It’s so strange to see a restrained Renato Polselli. But soon enough, he’d have literal insanity on the screen and we’d all be there for every moment. Until then, there’s this dramatic film in which a woman has her husband’s estate taken, him thrown out of their house and gets custody of their two children. The man flees to Italy with the children and fights for his rights, which is ahead of its time for 1964.

It was written by its star, Vincenzo Cascino, who also made 7 Golden Women Against Two 07, Le sette cinesi d’oro and produced Polselli’s The Sheriff Won’t Shoot. Polselli would often find himself working with actors who either wrote or produced their own films.

Cascino plays Lorenzo, an Argentinian industrialist married — and not happily — to Erika (Lisa Gastoni). Working with her lawyer Emilio Bernasconi (Umberto D’Orsi), she gets him in a sleazy takedown with another woman, seizes the estate and takes their children. For some reason, Lorenzo starts hearing voices in his head and, this being a Polselli movie, much of the film is given to jazz music parties with women dancing, including Solvi Stubing (Strip Nude for Your Killer), Annie Gorassini (Danger: Diabolik) and Gloria Paul (3 Supermen a Tokyo).

You can watch this on YouTube.

In the great Jay Slater biography and interview I found on Renato Polselli, he says, “In 1961, Polselli found critical success with Ultimatum alla vita and Avventura al motel. Ultimatum alla vita is a war drama in which women prisoners of the Germans begin to fight for the partisan cause. The film won a number of awards and was particularly well-received in France. Polselli freely admits that World War II affected him during the German occupation of Italy. “Minor Italian films such as All the Girls Are Going to Stop Me and From Matter to Life made me stop and think. These films were not only important to me personally, but for all the people of Italy. They conveyed social concerns regarding the war and Italy’s situation after the Allies left. In the 50s, Italian cinema found it difficult to raise these questions and answer our doubts.” Polselli switches his mood to one of deep thought and utter seriousness. “I knew that in the 50s, Italian cinema was restrained in what it could say. So, I decided to make films that could ask questions and try to raise more dangerous topics. One such film I saw at the cinema, now lost, was critical of the American invasion of Italy. The politicians were afraid of movies like this, and tried to ban them.” While on the subject of Ultimatum alla vita, Polselli changes direction and starts talking about mistreating his actors! “I have never really had a problem with actors in my films. The only actor who gave me trouble was Fabrizio Capucci, who plays the role of ‘Hans’ in Ultimatum alla vita. Capucci was always so stupid and full of himself. Eventually, after putting up with his behavior, I beat him up! After that, Capucci was fine on set and did what I asked of him.”

I kind of love that Italian directors have no issues with telling you that they physically fought their actors.

He goes on: “Avventura al motel was a sexual farce, very much like the teenage American comedies of the early 80s in which the characters were obsessed with losing their virginity. The film is a simple story in which couples attempt to screw in a motel, but are always disturbed before they can get down to the dirty deed. Avventura al motel was very successful at the Italian box office.”

Unfortunately, I can’t find a copy of Ultimatum alla vita, but I have seen Avventura al motel.

It’s pretty wild when you realize the excesses that Polselli would later unleash, but this is a light and frothy sex comedy in which a starlet and a pilot, two bit Casanovas, an industry manager and his secretary, and several others all have sexual hijinks in a fancy hotel. It was written by Polselli with Giovanni Grimaldi and Bruno Corbucci and stars Italian Western icon Anthony Steffen, comedy team Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia, Margaret Lee (Asylum Erotica AKA Slaughter Hotel) and Eva Bartok (Blood and Black Lace).

You can watch this on YouTube.

I mean, if you made a movie just for me, this would be it.

This had to be sent to the Italian censorship board twice, as they said that the film “consists of a rambling series of sadistic sequences, meant to urge, through extreme cruelty mixed with degenerate eroticism, the lowest sexual instincts.”

Also called Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel Trecento…(Rites, Black Magic and Secret Orgies in the Fourteenth Century…) and The Reincarnation of Isabel, this was written and directed by Renato Polselli, who also made Delirio Caldo, The Vampire and the Ballerina and Revelations of a Psychiatrist on the World of Sexual Perversion.

