ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

Not to be confused with the killer fish movie, Piranha (1972) the Venezuelan adventure-thriller sometimes known as Piranha, Piranha, or Caribe, stars William Smith and Peter Brown, who previously worked together in the mid-sixties western TV series Laredo. 

With a plot reminiscent of The Most Dangerous Game and the later rape-revenge films, Piranha concerns wildlife photographers Art Greene (Tom Simcox) and Terry Greene (Ahna Capri) are traveling through the Amazon region with their American tour guide Jim Pendrake (Peter Brown), when they encounter Caribe (William Smith), a homicidal lunatic who enjoys stalking and hunting human prey. It’s made clear early on in the film that Terry is not a fan of guns. First, she insists they not bring one into the jungle, then she is horrified when Caribe kills animals for no reason. Of course, after Caribe violates her and starts picking members of their party off, she changes her tune. By the film’s conclusion, Terry has had enough of Caribe’s macho bullshit and offs him with…you guessed it…a gun. 

I’m not sure if the message is pro-gun or pro-feminist. More than likely, it was neither. The script by Richard Finder (just isn’t that deep as evidenced by the incredibly long motorcycle chase comprises almost one entire act. Script notwithstanding, it’s an entertaining movie and as fine an example of ‘70s “guy cinema” I’ve ever seen. A manly film with manly men doing manly things. They wear matching (and not matching) denim and shirts open to the navel accented with neckerchiefs. Remember those? A stylish way to wick moisture from the muscly necks of guys doing stuff to make them sweat in humid, emerald green jungle environments. They also double as a headband. You might need a shower and a shot of whiskey when it’s over. I know I did. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y90UWuZYzE&t=2s

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sean Collier is a writer and movie critic. Listen to his podcast, The Number One Movie in America, on all major podcast apps. Follow him on Twitter for more reviews: @seancollierpgh

It’s an Italian/American ’80s cyborgsploitation arm-wrestling action western. You know, just another one of those.

After The Terminator hit, the overarching mode of genre cinema lurched into the near future as studios and directors around the world began developing stories featuring fancy gadgets and lots of action in mild dystopias. Sergio Martino, who had already flashed forward with 1983’s 2019: After the Fall of New York, likely had little trouble conceiving this story of a cyborg with a conscience on the run from everyone.

Paco Queruak (Daniel Greene) is tasked with assassinating a cult-of-personality environmental leader — “You Have No Future,” says his on-the-nose posters — but hesitates at the last moment, merely maiming him. Drawn to the Arizona desert, he evades law enforcement until he washes up at an out-of-the-way bar and motel run by Janet Agren (Linda), who will gradually become Paco’s love interest.

It takes an awful long time to get to the reveal, but you’ll have it figured out early — Paco is a cyborg, mostly mechanical but assembled using the spare parts of a mortally wounded man. (Yes, Martino quite cleanly conceived the “Robocop” plot a couple years early.) Now he’s being pursued by three different groups — the FBI agents investigating the attack, his creators and the local arm-wrestling goon and his minions.

Oh, right — the arm wrestling.

Soon after Paco arrives in Arizona, Linda explains that her bar is a hotspot on the underground arm-wrestling scene. Paco quickly defeats the house tough, Raul (George Eastman), making himself a demented enemy; by the next day, Raul has arranged for a high-stakes match where the loser will be immediately bitten by a rattlesnake.

It goes without saying that the arm-wrestling scenes are the absolute highlight of the film. (And yes, Martino also conceived the Over the Top plot a couple years early.)

While much of the acting is wooden — Greene can’t match the level of scenery-chewing rivals such as Eastman, even if he does look good knocking a guy out with a dual backhand chop — “Hands of Steel” more than stays afloat on its style and low-budget creativity, as Martino works overtime to create memorable action sequences on a shoestring. He’s helped considerably by the Claudio Simonetti score, which marries the composer’s synth instincts with elements of ’80s smooth rock.

Unfortunately, Hands of Steel is better known (as far as it’s known at all) for tragedy, rather than its merits. While filming a tricky helicopter scene, an on-set crash killed Claudio Cassinelli, who plays a mid-level bigwig in the organization that built Paco. The excellent Italian actor — memorable for roles in The Suspicious Death of a Minor, several Hercules films and dozens of others — died instantly. (Rumor holds that John Saxon, the film’s big bad, would’ve been on the same helicopter, but insisted on filming his scenes in Italy since it was a non-union shoot in the U.S.)

