The actual release date for this movie is under some debate: director Robert Altman — yes, the same one who did Nashville — shot the film in 1983; it was copyrighted in 1985, then shelved until it got a small theatrical release in 1987 and 1988.

The reason for the 1983–1988 delay was simple: MGM had no idea what it was. They expected a raunchy, commercial hit like Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Instead, they got a weird, satirical, jazz-infused art film about teens. They test-marketed it, audiences were baffled and the studio orphaned it until a change in management led to the tiny 1987 theatrical run.

While it might seem weird that the man who gave us M*A*S*H* tackled National Lampoon, Altman was actually in a career exile at the time. After the failure of Popeye, he worked on smaller budgets and experimental formats. Now, we could debate whether he was the right person to shoot it, but I kind of like this movie, which has a ramshackle, all-over-the-place feel.

Loosely based on stories written by Ted Mann and Tod Carroll. O.C. and Stiggs were recurring characters in the magazine, with the entire October 1982 issue being about “The Utterly Monstrous Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs.” One of the big differences is that the print versions of the characters are destructive, while their film versions are a little more socially redeemable.

O.C., which means Oliver Cromwell Oglivie (Daniel H. Jenkins), and Stiggs (Neill Barry) are two Arizona teens whose idea of a great night is driving their car, the Gila Monster, to pick up girls, get booze from Wino Bob (Melvin van Peebles) and pick up some ladies. And oh yeah, drive the Schwab family — Randall (Paul Dooley), Elinore (Jane Curtin), Randall Jr. (Jon Cryer) and Lenore (Laura Urstein) — nuts.

Even in a teen comedy, Altman used his signature multi-track recording system. If the movie feels “all over the place,” it’s because characters are often talking over each other in a way that Animal House never attempted. To capture the feel down right, Altman encouraged the young actors to live in the house that served as the O.C. and Stiggs home during production to create authentic clutter and chemistry.

Altman’s argument is that, while audiences saw his take on Porky’s, he saw through the fake outrage in those movies and was delivering satire. But yeah. No one else wanted that. As the director himself said, “It was a satire of teen sex comedies, gosh darn it, not an example of that dubious breed!”

The film features King Sunny Adé and his African Beats. Altman was obsessed with Juju music at the time and shoehorned a massive musical performance into the film, which was wildly out of place for a 1980s teen flick, but adds to that mind-roasting vibe.

But hey! Ray Walston is great as always as Gramps, and it’s kinda inspiring to get Dennis Hopper in one of these movies. He even flies his helicopter so Mark can woo Cynthia Nixon.

It’s kind of fascinating to me that this movie was even made, and that’s pretty much the charm of it. It’s a $7 million middle finger to the studio system. It’s not funny because of the jokes. It’s funny because it feels like it was directed by someone who had never met a teenager but had read a lot of Hunter S. Thompson.

Dick Butler (Ray Lovelock, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue) and Ingrid Sjorman (Ornella Muti, Flash Gordon) are trying to enjoy their own summer of love, traveling through Italy and paying for it with porn magazines and nudes of Ingrid. They get put through a relentless wringer. First, the police bust their smut-peddling operation; then, a biker gang strips them of what little dignity they had left. By the time they reach the gates of a sprawling, modernist villa, they aren’t looking for enlightenment. They’re looking for a place to hide.

Also known as An Ideal Place to Kill, Deadly Trap, Dirty Pictures and Love Stress in Japan, this Umberto Lenzi giallo is all about what happens next.

Our hapless couple has found their way to the home of bored middle-class housewife Barbara Slater (Irene Papas, Don’t Torture a Duckling). She’s up for some sexual shenigans, potentially with both of them, but she’s also way smarter than either of our teenagers realizes.

Dick and Ingrid aren’t just hippies; they are the poster children for 1971’s fading counterculture. Beautiful, entitled and spectacularly dim-witted, their “Summer of Love” is less about spiritual awakening and more about a sleazy, high-speed hustle across the Italian countryside.

In the book Blood and Black Lace: The Definitive Guide to Italian Sex and Horror Movies, Lenzi claimed that he had trouble getting Papas to participate in the threesome scene. What he had no trouble with was getting Lovelock’s help in capturing the free spirit of 1971, as he sings the theme “How Can You Live Your Life?” and rocks out some amazing clothes, including the Union Jack jacket that appears on the poster for the Oasis of Fear release of this movie.

