Based on the H. Rider Haggard novel, this Hammer feature — directed by Robert Day (The Initiation of Sarah) — takes Ursula Andress to the only logical place she can go after blowing minds as she rose from the beach in Dr. No. Now, she is a goddess.
Professor Holly (Peter Cushing), Leo Vincey (John Richardson, Torso, Black Sunday) and Job (Bernard Cribbins) have left the war behind and are their way to Africa when they discover a map of a secret land that is only rumored to exist. There, “She-Who-Waits” and “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed ” Ayesha (Andress) rules eternally.
She believes that Leo is the reincarnation of the lover she killed 2,000 years ago for cheating on her and wants him to walk through the blue fire to become immortal by her side.
In the midst of that drama, Leo has fallen in love with Ustane (Rosenda Monteros, The Magnificent Seven) and Ayesha decides to kill her for such impudence. Her tribe, the Amahagger, attack Ayesha’s army, all while her most fanatical follower, Billali (Christopher Lee) attempts to walk through the blue flames himself.
Despite Ayesha dying at the end of this film, the character would return in Hammer’s The Vengeance of She, with Olga Schoberová taking over the role.
The first Hammer movie to be built around a female character — in spite of them hating the sound of Andress’ accent and having her dubbed by Nikki van der Zyl* — this is an intriguing while dated look at a female ruler subjugating her subjects while remaining eternally in love.
She has been made so many times, starting in 1899 with Georges Méliès’ The Pillar of Fire. It was remade in 1908, 1911, 1916, 1917, 1925 (with Haggard writing the cards that appeared between the silent action) and 1935 before this movie and in 2011. I guess you can consider the Sandahl Bergman film She is somewhat inspired by this, even if it’s just the title.
Alejandro Muñoz Moreno became better known as Blue Demon, a Mexican luchador and film actor who was the contemporary, teammate and often rival of El Santo. From 1948 to 1989, he never lost his trademark mask in a series of mask vs. mask and mask vs. hair challenges, winning the hoods of Espectro II, Matemático, Rayo de Jalisco and Moloch and shaved the heads of Baby Olson, Tony Borne and Cavernario Galindo. He held the NWA World Welterweight Championship twice, the Mexican National Welterweight Championship three times and the Mexican National Tag Team Championship. He was such a big deal that each year or so, CMLL holds the Leyenda de Azul tournament in his name and he was buried in his trademark outfit.
Along the way, he found the time and energy to appear in 28 movies.
After La Furia del Ringand Asesinos de la Lucha Libre, this was the third film that Blue Demon would appear in. Directed by Chano Urueta, this is a great introduction to the hero, who battles werewolves and mad scientists. Whereas El Santo at least had a silver mask that you’d figure would give him the edge against el hombre lobos, Demon has no such extra advantage. Instead, he’s going to battle them with just the gifts that God gave him, which is mostly body slams, which somehow do end up curing the world of lycanthropes in this entry.
One of the wrestlers that Blue Demon is in the ring with in this, Ray Mendoza, may not be known as much to American audiences, but his sons became Los Villanos and two of them — Villano 4 and Villano 5 — wrestled for WCW.
Plus, the man who played El Sanguinario in this — Fernando Osés — would go on to write ten of the Santo films and nearly all of Blue Demon’s movies, including this one. He even directed three movies — El Chicano Justiciero, La Hija del Contrabando and Gente Violenta.
You know, for two genres that have so many movies, westerns and horror don’t cross over nearly as much as they should.
Director Alfredo B. Crevenna (Aventura Al Centro de la Tierra , El Planeta de Las Mujeres Invasoras) and writer Alfredo Ruanova (Blud Demon: Destructor de Espias, the Neutron movies) team up to tell the story of the two centuries old Rio Kid, who has taken up residence in a western town to draw out other gunfighters, murder them in cold blood — or duels, really — and then drink their, well, blood to gain their gunfighting skills. It’s a pretty great scam he has going and the townspeople all love him because he’s saved a few of the women from some of the rougher men out there.
Meanwhile, a guy named Texan, who is el hijo of a pretty well-known bandito, joins up with an old man named Nestor who was in jail because of the villainous Rio Kid, and the Rivero brothers all head to San Jose to see if they can take out the bad guy.
