You have to admire the balls of the makers of this movie. Actually, you can probably see them from space. They bought footage of Sir Christopher Lee from another movie and used it as the beginning and end of this movie, then said the film stars the venerable thespian. Learning that a lawsuit would be long and expensive, he just had to fume. I wonder if he was as angry as when he walked out of A Bay of Blood?

Lee’s speech has nothing at all to do with the rest of the movie. Let’s all admire his plaid slacks, however.

Anyway, the real meat of the movie involves the death of a dog named Poopers, four college students killing one of their professors and lots and lots of paintings, then Morak, an evil force, comes out of the possibly dead professor.

You’ll be forgiven if this movie seems like it makes no sense because it doesn’t. And that’s probably why I liked it: I watched it five drinks into a bender, and it was perfect for that moment when alcohol goes from tasting wonderful to tasting like way too much.

This was probably made in 1975, but who cares? How many movies do you know where dead teachers command cacti from beyond the grave to kill their students? I can think of one, and I’m writing about it right now.

Seriously, Christopher Lee spent as much time looking at contracts as all my favorite horror stars. Work is work, but I have no idea how he thought reading a script about a shaman convention inside a wood-paneled room was going to work out all that well.

Evan Lee made one movie. This was it. If he made any more, the world would have exploded.

In case you need to know just how odd and weird and whatever other descriptors you need for it, Ed Wood himself shows up in a cameo. Now that’s a guy who knew how to throw a non-sequitur speech directly into a movie. Pull the string!

Made in Germany as Mädchenhandel lohnt sich nicht, this is a black-and-white dive into the gutter that feels like it was filmed in the shadow of a rainy alleyway. We’ve got a plot that would make a grindhouse theater owner weep with joy: shady characters luring women to parties, drugging them and peddling them off for cold hard cash and fixes.

According to a reviewer on Letterboxd, in the German version, the nude scenes have been surgically removed. In their place? An off-screen ballad-singing duo who pipes up like a Greek chorus of morality. They don’t just sing; they warn the audience about the soul-crushing reality of trafficking and, at times, literally narrate exactly what is happening on screen as if we’ve suddenly gone blind.

This has a lot and maybe it all, like a street preacher who is screaming about the end of the world, slapflights, an evil boat nightclub, a bad guy named Pretty Boy who is surrounded by women who love him, a cop named Oscar who hangs people by their ankles, a one-eyed bad guy named Willie, big French hair and all dubbed dialogue.

This was directed by Jean-Pierre Bastid, whose book Laissez bronzer les cadavres! was filmed as Let the Corpses Tan. He also directed an erotic horror movie called Hallucinations sadiques and the mondo Les teenagers.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Marisa Mell is the female George Eastman. No, she doesn’t act like a wide-eyed gigantic maniac in every movie. It’s just that no matter what movie she appears in, just her name being in the credits guarantees that I will watch the film.

Also known as …dopo di che, uccide il maschio e lo divora (…After That, It Kills the Male and Devours It), which is one of the best titles ever.

A wealthy landowner named Don Miguel (Stephen Boyd, who was in Ben-Hur) is haunted by his dead mother and missing wife — who may have been murdered — when he meets a gorgeous runaway named Marta (Mell), who may have killed the man who she was running from.

I haven’t seen any of José Antonio Nieves Conde’s films before, but this movie makes me want to watch every single one of them.

The strange thing is that this movie pretty much became true in a way, as Boyd and Mell fell in love, as they made this and The Great Swindle one on top of the other*. Despite Boyd not wanting anything to do with Mell at first — was the man made of stone? — he eventually fell for her and they married in a gypsy ceremony near Madrid, cutting their wrists and sealing their blood. The couple was so possessed by the mystical and sexual desire they felt for one another that they even went to have it exorcized in another ritual.

Boyd had to run from her, as the relationship physically and mentally exhausted him. As for Mell, she’d tell the Akron Beacon Journal that “We both believe in reincarnation, and we realized we’ve already been lovers in three different lifetimes, and in each one I made him suffer terribly.”

