Travis McGee was created by John D. MacDonald and is neither a police officer nor a private investigator. He claims to be a “salvage consultant” who reclaims others’ property for a fee of 50 percent. He lives on a 52-foot houseboat, The Busted Flush, named for a thirty-hour poker game in which he won the floating home. The character has been in 21 novels, but only this movie and The Copper Sea have adapted McGee for the screen.

The film starts as Travis (Rod Taylor) and his friend Meyer (Theodore Bikel) are fishing. They’re surprised as a woman, Vangie (Suzy Kendall), is tossed off a bridge with her legs bound. He saves her and, as you imagine, falls in love. I mean, it’s Suzy Kendall in 1970, the same year she was in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.

Vangie soon tells Travis that she was part of a sex and murder scheme on cruise ships, where she would lure rich men to their rooms, and after she drugged them, her partner Terry (William Smith) would toss them into the ocean. She got out because she thought they were just stealing money, not killing people. Of course, Terry tracks her down and kills her, which sends Travis after her and his new partner Del (Ahna Capri), as well as teaming with a woman who looks just like Vangie named Merrimay (Kendell).

The fight between Travis and Terry at the end of the movie was real. Taylor broke three of Smith’s ribs. who, in turn, smashed his nose.

MacDonald disliked the film. saying that it was “feral, cheap, rotten, gratuitously meretricious, shallow and embarrassing.”

Robert Clouse, of course, went on to make Enter the Dragon. This is very much a 70s man’s novel movie, a place where men may get turned around by women, but they’re always correct, and everyone always wants to fall in love with them. Or in bed. Or fight them.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Poachers want to kill a 25-foot alligator, and it turns the tables on them, with only John Besser (Max Phipps) surviving. Ranger Steve Harris (John Jarratt), Aboriginal leader Oondabund (Burnum Burnum), and his second-in-command, Adjaral (David Gulpilil), come to save the man, who decides that he must kill the gator.

After the alligator kills a kid, Rex Garret (Ray Meagher) Steve’s boss, demands that the giant be killed. Oondabund tells Harris that it’s more than a living creature. It’s really Numunwari, who holds the souls of the dead of his village. They’re able to capture it and take it down the river, but Besser and his men show up, guns and all, killing the old man and nearly getting Harris and his girlfriend Cathy Pope (Nikki Coghill) too. Luckily, the gator snatches the man, biting off his arm and then taking his entire body below the water.

So, yeah, it’s Jaws in Australia, but what’s the big deal? Arch Nicholson also made Fortress , and writer Sonia Borg mostly wrote movies for the little ones. This would not be one of those movies.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Bill Van Ryn from Groovy Doom/Drive-In Asylum explained this movie short and sweet: “It’s like an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker without Kolchak.” It’s also about the press freaking out about an eight-foot-tall alien who is killing people who eyebeam lasers in the dirty and dingy streets of Los Angeles. It was initially about an autistic child who had never met people before. It was also originally to be directed by Tobe Hooper. Things didn’t quite happen that way.

John “Bud” Cardos (Kingdom of the Spiders, Gor II) stepped in to direct. And realizing that his movie now featured an alien instead of a child, he hastily put together an opening narration that discussed electric eels and Venus flytraps. If our planet has those, what about other worlds? What that has to do with the rest of the film, well, your guess is as good as mine.

What we end up with is a monster that beheads people while someone chants, “The dark! The dark!”  William Devane (Greg Sumner from TV’s Knots Landing) and a TV anchorwoman (original Wonder Woman and That’s Incredible host Cathy Lee Crosby) finally figure out how to catch the monster. Oh yeah — there’s also an ancient psychic who believes that a young actor will be the next to be killed, so we get some 7’70sHollywood parties along the way. Casey Kasem shows up. Keenan Wynn and Richard Jaeckel, too.

Roger Ebert referred to this movie as “the dumbest, most inept, most maddeningly unsatisfactory thriller of the last five years. It’s really bad: so bad, indeed, that it provides some sort of measuring tool against which to measure other bad thrillers. Years from now, I’ll be thinking to myself: Well, at least it’s not as bad as The Dark.”

