Directed by John Flynn from a screenplay by Paul Schrader and Heywood Gould, based on a story by Schrader, Rolling Thunder is the story of a man who should by all rights be dead. He might be, when you get down to it. U.S. Air Force Major Charles Rane (William Devane) has spent seven years as a POW in Vietnam. They throw a parade for him, but there’s no real joy for him back home in San Antonio. His wife, Janet (Lisa Blake Richards), has moved on, and who can blame her for needing a man? You can’t blame his son, Mark, for not seeing him as anything but a stranger. And you can’t fault the town itself for the strange way that they view him as some ghost or as an object, like Linda Forchet (Linda Haynes), the girl who wore his ID bracelet every day, sees him. There’s nothing in him to return affection or even emotion. All they can do is give him a piece of the American dream. A brand new Cadillac and 2,555 silver dollars, one for every day he was captured.

That’s when The Texan (James Best), Automatic Slim (Luke Askew), T-Bird (Charles Escamilla) and Melio (Pete Ortega) — the Acuña Boys — bust in, take those silver dollars and try to torture a man who has been tortured by the best. They mangle his hand in a garbage disposal, and when his son tries to save his dad by bringing out those silver dollars, they just shoot him. Kill his wife, too.

Only one person may know how he feels. Master Sergeant Johnny Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones). They were in Hanoi together all that time. He’s so disconnected from this world that he’s signed up for another ten years in Airborne. So when Rane uses Linda to get intel, when he finds those boys, he doesn’t even need to be asked to be in on the revenge. It’s just what has to be done.

After a disastrous test screening — Devane said, “The Mexicans set the theater on fire! They were really, really, really down on it,” Twentieth-Century Fox pretty much gave the film to American-International Pictures, who made a lot of money off it.

Part of the reason why that test screening went so badly was that the hand in the garbage disposal was much worse in the original cut of the film. It was filmed with a lamb shank for the hand, and when the scene played, writer Heywood Gould said, “One woman fainted, another person ran into the lobby and demanded his money back, and another guy was so freaked out that he entered his car in the parking lot, and crashed into another car.”

Rolling Thunder shows up in the work of Quentin Tarantino quite a bit. Beyond the company that he assembled to re-release movies — Rolling Thunder Pictures — the seven-year reference in the Christopher Walken speech in Pulp Fiction is a direct reference to how long Rane was a prisoner. There’s an Acuña Boys cup in Jackie Brown, an actual Acuña Boys gang in the second Kill Bill and an ad for a fake restaurant in Grindhouse. Is it any accident that his acting teacher was James Best?

As you can imagine, Paul Schrader didn’t like the movie. He doesn’t like it much. But I kind of love that about him, you know? In Schrader On Schrader, he says that he wrote the movie to criticize U.S. involvement in Vietnam as well as fascist and racist attitudes in America. Rane was originally written as a white trash racist, with many similarities to Schrader’s more famous character Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver. In fact, Bickle was in the script in a cameo. Schrader claims that he wrote a film about fascism, and the studio made a fascist film. There is a newspaper clipping about Rane — spelled incorrectly — at the end of Taxi Driver, so these movies are in the same cinematic universe, a term I know Schrader would attack me for using in connection with his art.

Filmed and released within four months of the late-1966 Sunset Strip curfew riots, this American-International Pictures film was directed by Arthur Dreifuss and written by Orville H. Hampton. It even has its own song, “Riot on Sunset Strip”, written by Tony Valentino and John Fleck of the Standells.

It has some of the same cast from another AIP movie, Hot Rods to Hell. In that film, Mimsy Farmer was the bad girl and Laurie Mock was the virgin. Here, they switch roles, as Farmer is Andrea Dollier, a young girl seduced by LSD and evil hippies. Aldo Ray plays Sgt. Walt Lorimer, a cop who has been trying to get along with the kids on Sunset, but when he finds his daughter sexually assaulted, he goes wild on a bunch of flower children. If only she hadn’t taken that drink laced by Herbie (Schuyler Hayden), she wouldn’t have been attacked by five boys that same night.

Beyond the music of The Standells, The Enemies and The Chocolate Watchband, we also get a long sequence of Farmer tripping out. Perhaps in my cinematic universe, her character Andrea goes on to become Estelle from More, which was made just two years later and is much franker about drug use. Maybe if her parents had stayed together, maybe if her mother, Margie (Hortense Petra), hadn’t been a drunk, maybe if her dad hadn’t been so driven to clean up the streets, all of this would never have happened.

I realize I love Mimsy Farmer on film because she’s always in trouble. Or causing it, freaking out about slashing her father, a man who always wanted a boy and got her instead or dealing with a conspiracy that wants to eat her or sunspots and autopsies. Her movie life is a nightmare, and she’s a dream, what can I say?

