Category Archives: Movie reviews

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: The Invisible Avenger (1958)

Posted on by

Golden Oldies Week (July 27 – August 3) Something Weird Video have released such a wide range of movies over the last 30 years that trying to categorize them can be tricky. They started out as a gray market mail order distributor (aka a bootlegger) not unlike the Cape Copy Center or Sinister Cinema and eventually moved into the niche se ploit titles that would set them apart. The movies on this list are the kind of cult genre titles that were the bread and butter of many of the bootleg companies of the 90s and most were not exclusive to SWV. If you look in the catalogs or on the website these would be under categories like “Nightmare Theatre’s Late Night Chill-O-Rama Horror Show,” “Jaws of the Jungle,” “Sci-fi Late Night Creature Feature Show,” or “Spies, Thighs & Private Eyes.” Many of these are currently available as downloads from the SWV site (until the end of 2024)!

The Invisible Avenger is a compilation of two television pilot episodes of a planned Republic Pictures TV show called The Shadow. Yes, the very same hero whose radio show had just ended in 1954. The TV show didn’t get picked up and this movie was released, which. is kind of curious as none of the advertizing — or the name — lets you know this is about Lamont Cranston and his alter ego. It had new footage added and was released again as Bourbon Street Shadows, again barely letting you know that this was a movie about The Shadow.

Some of this movie was directed by cinematographer James Wong Howe, whose only other directing credit is for the Harlem Globetrotters movies Go Man Go. He had a strange life in the Hollywood system, as his marriage to Sanora Babb was not recognized by the state of California until 1948, as they banned interracial marriage (she was white). It was the first time he could admit that he was with his wife, as the morals clause prohibited him from saying he was with a white woman. They also lived in separate apartments due to his traditional Chinese views before she moved to Mexico City to protect him from the blacklist. He would go on to be one of the most recognized cinematographers of all time.

Along with Ben Parker (Teen-Age Strangler) and John Sledge, he directed the episodes that make up this TV pilot. It’s very much torn from the headlines, as Pablo Ramirez (Dan Mullins), an expatriate to New Orleans from the Caribbean nation of Santa Cruz, is planning a coup against that country’s leader, the Generalissimo. The secret police of that country are trying to kill him and trumpet player Tony Alcalde (Steve Dano) summons Lamont Cranston (Richard Derr) and his mentor Jogendra (Mark Daniels) to help. They don’t get there in time, as Tony is killed, so they decide to help Ramirez as The Shadow.

Written by George Bellak and Ruth Jeffries, this is the sixth film that features this character. Again, it’s so odd that this is a superhero movie that wants to be sold as horror or anything but The Shadow.

You can watch this on Tubi.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Cry Panic (1974)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cry Panic was on the CBS Late Movie on January 6, 1976; April 7, 1977 and May 18, 1978.

Jack B. Sowards created perhaps one of the most interesting parts of Star Trek: the Kobayashi Maru, a no-win scenario for new Starfleet captains that was first brought up in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. He also wrote this TV movie which was directed by James Gladstone, whose tie to Star Trek is directing the classic episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” He also was behind the films Rollercoaster and When Time Ran Out…

Dennis Ryder (John Forsythe, who is astounding in this movie) is driving to San Francisco for a job interview when he hits a man who no one will admit is dead. No one — the sheriff (Earl Holliman from Police Woman), Ralph Meeker from The Alpha Incident, the town doctor (Noman Alden, Kansas City Bomber) and certainly not Anne Francis.

Jason Wingreen, who is in this, was also the voice of Boba Fett.

Seriously, this entire town is against Ryder. It’s a taunt 74 minutes and gets more out of that time than three movies today. I’ve heard people say it has a David Lynch vibe, which I can see. It’s intriguing when a man knows that he’s killed somebody and begs the police to charge him.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Bimini Code (1983)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: Bimini Code was on the CBS Late Movie on May 8, June 4 and November 20, 1986. 

Stacey (Vickie Benson, Cheerleader Camp) and Cheryl (Kristal Richardson) own a scuba shop, but also decide to help save a missing boy along with their friends Rick and Fuji. They end up being kidnapped themselves and taken to the undersea base of Madame X, AKA Countess Magda von Cress (Rosanna Simanaitis), a totally mean, totally eyepatched super villainess who of course is my favorite person in this movie. She even has a small dog!

Madame X is after the Power Stone — “The secret of the ancient Mayans! The secret of nuclear fusion!” — but she didn’t count on two women who can swim underwater and ride motorcycles. Not even a tarantula can stop them. And then in the last half of this movie, it becomes Raiders of the Lost Ark!