Hundreds of years ago, Isabella (Rita Calderoni, Nude for Satan) was tortured and burned for being a witch as her lover swore revenge. Then we meet Jack Nelson (Mickey Hargitay, making some wild movies as always) and his stepdaughter Laureen (also Calderoni) who are celebrating her engagement in a castle without knowing that the cellar is host to the black magic rites of the title. And if they get seven sets of eyes and the blood of virgins, they can bring back Isabella.

Any time this movie feels like it’s getting boring or starting to make sense, it cuts to either sex scenes or murder or Satanic rituals and you know, more movies could learn from what it was all about. I can only imagine the kind of parties that Polselli used to host.

There are also vampires, because this movie is also known as The Ghastly Orgies of Count Dracula.

You know, I never dated many girls who wore makeup before my wife. But there was one that was taking her time putting on makeup and she was putting on false eyelashes and I was trying to say that she didn’t need all that makeup and lashes and she said, “I’m doing it for me. And you. So let me get hot for you.” I wish I had seen this movie before I dated her, because man, the fake eyelashes in this are doing something to me.

Mickey (George Bashra, who also directed and wrote this film) and his wife Sophie (Maya Stange) have taken their kids Janelle (Ria Maric) and Jake (Finnian James) on a nice quiet holiday break. The kind that has no phone service or internet, the kind that kids hate. Of course, Mickey is an old soldier and when the family finds some mysterious packages, he must save his wife and kids from an army of trained killers.

This Australian action film has made its way to America on Tubi and if you can get past some of the thicker accents, you’ll find an enjoyable film. I mean, how often do you try and fix a big screen TV and find the kind of contraband that someone sends an entire army of mercenaries to retrieve?

“What are you going to do?” asks Sophie.

“What I’m trained to do,” answers Mickey.

These are the kind of guys who threaten a man’s entire family, as you expect for 80s action movie villains, and you know that Mickey’s one weakness is his love for them. You know they’ll be in danger but you also trust that he has a rage inside him that he was keeping inside for years.

Of course, these guys fought Mickey in Afghanistan and killed his brother Noah. Now they want revenge, people who once used to be his friends and now have become men who fight war to make money. Mickey trained most of them and now he has to kill them all.

The film also has a flashback to Afghanistan and shows what happened: Mickey wouldn’t allow them to kill civilians. I’m shocked there aren’t scenes of these guys pie facing children and kicking grandmothers to make them even more sinister.

That said, the fights are pretty great and I liked how each of the henchmen — and woman — have their own personality, kind of like Dreadnoks from G.I. Joe. I mean, they’re Australian, too. Despite all these odds, you never really count Mickey and his family out. That said, isn’t that what these movies are all about?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Crazy World…Crazy People was directed by Renato Polselli, who co-wrote the film with Giuseppe Pellegrini, who wrote and did second unit work on several of Polselli’s early movies.

A group of young musicians work with Maurizio, an older vaudeville actor (Posani), to organize a show that only gets on the stage thanks to girlfriends and Elvezia Allori, the actor’s wife (France Polesello). One of those musicians is Claudio Natili, who twenty years later would score Fulci’s The Devil’s Honey.

Thea Fleming also appears and is even on some of the posters. She showed up in several Eurospy movies like SuperSeven Calling Cairo, From the Orient With Fury and Operation Counterspy. Franco Latini is in the cast as well and he was the voice for Stan Laurel, as well as several muppets and the Italian dub voice of Skeletor and Donald Duck.

The film itself is a fake mondo about the concert and the issues of it getting to the public. It has none of the other outright insanity that you can find in Polselli’s other movies.

Revelations of a Psychiatrist on the World of Sexual Perversion is a mondo film that draws from real newspaper headlines to show the sexual sick truth, as I’m certain an American trailer would say if this movie had ever emerged from its native Italy. Directed and written by Renato Polselli, it has a psychiatrist named Dr. Froodman explaining the deviancy that he has seen to a group of his students.

