Possibly inspired by the kidnapping of Barbara Jane Mackle, The Candy Snatchers gets its name because Eddy (Vince Martorano), Jessie (Tiffany Bolling) and Alan (Brad Davis) have kidnapped a young girl named Candy (Susan Sennett) from her Catholic school. They keep her buried alive — with a pipe for air — in a field somewhere in California. Only the autistic Sean Newton (Christopher Trueblood) knows that she’s there, but he’s a little kid who can barely communicate, trapped with parents — Dudley (Jerry Butts) and Audrey (Bonnie Boland) — who seemingly hate him.

Candy will inherit $2 million from her late father when she turns 21. But if she dies before that, her stepfather, Avery (Ben Piazza), gets half, and his wife, Katherine (Dolores Dorn), receives the other. So he doesn’t even tell her that Candy is gone.

Even when presented with a severed ear — the criminals go to a morgue and cut one off a dead body — Avery doesn’t care. He’s already sleeping with an employee, Lisa (Phyllis Major), and doesn’t care that Alan seduces his wife. He cares even less when they kill her.

These horrible people are all determined to destroy one another. I won’t ruin the end of this, only to say that you will have to create your own conclusion to the story.

Bolling hated this, saying to TCM Underground, “I was doing cocaine…and I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I was very angry about the way that my career had gone in the industry…the opportunities that I had and had not been given…. The hardest thing for me, as I look back on it, was I had done a television series, The New People, and so I had a lot of young people who really respected me and… revered me as something of a hero, and then I came out with this stupid Candy Snatchers movie… It was a horrendous experience.”

Director Guerdon Trueblood — that’s his son playing Sean — and co-star Vince Martorano had been best friends at George Washington University in Virginia. They made a bet about who would get into filmmaking first. Trueblood became an in-demand writer for TV series and movies of the week. When he got the job of directing this movie, he asked writer Bryan Gindoff to create the character of Eddy specifically for Martorano, who was working as a commercial fisherman at the time.

At one point in this movie, the female inmates begin to fight, and Crazy Daisy (Tiffany Million, once a GL, OW girl and later an adult star) says, “I’ve seen this in Chained Heat!”

Yes, you sure did.

While Cirio H. Santiago also made a movie called Caged Fury just six years earlier, this one — directed and written by Bill Milling (who also wrote Silent Madness and Savage Dawn; he also directed adult films under the name Philip Drexler Jr. (A Scent of Heather), G.W. Hunter (Heart Throbs), Craig Ashwood (All American Girls), William J. Haddington Jr. (When A Woman Calls), Chiang (The Vixens of Kung Fu (A Tale of Yin Yang), Jim Hunter (Up Up and Away), Luis F. Antonero (Temptations) and Bill or Dexter Eagle (Virgin Snow).

Wikipedia claims that Fernando Fonseca (The Unholy) and one of my obsessions, Philip Yordan, wrote this, but I see no other evidence anywhere. Fonseca only wrote one other film, South Beach Dreams, and Yordan and Cannon never worked together, which is a fact that still makes me sad.

Kat Collins (Roxanna Michaels) is living out the first stanza of Poison’s “Fallen Angel:”

“She stepped off the bus out into the city streets

Just a small town and a girl with her whole life

Packed in a suitcase by her feet

But somehow the lights didn’t shine as bright as they did

On her mama’s TV screen

And the work seemed harder

And the days seemed longer

Than she ever thought they’d be”

After kissing her father (Michael Parks) goodbye and leaving Utah for Hollywood, she meets Rhonda Wallace (April Dawn Dollarhide), who gets her work with a photographer named Buck (Blake Lewis). After posing, the girls head off for the Sunset Strip and get into it with some bikers, which, seeing as how this is a 1990 direct-to-video movie, gets rapey and then they get saved by good, guy bike enthusiast Victor (Erik Estrada) and American Combat Karate school leader Dirk (Richard Barathy).

