Dan Wolman also made Baby Love and Nana for Cannon. Here, the Israeli filmmaker is in Sweden, making a movie about a young girl named Inga who leaves her small town for the big lights and big city of Stockholm. There, she’s shocked to find her sister Greta (Monica Ekman) is living in sin with her boyfriend Casten (Krister Ekman, Monica’s real-life husband). Before you can say Swedish adult film imported by Cannon, Casten is making love to both sisters, putting a wedge between them. Then, Inga leaves for home.

This movie has just as much sex as travelogue footage, padding it — barely — to eighty minutes.

Yet it has one thing that makes it worth watching.

Inga is played by Thriller star Christina Lindberg.

Yes, the one-eyed demoness of revenge.

I’d like to not have this article descend into me being a Tex Avery wolf over Lindberg, but that’s incredibly difficult. If you ever wondered, was the world created by an accidental combination of chemicals and the Big Bang or was there a Divine Designer behind it all, I point you to Christina Lindberg and ask you to make up your own mind.

EDITOR’S NOTE: On July 19, 1971, Cannon Releasing Corporation brought this British movie to America. It was first on the site on November 1, 2019.

Walter Eastwood (Michael Gough, Alfred from the Batman movies) has been physically and mentally abusing is wife (Yvonne Mitchell from 1984) and daughter, as well as raising a son to be exactly like him. So they do what any of us would. They kill him. The problem is that he won’t stay dead.

Mitchell and Gough were well-known stage performers with Gough appearing in so many British horror films. The couple’s children, Rupert and Jane, were played by Michael Gough’s real-life son Simon and Simon’s fiancee Sharon Gurney. That may seem weird, seeing as how they were married before the movie was released.

Otherwise known as The Velvet House, this take on Les Diaboliques was made for a minimal budget. It shows, but the acting is great.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Originally on the site on January 19, 2020, this folk horror film was brought to America by Cannon Releasing Corporation.

In his BBC documentary series A History of Horror, Mark Gatiss referred to this film, along with Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man, as the prime example of a short-lived subgenre he called folk horror.

It’s directed by Piers Haggard, who also was behind The Quatermass Conclusion, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu and Venom. He’s also the great-great-nephew of H. Rider Haggard, the creator of Allan Quartermain.

Robert Wynne-Simmons was hired to write the story, which was inspired by the modern-day Manson Family and Mary Bell child murders.

In the early 18th century, Ralph Gower (Barry Andrews, Dracula Has Risen from His Grave) uncovers a one-eyed skill covered with fur while plowing his fields. He asks the judge (Patrick Wymark, Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow) to look at it, but it’s gone missing, and his fears are ridiculous.

Peter Edmonton brings his fiancee, Rosalind Barton (Tamara Ustinov, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb), to meet his aunt, Mistress Banham. Banham disapproves of the coupling and demands that Rosalind sleep in an attic room. After screaming throughout the night, she soon gets ill, and the judge commits her. As she’s led away, Peter discovers she has a claw instead of a hand.

Claws show up all over this — hidden in fields to be found by children and attacking Peter inside the cursed room, causing him to sever his hand. The judge leaves behind the town for London but promises to return. He places Squire Middleton (James Hayter, The 39 Steps) in charge.

One of the children who found the claw, Mark, is lured out by his classmates and killed in a ritual game by the leader of a new cult, Angel Blake (Linda Hayden, Madhouse, Queen Kong). She even tries to seduce Fallowfield (Anthony Ainley, the Master from Dr. Who) and tells him that Mark had the devil inside him, which needed to be cut out. Her group also has a Black Mass inside a ruined church where they attack Mark’s sister Cathy (Wendy Padbury, companion Zoe on Dr. Who). They ritualistically assault and murder her before tearing the fur from her skin.

Of course, it’s not long before all hell quite literally breaks loose, with insane children raising Satan himself from the Great Beyond and Ralph growing fur on his leg, marking him for death. This movie is…well, there’s nothing else quite like it. I can see why it had a limited audience for years; it’s so dark and unforgiving.

“It never made much money,” said Haggard. “It wasn’t a hit. From the very beginning, it had a minority appeal. A few people absolutely loved it, but the audiences didn’t turn out for it.”

While Satan’s Skin was the original title, you must give it to American International Pictures’ Samuel Z. Arkoff, who created the film’s title.