If this was shocking in 1973, when it first came out, it would be even more shocking in 1979. In fact, some of the adult scenes would still feel taboo in 2023, as two men touching one another, even with a female third present, doesn’t often appear in mainstream adult.

There are all manner of perversions here — and if you get what they are just by the name like me, well, you have some issues — including zooerastia, nymphomania, necrophilia, fetishes and gerontophilia. Even one of the students gets involved, as she explains why she fell for an older adult man while just a child; his abuse of her is just one reason why this happened. And the doctor is not above sharing the story of his servant who lost his virginity at the late age of 44 to someone of the third sex, as they say in these mondo films.

A lot of the inserts were either staged with a totally different cast or taken directly from American loops. You have to love the Italian exploitation industry, as they have no fear when it comes to being outright thieves. Polselli used his Ralph Brown name for this; the cast has a few notable people in it, including Isarco Ravaioli as the professor (he’s also in The Throne of Fire, Polselli’s Mania and Oscenità, Satanik, Danger: Diabolik and a few Sartana and Django Clones); Franca Gonella (Diabolicamente… Letizia and Luigi Rosso’s Beauty and the Beast); Bruna Beani (the priestess in The Eerie Midnight Horror Show, Byleth: The Demon of Incest) and Melissa Chimenti, who was Papaya in Joe D’Amato’s Papaya: Love Goddess of the Cannibals. As most of those movies are filled with either sex, violence or sex and violence, you should know what you’re getting into here.

At once a movie that has a girl explain her sexual desire for dogs and then shag a stuffed animal while also being a film that closes with the line “We are all spent beings desperately trying to walk towards infinity,” this barrage of rapid cuts and filth is pretty much Polselli from here on out.

Directed by Stefan Brogen (Obsessed to Death), Twisted Neighbor is all about the NeighborNews app, which is a lot like the NextDoor app that Tubi has a Vice documentary about (VICE News Presents: Vigilante, Inc.) and how it takes over the residents of the gorgeous Sunny Vista gated community.

Ah yes, it’s Desperate Housewives without the multiseason commitment or budget, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.

Colleen Kirk (Kathryn Kohut, Obsessed to Death, Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist, Spare Parts) is the new girl on the block. She’s moved away from the big city and into this quiet suburb where she’s instantly judged by Jillian (Natalie Brown, The Strain), the leader of the neighborhood. She’s married to Dan (Zach Smadu), but cheating on him with Jared (Colton Royce) who is married to Kimberly (Josette Jorge) who is followed around by Ashton (Samantha Helt). Meanwhile, Theo (Oren Williamson) is the only one nice to her and is a schoolteacher who does mushrooms and is a cam guy. And oh, there’s also Quinn (Myles Erlick), who sells drugs.

As you can tell, there’s a lot of gossip going around this neighborhood and one of the homeowners who couldn’t keep her house up to par has already been killed. And she’s not the last person to die at the hands of an anonymous user on that app who wants Sunny Vista to stay perfect.

Colleen isn’t without her secrets, as she’s hiding the fact that her mother Vanessa (Fiona Highet) is a famous criminal who stole money from a charity that she had started. She speaks to her via a phone in jail and for most of the movie, she’s Colleen’s only friend until she decides that her past as a detective is much better than her present as a cookbook editor.

Twisted Neighbor is the kind of movie Tubi — and sick days or hungover Sundays — was made for. My favorite character was, of course, Shorty the chihuahua.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Barely released in 1974, Mania was once a lost giallo until a 35mm print surfaced in 2007 at the Cineteca Nazionale film archive in Rome, which keeps every movie submitted to censors. It’s somehow all at once a giallo, gothic horror and science fiction and refuses to make sense.

We start by meeting Lisa (Eva Spadaro) and her fiancée Lailo (Isarco Ravaiolo) as they speed along the highway with her remembering how she cheated on her husband Professor Brecht (Brad Euston, who also starred in the director’s Oscenità, a movie that is supposedly an allegory of female oppression yet contains corncob masturbation, bestiality and a lengthy lesbian orgy) with his twin brother Germano (also Euston), who is now in a wheelchair because his brother was caught in a mad scientist lab fire and his brother  —  not Lisa — could save him.  Now she’s lost her mind and is with her twin brother-in-law but also another man but oh yeah, there’s also a ghost car chasing them and Lisa is always taking her insanity up to 11.

