Blowjob has nothing to do with the sex act of its title and more to do with the works of Carlos Castaneda and Aldous Huxley. It was the follow-up to Blue Movie for director Alberto Cavallone, who said that it was a “deliberately pornographic film, but with political content. A movie about violence as a means of communication and knowledge in a repressive society.” Cavallone also claimed that it had no actual sex, which several performers dispute, as there were different cuts of the film. It was shot as The Naked Witch.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

The titular storm in director Shinji Sômai’s Typhoon Club (Taifû kurabu; Japan, 1985) is both a literal one, as the story takes place before, during, and after a typhoon event in Japan, and a figurative one as a group of rural junior high school students deal with the realities of teen life and the frustrations of a lack of adult role models. Yuji Kato’s screenplay treats its teenage characters with a realistic eye, and the ensemble cast of young performers nail every nuance that is asked of them.

Starting with the near-drowning of a boy by the girls he was spying on at the school pool — closed at night, but when did that ever stop teenagers who wanted to swim by the moonlight? — and featuring a maddening sequence of a boy stalking and terrorizing a girl classmate — whose back he has scarred with acid during science class in an earlier scene — inside their school that is more unnerving than many horror movie scenes, there are many reflections on death and danger. Typhoon Club isn’t solely focused on the gloomy, though, as the students try their best to live life their way, including a lesbian couple and their energetic friend, and a boy who hopes to escape his smaller town and attend high school in Tokyo. There’s a dance sequence that feels more authentic than practically any one that you can name from a major Hollywood feature about teenagers.

Beautifully shot, framed, helmed, written, and performed, Typhoon Club deserves its reputation as a classic slice of Japanese cinema. If you haven’t seen it before, this new 4K restoration is a perfect way to watch it.

Typhoon Club, from Third Window Films, is now available in a new 4K restoration, region-free blu ray.

Bonus Features

• New 4K digital remaster from the original negatives
• Feature audio commentary by Tom Mes
• Selected audio commentary by Josh Slater-Williams
• Assistant Director Koji Enokido Talk Event
• Introduction by Ryusuke Hamaguchi at the Berlin Film Festival
• Trailer 
• Slipcase with artwork from Gokaiju
• ‘Director’s Company’ edition featuring insert by Jasper Sharp – limited to 2000 copies

Directed by Erskine Forde and written by Eliza Hayes Maher (Deadly DILF) and Tiffany Yarde, this is the story of Caribbean cousins Fabienne Larke (Mishael Morgan) and Mirlande Holder (Andrea Lewis) who have decided to start a clothing company together. Fabienne is also a lawyer for a company that is trying to break a strike led by Zayn (Daniel Malik), a fiery union leader. What she doesn’t know is that she was only picked for this role because she’s a woman of color with a mother who was a factory worker. Can the cousins start their business and make it work when they are so unalike now — Fabienne being shy and devoted to work and Mirlande being live on social all the time and floating through her existence — or will things fail?

A lot of this movie is expected but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t entertaining. Actually, the fighting between the cousins felt authentic. I also liked that the movie didn’t go down the everyday route of having Fabienne and Zayn fall in love. There are some good messages about family, sticking with what you believe in and giving to others, as the cousins eventually create a company that gives clothing to young people who can’t afford interview clothes. Another fun Tubi movie!

You can watch this on Tubi.

The only copy I can find of Screams In the Night is, as nicely as I can put it, beat to shit. Whole sections of it turn into static and digital noise, the quality is at least fifth generation and the sound is barely listenable. There are no subtitles, either. And yet, in a world of 4K everything, I appreciate these analog moments when a movie looks bad and you need to fit to make it matter.

The marriage between Andrea (Rossano Brazzi) and Barbara (Maitena Galli) is near the end, beyond the saving that a vacation to Istanbul can provide. Yet they go anyway, along with his assistant Sylvia (Sylva Koscina), to a villa whose last tenant, a sculptor named Claudine, hung herself. The housekeeper Fatma (Güzin Özipek) keeps secrets, like how she practically worships the dead woman. Speaking of secrets, Sylvia and Barbara have some of their own, as they have begun their own relationship away from the impotent surgeon husband, who is convinced people are trying to kill him. Also, as this is a fantastic, Claudine’s spirit finds her way to Sylvia.