Chester Jump (Tom Ligon) dreams of being a racecar driver but for now, he’s fixing cars for Babe Duggers (Logan Ramsey; Mama Fratelli was his real-life wife). So until he gets there, he’s going on a rambling journey through Florida, picking up service industry women, challenging other men to races, fighting with his family and just trying to get by.

Then he goes from dirt to stock racing, finally succeeding in a demoliton derby before he walks away alone.

Take a look at that poster.

None of that happens in this movie.

What does are long arguments between Chester and his father, playd by an incredible Conrad Bain years before he was Mr. Drummond. He’s drunken, brutal and bleak. Jack Nance, Judd Hirsch and Sally Kirkland are also here in very small parts.

Also known as Fury On Wheels, this film was directed by Joseph Manduke (Omega Syndrome, the movie version of Beatlemania) and written by Richard Wheelwright in his only screen credit. It was shot at the now closed Golden Gate Speedway and many of that scenes locals were used as extras and as stunt drivers.

As for the character of Dutchman, you may recognize the voice. He’s “Voice of God” Norman Rose, who like Bain was also in Who Killed Mary What’s Her Name? He was also the voice of radio drama Dimension X, the voice in the Juan Valdez coffee commerical and the narrator for the American version of Message from Space.

Robert Koster, who was the second unit director, played the Scarecrow in Dark Night of the Scarecrow, while cinematographer Gregory Sandor also worked on Sisters, The Born Losers and The House on Bare Mountain. Working as the script and continuity supervisor? William Kerwin’s sister Betty. And the most interesting trivia of all is that the music producer for Jump was Martin Mull, years before he’d start acting.

William Sachs told Hidden Films — an incredible site devoted to obscure/rare movies not available for streaming — of this movie: “They fired the director (Louis Leahman). They didn’t know what to do with the footage. It was a meandering thing, there were so many things missing, nothing made sense. So I came up with a spine (for the movie), where the girl is in a mental hospital, and the guy comes to try to get her memory back, and that’s what I shot. I used flashbacks out of what was already shot. I shot it at Welfare Island — it’s now Roosevelt Island — at an old mental hospital. There were labs there with jars of fetuses and body parts that were 100 years old. They put my name on as co-director, though I really didn’t want them to.”

Yes, a movie originally about an outlaw and his two sons massacring the men working at a gold mine and then stopping at a cabin in the woods where a woman (Elsa Raven, Mrs. Townsend from The Amityville Horror) and her stepdaughter Sally (Anna Stuart, who was Donna Love for 976 episodes of Another World) live now became one told through the flashbacks of Sally as she attempts to come back to sanity.

And if you’re pondering why Helen looks familiar, that’s because she’s played by an uncredited Candace Hilligoss from Carnival of Souls.

That said — this movie is impossible to find and has even eluded me.

Did you know I liked giallo? Oh, that Letterbox list of three hundred plus movies let you know? Well, whether you’re new to the genre or have loved these black gloved killer movies for decades, Arrow Video’s Giallo Essentials: Red Edition is perfect with its new 2K restorations of the film from the original camera negative for The Possessed, The Fifth Cord and The Pyjama Girl Case.

The Possessed (1965): The Possessed is based on one of Italy’s most notorious crimes, The Alleghe killings, and adapted from the book by acclaimed literary figure Giovanni Comisso. It seems like a giallo, but it’s way closer to a film noir. Or maybe an art film. Often, people say that a movie feels like it’s inside a dream, but so much of this movie feels like one long evening of interconnected night terrors.

Also known as The Lady of the Lake, this films was written by Giulio Questi (Death Laid an Egg) and co-directed by Franco Rossellini (who would later produce Caligula) and  Luigi Bazzoni (The Fifth Cord, Footprints on the Moon).

Bernard (Peter Baldwin) is a novelist who has given up on life, despite his growing fame. Last summer, he fell in love with a maid named Tilde and hasn’t been able to get her out of his mind. As time goes on, despite the friendly way everyone at the inn treats him, he grows more and more worried about the conspiracy within this small town. That’s because while he was gone, Tilde committed suicide. And she may not have been the perfect woman that his creativity made her out to be.

Much like the giallo protagonist — a stranger on a strange who is often an untrustworthy narrator who must now investigate a crime that they themselves are implicated in — Bernard learns more about how his vacation getaway also isn’t the heaven that he dreamed that it was.

