Alive or Preferably Dead is also known as Sundance and the Kid and Sundance Cassidy and Butch the Kid, an attempt to win the audience of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was directed by Duccio Tessari, who wrote A Fistful of Dollars and would go on to direct A Pistol for Ringo. Its story comes from Ennio Flaiano, who wrote ten movies with Fellini, and has a screenplay by Tessari and Giorgio Salvioni (The Tenth Victim).

In the U.S. version, everyone gets an American name: Giuliano Gemma is John Wade; Nino Benvenuti becomes Robert Neuman; Sydne Rome is Karen Blake and director Tessari is called Arthur Pitt.

Country mouse Ted Mulligan (Nino Benvenuti, a former boxer) and city mouse Monty (Giuliano Gemma) inherit $300,000 if they can live together for six months.As soon as Ted arrives, he insults local tough “Bad Jim” Williams (Robert Huerta) who responds by burning down his brother’s house. Soon, the two of them are doing odd jobs, including robbing banks and kidnapping Rossella (Sydne Rome, What?, Some Girls Do) who they both fall for.

It’s all rather goofy and really a predecessor of the sillier Italian westerns that were soon to come riding into town.

Boot Hill (the Italian title means The Hill Made of Boots) is the last movie in a trilogy that began with God Forgives…I Don’t and was followed by Ace High. Taking advantage of star Terence Hill’s fame, it was re-released as Trinity Rides Again.

It was directed and written by Giuseppe Colizzi, who also made the other films in this trilogy, as well as All the Way Boys with Hill and Bud Spencer; Run, Joe, Run and Switch.

Hill plays Cat Stevens and Spencer is Hutch Bessy, who along with George Eastman as the mute Baby Doll are all somewhat friends and partners by the end. But to get there, Cat is shot and left for dead by a gang and nursed back to health by the circus of Thomas (Woody Strode), which includes can can dancers, dwarves and Mami (Lionel Stander), the dress-wearing manager of all of them, which ain’t easy, because when they met, it was murder.

Beyond the bad guy having the name Honey Fisher, he’s played by Victor Buono, which is quite a treat. There’s a strange dual look to this film, with the circus sections filled with color and near surrealism — they were shot by the movie’s original director Romolo Guerrieri (Johnny Yuma, The Sweet Body of Deborah, L’ Ultimo Guerriero) while most of the film’s look is quite dark and moody.

You can watch this on Tubi.

When this played a triple bill with Curse of the Living Dead (Kill, Baby, Kill!) and Revenge of the Living Dead (The Murder Clinic), anyone upset by these three films was offered free psychiatric care. Amando de Ossorio did more than just create the Blind Dead and direct The Loreley’s Grasp. He cared about your mental health.

Sylvia (Anita Ekberg, perfect) learns that she’s now a countess and has inherited a castle, even if the locals are horrified by the very mention of its name. Yet things get strange when she arrives, as both her uncle Count Walbrooke (Julián Ugarte) and the maid Blinka (Adriana Ambesi) claim to be vampires. There’s also some non-consensual whipping.

The entire family is cursed and Sylvia must remain at the castle — she’s the reincarnation of the witch Malenka — and she must stay unmarried or the curse will get worse. Her fiancee still comes to save her and stabs the count in the heart. If you saw it in Spain, it’s all a hoax but the bad guy dies anyway. In other countries, there’s an ending where he really was a vampire. I can hear Americans saying, “If I’m gonna come see Fangs of the Vampire, there better be vampires. Them Spaniards already fooled me with Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror, a movie that had no Frankensteins in it!”

A Rather Complicated Girl was directed by Damiano Damiani, the director who came to the U.S. to make the most Italian movie — sheer exploitation and a streak of pure meanness — ever made in America, Amityville II: The Possession.

Alberto (Jean Sorel) has heard two sapphic lovers speak on the telephone and his head is filled with fantasies. He decides that he has to meet one of them in person, so he tracks down Claudia (Catherine Spaak, The Cat o’ Nine Tails) and they soon find themselves making love non-stop in between acting as fake talent scouts so they can get involved with the innocent Viola (Gabriella Boccardo, A Quiet Place In the Country) and discussing the strange relationship between Claudia and the woman on the other line, her stepmother Greta (Florinda Bolkan, always the finest actor in any giallo).

