Marooned first went into production in 1965 with Frank Capra directing from a screenplay by Walter Newman. They couldn’t get the budget they needed to make the movie, which by the time John Sturges directed this in 1969 ended up being $8 million.

You know how everyone talks about the moon launch being faked? This is the opposite of that, as the people making this wanted it to look as realistic as what they saw on TV every night. NASA, North American Aviation and Philco-Ford created the film’s hardware, which included what would become Skylab, the headsets that would later be worn by the launch crews, the Mission Operations Control Room at Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Air Force Launch Control Center at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

Commander Jim Pruett (Richard Crenna), “Buzz” Lloyd (Gene Hackman) and Clayton “Stoney” Stone (James Franciscus) are the first crew of an experimental space station. Five months into their mission, Lloyd starts to act strangely and they decide to go back to Earth. The problem? They don’t have enough fuel, leaving them, well, marooned.

NASA Director of Manned Spaceflight Charles Keith (Gregory Peck) and Chief Astronaut Ted Dougherty (David Janssen) argue over whether or not the men can be saved. The President — only heard and not seen, it’s John Forsythe — says that the American people need to see these men saved, so a rescue mission is on while the astronaut’s wives — Lee Grant, Mariette Hartley and Nancy Kovack — watch as their men slowly die in space.

As a kid, this always upset me with the scene of Richard Crenna drifting into space to his doom. The nice thing is that Russia ends up working with the U.S. to save the men.

Based on a novel by Martin Caidin — who also wrote Cyborg, the book that was adapted by The Six Million Dollar Man — this won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. But what’s really interesting about this movie to me is that it somehow — despite its Columbia Pictures A-list status in 1969 — it would one day be owned by Film Ventures International and renamed Space Travelers. That’s why this movie — one with three Academy Award winners in Gregory Peck, Gene Hackman and Lee Grant — would end up on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

I love that FVI put all the care of a basic font over a space image to replace the Marooned title in the credits.

This movie was also a major flop when it played in theaters but at least there was a Super 8 home version so you could watch astronauts run out of air in the comfort of home!

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Terror With Cross-Eyes was directed by Steno, whose sons are Enrico and Carlo Vanzina, who together kicked off a new wave of giallo in the 1980s with Nothing Underneath. In this film — written by the director with Giulio Scarnicci and Raimondo Vianello — is about Mino (Enrico Montesano), Giacinto (Alighiero Noschese) and Mirella (Isabella Biagini) staging a murder to become famous. The problem is that when they arrive at Mirella’s apartment, there’s already the dead body of her roommate Margaretha (Maria Baxa).

As they watch the police take the body away, they run, only to be pursued by Commissario Pigna (Francis Blanche). Like good giallo protagonists, they decide to investigate the murder themselves and find that there are connections to organized crime. Anyone that has come close to Margaretha is also being killed by — as the title says — a man with crossed eyes.

Italian comedy is not usually comedy for foreigners. Consider this a crime comedy then with some small hints at giallo. This was lost for some time — and according to Mark David Welsh that may be because of a controversial Manson Family joke — but now it’s online and easier to watch. Sadly, it doesn’t have much to recommend, unless you — like me — are a giallo completist.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Six years after committing a murder and getting away with it — they used to pick up strangers at bars and play sex games with them while taking pictures, but one of them accidentally dies — Lea (Marília Branco), Andrea (Roberto Bisacco) and Vanni (Daniel Sola) get a photo of them that proves they are guilty. They pay the blackmail — they’re all rich enough now — but the messages keep coming. Who is it? Is it one of the three? Old friend Carletto (Lino Capolicchio) who is back in town? So cosa hai fatto l’estate scorsa?

The English translation of this movie is Shame on you, swine! and the film really shows how empty and pointless the lives of the idle rich are. They would have hated Carletto even if they didn’t think he was the one holding their past crimes over their collective heads; he’s a left wing radical artist who hates the capitalism that has given them whatever life they sleepwalk through.

