Originally conceived as a two-part TV pilot, The Scarface Mob would go on to become one of TV’s most famous shows, The Untouchables. It takes place in 1929 Chicago, as Al Capone’s (Neville Brand) gang runs the city and is making money selling booze despite it being illegal. They pay off anyone they can but Federal Investigator Eliot Ness (Robert Stack) plans on brings together a team of men from across the country who he feels can’t be bought.

Desi Arnaz had optioned the rights to Eliot Ness’ book about fighting Al Capone and decided to turn it into a two-part episode of his show, the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, under the title of The Untouchables. Westinghouse paid $200,000 for the two shows, but Arnaz put up his own money to get a better looking product and to hire Stack and Brand. He sold the rights to the film in Europe to make up the difference.

Brand would return for two episodes of the show, which were also released as a movie, Alcatraz Express. There’s also another two episodes that become a third film, The Guns of Zangara.

Stack, who was most famous for this show until Airplane and Unsolved Mysteries, based Ness on the three bravest men he had met: Audie Murphy, his former roommate and war hero Buck Mazza and stuntman Carey Loftin. He said of the men, “All three had one thing in common. Tthey were the best in their fields and they never boasted!”

Director Phil Karlson was a film noir director and he fits this story, which was written by Paul Monash, who created Peyton Place and wrote The Friends of Eddie Coyle and the Salem’s Lot TV miniseries.

According to the Italian-American Herald, “Italian-American actors and publishers who expose and perpetuate the stereotype image of Italians as mobsters, wife abusers, hitmen and cheats as it has since the debut of The Untouchables in 1959.” This is where, as always, I remind you that there is no such thing as the Mafia, but I’m Italian. I am legally bound to write this.

That said, everything about The Untouchables — good and bad — starts here. If anything, you can enjoy just how off the rails Neville Brand is.

The Arrow Video blu ray of The Scarface Mob has great extras, such as a video essay on the film and the career of director Phil Karlson by film critic David Cairns; another essay by Philip Kemp on the career of Eliot Ness and his depictions on film; a trailer and a gallery of original posters, lobby cards and publicity photos provided by The Scarface Mob and The Untouchables archivist Kelly Lynch.

It’s all inside a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Jennifer Dionisio and also comes with six postcard-sized lobby card reproductions, a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Jennifer Dionisio and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Barry Forshaw and liner notes on The Untouchables by Dan Lynch and Kelly Lynch.

You can get it from MVD.

Made by the same people who brought you Wheels of Tragedy and Mechanized Death, Signal 30 refers to the radio code used by the Ohio State Highway Patrol for a fatal traffic accident.

Today, there’s no way they would just show the dead bodies of people torn apart by car accidents and tell you how they got there. Everything would be blurred or they would just do reenactments. But no, here are real people in as close to a snuff movie as can exist, all authorized by the authorities.

Made in Mansfield, Ohio — which is between Cleveland and Columbus — this starts with these words: “This is not a Hollywood production as can readily be seen. The quality is below their standards. However, most of these scenes were taken under adverse conditions, nothing has been staged. These are actual scenes taken immediately after the accidents occurred. Also unlike Hollywood our actors are paid nothing. Most of the actors in these movies are bad actors and received top billing only on a tombstone. They paid a terrific price to be in these movies, they paid with their lives.”

There’s a moment where a young trucker is twisted and destroyed and then another is a black cinder as he is pulled from the barely recognizable detritus of what was once an big rig. It makes you realize that the highways are unsafe and may give you anxiety over even getting behind the wheel, because you are made of blood and muscles that won’t stand up to the destructive power of physics.

There’s also a barbecue restaurant in Cohoes, NY that has this name. You know, I always say the more horrifying the cartoon art of a barbecue spot, the better the food. There was once a place called Two Pigs that had two of the Three Little Pigs eating the third. I can only imagine that a restaurant named after vehicular death has to taste so good.

This movie is respected. Faces of Death is not. This is real. That one is fake. Draw your own conclusions.

You can watch this on YouTube.

A Bucket of Blood aspires to art as much as it does junk. Written by Charles B. Griffith, whose name you can associate with films as disparate as Smokey Bites the Dust, Barbarella and Death Race 2000, it’s a tale of trying to figure out how to create art when all you can do is repeat words and images. Maybe that’s what art really is.