In the same year that all this happened, Mell was also dating Pier Luigi Torri, an aristocratic nightclub owner who fled the country after a cocaine scandal. Arrested in London after it was discovered he had a $300 million dollar gold mine and had also scammed a bank, he somehow escaped his jail cell and ran from the police across rooftops, escaping to America for 18 months. Evidently, Mell dated Diabolik in art and in life.

So let’s talk about the Mell relationship in the film instead of reality. She has come to live with Miguel, who collects insects and has two servants who keep things tidy. She enters his life by claiming that she is on the run for a self-defense murder. Miguel decides to protect her from the police because she looks like his wife Pilar (also played by Mell) who has left him or was killed. He’s also tormented by the death of his sainted mother while she may not be who she says that she is.

Oh yeah — and now Marta is acting as Pillar to throw the police off the scent of the man whom she either wants to marry or destroy.

Marta is a gothic-style giallo but is also dreamlike throughout. There’s a continual obsession with placing Mell in front of mirrors. And for someone who was rarely used outside of her sex appeal in films, she absolutely haunting here. Somehow, Spain put this movie forward for Oscar consideration and if I ran those popcorn fart boring awards, I would have given this every single award.

Sure, this movie rips off Hitchcock, but it also wallows in sin, which is what I demand from the giallo that I come to adore. Somehow, someway, this aired on broadcast TV as part of Avco Embassy’s Nightmare Theater package, along with A Bell from Hell, Death Smiles on a Murderer, Maniac Mansion, Night of the Sorcerers, Fury of the Wolfman, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Witches Mountain, The Mummy’s Revenge and The Witch. Man, how did any of those air on regular TV?

*Credit to the Stephen Boyd Fan Page and Marisa Mell: Her Life and Her Work for this information.

Call it Mansion of the Doomed. Or The Terror of Dr. Chaney. You may also refer to it as Eyes, Eyes of Dr. Chaney, House of Blood or Massacre Mansion. But whatever name you choose to refer to this Charles Band-produced, Michael Pataki-directed movie, you will probably enjoy it. Seriously, it’s packed with sleaze, eyeball-removal, and plenty of your genre favorites.

Dr. Leonard Chaney (Richard Basehart) isn’t your typical megalomaniac; he is a man hollowed out by a singular, obsessive guilt. After causing a car accident that blinded his daughter Nancy (Trish Stewart), he transforms his basement into a makeshift surgical theater and starts cutting up eyeballs so that he can get his girl to see again, starting with her fiancé, Lance Henriksen and moving on to Marilyn Joi, who played Cleopatra Schwartz in The Kentucky Fried Movie.

Gloria Grahame — as Chaney’s wife — and Vic Tayback — playing a cop — are both in this, meaning that this is a Blood and Lace reunion. Pop the cork on that sparkling cider! Celebrate!

Frank Ray Perilli wrote this. He worked with Pataki on the softcore film Cinderella, plus he wrote the movies Dracula’s Dog, Laserblast, End of the World and Alligator.

Come for the stars, stick around for the Stan Winston effects and enjoy the craziness of Basehart as he goes from loving father to kidnapper of children to a man who has an entire group of eyeless victims just meandering around his basement.

This movie is pure scum. It’s even a category 3 video nasty, which means I had to watch it at midnight when I really needed to go to sleep. You can do the same and watch it for free on Tubi.

If Juan López Moctezuma had only ever gifted the world Alucarda, his seat in the pantheon of cult cinema would already be upholstered in velvet and stained with theatrical blood. But Moctezuma wasn’t just a director; he was a surrealist provocateur who served as the head of programming for Televisa and worked as the producer/right-hand man to Alejandro Jodorowsky on El Topo and Fando y Lis.

