Pig-masked bank robbers in Australia go up against BMX experts P. J. (Angelo D’Angelo),  Goose (James Lugton) and Judy (Nicole Kidman). Yes, Nicole Kidman in her second movie.

Perhaps even more amazing is that this was directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, who you may not pick to make a kid movie, but here we are. As they go up against The Boss (Bryan Marshall), Whitey (David Argue) and Mustache (John Ley), the kids use their BMX skills to stay ahead of the bad guys and get them arrested. The cops even build them a BMX track —  not Helltrack — as a thank you.

Kidman hurt her leg doing a stunt in this — jumping into an open grave! — and her stand-in ended up being a guy in a wig. As for me, I love that this was financed by The Rank Organisation, along with that old opening of the muscular guy ringing the gong. They also financed Twins of Evil, the Carry On movies, The Uncanny and so many more movies.

You have to love this in the credits: WARNING: The Stunts in this film were performed by professional stunt riders. For your own safety, PLEASE DO NOT IMITATE.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Abominable Dr. Phibes was on the CBS Late Movie on February 22, 1974 and December 30, 1975.

Church of Satan founder Anton Szandor LaVey claimed that the main character in this Vincent Price film was based on him. Well, his name is Dr. Anton Phibes and he’s an organist, researcher, medical doctor, biblical scholar and ex-vaudevillian who has created a clockwork band of robot musicians to play old standards at his whim. Seeing as how nearly all of these things match up with LaVey, I can kind of see his point.

Director Robert Fuest started by designing sets. While working on the TV show The Avengers, he got excited about directing and ended up working on seven episodes of the original series and two of The New Avengers. Soon, he’d be working in film more and more, starting with 1967’s Just Like a Woman. Between the two Phibes films, And Soon the Darkness, The Final Programme and The Devil’s Rain!, he became known for dark-humored fantasy and inventive sets, several of which he designed himself.

This movie is one I can’t be quiet about. It’s one of the strangest and most delightful films I’ve ever seen.

Dr. Anton Phibes died in Switzerland, racing back home upon hearing the news that his beloved bridge Victoria (an uncredited Caroline Munro) had died during surgery. The truth is that Phibes has survived, scarred beyond belief and unable to speak, but alive. He uses all of the skills that he’s mastered to rebuild his face and approximate a human voice. Also, he may or may not be insane.

Phibes believes that the doctors who operated on his wife were incompetent and, therefore, must pay for their insolence. So he does what anyone else would do: visit the Biblical ten plagues of Egypt on every single one of them.

Phibes is, of course, played by Vincent Price. No one else could handle this role. Or this movie. There’s hardly any dialogue for the first ten minutes of the movie. Instead, there are long musical numbers of Phibes and his clockwork band playing old standards. In fact, Phibes doesn’t speak for the first 32 minutes of the movie. Anyone who asks questions like “Why?” and says things like “This movie makes no sense” will be dealt with accordingly.

After the first few murders, Inspector Trout gets on the case. He becomes Phibes’ main antagonist for this and the following film, trying to prove that all of these murders — the doctors and nurse who had been on the team of Dr. Vesalius (Joseph Cotten!) — are connected. Phibes then stays one step ahead of the police, murdering everyone with bees, snow, a unicorn statue, locusts and rats, sometimes even right next to where the cops have staked him out.

Dr. Phibes is assisted by the lovely Vulnavia. We’re never informed that she’s a robot, but in my opinion, she totally is. Both she and the doctor are the most fashion-forward of all revenge killers I’ve seen outside of Meiko Kaji and Christina Lindberg.

Writer William Goldstein wrote Vulnavia as another clockwork robot with a wind-up key in her neck. Fuest thought that Phibes demanded a more mobile assistant, so he made her human, yet one with a blank face and mechanical body movements. I still like to think that she’s a machine, particularly because she returns in the next film after her demise here. Also, Fuest rewrote nearly the entire script.

