Marino Girolami is also the Frank Martin who directed Zombie Holocaust and the Franco Martinelli who directed Special Cop in Action and Violent Rome. He’s also the Dario Silvestri who made God Was in the West, Too, at One Time.

In this film, Professor Fabius (Raimondo Vianello) has learned how to possess other people. He takes over a teacher at a lady’s reform school by the name of Giacinto Floria (Ugo Tognazzi) and becomes a sex maniac, ruining that man’s nice relationship with his girlfriend Mafalda (Abbe Lane, the former wife of Xavier Cugat).  Nobody really has sex but just the idea of it in 1960 seemed to be enough.

Basically, this movie is Werewolf In a Girl’s Dormitory as a comedy. Look for Hélène Chanel (The Witch’s Curse) and Linda Sini (Seven Blood Stained Orchids) in the cast.

Bill Condon — the guy who made Chicago and started his career with Strange Invaders — was the new director for the last two movies in The Twilight Saga.

Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) are getting married. Jacob (Taylor Lautner, the inspiration for Taylor Swift’s “Back to December” and I have lost all of my Eurohorror sleazy movie cool points now) comes back but becomes angry when he learns that they plan to consummate their relationship while Bella is still human. This could kill her. Vampire bang it out hard (I have that sleaze back now, thanks).

Well, they raw dog it — actually, wouldn’t it be raw dogging if she was with Jacob? — and the vampiric sperm is so strong that it made her pregnant in just two weeks. Both Edward and Jacob want her to get an abortion but she’s going to have this baby if it kills her. The arguments over this vampire fetus get so bad that even the wolves break up with Sam (Chaske Spencer) and Jacob starting their own packs. Edward hates his unborn baby until he learns that it can read his mind.

Baby Renesmee is born and she kills Bella in the delivery. Jacob attempts to kill the baby but then they look in each other’s eyes and eyes, he imprints on her. This keeps the Lycans from killing her as their most absolute law is not to harm anyone who has been imprinted on. Bella heals and becomes a vampire. But what of our friends the Volturi? Well, they’re about to go to war with the Carlisles.

Everything in the other Twilight movies only served to prep me for this. All the baseball games, all the teen romance games, it all led up to a vampire baby falling in love with a werewolf.

As part of THE TWILIGHT SAGA 15th Anniversary SteelBook® Collection 4K, Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1 has extras like a commentary track by Bill Condon, another part of the series-length documentary, extended scenes, Bella and Edward’s personal wedding video and music video’s for Bruno Mars’ “It Will Rain,” Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years,” Iron & Wine’s “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” and The Belle Brigade’s “I Didn’t Mean It.” Get this set exclusively from Best Buy.

A Game For Eveline has Nathalie (Erna Schurer, Scream of the Demon Lover) and Pierre (Wolfgang Hillinger) arguing over having children when they nearly drive off a cliff. They find their way to the home of Phillipe (Marco Guglielmi) and Minou Giraud (Adriana Bogdan), another couple who are mourning the loss of their daughter Eveline. That night, in bed, Pierre hears the cry of a child and during other times, a doll seems to be moving around from room to room. Phillipe is the only one who can see her and he claims that she’s a ghost while Eveline claims that her daughter is alive and being hidden from her. In the midst of all this weirdness, the hosts seemingly want to keep them there as long as possible and keep trying to sleep with both of their guests.

You might find this boring but I loved the mood. And who can turn away Rita Calderoni when she shows up in a film, this time hiding up a platinum blonde wig, bestill my Italian Gothic loving barely beating right heart. She also looks just like the housekeeper who supposedly died with Eveline. And why is Phillipe kissing her?

The fact that Eveline is playing with a ball is no accident, particualrly after Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill! and Fellini’s ripoff act in his segment in Spirits of the Dead. Bava himself said, “That ghost child with the bouncing ball… it’s the same ideas as in my film, exactly the same! I later mentioned this to Giulietta Masina (Fellini’s wife) and she just shrugged her shoulders, smiling and said, “Well, you know how Federico is…””

Director Marcello Avallone was also the assistant director of The Horrible Dr. Hichcock and its believed that he directed most of the sexualized foreign scenes. He would go on to make Maya and Specters.

You can watch this on YouTube.

This film was made due to director Silvio Amadio (Il Sorriso Della Iena, Amuck!) and his interest in the occult. He had learned of it through his friendship with Demofilo Fidani, the director of four different Sartana ripoffs (One Damned Day at Dawn… Django Meets Sartana!, Passa Sartana… è l’ombra della tua morte, Four Came to Kill Sartana and Django and Sartana Are Coming… It’s the End) and the giallo A.A.A. Masseuse, Good-Looking, Offers Her Services.

