I love when a film series sticks around long enough to battle aliens. Hercules is no different, as now he must battle the evil Queen Samara (Jany Clair, Planets Against Us)  and her army of Moon Men, who demand that children be sacrificed to bring back their dead leader.

Hercules is played by Sergio Ciani, who used the stage name Alan Steel. He got his start doubling for Steve Reeves in Hercules Unchained and The Giant of Marathon. His run of seven Hercules films is filled with crazy situations to keep the peblu genre alive, such as Hercules and the Masked Rider, which had a Zorro theme, and Hercules and the Treasure of the Incas, which started as a sword and sandal movie and became a western after A Fistful of Dollars became a major hit during filming.

If you’re expecting this movie to be true to its mythological origins, you should know that it borrows from Roman, Greek, Ancient Egyptian and Cretan stories, as well as even soem Edgar Rice Burroughs. In Italy, Steel really playing Maciste, who was a star of silent Italian cinema, but American distributors changed him to Hercules.

Look, it’s Hercules against moon men with giant heads. You should be so lucky.

Watch this on Amazon Prime or download it from the Internet Archive.

Yes, you go into a movie named Racing Fever expecting b-roll footage and sure, you get it, but this is also a William Gréfe movie, which means that you’re going to get South Florida drama, in this case, the story of professional hydroplane racer Pop Gunner who has one race left in him before he passes the torch to his son Lee. But there’s also the matter of his main competition, Gregg Stevenson, who just so happens to be aardvarking with Pops’ little girl Linda.

So yeah. Gregg is already married and has a kid, which seems to complicate matters, but Linda stay with him even when he gets wasted and hits Pops with his race boat. I never saw Miss Budweiser — seriously, if you grew up in the 70’s, Miss Budweiser was a big deal — hit a human being, but there you go.

This leads Gregg’s wife and daughter to go to Lee — the son — for some reason and the daughter and the son end up shacking up too and getting knocked up and of course, someone has to get shot because this is a Gréfe movie and wow, you thought Thanksgiving was complicated in your family.

There’s also a song in it, because the kids need to dance, man. And a downer ending, because the 60’s were a drag. Look — it has some songs, it has some hunks, it has a cute girl, it has death and plenty of pathos. It’s also the movie that probably played last at the drive-in, when people were sleeping things off or getting one last round off. The IMDB reviews of this eviscerate the film when they should realize that this is exactly the movie that it should be.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Luigi Scattini’s directing career is all over the place, hitting all the various genres of the 60’s and 70’s. There’s comedy — War Italian Style, which unites silent film legend Buston Keaton with the Italian comedian duo of Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia (more on them in a bit). There’s mondo — Sweden Heaven and Hell, narrated by Edmund Purdom and featuring Piero Umiliani’s “Mah Nà Mah Nà, which would be used by Benny Hill and The Muppets. And more mondo — the magical Witchcraft ’70, as well as Questo Sporco Mondo Meraviglioso (This Dirty Wonderful World) and Sexy Magico. There’s Eurospy — the Richard Harrison-starring Ring Around the World. And plenty of sexual themed films like La Ragazza dalla Pelle di Luna (The Girl with the Moon Skin), La Ragazza Fuoristrada (The Off-Road Girl), The Body, La Notte dell’alta Marea (The Night of High Tide, which has Pam Grier) and Blue Nude. He’s also the father of Monica Scattini, the only actress I know who could be in both One from the Heart and Ruggero Deodato’s Concorde Affaire ’79.

Saying this is an uneven film is being generous to uneven films. The moronic antics of Franchi and Ingrassia, who play bellhops, play out around Mansfield lounging about and gradually getting undressed. Her husband at the time, Mickey Hargitay, also shows up.

Yes, a movie where Jayne is a doctor — of sexual relations — whose film of mating rituals around the world is an excuse to show mondo footage. These are the movies I fill my life with and bring to you.

Credit — or blame — goes to Massimo Pupillo, who would make Bloody Pit of Horror with Hargitay, and Amedeo Sollazzo, who worked with Franchi and Ingrassia throughout their long careers.

Directed by George Sherman and Giuliano Carnimeo — I’ve been diving deep into his films, including They Call Me Hallelujah, They Call Him Cemetery, his Sartana movies and The Case of the Bloody Iris — Panic Button is an example of the movies that Jayne Mansfield had to hunt down after her 20th Century Fox contract ended.

French entertainer Maurice Chevalier and Mansfield play actors who are picked to be in a new production of Romeo and Juliet. Eleanor “Woman of a Thousand Faces” Parker and Mike “Mannix” Connors also show up.

This tale of mobsters getting involved with Shakespeare was never really successful anywhere that it played. In the U.S., it was on double bills. And hey — it has one total review on Letterboxd other than this one.

Richard E. Cunha didn’t make many movies, but he sure made some insane ones. There’s She Demons with TV Sheena Irish McCalla, fanged women and Nazis taking over an island long after the war. Giant from the Unknown, featuring a monster named Vargas the Giant and effects by Universal’s Jack Pierce. Missile to the Moon, Frankenstein’s Daughter, Girl In Room 13…none of these movies are normal.

He teams with German director Gustav Gavrin, cowboy director Ray Nazarro and Albert Zugsmith (Sappho Darling, Violated!, The Cult) for this movie. That’s because production problems — financing, location and personnel issues — caused filming to stop several times and personnel changed along the way.