Thanks to the recent Arrow Video releases, I’ve done a deep dive on the films Bazzoni and wish that he had made more than the three giallo-esque films on his resume. Each of them subverts the form while working within it, offering challenging narratives and films that refuse to simply be background noise.

I’d never heard of this film before they announced it and am pleased to say that it’s moved up on the list of my favorite films. Consider this my highest recommendation.

The Fifth Cord (1971): Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage has scores of imitators that rose in the wake of its success. There were scores of gorgeous women being murdered, jazzy soundtracks blaring and movies with animals in their titles. And then, every once in a while, there’s a giallo that rises beyond the pack and asserts itself as a true work of art.

Giornata Nera per L’Ariete, or Black Day for the Ram, may appear to be an animal title, but it really refers to astrology (which kind of gives away some of the film). It’s better known as The Fifth Cord.

Director Luigi Bazzoni doesn’t have a huge list of films to his credit, but between this film, The Possessed and Footprints on the Moon, his take on the giallo form is unlike anyone else’s. This is more than a murder mystery. It’s a complex take on alienation and isolation at the end of the last century.

Based on David McDonald Devine’s novel — but based in Italy, not Scotland as in the book — The Fifth Cord starts with a man barely surviving a vicious attack on the way home from a New Year’s Eve party. We even get to hear the words of the killer:

“I am going to commit murder. I am going to kill another human being. How easy it is to say, already I feel like a criminal. I’ve been thinking it over for weeks, but now that I’ve giving voice to my evil intention I feel comfortably relaxed. Perhaps the deed itself will be an anti-climax, but I think not.”

Writer Andrea Bild (Franco Nero!) is assigned to report on the case and to put it bluntly, he’s a mess. Ever since his separation, he’s been drowning his life in whiskey and women.

Soon, the attacker strikes again and this time, whomever it is succeeds and leaves behind a black glove with a finger missing (Evil FIngers is an alternate title). That one finger missing turns into two, then three and comes with evil phone calls. Andrea has to take on the giallo role of the investigator before he becomes either the fifth victim or is arrested by the police — it turns out that he was at that very same New Year’s party, as was every single one of the victims.

The story itself is rather basic, but the way that it’s told is anything but. Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography places The Fifth Cord in an industrialized Rome that’s rarely seen in giallo, eschewing the historic architecture we’re used to seeing. I’d say that it’s a less flashy Tenebre, but this was made a decade before that movie.

If you come to these movies for the fashions, well, you may be slightly disappointed. But if you love the decor, look out. I’ve never seen more spiral staircases in one movie ever before. The house with the giant fireplace was also used for Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet, but looks so much more impressive here. And I loved how the modern architecture gives little room to run in the closing moments.

This movie has never looked better than on its recent Arrow Video release. It’s jaw-dropping how gorgeous the film appears and the Ennio Morricone soundtrack positively emerges from the speakers. I expect great things from this company, but they continually surprise and delight me at every turn.

The Pyjama Girl Case (1977): The Girl in the Yellow Pyjamas AKA The Pyjama Girl Case is more than just a giallo. It’s based on a true story, the 1934 Australian cold case that concerns the murder of Linda Agostini. Born Florence Linda Platt in a suburb of South East London, she left the UK behind for New Zealand after a broken romance, then went to Australia where she worked at a cinema and lived in a boardinghouse. Post-murder gossip claimed that she was a heavy drinker, a jazz baby and someone who entertained plenty of much younger men, which became an issue when she married the Italian expatriate Antonio Agostini. He moved her to Melbourne to try and get away from the bad influences that he felt existed in Sydney, but four years later she disappeared.

Her body was found inside a burning grain sack left behind on the beach. Her head was wrapped in a towel, her body was badly beaten and she had been shot in the neck. But what defined the case were her intricate silk pajamas, complete with a Chinese dragon design, a look that was not the type of clothing favored by your average Australian housewife.

Her body was kept in a formaldehyde bath for a decade and the public was invited to attempt to identify the body. In 1944, dental records proved that the girl in the yellow pajamas was Agostini. Meanwhile, her husband had been in an internment camp for four years during World War II due to his Italian heritage and sympathies toward the Axis. When he returned and was questioned by police commissioner William MacKay — a man he had once waited on — he immediately confessed to killing his wife.