Directed by Mauro Severino, who wrote the story with Giuseppe D’Agata, this film comes before the giallo form was set by Argento. At this point, they could be anything from a Hitchcock ripoff to a movie like this that uses crime and sleaze to poke at the ways of Milan in 1969.

Based around the nursery rhyme “Giro giro tondo” (“Ring Around the Rosie”), this Ennio Morricone soundtrack makes this even better.

You can watch this on The Cave of Forgotten Films.

Based on the novel Macchie di belletto by Ludovico Dentice, directed by Romolo Guerrieri (The Sweet Body of Deborah) and written by Franco Verucci, Massimo D’Avak and Alberto Silvestri, Un Detective (AKA Detective Belli) stars Franco Nero as Commissioner Belli.

He’s a corrupt detective hired by the rich Avvocato Fontana (Adolfo Celi) to look after his son Mino (Maurizio Bonuglia). There’s also a dead record producer named Mr. Romanis (Marino Masé), a model and singer called Emmanuelle (Susanna Martinková, Colpo rovente), an illegal alien trying to get in a relationship with Belli by the name of Sandy (Delia Boccardo) and Fontana’s mysterious and gorgeous wife Vera (Florinda Bolkan).

Also known as Ring of Death and released with the amazing title Tracce di rossetto e di droga per un detective (Traces of Lipstick and Drugs for a Detective), this is a tough movie filled with gorgeous people. As much a giallo as an early poliziotteschi, this has Nero beating suspects, ignoring the rules and doing things like driving Sandy directly into high speed traffic while interrogating her and that’s his love interest! And, well, Mino’s too.

This is a hard boiled detective movie made in Italy with Franco Nero being incredible. You need to watch it.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Professor Riccardo Dossi (Chris Avram) is having an affair with Benedetta (Anna Gael) — the young daughter of his best friend — and being blackmailed by his daughter Lilla (Angela McDonald) and her boyfriend — and Riccardo’s tennis coach — Sandro (Roberto Bisacco). It’s as much a crime of manners and trying to explain the rich and their issues in the late 60s as it is a giallo, but man, it looks great, the world that these people live in is gorgeous and Gael barely can keep her clothes on.

Gael was also Anna Abigail Thynn, Marchioness of Bath; Ceawlin Thynn, 8th Marquess of Bath; Viscountess Weymouth; the Dowager Marchioness; the Honorable Lady Thynn. Yes, beyond starring in movies like Therese and Isabelle, Dracula and Son and Zeta One, she met Alexander Thyn, Viscount Weymouth, in Paris in 1959. They had an affair that lasted for ten years until they were married in 1969. She was 15 when they met.

Unknown to the wealthy Riccardo, the three students want to execute — morally, that is — capitalists and weaken the system. They do it through sex, which is the weapon that no old white man can resist. Except that after he gets blackmailed at the tennis club — man, the heat of bourgeois — he takes the young girl home and balls her, only to have her overdose during the act. What’s a rich man to do? And what if she’s faking the big death, if not the little one?

Based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, this was directed by Franco Rossetti, who was one of the writers of Django and also the director of Emanuelle and Joanna, an Italian softcore movie with Sherry Buchanan in the cast. This was written by Ugo Guerra, Franco Rossetti, Francesco Scardamaglia and Moravia.

The band that recorded the soundtrack, The Rage Within, get their name from the English title for the film, even if the literal translation would be Crime at the Tennis Club. Composed by Phil Chilton and Peter L. Smith, the music was made to take over the storytelling, as there are long stretches without dialogue. Quartet Records, who have re-released it on vinyl, described it as “Think of it as Zabriskie Point, but without the star power of Pink Floyd.”

Trumpets of the Apocalypse is also known as Murder By Music and Perversion Story, even if it has nothing to do with Fulci’s movie of the same name.

Richard Milford (Brett Halsey) is a sailor on leave in London who learns that his sister Cathrin has tried to fly while on acid. He doesn’t believe that and investigates her death with her roommate Helen Becker (Marilù Tolo). It seems like the killer is The Romanian (Manuel De Blas) and the murder is all about some bad weed and a song that references the title. There’s a swinging club called the Mouse Hole, where we discover a face painted Romina Power.