Like The Twilight Zone: The Movie, it’s hard to sit back and enjoy the movie, knowing the circumstances. If you can manage it, there’s a fun blend of science fiction, western and pure style; no judgment, however, if you’d rather not approach Hands of Steel.

After Jacques Feyder refused to make a sound version of his 1921 film L’Atlantide, G.W. Pabst stepped in to make three this, shot in English, French and German with three different casts yet always having Brigitte Helm (the robot from Metropolis) in the lead.

Based on Pierre Benoit’s novel L’Atlantide, this movie has two French Foreign Legionnaires lost in the Sahara Desert when they find the very unlikely entrance to Atlantis, which is ruled over by Antinea. Yet this isn’t a movie like Stargate or one of the many matriarchal spacewomen films that would come out in the fifties. Instead, it’s a German Expressionistic dream-filled tale of what lies beneath the unexplored space of the desert and that is more unexplored space, because the Earth is vast and we are bored and yet there is so much that we have not done.

That said, the original novel is even more fantastic, with the queen presiding over a burial plot filled with the dead bodies of extinguished past lovers. Here, she’s the daughter of a dancer from our world and a tribal leader and you know, maybe we want the unreal over the real sometimes.

Brigitte Helm would retire three years later, yet was once considered to be Frankenstein’s bride. She moved to Switzerland and said that the Nazi takeover of the film industry sickened her; she made thirty movies in just seventeen years before that.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on September 21, 2021.

A section 3 video nasty, this movie was made by Rino Di Silvestro, who claimed that he wanted to make a serious werewolf movie. We should take the director of Deported Women of the SS Special Section at his word, I guess.

Daniella Neseri (Annik Borel, Weekend with the Babysitter, Truck Turner, Blood Orgy of the She-Devils) was assaulted when she was just a child, which has made her emotionally and sexually stunted and unable to have any relationships with men. Then she learns that she comes from a lineage of werewolf women, at which point she begins to have very involved dreams about being a wolf woman that manifest themselves when she gets all bothered watching her sister Elena (Dagmar Lassander, The House by the Cemetery, Hatchet for the Honeymoon) making sweet love to her man, so she responds by killing the dude, then throwing his body off a cliff because that’s how they did therapy in 1976.

Found near the body, Daniella is institutionalized before breaking away and continuing her murder spree before she finds love and respect — after killing a potential rapist — in the arms of Luca (Howard Ross, whose real name is Renato Rossini, and whose career stretched through nearly every genre of Italian exploitation, from Hercules Against the Mongols and The Man Called Noon to Marta, Naked Girl Killed in the Park and The Pyjama Girl Case to The New York Ripper and Warriors of the Year 2072).

Of course, this is an Italian horror movie and there’s no way that Luca and the werewolf woman can be happy just making love on the beach. Three men break in and assault her before killing him, so she hunts them all down before the cops arrest her. To ensure that no one learns any lessons, she’s institutionalized and dies, then her dad kills herself, then her sister, who has lost everything, just lives whatever life is left after all this.

Man, I don’t know if they knew what they had with this movie, a film that shows the institutions of men failing women on every level, including the male-directed movie that tells this story. That said, a movie where a woman equates sexual desire to being a werewolf and also she maybe is a werewolf and the knowledge that I’ve spent more time considering the psychosexual implications of this movie than the people who made it? That’s why I keep writing about films like this.

Also known as Daughter of a Werewolf, Naked Werewolf Woman, She-Wolf, Terror of the She-Wolf and Legend of the Wolf Woman, this film is something else.

Shot in 1967 around Dallas, Texas, who could foresee a time when this monster movie would be re-released in England under a whole bunch of titles like E.T.N.: The Extraterrestrial Nastie, E.T.N.: The Extraterrestrial Nasty, The Extraterrestrial Nastie and The Extraterrestrial Nasty. How did people feel when they rented this and got a movie about an alligator that mutated in space?