With a title that translates as Ghost Town, you know what you’re getting into. The townspeople have a song that drives Nestor to violence, the vampire has the longest fangs you’ve ever seen and it seems like Gunsmoke meets a Universal monster, which really is the episode of that venerable TV series that I always longed to see.
Roberto Mauri started as an actor before directing became his main calling card. You may have seen some of his Italian Westerns, like Sartana in the Valley of Death and He Was Called Holy Ghost or his oddball jungle film King of Kong Island or Slaughter of the Vampires. Oh yeah — he also wrote the giallo Clap, You’re Dead and came back in 1980 to make The Porno Killers.
Prefiguring the giallo craze that would happen in around five years, thanks to Argento, this movie has a masked killer who preys only on prostitutes, hence its alt title Call Girls 66.
When a prostitute is killed and several others are nearly snuffed out, that girl’s sister decides to investigate on her own, learning that not just one, but several famous actors seem to be behind the killers.
This movie has such a great payoff that I’m shocked that more giallo didn’t steal it. The killer is a man whose features were destroyed in the Hiroshima bomb blast and no woman will go near him, much less have sex with him. So he makes masks of famous actors and uses them to get close to the women, who he soon kills. Crazy, right?
Margaret Rutherford may have ben in more than 40 films, but she is best known for playing Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple in four movies and Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit. She also dealt with some family craziness, as before she was even born, her father killed his father by beating him to death with a chamber pot. After seven years in a mental ward, he was released. After starting his new family, changing his name and moving to India, his wife killed herself, leading Margaret to be raised by her aunt. She was told her father was dead, despite him trying to reach her for years.
Once she began acting, she was pretty much protected from the world by her husband — and frequent acting partner — Stringer Davis. There have been rumors that the two never consummated their relationship, but they did adopt a child of sorts by taking in a young man named Gordon Langley Hall who eventually had gender reassignment surgery and became known as Dawn Langley Hall, the name she used when she wrote the biography of Rutherford, Margaret Rutherford: A Blithe Spirit.
In 1965, Margaret — who suffered bad spells and electroshock therapies in her life in an effort to stay away from the madness she thought infected her family — Stringer Davis and Tom Corbett visited the haunted homes Longleat, Salisbury Hall and Beaulieu for an NBC special based on Diana Norman’s book The Stately Ghosts of England.
Honestly, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen, an absolute delight of old English manners, famous British actors and just plain goofball haunting silliness.
NBC promoted this show with articles in the New York Times and Show Magazine. There was plenty of William Castle-level BS in these, including all manner of ghost antics like slamming doors, ruined footage and broken cameras writer, producer and director Frank De Felitta asked for the ghosts to give him permission to film them.
Great story, right? Well sure, but De Felitta also wrote the novels Audrey Rose and The Entity. So he knew a great ghost story when he heard one.
Don “The Snake” Prudhomme and Tom “The Mongoose” McEwen were gods to us kids in the ’70. We bought the racing magazines and ripped out the glossy spreads of their cars and persons and Scotch Taped ’em to our bedroom doors and walls — right next to our Runaways (duBeat-e-o) and Suzi Quatro (Suzi Q) posters, and Roger Decoster’s mag-rips of his daring motocross jumps.
When the ABC Wild World of Sports held one of Prudhomme and McEwen’s drag or funny car races on a Saturday afternoon, the neighborhood streets cleared and everyone sat in front of the TV. The Snake and Mongoose were matched only by Richard Petty and Evel Knievel. They were the “Muhammad Ali” of racing. Everyone loved them.
So, to commemorate those “Funny Car Summers” of those youthful days of yore, let’s fire up that silver screen under the stars!
Man, when this commercial came on TV . . . EVERYBODY went to see this documentary that chronicles a summer in the life of “Funny Car” racer Jim Dunn and his family.
