BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!
Count Gabor Kernassy (Walter Brandi) lives in a castle surrounded by darkness and a forest, so when an entire group of exotic dancers, their piano player and their manager ends up on his doorstep, it all seems like a buffet. Yet one of those dancers, Vera (Lyla Rocco), is the reincarnation of his long lost wife Margherita Kernassy. How does this keep happening to these vampires? Well, maybe he isn’t the undead one. Ever think of that?
Directed by Piero Regnoli, who was one of the writers of I Vampiri as well as Patrick Still Lives, Burial Ground, Demonia, Nightmare City and so many great films, has made a movie that seemingly shares so much with The Vampire and the Ballerina. This film, however, has more of a lost romanticism and had the original title L’ultima preda del vampiro (The Vampire’s Last Prey). It was released in the U.S. as an adult movie and then edited for TV as Curse of the Vampire.
Regnoli co-wrote this with cinematographer Aldo Greci, who shot this and so many other movies including Play Motel.
This has a good vampire and a bad one, so to speak, as well as a housekeeper Miss Balasz (Tilde Damiani) and groundsman Zoltan (Antonio Nicos) who are on the side of good. But still, this is a movie where Katia (Maria Giovannini) can die and get buried and everyone keeps on dancing because, I mean, why stop dancing? It’s also the kind of early exploitation that has her get a stake to the heart and blood pours all over her shapely legs. Didn’t Russ Meyer say it best? “While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains… sex.”
Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.
Joan Denton (Jeanne Rainer, a model who went on to write several books, including The Beauty Trap, My Sundays with Henry Miller: A Memoir and Astrology For Lovers: An Astrological Guide to a More Fulfilling Sex Life) is the kind of evil woman I love in my movies. She’s rich, she hates nearly everyone and she also uses people, alternating between little girl and cruel adult sometimes in the same moment.
Somehow, she let working class orphan Eddie Mercer (Ted Marshall) into her bed. Maybe it’s all to upset her rich father Dr. Earl Denton (Charles G. Martin). How rich? He owns the entire town of Dentonville, Florida. However, she finds out that she’s pregnant and Eddie won’t go away. She wants an abortion. He wants her as his wife or to raise their child.
Family lawyer Sam Ingram (Robert J. Cannon) finds out about all of this, so he blackmails Denton, getting part of his estate and sets up an illegal abortion for his daughter. As for Eddie, he gets locked up and beaten by the cops. The only person who can help him is the fallen woman that he was kind to, Vicky Smith (Sue Ellis), who still wouldn’t give him an alibi. She’s trying to get her child back and working with her lawyer to make it happen. They met in the flophouse where they live, all working in the Dentonville laundry, cleaning the sheets and filthy clothes of the rich while they barely make enough to live. Eddie’s been an orphan his whole life, never adopted, the son of a sex worker who wants to belong, to have a family. Joan told him she loved him and that’s why he even made love to her in the first place. Now, she screams that he’s ruined her life.
This is a hard movie to find a person to make the protagonist, because so much of it feels like Florida in 2024. Joan should have the right to do whatever she wants with her body and the baby inside it, but she keeps dealing with men with unrealistic fantasies like Eddie or who tell her they will take care of it and are lying like her father. Eddie just wants to belong and has always felt like he has no worth. Vicky is a bad girl but not rich and amoral like Joan. She just wants to come to your apartment, drink and maybe take off her way too tight sweater on the outside, but on the inside, she’s just learned that she wants to be a mother, a fact that frightens her.
Jeanne Rainer is incredible in this, haunting and hunting Eddie down to the orphanage where he spent his childhood, shooting him in front of children, then following him to the swamp where she shoots him right in the eyes while he’s bleeding out in Vicky’s arms.
Director R. John Hugh came to Florida from England and made five movies. In addition to this movie, also called You’ve Ruined Me Eddie!, he made Fall Girl, The Meal, Naked in the Sun and Yellowneck. Writer Nancy S. Camp only has this movie on her IMDB and I really would love to see what else she could have done.
This is a movie that seems like it’s going to be a message or a hygiene film. Instead, you have a hysterical and deadly alluring rich black widow, a fallen woman trying to make good and a poor man who never had a chance all sweating, loving and going mental in the swampy nights of Florida. There’s no square up reel. Just brutal and unyielding death.
