A section 3 video nasty and a production of Harry Novak, this movie should come complete with soap so that you can clean yourself up after the way you feel post-watch. But hey, before we luxuriate in filth, let’s talk about Harry and Boxoffice International Pictures.

Just take a cursory scan through some of the films that Boxoffice brought to the eyes of maniacs like you and me: Kiss Me Quick! in which an alien comes to our planet in search of feminine breeding stock*, the spectacularly named mondo  Suburban Pagans, the drinking suburban housewives and their pot-smoking daughters in The Muthers, Jean Rollin’s The Nude Vampire, the Gary Graver-directed Erika’s Hot Summer, redneck trash (a good thing) like Country Cuzzins and Sweet Georgia, the brutal and wonderful Toys Are Not for Children, The Sinful Dwarf, Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks, Lisa, Rattlers, The Child and so many more. When I first started buying trailer collections, the Something Weird Extra Weird Sampler was where I first saw Harry’s signature swirl onto my screen and then blow my mind with the aberrant junk that he was fostering on the movie buying public.

The actual story of this movie isn’t really a story as much as it’s an opportunity to get single women one handing it and couplings two handing it. So yeah, Ralph has taken Donna to see his crazy uncle again, but first she has to see her man in the boat before putting on a scene before the somehow dead and yet able to speak from beyond the grave uncle. And then this movie makes me wonder, who is this for? Who wants to see fellatio interrupted by stabbing or Uschi Digard have sex with — not in — a bed** or a necrophilia scene that ends with a pitchfork murder? Someone, I guess. As Harry Novak himself once said, “When I was a kid, my Daddy told me, “There’s a buyer for everything.” And I lived to find out that he was right.”

But if you make it through all that freaky 70s not so sexy sex, well, you learn the truth. The fact that Donna is really the uncle who is really an alien who sells human brains as drugs on the planet Arkon and the gifts promised from the toy box are really death as we watch a whole bunch of hippies get trapped inside a death house.

Director and writer Ronald Víctor García started out as an electro-mechanical packaging designer for the Apollo Command Module, the Saturn Stage II Helium Purge System and the Polaris Atomic Submarine Launching Systems before making movies like this. And somehow, some way, he became the director of photography for Twin Peaks and One from the Heart. In fact, he’s still out there today, working as a cinematographer on The Good Fight.

I wouldn’t say that this movie was good, but I will say that I was pretty messed up in a good way by it. It has a great movie somewhere in there and I wished that they had found it.

*Harry had a thing for sexy aliens, producing one of my favorite named movies of all time, 1975’s Wham! Bam! Thank You, Spaceman!

**To be fair, I am a red-blooded male and I am willing to watch Uschi Digard do pretty much whatever she wants to do.

I got a package in the mail the other day from One 7 Movies and man, I’m glad I’m the one that opened it and not my wife, as it contained two bursts of scummy cinema that I’d be explaining for weeks. I didn’t ask for this but when someone sends me something, I feel compelled to review it.

Who are One 7? According to Mya DVD, the label’s press release states “It is our privilege to introduce a new label to the U.S. marketplace. One that builds upon the best traditions of Italian and European cinema, and is certain to gain cult status in the states quickly.

One 7 Movies was founded by one of the original partners of Mya Communications and No Shame Films. Expect the most classic, the most cutting edge, and the most sought after comedies, thrillers, science fiction epics, erotica, and much more…

All films have been beautifully transferred from original vault materials, and sleeve art design is eye-catching to say the least.”

They’re also making their disks with CAV, who handle some level of distribution for Mondo Macabro, New Concorde, Massacre Video, Grindhouse Releasing, Severin and others. I have no idea how they got my info, but they also sent me Redemptio, which solves that mystery of how that ended up in my mailbox.

Anyways…

The big selling point of this film — for me at least, beyond the fact that it’s The Thorn Birds six years before the book that inspired that mini-series was written — is that it has an Ennio Morricone soundtrack, with two of the songs, “Come Maddalena” and “Chi Mai,” being re-released as the song “Disco 78” in a different key and with louder and harder drums.

Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz (Mother Joan of the Angels) made this modern Mary Magdalene story in which the titular character (Lisa Gastoni, The Wild Wild Planet) is on the outs with her husband — who won’t divorce her — so she attends erotic parties. At one of them, a priest is blindfolded and led before her and she decides to try to seduce him, all the whole seeing him as perhaps her salvation. It’s complicated, just like this movie, which can’t decide what genre it is and honestly doesn’t care.

It’s an interesting movie that seems to want to spend as much time being titillating as it does wanting to explore religious mores and themes, which might make it a hard sell to some audiences. It also doesn’t have the cachet of a more well-known auteur for audiences to latch on to either. That said — I’m not upset with the time I spent with this film.

One 7 Movies also sent Os Violentadores De Meninas Virgens, a movie that I can’t justify, unlike The Devil in Maddalena. In that movie, a group of wealthy men hires a pimp to provide them with a continual supply of women to assault and deflower. While they get theirs in the end, getting there means endless scenes of simulated rough antics which aren’t my idea of entertainment. Your mileage may vary and I also hope that your mileage — if so — keeps you far away from me.

I wish I could tell you where to get more info on One 7, but they don’t have a website. I can send you to Diabolik DVD if you want to purchase Maddalena however.

I absolutely loved this movie. Seriously, what a madcap blast this was and it totally took me unawares. Arthur Anderson (Michael Craig) a wealthy Englishman with two previous wives who’ve also died suddenly and mysteriously, his third wife drowns. Luckily, his housekeeper’s testimony keeps him free and clear, even if the police continue to watch him.

The very night he is acquitted, Julie (Carroll Baker) breaks into his house, which is a giallo meet cute, and she becomes his fourth wife. But is she on the up and up? Is he? Why are the wives of Arthur Anderson dying in such frequency?

This movie steals just enough from Rebecca and Vertigo without being slavish to those films. I also absolutely adore that when we first meet Julie, she’s sleeping inside a tent in an abandoned mansion, because that’s totally normal. And is that Marina Malfatti (The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, All the Colors of the Dark) skulking in the background, wearing a cape as a casual during the rainy evening ensemble I spy?

Spanish giallo has been a great rabbit hole to go down and I’ve also been enjoying slowly watching the resume of Eugenio Martín, who is best known for Horror Express, as well as It Happened at Nightmare Inn. And come on — Carroll Baker starring giallo is nearly a genre in and out of itself.

And while there’s no real hero here, I still enjoyed every minute.

Also known as Death at the Deep End of the Swimming Pool and The Fourth Mrs. Anderson, this has just been re-released by Severin, who include a trailer, a deleted scene and an interview with Eugenio Martín biographer Carlos Aguilar in their always stellar package.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally covered this film on March 27, 2019, but want to bring it back to celebrate the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama Giallopalooza on September 17 and 18.

The second in Dario Argento’s “Animal Trilogy” with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Four Flies on Grey Velvet, this film isn’t one of the director’s favorites and it failed to follow up on the success of the first film in the United States, although it was very popular in Italy. It’s filled with a lot more humor — it still has plenty of shocking moments — and kind of meanders around. But there’s still so much to enjoy.

Franco “Cookie” Arno (Karl Malden) is a blind man who is obsessed with solving puzzles. One comes to him in real life as he walks at night with his niece Lori. They overhear a man plan to blackmail someone, then that man breaks into the Terzi Institute. We meet our second hero, the reporter Carlo (James Franciscus) when he investigates the affair.

The head of the institute, Dr. Calabresi, looks at his files in his office and phones someone who agrees to meet with him. He tells his fiancee Bianca (Rada Rassimov, the sister of Ivan, which you can tell by her eyes) that whatever was taken could be a big step forward. As the doctor waits on a train platform, he’s pushed off a train platform. This brings the two heroes together and starts a string of murders, as anyone connected to the mystery is quickly killed.

It turns out that the Terzi Institute is able to isolate the chromosomes that point to evil tendencies within people and they have a miracle drug that can change that. Carlo also becomes involved with  Professor Terzi’s daughter Anna and they’re followed by both the police and the killer.

From milk being poisoned to dead bodies being searched in the middle of the night inside a crypt, the noose tightens around our heroes’ necks, with even Cookie’s niece being kidnapped and in danger. And oh yeah — his girlfriend and her adoptive father have had an incestuous relationship for years.

