Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

The Wild Angels earned $7 million on a budget of $360,000, making it the highest-grossing low-budget film of its era. Not bad for a movie that had script issues between Roger Corman and Charles B. Griffith, as well as numerous re-writes by Peter Bogdanovich. Plus, the US State Department tried to prevent the film from being shown in Venice on the grounds that it “did not show America the way it is.”

And yet the Hells Angels brought a $5 million defamation lawsuit against Corman for how they were portrayed in this movie, which really makes me want to be a biker. Maybe they didn’t notice while they were acting as extras, each getting paid $35 per day for their cooperation and $20 per day for their motorcycles.

It’s also the first movie that Peter Fonda would be associated with the counter-culture and motorcycles. While promoting The Trip and autographing astill from this movie showing he and Bruce Dern on one motorcycle, the actor came up with the concept for Easy Rider.

It’s also a movie packed with taglines that shove you into the theater like “Their credo is violence…their God is hate…and they call themselves The Wild Angels” and “The most terrifying film of your time!”

Heavenly Blues (Fonda) shouts, “We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. We wanna be free to ride! We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man. And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that’s what we’re gonna do. We are gonna have a good time. We are gonna have a party.” That opening is at the beginning of Primal Scream’s “Loaded,” which informs so much of Edgar Wright’s The World’s End.

This episodic film moves from trying to find Joe “Loser” Kearns’ (Dern) stolen motorcycle to the gang evading the police to plan the Loser’s funeral and how Blues, Loser’s girl Gayesh (Diane Ladd) and Blues’ lover Mike (Nancy Sinatra) are pulled along as the gang disintegrates as a final party descends into madness.

The close of this movie, as Blues shovels dirt onto the grave of his best friend and says, “There’s nowhere to go,” is exactly why I keep coming back to Corman movies, which have such a heart and something to say in the midst of the mayhem and carny edge that get you into the theater.

We also have this movie to thank for Laura Dern, as the daughter of Dern and Ladd was conceived while this movie was being made.

Tokijiro (Kinnosuke Nakamura) has left behind being a killer and instead is wandering in search of freedom. That’s impossible, as he still has obligations, including one to a gang boss which forces him to kill a man named Mutsuda no Sanzo (Chiyonosuke Azuma). Seeking absolution, he listens to the man’s dying wish and vows to take care of his victim’s widow Okinu (Junko Ikeuchi) and her young son. That doesn’t matter to the Yakuza, who now want the entire family killed.

Directed by Tai Kato, whose Eighteen Years In Prison was also released by Radiance, this takes the novel Kutsukake Tokijiro by Shin Hasegawa and creates a gangster film that’s set in the Muromachi period. Tokijiro may be the deadliest of all swordsmen, but he has a code of honor that he must follow no matter what, even when it goes against his moral code. Complicated, yes. That said, he leads a violent, bloody and often depressing existence in which he must follow duty to the end.

Even those who kill for a living have to believe in something. Can someone ever wash their hands of all that murder? And for a movie that asks these questions, it isn’t afraid to present up close and gritty battles filled with blood.

The Radiance Films blu ray of Tokijiro: Lone Yakuza has extras including an interview with Koushi Ueno about the film’s place in genre cinema history, a visual essay on star Kinnosuke Nakamura by Japanese cinema expert Robin Gatto; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow and a limited edition booklet featuring new writing by scholar Ivo Smits and a newly translated archival review.

You can get it from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Murder Clinic was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 26, 1979 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, July 16, 1983 at 2:00 a.m.

The Murder Clinic predates the Argento era of giallo, coming around the same time as the Bava instigation with The Girl Who Knew Too Much and the krimi films. Known in its native Italy as La lama nel corpo (The Knife in the Body), it was written by Luciano Martino (brother of Sergio and writer of Delirium and The Whip and the Body) and Ernesto Gastaldi (The Sweet Body of Deborah, All the Colors of the Dark, The Case of the Bloody Iris and so many more) with direction coming from Elio Scardamaglia (this is the only film he’d direct as he usually produced movies) and Lionello De Felice. It’s based on the book The Knife In The Body by Robert Williams, a former Tuskegee Airman who became an actor. He also wrote Turkey Shoot, which really means that his work was produced all over the world.

The story takes place in 1870s England, so this movie can also be considered a gothic horror film. Dr. Vance, the director of a mental hospital (Wiliam Berger) is restoring his sister’s face using patients as raw material, all while a masked killer uses the giallo weapon of choice, a strait razor, to kill other people within the hospital.

This story would replay itself across many films—Slaughter Hotel, Faceless, Mansion of the Doomed (well, that owes a debt to Eyes Without a Face)—while the first scene, with a young woman being chased by a killer in the woods at night, and a scene where the killer stalks his prey in a room full of hanging sheets, feel like they inspired Suspiria.

The Murder Clinic itself feels indebted to Bava, really taking to heart the color strategies of Blood and Black Lace.

This is a movie with a fascinating release history. After Berger spent some time in an Italian prison—he had been wrongly accused of possessing hashish and cocaine—it was re-released with a line on the poster that said, “William Berger, guilty or innocent?”

In the U.S., Revenge of the Living Dead was renamed to cash in on Romero’s zombie film. It played triple features with Curse of the Living Dead (Kill, Baby, Kill!) and Fangs of the Living Dead (Malenka) in the 70s as the Orgy of the Living Dead.

With a great location—the Villa Parisi, home of Blood for Dracula and Patrick Still Lives—and appearances by Françoise Prévost (The Return of the Exorcist), Mary Young (who only appeared in this movie and Secret Agent 777), and Barbara Wilson (her only film, and she really should have done more), The Murder Clinic is an early giallo worthy of being enshrined in your collection.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cyborg 2087 was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 1, 1975 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, October 18, 1975 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, January 14, 1978 at 11:30 p.m.