I love that this movie tests what a giallo is a year before Argento would send everyone down the animal-named and switchblade holding path. Alberto is a rich man without a care, even making fun of the wife (María Cuadra) of his dying brother, asking her when she’ll find her next lover. As for Claudia, she already has one abusive and possessive boyfriend — Pietro (Gigi Proietti) — and the film goes near hyperbolic in showing she has no morals with an interlude where she tries to seduce a priest.

The two plays games with one another and if you’ve seen enough giallo, you understand that Alberto can’t outthink Claudia or her mental games, especially when she shows him the gun in her purse and wonders if he’d do anything for her. Perhaps they’ve found an equal match in one another, for a time, as the idea that they could make love in a room where someone hung themselves excites them both, as if they are above human concerns.

Interestingly, the interviewing of the young girl and Alberto’s constant questions about Claudia’s life and relationships makes this a proto-Sex, Lies and Videotape, as when he’s not probing mentally, he can’t probe physically. What’s the fun in being a rich and gorgeous playboy if you’re impotent? Maybe he really does need that gun.

After another in a series of fights with her lover Maurizio (Nino Segurini, Beyond the Door, Amuck), Manuela (Eva Green in her only movie) leaves him for the island where her friend Eleonora (Catherine Diamant, Devil In the Flesh) lives alone. Seeing as how this is a giallo, their friendship soon flowers into a relationship much deeper.

Maurizio follows her with the hope of winning her back. And when she chooses him, things get violent.

Directed by Silvio Amadio (Amuck, Smile Before Death), who wrote the script with Gino Mordini (The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine) and Roberto Natale (Bloody Pit of Horror), this film makes the most of its location, its small cast and cinematography by Joe D’Amato.

Also known as Island of the Swedes, Twisted Girls, No Man’s Island and Island of the Swedish Girls, it has a great body painting scene and an ending that takes from The Most Dangerous Game just as much as Franco did for Countess Perverse, but it comes as a natural outgrowth over the frustrated passions within the characters.

Very few of Amadio’s films are available in great quality, which is distressing, and I’d love to see a box ray set of this, Amuck, So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious… and Smile Before Death.

The German title for this movie, Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden (Necronomicon – Dreamt Sins) is metal as fuck and when you get right down to it, isn’t Jess Franco the same way? I feel like him like I do about Venom. Most Venom songs sound the same, but man, they all sound pretty good and while they aren’t the best musicians, they lucked on to some really great riffs and really, isn’t that what we’re looking for?

Franco’s first movie outside of Spain, this was his hope that he’d escape all the rules and censorship by working in Germany. The script was three pages long, which feels like two and a half pages too long for a Jess Franco movie, and the funding didn’t come through, but producer Pier A. Caminnecci paid for the rest and had an affair with lead actress Janine Reynaud despite her husband Michel Lemoine being in the cast. And that’s how a Jess Franco movie gets made.

American-International Pictures released this movie in the United States under the title Succubus and when Roger Ebert reviewed it, he called it “a flat-out bomb. It left you stunned and reeling. There was literally nothing of worth in it. Even the girl was ugly.”

Reynaud, who was also in Franco’s Kiss Me Monster and The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail, plays Lorna Green works in an S&M club where members watch fake deaths from the whip, the cross and yes, sex. And as Lorna continues to dance, she takes on the role of the femme fatale not just on stage, but in reality. But what is reality, after all, in a Jess Franco movie, particularly in 1969 when he had something of a budget, was shooting on film and some youth?

That said, if he had one of his muses in this, like Soledad Miranda or Lina Romay, I fear it would have been even wilder.

At once a mannequin movie and a film about a woman that may have killed someone and can’t remember and it’s driving her insane — oh man, two of my favorite themes — and it gets wild, like you’re drunk at a party and end up at another party and talking in the kitchen to someone and then someone hands you some pills and you wind up standing in the cold in the middle of a major city and the snow and rain and wind are in your face and you close your eyes and open them to heat and the most gorgeous and demonic creature you’ve ever seen is dancing mere feet away from you and you’re just a mere mortal and you want to touch their garment and jazz is blaring and you’re sure you’re in your bed but you’re so fucking far from home.

All hail Jess Franco.