EDITOR’S NOTE: This film and its Jess Franco-directed sequel The Girl from Rio, as well as the 2003 movie Sumaru, are all based on Sax Rohmer’s Sumuru, who leads the Order of Our Lady, a secret society that recruits beautiful women from around the world and teaches them how to seduce and exploit men, all with the goal of establishing a matriarchal world order.
If there’s a Venn diagram of what I love in movies, this movie would be at the center of it. It’s directed by Lindsay Shonteff, who was behind so many spy films and other moments of outright cinema lunacy like Night After Night After Night. It was filmed at the Shaw Brothers studios in Hong Kong. And it was produced by Harry Alan Towers, whose life included moments of bringing rock and roll to Europe, making Fu Manchu movies and oh yeah, running a vice ring. To top it all off, it’s a movie about an army of women ready to take over the world.
Sumuru is a woman as gorgeous as she is cunning, using an all-female army to kill off world leaders — like Klaus Kinski as President Boong of Sinoseia! — and replace them with more capable women. I really have no issues with her plan, her choice of henchwomen or Shirley Eaton in this role (she was also Jill Masterson in Goldfinger).
Nick West (Frankie Avalon!) and Tommy Carter (George Nader, Robot Monster) are on the case, particularly after Sumuru frames Nick for murder.
Krista Nell (The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance), Maria Rohm (Towers’ wife, who would end up being in all manner of Jess Franco films) and Essie Lin Chia (Return of the One-Armed Swordsman) all make appearances.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This Santo movie was first on our site on May 16. 2020. It’s yet another example of space women coming to Earth to take over. It’s also a totally awesome telling of that trope.
Santo has battled everyone from his fellow wrestlers to zombies, vampires, vampire women, the King of Crime, evil wax figures, a Hotel of Death, the Strangler, the Ghost of the Strangler and Satanic Power at this point. So yes, it was time to put Martians into the camel clutch.
Santo battles Wolf Ruvinskis, who also played Neutron, and who was also a luchador. He also goes up against Maura Monti, who played The Batwoman. Yes, Martian women have come here and they’re ready to take all our masked wrestlers.
The Martians have Astral Eyes on the top of their heads, which allow them to disintegrate human beings. Luckily, they can’t last long in our atmosphere. And even their most comely interstellar lasses can’t seduce El Enmascarado de Plata.
There’s also a bad guy named Hercules who unmasks Santo, played by Spanish wrestler Benny Galant, who for some reason acted as a Frenchman while in Mexico. Santo pulls a Mil Mascaras years before that was a thing and has another mask underneath, screwing over that red planet rudo. Hurricane Ramirez — a wrestler who started as a movie character before becoming the real thing played by Eduardo Bonada — is in this, if you’re interested in 1960’s luchadors.
I mean, Mexican wrestlers fight aliens. Life can be perfect, if you allow it to be.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Back on June 29, 2020, I said, “Behold pure magic! You may have noticed that I have a weakness for movies where planetary races of female overlords descend on our little mudball and wipe humans out left and right. This is one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of the genre ever and has suddenly leaped to the top of the list.” As we work on an entire week of movies where evil women try to destroy Earth, how dare I not include this one, which comes from Alfredo B. Crevenna, the director of The Fury of the Karate Experts, one of the most out-there films ever, a movie that somehow combines Santo, kung fu mysticism, aliens, the Coral Castle and Atlantis.
After walking into a flying saucer-looking ride at a carnival, a group of humans is soon light speeding their way through space, the prisoners of a planet of women looking for a new home. Beyond the nuclear family being menaced, we also have a boxer who is in over his head with the mob, his girl and the gang of thugs out to make him pay.
Soon, they’re being experimented on by the evil queen Adastrea and helped by her twin Alburnia. There’s a legend on their planet that twins would arrive, with one serving a dark god and the other a being of light. They’re both played by Lorena Velazquez, whose acting career continues to this day. She’s as close to a scream queen as this era would produce, with roles in The Ship of Monsters, Macabre Legends of the Colony, She-Wolves of the Ring and, in perhaps her best-known horror role, she was Thorina, queen of the vampires in Santo contra Las Mujeres Vampiros. She’s beyond fabulous in this, threatening the lives of children in one scene and sweet and tender in the next.