There’s still some controversy over whether or not he actually confessed. There’s just as much as to who the pajama girl was. Regardless, her husband only served three years on manslaughter, as he claimed the shooting was an accident, and was extradited to Italy. Historian Richard Evans wrote The Pyjama Girl Mystery: A True Story of Murder, Obsession and Lies in 2004 and claims that police corruption meant that the case needed to be solved as quickly as possible, as the public sentiment had turned against the cops.

The giallo that is based on the case is really well made and has an intriguing split narrative. On one hand, we have the retired Inspector Thompson (Ray Milland) investigating the case and dealing with his own mortality. Meanwhile, we see Glenda Blythe (Dalila Di Lazzaro, Frankenstein 80, the monster’s bride in Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, the headmistress in Phenomena, perhaps the other woman in Carlo Ponti and Sophia Loren’s marriage) struggle with the relationships in her life, including her husband Antonio Attolini, her lover Ray Conner (Howard Ross, The New York Ripper) and her mentor Professor Henry Douglas (Mel Ferrer). As the relationship with her husband starts to fall apart, she drifts into prostitution and in a harrowing scene, makes love to two men while one’s teenage nephew tries to not make eye contact with her.

Other than the Riz Ortolani score — Amanda Lear sings on two of them! — this isn’t a fashion-filled bit of fun. This is a dark and dreary journey through the end of a woman’s life and the elderly man devoted to finding out the answers to who and why, even if he knows that discovering that truth won’t change the fact that he’s closer to the end of his story than the beginning. At least he cares more than the modern police, who simply embalm her nude body, put it on display and allow people to stare at it.

I read the other day that giallo films were meant for the people outside of Rome, for provincial tastes that demanded a morality play. I’m not certain that’s entirely true, but this movie aspires to art and a heartbreaking moment as we reach the close and realize that the two stories are truly connected in the bleakest of ways.

Arrow Video’s Giallo Essentials: Red Collection has all three films in a rigid box packaging with newly designed artwork by Adam Rabalais in a windowed Giallo Essentials Collection slipcover.

The Possessed special features include new audio commentary by writer and critic Tim Lucas, a video appreciation by Richard Dyer,  interviews with the film’s makeup artist Giannetto De Rossi, award-winning assistant art director Dante Ferretti and actor/director Francesco Barilli, a close friend of Luigi and Camillo Bazzoni. It also has the original trailers and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sean Phillips.

The Fifth Cord has new audio commentary by critic Travis Crawford, a video essay on the film’s use of architecture and space by critic Rachael Nisbet, interviews with author and critic Michael Mackenzie, Franco Nero and film editor Eugenio Alabiso. Plus, there’s a rare, previously unseen deleted sequence restored from the original negative, the original Italian and English theatrical trailers, an image gallery and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Haunt Love.

The Pyjama Girl Case has new audio commentary by Troy Howarth, plus interviews with author and critic Michael Mackenzie, Howard Ross, editor Alberto Tagliavia and composer Riz Ortolani. Plus, you get an image gallery the Italian theatrical trailer and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Chris Malbon.

You can get it from MVD.

José Ramón Larraz loves the London countryside, a mood that can best be described as oppressive and the near-constant threat of psychosexual violence.

Paul (Malcolm Terris) and his mistress Olivia (Sibyla Grey, also from Whirlpool) break down outside the home of taxidermy enthusiast Julian (Karl Lanchbury, keeping up his maniacal streak of Larraz villains after Whirlpool) and his sister Rebecca (Lisbet Lundquist, who was also…yes, you get it now).

If you break down in the middle of the night in the foggy woods of England, let me give you some advice. Don’t go in the house.

Olivia quickly passes out and Paul decides to snoop around and becomes part of the orgy happening in the house before he’s quickly dispatched after daring to get aroused around Rebecca after she forces him to have sex with one of her female followers at gunpoint.

Yes, there are some true issues in this house.

Then, despite being warned that everyone in that house will try to kill her, Olivia doesn’t even worry about where her lover has gone. She smokes some weed and then gets hooked on heroin after the brother and sister keep trying to seduce her.

Rebecca scoring some heroin and then decimating an old pharmacist who becomes attracted to her is just one of the many strange things that happens, but Olivia says that being hooked on smack is better than the boredom of dating Paul. And then she sees one of his tattoos framed up on the wall, she learns that she better escape.

You want another reason to love this? Stelvio Cipriani rips off Black Sabbath in the main theme for the movie.

