June 3: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is martial arts! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Chi-Hwa Chen directed Jackie Chan in some of his earliest successes, like Half a Loaf of Kung Fu and Police Story. For this movie, he enters the fantastic and tells us the legend of Ming Ling Shur (Kam Fung-ling), a girl raised by apes and in the world of Hong Kong martial arts cinema, that means that she also has a fighting style based on the monkey that allows her to oufight nearly anyone.

Sadly, she falls for the wrong man, the prince (Chen Sing) that she serves as the guard for. He’s just using her to become emperor, but she wants love, so she gets a makeover — some have called this She’s All That mixed with Wolf Devil Woman and you know, yes as many times as I can say yes — and loses most of her powers. That means that she needs to relearn all of her martial arts abilities in time to battle a killer (Lo Lieh) and prove that the prince was the one behind the scheme to steal the crown.

Better titled The Ape Girl, we can consider Ming Ling Shut the Iron Monkey in fighting style and trickster ability. Despite being only a feral girl, she also somehow has a taile, yet the film never explains where she came from. You just accept these things and enjoy things like the opening where she does monkey style kung-fu intercut with a chimpanzee.

Luckily, even when our heroine becomes a gorgeous human, she retains her tail and remembers that everyone shunned her when she was more simian in appearance. Her master didn’t want her to become human, as he knew she’d have her heart broken, and there’s a lesson there for all of us.

So how does she make the great change? Her master’s wife puts her in a barrel for three days and pours special chemicals on her that make her transform into a woman with a tail. It’s pretty astounding.

Not many movies have flying monkey women who can choke men out with their prenhensile tails, so you should take this one and hold it close to your heart.

You can watch this on Tubi. The print is battered into oblivion and sometimes, that makes a movie that much better.

June 2: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is Westerns! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

The Price of Power (AKA A Bullet for the President) is an absolutely deranged idea for a movie. It uses the attempted assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881 to work out the feelings of the death of President John F. Kennedy just six years earlier.

Except that it’s a Western.

Made in Italy.

The idea came from commedia all’italiana director Luigi Comencini’s brother-in-law Massimo Patrizi, who wrote the script with director Tonino Valeri (Day of Anger, My Dear Killer, My Name Is Nobody) and Ernesto Gastaldi, whose writing credits include All the Colors of the Dark, Torso and The Suspicious Death of a Minor.

Bill Willer (Giuliano Gemma, a true star of the Italian west thanks to turns as Ringo and Arizona Colt) is trying to get revenge for the death of his father while trying to save the life of Garfield from the Pinkerton agency.

The Pinkertons may be heroes elsewhere, but in Pittsburgh, you can drive past the two adjoining cemeteries of St. Mary’s and Homestead where remains of six of the seven Carnegie Steel Company workers killed are buried, the bloody aftermath of the Battle of Homestead on July 6, 1892, when Henry Frick tried to use the agency to break strikers with violence.

Van Johnson plays the idealistic Garfield, who is coming to Texas to speak to people who have no interest in hearing what he has to say, yet he believes in the goodness in everyone. Of course, he’s killed and the Lee Harvey Oswald figure is Jack Donovan (Ray Saunders), a black man, which adds even more of a connection to the way the world of 1969 was looking, what with Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King being killed and the start of the Years of Lead in Italy. And I’m not certain that the scars in America’s psyche had yet healed, so I doubt anyone was ready for a movie they surely saw as escapism having María Cuadra play Jackie Kennedy and follow her exact movements in Dallas. She’s even given red roses, just like the President’s widow was.

The joy of the Italian west is in finding movies that explore not only the way that film depicts a time and place we can never go to — indeed, many of the filmmakers had not even been to America — and even find that an alternate version of history can tell us so many things about the world we live in today.

You can watch this on YouTube.

June 1: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is science fiction! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

One of the greatest memories of my life is a vacation to Washington D.C. when I was 12. I can’t remember it as being perfect. We didn’t have much money, we had to sleep in our van at least one night, we almost got caught in a flood and it was blistering hot. But that stuff never mattered. And sure, I’d come home to my first days of awkward middle school and wondering if I’d ever fit in. But for one blissful night, I sat under the stars somewhere in Virginia and saw a drive-in double feature while eating snuck in sandwiches we made from ham salad and bread we bought cheap at a local grocery store.

PSA: Don’t sneak food into drive-ins. There are so few in the U.S. and many of them survive based on their food sales. Spend a lot on food. Get a Chilly Dilly, the personality pickle.