There’s a rooftop battle that may or may not take out one of the protagonists — the movie doesn’t even tell us — and finally the killer is knocked down an elevator shaft, his hands bleeding as he tries to grab the cable to stop him. It’s one of the few moments of sheer awesome in this film, but hints that greatness is in the future of Argento’s films.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This Lucio Fulci giallo was first on our site all the way back on August 21, 2017. We’re covering it again as its one of eight movies that will be playing at the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama Giallopalooza September 17 and 18.

If you were a well-to-do woman in Italy in the 1970s, chances are — based on the movies that I have seen — that you are about to killed, have killed someone, are having a lesbian affair, are on drugs or all of the above.

Carol (Florinda Bolkan, Don’t Torture a Duckling) is one of those wealthy women. She lives with her father, rich lawyer and politician Edmund Brighton, husband Frank and step-daughter Joan (Edy Gall, Baba Yaga, The Devil is a Woman). Carol’s been having dreams that cause her to see a doctor. It seems next door neighbor, Julia (Anita Strindberg, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, The Antichrist) is having all-night sex and drug orgies that at once repulse and excite Carol.

All sorts of rich people shenanigans are going on — Frank is having an affair with his secretary. And Carol may or may not be having a lesbian affair with her neighbor. Her dreams have become so intense, she can’t tell fact from fiction. What worries her the most is that her latest dream ends with her stabbing Julia in vivid Fulci splendor while two hippies watch. That dream turns out to perhaps be true, as Julia is dead and Scotland Yard is on the case. The room and condition of the dead body match Carol’s dream.

The hippies that she remembers from her dream don’t remember seeing her kill Julia. But Carol’s prints are on the murder weapon. As she waits for her trial in a sanitorium, one of the hippies breaks in and chases her. What follows is an infamous scene where she happens upon a room full of vivisected, still alive dogs. It’s a dream sequence unconnected to the rest of the film, but it landed Fulci in prison. Carlo Rambaldi, the amazing special effects artist of E.T., Alien and more, saved the director from a two-year jail sentence by bringing the fake dog props to the courtroom.

Ready for some of those giallo red herrings? Turns out that Julia had discovered Frank’s affair with his secretary and had been blackmailing him. Carol gets released, but upon meeting a hippy woman at Alexandra Palace, she’s attacked, first by bats (this is Fulci, after all) and then by a hippy man who graphically stabs her before the police save her.

Then, stepdaughter Joan meets with the hippy woman witness but ends up with her throat cut. The hippie witnesses admit to stalking Carol and murdering the stepdaughter, but they know nothing of the night that Julia was killed, only recalling “a woman in a lizard’s skin.” At this point, everyone should scream and jump up and down, as the name of the movie has been said in the body of the film.

Another giallo moment — an action that happens off-screen with a main character. Brighton, Carol’s father, has killed himself, leaving a note that he had killed Julia. At his gravesite, the police ask how Carol knew about Julia calling to blackmail the family when it had never been revealed. Turns out Carol and Julia were in bed together when that call was made, but Julia had also threatened to go public with their lesbian affair.

But what about the hippies? Turns out they were so high on LSD, they remembered nothing. Carol decided that if she combined her crazy dreams with images of the murder, she’d get off because of temporary insanity. So wait — her father didn’t kill the girl? Did she kill her father? Why would she be having such crazy dreams about the neighbor if she’d already indulged in the affair?

If you’re confused by a giallo, sometimes I think it’s doing its job. And after all, this film is all about the visuals, as Fulci does a great job with the hippie sequences and throws some split screens in, pre-DePalma. It may drag in parts, but there are also bravura sequences to make up for that fact.

Paolo Lupi (Thomas Hunter, The Vampire Happening and the writer of The Final Countdown) convinces two older patients in the asylum he is trapped at to escape. One is quickly found, the other is run over by a car and Paolo manages to escape to a country home where he hides as a party starts. When everyone drops acid, he goes to work and they wake up to find a dead girl. They decide to bury her in the garden to stay out of trouble, but he’s still in the house. And they’ve left another girl, Francesca (Francesca Romana Coluzzi, who was Red Sonja‘s mother) alone in the house.

What kind of movie is Madness? Is it giallo? Is it a rape revenge film? A poliziotteschi? A musical with all the dancing? Who can say?

