EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this movie on January 4 at 7:30 PM ET at The Little Theatre in Rochester, NY. You can get tickets here. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.

There’s no way to calculate the influence of Blood and Black Lace. It takes the giallo from where Bava started with The Girl Who Knew Too Much and adds what was missing: high fashion, shocking gore and plenty of sex. The results are dizzying; it’s as if Bava’s move from black and white to color has pushed his camera lens to the brink of insanity.

Isabella is an untouchably gorgeous model, pure perfection on human legs. But that doesn’t save her as she walks through the grounds of the fashion house and is brutally murdered by a killer in a white mask.

Police Inspector Sylvester takes the case and interviews Max Morlan (Cameron Mitchell!), who co-manages the salon with his recently widowed lover, the Countess Christina Como. Soon, our police hero discovers that the fashion house is a den of sin, what with all the corruption, sex, blackmail, drugs and abortions going on under its roof. Isabella was murdered because she had kept a diary of all the infractions against God that happened inside these four walls.

Nicole finds the diary and tells the police she will deliver it, but it’s stolen by Peggy. As she arrives at the antique store her boyfriend Frank owns, the killer appears and kills her with a spiked glove to the face. The killing is shocking. Brutal. And definitely the forerunner to the slasher genre.

Even after the cops arrest everyone in the fashion house, the murders keep on piling up. Peggy claims that she burned the diary, so the killer burns her face until she dies. Greta is smothered to death. And Tilde is killed in the bathtub, then her wrists are slit open, spraying red into the water and marking her as a suicide.

So who is it? Come on. You’re going to have to watch it for yourself.

The success of Black Sunday and Black Sabbath had given Bava the opportunity to do anything he wanted. His producers thought that this movie would be a krimi film along the lines of an Edgar Wallace adaption. Instead, Bava gave more importance to the killings than the detective work, emphasizing sex, violence and horror more than any film in this form had quite before.

Blood and Black Lace was a failure in Italy and only a minor success in West Germany, the home of Edgar Wallace. And in America, AIP passed on the film due to its combination of sex and brutality. Instead, it was released by the Woolner Brothers with a new animated opening.

Today, Blood and Black Lace is seen as a forerunner of body count murder movies and the excesses of later giallo films. To me, it’s a classic film, filled with Bava’s camera wizardry and love of color. It is everything perfect about movies.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this movie tonight at 7 PM PT at the Los Feliz 3 in Los Angeles. You can get tickets here. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.

Has a movie ever had a better title? Nope. Sergio Martino’s fourth entry into the giallo genre, following The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail and the previously reviewed All the Colors of the Dark, it refers to the note that the killer leaves to Edwige Fenech’s character in Mrs. Wardh. And the title is way better than the alternate ones this film has — Gently Before She Dies, Eye of the Black Cat and Excite Me!

Martino wastes no time at all getting into the crazy in this one — Oliviero Rouvigny (Luigi Pistilli from A Bay of Blood, Iguana with the Tongue of Fire, Death Rides a Horse) is a dark, sinister man, a failed writer and alcoholic who lives in a mansion that’s falling apart (If this all feels like a modernized version of a Poe story like The Fall of the House of Usher, it’s no accident. There’s even an acknowledgment that the film is inspired by The Black Cat in the opening credits.). His wife, Irina (Anita Strindberg from A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin and Who Saw Her Die?), suffers his abuses, but never more so than when he gathers hippies together for confrontational parties. He makes everyone pour all of their wine into a bowl and forces her to drink it, then humiliates their black servant Brenda until one of the partygoers starts singing and everyone joins in, then gets naked. This scene is beyond strange and must be experienced. Luckily, I found the link for you, but trust me — it’s NSFW.

The only person that Oliviero seems to love is Satan, the cat that belonged to his dead mother. A black cat that talks throughout every scene he’s in, his constant meows led to my cats communicating with the TV. God only knows what a 1970’s giallo cat said, but it seems like his words spoke directly to their hearts.

One of Oliviero’s mistresses is found dead near the house, but he hides her body. The police suspect him, as does his wife. Adding to the tension is the fact that Irina hates Satan, who only seems to care about messing with her beloved birds.

