One of the last films produced at Hong Kong’s legendary Shaw Brothers studio, this is the story of a poet named Yu (Patricia Ha, Nomad) who refuses to comply with the way that ladies should behave in the conservative time that she has been born into. She becomes a Taoist priestess so that she can do whatever she wishes, but can society allow her to love nomadic warrior Tsui Pok Hau (Alex Man) and her maid Lu Chiao (Lam Hoi-Ling)?
Directed by Eddie Ling-Ching Fong, this is more of an art film than exploitation, regardless of the title. It’s based on the life of Tang Dynasty poet Yu Xuanji and was Fong’s first film, with the original cut said to be almost three hours long.
Once she leaves the convent, Yu expands on how she feels about free love and falls for a rich man, Yung (Poon Chun-Wai). Yet Tsui Pok Hau is never far behind. Her love for him could doom them both.
I wasn’t expecting anything with this film and was really knocked out by its scope and just how incredible it looks. It’s definitely nothing like anything that Shaw Brothers put out. Well worth seeking out.
The 88 Films release of this film comes with four art cards, commentary by David West, a stills gallery, a trailer and a gorgeous slipcover with art by Justin Coffee. You can order it from MVD.
Detective Mitchell Morse (Albert Jones) seems to have been on this case forever, but it doesn’t seem like that. He may really have been.
Directed and written by Neal Dhand, this begins with a body and a foot washing up on a beach in Jacksonville. The foot doesn’t belong to that body. And there just might be a serial killer on the loose. Morse has an unraveling relationship with his wife Emily (Keesha Sharp) and doesn’t really trust his younger partner, Dreyfus (Tom Lipinski). These are all the things that you expect from a neo-noir detective story, but this is setting up for a rug pull near the end.
With incredible photography by Charles Ackley Anderson, I wanted to love this more than I did. Dhand is making his first film and went all out, which you have to commend. I’m not sure how well it all came together, however, as it wasn’t until the last few moments reveal that what I saw as the flaws in the film were explained. The acting is good, the idea is right, but something just didn’t add up for me. That said, your mileage will always vary, and I could see others loving this.
You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
A triple feature of anime in the middle of the night. What better way to spend the evening?
Baoh the Visitor (1989): This movie takes over a year of manga and makes it fit into a 45-minute original video animation (OVA). Created by Studio Pierrot and distributed by Toho, this is an early release by Hirohiko Araki, who would go on to make JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.
17-year-old Ikuro Hashizawa has been taken by Doress and given a parasitic worm which transforms him into BAOH (Biological Armament On Help), giving him incredible superpowers which will also kill him in 111 days when the worm eats his brain. RFK, eat your stupid heart out.
BAOH is trying to escape along with 9-year-old psychic Sumire and her marsupial, Sonny-Steffan Nottsuo. They are being watched by Dr. Kasuminome, who created — perhaps too well, as he says — BAOH, along with his assistant Sophine and an army of monsters, including Number 22, Colonel Dordo and Walken, a psychic killing machine who melts objects before they can reach him. He sees BAOH as a worthy target and even burns the sigil for the creature onto his chest like some deranged Dr. Manhattan.
Hideaki Anno, who co-directed Shin Godzilla, was an animator on this movie.
Call Me Tonight (1986): We’ve all been there before, right? Phone sex girl Natsumi Rumi decides to actually meet one of her callers, Sugiura Ryo. The problem? When he gets worked up, he turns into a monster. She tells him that she’s familiar with Freud and decides to work out his issues.
So yeah, an anime, My Demon Lover, but also one that has references to Fright Night. It also doesn’t skimp when it comes to the transformation parts, as each time it’s almost a totally different monster. For all the promise of tentacle sex that you would expect in this, it’s more about titillation, as Natsumi wants to keep teasing Sugiura until he can control his transformations. Then what? We never find out, as another girl — and some bikers — ruin everything.
Dragon’s Heaven (1988): In the year 3195, humans and robots have gone to war. During one of the battles, a sentient combat suit named Shaian loses its pilot and shuts down for a thousand years. His enemy, Elmedin, is still alive, but Shaian has found Ikuru, a junker, who joins him as his new partner.
