June 25: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Italian horror! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Dino Buzzati’s I sette messaggeri (The Seven Messengers) is a collection of nineteen short stories in which a variety of protagonists interact with the unknown and death, often with the ending left up to the reader. One of the stories, Sette piani (The Seventh Floor) was made into a movie in 1967, while is based on Eppure bussano alla porta (Yet They Knock On the Door). In all, thirty-three movies and shows were made from the author’s work.

On a stormy night — is there a better evening for Italian horror? — the top of London’s high society of the 1920s gets stuck in the mud and forced to turn to a mansion in the darkness. Uriat (Luciano Pigozzi, a fixture in the films of director and writer Antonio Margheriti) explains to them that while they are in his home, they may use the powers of his mother (Marianne Leibl), a woman who can communicate with the dead. Yet she can do even more. She’s able to tell the dark secrets of every one of them, which includes violence, deception and — shudder, it’s 1969 in an Italian genre movie — a sapphic affair.

But they aren’t the only ones filled with sin, as Uriat and his mother were once charged with two murders, which conveniently may have been committed by one of the elite in their humble abode.

Shot on sets from other films, cinematographer Riccardo Pallottini achieved the look of the seance scene by being suspended upside down from the ceiling. With camera in hand, he was slowly dropped down as he bent over backward to raise the camera and capture each conspirator’s face.

Those characters include Archibald Barrett (Giuliano Raffaelli), a real estate baron who hasn’t exactly made his money ethically, aided by his lawyer Ben Taylor (Joachim Fuchsberger). Ben’s wife Vivian (Marianne Koch) has always come in second to her husband’s career, which is why she secretly shares a mistress — Elizabeth (Helga Anders) — with both Barrett and his business manager Alfred Sinclair (Claudio Camaso).

Set in a decades shuttered hunting lodged stuffed — pardon the pun — with taxidermied wild animals, the noose tightens around each person as this film goes from a dark night haunted house film to one of near-apocalyptic intensity. That’s what happens when a medium tells you, “An invincible monster will devour you all. That monster is your conscience.”

Thanks to Castle of Blood and The Long Hair of Death, Margheriti — known in the U.S. as Anthony Dawson — was a known gothic horror quality. This just works for me, as it has a wild look thanks to all the leftover sets the director found while shooting at Carlo Ponti’s studio. This is also the most that Pigozzi ever got to do in a movie, as he’s as close as this has to a hero instead of a henchman or the hero’s older friend. The score of Carlo Savina (Lisa and the Devil) helps this achieve more, as well.

If you thought that this movie wouldn’t involve Margheriti’s skill with shooting miniatures, have no fear. He’s saving it for the end.

Actors picked for success in the German market playing English people in an Italian horror film based on an English literary genre. Ah, I love movies.

June 25: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Hixploitation! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Will Zens made some wild movies. There was Capture That Capsule in 1961 that cashed in on the space race,  then The Starfighters which is about F-16s and not space. He also made an earlier Nam movie, The Shores of Hell in 1966, but by the next year he’d be making less serious efforts — in a good way — like jukebox musical The Road to Nashville (which has Marty Robbins, Waylon Jennings, Portner Wagoner, Johnny Cash and more in its cast) and Hell On Wheels (which has John Ashley and Marty Robbins, as the singer also dabbled in NASCAR racing). The same year that Zens made this, he also made Trucker’s Woman, which played double bills with this movie and has a subliminal pepperoni pizza image in it.

Written by W. Henry Smith and Joseph A. Alvarez (who wrote Redneck Miller, too), this has a federal agent named Jeff Wilson (Don Jones) come to Barefoot County to clean up all the moonshine before finding out that every woman in town is like an angel descended from some redneck heaven.

General Film Distributors carried this beyond its Carolinas roots to states like Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Tennessee. It was made by the Preacherman Corporation, which, as you can imagine, also made Preacherma and the sequel, Preacherman Meets Widderwoman.