Larraz made some wild movies that haven’t been seen enough. Let’s fix that now.

Only in a Santo movie can you find a masked wrestler go from a match in Arena Mexico to being part of Professor Romero’s journey to explore some ancient ruins. Yes, imagine you are a famous learned man and you say, “My mummy expedition needs a chef, a doddering professor, a manly hunter, his grandson Agapito (shh…that’s El Hijo del Santo without his mask) for comic relief, two attractive ladies and oh yeah — Santo.”

The professor is looking for the body of Nonoca, an Apache prince who had a forbidden affair with the intended sacrifice Lua, making her impure before she is killed for the gods. Both are killed and mummified and the Universal Monster gods are pleased. Like morons, the archaeological party ignores the curse and takes the necklace off the mummy and this soon becomes a slasher as the back from the dead Nonoca shoots nearly everyone with arrows, but only after Santo has a match against a panther.

Within this movie, someone states that fear is a bitch and Santo tells the grieving Agapito that men don’t cry. He also dresses in a safari outfit when it’s blazing hot out and never takes off his mask and wears a belt over his safari shirt. I would honestly kill a human being if Santo asked me to.

Santo’s battle against the mummified form of Nonoca was his 31st movie, directed by the dependable René Cardona Sr. who made one of the best Santo movies, Santo en el Tesoro de Drácula.

There’s a twist ending and I’m fine with it, as sometimes the supernatural exists in Santo’s world and sometimes it doesn’t. No matter what, Santo gets back to Arena Mexico and back to tapping out rudos like Goliat Ayala with his La de a Caballo.

An interesting note: Santo’s tag partner in the opening match against Gori Casanova (who lost his hair twice to El Enmascarado de Plata) and Dik Angelo (who lost his mask to Santo), El Rebelde, did many of his stunts in 17 films. He would go on to lose his mask to Ultraman and achieve even greater fame as Charles Bronson Mexicano due to, you guessed it, his resemblance to Charles Bronson.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The debut film of director Peter Sykes (Demons of the Mind, To the Devil a Daughter), Venom is quite frankly nuts.

Also known as The Legend of Spider Forest and Spider’s Venom, it tells the story of Paul (Simon Brent), a young man who visits a small German town to paint the scenery and ends up getting involved with Anna (Neda Arneric) and Ellen (Sheila Allen), the former a spider goddess with a germ lab in her home run by crossdressing Nazis and the other a woman who frequently whips Paul.

Decisions, decisions.

Donald and Derek Ford wrote this and their career is filled with sexploitation like Groupie Girl, The Wife Swappers and Commuter Husbands. Derek was also removed as the director of Don’t Open Till Christmas and made Blood Tracks.

He also wrote the book The Casting Couch with agent Alan Selwyn under the name Selwyn Ford, who is also a character in the book, so the book appears to be a true story that tells us about Joan Crawford starring in a stag film and how Marilyn Monroe was murdered as a result of her affair with Robert F. Kennedy. Supposedly, this was learned when Ford was making a movie called Bloody Mary in which an actress is abducted and forced to have an abortion during her affair with a powerful and married man. Peter Lawford was supposed to star in this movie and said, “Are you crazy? Do you want to get us all f****** killed?” before he quit, so Ford believed that Lawford was involved. This has been substantiated by filmmaker Philippe Mora and he should know because he directed The Howling II.

Anyways, the brothers also wrote the movie that dared make Peter Cushing go to London nightclubs and act like a swinger, Corruption, so I will watch anything they are involved in.

Even if it’s about spider women, spiders and none of it makes any sense.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Released in the U.S. as The Fearmaker, this movie finds opera singer Sarita Verdugo returning home to claim her inheritance after the death of her father. Yet when she gets back, everyone is against her and she has to deal with a near-maniacal level of greed as money — and the hint of supernatural menace — has made everyone an enemy.

Director Anthony Carras — I’m assuming IMDB lists the American reedit team instead of José Luis Bueno, who many Mexican sources list as the director yet he mainly served as a producer — only directed one other movie, Operation Bikini, while editing plenty of Roger Corman movies.

It’s like the filmmakers wanted to make a giallo, decided on a soap opera, and then remembered that they needed a giallo twist to end things. It’s not great or maybe even good, but there aren’t many Mexican giallo movies, which should maybe be referred to as amarillo.