Obviously, creator Makoto Kobayashi loves Moebius, as this looks like his art come to life. He was also a major name in Japan’s scratch-build model world, which means that in this, he decided to make human-sized versions of the robots and have them fight in a live-action opening to the film.
Since making this, Kobayashi has worked as a mechanical designer on Space Battleship Yamamoto 2199 and on everything from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure toGiant Robo, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and Urotsukidôji: Legend of the Overfiend.
I’ve never seen anything look this gorgeous in an anime. Thanks to the Chattanooga Film Festival for introducing this to me!
June 16-22 SNL Week: Saturday Night Live is celebrating 50 years on the air, can NBC last for another 50 years??
The Groove Tube comes from SOV sketches that were shown at the Channel One Theater on East 60th St. in New York. They took the best sketches on tour and whatever ones got the greatest reaction on college campuses were reshot on film and then put into this movie.
It starts with a 2001 recreation of the apes meeting a TV set. Then, music supervisor Buzzy Linhart plays a hitchhiker; director and writer Ken Shapiro plays Koko the Clown, who reads Fanny Hill as part of Make Believe Time; Chevy Chase and adult star Jennifer Welles (Abigail Leslie Is Back In Town, Inside JenniferWelles) in a Geritol parody; a news program that has Shapiro playing Indira Ghandi in brownface; the International Sex Games, which has adult stars Paul Norman (who directed the Bi and Beyond series) and Rebecca Brooke, who was in Chuck Vincent’s Grace’s Place as well as several Joe Sarno films like Confessions of a Young American Housewife and Little Girl, Big Tease and Chase and Shapiro singing “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.” Oh yeah — Richard Belzer is here and in blackface.
“Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow” was later used by Chevy Chase on Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live, although he doesn’t say the line in this. Shapiro would go on to work with Chase again, as he directed and wrote Modern Problems. Co-writer Lane Sarasohn would go on to work on Not Necessarily the News and Chevy Chase’s first post-SNL special and the other co-writer, Rich Allan, also worked with Shapiro and Sarasohn on a series of films that would be collected in 2024’s Poems Without Words.
Oh, and an aside: Shapiro started his entertainment career as Kenny Sharpe on live television and appeared often on Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater as “The Kid” and on George Scheck’s Star Time Kids Show with Connie Francis. His assistant in Hollywood, back in the 1970s, was Gus Van Sant. I almost spelled his name Gus Van Zandt because I like thinking about the director of the bootleg Psycho being in Lynyrd Skynyrd.
June 21: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Westerns!
“One night, you will see a red star overhead. It will shine like a great diamond. On the night, you will go far away. Further than where you came from. You are a legend, Little Rita. A beautiful legend. You arrived from the void and you’re returning to the void.”
Little Rita wasn’t even five feet tall and weighed around 86 pounds. The Italian/Swiss singer and actress was known as la Zanzara di Torino (The Mosquito of Torino) and Pel di carota (Carrot Hair). Yet she sold 50 million records worldwide and is one of the few Italian singers to score on the UK pop charts. Her release of “Remember Me”, sung in English, with “Just Once More” on the other side, reached #26 in the U.S. and she was a frequent guest of The Ed Sullivan Show. But in Spain, other than Italy, she has the most success.
In the 60s, she’d make six films — this movie, Clementine Cherie, La Feldmarescialla (The Crazy Kids of the War), Rita the American Girl, Rita La Zanzara (Rita the Mosquito) and Non Stuzzicate la Zanzara (Don’t Sting the Mosquito) — with the latter three directed by Lina Wertmüller.
Like all great Italian singers, she had a scandal. She married Teddy Reno, the man who organized the first song contest she won, a man who was still married. They were married in Switzerland in 1968 and officially in Italy in 1971, a country that had no official divorce law at the time.
In this, she’s Big Little Rita, somehow the fastest and deadliest gunfighter around, the “bestest in the West,” who is helping Silly Bull (Gordon Mitchell, who I imagine loaned his Western ranch set to this) to destroy the white man’s gold, which he believes has ruined the good nature of the world. Somehow, just a few years into the Italian West and not only is it being parodied, it’s also being called out for its anti-authoritarian bent.
