June 4: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is western.
I always say that Italian westerns bring the world together. Take this one, which is an Italian western by form, but really a co-production of the United Kingdom and Spain.
Directed by Robert Parrish — one of the many hidden hands that made Casino Royale — this is an example of one of my favorite subgenres of the cowboy movie and that would be the horror western.
Ten years ago, a group of Mexican revolutionaries led by the revolutionary leader Aguila murdered a priest and his followers. Now, a widow — Stella Sevens — has come back looking for revenge.
Talk about a cast! The town is now ruled by a priest (Robert Shaw!) who may be Aguila. Stevens hires a sadistic Mexican outlaw (Telly Savalas!!) named Don Carlos who promises to help her in exchange for gold. And soon, an army colonel (Martin Landau!!!) arrives in an attempt to find Aguila himself.
The same team made Pancho Villa, another British and Spanish western that Telly Savalas was involved with. They also made Horror Express and hired Savalas, who no doubt used the paycheck to cover his partying and gambling lifestyle. I say that not as an insult. If I could have been one person other than myself, Savalas seems like a great choice.
I’d like someone to explain to me why Stevens sleeps in a coffin — is she a ghost? — and exactly how the filmmakers arrived at setting the dance hall scene to Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans.” It’s not the best western, Italian influenced or not, I’ve seen, but it’s certainly one of the more interesting, in theory if not in actual filmed practice.
This is also a tremendous spolier, but Savalas’ death scene took me by major surprise and I love how he’s as shocked as I was. He keeps trying to figure out what to do when he’s emasculated by losing his trigger finger and never gets it together. As always, a wonderful performer.
June 3: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is a movie with Henry Silva in it.
Henry Silva is 92 years old and if life works out the right way, he’ll outlive us all. He was so good as a student at the Actor’s Studio that when they did A Hatful of Rain, he made it to the Broadway play and the movie.
Yet amongst folks like you and me, we know Silva from showing up as mobsters, killers and general scumbags in all manner of movies from so many countries. He had his first lead in 1963’s Johnny Cool, killing off so many bigger actors, like Mort Sahl, Telly Savalas, Jim Backus, Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis, Jr. before Elizabeth Montgomery sells him out. But by November of that year, the President was dead and no one wanted to see a dark film noir.
In 1965, Italy came calling and Silva took a chance. He moved his entire family there and launched a career of playing, well, more horrible people. The next year, The Hills Run Red made him a star in Spain, Italy, Germany and France. And by 1977, he’d been in twenty-five movies. Stuff like Almost Human, gritty gangster versus cops films that audiences loved.
Silva made movies in Hong Kong (Operation: Foxbat), Japan (Virus), Australia (Thirst), Spain (Day of the Assassin), Canada (Trapped), France (La Marginal) and for TV (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century). He’s the kind of guy who can be in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai just as easily as L’ultima Meta or Megaforce.
It’s hard to pick just one Henry Silva movie, but I picked perhaps one of his most brutal.
Playing as Quelli Che Contano (Those Who Matter) in Italy, as well as Love Kills and Guns of the Big Shots, this Andrea Bianchi-directed film is made of everything mean you can imagine. What else would you expect from the maker of Strip Nude for Your Killer and Burial Ground? A meditation on the value of mindfulness?
When the Italian mob families of Don Ricuzzo Cantimo and Don Turi Scannapieco keep their battles and crimes going to such a degree that they’re smuggling heroin in the body of a dead child — yes, this is how the movie begins — the big bosses leave the decision as to how to handle business in the hands of Don Cascemi.
He calls in an expert — Tony Aniante (Silva) — and tells him to kill everyone, which he does with no small amount of Yojimbo/A Fistful of Dollars influence. There’s a lot to deal with, like the fact that Scannapieco has it in for Cantimo because he killed his son-in-law and made his daughter go off the deep end while also crippled her son. And oh yeah, Ricuzzo’s week (Barbara Bouchet, more on her in a minute) decides that she’s got to get some Silva stirring up in her guts. If that doesn’t get confusing enough. Ricuzzo’s youngest son and Scannapieco’s younger daughter are also ready to play an eternal game of hide the cannoli.
Hey wait — didn’t you say this movie was brutal and potentially deranged?
Why yes, I did.