I really didn’t think it was that bad. It’s not the best movie ever, but I was certainly entertained. Not riveted. But entertained. But how can you hate a film where a giant alien shoots laser beams out of his eyes and rips people’s heads off so that the coroner can put them in body bags (along with mini head bags)?

Daredevil — there’s the title! — Paul Tunney (George Montgomery) gets blamed for another stunt driver’s death and finds himself making a living by running drugs and dealing with some kind of bad mojo put on him by that driver’s sister, Carol (Gay Perkins).  Oh yeah — he’s also making sweet love to his one-armed mechanic Huck’s (Bill Kelly) wife Julie (Terry Moore) because, look, Paul’s a jerk. He deserves everything that happened to him.

Montgomery went from a stuntman at Republic to leading man status at 20th Centiry Fox, taking over roles meant for Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda during the war before he was drafted into working for the U.S. Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit, appearing in documentaries and training films. As his leading man status waned, he appeared in movies like Hallucination Generation, Satan’s Harvest (which he directed) and Django the Condemned.

Moore was married five times but has claimed that she was with Howard Hughes from 1949 to 1976. She’s been acting since 1940 — and has two movies coming soon, according to IMDB — and starred in Mighty Joe Young, as well as appearing in Hellhole, Beverly Hills Brats and many more films. She was even on the cover of Playboy in August 1984 at the age of 55.

By 1972, however, they were both in movies like The Daredevil.

Director Robert W. Stringer was usually a composer for movies, and this is his only directing credit. Writer Robert Walsh also scripted Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws. They made a movie that combines the rednecksploitation that drive-ins were looking for with the downer ending that was of the time. It’s not great, but it’s perfect for a second drive-in feature; a make-out and barely watch the movie movie, if you will.

You can watch this on the Cave of Forgotten Films.

Marc Lawrence had a career filled with playing the heavies, mostly gangland types. In fact, his autobiography was entitled Long Time No See: Confessions of a Hollywood Gangster.

Lawrence found himself under scrutiny for his political leanings. He was the son of Polish and Russian parents and was married to Odessa-born novelist and screenwriter Fanya Foss. Once called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he admitted he had once been a member of the Communist Party and named Sterling Hayden, Lionel Stander, Anne Revere, Larry Parks, Karen Morley and Jeff Corey as fellow Communists. Blacklisted, he continued to make films in Europe before returning to America.

He’s probably best known for playing gangsters in Diamonds Are Forever and The Man With the Golden Gun, but he also shows up in plenty of genre films like From Dusk Till Dawn and Dream No Evil. He directed several episodes of TV shows before helming Nightmare in the Sun, which was written by his wife and stars Ursula Andress and Aldo Ray. This was the only other film that he’d direct. He also wrote the movie, and it stars his daughter Toni. It’s also one of the strangest movies you’ll find.

Also known by many, many names — The 13th Pig, Daddy’s Deadly Darling, Horror Farm, Daddy’s Girl, The Strange Exorcism of Lynn Hart, The Strange Love Exorcist and Roadside Torture Chamber — Pigs is all about Lynn Webster (Toni Lawrence), who has escaped a sanitarium and hides out in the diner owned by Zambrini (Marc Lawrence).

Behind the diner lies a pigpen of swine that have been taught to eat human flesh. Zambrini soon has a partner in murder as Lynn begins to kill any man who reminds her of the father who assaulted her. She kills him and she’ll kill anyone else who gets in her way.

This movie is pretty much the 70s — complete insanity and murderous intent, capped off with off-kilter camera angles. Suffice to say, I loved every single moment of it.

Toni Lawrence would go on to appear in several TV shows and the Final Destination inspiration Sole Survivor. She was also, once married to Billy Bob Thornton, who honestly has some amazing taste in ladies.

Jesse Vint plays the sheriff who tries to see the good in everyone. He shows up in plenty of redneck cinema with appearances in movies like Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw, Black Oak Conspiracy, the Walking Tall TV series and Macon County Line. He also stars in the absolutely incredible science fiction weirdo film Forbidden World.

