Partly adapted from the 1952 non-fiction book The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley, which was turned into the play The Devils by John Whiting, United Artists had already given up on this movie after seeing how controversial Ken Russell’s screenplay was. Warner Brothers then took over but its rough sexual and violent nature, not to mention how it presented religion, led to major issues. It’s since been banned in several countries and was heavily edited for release in many countries, with several places never seeing its original uncut version.

Two scenes were cut and have rarely been shown, one where nude nuns sexually use a statue of Christ while Father Mignon watches and masturbates, as well as another that showed Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave) masturbating with the charred femur of Grandier (Oliver Reed) after he is set ablaze for his crimes.

As for Rusell, he said, “I was a devout Catholic and very secure in my faith. I knew I wasn’t making a pornographic film… although I am not a political creature, I always viewed The Devils as my one political film. To me, it was about brainwashing.”

Behind the very human — and at times occult and otherworldly — moments of the film, the dramatic narrative behind The Devils is Cardinal Richelieu working to influence Louis XIII and get him to stop the Protestants from rising up. However, Louis forbids Richelieufrom destroying the town of Loudun, having made a promise to its Governor to keep the town intact.

Whiole Loudun’s Governor has died, the town is now controlled by Urbain Grandier (Reed), who may be a popular man of God, but is also a man who has secretly married a woman. Meanwhile, Sister Jeanne des Anges, the deformed abbess of the local Ursuline convent who is sexually obsessed with Grendier, grows upset that the man she is in love with has not taken her.

The cardinal gets what he wants by accusing Grandier of witchcraft, bringing in Father Pierre Barre, a professional witch-hunter whose exorcisms are even more salacious than the crimes he has been sent to investigate. He unleashes a sexual firestorm amongst the nuns and a mockery of a trial that somehow finds Grandier convincing Barre that he is innocent. Yet it is too late. Despite his innocence, the town is destroyed.

How metal is this film? Ministry sampled it for their song “Golden Dawn” and other artists such as Belphegor and Skinny Puppy have also used dialogue from this movie.

You may have thought that Billy Jack was dead after The Born Losers, shot in the back while trying to do the right thing. The truth is, he was just getting started. An anti-authority film, this movie struggled to be made, with American International Pictures pulling out while it was being made. Then, 20th Century Fox stepped in but refused to distribute the film. Auteur Tom Laughlin would not release the sound for the film, making it unreleasable until he could own the film himself, getting Warner Brothers to distribute it. He was unhappy with how Warner Brothers sold the film, so he sued them and finally released the movie himself.

At the heart of the film, the movie presents a conundrum: the only way to achieve peace is to repeatedly beat the stuffing out of people.

Also, the Navajo Green Beret Vietnam War veteran and hapkido master known as Billy Jack is played by director (as T.C. Frank), producer (as Mary Rose Solti) and co-writer (as Frank Christina) Tom Laughlin, who is totally white. That said, the role of Billy Jack is anything but the way that Native Americans had been portrayed up until the early 70s.

Laughlin was also a muckraker, really in the best of ways. He’d written the film nearly two decades before after seeing the way Native Americans were treated in Winner, South Dakota, the home of his wife Delores Taylor. What took so long to get it to screen? Well, beyond building his acting career, Laughlin also quit acting in 1959 to start a Montessori preschool in Santa Monica, California.

After the school went out of business, he went back into acting and after the Billy Jack series, he was set to change the world with Billy Jack Enterprises, which had plans for a new Montessori school, a record label, an investigative magazine, books, a distribution company and more message-laden movies, including films for children. Yet the last movie, Billy Jack Goes to Washington, didn’t connect with audiences. Or, as Laughlin charged, it was the fault of Warner Brothers illegally selling the television rights to his films. Or even Senator Vance Hartke, who he said told him that, “You’ll never get this released. This house you have, everything will be destroyed.” in front of Lucille Ball, angered that the film correctly pointed out how senators were owned by lobbyists.