That very same ghost attacks the housekeeper Erina (Mirella Rossi) with a plastic bag that is filled with blood by the end, but it doesn’t kill her, just scar her and take away her voice. For some reason, this makes Germano hate her and abuse her further with his wheelchair. Someone has also dropped off a model of a coffin — the same one her husband was buried in! — and her doctor tells her that the best mental health thing to do is go back to the now haunted house and face her fears.

Oh yeah. Lisa also has another maid, Katia (Ivana Giordan), who is her secret lover and when they hook up, the camera spies Erina pleasuring herself with a bottle while she secretly watches. Just in case you needed more sleaze, I guess. This somehow turns into a catfight and ends up Erina running in terror and right into Germano, who tortures her some more before using his burned-up hands to feel her up.

If it needs to get stranger, well, Lisa is attacked by a net full of snakes in the attic, saved by Erina and then those two go at it while Katia goes out into the garden and makes love to Germano atop his wheelchair.

This involves her reading mash notes from her deceased hubby who soon arrives as a zombie because why not? This is followed by her going into his crypt and this briefly being a Hammer movie until Germano decides to torture both Lisa and the housekeeper inside a futuristic BDSM machine because, look, I don’t know, this movie is awesome.

And by awesome, I mean weird as fuck.

I hesitate to give away any more. Trust me, there’s so much more. According to Eurofever, the fumetti of this movie shows page after page of graphic sex scenes that were taken from the final print. Like, you know how Erich von Stroheim supposedly shot crazy stuff that the Hayes Commission would never allow in his films? This goes there. And then it goes so much further. I mean, this is a movie that ends with a character leaping to her death and landing in a tree that — you won’t believe it — tears all of her clothes off.

The blame — or the thanks — for this goes to Renato Polselli, who also made The Vampire and the Ballerina, The Vampire of the Opera and two movies nearly as wild as this, Delirium and Black Magic Rites AKA The Reincarnation of Isabel. He pushes everyone in this cast to just go wild, so wild that Alucarda might appear and ask them to tone down all the screaming.

Claudio Fragasso was the assistant director. Do you need more to get you to watch it? How about Euston wrote it and, according to Roberto Curti’s Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1970–1979, “provided most of the money for the film himself on the condition that he was cast as the protagonist.”

This is absolute trash with a wild acid rock soundtrack that was made by a maniac, has actors overacting to a degree that they nearly destroyed reality and gorgeous women in fishnets making love just because they can. They need to invent a new galaxy for how many stars I give this movie.

You can get this from the Internet Archive.

What does it take to get your film outright banned from Italy?

This is the film that shows you.

This movie was supposed to be released in 1973, but the production company went bankrupt. Then, in 1975, it was banned by the Italian board of film review. Finally, in 1979, director and writer Renato Polselli re-cut and re-dubbed the movie to transform it into an allegory of female oppression and it was approved.

Then he decided to go for it and made an extended version with hardcore inserts that was released in adult movie theaters. That version was seized by the authorities for a few months.

A group of sinners has destroyed Mirielle (Mirella Rossi) and made her hate her body. Now, one by one, a lawyer calls them out and makes them confess their sins. I mean, yes, technically, that’s what they say this movie is about, but somehow it also has the Garden of Eden. Satanic rituals — more than one! — and just about every single form of perversion that has ever been imagined from bestiality with a donkey to nature-based masturbation with a corncob and a tree branch, as well as a candle being used, orgies, toes being inserted, whipping and just about anything else you can pull out of the filthy mind of Renato Polselli, who seems to

Obviously not available in a great quality — I can’t even imagine who would put out this movie — and it concerns the idea that in the Garden of Eden, men and women were equal but after the apple got eaten, well, men had to become masters and women the slaves and no one has been happy about it. Men treat women horribly, mothers in turn treat their sons even worse and sex — which should be a holy act — has turned into perversion.

Cue the Black Mass.

