Oh René Cardona. Here you are remaking the lucha libre movie you did back in 1962, Las Luchadoras Contra el Medico Asesino, or The Wrestling Women vs. the Killer Doctor or Doctor of Doom, as it was called in the U.S.

While this was made in 1969 as La Horripilante Bestia Humana, or The Horrible Man-Beast, this one didn’t play in the U.S. until 1972. With alternate titles like Horror y Sexo and Gomar – The Human Gorilla, this is a fine blend of ladies wrestling with apes and, well, human heart surgery footage.

Rene is also known for his films Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy, the incredibly baffling Santa Claus and Survive!, a movie all about plane crashes and cannibalism.

Female masked wrestler, Lucy, dresses like the devil and wrestles at the arena — dare we say Arena Mexico? — every Friday, where she often knocks out other girls who dress like cat girls. She wants to retire for a life of leisure — and less stress — with her cop boyfriend.

However, Dr. Krellman (Jose Elias Moreno, who was Santa Claus in the aforementioned film in which he battled Patch the demon) wants to cure his son of leukemia. So he does what doctors have always said would work—puts a gorilla heart inside his boy. As we all know from health class, this turns his son into a deformed and murderous man-ape with the craziness of the organ donor to boot.

The inclusion of actual, grainy footage of a human heart transplant was a common shocker tactic in Latin American and European exploitation of the time. It provides a stomach-churning realism that clashes wildly with the rubbery, sweaty Gorilla-Man makeup.

You won’t be bored, what with the nudity, real open heart surgery and rampant murders. A monkey man that rips off dudes’ faces and the clothes of girls? Si, muchacho.

This made the Section 1 video nasties list, probably because its VHS cover art had a bloody surgeon’s hands holding a scalpel with the words “Warning: this film contains scenes of extreme and explicit violence.”

Night of the Bloody Apes is a bizarre cocktail of genres that shouldn’t work, yet remains endlessly watchable. It manages to be a sports movie, a medical thriller, a monster flick and a procedural all at once.

You can watch this for free on Tubi.

If you want to see what Donald Pleasence movies I’ve seen, here’s the Letterboxd list. I love him because he was a working actor. Like John Carradine, he was there when you needed him. And at times, he’d show just how good he was. But he’s a workmanlike — in a good way — presence in so many movies.

Directed by Lee Madden (The Night God Screamed, the Alan Smithee who made Ghost Fever) and written by Hugh Smith (second unit director of Abby, writer of The Glove), Night Creature has Pleasence as Axel MacGregor, a writer and big game hunter who has unleashed a deadly black panther and doomed everyone around him which is a real problem as his daughters Leslie (Nancy Kwan, Wonder Women) and Georgia (Jennifer Rhodes) have just come to town along with Ross (Ross Hagen, who also produced this movie), a guide who seems pretty sleazy.

All this movie should be about is Pleasence hunting the animal that already hurt him, and he’s brought it to his turf for one last battle. You have the great thespian monologuing and trying to imitate the big beast and man, his eyes bugging out, and him snarling, and that’s the best.

At times, I’m given to just yelling out Pleasence line reads, like “The evil is gone” and “I shot him six times.” I celebrate him eating at a salad bar in 90s giallo. I’ve read that he drank through this entire movie, and I in no way want to judge him for that. My memories of the actor are always wonderful, and he lives again every time someone watches one of his films, whether he’s playing a President, the devil or a preacher who turns into a warthog.

You know those movies that feel like a cold, damp fog rolling off the English Channel? The ones where everyone wears thick knit sweaters and looks like they haven’t seen a sunbeam since the late sixties? That’s Neither the Sea Nor the Sand. It’s a romance from beyond the grave flick that treats romance with the bleak, grey reality of a rotting corpse that just won’t quit you.

Anna Robinson (Susan Hampshire) is having a rough go of it. She’s ditched her husband and fled to the island of Jersey to get her head straight. While wandering the dunes, she meets Hugh Debernon (Michael Jayston). They fall into that kind of intense, us-against-the-world love that usually ends in a double suicide or a very awkward Thanksgiving. Speaking of awkward, Hugh’s brother George is a religious zealot who thinks Anna is basically the Whore of Babylon in a trench coat.

The lovers head to Scotland for some “Is this just an affair?” soul-searching. Hugh promises it’s the real deal, but then—boom—he drops dead on a beach while playing tag. The local doc checks the pulse, signs the papers and calls it a day. Anna, understandably, loses her mind with grief.

But then Hugh just… gets up and walks back into the house that night.