According to Roberto Curti in his book Italian Gothic Horror Films 1970-1979, director and writer Pupi Avati refused to “oblige to the rules of commercial film-making” and this movie — thought of as improvisational film jazz, mostly written and shot on the spot — was him trying yet again to create his own vision. While his previous TV movie Jazz Band was well-received, none of his movies had made money (there’s a moment in Curti’s guide to 1980s Italian Gothic where Lamberto Bava, while speaking about his film Macabre, says “…a week after the film’s release, the producer told me it was the first Avati production that made any money.).

This begins with a ratcatcher (Ferdinando Orlandi) staying overnight at a farmhouse and telling a young girl a bedtime story. There was once a house in the swamp and in it lived a family — father Giove (Adolfo Belletti) and his sons Silvano (Lino Capolicchio), Marione (Gianni Cavina), Marzio (Giulio Pizzirani) and Bracco (Carlo Delle Piane) — in a place where no woman had been for years. Possibly, this was because Giove’s wife died while giving birth to his fourth son.

One night, a pianist named Olimpia (Roberta Paladini, What Have They Done With Your Daughters?) appeared and in time, each member of the family asked her to marry them. She accepted each of their engagements and the marriages were celebrated throughout the day and night. But the next day, she was gone and they were all dead in a tableau reminiscent of Leornardo’s The Last Supper.

As the ratcatcher finishes his story, we notice that the girl looks just like Olimpia.

Pizzirani remembered that it was not an easy movie to make. “We did not know anything about the story. Pupi showed up at morning, gave us a sheet of paper and we had to study our lines. Sometimes the dialogue lines were not call and response, and I recall having to learn very long parts, deadly difficult speeches which later on I would repeat, improvising upon them a bit. It was traumatic.”

What emerges is a story made of stories and each of those tales deals with how we confront the story we don’t know the ending of. Our own. Avati said, “I have a problem with death and so I tried to make it beautiful, sunny, warm.” Is Olimpia even real? Did the mother die or leave the men alone to their own lives? How much is allegory and how much is actual? Avati always makes me ask so many questions.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Ignore the Lucio Fulci Presents, as he had nothing to do with this other than to sign over his name. It was directed by Enzo Milioni, who also made Quello strano desiderio and The Sister of Ursula, and was written by Millioni and Giovanni Simonelli, who directed Hansel e Gretel.

Nino (Marcello Mastroianni) is a married man who does taxes. His life is, well, quiet and somewhat boring. And then one day he sees Anna (Romy Schneider), a woman he was in love with decades ago. Time has not been kind to her. He pays for her busfare and she disappears, only to call him that night and offers to repay him. He meets her at her dilapidated apartment, only to learn that she has died three years ago.

His wife Teresa (Eva Maria Meineke) is growing upset with his obsession with the past. Despite him being sure that she is gone, she calls again and asks him to visit her mansion. When she answers the door, she is the same woman he knew years ago, young and vital. She tells him that she still loves him, but can’t make love to him, as she is married to the man who owns this gigantic home, Conte Zighi (Wolfgang Preiss). She changes her mind and says that they should take a boat to where they once would get away to be with one another, except that she disappears by falling into the water. When Nino informs the police, his wife leaves him and a tearful Conte Zighi tells him that his wife died three years before. His servant even takes him to see her gravestone.

At the end, Nino is in a wheelchair in his senior home, watching the sun set. A gorgeous woman comes to bring him inside. It is Anna.

Directed by Dino Risi (Anima persa), who wrote the script with Bernardino Zapponi based on the book by Mino Milani, Fantasma d’amore is about a man who has no passion left, a life which has no joy and only memories, which have become colored by the idea that they are the past, of a great love lost for good to keep him warm in the dark nights of the soul. Yet Anna says to him, “You really believe time exists…time which makes us age, which consumes us, that indeed exists. But inside of me, I’m not aged at all.” The fact that this woman, for a time, loved him is enough to sustain him all the way to the loneliness of the grave.

Speaking of age and remaining young through memory, the Riz Ortolani score features a 72-year-old Benny Goodman playing clarinet.

The idea of marrying a witch is a strong one. Generally in most cinema, it is treated as a positive, as seen in I Married a Witch, which was later stolen by television to become Bewitched. Only in Italy would such the start of this story feel as if it were closer to Black Sabbath than the adventures of Darren and Samantha.