Catharin’s music professor killed himself the same way a day before, so obviously our heroes are on to something. There’s also a hurdy-gurdy player whose instrument is his weapon. Alert Donovan…

Director Julio Buchs also made Alta tensión. He wrote this with Domenico Comanducci, Federico De Urrutia, José Luis Martínez Mollá and Mino Roli. I’m a fool for swinging sixties murder movies, much less Spanish-Italian co-productions, so I had a lot of fun watching this.

You can watch this movie on YouTube.

Also known as Femmine insaziabili (Insatiable Females), Mord im schwarzen Cadillac (Murder In a Black Cadillac), The Insatiables and Beverly Hills, this giallo was directed and written by Alberto De Martino (Miami Golem, Holocaust 2000, OK Connery, Strange Shadows in an Empty Room, The Antichrist).

Paolo Sartoni (Robert Hoffmann, Spasmo) is an Italian journalist making his way in Los Angeles who takes a beating meant for his childhood friend Giulio Lamberti (Roger Fritz), who is now known as Lambert Smile, the advertising face of International Chemical, but he’s upset the company. Paolo decides to write the story of this assault, only to learn that Giulio is dead. The more he learns about his old friend, the more he discovers that America corrupted him and even caused him to leave his wife Luisa (Nicoletta Machiavelli).

Everyone that Paolo meets from the company are all horrible, including the President of the comapny, Donovan (Frank Wolff), secretary Mary Sullivan (Luciana Paluzzi, A Black Veil For Lisa), Giulio’s boss and new lover Vanessa Brighton (Dorothy Malone, who years later would be in the erotic thriller — what they called giallo in the 1990s — Basic Instinct) and her daughter Gloria (Romina Power, who accidentally had her swimsuit bottom removed by a cameraman and that scene is in the movie; her mother went to producer Goffredo Lombardo shouting and complaining about De Martino; I find this story hilarious because in the same year, she was in Jess Franco’s Marquis de Sade’s Justine), who makes a pass at Paolo. That’s when he learns that Giulio is still alive and will kill anyone — including Paolo’s editor Richard Salinger (John Ireland) — to keep his death a secret.

Bruno Nicolai did the soundtrack, which adds a lot for me. This is a fun film, made in America and filled with the sights, sounds and lovemaking of the late sixities.

Directed by Vicente Aranda (The Blood Spattered Bride), who wrote the story with Antonio Rabinad, based on the short story Bailando para Parker by Gonzalo Suárez, Exquisite Cadaver starts with a girl committing suicide by laying down headfirst on train tracks.

We meet a man (Carlos Estrada) who is the publisher of pulp horror — giallo — and someone who has become quite successful as a result. He gets a severed human hand in the mail, which he buries in a park. Another package is sent, this time with a torn dress and a photo of a woman. He also gets a telegram, which his wife (Teresa Gimpera, Hannah Queen of the Vampires) reads and it ends with the promise of sending a forearm. He lies and says its for work, but as she follows him, she notices that he is also being stalked by a woman in a black veil.

The woman is Parker (Capucine, The Pink Panther), who lures the man to her house where she gives him LSD. He staggers through her villa, following the sound of her voice, which leads him to a woman’s body inside a refrigerator. He passes out and wakes up at home, his wife having been called by Parker to get her husband.

The man reveals to his wife that he had an affair with a woman named Esther (Judy Matheson, The House That Vanished; is it too soon to talk about ’72?) who told him “I’d die so that my love for you will last. So that indifference will not kill it” before she laid down on the train tracks, as we saw as the movie began. Except that a detective that the man’s wife hired saved Esther.

As she tried to get her life together, Esther fell for a doctor before meeting Parker, who she soon began an affair with. Parker was in love with her, trying to save her, but Esther never stopped loving the man, finally killing herself. Parker then made this plan to get revenge for her lost love, even cutting. her corpse to pieces, sending each one until finally, the head arrives. The man looks for his wife but she is gone, leaving for Paris and a new relationship with Parker, who has seduced her.