Roger Corman himself directed this one, shot in five days for $50,000. But hey — AIP wanted a horror film and had sets left over from Diary of a High School Bride. The same set would also be used for The Little Shop of Horrors.

We start by hearing the beat poetry of Maxwell H. Brock (Julian Burton, The Masque of the Red Death) at The Yellow Door cafe. People only know when to clap when they’re told, as the people he decries as sheep really live up to it. But it’s art, baby.

Busboy Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) yearns to be part of this hip crowd and wants to win the heart of Carla (Barboura Morris, The Trip), a friendly hostess at the club. As he fails to make her a sculpture, his landlady’s cat Frankie (Myrtle Vail plays the snooping older woman; she’s actually Griffith’s grandmother) gets stuck in the wall. He tries to cut it out of the wall, but ends up killing the cat. So he does what any of us would: he covers it in clay, sticks a knife in it and calls it art.

The next morning, Walter’s boss Leonard (Antony Carbone, Creature from the Haunted Sea) makes fun of the morbid art, but Carla loves it. So up it goes, on display, where the beatniks all fall in love with it. One of those crazy cats named Naolia gives him some heroin to remember her by, but Walter has no idea what it is.

As he’s followed home by undercover cop and total fink Lou Raby (Bert Convy!), he’s told he’s going to be arrested for possession. He panics and hits Lou with a frying pan, giving him another piece of art called “Murdered Man” for everyone to fall in love with. But the secret’s soon to get out, as Leonard sees fur sticking out of his “Dead Cat” piece.

Walter is now the king of the artistic set, except for Alice (Judy Bamber, Dragstrip Girl), a model who is pretty much disliked by everyone. Walter asks her to be in his model and she agrees, only to be strangled and turned into his next art object. The results so impress Brock that he throws a party for Walter, who drunkenly beheads someone directly after and shows the results to his boss.

This has to end like all wax-related films. Walter finally feels enough self-worth to propose to Carla, who rejects him and soon learns that the sculptures are really human bodies covered in wax. Everyone chases him home, where he makes his last piece of art from himself — the “Hanged Man.”

Dick Miller said of the film — in the book Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers — “The story was good; the acting was good; the humor in it was good; the timing was right; everything about it was right. But they didn’t have any money for production values … and it suffered.”

Miller would go on to play a character named Walter Paisley in the films Hollywood Boulevard, The Howling, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Chopping Mall, Night of the Creeps, Shake, Rattle and Rock!, Rebel Highway, The Adventures of Biffle and Shoosterror and Schmo Boat.

The movie was remade in 1995 as part of the Roger Corman Presents series on Showtime. While never available on DVD, it was released as The Death Artist on VHS. It adds perhaps the one thing missing from the original: Paul Bartel. He and Mink Stole play a rich couple looking for new artists. Walter is played by Anthony Michael Hall, Carla by Justine Bateman, Shadoe Stevens is Maxwell and Sam Lloyd is Leonard. Taking place in a cappuccino bar, it also features Will Ferrell and David Cross in some of their first roles.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Day the Earth Froze is a Russian-Finish film that goes by Sampo. It was bought by American-International Pictures, cut by 24 minutes, the crew was renamed (Aleksandr Ptushko is Gregg Sebelious,  Eve Kivi is Nina Anderson and Andris Oshin has the name Jon Powers) and it was a double feature with Conquered City. There’s also the idea that this was shot in Vistascope, whatever that could be.

It’s all about how Lemminkäinen tries to win the heart of Annikki and battles the evil witch Louhi, who wants to make a magic machine called a Sampo that can make salt, grain and gold. When our hero fails to get it for her, she steals the sun and the world freezes, just as you’d expect from the name of the movie.

Directed by the same man who made The Magic Voyage of Sinbad and The Sword and the Dragon, each scene was shot four times: once in Russian, once in Finnish and then in both standard and anamorphic widescreen

If you have only seen the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, well, you can get the original film in a restored version from Deaf Crocodile. You can also watch this on Tubi.