Of the cast, probably you might know Sherry Robinson, as she was Lisa in The Gruesome Twosome, while Jeff McKay would be on shows like Tales of the Golden Monkey, Magnum P.I. and JAG. He and Jacquelyn Pyle also did the radio ads for Axe.

I’ve had the poster for this movie for years and you know, that artwork is about a million times better than the actual movie, which is really as it should be.

Also: When I get down, I sometimes think back to the cycle of Southern and rural culture taking over media, then the powers that be getting rid of them, then it happening all over again. Just witness the cycle of CBS canceling the Beverly Hillbillies universe, then the Dukes ten years later and today, so much of reality TV has stories set in non-urban places. Demographics are always the culprit for why it all goes away, but then everything has a cycle. A time to be born, a time to die, a time for movies about stock cars and moonshine, I pray it’s not too late.

June 24: 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.

A cut and paste — I mean, Godfrey Ho’s name is all over his — of new footage with the movie Don’t Love Any Stranger, this starts with a couple making love before she slices his throat with a razor. Then, two women are sight-seeing before a gang attacks them.

There are two gangs in Hong Kong, the Serpents and the Scorpions. Interpol is on the case, sending an agent who targets a boss and pitting gang against gang.

We then go to a karaoke bar where Allison sings “Mickey.” The Mickey you’re so fine song, copyright be damned, this is, again, Godfrey Ho. She’s really there to find out who killed her friend Rosie, which means working in a hostess club owned by Scorpions leader Phoenix. A fight breaks out and the once cheerful singer shreds a man’s face before bonding with Phoenix, who decides to tell her how she got to her position, which mostly involved killing every man that wronged her. Now, she’s at war with the Serpents and their boss Hercules.

There’s also The White Tycoon, who has hired three secret agents — including the aforementioned blonde woman, who is the best part of this, killing numerous marks every time she appears on screen — to sow dissension between the gangs. He also likes to sacrifice chickens to increase his power before he fights the secret agent, who finds him by torturing the blonde woman by placing her face first in an oil drum, adding a rat and then throwing in a cat. And he’s the good guy, but as I’ve learned from Godfrey Ho movies, the good guys are allowed to torture people.

You know, these movies are all flowing together in my brain and now I have so many Thunderbolt-named movies: Majestic Thunderbolt, Scorpion Thunderbolt, Ninja Thunderbolt, Ninja Operation 4:Thunderbolt Angels, Inferno Thunderbolt and Mission Thunderbolt. I plan on watching them all, but there are times that between the fact that they are two movies at the same time and that they all flow together, they put me into a near-murderdrone drug state.

Which is why I am watching them.

I honestly have no idea what is happening in this movie for a lot of the time, but of all the Godfrey Ho movies that I have seen, this one looks the best quality wise.

You can watch this on Tubi.

June 23: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Cynthia Rothrock! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Robert Clouse worked with some of the greatest martial artists on film, from Bruce Lee to Jim Kelly, Robert Wall, Bolo Yeung, Jackie Chan and for this movie and its sequel, Cynthia Rothrock.

China O’Brien is a cop who teaches a martial arts class to her fellow officers. One of the class members challenges her to a fight in an alley that ends up involving several gangs and someone is killed. She resigns in disgrace and heads back home to Beaver Creek, Utah.

She learns that her father — and town sheriff — John (David Blackwell) is losing control of the town thanks to corruption in the force and a bought-off judge. But the real problem is Edwin Sommers (Steven Kerby), a crime boss who is taking over the town. He uses car bombs to kill the last two good cops, Ross Tyler (Chad Walker) and China’s dad.

Now, Marty Lickner (Patrick Adamson) looks to become the paid for law for Sommers, unless China follows the advice of her ex-boyfriend Matt Conroy (Richard Norton) and runs for sheriff herself. She wins  — they shot her parade scene during an actual town parade and the local newspaper reported that Rotchrock was actually running for sheriff —  and is nearly killed in a drive-by shooting, so she deputizes Matt and Native American biker Dakota (Keith Cook, who was Sub-Zero in Mortal Kombat Annihilation) to go after Sommers.