Before it’s over, we have heads exploding as they’re shot, a child’s body on an autopsy table, a head goes flying out a windshield, multiple dead bodies smashed by a steamroller, a bandsaw go clean through someone’s head and Silva drag Bouchet around a barn, beat her with a belt, then beat her in the face with the belt buckle, then have violent bloody sex with her in a grimy barn. Earlier in the film — because this is an Italian film where women come to enjoy all manner of upsetting couplings, our hero shoves her head into a bloody pig carcass while they make love — well, not really, right? — in the kitchen. To make things worse, Bouchet is totally turned on by this experience. Then she tells her husband all about it, because that’s the only way they can make love. Yes, this movie is the scumbag movie that scumbag movies warned you about.
Tony is brutally efficient, whistling his signature song before quickly blasting guys in the head with his Luger, like some unholy Italian western character combined with his Johnny Cool role. He’s death itself, as a scene of him walking into a Sicilian town has everyone closing their windows rather than even seeing him show up. Stick around for the end of the film, which neatly explains exactly why Tony whistles that tune as he murders everyone around him.
Released in the US with that garish poster above by Joseph Brenner Associates — the people who brought you Eyeball, The Devil’s Rain!, The Girl in Room 2A and many more — Cry of a Prostitute was sold with the tagline, “For a lousy twenty-five bucks, some people think they can do anything!” along with Bouchet’s abused face.
Bouchet would tell House of Freudstein, “That was unpleasant I didn’t remember it being that unpleasant when we made it. In fact I prefer not to remember too much about that one. When Quentin Tarantino arranged a screening of some of my movies in LA he opened with that one and I wish he hadn’t…” However, in Eurocrime! The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s, Silva claims that Bouchet was tougher than nearly any of the men he met in those movies and intimidated him.
June 2: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is slasher!
Isn’t it strange that the only force that could unite every heterosexual teenage boy’s dream of seeing Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer together in the same movie would be David DeCoteau and that he would do it more than once?
Quigley is Melody, a girl with bad teeth. Come on, who is going to love her? And Brinke as Marci? She has glasses! Surely a fate worse than death. Or what Bauer’s Mickey must endure, as she’s overweight. Luckily — or not — for our girls, they’re possessed and suddenly make the minor cosmetic changes needed to become popular.
Of course, before they get revenge, they must take a bath together.
I guess never let it be said that DeCoteau didn’t know what his audience wanted.
Made for $40,000 using left-over film, cast, and crew from Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, this is the kind of film where the actresses do their own makeup and posters from past films are considered set decoration.
Except something weird happened. The company distributing the film went out of business and less than 2,000 copies of the tape were ever distributed. The film became an instant collector’s item as tales of the bath scene grew legendary. When it eventually aired on USA Up All Night, that scene was no longer in the movie, replaced with the girls jumping on a bed.
Luckily, today we have companies like Vinegar Syndrome willing to put stuff out like this for the masses. And by masses, I mean maniacs like me that laid awake at night wondering if they’d ever see this movie.
June 1: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is ’80s action! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
Words cannot express how important ninjas were in 1985. Every single day, American kids drew pictures of them during class, beat on one another with their weapons and watched their movies, which could nearly have an entire shelf of your local video store all to themselves.
Pray for Death is Sho Kosugi’s vehicle and he makes the most of it. You may remember him as the villainous Hasegawa who fought Franco Nero in Enter the Ninja, but here he’s graduated to become the hero. He plays salaryman Akira Saito, who has decides to follow his wife’s dream and immigrate from Japan to the United States along with their two sons Takeshi and Tomoya (Sho’s sons Kane and Shane).
What his family does not know is that Akira is a ninja and has kept the temple’s secrets, even killing his own brother Shoji as he tried to steal from their adopted father Koga (Robert Ito, Sam Fujiyama on Quincy, M.D.). His master tells him to leave Japan behind and erase the guilt he’s felt over what happened.
Purchasing an old store from a kindly man named Sam Green (Parley Baer, the mayor of Mayberry!) that will become Aiko’s Japanese Restaurant. But before they can see any success, two crooked cops hide a necklace inside the floorboards, leading to Akira’s children being attacked, Green being murdered and eventually, our hero’s wife being injured and then killed inside the hospital while she recovers.
This all means that Akira must return to the ways of the ninja and literally force a man to pray for death before impaling his hands and sawing him in half. Yes, this form of ninjitsu is not quiet in any way.
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