The Cisco Kid (Gilbert Roland) attacks a stagecoach carrying a wealthy young French person named Du Bois who ends up being Jeanne Du Bois (Ramsay Ames). The gang escapes with the money which Cisco says is money stolen for years from the poor of California. Of course, she soon falls in love with Cisco — and he with her, come on, he’s Cisco and she’s Ramsay Ames — and he gives her the money back. She has to decide what to do with it.
Directed by William Nigh and written by Charles S. Belden, this was another quick movie made for Monogram Pictures yet the Cisco Kid’s legend has lived all the way to today, as I’ve been watching movies with the character in them all week.
The Cisco Kid Western Movie Collection is available from VCI Entertainment. It has 13 movies and extras like two Cisco Kid TV episodes, interviews with Duncan Renaldo and Colonel Tim McCoy, and photo and poster galleries. You can get it from MVD.
Also known as The Stranger and the Gunfighter, Là dove non batte il sole (Where the Sun Doesn’t Shine) and El kárate, el Colt y el impostor (Karate, Colt and the Imposter), Blood Money comes from the era where Shaw Brothers was working on other genre mash-ups as part of international co-productions like Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires.
Ho Chiang (Lo Lieh) must go to America and find his uncle Wang’s missing fortune and return it to a warlord or his entire family will be executed. His only clue is that a thief named Dakota (Lee Van Cleef) accidentally killed his uncle when he blew up his safe and he knows where Wang’s uncle is buried.
Yes, a movie where Lee Van Cleef and Lo Lieh fight people and are on a quest to see Patty Hsepard and Erika Blanc’s butts. Did I manifest this movie into being? And it’s directed by Antonio Margheriti?
Zontar, the Thing from Venus is one of the many remakes of Roger Corman movies — this one is It Conquered the World — directed by Larry Buchanan.
This starts at a dinner party. That’s where NASA scientist Dr. Keith Ritchie (Anthony Huston) reveals to Dr. Curt Taylor (John Agar) that he’s been secretly meeting with an alien from Venus named Zontar who is coming to solve all of Earth’s issues. A dinner party would not seem to be the time to do this.
Zontar ends up being a three-eyed, bat-winged, skeletal black creature and I don’t want to be one of those people that judges people by their outside appearances, but I don’t think Zontar has any intention of making the world a better place.
Not even when Zontar starts possessing people with lobster injecto-pods does Ritchie think this friend is a horrific alien monster. No, it takes his wife Martha (Patricia De Laney) dying before he does something about it. Scientists are really smart and also so dumb.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.
One of only two movies that James L. Wolcott would direct — the other is a compilation film called The Best of Laurel and Hardy — this is one odd duck. It also features scenes that were, believe it or not, directed by his friend Tennessee Williams, who was on set and thought it’d be fun to try.
It’s shot inside Coral Castle, an oolite limestone structure that was built by one man, Edward Leedskalnin, who either used ley lines or reverse magnetism to move and carve numerous stones — all by himself — with several weighing multiple tons. Other movies shot there include Nude on the Moon and La Furia de Los Karatecas.
Mother Nature herself explains to us an experiment that she created with Father Time. On the island of Wongo, they made two tribes, the ugly and violent men and the gorgeous women. On the island of Goona, they did the exact opposite.
Now, the four tribes have come into contact with one another, as the brutish apes of Wongo have attacked the attractive men of Goona. That tribe sends their king’s son to seek help and he discovers the attractive women, who suddenly realize that they no longer have to settle for the grotesque men that their mothers and grandmothers once did.
Going against tradition has its downside, as the crocodile god of the people — played by stock footage — grows angry and demands their deaths. They rebel, defeat their oppressors and make their way to Goona, just as the good looking men of the tribe are engaging in the ritual where they must survive weaponless in the jungle. The women easily defeat them and take them for husbands while the less good looking races find one another too.
The women of Wongo are played by Marie Goodhart, Michelle Lamarck, Val Phillips, Jo Elaine Wagner, Adrienne Bourbeau (not Adrienne Barbeau, who would have been 12 when this was filmed), Joyce Nizzari (Playboy Playmate of the Month for December 1958, who was photographed by Bunny Yeager and would serve as one of Hugh Hefner’s personal assistants in the 1990’s), Jean Hawkshaw, Mary Ane Webb and Candé Gerrard.
The women of Goona were played by Barbara Lee Babbitt, Bernadette, Elaine Krasher, Lillian Melek (Pagan Island), Iris Rautenberg and Roberta Wagner.