Golden Harvest worked to make Rothrock a star back home in the U.S. and cast her in this. It works but she doesn’t come off as fearsome as she did in her Hong Kong films. Most of the cast and crew returned for the sequel.

The song “Distant Storm” in this movie is by the band Tess Makes Good. That’s actually Tori Amos.

June 22: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Revenge! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Norifumi Suzuki is probably best known for the ten-movie Torakku Yarō series in which Momojiro Hoshi and Kinya Aikawa race around Japan in dekotora or highly decorated trucks. Suzuki also wrote Red Peony Gambler, which became an eight-film series. He also made School of the Holy Beast.

Christina Lindberg, the star of Thriller, was on a plane to Stockholm when she was approached by two Japanese men who asked if she’d like to be in a movie. That sounds like the plot of a TV movie, but she said, “Why not?” and in a few weeks was making this movie and Sadao Nakajima’s Porno Queen: Japan Sex Tour for Toei.

The star of the show, though, is Reiko Ike. She first appeared in Toei’s Hot Springs Mimizu Geisha just a year before and claimed that she was only sixteen when she was nude in that movie. The scandal made it one of Toei’s biggest movies and her a star. One of the icons of Japanese Pinky violence films, Ike is on the same level as a Pam Grier or Tura Satana here in America. She’s in all four Terror Female High School movies, as well as one of the Battles Without Honor or Humanity sequels and The Street Fighter’s Last Revenge. She even released an album, Kōkotsu No Sekai (World of Ecstasy) AKA You, Baby before she was busted for drugs and then illegal gambling before her retirement.

Look out Donna Summer, because the entire album is basically spy lounge with Ike orgasming over it. It’s also beyond incredible.

Ike plays Ocho Inoshika in this, a young girl living the life of a small-time criminal in 1920s Tokyo. While all she does is gamble and occasionally steal from people, she’s also seeking the men who killed her detective father when he learned too much about the wrong powerful people.

After watching a young anarchist get killed, she listens to the young man’s dying request. He asks Ocho to take all of his money and free his sister Yuki from a life of prostitution. When she meets the brothel owner, he demands that Ocho play against female gambler Christina (Lindberg) for Yuki’s ownership. During this game, we see flashbacks to the lives of both women. And Christina is here for a reason, as she’s tracking down the anarchists to keep the local government running or so she says, because she’s really here because a young Japanese anarchist made love to her like no one before or since. He also has made a slave of Ocho’s mother, so as you can imagine, everyone is going to die.

Ocho is getting closer to those who killed her father — they have the tattoos of a deer, a butterfly and a boar on their backs — and that means plenty of bloody sword battles, including one where she emerges from a tub fully nude and battles into the snow. As she kills everyone in her path, limbs fly through the air, blood sprays like it’s being shot out of a cannon and her nude form is covered in plasma. It’s one of the most incredible scenes that you will see in any movie ever.

There’s also a battle in front of a stained glass window of Jesus, a whipping scene that aspires to become anything but exploitation junk and an ending in which our heroine emerges triumph amongst a snow of falling playing cards.

Any time people get all high and mighty about films and act like scholars, I’m reminded that I’ll never get there because this is the kind of movie that I prefer. I would have it no other way.

This has a sequel as well, Female Yakuza Tale: Inquisition and Torture.

June 21: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Aliens! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Shot in Newnan, GA* — look for a scene outside Stone Mountain — Uno sceriffo extraterrestre… poco extra e molto terrestre (An extraterrestrial sheriff… a little extraterrestrial and very terrestrial) is exactly what I want out of the movies that I watch. I got more enjoyment out of this film than probably anything new that I will watch this year. What can I say? Movies where Bud Spencer punches people and Oliver Onions are on the soundtrack are my true joy in life.

