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: Carla Mancini

If you asked me — I don’t know how it would come up, but just go with this — who I would pick to adapt Voltaire’s 1759 novel Candide, I would never think to ask Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi.

But it happened.

Yes, the team that made Mondo Cane, Mondo Cane 2, Women of the World, Africa Blood and Guts and one of the hardest movies you will ever try to survive, Goodbye Uncle Tom.

It was the critical and commercial failure of that last movie that convinced the Jacopetti and Prosperi that maybe they should stop making mondo movies — well, Goodbye Uncle Tom does have them go back in time to the age of slavery in a magical helicopter, but it’s shot with the real slaves of Papa Doc Duvalier, losing the plot before it even starts — and creating an actual narrative one.*

I wondered, as I watched what unfolded before me, if in their travels across the world, did Jacopetti and Prosperi check out not just people being brutalized and animals being destroyed, but also the midnight showings of films by Ken Russell and Alejandro Jodorowsky? Or at the very least, Federico Fellini.

Because that’s the only way that this all makes sense.

Joined by screenwriter Claudio Quarantotto, film critic of Il Borghese, the idea and story came from Jacopetti. He believed in this film so much, but he just wasn’t great with actors. That’s where Prosperi came in, as he believed in Jacopetti.

Sadly, this movie would finally end their partnership.

Candido (Christopher Brown, who went from this to an episode of Bigfoot and Wildboy) lives in some unspecified time and is being raised in some unknown land by the Baron (Gianfranco D’Angelo, Io Zombo, Tu Zombi, Lei Zomba) in his castle Thunder-ten-Tronckh.

Beyond non-stop eating, drinking and partying — there’s even a three-breasted woman years before Total Recall —  he studies the philosophy of Dr. Pangloss (Jacques Herlin, Slap the Monster On Page One). All he has learned is optimism and that everything has a purpose, so his worldview is rosy at best.

Life is pretty good and then he gets caught facedown between the thighs of the Baron’s daughter Cunegonda (Michelle Miller, who went from the Broadway stage to this movie and then to being one of the vampires in Leif Jonker’s Darkness).

Exiled from the life of pleasure, Candido is drafted into an army that seems ill-equipped for a world that’s much more modern on the outside than the first part of this movie has led us to believe. They put helmets on their heads and batter their way through stone walls, but that doesn’t help them against a modern army equipped with machine guns and flamethrowers. Our protagonist barely escapes with his life. Unlike the army he’s been conscripted into, he has no intention of dying just for an ideal.

At this point, Candido descends into a journey filled with multiple horrors, including Salvatore Baccaro** as an ogre who is trying to assault a dead girl; an army takes the Baron’s castle and Cunegonda’s virginity; Dr. Pangloss is hung by the Inquisition for not believing in original sin and he must rescue the slave Cocambo (Richard Domphe) by pretending to be his owner.

This all makes him doubt the cheery worldview of his now lynched mentor, as Candido opines, “This is not the best of all possible worlds,” an inverse of the core message he once learned.

That’s when he finally meets Cunegonda again, no longer pure after having at least 127 lovers — she can’t remember right now — as well as two owners and four current boyfriends. She now loves violence for pleasure and is far from the ideal woman who has kept Candido’s spirits alive through his endless quest.

Everybody decides to get on a ship bound for the New World, a place much better than wherever we are. Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Abraham Lincoln, Al Capone and Marylin Monroe are all here and alive. No, really. And so is Dr. Pangloss,  alive and forgetting psychology, now making TV commericals and shouting, “Thank you for the new world which is certainly the best of all possible worlds.”

In this unexplored place, is Cunegonda a porn star, a saint or both? Well, who can tell, because children are blowing themselves up with grenades in the hope of killing soldiers. We go from Northern Ireland to the Arab–Israeli conflict to a field of poppies made up of mutually assured destruction. It all ends just in time for young people to throw the symbols of the past — the cross, the hammer and sickle, the swastika — into a river.