Anna is thrilled and thinks the doctor was a quack. The audience, however, sees Hugh’s thousand-yard stare and realizes he’s basically a flesh-puppet for Anna’s sheer willpower. The trip back to Jersey marks the end of the honeymoon. Hugh has stopped talking entirely. He just sits there, staring at Anna with eyes that say, “I’m currently decomposing.“

George isn’t buying the miracle story. He’s convinced Anna is a witch who conjured an evil spirit to pilot his brother’s meat-suit. To prove it, he literally burns Hugh’s hand to see if he flinches. (Spoiler: He doesn’t. Hugh starts “talking” to Anna in her head. He pretends to go along with George’s plan for an exorcism, but during the car ride to see the priest, Hugh uses his zombie-psychic powers to run George’s car off a cliff. There’s even some Bewitched sound effects!

The cops show up to tell Hugh his brother is dead, leading to a truly bizarre scene where Anna hands over Hugh’s own death certificate from Scotland while he sits in the corner acting like a very aggressive mannequin. Eventually, the reality of the situation—and the smell?—becomes too much. Anna realizes that if she wants to be with her man, she’s gotta go where he’s going. The film ends with the two of them walking hand in hand into the freezing ocean, while their friend Collie watches from the shore, probably wondering whether he should have called a mental health professional three weeks ago.

Directed by Fred Burnley and written by Rosemary Davies, based on a book by Gordon Honeycombe, this is the kind of romance movie for people who like the fog and the grave. You know who you are.

You can get it from Vinegar Syndrome.

Can director and writer Joe Sarno do a title or what?

The story begins with Marcia (Tamara Glynn), a young woman from the country, hitchhiking her way to the city. She isn’t the typical wide-eyed waif; she is acutely aware of the power of her appearance. When a driver picks her up, she essentially trades sex for a safe ride and a bit of cash, viewing it as a simple transaction to reach her goal. She is headed toward a roadhouse where her sister, Vicky, works as a hostess and has promised her a job.

Upon arriving at the roadhouse, Marcia learns the dark truth: Vicky has been murdered. The method was particularly brutal. She was strangled with her own silk garter belt.

Rather than fleeing in terror or going to the police, who are largely in the pocket of the local elite, Marcia decides to step directly into her sister’s shoes. She takes the hostess job at the roadhouse, moving into the same room where Vicky lived, effectively becoming the new Vicky to draw the killer out of the shadows.

As Marcia works the floor, she discovers that the roadhouse is a front for the secret desires of the town’s most respectable citizens. She begins a dangerous game of manipulation with all of them. And as for the Garterbelt Strangler, it isn’t just a random maniac; the motive is tied to the corruption and secret lifestyles of these powerful men. Marcia finds herself increasingly imperiled as she realizes that her sister was murdered because she knew too much about a specific civic leader’s proclivities.

The film culminates in a claustrophobic confrontation where Marcia’s life is threatened by the same lace instrument that killed her sister. In true Sarno fashion, the resolution is less about justice and more about the survival of the craftiest person in the room, leaving the viewer with a bleak look at the hunger that drives both the powerful and the desperate.

Kelly (Jeanne Bell, the second black Playboy Playmate in October 1969, the first to be on the cover in January 1970 — with four other black Playmates — and also the first to be on the cover by herself in October 1971; she’s also TNT Jackson) and Anggie (Rosanne Katon, Playboy Playmate September 1978; The Swinging Cheerleaders) are pirates who steal from rich tourists and give to poor people. Then, the Justice Department finds Kelly and lets her know that her sister Sandra has been taken by drug dealer Monteiro (Tony Carreon). If the pirates can get into his plantation and get info, they’ll get immunity for all their past crimes.

They break in, join up with a prisoner, Marcie (Trina Parks, Darktown Strutters), and the bad guy’s woman, Serena (Jayne Kennedy, Body and Soul), then work on blowing the base up real good. That’s because Sandra had already been killed when she tried to escape. Well, the girls try to make it out, but not everyone is on the right side.

Cirio Santiago directed this, Cyril St. James wrote it, and Dimension Pictures released it in the U.S. It’s a combination of women-in-prison and blaxploitation films. I wish it had more tension or reasons to tell you it’s a must-see, but it’s interesting for the leads all being black and otherwise. It has long scenes of padding when you want all the madness of a WIP film. The chase kicks some of that off, but this seems to have all of the ingredients of a firecracker — speaking of Firecracker, that’s a much better Santiago film — but then the fuse sputters.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Depending on where you found this tape in the 70s, it went by a dozen different names. In Spain, it was the poetic Una gota de sangre para morir amando (A Drop of Blood to Die Loving); in France, the nonsensical Le bal du vaudou (The Voodoo Ball); and in the UK, it was slapped with the grindhouse titles Clockwork Terror or Murder In a Blue World.

It’s director and co-screenwriter Eloy de la Iglesia’s take on a future world that at times may feel very 1973 but also feels way more 2022 than we may want to admit.

