1966 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, December 31, 1966 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, May 17, 1969 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, January 20, 1973 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, July 26, 1975 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, June 24, 1978 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, October 15, 1983 at 2:00 a.m.
As a kid, I’d see a title like She-Wolf of London and prepare myself for lupine madness, only to be angered by the fact that there is not a single werewolf in this movie. Imagine how angry I am as an adult when I watch films like The Wolf of Wall Street!
Years before Lassie and Lost In Space, June Lockhart would play the title character. There’s been a series of murders at a local park and her relatives inform her that because the blood of a werewolf runs in the family and that she is responsible for the deaths. Not Maureen Robinson!
As our heroine begins to worry that she is the next to suffer the Curse of the Allenbys, her aunt both tries to help and worry her at the same time. I smell gaslighting! Can you smell gaslighting? Because I totally can.
Sara Haden, who plays Aunt Martha Winthrop, is perhaps best known for playing another movie aunt, Aunt Milly Forrest in thirteen Andy Hardy films.
This was directed by Jean Yarbrough, who also brought us Hillbillys in a Haunted Houseand Jack and the Beanstalk, one of only two movies that Abbott and Costello made in color (the other is Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd).
EDITOR’S NOTE: She Demons was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January 10, 1970 at 1:00 a.m.
Jerrie Turner (Irish McCalla, a model for Vargas and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle), Fred Maklin (Tod Griffin), Sammy Ching (Victor Sen Yung, Charlie Chan’s number one son) and Kris Kamana (Charles Opunui) are the only survivors of a shipwreck and wash up on a beach paradise that they soon learn is not just filled with demonic native women with spears, but also Col. Osler (Rudolph Anders), a survivor of the Third Reich who is using this little bit of heaven on Earth to experiment with lava and pain. The women have all become She Demons because Osler’s wife Mona (Leni Tana) had her face burned off by that hot volcanic magma and he hopes that he can fix it. So, you know, Eyes Without a Face, except that was made a year before that film!
Richard Cunha made Giant from the Unknown and Astor Pictures demanded that they would only release that movie if he made a second for a double feature. This is what he created and wow, I am so happy that it was filmed. A Nazi war criminal lives in a mansion tended to by island slaves, protected by an army, all surrounded by lava while he is vainly trying to fix the face of wife.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Brain That Wouldn’t Die was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 5, 1966 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, June 28, 1969 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, February 27, 1971 at 1:00 a.m.
I really dislike anyone who makes fun of this movie. It’s been riffed and goofed on for years, but it’s way better made than it has any right to be and is filled with some big ideas that other movies from its genre and time never would dare to include.
Shot independently around Tarrytown, New York, in 1959 under the working title The Black Door, this film finds Dr. Bill Cortner (Jason Evers) as a surgeon who just won’t accept that death is the end for his patients. And when his fiancee Jan Compton (Virginia Leith) is critically injured in a car accident that he causes, he takes her head and along with his crippled assistant Kurt (Anthony La Penna), he struggles to find her a new body to transplant her still living head on.
While Jan loses her mind due to pain and the sheer oddity of being alive without a body, Dr. Bill hits the go go clubs looking for the perfect body for her. That’s one of the strangest and most delightful moments here, as instead of just any body, Dr. Bill realizes that he needs a body that best answers his sexual needs, which means he cares less about saving Jan than satisfying his repressed desires.
Throughout this story and its slowly going mad rush to tragedy, there’s a past experiment hidden behind the door. It’s played by Eddie Carmel, a 7’3″ circus performer who was known as The Jewish Giant.
This was directed and written by Joseph Green, who owned Joseph Green Pictures. It was such a tiny corporation that it had one employee, Joseph Green, and brought so many wild movies to screens like Jess Franco’s Kiss Me Monster and Two Undercover Angels, Claude Chabrol’s Pleasure Party, Something Creeping in the Dark, Death Knocks Twiceand his own film, The Perils of P.K.
I love the way this movie takes our world and instead creates its own, a place where strippers fight on stage, where camera clubs are a plot point — Sammy Petrillo is one of the dirty men taking pictures! — and old girlfriends can be wooed back just to potentially get to be the body for a new fiancee.