Buck then introduces the ladies to a porn director, but that ends up setting them up as prostitutes and sending them off to Honeywell Prison, which is where the movie really gets going. You know exactly all of the women in prison moments, precisely, and the guards are as bad as you’d think they’d be. They’re led by Spyder (Gregory Scott Cummins, former San Diego Chargers punter) and include Pizzaface (Ron Jeremy), Paul Smith remembering everything he once did years ago in a similar role in Midnight Express and Mindi Miller (Sugar from Penitentiary III) as Warden Sybil Thorn, an S&M catsuit wearing evildoer named for two WIP legends: Sybil Danning from Caged Heat and Dyanne Thorne, who forever will be Ilsa.

So while Roxanne is getting indoctrinated into white slavery, her sister Tracy (Elena Sahagun) figures that the best plan is to do the exact same things her sister did and get put in the same prison. She’s also helped by giallo-level policework from Detective Randall Stoner (James Hong). Of course, Estrada and Barathy have to rescue her, but Estrada catches a bullet, so the white kung fu expert has to fight his way out of this lingerie hell, which magically releases them right in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater.

This movie is also replete with adult stars as prisoners, including Kascha using her more mainstream name Alison LePriol, Janine Lindemulder — who knows a little something about the big house after serving a six-month federal prison sentence for tax evasion — as Lulu (you may recognize her, if you didn’t watch adult movies, as being on the cover of Blink 182’s Enema of the State album cover or for her relationship with Jesse James) and Julia Parton (yes, a relative of Dolly and once the publisher of High Society).

As for the bad guys putting this all together, there’s Jack Carter as the big bad Mr. Castaglia, as well as Beano, who you may remember from Deathrow Gameshow, as Tony “Two A Day” Tarentino. This movie feels like it knows way too much about the dark side of Los Angeles, what with Jeremy in the cast and Big G being played by Bill Gazzarri.

So Gazzari’s…

The three hundred feet or so on Sunset Boulevard that started at Gazzarri’s and ended at the Rainbow and the Roxy Theatre was where rock and roll lived in the 90s (although the place was hot from the 60s on, with The Doors being a house band and the Miss Gazzarri’s Dancers counting Catherine Bach and Barbi Benton as alumni). When Gazzarri died in 1991 and the club closed down in 1993, it was damaged in an earthquake and went through many name changes before becoming the nightclub 1 Oak. If you want to see the club, I recommend The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. Nearly every major metal band played Gazzarri’s, including longtime house band Van Halen, Ratt, Cinderella, Quiet Riot, Mötley Crüe, Poison, Guns N’ Roses, Warrant and Faster Pussycat, as well as bands you may not know if you didn’t read Hit Parader and Rip! like Shark Island, Hurricane and, if you saw Decline, Odin.

What you’ve seen is pure sleaze. I mean, it’s a woman in prison movie. Would you want it any other way? Why are you watching it if you’re just going to judge me? You’ve read this far. You’re complicit.

You can watch this on Tubi.

William Asher was credited by many as inventing the TV sitcom. He brought Our Miss Brooks from radio to TV, directed 100 out of 179 episodes of I Love Lucy, produced and directed Bewitched (which starred his second wife Elizabeth Montgomery) and also had episodes of Make Room for Daddy, The Twilight Zone, The Patty Duke Show, Gidget, The Dukes of Hazzard and Alice on his resume. He even planned JFK’s inauguration ceremony along with Frank Sinatra.

He was also one of the leading beach party directors, with Beach Party, Muscle Beach, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, Beach Blanket Bingo and Bikini Beach to his credit. Of this time in his life, he would say, “The scripts of the Beach Party films were sheer nonsense, but they were fun and positive. When kids see the films now, they can get some idea of what the ’60s were like. The whole thing was a dream, of course. But it was a nice dream.”

I tell you all this to set you up for one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen — imagine what that entails — and one that has stuck with me for years: Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker.

Originally, Michael Miller (Jackson County Jail) was set to direct this film. Still, he was replaced by Asher (he had also recently lost the job on The Eyes of Laura Mars to Irvin Kershner). He did direct the opening, however.

And what an opening it is!

Years ago, Billy (Jimmy McNichol, brother of Kristy, who is shirtless pretty much for the entire film) was sent to stay with his aunt Cheryl (Susan Tyrell, owning this movie like no one has ever owned a movie before). However, not only did their brakes give out, but a giant log beheads Billy’s dad, and the car goes off a cliff, where we see a photo of young Billy floating out into the water as the car explodes, floating, all of that, in the very first scene of the movie!