Directed by James A. Sullivan (who also directed Fairplay, a western family comedy, and The Pickle Goes In the Middle, a gangster comedy about taking over a fast food restaurant; he also edited Manos: The Hands of Fate and Brutal Fury) and written by Russ Marker (who himself directed The Yesterday Machine and The Demon from Devil’s Lake), this is the kind of movie where people allowed their own houses to be used for the production. No one got rich, but hey, we’re talking about this movie fifty years later.

NASA experiment Operation Noah’s Ark sends a whole bunch of animals to the moon and back just to see what will happen with them. What has happened with that kind of scientific method, the kind that says, “Just shoot a monkey into space, fuck it?” Gentlemen, tonight we’re going to blow up the moon.

Fantastic Four-style cosmic rays blast the ship, which falls back to Earth and crashes in Satan’s Hollow, Texas because Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina was, well, not near Texas where this was shot. Then some college students get the bright idea to throw a party at the crash site because, well, look kids have never been smart. The kids of the sixties who want to go back to a great America were dumb enough to party where a UFO crashed and thought ducking and covering would save them when the nukes rained down.

Sheriff Clint Crawford (John Agar) and Professor Alan Clayton (Roger Ready) know there’s only one way to kill a monster: blow it the fuck up. They do. We cheer. The end.

But anyways, Brenda Venus is in this. I am certain she is not a real person. Here’s why: she’s in movies like FM, Deathsport and this, but at some point in her life, bought a book at an auction that had Henry Miller’s address in it. She wrote to him, he wrote back and became her mentor. They wrote about 1,500 letters to one another over four years.

She’s in Night Fight.

Sure, I guess.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on March 13, 2018.

After 1990: The Bronx Warriors, director Enzo G. Castellari created this film, originally entitled The New Barbarians. The title change reflects the name New Line Cinema would use when they released the film in the United States. This movie checks off nearly every box when it comes to what it’ll take to get me to love a film: it’s Italian. It’s a ripoff of Mad Max. It has George Eastman in it. It has a big name (well, in Italy) American star, Fred “The Hammer” Williamson. It’s packed with enough weird quirks that would put off anyone else, but they made me fall in love with it. And oh yeah — Giovanni Frezza (Bob from House by the Cemetery) makes an appearance.

2019. No relation to 2019: After the Fall of New York. But after a nuclear war, a gang called the Templars take it upon themselves to purge the Earth of anyone left alive. The film starts by showing us just one of their attacks, as they take their modified cars and golf carts out for a spin, murdering a convoy of survivors. Normal humans might look ragtag and dirty, but the Templars wear all white battle armor and have punk rock hairdos. The gang is a real family affair, as Shadow (Ennio Girolami) is Castellari’s brother and Mako (Massimo Vanni) is their cousin. Their leader is George Eastman as One.

After murdering everyone they’ve found, One tears a Bible apart and proclaims, “Books. That’s what started the whole apocalypse!” and “The world is dead. It raped itself. But I’ll purify it with blood. No one is innocent. But only we, the Templars, are the ministers of revenge!” Needless to say, George Eastman is doing what he does best here: not only chewing the scenery but taking big bloody bites out of it.

Later, Scorpion (Giancarlo Prete, Escape from the Bronx, Black Belly of the Tarantula) finds the survivors of the attack and fends off some scavengers. He puts one man out of his misery and takes what’s left for himself. We follow him as he meets up with his mechanic — yep, little Bob — who lives in an armored ice cream van, ala the KLF. They have a little gun battle, as you do, just to show that they’re friends. Scorpion needs his gearshift fixed and the problem seems to be that there’s an ear stuck in it. Yep. You read that right.

The Templars are looking for The Signal, the radio station that shows where humanity is still alive. Any car they see, they destroy, including the modified UPS van that Alma is in. They impale the driver and drag him off while she’s saved by Scorpion after being caught and dragged by a net. Scorpion and Shadow have a war of words after our hero spares Mako.

You can’t tell me that Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard didn’t base the look of The Walking Dead character Princess on this film.

Anyways, Scorpion takes Alma to his base where he repairs her shoulder and makes sweet, sweet love to her. Against One’s commands, Mako leads a group of Templars against Scorpion, who is saved by Nadir (Williamson), an arrow wielding, well-dressed badass. No, seriously, let’s all drink in the magic that is Nadir.