The first movie we saw was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a mind-blasting onslaught of adventure, non-stop shreiking, monkey brains being eaten right out of their skulls and chest tearing gore. Years later, that film’s writers, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, would do the same thing to me all over again with their classic Messiah of Evil, a movie I was in no way prepared for at a pre-pubescent age.

The second film — which we knew nothing about — was The Philadelphia Experiment.

Based on the book The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility by Charles Berlitz (yes, the very same Berlitz that was part of the family that is The Berlitz School of Languages, as well as a military intelligence officer accused of inventing mysteries and fabricating evidence, which we now call disinformation) and William L. Moore (who circulated the Majestic-12 document that later in my teenage years would overload my Commodre 64 and convince a seventeen-year-old  possibly on drugs me that government troops were coming out of the woods to silence me and kill my family; I woke everyone up and ran into the yard screaming, I was a handful; Moore is also a disinfo agent), the original script for this movie was written by John Carpenter, who couldn’t figure out how it should end, never mind that it was based on a true story.

On that real story: An ex-merchant marine named Carl M. Allen sent an anonymous package marked “Happy Easter” that was Morris K. Jessup’s book The Case for the UFO: Unidentified Flying Objects filled with notes in three blue inks to the U.S. Office of Naval Research. These notes discuss how UFOs fly, discuss alien races and show that aliens are worried that the book knows too much and refer to the Philedelphia Experiment.

Allen then started writing to Jessup as himself and Carlos Miguel Allende warning him to stop studying flying saucers. He claimed that  he was serving aboard the SS Andrew Furuseth and saw the actual event as the ship teleported from Philedelphia to Norfolk, Virginia and then back, during which he saw crewmembers go insane, become intangible and frozen within time. Jessup asked for info which Allen never really proved.

So this is where it gets weird. Well, weirder. Jessup was invited to the Office of Naval Research where he was shown that annotated book and realized that it had the same handwriting as Allen. Why?

Can it get weirder? Sure.

Commander George W. Hoover, one of the members of the Office of Naval Research, showed the annotations to a contractor named Austin N. Stanton, who was the president of Varo Manufacturing Corporation. Stanton got so obsessed that he used his office’s mimeography machine to print multiple copies of the letters and the annotated book. Keep in mind that this was super expensive in the late 50s and also went against so many laws and levels of security clearance.

So what happened to Jessup? No one wanted to read his books, he lost his agent and he eventually committed suicide. As others tried to find Allen, his family would only say that he was a master leg puller. He was also from New Kensington, Pennsylvania — so close to Pittsburgh. They gave researchers tons more of his handwritten notes on the subject.

Whew — yes I will get to the movie — the Varo annotations were used in several conspiracy and UFO books, finally gaining some interest thanks to Berlitz and Moore. Then the movie got made. And then, another sailor named Alfred Bielek claimed he was also on the ship and that the movie was totally accurate. That’s funny because the book ripped off another book, George E. Simpson and Neal R. Burger’s Thin Air.

Let me stop for a second and tell you that this movie has even crazier DNA.

That’s because it was directed by Stewart Raffill.

Sure, he made The Ice Pirates the same year. But afterward, his career is filled with the kind of movies that crush minds. Movies like Mac and Me. Mannequin 2: Mannequin on the Move. Tammy and the T-Rex.

Yes, all the same director.

By the time he got to this movie, the script had been written nine times. Despite Michael Janover (who wrote the horrifying Hardly Working), William Gray (Humongous, Prom Night) and Wallace C. Bennett (The Silent Scream, Welcome to Arrow Beach) being in the credits for the script, Raffill says that he dictated the script and had someone type it.

As for the story, United States Navy sailors David Herdeg (Michael Pare) and Jim Parker (Bobby Di Cicco in 1943 and Ralph Manza in 1984) are on the USS Eldridge in 1943 as Doctor James Longstreet (Miles McNamara in the past, Eric Christmas — who was Mr. Carter in Porky’s — in 1984) makes the ship invicible to radar, but as things go wrong, David and Jim jump overboard and end up in the future — or our past are you confused? — and kidnap Allison Hayes (Nancy Allen) and get into military related hijinks before Jim gets zapped back in time.

There’s some wild science in here as David eventually has to go into a vortex and smash stuff with a fire axe to free the ship, which ends up with burned sailors and men being fused into the ship.

A sequel came out in 1993 with Brad Johnson from Nam Angels as David going up against Gerrit Graham as well as 2012 SyFy reimagining that Pare shows up for. Man, Michael Pare also made Streets of Fire the very same year and really should have been better considered.