Speaking of children, the space women have a plot to take human lungs — the younger the better — and use them to make their own ability to breathe our air.
One of the space women, Eritrea, is played by Maura Monti, who would play a similar role in Santo vs. the Martian Invasion, released the very same year. She’s also The Batwoman, which we covered last week.
This movie packs plenty of poignant moments and hilarious dialogue inside it, so much so that you’re unsure if you’re watching a drama or a comedy at points. The sets are astounding works of pop art, the aliens’ costumes leave little to the imagination and the bad guys are as bad as you can get. All movies should aspire to do so much with so little.
Rafael Portillo, come back on down, you’re back for another blast of strangeness, this time taking us to an island of dinosaurs! Much like Columbus searching for a trade route to the West Indies and finding Florida, these scientists are seeking Atlantis and end up somewhere else entirely, a place teeming with all manner of giant lizards.
Yes, the Professor (Manolo Fábregas, Two Mules for Sister Sara) has convinced Pablo (Genaro Moreno, Las Mujeres Panteras), Esther (Elsa Cárdenas, Giant) and Laura (Alma Delia Fuentes, Panic) to jump in a prop plane and seek out this secret spot. Of course, the plane crashes but everyone is having so much fun on the island — no one gets upset at all — that this seems like a breezy travelogue.
That is until Laura is taken by a caveman named Molo (Armando Silvestre, Santo contra Los Zombis) and together, they battle dinosaurs — amazingly, stolen from much bigger productions like One Million B.C.* — and fall in love, at which point she teaches him the value of money, shows his people how to make new weapons and gives the women tips on combing their hair. She’s like one of those angels from the Book of Enoch that comes down to Earth after the Great Fall only to teach us things like dying garments and how to use makeup**.
Everything works out . Well, a volcano does wipe out most of the island and that too was taken from that 1940 Hal Roach movie. So maybe not so well for everyone.
*To be fair, these lizards with fins glued on them show up in more than just this movie. You can also spot them in everything from Tarzan’s Desert Mystery, Two Lost Worlds and Untamed Women to Robot Monster, King Dinosaur and Teenage Caveman. Thanks to Mark David Welsh for pointing this out.
**The angel Azazel is the one who did all that, plus showed humans how to make swords, daggers, shields, breastplates, bracelets, ornaments and how to create jewelry. Other angels like Amezarack, Amaros, Baraqiel, Kokabel, Tamiel and Asradel had to content themselves with just showing humanity how to cast spells and astrology.
Known as The Panther Women, this Rene Cardona-directed lucha libre film really hits everything that I want out of movies. It’s got wrestling action galore. It has a Satanic sect of werepanther women. And it has an ancient curse. Seriously, this is the kind of movie that I dream of making.
This film is in the same universe as the Aztec Mummy films, Las Lobas del Ring and Las Luchadoras Contra El Médico Asesino. That is to say, it’s completely and insanely awesome.
A sect of Satanic werepanthers — they’re right in the title — are out for revenge for the warlock they worshipped getting killed a few hundred years ago.
Look out for the villain played by Tongolele, who set the screen ablaze in Isle of the Snake People! It also has Gerardo Zepeda in it, who plays El Angel*, who had been a pro wrestler for about 15 years before dedicating himself to acting, always playing “the mean bastard,” as he himself said, in movies like Santo and Blue Demon Against the Monsters, where he was the cyclops and a zombie. Plus, real life luchas such as Betty Grey, Marina Rey, Maria Guadalupe Delgado, Ma. Judith Mercado, Jesús Murcielago Velázquez, Cavernario Galindo and Reyes Olivia.
They could have made a few hundred of these movies — and they totally did — and I would watch every single one of them — and I do.
You can get this from VCI. They’ve also released it on blu ray along with La Mujer Murcielago, which you can get on Amazon.
*El Angel is a chemist, pro wrestler and crime fighter devoted to fighting occult forces. When asked why he wears a mask, he answers, “Because justice has no face.” He’s cool.