I’m obsessed with Polselli. Was he a learned man who was interested in pushing these ideas? Or was he like Joe D’Amato, someone who used sex to make money? He’s long gone — he died in 2006 — and the only interview with him I could find was on an old forum and posted by Jay Slater. It was written in 1997, nine years before he died, and in it, I learned that Polselli had a degree in philosophy and doesn’t think much of Dario Argento, saying “Argento doesn’t make real giallos. He takes five or six horrific elements and sticks them together with a very thin plot.”

This part of the interview speaks directly to this film:

“The director intended the film to be about obscenity and how it has asserted itself in the world, and through religious circles. He submitted the movie as Quando l’amore e’ oscenita’ (When Love is Obscenity) in 1973, but the Italian censors had finally had enough with the director’s films – the president of film classification remarked: “You have made a film way too tough.”

“Another way of interpreting the film is how it fights against the Italian system, and how obscenity was dealt with throughout history. I was very much against the contemporary ideas of Italian thinking, and how politicians were blinded by the church and its religious thinkers. The censors were shocked by my film, not because of its graphic imagery, but due to its political nature. Because of this, I had to re-edit and re-dub the entire film, and turned it into a feminist picture,” Polselli sighs. Six years later, he re-submitted Oscenita’ as a giallo, another illustration of ultra sexual violence against women. A three-minute presentation trailer can be found circulating between collectors of the genre, and Polselli hopes to release the original cut of Oscenita’ on video and DVD in the near future.”

New Fist of Fury is the first film Lo Wei directed — of many! — that starred Jackie Chan, who used the stage name Sing Lung which he is known in China as. It means “becoming a dragon.”

Chan had previously appeared in the original Fist of Fury as a stuntman. This movie was Lo’s attempt to market Jackie Chan as the new Bruce Lee. Chan became known for it, but didn’t become a true star until he began infusing comedy with his martial arts.

Theatrical 1976 edition: A brother and sister escape from Japanese-occupied Shanghai to Japanese-occupied Taiwan. There, they work with their kung fu teacher grandfather, who is dealing with a Japanese martial arts school that is attempting to dominate all of the other schools, even using murder to get their way. Chan plays a young thief who resists learning kung fu yet finally accepts them and becomes a master who fights the Japanese to support the rights of the Chinese people.

Rerelease 1980 version: Chan plays the same thief, but who is met earlier when he steals a pair of nunchaku from Da Yang Gate, a Japanese martial arts school. They offer him a job in their casino and when he refuses, they attack him. He’s saved by the students of the Jingwu school and is invited to their master Mao Li Uhr’s 80th birthday party. Those same Japanese martial artists attack the party, causing the master to have a heart attack and strengthening the resolve of the Jingwu to reestablish their school. Chan joins them and learns that he must defend the Chinese people.

Produced three years after Bruce Lee’s death — the movie opens with his lover Li-Er mourning the death of his character Chen Zhen — this was Chan’s first big break. Sure, he had played in uncredited roles, done stunts and smaller movies, but at one point he even moved to Australia and was working in construction. Luckily, he returned and worked hard to become the star that he is today.

This movie is fine, however, but it doesn’t establish who Jackie Chan really could be. He wasn’t the next Bruce Lee. He was the first Jackie Chan and would soon have his own copycat clones. After all, he even has a genre named after him, Jackiesploitation.

The Arrow Video blu ray release of New Fist of Fury has a new 2K restoration from the original negatives by Fortune Star for both the 120-minute theatrical cut and the 82-minute 1980 re-release. It also has commentary on the theatrical cut by martial arts cinema experts Frank Djeng and Michael Worth, co-directors of Enter the Clones of Bruce Lee and a commentary on the re-release cut by action cinema expert Brandon Bentley, who also contributed a video essay that compares this film to another sequel that came out at the same time, Fist of Fury Part II. There’s also a trailer gallery, including a Chen Zhen trailer reel of sequels and reboots; an image gallery; a double-sided fold-out poster and reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tony Stella and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by Jonathan Clements and an archival retrospective article by Brian Bankston. You can get it from MVD.