If you want to learn more about them — and this slice of strangeness — I recommend the Women of Wongo page.
I’m trying to think of what message this is all trying to send and how it ties into female-based societies when it really seems that this movie is all about outward appearance. It does have a talking parrot and lots of alligator wrestling, so it has that going for it.
Back in the day of these movies, the costumes were never one and done. Ray “Crash” Corrigan was an experienced gorilla man and played a similar role earlier that year in The White Gorilla, where he was both the jungle explorer and the gorilla. This costume was years later brought out of storage for Jerry Warren’s 1956 movie Man Beast. Corrigan also played apes in Tarzan the ApeMan, Tarzan and His Mate, the Flash Gordon serial, Three Missing Links, Murder in the Private Car, Hollywood Party, Round Up Time In Texas, The Ape, Three Texas Steers, Dizzy Detectives, Dr. Renault’s Secret, The Monster Maker, The Hairy Ape, Miraculous Journey, Crime On My Hands, The Lost Tribe, Zamba, Forbidden Jungle, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, The Strange Case of Doctor Rx, Captive Wild Woman, Nabongaand Unknown Island. Corrigan was also It in It! The Terror from Beyond Space.
He sold the suits to Steve Calvert, a Ciro’s bartender, who like him rarely asked for screen credit. But he was making money. Corrigan was on a hunting trip with Clark Gable when he decided to buy some land that he called Corriganville. That was used to shoot movies and as a tourist attraction. Corriganville was eventually sold to Bob Hope in 1966, becoming Hopetown, but is now known as Corriganville Park.
Anyways, White Pongo.
In the Belgian Congo, natives dance around the fire and plan on killing Gunderson, who is freed by an attack by an albino gorilla named White Pongo and an elderly scientist who sends him with a diary all about the gorilla into the jungle. As you can imagine, the goal is to bring this supposed missing link back to civilization which is never a good idea.
Director Sam Newfield made hundreds of movies, such as The Terror of Tiny Town, Fight That Ghost and I Accuse My Parents. It was written by Raymond L. Schrock, who wrote the Lon Chaney The Phantom of the Opera.
Big Bruh is from Bento Box, the same people who brought you Bob’s Burgers, Duncanville, The Great North and Housebroken on Fox and Pastacolypse and Millenial Hunter on Tubi.
Created by writer, stand-up comic and Duncanville co-producer Jerron Horton. Big Bruh is described as “a satirical comedy about a famous, undefeated boxer who is as ignorant as he is materialistic, struggling to find common ground with the bratty kid with high morals he’s paired with through the Big Bruh program.”
Randy “The Bone Stretcher” Bowers (Byron Bowers) is in the fight of his career against champion Money Montez Sheffield (Killer Mike), who takes a knee rather than box him. He claims that Bowers isn’t the kind of man who is even deserving of the belt and when Bowers wins by forfeit, the championship that he’s wanted all along rings hollow. He’s not the champion in his heart until he defeats Montez. To get the match he wants, he has to prove himself by becoming Big Bruh to Nikki (Kristin Dodson), a young girl who is not impressed by his status or bank account.
Plus, there’s MyBoy (Fahim Anwar) and the rest of his entourage to deal with, as well as his trainer Granny (Punkie Johnson) who is looking for the next depressed young man to mold into a boxing champion.
Directed by Jason Schwarz (Millenial Hunter) and written by Horton, this is only about an hour of your life and there are a few laughs in it. It’s a cute idea and I like that Tubi can be a channel for animated movies like this.
Produced and directed by Roger Corman, this movie was originally a double feature with Beast from Haunted Cave. When it was released to TV two years later, a new prologue was added by director Jack Hill to add to its running time.
The musical score from this film may seem familiar because it’s the same music from Corman’s A Bucket of Blood. It was written by Fred Katz, who sold Corman the same score for a total of seven films, including The Little Shop of Horrors and Creature from the Haunted Sea.
Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot) is the founder and owner of a large cosmetics company. She starts losing money when the public begins to see that she is aging, so her scientists reverse the aging process by using the royal jelly of the queen wasp. It doesn’t work fast enough, so she breaks into her own company’s lab and injects herself multiple times.
So she gets twenty years younger over the weekend but occasionally transforms into a wasp woman who kills people. At the end, when acid is thrown in her face, that scene was more real than it should have been. Someone had filled the breakaway bottle with water and it was so heavy that when hit her, she thought that her teeth had been knocked out. To make matters worse, the fake smoke used to simulate the acid also choked her. So after she fell through the window, she found herself unable to breathe. To save herself, she tore off her makeup as well as a good chunk of skin around her neck.
