CANNON MONTH 3: The Light at the Edge of the World (1971)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For the last two days of Cannon Month, I’m going to cover movies that weren’t produced by Cannon but which were distributed by them on one of their various home video labels including Cannon / MGM/UA Home Video, HBO/Cannon Video, Cannon Video, Cannon / Guild Home Video, Cannon / Rank Video, Cannon Screen Entertainment Limited, Cannon Classics, Cannon / Warner Home Video, Cannon/VMP, Cannon Screen Entertainment, Scotia/Cannon, Cannon International, Cannon/ ECV, Cannon / Showtime, Cannon / United Film, Cannon / Isabod, Cannon / Mayco and so many more.

Kevin Billington was the son of a factory worker who ended up marrying Lady Rachel Billington. He was also a director of plenty of TV movies, like a well-considered BBC version of Henry VIII. He ended up directing this international collaboration of French, Spanish and Italian producers. They paid Kirk Douglas an estimated $1 million dollars to star, which is about $7.2 million in today’s money.

Will Denton (Kirk Douglas) runs an isolated lighthouse to hide from a failed romance and the fact that he killed a man in self-defense. The only people he ever speaks to are the crew, Captain Moriz (Fernando Rey) and assistant Felipe (Massimo Ranieri). They watch over a very strategic trade route near the Tierra del Fuego archipelago at the southern tip of South America.

Yet in one horrible moment, it all changes, as Captain Jonathan Kongre (Yul Brynner) and his pirates — they include actors from Sergio Leone’s films, such as Luis Barboo, Víctor Israel and Aldo Sambrell — kill Moriz and Felipe, smash the lighthouse signal and start to loot everything they can. Surviving their attack along with an Italian sailor named Montefiore (Renato Salvatori), they begin to fight back.

Kongre has also made a change in his life. He always kills everyone on the ships that he takes over, but he’s fallen for one of the women on board, Arabella (Samantha Eggar). Denton tries to save her, but when Montefiore is caught and slowly killed, he puts his friend out of his misery, just as Kongre angrily gives the woman to his crew. Denton sinks the ship and it ends up with just the two men, battling each other to the death inside the lighthouse.

If you’re expecting a light hearted Jules Verne adventure, well, this is as rough as it gets. It’s about a broken man trying to just live out his days coming up against a sophisticated villain who loves murder and carnage. I mean, they kill Douglas’ monkey. That’s how horrible the bad guys are. They deserve everything they get.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: The Naked Zoo (1970)

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BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Rita Hayworth spent the last few years of her life not knowing who she was anymore, painting when she did, and mostly staring out her window at Central Park. She died with many people thinking that alcoholism had robbed her of her career when the truth was Alzheimer’s had impacted her final years and back then, the world didn’t understand that disease at all.

Before she slipped away, she made a movie with William Gréfe, which blows my mind, and that movie is 1970’s The Naked Zoo, which was originally called The Grove, named for Coconut Grove, a former artist’s colony in Miami.

So how did Gréfe — the maker of movies like Sting of Death and Whiskey Mountain — get a big star like Hayworth into a movie made for just $250,000? Well, her agent originally wanted all of that cash, but they were able to make a deal for $50,000 for two weeks of shooting. Her parts were shot in a deserted house near the Pirate’s World theme park (of my dreams, as well as movies like Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny and Musical Mutiny).

Once known as “The Great American Love Goddess,” Hayworth’s life was filled with men who wanted her to be the seductive woman she was in films only to learn that she was a real person. Or, perhaps even worse, men who only sought to control her, like first husband Edward Charles Judson, a twice her age businessman who remade her into a sex symbol that he could buy and sell to Hollywood. Her marriages to Orson Welles, Prince Aly Khan, Dick Haymes and James Hill were also marked with mental and physical abuse, with only Welles not outright beating and humiliating her in public*.

By 1972 — two years after this film — her health and mental state was so bad that she had to read her lines one at a time while making The Wrath of God. She was to be in Tales That Witness Madness, but left the set before she appearing in one scene.

Back to Willian Gréfe. He had hoped to make a movie closer to The Graduate, but you know, as seen through the Florida drive-in movie haze of sex, drugs and crime. And still, this was edited by its distributor, with cuts made to add a masturbation scene and the band Canned Heat playing at a party. Those scenes were filmed by Barry Mahon, pretty much making this movie a team-up of Florida’s two top exploitation experts.

The film itself concerns Hayworth playing Mrs. Golden, a rich woman who lives with her cockolder, wheelchair-bound husband Harry (Ford Rainey, Dr. Mixter from Halloween II!). She sleeps with an author named Terry Shaw (Steve Oliver from Peyton Place) and when her husband finds out — and tries to gun them down — Terry stops him, but despite the death of the old man being in self-defense, Mrs. Golden starts blackmailing him.