This movie was shot in the same home as Fulci’s Perversion Story and Argento’s The Cat O’Nine Tails. I have no idea where they got the matching white bell-bottom outfits or the yellow old-school car they covered in flower stickers.

While not a top-tier giallo, this is still a quick watch packed with plenty of twists. Don’t get it confused with another Lenzi movie, A Quiet Place to Kill.

This is one of the many movies in which Independent-International used comic book artist Gray Morrow to do the art for the posters. He also did the poster and sales art for Brain of Blood, Cinderella 2000, Dracula vs. Frankenstein, Nurse Sherri, Five Bloody Graves, Blazing Stewardesses and Dynamite Brothers.

This film, produced by Sam Sherman and remixed by Al Adamson, was once Captain Roughneck from St. Pauli, directed and written by Rolf Olsen. In that movie, Captain Jolly (Curd Jürgens) and his men have been hired to smuggle a vaccine within a shipment of booze. When government officials try to take that booze from him, he destroys it, and the vaccine gets stolen, which gets him blamed for taking it. There are also some nurses — they had to come in somewhere — kidnapped in the jungle.

It’s a little over an hour long, and the new material from Adamson has some of the nurses making out. One of them is Swedish model Lenka Novak, who also appeared in Moonshine County Express, Coach, The Great American Girl Robbery and Vampire Hookers and was one of the Catholic high school girls in trouble in The Kentucky Fried Movie.

The movie often feels like two different films fighting for screen time: a gritty German smuggling drama and a 1970s American sexploitation romp. That’s because that’s exactly what’s happening on screen. And it’s a bit of a shock to see Jürgens in an Al Adamson-edited mess. Jürgens was a genuine international star, famous for playing the villain Karl Stromberg in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.

“It was hardly the crime of the century…It wasn’t even the mugging of the month. It was just a rollicking rip-off!”

Professor (Robert Nichols, The Thing) is a man with a tweed jacket, a permanent squint and a foolproof plan that involves more geometry than common sense. His crew is a motley collection of losers and their target is Big Bertha’s, a sprawling, neon-lit roadhouse tucked away in the backwoods. To the Professor, it’s a vault of untaxed cash and liquid gold. To the rest of the county, it’s the only place to get a decent drink and a game of cards without being judged by the preacher.

Big Bertha (Hetty Galen, The Manitou) doesn’t need a security system. She has a six-gauge shotgun named Persuasion and a staff of girls who can outshoot, outdrink and outwrestle any man in three counties.

The Professor’s stealthy approach is doomed from the start. They arrive just as the local Sheriff’s Department is celebrating a birthday. The parking lot is a sea of squad cars, yet the Professor mistakes the flashing lights for grand opening decorations. Once the moonshine is discovered and the bullets start flying (mostly hitting vases and bottles), the movie devolves into pure physical comedy. It doesn’t take itself seriously. The film thrives on the absurdity of professional”criminals being outmatched by a house full of girls in nightgowns and a rowdy sheriff’s department. Somewhere in all of this is Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead.

This was directed by Peter Kares, the only film he’d helm, but he also produced Longshot and The Switch or How to Alter Your Ego. There were plenty of writers, including Robert N. Langworthy, who produced Preacherman and scored Sex and the College Girl, who came up with the concept; Robert Vervoordt and Albert T. Viola (Amos Huxley himself, the star of Preacherman) worked out the story and Viola and Harvey Flaxman (the writer of Grizzly!) wrote the script.

Nerd facts: An orphan in this is played by Paige Conner, who would go on to be Katy, the space devil child in The Visitor! There’s also Josie Johnson from Stigma (she’s also in Fingers, which has a dream cast of Harvey Keitel, Tisa Farrow, Jim Brown, Tanya Roberts and Danny Aiello) and George Ellis shows up. He was horror host Bestoink Dooley, who was in his own movie, The Legend of Blood Mountain. Mary Mendum is here as well. She used the name Rebecca Brooke for several of Joe Sarno’s films, such as Misty and Abigail Lesley Is Back in Town. Speaking of those movies, Bil Godsey was the cinematographer on them both, as well as this film. He also shot camera on Sisters and Deep Throat Part II.