Instead of a luchador, 1967’s Rocambole Las Mujeres Amplas pits the superhero* against a mad scientist who has turned several women ugly and will only make them beautiful again if they do his bidding. I’m not a megalomaniacal mastermind, but that’s a pretty unique plot.
Director Emilio Gómez Muriel made seventy-seven movies, incuding La Ladrona, Blue Demon: Destructor of Spies, the Neutron movies and Sangre en El Ring.
Gilda Mirós, who is one of the women brought into this plot, also went up against El Santo in Santo el Enmascarado de Plata contra Invasión de Los Marcianos and Blue Demon in Blue Demon y Las Invasoras. Regina Torné would get involved in a similar plot, with her beauty destroyed and only an evil scientist played by John Carradine — trust me, if a doctor played by John Carradine offers to help you, you’re in a bad way — in La Señora Muerte, which is awesome.
So why does Rocambole not look anything like he has in any movie ever? I blame Bat-Mania. I mean, just look at the poster for the sequel to this one, Rocambole contra La Secta del Escorpion.
*Rocambole is a French superhero who started as a master thief and then went to the India where he gained mystic powers and a group of adventurers who he leads from the shadows, like, well, The Shadow. According to Cool French Comics, Rocambole bridges the gap between “old-fashioned gothic novel to modern heroic fiction, in the sense that it created and virtually defined all the archetypes of modern super-heroes and super-villains.”
Gappa: The Triphibian Monster, originally released in the U.S. as Monster from a Prehistoric Planet, is pretty much Gorgo with monsters taken from Japanese legend. That’s totally fine with me, because this movie is absolutely gorgeous.
It’s crazy that this was the only giant monster movie that the Nikkatsu studio made. After this, it’s all Roman Porno and pinky violence.
An expedition from Tokyo heads to Obelisk Island — you know, just like Skull Island — where the president of Playmate Magazine, Mr. Funazu, wants to make a resort. The natives welcome them warmly until the forbidden zone is breached and the expedition takes a gappa egg with them. They plead that the egg’s parents will do anything to get it and you know how humans act in Japanese kaiju films. That means that before you know it, we have two giant bird/turtle/lizard monsters going wild all over Japan to get their baby back.
This is a movie that could never be made today, because all of the natives of Obelisk Island are basically Japanese actors painted in blackface. Plus, the actions of the civilized people cause the Gappas to ignite a volcano and destroy every single villager except Saki, a young boy painted brown.
Speaking of racism, there was an urban legend that Nikkatsu’s international English translation had the line, “The monsters are attacking Tokyo. Fortunately they are attacking the Negro section of town.” This is not true.
Akira Watanabe left Toho to work on the special effects for this movie. He’s known for finishing the designs of Baragon and King Ghidora. There must not have been any bad blood, because he came back to be the art director for movies like King Kong Escapes, Son of Godzilla and Prophecies of Nostradamus.
Happy holidays, everyone. To help celebrate, this is the first of two very horrifying holiday options for you to watch. Despite Santa being in the title of this movie, he only briefly appears, but that isn’t why we watched this movie. No, we’re here because this is another film in the career of Herschell Gordon Lewis that we had to check off.
Yes, parents that dropped their kids off at the theater for an all-day matinee in 1967 probably had no idea that just a few years earlier, the man they are trusting with the psyches of their children made Blood Feast.
So how did this even happen? Well, producer J. Edwin Baker was also a spook-show performer known as Dr. Silkini — his act was The Asylum of Horrors — and he hired Lewis to make a movie for his friend magician Roy Huston.
Huston plays Merlin, making this the second baffling holiday movie* I’ve seen where Santa joins forces with King Arthur’s closest confidant. I have no idea why this is a thing, to be perfectly honest.
The film starts with Santa Claus chilling out on the day after Christmas by reading some Mother Goose, which puts him to sleep. This section is tacked on, of course, to the original film so that they could get more money out of it. It’s also so shoddily made that we can audibly hear Lewis yell cut.
