You know how Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups old commercials used to go? Well, the makers of this movie got a real smart idea. They took the two big trends of the early 70s — blacksploitation and martial arts — and made one movie with both of them.

Stud Brown (Timothy Brown, a former NFL player who was also on M*A*S*H*) and Larry Chin (Alan Tang) unite to battle drug dealers and find Chin’s brother Wei (James Hong). They’re up against a corrupt cop named Detective Burke (Aldo Ray!) and the disappearance of our hero’s brother may not be as tragic as it seems.

What makes this movie worth watching is the dream team of director Al Adamson and producer Cirio H. Santiago. Lovers of truly bottom basement movies see these two names and feel a certain twinge, the kind you get when you remember young love or holidays gone by.

Another important thing for lovers of 70s exploitation cinema to notice is that the deaf mute love interest Sarah is played by Carol Speed, who is known and loved as Abby.

Directed by Chang Cheh and written by Chiu Kang-Chien, this is about Tang Ren-jie (Ti Lung) and his older brother, Tang Ren-lin (Ku Feng), who are the adopted son and henchman of triad leader Shen Tian-hung (Yeung Chi-hing). Shen wants to retire, but before that, he uses  Tang Ren-jie (Ti Lung) and The Rambler (David Chiang) to put an end to his rivalry with rival Liu Shou-yi (Ho Ban). The plan goes badly when both bosses are killed; Tang takes the blame and is kicked out of the country. Yet when he returns, he discovers a plot to destroy both of the gangs.

What a wild movie! Tang Ren-jie has a tattoo of a woman on his chest, and it’s said that whenever The Rambler rambles, someone has to die. This being a Chang Cheh movie, you can be assured that nearly everyone will die.

In the U.S., this was released as Duel of the Iron Fist and Revenge of the Dragons. It was distributed in 1971 by United International Pictures, who also brought you Scalpel, Sixteen and Devil In the Flesh and in 1973 by Howard Mahler Films, who proudly presented Satanico Pandemonium, The Last Victim (Forced Entry) and The Love Doctors.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Dr. Henry Jekyll (James Mathers, who also wrote this movie; he was a playwright and actor whose career was filled with minor roles on TV and on stage) is the grandson of the one from the book and lives in San Francisco. This movie feels like it could take place in the 1800s or 1979, depending on the scene. He invites his teacher, Professor Atkinson (John F. Kearney, in his first acting role at the age of 48; he’s follow that with non-sex roles in the Gary Graver adult movies Indecent Proposal and Society Affairs; he also directed Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men at the Savoy Theatre in London, England with George Costigan, Matthew Kelly and Tyrone Huggins in the cast and OH YEAH is Mike Justice’s dad!) to see his work and commisaerate on the death of Atkinson’s daughter — and Jekyll’s girlfriend and lab assistant — Julia (Dawn Carver Kelly, one and done).

Except that his experiments involve making men and women battle in proto-MMA fights after being injected with drugs. And he also has a mute sister, Hilda (Nadine Kalmes), whom he claims that he hates and desires as much as their mother. There’s also his lab assistant, Boris (Jake Pearson), who we’re led to believe was attacked by Jekyll during an adventure and is now serving him. 

Jekyll wants to hurt — or marry — Julia and often forces her to accept him making love to her while his sister watches one-handed from the hallway. He also likes to whip Boris and say “Love is pain” over and over again. He also loves to inject his test cases — Rick Alemany (also the fight coordinator), Tes Luz, Lydia Altamirano, Jesse Washington and Earl Garlin — in fights to the death that are way too worked. 

It’s…well, great is too much, but it’s certainly strange, as everyone starts this movie on 10 or zero, depending on if you’re a scientist or brainswashed, and you get long scenes of savagery and the professor screaming “No, no, no more!” 

Hyde Productions Inc. registered its copyright in Nevada, and the premiere was a double feature with The Driller Killer at Miami-area drive-ins: the Turnpike Drive-In, the Tropicaire Drive-In, and the Homestead Theatre. Arthur Weisberg, the presenter of this film, also used the name Rochelle Gail Weisberg, also was behind Teeny Buns, C.B. Hustlers, Drive In Massacre, Spirit of Seventy Sex, 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy, The Driller Killer and Ms. 45. He also conducted the score for Dark Dreams, played basoon on The Miracle Worker and is credited with inventing the “Future Basoon” and taught at the Juilliard School, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Yale School of Music, Manhattan School of Music and Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Let’s get this out of the way: Brian De Palma, much like Giallo, was heavily influenced by Hitchcock. In fact, when an interviewer asked Hitchcock if he saw the film as an homage, he replied, “You mean fromage.” That said — Hitchcock died three months before the film was released, so that story could be apocryphal (it’s been said that the famous director made this comment to either a reporter or John Landis).

What is true is the interview that De Palma did after Dressed to Kill (Rolling Stone, October 16, 1980).  The director claimed, “My style is very different from Hitchcock’s. I am dealing with surrealistic, erotic imagery. Hitchcock never got into that too much. Psycho is basically about a heist. A girl steals money for her boyfriend so they can get married. Dressed to Kill is about a woman’s secret erotic life. If anything, Dressed to Kill has more of a Buñuel feeling.”

However, I’d argue that this film has more in common with Giallo than anything the “Master of Suspense” directly created. That’s because—to agree with DePalma above—this film does not exist in our reality. Much like Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, it exists in its dream reality, where the way we perceive time can shift and change based on the storyteller’s whims.

Yet what of DePalma being dismissive of Argento in interviews, claiming that while he saw the director as having talent, he’d only seen one of his films? Or should we believe his ex-muse/wife Nancy Allen, who claims that when she told DePalma that she was auditioning for Argento’s Inferno, he said, “Oh, he’s goooood.”

Contrast that with this very simple fact (and spoilers ahead, for those of you who worry about that sort of thing, but face facts, this movie is 37 years old): DePalma rips off one of Hitchcock’s best tricks from Psycho: he kills his main character off early in the film, forcing us to suddenly choose who we see as the new lead, placing the killer several steps ahead of not just our protagonists, but the audience itself.

And yet there are so many other giallo staples within this film: fashion is at the forefront, with a fetishistic devotion to gloves, dresses, spiked high heels, and lingerie being displayed and removed and lying in piles all over an apartment or doctor’s office. This is the kind of film that makes you stop and notice an outfit, such as what Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson, Big Bad Mama, TV’s Police Woman) wears to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the blue coat that Liz Blake (Nancy Allen, Carrie, Strange Invaders) wears to meet Dr. Robert Elliot (Michael Caine, how could we pick any movie other than Jaws 4: The Revenge).

Then there are the music cues from Pino Donaggio, who also scored Don’t Look Now, Fulci’s The Black Cat, and Argento’s Do You Like Hitchcock? The film not only looks the part, but it has intense sound, too.

We also have characters trying to prove their innocence, investigating ahead of the police. Or the son of the murder victim who wants to discover why his mother really died. Or her doctor, who has an insane patient named Bobbi who has stolen his straight razor and demands that she give him more time than the rest of her patients. All of them could be the killer. Giallo gives us no assurances that just because we see someone as the protagonist, there’s no reason they couldn’t also be the antagonist.

Let’s toss in a little moral ambiguity here, too. Kate is a woman who is bored with her life. She’s raised a son and seen her marriage lose any hope of sexual frisson. Liz is a prostitute — no slut shaming here, she’s a strong businesswoman more than anything  — but she’s also a practiced liar, as a scene shows her deftly manipulating several people via phone to get the money she needs to buy stock based off an insider tip she receives from a client. Dr. Elliot is obviously attracted to Kate but claims that his marriage prevents him from having sex with her. Yet it seems like he has secrets beyond informing the police of the threats of his obviously unbalanced patient, Bobbi. And then there’s Peter, Kate’s son, who has no issues using his surveillance equipment to spy on the police or Liz. If this character seems the most sympathetic, remember that he is the closest to the heart of DePalma, whose mother once asked him to follow and record his father to prove that he was cheating on her.