Directed by Michele Lupo (The Weekend Murders, Arizona Colt) and written by Marcello Fondato (Blood and Black Lace) and Francesco Scardamaglia (Kill Them All and Come Back Alone), this starts as the town sees a UFO touch down, which means that everyone loses their mind. Everyone but Sheriff Hall (Spencer), who doesn’t believe in aliens. So let crooks like Brennan (boxing champ Joe Bugner) use aliens to try and break the law. The big burly Sheriff will keep things normal.

Until later that night, when he gets the call to save a lost kid at Six Flags Over Georgia. He easily finds him but also finds another who calls himself H7-25. He’s played by Cary Guffey, who was Barry, the little boy in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And this is also why I love Italian cinema, because they put him on the poster and can make it seem like this movie is connected in some way to that blockbuster.

H7-25 convinces Hall that he’s an alien by healing his deputy’s rheumatism, repeatedly saving him with his alien weapon and even blasting him with enough bio-magnetic energy that he can catch gigantic fish and speak with horses. He returns the friendship by teaching H7-25 the wonders of baked beans. Yes, it really is a Bud Spencer movie.

At the same time, Air Force man Briggs (Raimund Harmstorf) is trying to take in H7-25 for dissection. Even Brennan ends up helping the sheriff and the alien escape. By the end, the alien child likes Earth so much that he decides to stay for a little longer, which would be the sequel, Everything Happens to Me, which is a lot like Stranger Things and was made 36 years before it.

*Georgia is also the home of so many wonderful Italian movies. The Last Shark, The Visitor, Cannibal Apocalypse, City of the Living Dead and Madhouse.

June 19: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Blaxploitation! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Private detective Sheba Shayne (Pam Grier) has come back home to Louisville from the big city of Chicago and she’s fighting back against the criminals out to ruin her father’s insurance business. Teaming up with her father’s partner — and her former lover — Brick Williams (Austin Stoker), she does exactly what she set out to do, even if the local cops warn her off and the thugs blow up her car.

They can kill her dad, they can drag her in a speedboat but they can’t make her give in. This is the kind of movie where Pam Grier effortlessly chases bad guys on a jet ski and dispenses them with a spear gun. In short, everything you want, including Pam kicking at least one of the bad guys directly in the balls.

David Sheldon and William Girdler sold this movie to Samuel Arkoff by telling him they already had a script done. Well, they didn’t. A day later, after selling the movie, they did.

This was also the last movie that Girdler would make in Kentucky, now ready to move onward.

As much as I like Girdler’s films, Jack Hill knew how to make Pam Grier movies. The Big Doll House, The Big Bird Cage, Coffy and Foxy Brown really are a high bar to achieve, if you think about it.

June 18: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 90s comedy! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

I never saw Drop Dead Fred — I was 19 when it came out and despite my love of The Young Ones and everything Rik Mayall ever did, I somehow just never made time for it — when I was a kid, but man, this is one of those movies that’s at once perfect for children and also so anarchic and wild that their parents may never want to show it to them.

It also comes from a very, very dark place.

While originally intended for Tim Burton to direct and Robin Williams to play Drop Dead Fred, it ended up with Dutch director Ate de Jong and Mayall being involved. Yes, the director of Highway to Hell and the man known for abusing Adrian Edmondson on both The Young Ones and Bottom were selected to make a movie for children.

In 2021, The Telegraph published “Rik Mayall’s mental health misadventure: how Drop Dead Fred repelled America,” de Jong revealed that as he rewrote the script, he based much of it on his own life, saying “…the trauma of child abuse goes deep and its claws reach far in time. It was not something ever spoken about on the set, not with Rik or anyone, but for me it existed.”

This is the same movie that Rotten Tomatoes summarized as “Tackling mature themes with an infantile sensibility, Drop Dead Fred is an ill-conceived family comedy that is more likely to stir up a headache than the imagination.”

Gene Siskel said, “This is easily one of the worst films I’ve ever seen.”

Hmm. Maybe I saw a different cut.

