Crown International Forever.

Directed by Robert Anderson* (Cindy and Donna), who wrote this with Terry Anderson and Dave Dixon, this movie starts off with high school senior Mindy Evans (Patricia Wymer, The Babysitter) dumping her boyfriend Bill (Gary Rist, who went on to compose the music for Lifepod) and hooking up with very married photographer and teacher Jack (Steven Stewart). He hasn’t had sex in, well, maybe years and as soon as his wife heads out of town, he gets with the much younger girl and of course, knocks her up. So she does the sensible thing and goes on a road trip with her best friend Sandy (Marly Holiday).

An early movie for Bruno Kirby and Dennis Christopher, this has the Crown house style of being a movie where nothing seems to happen for a long stretch of time. Usually that ennui is punctuated with blasts of violence or nudity, but this is a pretty friendly movie for them.

Instead, it has dune buggies, a drugged out biker gang, a hippie enclave and the requisite teenage trappings of 1971. It also has Terri Johnson, who was pretty busy in the early 70s. She’s a shower girl here, but shows up licking her lips during a Black Mass in Her Odd Tastes, a witch in Blood Sabbath, some adult loops and as an Amazon in Flesh Gordon. There’s also Kathy Hilton (If You Don’t Stop It… You’ll Go Blind!!!, Invasion of the Bee Girls, The Toy Box and also a witch in Blood Sabbath).

I enjoyed this, even when it was just long stretches of motorcycle chases or a gang beating up a hippie kid. It’s the small moments that make me happy and even the slowest and dumbest Crown International movie makes me happier than anything that’s going to be released this year.

*Not the Oscar winner, despite what Wikipedia tells you.

Milton Moses Ginsberg started his directorial career with Coming Apart, a near-documentary which starred Rip Torn as a mentally disturbed psychologist who has been filming his sexual affairs. Sally Kirkland was also in the film, which was shot within a one-room, 15’x17′ set.

This movie is absolutely nothing like that movie.

Jack Whitter (Dean Stockwell) is the press secretary for the White House. While he’s in Hungary, a Communist werewolf bites him, which is no help at all when he moves back to our nation’s capital and starts making time with the President’s daughter.

Of course, now he’s also killing members of the President’s Cabinet with all of the murders forming the shape of a pentagram. I guess it’s up to the Second Daughter to take him out with a silver bullet, eh?

You must admire a movie that posits Clifton James, Sheriff J.W. Pepper from the 1970’s James Bond films, as our nation’s attorney general.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

Paul Andolina, whoe writes the site Wrestling with Film, is in charge today. Beyond loving wrestling, he also knows a ton about Russian and lucha films (and he even speaks pretty good Spanish, so we hear!).

War of the Robots — originally titled La Guerra dei Robot — is an Italian science fiction film released in 1978 most likely to cash in on the franchises of both Star Trek and Star Wars. I’d like to imagine this film came about when Alfonso Brecia and Aldo Crudo were as high as cucuzzi (Italian squash) are long which just so happens to be extremely.

I could not ask for a more crazy colored sci-fi romp than what this film offers. Female scientist Lois and male professor Carr are on the cusp of something extraordinary; they soon will be able to create any creature they want and make the first immortal man! However, their plans are cut short when a mysterious group of gold-clad humanoids attack and abduct them. It’s up to Lois’ lover Captain Boyd and crew to rescue them from their captors.

War of the Robots has a lot of twists and turns during its hour and thirty-nine-minute runtime. There also is a cut of the film that is four minutes longer but the cut included on the Chilling Classics set is the shorter one.

When the crew finally gets to Lois and Dr. Carr it turns out nothing is what it seems at all. Louis is now an empress and Carr is mad with power over the gold-clad humanoids who turn out to be androids. The inhabitants of the planet Louis and Carr are taken to also happen to be wrinkly old monster folks. The latter half of the movie turns into a whole scale war. Battle is waged in caves, palaces, command decks and even in starship space battles.

This movie has a bit of everything; it’s got phasers, it’s got laser swords, it’s got mutants who live on irradiated asteroids but most importantly it has West Buchanan! West Buchanan is an American actor who starred in his fair share of Italian genre films. It just so happens that West Buchanan looks like he could be Harley Race’s twin brother. Harley Race is a wrestler who has worked for NWA, WWE, and WCW. I was really surprised how similar they look. Now the reason I bring that up is that I’m a collector and avid watcher of films that star professional wrestlers. That’s not the sole reason I enjoy this film so much it’s not the greatest film by any means but those who like campy science fiction films should find plenty to enjoy. I think most folks will especially like the scenes where androids are sliced in half by laser swords.