Also: One of the songs in this — it’s all library music — is the song that plays in the drive-in intermission where the hot dog and the bun do tricks under the big top.
Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.
Paul Frees really did it all. Actor, voice actor, comedian, impressionist, screenwriter and even writer and director, at least for this one movie. He’s even the “Ghost Host” in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland and Disneyworld.
Originally intended to be called Sideburns and Sympathy, this movie is all about Eddy Crane, a small-time crook who gets discovered by a music exec. However, his old gang can’t give up their ways. Then there’s the worry of his old girl, Iris, who is getting left behind for the music exec’s secretary. Things won’t end well.
So yeah. The movie is really bad. But let’s judge Paul Frees, who did so many other cool things, like the films of George Pal (the voice over for the rings in The Time Machine, the reporter in War of the Worlds, the narration that starts Doc Savage), the voices of John Lennon and George Harrison in The Beatles cartoon, the voice of The Millionaire, as well as the vocal chords behind Colossus: The Forbin Project. He’s also the man behind the narration that apocalyptically ends Beneath the Planet of the Apes: “In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead”.
You can watch this on YouTube. You can also download it on the Internet Archive.
Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.
Also known as Ein Toter Hing im Netz or A Corpse Hung in the Web, this West German horror film is all about Gary, a nightclub manager who invites several pretty ladies to strip dance in Singapore. They crash land on the way, make it to an island and find a giant spider web. Soon, Gary is bitten by the spider and becomes a mutant.
First released here as an adults’ only nudie cutie called It’s Hot in Paradise, it was re-released without nudity as Horrors of Spider Island. Your enjoyment of this film depends on how much you like watching women wrestle one another and pull hair. I mean, who amongst us can say no to that?
Maybe just look at the awesome German poster, hmm?
When I first saw this, I was way too dismissive of it. It has the same cinematographer as Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Georg Krause, shooting a movie with nearly nude women menaced by spiders. Was I in a bad mood the first time I wrote about this? What was wrong with me?
EDITOR’S NOTE: Blood and Roses was on the CBS Late Movie on July 15, 1975.
Carmilla has been made so many times — Vampyr, Dracula’s Daughter, Crypt of the Vampire, The Vampire Lovers, The Blood Spattered Bride — but the Roger Vadim-directed movie moves the setting to Italy in the 20th century.
Carmilla (Annette Stroyberg, Vadim’s wife at the time) is torn apart by the engagement of her friend Georgia (Elsa Martinelli, The Tenth Victim) to her cousin Leopoldo (Mel Ferrer, Nightmare City, The Visitor, both versions of Eaten Alive (with and without the exclamation mark), The Antichristand dude, Mel Ferrer has been in so many movies I love, even The Norseman) and she has no idea who she loves more. Yet she’s also found a dress that belonged to a vampiric forebearer and gone into her grave and nothing good is going to come of that.
And yes, Leopoldo is Count Karnstein, which would make him from the same family as the vampire in Twins of Evil and the rest of Hammer’s Karnstein Trilogy (we already mentioned the other two films, the third is Lust for a Vampire). The role was originally intended for Christopher Lee, which makes sense.
This is the artier side of vampire films when so much of this week has been wallowing in the mire and muck. See, sometimes we can be classy when we share a lesbian vampire movie.
Bleeding Skull’s Top 50 (July 7 – 13) The middle-brow champions of low-brow horror, Bleeding Skull has picked out some of their favorites from the SWV catalog. They neglected to put I Drink Your Blood or EEGAH!on the list, but I think I can forgive them since they included Ship of Monsters.
Rogelio A. Gonzalez made more than 70 movies, but I wonder if he ever made anything near as good as this movie, which is perhaps one of the strangest films I’ve ever had the delight to witness.
