Yeah, Lee Marvin might be the coolest person to ever live.

And Point Blank?

This film has more swagger in its first five minutes than most modern action movies have all put together.

Marvin was in London filming The Dirty Dozen, but already had his sights set on his next move: an adaptation of Donald Westlake’s hard-boiled pulp classic, The Hunter. He sits down with director John Boorman to go over the script, and they reach the same conclusion almost immediately: it’s absolute trash.

But that character, Walker? That cold, unkillable force of nature? That was pure gold.

So, Marvin does what only Lee Marvin could get away with. He calls a meeting with the big brass at the studio, the producers, his agent, and Boorman. He walks into that room like he owns the place—because, let’s be honest, he did—and lays down the law. He asks if he has script approval. They nod yes. He asks if he has approval over the principal cast. They nod yes again.

Then, he said, “I defer all those approvals to John.”

Just like that, Boorman—a guy fresh off the boat and doing his very first Hollywood feature—is handed the keys to the kingdom. He had final cut, complete creative control and the total backing of the biggest tough guy in the business. That’s how you get a movie as uncompromising and weird as Point Blank. 

After being betrayed and left for dead by his partner on the abandoned rock of Alcatraz, Walker (Marvin) returns to Los Angeles like a ghost haunting his own life. He’s not just looking for his $93,000; he’s looking for something, anything and heaven help anyone who stands in his way.

This isn’t your grandfather’s detective story. Boorman used avant-garde techniques, fractured timelines and bold color palettes to create an atmosphere of existential torpor.

The story starts on Alcatraz. Walker and his buddy Mal Reese (John Vernon; Marvin didn’t think Vernon was strong enough to contend with him. Marvin then punched him in the stomach during a fight scene, causing the actor to yell that he was an actor, not a fighter.) pull off a massive heist, but Reese is a snake. He puts a few slugs in Walker, makes off with the loot and steals Walker’s wife, Lynne (Sharon Acker), for good measure.

Walker should be dead. Maybe he is — we’ll get to that.

Walker tracks Reese to a heavily guarded apartment, using Reese’s own lover, Chris (Angie Dickinson), as his inside woman. The scene where Reese goes over the balcony while clinging to a bedsheet? It’s pure, beautiful chaos. Walker then hits the high-level guys — Carter (Lloyd Bochner), Brewster (Carroll O’Connor) and the mysterious Fairfax (Keenan Wynn) —one by one. Every time he gets close to the money, it slips through his fingers, replaced by more violence.

The genius of the plot isn’t in the heist; it’s in the surreality. Walker’s confrontation with Chris at Brewster’s house is bizarre. One minute, she’s slapping him, taunting him through a speaker system, hitting him with a pool cue and then—boom—they’re in bed. It doesn’t make sense in a standard movie, but in this movie’s world, it’s the only thing that does.

And that ending? Walker hides in the dark, watching the hierarchy of The Organization cannibalize itself while the money just sits there on the ground. He doesn’t even take it. He just stands there, a phantom who’s done his job and has nowhere left to go.

Is Walker a man, a ghost or a manifestation of post-WWII trauma? Boorman keeps his cards close to his chest, and honestly, that’s what makes the movie work.

On the commentary track for this, Boorman said that another adaptation, Payback, was so poorly made that Mel Gibson must have used the original script he and Marvin had thrown away. Boorman was joined by Steven Soderbergh for that commentary, who said that Point Blank was “a film that I’ve stolen from so many times.”

Back to being cool. There are just some actors — and therefore, the characters they play — so effortlessly and effusively cool that we can’t believe they’re alive. Like Clint in High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider, that’s the only explanation our geeky and awkward minds can offer up as to why Marvin’s Walker can walk the same world as us.

If you’re looking for a fairy tale that trades in moral lessons for, well, other kinds of lessons, The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio is exactly the kind of sleazy, weird and profoundly goofy artifact you seek. Directed by Corey Allen — who, in a bizarre twist of fate, went on to direct episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Murder, She Wrote as well as the Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow movie Avalanche and who appeared in Rebel Without a Cause — this is a softcore sex comedy that makes you wonder what exactly was in the water in 1971. Maybe we should ask writer Chris Warfield, who also played an adult as Billy Thornberg.

