Tag Archives: 1971

ARROW VIDEO 4K UHD RELEASE: The Andromeda Strain (1971)

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This movie is Dr. Jeremy Stone (Arthur Hill) informing the United States Senate Committee on Space Sciences about an alien invasion, not of creatures, but of a virus. After a satellite crashes in Piedmont, New Mexico, everyone dies. Only two people have survived: 69-year-old alcoholic Peter Jackson (George Mitchell) and six-month-old infant Manuel Rios (Robert Soto).

Directed by Robert Wise and written by Nelson Gidding, this is based on the Michael Crichton book. The Infectious Diseases Society of America magazine, Clinical Infectious Diseases, said that this movie is the “most significant, scientifically accurate, and prototypic of all films” of the killer virus genre.

You may not find that exciting, because it’s so close to the very dense book. I remember my mom telling me about this as a kid, because the ads for it upset me so much that she had to explain to me what it was about or I would have never gone to sleep.

The Arrow Video release of this movie has a 4K restoration from the original camera negative by Arrow Films, audio commentary by critic Bryan Reesman, an appreciation by critic Kim Newman, archive featurettes including a making of and A Portrait of Michael Crichton; highlights from the annotated and illustrated shooting script by Nelson Gidding; a theatrical trailer, TV spots and radio spots; an image gallery; an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring writing by Peter Tonguette and select archive material and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Corey Brickley. You can order The Andromeda Strain from MVD.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The Corpse Grinders (1971)

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Ted V. Mikels lived the kind of life that most teenage boys dream of. He lived in a house that looked like a castle, made exploitation movies and lived with gorgeous women who wanted to be filmmakers that he referred to as Castle Ladies.

When the Lotus Cat Food Company finds itself going out of business, its owners, Landau (Sanford Mitchell) and Maltby (J. Byron Foster), decide to start using dead bodies from a graveyard for the source of their cat food. The cats then have a taste for man and start killing. Only veterinarian Howard Glass (Sean Kenney) and nurse Angie Robinson (Monika Kelly) can stop the wild cats.

Not only was this written by Arch Hall Sr. — the father of Arch Hall Jr. — the script was touched up by Joe Cranston — the father of Bryan Cranston.

This film had quite a life. It played triple features with The Embalmer and The Undertaker and His Pals, double features in the UK with Horror Hospital and played drive-ins from 1980 to 1985 as The Flesh Grinders. It was also part of the legendary 5 Deranged Features lineup, playing as Night of the Howling Beast along with Dracula vs. Frankenstein under the title They’re Coming to Get You, The Wizard of Gore as House of Torture, Creature from Black Lake and Shriek of the Mutilated. House of Schlock has a great article about this.

MILL CREEK BLU-RAY BOX SET: Bewitched The Complete Series

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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.

CBS LATE MOVIE: A Tattered Web (1971)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: A Tattered Web was on the CBS Late Movie on August 7 and November 16, 1972.

This made-for-TV movie originally aired on September 24, 1971 and was soon on the CBS Late Movie. It stars Lloyd Bridges as Sgt. Ed Stagg, an older cop devoted to the daughter he raised alone, Tina (Sally Shockley). Tina’s mother cheated on him and disappeared, so he’s super worried about her new husband, Steve (Frank Converse), whom he keeps catching in the apartment of fallen woman Louise Campbell (Anne Helm). He warns him, he warns her, he shoves her into a wall, she dies. What’s a cop to do?

When he and his partner, Sgt. Joe Marcus (Murray Hamilton), are assigned the case, you can imagine what it does to his mental health. Even since the betrayal of his wife, he’s kept his daughter in the dark, trying to remove anything harmful from her life, keeping her almost as a child. Now that she’s living with her oil worker husband under his roof, he’s trying to do the same thing. Except that the neighbors of the dead Ms. Campbell saw Steve go in and out of her place; Ed’s also left his fingerprints behind on a glass.

So he does what any cop would. He finds a man on death row named Willard Edson (Broderick Crawford) and convinces him that he also killed Campbell. Everyone gets away with it, right? Maybe.

In 74 minutes, director Paul Wendkos and writer Art Wallace provide everyone with great material. Bridges isn’t doing comedy or being a nice old man in this. He’s a lunatic from the start. Converse and Hamilton shine, while Crawford makes a meal of the few moments he’s in the movie.

Like many TV movies, this played in theaters overseas. In Norway and Sweden, it was Alibi. In Spain, The Portals of Eden.

You can watch this on Tubi.