I was wondering how to even describe this movie. Basically, Gamma (Ana Bertha Lepe, Miss Mexico 1953 and a third-runner up for Miss Universe) and Beta (Lorena Velazquez, Miss Mexico 1960 and also Zorina queen of the vampires in Santo vs. Las Mujeres Vampiro) have come from Venus to find men to repopulate their planet. Of course, they can’t resist biting people or falling in love with Lauriano (Eulalio “Piporro” Gonzalez, one of the kings of golden age of Mexico comedy and the literal embodiment of Northern Mexican culture), a singing cowboy.
Sure, that would set up a great movie, but this is Mexico. Which means that the ship has a robot named Tor who is collecting a whole bunch of monsters — why, the title translates as Ship of Monsters, surprise! — and those monsters are about to go crazy. There’s Uk the cyclops, the many armed Carasus, Prince of Mars Tagual, Utirr the spider and the dinosaur skeleton named Zok. Also, Tor falls for a jukebox. And some of the special effects were ripped off from the Russian movie Road to the Stars.
Imagine if Ed Wood lived in Mexico, had a better budget, lucked out and had magnificent actresses willing to wear swimsuits and high heels, as well as a singing cowboy. Then we’d cut open slice open a peyote cactus and make him sit in a cave until he made this and it still might not this charming and odd.
Adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Fall of the House of Usher, this film marked the beginning of a series of eight Poe adaptations by Roger Corman, often in collaboration with writer Richard Matheson. Shot in a mere fifteen days, it was a bold departure for American-International Pictures, known for its black-and-white double features. This venture into color cinema with a substantial budget was a significant risk by AIP’s standards, adding a unique twist to the film’s production history.
Central to the narrative is the tragic fate of the Usher family, cursed to descend into madness. This ominous prophecy has not only engulfed their home but also the very ground it stands on, leading to its gradual decay and destruction.
Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon, Black Sabbath) traveled to the House of Usher to take his fiancee Madeline, who is opposed by her brother Roderick (Vincent Price), who is determined to see his family’s bloodline end with this generation. This leads to an argument so brutal that Madeline’s catalepsy is triggered, making her appear dead, and when she’s buried alive, she fully gives in to the madness within the Usher family, bringing the entire home down in flames all around everyone but our hero, who leaves with nothing.
Although Corman and Lou Rusoff are usually given credit for the AIP Poe cycle of films, Damon spoke up on a Black Sabbath commentary track, claiming he gave Corman the idea and was even allowed to direct The Pit and the Pendulum. This story hasn’t been confirmed, as there are several images of Corman directing that movie.
The success of House of Usher not only paved the way for more collaborations between Corman and Price but also set a precedent for reusing the same sets and special effects. The iconic Usher house set, which was actually a scheduled demolition, was set ablaze, and the footage used in multiple films, a testament to the enduring influence of this production.
You can watch this and so many of the films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. I’ll be posting reviews and articles over the next few days, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
June 17: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Lucio Fulci! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
When writers cover Italian exploitation film genres, often the concentration is on horror, cannibal movies, mondos, Westerns, giallo. Anything but musicarello, which are jukebox musicals inspired by Elvis’ Jailhouse Rock and Love Me Tender. The movie that really broke this filone — a small stream, so to speak, that flows from the larger river of Italian cinema — was Go, Johnny, Go!, which was directed by Paul Landres and starred Jimmy Clanton, Chuck Berry, Ritchie Valens and Eddie Cochran. Released in Italy as Vai, Johnny vai!, it had sequences filmed just for the Italian market with singer Adriano Celentano opening and closing the movie.
In a pre-MTV world, musicarello featured young singers in the main roles — like Gianni Morandi, Al Bano, Mal Ryder, Tony Renis, Adriano Celentano, Bobby Solo, Orietta Berti, Little Tony, and more — as they performed songs from their latest albums.
As you may expect, several of the same directors who excelled in other Italian genres made their own music movies, including Bruno Corbucci (Questo pazzo, pazzo mondo della canzone), Ferdinando Baldi (Rita of the West), Ruggero Deodato (Donne… botte e bersaglieri), Duccio Tessari (one of the founders of the Italian Western, he made Per amore… per magia…) and the unholy team of Antonio Margheriti and Renato Polselli (Io Ti Amo).
Yet the originator of native Italian-made musicarello is the very same man who most in America only know as the Godfather of Gore. Yes, Lucio Fulci made Ragazzi del Juke-Box and the second example of the genre, Urlatori alla Sbarra (Howlers In the Dock).