Now, Billy is a high school senior living with his aunt. He has a dream of playing basketball on a scholarship at the University of Denver, but Cheryl is having none of it. His school life isn’t much better, as his teammate Eddie (Bill Paxton!) is jealous of his closeness to their coach Tom Landers (Steve Eastin, Field of Dreams). But there’s a bright silver lining: the school’s newspaper photographer, Julia (Julia Duffy from TV’s Newhart), is into him.

On Billy’s seventeenth birthday, his aunt changes her mind about the scholarship just in time for her to put the moves on TV repairman Phil Brody (William Caskey Swaim, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning), who rebuffs her, only to then pull down his pants and tell her to “work it.” She flips out and attacks him, so he shoves her down. She retaliates with a kitchen knife as Billy watches from outside the window, as blood sprays all over his birthday balloons.

Cheryl hysterically tells the police that Phil tried to rape her. But his blood is all over Billy and so are the kid’s prints on the knife. That brings in Joe Carlson (a brutal Bo Svenson), whose homophobic mindset deduces that Billy’s coach Tom was his love and that Billy killed Phil — who was Tom’s lover — as part of a love triangle gone wrong. He thinks Cheryl is just covering up for her nephew when the truth is anything but that.

What follows is Cheryl going bonkers, doing all manner of things like drugging Billy’s milk so that his basketball tryout goes wrong and shearing her hair into an unmanageable chunk of a hairstyle. Oh yeah — she also treats her nephew way too lovingly, to the point that it’s uncomfortable. And then she goes completely insane when she catches Billy in bed with his new girlfriend.

Of course, by the end of the film, she’s nearly murdered that girlfriend twice, stabbed a noisy neighbor, killed a cop, and we discover that she’s really Billy’s mom and his birth father’s body is mummified in the basement while his head floats in a jar of formaldehyde.

Even after their final confrontation, Billy must deal with Joe the cop and his bigoted ways. To say that this movie builds to a fever pitch is an understatement. And I really don’t want to give all that much more away. Yes — even with those spoilers above, there’s so much more to explore here.

Nearly all of the major creative forces of this film came from places of personal pain. Asher lived through the Depression, losing his father before he was even a teenager. His mother (stage actress Lillian Bonner) became an alcoholic, so he escaped by way of the Army Signal Corps at the age of 15.

Screenwriter Alan Jay Glueckman (his script Russkies was made into a film directed by Halloween II and Halloween: Resurrection director Rick Rosenthal, plus he wrote two home invasion made for TV movies, The Fear Inside and Facemade-for-TVlus, his short film Pickup was the first film appearance of Glenn Close) continually wondered about who his birth parents were and had a tumultuous relationship with his adoptive ones due to their refusal to accept his homosexuality.

And Susan Tyrell, the heart of this film, was born into show business. Her father was a top agent at the William Morris Agency, representing Loretta Young and Carole Lombard. Yet she always described her proper upbringing as miserable, due to her demanding British mother, a socialite and member of the diplomatic corps in China and the Philippines during the 1930s and 1940s.

By her teenage years, Tyrell had cut off contact with her mother, of whom she would say, “The last thing my mother said to me was, “SuSu, your life is a celebration of everything that is cheap and tawdry.” I’ve always liked and I’ve always tried to live up to it.”

She stayed in contact with her father, who was able to use his connections to get her a bit part in a touring play with Art Carney, as well as have Look magazine follow the show. He’d die a few months later from a bee sting.

Even her Playbill obituary says that she specialized in roles like “whores, lushes and sexpots.” Perhaps her most famous role was in John Huston’s Fat City, which earned her an Academy Award nomination. She was also part of the Warhol Factory scene and appeared in numerous films. She appeared in various roles, including the Queen of the Sixth Dimension in Forbidden Zone, Solly in Angel and Avenging Angel, the miniature Midge Montana, wife to Kris Kristofferson’s ringmaster in Big Top Pee-Wee, and Ramona Ricketts, the grandmother to Johnny Depp in Cry-Baby.

What I’m saying is, this is a movie made by people who actually lived.