Is Paolo even the real murderer? And have you ever seen such a sad orgy before?

Director Cesare Rau only made this one movie. He was a second unit director on Death Walks In Laredo, but there’s not much else info on him. Of the writers, Alfredo Lupo has the most credits, and they include being the production manager of Reflections in Black under the name…Cesare Rau? Are they the same person?

The only thing I don’t have questions on is that the theme of this movie, “Madness,” was composed by Black Sunday Flowers, which is really Paolo Ormi, who was the musical director for The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and contributed to the soundtracks of Terror Force Commando, Bárbara and The Porno Killers.

Sure, that’s a pretty lurid title — the Italian title I vizi morbosi di una governante translates as Morbid Vices of a Housekeeper — and trust me, this lives up to it, what with an older woman using a mentally challenged man and a teenager sexually — not at the same time! — and then a game of charades which is mostly people yelling out the names of films while everyone else gropes one another.

There are more than a lot of camera zooms in here, as well as bad sartorial choices and even worse life ones. When Ileana and her bunch of hip friends — their words not mine — gather at a gothic castle owned by a wheelchair-bound older relative of one of the girls, things get pervy, weird and murdery, just as you’d expect.

If you are a hip friend or have hip friends (at which point that makes you a hip friend), then you should take this warning: do not go to hang out in gothic castles. Nothing, in my movie — not life — experience says that things will go well.

Meanwhile, two of these with it pals are using Chinese treasures to smuggler heroin — as you do — while Elsa the party girl ends up with both of her eyes torn out, just like Ileana’s mother had done to her by a relative who has lost his mind and is possibly prowling the catacombs of the castle.

This would be the last film that Filippo Walter Ratti would direct. You may have seen his other movies, including Mondo Erotico, Operation White Shark and Night of the Damned. Screenwriter Ambrogio Molteni also wrote the two Black Emanuelle movies, as well as Yellow Emanuelle, Sister Emanuelle and Violence in a Women’s Prison.

Speaking of Emanuelle, you may recognize Annie Carol Edel from Emanuelle and Francoise or perhaps from Almost Human or even The True Story of the Nun of Monza. No? How about Isabelle Marchall from Black Emanuelle? Or Patrizia Gori from Cry of a Prostitute, The Return of the Exorcist or as Francoise in Emanuelle and Francoise?

This appears along with Murder Mansion and Autopsy on Vinegar Syndrome’s Forgotten Gialli Volume 3 complete with a new scanned and restored 4k version from its 35mm original camera negative and an interview with Giuseppe Colombo. Or you can watch it on Tubi.

Qualcosa Striscia nel Buio may mean Something Crawls in the Dark, but the inexact translation of the original title is what this played in the U.S. as.

A series of travelers are headed out into a foreboding evening — it was a cold, dark night — when they realize that a washed-out bridge means that they’re all finding shelter in the same house that was once the home of a lady occultist. The cars contain all manner of individuals with their own reasons for being out in the storm, like the two detectives transporting a restrained Farley Grainger, a fighting husband and wife, and a surgeon and his assistant.

Of course, one of these folks will decide to conduct a seance and that’s the point where everything falls to pieces. The result of this occult ritual is that everyone becomes possessed and starts acting like Ecstasy-loving maniacs. And with the phone lines not working, the bridge out and a storm outside — and now inside an emotional weather outburst happening — the movie transitions from giallo to outright gothic horror.

There’s also a butler named Joe who just happens to keep a pantsless woman who he occasionally makes love to, as well as a POV camera view that keeps happening, making this film stand out from the giallo pack somewhat as the ghost takes over each person, making them give in to their desires and even stopping clocks dead.

“Exorcism…the Occult…A Horror-Filled Night In A House Of Terror!” Writer and director Mario Colucci only directed one other movie, Revenge for Revenge, that he also wrote, directed and acted in. There are some interesting actors other than Granger here, such as Italian Neorealist actress Lucia Bosè (she’s also in Arcana), Giacomo Rossi Stuart (Kill, Baby, Kill; The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave), Angelo Francesco Lavagnino (who is in Fulci’s Beatrice Cenci as well as Orson Welles’ Othello and Chimes at Midnight) and Loredana Nusciak (Maria, the lover of Django) appearing as the photo of the lady of the house, who we are to believe is the ghost.