EDITOR’S NOTE: I think this movie is where Franco — on April 26, 2020 — won me over. Yeah, it’s a goofy movie, but I sure fell in love with it.
Also known as Sadist Erotica, The Case of the Two Beauties, Two Avenging Angelsand Red Lips Sadisterotica, this mindblast from Jess Franco is kinda sorta a Eurospy movie, but you get the feeling that Mr. Franco just wants to get to the choking and nudity and whipping and forget whatever minor plot there is.
Basically: two lesbian detectives are trying to find criminals, so they themselves pose as a supercriminal named Red Lips (this goes back to Franco’s second movie, Red Lips, which was before Bondmania). The police have no idea and the tone of the films go from swinging fun and humor to outright brutality with no warning whatsoever.
I have no idea if I can explain what happens in this movie, which starts with an attractive brunette — Franco loved his brunettes, so get ready — being ripped to shreds by a werewolf man while a rich guy named Klaus Thiller watches and paints it all.
Then Red Lips steals a painting and we learn that the two lesbians, the blonde Regina (Rosanna Yanni, Count Dracula’s Great Love) and redhead Diana (Janine Reynaud, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail) wear the mask and outfit when it suits them.
So yeah. The girls get hired to find someone that Thiller probably killed, they sleep with every man around them and yet still wind up with one another. Also: every few minutes, just when things threaten to get boring, there’s a go go dancing scene filled with nudity and blaring music.
This movie made no sense and I loved it for that reason. You might hate it. Who can say?
EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally watched this on April 25, 2020 but are bringing it back for this month of all things Franco. Jess Franco. There are no other Francos in our world. Well, maybe Franco Nero.
This movie is completely off the rails from the very first minute of screen time. Jess Franco is an acquired taste, but here, he’s tasting like the finest of wine, as jazzy beats play over Eurospy action. This was his first film working with composer Bruno Nicolai and it all works like magic.
Ray Danton plays Lucky, who is very much a gentleman thief. You’ll recognize him from playing Sandokan in two films, as well as spy appearances in Special Agent Super Dragon, Code Name: Jaguar and the abortive Derek Flint TV pilot, Our Man Flint: Dead on Target.
There’s some plot about counterfeiting here, but really it’s an excuse for Lucky to run around and romance women. Quite literally, the movie ends the way it does because, as our hero says, “We ran out of money.”
This movie is a blast. Do yourself a favor and hunt it down.
As a kid, I only saw the end of Clive Donner’s directing career — TV movies like Babes In Toyland and Spectre and weird stuff like Old Dracula, The Nude Bomb and Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen.
At one point, he was a big part of the British New Wave, making movies like What’s New Pussycat?, Nothing but the Best and The Caretaker.
Luv wasn’t well-received by critics, but I think it was just the inevitable backlash against what the old guard was told was the next new thing.
The story begins with Harry Berlin (Jack Lemmon) about to jump off of a bridge before he is distracted by an old friend he barely remembers, Milt Manville (Peter Falk), who can’t stop bragging about how good his life is. Harry has a plan, though. He plans on leaving his wife Ellen Manville (Elaine May, who went on to write many a romantic comedy) and hopes that Harry can take care of her when he’s gone.
The problem? Milt and Ellen love each other more than they love their new spouses, so they try and get Harry to fall for Milt’s Linda. Either that or he’s going to have to really jump off the bridge.
I kind of love the poster for this, which panders to hippies, who were all either avoiding theaters or waiting for Easy Rider.
Paul Montgomery and his wife Jennifer (James Caan and Katharine Ross) are wealthy New Yorkers who amuse themselves by holding parties in their townhouse and playing sadistic games on their friends.
Then they meet Lisa Schindler, an older cosmetics saleswoman played by Simone Signoret. She faints as soon as she enters their home and spends the night. The woman may be psychic and definitely fits into the gameplaying nature of the couple, as she sets up some simulated situations for them to argue about, like a grocery deliveryman (Don Stroud) potentially having an affair with Jennifer, just to see how they’ll react.
When the deliveryman comes back the next day, Paul threatens him with a gun after he sees the man make a pass at his wife. But it’s all a joke on his part, as the gun fires blanks, until the second shot murders him and they have to hide his body. But when do the pranks stop? When they encase the man in plaster? Or when his ghost keeps walking through the house?
While the part of Lisa was originally intended for Marlene Dietrich, Simone Signoret makes sense, as the film she may be most famous for, Diabolique, has a similar tone. It’s interesting that in 1967, as everyone was moving to the New Hollywood, Harrington had an eye to the glory days of the past.