This brings her into combat with both Ringo (Kirk Morris, who was really Adriano Bellini, a star of peplum and fumetti) and Django (Enzo Di Natale, who only made this movie, which is odd as I’m shocked more Italian directors didn’t cast him as a fake Franco Nero) in this comedic West. There’s also a character named Zorro, played by Romano Puppo, who was the leader of the zombies in Zombie 4: After Death, as well as showing up in Cop Game, Robowar and Escape from the Bronx as Trash’s father.
After Rita is taken by Sancho (Fernando Sancho, who was in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the rebels and would go on to be in several Italian Westerns, as well as playing the corrupt mayor in Return of the Blind Dead) and his men, she’s rescued by a dashing young cowboy named Black Star, who is Terrence Hill, four years before making what many consider the first Italian comedy Western, They Call Me Trinity.
Yet when they fall in love, that first night, he does what every other white man does and steals the gold. When caught, he’s sent to the Native Americans for punishment, but Rita talks them into letting him go. He feels bad for how he’s treated her and keeps turning himself in to be hanged. It takes him telling her he loves her for this all to end, at which point all the gold is destroyed, and Rita goes somewhere, following that deep dialogue about being a legend. He goes into the stars to get her back.
“A movie should have a happy ending, or no one would go see it.”
That’s what Francis Fitzgerald Grawz, the piano-playing singer from Germany, played by Lucio Dalla, says at the end. His talent caused Pupi Averti to give up music for directing, inspiring his movie Ma quando arrivano le ragazze. Another singer, Teddy Reno, plays the sheriff. Yes, the same Teddy Reno who had the scandal with Rita.
It was shot by Enzo Barboni, the cinematographer on Django(and Nightmare Castle), so it looks just like the films it’s making light of. Of course, he would go on to make They Call Me Trinity, perfecting what started in this.
In France, after the success of the Trinity movies, this was re-released as T’as le bonjour de Trinita (Hello from Trinity). It was called Enas trellos… trellos Trinita (Crazy, Crazy Trinity) in Greece and Crazy Westerners in the U.S.
How about the fact that Fernanda Dell’Acqua — thanks Spaghetti Western Database — the sister of stuntmen Alberto, Ottaviano and Roberto was Rita’s stunt double? This movie ended her career, as her horse ran toward a ravine and didn’t stop. She barely got off in time, but ruined her leg. She was told, weeks later, that the horse died from regret. But this is Italy…
At one point, Gordon Mitchell’s Chief tells Rita, “You will return to nothingness, because from nothingness you came.” That’s a very sage — and saga — thing to say to a heroine. Also very Catholic.
A musicarello Italian Western with Pink Panther credits with an anti-capitalism streak, golden hand grenades, evil versions of cowboy icons and a gorgeous leading lady who, despite being tiny, gives it her all. I had no expectations and came away inspired.
I love the CFF Red Eye movies and honestly, they’re the start of my summer. This is a perfect movie for the weather that is heating up, a film that won’t make too many demands on your brain and goes well with, well, drugs.
Shot in two weeks for $50,000 outside Stamford, Connecticut by local producer/director Del Tenney, The Horror of Party Beach was advertised as “The First Horror-Monster Musical.” Tenney would also direct I Eat Your Skin, a movie that we all know as the much worse half of the famous double bill with the utterly astounding I Drink Your Blood.
The Del-Aires just want to play a party on the beach for the kids, but radioactive waste transforms a skeleton into a shambling monster. Hank Green just wants to get with Tina, but she’s drunk and wants to hook up with a biker. A fight ensues, but dudes are dudes and get along and end up shaking hands. So The Del-Aires play “The Zombie Stomp” and everyone has a swell time until that monster — remember him? — kills Tina and her bloody body washes up at the party.
Meanwhile, Dr. Gavin and the cops are on the case, but the doctor is more on Hank’s case, but he just knows that his assistant is the object of his older daughter’s affection. And then there’s some voodoo, because you know, why not. And then there’s a slumber party, because that’s what girls do when they’re in their early twenties. But never mind, the monster has found friends and they decide to wipe out all of these nubile young somnambulists.