The film follows a journalist who treks to a remote, mist-shrouded institution to profile the revolutionary “System of Soothing” pioneered by the esteemed Dr. Maillard (Claudio Brook, Alucarda, The Devil’s Rain!). The pitch? Treat the mentally ill by allowing them to indulge their delusions rather than chaining them to walls. However, the progressive atmosphere quickly curdles into something far more sinister. The reporter discovers a chaotic, ritualistic society where the doctor’s daughter, Eugenie, tells the reporter that he hasn’t met the real doctor, just one of the inmates who is quite literally running the asylum and randomly quoting Aleister Crowley. Even better — Susana Kamini, Justine from Alucarda, shows up as a cult priestess!

Imagine if Hammer or Amicus made a movie in Mexico, with all of the dialogue in English, and fed massive amounts of drugs to everyone involved. That’s pretty much how I imagine that this film was made. It’s also an Edgar Allan Poe story (The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether), but really, it’s also a costume drama with more powdered wigs than a British courthouse.

Brian Trenchard-Smith is the patron saint of go-big-or-go-home. For his feature debut (along with action scenes directed by star Jimmy Wang Yu), he didn’t just walk through the door. No, he kicked it down, set it on fire and then hang-glided over the ashes. The Man from Hong Kong (aka The Dragon Flies) is the ultimate East-meets-West collision, a 50/50 co-production between Australia and Hong Kong that plays like a James Bond flick on a steady diet of adrenaline.

Originally, this was supposed to be a Bruce Lee vehicle. Can you imagine? But after the Dragon passed, the production pivoted to Jimmy Wang Yu (The One-Armed Swordsman himself). He plays Inspector Fang Sing Leng, a Hong Kong cop who lands in Sydney to extradite a drug courier and ends up tearing the city apart to get to the man at the top. That man? None other than George Lazenby.

Yes, the guy who played Bond once gets to play the heavy here, Jack Wilton, and he is clearly having the time of his life being a total bastard. He’s joined by an Ozploitation who’s who, including Hugh Keays-Byrne and Roger Ward (both of whom you know from Mad Max). Even a young Sammo Hung, billed as Hung Kam Po, shows up to get into a scrap on top of Uluru!

If you’ve seen Stunt Rock, you’ve seen the action from this movie, as legendary stuntman Grant Page hang-gliding over Sydney Harbor like it’s no big deal. This is a stunt show with massive automotive carnage designed by Peter Armstrong that rivals anything coming out of Hollywood at the time. In the final showdown, Lazenby actually gets set on fire. Not movie fire. Real fire. He even got singed during the take, because that’s just how they rolled down under

And let’s not forget the theme song. “Sky High” by Jigsaw is a soaring, majestic piece of 70s pop that has absolutely no business being the intro to a movie where people are getting punched in the throat, yet somehow, it’s perfection. It was also the theme song for Mil Mascaras and his brother Dos Caras in Japan.

If you want to see what happens when you mix martial arts mastery with a complete lack of regard for human safety, make The Man from Hong Kong your destination. Also: No permits were used to film this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Call it Il paese del sesso selvaggio (The Country of Savage Sex). Or refer to it as Deep River Savages and Sacrifice! Or just say it by the name most of the U.S. saw it as, Man from Deep River. Whatever title you see it as, you can claim to have seen the first movie in Italy’s cannibal cycle, which, like all filones, takes another, the mondo, and goes even further.

British photographer John Bradley (Ivan Rassimov, who was Serbian) has been photographing the Thai wildlife. A boxing match is more interesting to him than the woman he’s with and soon, he’s so drunk that he’s stabbing a man in a bar fight. Then, it’s time to go into the heart of darkness and go down the river. He wakes up, and his guide is dead, and he’s been taken, as the natives believe him to be a merman thanks to his wetsuit. 

After some torture, the chief Luhanà agrees to release John to Maraya (Burmese/British cannibal movie queen Me Me Lai), who has shown an interest in him. Her governess, Taima, speaks English and decides to help him escape. That night, a helicopter comes close, and John tries and fails to get away, killing Maraya’s fiancé, Karen. This, for some reason, makes him seem like he could be a member of the tribe, so they start to torture him all over again to see if he belongs. In case you’re wondering, yes, this would like you to think it’s A Man Called Horse.

