EDITOR’S NOTE: Ator the Fighting Eagle was on the CBS Late Movie on April 12 and July 19, 1985. I am amazed that this was on national U.S. television.

Let’s list the reasons why this movie made it to our site:

Joe D’Amato directed it. Where do we even start with his filmography? Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals? Antropophagus? Endgame?

It’s an Italian ripoff of Conan the Barbarian, which means it’s going to be at the same time better, worse and more inventive than the movie that inspired it.

It’s written by Michele Soavi (Stagefright, The Church, The Sect, Cemetery Man)!

Once, Ator was just a baby, born with the birthmark that prophesied that he’d grow up to destroy the Spider Cult, whose leader Dakar (a pro wrestler who appeared in Titanes en el Ring against Martín Karadagian) tries to kill before he even gets out of his chainmail diapers.

Luckily, Ator is saved and grows up big, strong and weirdly in love with his sister, Sunya. It turns out that luckily, he’s adopted, so this is only morally and not biologically upsetting. His father allows them to be married, but the Spider Cult attacks the village and takes her, along with several other women.

Ator trains with Griba, the warrior who saved him as a child (he’s played by Edmund Purdom, the dean from Pieces!). What follows are pure shenanigans — Ator is kidnapped by Amazons, almost sleeps with a witch, undertakes a quest to find a shield and meets up with Roon (Sabrina Siani, Ocron from Fulci’s batshit barbarian opus Conquest), a sexy blonde thief who is in love with him.

Oh yeah! Laura Gemser, Black Emanuelle herself, shows up here too.

Ator succeeds in defeating Dakkar, only to learn that the only reason that Griba mentored him was to use him to destroy his enemy. That said, Ator defeats him too, leaving him to be eaten by the Lovecraftian-named Ancient One, a monstrous spider. But hey, Ator isn’t done yet. He kills that beast too!

Finally, learning that Roon has died, Ator and Sunya go back to their village, ready to make their incestual union a reality. Or maybe not, as she doesn’t show up in the three sequels, The Blade Master, Iron Warrior and Quest for the Magic Sword.

Ator is played by Miles O’Keefe, who started his Hollywood career in the Bo Derek vehicle Tarzan the Ape Man, a movie that Richard Harris would nearly fist fight people over if they dared to bring it up. He’s in all but the last of these films and while D’Amato praised his physique and attitude, he felt that his fighting and acting skills left something to be desired.

Ator the Fighting Eagle pretty much flies by. It does what it’s supposed to do — present magic, boobs, sorcery and swordfights — albeit in a PG-rated film.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Betsy was on the CBS Late Movie on September 15, 1982.

Based on the Harold Robbins book, directed by Daniel Petrie (Bronco and Billie, Six Pack, Fort Apache the Bronx) and written by William Bast and Walter Bernstein, this is the story of Loren Hardeman Sr. (Laurence Olivier) and the car that will bring his company back to glory, named for his great-granddaughter (Kathleen Beller). This goes against what his grandson (Robert Duvall) thinks the company’s future is. It’s also about the loves of race driver Angelo Perino (Tommy Lee Jones) and a special fuel that will power The Betsy.

In The Golden Turkey Awards, Harry and Michael Medved said of this movie: “Another Harold Robbins book bites the dust as a wretched, melodramatic film. Lord Laurence Olivier’s attempt at a Texas twang is a hilarious flop, as is his incestuous relationship with his daughter-in-law, Katharine Ross.”

Jokes on you, Medveds, that’s just cucking your son, not incest. It’s also a scene where the homosexual son of the elder Loren shoots himself in the head while the young version of the grandson Loren watches, then goes upstairs to tell his mom, who has grandpa between her thighs.

That’s Harold Robbins, right?

Well, in the world of this movie, it’s an actual choice between Kathleen Beller and Lesley-Anne Down. Come on, Tommy Lee Jones!

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Psychic was on the CBS Late Movie on May 27, 1981 and June 25, 1982.

Before Fulci became known as the godfather of gore, he made movies in nearly every genre. This is the next to last film he’d make — Silver Saddle follows it in 1978 — before 1979’s Zombie announced to the world that he was here to tear eyeballs, unleash bats and provide dazzling if incomprehensible odes to mayhem.