This movie is ridiculous, made by out-of-touch people for kids who are probably far away from Los Angeles and want a piece of the action. Therefore, I love every minute.

I get it. This movie isn’t a giallo. But what is it, really? It was sold under so many titles, from the more horror-centric Cauldron of Death (complete with a completely insane poster) to the more crime-oriented Gangland, the great Italian title Un Tipo Con una Faccia Strana ti Cerca per Ucciderti (A Guy With a Strange Face Is Looking for You to Kill You), The Dirty Mob, Mean Machine and even O Exolothreftis (The Terminator) in Greece.

It was written by Jose Gutierrez Maesso, who wrote Django and was an uncredited writer for the magical Pensione Paura. He’s joined by Santiago Moncada, who wrote A Bell from Hell, Hatchet for the Honeymoon and The Corruption of Chris Miller, along with Mario di Nardo (The Fifth Cord, Five Dolls for an August Moon). Directing all of this mayhem is Tulio Demichelli, who made the utterly insane Assignment Terror, as well as The Two Faces of Fear,  Espionage in Lisbon and the well-named There Is Someone Behind the Door.

Make no mistake — this is a movie awash with exploitation, gore, aberrant behavior and no real heroes. In short, it’s exactly the kind of movie you come to this site to read about.

Rico Aversi (Chris Mitchum) has just got out of jail, two years after Don Vito (Arthur Kennedy, the inspector from The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue) killed his father. Everyone wants Rico — notice that his name is spelled completely unlike the title of the movie — to kill the boss off, but Rico just wants to enjoy life outside of prison.

Malisa Longo (Cat in the Brain) plays his girlfriend — and who used to love Rico’s woman — and she enjoys sleeping with the hired help, which gets one unlucky member of the workstaff castrated in shocking detail. Then his John Thomas gets shoved into his mouth, and he’s dipped in acid and turned into soap. This movie is not interested in being unoffensive. Plus, you get Paola Senatore (Eaten Alive!) as Rico’s sister, whose death finally sets him on the path to revenge.

Robert Mitchum is one of my favorite actors ever, so it kind of pains me to admit this, but his son kind of slumbers through this leading role. But then again, everyone else in this movie is going to seem boring next to Barbara Bouchet, who pretty much sets the screen on fire, dances on the flames and sets it ablaze all over again in this movie. Anyone could show some leg to get the attention of some criminals. Bouchet goes all in, dancing nude on the roof of a car, covered in fog, giving her all no matter how grimy this scumfest gets. Without her, this movie would be passable. With her, it’s transcendent.

So yeah. It’s not a giallo. But man, if you’re coming in looking for bad behavior, gorgeous women and great clothes, it’s all covered.

After The Cheerleaders and The Swinging Cheerleaders, where else was there to go?

This feels like porn without the penetration and by that, I mean it feels like amateur porn and somehow, David Hasselhoff is in it as a character named Boner. There’s a moment where the cafeteria spaghetti is dosed with LSD and the entire school freaks out, ending up in the gym showers as class is cancelled and the orgy begins. There’s also a moment where one of the cheerleaders gives one of the boys a rim job while he works in an ice cream stand, which feels way ahead of its time, seeing as how it was made in 1976.

Yes, there’s a story where the adults want to combine Aloha and Lincoln High to sell the school land and make money. Everyone dances whenever they feel it. Sex solves everything.

Speaking of sex, Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith is in this and was actually pregnant while it was being made. This is even worked into the plot, as much as the dinosaur theme park is. She’s holding her real son, Justin Sterling, at the end. His father, John, composed the music for this film.

Directed by Richard Lerner, who was involved in all of the cheerleaders series one way or another, this was written by Ted Greenwald, Nathaniel Dorsky and Ace Baandige, which, as I’ve said before, has to be their real name.

Beyond Rainbeaux, there’s also Penthouse July 1976 Pet Helen Lang, who was also in Tarz and Jane and Cheetah and Hot Nasties, which stars Susan Kiger, the first Playboy Playmate to do porn before she became a Playmate in January 1977; Jerri Woods (Toby from Switchblade Sisters); Patrice Rohmer (Harrad Summer) and Susie Elene.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Also known as Bruce’s Revenge, Return of Fists of Fury , and Ninja vs. Bruce Lee, this was made under the title Zhong lie Jing Wu Men. It’s superstars — that’s what they said — Bruce Le as Bruce Wong, who comes to Manila to visit his uncle, who has apparently forgotten and just left home. So he wanders the streets and meets a young thief named Piggy and saves a girl from the deadliest pimp in the Philippines, Mr. Cross.

One of the women Bruce saves is his cousin, who runs a martial arts school with his other cousin. He helps them fight Mr. Cross, who has one henchman who is such a gay stereotype that even far-right people will be offended by this movie’s homophobia. Anyway, Bruce shuts almost everything down, so the bad guys hire a killer named Sakata to kill everyone, starting with his male cousin.

