Also known as Ninja Killers or A Real Man, this started as Tou tiao hao han. Directed by Min-Hsiung Wu and written by Yang Ho, it was remixed in the U.S. by William C.F. Lo and Richard S. Brummer, who edited New Year’s Evil, Schizoid, Godmonster of Indian Flats, and Alabama’s Ghost, and did sound editing and effects for plenty of Russ Meyer movies. He ran the boom mic on Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! 

This was distributed by Ellman Film Enterprises, who also put the original The Toy, Scream Bloody Murder, Will to Die, Panorama Blue, Coed Dorm, Diabolic Wedding, The Loves of Liszt and The Gatling Gun into grindhouses and drive-ins.

To Pa (director Mo Man-hung) and his Eagle Claw Fighting Clan are trying to rob some gold but are stopped — at first — by Chen Chen Chow, the Lightning Whipper (Ma Kei). Yes, despite having a name like that, they are able to kill the hero, but Lei Peng (Yik Yuen) takes the gold back and plans on returning it to the government. To Pa reacts to this by killing his entire family, except for his son, who is saved by Lady Tieh (Mo Man-ha).

Chen (Chiang Ming) and Mu Lan (Chang Ching-ching), the children of the Lightning Whiper, are able to save Lei Peng from prison. This allows all of them to join up and take the fight back to To Pa.

This has kung-fu vampires, a dude called the One-Man Army because he can hypnotize people before hitting them with his wild double swords, the “Solar Ray of Death,” and a bad guy who loses his arms but gains the kind of martial-arts weapons you watch these movies for. 

You used to be able to buy this for a dollar, but now, someone will put it out on 4K UHD and ask for $70. At least you’ll get a slipcover.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Russ Meyer made Fanny Hill in 1964, the Oliver Reed version I watched numerous times on Cinemax was in 1983, and Tinto Brass made Paprika in 1991. But this is the Swedish version, and the American print ads didn’t just say “from the makers of”; they said “from the country that gave you I, A Woman, Inga, I Am Curious (Yellow).” Yes, the whole country made this.

Actually, Mac Ahlberg directed and wrote it. He made all of the I, A Woman movies as well as working as the cinematographer on Hell Night, The Seduction, Parasite, Chained Heat, The Graduates of Malibu High, Dolls, House, Good Burger and Re-Animator. 

Diana Kjær is Fanny. Maybe you know her from Dagmar’s Hot Pants, Inc. Anyway, she’s a girl from the country who has become a sex worker. A rich older man, Jan Wilhelmsson, falls for her, and when he dies, she’s in the will. This allows her to support a past lover, Roger (Hans Ernback).

In the November 19, 1969 issue of Variety, this film was listed as the top movie in the U.S. 

There would be a sequel, Around the World with Fanny Hill, starring Shirley Corrigan. She was also in Devil’s Nightmare, Dr. Jekyll vs. the Werewolf and Who Killed the Prosecutor and Why?

Les Tremayne, who was one of the most popular and well-known voices of the Golden Age of Radio, working on shows like The Jackie Gleason/Les Tremayne Show, Ford Theatre, Inner Sanctum, The Whistler and more. He even had a breakfast show with his second wife. As entertainment moved into television, he was all over the dial, as well as showing up in movies like The War of the Worlds, The Monolith Monsters, The Monster of Piedras Blancas, The Fortune Cookie, Forbidden Planet, The Angry Red Planet, King Kong vs. Godzilla and The Slime People. He even played Big Daddy Hogg on The Dukes of Hazzard, Dr. Frankenstein on The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo and the titlular mentor on Shazam!

None of those roles could have prepared him — or us — for Fangs.

As Snakey Bender, Tremayne plays a man of obsessions, obsession that we as mortal people just may not understand. There’s one day a week that he cares about and that’s Wednesday. On that day, he makes his journey into town where he visits the attractive schoolteacher Cynthia (Bebe Kelly, If You Don’t Stop It… You’ll Go Blind!!!), whose students perform the task of hunting down small rodents for him so that his beloved pets — he claims to be part snake by the way — have some food for the week. Then he harasses the general store employees before meeting up with his one true friend, Burt (Richard Kennedy), and they have a concert where they blast the music of John Philip Sousa.