What we end up with is a tale of three robbers who steal a million and end up turning on one another. Actually, it soon becomes two, with Lylle Corbett (Cameron Mitchell) killing Dolph and Darlene (Jayne Mansfield) having to deal with it.

They end up on an island where everyone wants their money and everyone is ready to kill for it. You kind of have to love a movie that offs nearly everyone in the cast, closing with Mansfield drowning herself to take the last of the money.

Mansfield called the film: “The best role of my career.” She was four months pregnant with her daughter Mariska Hargitay when she made this. Her voice is dubbed in this by Carolyn De Fonseca, who would one day do Jayne’s voice from beyond the grave for The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield.

You can watch this on Tubi.

We’ve already discussed the lunacy of Jerry Warren and his movie The Wild World of Batwoman a while back. That’s not the only bonkers movie that he’d ever make. Let’s take this movie, which is really La Casa del Terror and La Momia Azteca mixed into a new movie, along with footage that Warren shot just for this new effort. You think Puffy invented the remix? Check in with Jerry.

Warren took his scissors to all of the comedy scenes of Tin-Tan from Casa del Terror, replacing them with the Lon Chaney Jr. footage from La Momia Azteca. This wasn’t anything new for him, as he’d already released Attack of the Mayan Mummy the previous year, replacing most of that movie with newly filmed American footage. And he’d use footage from that movie to make this!

He also took two Chilean movies — La Casa esta Vacia (The House is Empty) and La Dama de La Muerte (The Lady of Death) and made Curse of the Stone Hand.

I have no idea what drive-in fans thought, thinking they’d probably seen this movie before because they totally had. They just didn’t have IMDB to look it up.

A psychic named Ann Taylor — no relation to Ann Taylor or her Loft — goes back to her past life and leads a team of archaeologists to an Aztec pyramid with two mummified bodies, one being an Aztec warrior and the other a werewolf, who just so happens to be Lon Chaney Jr., who is white and not Mexico and no one ever brings that up.

The craziest thing then happens: the Aztec warrior escapes and kidnaps the psychic. They both get hit by a car and that’s it. They’re out of the movie, never to be seen again, because they’re dead. We’re only told this fact by a newspaper that spins on to the camera.

This is the Face of the Screaming Werewolf, after all. Not the Faces of the Screaming Warrior and the Aztec Mummy.

Meanwhile, Lon Chaney Jr. goes full lycan, kills the scientist who revived him and then is stopped by Tin-Tin, who shows up out of nowhere because he’d been edited out of the movie up until now. Yes, this nameless hero just shows up unannounced and murders the werewolf with a torch, just like he did in La Casa del Terror, but now without the benefit of a lick of context.

To top that all off, two cops then discuss how there was never a werewolf at all. Yes, somehow even in the world of a Jerry Warren film, the cops can watch the truth and distort it before your eyes.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Albert T. Viola — yes, the same man who wrote, directed, produced and starred in Preacherman — completed the American version of this film, known as A Fool’s World in Italy. There, it was directed by Roberto Bianchi Montero, who also made the mondos Africa Sexy, Orient By Night, Sexy Nudo, Sexy nel Mondo, Universo Proibito and Superspettacoli nel Mondo. He would go on to make So Sweet, So Dead.

Imagine a world “throbbing and pulsing with love, from the jungle orgies of primitive tribes to sin-filled evenings of the London sophisticate.” Now imagine those very same words coming out of the mouth of Boris Karloff.

Here are just some of the folks you will meet and sights you will see: a dwarf singer, bodybuilders, bedouin pimps, Japanese models for rent, Indian exorcists, people who can’t stop smoking, Jehovah’s Witnesses, lottery players, a clone of Valentino, high end rich dogs, a Boreno version of Romeo and Juliet, cults, nightclubs, Luna Park, London after hours and so much more.

You can get this — along with The Orientals — on blu ray from Severin.

After 1957’s The Aztec Mummy, The Curse of the Aztec Mummy and The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy, it would take seven years for Popoca the Aztec Mummy — or some form of him — to return to menace Mexico. That said, U.S. producer Jerry Warren did release the original in the U.S. as Attack of the Mayan Mummy.

Popoca’s origins are much the same as Imhotep/Ardath Bey. He loved the wrong woman and paid for it, being mummified and now back alive, looking for his lost love. Except instead of Egypt, he was on the western side of the world. He was stopped with a crucifix — Mexico is incredibly Catholic — and being blown up real good with dynamite — Mexico is incredibly bloodthirsty.

An archaeologist leaves a secret codex with a professor just before he is killed by the Black Dragons. What would you do if you had such an important mythological relic? Well, I would do the same thing as this smart guy. I’d give it to Gloria Venus and Golden Rubi, the wrestling women of the movie’s title.

He isn’t ready for the Black Dragons to go another step further and kidnap the daughter of the archaeologist they murdered and have her steal the codex, though.

By the end of the movie, of course an Aztec mummy has been freed — we literally wouldn’t have a movie without this happening — and the gang, the mummy and our wrestling women must all have a battle royal.

There are really two Aztec mummies in this one: Xochitl, a female mummy, and her lover Tezomoc who can transform into a snake and a bat, which are totally new things when it comes to the mummified undead, at least to me. There are also evil female judo wrestlers because, well, that’s what was in the aqua that day.

The tagline for this movie was, “WEIRDOS! We dare you to see it!”

Accept the dare. Watch this on Tubi. It’s also on YouTube: