Colonel Jonas (Joseph Cotten) has led the Hellbenders through the Civil War and he refuses to give in at the end of the battles. He takes his sons Ben, Nat and Jeff on a continuing campaign of massacres, killing Union soldiers as they move money and placing their treasure inside a coffin.
Even the love and devotion of Clare (Norma Bengell) is not enough for Jonas, who wants more power, more destruction and well, just more.
There’s a fabulous score by Ennio Morricone — that goes without saying — and Sergio Corbucci’s direction, which guides another Italian Western that is all about darkness and despair. Cotten is one of my favorite actors of all time. Even in a small picture, he makes something wonderful. This is no small picture.
Django Kill…If You Live, Shoot! is unlike any Italian Western that you’ve ever seen, somehow being all at once a Western, a splatter movie and some surrealism too. If you’re going in expecting the normal themes of a loner at war with an uncaring world, sure there’s some of that. There’s also way more than you could ever expect.
There’s a reason for that. It’s written and directed by Giulio Questi, whose films are never normal, from his script for The Possessed to the positively deranged Death Laid an Egg and Arcana, which pretty much ruined his directing career and kept him out of movies for almost a decade until he made some TV movies in the early 1980s, a place that allowed him to keep making films until as late as 2011, three years before his death.
Man, I don’t know where to even begin with this one.
Two medicine men discover a man known only as The Stranger (Tomas Milian, Don’t Torture A Duckling) who remembers attacking a Wells Fargo wagon and splitting the gold with his partner Oaks (Piero Lulli, the sheriff in My Name Is Nobody) before getting shot in the back. The Native Americans tell our protagonist that they have melted down what is left of the gold into bullets and that they want to follow him on a hunt to what they call The Unhappy Place.
The Unhappy Place ends up being a town full of maniacs who lynch Oaks’ gang. The villain barricades himself in a saloon before The Stranger finds him and wounds him before the townspeople tear him apart to get to the gold bullets. Meanwhile, as a shocked Stanger and the medicine men try to bury what’s left of the gang, the townspeople argue over what’s left of the gold.
Foremost amongst the weirdness in this town is the homosexual rancher with a hate-filled parrot Sorrow (Roberto Camardiel, Arizona Colt), who will kill anyone in his way to get the treasure. His men even crucify our hero and torture him with vampire bats (!) and scalp one of the medicine men.
What can you say about a movie where people desire gold so much that it ends up melting them while an entire town watches before our hero rides away alone, followed by children using string to distort their faces?
This is a baffling, fascinating entry in the world of the Italian Western, one that would be great even without the Django title. It’s also the movie debut of Ray Lovelock, who plays the doomed Evan.I haven’t even gotten to the psychedelic editing yet!
This is one of the strangest and yet most gorgeous Italian Westerns I’ve seen. A definite recommendation.
We already discussed Tonino Valerii’s My Name Is Nobody early this week. He also made this film with Lee Van Cleef, a face that Western audiences associate with the Italian Western.
Here, he plays Frank Talby, an aging gunfighter who starts to teach the rules of the life to Scott Mary (Giuliano Gemma, who will always be known as Ringo). However, the life of constant death may not be the right life for Scott, as Murph tries to teach him. The end of this movie is sobering; there is no real triumph in the death that he unleashes.
Come for the Western action; stay for the story and the Riz Ortolani score (you can hear some of it in Django Unchained). This film is an interesting counterpoint to Valerii’s later Nobody. It also features Al Mulock (who died in spectacular fashion in Leone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly; when he killed himself by diving out of his hotel window in full costume while making Once Upon a Time In the West, Leone famously yelled, “Get the costume, we need the costume.”) and German actress Christa Linder, who was in Fulci’s Dracula in the Provinces.
Anyone upset about the continuity issues of the Halloween movies should sit down and watch some Italian Westerns, where characters may or may not be the same actor or even the same character from film to film.
Django is the best example, with two official films (Django, Django Strikes Again), a remake (Django Unchained) and nearly forty unofficial movies, including this one. Of these films, experts believe that only Django, Prepare a Coffin is a semi-official, legitimate sequel, as it was originally intended to star Nero.
In this film, Django Foster comes home to find his father dead and the family’s fortune stolen. The role is played by Sean Todd, but come on. We all know that that Americanized stage name can only be Ivan Rassimov. His sister Rada is also in this film as is Ignazio Spalla from the Sabata series.
This film was directed by Edoardo Mulargia, who would go on one day to make the movies Orinoco: Prigioniere del sesso, which was re-edited and released in the U.S. as the Linda Blair-starring Savage Island.
Mulargia would also make Cjamango with Rassimov and Mickey Hargitay, as well as W Django! and Shango with Anthony Steffen. Obviously, he really liked Django or at least the money that came from making people think his movies were actual sequels.
So William Asher (who took a slasher ’80s shot with Butcher, Baker Nightmare Maker) did a pretty good job with Fireball 500, Fabian’s first racing flick for the Roger Corman stable — and it made bank. So it was decided to get Fabs behind the wheel of the “real star” of that movie once again: the 1966 Plymouth Barracuda customized by George Barris (The Batmobile, The Monkeesmobile, The Munster’s Koach) dubbed Fireball 500.
That planned film, Malibu 500, became this fourth movie (after Rebel 500 was also rejected) — after Hell’s Angels on Wheels with Jack Nicholson (on his way to Easy Rider) — directed by Richard Rush (of one of my dad’s favs: Freebie and the Bean!). And yeah, as with most race flicks: we have another racer causing an accident that places his career — and love life, since he can’t drive — in jeopardy. Does it all sound like the romantic polygons from Red Line 7000, where everyone is trying to bed everyone? Yep. Is this just an ol’ A.I.P. beach movie minus the sand and plus the asphalt? Yep.