Through some buffoonery, we learn that sodium can kill these monsters. There are also many, many more songs by The Del-Aires, who can’t seem to grasp the fact that monsters are rising up and mostly killing attractive women. Perhaps they could put their guitars down, pick up some table salt and get to work wiping out whatever the hell these creatures are?
This movie even got a photo comic book tie-in from Warren Publishing, the home of Famous Monsters, Eerie and Creepy. Wally Wood and Russ Jones worked on it and it’s a great collectors’ item.
Beyond all those groovy tunes by The Del-Aires, Edward Earle Marsh composed the soundtrack. You may know him better as Zebedy Colt, who started his career in Laurel and Hardy’s Babes In Toyland before releasing a series of gay cabaret songs before embarking on a career in pornography which would lead him to being in movies like Barbara Broadcast and directing films like The Devil Inside Her, which has nothing to do with the Joan Collins film of the same name.
You can watch this for free on Tubi or buy the Severin blu ray to get the best possible experience.
You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
Bob Morgan — someone I never knew before watching this — is a second-generation Kentucky artist and LGBTQ activist who learned art from his mom and “honed his creative identity under the influence of his mentor and gay dad Henry Faulkner and his gay mom Sweet Evening Breeze.” He may have started as a drag performer, but he now feels that he is telling his story and the tales of others through his photos and mixed media artwork.
I love this line about the movie: “Bob’s just going to tell some stories–about art and garbage, sex and drugs, subversion, AIDS grief, queer joy, and being an outsider turned community icon.”
Directed by Grayson Tyler Johnson and Tom Marksbury, this shows why Bob not only collects all the things he finds, but also the stories. I used to feel like when we escaped the Reagan 80s that life was going to get better and the negativity about gay people or any marginalized people just seems like it won’t die, huh? Life would be gray without all of thee colors and yet, here we are. I’d rather just hear Bob go on and on.
You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
This is my first film at Chattanooga Film Fest 2025, and wow, it’s already a winner. Abigail Before Beatrice defines slow burn, and that’s not a bad thing here. It parcels out the info that you need in just the right way, gradually revealing who people are, what they’ve been through and how—and if—they can move on.
The second full-length film from director and writer Cassie Keet, this concentrates on Beatrice (Olivia Taylor Dudley), a woman who lives so far removed from the world that at times she feels like a feral child. She has a barely working phone, steals strawberries to make jam and works several at-home jobs where she never has to physically meet another human being. Yet there was a time that she belonged — even if it was to a cult — and when she reconnects to fellow survivor Abigail (Riley Dandy), who has moved on to create a podcast that details all she went through, she still feels love for her. And yet we soon learn that Beatrice can’t move on to a reality outside of the religious nightmare that she endured for so long.
Now that their leader, Grayson (Shayne Herndon), is being released from prison, Abigail is preparing to defend herself. As for Beatrice, reconnecting with that man will send her into a spiral that has been coming for so long.
My only quibble with this film is that the moments that start it off, about how Beatrice connects with Will (Jordan Lane Shappell) and his daughter Jillie (Andersyn Van Kuren), seem forgotten until the finale, which I’m still not sure is happening or just another fantasy in its lead’s head.
So often, when people experience true crime through documentaries and podcasts, they seem to place a distance between themselves and what they watch. “I would never do that.” “How stupid these women are.” “Who could believe these stories?” Yet, the women in this story have each come to Grayson for different reasons, one he could see and use against them, as even years later, they still argue over who his favorite was, as if that matters any longer. But to answer those questions true crime watchers have, or the way they don’t get it, they aren’t living through the cult experience. They have no idea how it can prey upon your innate need to be adored, to be told you matter, to feel like you have a purpose. It’s so simple and trite to question an abusive relationship until you’ve been the one locking yourself in a bathroom. This movie tries to get in that room, to get inside that head, to show you that yes, people can be trapped by these silver-tongued words, and the worst part is what comes after. Can you heal? I don’t know the answer.