Somehow, in all this insanity, it looks and sounds beautiful. Credit goes to cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini, who also shot The Last Match, Firestarter, Treasure of the Four Crowns, My Name Is Nobody and Short Night of Glass Dolls, and Riz Ortolani, the only man who could make the excesses of Jacopetti and Prosperi sound like symphonies, who can create a song called “Crucified Woman” that is a balm for the soul.

I’ve always said that there’s a thin line between the arthouse and the grindhouse. This movie reminds me of this, a film full of sound and fury and big ideas and bigger images, all united by the message behind everything Jacopetti and Prosperi made together: the world is shit.

Nobody else could make this.

It reminds me of a story about my wife. She saw Super Mario Brothers the movie before she experiencing the video game, so when she got to play it, she wondered why Dennis Hopper wasn’t in it.

I’ve never read Voltaire, so I’m probably going to negatively compare the book to the movie.

Somewhere in all this, Carla Mancini appears.

*Prosperi would make one more non-mondo movie, the absolute punch in the face that is The Wild Beasts. Jacopetti made two more movies, Operazione ricchezza and Un’idea della pace.

**Between The Beast In Heat, Caligula et Messaline, Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks and nearly ever other movie I’ve seen him in, do you think Baccaro was sad that he was typecast as a sexual assault-obsessed monster?

You can watch this on YouTube.

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: Unsung Horrors rule (movies under 1000 views on Letterboxd)

The Washington Post called Earl Ownesby the “South’s king of Grade B movies.”

They described this movie with this purple prose: “The lights dimmed, and within minutes, there was a fist fight, a hooker was carved up by a hood and an ex-con was framed for her murder. And before scores were settled, a prison guard was impaled on a stick, bullets turned bad guys into Swiss cheese and countless people were slaughtered, all in the name of revenge and profits. Most died slowly, foaming red Karo syrup at the mouth.”

Making movies out of a studio complex in the Appalachian town of Shelby, N.C., Owensby gave America — he said “My audience is grass-roots America. The guy who comes out of the textile mills in the Carolinas or the car plants of Detroit or the wheat fields of Kansas. They’re gonna love Chain Gang.” — movies like Wolfman, Rottweiler, Buckstone County Prison, Tales from the Third Dimension in 3D and so many more. He made them cheap. He knew what people wanted.

Buckstone County Prison is a lot like this. He wasn’t afraid to throw some BS in his ads — “First there was Cool Hand Luke then Billy Jack, but there has never been anyone like Seabo.” — and it did pretty well. Chain Gang is a lot of the same as Mac McPhearson (Owensby) is framed for murder — he was just trying to save a stripper from getting beat up, but they hunted them down and killed her — and tossed into Black Creek Prison Farm and has to escape to get back at those that did him wrong.

If you’re running a prison scam, don’t have the guy you sold out come to do your yard work as part of the prison gang work. That’s my advice to all future drive-in bad guys.

Director Worth Keeter started making movies for Owensby and went on to direct tons of American sentai shows like Beetleborgs and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. He also made L.A. Bounty, which if anything at least has that Sybil Danning in the fog poster art, The Order of the Black Eagle and Unmasking the Idol. Writer Todd Durham went on to write Hotel Transylvania.

A lot of the mid 80s Ownesby movies were made in 3D. There isn’t a lot of 3D needed for this, but there you go. It was still in 3D. A male prison movie in your face!

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: Germany

Also known as The Gorilla of Soho, this is one of Rialto Film’s many krimi adaptions of the works of Edgar Wallace. Now, you may get confused — I do — as to whether these are giallo or not, what with Wallace also being one of the main inspirations for those Italian psychosexual movies. I guess the rule I always use is that in krimi, the cops seem to have a better idea of what they’re doing and the bad guys often have the wildest ways to kill people. You know, like a gorilla.

A gorilla is murdering rich men who have nothing in common other than the fact that they have money, all of which goes to the Love and Peace Foundation after their deaths and helps to support St. Mary’s Home for Wayward Girls.