By the 1980s, Amadio was more known for his work with esoterism, which is a combination of pagan philosophies, the Kabbalah and Christian philosophy. According to Roberto Curty in Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1980-1989, the director worked with a group known as Circolo di spiritualisti (Circle of Spiritualists) and became a well-respected occult writer and a devotee of conjuring the dead to visit him.

An American composer Paul Robbins (Guido Mannari, Caligula) who uses the dodecaphone twelve-note technique has come to Rome with his ten-year-old son Alan (Stefano Mastrogirolamo) to work on a new opera. He hires Laura (Sherry Buchanan, Eyes Behind the Stars) to look after the boy who has an imaginary friend — a raven-tressed woman dressed in white — whose voice starts showing up on tapes, just as his father is attacked by a dog. The woman eventually possesses Alan as part of a revenge plot; Daniela (Martine Brochard, Eyeball) believes that her sister Eleonora’s death — Paul’s wife and Alan’s mother — was brought about by the composer. Now, he must rely on Professor Power (Philippe Leroy, The Laughing Woman) to save his son through a psychic duel fought — as Chris Claremont would write — not in the physical realm, but the astral plane, no quarter asked, none given.

It’s the first movie written by Claudio Fragasso, who told Fangoria, “Silvio Amadio came to me with an actual medium and told me that the dead had told them I should write the script.”

The first twenty minutes of this movie explain how Peo (Piero Vida) became Father Renigio after his younger years of vice. As a criminal who goes by Carlo hides in his church, Peo goes to speak to the man’s exotic dancer girlfriend Alma Del Rio and tell her how he once hid in a castle and met Satan.

An old man (Christopher Lee) had opened his castle for him and several of his friends, asking them to help find the dead body of his wife, but they were so high that they decided to have a bongo dance line instead.

Shot under the name Faust ’63 and originally called Katarsis, this feels like if Jerry Warren and Jess Franco made an Italian Gothic movie together and made a goofy-eyed spider as one of the monsters. Its production company, I Films della Mangusta, went bankrupt shortly after filming. The movie was bought by Eco Film, who added the new footage. Director Giuseppe Vegezzi dropped out of directing movies after this experience and even attempted suicide, which is why the first twenty minutes feel like a totally different movie, as they were added to pad the time.

Somehow, the music from this movie by Berto Pisano made its way into Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror.

At one point, this was a lost movie. Now, you can watch it on streaming whenever you want.

You can get this from Severin as part of The Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee Collection or watch it on Tubi.

Based on Un’anima persa by Giovanni Arpino, The Forbidden Room has Tino (Danilo Mattei) come to Venice to study painting and stay with his Uncle Fabio (Vittorio Gassman) and Aunt Elisa Stolz (Catherine Deneuve). Yet the house just seems off; Fabio is abusive to Elisa. She just takes it.

He also starts to hear sounds from the attic in the section of the house he is never allowed to explore. It’s gigantic yet has fallen into ruin, cobwebs and cracks all over, even as it contains a full theater where Elisa once performed. The sounds come from a door behind the stage and soon, Tino learns that they belong to another uncle. Annetta (Ester Carloni), the housekeeper, allows him to enter that door and he learns that it is where Fabio’s brother (also Gassman) lives. He has gone mad after the death of Elisa’s ten-year-old daughter from her first marriage and screams, eats like a child and destroys baby dolls. But is the girl dead? And how did she die? The truth will ruin Tino, sending him away from painting and Venice, which always seems to attract the most gloomy of movies.

Director Dino Risi also made the original The Scent of a Woman. He wrote the script with Bernardino Zapponi, who wrote Deep Red. This has fantastic elements that show up before it’s over but is more drama than horror. However, it’s so well made that it will keep your interest for the whole film.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Kiss or The Kiss of Death was directed by Mario Lanfranchi (Death Sentence), who also wrote the script with Pupi Avati. It’s based on Il bacio di una morta by Carolina Invernizio, which was already adapted by Guido Brignone in 1949 and Carlo Infascelli just a year earlier in 1973.

Countess Elena Rambaldi (Eleonora Giorgi) has a half-brother named Alfonso (Brian Deacon) who has been exiled by their father, Count Rambaldi. When Alfonso comes home and embraces his sister, it upsets the elder Rambaldi so much that he dies from a heart attack. Elena inherits his fortune and soon falls in love with Guido (Maurizio Bonuglia) and goes to Venice for their honeymoon, which does not last long as he’s soon enraptured by a dancer named Nara (Martine Beswick). She convinces him that his wife and her brother are lovers. He responds by allowing his new lover to poison Elena, who is brought back to life by a kiss from her brother while lying in her coffin. Guido sees that he was wrong and leaves Nara, who accuses him of killing his wife. 