That’s really the whole story, although there’s also plenty of party scenes and romance between Terry and Nadine (Fleurette Carter, who was also in The Hookers) and Pauline (Fay Spain, Dragstrip Girl).

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Devil’s Due (1973)

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BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Cindy (Cindy West) is not having a good day. She’s been drugged and assaulted by Dean Carlson (John Buco), who has made her pregnant. She runs to tell her mechanic boyfriend Willie Joe (Davey Jones), but after making love and telling him that he’s the father, he dumps her. She runs to her father, the only man who never let her down, only to discover that he’s balls deep in her best friend Barbie (Lisa Grant). She screams so loud that she has a miscarriage and loses her voice.

Cindy runs again, this time to the big city, where she moves in with Dawn (Andrea True, who would go on to sing “More, More, More) and Nicky (Darby Lloyd Rains), two lesbians who say that she’s the best thing that ever happened to them.

This wouldn’t have this title if it wasn’t for Kampala (Gus Thomas, who would go on to become Cortland, New York District Attorney Mark Suben) and his sex cult. Cindy soon sees right through the leader, as men have ruined her life. The girls all conspire to take over the sex group — Jamie Gillis is also a member, along with Marc Stevens, Georgina Spelvin (the same year that she was in The Devil In Ms. Jones) and Tina Russell — and this movie rewards us with dialogue like,  “You may find this kind of strange, Cindy, but I work for the Devil!” and “You must kiss the cock of Satan!” Also: Death by poisoned nipples.

Devil’s Due is really influenced by the Church of Satan photo layouts that often appeared in men’s magazines. Directed by Ernest Danna and written by Gerry Pound, it’s not great but it is fun if you enjoy the occult of the 70s.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Whiskey Mountain (1977)

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BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Bill (Christopher George, taking a vacation from his wife, who is in nearly every movie with him), Jamie, Dan (Preston Pierce, Angels’ Wild Women) and Diana (Roberta Collins, Matilda the Hun from Death Race 2000) are on a treasure hunt deep in the Southern backwoods, seeking an inheritance of prices Civil War rifles. Sure, why not?

After thirty minutes of more of travelogue and dirt bike footage, you may wonder, “Has slasher month gone to Sam’s head? When are we going to get to the senseless violence?” Patience, slashawan.

The deeper into the South our protagonists find themselves, the less hospitality they get from the locals, but hey, there’s plenty of money on the other side of the rainbow on Whiskey Mountain, right? Well, there’s also a drug operation that runs everything around, even the cops, all headed up by Rudy (John Davis Chandler, probably the only actor I know that appeared in both Adventures In Babysitting and High Plains Drifter).

This is a movie that has all real marijuana as props and a soundtrack by the Charlie Daniels Band, along with the exact kind of horrors you know await them yankees when they ask too many questions and push too hard. It’s also filled with Peckinpah-esque slow-motion — most effectively when George is double firing shotguns — to go with a brutal scene where we only hear the assault on the girls and see still evidence as it develops on Polaroids. Also — it’s 1977 and technically a motorcycle movie. so that means that it also has a potential downer ending freeze frame.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: My Tale Is Hot (1964)

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BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Lucifer U. Devil (Max Gardens, AKA Manny Goodtimes) is mad that Hell hasn’t seen any new arrivals of note since Hitler. He wants the soul of Ben-Hur Ova (Jack Little) and is trying to figure out how to lure him away from his wife Miassis (Bea Reddy). So the first of the fallen bets his wife Saturna (Ima Ghoul) that he can get the man who won the “World’s Most Faithful Husband” by Ladies House Companion to break the Seventh Commandment.

This movie has those really tiny pools that only existed when nudie cuties were being made. These pools are so miniature than only one or two women can fit at the same time. I wonder who made these are what their purpose was other than to show off the breasts of young starlets?

Directed and written by Peter Perry Jr., who uses the name Seymour Tokus, this has a dance by famous burlesque queen Candy barr, as well as appearances by actresses with names like Carry Meoff, Lotta Partz and Evan less. More famous actresses include Carol Baughman, Monica Liljistrand, Gaby Martone, Barbara Nordin, Adele Rein and Karen Wyatt, many of whom turn up in Mondo Keyhole.

The secret of Ben-Hur Ova? He’s a sheik and has a hundred wives, so he’s faithful to all of them. Now I ask, who was Ima Ghoul and what is she up to?