Finally, we have the color palette of Bava’s takes on giallo mixed with extreme zooms, split screens and attention to the eyes of our characters. The blood cannot be redder.

The film opens with Kate in the shower. While the producers asked Dickinson to claim that it’s her body, it’s really Victoria Johnson (Grizzly) as a body double. Her husband comes into the shower to make love to her, but she finds it robotic and not the passion she feels she deserves. Directly after, she tells Dr. Elliot that she’s frustrated and attempts to seduce him, but he rejects her.

More depressed than before the appointment started, she heads to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Despite being surrounded by inspiration, such as the statue of Diana by Saint-Guadens, West Interior by Alex Katz and Reclining Nude by Tom Palmore (a tip of the hat to the amazing I Talk You Bored blog for an insightful take on the film and the research as to what each work of art is), she absentmindedly writes entries in her schedule. Planning the holiday meal gets her through the mindlessness of her life, flowing penmanship reminding her to “pick up turkey” instead of slowing down and appreciating not just the artwork around her but the people. There’s a young couple in lust if not love. There’s a young family. And then, a man with dark glasses catches her eye before brazenly sitting down next to her.

We are used to male characters chasing after female characters who aren’t defined by anything other than being sex objects. Instead, we have Kate pursuing the man, making the first, second, and even third moves until we realize that she was just following the man’s breadcrumbs.

Of note here is that color plays an essential role in the scene, as do expected manners. Kate is a wife and mother. She is who society expects to have virtue, and she is clad in all white, but her intentions are anything but pure. She finally has what she wants—the thrilling sex life that she may have only read about in trashy paperbacks.

This scene is a master class in pacing and movement. Imagine, if you will, the words on the page: Kate follows a mystery man through the museum. And yet, those are just eight words. We get nearly nine minutes of wordless pursuit, yet it never grows dull.

Finally, Kate follows the man out of the museum, but she loses him until she looks up and sees her glove dangled from a taxi. But blink, and you miss death in the background as Bobbi blurs past the camera.

When we catch up with Kate, it’s hours for her but seconds for us because this movie is a dream universe. She wakes up in bed with a stranger. There’s a gorgeous camera move here as DePalma moves the camera backward, an inverse of how a lesser director would have treated this scene. Instead of showing the two lovers tumbling through the apartment and removing clothes at every turn, we see Kate reassembling herself to move from her fantasy world to reality and toward her real world, which will soon become a nightmare. The camera slides slowly backward as she gets dressed, remembering via split-screen and sly smile how she doesn’t even remember where her panties have gone. She’s still wearing white, but under it all, she’s bare, her garments lost in a strange man’s house. A man whose name she doesn’t even know.

So now, as she emerges from realizing her sexual fantasies, she feels that she must make sense of it. She wants to write a note to say goodbye but doesn’t want to overthink it. Maybe she doesn’t even want it to happen again. And then she learns more about the man. It starts with his name and then becomes more than she ever wished to find out: his health report shows that he has multiple STDs.

Kate leaves the apartment and makes her way to the elevator, where she tries to avoid anyone’s eyes. In the background, we see an ominous red light, ala Bava. Bobbi—death and punishment for sin—is coming.

The death scene — I hold fast to my claim that The New York Ripper is close to this film but made by a director who doesn’t have the sense to cut away from violence — DePalma stages his version of the shower scene. But more than Psycho, we’ve come to identify with Kate. She’s a woman fast approaching middle age who wants a thrill, and yet, she’s punished by disease and death. She didn’t deserve this, and her eyes pleaded not to the killer as much as they did to the camera. And to us.