Basically, Snakey is one of those people who seem harmless but if one thing impacts their life’s routine, the mental damage will not be visited upon him. No, it will be meted out to everyone in his path.

The first chinks in his armor appear when Brother Joy starts preaching against him, saying that snakes are the devil’s animals and that he’s making the children play on the left hand path.

And then Burt marries Ivy (Janey Wood, Pamela from Terror at Red Wolf Inn).

Unlike Snakey, Burt realizes that he’s old and that if he wants to marry a showgirl who really only cares about his money but will give him the kind of companionship a life of hard work deserves, well, he’s going to do it. And sure, the Wednesday concerts will end for awhile, but what’s the harm in that?

You can just imagine how Snakey reacts.

Actually, you can’t. Because things get worse.

It turns out that that schoolteacher likes having the snakes around because those visits are conjugal. That’s right, while Snakey is out with the kids, she’s doing whatever one does with a snake in a Biblical way. Her secret gets outed to the general store owners Bud and his lesbian sister Sis, who is played by Alice Nunn, who really has the best cameo of all time as Large Marge in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure who start blackmailing her, cutting off Snakey’s rodent supply and therefore pushing him on the path to no return.

The weirdest thing about this movie is that it has such a level of scum and sleaze all over it yet has no nudity and little to no violence. Heck, it barely has all that many snakes in it. But what it has is a man who realizes that the world is changing around him and no matter what he does, it keeps moving past him. And people use his snakes as sermons or for pleasure but never really see him as anything other than that old weird man from the desert that lives with all the serpents. Except the kids, and when the kids aren’t allowed to see him and hunt vermin, well, I mean, how dare you take away vermin-gathering little ones from an old man ready to explode?

Somehow, Snakey becomes a Bond villain, able to kill people with all manner of objects and traps and, yes, snakes. All along, he told the townspeople how moronic they were and now, he’s proving it. You should have let him keep air conducting and marching around the house and paying kids for mice and just let him be. But some people have Hell inside them and you should just keep them on their maze-like path so that they don’t solve the riddle inside their head and realize that they’d be better off if they just went and killed you.

Also known as Snakes, Snakelust and the wonderful title Holy Wednesday, this was directed and co-written with John T. Wilson by Art Names, who was mostly a sound man on all sorts of movies, including being the post-production sound guy for The Astrologer, which had to be the kind of experience that destroys your mind. Actually, his sound resume is packed with aberrant films that I adore, such as Alligator; Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker; Savage Streets and The Jesus Trip. He and Wilson also co-wrote Girl in Gold Boots and The Black Klansman, so their partnership wasn’t a one and done on the weird writing ability.

By direct, I mean he put the camera down and said action, really. You don’t really consider the direction or cinematography in this, but that’s the best part of it. It just plays out in front of you, with you as the casual observer to one man’s meltdown. He just wants to be alone with his snakes and needs the help of others. And he needs that one night of marching band concerts. I guess it really was too much to ask, huh?

There are weird movies that have been made to be weird and there are weird movies made because someone had a vision that perhaps nobody could ever understand. This would be the latter and that’s perfect. My dream is to go back in time and sit in a drive-in where the blockbuster baiting tagline for this movie got some cars in the lot and then this starts playing and people start wondering, “What is this? Who is this for? Why did they make this?”

Movies are awesome, everyone.

What happens when you mix a teen sex comedy with a gore film? It’s kind of like chocolate and peanut butter, one would think, but the results don’t always taste as good. Witness 1985’s Evils of the Night.

