EDITOR’S NOTE: You can read another take on this film here.

Based on the Charles Exbrayat novel Vous souvenez vous de Paco, this is all about everyone in the orbit of a corrupt politician named Maurice Leprince (Jean Servais), those who want to protect him and those who seek to stop him. This is Franco’s homage to noir, with an aquarium scene that references The Lady from Shanghai as well as tips of the cap to other noir classics.

Juan (Serafin Garcia Vazquez) has learned that Leprince runs the crime in the city and is killed. His handler Mora (Fernando Fernan Gomez) goes after the criminal but is dumped in the river. He quits the force so that he can use whatever force he needs to get revenge. I mean, you throw someone through a good cop’s window and this is what happens.

There’s also a female killer — a Franco Cinematic Universe favorite — who is killing all of Leprince’s men to get revenge for Juan and wants him in her sights before it’s all over.

Franco as always struggles with action scenes but when it comes to capturing a city in the shadows and the smoke-filled jazz cabarets within, he proves to be a genius.

A year after making this, Franco would be Welles’ assistant on Chimes at Midnight.

You can buy this from Severin or watch this on Tubi.

The Jaguar comes early in the career of Jess Franco and, as with much of Italian and Spanish directors, he was working on a western.

Venezuela, 1863. Colonel Saltierra (Georges Rollin) brazenly attacks the home of Colonel Mendoza (Felix Dafauce), murdering everyone except for the man’s son Jose (Jose Suarez) and a servant named Juano (Roberto Camardiel). Within a few years, no one is left to challenge Saltierra except for revolutionaries — which includes Spanish pop stars Los Machucambos — led by a Robin Hood named The Jaguar, who is, as you can already figure out, Jose.

The trouble is that Jose is in love with Saltierra’s daughter Ines (Marta Reves) who is already promised to one of her father’s men, Lieutenant Alberto Kalman (Todd Martens). Sylvia Sorrente, who plays the dancing informant Lolita also shows up in Castle of Blood and The Poppy Is Also a Flower, as well as an uncredited role as a Roman citizen in Bruno Mattei’s Caligula et Messaline.

Franco actually has a budget here and this is not full of his usual zooms and leering at the female characters, although you can tell he’s having a blast capturing the lusty dancing and energy of Sorrente. This was written by his first wife, Nicole Guettard, using the name Nicole David. She also wrote The Mistresses of Dr. Jekyll as David Coll, the story that Al Otro Lado del Espejo is based on and used the name Nicole Franco for the credits on the movies Celestine, Maid at Your Service; Lorna the Exorcist, Le Jourisseur, But Who Raped Linda and Les chatouilleuses. She’s also the script supervisor for The Diabolical Dr. Z, Vampyros Lesbos, X312 – Flight to Hell, Eugenie de Sade, Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein, La Maldicion de Frankenstein, Sinner: The Diary of a Nymphomaniac, Quartier de femmes and Game of Murder. She shows up in a few of his films, including Robinson und seine wilden Sklavinnen as a script girl, as a doctor in A Virgin Among the Living Dead, Gloria in Al Otro Lado del Espejo, as well as Midnight Party and Shining Sex, where she plays a cabaret owner.

I love that at one point Italian gothic horror was getting imported to America regularly. Like this movie, known as Metempsyco over there and directed by one and done Antonio Boccacci who was mostly a paperback writer.

Shot in sepia tone, it stars Annie Alberti — a one-time fumetti novel star — as Anna Darnell, who is tormented by visions of a dead countess. Her father does the only sensible thing. No, he doesn’t pay for her therapy and give her space to solve her issues. No, instead he takes her to the castle where the countess lived — and a place where at least two women have died in recent days — and lets her work it out. Well, hope you do well, Anna, and enjoy that strange mutilated hunchback doing all the tying up and killing.

This was released in the U.S. along with Night of the Vampires which was given the title Cave of the Living Dead.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: You can also check out this review by Dustin Fallon of The Blancheville Monster.