Here’s where we have to wonder aloud about DePalma’s long-discussed misogyny. This film was protested by women’s groups, who stated in this leaflet that “FROM THE INSIDIOUS COMBINATION OF VIOLENCE AND SEXUALITY IN ITS PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL TO SCENE AFTER SCENE OF WOMEN RAPED, KILLED, OR NEARLY KILLED, DRESSED TO KILL IS A MASTER WORK OF MISOGYNY.” Is DePalma guilty of the slasher film trope of “you fuck, and you die?” Maybe. Perhaps if she had remembered her marriage, at best, she wouldn’t be here. At worst, she wouldn’t have forgotten her ring in the stranger’s apartment and would have survived.

The way I see it, the death of Kate allows us to make the transition from past protagonist to new heroine, as the doors open post-murder to reveal a grisly scene to Liz and her john. The older man runs while Liz reaches out to Kate, their eyes meeting and fingers nearly touching. Kate’s white purity has been decimated by the razor slashes of Bobbi, the killer. As their transference is almost complete, Liz notices Bobbi in the mirror. Remember that we’re in a dream state? Time completely stops here, so we get an extreme zoom of both the mirror and Liz’s face. She escapes just in time, grasping the murder weapon and standing in the hallway, blood on her hands as a woman screams in the background, figuring her for the killer.

At this point, the film switches its protagonist. Unlike the films of David Lynch, like Mulholland Drive, this transference is not a changed version of the main character, but her exact opposite. Kate wore white, was older, and had a marriage and child, yet she slowly came to feel like an object to the men in her life. Liz wore black, was young and single, but was wise to the games of sex and power. She isn’t manipulated, turning the tables on men by using their needs for personal gain. Kate may have seen sexual fantasy as her greatest need, but for Liz, it’s just a means to an end.

Kate and Liz are as different as can be. For example, Kate goes to the museum to find inspiration. Liz only sees art as commerce, and she spends plenty of time explaining to Peter how much money she could make by acquiring a painting.

Dr. Elliott discovers a message from Bobbi on his answering machine (these machines and the narrative devices they enable must seem quaint and perhaps even anachronistic to today’s moviegoers). Once, Bobbi was his patient, but he refused to sign the paperwork for their (as the pronoun hasn’t been defined, so I’ll use they/their) sex change. In fact, Dr. Elliot has gone so far as to convince Bobbi’s new doctor that they are a danger to herself and others.

The police, however, have arrested Liz, and Detective Marino (Dennis Franz, TV’s Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue) doesn’t believe a word she has to say. There’s a great moment here where Liz goes from wide-eyed ingenue to knowing cynic in the face of Marino’s misogynistic tone. Meanwhile, Kate’s son Peter (Keith Gordon, Jaws 2, Christine) uses his listening devices in the station to learn more about his mother’s death than the police are willing to let on.

He begins tracking Liz, obsessively noting the times that she comes and goes from her apartment. He’s doing the same to Elliot’s office. But he’s not the only one tracking people. Bobbi has been stalking Liz, including a sequence where our heroine goes from being chased by a gang of black men to talking with an unbelieving police officer to Peter saving her from Bobbi with a spray of mace.

Because Peter has seen Bobbi also emerging from Dr. Elliott’s office, so he joins forces with Liz to discover who she is. That means that Liz uses her chief weapon — sex — to distract the doctor long enough to discover Bobbi’s real name and information. We learn that Liz’s mental sex game is as strong as her physical attributes here — she says that she must be good to be paid as well as she is. She knows precisely the fantasy Dr. Elliott wants to hear. But perhaps she also knows the fantasy that the mainly male slasher/giallo viewer wants: the woman submitting to the killer holding the knife.

Peter watches outside in the rain when a tall blonde pulls him away. Has he been taken by Bobbi? No — Liz returns to have sex with Dr. Elliott; he has been replaced by the killer. Bobbi lifts the razor as Liz helplessly crosses her arms in front of her face for protection. But at the last minute, the blonde who grabbed Peter outside is revealed to be a police officer, as she shoots Bobbi through the glass. That shattered pane also breaks Bobbi’s illusion and mask, revealing that Dr. Elliott is the man under the makeup and clothes.