Three vampire aliens, Dr. Zarma (Julie Numar, who of course is the Catwoman, but is also a writer, real estate mogul and lingerie inventor), Cora (Tina Louise, who is of course Ginger from TV’s Gilligan’s Island) and Dr. Kozmar (John Carradine, who is of course skinny Dracula), have come to a college town to get the blood of young co-eds, which keeps them young.

There’s also Neville Brand (Al Capone from TV’s The Untouchables) and Aldo Ray (whose career trajectory goes from the highest of heights to the lowest of lows) as two old mechanics that are helping the aliens. As for the teens, we’ve got Tony O’Dell (Ferdy in Chopping Mall), Karrie Emerson (who was also in Chopping Mall), 80’s adult movie queen Amber Lynn and “Raw Talent” Jerry Butler, who was also a well-known adult film star.

Director Mardi Rustam (who wrote and produced Psychic Killer and Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive) is the person to blame for all of this. If you’re used to sex in the woods looking fake and feeling gratuitous, then this film will decimate your sensibilities. It feels like porn sex could literally break out at any minute, but the only penetration is when one of the girls gets drilled. With a drill. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Along the way, there are lesbian aliens, spaceships, axe murders, the Millenium Falcon on the poster for the movie, rings that shoot lasers, John Carradine in a space suit and more.

You can also blame Aquarius Releasing for this one, the fine (well, maybe not fine) folks who brought Dr. Butcher, M.D., Zaat, Deep Throat, Make Them Die Slowly (Cannibal Ferox) and Silent Night, Deadly Night to 42nd Street. They also released The Beyond as Seven Doors of Death, cutting out plenty of gore along the way to get an R rating.

Look, this movie is terrible. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t entertaining. The pathos at the end when one of the mechanics laments his dead friend are poignant. You could find a worse movie at 4 AM to watch.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Robert Craig Knievel was the hero of my childhood. After all, who else was brave, insane or dumb enough to attempt more than 75 ramp-to-ramp motorcycle jumps in his life, a life that should have ended way shorter than the 69 hellacious years that he lived on this planet with?

How does one become a daredevil? For Evel — who was given that name by a jail guard — it all started with rodeos, ski jumping and pole vaulting. Upon returning from the army, he started a semi-pro hockey team, the Butte Bombers. In one of their games, where they played against the Czechoslovakian Olympic ice hockey team, Evel was ejected from the game minutes into the third period and left the stadium. When the Czechoslovakian officials went to collect the money for playing, they learned that it had been stolen.

After the birth of his son, Evel started the Sur-Kill Guide Service, which was really just a front for poaching in Yellowstone National Park. He was arrested for this and then hitchhiked with a 54-inch rack of antlers the whole way to Washington to plead his case.

It was around this time that Evel decided to stop committing crimes — don’t worry, he kept up with them — and get into motorcycle riding. A broken collarbone and reading Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude led to Evel working for the Combined Insurance Company of America, a job he held for a few months until they wouldn’t promote him to vice president after a few months. Whew Evel! And then a failed Honda dealership led him to work for Don Pomeroy at his motorcycle shop, where the owner’s son Jim taught him how to do a wheelie.

This led Evel to do his first stunt show that he promoted entirely on his own, even serving as his own MC. He did a few wheelies and then jumped a box filled with rattlesnakes and mountain lions. This is where you either say, “This is stupid” or become fascinated. Me? How awesome is it to have a box filled with dangerous wildlife and decide to jump a motorcycle over it? Yep, this is why I was obsessed with Evel as a child.

This led to an obsession with jumping more things — like cars — and the unfortunate side effect of getting hurt nearly every time. He crashed around twenty times — huge, incredibly violent crashes — and his Guinness Book of World Records entry states he suffered 433 bone fractures by the end of 1975.