Our story begins with Gepetta (Monica Gayle, my beloved Patch from Switchblade Sisters, as well as the titular Nashville Girl), a lonely hippie woodcarver who just wants a companion. Thanks to a visit from a fairy godmother played by the legendary sexploitation icon Dyanne Thorne (who would go on to be the Ilsa of Nazi exploitation fame), her life-sized wooden puppet (Alex Roman, who died after scuba diving into a kelp bed) becomes a real man.

The twist? It’s not his nose that grows when he tells a lie. It’s his other equipment that grows whenever he engages in loveless sex. Naturally, the film turns into a surreal picaresque journey where our wooden protagonist wanders into a life of male prostitution and live sex shows, serving as a biological facsimile of a man who is essentially a puppet for everyone else’s desires.

The cinematography was handled by none other than drive-in hero Ray Dennis Steckler (under his pseudonym, Sven Christian), and his wife, Carolyn Brandt, can even be spotted in the audience of one of the film’s performances. It’s a true family affair if your family happened to be the bedrock of the 70s grindhouse circuit.

This is very softcore, meaning there is very little actual nudity compared to what modern viewers might expect. Instead, you get a lot of strange faces, loud orgasm sounds that resemble a roller coaster malfunction and a narrative that manages to be both deeply cynical and aggressively stupid at the same time.

You also get appearances by Karen Smith (Candi from H.O.T.S.), Debbie Osborne (The Toy Box), Neola Graef (Cries of Ecstasy, Blows of Death), Sandy Dempsey (A Clock Work Blue), Uschi Digard (my dreams, really the whole movie is worth watching for her to show up; she was also in Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, Fantasm and Ilsa Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks), Casey Larrain (Nympho Cycler), Barbara Mills (Sinthia: The Devil’s Doll), Ruthann Lott (Zero In and Scream) and Lynn Harris (The Erotic Adventures of Zorro).

Piranha, Piranha isn’t the Joe Dante creature-feature you’re likely thinking of, but rather a sweaty, low-budget Venezuelan adventure. Wildlife photographers Art (Tom Simcox) and his sister Terry (Ahna Capri, Enter the Dragon) head into the Amazon, presumably to capture some stunning shots of nature. They hire Jim Pendrake (Peter Brown), an American guide who presumably knows his way around the bush. However, the travel itinerary goes to hell once they cross paths with Caribe (William Smith), a local hunter who has decided that humans are just as fun to track and kill as the local wildlife.

It’s essentially The Most Dangerous Game set against the backdrop of the rainforest, where the characters have to worry about both the guy with the rifle and the titular flesh-eating fish waiting in the murk.

The film is a curiosity, directed by William Gibson (no, not that techomancer; this is the director’s only movie) and written by Richard Finder (also his only work on IMDb). While these names aren’t exactly household staples in the pantheon of cinema greats, they delivered a flick that serves as a perfect time capsule of 70s grindhouse adventure. The production is a scrappy international affair, filmed on location in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Colombia, giving it an authentic, rough-around-the-edges grit that you just can’t replicate on a soundstage.

You’ve got William Smith, a legendary tough guy of B-movie cinema, chewing the scenery as the villain. He makes every movie better. Pairing him with Peter Brown is a treat for fans of the 1960s show Laredo, where the two played Texas Rangers.

The setup is classic grindhouse comfort food: an expedition gone wrong, deep in the South American jungle. You’ve got the requisite crew of researchers, some high-stakes tension, and, of course, the ever-present threat of being reduced to a skeleton in mere seconds by a swarm of hyper-aggressive, aquatic pests. What makes Piranha, Piranha truly special in that specific, battered-print-from-a-drive-in kind of way is the commitment to the danger of the jungle.