The bad guys in this work for the Scorpio Peanut Company. Let that set in.

This movie taught me that people can speak underwater, that if you’re a bad guy you can dress however you want no matter how hot the jungle is, that a film can have tons of action and locations and still drag, that women in bikinis are our last line of defense and that you should always screen your henchmen.

Director Barry Clark and writer Gabrielle Rivera have made a movie that feels like if Andy Sidaris didn’t care at all about showing naked women. It has the feel of his movies, but none of the sheer wildness of them and no one remembers that you’re supposed to have several hot tub scenes.

You can watch this on YouTube.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: The Devil and Miss Sarah (1971)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Devil and Miss Sarah was on the CBS Late Movie on February 24 and April 4, 1974.

Directed by Michael Caffey (who did a lot of TV, including the “Horror In the Heights” episode of Kolchak the Night Stalker) and written by Calvin Clements Jr. (whose career was also mostly in TV), The Devil and Miss Sarah has Gil Turner (James Drury), a farmer, escorting a criminal named Rankin (Gene Barry) to prison. Turner is bringing his wife Sarah (Janice Rule) along with him, which is a bad idea, because Rankin has occult powers and wants her.

Shot in the Utah desert, this has some great natural scenery and keeps the idea if the supernatural is real a mystery until the end. Sarah may or may not also have psychic powers, which means that she may see Rankin as a better partner than her husband. Or perhaps Gene Barry is so incredible in this it seems like he can dominate anyone.

A Manson-influenced Western about a Western outlaw who might be Satan. TV movies were bringing it in 1971.

You can watch this on YouTube.

 

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Brotherhood of the Bell (1970)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Brotherhood of the Bell was on the CBS Late Movie on August 11 and December 5, 1972 and November 27, 1973.

Director Paul Wendkos (The Mephisto Waltz) was nominated by the Directors Guild of America for “outstanding directorial achievement in television” because of this film. It was written by David Karp, who also wrote the original novel. It had been made once before as an episode of Studio One in 1958.

A world premiere CBS Thursday Night Movie on September 17, 1970, this arrived just as the seventies began, a decade packed with conspiracy. Professor Andrew Patterson (Glenn Ford) is back at the College of St. George in San Francisco to watch a young man be initiated into the secret society that he joined there, the Brotherhood of the Bell.

After the ritual, one of the leaders — Chad Harmon (Dean Jagger) — gives Patterson an assignment. Stop Dr. Konstantin Horvathy (Eduard Franz) from accepting a deanship at a college of linguistics so that a brother can take that position. Harmon is to blackmail Horvathy with the names of the people who helped him defect. Patterson wonders if this is legal. He’s told that he should be happy this is all they’re asking of him.

The professor does what he is supposed to do and it causes Horvathy to kill himself. Patterson then does exactly what no brother should do and reveals the truth to his wife Vivian (Rosemary Forsyth) and his father-in-law Harry Masters (Maurice Evans). This causes the Federal Security Services (as conspiracy-filled as this movie is, it doesn’t name the FBI; the agent is played by Dabney Coleman) to get involved and his father-in-law to turn him into the Brotherhood and Patterson’s father Mike (Will Geer) gets ruined in the process, then has a stroke and dies. Patterson also loses his job, gets humiliated on a talk show by Bart Harris (William Conrad) and is at rock bottom when his former boss Dr. Jerry Fielder (William Smithers) and the man he saw initiated Philip Dunning (Robert Pine) both stand up for him.

Obviously, the makers of The Skulls watched this movie.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Double Agent 73 (1974)

Posted on by

Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!  

Jane Tennay (Chesty Morgan) is Agent 73, given her name because of her, well, large bust. Her agency has sent her to kill heroin dealers one by one. After each murder, she has to take a photo as proof, using the camera that been inserted inside her left breast. And like Snake Plissken with bodacious ta tas, Agent 73’s sweater meat will explode if she doesn’t get her job done in time.

If that all makes sense to you, welcome to the cinematic universe of Doris Wishman, as this is the second appearance of Chesty Morgan, who might even be playing the same character she was in Deadly Weapons.

As she looks for the crime boss Toplar, she starts to fall for a fellow agent named Tim (Frank Silvano). But hmm…could Toplar be someone she’s already close to?

In 2002, Doris Wishman was on Conan with Roger Ebert — which had to be a thrill for him — and let the world know she was still making movies like Dildo Heaven. We should all be praising the woman who said, “After I die I will be making movies in hell!”