While Scorpion uses a car to roll over Mako’s dead body, Nadir shoots one of his arrows directly into a Templar’s neck, blowing his body to bits. Our hero sends Mako’s body back to One as his answer to where he stands. Holy shit, when Nadir talks, saying stuff like, “I enjoyed…your little game…of war!” I lose my mind every single time.

One kills the rest of Mako’s men while studying the fallen man’s dead body. He yells, “We are the Templars. The warriors of vengeance. We are the Templars. The high priests of death. We have been chosen to make others pay for the crime of being alive. We guarantee that all humanity, accomplices and heirs of the nuclear holocaust, will be wiped out once and for all. That the seed of Man will be canceled forever from the face of the earth!” They honor Mako’s dead body, saying that they will take ten thousand lives for his and will now hate and exterminate. But only One will have vengeance on Scorpion.

Our three heroes then meet a caravan of religious people led by Moses who have found The Signal, the aforementioned radio signal which will lead its followers to the last civilization on Earth. Alma and Nadir decide to stay with the caravan. And why would Nadir leave after he finds such perfect companionship with Vinya, a girl with glittery eye makeup, a side ponytail, access to booze and who does the deep concentration service and biorhythmic concentration (but it’s been a while since she’s done it). Let me tell you — the entire scene where she and Nadir talk about the end of the world before he starts making out with her is ridiculous and nonsensical and so perfect.

However, Scorpion claims that “heaven is dead” and that “memories are worth nothing.” Man. He was emo before anyone knew what it meant. He walks in on Nadir, who has obviously just got done making love and says goodbye. The rest of the Templars find him in seconds and take him to One, who reinitiates Scorpion into the Templars by anally raping him. Yes, you read that right. All of the motorcycle helmet wearing dudes watch while hanging around on cars and bikes as One takes it to our hero. Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting that. He gets interrupted by a scout who tells them they’ve found the caravan and that they need to finish off Scorpion while he goes off and murders everyone else.

Luckily, Nadir gets to Scorpion just in time. Not as luckily, doing so means that the caravan gets easily overtaken. He then yells at our hero, “Here lies the great Scorpion, in pain, victim of the big, bad queers, the Templars! All you had to do was ask. Nadir, I need your help. You’re not so great now, Scorpion.” But don’t worry. One training montage later and the mechanic kid — let’s call him little Bob, as that’s what I always call Giovanni Frezza in any movie — and our heroes are back to save everyone.

One smokes some weed while listening to a tape that says, “If you could win the sky, if you could win the sky, I, this evening would have possessed the world. But I don’t want to stain my name with ridicule. Fighting against the world of endless sky. Yet, I feel that soon, I too shall breach the supreme barrier.” What? What the fuck is he listening to! The dude is just totally smoking up while everyone else is out there killing humanity!

This leads to One giving another amazing speech: “Idiots! Dreamers! Don’t you understand? The world is dead! We have all closed our eyes! Even the heavens are silent! You! And you! And you! You are walking dead! Walking corpses! There is nothing left! Nothing. Not even The Signal you think you hear. Nothing. There’s no more soul. There’s no more hope. There’s only one faith. One ecstasy. Death! And death you shall have, you last ugly dregs of humanity! You don’t deserve to live!” A car filled with dead bodies shows up and interrupts, but they realize too late…it’s a trap! Scorpion, Nadir and Bob are here to kill as many Templars as possible and save the day.

One and Scorpion have a stare down. It’s obvious that beyond the rape earlier that these guys were lovers at one point. They have to be for this much pent up hatred. One gets off the first shot, but Scorpion has on clear body armor under his cape. You have to see this shit to believe it!

Meanwhile, Shadow starts taking out people one by one, killing Moses and Wiz. But Scorpion blows him away as Nadir takes out the rest of the Templars. There’s even a scene where Bob saves Nadir, leading to a high five. Then, Scorpion tracks down One before he runs away and impales him in the ass with a drill before blowing his car up.

The survivors gather. Nadir’s woman lived. So did Alma. And one would imagine that they’ll look for The Signal, but that’s it. Scorpion and Bob hold hands as Claudio Simonetti’s synth score blares. All hail Warriors of the Wasteland!Or The New Barbarians!