This movie features an instrumental version of Barry Manilow’s “Mandy” that completely made me insane, with me screaming out the lyrics. “I’m standing on the edge of time, I’ve walked away when love was mine, Caught up in a world of uphill climbing, the tears are in my mind, and nothing is rhyming.”

Also: This ends with the police all coming to bust up the final fight between Mr. Cross, Sakta, Sakata’s brother, a hundred goons and Bruce. Piggy watches, all alone on the beach, crying, realizing that he will forever be alone. So…an unhappy ending?

If you were Asian, did martial arts and looked like Bruce Lee with aviator sunglasses on, you always had a job in 1977.

Director Joseph Velasco also went by Joseph Kong and made Bruce’s Secret Kung Fu. Thundering Ninja, The Clones of Bruce Lee, Treasure of Bruce Lee, The Young Dragon, Enter the Game of Death, Bruce’s Deadly Fingers, Bruce and the Shaolin Bronzemen and Kung Fu Master: Bruce Lee Style. He made more off Bruce Lee than Bruce Lee made off of Bruce Lee.

When you pair the steely gaze of Franco Nero with the unhinged, lip-smacking energy of Telly Savalas, you expect a certain level of Euro-crime carnage. Redneck, known in its native Italy as Senza ragione, delivers that in spades, though it’s a strange, disjointed beast that feels like two different movies glued together by a madman who loves sleaze.

The premise is pure, high-octane 70s trash: Memphis (Savalas, channeling maximum camp) and his partner Mosquito (Nero) botch a jewelry store heist. While fleeing the scene, they carjack a vehicle, only to realize they’ve accidentally kidnapped Lennox Duncan, the 13-year-old son of a British consul. Naturally, this brat becomes their passport out of the country. He’s played by Mark Lester. Yes, the star of Oliver and the man who was a close, long-time friend of Michael Jackson. They were godfathers to each other’s children, and he has claimed to have donated sperm to Jackson, saying that Paris Jackson could be his daughter. Is that the strangest thing that happened in his life? Or would it be when a drunken Oliver Reed brought a prostitute for him for his 18th birthday?

But back to the movie, which is an unpredictable road film that shifts from a gritty crime thriller to a weirdly meditative, occasionally uncomfortable character study of an impressionable kid dragged into a world of violence.

The film starts strong with a frantic, albeit poorly planned, robbery and a classic Italian car chase. However, once the dust settles and the trio hits the road, the pacing hits a wall. Memphis descends into genuine, teeth-grinding insanity, while Mosquito, who is supposed to be the Lennie to Memphis’ George, somehow ends up being the surrogate father figure for young Lennox.

The movie’s middle act is where things get truly bizarre. There’s a strange, unsettling bond that forms between the kidnappers and the kid, culminating in a sequence where the boy watches Mosquito shave that has sparked decades of “Is he looking at the butt?” debate on the internet. It’s exactly the kind of sleazy, confusing Euro-cinema moment that makes me keep watching these movies. And yes, I may be straight, but when Franco Nero bares his ass, you look.

Savalas is clearly having the time of his life, but he leans so heavily into the camp that his incessant whistling and twitchy mannerisms threaten to swallow the entire movie whole. If you love him, he’s going to push you to hate him, between assaulting and murdering Maria (Ely Galleani), shooting a child, forcing Nero to wear her tiger stripe robe, murdering a dog and then killing an entire family of Germans by pushing their mobile home into a river.

By the way, the girl in that family is played by Lara Wendel, who would be chased by a dog and horribly murdered in Tenebre; she’s also in The Red Monks, Killing Birds, My Dear Killer, The Perfume of the Lady In Black, Ghosthouse, and You’ll Die at Midnight. In my world, that’s what we call a killer resume. Her father was Walter Barnes, a former football player who was a sheriff in High Plains Drifter, Bronco Billy and Smokey Bites the Dust, as well as one of the rangers in Day of the Animals. Her mother and brother also appear in this and are killed by Telly.

Why is Telly — a Greek-American born in Long Island — playing an American Southerner who speaks jive? Who thought having a teenage boy watch a naked Franco Nero and then examining his own naked body was a good idea? How many taboos is this movie ready to shoot in the face?

Maybe it was director Silvio Narizzano, who was born in Quebec and started his career in Toronto-based television before directing movies like Die! Die! My Darling!, Georgy Girl and the insane Carroll Baker and Denis Hopper-starring Bloodbath. Or perhaps it was writers Win Wells, who was also behind The Greek Tycoon, and Masolino D’Amico, a writer on Olivia Hussey’s Romeo and Juliet, as well as Caligula and the Cannon version of Otello.