In Robert Curti’s book Italian Gothic Horror Movies 1970-79, he states that this movie was based on an Italian feuilleton or serial novel, which was the literary ancestor of the Italian Gothic, creating a mixture of melodrama, horror and romance.

Avati added occult elements to the story, like the sapphic witch Madame Lixen (Valentina Cortese) who conducts Satanic masses and has a volcanic scene with Beswick. There are also horror elements here, like when Guido searches for his wife’s ghost throughout the streets of Venice and Nara dances for him with a bra that has demonic hands cupping his breasts.

It’s not really horror, not really romance, but actually pretty good.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed and written by Jean-Marc Minéo, a former six-time kung fu champion of France, Europe and finally the world champion, Last Resort reminds me of the films released by Cannon-like labels after it went out of business, 1990s direct to video efforts that were all about action, that got the story out of the way as soon as possible. This is not a bad thing.

Michael Reed (Jon Foo) nearly died in Syria and ever since can’t get himself off the couch. This former soldier has pushed his wife Kim (Julaluck Ismalone) away and she’s taken their daughter Anna (Angelina Ismalone) to the bank and then out of his life. They’re taken hostage by Islamic terrorists led by an American named Cooper (Clayton Norcross) who are really after a bioterror weapon in one of the safety deposit boxes. He didn’t count on Michael — who he knows, it turns out that Michael wasn’t an ordinary soldier — who starts killing his men one-by-one, as this movie echoes so much of Die Hard but yet, doesn’t every action movie made after it do the same? For example, there’s one cop who looks out for our hero when no one else believes in him.

There’s enough fighting and guns in this — including a sniper ending that I wish I’d seen in a crowded theater — to satisfy most action fans. Sure, it’s a by the numbers shoot ’em up run and gun film, but we don’t get that many of those any more. I can look past the awkward line readings if I’m going to get stuff that moves this fast and looks this good.

You can watch this on Tubi.

How did the Star Wars Holiday Special ever happen?

George Lucas was trying to keep Star Wars on peoples’ minds by producing a holiday variety TV special. As the filmmakers ask, what could possibly go wrong?

Everything.

Directors Jeremy Koon (Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made) and Steve Kozak have assembled the people who were there when it was made, the folks who watched it when it was first on TV and those who have been influenced by it. You’ll hear from writer Bruce Villanch, director Steve Binder, superfans like Paul Scheer and Taran Killam, and those who have been close to the Forece like Seth Green and Donny Osmond. Donny Osmond? Yes.

I watched the special live when it aired — the only time it ever played — on November 17, 1978. Even at six years of age, I wondered why Harvey Korman, Bea Arthur, Diahann Carroll, Starship and Art Carney were in a special that should have been about the Rebellion fighting the Empire.

What cultural force can unite Bob Mackie — who designed the dresses — and Weird Al, Kevin Smith, Mick Garris and the Wookies?

Only the Star Wars Holiday Special. 

This film does a great job of explaining why this happened without just making fun of it. It would have been so easy to just laugh at it, but I love that this takes a balanced — yet still fun — look at something many have heard of and few have seen.

You can watch this movie on demand, on blu ray and DVD and in select theaters. For more information, visit the official site.

Directed and written by Alejandro Rojas and Juan Sebastián Vásquez, this is the story of Diego (Alberto Ammann) and Elena (Bruna Cusí) as they attempt to enter the United States. Their trip stops in New York City, where they had hoped to see Diego’s brother before moving to Miami. But as they are lost inside customs, they may never go anywhere.

The frightening thing about Upon Entry is how realistic it is while how much it also feels like something out of Kafka. They get no answers, no food, no water and instead question after question about everything in their lives, which slowly become more intrusive and therefore painful to attempt to answer.

We learn nothing of the situation and these characters other than from the answers that Diego and Elena give to the man and woman (Ben Temple and Laura Gómez) interrogating them. As we wish to learn who they are and why they are being kept, we become complicit in the way they are mistreated.

There are moments throughout this film that disarmed me and then would worry me, as I was caught up in the same questioning techniques, feeling trapped in the same small room as this film’s heroes. Is this what it’s like to come to the land of opportunity? And yet some will see them and their foreign origins as reasons to see them as less than human beings. This movie frightens me the more I consider it.

What an incredible work. This needs to be seen.

You can watch this on Tubi.