La chica de las bragas transparentes (The Girl In the Transparent Panties) is also known as Pick-Up Girls. It’s yet another detective tale for director and writer Jess Franco as private eye Al Crosby (Antonio Mayans) has been hired by a wealthy man named Harry Feldman to take his place at a meeting with a crime figure named Emilio (Miguel Ángel Aristu).

Nothing goes right. He’s drugged and photographed with two sex workers, Suzy (Lina Romay) and Bijou (Doris Regina), then nearly murdered by his client’s wife, all before he’s beaten up by even more women and ends up getting his rich patron killed. Maybe Mrs. Carla Feldman (Rosa Valenty) isn’t all that innocent. That means that Al will team up with the dead man’s mistress, Coco (Mari Carmen Segura), and Suzy and Bijou, who have been sent to prison, to get them out of the way to learn the truth.

So many questions. Is Al Crosby another name for Al Pereira? Why are there no diamonds being taken in this, like in every other Jess Franco plot? With their spy experience, are Suzy and Bijuo related to the Red Lips? And how many detectives find out that they’re looking for the missing penis of their actual client?

As always, I feel the urge to look deeper into a Jess Franco movie than anything else. Why does he do that to us? Was it intended? Or are we compelled to find something where there may be nothing?

Elliot Lester directed the Arnold movie Aftermath, which was good, and now he’s adapting this Joe R.  Lansdale Western horror story with writer Chris Kelley. It’s been a passion project of Peter Dinklage, who has been trying to make it for ten years. He plays bounty hunter Reginald Jones, a bounty hunter who hunts criminals with his partner Eustace (Gbenga Akinnagbe). They’re hired by Jack (Levon Hawke) to save the missing sister, Lula (Esme Creed-Miles), who has been kidnapped by Cut Throat Bill (Juliette Lewis) and her gang.

This has some interesting casting, with Metallica’s James Hetfield playing Simon Deasley, the partner of brother Malachi (Macon Blair), two criminals hired by Bill to take out the bounty hunters. Plus, Jack also saves an imprisoned saloon girl, Jimmie Sue (Leslie Grace). And it all feels very The Great Silence and I mean that as a compliment. I really loved Lewis in this, as her character is covered in scars and has assumed a masculine role to fight back against the men who did her wrong, which has made her the villain.

I also loved how this is at the end of the West, as characters ride motorcycles and you get the idea that the modern world is just about to change everything for everybody. What makes me happy is that Tubi has picked this up and is giving people a chance to see it, as new Westerns — much less good ones — are in short supply these days. It looks gorgeous — cinematographer Guillermo Garza is incredible — and it’s great to see a Lansdale story become a movie. His story “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” was used as an episode of Masters of Horror, directed by Don Coscarelli, who also made another Lansdale adaption, Bubba Ho-Tep. Other Lansdale films include Christmas With the Death, Cold In July and the Hap and Leonard TV show.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Toni (Tristan Cunningham) is being abused by her husband Marcus (Tarek Zohdy), and to find out how to get away, she sneaks away and attends Destiny’s (Meyon Jacobs) “Take It Back” empowerment seminar. After all, if Destiny could heal herself and fight back after a sexual assault, maybe she could teach Toni how to survive.

The problem for Destiny is that she’s not in all that great of a marriage either. Kendall (Leah Pipes), her wife, wants her to go corporate instead of helping women. These ladies could benefit from a Strangers On a Train-style path out of their bad relationships, which is exactly what happens. The problem is when Toni fulfills her end, and Destiny doesn’t exactly live up to her end of the deal.

Destiny also has a sister named Faith (Paigion Walker) who plans on marrying Senator James Hawthorne (Matt Marshall), while Kendall has eyes for Destiny’s assistant, Sufe (Emily Morales-Cabrera). When Toni learns that Destiny’s entire empire is based on her not exactly telling the truth, she decides that if her husband isn’t going to die, Destiny’s reputation will.

Directed by Dylan Vox (who also made Deadly DILF for Tubi) and written by Jeremy M. Inman (who wrote Sinister Squad and Avengers Grimm: Time Wars, as well as Hustlers Take All for Vox), this isn’t as good as even Throw Mama from the Train, but let’s hear it for it having a same-sex couple and gender swapping the story. The first part has the crazy energy I wanted this entire movie to have. I just wish it could have kept up the wildness.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Loulou (Lina Romay), Fifi (Brigitte Monnin), Gigi (Anna Gladysek), Mimi (Maria Mancini), Simone (Monica Swinn) and Coco (Pamela Stanford) — an all-star team of Jess Franco’s actresses — work at a brothel where they protect the rebels and their leader Carlos Ribas (Fred Williams). But when the government comes back into power, they arrest these women and plan on using them as a joy division for their troops until they escape and live in a convent.

As you can imagine, these ladies of loose morals get into some shenanigans. I wrote that sentence as if it were a one-line review in the TV Guide.