RADIANCE FILMS BLU RAY RELEASE: Sympathy for the Underdog (1971)

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Returning from a ten-year prison sentence, gang leader Gunji (Koji Tsuruta) learns that his territory is now owned by a former enemy who only appears to be a legitimate business. Instead of staying, he and his crew head off to Okinawa.

Directed by Kinji Fukasaku, this finds a proud yakuza learning that his men are now gambling addicts working minimum wage jobs, a far cry from the lawless world he was once part of. Now, there are corporate gangs, big-time operations that have no time for rough individualists like Gunji, who, like the cowboys of the West, are doomed to not fade away but to go out of this world in a violent hail of bullets.

The Radiance Films Blu-ray release of this movie has extras including audio commentary by yakuza film expert Nathan Stuart; an interview with Fukasaku biographer Olivier Hadouchi; a visual essay on Okinawa on screen by film historian and author Aaron Gerow; a trailer; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow and a limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Bastian Meiresonne and an archival review of the film. It’s a limited Edition of 3,000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with a removable OBI strip, leaving the packaging free of certificates and markings. You can order the film from MVD.

CBS LATE MOVIE: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Abominable Dr. Phibes was on the CBS Late Movie on February 22, 1974 and December 30, 1975.

Church of Satan founder Anton Szandor LaVey claimed that the main character in this Vincent Price film was based on him. Well, his name is Dr. Anton Phibes and he’s an organist, researcher, medical doctor, biblical scholar and ex-vaudevillian who has created a clockwork band of robot musicians to play old standards at his whim. Seeing as how nearly all of these things match up with LaVey, I can kind of see his point.

Director Robert Fuest started by designing sets. While working on the TV show The Avengers, he got excited about directing and ended up working on seven episodes of the original series and two of The New Avengers. Soon, he’d be working in film more and more, starting with 1967’s Just Like a Woman. Between the two Phibes films, And Soon the Darkness, The Final Programme and The Devil’s Rain!, he became known for dark-humored fantasy and inventive sets, several of which he designed himself.

This movie is one I can’t be quiet about. It’s one of the strangest and most delightful films I’ve ever seen.

Dr. Anton Phibes died in Switzerland, racing back home upon hearing the news that his beloved bridge Victoria (an uncredited Caroline Munro) had died during surgery. The truth is that Phibes has survived, scarred beyond belief and unable to speak, but alive. He uses all of the skills that he’s mastered to rebuild his face and approximate a human voice. Also, he may or may not be insane.

Phibes believes that the doctors who operated on his wife were incompetent and, therefore, must pay for their insolence. So he does what anyone else would do: visit the Biblical ten plagues of Egypt on every single one of them.

Phibes is, of course, played by Vincent Price. No one else could handle this role. Or this movie. There’s hardly any dialogue for the first ten minutes of the movie. Instead, there are long musical numbers of Phibes and his clockwork band playing old standards. In fact, Phibes doesn’t speak for the first 32 minutes of the movie. Anyone who asks questions like “Why?” and says things like “This movie makes no sense” will be dealt with accordingly.

After the first few murders, Inspector Trout gets on the case. He becomes Phibes’ main antagonist for this and the following film, trying to prove that all of these murders — the doctors and nurse who had been on the team of Dr. Vesalius (Joseph Cotten!) — are connected. Phibes then stays one step ahead of the police, murdering everyone with bees, snow, a unicorn statue, locusts and rats, sometimes even right next to where the cops have staked him out.

Dr. Phibes is assisted by the lovely Vulnavia. We’re never informed that she’s a robot, but in my opinion, she totally is. Both she and the doctor are the most fashion-forward of all revenge killers I’ve seen outside of Meiko Kaji and Christina Lindberg.

Writer William Goldstein wrote Vulnavia as another clockwork robot with a wind-up key in her neck. Fuest thought that Phibes demanded a more mobile assistant, so he made her human, yet one with a blank face and mechanical body movements. I still like to think that she’s a machine, particularly because she returns in the next film after her demise here. Also, Fuest rewrote nearly the entire script.

After killing off everyone else — sorry Terry-Thomas! — Phibes kidnaps Dr. Vesalius’ son and implants a key inside his heart that will unlock the boy. However, if the doctor doesn’t finish the surgery on his son in six minutes — the same amount of time he had spent trying to save Phibes’ wife — acid will rain down and kill both he and his boy.

Against all odds, Vesalius is successful. Vulnavia, in the middle of destroying Phibes’ clockwork orchestra, is sprayed by the acid and killed while the doctor himself replaces his blood with a special fluid and lies down to eternal sleep with his wife, happy that he has had his revenge.