2087: Free thought is illegal. The population is docile. Only a secret group of free thinkers exist and they are able to send Garth A7 (Michael Rennie) back in time to either stop Professor Sigmund Marx (Eduard Franz) from showing his new invention to the government or, if that fails, to murder him. Yes, what Marx makes today will create the mind control of the future. As Garth A7 escapes back in time, he is followed by two other cyborgs called Tracers (Dale Van Sickel and Troy Melton).

To succeed in his mission, he takes over the mind of Marx’s assistant Dr. Sharon Mason (Karen Steele), using her to find Dr. Zeller (Warren Stevens), who removes the tracking device that allows the Tracers to find him.

A member of the Marines in World War II, director Franklin Aderon got into Hollywood as a technical advisor on the serial The Fighting Marines. He wrote screenplays and produced at Republic Pictures before directing his own movies, including Canadian Mounties vs. Atomic Invaders and Dimension 5. He also directed several Western TV shows.

This was written by Arthur C. Pierce, who went from being in the Navy during the war to shooting industrial films and creating special effects. He eventually became a writer, making Beyond the Time Barrier and The Cosmic Man. He also directed The Astral Factor, The Navy vs. the Night Monsters, Women of the Prehistoric Planet, Las Vegas Hillbillies, Mutiny In Outer Space and The Human Duplicators.

For as similar as some of Pierce’s stories are to other films — Beyond the Time Barrier cashed in on The Time Machine and The Cosmic Man is like The Day the Earth Stood Still — this film predates Terminator 2 with the idea of a machine coming back in time to murder the inventor that led to its creation.

Speaking of The Day the Earth Stood Still, this film has its star, Michael Rennie, who is playing a very similar role to Klaatu. He would do the same in a three episode story in the TV series The Invaders, in which he played one of the alien leaders, Alquist.

The strangest part of this is that Dr. Mason falls in love with Garth A7, even when he tells her that he had to get her to do things against her will. It doesn’t matter, as she has found something much like love with him. She asks him to bring her back to his future and he tells her that when he goes back, if he was successful, he will no longer exist. He is willing to cease being to make tomorrow free; she forgets him as he walks back into time and by the end, is making a date with another man instead of looking at this cyborg with a blinking metal chest as a project to fix, a blank slate to project her love upon.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Bubble was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 6, 1979 at 1:00 a.m. It played as Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth. 

Tony (Johnny Desmond) flies Mark (Michael Cole) and his pregnant wife Catherine (Deborah Walley) through a storm which causes them to land. She gives birth as the men wander the city, finding it filled with all sorts of odd buildings and technology, as well as drugged out people. It’s all covered by a dome that keeps people from leaving, other than the shadow that keeps appearing over the town that pulls people into the sky.

As Tony is taken away, Mark starts to dig under the dome before he’s caught. He gives a speech about being free, just in time for it to rain and the aliens to go away.

The Bubble came out in 3D in 1966, years after the first of the fad, and had twenty minutes of pure popping out at the camera moments that got cut from the 2D version of this. This was made in Space-Vision 3-D, the same process that was used for Andy Warhol’s Dracula. It was directed and written by Arch Oboler, who also directed and wrote the 3D movie Bwana Devil and The Twonky.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 11, 1967 at 11:20 p.m.

Instead of having that who is your favorite Bond discussion, we should all talk about who our favorite remix remake ripoff Bond is or which movie is best. Man, Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill is a pretty good one, even if it has some of the most laddish louts I’ve seen in one of these.

Based on Kommisar X, a popular series of crime novels from Germany, Kommissar X is a private detective and FBI Special Agent named Joe Walker, who is played by Tony Kendall. He’s paired with New York City police captain Tom Rowland is played by Brad Harris).

This is just the first of seven movies in this series of films. In 1966 alone, this movie, Kommissar X – Drei gelbe Katzen (Three Yellow Cats AKA Death is Nimble, Death is Quick) and Kommissar X – In den Klauen des goldenen Drachen (So Darling, So Deadly) all were released, followed by Kommissar X – Drei grüne Hunde (Death Trip AKA Kill Me Gently) in 1967, Kommissar X – Drei blaue Panther (Three Blue Panthers AKA Kill Panther Kill) a year later, Kommissar X – Drei goldene Schlangen (Three Golden Serpents AKA Island of Lost Girls) in 1969 and finally, 1971’s Kommissar X jagt die roten Tiger (FBI: Operation Pakistan AKA Tiger Gang).

The two men meet and come together to figure out why a scientist named Bob Carroll was killed. It. turns out that a rich villain named Oberon (Nikola Popović) who was stealing gold from his partners by irradiating it and having Carroll fix that at the cost of his own life when he became sick.

With a theme song called “I Love You Joe Walker,” you know that he’s going to be one of those spies that swing.

I kind of wonder how every Eurospy villain has an army made up of women with go go boots. And somehow, Joe Walker can turn any of them to his side with just a kiss. One can only imagine if he can do that vertically, what he does when things get horizontal.

Director Gianfranco Parolini went from peplum to westerns to Eurospy with ease, making three of the movies in this series, as well as The Three Fantastic Supermen, If You Meet Sartana…Pray for Your Death, the three Sabata movies, God’s Gun and the fantastic Yeti Giant of the 20th Century. He wrote the script along with Giovanni Simonelli (Jungle Raiders, The Crimes of the Black Cat, The Face With Two Left Feet, A Cat In the Brain), based on the books by Paul Alfred Müller AKA Bert F. Island.

This movie is a total blast, made in the time when ironic and cynical films did not seem to exist.