Released in Italy as Horror, this film’s script by Gianni Grimaldi and Bruno Corbucci was said to be based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Sure, there are some parts of The Fall of the House of Usher, A Tale of the Ragged Mountains and Some Words with a Mummy, but it’s as much a true Poe as the films of Roger Corman.

It was directed by Alberto De Martino who I celebrate for so many of his remake remix rip-off movies like OK Connery, The Antichrist and Holocaust 2000. Outside of those movies, he also made the wild giallo cop movie hybrid Strange Shadows In an Empty Room. It won’t sell you on this movie if I told you that he said that it was “a little film of no importance.”

Emilie De Blancheville (Ombretta Colli, who would one day become the President of Milan) has returned to her family’s ancestral home only to learn that everything has changed. Her father, the Count Blancheville, has become disfigured and gone mad, locked in a tower. Her brother Rodéric (Gérard Tichy) has taken over the home and rules over his servants with an iron fist after, well, all the old help has been killed. And now, the Count is loose and sure that if his daughter is killed before his 21st birthday, the curse on the Blancheville family will end. And oh yes — there’s also a cold and evil housekeeper known as Miss Eleonore played by Helga Liné.

AIP sold this to American TV, so if you watched horror shows from the 60s to the 80s, there’s a good chance you’ve seen this. However, you haven’t seen it look as good as it does in the new Arrow box set.

Along with a new video introduction by Italian film devotee Mark Thompson Ashworth, a limited edition 80-page book featuring new writing by Roberto Curti, Rob Talbot, Jerome Reuter, Rod Barnett and Kimberly Lindbergs, a fold-out double-sided poster and limited edition packaging with reversible sleeves featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Colin Murdoch, The Blancheville Monster also has commentary by filmmaker and film historian Paul Anthony Nelson, a new video essay by writer and pop culture historian Keith Allison, a new video interview with author and filmmaker Antonio Tentori, opening credits for the US release of the film and a trailer.

You can get this set from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally appeared on the site on July 6, 2021. Kino Lorber has re-released this on blu ray, including audio commentary by film historians Richard Harland Smith and Perry Martin, a “Trailers From Hell” with Mick Garris and the theatrical trailer. 

Of the three stories featured in Twice-Told Tales, only one of them — “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” — is actually from the Nathaniel Hawthorne book. The other two — “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and The House of the Seven Gables — are from another story and a book the author wrote.

Much like Tales of Terror, all three of these stories feature Vincent Price as narrator and star. It was written and produced by Robert E. Kent, the man who brought Roy Orbison to the screen in The Fastest Guitar Alive. This was directed by Sidney Salkow, who also worked with Price on The Last Man On Earth.

In “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” Carl Heidegger (Sebastian Cabot, The Time Machine) and Alex (Price) meet to celebrate Heidegger’s 79th birthday. As they look back on their lives, they learn that Carl has never gotten over the death of his fiancee Sylvia. In a drunken depression, he wanders down to her grave, only to find her perfectly preserved. As he drinks the water that rains down on her coffin, the old man — and then his friend — become young again.

Both of them decide to inject the dead woman with the water and she returns, only to inform Carl that Alex was her lover. The two men clash, only for Alex to die and Sylvia to wither to a skeleton. Alex wanders the crypt, unable to find any more of the water.

While dramatic, this story doesn’t match Hawthorne’s, during which four older people use water that they’ve found from the legendary Fountain of Youth, near Lake Macaco in Florida. It doesn’t end on such a down note either.

“Rappaccini’s Daughter” is the story of a man (Price) who has kept his daughter like a plant in a garden, treating her with the extract of an exotic plant that makes her very touch deadly. Yet what happens when she falls in love with a young man (Brett Halsey!)?

This story inspired the DC Comics character Poison Ivy, while the story itself was based on Indian fairy tales of poisoned maidens. The pop culture life of this story also extends to the Fleetwood Mac song “Running through the Garden.”