The killer is arrested and goes into an insane asylum; Dr. Levy explains that while the Bobbi side of his personality wanted to be free, the Dr. Elliott side would not allow them to become a true woman. Therefore, whenever a woman broke through and aroused the male side of the persona, the female side would emerge and kill the offending female.

Inside the mental asylum, a buxom nurse attends to the male patients. The room is bathed in blue light, a cool lighting scheme that echoes Mario Bava’s films. The movie has moved from a dream version of reality to a pure dream sequence. It intrigues me that Carrie and Dressed to Kill both start with a shower scene and end with a dream threat to the surviving secondary heroine.

Within the asylum, Dr. Elliott overcomes the nurse and slowly, methodically, folds her clothing over her nude form. As he begins to either dress in her clothes — or worse, molest her dead body — the camera slowly moves upward as we realize that there is a gallery of other patients all watching and screaming. This scene reminds me of the gallery of residents watching a doctor perform surgery, yet inverted (have you caught this theme yet?) and perverted.

Bobbi emerges once again, and because she is dead, she cannot be stopped. Liz is bare and helpless in the shower, and nothing can protect her from being slashed and sliced and murdered — except that none of this is real. She awakens, screaming in bed, and Peter rushes in to protect her. And for the first time in the film (again, thanks to I Talk You Bored for noticing), she is wearing white.

Many find this a hard movie to stomach due to its misogyny. I’ll see you that and tell you it’s a misanthropic film that presents all of humanity, male and female, negatively. The men in this film are actually treated the way women usually are in films, as either silent sex objects (Warren Lockman), sexless enemies (Kate’s husband), shrill harpies that need to be defeated (Detective Marino) or sexless best friends who provide the hero with the tools they need to save the day (Peter). Seriously, in another film, one would think Peter would have a sexual interest in Liz, but despite her double entendres and come-ons, he remains more concerned with schedules and numbers and evidence.

Bobbi, the combination of male and female, comes across as a puritan punisher of females who benefit from sex, either emotionally or monetarily. Or perhaps they are just destroying the sex objects that they know that the male side of their brain will never allow them to become. Interestingly, Bobbi’s voice doesn’t come from Michael Caine but from De Palma regular William Finley (The Phantom of Phantom of the Paradise).

What else makes this a giallo? The police seem either unwilling to help at best or ineffectual at worst until they tie things up neatly at the end. And the conclusion, when the hand emerges not from the doorway — but the medicine cabinet — to slash Liz echoes the more fantastic films in the genre, such as Suspiria, All the Colors of the Dark and Stagefright, where reality just ceases to exist. At the end of all three films, the heroine has confronted the fantastic and may never be the same.

In the first, Suzy narrowly escapes from hell on earth and emerges laughing in the rain. Is she happy that she survived? Has she achieved a break from reality? Is she breaking the fourth wall and laughing at how insane the film has become, pleased that the torture is finally over?

In the final scene of All the Colors of the Dark, the fantasy world is all a ruse, yet our heroine, Jane, is now trapped in the dream world. She can tell what will happen before it does; she knows that her husband has both slept with and killed her sister, but he has saved her from a fate worse than death. Yet all she can do is shout, “I’m scared of not being myself anymore. Help me!”

In Stagefright, the final girl walks out of the scene and out of reality as she defeats the killer. She has transcended being an actress to removing herself from fiction.

In all these films, the characters are not unchanged by their experiences with the dream world. In Dressed to Kill, the final dream sequence renders Liz truly frightened for the first time in the film. It’s the only time we see her as vulnerable — even when faced with an entire gang of criminals on the subway, she retains her edge. As Peter reaches out to comfort her — the only sexless male in the film and not just a sublimated one like Dr. Elliott — she recoils from his touch before giving in to his protective embrace.