If you’re interested, the ten plagues Phibes unleashes are:

1. Blood: He drains all of Dr. Longstreet’s blood

2. Frogs: He uses a mechanical frog mask to kill Dr. Hargreaves at a costume party

3. Bats: A more cinematic plague than lice from the Biblical plagues, Phibes uses these airborne rodents to kill Dr. Dunwoody

4. Rats: Again, better than flies, rats overwhelm Dr. Kitaj and cause his plane to crash

5. Pestilence: This one is a leap, but the unicorn head that kills Dr. Whitcombe qualifies

6: Boils: Professor Thornton is stung to death by bees

7. Hail: Dr. Hedgepath is frozen by an ice machine

8. Locusts: The nurse is devoured by them thanks to an ingenious trap

9. Darkness: Phibes joins his wife in eternal rest during a solar eclipse

10. Death of the firstborn: Phibes kidnaps the son of Dr. Vesalius

I love that this movie appears lost in time. While set in the 1920s, many of the songs weren’t released until the 1940s. Also, despite the era the film is set in, Phibes has working robots and high technology.

There’s nothing quite like this movie. I encourage you to take the rest of the day off and savor it.

How does Phibes live up to being a Satanic film? In my opinion, Phibes embodies one of the nine Satanic statements to its utmost: Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek. The men and woman whose negligence led to the loss of Phibes’ wife were never punished. Phibes had to become their judge, jury and yes, destroyer.

On the other hand — or hoof, as it were — Phibes is the exact antithesis of the ninth Satanic sin, Lack of Aesthetics, which states that “an eye for beauty, for balance, is an essential Satanic tool and must be applied for greatest magical effectiveness. It’s not what’s supposed to be pleasing—it’s what is. Aesthetics is a personal thing, reflective of one’s own nature, but there are universally pleasing and harmonious configurations that should not be denied.” So much of what makes this film is that Phibes’ musical art is just as essential as his demented nature and abilities. Music is the core of his soul, not just revenge.

Another point of view comes from Draconis Blackthorne of the Sinister Screen: “This is an aesthetically-beauteous film, replete with Satanic architecture as well as ideology. Those who know will recognize these subtle and sometimes rather blatant displays. Obviously, to those familiar with the life of our founder, there are several parallels between Dr. Anton Phibes’s character and that of Dr. Anton LaVey – they even share the same first name and certain propensities.”

CBS LATE MOVIE: Lola (1970)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Lola was on the CBS Late Movie on December 13, 1972 and August 9, 1973.

Also released as Twinky and London Affair, Lola has the kind of story that only a movie made in 1970 could have.

Scott Wardman (Charles Bronson) falls in love — or something — with Sybil Londonderry (Susan George), who also goes by Twinky and Lola. The problem is that he’s 38 and she’s 16. He seemingly knows the age of consent and any guy that can instantly tell you that is a creep.

Then Scott gets busted for being married to a child and forced to leave England. He says, “I make one uncool move with a nutty 16-year-old kid, and suddenly my whole world is turned upside down.” Now this pornographic author has to go back to the United States.

If you think this couldn’t happen, well…

Norman Thaddeus Vane wrote this, and it’s based on his own marriage to 16-year-old model Sarah Caldwell, whom he married when he was also 38. In an interview with the astounding Hidden Films, the writer — and later director — would claim, “There was a reason I wound up marrying Sarah Caldwell (who was 16 at the time and later cast in Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter which Vane scripted; Vane later based the script for Lola on this scandalous marriage). I was a good-looking kid on King’s Road in Chelsea. I had a sports car, I had money, and I had a beautiful flat.”

Vane also pretty much explains the plot of this film in that interview: “I met her at a party. She was stunningly beautiful. I had a small flat on King’s Road in Chelsea, and she used to come over secretly on the way back from school, and we used to fuck. And she told her parents that she was seeing me — I was probably about 38 or something—and they were angry. Her father was head of the East India Trading Company. The only way we could see each other was if we got married, and in Scotland, you could get married at 16. So we eloped there. I had been sleeping with a Scottish girl from Glasgow. You had to spend three days in residence in Scotland before you got married, so I asked her if we could use her family’s address, and she said yes. Sarah called her parents and said, “I’m very sorry to tell you this, but I got married today!” The newspapers wrote columns about her; it was like a front-page story for months afterwards. They called me “The Cad of the Year.”