There was going to be a fifth film, The Return of Billy Jack, that ended in the 2000s when Laughoun got hurt and the money ran out. He claimed for years that it would get made with the title changing to Billy Jack’s Crusade to End the War in Iraq and Restore America to Its Moral Purpose, Billy Jack’s Moral Revolution and Billy Jack for President, with the plan to have Billy Jack and President George W. Bush debate each other.

Man, I wish that was made.

That said, the original Billy Jack is an incredibly strange movie, a film made of a singular vision.

Billy Jack is the defender of the Freedom School, a school full of happy children taught my Laughlin’s real-life wife Delores, who are assaulted from all sides by the horrible folks of the redneck town where, for some reason, they have decided to make their home. A movie this strange demands a run-on sentence like that to describe it.

This is the kind of movie where the hero must face off with a snake and purposefully be bitten with venom so that he can become brothers with the snake, as well as have a theme song “One Tin Soldier (The Legend of Billy Jack),” which was recorded by Jinx Dawson and her band Coven, whose album Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls is as metal as it gets, even featuring a black mass as its second side.

You don’t really watch Billy Jack. It washes over you. The words I use to describe it aren’t enough. It’s absolutely ridiculous in the finest of ways and I really want you to experience it.

Man, I have a big affection for Tony Anthony thanks to his ability to knock out really strange Italian westerns like Get Mean and Comin’ at Ya! Little did I know that he also made a remix of Zatoichi in the American west.

Fifty mail-order brides have been kidnapped by bandits and the blind man who was hired to get them across the country, Ciego (Anthony) is on his way to get them back.

Candy, one of the villains in this, is played by Ringo Starr. Wait, Ringo? Dude, did any of The Beatles have a more interesting few years? Paul went into Wings, George was all into religion, John stayed in bed and Ringo was out and about making movies with Freddie Francis, Terry Southern, Ferdinando Baldi, Frank Zappa and Mae West.

The real bad guys are Domingo (Lloyd Battista, who wrote this movie, as well as nearly all of Anthony’s Italian cowboy films) and his sister Sweet Mama (Magda Konopka, who played Satanik), who have taken the women so that they can try and take out a general (Raf Baldassarre, who was in both of Luigi Cozzi’s Hercules movies).

Shirley Corrigan from Crimes of the Black Cat, Carla Brait from Torso, Malisa Longo from Helga She Wolf of Stilberg, Krista Nell from So Sweet, So Dead, Solvi Stubing from Strip Nude for Your Killer, Karin Skarreso from LSD Flesh of the Devil, Janine Reynaud from Kiss Me Monster, Diana Lorys from Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, Lucretia Love from Enter the Devil, Mirta Miller from Eyeball and Elena Veronese from The Police Are Blundering In the Dark are all in this. Wow!

Ringo even recorded a theme song for this movie that wasn’t used. It’s in the b-side of his single for “Back Off Boogaloo.”

According to Anthony, his friend Frank Wolff (Death Walks on High Heels) wanted the role of Candy as he had already played against Anthony in A Stranger In Town. Allen Klein — yeah, the same guy who was the reason we had to wait forever to get El Topo and The Holy Mountain released on blu ray — wanted Ringo, who wanted to go into acting after the breakup of the Fab Four. Wolff stopped his friendship with Anthony and killed himself shortly after this film was made.

You know whose name doesn’t show up in the credits? Bruno Mattei. Yet on several sites, I’ve seen claims that he helped direct this movie. I still haven’t found any info, but if anything, I’d assume he did some editing or second unit work. Does anyone out there know?

The eleventh Godzilla movie was one that never felt right to me watching it on TV as a kid. It always looked dingy, dirty and cheap. Seeing the new Criterion re-release of this movie is a revelation, as the original Japanese version is a wild, out of control environmental message film with animated moments and musical numbers that battles within itself, somehow unrealizing that it is a big rubber suit monster movie.