In Evel’s 1999 autobiography, he published this photo, which showed his many, many broken bones and injuries. You can learn more at http://www.stevemandich.com/evelincarnate/knievelinjuries.htm

Evel crashed at Caesar’s Palace. He crashed jumping Pepsi trucks. He crashed outside the Cow Palace. And then he started dreaming big — he wanted to jump teh Grand Canyon. Why? Take it from the man himself: “I don’t care if they say, “Look, kid, you’re going to drive that thing off the edge of the Canyon and die,” I’m going to do it. I want to be the first. If they’d let me go to the moon, I’d crawl all the way to Cape Kennedy just to do it. I’d like to go to the moon, but I don’t want to be the second man to go there.”

The government would never allow Evel to do this. It’s even a big part of this movie — just look at the posters. Finally, he’d jump Snake River Canyon, an event whose close circuit telecast bombed, almost bankrupting a young Vince McMahon Jr. before he even bought his father’s WWF. He used the Skycycle and nearly drowned when again he failed to make the jump.

A year later, Evel would crash again jumping thirteen buses in front of Wembley Stadium. After the crash, despite breaking his pelvis, Knievel made it to his feet and talked to the crowd, announcing his retirement: “Ladies and gentlemen of this wonderful country, I’ve got to tell you that you are the last people in the world who will ever see me jump. Because I will never, ever, ever jump again. I’m through.” Frank Gifford begged him to go out on a stretcher, but Evel said “I came in walking, I went out walking!”

Of course, Evel was a carnie and kept on pulling off stunts until 1977, when a Jaws-inspired leap broke both his arms and nearly blinded a cameraman.

The life of Evel is a complicated story to tell. On one hand, he was an entertainer, out there in a jumpsuit covered with stars and a cape. On the other, he was a man who believed in keeping his word and battling the evils of drugs (a Hell’s Angel threw a tire iron on stage during one of his jumps as he had often battled against the group for being drug dealers and he ended up putting three of them in the hospital). And on another hand, he lost his Ideal Toy and Harley Davidson endorsements when he went wild on Shelly Saltsman, a sports promoter, Hollywood producer and author of the book Evel Knievel on Tour, which alleged that Evel used drugs and abused his family. To get back at him, despite having two broken arms, Evel cornered him on the 20th Century Fox backlot and beat him unmerciful with a baseball bat.

When the news of Knievel’s attack came up on the news, Saltman’s elderly mother had a heart attack and died three months later. Evel got a six month work furlough and was ordered to pay $12.75 million in damages, money he never paid. After the stunt icon’s 2007 death, Saltman decided to sue his estate for $100 million US dollars with interest, but he never got a dime before he died in 2019.

As for Evel, even his death was an event. His packed funeral was presided over by Pastor Dr. Robert H. Schuller — who baptized Evel in 2007 at his Crystal Cathedral, which led to an influx of new parishioners — with Matthew McConaughey giving the eulogy. But first — there were fireworks. Before he died, Evel said that he “beat the hell out of death.”

I told you all that to tell you about this movie.

The film begins with Evel — played by George Hamilton — giving a speech directly to us, the viewer: “Ladies and gentlemen, you have no idea how good it makes me feel to be here today. It is truly an honor to risk my life for you. An honor. Before I jump this motorcycle over these 19 cars — and I want you to know there’s not a Volkswagen or a Datsun in the row — before I sail cleanly over that last truck, I want to tell you that last night a kid came up to me and he said, “Mr Knievel, are you crazy? That jump you’re going to make is impossible, but I already have my tickets because I want to see you splatter.” That’s right, that’s what he said. And I told that boy last night that nothing is impossible. Now they told Columbus to sail across the ocean was impossible. They told the settlers to live in a wild land was impossible. They told the Wright Brothers to fly was impossible. And they probably told Neil Armstrong a walk on the moon was impossible. They tell Evel Knievel to jump a motorcycle across the Grand Canyon is impossible, and they say that every day. A Roman General in the time of Caesar had the motto: “If it is possible, it is done. If it is impossible, it will be done.” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I live by.”

Then we get a movie version of Evel’s life. It was originally written by Alan Caillou, who played King Sancho in The Sword and the Sorcerer. Hamilton wanted John Milius to rewrite it. Upon reading the original script, he launched it into Hamilton’s pool and beat it with an oar. That meant that he was the new writer.