I Dream of Jeannie was created and produced by Sidney Sheldon* and it seems like for a long time, he was the only person that believed in it. He originally wanted the first season to film in color — it was one of only two shows on NBC at the time not in color, but special photographic effects employed to achieve Jeannie’s magic weren’t technologically advanced enough to be in a full range of colors yet — but NBC did not want to pay it.
It was $400 an episode.
The network and Screen Gems didn’t think the show would make it to a second season. But Sheldon saw that ABC’s Bewitched was a success and bet on the show.
He was right. It was in the top 30 shows for almost every year that it was on before becoming a syndication powerhouse.
In the pilot episode, “The Lady in the Bottle”, astronaut USAF Captain Tony Nelson (Larry Hagman) lands his one-man capsule Stardust One on a deserted island in the South Pacific. While wandering the beach, Tony notices a strange bottle** that moves by itself. When he rubs it, smoke and a genie (Barbara Eden) pop out.
Tony’s first wish is to be able to understand her, then for a helicopter to rescue him. Jeannie, who has been trapped in the bottle for 2,000 years, falls in love with him and follows Tony back home where she soon breaks up his engagement with his commanding general’s daughter, Melissa. It seems like this was a storyline being set up for the long game, but Sheldon realized that this romantic triangle didn’t have much rope.
Tony keeps Jeannie in her bottle until he realizes she needs a life of her own, which is mostly her using her genie powers to try and make his life better. He worries that if anyone finds out that she exists that he won’t get to be part of NASA, but his worries lead him to being investigated by psychiatrist U.S. Air Force Colonel Dr. Alfred Bellows (Hayden Rorke) with the only person — at first — that knows his secret being Major Roger Healey (Bill Daly).
Unlike many of the sitcoms of the era, I Dream of Jeannie had multipart story arcs (which were created to serve as backgrounds for national contests). For example, nobody knew when Jeannie’s birthday was and the guessing game led to a contest, with the answer being April 1. There was also a four-episode event where Jeannie was locked in a safe on the moon and fans had to guess the combination to save her and another where Tony was replaced and had to be found. But there are also several long storylines, like Jeannie’s evil sister also named Jeannie, Jeannie’s ever-changing origin story which includes Eden’s first husband Michael Ansara as the Blue Djinn, Jeannie taking over the crown of her home country Basenji and so many more.
Supposedly, Hagman was so hard to work with that the producers seriously considered replacing him with Darren McGavin. They even wrote out a story with Tony losing Jeannie and McGavin finding her, but it never ended up happening. In her 2011 book Jeannie Out of the Bottle, Eden wrote, “Larry himself has made no secret about the fact he was taking drugs and drinking too much through many of the I Dream of Jeannie years and that he has regrets about how that impacted him.”
When there were two TV movies in the 80s, Hagman didn’t return. In I Dream of Jeannie… Fifteen Years Later his role was played by Wayne Rogers and as he’s on a space mission in I Still Dream of Jeannie, he’s simply written out and Hagman’s Dallas co-star Ken Kercheval took over as Jeannie’s master. There was also a cartoon called Jeannie that aired from 1973 to 1975 that had Julie McWhirter (who in addition to being the voice in so many cartoons is also the wife of Rick Dees) play Jeannie, “Curly” Joe Besser as Babu a genie in training and Mark Hamill as Corey Anders, a high school student.
Eden has also gone on the record as saying that she never connected with another actor in the same way as she did with Hagman. They’d reunite for the 1971 TV movie A Howling in the Woods.
Why did the show end? It was still near the top thirty after all. Well, Eden believes that there were enough episodes for syndication already and the ratings had gone down after Jeannie and Nelson got married in season 5. No one except for the network wanted that and it eliminated the romantic tension of the show.
I grew up watching this show multiple times a day, often paired with its one-time rival Bewitched. Just going back through these — the original 8 episodes with Paul Frees narration instead of the theme song are a revelation — has made the end of the year doldrums so much better.
You can get all 139 episodes on the Mill Creek I Dream of Jeannie The Complete Series blu ray set. You’ll get hours and hours of fun for a really great price at Deep Discount.
*Sheldon was inspired by the movie The Brass Bottle, which has Tony Randall’s character get a genie played by Burl Ives. Randall’s girlfriend was played by Eden.
**The bottle is actually a special Christmas 1964 Jim Beam liquor decanter containing “Beam’s Choice” bourbon whiskey. How weird is that?
Before Austin Powers was a thing — way before — Edwardian adventurer and gentleman Adam Adamant woke up from a long sleep in 1966 and joined Georgina Jones on a series of adventures. That said, this series also has a dandy gentleman with a hidden sword and a gorgeous and capable female partner three years after The Avengers, but hey — it’s still pretty awesome.