The furniture in this didn’t come from the past. It came from a place beyond , a world where everyone has fake eyelashes and too much makeup and is barely able to walk on the highest of high heels, where giant breasts can make a flash so huge it fills the entire screen. We’ll never live in this world but we can visit for a few moments at a time and watch a secret agent cover those boobs with poison so a guy licks them off and dies, never mind that she’s so much bigger in the chest than his girlfriend.

Also, in keeping with my theory that Doris has a lot of Bruno Mattei in her, this takes nudist footage from Blaze Starr Goes Nudist and has the same surgery scene from The Amazing Transplant. Unlike Bruno, Doris made those movies, so I guess she can take from her own work. Maybe that makes her closer to Jess Franco.

Jane’s boss in this, Bill, is played by Peter Savage. He was a boxer that grew up with Jake La Motta and wrote the book Raging Bull. He also made the movie Cauliflower Cupids, which has Jane Russell, Alan Dale and several boxers, including La Motta, Rocky Graziano, Willie Pep, Paddy DeMarco, Tony Zale and Petey Scalzo. Savage wrote, directed and stars, so this is a vanity production, but one very low on cost.

This is probably one of the more coherent of Wishman’s movies and it still makes no sense. And by that, I mean it’s incredible.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Deadly Weapons (1974)

Posted on by

Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!  

Liliana Wilczkowska was born in Poland and was orphaned by the Nazis. She grew up in Israel, moving to the U.S. in 1957 to marry Josef Wilczkowski ten days after they met. Her husband and one of his meat market employees died in a robbery in 1965 and by the 70s, she was using her 73-32-36 body as an exotic dancer, going by the name of  Zsa Zsa “Chesty” Gabborr, dancing mainly to pay for her two young daughters.

She made it to the “Combat Zone” of Boston red light clubs and took on the name Chesty Moore. Dancing to Tom Jones’ “Delilah,” she would often allow men to touch her breasts to prove they were real. You have to understand that her body defies imagination.

Wearing bras specially made by Texas company Command Performance, she would often appear with two little people, each carrying a breast. She married — and quickly divorced — National League umpire Dick Stello, and then she appeared in two of Doris Wishman’s films. I’ll get to one of them in a moment. She’s also the only person I can think of that is in a Wishman movie and a Fellini film, as she was cut from Casanova.

Morgan kept dancing four months a year — she made $8,000 a week — and doing real estate in the off season until 1991, when she was 54 years old. Tired of the constant legal battles, she became a landlady just as she became famous all over again when John Waters featured a scene from Deadly Weapons in his movie Serial Mom.

In this film, she plays Crystal, an ad exec whose lover Larry (Richard Towers) has just been killed. To get revenge, she drugs and smothers man after man with, well, her mams. There’s Tony (Harry Reems), Captain Hook and by the end, even her own father in her way. Chesty also seems always just on the verge of falling asleep.

Do you need any more reasons to watch this? Well, the soundtrack, made up of library cuts from KPM Music’s KPM 1055 Dramatic Background, is incredible. That song “Hippy?” That’s the trailer music for Torso. You’ll fall in love with the theme, “Hard Selling Woman” by Mike Lease with The Studio G’s Beat Group. And despite how grimy this may all feel at times, you may fall for this film, too. There’s nothing else like it and somehow, the sequel is even weirder.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Dildo Heaven (2002)

Posted on by

Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!  

Allow me to play this broken record again, but it’s astounding just how much the moviemaking of Doris Wishman, Bruno Mattei and Jess Franco line up. At the end of all of their careers, there they are, making movies way past their contemporaries, even if it’s shot on video now. As Bruno would make Zombies: The Beginning and Franco would make so many movies in hotel conference rooms with quick zooms into the anatomy of his actresses, Doris would come back to make this film, one that is so close to her past movies even if it looks better when every other director who shot on video was supposedly taking a step down quality wise.

Doris was 89 when she made this and working at the Pink Pussy Cat in Miami — which is in the movie and so is Doris, as well as a photo of Chesty Morgan on the wall — and it allowed her to finally have synch sound in a movie and seemingly look back on her own career. Yet in this movie, she still does all the things you want: the apartment is needlessly over decorated, sex scenes often just show feet rolling around in the bed, dialogue feels like one of those Russian spy stations that are trying to read English phrases to send coded messages and all the men are jerks. And, as if ready to seem like another of my favorite warped directors, Claudio Fragasso, Doris places several stuffed animals in this and they are often zoomed in on.