Marc Lawrence’s original cut of the film is the one released as The 13th Pig. However, there are two additional versions. The Love Exorcist / Blood Pen titled versions begin with another actress playing the role of Lynn Webster, who runs away from an attempted exorcism. The Daddy’s Girl version, which was released on VHS, started with Lynn’s father attacking her. She stabs him to death, ends up in the asylum, but escapes when a nurse takes off her uniform to make love to a doctor. She wears those clothes, takes that amorous caregiver’s keys and runs away. Multiple actresses play Lynn in these scenes, and all wear completely bonkers wigs.

Check out Bill Van Ryn from Drive-In Asylum as he breaks down the advertising history of Pigs with a collection of newsprint images for this film.

I don’t trust the media. I mean, tonight, my YouTube was all about how bad Cuba is and I kind of distrust it now.

Anyways, this is Kill Castro or Cuba Crossing, a 1980 movie in which Hud (Robert Vaughn) holds a grudge since the Bay of Pigs and wants to kill Castro. Using bar owner, boat captain Tony (Stuart Whitman), and funded by Mr. Bell (Raymond St. Jacques) and Rossellini (Michael V. Gazzo), this isn’t going to end well, because the money men just want to move drugs.

This is the kind of movie that has Robert Vaughn on a beach shouting, “Damn you, Kennedy!”  It’s also the kind of release that has many alternate titles, such as The Mercenaries, Key West Crossing, and Sweet Dirty Tony.

A drag queen sings “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” Sybil Danning shows up, as does Woody Strode and Albert Salmi, man-eating turtles, a homoerotic wrestling match (spoiler: all wrestling is homoerotic), a shark attack, a fake Marilyn Monroe singing “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” iguanas getting involved in a bar fight and, well, it’s way more boring than this paragraph would lead you to think. Oh yeah — Caren Kaye, who was the mom on the sitcom It’s Your Move and was the attractive mom in My Tutor, she’s in this. She seduces Stuart Whitman. Yes, it’s a man’s world.

IMDB BS ALERT: “Captain Tony’s Saloon is a real bar in Key West, FL, and was owned by the real Captain Tony, who was also mayor of Key West for a time. He appears in the film as a watcher on horseback in one of the scenes when “Tony” visits the Cuban coast.” Actually, it’s real and here’s the website.

Director Chuck Workman used to edit all the Oscar montages. How did he make such a messy movie? The script, maybe? It was written by Robin Swicord, who get this, went on to write the 1994 Little Women, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Practical Magic and Memoirs of a Geisha. That’s right — she wrote all of your wife’s favorite films. Producer and co-writer Peter Barton went on to Reading Rainbow and man, I’m out of facts.

Thanks to Through the Shattered Lens, I can share the long — and hilarious — opening titles with you:

“From 1961, the year of the Bay of Pigs to today, the Government of the United States has been embroiled in a series of events which have continually led our nation to crisis after crisis and to the brink of war.

ASSIGNMENT — KILL CASTRO, a true story is one of the most confusing and frustrating historical events that might have led to a world power showdown.  It happened yesterday!  It happened today!  It can happen again!

Names of persons and places have been changed to protect the individuals who were called upon to aid their country and in doing so placed their lives in jeopardy.

“I WILL GIVE ALL FOR THE LOVE OF MY COUNTRY … RIGHT OR WRONG! — G.W. Bell, Chief of Caribbean Operations, Central Intelligence Agency”

This motion picture is dedicated to all people who desire to live in a free democratic society.”

You can watch this on YouTube.

Henry Silva was so good as a student at the Actors’ Studio that when they did A Hatful of Rain, he made it to the Broadway play and the movie.

Yet amongst folks like you and me, we know Silva from showing up as mobsters, killers and general scumbags in all manner of movies from so many countries. He had his first lead in 1963’s Johnny Cool, killing off so many bigger actors, like Mort Sahl, Telly Savalas, Jim Backus, Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis, Jr. before Elizabeth Montgomery sells him out. But by November of that year, the President was dead, and no one wanted to see a dark film noir.

In 1965, Italy came calling, and Silva took a chance. He moved his entire family there and launched a career of playing, well, more horrible people. The following year, The Hills Run Red made him a star in Spain, Italy, Germany and France. And by 1977, he’d been in twenty-five movies. Stuff like Almost Human, gritty gangster versus cops films that audiences loved.