This movie has it all — malignant motherhood, a modern-day retelling of Oedipus, an inversion of a modern-day girl trope where Billy becomes the victim and Julia the helpful savior, and — strangely enough for a film made in 1981 — the homosexual characters are the positive characters in the story and not the monsters. In fact, Billy may be homosexual himself, if you chose to read the movie that way.

Of course, the movie was pretty much dead on arrival, thanks to a disastrous test screening and a new title, Night Warning, that says nothing about what the audience is about to see. It’s also a movie so strange that it seems to occupy its own universe, unlike any other film before or since. I can see why the general public wouldn’t enjoy it. In England, it made the infamous Category 2 video nasty list.

Basically, what I’m saying is rush out, find this and watch it. Now.

I’ve often said that I prefer Zombi 2 to Dawn of the Dead — at least if I am looking for a more fun movie — because it skips the political allegory and gets right to the zombie splatter that I really want to see.

Burial Ground (also known as Le Notti del terrore, Nights of Terror, Zombi Horror, The Zombie Dead and most confusingly, Zombi 3) raises you that lack of Romero’s restraint and storytelling, doubles down by ripping off Fulci’s work which is in itself a ripoff (but a masterful one) and piles on the sleaze. No, really. This is a film that is ready to outright offend everyone.

The film starts with a professor accidentally unleashing an evil curse that reanimates the dead. He’s instantly killed. Meanwhile, three “jet-set couples” (I’ve heard them referred to this way several times and it always makes me laugh) and a creepy man child named Michael (who was played by Pietro Barzocchini, who was 25-years-old at the time…more on that soon) arrive at a nearby mansion, invited by the professor. We catch Evelyn (Mariangela Giordano, The Sect) stealing lingerie that she found in the mansion, to which her boyfriend James replies, “You look just like a little whore, but I like that in a girl.” At that point, that creepy manchild of hers, Michael, comes in and freaks out while his mom absentmindedly just stands there, nude.

It doesn’t take long before the dead attack. A maid is decapitated with a scythe because these living dead can use tools. Why are they more evolved than Romero or Fulci zombies? We never learn.

The zombies break into the mansion and attack everyone. This leads to that young creep, Michael, becoming totally shell-shocked. Evelyn, his mother, attempts to confront him, so he becomes to fondle her breasts. As he kisses her, he tries to get his hand between her legs. She slaps him as he runs away, shouting, “What’s wrong? I’m your son!” He runs right into one of the party guests, Leslie, who is now a zombie. Like a Fulci librarian, he stares at her as she makes her way toward him.

At this point, everyone reasons that they should just let the zombies into the house, because they are slow and it will allow them to escape. Sure. That always works. Evelyn goes to find her son, who has been killed by Leslie. She flips out and smashes Leslie’s head against a tub, screaming as loudly as possible, all the while.

Everyone runs toward a monastery, where the film decides to become a Blind Dead film. The zombie monks chase everyone to a workshop where they kill Mark with power tools. Creepy Michael has now become an even creepier zombie. Evelyn has lost her mind and thinks it’s a miracle, so she bares her breasts for her son to suck on. He replies by eating her breast off in graphic detail.

Finally, Janet is menaced by multiple zombie hands as the film ends with the Profecy of the Black Spider. Yes, that’s how they spell prophecy. “The earth shall tremble, graves shall open, they shall come among the living as messengers of death, and there shall be the nigths of terror.” And yes, they also spelled nights incorrectly.

Director Andrea Bianchi isn’t one for subtlety, which is evident in films like Strip Nude for Your Killer and Confessions of a Frustrated Housewife on his IMDB credits. Suppose you’re looking for unrepentant gore (Fulci’s through-the-door eye gouge is repeated here with a window). In that case, consider the bad special effects (the latex zombie heads are near Troll 2 in their quality), the playing with guts and gore ala Blood Feast, and the total lack of storyline or sense. Then I’d advise you to watch this one.

This movie is ridiculous, but man, I love it. It’s the kind of film you can say, “But yeah, did you see Burial Ground? That one is totally insane.” And I love Berto Pisano’s atonal, goofy soundtrack that blares any time the zombies show up. But if you’re looking for a movie with any class, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Here’s a drink to enjoy during this movie.