In the same way, the film changes us. It has thrilled us, made us think, or even made us angry. True cinema—true art, really—makes us confront what we find most uncomfortable. Sure, we can deride and decry many of this film’s choices, but the fact that I’ve devoted days of writing and over three thousand words to it speaks to its potency. Thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far.

PS—I’ve often discussed—in person and on podcasts—that I experienced so many R-rated movies for the first time via Mad Magazine. I’m delighted I could find the Mort Drucker illustration for his skewering of Dressed to Kill.

Dracula vs. Frankenstein feels like the most Independent-International movie there is. I have no other way to explain why this movie seems like it came from another reality. It has Dr. Durea (J. Carrol Naish, in his last film), the last descendant of Dr. Frankenstein, killing women with his assistant Groton (Lon Chaney Jr., in his next-to-last movie) to try to concoct an elixir that will fix his legs and his henchman’s simple brain. They’re visited by Dracula (Zandor Vorkov, really Raphael Peter Engel, given that name by Forrest J. Ackerman and someone who once ran record stores; according to this interview in Fangoria, he’s wearing a rental cape that was once used by Bela Lugosi) who wants them to finish their cocktail so that it can allow him to walk in the daytime which he feels will make him finally able to take over the world.

The doctor and his assistant decide to set up their lab — using the Kenneth Strickfaden equipment from the Universal films — in a haunted house known as the Creature Emporium. They keep killing women while Dracula is sent after the man who put the doctor in a wheelchair, Beaumont (Forrest J. Ackerman). A biker named Rico (Russ Tamblyn) gets involved, and Dracula gets his blood hot over a showgirl by the name of Judith Fontaine (Regina Carroll).

I nearly forgot! Dracula also has the corpse of the Frankenstein Monster, which he took from Oakmoor Cemetery. He’s played by both John Bloom and Shelley Weiss. The goal is to bring that creature back to life as well. Graydon Clark is in here as The Strange, a hippie leader, and of course, the kids all drop acid.

Judith also learns that the doctor has kept her sister Joanie (Maria Lease) and her friend Samantha (Anne Morrell) nude and trapped between life and death. He’s using a special enzyme in their plasma that comes from the fear before death to create his magical elixir so that he can heal his leg, fix his quiet friend and help Dracula. His hypothesis is that if Judith watches Mike (Anthony Eisley), a hippie who has fallen for her and she for him, die, then the enzyme in her blood will be strong enough to complete his work. He sends Grazbo the dwarf (Angelo Rossitto) and Groton after them, but the little guy falls through a trapdoor and onto an axe, Groton gets shot by the cops, and he himself falls onto a guillotine, which cuts his head off.

But oh, Mike, you aren’t safe. Dracula attempts to take Judith, and when our hero tries to save her, the vampire blasts him with his ring and turns him into ashes. Now, the fanged Frank Zappa lookalike tries to drink her blood in a desecrated church, but the Frankenstein Monster falls in love, too and fights Dracula. This sounds like the kind of story an elementary student would make up in class when they should be studying, and that’s why I love it. Dracula rips off the creature’s arms and head, but gets burned by the sunlight.

Lon Chaney Jr. was in bad shape during this, lying down between takes and barely able to speak, as he could be heard. He would speak to Adamson’s father and say things like, “You and I are the only two left. They’re all gone. I want to die now. There’s nothing left for me; I just want to die.”

What makes me love this even more is the theory that this was a sequel to Satan’s Sadists, with Russ Tamblyn and the other bikers from that film coming back. Sam Sherman decided to turn it into a horror film and much of the biker footage was cut as a result. Not all of the biker footage could be cut, which is why Tamblyn and his biker gang wander in and out of the movie.

This movie has one of my favorite lines of all time, as Dracula hypnotizes Forrest and takes him to his doom. He gives him directions as he speaks, and I wonder, why doesn’t he just have him drive, as he’s already taken over his will? He says, “I am known as the Count of Darkness, the Lord of the Manor of Carpathia. Turn here.”

