Russ Meyer made Fanny Hill in 1964, the Oliver Reed version I watched numerous times on Cinemax was in 1983, and Tinto Brass made Paprika in 1991. But this is the Swedish version, and the American print ads didn’t just say “from the makers of”; they said “from the country that gave you I, A Woman, Inga, I Am Curious (Yellow).” Yes, the whole country made this.
Diana Kjær is Fanny. Maybe you know her from Dagmar’s Hot Pants, Inc. Anyway, she’s a girl from the country who has become a sex worker. A rich older man, Jan Wilhelmsson, falls for her, and when he dies, she’s in the will. This allows her to support a past lover, Roger (Hans Ernback).
In the November 19, 1969 issue of Variety, this film was listed as the top movie in the U.S.
Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.
Today’s theme: 1960s!
Larry Buchanan was making low budget TV movies for American-International Pictures.
He called them with this idea:”We get this signal from outer space… What is it, Mr. Nicholson, what is it? And I said, Mars Needs Women! He said, ‘When can you start?”
As for Tommy Kirk, he had been a Disney kid and when he got the lead when John Ashley was busy, he wanted to make this his comeback. After all, he knew the role. He had already been a Martian seeking Earth women in AIP’s Pajama Party. Buchanan allowed Kirk to create his own soliloquy in the film, which is pretty great. However, Kirk looked back and said that this was “…undoubtedly one of the stupidest motion pictures ever made. How I got talked into it, I don’t know.”
“Mars … Needs … Women.” That’s the message from space and Mars can only make boy chidren, so five of their race, led by Dop (Kirk), come to Earth to steal our most perfect women. Mainly from Texas. Larry didn’t have much of a budget, after all.
The women are an artist (Pat Delaney). a housewife (Sherry Roberts), an air hostess (Donna Lindberg), a stripper (Bubbles Cash, the inspiration for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, who is also in Hot Thrills and Warm Chills and according to a fan, signed her aurograph like this: “the B in Bubbles was a pair of breasts with nipples. Her last name was a dollar sign.”) and scientist Dr. Marjorie Bolen (Yvonne Craig!), who Dop falls in love with and of course he does, it’s Yvonne Craig in 1968.
Shot in black and white on 16mm, blown up to 35mm and filled with stock footage, this was shot all over Dallas, which was playing Houston in the movie.
Someday sad, I will run out of Larry Buchanan movies. But that day is not today. Today is a good day.
Latitude Zero is a futuristic utopia that lies hidden fifteen miles below sea level at the intersection of the Equator and the International Date Line. There, people from all over the world — many of whom were reported missing at sea and have now aged — have lived since the 19th century, assisting humanity in their development. Their lead vehicle, Alpha, is commanded by Captain Craig McKenzie (Joseph Cotten). He rescues three scientists, Dr. Ken Tashiro (Akira Takarada), Dr. Jules Masson (Masumi Okada) and journalist Perry Lawton (Richard Jaeckel) from a bathysphere accident, narrowly avoiding the henchmen of Latitude Zero’s enemy, Dr. Malic (Cesar Romero).
Alright, I already love this movie two minutes in.
Malic has kidnapped Dr. Okada (Tetsu Nakamura) and his daughter Tsuruko (Mari Nakamura), using them to create new monsters to attack his enemies. One of these is a lion with condor wings, into which he has placed the brain of the disgraced henchman Kuroiga (Hikaru Kuroki). Or human bats and kaiju rats.
Along with Latitude Zero scientist Dr. Anne Barton (Linda Haynes), the crew attacks the evil base of Blood Rock as this movie goes from giant monsters to Eurospy. By the end, everyone has joined the crew, except Lawton, who soon finds that any memories he has of this adventure are fading away. At the last moment, he charts a course back to Latitude Zero.
Based on the NBC radio serial Latitude Zero, which only had seventeen episodes, this was directed by Ishirô Honda and filmed in English. It was a co-production between Toho and the American television production company Four Star Productions. After having flown out the American cast to Japan, Four Star’s owner, Don Sharp, declared bankruptcy and pulled out of the contract. Toho made the movie anyway and ensured that everyone was paid.