This is the story of three roommates — Lisa, Beth and Tess — who all want to sleep with their boss. Only Tess has succeed so far, except she’s had to hide her short dark hair and wear a blonde wig to win him over. There’s also a teenage peeper who keeps looking in on the girls and fantasizing about them, which transforms into footage from The Immoral Three. Not to be outdone, but when a TV comes on later, it’s playing Doris’ Love Toy. Never mind that these movies were shot on film and the jump between media is jarring.

That peeping tom also has a dream where he has two penises, which reminds me of the creepy story where Bill Cosby told Keenan Thompson that after he played Fat Albert, “You know, life is good in the movies or whatever, but you just be ready, because when this movie comes out, you’re gonna need two dicks — because women are gonna be all over you.” That pervert also goes to Dr. Faust, who promises that his cream can make his small one eyes monster into a bigger beast. That reminds me of a joke that used to make my dad laugh, even when he was going through dementia.

“Dad, I finally got this penis cream. It’s going to make me so much bigger when I rub it on it.”

“Does it work?”

“They said it might take a few months. But my hands are huge!”

This movie made me overjoyed, as it feels like unlike so many directors, Doris got the opportunity to finish her career on her terms, making a movie that was uniquely hers. She never fit any mold, starting to direct movies much later in life than most and keeping it up way past nearly all of her nudie cutie contemporaries. I’ll think about this film and how the women finally discover that perhaps dildos are better than men — and then a new neighbor knocks on the door — more than any movie I’ll see made in this year or any other.

It feels and looks like sub-VCA porn and never gives you the payoff. And that’s the payoff. And it’s wonderful.

Thanks to the incredible theironcupcake on Letterboxd, whose Doris reviews were an inspiration to me. She even wrote down the lyrics to this film’s theme:

“When love has left and you’re bereft, reach for your dildo
When life’s a mess and fraught with stress, reach for your dildo
When a lover twice caught cheating
Says for you his heart’s still beating
Send him away, don’t let him stay
Reach for your dildo!
My dildo is very close to me, I keep it in my drawer
It’s HIV negative, it has no flaw
Someday I’ll find my love divine and I’ll be overjoyed
But ’til that fateful day, my dildo fills the void
Reach for your dildo!”

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: The Horsemen (1971)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Horsemen was on the CBS Late Movie on October 26, 1973; September 20, 1974 and June 11, 1976.

Uraz (Omar Sharif) is the son of Tursen (Jack Palance), a stable master and retired buzkashi player, a sport in which horse-mounted players attempt to place a goat or calf carcass in a goal. He has lost his honor when he breaks his leg in a game that his father has bet all of the family’s money on, which means he has to learn how to ride and play again, despite most of his leg.

Based on Joseph Kessel’s Les cavaliers, this was scripted by Dalton Trumbo and directed by John Frankenheimer, who loved the movie even if it wasn’t a financial success.

There’s a lot of animal violence in this, so be warned. I mean, it’s a game played with a dead animal, after all. The same game is played in Rambo III, in case you wondered. Like that movie, the Afghanistan of this film is long gone.

It’s a big Hollywood film about a sport and a place that I can imagine very few people were interested in, which makes me interested in it.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: The Blood Beast Terror (1967)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Blood Beast Terror was on the CBS Late Movie on March 8, 1974.

When you mention 1960’s British horror films, most people are going to think of Hammer. Or Amicus. But there’s also Tigon, the very small studio who could, and by could, I mean make some astoundingly strange movies.

Witchfinder General, The Curse of the Crimson Altar, The Blood on Satan’s Claw…these are the movies that make me think that England in 1967 was an insane place to be.

Vernon Sewell directed this thriller about young and good looking men having their throats torn open and drained by a killer so frightening that whomever it is has driven the last eyewitness mad, claiming that a horrible winged creature with huge eyes is the killer.

Detective Inspector Quennell (Peter Cushing) responds by thinking that a giant eagle — no, not the Pittsburgh-based grocery store — has to be the murderer.

If this development has you happy, then good news. This is the kind of stiff upper lip British low budget fun you’re looking for. Yes, I struggled to include this in either the werewolf or vampire weeks we’re planning because it features a weremoth who lives on human blood. A weremoth! What will they think of next!?!

Cushing considered this the worst of his many films. Scanning his vast resume should tell you just how low this must be, but he was acting in as many films as he could to pay for the care of his wife Helene, who was suffering from emphysema. She would die four years later and by all accounts, he never recovered.

This played on double bills with the 1962 Italian film Slaughter of the Vampires.