Drop Dead Fred feels different in a world that understands childhood abuse and the ways that we cope with it. Elizabeth Cronin (Phoebe Cates, who the movie tries to make look like a woman who has never grown up and who is dowdy, but come on, it’s Phoebe Cates) grew up with a mother (Marsha Mason, absolutely perfect in this movie) who repeatedly emotionally abused her to the point that she found happiness with an imaginary friend named Drop Dead Fred (Mayall). After she caused too much chaos with Fred, her father forced her to symbolically — but totally not — duct tape Fred into a box and put him away forever.

This scene is also based in horrifying childhood memories. A friend of co-writer/executive producer Carlos Davis named Steve Burnette told the story that his mother had an imaginary friend as a girl which upset her mother so much that she demanded that she flush it down the toilet and kill it. This traumatized her for years.

When Elizabeth grows up, she remains the same unassertive and frightened little girl, just accepting her husband (Tim Matheson) leaving her for another woman (Bridget Fonda in an uncredited part), losing her job, getting her car stolen and having to move back home with her oppressive mother. Despite help from her friend Janie (Carrie Fisher), Elizabeth remains trapped, a victim of past abuse.

Then she unleashes Fred by opening the box and in a fit of pique, he responds to her growing up by smearing dog crap all over the carpet.

Drop Dead Fred has come back because his whole job is to figure out how to make Elizabeth — Snot Face, as. he calls her — happy again. But can she be happy? Her father abandoned her to a mother who, at best, used words to make her never feel like she was right or if she mattered. And then, when she tries to assert herself, her mother places all the blame on her, saying that she’s too emotional or being silly. Of course you’d invent — or be open to — an imaginary friend.

Seriously: I had an imaginary friend — in the form of a doll — named Freddy when I was 3 years old, a character well-known enough to my parents that my father made a book called Freddy Did It that recounted stories of where I broke things around the house for attention and blamed the doll.

At the end of all this, after enduring so much real life and even having her mother infantilize her by bringing her to a child psychologist to get pills that will make Fred go away, Elizabeth instead goes into a dream universe where she learns just how important that she is and that at least one person, Fred, truly loves her, values her and views her happiness as valid. She has learned from his dream world everything she needs.

The film originally ended with Elizabeth at Mickey’s house. After she reads his daughter Natalie a bedtime story, the little girl comes downstairs with her teddy bear torn apart and says that Drop Dead Fred did it. There’s a shot of a book with Fred in it and you hear his voice. Audiences hated this and wanted him brought back. The ending is so poignant and perfect to me, as Natalie now needs Fred. Elizabeth knows this and knows she can no longer see her best friend but now, someone who will be very important to her has needs just like she did. But unlike everyone else, she can believe in this little girl and support her and give her what she never did.

How dumb am I for ending this movie crying for ten minutes after it was over?

This is a movie for children where the main character and her childhood dream friend discuss eating her mother and pooping her all over the dining room table and here I am just overcome with emotion.

I have no idea why this movie was so hated when it came out and why no one isn’t talking more about it today. I also have no idea why I waited so long to see it, but it was exactly what I needed today.

June 17: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Lucio Fulci! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

The only bad thing about being a Lucio Fulci fan is that you eventually start to run out of first watches of his movies. Once you’ve even entered into the post-80s high and learned to love movies like Voices from Beyond, Sodoma’s Ghost, Touch of Death, The Sweet House of Horror and Demonia (and more) the only way out is backward. That’s when you start to watch the movies that Fulci created before he was only known for gore, quality films like Perversion Story, Don’t Torture A Duckling and A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin are waiting for you.

Before that, Fulci went to medical school and decided, upon graduation, that there was more money in movies than in treating patients. After apprenticing at Centro Sperimentale, he directed documentaries and worked as an assistant director and screenwriter in the Italian comedy genre throughout the 50s. He apprenticed under famous Italian comedy director Steno and eventually became known for a series of movies starring Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia.