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

CANNON MONTH 3: The Freeway Maniac (1989)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For the last two days of Cannon Month, I’m going to cover movies that weren’t produced by Cannon but which were distributed by them on one of their various home video labels including Cannon / MGM/UA Home Video, HBO/Cannon Video, Cannon Video, Cannon / Guild Home Video, Cannon / Rank Video, Cannon Screen Entertainment Limited, Cannon Classics, Cannon / Warner Home Video, Cannon/VMP, Cannon Screen Entertainment, Scotia/Cannon, Cannon International, Cannon/ ECV, Cannon / Showtime, Cannon / United Film, Cannon / Isabod, Cannon / Mayco and so many more.

There’s no way that the Gahan Wilson that wrote this movie is the Gahan Wilson who drew all those cartoons for Playboy, right?

Because if he is, then this is a comedy and this movie makes a lot more sense.

And if not, then I have no idea what the filmmakers were going for in this one.

So after this movie completely rips off the open of Pieces and Nightmare, we move to an asylum where the inmates are being given cigarettes as some form of therapy. One of them escapes and kills everyone in his way and that’s Arthur (James Jude Courtney, who would go on to be The Shape in the 2018 Halloween). He nearly kills an actress named Linda (Loren Winters, who was a one and done actress in this, along with producing the film), whose experience ends up getting her cast in a cheesy science fiction movie called Astronette that will use her notoriety for publicity.

There’s no way Arthur would hunt her down, right?

I have so many questions for this movie. How did they get Robbie Krieger from The Doors to write the theme song? Why did they have Linda’s boyfriend cheat on her and suddenly become a sympathetic hero in the last act? Why is there no real freeway in this movie? Why does Arthur howl at the moon? Why is some of this movie well-shot with decent stunts and other portions have the worst acting you’ve ever seen? Are you surprised that this was released by Cannon — well, released on VHS in the Netherlands by Cannon Screen Entertainment, so not really produced by Cannon.

There’s not really another slasher like The Freeway Maniac. It’s…something else.

CANNON MONTH 3: Razorback (1984)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For the last two days of Cannon Month, I’m going to cover movies that weren’t produced by Cannon but which were distributed by them on one of their various home video labels including Cannon / MGM/UA Home Video, HBO/Cannon Video, Cannon Video, Cannon / Guild Home Video, Cannon / Rank Video, Cannon Screen Entertainment Limited, Cannon Classics, Cannon / Warner Home Video, Cannon/VMP, Cannon Screen Entertainment, Scotia/Cannon, Cannon International, Cannon/ ECV, Cannon / Showtime, Cannon / United Film, Cannon / Isabod, Cannon / Mayco and so many more.

Between the cinematography of Dean Semler (The Road Warrior, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) and the lunatic vision of Russell Mulcahy (who was known for his music videos before making movies like this and Highlander; some of the videos he directed include “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles, “Vienna” by Ultravox and tons of Cultre Club and Duran Duran songs), Razorback looks better than any movie about a gigantic rampaging pig should.

But not just any pig. A gigantic razorback that’s so maniacal that it eats its own young and now has the power to implicate men in the murder of their family. That kind of pig. Most of the film’s budget went to making six animatronic pigs that were used for different stunts, including a special boar made to attack cars.

As for real boars, they really are pretty tough. Can they be stabbed in the throat and keep going? I honestly don’t want to find out for myself. But hey — this is a Jaws on land film that even has “New Moon on Monday” show up on the soundtrack. And there are moments where the camerawork gets nearly psychedelic and you think, “Hey, is this art or a movie with a giant pig that eats people?”

CANNON MONTH 3: They’re Playing with Fire (1984)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For the last two days of Cannon Month, I’m going to cover movies that weren’t produced by Cannon but which were distributed by them on one of their various home video labels including Cannon / MGM/UA Home Video, HBO/Cannon Video, Cannon Video, Cannon / Guild Home Video, Cannon / Rank Video, Cannon Screen Entertainment Limited, Cannon Classics, Cannon / Warner Home Video, Cannon/VMP, Cannon Screen Entertainment, Scotia/Cannon, Cannon International, Cannon/ ECV, Cannon / Showtime, Cannon / United Film, Cannon / Isabod, Cannon / Mayco and so many more.

Hikmet Avedis was the director of 1974’s The Teacher. Howard Avedis is the director of this film. They’re similar films. And the same person. So there you go.

This movie is all about Jay (Eric Brown, Private Lessons), who gets caught up in a film noir-like murder mystery. And see, you thought that this was going to be all about teen comedies and not death! Wrong!

What sold me on this movie were the two leads: Andrew Prine (The Town that Dreaded Sundown, Simon King of the Witches) and Sybil Danning (Battle Beyond the Stars). They’re a married couple who want to get his mom into a retirement home, but things go wrong and she gets killed. Jay gets way too deep into their affairs, but look: if you were a 19-year-old college kid and Sybil Danning regularly rumbusticating you, chances are you’d do anything she asked.