Milius would go on to say that he preferred the final product to many of the other films shot from his scripts. “They didn’t restrain it or tone it down, they shot the script. The guy is just as obnoxious and full of hot air as he was in the script. Just as full of life and vitality too. He’s Evel Knievel! He wouldn’t take a dime off of anybody.”

Hamilton would later tell Pop Entertainment, when asked about the film, “The thing about it is at that time Evel was not famous. When we made that movie he took a jump over the fountains and splattered. He had not become a Mattel toy at that time. I put a writer on it named John Milius – who later wrote Apocalypse Now. He was the best of the writers of that era. I got him to write the script for me. Then Milius made me read the script to Evel. I realized he was kind of a sociopath and was totally messed. Then all of sudden Evel started to adopt lines out of the movie for himself. So his persona in the movie became more of his persona in real life. He would have been every kid’s hero on one hand, but then he went and took that baseball bat and broke that guy’s legs and that finished his career in the toy business. Evel was very, very difficult and he was jealous of anybody that was gonna play him. He wanted to portray himself and he did go and make his own movie later on. He had a great perception of this warrior that he thought he was and that was good. Then he had this other side of himself where he’d turn on you in a minute. Success is something that you have earn. You have to have a humility for it, because it can leave you in a second. It may remember you but it can sure leave you. I think if you don’t get that and you don’t have gratitude for what you are and where you are it doesn’t come back and it goes away forever.”

Evel Knievel ends with our hero successfully making a jump at the Ontario Motor Speedway and driving to a dirt road that leads to the Grand Canyon — which is about 456 miles if you take I-40. Again, he looks right at the camera and says, “Important people in this country, celebrities like myself — Elvis, Frank Sinatra, John Wayne — we have a responsibility. There are millions of people that look at our lives and it gives theirs some meaning. People come out from their jobs, most of which are meaningless to them, and they watch me jump 20 cars, maybe get splattered. It means something to them. They jump right alongside of me — they take the bars in their hands, and for one split second, they’re all daredevils. I am the last gladiator in the new Rome. I go into the arena and I compete against destruction and I win. And next week, I go out there and I do it again. And this time — civilization being what it is and all — we have very little choice about our life. The only thing really left to us is a choice about our death. And mine will be — glorious.”

Sue Lyon, who debuted as Lolita in the film of the same name, plays Evel’s woman. She’d go on to be in all manner of movies that I could go on for hours about like End of the World and Alligator.

George Hamilton seems as far from the real Evel as you can get. But he was a carnie too, as Milius related that Hamilton was “A great con-man, that’s what he really is. He always said, “I’ll be remembered as a third-rate actor when in fact, I’m a first-rate con man.””

Evel made one more movie. You should watch it: Viva Knievel!

You can watch this on Tubi or download it on the Internet Archive.

An adaptation and modern-day update of Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, this was the second de Sade film made by Jess Franco*, but by no means the last. In fact, it’s not even the previous movie, called Eugenie, that he would make. While this one is Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion (or De Sade 70 or Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir), there’s also the better-known — and Soledad Miranda-starring — Eugenie de Sade.

Eugenie (Marie Liljedahl, Inga, Dorian Gray) has spent her entire life in a convent, and despite an exterior that drives men and women wild with lust, she’s inexperienced in the ways of the world. Her father (Paul Muller, Nana, Barbed Wire Dolls) wants to bed Madame Saint Ange (the wife of producer Harry Alan Towers who appears in 99 Women, Venus In Furs and The Bloody Judge amongst other movies; don’t judge her being in this as nepotism, because she’s amazing in this movie), who agrees as long as she can take Eugenie to her secluded island mansion, where she and her step-brother Mirvel (Jack Taylor, whose career in exploitation movies took him all over the world) can seduce her and probably each other and definitely everyone and play the kind of strange incestual games that only the super rich seem to play.