The witch Finnicella (Eleonora Giorgi, Inferno) has been sentenced to being burned at the stake by the Catholic church but is brought back to life three hundred years later by her lover, the demon  Asmodeus (Helmut Berger). She is charged with making Emilio Altieri (Renato Pozzetto) fall in love with her — he’s the descendent of the cardinal who doomed her to the flames who would one day become Pope Clement X — and then kill him. Yet when she finally meets him, he’s already in love with Tania (Lia Tanzi, The Suspicious Death of a Minor). Even when she becomes his secretary and wantonly offers herself to him, Finnicella can’t win him to her embrace. He even fires her, at which point she kisses him, but he still stays pure.

That’s when Finnicella realizes that she’s in love with him, even if her demonic master decrees that Emilio must die.

At Emilio’s wedding, she slips a love potion into his champagne. He doesn’t drink, but he acts as if he has and leaves his soon-to-be wife, claiming to be in love with another. Finicella doesn’t believe him, as she thinks it’s just the magic. He proves it, as Tania drank the champagne and has remarried her ex-husband Roberto (Enrico Papa) in the moments they were speaking.

Emilio and Finnicella marry and honeymoon in Paris. As she flies him over the city, having revealed that she is a witch, Asmodeus appears. He reminds her of their deal and why she was brought back to life. She pleads that she is in love, but it gets her nowhere, as the demon guns her down and her husband is blamed for her murder. Finnicella’s ghost begs Asmodeus to fix all of this and he says that a witch could never make him lose his head and proclaims just how smart he is, which ends up with her cutting his head off with a guillotine. Now, holding his head, Asmodeus must release Emilio from prison, erase the crime and bring the witch back to life.

Directed and written by Franco Castellano and Giuseppe Moccia, this was a big success in the Italian box office. If you look closely enough, you can spot Rentao Polselli regular Rita Calderoni, as well as Serena Grandi, Shôko Nakahara (who years later would be in Tokyo Gore Police) and Maria Grazia Smaldone (Libidomania) in small parts.

The best thing about this movie, for me, was the soundtrack. It’s by Detto Mariano, who also did the soundtracks for Miami Golem, War Bus and Titanic: The Legend Goes On. Giorgi sings the title song “Magic” and so much of the feel is disco with distorted guitar; it’s an absolute treat!

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Kiss of a Dead Woman was directed by Carlo Infascelli (Forbidden Decameron) and would be his last film. It was written by Infascelli, Adriano Bolzoni, Tatiana Pavoni and Gastone Ramazzotti and was based on the same novel, Carolina Invernizio’s Il Bacio Di Una Morta, as the better-known film of the next year, Il Bacio. It was also made into a film in 1949.

The story is the same. It begins with Clara (Silvia Dionisio, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man) supposedly dead and her brother Roberto (Peter Lee Lawrence, Killer Caliber .32) saving her by asking to see her body and realizing that she is still breathing. We see in flashback how brother and sister loved one another but she married Count Guido di Lampedusa (Orso Maria Guerrini, The Big Racket), a relationship that seemed good until he fell for singer Yvonne Rigaud (Karin Schubert, Emanuelle Around the World), who plans to take him for her own and murder Clara. Her husband comes to his senses and saves his wife, giving us a happy ending that seems too simple.

That said, this feels more giallo than Mario Lanfranchi’s version of the story with a black gloved poisoner shown in POV shots and even an attempted assault at the close of the story.

Peter Lee Lawrence was the AKA of Karl Hirenbach, a German actor who mainly worked in Italian Westerns. He also appeared in photo comics as Pierre Clement and sadly died of a brain tumor at the too young age of just thirty. As for Karin Shubert, she had a sad life as well. After a career appearing in Italian exploitation films from Westerns to commedia sexy all’italiana and very late Eurospy like Missile X: The Neutron Bomb Incident, she starred in several Joe D’Amato films. That’s not the sad part. That comes in when we learn that she was divorced and her son’s drug addiction led to him having violent outbursts, often directed at her. His treatment was expensive, so she went from posing nude to adult films until retiring in 1994. That year, she tried to mix barbiturates with vodka to escape life but was rescued by neighbors. Two years later, she killed herself by carbon monoxide poisoning.

This movie feels like it was filled with tragedy, as Carlo Infascelli retired after this, as the death of his producer son Roberto was too much. Add to that Riccardo Pallottini, the cinematographer, who was killed in a plane crash while making Tiger Joe for Antonio Margheriti.

Less horror than costume drama, there’s still a lot to like in this film.