The last story is “House of the Seven Gables,” which finds a cursed family, reincarnation, an inheritance and skeletal hands emerging to attack Price. The same story had been previously filmed in 1940 and also featured Price (he plays Gerald Pyncheon here; he played Clifford in the original).

The Hawthorne novel was a major inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft, who claimed that it was “New England’s greatest contribution to weird literature.” You can detect the novel’s shadow cast over his stories “The Picture in the House”, “The Shunned House” and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

They even made this into a Dell comic book!

If you enjoy anthology horror and Vincent Price, this one is for you. If you don’t, never speak to me again.

An older Mexican horror film that actually played in the U.S. — American-International Pictures offered it for syndication in 1965 — The Curse of the Crying Woman is another film that attempts to translate the legend of La Llorona, the crying woman, and does the best job of any I’ve seen.

The film starts with full realization of the weirdness and wildness within, as a carriage ride is interrupted and all three passengers are hunted down by a mysterious woman in a long black dress served by her three monstrous dogs and an even more frightening henchman. In case you wondered, “Did Black Sunday play in Mexico?” this scene will definitely answer affirmatively.

That’s when the film introduces us to Amelia, our heroine, who has come to stay at the home of her Aunt Selma, a place covered with cobwebs, where the cries of a woman can be heard at night and bodies of generations of relations decompose in the basement. One particularly relative was a powerful witch who will come back to power and take Selma to an afterlife filled with black masses and blood drinking, a fact that she excitedly relates to a shocked Amelia.

From there, the film descends into wild scenes of Selma transforming into the Crying Woman, an eyeless creature surrounded by thousands of eyes, as well as a black mass filmed in negative and dead bodies coming back to life. It’s a movie that transcends its inspiration and delivers its own artful — and scary — take on a legendary story.

Volcan Popocatepetl (Smoking Mountain in Aztec) is just miles away from Mexico City and has been erupting for the entire last week (as I write this it’s June of 2022) giving off up to 36 steam and gas emissions a day.

Why would you try to build an elevated train across a volcanic mountain? Is it any wonder that there have been numerous incidents that have led to lost lives as the corporate bosses demand more progress? The workers believe that these murders are being caused by the treasure guardian of the ancient Aztec leader Montezuma. A gigantic man, covered in white fur, with a face like that of an owl and enough strength that it can tear men apart.

Directed by Jaime Salvador and written by Federico Curiel (Arañas Infernales, Las Momias de Guanajuato) and Alfredo Ruanova (El Pueblo Fantasma), this movie marks the first time I’ve seen a fluffy white sasquatch on film. It’s also the initial time — and this is more shocking — that the bigfoot has the power to obscure men’s minds.

The entire creative team would return to the very same story in a few months by making the sequel, El terrible gigante de las nieves.

Gunfight In the Red Sands was directed by Spanish director Ricardo Blasco, who wrote the script with James Donald Prindle and Albert Band, the father of Charles. It’s also the first western to feature a score by Ennio Morricone — under the name Dan Savio — and the second to star Richard Harrison.

The family of Ricardo “Gringo” Martinez (Harrison) has discovered gold on their land. This would be good news if the youngest son, Manuel, didn’t shout about it while drunk at a saloon in Carterville. Soon enough, three masked men soon show up at the Martinez home, kill the father, wound Manuel and steal the gold — riding past the unaware Gringo who is just returning home after years of fighting with guerillas against the Mexican government.

Gringo — so called because he was a white child adopted by the Martinez family — seeks the help of Sheriff Lance Corbett to find the killers, but can only identify by their horses. That’s not going to help when the entire town of Carterville wants the gold.

As this was made back in 1963, it’s much closer to an American western than the rough and brutal movies that Italy would soon be making. Cinematographer Massimo Dallamano would go on to work with Sergio Leone and make his own movies, including What Have You Done to Solange? and What Have They Done to Your Daughters?

You can watch this on Tubi.