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Shot entirely on location in Monroe, North Carolina, and produced by the local Preacherman Corp, the film is a product of the early 70s Southern Dixie filmmaking boom. Of the seventeen actors on screen, eleven were local Carolinians, lending it a certain authentic regional grit. The whole operation was the brainchild of Albert T. Viola, a Brooklyn-born transplant who decided to write, produce, direct and star as the titular con man, Amos T. Huxley. He clearly had a blast, though he and co-star Ilene Kristen (the future Ryan’s Hope soap star who plays the target, Mary Lou) are essentially the only ones who saw a career beyond these woods.

Huxley is a roving grifter whose primary hobbies are shaking down congregations and seducing farm girls. After getting booted from White Oak County for sleeping with the Sheriff’s daughter, he’s left for dead, only to be scooped up by the dim-witted but well-meaning farmer Judd Crabtree. Huxley immediately sets his sights on Judd’s daughter, Mary Lou, a girl so pathologically eager to please that she’s already juggling four local boyfriends.

Huxley manages to convince the entire family that he is a divine emissary. To keep the father distracted, he sends him on errands to hunt for the angel Leroy, a celestial cover story for when Huxley wants to sneak into the barn or bedroom. The film reaches peak absurdity when Huxley realizes the family’s true business isn’t farming but moonshining. He pivots from a bogus preacher to a bootlegger, convincing the locals, including the corrupt Sheriff Zero Bull, that they should launder their illicit corn whiskey profits through a new, tax-free church operation.

The insanity didn’t stop there, either. Bill Simpson, who played the villainous Sheriff Zero Bull, actually reprised his role in a 1973 sequel, Preacherman Meets Widderwoman. That follow-up, which saw our hero tangling with a five-time widow, never received a national release, languishing instead in the regional Southern drive-in circuit.

Released at the dawn of the 1980s, Pinball Summer (also known as Pick-Up Summer or Flipper Girls in Germany) follows the Crown International beach movies and precedes Porky’s. Most of the action revolves around a place called Pete’s, an arcade hosting a pinball competition and a Miss Pinball pageant, which I really hope was a thing at some point.

As the competition heats up, our group of heroes finds itself in an escalating rivalry with a local biker gang. The conflict, which involves everything from burger joint antics to high-speed amusement park chases, revolves around winning the coveted pinball trophy. While the premise sounds like classic exploitation fare, the film is surprisingly lighthearted, focusing on the harmless hijinks, budding romances and the neon-soaked culture of the era.

Despite being filmed in Quebec, the movie successfully masqueraded as a California-based production, fooling many American audiences at the time. Film Ventures International acquired the film for the U.S. market but was initially nervous about the subject matter. They believed the pinball craze was dying and attempted to rebrand the film to distance it from the arcade theme, unaware that the film would perform quite well regardless of the title change.

Speaking of movies leading to something more, director George Mihalka and cinematographer Rodney Gibbons would make My Bloody Valentine after this, a movie much better remembered than this teen summer comedy revolving around disco, burger joints, amusement parks and hijinks between a biker gang and our heroes over the pinball trophy.

The film acts as a bizarre rehearsal for that horror classic. You’ll see several faces that migrated from the arcade to the coal mines, such as Helene Udy (Sylvia in My Bloody Valentine), Thomas Kovacs (Mike) and Carl Malotte (Dave) all appear in Pinball Summer, providing a strange continuity between this sunny teen comedy and the brutal slasher that followed.

When you see a poster featuring young women in dog collars and chains, you are braced for a sleazy, depraved descent into S&M nightmare territory. But Raphael Nussbaum’s Pets is a far more bizarre beast. It is a fragmented, episodic odyssey of a young runaway that feels less like a cohesive narrative and more like a fever dream of mid-70s exploitation cinema.

Based on a series of one-act stage plays by Richard Reich, the film follows the perpetually charming Candice Rialson (Candy Stripe Nurses, Summer School Teachers, Chatterbox) as Bonnie, a naive runaway whose presence acts as a catalyst for the ruin of everyone she encounters. The film is structured in three distinct, tonal-shifting acts:

• Act I: Grimy Sun-Drenched LA: Bonnie falls in with a bad girl named Pat (Teri Guzman). They attempt to rob a wealthy man on the beach. This segment captures that specific, palpable 1970s Los Angeles desperation before ending in a botched escape.