You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
While many may know him as the lead on the CW series Roswell, New Mexico, Michael Vlamis has always been shooting and writing his own films. This full-length debut, which he also stars in and co-wrote, is something else—something that comes from real pain. As he told Deadline, “I’m interested in exploring the guilt and grief that haunted me following a tragic accident I experienced a few years back. If you don’t try to face your feelings, they’ll eventually consume you.”
Tessa (Aurora Perrineau) and James (Vlamis) came together over the crossword. They challenged each other with it. They raced to see who could do it first. Even their wedding proposal was inside one. They had a daughter, Lily, who died in a drowning accident, and since then, their lives have changed. She’s become a famous writer of children’s books, starting with Lily Learns. He’s retreated into…mostly grief. She suggests he get back to the crossword as part of his therapy.
The clues for each day seem way too close to his life. Every coincidence can’t be one. A boorish houseguest playing hide-and-seek gives way to James having an emotional outburst. He starts to believe that maybe Tessa now has everything she wants. Could she have watched their daughter die? Or was it because he was more concerned with his crossword and not watching her in the pool?
Every frame of this drips with grief and hard work. Harvey Guillén from What We Do In the Shadows shines in a small role as a magazine interviewer who has no warning that he’s stepped into a house filled with conflict. Both leads shine and play off each other so well. And yet while the ambiguous ending may frustrate some, I’m not sure it could end any other way.
You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
June 16-22 SNL Week: Saturday Night Live is celebrating 50 years on the air, can NBC last for another 50 years??
I hate saying people are nepo babies to the point that, of course, I did it right in the first sentence. But yeah, Please Don’t Destroy are Ben Marshall, John Higgins and Martin Herlihy and of them, only Marshall doesn’t have famous parents. Higgins’ dad is Steve Higgins, producer of SNL and Jimmy Fallon’s announcer, as well as the nephew of Chris Elliot and actor David Anthony Higgins. Herlihy is the son of Tim, Adam Sandler’s longtime writing partner and a former SNL producer. They got together in 2017 and, within just four years, ended up as writers on SNL, writing digital shorts. She’s not the only person with a family history at the show, as Jane Wickline’s mother, Marcy Hardart, was Lorne Michaels’ assistant, and her father, Matt, was a writer on Letterman and In Living Color.
I mean, I guess you can come from anywhere and be funny. Whether or not SNL is funny is up to you.
Ben, John and Martin are the names the guys use in this, and they’re all growing away from one another. Ben is taking over Trout Plus, the family store, from his father (Conan O’Brien). At the same time, Martin has found religion and a girlfriend who goes by Amy (Nichole Sakura). John is about to be left behind, so he decides to make a break to Foggy Mountain to find a treasure — Jean Pierre La Roche’s bust of Marie Antoinette — that everyone is looking for, like park rangers Lisa (Megan Stalter) and Taylor (X Mayo) and the cult of Deetch Nordwind (Bowen Yang), who have been looking for it for perhaps a decade.
Funny moments:
Gaten Matarazzo of Stranger Things is killed by a cult
Martin goes full-on action hero and has a weird Italian accent.
The fact that the music seems trapped in the mid-2000s.
The non-nepo baby is the fictional nepo baby.
Truly, this is the kind of movie that people who think I should watch something would send me, and I’m not being elitist here. I mean, I watch SNL every week knowing it sucks, so what taste do I have? I mean, I like the Lonely Island movies and these guys feel like, well, the kids who watched Lonely Island on YouTube and decided to do i. Still, alsoo they had rich dads, like the dude I used to work for whose son works in his company who hated the sons of people who owned companies when he was young and now he’s old and his son is a wash out and barely wants to work, but he’s his son, dammit. What do I know? My son is a 3-pound dog that I hope outlives me, and I can’t teach him how to be a writer. Comedy feels half ass today and I’m saying that as someone who finds the dumbest and worst teen sex comedies uproarious. The bar is low, and this is fine. It’s fine. I’m trying to convince myself, not you. You can do whatever you want.
I mean, is a Soulja Boy needledrop so funny that you have to do it three times really that funny?
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