An adaptation and modern-day update of Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, this was the second de Sade film made by Jess Franco*, but by no means the last. In fact, it’s not even the previous movie, called Eugenie, that he would make. While this one is Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion (or De Sade 70 or Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir), there’s also the better-known — and Soledad Miranda-starring — Eugenie de Sade.

Eugenie (Marie Liljedahl, Inga, Dorian Gray) has spent her entire life in a convent, and despite an exterior that drives men and women wild with lust, she’s inexperienced in the ways of the world. Her father (Paul Muller, Nana, Barbed Wire Dolls) wants to bed Madame Saint Ange (the wife of producer Harry Alan Towers who appears in 99 Women, Venus In Furs and The Bloody Judge amongst other movies; don’t judge her being in this as nepotism, because she’s amazing in this movie), who agrees as long as she can take Eugenie to her secluded island mansion, where she and her step-brother Mirvel (Jack Taylor, whose career in exploitation movies took him all over the world) can seduce her and probably each other and definitely everyone and play the kind of strange incestual games that only the super rich seem to play.

Sir Christopher Lee also shows up as the narrator for all this wallowing and also as Dolmance, the leader of a cult of fiends that drug young women and beat them with whips and yeah, Sir Christopher claims he had no idea what kind of movie he was in, which I find hilarious, because this wouldn’t be the last time he’d work with Franco. Providing his own wardrobe — the smoking jacket he wore in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace — Lee claimed that he was unaware there was a nude woman on the sacrificial altar behind him, as Franco and crew had wrapped drapery over her that they’d yank off as soon as the camera started and would then recover her when he was done with his scene. I mean, I love Jess, but sometimes he can barely focus the camera. One wonders how he’d ever had the chicanery and ability to pull one over on a man who was once quite literally a secret agent.

This movie feels like a dream. I’ve said that of other Franco movies, but trust me, a much better-realized, better-shot dream, with a score by Bruno Nicolai that makes it seem way classier than it is.

*The first is Marquis de Sade: Justine.

After studying at USC, director Richard Franklin returned to Australia, where he directed four episodes of the Australian police drama Homicide before making this film and Fantasm. Based on the folk poem “The Ballad of Eskimo Nell,” which is about well-endowed Dead-Eye Dick and sidekick Mexican Pete being unable to satisfy sex worker Eskimo Nell, this finds Dead-Eye Dick (Max Gillies) as a common peeper. He discovers a husband about to kill Mexico Pete (Serge Lazareff) for sleeping with his wife, so he saves him, and they head to Alaska to find Nell.

Franklin says it was never his intention to make a sex comedy, as he wanted to make something like Midnight Cowboy. The poem is known only in what Franklin called the English world of Canada, Australia, and England, so it had limited hopes in the U.S. However, as government funds were used to make this movie, a softcore comedy, people were not happy. Franklin said, “The theatres were picketed, and it was actually fairly successful in terms of damaging the picture. I thought it would be great publicity, but the one thing people don’t want to hear is that tax dollars have been wasted. The minute they hear that, they’re less inclined to throw good money after bad, if you see what I mean. So the film was not successful.”

It also didn’t help that a British film based on the same poem, Eskimo Nell, was released at the same time, when it didn’t make it to Australia until 1976, when it was called The Sexy Saga of Naughty Nell and Big Dick.

Or that sex symbol Abigail was upset about being fully frontal in this film. A public rift was reported in the Australian press between Franklin and the singer/actress, with the headline “Movie Producer Abigail: He Used My Body.”

If The Alaska Kid is familiar, it’s because he’s played by pro wrestler Paul “Butcher” Vachon.

Also known as The Equinox … A Journey into the Supernatural and The Beast, this movie was directed by Jack Woods and Dennis Muren. It started as a $6500 film that Muren made with his friends Dave Allen, Jim Danforth and Mark McGee while he was in business classes at Pasadena City College. Strangely enough, Ed Bagley Jr. was one of the cameramen!

Producer Jack H. Harris hired editor Woods to add enough footage to make this a full-length film. When the final movie was released, Muren was listed as the associate producer, even though he directed the entire movie and created many of the effects.

Four teenagers — David Fielding, Susan Turner, Jim Hudson (Frank Bonner, who would go on to be Herb Tarlek on WKRP in Cincinnati) and Jim’s girlfriend, Vicki — have gone looking for a lost scientist named Dr. Arthur Waterman, who is played by Fritz Leiber. Leiber isn’t just any actor. Nope, he’s one of the foremost fantasy authors of all time and the person who actually came up with the term sword and sorcery. He was brought into this project by Famous Monsters of Filmland editor Forrest J. Ackerman.