Lured into a trap in the hopes of rescuing the love of his life Louise, The Face had finally trapped his nemesis in a gigantic block of ice. Hiding his identity behind a leather mask and a sinister whisper of a voice, The Face gave Adam one last wish. Ever the gentleman, he asked to see Louise before death. Imagine how he felt when he learned that she was really in league with his archenemy! The last words that he hears — and that haunt him every time he’s unconscious in the episodes — is “So clever, but oh so vulnerable.”
Sixty-four years later — hmm, I wonder if there’s a synchronistic Beatles reference afoot — the building is Adam is buried inside is destroyed and he comes back to life. After running from a hospital and collapsing on the street, he’s rescued by Georgina, who has read all of the stories of his life and wants to be part of his new cases.
Gerald Harper played Adam, while Georgina was a role for Ann Holloway in the now lost pilot and Juliet Harmer in the series. I’ve always found it amusing that Adam constantly believes that Georgina has to be a boy based on the way that she carries herself, while he remains quite the fancy gentleman. Adamant’s manservant, a former music hall artist named William E. Simms, was played by Jack May who is in Night After Night After Nightand Trog.
By the second season of this show — created by many of the men that originated Dr. Who like Donald Cotton, Richard Harris and Sydney Newman (who oversaw the team that came up with The Avengers) — The Face had come back, freezing himself right after Adam and watched over within his ice tomb by Louise.
Only 29 episodes were made and sadly just 17 remain. I wish there were more and I’d love to see this come back as something new, but then people would just think it was stealing from Agent Powers. I was happy to learn that in 2020, Big Finish put out two audiobooks with new adventures. They’ve also put out audio tales of The Avengers, Blake’s 7, Dan Dare, Dr. Who, Dark Shadows, The Prisoner, Space:1999, Terrahawks and many more.
You know, if Herschell Gordon Lewis only made his nudie movies or just the gore, he’d be celebrated still, but for my money, the real good Lewis movies are the ones that almost frighten you by their incoherence or ability to fully create a world that is unlike any we will ever live in, like how She-Devils on Wheels gives us a reality — in 1968 — where female bikers are the alpha predator of all creation. Or the nihilistic mind blast that’s Just for the Hell of It which ends with a character saying, “Who cares man” when everyone he knows is dead.
Then there’s Something Weird.
Everything starts when Cronin Mitchell tries to help a man who has fallen from an electrical pole and gets rewarded with a face full of electricity which burns his face off. He wants to die — and why wouldn’t he — but he’s also gained ESP thanks to all that pure energy blasting him right in the brain.
At this point, most people would step back, see that their work is good and then finish the movie. But Lewis is a trickster god who felt the need for more, more, more.
Mitchell has become a bandaged hermit who gives psychic readings when the Bible of the Witches ends up in his hands, followed by a literal witch who promises that he can have his face back if he agrees to be her lover. Now he’s handsome again, but a slave to the sorceress.
She becomes his assistant Ellen and now Mitchell is hunting serial killers along with a karate chopping government agent who is in love with Ellen because he has no idea that she really looks like the cartoonist witch but hey, maybe love is blind. To find this elusive killer, it’s going to take some LSD.
But before that, Mitchell levitates for an audience and then finds a ghost inside a church. These side stories just pad the 80 minutes of running time but honestly, I’d pay whatever money is needed for more adventures of Mitchell being weird.
Anyways, Jordan can’t deal with the fact that he can’t have Ellen, so he goes nutzoid and attacks her. She escapes and demands that her psychic slave murder the government agent, so Mitchell psychically attacks him with several blue blankets which somehow the misogynistic loverboy escapes and what is this movie?
Then this whole thing goes proto-giallo as Mitchell takes the LSD and discovers that the cop that’s been leading them through the case is the killer, but the trip he’s on leads directly into a bullet between the eyes and our hero is dead.
The movie keeps going.
So now Jordan can be with Ellen and sees her, but at that moment he sees the witch and runs into traffic and burns his face off, which she heals but…
Time is a flat circle.
This is a movie that obsesses me. Like I can’t stop thinking about it. Who was it for? Why was it made? Yeah, Lewis was in it to make money, but who would pay to see this (me)?
All these Film Twitter kids writing about how movies stick in their head for life and how things are fever dreams and they’ve never had the moment where you randomly put on this movie and are not ready for its power. About as perfect a movie that’s filled with imperfections can be.