Anyways, Lester’s father Michael, must have made some contacts in Italy, as he would go on to write and produce Antonio Margheriti’s Codename: Wild Geese.

What a weird movie.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Also known as Soul Soldier, Black Cavalry and Buffalo Soldier, this John “Bud” Cardos-directed movie is about Eli Brown (Robert DoQui), who escapes all the trouble his sex life gets him into by joining the 10th Cavalry at Fort Davis, which is led by Col. Grierson (Cesar Romero, who we all know from Gilbert Gottfried liked having oranges thrown at his butt). 

Soon, Eli befriends Native American Walking Horse (Robert Dix) and plans to settle down with Julie Brown (Janee Michelle). However, her affections are divided, as she is also attracted to Sgt. Hatch (Lincoln Kilpatrick), creating a complex love triangle that drives the story.

Here’s what’s wild: After this was filmed on 16mm and released under the title The Red, White and Black, producer Stuart Hirschman asked John Cardos to salvage the film. Cardos, after looking at the existing footage, said it needed to be reshot at 35mm and got away with it. This feels like absolute BS, but Wikipedia says it was released in 1970 and 1972.

Barbara Hale, Della Street on Perry Mason and Dr. Jenny Lager in The Giant Spider Invasion, shows up, as does Louise Jefferson herself, Isabel Sanford. 

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed by Jim Markovic (Sleepaway Camp IV: The Survivor, the American editor for Zombie Holocaust AKA Dr. Butcher, MD) and written by Larry Dolgin and Dick Randall (yes, the maniac who brought us Pieces, The French Sex Murders and The Wild Wild World of Jayne Mansfield), this starts by telling us that Bruce Lee is dead. Then, we watch four of his childhood films: Bad Boy, Orphan Sam, Kid Cheung and The Carnival, all dubbed into English and given a disco soundtrack.

After seeing Bruce’s funeral — never had so many people come to a funeral, which is BS — we meet Bruce’s imitators, Bruce Li and Dragon Lee, who appear in fight scenes from the movie Last Fist Of Fury. Actually, we get to see the whole movie with a wild dub and a steel baseball-glove weapon. Japan has invaded China and started putting shame on Dragon Lee’s school. One of his students is killed, so every Japanese person in the movie must die. 

This movie must have confused the hell out of people who think China and Japan are the same thing.

It goes without saying that Bruceploitation movies are scummy. You should n ot be afraid and watch it in the worst dub possible. 

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

Andy Milligan was a maniac who made movies filled with maniacs. By all reports, he was in the same constant bad mood as nearly every one of his characters, just as willing as them to start screaming no matter what, no matter when. This may have been because he inherited the same bipolar disorder or schizophrenia that his mother had. Forget the words of Stephen King, who said that Andy’s films were made by “morons with movie cameras” and instead, just imagine the chaos of each film’s shoestring budget set with a fastidious Andy melting down and then savor the results.

The other thing about the Milligan Cinematic Universe is that often there will be supernatural beings. The Mooneys in this movie are all werewolves who transform once a month on the night of the full moon. Pa (Douglas Phair) has spent nearly all of his near-two hundred years of life trying to cure his family, which includes his caretaker Phoebe (Joan Ogden), the sadistic Monica (Hope Stansbury) who mutilates vermin and Malcolm (Berwick Kaler), who is so far gone that he’s kept locked up.

There’s also Diana (Jackie Skarvellis), who has come back home from medical school along with a new husband named Gerald (Ian Innes). She’s the last hope for the Mooneys, as she is the only one who doesn’t gain fur once a month.

Shot in London — along with The Body Beneath, Bloodthirsty Butchers and The Man with Two Heads — new scenes were added when producer William Mishkin wanted to cash in on the success of Willard. Those scenes — one has Andy in it — were shot in his Staten Island home. Milligan had a hard time getting rid of the rats, even when he tried to give them away to the audience that would come to see this film. He also plays the gunsmith who creates silver bullets and Mr. Micawber, a man who sells flesh-eating rats that have already bitten off one of his arms and a lot of his face.

Despite being set a century before, we can see and hear cars, as well as see electrical outlets, but man, Andy made all the costumes himself by hand and I can just imagine him getting out the patterns and swearing the whole time, shouting about thimbles.

The greatest thing about this movie is the title, which had to lure people in because it’s so good and then people would be confronted by a toxic family just shouting and snipping and screaming and that’s the real movie, not the furry masks or flesh-consuming vermin. That’s what I’m here for.

Here’s a drink recipe to get you through the film.

Red Eyed Black Rat

• 1/3 cup orange juice
• 3 oz. dark rum
• 2 oz. cola
• 2 maraschino cherries

This one is pretty simple. Pour the juice, rum, then cola over ice and enjoy. For extra fun, drop in the cherries and pretend they’re rat eyes staring at you in the dark of the wasteland.

You can watch this on Tubi.