Sir Christopher Lee also shows up as the narrator for all this wallowing and also as Dolmance, the leader of a cult of fiends that drug young women and beat them with whips and yeah, Sir Christopher claims he had no idea what kind of movie he was in, which I find hilarious, because this wouldn’t be the last time he’d work with Franco. Providing his own wardrobe — the smoking jacket he wore in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace — Lee claimed that he was unaware there was a nude woman on the sacrificial altar behind him, as Franco and crew had wrapped drapery over her that they’d yank off as soon as the camera started and would then recover her when he was done with his scene. I mean, I love Jess, but sometimes he can barely focus the camera. One wonders how he’d ever had the chicanery and ability to pull one over on a man who was once quite literally a secret agent.

This movie feels like a dream. I’ve said that of other Franco movies, but trust me, a much better-realized, better-shot dream, with a score by Bruno Nicolai that makes it seem way classier than it is.

*The first is Marquis de Sade: Justine.

After studying at USC, director Richard Franklin returned to Australia, where he directed four episodes of the Australian police drama Homicide before making this film and Fantasm. Based on the folk poem “The Ballad of Eskimo Nell,” which is about well-endowed Dead-Eye Dick and sidekick Mexican Pete being unable to satisfy sex worker Eskimo Nell, this finds Dead-Eye Dick (Max Gillies) as a common peeper. He discovers a husband about to kill Mexico Pete (Serge Lazareff) for sleeping with his wife, so he saves him, and they head to Alaska to find Nell.

Franklin says it was never his intention to make a sex comedy, as he wanted to make something like Midnight Cowboy. The poem is known only in what Franklin called the English world of Canada, Australia, and England, so it had limited hopes in the U.S. However, as government funds were used to make this movie, a softcore comedy, people were not happy. Franklin said, “The theatres were picketed, and it was actually fairly successful in terms of damaging the picture. I thought it would be great publicity, but the one thing people don’t want to hear is that tax dollars have been wasted. The minute they hear that, they’re less inclined to throw good money after bad, if you see what I mean. So the film was not successful.”

It also didn’t help that a British film based on the same poem, Eskimo Nell, was released at the same time, when it didn’t make it to Australia until 1976, when it was called The Sexy Saga of Naughty Nell and Big Dick.

Or that sex symbol Abigail was upset about being fully frontal in this film. A public rift was reported in the Australian press between Franklin and the singer/actress, with the headline “Movie Producer Abigail: He Used My Body.”

If The Alaska Kid is familiar, it’s because he’s played by pro wrestler Paul “Butcher” Vachon.

Also known as The Equinox … A Journey into the Supernatural and The Beast, this movie was directed by Jack Woods and Dennis Muren. It started as a $6500 film that Muren made with his friends Dave Allen, Jim Danforth and Mark McGee while he was in business classes at Pasadena City College. Strangely enough, Ed Bagley Jr. was one of the cameramen!

Producer Jack H. Harris hired editor Woods to add enough footage to make this a full-length film. When the final movie was released, Muren was listed as the associate producer, even though he directed the entire movie and created many of the effects.

Four teenagers — David Fielding, Susan Turner, Jim Hudson (Frank Bonner, who would go on to be Herb Tarlek on WKRP in Cincinnati) and Jim’s girlfriend, Vicki — have gone looking for a lost scientist named Dr. Arthur Waterman, who is played by Fritz Leiber. Leiber isn’t just any actor. Nope, he’s one of the foremost fantasy authors of all time and the person who actually came up with the term sword and sorcery. He was brought into this project by Famous Monsters of Filmland editor Forrest J. Ackerman.

They have a picnic — as you do when you’re in the foreboding woods — then make their way to a mysterious castle. They also learn that Dr. Waterman’s cabin has been destroyed, and even worse, the demon Asmodeus (played by Jack Woods, the new director, when he’s a park ranger at least) is hunting them with his army of monsters. He really goes after them once they get a book of spells from an old man inside a cave. Those monsters — a giant ape and a green-furred giant — are marvels of stop-motion. Our heroes barely escape as the ape kills the old man.