After killing off everyone else — sorry Terry-Thomas! — Phibes kidnaps Dr. Vesalius’ son and implants a key inside his heart that will unlock the boy. However, if the doctor doesn’t finish the surgery on his son in six minutes — the same amount of time he had spent trying to save Phibes’ wife — acid will rain down and kill both he and his boy.

Against all odds, Vesalius is successful. Vulnavia, in the middle of destroying Phibes’ clockwork orchestra, is sprayed by the acid and killed while the doctor himself replaces his blood with a special fluid and lies down to eternal sleep with his wife, happy that he has had his revenge.

If you’re interested, the ten plagues Phibes unleashes are:

1. Blood: He drains all of Dr. Longstreet’s blood

2. Frogs: He uses a mechanical frog mask to kill Dr. Hargreaves at a costume party

3. Bats: A more cinematic plague than lice from the Biblical plagues, Phibes uses these airborne rodents to kill Dr. Dunwoody

4. Rats: Again, better than flies, rats overwhelm Dr. Kitaj and cause his plane to crash

5. Pestilence: This one is a leap, but the unicorn head that kills Dr. Whitcombe qualifies

6: Boils: Professor Thornton is stung to death by bees

7. Hail: Dr. Hedgepath is frozen by an ice machine

8. Locusts: The nurse is devoured by them thanks to an ingenious trap

9. Darkness: Phibes joins his wife in eternal rest during a solar eclipse

10. Death of the firstborn: Phibes kidnaps the son of Dr. Vesalius

I love that this movie appears lost in time. While set in the 1920s, many of the songs weren’t released until the 1940s. Also, despite the era the film is set in, Phibes has working robots and high technology.

There’s nothing quite like this movie. I encourage you to take the rest of the day off and savor it.

How does Phibes live up to being a Satanic film? In my opinion, Phibes embodies one of the nine Satanic statements to its utmost: Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek. The men and woman whose negligence led to the loss of Phibes’ wife were never punished. Phibes had to become their judge, jury and yes, destroyer.

On the other hand — or hoof, as it were — Phibes is the exact antithesis of the ninth Satanic sin, Lack of Aesthetics, which states that “an eye for beauty, for balance, is an essential Satanic tool and must be applied for greatest magical effectiveness. It’s not what’s supposed to be pleasing—it’s what is. Aesthetics is a personal thing, reflective of one’s own nature, but there are universally pleasing and harmonious configurations that should not be denied.” So much of what makes this film is that Phibes’ musical art is just as essential as his demented nature and abilities. Music is the core of his soul, not just revenge.

Another point of view comes from Draconis Blackthorne of the Sinister Screen: “This is an aesthetically-beauteous film, replete with Satanic architecture as well as ideology. Those who know will recognize these subtle and sometimes rather blatant displays. Obviously, to those familiar with the life of our founder, there are several parallels between Dr. Anton Phibes’s character and that of Dr. Anton LaVey – they even share the same first name and certain propensities.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Last Resort was on the CBS Late Movie on December 29, 1988.

Zane Busby started her career as an editor for Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain and acted in Up In Smoke before directing this movie for Julie Corman. This is one of those movies that has a surprising cast, beyond Charles Grodin in the lead (also in King Kong ’76, So I Married an Axe Murderer, and Axe Murderer). There’s Megan Mullaly (TV’s Will and Grace), Gerrit Graham (Phantom of the Paradise), Jon Lovitz (Almost Sharkproof), Phil Hartman (Cheech and Chongs Next Movie) and Mario Van Peebles (A Clear Shot) all making appearances.

George Lollar (Grodin) takes his family on vacation to Club Sand, where everyone else is having sex while he has his kids in tow. There’s also a revolution happening, a staff that could care less about hospitality, and Charles couldn’t be more like Charles Grodin.

It’s also the only woke movie I’ve seen in these 80s comedies, where the other f-word gets someone in trouble. About time — I knew things were intolerant back then, but it’s nice to see that some people were also willing to tell people to back off.