This movie went from theaters to video stores faster than any movie had before. Maybe people thought that they had already seen it as The Final Countdown.

None of that is important to me. I have a wonderful memory of sitting in movie theater seats — outside no less — and getting to see two wild movies that I’ve thought of so many times since. We should all have a vacation so wonderful.

You can watch this on Tubi.

June 30: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is vampires.

I’ve had the Criterion version of this movie on my shelf for a while, so when Severin re-released this film for their summer sale, I decided that it was the vampire movie that would close out my first ever Junesploitation.

Also known as Blood for Dracula, this was written and directed by Paul Morrissey, despite the fact that some prints had director Antonio Margheriti listed.

A day after the principal shooting for Flesh for Frankenstein ended, Morrissey had Udo Kier, Joe Dallesandro and Arno Juerging get shorter hair cut and start filming. You can spot several directors in this film, like Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves) and Roman Polanski.

The Dracula in this film (Udo Keir) is not the romantic master of women. Instead, he’s sick for most of the film, whining about his lot in life and the fact that there just aren’t many virgin women left. His familiar, Anton (Arno Juerging), has brought him to Italy in the hopes that a more religious country will have more virgins, as they are the only food that vampires can eat outside of a vegetarian diet.

Il Marchese di Fiore (de Sica) believes that one of his four daughters would be perfect to marry Dracula, but he doesn’t realize that two of them, Saphiria (Dominique Darel) and Rubinia (Stefania Casini, Suspiria), have been deflowered by the Marxist handyman Mario (Dallesandro). Dracula soon learns that they are not pure by drinking their blood. While he is weakened, he is able to make them into his slaves.

Dracula does succeed in drinking. the virginal plasma of the plain eldest daughter Esmerelda (Milena Vukotic) but not the youngest, Perla (Silvia Dionisio, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man).

hat’s because Mario assaults her to destroy her virginity, which is somehow trying to be protective.

Throughout this film, the noble traditions of the past are undone by the common man, much less the modern man. You can ascribe artifice to that or just realize that Dallesandro was not doing an accent, no matter what, and you got what you got. Which is kind of like how this movie has Andy Warhol’s name on it, leading people to wonder what he had to do with the making of it.

He answered, “I go to the parties.”

June 29: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is gangsters.

In Italy, they call this movie Il cinico, l’infame, il violento, which means The Cynic, the Infamous, the Violent. This poliziotteschi is a sequel to another Umberto Lenzi film, 1976’s The Tough Ones, with Maurizio Merli playing the role of Inspector Leonardo Tanzi in both movies.

Luigi “The Chinaman” Maietto (Tomas Milan, The Big Gundown, Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!) escapes from prison and sends two of his men to kill the man who put him away — Tanzi. He’s left for dead and even the newspapers print that he’s dead, but he’s just biding his time, waiting to get revenge.

Tanzi just wanted to stay retired — it looks like he’s become a giallo author — but now he’s a vigilante who comes up against Maietto and American syndicate boss Frank Di Maggio (John Saxon).

This movie boasts three writers whose work pretty much hits every side of the Italian exploitation experience. There’s Lenzi himself, who made everything from Eurospy films (Super Seven Calling Cairo, The Spy Who Loved Flowers, 008: Operation Exterminate), Westerns (A Pistol for a Hundred Coffins), giallo (Orgasmo, A Quiet Place to KIll, Oasis of Fear, So Sweet…So Perverse, Seven Bloodstained Orchids, Spasmo, Eyeball), cannibal movies (Man from Deep River, Cannibal Ferox), peplum (Ironmaster, Samson and the Slave Queen), horror (Nightmare Beach, Ghosthouse, Demons 3, Hitcher in the Dark) and so much more. Then you have Ernesto Gastaldi, who wrote so many films that I love, including The Whip and the Body, The Possessed, The Sweet Body of Deborah, Day of Anger, All the Colors of the Dark, Torso, My Name is Nobody and tons of other great films. And then there’s Dardano Sacchetti, who wrote just about any Italian genre film worth watching.

Man, somehow Junesploitation has led me to many Italian crime films. For this I am very excited!

June 28: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is free.

Il cittadino si ribella (The Citizen Rebels) finds Franco Nero getting beaten down by muggers, so he goes looking for his own justice, only to get beat down even worse until he finally learns how to get revenge. This was the first vigilante film in the poliziotteschi genre, as this made it to Italian theaters before Death Wish.

