Steve Wilson joins Bill and Sam this Saturday at 11 p.m. EST for William Castle’s Homicidal. You can watch it on Tubi.
Every week, we watch a movie (sometimes more than one), discuss it, look at the ad campaign and make a cocktail that goes with what we’re going to watch. Here’s this week’s drink.
Killer Kool-Aid
2 oz. vodka
1 oz. Southern Comfort
2 oz. Midori
1 oz. amaretto
6 oz. grape Kool-Aid
Shake everything up with ice in a cocktail shaker.
Pour in a glass filled with crushed ice and drink.
The Cisco Kid (Duncan Renaldo) and Pancho (Lee Carrillo) have to stop Steve Gentry (Douglas Fowley) who has killed Jim Mason (Frank Matts), the well-respected leader of a small town. He takes over all of his businesses and is uses an actress named Lil (Ann Savage, Detour) who pretends to be the man’s widow. How bad are these bad men? They beat up Preacher Henry Lane (Byron Foulger).
Directed by Ford Beebe and written by J. Benton Cheney, this is an hour of your life that will enjoyable go by as you think about how awesome Ann Savage was in Detour and how fun Cisco and Pancho are at playing with their dialogue.
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 Kill and Pray, this comes from director Carlo Lizzani, who also made Un Fiume di Dollari. It starts with a massacre of Mexican people as they are betrayed aby Confederate soldiers under the command of Ferguson (Mark Damon). Only a young boy survives, running into the desert where he is raised by Father Jeremy (Ferruccio Viotti) and grow into a holy man who is also incredibly good with a gun.
His stepsister Princy (Barbara Frey) rebels against her family and joins a traveling circus and the boy (Lou Castel) sets out to find her, getting the name Requiescant for the words he says every time he shoots someone. It basically means “go in peace” and he’s atoning for each murder while providing last rites.
He finally finds his sister in San Antonio, a town now run by Ferguson and a place where his stepsister is forced into sexual slavery by Fergusson’s henchman Dean Light (Carlo Palmucci). Once he learns who is in charge, he joins the cause of Father Don Juan (Pier Paolo Pasolini, who also worked on the script and yes, that’s the same person who made Salo). Holy men sometimes need to kill, at least in the Italian West.
Damon is a revelation here, appearing as if he has walked out of a gothic horror movie all in black with his pale skin, literally treating everyone around him like they mean nothing. There’s a scene where he strangles his wife while Dean watches where he seems aroused as he shouts “She died well, Dean. It was a beautiful moment for her.”
I love the idea that these religious men have had enough and need to speed up God’s vengeance.
There was a serial and movie of this released at the same time. They filmed several principal scenes with different dialog along with a new ending to make two totally different films. It’s also sort of a sequel to another serial, Darkest Africa.
This stars Clyde Beatty, who was one of the most famous circus performers and animal trainers in the world. He got into the business by hitching a ride on a train and joining Howe’s Great London and Van Amburgh’s Wild Animal Circus. His greatest shows had him in a cage alone with 43 lions at the same time. His wife Harriett Evans and his daughter Albnina were both animal trainers.
Directed by David Howard (MysteryRanch) and Armand Schaefer (who went into producing when TV came around), who wrote the story with Wyndham Gittens and Barney A. Sarecky, this has Clyde looking for his lady Ruth (Cecilia Parker) in the jungle. He even crashes a zeppelin to get out there! Every animal is real except for the guy in the ape suit.
Michael Gold (Brandon Lee) tries to convince Dr. Braun (Ernest Borgnine) to defect to the U.S. before the KGB takes him and his stolen diamond to create a laser. He doesn’t go with him and is captured, which means that a rescue must happen. Gold and Braun’s daughter Alissa (Debi A. Monahan) must find Col. Kalishnakov (Graham Clarke) and get back the weapon, the diamond and the scientist.
Director BJ Davis is a stuntman who has been in so many movies — he did stunts in this — as well as the director of the video for Meat Loaf’s “I’d Lie for You (and That’s the Truth),” which is kind of cool. This has the worst accent ever coming out of Borgnine’s character to the point that I thought he was dubbed. He’s not.
This movie has the most sexist dialogue ever.
Alissa: “What do you want me to do? Get on my knees?”
Gold: “That would be nice.”
This would have been a forgotten movie if Lee hadn’t died. Then it was all over the place on VHS, as it was public domain in the U.S. It’s better than a lot of the other bargain bin action movies from then, but Lee would improve quite a bit by the time he starred in his last movie, The Crow.
I love this movie because I know that it upset people so much. It was titled King of Kong Island and there’s no King Kong, there’s barely an island and it’s so Italian that you know that I was yelling things in pure joy throughout the entire movie. Eva, la Venere selvaggia didn’t even know that in America people expected it to be something it couldn’t be.
Albert Muller (Marc Lawrence, the man who would make Pigs) is putting radios into the heads of gorillas to control them. These apes kidnap Diana (Ursula Davis, An Angel for Satan, Crypt of the Vampire) and Burt Dawson (Brad Harris) attempts to save her before being abducted by natives who are led by a white girl because that’s how movies work.
She’s Eva (Esmeralda Barros, God Is My Colt 45) and she doesn’t fall in love with Burt. No, she’s just kind of there. He’s into Diana. I’m also making this sound way more action-filled than it is because it’s packed with long moments of talking yet the beat up print and fuzzy noises that approximate a soundtrack on the Mill Creek box set that I viewed this on made me feel like I was lying in a sleeping bag with my feet under a warm old Zenith TV as a kid and I had no responsibility or anywhere to be.
Director Roberto Mauri also made He Was Called Holy Ghost.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Apologies. I know this was just part of Chiller Theater month but it’s also on the Mill Creek box set I’m writing about.