As for the movie itself, Old King Cole calls Merlin, a rag doll who is legally never referred to as Raggedy Anne (or Annabelle, for that matter), Prince Charming, Sleeping Beauty, Mother Goose and a ghost who they originally called Casper before an audio edit saved the production from a lawsuit onto the stage for singing, something resembling dancing and the kind of magic tricks that you could have bought from a mail order store to bore your friends with.
Do you remember — if you’re a jerk like me — how much you hated up with people school assemblies? This is just like being stuck at one of those, with Lewis just plopping his cameras down and shooting whatever happened on stage.
There’s so much hand work and goofy acting tics and a witch that gets set on fire and not Raggedy Ann is just horrifying and the real magic trick is that somehow the hour running time of this feels like a hundred years. But hey, it’s Christmas and I have pledged to watch everything the Godfather of Gore ever did, so if you’re going to hit the highs of She-Devils on Wheels and Two Thousand Maniacs!then you’re going to suffer the valleys on the journey.
*The other is, of course, the Mexican mind melter known as Santa Claus.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This review originally ran on August 8, 2020, as we watched the Savage Cinema box set.
William Grefe came right out of the Florida swamps and demanded that you watch his films. He was second unit on I Eat Your Skin before unleashing films like Mako: The Jaws of Death, Death Curse of Tartu and Stanley, a movie in which a young man menaces Alex Rocco and Marcia Knight with snakes.
Rod Tillman (Steve Alaimo, whose life took him from being in the Redcoats, whose song “Mashed Potatoes” hit #75 on the Hot 100, hosting Dick Clark’s Where the ActionIs and even owning TK Records, who dabbled in the Miami bass scene) is a stock car racer out of cash. He sells everything he owns and enters Swinger’s Paradise where he does nothing if not swing. Actually, that’s where he meets Satan’s Angels, a biker gang who needs a getaway driver for a con they have in mind.
They are Banjo (Willie Pastrano, who held the unified world light heavyweight boxing titles (WBA, WBC, The Ring) from 1963 until 1965), Fats (Jeff Gillen, yes, Jeff from Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and the director of Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile, as well as Santa Claus in A Christmas Story), Linda (Bobbie Byers, the voice of Johnny Sokko in Voyage Into Space) and Jester (John Vella, who played for the Oakland Raiders).
The cops try and get Rod on their side too, but he’s all into Linda, who claims she doesn’t do the crimes for the financial prize, but for the kicks. It all ends up in a lighthouse shootout between the cops, the bikers and our hero, who is caught between both sides.
Featuring real-life members of the Hell’s Angels and a Tampa garage rock band known as The Birdwatchers — you know, for the kids — this movie is probably amongst the best on this set. It also has, I can assure you, motorcycles in it.
You can either watch this on YouTube or see the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version on Tubi.
“Okay, kid. I want you to make me a film under 80-minutes for $18,000 bucks,” cigar chomps the film executive planting his wing-tips on his desk. “And I got this ratty gorilla suit at an auction . . . they lost the gorilla head, so use this alien mask that I think is left over from 20 Million Miles to Earth . . . and use these reels of NASA stock footage . . . oh, and I can’t afford any lights, so shoot all the night time scenes day-for-night. And you’re using John Agar in the lead.”
“Who’s John Agar?” snivels the fresh-out-of-film-school grad.
“A washed up drunk who boinked Shirley Temple. He comes cheap.”
“Well, sir. Thank you for the opportunity—.”
“Believe me, kid. If I could get Larry Buchanan to shoot this, I would. Now, let’s go to work.”
. . . And so starts this go-go swingin’ adventure: A NASA rocket sent into space filled with test animals flies through a radiation cloud and crashes into the wilds of Cielo, Texas, so a mutated-gorilla monster can munch on a bunch of 18-going-on-30 teenagers in a wooded area known as “Satan’s Hollow.” (Speaking of a “Satan’s Hollow,” check this out.)
“Hey, gang,” head cool kid Chris Jordan calls out. “Let’s go have a swingin’ dance party in the woods! You know, our own ‘private blast’ where that mysterious object crashed!”