I wish they made ten of these. Seriously, what a wild, strange and wonderful movie.
Larry Buchanan made a number of low-budget 16mm color remakes of American International Pictures movies for television. Despite the limited budget, he was able to create some truly wild films, including this one, which was inspired by Voodoo Woman.
Dr. Simond Trent (Jeff Alexander) has set up shop deep in the Texas swamps — these are a real thing — and has taken the natives — this is not a thing — for experiments, trying to reverse their evolution.
MOASASOURI – A MONSTER FROM ANOTHER AGE…with terrifying, destructive powers…his victims fight for their lives in a silent, eerie underwater battleground!
Sure, whatever you say!
Every time Trent creates a new creature in his glass fog machine, yelling “Live! Breath!” it never makes it. So then he carries it to his swimming pool full of stock footage and feeds it to the gators, as if Porky Wallace did mad science instead of running a redneck bar.
Frenchy (Roger Ready) and Brenda Simmons (Shirley McLine) join oilman Driscoll West’s (Bill Thurman) expedition in the hopes of making some money for doing nothing. She tries to seduce him, but he turns her down, and one of their thugs, Ritchie (Cal Duggan), kills the rich man. So when geologist Barry Rogers (John Agar) arrives to start the exploring, she explains that she’s Driscoll’s wife, and he’s none the wiser.
Thanks to their guide, Rabbit Simms (Charles McLine), they all end up at the suburban house/mad scientist lab of Trent, whose wife, Pat (Francine York), wants to leave, and the men all treat her like they’re John Ashley in a Blood Island movie. Then, Brenda’s plans go awry, and she is transformed into something else. A green creature that doesn’t look real at all, and therefore makes this movie so much better as a result. She instantly launches Trent into his own gators, then dives in herself, escaping a life as a monster instead of, well, being a monster.
I watched this in the middle of the night, and maybe I wasn’t sober at all, which was the ideal way to watch it. You should feel on the verge of passing out and in another state of consciousness before it starts, then let it wash over you. More monster movies should have body paint instead of latex suits or complicated CGI.
Has there ever been a better movie than Destroy All Monsters? It is everything magical about film: giant monsters smashing cities and fighting one another while people run and scream in terror. It is cinematic junk food, a treat for the mind that transports me back to watching Action Movies on Youngstown’s WKBN 27 as a little kid, jumping around the room in pure glee.
Every giant monster on Earth has been captured and sent to Monster Island, where they are kept secure and studied — until all communication is mysteriously cut off.
Turns out that the scientists on the island are being mind-controlled by the Kilaaks, who demand the human race surrender or face total destruction. They control the monsters to attack famous cities all over the world: Godzilla decimates New York City, Rodan smashes Moscow, Mothra takes out Beijing, Gorosaurus crushes Paris and Manda, a giant Japanese dragon, goes shithouse on London. All of these attacks are to keep the UNSC forces from finding out that Tokyo is the real target.
Luckily, the humans are able to take out the control signals and the good guy monsters take on King Ghidorah, who is overcome and killed (Minilla, Varan, Anguirus and Kumonga show up, too). The Kilaaks also have a Fire Dragon, a monster that starts setting cities on fire. Godzilla takes out its base, and the forces of good triumph.
This was intended to be the final Godzilla film, as the series’ popularity was waning. However, the success of Destroy All Monsters led to even more Godzilla films.
When I was a kid, I was impatient for the human scenes to end and for the monsters to show up. I’ve never changed. All I want to do is watch giant monsters destroy cities and fight one another. This movie delivers all of that and more. It’s not high art, but does it have to be?
Let me put it out there right now: This movie is completely insane.
Let me see if I can summarize it.
A high-tech chicken farm is attempting to breed birds with no heads or bones. A love triangle develops between the three people who run it: Anna (international sex symbol and the photojournalist who was one of the first to interview Fidel Castro, Gina Lollobrigida), her prostitute killing husband Marco and their secretary Gabriella (Ewa Aulin, the near goddess who appeared in films like Candy and Death Smiles on a Murderer).