Man, not to pile on the Grodin downers, but this movie is the kind of film that posits the question, “Can Charles Grodin be the Chevy Chase that people love or the Chevy Chase that people hate?” Remember that Casio keyboard that Chevy would randomly play on his abortive talk show? I’m shocked Grodin wasn’t lugging it around. There’s your answer.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Lola was on the CBS Late Movie on December 13, 1972 and August 9, 1973.

Also released as Twinky and London Affair, Lola has the kind of story that only a movie made in 1970 could have.

Scott Wardman (Charles Bronson) falls in love — or something — with Sybil Londonderry (Susan George), who also goes by Twinky and Lola. The problem is that he’s 38 and she’s 16. He seemingly knows the age of consent and any guy that can instantly tell you that is a creep.

Then Scott gets busted for being married to a child and forced to leave England. He says, “I make one uncool move with a nutty 16-year-old kid, and suddenly my whole world is turned upside down.” Now this pornographic author has to go back to the United States.

If you think this couldn’t happen, well…

Norman Thaddeus Vane wrote this, and it’s based on his own marriage to 16-year-old model Sarah Caldwell, whom he married when he was also 38. In an interview with the astounding Hidden Films, the writer — and later director — would claim, “There was a reason I wound up marrying Sarah Caldwell (who was 16 at the time and later cast in Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter which Vane scripted; Vane later based the script for Lola on this scandalous marriage). I was a good-looking kid on King’s Road in Chelsea. I had a sports car, I had money, and I had a beautiful flat.”

Vane also pretty much explains the plot of this film in that interview: “I met her at a party. She was stunningly beautiful. I had a small flat on King’s Road in Chelsea, and she used to come over secretly on the way back from school, and we used to fuck. And she told her parents that she was seeing me — I was probably about 38 or something—and they were angry. Her father was head of the East India Trading Company. The only way we could see each other was if we got married, and in Scotland, you could get married at 16. So we eloped there. I had been sleeping with a Scottish girl from Glasgow. You had to spend three days in residence in Scotland before you got married, so I asked her if we could use her family’s address, and she said yes. Sarah called her parents and said, “I’m very sorry to tell you this, but I got married today!” The newspapers wrote columns about her; it was like a front-page story for months afterwards. They called me “The Cad of the Year.”

This entire interview is wild and I urge you to read it, as he claims that director Richard Donner immediately slept with Susan George, that the movie was financed by an Italian baron and Bronson superfan who later committed suicide over Britt Ekland, that Bronson’s wife Jill Ireland wanted to play the teenage girl and that Bronson couldn’t be controlled by Donner and he ruined the movie.

Lola is fascinating because why would Scott and Lola ever get together — well, sex — or stay together? There’s nothing that suggests that they have a single thing in common other than her schoolgirl crush on him, and well, yeah, she’s Susan George in 1970, I get that. Yet Bronson comes off as, well, Charles Bronson, a man who speaks little and is quick to violence. Maybe that’s how I see him, as I’ve watched so many of his action movies, but when you visit the posters and VHS covers for this, you’ll know that I wasn’t the only one who saw Bronson just as a force of violent nature.

Lola ends up getting an apartment for the couple while Scott is in jail over a misunderstanding, then she doesn’t realize that he has a job as a writer and needs to be left alone while he’s working. As a jerk of a writer myself, I get it. She also acts like a kid because she is one. Finally, after running away and coming back, she goes back to England for good.

This is not the last movie that Vane would make that references his life. The Black Room is about how he cheated on his wife in his own black room with Penthouse centerfolds that he met while working at that publication. It remains to be discovered if any of those women were vampires. Vane also made the absolutely baffling Club Life, a movie that I want everyone to watch.

I wonder if Susan George met with her agent and said, “Can I do something not so scuzzy for my next movie, like sleep with a guy twice my age?” And the agent said, “Susa,n baby, have I got a movie for you. It’s classy. It’s called Straw Dogs.”

You can watch this on Tubi.