After filming ended, Aranda gave Matheson the silver hand pendant that her character wore in the film. She still has it to this day and even established a trademark of wearing it in her subsequent films.

As for the director, he had an accident on the set which led to him directing much of this movie from a stretcher.

Thanks to Theater of Guts, I know that this was released in the U.S. by Gadabout-Gaddis Productions, who released The Man from Nowhere, Find a Place to Die, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, One On Top of the Other and Marta. According to the site, it played drive-in screens as late as 1983 as a double feature with Twilight Zone: The Movie.

The title Exquisite Corpse comes from the game created by Surrealism founder André Breton that has a collection of words or images collectively assembled by several creators who have no idea what has come before other than a line, which is added to until a complete art piece emerges. The name comes from the phrase that was part of the first work created by the game, “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.”

The Spanish title, Las Crueles (The Cruel Ones), is meant to sound like Les Diaboliques. It was not the title preferred by Aranda.

When this was submitted to censors as Eros e Thanatos, censors wouldn’t let it play. Director and writer Marino Girolami (the director of My Friend, Dr. Jekyll; he used many names over the years. As Frank Martin he directed Zombie Holocaust and as Franco Martinelli he made Special Cop in Action and Violent Rome. He used the name Dario Silvestri to direct God Was in the West, Too, at One Time.) cut the film down, including a scene where the killer caressed the body of a victim. All of that showed up in the fumetti release. This film was consider lost for some time, as it wasn’t even released during the boom of VHS releases.

Franco Adami (Umberto Liberati) is charged with murder after a prostitute that he’s seen shows up dead, her body nude and strung up. Defense attorney and alcoholic Montani (Folco Lulli) tries to argue his case with Adami claiming that flashbacks to animal violence let to him killing the lady of the evening. Montani needs some evidence that this is possible, so he meets with the director of an asylum (Daniele Vargas) and meets two patients with similar cases.

Usai (Silvio Bagolini) was a man obsessed with a young girl named Francesca (Caterina Barbero, who was 18 when this was made, which is I guess a little bit less upsetting but still, this has upskirts and full frontal nudity of a teenager shown) who he gets to tutor. Because of his childhood — he had a doll and his father didn’t want his male son to have baby dolls, so he beat him — he can’t stop his thoughts, which end with him killing her and her parents finding her nude and dead by his side just like a human version of a doll.

Gilberto (Piero Lulli) took the sermons he listened to in church — plus the abuse from other students and the priests — and started to kill sex workers to punish them for their immoral acts. He’s Donny Kohler ten years early, using fire to murder women who he believes are sinners.

Montani presents this evidence and not only does it end with Franco going to a mental home instead of prison, he’s able to convince the editor of the paper to take back the things they said about his client. That’s when we learn that Montani is a drunk because his son killed a boy his age and then committed suicide in jail, so he understands the place that Adami was in.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Following the death of her grandfather, Valentina Garbini (Caterina Barbero) and her husband Pierre (Maurizio Bonuglia) have settled into the old family home, sharing it with her cousin Marta (Lisa Seagram, who mostly did TV in America, including three episodes of Beverly Hillbillies as Edythe Brewster, the new wife of the oil man who helped Jed Clampett get rich. They stay in the cabin that has been relocated to the side of the mansion for their honeymoon. She was also Lila, who poisoned Batman and Robin on their TV show with lilacs, and later ran an acting school in Hawaii, Actors 2000). The cousins are oppposites, as Valentina is free with her body while Marta is virginal. The one time that Marta tried to lose her innocence to a local man, her grandfather beat her with a whip.

This changes when Valentina dies. Pierre is fingered by the police, but Marta hides the murder weapon to keep her cousin’s husband by her side, as the suspicion now is on Valentina’s friends. Now, Marta can get what she wants — a man — and the entire mansion. Things don’t end up working out for her, but that’s the morality coming in, I guess.

Also known as The Mill of the Virgins, this was directed by Gianfranco Baldanello (The Uranium Conspiracy, Very Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, Danger!! Death Ray) and written by Augusto Finocchi and Vittorio Metz. It was edited by Bruno Mattei.

You can watch this on YouTube.