Yes. Headless and boneless chickens, all inside a fashionable proto giallo filled with sex and murder. You better believe I’m all over this movie.
Director Giulio Questi was also behind Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!and Arcana. I’ve seen this movie explained as a “socio-politically sophisticated avant-garde giallo,” which is pretty much the best way I can think of telling you what it’s all about. It’s also around 40 years ahead of its time, yet blissfully stuck in 1968.
Despite being Anna’s cousin, Gabri hooks up with her husband, and they debate running away together. However, Gabri is already married to Mondain, and their plan is to kill Anna and frame Marco. There’s also the issue of Anna wanting to have something special and strange with Marco, which, instead of being a child, ends up being these Eraserhead-ish chicken balls that scream and bleed worms when he kills them.
When Marco discovers his wife’s body in a hotel room, he cleans the scene up and brings her body to the farm to turn it into chicken feed. That’s when we learn his big secret: he doesn’t really kill prostitutes, but instead role plays the murder and sends them away with plenty of cash. But then, as he tries to feed his wife into the machine, he falls in just as the police arrive to catch him disposing of the body. Gabri and Mondaini are eventually seen as we watch the chickens chow down on human food. Nothing good is gonna come out of that. I mean, poultry that feeds on human flesh seems way worse than any steroids or hormones.
I’ve never seen a movie that straddles being an art film, a drug film, a murder mystery story and a science fiction examination of man trying to change nature, along with psychedelic film techniques and non-linear editing techniques. It’s also a satire of the highest order. I have no idea why people aren’t constantly discussing this movi,e and I’m going to do my best to drive people nuts talking about it over and over again.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Pretty Poison was on USA Up All Night as one of the third movies. I can’t find the date — do you know when it aired?
Dennis Pitt (Anthony Perkins) wants a life of adventure, and he gets it.
On parole from a mental institution — he set the fire that accidentally claimed the life of his aunt — he works a menial job watching bottles go through the line at Sausenfeld Chemical Company. So when he sees the gorgeous Sue Ellen Stepanek (Tuesday Weld) march across the field in her majorette uniform, he brings her along into the games in his head, pretending to be a CIA agent and having some fun with a young and innocent teenager.
Except that Dennis goes from being the antagonist to the protagonist.
Directed by Noel Black (Private School) and written by Lorenzo Semple Jr. (the TV Batman, Flash Gordon) from the book She Let Him Continue by Stephen Geller, Pretty Poison spends so much of the movie making us think that Dennis is the same kind of killer that Perkins played in Psycho — the last film he was in before going back to the stage — and he’s really just a scared little boy being shocked by the evil inside a gorgeous young lady.
Semple told Shock Magazine, “It was very hard to cast. Tuesday was excellent for it, but Tony was much too obvious for it. We really tried to find somebody young to do it. We never could find a new, young actor the studio would go with.”
Weld had tremendous issues with Black. She told Rex Reed it was “The least creative experience I ever had. Constant hate, turmoil and dissonance. Not a day went by without a fight. Noel Black, the director, would come up to me before a scene and say, ‘Think about Coca-Cola.’ I finally said, ‘Look, just give the directions to Tony Perkins, and he’ll interpret for me.” She further hated the movie, saying, “I don’t care if critics like it; I hated it. I can’t like or be objective about films I had a terrible time doing.”
The movie largely disappeared from theaters, and any reputation it had stemmed from critics like Pauline Kael, who vilified Fox for its failure to market PrettyPoison effectively. 1968 was a strange year. However, it was a time when the country felt like it was falling apart, and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both assassinated. A film that has a young woman gleefully accepting murder and even turning a gun on her mother (Beverly Garland) was going to have a hard time.
But wow — this movie. It really took me by surprise, and I loved the turn Perkins gives to his character; at the end, he is so frightened of Weld that he willingly goes to prison for her crimes. She’s learned nothing and is already moving on to her next victim, yet the end teases that parole officer Morton Azenauer (John Randolph) has figured her out. At one point, it seems like Dennis has all the answers, but when the world cracks on him, he becomes a child.