To understand this movie, you have to understand De la Iglesia. A member of the Spanish Communist Party and an openly gay man living under the iron-fisted censorship of dictator Francisco Franco, his films weren’t just entertainment. They were Molotov cocktails. He specialized in Quinqui cinema, focusing on delinquency, social protest and the grit of the marginalized. Murder In a Blue World is another of his assaults on the status quo.

Sue Lyon (yes, Kubrick’s original Lolita) stars as Anna Vernia, a dedicated nurse by day who spends her nights acting as the “adistic homosexual killer the police are panicking over. In a stroke of brilliant irony, Anna collects pop art and even owns a copy of the novel Lolita. When she isn’t working, she lures gorgeous young men back to her apartment, sleeps with them and then—inspired by the rhythm of their post-coital heartbeats—slices them open with a scalpel.

She’s dating Dr. Victor Sender (Victor Sorel), a man convinced he can cure the rampant crime in their futuristic city through aggressive electroshock therapy. It’s a classic battle of ideologies: Victor wants to lobotomize the violence out of society, while Anna is the violence society created.

De la Iglesia doesn’t just tip his hat to Stanley Kubrick; he steals the hat and wears it. Early in the film, a family settles in to watch A Clockwork Orange on TV before being brutally attacked by a motorcycle gang.

Enter David (Chris Mitchum), a gang member with a conscience who gets beaten and expelled by his peers. After witnessing Anna disposing of a corpse, David decides to play a dangerous game of blackmail. He doesn’t want to turn her in; he wants her money to buy a motorcycle. It’s a strange, psychosexual cat-and-mouse game between a survivor of the streets and a high-society predator.

When David’s old gang leaves him for dead, he ends up in Victor’s hospital, slated for the doctor’s redemption treatment. Anna, having developed a twisted affection for the boy, realizes she can’t let the state take his soul. In a haunting finale, she reads Edgar Allan Poe to him, choosing to end his life on her own terms while Victor’s patients lose their minds in the background. It’s a bleak, beautiful bath in some dystopian dread.

I love how this movie somehow combines the ancient future of the 70s with the trapping of giallo. This is a strange and wonderful film that I plan on going back to several times.

If there is one thing you need to know about The Hammer, it’s that Fred Williamson doesn’t wait for permission. While most actors are content to sit in their trailers waiting for lighting setups, Fred was busy staging a cinematic heist.

The story goes that while filming Enzo G. Castellari’s The Inglorious Bastards (the one Tarantino loved so much he borrowed the title), Fred realized he had a crew, a camera and a weekend. Every Friday, he’d essentially kidnap the production equipment and go shoot his own movie. He spent the weekdays writing the script on the fly and Saturdays and Sundays playing the baddest man in Italy.

In Mr. Mean, Fred plays the titular character, a high-stakes hitman hired by a former Cosa Nostra heavy to take out a guy named Ranati (Stelio Candelli). Ranati is the kind of low-life even the Mob can’t stand. He’s running fake charities to steal from the poor. It’s bad for the brand, see? But once the job gets moving, Mr. Mean finds out he’s being set up by the very people who cut him the check.

This has that greasy, gritty Euro-crime aesthetic thanks to the Italian locations, but it’s injected with the soul of a Blaxploitation epic. Speaking of soul, The Ohio Players show up as themselves and provide a soundtrack that absolutely drips with funk.

Is the plot a little messy? Sure. That’s what happens when you write a movie on a Tuesday and film it on a Sunday. But you aren’t watching this for a tight screenplay; you’re watching it for Fred Williamson looking cool in a leather jacket, Raimund Harmstorf as a heavy named Rommell and the sheer audacity of a film made behind the backs of another production’s producers.

Mr. Mean is the ultimate DIY action flick. It feels like a beautiful accident, a collision between the Italian Poliziotteschi genre and the American badass archetype. 

You can watch this on Tubi.

Before Jonathan Kaplan was racking up critical acclaim for Heart Like a Wheel or The Accused, he was a king of the drive-in circuit. We’re talking a blistering run of exploitation gold: Night Call Nurses, The Student Teachers, The Slams, Truck Turner and White Line Fever. But even the best directors have a car crash moment. On an episode of  Trailers From Hell, Kaplan didn’t mince words, calling this movie “the biggest failure of his career.“

Written by Ken Friedman (who also wrote several other Kaplan films, such as Bad Girls and Death By Invitation), this was an attempt by Dino De Laurentiis to make an American movie starring Italian actor Terence Hill, who was already well-known to American audiences for They Call Me Trinity.

The plan? Put Hill in a big-budget, globe-trotting action comedy. The result? Total box office poison. Variety reported that Radio City Music Hall actually sued 20th Century-Fox for over $100,000 because ticket sales were so pathetic. When the Rockettes are looking for a refund, you know you’re in trouble.

”When a simple garage mechanic suddenly inherits a billion dollars, he gets more action, excitement, romance, and riotous adventure than money can buy!” Yes, Terence Hill is Guido Falcone, an Italian mechanic who is the only relative not to have begged his rich American uncle for money. When he gets the entire estate, his uncle’s business manager, John Cutler (Jackie Gleason), flies to Italy to try to con him. Despite his sweet nature, Guido is way smarter than he appears and wants to look over the estate; he has to be in San Francisco on a certain date to accept the offer. Cutler, wanting the money for himself, hires Rosie (Valerie Perrine) and her friend Bernie (Dick Miller) to distract Guido and keep him from signing his estate papers.

The movie was originally supposed to feature Lily Tomlin, but the studio gave her the thumb. Enter Valerie Perrine. As the urban legend goes, Perrine introduced herself to the famously modest and sweet-natured Hill by claiming she could light a cigarette with her vagina. Unsurprisingly, the chemistry evaporated instantly. The two supposedly despised each other, making the falling-in-love scenes feel about as romantic as a root canal.

The supporting cast includes R.G. Armstrong as a Southern sheriff, Chill Wills as a military leader, Slim Pickens as a rancher, William Redfield as a company lawyer, Sam Laws and Johnny Ray McGhee as a father and son with differing views on life, and even Leo Rossi as a kidnapper. As I say, it’s the kind of cast I personally would call an all-star, even if no one else would agree.

Hill would also appear in another box-office bomb that year, March or Die, which also starred Gene Hackman and Catherine Deneuve.

I have no idea why Hollywood would hire Hill to play in a movie that’s nothing like what he does best. At least he was able to work with Bud Spencer again and make plenty of late 70s and 80s buddy movies, as well as Super Fuzz as a solo movie three years later.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Der Sittlichkeitsverbrecher is a Swiss social issue film that aims to educate but often feels like a dark, unsettling drama, blending documentary elements with a grim narrative filled with trench coats and grimacing character actors.

Zurich is under siege and we follow the tireless Swiss police and the high-tech (for 1963) wizards at INTERPOL as they hunt down a rogue’s gallery of voyeurs, fetishists and sadists. Once these guys are caught, the movie shifts from a police procedural into a sterile, white-walled nightmare of psychological testing and the ultimate cure: voluntary brain surgery. 

Director Franz Schnyder was usually known for wholesome Swiss village stories, so seeing him dive into the muck of sex crimes is like finding out your favorite kindergarten teacher moonlights as a bouncer at a dive bar.

The film spends a lot of time on rehabilitation. It treats the human brain like suburban dads treat their old cars. If it’s not running right, just get under the hood, play with the timing belt, and see what happens. Except, you know, they’re cutting into human brains.

While the rest of the exploitation filmmakers were busy filming grainy loops of women peeling oranges, Sarno was busy being the Ingmar Bergman of 42nd Street. He didn’t just want to show skin; he wanted to show the quiet, desperate rot behind the picket fence.

Moonlighting Wives follows Mrs. Joan Rand (Tammy Latour), a woman who realizes that the American Dream is expensive and her husband’s paycheck isn’t cutting it. She goes from being sexually harassed at a stenographer job to organizing a stable of neighborhood wives into a call-girl ring. But this isn’t a girl power heist movie. It’s a Sarno film, which means everyone is miserable. Even when they’re making money, they’re staring into the middle distance, wondering where their souls went.

Based on an actual scandal that took place in Nassau County, NY, in February of 1964, this finds Joan using everyone in her way and paying for it, because when this was made, the bad had to go to jail. Today, she’d be getting away with it and moving on to an even bigger scandal.

Tammy Latour was a staple of Joe Sarno’s early black-and-white “adults only” dramas. This film was thought lost for decades until a print was famously discovered in an eBay film lot and restored. Latour also appears in Sarno’s Flesh and Lace.

The cast also includes Joe Santos, playing one of the detectives. He went on to become a legendary character actor, most famous as Sgt. Dennis Becker on The Rockford Files. He was actually Joe Sarno’s cousin, which is how he ended up in these early “roughies” like this one and The Panic in Needle Park.

As for the belly dancer, that’s Fatima, who was a real-life professional dancer. Sarno often included “floor show” segments in his films to pad the runtime and add “production value” without needing to record synchronized dialogue.

Gretchen Rudolph, who plays Nancy, is also in everything from Fantasm and My Body Hungers to Bed of Violence and Run Swinger Run!

What makes Moonlighting Wives a cut above the usual is that it actually has something to say about the 1960s domestic trap. It’s about the commodification of the Happy Housewife archetype. Joan isn’t a villain; she’s an entrepreneur in a world that gave her no other outlets.