Wikipedia says that the musicarello is a mix between “fotoromanzi (photo comics or fumetti), traditional comedy, hit songs and tentative references to tensions between generations.” This is before the Days of Lead and radicalized political moments that would make up much of the late 1960s and 1970s in Italy. And as the genre gets older, generational revolt wouldn’t be something studios wanted to sell to, particularly as the music in this genre was no longer being directed toward young people. Think how the American-International Pictures beach movies seem so dated in just a few years versus movies that Hollywood was releasing by the end of the 60s and early 70s.
A company that makes blue jeans has to rethink their image because of a group called the Teddy Boys, young men and women who love American rock ‘n roll. The leaders of this music-loving group of kids are Joe Il Rosso (Joe Sentieri, whose biggest song was “Uno dei tanti,” which was translated by Leiber and Stoller and recorded by several English-speaking artists as I (Who Have Nothing); he appears in several films, including The Most Beautiful Wife with Ornella Muti), Mina (Mina, Italy’s best-selling music artist of all time; known as the “Queen of Screamers” and the “Tigress of Cremona;” she was banned from TV and radio due to her relationship with married actor Corrado Pani and out of wedlock pregnancy. She was so famous and beloved that this ban ended in a year despite her songs being about religion, sex and one of her favorite things, smoking. Her look was so alien to Italian audiences — shaved eyebrows, dyed blonde hair and fragrant sex appeal — which makes Mina look as cool in 2024 as she did in 1960) and Adriano (Adriano Celentano, who introduced rock ‘n roll to Italy with songs like “24.000 baci”, “Il tuo bacio è come un rock”, and “Si è spento il Sole;” he’s in Fulci’s first music movie as well as a singer in La Dolce Vita. His daughter Rosalinda is best-known for playing Satan in The Passion of teh Christ).
The jeans company wants the kids to improve their image and do good deeds, yet their remain suspicious of them. While this is happening, Joe falls in love with Giulia (Elke Sommer, Baron Blood) — and can you blame him? — whose father Giomarelli (Mario Carotenuto) runs the TV network and wants these rockers off television and to stop influencing other young folks.
Thanks to Italo Cinema, I can report there are nearly twenty songs in this:
Joe Sentieri: “Let’s Go,” “Moto Rock, ” “Millions of Scintille” and “Don’t Talk:
Mina: “I Know Why,” “Nessuno,” “Whisky” and “Tintarella di Luna”
Adriano Celentano: “Rock Matto,” “Blue Jeans Rock,” “Nikita Rock,” “Impressive for You” and Your Cheek is Like a Rock
Chet Baker: “Arrdividerci”
Brunetta: “Precipito” and “Beby Rock”
Umberto Bindi: “Odio”
Gianni Meccia: “Delicate soldiers”
Corrado Lojacono: “Carin”
I Brutos:” I, Blue Devil”
You may look through that list and be somewhat amazed that Chet Baker is in it. The “Prince of Cool” was seen by Hollywood as a potential movie star but the promise of his early career was marred by a life filled with drug addiction. That comes up in this movie, as he is often sleeping — and often, yes, he really was nodding off — and it’s turned into a comedic plot point.
This is also the first film appearance of model — and the only woman fashion designed Valentino ever loved — Marilù Tolo. She’s also in one of my all-time favorite Italian Westerns, Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!
Fulci co-wrote this with Giovanni Addessi (who would later write and produce Web of the Spider) and Vittorio Vighi (I Maniaci!). Yet his closest collaborator was Piero Vivarelli, who is listed as screenwriter and assistant director. Vivarelli — according to previously cited Italo Cinema — “had been working for radio stations since the 1950s and from the 1960s onwards was editor of the music magazine Big, for which he always wrote the editorials himself and which was regularly devoured by young people looking for good music. Vivarelli’s opinion carried weight; whoever he thought was good could become famous, but whoever he ignored was ignored by the audience.”