I must also point out the amazing score is by Marcello Giombini who also scored some of the Emmanuelle films, Sabata and even Antropophagus. If you have the chance to watch this I do recommend it. Apparently it is part of a series of science fiction films by director Alfonso Brecia, The films that precede it are War of the Planets, Battle of the Stars and it is followed by Star Odyssey. I hope I stumble across the other films as I truly did enjoy this film.

Ann (Sydne Rome, the daughter of an Akron, Ohio plastics manufacturer who went to Europe and became a star in movies like Some Girls Do and Sex With a Smile; she also dated David Bowie for a year, became the face of aerobics in Europe by the 80s and recorded several songs) is an actress having an affair with a wealthy food mogul (Carl Mohner) . He gets rid of her, she stumbles into the street and gets hit by a car.* When she gets back to acting, well, she can’t do nude scenes any more — a fact that enrages actor Stuart Chase (Robert Vaughn) — because the accident so ruined her breasts that she won’t show them.

She and her roommate Michelle (Maria Schneider, yes, the star of Last Tango In Paris) are out of money, so Ann dresses like Michelle to get a job babysitting the son of that very same wealthy food mogul. Then, she, Chase and Vic (Vic Morrow), an ex-stuntman unleash the next part of their plan, where a woman named Lotte (Nadja Tiller) hires Michelle to watch the boy — Boots (John Whittington) — while getting the money. The kid thinks that the brutal Ann is watching him, so he’ll stay quiet, and Michelle has no idea what’s happening.

The plan is, well, kind of dumb but it gets worse when Morrow can’t be controlled and he kills everyone he can while screaming every single line. The ending is confusing, but hey, if you like Rome, Schneider and Morrow, there’s a bit of fun to be had here.

Also known as Scar Tissue and The Raw Edge, this was the last movie that René Clément (The Deadly Trap) would direct. He wrote it with Nicola Badalucco (The Damned), Mark Peploe (The Last Emperor) and Luciano Vincenzoni (For A Few Dollars More).

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

*Oddly enough, Rome was disfigured in a car crash in 2009 that paralyzed the right side of her face.

Pepe “Pepper” Morales (John Astin) already has four kids and another on the way with Maria (Maria Pohji). What better time than now to quit his job at a can company and paint a car so it looks like a taxi and be his own boss?

Directed and written by Alexander Grasshoff — who also made that Fascist warning movie we watched in high school The Wave that no one paid attention to — with directing help by Astin. This is a movie where John Astin beats up an innocent Frank Sinatra Jr., where Alan Sherman gets in the cab and a female soldier is taken to Tijuana for an abortion. In a family movie. Yes, that happened. Avco Embassy released it, so maybe they weren’t used to family audiences.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on YouTube.

Stephen Boyd only lived to see 45, but the guy had the kind of life that could fill several others, what with starring in epics like Ben-Hur, nearly drowned in the Ardèche river and shared a camp with cannibals for the movie The Big Gamble, was censored for his near-nudity in GIna Lollobigida’s dream project Imperial Venus and traveled the world to be in movies like Genghis Khan (Yugoslavia), The Bible (Egypt), Assignment K (Germany), Shalako (Spain), Slaves (the supposedly haunted Buena Vista plantation near Shreveport, Louisiana),  The Hands of Cormac Joyce (Australia) and The Manipulator (South Africa). He was also in wild movies like The Oscar and Fantastic Voyage; was one of the first celebrities to be involved in Scientology with a status of OT 6, a position above that of Clear; was spoken of by many to be incredibly friendly and spent much of his time on sets with the crew and oh yeah, he was so close with Brigitte Bardot that one of her husbands left her. He was also married in a gypsy blood ritual to Marisa Mell, a relationship so intense that they had an exorcism to stop their passion. Boyd was also the only actor to have a relationship on set with Dolores Hart before she became a nun; they remained in contact for the rest of his life. He finally married Elizabeth Mills, who had been his personal assistant for over twenty years, in 1974. Sadly, he died of a heart attack in 1977 while golfing with his wife. He would have been in The Wild Geese had he lived.

Stephen Boyd stars in this movie as Hugo Graham, who is asked by Zappy (she’s in the credits as Cheryl Stoppelmoor, but the world would soon know her as Cheryl Ladd) to join her and her friend Victor Spivak (Chuck Woolery, before he hosted game shows) to explore a wrecked ship. She even has a boat, captained by Asper (Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier).

Ladd married her husband David — also in this movie — before it was released in the U.S. And yes, that is Darby Hinton in there. And Commandant Mauser himself, Art Metrano.

This was directed by Virginia Lively Stone and written by John Walker and J.A.S. McCrombie, who also wrote Stone’s other two movies, Money to Burn and Run If You Can.

Twelve months later, Jaws was a big deal. So the filmmakers brought back Boyd, added some gore, some skin and a new title, Evil In the Deep. They took what was a G-rated movie and made it R-rated and I love them for it.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on YouTube.