• Act II: Counterculture Muse: Bonnie becomes the muse and lover of an eccentric artist, Geraldine Mills (Joan Blackman). This act shifts into a heady, late-60s artsy vibe, which is violently punctured by a senseless, jarring home invasion. In a bizarre twist of logic, Bonnie opts to keep the intruder in her room for intimate purposes, forcing a jealous, desperate Geraldine to commit murder, sending Bonnie fleeing once again.

• Act III: The Menagerie: Finally, the film delivers the “pets” promised by the marketing. Bonnie is ensnared by Vincent Stackman (Ed Bishop), a wealthy, whip-wielding sadist. This act feels like an entirely different film stapled onto the back of the first two—a claustrophobic dive into the actual depravity hinted at by the promotional art. Stackman treats women as literal pets, housing them in his mansion alongside actual canines.

Pets is an odd duck. It has a legit theater background, which gives the dialogue an occasionally stilted quality. It’s not quite a horror movie, not quite a drama and it’s arguably too slow for some. Not for me. I loved the sheer weirdness of it all and how firmly Rialson keeps everything held together. 

Mike Cartel, who played Rialson’s brother, assisted Nussbaum when it came down to casting the lead. He acted in twenty video-taped G-rated romantic scenes with other actreses before Rialson got the role.

Warning: A dog gets thrown to its doom.

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Directed by Bob Balaban (yes, the guy from Christopher Guest comedies) and written by Christopher Hawthorne. Parents finds the Laemle family — Nick (Randy Quaid), Lily (Mary Beth Hurt) and Michael (Bryan Madorsky) moving into the California suburbs. Between seeing his parents making love and watching his father do an autopsy, Michael is a bit screwed up. His dreams are horrible and he believes his parents are cannibals. But what if he’s right?

But what can you do when your parents want to feed you the meat of your guidance counselor, Millie Dew (Sandy Dennis)?

The film’s most unsettling quality is its visual obsession with food. Director Bob Balaban utilized macro photography and heightened sound design to make the sound of a knife hitting a plate or the sight of a pot roast look like a crime scene. To make the mystery meat look particularly unappetizing and gelatinous, the production used a mix of brisket, food coloring and heavy amounts of glaze.

Siskel and Ebert disagreed on this; a big surprise was that Gene loved it and Roger didn’t. However, Ken Russell compared it to Blue Velvet and claimed that it was better than Lynch’s movie.

While Randy Quaid has certainly moved into legitimately weird territory in real life over the last decade, his performance in Parents is often cited by critics as a masterclass in repressed 1950s aggression. He isn’t playing crazy. He’s playing a man who is desperately trying to appear normal, which is much scarier.

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Umberto Lenzi, come on down! We’re eager for you to shock us, titillate us, and perhaps even thrill us a bit. Oh, and you’ve brought Carroll Baker with you! Please, show us the tale you’ve crafted!

Released in Italy as Orgasmo, it was one of the first X-rated movies in the U.S., and the ads definitely played it up, especially because it featured Baker. She had left America as a single mother with two children, and her prospects in Hollywood weren’t great. In Italy, despite making movies that she said “What they think is wonderful is not what we might,” she found a career. Later, she would admit that it showed her an entirely different world and brought her back to feeling alive again.

What’s confusing is that Lenzi’s next movie was released as Paranoia in Italy and A Quiet Place to Kill in America.

I love this interview that she did with Tank Magazine, answering if she ever did any avant-garde projects: “Some of the films in Europe, of course, but a lot of them I haven’t even seen. The one I’m curious about is called Baba Yaga; it was a really far-out, wild, cartoonish sort of thing. I play the title character, a 1,500-year-old witch, and all my sisters were witches, too. I didn’t have to be completely naked, but in every Italian film, there was a scene where you had to show your breasts. Usually, I was talking on the telephone or reading a book. One day, they announced a nude scene – I couldn’t believe it. But the make-up artist and hairdresser were already there, dying the other girls’ pubic hair to match the hair on their heads.”