Once Franco makes friends with a thug named Tommy (Giancarlo Prete), he finally gets to take out the people who done him dirty in spectacular fashion. I mean, there are absolutely no permits in this movie and tons of stuntmen — including Franco doing all of his own stunts — defying death just to entertain you.

Plus, you get music by Guido and Maurizio DeAngelis (AKA Oliver Onions), which makes any movie better. And yeah! A pre-Ringo Barbara Bach!

Strangely enough, while this movie inspired Vigilante, it was released in the UK as Vigilante 2.

I pretty much love everything Enzo G. Castellari made, like Keoma, The Last Shark, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, The New Barbarians, Escape the Bronx, The Inglorious Bastards…just add this to the list. I mean, Franco Nero shotgun blasting scumbags while wearing a turtleneck? Let me see the movie made this year that can live up to that. Even the ending made me emotional.

Just watch it! You can find it on Tubi.

June 27: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is cops.

I am a conundrum. I speak up against the brutality and the militarization of our police nearly every day, but then the movies I choose to relax and watch are poliziottesco films in which cops go against the system and act nearly as bad — if not worse — than the criminals they are after.

The third film in the Commissioner Betti trilogy — after Violent Rome and Violent Naples — Special Cop In Action is also known in Italy as Italia a mano armata (Italy at Gunpoint). This was directed by Marino Giorlami, who went from being a physical therapist to the director of films such as The Fury of Achilles and Zombie Holocaust. He’s also the father of director Enzo G. Castellari.

The mobsters in this film are the kind of Italian movie bad guys that go from realistic to super villains by the end of the film, moving from robbing banks and taking hostages to hijacking school buses filled with children.

Cops Betti (Maurizio Merli, Highway Racer) and Ferrari (Aldo Barberito) are trying to find one of those kids when one of the criminals assaults a female cyclist, altering authorities to their hiding place. When one of the kids is killed, a mother unloads on Betti, who decides to take the place of the children as a hostage. Man, Betti gets abused throughout this movie, shot multiple times, beaten and dumped on a highway and even set up for murder.

Man, this movie starts off hot and never slows down. Cops get dragged behind cars, John Saxon shows up, there’s a J&B appearance and a downbeat ending — the dead kid’s mom and our hero have dinner when some syndicate thugs blow him away in a drive-by. I’d say that that was a massive spoiler, but that ending doesn’t appear in every print, so who knows if they added it in the hopes they could make a fourth film someday. Or perhaps when they realized this was the end, they remembered it was the 70s and nearly every movie has to end with a downer, so they edited on this closing.

Honestly, I kind of think that Betti can shrug off getting gunned down. If anything, the excessive abuse he endures in this movie is proof.

June 26: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 80s horror.

Midnight (Lynn Redgrave) is a horror hostess who wears low-cut outfits, makes bad puns before the movies she shows and looks like an undead mistress of, well, the night. Pretty much exactly like Elvira, which seems weird, because they could have just hired Elvira to be in this movie.

She’s fighting station owner Mr. B (Tony Curtis) for the rights to her name, who keeps throwing things in her way to screw up her life, like trying to lure away her boytoy Mickey Modine (Steve Parrish, Scanners III) by introducing him to Missy Angel (Karen Witter, Playboy Playmate of the Month March 1982, as well as Mortuary Academy and Popcorn).

Then, everyone around our protagonist — like her agent(Frank Gorshin) — starts getting murdered and all fingers point to Midnight.

This was written and directed by Norman Thaddeus Vane, who wrote and directed Frightmare. Before that, he was a contributing writer for Penthouse, working on the letter to Forum.

I really need to make a Letterboxd list of Wolfman Jack movies one of these days. He’s in this for a bit and is a welcome addition to the proceedings.

According to Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare U.S.A., this movie was a complete nightmare behind the scenes. Karen Black was originally going to play Midnight — I am so into that casting choice — with George Segal playing opposite her. Yet when she quit the film and Redgrave came on, Segal refused to be in the movie due to “agent conflicts.” As for Ms. Redgrave. she locked herself in her trailer and wouldn’t do any ADR after the film wrapped. Then Sont cut ten minutes and barely released it in theaters.

You know what? She’s awesome in this movie, acting like she’s playing for people in space, not just the back row of the theater. It’s a role that literally defines over the top. That said, she’s still no Cassandra Peterson.

June 25: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is a car movie.