W. Lee Wilder and Planet Teleplays were just cranking out science fiction movies in the 50s and we’re all the better for it today.
Dr. Douglas Martin (Peter Graves) is a scientist studying nuclear blasts at Soledad Flats. As he flies over the area, his plane crashes and he wakes up healed yet with a large scar on his chest. He starts acting so weird that the FBI gets called in. Once he’s given truth serum, he lets it be known that he’s being controlled by aliens from Astron Delta under the command of The Tala.
These aliens have some wild plans that involve mutant lizards and bugs that will wipe out the people of Earth. Using a slide rule, Martin figures out that if he can shut down Soledad Flats for ten seconds, he’ll overload the alien base and kill all of them. You know how good U.S. military men are at that and yes, he blows them up real good.
UFO skeptic Dr. Aaron Sakulich thinks that many alien abduction stories contain the same elements, such as medical testing, strange scars, memory being erased, aliens with giant eyes and the feeling of being kind controlled. He feels that the initial articles about UFOs and abductions were influenced by this movie and that they entered the collective unconsciousness. Fiction influencing reality or the subconscious.
As for those big eyes, they’re egg cartons.
In 2002, this movie was redubbed by director Doug Miles and writer Tex Hauser as Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. The plot of that movie is about alien invaders that have a machine that can turn people gay and Operation Manhole, a government project that will lure gay people to one location and drop a bomb on them. The tagline: “They came from outer space… and they’re fabulous!”
Cisco (Duncan Renaldo) and Pancho (Leo Carrillo) have to prove their innocence after robberies made by two thugs (David Sharpe and Edmund Cobb) who look just like them. Our heroic dup gets jailed, but the outlaws have one more big score and need to free Cisco and Pancho to have an alibi.
Director Derwin Abrahams worked in serials and TV, while writer Ford Beebe directed a hundred movies. These guys moved fast back then, making entertaining adventure and Western movies. The same year, there would be the first of 156 episodes of The Cisco Kid TV series.
I’m amazed that people talk about superhero fatigue. They should look back and see how many Western movies and shows there were in 1950.
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.
Look, I know this is directed by the British Terence Young and has a cast that is multinational, but this movie is so great I’m inclined to overlook such things.
It stars one of the Magnificent Seven, Charles Bronson, and one of the Seven Samurai, Toshiro Mifune. At the time, Bronson was a huge deal everywhere but the U.S. In fact, in Japan, he was known as the face of the Mandom cologne (and still is, I have friends who only know him as that) in commercials directed by the man who made Hausu, Nobuhiko Obayashi.
Link Stuart (Bronson) and Gauche (Alain Delon, can this movie have any more suave dudes in it?) have robbed a train of about $400,000. That should be enough to set them up for life, but then they discover that a Japanese ambassador is on his way to Washington to give the President a gold sword. Gauche kills one of the bodyguards and blows up the train car, injuring Link. He’s left for dead but nursed back to help by the Japanese. The surviving bodyguard, Kuroda Jubei (Mifune), takes a blood oath to get the sword back and kill Gauche. Otherwise, both Japanese will have to commit ritual seppuku and kill themselves for their loss of honor. Link is asked to lead Kuroda to Gauche but keeps trying to lose him.
Gauche has killed all of the men and buried the money. So if he dies, Link won’t learn where his rightful stolen money is. Over time, he comes to respect the honor that Kuroda has, a man who feels that he is the last of his time as such things as duty and having a moral code are dying. The plan to get the sword and the money isn’t honorable at all. They kidnap Gauche’s lover Cristina (Ursula Andress) and offer to switch her for what they want. An attack by Commanches delays things, but Cristian soon learns that Gauche isn’t the honorable criminal she thought he was.
By the end, only Gauche, Link, Kuroda and Cristina are left alive. Kuroda realizes that he needs to kill Gauche to get his honor, but Link also needs what is his. That hesitation costs him his life, a fact that places his friend’s need above money, as Link blasts Gauche and promises — and fulfills that promise, even if being caught will see him lynched — to return the sword.
I love this IMDB fact: Mifune entertained the cast and crew throughout the entire production with his refined culinary skills, bringing over a supply of Japanese meats, watercress, seaweed and other ingredients. He would also exchange recipes for French and Italian dishes, including spaghetti.
This movie is pretty much everything I love. The swagger of Bronson, the detached cool of Mifune, the cockiness of Delon and Andress looking incredible even when fighting inside a burning field. Even Cappucine is in it!
Jerry Warren sat on this movie for two years before playing it with Teenage Zombies. Shot in Colossal Cave in Tucson, Arizona, the monster costume looked so bad that Warren didn’t use it. Let’s think on that for a minute. An effect so bad that Jerry Warren wouldn’t use it.
Professor Millard Wyman (John Carradine) has sent Paul Whitmore (Allen Windsor), Craig Randall (Robert Clarke), Lauri Talbott (Sheila Noonan) and Dale Marshall (Phyllis Coates) to the bottom of the ocean but their vehicle becomes lost. They swim — in scuba suits at crushing depths — into a cave where only Matheny (George Skaff), an old sailor, is still alive.
Professor Wyman’s brother Jim (Joe Maierhauser) has luckily built another vehicle, because Matheny is looking at the ladies like a man who is been in a cave for more than a decade and suddenly has a gypsy girl from Beast from the Haunted Cave and Lois Lane right within staring distance. Before he can say, “You know, I killed a man,” a volcano goes live, he dies under some rocks and all the white scientists celebrate their good fortune above the surface and no one gets the bends.
Warren sold this with “A Nightmare of Terror in the Center of the Earth with Forgotten Men, Monsters, Earthquakes and Boiling Volcanos!” I mean, yes, it has those things, but it’s…maybe not as exciting as the ads make it sound. The petrified world is the movie itself.
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