There’s a statement in this about government authoritarianism, but really, Line Romay, Pamela Stanford and Monica Swinn were all I needed to read to make me watch it. Also, if you looked at Maria Mancini’s name and wondered if she’s Carla’s sister, I want to thank you for making me not feel alone in my complete nerdiness. She’s also in Giallo in Venice and Seven Women for Satan.

No nuns in my childhood looked like Lina Romay, but I don’t think that ever existed outside of this movie.

A Roger Ebert “Dog of the Week” also known as The Great American Girl Robbery, Bus 17 Is Missing and Cheerleaders’ Naughty Weekend, Cheerleader’s Wild Weekend finds a bus filled with twentysomething teenagers — three teams of cheerleaders, including Kristine DeBell (Alice from the adult Alice In Wonderland and a former Ford model; she’s in so many movies that it’s hard to just pick a few, but let’s say The Big Brawl and Tag: The Assassination Game), Wally Ann Wharton (who has plenty of non-sex adult roles and is also in Last Resort), Leslie King (who would go on to write 1988’s To Die For), Lachelle Chamberlain (whose IMDB roles include Miss Teenage U.S.A., a young girl and pretty girl), Marilyn Joi (Cleopatra Schwartz!) and Lenka Novak (one of the Catholic High School Girls In Trouble) — getting kidnapped by the National American Army of Freedom, who are made up of ex-football players and one butch woman. They call their demands into DJ Joyful Jerome (Leon Isaac Kennedy) while Jason Williams from Flesh Gordon and Robert Houston from The Hills Have Eyes attempt to save them.

This is a scummy movie, but at least one of the sexual assault scenes was so dark it didn’t end up in the movie. When you look at the poster art, you’ll say, “This looks like a sex comedy.” But no. No, it’s kind of like if the SLA kidnapped the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. Look at how dark this IMDB trivia is: “A brunette actress broke her left arm during production, and they avoided filming her left side through the remainder of the film.” We don’t even know her name.

When you see Bill Osco and Chuck Russell’s names on this, you know what you’re getting into.

It was directed by Jeff Werner and written by D.W. Gilbert and Williams, who conveniently wrote himself into the good guy role and got the girl at the end. These guys also made a movie in which women use striptease to keep their captives from killing them. But hey, you know the movies I like. This fits right in.

The MVD Rewind Collection release of this movie — what a great release for such a scuzzy movie and I applaud them for that! — has extras like two commentary tracks, one by director Jeff Werner, actress Marilyn Joi and editor Gregory McClatchy and the other with Kristine DeBell; interviews with DeBell. Joi, Jason Williams and Leon Isaac Kennedy; a photo gallery; an alternate title card; a trailer and a collectible mini-poster. You can get this from MVD.

1963: During the Cold War, CIA agent Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) teams with KGB officer Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) to thwart a criminal organization. They must find Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander), daughter of nuclear scientist Dr. Udo Teller (Christian Berkel) and defeat Nazis who want to bring about the Fourth Reich.

Based on the TV series, this is an OK action movie, but it makes a mistake similar to so many remakes: Do we want the origin story? Or do we want to see Solo and Kuryakin already working together as part of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement? It’s cool when Hugh Grant shows up as Alexander Waverly, but for those who love the original show, will they love this? And for those who don’t know it, is this a spy film that is different enough?

I didn’t dislike what I watched, but the original show was a phenomenon. Yet, for a movie that took over a decade to happen, does it mean anything to anyone other than its small fanbase that’s still left, who may not enjoy the changes? Maybe I should stop worrying and enjoy watching Richie’s work, as this all looks nice.

The Arrow Video release of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. has plenty of extras, including new audio commentary by critics Bryan Reesman and Max Evry; new interviews with co-writer/producer Lionel Wigram and Luca Calvani; Legacy of U.N.C.L.E., a new featurette celebrating the original 1960s TV series and its influence on the 2015 movie, featuring Helen McCarthy, David Flint and Vic Pratt; a featurette on Guy Ritchie’s films; archival features on the making of the movie; a trailer; an image gallery; a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Dare Creative; an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by Barry Forshaw and a reprinted article from CODEX Magazine on the film’s cinematography and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Dare Creative. You can order it from MVD in 4K UHD or Blu-ray.

No, this is not Eugenie (AKA  Philosophy in the Bedroom). It’s also not Eugénie de Sade (AKA DeSade 2000). This is 1980’s Eugenie (Historia de una perversión), but yes, it’s another Jess Franco movie. It is a remake of the 1970 movie listed above and is also known as Erotismo. Franco danced with this subject many times, also making How to Seduce a Virgin.

Alberto de Rosa (Antonio Mayans, a Franco stock member) wants the young Eugenie (Katja Bienert, El tesoro de la diosa blanca), so he gets his sister Alba (Mabel Escano) to help by seducing her father and talking him into letting brother and sister take his daughter for, well, you can only guess.