Baker plays Kathryn West, a glamorous American widow who retreats to a palatial Italian villa just weeks after her wealthy husband’s passing. She is the picture of fragile elegance, drowning in luxury and boredom until a handsome drifter named Peter (Lou Castel) breaks down at her gates.

The villa’s isolation quickly turns from a sanctuary into a playground for predators. Peter moves in, followed shortly by his sister, Eva (Colette Descombes). The dynamic is electric and immediately suspicious. As the siblings weave a web of sexual manipulation, the truth emerges: they aren’t related, and Kathryn isn’t their host—she’s their mark.

The film descends into a harrowing depiction of gaslighting, which is a term that gets used a lot these days. Trust me. This movie has real gaslighting. Peter and Eva keep Kathryn in a drug-induced stupor, fueling her with pills and booze while playing a haunting, discordant song on a loop to shatter her psyche. It is a proto-slasher psychological thriller where the weapon isn’t a knife, but the systematic erosion of a woman’s reality. But don’t worry. In the world of Lenzi, every sin eventually demands a receipt.

Caroll Baker started off as a Hollywood sex symbol before retreating to Europe, where she’d make Baba Yaga, So Sweet… So Perverse and The Sweet Body of Deborah, amongst others. Eventually, she’d move back to America and become a mature actress. As for Lenzi, he’d go on to make Eaten Alive, Cannibal Ferox, Nightmare City and more.

If you appreciate melodramatic twists, layered narratives, and visually striking sex scenes, then it’s time to indulge in this film.

If you think you’ve seen it all because you sat through The Devils or owned a bootleg of Killer Nun, Bruno Mattei is here to grab your rosary beads and yank you straight into the abyss. The Other Hell (originally L’altro inferno) isn’t just a movie; it’s a 90-minute assault on every Sunday School lesson you ever endured.

Get ready for a movie overflowing with blasphemy, shot at the Convento di Santa Priscilla in Rome (once owned by FIAT but now by the Secret Service). Then again, the print that Severin used for the Blu-ray was found behind a false wall in a Bologna nunnery! I sum up this movie with these three words: Not fucking around.

Written by Claudio Fragasso (Rats: The Night of Terror) and directed by Bruno Mattei (Seven Magnificent Gladiators, Robowar), this is a pull-no-punches nunsploitation shockfest. You think mother! was bad?  Then you are by no means ready for this one. A baby gets boiled alive, and that’s the very least of the shocks in store. And if you’re Catholic, well, get ready to go to confession.

Boasting a Goblin score stolen from Beyond the Darkness (actually from their albums Roller and Il fantastico viaggio del bagarozzo Mark; Fragasso said they had the band in the movie “as they were fashionable and asked them to write music for the film, but they asked for a lot of money, leading to the production to use stock music with a few modifications.” Mattei claimed that he was friends with their publisher, Carlo Bixio, who gave him the music he wanted.

The plot kicks off with Sister Cristina getting lost in the catacombs — never a good move in an Italian movie — where she finds Sister Assunta (Paola Montenero, Sylvie from A Bay of Blood) in a morgue laboratory. Assunta is busy embalming corpses and casually dropping lore about nuns fornicating with Satan and the mysterious murder of the previous Mother Superior, Sister Florence. Before you can say “Hail Mary,” Assunta goes into a supernatural trance, murders Cristina and then drops dead herself.

Mother Vincenza (Franca Stoppi, who was also in Beyond the Darkness) tries to play it off as an accident to Father Inardo (Andrea Aureli), but the gig is up when Sister Rosaria (Susanna Forgione) starts spraying blood from her mouth during communion and develops a case of terminal stigmata.

Enter Father Valerio (Carlo De Mejo, who survived City of the Living Dead only to end up here). He’s a scientific priest sent to investigate, but he spends most of his time clashing with Vincenza, who runs the convent like a fascist boot camp.