Remember that servant? Well, she’s dead now, but not before she walks around half-naked in Oliviero’s mother’s dress while he watches from the other room. She barely makes it to Irina’s room before she collapses, covered in blood. Blood that Satan the cat has no problem walking through! He refuses to call the police, as he doesn’t want any more suspicion. He asks his wife to help him get rid of the body.

Oliviero’s niece Floriana (Edwige Fenech, pretty much the queen of the giallo) is in town for a visit, learning how Oliviero hasn’t been able to write one sentence over and over again for three years, stuck in writer’s block (and predating The Shining by 5 years in book form and 8 years away from Kubrick’s film). Unlike everyone else who tolerates Oliviero’s behavior or ignores it, Floriana sees right through the bullshit. The writer is used to seducing every woman he meets and she initially rebuffs him, even asking if it’s true that Oliviero used to sleep with his mother. He angrily asks if it’s true that she’s a two-bit whore. “Those would be two bits worth spending,” is her caustic reply.

Irina confides all of her pain to Floriana as the two become lovers. And another girl gets murdered — perhaps by Oliviero. Then, a dirt bike racer comes to drop off milk and hit on Floriana. Whew — I was wondering when this film would get hard to follow and start piling on the red herrings!

After being questioned by the police, Oliviero comes home to choke his wife. He stops at the last second…then we’re off to the races! The motorbike races! The milkman loses when his bike breaks down, but he’s the real winner — taking Floriana back to the abandoned house that he lives in. And oh look — there’s creepy Oliviero watching the action.

Meanwhile, Satan has gotten into the coop and chowed down on several of the birds. Irina catches him and they have quite the battle. He scratches her numerous times before she stabs him in the eye with a pair of scissors. An old woman watches and is chased away by Irina’s yelling.

She’s afraid that her husband will kill her once he learns that she killed Satan. And Oliviero keeps wondering where the cat is, especially after he buys the cat his favorite meal from the store — sheep eyes. That said — Satan might not be so dead, as we can hear his screaming and see him with a missing eye.

Floriana puts on Oliviero’s mother’s dress, asking if this is what the maid looked like before she died. Whether it’s the dress or the forbidden family love or just her beauty, he rips off her dress — at her urging, mind you — and begins making love to his niece. We cut to Idrina, caressing her pet birds, when Oliviero confronts her with scissors and questions about Satan. He almost stabs her before he ends up raping her inside the coop, while Floriana looks on. She playing them off the other, even telling Idrina that she’s slept with her husband. She also tells her that Oliviero wants to kill her, so she should kill him first.

Idrina wakes up to the sound of Satan, but can’t find him anywhere. What she does find is her husband in bed with Floriana, who is belittling him. With every sinister meow, there’s a zoom of the cat’s damaged eye. Finally, Oliviero attacks her for spying on him, slapping her around before he leaves to write. She walks the grounds of the mansion, seeing the motorcycle rider make a date with Floriana and catching sight of Satan, who runs from her. In the basement, she finds scissors and the hidden bodies of her husband’s lover and the murdered maid. In a moment of clarity — or madness — she stabs her husband while he sleeps. The sequence is breathtaking — a giallo POV shot of the murder weapon intercut with the same sentence being typed over and over interspersed with all of the abuses that Oliviero had wrought upon her. She stabs again and again before Floriana interrupts, asking her if it was easy. The sentence that the author had written again and again was him claiming that he would kill her and there was a space in the wall for her, so obviously, she had to kill him.

As for Floriana, all she wanted was the family jewels, which were hidden in the house. They seal Oliviero’s corpse within the wall while Walter watches from afar. He’s played by Ivan Rassimov, who does creeping staring dudes better than anyone else — witness his work in All the Colors of the Dark. And it turns out that he’s the real killer! He’s been typing “vendetta” over and over again. Floriana asks if Idrina was planning to kill her before she runs off into the night, then Walter appears to kiss Idrina. Turns out they were working together all along — she tells him where to find Floriana the next morning. Holy shit — Idrina reveals her whole plot, revealing how she drove her husband crazy, making him believe that he could have been a murderer! She wishes that there was an afterlife so Oliviero’s mother — who she killed! — could tell him how great her revenge was. She ends by wishing that her husband was still alive so that he could suffer for eternity.