The most popular, best known, and best-distributed film of the night — it is also the most disappointing (to those wee eyes of long ago) of the films of the night. You know how great Pawn Stars and American Chopper were when they first went on the air — then they turned into a Kardashians-styled sit(shite)com that’s all about Chum Lee and Corey Harrison bumblin’ about the shop and Junior and Senior fighting? Where’s the neat junk? Where’s the bikes? Where’s Frank and Mike? Who in the hell let Danielle, this Memphis blond chick, and Mike’s bumblin’ brother on the set? Where did the pickin’ go? This is American Pickers, right?
Well, that’s what watching this movie is like: all family drama and little vroom-vroom. Way to go marketing department and Mr. Distributor. You broke our little-tyke hearts — and pissed off our parents, who paid the drive-in fare, because we bitched from the backseat that we were bored — and watched 99 and 44/100% Dead (or was it The Exorcist) through the rear window, instead.
You can watch Funny Car Summer on You Tube HERE and HERE.
Wheels On Fire is a classic motor sports documentary — and also one of the most obscure and hard-to-find (as you can see, it’s even impossible to find a decent image of the theatrical one-sheet). But not in the land of Oz, since this was filmed in Liverpool, Sydney. This one kicks ass because of — before there were web-cam and fiber optics — has the first ever “race cam” strapped onto the drag car, which takes you behind the wheel at speeds above 300 kilometers (miles in the States) per hour.
Again, this one is near impossible to track down on VHS and DVD — and the DVDs are grey market VHS-rips. And there’s no trailer or clips . . . denied.
Intermission! The Snack Bar is Open! Check out our classic drag racing poster art gallery while you wait in line!
Not to be confused (and it is) with the “on” movie above, Wheels of Fire focuses on the lives of five major drag racers of the era: Don Garlits, Don Prudhomme, Shirley Muldowney, Richard Tharp and Billy Meyer, as they are each followed through a complete drag racing season. Yep. This is reality TV before Robert Kardashian had his first kid (I think; too lazy to check K-Dash B-Days), the very same kids who unleashed the ubiquitously-hated broadcasting format.
As with the oft-confused Wheels on Fire, there’s no online streams of this lost, classic drag racing film. It was on You Tube in several parts, but was removed. Only this 10:00 minute clip is available, which we’re posting in lieu of an official trailer (. . . and don’t be surprised if it also vanishes to grey screen; yep, it’s gone). The now out-of-print DVDs are available in the online marketplace from time to time (and, as you can see, it’s impossible to find a decent theatrical one-sheet). The NHRA web platform and their upper-tier cable channel rerun it from time to time.
Documentarian Les Blank of Burden of Dreams fame, which chronicled the making of Werner Herzog’s and Klaus Kinski’s Fitzcarraldo, made his docu-debut with this drag chronicle — its seeds (A Rubber Tree plant, ha-ha! ugh.) planted courtesy of his first behind-the-camera gig shooting drag racers in Long Beach, California.
This one has it all: Souped-up “Blower” Mercurys and Chevys (like in Two-Lane Blacktop), rails, and funny cars. While it chronicles other racers, this one is a showcase for Rick “The Iceman” Stewart as he attempts to grab the world’s record — as Los Angeles’ Canned Heat Blues Band provides the musical backing.
Les Blank has made this easily accessible as an Amazon Prime and Vimeo VOD that’s also available for purchase at Les Blanks.com and on eBay.
And so goes our “Fast and Furious Week: Part Deux.” Can you smell the rubber Big Daddy is cookin’, Dwayne? And, do you have a hankering for even MORE drag racing films? Then check out our first “Fast and Furious Week” reviews of Burnout and Fast Company.
Poster by Dennis Preston for “The Great Bed Race” in Lansing, Michigan on August 11, 1979/courtesy of Splatt Gallery Facebook.
Update: In May 2021, we went drag racing crazy and reviewed several more drag flicks as part of our “Drag Racing Week” theme-feature of the month. Image Courtesy of Vectezzy.
Another drag racing doc? You bet. During out two month “Cannon Month” blow out in July and August 2022, we discovered this Cannon-distributed ditty. Who knew?
In August and December of 2020, we had two “Fast and Furious” tribute weeks filled with the aromas of burning rubberand bubbling oil.
Mill Creek’s “Savage Cinema” 12-pack got us started as we reviewed over 40 filmsin August 2020.
Yeah, we did another week with another 40-plus films.