By the end of the film, he’s had a child with Maraya, but she doesn’t make it. When the helicopter comes to rescue him again, he hides and goes deeper into the jungle, having left the world of civilization behind.

This film was a huge success in New York City’s grindhouses, but it ran into problems when it tried to cross the pond. Even though the BBFC took one look at the celluloid in ’75 and slammed the door on a theatrical release, the flick pulled a fast one, sneaking into UK homes under the title Deep River Savages. But you can’t keep a good exploitation film down for long without the moral crusaders noticing. By 1983, when the DPP was busy clutching their pearls and drafting the infamous Video Nasties list, Lenzi’s opus was right there in the crosshairs. Once the Video Recordings Act of 1984 became the law of the land, the UK government dropped the hammer. Deep River Savages wasn’t just trimmed. It was banned in its entirety until 2003, when three minutes were cut. In 2016, another release saw three more minutes chopped with the same disdain that animals are sliced to bits in this. In the U.S., this got an R rating.

Director Umberto Lenzi really hit almost every filone Italy had to offer, from peplum (Samson and the Slave Queen) and Eurospy (008: Operation Exterminate, SuperSeven Calling Cairo) to comic book movies (Kriminal, Tarzan In the Golden Grotto), giallo (Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, Eyeball, Spasmo), pliziotteschi (The Tough Ones), Conan rip-offs (Ironmaster), horror (Ghosthouse, Nightmare Beach) and even VHS era cash-ins (Primal Rage, Hitcher In the Dark). He also made two more cannibal films, Eaten Alive! (which takes scenes from this film) and Cannibal Ferox, which was released in the U.S. as Make Them Die Slowly. 

In case you’re wondering about that scene where Me Me Lai gets raw-dogged on the ashes of her dead fiancé, it’s based on truth and isn’t just the kind of transgressive imagery we expect in Italian movies. It’s based on a traditional African ritual known as widow cleansing. In the internal logic of the culture, a woman becomes dirty when her husband dies. She’s essentially a walking biohazard of bad luck and grief, supposedly possessed by the lingering spirit of the deceased. To stop this curse from spreading like a supernatural virus through the rest of the village, the widow has to be scrubbed clean and the only way to wash away the shadows of the dead is through a three-day marathon of unprotected sex with a purifier, who is usually the dead guy’s brother.

A warning: For many fans of cult and exploitation cinema, scenes of real animal death are often the ones that make the movie difficult to revisit. Here is the breakdown of the animals killed on screen in this film:

• A Crocodile: This is one of the film’s more protracted and famous scenes. The animal is dragged from the water, bound and then cut open and gutted while still alive.
• A Python/Large Snake: The snake is decapitated during a sequence intended to show the dangers of the jungle.
• A Monkey: In a scene that reflects the survival tropes of the genre, a monkey is killed and its brain is eaten by the characters.
• A Mongoose vs. Cobra: True to the mondo style that influenced Lenzi, there is a sequence featuring a fight between a mongoose and a cobra that ends with the snake’s death.

While Man from Deep River is often praised for its lush cinematography and for being more of a fish-out-of-water adventure than the later, more mean-spirited cannibal films like Cannibal Holocaust (intended as a Lenzi-directed sequel, but he turned it down twice), the inclusion of these non-simulated animal deaths remains its most controversial element.

The Florida-based director William Grefe has brought many swamp-tinged bits of exploitation goodness — or badness — to the screen, including Alligator Alley, The Wild Rebels, The Hooked Generation and many more. As one of the first films to capitalize on the shark craze in the wake of Spielberg’s success, this film’s sympathetic view of sharks as victims is a pretty unique take on the genre.

Marine salvager Sonny Stein (Richard Jaeckel, who pretty much had a one-man war against nature with him battling bats in Chosen Survivors, bears in Grizzly and, well, any and all beasts with a chip on their shoulder in Day of the Animals) is given a medallion that allows him to communicate with sharks. He becomes increasingly disconnected from humanity — easy to do, since everyone in this movie is scum — and uses his sharks to take out those who oppose his beliefs.