A sequel to Oh! Those Most Secret Agents!, this follows almost the same plot as that movie. Franco and Ciccio get confused for cosmonauts Colonel Paradowsky and Major Borovin, which makes sense as the comedy team plays both roles. The Italians are used to take the place of the two missing Russians who have gone missing in the cold void of space, so they land the rocket so the space race can be lost by America. Then the Russians come back and hijinks ensue.

Mónica Randal from The Witches Mountain, Linda Sini (who would also be in Fulci’s Massacre Time and Don’t Torture A Duckling), Maria Silva (Tombs of the Blind Dead), Francesca Romana Coluzzi (Marisa Mell’s body double in Danger: Diabolik! as well as Giovannona Long-Thigh and Fulci’s Dracula In the Provinces; she’s also Red Sonja‘s mother) liven things up.

Fulci said that this movie and The Two Parachutists were both filmed in just seven weeks.

While this has a 002 in the title, it is not a Eurospy movie. It’s also one of only two science fiction movies Fulci would make, along with Warriors of the Year 2072.

June 16: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is yakuza! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Director, writer and star Paul Naschy in a Yakuza film. Yes, Naschy co-produced this and The Beast and the Magic Sword with Japanese filmmakers and here, he plays Bruno Rivera, a cold blooded killer currently working for a Japanese crime family.

After a plan is made to steal diamonds along with his lover Meiko (Eiko Nagashima) and her brother, he goes wild and kills everyone in the car that has the precious stones and screws over his girl and her family. Perhaps you don’t understand how the Japanese honor system works, Bruno, because these people will never stop hunting you, particularly when you break a woman’s heart and kill her brother.

Bruno doesn’t walk away in one piece and barely makes it to the home of Dr. Don Simon (Lautaro Murúa), who offers to nurse him back to health until he can deal with whatever honor he needs to repay. This being a Paul Naschy movie, the house that his character is recuperating in also has two obscenely gorgeous daughters living there, Monica (Silvia Aguilar) and Alicia (Azucena Hernandez).

As he comes back to the land of the living, Bruno exists barely in our world, being visited by a ghost and hearing the human sounds of pigs as they are slaughtered. That’s because this town is obsessed with a gigantic bacchanalian celebration in which each person makes a stew and a pig-based dish.

Sure, seems strange so far, but it gets wilder inside the very same house used for Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll. Meiko has found where Bruno lives thanks to a weirdo who eventually gets messily masticated by swine as Naschy makes sweet, sweet and sweaty love; the black maid loves being beaten by Dr. Simon; rocking chairs rock all by themselves and a black-gloved killer is turning this into a giallo by stalking people in POV and murdering them with a hook. And what is wrong with Teresa (Julia Saly), who has been confined to her room?

Also: Paul Naschy blows up a woman with a grenade.

As if you didn’t guess, Naschy gets love scenes with both Aguilar and Hernández. If you’re going to write and direct your own weird riff on how horrible people are and how close pigs are to us, well, go for it.

Between the diamond theft and the fact that this movie stitches together a Yakuza storyline with pretty much the same exact story as the aforementioned Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, this feels like the most Jess Franco or Bruno Mattei take on a Naschy film. You have to love that Bruno’s character development is that he decides to stop killing people and ruining lives once he starts sleeping with even hotter looking women, only to have that be the death of him. Oh yeah, spoiler.

Also known as El carnaval de las bestias (The Beast’s Carnival), a title that makes even more sense once a gathering of maniacs shows up in costume to go hog wild on some stem, call each other all manner of off-color insults sure to offend people and then pull out one woman’s breasts.

Naschy gets it all in: nearly giallo — the killer is never revealed — and also a crime movie, a rumination on man’s inhumanity to beasts and his fellow men, sexy hijinks and an ending which makes every single minute of watching this worthwhile. Impossible to put a genre tag on, kind of ramshackle but completely wonderful. You did it again, Paul.

You can watch this on Tubi.