The ninth movie in the saga of Count Waldemar Daninsky — as always played by Paul Naschy —  wasn’t released in the United States until 1985, when it was retitled from its original title, El Retorno del Hombre Lobo (The Return of the Wolfman). The last Naschy movie to play the U.S. theatrically as The Craving, it’s also been released here on DVD and Blu-ray as Night of the Werewolf.

Naschy has gone on record saying this was his favorite Hombre Lobo film and that it was a remake of his 1970 effort, La Noche de Walpurgis (Walpurgis Night).

The film opens with a brutal, atmospheric prologue set in the 16th century. Waldemar Daninsky is sentenced to death alongside a coven of witches led by the “Blood Countess” herself, Elizabeth Bathory (Julia Saly). Because Daninsky’s curse makes him virtually unkillable, the executioners resort to a multi-layered failsafe. It starts with a silver cross dagger pushed into his heart, an iron mask bolted to his skull and a subterranean tomb where his grave is hidden from anyone who wants to bring him back to life.

Fast forward to the modern era, where three female scholars arrive at the ruins of the Daninsky estate. When tomb robbers—ignoring every red flag in history—pull the silver dagger from Waldemar’s chest, they don’t just resurrect a man; they unleash the Wolfman just as Bathory’s disciples succeed in resurrecting their mistress. One of the women that Daninsky meets in our time — Karin (Azucena Hernández) — will become his great love, but if you’ve watched any Spanish werewolf movies, love is often doomed to mutual death and funeral flames.

This higher-budgeted effort — produced by Naschy’s own Dalmata Films — failed to score in foreign markets and spelled doom for the studio. That’s a true shame, as it’s probably the best-looking version of Naschy’s werewolf vision.

Emilio Paolo Miraglia created two gialli — this film and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times. This one goes deeper into the horror realm than the genre’s typical themes. For example, instead of a modern city or a fashion house, we get a crumbling, mist-shrouded estate filled with secret passages and family curses.

Lord Alan Cunningham starts this movie off by running away from an insane asylum, a place he’s been since the death of his redheaded wife, Evelyn, whom he caught having sex with another man. To deal with his grief, Alan does what any of us would do — pick up redhead prostitutes and strippers, tie them up, then kill them.

A seance freaks Alan out so badly he passes out, so his cousin — and only living heir — Farley moves in to take care of him, which basically means going to strip clubs and playing with foxes. Alan nearly kills another stripper before Farley gives him some advice — to get over Evelyn, he should marry someone who looks just like her. Alan selects Gladys (Marina Malfatti, All the Colors of the Dark) as his new wife and comes back home.

Sure, you meet someone one night and marry them the next. But nothing could compare to the weirdness of living in an ancient mansion with a staff of identical waitresses, Evelyn’s brother, and Alan’s wheelchair-bound aunt. Our heroine is convinced that Evelyn is not dead. And the other family members get killed off — Albert with a snake, and Agatha is eaten by foxes!

Gladys even looks at the body in the tomb before Alan catches her and slaps the shit out of her, as he is going crazier and crazier. Finally, Evelyn rises from her grave, which sends him back to a mental institution.

The big reveal? Gladys and Farley were in on it all along. But wait, there’s more! Susan, the stripper who survived Alan’s attack, was the one who was really Evely, and Gladyshads had been poisoned! Before she dies, the lady who we thought was our heroine wipes out the stripper, and Farley gets away with the perfect crime.

But wait! There’s more! Alan had faked his breakdown and did it all so that he could learn that it was Farley who was making love to his wife and killed her when she refused to run away with him. A fight breaks out, and Farley gets burned by acid. He’s arrested, and Alan — who up until now was pretty much the villain of this movie — gets away with all of his crimes!

This is a decent thriller, but it really feels padded in parts and tends to crawl. That said, it has some great music, incredibly decorated sets and some twists. Not my favorite giallo, but well worth a Saturday afternoon watch. There are moments of sheer beauty here, such as the rainstorm in which Alan sees Evelyn’s ghost rise.

The ending remains one of the most cynical in the genre. Usually, the killer is caught, and justice is served; here, Alan—a man who spent the first forty minutes of the movie torturing and murdering innocent women—is essentially framed as the hero because he outsmarted his even greedier cousin. It’s a dark, twisted piece of Euro-cult cinema that prioritizes style and shock over moral resolution.

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.