By the way, Dennis and Sue Ellen go to see The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, directed by Roger Corman.
As the trailer will tell you, Corruption is not a woman’s picture.
That’s debatable.
What is not is that Corruption is a ripoff of Eyes without a Face.
But hey — some of my favorite movies are total rip-offs.
Renowned plastic surgeon Sir John Rowan (Peter Cushing) starts the movie at a swinging 60s party with his beautiful fiancée Lynn (Sue Lloyd, Hysteria). Sir John isn’t dealing well with all this counterculture excess, so when a pervy photographer makes a pass at his girl, he attacks the man, sending a hot light into Lynn’s face. This party may seem like a parody when seen today, but this is a serious scene, with Cushing facing the Summer of Love and not dealing so well with all of it.
Rowan pledges to fix Lynn’s scarred face through a combination of laser technology and a pituitary gland transplant. Sound good? Well, it’s fueled by murder, giving the fluids of young women to his wife, to keep her face from scarring and it needs to be repeated again and again to stop the scars from coming back. Everything goes well — as well as repeatedly killing people and basically feeding their skin to your wife can go– until Sir John and Lynn try to seduce a new victim who ends up being part of a gang of robbers.
Those criminals break into the home of Sir John and they soon learn his secret. However, no one profits from this knowledge, as everyone ends up getting killed by a surgical laser. And then, get this — it’s all a dream!
Cushing would say, “It was gratuitously violent, fearfully sick. But it was a good script, which just goes to show how important the presentation is.” You have to love a movie where Van Helsing flips out at a party that Austin Powers would say is way too mod. And wow, it’s pretty gory for a late sixties British movie!
Director Robert Hartford-Davis would also make Incense for the Damned, Gonks Go Beat and The Fiend.
Also, just to remind you one more time, Corruption is not a woman’s picture.
Bewitched aired throughout the most tumultuous time in modern history — hyperbole, that could also be today, but true, as rehearsals for this show’s first episode were on the day Kennedy was shot and the episode “I Confess” was interuppted by Martin Luther King Jr.’s death — from September 17, 1964, to March 25, 1972. The #2 show in the country for its first season and remaining in the top ten until its fifth season, it presents a sanitized and fictional world that at the time may have seemed contrary and fake to the simmering 60s, but today feels like the balm I need and an escape.
Within the home on 1164 Morning Glory Circle, Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) and Darrin Stephens (Dick York, later Dick Sargent) have just had a whirlwind romance and ended up as husband and wife. At some point, she had to tell him that she was a witch, a fact that he disapproved of, and that she should be a normal housewife instead of using her powers. Yet she often must solve their problems — usually caused by her family, such as her mother Endora (Agnes Moorehead) — with a twitch of her nose.
Creator Sol Saks was inspired by I Married a Witch and Bell, Book and Candle, which luckily were owned by Columbia, the same studio that owned Screen Gems, which produced this show. You could use either of those movies as a prologue for this, which starts in media res — I like that I can use such a highbrow term to talk of sitcoms — with our loving couple already settling into the suburbs.
Author Walter Metz claims in his book Bewitched that the first episode, narrated by José Ferrer, is about “the occult destabilization of the conformist life of an upwardly mobile advertising man.” As someone who has spent most of his life in marketing, maybe I should look deeply into the TV I watched as a child. Bewitched was there all the time in my life, wallpaper that I perhaps never considered.
Head writer Danny Arnold, who led the show for its first season, considered the show about a mixed marriage. Gradually, as director and producer William Asher (also Montgomery’s husband at the time) took more control of the show, the magical elements became more prevalent. What I also find intriguing is that with the length of this show’s run, it had to deal with the deaths of its actors and York’s increasing back issues, which finally forced him to leave the show and another Dick, Dick Sargent, stepping in as Darren, a fact that we were to just accept.
That long run, the end of Montgomery and Asher’s marriage and slipping ratings led to the end of the show, despite ABC saying they would do two more seasons. Instead, Asher produced The Paul Lynde Show, using the sets and much of the supporting cast of this show. He also produced Temperatures Rising, which was the last show on his ABC contract, which ended in 1974.