A ten-year-old runaway boy named Gus has left behind an abusive home to go out on the road in a stolen ‘66 Ford Mustang that he drives with stilts attached to the gas pedals. His goal is to collect game cards from the Chimera Gas Company and if he spells M-O-T-O-R-A-M-A, he wins $500 million dollars.

The first person Gus meets on his journey — and the last — is Phil (John Diehl), a gas station attendant who flies a yellow kit with a photo of a cop (Robert Picardo) shaking hands with him, all to show whatever is in heaven that he’s a worthwhile person.

The real thrill of watching this movie is in seeing who shows up next. From Martha Quinn as a bank teller and Jack Nance as a hotel clerk to Meat Loaf as an arm-wrestling biker, Mary Woronov as a kidnapper, Flea as a busboy,  Robin Duke as a corporate drone, Allyce Beasley as a receptionist, Susan Tyrrell, Michael J. Pollards, Garett Morris, Drew Barrymore as the girl of our hero’s dreams and, of course, Dick Miller — man, this movie has something for everyone. And by everyone, I mean me.

Director Barry Shils produced Vampire’s Kiss and also made Wigstock: The Movie. Writer Joseph Minion wrote the aforementioned Vampire’s Kiss and After Hours, as well as directing Daddy’s Boys for Roger Corman, using the same sets as Big Bad Mama II.

This movie is great because it’s a hijinks ensue film, but within the context of a child becoming an adult by undergoing a quest to determine what really means the most in life. It’s not weird for weird’s sake. It just feels like it was filmed in a place not quite our own and sent to the wrong reality, where we must study it and determine what we can learn from Gus’s quest.

June 24: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is free space!

Sergio Martino made some truly baffling and wonderful movies in the late 80s. Perhaps even stranger, two of them — this film and American Rickshaw — were made in Miami, a place that Italian directors loved in the wake of Miami Vice (see also: Cy Warrior, Cop Target, The Last Match, Mean Tricks, First Action Hero, Plankton, Karate Warrior 2, Primal Rage, Moving Target, Nightmare Beach, the Bud Spencer version of Aladdin, Brothers In Blood, Striker, The Wild Team, Cut and Run, Miami Golem, Super Fuzz*, Go for It* and Atlantis Interceptors*).

Also known as Qualcuno Pagherà (Someone Will Pay), Punhos de Exterminador (Terminator Fists, which is a great title), Vaincre ou Mourir 2 (Win or Die 2), Bloodfight and The Opponent, this movie is seriously everything I love about late 80s Italian bootleg cinema.

Daniel Greene was once Paco Queruak in Hands of Steel, which is why that Terminator Fists title makes sense, and now he is Bobby Mulligan, a boxer who works for Martin Duranti (Giuliano Gemma, Silver Saddle). His wife, Gilda (Mary Stavin from Strike Commando 2 and Born to Fight) ends up working our hero’s speedbag — if you know what I’m saying and I think you do — and Martin declares a vendetta against our hero.

Bobby was already in love with Anne (Keely Shaye Smith, who was in the “Stuck with You” video with Huey Lewis before marrying Pierce Brosnan), whose father Victor (Ernest Borgnine!) was once a boxer, which will come in handy later. He doesn’t trust anyone who is a fighter with his little girl, especially after he gets in a slaphappy battle with our hero in his grocery store.

Duranti, learning that he’s been cucked, wants Bobby to do the job in a fight against Eddy (James Warring, who was the World Kickboxing Association World Cruiserweight Champion), but Bobby has no idea what that means and wins the fight. So the mobbed out Duanti sends his men to break our hero’s right hand, pretty much ending his boxing career. However, Victor comes around and starts respecting our hero because he also refused to throw a fight. Guess what? His daughter comes around too.

Remember that opportunity for Victor I mentioned? That comes when the mob takes our hero’s ex-drunk coach Larry (Bill Wohrman, Porky’s), forces him to drink chemicals and drowns him in a scene that is a narrative and tonal shift, but so is the end of this movie, when our hero goes from the championship match to rescuing his woman in a junkyard and getting horrible and bloody revenge, but not before the bad girl turns good and pays for it with her life.

I really wish Martino had made more of these cover movies, because I love every single one of them. It starts with the conventions of the accepted boxing movie and just gets wild, as you hope that it will.

The montage where Borgnine teaches Daniel Greene to box with only his left hand is beyond joyous, as is the scene where our hero tries to do some road work and a car runs him down. Man, I got so excited writing about this that now I want to watch it again.

*Yes, I know, these were made years before Crockett and Tubbs got to town.