After finding an African doll on one of the bodies, Scotland Yard Inspector Perkins (Horst Tappert) hires Susan (Uschi Glas), an interpreter who can do more than just tell him what the African doll had to say. She can also go undercover at St. Mary’s.

Maybe cops putting innocent people into danger like this is just an Edgar Wallace thing,

She learns that there’s a gang called the Gorillas that has ties to St. Mary’s, which seems to be the dumbest group of crooks ever as they can barely hide their tracks. There’s also a muta African girl named Dorothy (Catana Cayetano) and she’s part of the scheme, forced to help the evil Sister Elizabeth (Hilde Sessak) kill the millionaires. She’s the one who left the doll on the body to try and get help.

As if that’s not enough, the head of the Love and Peace Foundation, Henry Parker (Albert Lieven, is blackmailed by Sugar (Herbert Fux) and his brother’s widow Cora (Beate Hasenau). She’s fallen on hard times and becomes a sex worker. And oh yeah — Susan inherits a ton of money from the father she never knew, so now the nuns want to toss her in the Thames.

It turns out that Mother Superior (Inge Langen) and Parker are running this scam. They want to take the money from the rich and give it to the poor and by that, I mean themselves. They even have a henchman named Pepper (Uwe Friedrichsen) who wears the gorilla suit, which seems to be a bit of icing on the cake that already has icing on it.

If you say, “Have I seen this before?” the answer may be yes, provided that you have seen either the 1939 or 1961 versions of Dead Eyes of London. It has a very similar plot except, you guessed it, this one has a gorilla in it. And sleaze.

If Alfred Vohrer was going to direct the same movie again, it seems like he was going to add lots of topless women, exotic dance clubs and houses of ill repute. It’s so filled with sex that the head of Scotland Yard, Sir Arthur (Hubert von Meyerinck) has a girl in his closet who keeps emerging at the exact wrong time as if he were the krimi Commandant Lassard.

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: 1950s

William Cameron Menzies invented the term production designer.

Let that sink in.

He directed Chandu the Magician, Things to Come and Invaders from Mars, but he may be better known for his art direction on movies like Gone With the Wind, Our Town, For Whom the Bell Tolls and so many more movies. He was also a pioneer of adding color to film.

In The Maze, written by Daniel Ullman and based on the book by Maurice Sandoz (illustrated by Salvador Dali!), Gerald MacTeam (Richard Carlson) breaks off his engagement to Kitty (Veronica Hurst) after his uncle dies. He moves back to Scotland where he inherits a huge house and servants. Yet Kitty won’t accept that he broke off their upcoming marriage and travels there with Aunt Edith  (Katherine Emery).

Yet the Richard she finds is much older and acts differently. What has happened?

This movie has one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen: a hedge maze that has a frog god inside it, who is really the actual master of the castle, Sir Roger MacTeam, and who gets so upset that it climbs up into the castle and hops out a window to its death. In 3D!

Leonard Maltin called it “ludicrous (and unsatisfying)!” What does he know? Who did he ever fistfight and defeat?

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: Witches

Directed by Álex de la Iglesia (Perdita Durango, El día de la bestia), who co-wrote the script with Jorge Guerricaechevarría, Witching and Bitching starts with José (Hugo Silva) and Antonio (Mario Casas) arguing as they rob a pawn shop. The issue is that José has brought his son Sergio (Gabriel Ángel Delgado) along for the ride and it’s a violent one, as numerous people die all around them. They escape in the car of Manuel (Jaime Ordóñez), forcing him to drive them to the border, all while being followed by Silvia (Macarena Gómez), Sergio’s mother, and two cops named Pacheco (Secun de la Rosa) and Calvo (Pepón Nieto).