It turns out the convent’s basement isn’t just for storing communion wine. It’s housing Elisa (Francesca Carmeno), Vincenza’s illegitimate, horribly disfigured daughter, who was tossed into boiling water at birth by the former Mother Superior. Elisa didn’t die, though; she just developed Carrie-esque telekinetic powers, like making people strangle themselves with their own rosaries.

By the time we get to the finale, Vincenza has dropped the act, admitted she made a pact with the Devil and claimed Elisa is the literal daughter of Satan. It all ends in the morgue with resurrected corpses, psychic battles, and Father Valerio losing his mind. The final kicker? The Bishop shows up to investigate the earthquake and gets a face full of rotting nun corpse falling out of a coffin.

Oh yeah — between priests being set on fire and a nun’s severed head in the sacristy, this movie is every nightmare you had in CCD class. When Mother Vincenza yells, “The genitals are the door to evil! The vagina, the uterus, the womb; the labyrinth that leads to hell; the devil’s tools!” you’ll either cheer or recoil in terror, depending on whether or not you ever sat through a five-hour Good Friday mass.

Seriously. This movie tested even my resolve of how far is too far. Which is just another way to tell you that I loved it.

This was shot at the same time as The True Story of the Nun of Monza with most of the same cast and crew. Fragasso says that he shot The Other Hell downstairs and Mattei shot the other upstairs, helping each other as needed. As for Mattei, he would always say that Fragrasso was just an assistant director. They did the same two movies for the price of one on Women’s Prison Massacre and Violence In a Women’s Prison, as well as Scalps and White Apache.

Mattei was interviewed by European Trash Cinema and said, “Let’s say that he has influenced almost everyone. For example, L’altro Inferno/The Other Hell utilized Argento’s concepts, but wasn’t an absolute copy of Inferno, the title was dictated by the distributor. He makes movies wilh lots of blood, I’m not adverse to it but in some countries, like Germany, gory movies aren’t distributed.”

While it premiered in Italy in 1981, it didn’t reach American theaters until 1984, where it was renamed Guardian of Hell. It was unleashed on VHS by Vestron Video, finding its true home in the wood-paneled basements of horror nerds who wanted something a little more European.

I can’t believe that you could have walked into a multiplex and watched this.

Interpol agent Ramon Ortega (Franco Guerrero) and his new blonde American children’s book author wife Ann (Jody Kay, Death Screams) are back in the Philippines after a honeymoon in San Francisco. Within minutes, the drug dealer that our hero is after — Edwards (Christopher Mitchum) — has sent his men to kill Ann and has had his arm chopped off. And in case you’re wondering if the drug dealer is evil, he has an evil Axis symbol on the side of his boat.

Edwards doesn’t just want Ortega dead; he wants him broken. After the brutal hit on the beach that leaves Ann dead and Ortega’s arm severed by a machete, Edwards leaves him alive as a living warning. Ortega spirals into depression and drinking, just trying to live out the rest of his life in pain, when a new master named Wo Chen appears and teaches him how to fight with one hand and how to do gun fu, if you will, in which they have a gigantic training device with numbers. The master calls out the targets, and Ortega improves with each shot.

You feel for Ortega, as he found the right kind of woman, the one who sleeps with baby dolls and has sex in the shower with her shower cap on, the height of eroticism. But seriously, he really does hit rock bottom, but this film pulls him up and gives him the chance to get revenge.

Ortega eventually fits his stump with a specialized prosthetic that allows him to steady his aim, effectively turning his entire body into a tripod for his .45 caliber vengeance. The showdown moves from the slums of Manila to Edwards’ fortified compound. Ortega has to dismantle a small army of mercenaries using a combination of one-handed reloading techniques and raw, unadulterated 80s rage.

This movie is an absolute blast from start to finish, delivering the kind of weirdness and magical action that could only come from the Philippines and a master director like Bobby A. Suarez, who also directed American Commandos, The Bionic Boy, Cleopatra Wong and Warriors of the Apocalypse.

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