Vivarelli lived a wild life. In addition to his music influence, he directed comic book adaptions Avenger Xand Satanik, wrote Django and later in his career wrote the story for D’Amato’s Emauelle In Bangkok and the lunatic Emanuelle In America. Besides that, he was the only foreigner other than Che Guevara to have his membership card for the Cuban Communist Party signed by Fidel Castro.
Working together with cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo (who would go on to shoot 8 1/2, The 10th Victim and Juliet of the Spirits before dying way too young) , Fulci and Vivarelli created a new visual template for how young audiences saw music that would be adapted by Scopitones and music videos.
Not to be a broken record, but Fulci remains, as ever, so much more than his horror movies.
Drected by Roger Corman, written by Charles B. Griffith and made under the name The Passionate PeopleEater, this movie was made in two days for $28,000 on the same sets as A Bucket of Blood. Playing double features with Black Sundayand Last Woman On Earth, it became a cult film and that continued once it aired repeatedly on TV.
Gravis Mushnick (Mel Welles) and his two employees, Audrey Fulquard (Jackie Joseph) and Seymour Krelboined (Jonathan Haze), run a flower shop that seen better days. When Seymour screws up an order for dentist Dr. Phoebus Farb (John Shaner), he’s fired until he shows his new plant, which he claims he grew from a seed that he was given by a Japanese gardener over on Central Avenue. He names it Audrey 2 and before you know it, it lives on human blood and then people. Yet it brings people into the store and becomes famous. Gravis calls Seymour son now.
Of course, Gravis eventually sees Seymour feeding a dead homeless man — it was an accident, but still — to Audrey 2 and then Dr. Farb, who he killed in self defense. But the crimes are getting worst and the police — named Fink and Stoolie — and the Society of Silent Flower Observers of Southern California wants to give Seymour an award. All he wants is the original Audrey, but the plant hypnotizes him and makes him continue bringing him food.
The movie was actually written at a coffee house. Corman said, “We ended up at a place where Sally Kellerman (before she became a star) was working as a waitress, and as Chuck and I vied with each other, trying to top each other’s sardonic or subversive ideas, appealing to Sally as a referee, she sat down at the table with us, and the three of us worked out the rest of the story together.”
This is also an early Jack Nicholson movie — the actor said that “I went in to the shoot knowing I had to be very quirky because Roger originally hadn’t wanted me. In other words, I couldn’t play it straight. So I just did a lot of weird shit that I thought would make it funny.” — and as you know, went on to become even bigger when it was made into a musical and remade in 1986. There was even a cartoon, Little Shop, that was on Fox Kids and had Corman as a consultant. As for this one, Corman was so sure it wouldn’t do well that he never got a copyright and let it go into public domain.
As he starts the movie explaining how the gimmick works — Illusion-O — we learn that we will have the chance to see ghosts. Or not.
Most scenes of the movie is in black and white, but scenes involving ghosts let you watch them with special viewing glasses. If you want to see the ghost, you look through the red filter. If you don’t want to see them, watch through the blue filter.
Occultist Dr. Plato Zorba has given his house to his poor nephew Cyrus (Donald Woods), who moves in his wife Hilda (Rosemary DeCamp) and children Medea (Jo Morrow) and Buck (Charles Herbert). They find out from their lawyer Ben Rush (Martin Milner) that they share the house with 12 ghosts and they must stay there and not sell it or the state gets everything.
There’s also a seance-happy housekeeper called Elaine Zacharides (Margaret Hamilton!) and somewhere, if they can find it, a fortune.
How could you live with twelve ghosts? There’s a floating head, a screaming woman, a set of hands, a skeleton on fire, a chef who keeps killing his wife and her lover, a lynched woman, an executioner with a head that he’s chopped off, a lion (Zamba, who played Kitty Cat on The Addams Family) with a headless lion tamer and Dr. Zorba, who has left behind goggles to help them see the ghosts and an Ouija board that soon warns that death is coming.
Who killed Dr. Zorba? Where is the money? Will the family stay alive living here? Who will become the thirteenth ghost that frees all the other spirits? And how cool is it that the exterior shots are the Winchester House, an actual haunted place?
As much as I dislike remakes, I really dig the newer version of this, Thir13en Ghosts. Dark Castle, who produced that film, has been talking about doing a series about each of the ghosts. I’d love to see that.
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