This entire interview is wild and I urge you to read it, as he claims that director Richard Donner immediately slept with Susan George, that the movie was financed by an Italian baron and Bronson superfan who later committed suicide over Britt Ekland, that Bronson’s wife Jill Ireland wanted to play the teenage girl and that Bronson couldn’t be controlled by Donner and he ruined the movie.

Lola is fascinating because why would Scott and Lola ever get together — well, sex — or stay together? There’s nothing that suggests that they have a single thing in common other than her schoolgirl crush on him, and well, yeah, she’s Susan George in 1970, I get that. Yet Bronson comes off as, well, Charles Bronson, a man who speaks little and is quick to violence. Maybe that’s how I see him, as I’ve watched so many of his action movies, but when you visit the posters and VHS covers for this, you’ll know that I wasn’t the only one who saw Bronson just as a force of violent nature.

Lola ends up getting an apartment for the couple while Scott is in jail over a misunderstanding, then she doesn’t realize that he has a job as a writer and needs to be left alone while he’s working. As a jerk of a writer myself, I get it. She also acts like a kid because she is one. Finally, after running away and coming back, she goes back to England for good.

This is not the last movie that Vane would make that references his life. The Black Room is about how he cheated on his wife in his own black room with Penthouse centerfolds that he met while working at that publication. It remains to be discovered if any of those women were vampires. Vane also made the absolutely baffling Club Life, a movie that I want everyone to watch.

I wonder if Susan George met with her agent and said, “Can I do something not so scuzzy for my next movie, like sleep with a guy twice my age?” And the agent said, “Susa,n baby, have I got a movie for you. It’s classy. It’s called Straw Dogs.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

88 FILMS BLU RAY RELEASE: Lady With a Sword (1971)

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Directed by actress Kao Pao-shu, this finds Feng Fei Fei (Lily Ho) facing a challenge. She wants revenge on the three men who killed her sister and almost ended her nephew. Getting that bloody payment isn’t the hardest thing in the world for her, as she’s the fiercest swordsperson in perhaps all of the martial world.

The problem is that one of the killers appears to be Chin Lien Pai, the man to whom she has been promised. All the fighting skills in the world can’t get past family obligations and love.

I love that this had a female director. After this, she started her own company with her husband, making this the only film she would direct for Shaw Brothers.

This wasn’t dubbed when it was released in the U.S., instead appearing with subtitles, which wasn’t usually the way these movies came out here. I wish they’d given it a better title.

The 88 Films release of Lady With a Sword has awesome new art by R.P. “Kung Fu Bob” O’Brien, as well as commentary by David West and a stills gallery. You can get it from MVD.

JUNESPLOITATION: Rita of the West (1967)

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June 21: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Westerns!

“One night, you will see a red star overhead. It will shine like a great diamond. On the night, you will go far away. Further than where you came from. You are a legend, Little Rita. A beautiful legend. You arrived from the void and you’re returning to the void.”

Little Rita wasn’t even five feet tall and weighed around 86 pounds. The Italian/Swiss singer and actress was known as la Zanzara di Torino (The Mosquito of Torino) and Pel di carota (Carrot Hair). Yet she sold 50 million records worldwide and is one of the few Italian singers to score on the UK pop charts. Her release of “Remember Me”, sung in English, with “Just Once More” on the other side, reached #26 in the U.S. and she was a frequent guest of The Ed Sullivan Show. But in Spain, other than Italy, she has the most success. 

In the 60s, she’d make six films — this movie, Clementine Cherie, La Feldmarescialla (The Crazy Kids of the War), Rita the American Girl, Rita La Zanzara (Rita the Mosquito) and Non Stuzzicate la Zanzara (Don’t Sting the Mosquito) — with the latter three directed by Lina Wertmüller.

Like all great Italian singers, she had a scandal. She married Teddy Reno, the man who organized the first song contest she won, a man who was still married. They were married in Switzerland in 1968 and officially in Italy in 1971, a country that had no official divorce law at the time.

In this, she’s Big Little Rita, somehow the fastest and deadliest gunfighter around, the “bestest in the West,” who is helping Silly Bull (Gordon Mitchell, who I imagine loaned his Western ranch set to this) to destroy the white man’s gold, which he believes has ruined the good nature of the world. Somehow, just a few years into the Italian West and not only is it being parodied, it’s also being called out for its anti-authoritarian bent.

This brings her into combat with both Ringo (Kirk Morris, who was really Adriano Bellini, a star of peplum and fumetti) and Django (Enzo Di Natale, who only made this movie, which is odd as I’m shocked more Italian directors didn’t cast him as a fake Franco Nero) in this comedic West. There’s also a character named Zorro, played by Romano Puppo, who was the leader of the zombies in Zombie 4: After Death, as well as showing up in Cop Game, Robowar and Escape from the Bronx as Trash’s father.