They have a picnic — as you do when you’re in the foreboding woods — then make their way to a mysterious castle. They also learn that Dr. Waterman’s cabin has been destroyed, and even worse, the demon Asmodeus (played by Jack Woods, the new director, when he’s a park ranger at least) is hunting them with his army of monsters. He really goes after them once they get a book of spells from an old man inside a cave. Those monsters — a giant ape and a green-furred giant — are marvels of stop-motion. Our heroes barely escape as the ape kills the old man.

It turns out the book belonged to Dr. Waterman, who used it to conjure demons of his own, but lost control of a tentacled beast that destroyed his home. After Asmodeus kills Jim, he reveals his true form as a winged demon. Dave and Susan are killed before our remaining teens, Dave and Susan, make their way to a cemetery.

After a battle with Asmodeus, they destroy the demon with a giant cross, which causes the cemetery to explode, killing Susan. Another giant monster appears and tells Dave that he will die in one year and a day, which drives him insane. The movie quickly moves to that time, where we see Susan — now looking totally evil — showing up at his insane asylum.

The entire crew that made this movie did so much more afterward. Muren would go on to become a nine-time Oscar-winning visual-effects artist for his work on Star Wars and Jurassic Park. Danforth would create matte and stop-motion work for The Thing, Creepshow, Clash of the Titans, and Prince of Darkness, among others. Mark McGee, who was in high school when he worked on this film and was already writing for Famous Monsters (he’s the one who got connected with Leiber and brought Forry along to be a doctor’s voice), wrote the scripts for Sorority House Massacre II and Sorceress, both movies directed by Jim Wynorski. Finally, David Allen would go on to work on everything from Flesh Gordon, Laserblast and The Howling to Full Moon efforts like the Puppet Master series and The Dungeonmaster.

You can see the influence of Equinox on movies like Evil Dead and Phantasm. It’s the bridge between the Ray Harryhausen stop motion movies they loved and the occult-tinged efforts that would make up 1970s genre films. This is a movie packed with ideas and talent.

Jamaa Fanaka may have been one of the leading directors of the L.A. Rebellion film movement, but he’s probably best known for his Penitentiary films. Born Walter Gordon, he changed his name so that anyone seeing his movies would know that he was black. Working alongside one of the professors in the African Studies department at UCLA, he came up with the name Jamaa Fanaka, which means “through togetherness we will find success.”

Emma Mae is his first full-length movie, written when he was still in college. It’s the story of a young woman (Jerri Hayes) moving from the deep south to Los Angeles, where she falls in love with Jesse Amos (Ernest Williams III), who soon goes to jail along with Zeke (Charles David Brooks III) for fighting the police.

Also known as Black Sister’s Revenge, it follows Emma Mae as she tries to raise cash to get her man out of jail, starting with a car wash and ending with a bank robbery, only to learn that he never loved her. She then beats him into oblivion, a moment not often seen in film. She reclaims who he is and moves on.

Fanaka would make wilder pictures, but this is an excellent introduction to how he was trying to tell the black experience, even if it is episodic and wanders a bit.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Italian movie logic: Emanuelle in Bangkok is the sequel to Black Emanuelle, and Black Emanuelle 2 is not.

Photojournalist Emanuelle (as always Laura Gemser) and her archaeologist friend Roberto (Gemser’s husband Gabriele Tinti) are on a series of journeys, whether it’s to meet a Thai king or explode caves in Casablanca or meet a special masseuse or being too close to Prince Sanit (Ivan Rassimov) or Roberto forcing her to choose between him and a female lover Debra (Debra Berger, who was in the Tobe Hooper version of Invaders from Mars).

Like all the D’Amato Emanuelle movies, these films go from narrative to travelogue to mondo, with simulated moments of lovemaking standing in stark contrast to real moments of horrifying violence, like a battle between a mongoose and a snake. And that ping pong trick that other movies joke about? This movie has it.

Yet it’s also a movie that synchronizes pistons on a ship with the first lovemaking scene like high art and has a heroine that refuses to be possessed no matter how many men try to destroy her, breaking hearts and remaining independent and perhaps it’s my hope for a better world and my innocence that I see something life-affirming in the Black Emanuelle films, a series of movies devoted to softcore lovemaking interspersed with brutality. But hey — that’s me.