It turns out the book belonged to Dr. Waterman, who used it to conjure demons of his own, but lost control of a tentacled beast that destroyed his home. After Asmodeus kills Jim, he reveals his true form as a winged demon. Dave and Susan are killed before our remaining teens, Dave and Susan, make their way to a cemetery.

After a battle with Asmodeus, they destroy the demon with a giant cross, which causes the cemetery to explode, killing Susan. Another giant monster appears and tells Dave that he will die in one year and a day, which drives him insane. The movie quickly moves to that time, where we see Susan — now looking totally evil — showing up at his insane asylum.

The entire crew that made this movie did so much more afterward. Muren would go on to become a nine-time Oscar-winning visual-effects artist for his work on Star Wars and Jurassic Park. Danforth would create matte and stop-motion work for The Thing, Creepshow, Clash of the Titans, and Prince of Darkness, among others. Mark McGee, who was in high school when he worked on this film and was already writing for Famous Monsters (he’s the one who got connected with Leiber and brought Forry along to be a doctor’s voice), wrote the scripts for Sorority House Massacre II and Sorceress, both movies directed by Jim Wynorski. Finally, David Allen would go on to work on everything from Flesh Gordon, Laserblast and The Howling to Full Moon efforts like the Puppet Master series and The Dungeonmaster.

You can see the influence of Equinox on movies like Evil Dead and Phantasm. It’s the bridge between the Ray Harryhausen stop motion movies they loved and the occult-tinged efforts that would make up 1970s genre films. This is a movie packed with ideas and talent.

Jamaa Fanaka may have been one of the leading directors of the L.A. Rebellion film movement, but he’s probably best known for his Penitentiary films. Born Walter Gordon, he changed his name so that anyone seeing his movies would know that he was black. Working alongside one of the professors in the African Studies department at UCLA, he came up with the name Jamaa Fanaka, which means “through togetherness we will find success.”

Emma Mae is his first full-length movie, written when he was still in college. It’s the story of a young woman (Jerri Hayes) moving from the deep south to Los Angeles, where she falls in love with Jesse Amos (Ernest Williams III), who soon goes to jail along with Zeke (Charles David Brooks III) for fighting the police.

Also known as Black Sister’s Revenge, it follows Emma Mae as she tries to raise cash to get her man out of jail, starting with a car wash and ending with a bank robbery, only to learn that he never loved her. She then beats him into oblivion, a moment not often seen in film. She reclaims who he is and moves on.

Fanaka would make wilder pictures, but this is an excellent introduction to how he was trying to tell the black experience, even if it is episodic and wanders a bit.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Italian movie logic: Emanuelle in Bangkok is the sequel to Black Emanuelle, and Black Emanuelle 2 is not.

Photojournalist Emanuelle (as always Laura Gemser) and her archaeologist friend Roberto (Gemser’s husband Gabriele Tinti) are on a series of journeys, whether it’s to meet a Thai king or explode caves in Casablanca or meet a special masseuse or being too close to Prince Sanit (Ivan Rassimov) or Roberto forcing her to choose between him and a female lover Debra (Debra Berger, who was in the Tobe Hooper version of Invaders from Mars).

Like all the D’Amato Emanuelle movies, these films go from narrative to travelogue to mondo, with simulated moments of lovemaking standing in stark contrast to real moments of horrifying violence, like a battle between a mongoose and a snake. And that ping pong trick that other movies joke about? This movie has it.

Yet it’s also a movie that synchronizes pistons on a ship with the first lovemaking scene like high art and has a heroine that refuses to be possessed no matter how many men try to destroy her, breaking hearts and remaining independent and perhaps it’s my hope for a better world and my innocence that I see something life-affirming in the Black Emanuelle films, a series of movies devoted to softcore lovemaking interspersed with brutality. But hey — that’s me.