Walter sets up an accident that takes out Floriana and her boyfriend, as their motorcycle crashes, sending blood across the white heart of a billboard and out of her lips. He tosses a match on the gasoline-soaked highway, burning both of their corpses. He collects the jewelry and gives it to Idrina, who responds by shoving him off a cliff!

When she returns to the mansion, the police are there, as there were alerted to her stabbing Satan by the old woman. They come inside the house to write a statement, but hear the sound of Satan’s meows. Following the sound, they find him inside a wall — with the corpse of her husband!

Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key is superb. An intriguing story — only a few derailing giallo moments (like the killing of the girl in the room with the dolls and the B roll motocross scenes) — with great acting, eye-catching camerawork and some genuine surprises, it’s well worth seeking out and savoring.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this movie tonight at 6:45 PM at the Music Box Theater in Chicago, IL. You can get tickets here. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.

This movie is also known as Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, which is an edited version for U.S. audiences. There’s also an even further edited TV version called House of Doom. I’ll tell you, this is the only movie I can think of where the children’s song “Frere Jacques” plays during murders.

It was directed by Carlos Aured, who would also make Horror Rises from the Tomb, Curse of the Devil and The Mummy’s Revenge with this movie’s star and co-writer, Paul Naschy.

Naschy plays a ne’er do well named Gilles who wanders into a French town looking for work but ends up getting a ride from a woman named Claude (Diana Lorys, Fangs of the Living Dead) with a fake hand. She soon hires him to put in some work on the house that she shares with her sisters, the insatiable Nicole (Eva Leon) and the wheelchair-bound Yvette (Maria Perschy).

Oh yeah — it’s giallo week. I forgot to mention that a black-gloved killer is murdering only blue-eyed women and putting them eyeballs into glasses of water. The top suspect? Lucio Fulci. No, no, it’s Gilles.

All those eyeball scenes earned this movie a spot on the section 3 video nasty list. Trust me — it’s not as rough as many of the films on that list, but it probably disturbed enough people that it got picked. It’s an odd film with a strange atmosphere.

As the war between what is left of humanity and the demonic Illuminati continues, it turns out that only the blood of criminal Tickles the Clown (voiced by Bill Oberst Jr.) can make an antidote to a virus created by the beasts that come from Hell. But to get it, he wants to see the breasts of Commander Kali, something that she doesn’t tell Bigfoot or her sort-of boyfriend Van Helsing.

The next part of BC Fourteen’s digitally animated space saga, this movie is mostly Tickles sexually harassing Kali and I think the third time that I remember Van Helsing getting killed. I guess that can happen with clones.

It is kind of weird to have this animated clown in a space jail propositioning a space commander and it’s all the same animation repeating itself with voiceover. I’ve watched all of the movies in this series so far and am used to it, but I’m just warning you.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Today’s movie is brought to you by CK Fortune, who has graciously become a Big B&S’er, a monthly supporter of the site and got to pick an entire week of movies. His idea this time was for a series on movies that started as one film and were dubbed into something else.

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Circle of Death is an anthology horror film that is hosted by late night podcaster Deadman Dave (Mark Ricche), who takes his listeners through four macabre tales of obsession, madness and murder. It’s written by Christian Bareford and BC Fourteen, with segments directed by Fourteen, the Bareford Brothers and Scott Vangrootenbruel. The DJ Deadman Dave connecting sequences were directed by Mark Ricchie and were written by Christian Bareford and BC Fourteen. They don’t just quote classic stories, but also a Geto Boys song.

The first of these stories is “3 To Go,” directed by Scott Vangrootenbruel and written by Christian Bareford. Four acquaintences reunite once a year to compare tales of the fantastic. They are Erving Rosseau (Erik Thompson), Miranda (Delaney Hathaway), Dr. Bartholomew Chambers (Olav Carter) and their host, Dante Beaumont (Bill McLaughlin). They each draw numbers from a chest, which must be part of their story. Dr. Bartholomew tells about a patient named Mitch Ermer (BC Fourteen), who had an abdominal tumor and died in a surgical accident. Beaumont then tells the story of a small town named Cyril and the McMullen family and how they died in a fire. Miranada tells of Michael Williamson, a single man and sports columnist who was killed as he looked for the darker side of love. Erving is last, filling everyone’s glass before he tells the story of a wanderer, a woman who was in a car crash. Yet Erving has the darkest secret story of them all and the connection to all that we have just heard. This feels like the story was shortened to fit into the running time and I feel would be a much better full-length story with more time to breath, as there are some good ideas in this.