They end up in Zugarramurdi, Navarre, a place where alleged occult activity happened in the seventeenth century and was punished in the Basque witch trials, as well as the home of the Basque witch museum and the Witch Caves. There they meet a coven of cannibal witches and their leader Graciana (Carmen Maura) and her mother Maritxu (Terele Pávez). After Sergio is nearly cooked in an oven, they escape, only to quickly be recaptured by the witches.

Silvia and the two cops save José, Antonio,and Manuel but are soon captured, with Silvia is transformed into a witch by toad juice. Our protagonists are captured — again! — and only José escapes, saved by Graciana’s daughter Eva (Carolina Bang) who has fallen for him. She wants him to leave but he refuses as his son is still captured. Eva is buried alive by her mother, but soon saved by José who gets help from Eva’s brother Luismi (Javier Botet).

Luismi and José can only watch as Antonio, Manuel, Pacheco and Calvo are set to be sacrificed to a gigantic witch that eats Sergio — who passes right out of its body and is showing his own magic powers — and then destroy the creature and most of the witches. However, as José and Eva celebrate their love, we learn that Silvia, Graciana and Maritxu are waiting for their revenge.

Look, any movie that starts with statues — including Jesus — coming to life and starting a robbery and ends with a witch apocalypse is one I’m going to love. As always, de Iglesia takes you on a thrill ride filled with violence, lurid colors and fun effects. I’m there for whatever movies he makes.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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: Castle, William or actual

We need more people like William Castle.

As he starts the movie explaining how the gimmick works — Illusion-O — we learn that we will have the chance to see ghosts. Or not.

Most scenes of the movie is in black and white, but scenes involving ghosts let you watch them with special viewing glasses. If you want to see the ghost, you look through the red filter. If you don’t want to see them, watch through the blue filter.

Occultist Dr. Plato Zorba has given his house to his poor nephew Cyrus (Donald Woods), who moves in his wife Hilda (Rosemary DeCamp) and children Medea (Jo Morrow) and Buck (Charles Herbert). They find out from their lawyer Ben Rush (Martin Milner) that they share the house with 12 ghosts and they must stay there and not sell it or the state gets everything.

There’s also a seance-happy housekeeper called Elaine Zacharides (Margaret Hamilton!) and somewhere, if they can find it, a fortune.

How could you live with twelve ghosts? There’s a floating head, a screaming woman, a set of hands, a skeleton on fire, a chef who keeps killing his wife and her lover, a lynched woman, an executioner with a head that he’s chopped off, a lion (Zamba, who played Kitty Cat on The Addams Family) with a headless lion tamer and Dr. Zorba, who has left behind goggles to help them see the ghosts and an Ouija board that soon warns that death is coming.

Who killed Dr. Zorba? Where is the money? Will the family stay alive living here? Who will become the thirteenth ghost that frees all the other spirits? And how cool is it that the exterior shots are the Winchester House, an actual haunted place?

As much as I dislike remakes, I really dig the newer version of this, Thir13en Ghosts. Dark Castle, who produced that film, has been talking about doing a series about each of the ghosts. I’d love to see that.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

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: Mexico

The Ghost of the Convent (released in the U.S. as The Phantom of the Convent) starts with sin: Cristina (Marta Roel), the wife of Eduardo (Carlos Villatoro), decides to try to lure Alfonso (Enrique del Campo) into her arms as they explore a forest together. However, a mysterious stranger guides them to an abandoned monastery.

Father Superior (Paco Martinez) reveals to them that one of the monks tried to seduce a friend’s wife once. Even in death, the monk couldn’t find peace and he remains today, a fact that Alfonos sees for himself. Imagine how he feels, ready to take his friend’s wife, and he sees the mummified monk, a book filled with blood and the body of Eduardo.

But is it all a dream? All three wake up at the holy place, which is now a tourist attraction.

Director Fernando de Fuentes was mainly known for his Revolution Trilogy — El prisionero trece, El compadre Mendoza and Vámonos con Pancho Villa — and was a pioneer in filmmaking. He also contributed to the script by Juan Bastillo Oro and Jorge Pezet.