After Rita is taken by Sancho (Fernando Sancho, who was in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the rebels and would go on to be in several Italian Westerns, as well as playing the corrupt mayor in Return of the Blind Dead) and his men, she’s rescued by a dashing young cowboy named Black Star, who is Terrence Hill, four years before making what many consider the first Italian comedy Western, They Call Me Trinity.

Yet when they fall in love, that first night, he does what every other white man does and steals the gold. When caught, he’s sent to the Native Americans for punishment, but Rita talks them into letting him go. He feels bad for how he’s treated her and keeps turning himself in to be hanged. It takes him telling her he loves her for this all to end, at which point all the gold is destroyed, and Rita goes somewhere, following that deep dialogue about being a legend. He goes into the stars to get her back.

“A movie should have a happy ending, or no one would go see it.”

That’s what Francis Fitzgerald Grawz, the piano-playing singer from Germany, played by Lucio Dalla, says at the end. His talent caused Pupi Averti to give up music for directing, inspiring his movie Ma quando arrivano le ragazze. Another singer, Teddy Reno, plays the sheriff. Yes, the same Teddy Reno who had the scandal with Rita.

Director Ferdinando Baldi, who co-wrote the script with Franco Rossetti (who had a right to make fun of Django and Ringo, as he was one of the writers of both the original Django, the non-official sequel Django Prepare a Coffin and Ringo and His Golden Pistol, not to mention Zabriskie Point under his Americanized name Fred Gardner; he also directed and wrote Delitto al circolo del tennis and Emanuelle and Joanna, which has Sherry Buchanan in it), also made Texas Adios, Blindman, Long Lasting Days (as Sam Livingstone), Get Mean,  Nine Guests for a Crime, Comin’ at Ya!, Treasure of the Four Crowns, War Bus, Terror Express, Tan Zan: The Ultimate Mission and Just a Damned Soldier (as Ted Kaplan on the last two). I’ve seen tons of his movies!

It was shot by Enzo Barboni, the cinematographer on Django (and Nightmare Castle), so it looks just like the films it’s making light of. Of course, he would go on to make They Call Me Trinity, perfecting what started in this.

In France, after the success of the Trinity movies, this was re-released as T’as le bonjour de Trinita (Hello from Trinity). It was called Enas trellos… trellos Trinita (Crazy, Crazy Trinity) in Greece and Crazy Westerners in the U.S.

How about the fact that Fernanda Dell’Acqua — thanks Spaghetti Western Database — the sister of stuntmen Alberto, Ottaviano and Roberto was Rita’s stunt double? This movie ended her career, as her horse ran toward a ravine and didn’t stop. She barely got off in time, but ruined her leg. She was told, weeks later, that the horse died from regret. But this is Italy…

At one point, Gordon Mitchell’s Chief tells Rita, “You will return to nothingness, because from nothingness you came.” That’s a very sage — and saga — thing to say to a heroine. Also very Catholic.

A musicarello Italian Western with Pink Panther credits with an anti-capitalism streak, golden hand grenades, evil versions of cowboy icons and a gorgeous leading lady who, despite being tiny, gives it her all. I had no expectations and came away inspired.

You can watch this on YouTube.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The Animals (1971)

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Also known as Five Savage Men, this starts with everyone on a stagecoach being killed, other than schoolteacher Alice McAndrew (Michele Carey, The Choirboys), who is assaulted and left for dead by Pudge Elliot (Keenan Wynn) and his henchmen, who include Peyote (Joe Turkel, not tending bar for Jack Nicholson) and Jamie (Pepper Martin). I mean, they crucify her to the ground in the desert before they do it and I get it, it’s a revengeomatic, but in the ways of Michael Winner — this was directed by Ron Joy and written by Richard Bakalyan — that assault goes on so long that we begin to feel complicit in it.

After they depart, Native American Chatto (Henry Silva, who was Sicilian and Spanish) rescues her — why didn’t he jump in sooner? — and not only brings her back to health, he also teaches her how to kill and becomes her lover, which seems kind of odd, but what do I know?

The law, led by Sheriff Allan Pierce (John Anderson), thinks Chatto is behind all of this. You can see where that is going. What you won’t expect is an acid rock soundtrack by Rupert Holmes, who had two hit songs about cheating, “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” and “Him.” I never knew that he created the AMC series Remember WENN.

You can watch this on Tubi.