The original title of this movie translates as With Heart in Mouth, but it was also released under several alternative titles, including I Am What I Am, Deadly Sweet, En cinquième vitesse (In Fifth Gear), Dead stop – Le coeur aux lèvres (Dead Stop – The Heart to the Lips), Con el corazón en la garganta (With My Heart in My Throat), Heart Beat and Ich bin wie ich bin – Das Mädchen aus der Carnaby Street (I Am What I Am – The Girl from Carnaby Street.
Bernard (Jean-Louis Trintignant) discovers Janes (Ewa Aulin, Candy) standing over a dead body in a London nightclub and instantly believes that she has to be innocent. Her father has recently been killed in a car accident, but Jane thinks that he was killed because of a blackmail scam gone wrong. And that body? The blackmailer.
He protects her from a series of shadowy men — including a dwarf — and the police that are following them both as they go deeper and deeper into the darkness that is her life. So does the control that he thinks he has over her life, but Jane is the kind of hurricane that has seemingly destroyed many a man before.
Man, this movie is something else. Tinto Brass directed it and it looks part comic book, part documentary, shot with hidden camera and wild zooms. It’s as 1967 as it gets and I mean that in the best of ways, with loud fuzzed-out music, pop art sensibility, switches from black and white to color and moments where Aulin’s beauty threatens to shatter whatever reality exists on film. Guido Crepax, whose comic Valentina was the basis of Baba Yaga, drew the storyboards and his art appears throughout the movie.
Brass’ only giallo, this feels more Antonioni than Bava. And yeah, it may go on a bit too long, but when it’s on, it’s on.
Now, to be up front, Aulin was all of sixteen when she made this and she has some semi-nude scenes. If that offends you, you can choose not to watch this.
You may say, “This title sounds a lot like Amicus’ Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors.” The studio and their lawyers felt the same way, as this movie was forced to change its title, which means that it played under the other names Return from the Past, The Blood Suckers, Alien Massacre, Gallery of Horror and The Witch’s Clock.
It was directed by David L. Hewitt, who went from working in a traveling spook show to making movies like The Wizard of Mars, Monsters Crash the Pajama Party, The Mighty Gorga and The Girls from Thunder Strip. He wrote the script, basing it on stories by Russ Jones, who created Creepy. Jones also plays a man killed by a mob and a corpse back from the dead, even creating his own makeup.
“The Witches Clock” is the only story with lead actor John Carradine in it — he also narrates — and tells the story of a couple buying a Salem mansion with a haunted clock that has the power to bring the dead back to life. It has a pretty great conclusion, as the entire house and everyone in the story is set on fire, with Carradine’s character coming back to start the cycle all over again with a new family.
“King of the Vampires” features Scotland Yard against a bloodsucker. There’s a pretty forward thinking close here as well with the police unable to wrap their minds around the fact that the killer just might not be a man.
“Monster Raid” isn’t as good as the first two stories, as it’s a simple back from the dead to get revenge on a conniving wife story.
“The Spark of Life” lives up to its name, as Lon Chaney Jr. is a scientist who gets two students to help him bring a man back from the dead. However, their experiment isn’t a success because that man was a murderer and he may have been better dead.
“Count Alucard” pits Dracula against Harker (one of several roles in this movie for Roger Gentry), a vampire hater with a secret.
This movie does something amazing: it steals from Roger Corman, who usually steals from himself. There’s footage from The Terror, House of Usher, The Raven and The Haunted Palace used in several places in this.
“So shocking it will sliver your liver!” That’s a great tagline. This isn’t a great film. But any movie that has Carradine as a narrator can never be hated.
If I had to pick two Mexican stars to be secret agents, it would be Santo and Jorge Rivera, who we all know as Mace from Fulci’s insane ode to fog Conquest. Yes, the Eurospy craze stuck around a little but longer in Mexico and if Santo gets to be a spy, so be it.
The whole scheme in this movie is to counterfeit money and — I’m guessing — destroy the world’s economy. Everyone evil has a watch welded to their wrist that allows the bosses to listen in and destroy them, if they must.
Somehow, even more than a Bond film, this become a proto-Andy Sidaris affair which I could not applaud for more fervently. Yes, Jorge ends up in bed with a Japanese exotic dancer and then gets attacked by a small plane that he blows up with a bazooka. As far as I’m concerned, that sounds like this movie could have been filmed on Savage Beach.
For some reason — feel free to make up the story in your head as you watch — Ruth is absolutely in love with her enemy Jorge, saying things like “Whatever happens, I really love you.” and telling him that she never lied before expiring from the multitude of bullets that she’s been perforated by.
I am all for more spy movies with Santo and luckily, René Cardona and son would immediately make El Tesoro de Moctezuma, which would bring our secret agent amigos together again.
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