Feminist Betty Friedan’s two-part essay “Television and the Feminine Mystique” for TV Guide asked why so many sitcoms presented insecure women as the heads of households. None of this has changed much, as the majority of sitcoms typically feature attractive women and funny but large husbands, a theme created by The Honeymooners, and the battles between spouses. I always think of I Dream of Jeannie, a show where a powerful magical being is subservient to, well, a jerk. At least on Bewitched, Samantha is a powerful, in-control woman with a mother who critiques the housewife paradigm.
Plus, unlike so many other couples on TV at the time, they slept in the same bed.
Bewitched‘s influence stretched beyond the movie remake. The show has had local versions in Japan, Russia, India, Argentina and the UK, while daughter Tabitha had a spin-off. There was even a Flintstones crossover episode!
Plus, WandaVision takes its central conceit — a witch hiding in the suburbs — from this show. And Dr. Bombay was on Passions!
This is the kind of show that has always been — and will always be — in our lives. Despite my dislike of Darren’s wedding vows of no magic, there’s still, well, some magic in this show. Just look at how late in its run it went on location to Salem for a multi-episode arc, something unthought of in other sitcoms.
You can watch this just for the show itself, to see the differences between the two Darrens and when Dick York had to film episodes in special chairs because of his back pain, when the show did tricks like have Montgomery (using the name Pandora Spocks) playing Samantha’s cousin Serena to do episodes without York or just imagine that the world was changing outside. Yet, magic and laughter were always there on the show, throughout the lives, divorces and deaths of its principals and supporting cast.
The Mill Creek box set is an excellent, high-quality way to just sit back, twitch your nose and get away from it all. This 22-disc set has everything you’d want on Bewitched, including extras like Bewitched: Behind the Magic, an all-new documentary about the making of Bewitched, featuring special guest appearances by actor David Mandel (Adam Stephens), Steve Olim (who worked in the make-up department at Columbia), Bewitched historian Herbie J Pilato, film and television historian Robert S. Ray, Bewitched guest star Eric Scott (later of The Waltons) and Chris York, son of D. York (the first Darrin). There are also sixteen new episodic audio commentaries, moderated by Herbie J Pilato that include behind-the-scenes conversations with Peter Ackerman (son of Bewitched executive producer Harry Ackerman), David Mandel, Bewitched guest star Janee Michelle (from “Sisters at Heart”), Steve Olim, Robert S. Ray, former child TV actors and Bewitched guest stars Ricky Powell (The Smith Family), Eric Scott (The Waltons), and Johnny Whitaker (Family Affair and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters) and Chris York (son of D. York). There’s also an exclusive 36-page booklet featuring pieces by Bewitched historian Herbie J. Pilato, as well as an episode guide. You can order it from Deep Discount.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Lost Continent was on the CBS Late Movie on April 28 and October 25, 1972 and November 22, 1973.
Produced, directed and written by Michael Carreras — based on Dennis Wheatley’s novel Uncharted Seas — this is a rare Hammer that’s an adventure movie and not horror. It taught me if you’re taking a tramp steamer, make sure they’re not carrying white phosphorous to sell. Also: Check out the weather, because if a hurricane is coming, it’s not a good idea to be on a boat. The stolen stuff blows up, the hurricane hits, the boat crashes.
This will bring you to an island with a shipwrecked Spanish galleon and an island ran by the child descendent of Sanish conquistadors. That kid gets stabbed at one point — by a cleric — and a priest with the plague and all of his monks burn inside a church as pipe organ music plays. There’s also a shark attack, a flare gun accident, killer seaweed, weird monsters, barbarians, leprosy, a giant hermit crab, a big scorpion and so many ideas that you’ll wonder if you’re still watching the same movie.
It has a theme song by The Peddlers, so it has that going for it. Hammer girls include Hildegard Knef (who would play the witch in Witchery), Suzanna Leigh (Lust for a Vampire) and Dana Gillespie (who dated Bowie when she was 14) — who plays a native girl named Sarah who uses balloons and snowshoes to walk through the deadly seaweed. Huh? Yeah!
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