Bienert is fine in this, but she’s also dealing with Maria Rohm and Soledad Miranda to live up to in Franco’s first two attempts. That’s not fair to her to be compared to them. She was also underage when this was made, which is something that would never happen today or at least we’d like to believe that.

This also has Lina Romay barking and behaving like a dog, so there’s that.

In Germany, most of the plot and character pieces are thrown away to make way for inserts from Triangle of Venus. For these Teutonic perverts, Jess Franco was simply not dirty enough.

Despite being approached several times with New York Times reporter Gerald Walker’s 1970 novel Cruising, William Friedkin (The Exorcist, Sorcerer and perhaps not as successfully, Jade) wasn’t interested. He changed his mind after an unsolved series of murders in New York’s leather bars.

Articles by Village Voice journalist Arthur Bell and NYPD officer Randy Jurgensen helped inform this film. The latter went into the same deep cover as this film’s protagonist, Steve Burns. Then, Friedkin learned that Paul Bateson, a doctor’s assistant who appeared in The Exorcist, had been implicated in the crimes while serving a sentence for another murder.

Friedkin did some of his research for the film by attending gay bars dressed in only a jockstrap, but by the time the movie began filming, he had been barred from two of the most oversized bars, the Mine Shaft and Eagle’s Nest, due to the controversy surrounding the movie.

Much like The New York Ripper and God Told Me To, this movie feels like one set at the end of the world — New York City near the close of the 20th century. Someone is picking up gay men, murdering them and leaving their body parts in the Hudson.

Officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino)—exactly the type of man the killer has been after—is on the case. Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino) has assigned him to infiltrate the foreign world of S&M and leather bars. However, as the case progresses, he loses himself and his relationship with Nancy (Karen Allen).

Soon, he learns of just how brutal the NYPD is to gay men — even if they’re just suspects. And he finds himself growing closer to his neighbor Ted (Don Scardino, Squirm).

By the end, nothing is truly clear. While the killer may be Stuart Richards, a schizophrenic who attacks Burns with a knife in Morningside Park, it could also be Ted’s angry boyfriend Gregory (James Remar). After all, Ted’s mutilated body is discovered while Stuart is in custody. Or the real killer is still out there — perhaps he’s even a patrol cop (Joe Spinell). The truth is never told.

Spinell is incredible in this, which is no surprise. He used his real life for inspiration, as there’s a line about his wife, Jean Jennings, leaving him and moving to Florida with his daughter. His wife had just done exactly that before this movie was shot.

The actual version of this movie may never be released. Friedkin claims it took fifty rounds to get the MPAA to award the film an R rating. Over 40 minutes of footage was cut, which consisted of time spent in gay bars. The director claims that these scenes showed “the most graphic homosexuality with Pacino watching and with the intimation that he may have been participating.”

This footage also creates another suspect — Burns himself may have become a killer.

When Friedkin sought to restore the missing footage for the film’s DVD release, he discovered that United Artists no longer had it and may have even destroyed all the cut footage.

In 2013, James Franco and Travis Mathews released Interior. Leather Bar is a metafictionalized account of the two filmmakers’ attempts to recreate the lost 40 minutes of Cruising.

There’s a disclaimer at the start that says, “This film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world. It is set in one small segment of that world, which is not meant to be representative of the whole.” Years later, Friedkin would claim that MPAA and United Artists required this, hoping that it would absolve them of the controversy that had been all over this production.

That’s because protests had started at the urging of gay journalist Arthur Bell, the aforementioned Village Voice writer whose series of articles on the Doodler’s killing of gay men inspired this movie. There were numerous disruptions to the filming, as protesters blasted music and loud noises at all filming locations, leading to hours of ADR to fix the ruined dialogue.

The Arrow Video 4K UHD release of Cruising features a brand-new restoration from a 4K scan of the original camera negative, supervised and approved by writer-director William Friedkin. It also includes a Friedkin-approved newly remastered 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio mix of the film. The release also includes archival featurettes and two commentaries by Friedkin.

There’s also new commentary featuring the original musicians involved with the soundtrack; Heavy Leather, an alternate musical score by Pentagram Home Video; deleted scenes and alternative footage; on-set audio featuring the club scenes and protest coverage; censored material reels; a theatrical trailer, teasers and TV commercials; interviews with Karen Allen, film consultant and former police detective Randy Jurgensen, editor Bud S. Smith, Jay Acovone, Mike Starr, Mark Zecca and Wally Wallace, former manager of the Mineshaft; Breaking the Codes, a visual essay surrounding the hanky-codes featuring actor and writer David McGillivray; Stop the Movie, a short film by Jim Hubbard capturing the Cruising protests; archival featurettes; William Friedkin’s BeyondFest 2022 Q&A at the American Cinematheque and an extensive image gallery featuring international promotional material, on-set sketches, and more.

It also has a 120-page perfect-bound collector’s book featuring articles from The Village Voice and The New York Times, essays from the film’s extras cast, an introduction from William Friedkin and an archive interview with Al Pacino. The set is enclosed in a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sister Hyde.

You can get it from MVD.