I wish that Enzo G. Castellari had made ten of these movies. This is exactly why I watch movies — to be entertained, to yell at the screen, to jump up and down in glee. Exploding arrows, heads flying off, cars with domes and saw blades that hack off human heads — this one has it all! Throw in “The Hammer” as a bad ass who could pretty much carry his own movie — he’s honestly way more entertaining than the lead — and you have a winner.

Seriously — with the idea of a religious group versus an evil gay biker army, this movie seems like a Jack Chick tract come to life. Yes, after the fall of man and the rapture, only a radio signal will lead us all to heaven, that is, if you can avoid all the rapes and murder. It goes without saying that this movie has no interest in being politically correct. The fact that it has no real animals were murdered makes it as woke as Italian cinema gets.

The second of the 1960s CCC Films Dr. Mabuse film series, this movie follows up Fritz Lang’s The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. Gert Fröbe, who plays Inspector Lohmann, was the selling point in the U.S., as he had become known as Goldfinger.

The lawman is called away from his vacation to investigate a series of murders, including an Interpol agent with proof that American organized crime is working with a European crime syndicate, as well as the wife of one of that group’s members, who is killed by a flamethrower in a scene that’s pretty intense seeing as how this was made in 1961.

That woman was carrying Lohmann’s book, The Devil’s Anatomy, written by a Reverend Briefenstein of St. Thomas Church. That book has a theory: Satan is a spirit that can take the form of a werewolf, vampire or Dr. Mabuse. Yet, isn’t Dr. Mabuse dead?  A priest informs Lohmann that even though the body can die, a soul can infest the bodies of other men. At that very point, Dr. Mabuse’s voice crackles from the church’s speaker system, demanding that the investigation stop now.

Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss) now has an army of zombie criminals that he will use to take anything he wants, including giving these zombies orders to every prisoner in a jail and then sending them to destroy a nuclear power plant.

This movie would be followed by three more: The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Scotland Yard Hunts Dr. Mabuse and The Secret of Dr. Mabuse. In 1990, Claude Chabrol would bring the character back for his movie Dr. M.

This film’s director, Harald Reinl, also made the krimi The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on November 13, 2018.

Also known as Bakterion, Nightmare Killing and even Zombie 4 in Greece, this film was directed by Tonino Ricci, Fulci’s assistant director on White Fang and Challenge to White Fang.

It all starts with lab rats going nuts and killing one another, which was not what I was planning on watching while I ate my breakfast while watching this. What was I thinking?

Professor Adams has gone missing — maybe it was a fishing trip — but we all know that he’s behind all of the random killings. The government literally sends Captain Kirk (David Warbeck from The Beyond) to figure out what’s going on. He starts working with Jane (Janet Agren, Eaten Alive!, Hands of Steel) to figure out how to stop the infection and save not just the town, but soon the entire world. Yep, there’s plenty of talk about how this mutant virus could end life as we know it, yet all we see is one rotting meatloaf looking doctor.

Will the military nuke the town? Can Captain Kirk stop the worst special effect you’ve ever seen this side of Curse of Bigfoot? Will Jane feel bad for the professor, whose face looks like the inside of a stuffed pepper? Did I laugh out loud at this end credit copy?

William Beaudine made movies in almost every genre and not only that, he made tons of them. His career started in 1909 and ended in 1966 with Billy the Kid Versus Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter. He made 75 movies in the forties and Emergency Landing also known as Robot Pilot is one of seven he made in 1941. His nickname? “One Shot” because that’s all he ever used, hurrying to get movies finished and out of the way.

“Doc” Williams (Emmett Vogan) has invented a wireless remote control airplane, but he and his pilot friend Jerry Barton (Forrest Tucker) have difficulty selling it, even to Jerry’s aircraft industry boss George Lambert (William Halligan). Meanwhile, two enemy agents plan on stealing that invention and oh yeah, don’t forget the screwball comedy with George’s spoiled daughter Betty (Carol Hughes, who plays Dale Arden in the Flash Gordon serials).

There’s also a role for Billy Curtis as Judge Gildersleeve. Curtis was the Muchkin city father in The Wizard of Oz, as well as roles in Gorilla at Large, Gog, High Plains Drifter and Eating Raoul over his fifty year career.

This played on TV as early as 1945, making it one of the first films to play on that new at the time invention.