This Cocktail Smells of Death

• 1/2 oz. vodka
• 1/2 oz. rum
• 1/2 oz. apple schnapps
• 1/2 oz. blue curacao
• 1/2 oz. Chambord
• 1/2 oz. blueberry vodka
• 1/2 oz. orange juice
• 2 oz. cranberry juice
• Frozen blueberries

1. Fill a glass a quarter of the way with frozen blueberries.
2. Combine all ingredients in a shaker and mix with ice, then pour over blueberries.

William Allen Castleman directed Johnny Firecloud and The Erotic Adventures of Zorro, as well as composed the music for The Swinging Cheerleaders, The Adult Version of Jekyll & Hide, the 1974 The Wrestler, The Big Bird Cage, Trader Hornee, The Ecstasies of Women, Thar She Blows!, Space Thing, Nude Django, The Lustful Turk, The Acid Eaters, Ski on the Wild Side, She Freak, The Defilers, The Devil’s Mistress, Starlet!, Trader Hornee, ‘Gator Bait and At the End of the Rainbow. He also produced 7 Into Snowy and Chorus Call, so he was busy.

Written by Alvin L. Fast, who also wrote Moonshine Girls, Tom, Eaten Alive, Black Shampoo, Satan’s Cheerleaders and Angels’ Brigade, Bummer is about a rock band called The Group who are, well, out getting groupies. Their bass player, Butts (Dennis Burkley), goes nutzoid and starts killing people. First, he throws two of the girls in a shower and slaps them while calling them pigs. But you know, he owns the touring van. The limit comes when he kills people, starting with a groupie and the lead singer Duke (Kipp Whitman) before the other band aids get their revenge.

One of those girls is Carol Speed from Abby! Other ladies include Connie Strickland (The Centerfold Girls), who plays Barbara, the girlfriend of drummer Gary (David Buchanan); Dolly, who is Diane Lee Hart from The Pom-Pom Girls and Morely, The Group’s manager, who is Leslie McRay (Cleopatra in Death Race 2000).

Shot by Gary Graver, which makes this way better than it should be. It also has one of the most misogynistic taglines ever: ““You don’t have to rape a groupie… You just have to ask!”

David F. Friedman, the other producer, and Bob Cresse show up as cops at the end. As Herman Traeger, Friedman produced Ilsa and he was behind much of the soft core — and some hardcore — exploitation that made up the best of the form. Cresse wrote and produced most of those and shows up in them, often as a love camp commandant or as Granny Good in House On Bare Mountain. Cresse had a reputation for being tough, often carrying guns and with two bodyguards on his payroll. His career ended when he was walking his dog and saw two men beating a woman on Hollywood Boulevard. He pulled out a gun and ordered the men to stop. One of them said he was a cop and shot Cresse before killing his dog. The hospital stay that followed — he had no health insurance — ruined him.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Originally a South Korean movie called Amelika bangmungaeg (also called Visitor of America), this was released in the U.S. by Aquarius Releasing with new dubbing, an incredibly insane poster of Bruce Lee emerging from a grave to defend a half nude woman and battle a flying bat baby as well as a new beginning filmed in the U.S. where lighting strikes the grave of Bruce Lee, who soon emerges, ready to fight. In an amazing display of absolute lunacy, that’s it. No more Bruce Lee.

No, instead, we follow Wong Han (Jun Chong, a judo master who used the name Bruce K. L. Lea; he’s the founder of the World United Martial Arts Organization (WUMAO); has trained Lorenzo Lamas, Sam J. Jones, Phillip and Simon Rhee, and Heather Graham; he also shows up in L.A. Street Fighters, Silent Assassins and Street Soldiers) as he makes his way to America to try and learn who killed his brother Han Ji-Hyeok.

Also, it appears that Wong’s brother died by jumping off his apartment building and is being incinerated in the furnace of the same building, which ends with Wong scooping up all the burned bones and placing them around his neck, along with a photo of the deceased and wandering the streets looking for answers. He’s then attacked by a man in black, whom he defeats and kills, which leads to his arrest.