Silva made movies in Hong Kong (Operation: Foxbat), Japan (Virus), Australia (Thirst), Spain (Day of the Assassin), Canada (Trapped), France (La Marginal) and for TV (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century). He’s the kind of guy who can be in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai just as easily as L’ultima Meta or Megaforce.

It’s hard to pick just one Henry Silva movie, but I decided perhaps one of his most brutal.

Playing as Quelli Che Contano (Those Who Matter) in Italy, as well as Love Kills and Guns of the Big Shots, this Andrea Bianchi-directed film is made of everything mean you can imagine. What else would you expect from the maker of Strip Nude for Your Killer and Burial Ground? A meditation on the value of mindfulness?

When the Italian mob families of Don Ricuzzo Cantimo and Don Turi Scannapieco keep their battles and crimes going to such a degree that they’re smuggling heroin in the body of a dead child — yes, this is how the movie begins — the big bosses leave the decision as to how to handle business in the hands of Don Cascemi.

He calls in an expert — Tony Aniante (Silva) — and tells him to kill everyone, which he does with no small amount of Yojimbo/A Fistful of Dollars influence. There’s a lot to deal with, like the fact that Scannapieco has it in for Cantimo because he killed his son-in-law and made his daughter go off the deep end, while also crippled her son. And oh yeah, Ricuzzo’s week (Barbara Bouchet, more on her in a minute) decides that she’s got to get some Silva stirring up in her guts. If that doesn’t get confusing enough. Ricuzzo’s youngest son and Scannapieco’s younger daughter are also ready to play an eternal game of hide the cannoli.

He,y wait — didn’t you say this movie was brutal and potentially deranged?

Why yes, I did.

Before it’s over, we have heads exploding as they’re shot, a child’s body on an autopsy table, a head goes flying out a windshield, multiple dead bodies smashed by a steamroller, a bandsaw go clean through someone’s head and Silva drag Bouchet around a barn, beat her with a belt, then beat her in the face with the belt buckle, then have violent bloody sex with her in a grimy barn. Earlier in the film — because this is an Italian film where women come to enjoy all manner of upsetting couplings, our hero shoves her head into a bloody pig carcass while they make love — well, not really, right? — in the kitchen. To make things worse, Bouchet is totally turned on by this experience. Then she tells her husband all about it, because that’s the only way they can make love. Yes, this movie is the scumbag movie that scumbag movies warned you about.

Tony is brutally efficient, whistling his signature song before quickly blasting guys in the head with his Luger, like some unholy Italian western character combined with his Johnny Cool role. He’s death itself, as a scene of him walking into a Sicilian town has everyone closing their windows rather than even seeing him show up. Stick around for the end of the film, which neatly explains exactly why Tony whistles that tune as he murders everyone around him.

Released in the US with that garish poster above by Joseph Brenner Associates — the people who brought you Eyeball, The Devil’s Rain!, The Girl in Room 2A and many more — Cry of a Prostitute was sold with the tagline, “For a lousy twenty-five bucks, some people think they can do anything!” along with Bouchet’s abused face.

Bouchet would tell House of Freudstein, “That was unpleasant. I didn’t remember it being that unpleasant when we made it. In fact, I prefer not to remember too much about that one. When Quentin Tarantino arranged a screening of some of my movies in LA, he opened with that one and I wish he hadn’t…” However, in Eurocrime! The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s, Silva claims that Bouchet was tougher than nearly any of the men he met in those movies and intimidated him.

Originally made as Agowa gongpo (Crocodile Fangs), this is the story of Tony Akom (Nat Puvani) and John Stromm (Min Oo), two workaholic doctors always at odds with their wives, who are angry that they work so much. They decide to make up for it and take them on vacation, which is a major mistake, as they are dragged underwater by a crocodile mutated by nuclear testing into an unstoppable creature of wife-chewing destruction. Now, they must destroy it and join up with fisherman Tanaka (Manop Asavatep) and a photographer named Peter (Robert Chan Law-Bat) to make it happen.