You say you need more racing films? You mean we haven’t covered enough? Well, then head on over to Demaras Racing under their “Fast Films” section for their reviews on car flicks. From Mickey Rooney in The Big Wheel to a discussion of Dustin Hoffman’s ride in The Graduate to the cars in THX 1138 — so many that we missed or never got around to reviewing — they’ve got you covered.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes forB&S About Movies.
About the Author: Paul Andolina is one of my favorite people to talk movies with. If you like his stuff, check out his site Wrestling with Film.
Evil Brain from Outer Space is a science fiction film from 1965. It happens to be a couple of the Japanese Super Giant films that have been hacked up and spliced together to make one English dubbed film. It’s an odd movie about a group of aliens who send one of their own to earth to stop the brain of the evil mutant Balazar from destroying humanity.
Special effects films and television shows are big in Japan and they have been since Godzilla roared onto screens. The Super Giant series from the late 50’s is a bunch of stand-alone films that are about the deeds of a man named Giant of Steel or as he is known in EBfOS Star Man. Star Man is a superhero basically and he wears some pretty nifty lycra outfits, he looks like a luchador that forgot his mask at home.
Evil Brain sees Star Man coming to earth to stop a few evil doctor/scientists who are in league with the evil extraterrestrial brain of Balazar. There is a hawk that hangs out with one of these doctors and a one-legged man who serves the other. There are some pretty awesome mutants who fight Star Man in this film as well. One looks like a chupacabra from the black lagoon and has strange tendril-like fingers and makes some weird noises, if I had seen this a child I would have been scared of him immediately. I actually said out loud, “WTF is that?” while watching the movie. He is by far my favorite part of the film. The other mutant is a long-haired demon lady who doesn’t quite know how to put on her lipstick. She jumps around and scratches the air while making demonic cat noises. There are also some generic henchmen mutants as well.
I would love to see the Super Giant serials in Japanese with English subtitles but I’m not sure they can live up to the insanity that is this film. It seems longer than it is because there is too much jibber-jabber. Honestly would love to see Star Man just mess up some mutants and forgo the plot altogether. If you like psychotronic films this is definitely the one for you. I have no idea what they were thinking when they pieced this bad boy together. I’d like to believe there was some acid involved and a whole lotta pot. It is in black and white but it still is a lot of fun.
If you have any interest in the Tokasatsu trend in Japan and want to see an earlier effort you can’t get much better than Evil Brain from Outer Space.
A bunch of salamander men from the planet Kulimon in the Moffit Galaxy plan on taking over Earth by unleashing a lethal plague on mankind (maybe not what you want to watch right now). It’s up to Starman from the Emerald Planet to save the human race.
I always wondered why these movies didn’t make any sense when I was a kid.
That’s because they were all part of a much larger story that we had no idea about. We’re coming into the middle of a movie serial called Kōtetsu no Kyojin (Giant of Steel). To be more exact, we’re watching episodes 3 and 4, which were called The Mysterious Spacemen’s Demonic Castleand Earth on the Verge of Destruction.
That’s because Walter Manley Enterprises and Medallion Films bought these movies from Japan and then did pretty much whatever they wanted with them. While the original films are 48 and 39 minutes long, they jammed them together, took out 9 minutes and used library music and dubbed dialogue.
While the American version refers to the bad guys as salamanders, those that love Japanese crytozology will recognize them as kappas, the dreaded frog-like beasts that haunt rivers and lakes. They also have a doctor who can hypnotize people, a witch and their leader, who is able to change the rotation of the planet.
Starman predates both Ultraman and the sendai ranger shows, but he’s very similar. He tends yo leap off things and do tons of backflips. A lesser hero would get dizzy and puke from the acrobatics that he does, but that’s why he’s such a winner, I guess.
Walter Manley Enterprises also brought the Jayne Mansfield-starring The Loves of Hercules, Invasion of the Neptune Men, Curse of the Blood Ghouls, Giants of Rome, Cavalier in Devil’s Castle and Revenge of the Black Eagle to America, amongst other films.