Things didn’t get much better in life for Susan Cabot. This was her last film and at the end of her life, she suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts. The psychologist that she was seeing felt that she was so troubled that he could no longer see her and her home was filled with trash and rotting food.
After her mental health continued to worsen, Cabot’s 25-year-old son, Timothy Scott Roman, beat her to death with a weightlifting bar. While he would initially claim that a man in a ninja mask was the killer — thinking that no one would believe her struggles with mental illness — the truth was that she woke him screaming and attacked him with both a scalpel and the barbell. His defense attorneys claimed his aggressive reaction to his mother’s attack was due to the drugs he took to counteract his dwarfism and pituitary gland problems.
Prosecutors changed the charge to voluntary manslaughter at the end of the trial, as no evidence had been presented to support the premeditation required for a murder conviction. Roman, who had already spent two-and-a-half years in jail, was sentenced to three years’ probation.
Corman remade this with director Jim Wynorski for his Roger Corman Presents series on Showtime.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi. You can also watch it with the Cinematic Titanic crew riffing on it on Tubi.
The Cisco Kid (Gilbert Roland) has no Pancho to help him. That said, he can still keep a young girl named Pepita (Ramsay Ames, who played Princess Ananka in The Mummy’s Ghost; despite her exotic appearance, she was born on Long Island) from marrying a rich man to save her family home. There’s also a gang of stagecoach robbers. It makes it all simple when the man aiming to steal Pepita ends up being the same man who leads the criminals.
According to director William Witney, there were several Republic Pictures’ stuntmen who got hurt running on rooftops to get a better look at Ames walking across the backlot. In fact, more of them got hurt that way than in the actual stunts.
This was directed by William Nigh, who directed many of the East Side Kids and Mr. Wong movies, and written by Charles S. Belden.
The Cisco Kid Western Movie Collection is available from VCI Entertainment. It has 13 movies and extras like two Cisco Kid TV episodes, interviews with Duncan Renaldo and Colonel Tim McCoy, and photo and poster galleries. You can get it from MVD.
As he watches the circus, Sergei “Polack” Kowalski (Franco Nero) thinks that one of the performers is Paco Roman (Tony Musante), which makes him think back to when they were revolutionaries and battled against another mercenary named Curly (Jack Palance).
Much like another Nero character, Django, Kowalski has a gun that gives him a big advantage, a Hotchkiss M1914 machine gun. Paco hires him to teach him how to lead a revolution. They go from town to town, stealing money, horses and weapons, even adding another member to their group, Columbia (Giovanna Ralli, What Have They Done to Your Daughters?).
Yet Paco and Kowalski soon start fighting over how much it costs to have him be part of the revolution. Finally, Paco imprisons him and marries Colombia, but then Curly and his men attack. He tries to free Kowalski, who turns the tables on him and he has to be saved by his wife.
Back to the circus, where Curly and his men attack. Kowalski kills them all and gives each man a bullet for their final duel. Then, he takes Paco to collect the reward only for Colombia to betray them both or so it seems before she and the circus performers create a diversion big enough for our two heroes to use machine guns to kill every one of their enemies. Kowalski suggests to Paco that they should be mercenaries, not understanding the dream of the revolution.
Director Sergio Corbucci set the standard for violence in Italian Westerns in movies like Django and The Great Silencebefore making comedies. Yes, somehow, the same man who made Super Fuzz made the most depressing Western ever, one that leaves its hero and his lover dead in the snow.
Made by Daei, the same people who would gift us with Gamera, and released in the U.S. eleven years after it came out in Japan, this movie has been pointed to as one that Kubrick watched as he grew fascinated with science fiction.
The Pairan aliens of the film are perhaps the best reason to watch this. They’ve never looked better than now, with the gorgeous remastered transfer that’s on Arrow’s new disk. Designed by avant-garde artist Taro Okamoto, they’re unlike any aliens we’d imagine in the West. Instead of humanoid creatures, they’re stars that dance their strange ballet toward camera as they wonder how to reach Earth’s scientists.
One of those aliens decides to take the form of entertainer Hikari Aozora and reach out to our scientists and World Congress to borrow our nuclear weapons to obliterate another planet in the path of our world called Planet R. As no one decides to listen to her, we’re forced to deal with all the impact of having a rogue planet come closer and closer to us. The whole “listen to science’ mantra that our world is ignoring happens here as well, but sadly, we don’t have human-sized star aliens with one giant eye to right our course.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.