“Yeah, and we can do some off-screen shimmy-shammin’ so the Klingon-headed-gorilla space monster can chew us up,” squeals Judy.
“Shit. Let’s go to work, Ben,” says Sheriff Clint Crawford (John Agar) to Deputy Ben Whitfield (Bill Thurman). “It looks like we’re stuck in a movie that’s worse than Robot Monster. Hell, even The Giant Gila Monster.”
“Yeah,” whisky bottle swigs John Agar. “At this rate, we’ll be co-starring in Ed Wood pictures. Damn shame I won’t live long enough to star in an ‘80s SOV stinker. Heck, I would have been great as the detective in Blood Cult.”
“Nah, I’ll do just fine, John. I won’t end up in SOV crap like Spine. Respected directors like Louis Malle, Steven Speilberg, and Lawrence Kasdan will cast me, and I’ll work with Steve McQueen,” chest puffs Bill. “Now go stuff that mannequin with explosives so the dumb space gorilla eats it and we can get the hell out of here and have a beer,” bug neck-smacks Bill Thurman. “And besides, John, don’t you remember? You do that interview in 1986. So it’s not that you died, it’s just that you’ll be so washed up, that the director, Christopher Lewis, wouldn’t want you.”
“Hey, wait a sec . . . Lewis? Loretta’s kid. Yeah, didn’t I bang Loretta Young?”
“Yeah, right, Johnny boy,” says Bill with a back pat. “She married Clark Gable. What would she want with a pug like you? Now, let’s go kill us a space gorilla.”
John Agar was on top of the world. He starred alongside John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima, Fort Apache, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. He was the toast of tinsel town with his five-year marriage to Shirley Temple. . . . Then the marriage failed and his drinking got worse and he became a stock player for Larry Buchanan at AIP Studios in the low-budget frolics The Mole People and The Brain from Planet Arous.
Me: I always cherish Mr. Agar in my late dad’s John Wayne flicks and I’ll always remember John in the Alien precursor and the UHF double-billed, Journey to the Seventh Planet (alongside The Demon Planet, aka Planet of Vampires).
“I don’t resent being identified with B-science fiction movies at all,” Agar reflected in a 1986 interview chronicled at Monster Shack. “Why should I? Even though they were not considered top of the line, for those people that like sci-fi, I guess they were fun. My whole feeling about working as an actor is, if I give anybody any enjoyment, I’m doing my job, and that’s what counts.”
You did, John Agar. You most certainly did. You are at the center of this writer’s Venn Diagram-Borromean Rings of my “Bad Sci-Fi Battle of Evermore.”
In addition to satisfying my John Agar fix, Night Fright also quenches my Bill Thurman completest-compulsions—and gives me an opportunity to talk about Hollywood fringe-obscurity, Brenda Venus.
Brenda Venus, who stars as Sue, grew up to sprout “white nipples” so Eric Swann (Martin Mull) could boink her on the audio mixing console in FM (1978). Oh, you’ve seen Brenda around. She was in Fred Williamson’s blaxploitation spaghetti western, Joshua (1976) and Jack Hill’s Foxy Brown (1974). She starred with Clint Eastwood in The Eiger Sanction (?!) and she endured the wrath of Ankar Moor in Deathsport (1978). Brenda’s Wikipedia is well worth the visit and it directs you to her very cool, official website.
As for Bill Thurman: It’s like shootin’ fish in a Larry Buchanan-AIP barrel. Bill was in everything calculated inside the UHF Venn Diagram of my youth and went on to become the “go-to actor” when you needed a backwoods sheriff or redneck.
He was Sheriff Brad Crenshaw in Zontar, the Thing from Venus.
And get a load of the ‘80s VHS and ‘90s digital-platform repacks of Night Fright: they really are better than the movie. And don’t be fooled by its alternate titlings and confuse it with 1958’s Night of the Blood Beast, which is also available on the Mill Creek Pure Terror 50 Box Set (and my condolences to whomever reviews that stinker. Wait. What? I’m the “whomever” reviewing it? Crap!).
So, yeah, Night Fright sucks. But it’s also one of my cherished UHF snowy memories. Thanks, Mill Creek!
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