Wong is bailed out by a wealthy man named Scott Lee and asked to find a woman named Susan (Deborah Dutch, Deep Jaws, 976-EVIL II), who ends up being a waitress. Lee’s decision to hire him is a mystery, given that he’s shown no ability to find the killers of his brother, so there’s no precedent for his detective skills. Anyways, he decides to help Susan and teaches her martial arts so quickly that she can fight nearly as well as he in mere days. She soon informs our hero that she learned from her job in Lee’s Turkish bathhouse that five men were involved in the death of his brother: the black man Wong has already battled, as well as a white man, a Japanese fighter, a Mexican and a cowboy. Given that there are about 4 million people in Los Angeles, finding them will be challenging. Then again, he didn’t see the killers yet and did find Susan, so he’s batting .500, which would get you in the hall of fame.

Then, our hero goes to a Christmas parade. Why? So the people there can look directly at the camera, and the filmmakers could shoot this without permits. Our hero is a peculiar individual who refuses to sleep in Susan’s house due to moral reasons. Consequently, she purchases an RV for him to sleep in outside her house.

Anyway, the cowboy is the last one standing, having killed the other killers before Wong, which means our hero and he will have to battle one-on-one. He fights like a pro wrestler, which I can appreciate, and then we learn that maybe Wong’s brother is still alive, as nearly everyone else dies. Yes, our hero can’t even protect the woman who helps him, choosing to do a fancy flying kick instead of just disarming the bad guy.

Directed by Lee Doo-yong and written by Hong Ji-Un, this movie is really something else. It’s not goo,d and yet I loved every moment. I kept thinking about the trailer and the poster and how they had to have led people to say, “Bruce Lee versus the black angel of death? How can I not watch this?”

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Edward J. Lakso and Herbert L. Strock, Brother On the Run has Billy (Kyle Johnson) and Frank (Gary Rist) on the run — one is black, the other is white — and they hide out after a job gone wrong with Billy’s sister Maud (Gwenn Mitchell), who lives next to Professor Grant (Terry Carter). The title comes from, of course, these brothers on the run despite the teacher trying to help them. He also has sex with two women before he gets to that help.

Lasko wrote The Power Within, Back to the Planet of the Apes, Mr. Tease and His Playthings and tons of TV, while Strock directed Monstroid, The Crawling Hand, The Devil’s Messenger, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, How to Make a Monster, Blood of Dracula and, yes, so much TV.

What they made here is about as good as you’d imagine, as two middle-aged white guys try their hands at blacksploitation.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Sam Peckinpah said, “For me, Hollywood no longer exists. It’s past history. I’ve decided to stay in Mexico because I believe I can make my pictures with greater freedom from here.”

With the exception of a few key individuals, Peckinpah made this movie with a Mexican crew, including cameraman Alex Phillips, Jr., who had a preference for wide-angle lenses and loved zooms. This setup allowed Peckinpah to essentially edit the film in his head as he shot.

It also allowed him a lot of creative freedom and to capture the bleak world he wanted. Shooting at a bar called the Tlaquepaque, he said out loud that this place was real. It was — the owner had once killed a woman on the premises and bribed the right people to make it go away.

And the results, sure, they ended up in the Medved co-authored The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time, but Roger Ebert said, “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is Sam Peckinpah making movies flat out, giving us a desperate character he clearly loves, and asking us to somehow see past the horror and the blood to the sad poem he’s trying to write about the human condition.”

Who is Garcia? He was once the man selected to be the successor of El Jefe (Emilio Fernández), but he messed up when he knocked up the boss’s daughter Teresa, putting a million-dollar bounty on his head. Two months pass before two hit men, Sappensly (Robert Webber) and Quill (Gig Young), walk into the saloon where Bennie (Warren Oates) plays piano.

He claims he doesn’t know who Garcia is, yet he surely does. He’s the man whose lover, Elita (Isela Vega), cheated on him with. He confronts her as to the man’s whereabouts and learns that he died in an accident. Easy money — he gets $10,000 for Garcia’s head, plus a $200 advance for expenses, and takes Elita along with him to dig the grave. On the way, he proposes to her, telling her that she can retire and they can live in peace. Still, we know that can never happen as the moment they get there, they’re attacked by bikers (Kris Kristofferson and Donnie Fritts) who nearly assault her before Bernie comes to and dispatches them both. As he starts digging the grave despite Elita’s protests, he’s knocked out. He wakes up buried alive with his girl dead by his side, the body of Garcia already missing its head. Oates took mushrooms before this scene, so he’s really living this experience.