The monastery says “When the soil harbors no impure desire, there is nothing to fear in the house of God.” Yet this trio is pulled in and may not be able to leave and they aren’t the only group of people pulled into this shadow world where ghostly monks repeat the same actions eternally and the sinful monk wails in his cell forever. This film also takes its time, yet it demand watching, as its spectral fingers are intertwined in so much of the horror that we love all these decades after.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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: Sequel

Directed by David Price — the son of studio boss Frank Price — and written by A. L. Katz and Gilbert Adler (they both also worked on Bordello of Blood), Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice is anything but, as it’s the first of what would be nine sequels. Two of them were reboots.

Hemingford, Nebraska isn’t Gatlin but it’s close enough. Two days after the events of Children of the Corn, the people of this town adopt the orphans of Gatlin and one of them, Micah (Ryan Bollman), starts talking to He Who Walks Behind the Rows and yes, the sequel is ready.

John Garrett (Terence Knox) is in town reporting on the children and his son Danny (Terence Knox) has come along for the ride. John’s career is bad, but not as bad as his life, as he’s going through a divorce and Danny hates him for it, so he fits right into all these creepy children.

After some lighting wipes out some reporters John knew from back when life was better, he gets down to business and starts sleeping with bed-and-breakfast owner Angela Casual (Rosaline Allen) and no, I won’t go for the easy joke and say that she lives up to her name. Danny might, because he’s mad that his dad is getting it on so quickly, but he also meets the creeptastic Lacey Hellerstat (Christie Clark) who drops some knowledge on him about her hometown.

While all that drama is happening, Micah and his child gang get to work dropping houses on people and using voodoo dolls to kill people while they’re in church. They even throw an old woman and her mechanized wheelchair through a window. I am a strange person, I realize this, but I laughed like a lunatic during this.

Somewhere in all of this, there’s a Native American professor named Dr. Frank Red Bear (Ned Romero) who throws some exposition on this sequel fire and claims that this has happened before but good news, there’s a prophecy that there’s a good spirit and not a bad spirit. Or maybe it’s people selling bad corn which has a green gas that comes out of it.

Dr. Frank Red Bear gets some great dialogue.

Dr. Frank Red Bear: Koyaanisqatsi. It means life out of balance. My ancestors would have told you that man should be at one with the earth, the skies, and water. But the white man has never understood this. He only knows how to take. And after a while, there’s nothing left to take. So, everything’s out of balance. And we all fall down.

John Garrett: Wait a minute… so that’s what happened here in Gatlin?

Dr. Frank Red Bear: No… what happened in Gatlin was, those kids went ape-shit and killed everyone.

As if they’re been challenged to go as hard as they can, the children lock every adult in a building and set it on fire, killing almost every character in the movie before kidnapping Angela and Lacey, taking them into the cornfields and trying to get Danny to sacrifice them.

Now, as you sit there, you may ask yourself, “Do I want to watch a child get pulled into a harvester, but not before he has a demon face?”

Of course you do. This movie delivers.

He Who Walks Behind the Rows is now a good spirit by the end as Dr. Frank heals from being dead after shot with an arrow as his ghost paints some rocks.

The director claims that a local Christian group protested the movie and left a dead rodent for him as a warning, so they made their own church for the movie.

You can blame former New World exec Larry Kuppin for this. After there hadn’t been a sequel for years, he picked up the filming rights and formed Trans Atlantic Entertainment. This studio existed just to make sequels to several New World Pictures films, including this movie, Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, Hellraiser III and Avenging Angel. They also announced sequels to Wanted Dead or Alive and Crimes of Passion which didn’t get made.

Trans Atlantic also produced Female Perversions, Death Ring, The Vineyard, Rage and Honor II, Plughead Rewired: Circuitry Man II, Tollbooth, Cirio Santiago’s Vulcan, ’68, I Shot a Man In Vegas and The Tale of Tillie’s Dragon.

In fact, the same crew shot this and Hellraiser III back to back to save money.