The second story of obsessive madness, starting with the words of the “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. “The Heart and the Hunted” is directed and written by BC Fourteen. It has Del (Jason Bareford) in a hunting stand with a crossbow, then having a rough night dreaming of running through a field before screaming at someone unseen and repeatedly firing his handgun. As he drives in the day, we find Mary (Jennifer DiBlasio) getting out of the shower and getting ready for an evening on the town that ends with Del and her getting together, only for her to wake up bound with her mouth covered with duct tape. He’s in the tree stand, waiting to shoot her if she tries to get away, leaving her in the woods all night while he watches. He’s been waiting for a monster known as The Thing (Michael Kolence) and is using her as bait. This looks really great at the end and the creature design is so fun. It reminded me a lot of Humanoids from the Deep and again, as I said after the first story, I would have loved to have seen this as a full-length movie.

“The Dirty Hands Man” is directed by the Bareford Brothers and stars Mark Sebetch as that character, who was created bt Christian. A day at a house on the egde of the lake becomes a waking nightmare for a young man named Jakob (Logan Monaco) who discovers more about himself, as well as her legal guardian Catarina (Reagan DeFazio) and her family and friends. She looks down on Jakob so much that she won’t even let him go to the bathroom inside the house, which may seem weird to you, but I had a girlfriend — who I dated for years — whose mother wouldn’t allow me to use their bathroom because I was low class. Once Jakob is allowed to use the toilet, Katarina follows him and makes him wash his hands again. She also meets Robert (Erik Thompson) and Ashleigh (Brittany Stoler), the rest of her family. But because this all starts with him being questioned by the police — Boggs (Boomer Payne) and Merkle (Jason Bareford) — you know this all isn’t going to work out.

As they sit around the fire, Robert and Ashleigh explain their life story to Jakob, including how they lost their parents in a car wreck that left her with pins in his leg. They also learn that Catarina had a child that she gave away, all in time for the Dirty Hands Man to appear out of the woods and murderer everyone and knock out Jakob. Or so he’d like the cops to believe. There’s a big reveal in this and again, I wish the story had time to breathe because the conversations between the characters feel real and I was just starting to get into it when it was time to move quickly to the resolution.

The last story is “Perfect” and it was directed by BC Fourteen. He also wrote the story with Josh Garrell. A plastic surgeon Clay Smith (Andrew Hopper) meets Patricia (Laura Leigh) and tells her about his friend Peter (Lance Arthur Smith), whose emails brought them together for what seems like a blind date, even if she’s been dating Peter. Clay is someone who operates on several movie stars and is known from gossip magazines. Worried about Peter, she brings him to meet him in person and to possibly speak to him about what he’s been doing. When Clay gets there, he learns that Peter is operating on brains and covered in blood. This entry has some dark imagery and really effective lighting throughout that really adds to the darkness within this episode.

The Circle of Death has some interesting stories within it. It’s definitely worth exploring to scratch your anthology film itch and it’s great to see a movie made around Pittsburgh with this level of quality. I’d love to either see these movies expand or another collection of them, as it was a fun watch. You can watch it on Amazon Prime.

Many of the bad guys in this series of movies — Crosscoe the Werewolf, Bartholomew the Man-Made Monster, Tickles the Clown and Megalodon — are going crazy and it falls to our hero Bigfoot, as always, to pick himself up and defend what’s left of humanity. Luckily, he has a new look and actually seems to look more like a Bigfoot than an ape. So there’s that.

Meanwhile, new commander Grace Sherwood comes into the forest and runs into a witch version of herself, ending this on a cliffhanger, there’s a Dr. Frankenstein playing both sides of the war, a new astronaut partner named Holmes and finally, Bigfoot and Megalodon fight for real, even if it takes the entire movie to get there. That said, it’s only an hour long, so it won’t ruin your plans for the day.