If any film earned being a video nasty, it would be this one, a movie that has a man who was abused as a child growing up to be a serial killer obsessed with burning people alive. There is no one to root for or cheer for, only mayhem, malice and murder.

In short, the kind of movie that Gene Siskel would have a conniption over.

When Donald (Dan Grimaldi, a math professor who also played Philly and Patsy Parisi on The Sopranos) was a kid, his mother would use a stove to burn the evil out of him. Now fully grown, he seeks out women that remind him of her and kills them with a flamethrower in relentlessly graphic detail.

While the killer tries to confess his sins, he can’t stop. Even a simple double date ends with him smashing a candle over a woman’s head. And get this, it even has an ending very similar to Maniac, another movie that offers no easy answers or way out.

This is also a definite disco slasher. A truly mean spirited blast of sheer degeneracy — and therefore everything wonderful about the slasher form — Don’t Go In the House has songs like “Boogie Lightning,” “Dancin’ Close to You,” “Straight Ahead” and “Late Night Surrender” playing in between moments of women being set ablaze and a mother rotting somewhere in a house that has an impossibly huge torture chamber in the basement.

You can watch this on Tubi or buy the blu ray from Severin.

Dr. Death (John Considine) is a thousand-year-old magician who can transfer souls from one body to another. He keeps himself alive by jumping from one body to the next, and oh yeah — he has acid blood. I mean, sure, I’m down with that.

Sadly, this never got a sequel, as that was the plan. The main story is about Fred Saunders (Barry Coe), whose wife has just died and promised to return from the other side. After discovering that each spiritualist is a carny liar, he meets Doctor Death, who truly can bring the dead back from the grave. Of course, he’s also an absolute maniac.

One of the film’s financiers was Barry Gordy, who got to direct a scene. It’s also the last screen appearance of Moe Howard and has horror host Larry “Seymour” Vincent as a killer.

Consider this a 1973 TV movie that played theaters and drive-ins. It’s low budget, but groovy as it gets. I want to live in the world of this movie so badly. I really wish they’d made ten of these movies. “Enter that body!” says Doctor Death. Sure, whatever you want.

Dillinger, Bonnie, Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and Ma Barker are the Doberman Gang, six Dobermans who join the gang of Eddie Newton (Byron Mabe), Sammy (Simmy Bow), June (Julie Parrish) and former Air Force dog trainer Barney Greer (Hal Reed). Oh yes — there’s also a bulldog named J. Edgar.

Eddie and June have been a couple, but she soon sees that he could throw her away at any time. She starts getting close to Barney, who soon learns that this is a criminal plan to train these dogs. He’s told that he’ll be killed if he tries to get away, so he works with them in the hopes that he can save the dogs and June. But he soon has second thoughts when he learns that the dogs will be killed.

Good boys. J. Edgar gets them to run off with the money. The bad news is that one of the dogs was hit by a car, and I could have done without that part. Except that in the sequel, The Daring Dobermans, that dog is fine. Whew.

There are also two more movies in the series, The Amazing Dobermans and Alex and the Doberman Gang.

I didn’t have to worry so much, as this was the first movie to have the “No Animals Were Harmed” onscreen credit from the American Humane Association.

This was directed by Byron Ross Chudnow and written by Louis Garfinkle, who also wrote I Bury the Living, Face of Fire, The Hellbenders, Little Cigars and The Deer Hunter—yeah, I know, wow—and Frank Ray Perilli, who wrote Mansion of the Doomed, the Michael Pataki adult Cinderella, End of the World, Dracula’s Dog, the adult Fairy Tales, Laserblast, The Best of Sex and Violence and co-wrote Alligator with John Sayles.

Dimension Pictures played this as a double feature with The Twilight People. I love that!

Image from Mike’s Take On the Movies.