This movie has a lot in it, to tell the truth. It’s somewhat a sex comedy. It’s sometimes a slasher, like when a hidden Santa Claus beats a woman with a baseball bat. It’s got Dominick Brascia in it, who played the candy bar eating heavy guy in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. It’s got Alvy Moore in it, who was Hank Kimball on TV’s Green Acres. It was the best role Sybil ever thought that she acted in. And by the end of the movie, it’s become a giallo complete with a room full of horrific artwork, dead bodies and a secret sibling!

Despite the tagline, “From his French maid, he got Private Lessons. Now his English professor is giving him a REAL education,” this is not a sequel to that film. Also: I kind of hate Eric Brown, as he got to do love scenes with both Sybil and Sylvia Kristel. That’s kind of getting way too much out of your life. No one deserves that much.

Just listen to this song and remember: Eric Brown got to do three love scenes with Sybil Danning. Try not to get enraged. It gets worse: he hooks up with Sylvia Kristel in Private Lessons. You’ve just gone postal.

You can get this from Kino Lorber.

CANNON MONTH 3: Nothing In Common (1986)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For the last two days of Cannon Month, I’m going to cover movies that weren’t produced by Cannon but which were distributed by them on one of their various home video labels including Cannon / MGM/UA Home Video, HBO/Cannon Video, Cannon Video, Cannon / Guild Home Video, Cannon / Rank Video, Cannon Screen Entertainment Limited, Cannon Classics, Cannon / Warner Home Video, Cannon/VMP, Cannon Screen Entertainment, Scotia/Cannon, Cannon International, Cannon/ ECV, Cannon / Showtime, Cannon / United Film, Cannon / Isabod, Cannon / Mayco and so many more.

Nothing In Common is responsible for what I do for a living.

I won tickets to see this movie from a trivia contest on WKST radio in New Castle, PA. As I sat in the theater, I was amazed by the office that David Basner (Tom Hanks) worked in as ad guy. There were markers everywhere, everyone was stressed but having so much fun and people were playing guitars at their desks. Surely advertising was the most fun job ever!

Almost three decades later I can tell you that none of this is true.

David’s parents Max and Lorraine (Jackie Gleason and Eva Marie Saint) have finally split up. David’s just broken up with his girlfriend Donna (Bess Armstrong). And what’s even worse, his dad has lost his job. And at the same time, he’s pitching Colonial Airlines and dating the owner Andrew Woolridge’s (Barry Corbin) daughter Cheryl (Sela Ward).

You can imagine that 14-year-old me was amazed that normal looking guys could dare Sela Ward if they were funny and worked in advertising.

Max has been a horrible husband, father and even caretaker of himself. His diabetes is out of control, leading me to a lifelong fear of losing my feet after watching this. But David comes through for him, even though his father doesn’t deserve it. Oh Garry Marshall, you got me.

This is the movie that took Tom Hanks from funny guy to someone who could be in dramatic movies. Sadly, Gleason would be dead just a year after this film. He’s pretty fearless in it, playing someone who we should have no sympathy for whatsoever. He made this while he was deathly sick with colon cancer, liver cancer, thromboses hemorrhoids, diabetes and phlebitis.

Writers Rick Podell and Michael Preminger would write the TV movie Gleason which starred Grad Garrett as The Great One.

And hey — it has Thompson Twins playing “Nothing In Common” which was their first release as a duo.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Roseland (1971)

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BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Fredric Hobbs made some strange movies, that’s for sure. Only three are available — this one, Godmonster of Indian Flats and Alabama’s Ghost — and none of them are alike other than the fact that all three are movies made by either someone who was an artist, borderline insane or probably both.

Adam (E. Kerrigan Prescott) is a rock star — his big song is “You Cannot Fart Around With Love” — who has become obsessed with the Hieronymus Bosch painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. It’s led to him becoming unable to perform sexually and, as such, he must steal pornography.

So he does what any sex addict shouldn’t and gets a job at a burlesque theater, which ends with him stripping down to just his panties, which leads to him going into the psych ward. He can’t pay for therapy, but he doesn’t have a singing career without going through it. But suddenly, he falls for a nurse and we have a way too long softcore scene between them.

That’s when things get weird.

Hieronymus Bosch, who is now black and played by Christopher Brooks (Alabama from Alabama’s Ghost), arrives for exposition that tells us that it’s really the future and our hero — or whatever he is to us — is the new Adam after a future war and the painting is really his future, once he escapes from the doctor, who is now spraying the world with deadly gas. It ends as it must. with Adam and Eve making love on a giant flower and repopulating the world.

Say what?

This movie is totally 1971, an art film that hasn’t made any more sense with age. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Every Hobbs experience has made me question my own sanity, which is more than you should expect for an exploitation film about the evils of pornography.