If you ever wanted to watch a movie where an evil clown flies a spaceship, I mean, there are several of these for you to watch. I’m nearing the end of all of them and I’m hoping that director and writer BC Fourteen has like three more to unleash on Tubi or I’m going to have to start watching Criterion movies or something.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Bigfoot is burned out from all the battles in space after Bigfoot vs. Megalodon and Bigfoot vs. Krampus. He’s takes a vacation just in time for Earth to get nuked for the third or fourth time in this series, while Lucifer sends Baphomet to create even more madness in the universe as well as eliminate the last humans. Bigfoot tries to stop him but gets blown up and sent to Hell, where he believes that he’s in some kind of mall and wanders around looking for a meat lover’s pizza.

Director and writer BC Fourteen has kept making this series of films and in each one, weirder and wilder things keep happening, like Lucifer lecturing the viewer, telling you that there’s no God and that at the end, you just end up in Hell serving him.

I’m still in love with the strange way that Bigfoot walks and how every long speech in this is illustrated by stock photography like how an ad agency would pitch new business. So much of this is the same animation and everyone looks like they come from Halo, except for Lucifer in a wheelchair and the swaying arms of Bigfoot as he lumbers into the scene.

If BC Fourteen makes thirty of these, I’ll watch them all.

You can watch this on Tubi.

In 2044, advanced AI finally drains the last of Earth’s natural resources. Humanity escapes at the last minute, along with a Chinese clone of President Donald Trump who spends a thousand years on Mars with a slowly draining AI robot, racing around on a rover.

Now, he’s been brought into a battle between what is left of humanity and the Illuminati, who are based in Hell and have Satan, Anubis and Aleister Crowley among their troops. Along with a clone of Van Helsing, Commander Kali and Dr. Jekyll, all characters that would go on to appear in the rest of BC Fourteen’s movies.

A lot of people say this looks like a video game cutscene and yeah, it does. But I kind of love these movies for that. I miss they were an actual video game where you could take Donald — not the Donald, a Donald — into Hell and fight Satan hand to small hand.

Somehow, these movies get even weirder after this and I would advise that you watch all of them. A clown who is Hannibal Lecter that flies a spaceship? A werewolf in space? A pumpkin headed bad guy? It does all of that and more, including a reptile Anton LaVey.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Bakeeba Ruffin, who is also known as rapper Tef Kaluminati or Cinematic Ref, has also made Savage Genesis and The Day After 19. He also appears as a character named Teflon in this, the lead character, a gangster from a small town who only has one friend named Prince (Joshua Bullock).

Shot in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, as well as Raleigh, Princeville, Whitakers and outside a Marriott in Tampa, Florida, this is about the twists and turns of life on the streets and the fact that whatever you’ve done in the past is never really over and can never be erased.

All movies are miracles and it’s incredible that this movie has the opportunity to be seen on streaming platforms. A lot of it looks to be shot like Curb Your Enthusiasm and the actors are improv reading their lines. Sometimes, that makes it seem like simple conversations go forever. That said, the end of the movie has a huge gun battle that seems like it was so much fun to shoot, even if the computer-added flashes take away from it. I assume this was shot with no permits and guerilla style, which is pretty great.

This feels pretty authentic to me, but hey, I’m a white kid from a small town in Pennsylvania, so what do I know? I was entertained.

You can learn more about this movie at the official Facebook page.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This TMZ documentary is directed by David Thies and tells what happened to Prince on April 21, 2016 as he died from a drug overdose. He had been dealing with the flu but may have overdosed another time a week before.

His loss was a major shift to the world, a loss that I never thought would happen. Prince always just was a force in my life since I was young and always someone that I knew would be releasing music and making contributions to culture. His loss changed the world for me.

What I didn’t like about this documentary is how they sensationalized his drug use. He was in pain most of his life from performing. Aren’t rock stars supposed to do drugs? No one at TMZ has ever had an addiction? It all comes off as very wrong to me.

I think it’s so weird that the pills that ended Prince’s life came from Walgreens. It seems so normal and generic and not a rock and roll thing. I guess it proves that anyone can have an addiction and it can be something as simple as you pick up at your pharmacy.

When I was young, Prince — unlike every other performer — scared people. Who was this small black man singing in a high pitch and combining sex and religion? I loved his edge and how he seemed to cultivate a secret world around himself. I wish he was still here.

You can watch this on Tubi.