When the English language version of this film was created by producer Dick Randall, numerous cuts were made. Out was the hurricane that opened the original movie. It was a new beginning shot by Randall in which a crocodile eats two naked women. This one movie didn’t have enough crocodile-human feasting for Randall, who added in a scene from Krai Thong in which three kids turn into a snake. And the ending, in which Tony threw dynamite into the crocodile’s gullet, was edited with Peter strapping himself with the TNT and swimming right into the giant mouth of the croc. Above all else, all Jaws rip-offs must end with the beast being blown up. That’s the rules.

What breaks the rules is that much like The Ghost Galleon, I can only imagine that some of the effects in this were created by a toy boat in a bathtub. Yet going even further, this has a reptile crawling all over it.

Original director Sompote Sands also made the aforementioned Krai Thong, as well as The 6 Ultra Brothers vs. the Monster Army, Hanuman and the Five Riders (a bootleg Kamen Rider) and Jumborg Ace & Giant.

A warning: This movie was condemned by the American Humane Association for a moment where a genuine crocodile is murdered on screen. This isn’t Italian, mind you. It’s from Thailand.

We start in an asteroid prison, where the Krites hijack a spaceship and escape to Earth. The warden hires Ug (Terrence Mann) and another shapeshifting bounty hunter to follow them.

As they study Earth transmissions, Ug takes the form of rock star Johnny Steele and the second remains blank. You will hear the song “Power of the Night” so many times in this movie that you’ll be able to sing it yourself.

Meanwhile, in Kansas, the Brown family is enjoying rural Earth life. There’s father Jay (Billy “Green” Bush, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday), mother Helen (Dee Wallace Stone, The Howling, Cujo, Popcon), and their kids April and Brad. As the kids go to school, Jay waits for mechanic Charlie (Don Keith Opper, who is in all four Critters films) to show up. Once a major league prospect, he started getting messages from radios and possibly even UFOs through his fillings and went insane.

That night, the Krites’ ship crashes. Thinking it’s a meteorite, Jay and Brad check it out only to catch one of the monsters eating its way through a cow. They cut all the power to the farm, take out a cop and shoot Jay with one of their tranquilizing quills.

While all this is going on, April is horizontally dancing with NYC transplant Steve (Billy Zane!) who gets eaten almost immediately. Her brother saves her with some firecrackers. Just then, the bounty hunters come to town, with one of them continually changing shape to become different townspeople.

Everything works out well, with the Krites being wiped out. The bounty hunters even leave behind a device to call them in case of a sequel as we see eggs that are about to hatch.

There’s a funny scene with a Critter playing with an E.T. doll, which Dee Wallace Stone also starred in. And I almost forgot — genre vet Lin Shaye (the Insidious films) shows up too!

The character design of the Critters is probably the best part of the film. The Chiodo Brothers also worked on Ernest Scared Stupid, Team America: World Police, Large Marge in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, the “mousterpieces” in Dinner for Schmucks and, of course, Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

Depending on when you grew up, Critters is either silly fluff or a treasured part of your childhood. I tend to the former while Becca is definitely on the latter choice. Director Stephen Herek also directed plenty of her other favorites like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter is Dead and The Mighty Ducks.

Sue (Rene Bond) and Jan (Sandy Dempsey) look like they’re stranded and two musicians, Dave Anderson (Bond’s man Ric Lutze) and Billy B (John Paul Jones), pick them up. The truth is, they’re setting them up to get taken by their pimp Mike (Louis Ojena ) and forced to play as his band, but they both have hearts of gold and decide to save the men.

Director Lew Guinn was the DP for Deadwood ’76 and Terror In the Jungle, as well as the editor of Invasion of the Star Creatures. This is the only directing credit he had.

Executive produced by Harry Novak — who paid for Bond’s breasts, making her the first American adult actress to get implants, unless some pervert writes and proves me incorrect — this also has Marie Arnold (The Toy Box, Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love!, Meatcleaver Massacre, Fantasm) and Penny King (The Training of Bunny).

The sex scenes are boring, the movie is kind of gross looking, the country songs are horribly mimed and Rene Bond is an angel that lifts this all on her own and makes it watchable. I can’t tell yoy how many movies I’ve watched just for Rene Bond. Maybe I can. Maybe I shouldn’t have made fun of other perverts, because now I feel bad.

The ending kind of comes out of nowhere!