So Fabian’s stock car racer Tommy Callahan is forced to join Pete Madsen’s (Jewish “borscht belt” comedian Jan Murray?) thrill circus to make a buck after his blackouts cause a fatal accident that gets him thrown off the circuit. Ah, but career redemption is to be found in his romance with Madsen’s daughter Francie (Annette Funicello), as he teachers her boyfriend, Eddie Sands (ubiquitous ’70s and ’80s TV actor Warren Berlinger), everything he knows about stock car racing. Then Eddie has to go and romance Tommy’s lady, Annie Blaine (Diane McBain, of Spinout with Elvis and later, Maryjane with Fabs). And, you know the next part of the story . . . as Sam, the chief cook and bottle washer at B&S Movies would say: “a fierce rivalry on the track between Tommy Callahan and Eddie Sands, ensues.”
And I have to add: “The discovery of an old childhood trauma that causes the blackouts, ensues.”
So, let’s get to the meat (or is that rubber) of the matter: Is this better than Fireball 500? Thanks to all of the stock car racing footage already shot by producer Burt Topper during the course of three years that Rush was forced to cut into the film, yes, as process shots in racing flicks, simply put, sucks exhaust vapors. Is it better than Fabs third racing romp, The Wild Racers? Hella-no. That Grand Prix-instead-of-stock cars romp is the best of Fabian’s three A.I.P. fast and furious rubber romps. But as with anything Corman touched — between tight budgets and pre-sale deals — Thunder Alley made bank. So A.I.P. hired Rush to direct Psych-Out and The Savage Seven.
Oh, the film’s true claim to fame: The song “Riot in Thunder Alley” by Eddie Beram also appears in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. Now, if we can only convince The Q to give Fabian the same touch he gave to John Travolta and get Fabian back on the screen.
I can’t think of one my favorite actors more deserving.
The Savage Cinema set from Mill Creek just keeps on rolling this week, bringing to us not only some NASCAR, but former racer turned country star Marty Robbins, who sang “El Paso” and “Honkytonk Man.”
Three brothers — stock car driver Marty (Robbins playing himself), mechanic Del (John Ashley, the man from Blood Island) and revenue agent Steve — all have their issues. Marty is trying to be a star, Del wants to be Marty and Steve is busting some moonshiners.
Del tries to out do his brother to prove himself to his girlfriend Sue (Gigi Perrau, The Cool and the Crazy) and the gang ends up almost killing them all. Meanwhile, Connie Smith and the Stonemans play a whole mess of songs.
The entire film was independently made in Nashville, Tennessee. John Ashley told Trash Compactor, “Marty was a terrific fellow and a great singer, and I was a big fan of his. He was a stock car racer, loved stock cars, and the producers had put this thing together. They said to me that this was going to be his motion picture debut, and they needed me to play his brother and basically carry the movie. So I went down there for six or seven weeks.”
This was directed by Will Zens, who also made Trucker’s Womanand Hot Summer in BarefootCounty, two Joe Bob Briggs-approved redneck movies.
Savage Cinema promises you biker movies and it delivers on them. Such is the joy of a Mill Creek box set. While you may often find things that you had no idea you needed, by and large, if the cover art has an alien or a motorcycle, you may get at least 30% out of the films inside about what was promised. Those kind of odds get you into the Hall of Fame, at least in Cooperstown.
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.
Translated as Even the Wind Is Afraid, this Carlos Enrique Taboada-directed horror film touches on the gothic and predates a very similar feeling film, Suspiria, by nearly a decade.
It’s all about Claudia, a student who investigates a tower that keeps showing up in her nightmares, where she sees the hung body of a student who killed herself years before and whose ghost has been haunting the teachers.
It turns out that the ghost is real and it is Andrea, a girl who had asked to leave the school to see her dying mother before it was too late. When Bernarda (the principal of the school) refused, Andrea hung herself inside the tower. Now, Andrea will not rest until everyone pays. And for some reason, she’s picked Claudia to help.
This movie was remade as The Wind of Fear in 2007, with Alicia Bonet (who played Claudia) playing her mother.
That said, I’d recommend you check out the original, which was incredibly entertaining. It really does have that feeling of isolation and worry that the teen years engender, with plenty of gothic mood as well. You can see its influence on del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, particularly in that movie’s setting.
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.
What else should I expect 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.
If you’re looking for more movies like this, you can always pick Catwomen of the Moon, Fire Maidens from Outer Space, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, Missile to the Moon, Amazon Women on the Moon or Queen of Outer Space.
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.
Robert Cohen also made Inside Red China, Inside East Germany, Committee on Un-American Activities and Inside Castro’s Cuba. This movie was sold as starring Jayne Mansfield, who had just died, even though she’s only in it for a moment. I love how each person narrates their own scenes in the film, setting up who they are as we explore Hollywood from 1965 to 1967.
We start with hippie vegan Gypsy Boots and stripper Jennie Lee doing a Watusi dance before meeting S&H Green Stamp — points for anyone that remembers those — Lewis Beach Marvin III, who lived in a $10 a month garage while owning a mountain retreat in Malibu.
We also get to meet doomed hairstylist Jay Sebring, Ram Dass, Bobby Jameson (whose protests and suicide attempts became more of his story than his music), surfers, fashion designers, actresses, transexuals, child fashion models, Bobby Beausoleil and more.
This doesn’t get as scumtastic as most mondo. Your mileage, therefore, may vary.
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