They also made three more Starman movies. It all begins in Atomic Rulers of the World, which is Super Giant and Super Giant Continues; Attack from Space which is The Artificial Satellite and the Destruction of Humanityand The Spaceship and the Clash of the Artificial Satellite; and finally Evil Brain from Outer Space, which took the full color films The Space Mutant Appears, The Devil’s Incarnation and Kingdom of the Poison Moth and made them black and white. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.
Director Teruo Ishii, known as “The King of Cult,” made tons of movies. He directed 10 of the 18 A Man from Abashiri Prison films, all eight of the Joys of Torture series, Horrors of Malformed Men, Sonny Chiba’s The Street Fighter’s Last Revenge, some Pinky violence films, a few biker movies, two Yoshiharu Tsuge manga adaptions (Master of the Gensenkan Inn and Wind-Up Type) and so many more. In all, he made 83 films and numerous shows for TV.
Ishii left the series after the sixth movie, as he learned that a child had imitated Super Giant, dressing up like the hero and jumping out of a window to the street below. This is why Japanese superhero shows began airing a disclaimer before every show, warning kids to not imitate the things they saw on screen.
I would hope that no one copied any of the Yakuza and erotic torture that he’d be in charge of in his later films.
Seriously, I love this movie. It’s kind of goofy looking compared to the CGI superheroics that we have today, but it has a charm that none of them do.
You can watch this on YouTube and download it for free on the Internet Archive.
Part of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ so-called Blood Trilogy with Blood Feastand Two Thousand Maniacs!, this one concerns Adam Sorg, an artist who is seeking the perfect color red for his latest masterpiece. While conventional science would tell you that blood would turn brown when it dries, in this movie, it remains the same garish tone that an Italian giallo would feature.
Color Me Blood Red and A Bucket of Blood are essentially the same basic film, except that where Roger Corman keeps much of the violence off-screen, you’re here for a Lewis film to see blood and organs splash all over the screen. You’re not here for subtlety.
Gordon Oas-Heim is positively unhinged here as the lead. It’s kind of amazing that years later, he’d play Manford the butler on The New Monkees. He also shows up in Lewis’ Moonshine Mountain as the sheriff (he used the stage name Adam Sorg here!) and also is in Andy Warhol’s Bad.
This would be the last film from the duo of Lewis and David F. Friedman. There were plans to make a fourth in the series — Suburban Roulette* — but Friedman thought they’d done all they could when it came to gore. He’d move on to make roughies and nudie cuties like A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine; 7 Into Snowy and The Acid Eaters, as well as Love Camp 7 and Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS using the name Herman Traeger.
You can watch this on Tubi or get the Arrow Video blu ray from Diabolik DVD. That has audio commentary by Lewis and Friedman, as well as Something Weird as a second bonus film. If you don’t have the gigantic Lewis box set, this is a great purchase.
*Lewis would end up making a movie with this title in 1968.
American-International Pictures had made some money in the U.S. with Mario Bava’s Black Sunday and Black Sabbath. It just made sene for Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson to gain more control by producing the films themselves instead of just buying the rights.
Working with Italian International Film and Spain’s Castilla Cooperativa Cinematográfica, AIP provided the services of writer Ib Melchior (The Angry Red Planet) to create the American version of this movie, which was based on Renato Pestriniero’s short story “One Night of 21 Hours.”
This movie was quite literally the Tower of Babel, as each major cast member performed in their respective languages: Barry Sullivan spoke English, Norma Bengell spoke Portuguese, Ángel Aranda Spanish and Evi Marandi Italian. And the low budget would have made a cheap-looking movie with any other director, but Bava was the master of in-camera effects and flooding his sets with color and fog. In a Fangoria article, he would say, “Do you know what that unknown planet was made of? A couple of plastic rocks — yes, two: one and one! — left over from a mythological movie made at Cinecittà! To assist the illusion, I filled the set with smoke.”
When 1979’s Alien came out, those that had been exposed to Bava’s work would let people know that many of the ideas in that film came directly from this modest film with its $200,000 budget — I know Joe Bob, everyone lies about budgets. While Ridley Scott and Dan O’Bannon would claim for years that they had never seen this movie before, the writer would later say, “I stole the giant skeleton from the Planet of the Vampires.”