One of those people is an incredibly chubby club owner who is using high-frequency sound to train his sharks and kind of pimping out his wife, Karen (Jennifer Bishop, Bigfoot), to get Sonny on their side. Have you ever seen a movie where strippers have been trained to swim with sharks? Who would want to see that? This movie provides the what, if not the why.

Another is a shady shark researcher, Whitney, who murders a shark and her pups for “science.” You will stare, unbelievingly, at the screen as Jaeckel overemotes, clutching a dead baby shark in his mitts. Oh yeah — Harold “Oddjob” Sakata is also in this, playing a character named Pete who ends up on the wrong side of a shark’s teeth while trying to poach Sonny’s friends.

The stunt footage is pretty amazing and even gets a mention before the movie even begins, boasting that no mechanical sharks were used. Other than the weird premise and a few good scenes, you can nap through most of this and not feel bad, though you might wake up when Sonny tells his shark buddy Sammy that he can’t help it if he was born a man.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Much like The Wizard of Oz, The Magic Christmas Tree believes reality is in black and white, while dreams are in color. Both films have a witch. Both movies have wishes. But only one of them had a budget. And only one of them is a classic beloved by families for generations.

Sorry, Richard C. Parish. Your one-and-done directorial effort isn’t getting a 4K re-release this year. Or any year, really.

In the black-and-white real world, three boys are walking home from school on Halloween. One of them, Mark, helps a witch get her cat Lucifer out of a tree. The moment someone told me I had to climb a tree to save a demonic cat, I would honestly be out of there, but Mark instead falls out of the tree and gets knocked out.

When he wakes up, the witch gives him a magic ring, as well as some magic seeds that need to be planted. On Thanksgiving, while everyone else is sleeping off the turkey, Mark is combining the turkey wishbone with the magic seeds, the magic words and the magic ring to grow the magic Christmas tree. His turtle Ichabod just watches in terror as Mark engages in a rite of eroto-comatose lucidity.

This tree that grows is unkillable, even when Mark’s dad cuts the grass in the middle of November. I guess we should assume that they live in California. Also — Mark’s dad is played by the director, and his dialogue appears to appear as if by magic. In fact, this entire film appears dubbed even when it isn’t.

While Ichabod the turtle eats the grass, Dad has a wacky grass-cutting session that ends with the mower in flames and him acting drunk. The way he talks to his wife gives you a good idea of how he really treats her. This film cuts deeply into the dark underbelly of post-war America. The dream is dead. The power mower is in flames. The Christmas tree is alive.

That’s right. On Christmas Eve, the Magic Tree comes to life and can talk. It grants Mark three wishes. The Magic Christmas Tree also speaks with all the snark and pomp of Charles Nelson Reilly. Seriously, it’s as if the tree has seen it all and is bored with this charade. He’s merely indulging Mark.

Now, Mark’s a smart kid, so he wishes for an hour of absolute power, which he promptly is corrupted by absolutely. That said, he’s not that smart, because why wish for only an hour? Just wish for absolute power. Don’t put any limits on it, Mark. And don’t talk to trees.

What does Mark do with all that power? He makes flowers appear and disappear. Mark has obviously not gone through puberty, because if I had a magic power in 1964, I would have used the entire hour with Barbara Steele. Or Mamie Van Doren. Or Bardeau. Ah, you get the picture, even if Mark doesn’t.

Instead, he makes people run all over the place and throw pies in one another’s faces, but the camera is so far away you may wonder exactly what’s happening. It’s all kind of like Benny Hill, but terrifying instead of madcap. Firemen get pies in their faces while their antique engines careen out of control. Happy holidays, La Verne, California. Hope you survive the experience.

Yes, the same town where the wedding scene in The Graduate was shot (and Wayne’s World 2) is subject to the Magic Christmas Tree, gifting Mark with the power to be a complete jerk.

Mark’s second wish is to have Santa Claus all to himself. He couldn’t think of any other wishes. I mean, you have any power in the world, and you can’t think of a wish?

Santa really seems like he’s senile. He also seems like he can’t stand up from the chair he’s stuck in.

This wish makes every other child in the world very sad, so Mark uses his third wish to send Santa back to the children. That’s because he’s sent to a pocket dimension where his selfishness leads him to meet the very embodiment of Greed. The giant man yells, “You are my little boy!” and offers him a mountain of cake and toys to stay.

Greed is played by Pittsburgh native Robert “Big Buck” Maffei, who uses his 7’1″ frame to his advantage, playing monsters and aliens in a ton of television shows and movies, including a creature (actually a Taurus II anthropoid) in “The Galileo Seven” episode of Star Trek and the giant cyclops on Lost In Space. His last movie appearance was in Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams.

Mark gives Santa back to the children. But of course, it was all a dream. A horrible, horrible dream. Mark may have learned something. Maybe we all did.

The bastards at Goodtimes released this on VHS in 1992, pairing it with Rene Cardona’s Santa Claus. I can’t imagine a more horrifying double feature ever — the battle of Santa and Patch directed by the man who brought you Night of the Bloody Apes, paired with this film that feels like it was shot on one of those Price Is Right Showcase Showdown sets with all of the lights turned out.

You can watch this for free on The Internet Archive and Tubi. I would advise you to avoid it and ensure that your Christmas Day isn’t filled with relentless horror.

Before he made The Beast Within and Howling II, Philipe Mora made this movie about Dan Morgan, who roamed the New South Wales bush under a revolving door of aliases, including Billy the Native, Warrigal and Down-the-River Jack.

Dan Morgan didn’t just walk through the New South Wales bush; he haunted it. Operating under a revolving door of aliases like Billy the Native, Warrigal and Down-the-River Jack, he was less a man with a grudge and more a one-man insurgency against the Crown.

By August 1863, the authorities had reached their breaking point after Morgan plugged police magistrate Henry Baylis during a high-stakes shootout. As his rap sheet grew longer and his methods bloodier, the government placed a bounty on his head that eventually ballooned to £1,000, which was a fortune at the time. By March 1865, he was officially declared an outlaw under the Felons Apprehension Act, making him “fair game” for any citizen with a rifle.

His reign of terror ended abruptly a month later at Peechelba Station in Victoria. While Morgan was busy holding up the homestead, a stockman crept through the shadows and shot him in the back.

History has painted Morgan as a Mad Dog, a bloodthirsty, erratic lunatic who probably didn’t need much of a reason to pull the trigger. But here’s the thing that makes for a great movie: despite being a total headcase, he was a wizard in the woods. His bushcraft skills and horsemanship were legendary and he had a network of sympathizers who kept him hidden from the law for two years. He was a folk hero to some and a monster to others, which is exactly why he fits right in here.

Based on the book Morgan: The Bold Bushranger by Margaret Frances Carnegie, the film drips with authenticity. Carnegie actually assisted Mora in scouting the real-life locations where Morgan’s crimes took place, lending the movie a haunting, topographical realism.

The narrative kicks off with Dan Morgan (played with unhinged intensity by Dennis Hopper) witnessing a horrific massacre of Chinese immigrants on the goldfields. This trauma, followed by a brutal prison sentence where he is victimized and broken, serves as the catalyst for his transformation. He doesn’t just decide to rob people; he decides to declare war on a world that offered him no mercy.

If the onscreen performance feels volatile, it’s because the offscreen reality was just as chaotic. Dennis Hopper was at the height of his lost years, fueled by substances and a total commitment to the role.

At teh end of the shoot, Mora claims that Hopper lived up to being, well, Dennis Hopper: “Rode off in costume, poured a bottle of O.P. rum into the real Morgan’s grave in front of my mother Mirka Mora, drank one himself, got arrested and deported the next day, with a blood-alcohol reading that said he should have been clinically dead, according to the judge studying his alcohol tests.”

You can watch this on Tubi.