Yoshimitsu Banno, who directed this, also made Prophecies of Nostradamus for Toho, which is another movie that should just be schlock and has moments that aspire to become outsider art.

Not all would agree that this movie is wonderful. Tomoyuki Tanaka*, one of Godzilla’s creators, demoted Banno and went so far as to claim that the director ruined the King of Monsters.

Hedorah is a microscopic alien that grows larger by eating Earth’s pollution and soon grows into a poisonous, acid-secreting sea monster. Or Smog Monster, if we believe one of the American titles.

Much like the motorcycle death scene in the aforementioned Nostradamus film, a party is thrown on Mt. Fuji to celebrate the last day of life before Japan. Thousands have died and so many more will as Hedorah and Godzilla fight again, with the pollution-eating beast doing more gore-drenched damage to the big green lizard than anyone before — he takes his eye and burns his hand to the point we see bone — before drowning him in sludge.

Godzilla returns, flying backward in an astounding scene that’s nearly hilarious, but then things get beyond serious when Godzilla repeatedly burns his enemy, tearing away at him bit by bit before returning to the ocean, staring back one last time to remind humans that Hedorah was all their fault.

This was released in the U.S. by American-International Pictures and teamed with The Thing With Two Heads before playing repeatedly on TV. I know that I saw it multiple times and never thought much of it until now.

Lucio Fulci would have loved this one, because not only does Godzilla nearly lose an eye, but he also tears Hedorah’s eyes right out of his body.

I mean, there’s no other kaiju movie inspired by Rachel Carson. For me, this movie is a success because it’s just so wild that this arose from a major franchise. Here’s to experimentation, with films that have Bond-like openings, wild musical numbers and extended sequences of a giant monster pulling junk out of another one.

*Tanaka banned Banno from ever working on another Godzilla film for as long as Tanaka lived. That said, after Tanaka’s death, Banno acquired Godzilla’s film rights and had planned to produce an IMAX short film entitled Godzilla 3-D to the Max. When funding fell through, he worked with Legendary Pictures on behalf of Toho and was an executive producer of 2014’s Godzilla.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Back in December of last year, December 25 to be completely exact, we posted this Barry Mahon Christmas movie. Enjoy!

Oh Barry Mahon.

While the rest of the world thrills to Tom Cruise cussing out castmembers concerning COVID-19, Mahon’s real-life story offers movie maniacs the kind of thrills that we breathlessly devour and share with one another. After volunteering for the British air force before America officially entered World War II, Mahon earned the British Distinguished Flying Cross and escaped from a concentration camp twice after being shot down, then became the personal pilot and manager of Errol Flynn before going into making his own movies.

And oh his movies.

Barry’s oeuvre is a madcap mix of ripped from the headlines fearmonger films like Rocket Attack U.S.A. and Cuban Rebel Girls along with horror like The Dead One and Sex Killer, then some nudie cuties like Fanny Hill Meets Dr. Erotico and The Diary of Knockers McCalla and finally, improbably, kids movies like The Wonderful Land of Oz, Jack and the Beanstalk and the Thumbelina movie that is part of perhaps the most berserk holiday movie of all time, Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny. Oh yeah — and he also made Musical Mutiny, a movie that I have yet to come to grips with*.

I hesitate to even call this a movie because it was made with all the motion of, well, a slide show. Instead, it’s a series of still images with a narrator speaking every single part. It is the very epitome of low budget, with puppets and people shot in only the murkiest of lighting.

If you ever watched Rodolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and wondered why everyone treated the hero so poorly — and why he would not only forgive them but blame himself for so much of their horrific and abusive behavior — then get ready. Calvin gets brutalized throughout this movie with even the narrator continually reminding us of how ugly he is.

*Some people, if given a time machine, would go back to meet famous people or kill Hitler. I would just go to Dania, Florida and spend the day at Pirates World.

You can watch this on YouTube.