Want to know how I know those claims are true? From the very start of this film, two large ships — the Galliott and the Argos — in deep space respond to an SOS call and are lured to a planet where alien beings either take their bodies over or murder them. The crew of the Argos instantly begins murdering one another — with only Captain Markary (Sullivan) able to pull his crew out of madness. When they arrive at the other ship, everyone is already dead, including Markary’s brother.
Soon, the bodies of the dead are walking as if alive, the ships are damaged beyond repair, and crew members are getting wiped out (look for a young Ivan Rassimov — later of the giallos The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and All the Colors of the Dark, and the Star Wars clone The Humanoid — as one of them!).
While this film is 55 years old, I have no interest in ruining the ending for you. Instead, I want you to sit and bask in its colorful glow, awash in fog and mystery, with pulpy science fiction heroes running around in fetishy costumes and discovering skeletons that could in no way be human. It is everything that is magic about film.
Atlas — the comic company that tried to challenge Marvel and DC in the 1970’s — combined I Am Legend with this film to create the comic Planet of the Vampires. Much like all of their books, it only ran three issues, but the first one boasts a cover with pencils by Pat Broderick with Neal Adams-inks and other issues have great work by Russ Heath. The first issue was also written by future G.I. Joe mastermind Larry Hama. I have no doubt that Atlas did not pay AIP for the rights to this.
— Sam Panico
In 1972 Marvel Comics founder and publisher Martin Goodman left Marvel, selling the company in 1968—a company which he founded in 1939. When Marvel failed to honor Goodman’s retirement agreement to allow his son Chip to run the company, Goodman Sr. created Seaboard Periodicals and the Atlas Comics imprint in June of 1974 to go head-to-head with Marvel.
And by April of 1975—it was all over.
During Seaboard’s ten short months of existence, they published between two to four issues across 31 titles (comics and magazine-periodicals) for a total of 72 issues. In addition to creating original superhero characters, Seaboard attempted to acquire the rights to Japan’s Toho Studios’ stable of monsters, such as Godzilla, along with TV’s then popular Kolchak: The Night Stalker (check out our “Exploring: Dan Curtis” featurette) and a series of pulp-action spy novels.
Another one of Seaboard’s choices for adaptation came courtesy of Charlton Heston’s back-to-back hits with Planet of the Apes (1968; check out out “Ape Week” of reviews of the franchise), The Omega Man (1971) and Soylent Green (1973) (check out our September 2019 “Atomic Dustbin” of Apoc film reviews)—so began the legal processes to acquire the rights to and create a comic book version of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend.
And Matheson refused.
So Seaboard’s staff of writers and artists came up with their own variant of Matheson’s tale: a hybrid of Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man that also bared a striking similarity to Yul Brenner’s New York-based post-apocalyptic entry: The Ultimate Warrior (1974). And, of course, as Sam pointed out, the writers at Seabord dumped a heaping, radioactive helping of the Master Bava’s Planet of the Vampires into the atomic dustbin for good measure. (You don’t think so? Check out those black leather-yellow piped uniforms in Bava’s film against the white-blue piped uniforms of the Ares IV crew.) And, as with their rips of those 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros.’ apoc properties, Seaboard didn’t pay AIP a dime for the rights.
And while surely John Carpenter was influenced by those four films, an apocalypse film critic can’t help but wonder if Carpenter read those three mid-1975 comic issues of Seaboard’s Planet of Vampires in creating his vision of a dystopian Big Apple for his own game-changing science fiction film: Escape from New York (1981)—all that was missing was The Empire State Building’s use as an architectural spine to support a domed city on the isle of Manhattan.
And Sergio Martino didn’t pay AVCO Embassy a dime.
And, as Sam explored, a whole bunch of people ripped off Alien (read a rundown of his reviews of those Alien rips HERE and HERE) . . . which ripped off Planet of Vampires . . . and no one paid Dan O’Bannon a dime. So it all evens out. Bava wins the apoc sweepstakes.
You can watch Bava’s incredible film on Amazon Prime.
— R.D Francis
About the Authors: Sam Panico is the proprietor of B&S About Movies. You can learn more about the writings ofR.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S Movies.
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