Dario Germani made Anthropophagus II two years ago, a sort-of sequel to the Joe D’Amato-directed and George Eastman-starring baby munching epic. This starts almost like a giallo, as Hanna (Valentina Corti) wakes up to her husband dead. As she’s in the hospital, she learns that she’s a suspect and that she’s also pregnant.
She runs to Budapest, where she meets her cousin Hugo (Salvatore Li Causi), who lets her in on the history of their family tree, one littered with forced cannibalism. At least there’s a flashback to Anthropophagus and we get to see the familiar and beloved face of George Eastman in a boat freaking out over how he’s killed his wife and child before, you know, eating them.
Maybe I romanticize the 1980s Filmirage era, but I’ve watched so many of those movies so many times. Yet there was a time when The Grim Reaper played U.S. theaters and drive-ins and I can’t even imagine how people felt when being confronted by it. This feels like a cannibal movie that has grafted itself onto D’Amato’s film and you know, I can’t be mad. If he was alive today, he’d probably be doing the same thing and would love that digital video would allow him to shoot so quickly.
There is one pretty great scene where Hugo picks up a couple and they go to a park for a a tre vie. As he approaches the guy, he goes for what his victim thinks is a kiss and then tears out his throat. Then, nude, he chases the naked female victim as well.
That said, the original presented Eastman as a terrifying monster — as does Absurd, its spiritual sequel — with frenzied eyes. It’s an image that has stuck in my head for decades and I fear that I’ve forgotten a lot of this film already, which is astounding when its one that has infants being consumed.
For a fun bit of science fiction horror with a 1980s aesthetic and an offbeat humorous vibe, you need look no further than director Sam Fox’s short-film blast of oddness The Blue Diamond (U.S., 2024). You know you’re in for a good time when Barbara Crampton is part of the cast, and that’s just for starters.
Crampton portrays Jacqueline, the recently deceased leader of a self-help cult based around, of all things, skiing. Her adult daughter Alison (Desiree Staples) travels to the group’s ski lodge for her mother’s funeral, and is understandably uneasy around the cheerful cult members, who behave in, shall we say, unusual manners and who dress in colorful 1980s ski outfits. The mother and daughter had a contentious relationship, and the more Alison learns the secrets behind Jacqueline’s freaky following, the worse things get for her.
Fox invests her unique short with interesting family drama, an engaging air of mystery, and plenty of highly entertaining bizarreness — wait until you get a load of the dance number. Crampton and Staples play off of each other marvelously. The short’s color palette and music scream “Soooo eighties!” and Fox directs with panache.
The Blue Diamond is currently on the film festival circuit and screened as part of Beyond Fest, which ran September 25–October 9, 2024 in Los Angeles. For more information, visithttps://beyondfest.com/
22. CTHULHU’S COHORT: Wrap your tentacles around a “weird fiction” tale.
Directed and produced by Sean Branney, Andrew Leman and David Robertson, this movie was distributed by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, a group of live action role players of The Call of Cthulhu role playing game. That game’s creator, Sandy Petersen, contributed money to complete the film.
Miskatonic University professor of mythology Albert Wilmarth (Matt Foyer) is a folklorist exploring the Old Ones, the ancient beings that existed before man in the books of Lovecraft. He’s been writing to Henry Akeley (Barry Lynch), a man whose farm is under attack by something that he believes is connected. He’s also arguing that these creatures can’t exist with Charles Fort (Andrew Leman), who the phrase fortean is named for.
Those eternal monsters are known as the Mi-Go and they promise to take people to space, as long as they are allowed to put their minds into a cylinder.
This same group also made The Testimony of Randolph Carter and The Call of Cthulhu. They understand not just Lovecraft, but making movies, as this changes the original story for the benefit of a more interesting movie. The third act is new, as is the ending. The characters all come from the role playing game, as they are the heroes that the filmmakers used.
The Whisper In Darkness was shot in a process called Mythscope, which makes it seem like it was made in the 1930s. It comes across like this is a lost film, one filled with at the edges of sanity madness. And isn’t that how it should be?
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