At once an exploration of the Beats and one of the last original film noir movies, The Beat Generation is about the police looking for Stan Hess (Ray Danton), a serial rapist known as the Aspirin Kid because he goes to married women’s homes, acts like he has a headache and then attacks them while their husband isn’t home. He meets a cop named Culloran (Steve Cochran) who doesn’t realize he has the man everyone is looking for in his car. The cop and his partner Baron (Jackie Coogan) think that the real rapist is beatnik Art Jester (James Mitchum). How wrong he is, learning that when Hess assaults his wife and makes her pregnant, nearly ending his marriage while Jester falls for a gangster’s wife, Georgia Altera (Mamie Van Doren).

Directed by Charles F. Haas, who also made the Van Doren movie Girls Town, The Beat Generation has plenty of beatnik moments, like Maila Nurmi — Vampira — has a white rat walking all over her ghostly skin while freestyling a poem. Louis Armstrong is also on hand and recorded the theme song.

Irish McCalla was going to be the lead, but was told there was a rape scene and she’d have to do more for the European version, but the assault would be in good taste. She decided to take a smaller part.

This was written by Richard Matheson, who based it on a true story, saying it was “about a guy who would meet salesmen and talk to them on the road, learn all about their houses, where they were during the day, what they did; then he would go and attack the wives while the salesmen were still on the road. I wrote it as a police procedure film.”

There’s also a wrestling beatnik. That’s Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, who used to slap people in boxing matches. Despite all the silliness, this is a much darker movie than you’d think.

Producer Herman Cohen was inspired by reading a series of newspaper articles about Scotland Yard’s Black Museum. He got to visit the museum and wrote this with Aben Kandel. Many of the weapons in this — including the binoculars — were based on actual weapons of murder.

Cohen wanted Vincent Price or Orson Welles, but Anglo-Amalgamated pushed for a British actor, so Michael Gough is the main bad guy, Edmond Bancroft. Working with his assistant Rick (Graham Curnow), he’s creating a black museum of his own filled with things that have killed people. He also writes about them in the paper and in books. He’s so known for this that a shop owner (Beatrice Varley) keeps weapons that she gets just for him.

There’s also a serial killer who is murdering people with other strange weapons and every time it happens, Bancroft goes mad and his blood pressure goes to 200/100, which let me tell you as someone who is oCD about testing and retesting my blood pressure would kill you.

Bancroft fights with his lover Joan (June Cunningham), who laughs at him and calls him a cripple. She goes out by herself, gets soused and hits on every man she sees before coming home to have a strange looking man place a guillotine on her bed and chop her head off.

As all that is happening, Rick falls for Angela (Shirley Anne Field) and starts planning to get married. However, he is tied to the crime writer by a dark secret.

Making this even better is the opening, which has hypnotist Emile Franchele and HypnoVista. This was added in the U.S. by American-International Pictures. I don’t know if I could be more excited to watch a movie after the opening.

Directed by Arthur Crabtree, this is a movie that was called “lurid,” “nasty” and “sensationalism without subtlety of characterization, situation or dialog.” Those people were right, right and very wrong.

The VCI blu ray of Horrors of the Black Museum has archival commentary by Cohen, a 2023 commentary by  Robert Kelly — who also created the new artwork for the cover, a tribute to Cohen and the original U.S. HypnoVista opening featuring psychologist, Emile Franchel. You can get this from MVD.

Directed by star Pietro Germi and written by Ennio De Concini based on That Awful Mess on Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda, The Facts of Murder starts with a mystery. How did someone have time to find the valuable jewelry in Commendatore Anzaloni’s apartment and get away so quickly? The police, led by Inspector Ciccio Ingravallo (Germi) start to follow Assuntina (Claudia Cardinale), the maid of next-door neighbor Liliana Banducci (Eleonora Rossi Drago), but soon Liliana’s body is found by her cousin Dr. Valdarena (Franco Fabrizi). He removes a letter before the police arrive and hey, why did Liliana change her will last week?

This appears as part of Radiance’s World Noir, along with Witness In the City and  I Am Waiting. It’s intriguing to see noir from a country that usually gives his giallo, so this was a great watch.

The Radiance Films blu ray release of The Facts of Murder has a new 4K restoration of the film by L’Immagine Ritrovata at the Cineteca di Bologna, plus a new interview with Pietro Germi expert Mario Sesti, a documentary about Pietro Germi, and a visual essay by Paul A. J. Lewis on the presence of noir trends in Italian cinema and the evolution of the genre. You can get the film from MVD.