Fulci is no stranger to the Giallo, with some of his most important films being A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin and Don’t Torture a Duckling and the unappreciated Perversion Story. The title refers to the film’s exploration of the duality of human nature, a theme that Fulci often revisits in his work. Here, he’d team up again with writer Roberto Gianviti and begin his long partnership with writer Dardano Sacchetti, who sought to lend a touch of Argento to the original script’s traditional mystery.

What emerged was a film shrouded in mystery and darkness—a rumination where death is inescapable and always close, a world where doom hangs over every moment, captivating the audience with its enigmatic atmosphere.

The film is set in Dover, England, in 1959, a time of social change and upheaval. A woman commits suicide by literally diving from the Cliffs of Dover. Forgive the harmful effects — Fulci tends to use wooden bodies in his films for some reason, much like the end of Duckling. The main point is that her daughter Virginia may be living in Italy, but she can clearly see her mother’s day.

Today, Virginia (Jennifer O’Neill, Scanners) lives in Rome and is married to a wealthy businessman named Francesco (Gianni Garko, Sartana himself!). As she drives him to the airport for his next business trip, she begins to see visions. An older woman is being killed. A wall is torn down. And a letter is under a statue. How strange is it that the house she is beginning to renovate looks precisely like the one in her visions?

When she tears down the wall that looks like the one in her dreams, she finds the skeleton of her husband’s ex-lover and the police want to charge him with the murder. Virginia becomes the detective of the story, obsessed with saving her husband with the help of psychic researcher Luca Fattori. Soon, they believe that the real killer is Emilio Rospini (Gabriele Ferzetti, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service).

So who is the woman? Why was her body in that room, which was once her husband’s bedroom? Why is the woman’s face on the cover of the magazine that Virginia buys? That’s because Virginia’s visions aren’t the past but premonitions of the future.

Meanwhile, she’s given a wristwatch that plays a haunting theme every hour in the house. This eerie soundtrack, composed by Fabio Frizzi, adds a layer of suspense and tension to the film and was reused to incredible effect in Kill Bill. The growing knowledge that the victim isn’t dead yet—and that Virginia may be that victim—darkens every frame of Fulci’s epic.

Quentin Tarantino was so in love with this film that he intended to remake it with Bridget Fonda sometime in the 2000s, but this never happened.

Perhaps just as interesting as the film is the life of its star, Jennifer O’Neill. Possibly best known for her long career as a Cover Girl model, she has been married nine times to eight husbands (she married, divorced, and remarried her sixth husband, Richard Alan Brown). By the age of 17, she’d already attempted suicide so as not to be separated from her dog, had a horse break her neck in three places and married her first husband. She’s also had a horrible history with guns, having accidentally shot herself in 1982 and being on the set of the TV show Cover Up in 1984 when co-star Jon-Erik Hexum accidentally killed himself. While waiting for a delay, he had been playing Russian roulette with a prop gun and was unaware that the discharge could still cause damage. Placing the gun to his temple, he fired and caused so much damage to his brain that he died six days later.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Great Alligator was on the CBS Late Movie on May 26, 1982; June 17 and December 28, 1983; and June 13 and August 30, 1984.

Sergio Martino directed some of my favorite films of all time, such as The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, All the Colors of the Dark, 2019: After the Fall of New York, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key as well other completely out there films like Hands of Steel, Torso, American Tiger, The Mountain of the Cannibal God and The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail. Throw in a script co-written by one of my favorite Italian scuzzfest actors and directors — George Eastman — and you have the recipe for a movie that should blow my mind.

The Great Alligator should be, well, great. And there are moments where it feels like it’s going to be, as it attempts to be a mash-up of Jaws and Cannibal Holocaust, which again, seems like a great idea. Throw in the gorgeous Barbara Bach before she married Ringo Starr, Claudio Cassinelli (Murder Rock) and Mel Ferrer — who went from the A-list and marrying Audrey Hepburn to appearing in some of the most crazed films, like The Visitor, Nightmare City and Eaten Alive! to name but three — and you have a cast ready to make it happen. And the central theme of the movie — tourists anger the god of a resort island who then becomes a giant alligator and eats them all — is great, too.

Turns out that Kuma, that river god, doesn’t like how Mel Ferrer runs Paradise House and wants none of his native people to work with the whites any longer. The natives then wipe out anyone that works there, no matter where they come from and Cassinelli and Bach must climb the waterfall that Stacy Keach fell off of in The Mountain of the Cannibal God to find the only person who may be able to save them, Prophet Jameson (Dr. Menard from Zombi 2).

