Jeanne (Joan Taylor, 20 Million Miles to Earth) has just dumped boring — and safe driving — Larry (Robert V. Stern) and hooked up with hot ro racer Nick (Dick York!), who drives 55 MPH which is three times the speed limit. Nick and everyone in his car celebrate his great football game and the school dance by racing over a hundred miles an hour, blasting right into a truck and killing everyone but Jeannie, ruining her face forever or at least until a mad scientist can go all Eyes Without a Face on her.

This movie has a radio DJ who reminds us about teenicide, which is “the fine art of killing yourself, and maybe someone else, before you reach the age of 20. You do it with an automobile.”

They never show the destroyed face of Jeannie but we’re left to imagine just how horrible it is.

Last Date was directed by Lewis D. Collins, who made 127 movies, including Jungle Goddess. It was written by Bruce Henry. I don’t know if it will make you slow down.

You can watch it on YouTube.

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.

Directed by Ida Lupino — who co-wrote the script, along with producer Malvin Wald and her husband at the time Collier Young — this was the second post-Code Hollywood film to deal with the issue of rape. The other is after Johnny Belinda.

Ann Walton (Mala Powers) is ready to marry Jim Owens (Robert Clark) when a man who works near her starts following her, finally attacking her. All she can remember of him is a scar. Everyone is supportive, but she feels that Jim will never see her the same way again, so she runs.

She runs again when the bus she is on has a radio message play about her parents looking for her. That’s when she’s rescued by Rev. Bruce Ferguson (Tod Andrews). They start to grow close, but when another man kisses her at a carnival, she attacks him with a wrench. That’s when the reverend learns of her past and helps her to not go to jail.

Instead of giving in to her love, he sends her back home to Jim in an attempt to get back to her old life.

While the word rape could never be said in this movie, Lupino uses that to her advantage. The sad part of this is that a movie made seven decades ago still shows men to be the same as they are today, either wanting to control, own or foul any woman at any opportunity.

The Kino Lorber blu ray of Outrage has a new Paramount Pictures 4K scan and audio commentary by film historian Sara Smith.

Gregg G. Tallas started his career working with Fritz Lang, which does not explain how his career took him to some crazy places, such as Espionage in Tangiers, Assignment Skybolt and the movie he’d make 12 years later, Cataclysm, which is, of course, “The Case of Claire Hansen” in Night Train to Terror.

So yeah. He made this bit of insanity too, which stars 1950’s tabloid star Laurette Luez, who was also in D.O.A. She’s Tigri in this film, one of the Amazons who hate all men. That said, they still need to kidnap them and use them to get pregnant, but otherwise, they hate the gender.

You know who wins them over? Engor.

He’s played by Allan Nixon, speaking of tabloid stars. He became an informant for Confidential magazine after years of being out of control, getting arrested for drunk driving and getting in fights. And, well, pure crazy stuff. That’s because in 1958, he got in a heck of a battle with his third wife Velda May Paulsen after she visited her ex-boyfriend Burt Lancaster in the hospital. He hit her, she stabbed him with the kitchen knives he gave her for Christmas. He didn’t press charges, they got back together and she died before the year was over because of burns she suffered in an explosion. Nixon — a Ron Ormond star — would eventually become a writer under his own name and using the pen names Nick Allen and Don Romano for the Shaft paperbacks.

Engor is such a man here that not only does he figure out fire — screw you Prometheus — he also kills a big lizard. After that, all the ladies — who include Joan Shawlee from The Apartment and Brian Keith’s life and the vamp in Singin’ In the Rain Judy Landon — decide that it’s time to get married.

There’s also a commentator who says inane things like, “And Engor called it Firee, which was his word for Fire.” He’s really the best thing in this whole movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Juan Carlos isn’t a great hero. He’s been infantilized by his mother and is going through therapy, which would probably a novel idea in the macho culture of Mexico, much less today. In his dreams, he can see the serial killer that has been haunting the city, quite literally The Man Without A Face that the title refers to.

A decade later, Hitchcock’s Psycho would feature a plot with similar beats to this film. In much the same way, another of director Juan Bustillo Oro’s films, Dos Monjes, predated Kurosawa’s Rashomon and features the same narrative idea of showing the same event from divergent points of view.t also features a faceless killer 14 years before Mario Bava would bring Blood and Black Lace to the screen (that said, The Blank started appearing in the Dick Tracy newspaper strip in 1937 and probably influenced the look of this film as well).

While not the fastest-paced movie you’ll ever see, this film is worth watching for its mix of three decades before David Lynch surrealism, German expressionism fog and angles, and a film noir storyline moved to Mexico. There’s not another movie that looks and feels like this one.