Arguing with the head, which has been packed in a sack with dry ice, Bennie leads a death march across Mexico, with everyone in his way dying, death always at his side, waiting for him, as he begins to realize that the head means nothing at all to him or anyone else. The money was meaningless. The revenge doesn’t matter. Yet he must follow through.

Warren Oates copied Peckinpah to play his part, right down to borrowing a pair of sunglasses from the director. This was the only time that the maverick creator ever got the final cut on one of his movies. The twosome also bonded over cocaine, which only added to the air of paranoia and doom that fills every single second of this movie.

I can see why some would dislike and even hate this movie, but for me, it just plain sings. The song may be abrasive, filled with anger, but it’s a song nonetheless.

Known as The Brainiac in the U.S., this was directed by Chano Urueta, who helped Blue Demon get on the silver screen and was written by Federico Curiel, who would make The Champions of Justice, several Santo movies and Neutron.

All the way back in 1661, Baron Vitelius was burned at the stake during the Inquisition and claimed that the next time a particular comet passed by the Earth, all of the children of those who did him wrong would pay. I mean, you would think a bunch of religious folks would treat a necromantic sorcerer better, but such is life in ancient Mexico.

Three hundred years later, Baron Vitelius rides back in on that comet and is now able to change at will into a monster able to suck out the brains of his victims via a gigante-forked tongue, which is incredibly easy to do thanks to his ability to hypnotize his victims.

How bonkers is this movie? No less than Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart paid tribute to it in their song “Debra Kadabra,” saying, “Turn it to Channel 13 / And make me watch the rubber tongue / When it comes out! From the puffed and flabulent Mexican rubber-goods mask / Next time they show the Binaca / Make me buy The Flosser / Make me grow Brainiac Fingers / But with more hair!”

In America, we’d be satisfied with an evil alien. In Mexico, it was added that he was a wizard who brought people back from the dead before he was burned alive and ascended to a heavenly body for three hundred years. Viva la peliculas de terror!

You can watch this on Tubi.

I will not call this by its main title, as I’m a white person and have no right to use it. Instead, I’m going to call it Boss or The Black Bounty Killer. And despite its incendiary title, it is a major movie in black film history, as Dana M. Reemes’ wrote in Directed by Jack Arnold: “Jack Arnold seems to have been artiste exécutant on this picture; content-wise, we must regard Fred Williamson as the film’s auteur. He is like a black Clint Eastwood in a Cottafavi western. William’s bounty hunter turns the tables on the town’s White establishment with an intelligent and biting wit. He is very popular in the nearby Mexican village and is generous to its inhabitants—a kind of cinematic third-world unity. From an ideological standpoint, it is interesting to note that the only White male who turns out to be worth much is the blacksmith, a simple, honest tradesman.”

Boss and Amos (Fred Williamson and D’Urville Martin) stop a stagecoach robbery and save Clara Mae (Carmen Hayworth). They then learn that several of the bodies in the aftermath have rewards for their capture, while one was due to become the sheriff of the town of San Miguel, as recommended by Jed Clayton (William Smith). Does Mayor Griffin (R. G. Armstrong) know that this man was a criminal?

They end up becoming the lawmen of this town and Boss even romances the white Miss Pruit (Barbara Leigh), which starts off on the wrong foot when she has fond memories of the slaves her father once owned. This may not be the best way to handle things. But by the end, Boss and Amos are defending the town from Jed, who has killed Clara Mae and kidnapped the Mexican boy, Poncho, who has become friends with them. Then, the mayor shoots Boss twice, who somehow is able to kill him with a knife. He tells Amos, “Don’t let me die in a white town,” before they leave. Does Boss survive? I’d like to think he does.

Jack Arnold did so much, like The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Mouse That Roared and The Space Children. He produced this with Williamson, who wrote the script. It’s way better than you’d expect, made at the height of the Black Power movement, yet it makes the hero the outsider who is fighting the sins of white America.