That said, once the face painted natives and a giant alligator attack everyone, burning down Paradise House and menacing screaming tourists, who survives and what will be left of them is up for grabs. Look for appearances by Bobby Rhodes (the pimp from Demons), Romano Puppo (Trash’s father from Escape from the Bronx) and Sylvia Collatina (Mae Freudenstein, the ghost girl of The House by the Cemetery)!

The huge body count, numerous alligator attacks and attempts at being something more than a Spielberg clone — outside of the way the attacks are filmed and that Ferrer keeps everything a secret so tourists keep coming — make this a movie that I enjoyed on some level. But much like Martino’s post-giallo efforts, I keep wishing for him to go from simply good to flat out amazing. The ideas are there. The execution, however, is not.

You can get this from Severin.

• EDITOR’S NOTE: Patrick was on the CBS Late Movie on August 26, 1983 and March 2 and August 9, 1984.

Directed by Richard Franklin (Psycho II, Road Games) and written by Everett De Roche (Race for the Yankee Zephyr, Harlequin), Patrick opened the world to the genre of Ozploitation. While the Australian score was by Brian May, the Italian cut was scored by Goblin. In fact, it did better internationally than in Australia, even if the U.S. version dubbed over all of the accents.

Patrick (Robert Thompson) hasn’t left his hospital bed or closed his eyes in three years. After killing his parents, he’s been in a coma in a private hospital, never keeping the same nurse for long. Now, Kathy Jacquard (Susan Penhaligon) has taken the job, hoping that it will help her finally divorce her husband Ed (Rod Mullinar).

According to Dr. Roget (Robert Helpmann), Patrick is being kept in his care to explore life and death. Never mind that other patients have seen him fly out of his window. He can also kill people from afar, like when he tries to drown Dr. Brian Wright (Bruce Barry) when he tires to pick up Kathy, who he has been communicating with via spitting and spirit typewriting. Strangely, her only ally end up being Matron Cassidy (Julia Blake), the same woman who was tough on her at the beginning of the movie.

Yes, Quentin Tarantino admits that he took the paralyzed in bed spitting scene in Kill Bill Vol. 1 from this movie. He has also said that “Hitchcock was overrated but you know who was better? Richard Franklin.” and stated that Road Games is his favorite Australian movie.

Soon, Patrick is showing her that he can still feel — his erection is how he does it — and that the hospital is trying to kill him with electroshock therapy. By the end of the movie, he’s making her choose between her ex-husband or him as she injects him with potassium chloride and is linked to his mind as he passes on.

Maybe not. After all, he leaps from the bed while dead — a scene that the filmmakers started with and worked backward from, unlike the modern horror movie creators who have no idea how to close their stories — and his eyes reopen after his death.

Two years after this, the Italians made Patrick Still Lives, a truly baffling sequel that took the basic ideas of this movie — the same story, I can admit it — and infused it with near pornographic levels of sex and violence. It’s just as incredible as that sentence makes it sound. There was a remake in 2013 that I need to see but what I wish was filmed was Franklin and De Rouche’s sequel idea, Patrick II: The Man Who Wasn’t There. A religious cult would dig up Patrick and he would be in a coma, at which point he’d start being obsessed about another young lady.

The poster has a great tagline: ”I saw a man upon the stair, I looked again, he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today, I wish that man would go away.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: The People Next Door was on the CBS Late Movie on December 28, 1976.

David Greene was behind a lot of my favorite TV movies, like Roots; Rich Man, Poor Man; Madame Sin and the remake of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? He also made I Start Counting and The Shuttered Room.

Arthur and Gerrie Mason (Eli Wallach and Julie Harris) realize that their marriage isn’t perfect and struggle to fix it as their daughter Maxie fights drug addiction. Arthur catches her in bed with a biker, high on cocaine, and immediately believes that his rock star son Artie (Stephen McHattie) who gave her the drugs, but it turns out that its the nerd next door.

Roger Ebert said that The People Next Door was “the best movie so far about parents, kids and drugs, and probably the best we’re likely to get (considering Hollywood’s recent tendency to exploit the drug culture for “youth movies”).”

This has a decent cast, with Hal Holbrook, Cloris Leachman and Rue McClanahan all showing up, along with Rutanya Alda as a nurse.

It didn’t make me want to stop doing drugs, but your viewing may change your habits.