Other than The Ghost, I hadn’t seen many Riccardo Freda films before, only really knowing him from not finishing both I Vampiri and Caltiki – The Immortal Monster, films which Mario Bava took to completion. After The Bird with the Crystal Plumage made giallo into a box office success, Freda decided to try his hand at the form.

While the film’s credits say that this is based on the book A Room Without a Door by Richard Mann, that was probably an invention of the filmmakers. Freda ended up being unhappy with the movie, wanting Roger Moore for the lead.

The first thing you may notice about this film is that it’s made in Ireland, so the typical giallo set pieces aren’t there. There’s one gorgeous shot of the hills and rocks high above the water later in the movie that is completely breathtaking. And the accents in the film mark this as nowhere near Italy.

Starting with the first murder, where a girl has acid thrown in her face and her throat slashed, the film sets the tone that this is a lurid, scummy affair. But unlike most giallo, the murders appear at odds with the story. They just happen — there’s rarely any lead or tension to them and we often only see the final results, unlike the movies of Argento that wallow in both the set-up and execution of the murders, often at the expense of the story itself.

Once the corpse is found inside a limo — one that belongs to Swiss Ambassador Sobiesky — that suspect claims diplomatic immunity. So the police pull an end around, bringing in tough ex-cop John Norton (Luigi Pistilli, A Bay of Blood, Enter the Devil, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key) to get close to the family and discover the real killer.

He gets close in the biblical sense with the ambassador’s daughter Helen (Dagmar Lassander, The House by the Cemetery, Hatchet for the Honeymoon)and caught up in the blackmail and sheer lunacy of the entire clan. Valentina Cortese (The Girl Who Knew Too Much, The Possessed) really stands out as the mother, who is always smoking long cigarettes and showing up way overdressed for any situation.

This is the kind of movie where every single individual — even the grandmother and daughter — can be the killer. It also has a completely pointless scene where the family cat is decapitated and left in the icebox. There’s no real hero here, just a lot of bad people and people who are worse than them. By the end of the film, you’ll have an entire living room filled with red herrings, trust me.

Arrow Video has released the ultimate version of this film, using a new 2K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative, along with the original English and Italian soundtracks, titles and credits (with newly translated English subtitles for the Italian soundtrack).

There’s also audio commentary by giallo connoisseurs Adrian J. Smith and David Flint; Of Chameleons and Iguanas, a newly filmed video appreciation by the cultural critic and academic Richard Dyer; Considering Cipriani, a new appreciation of the composer Stelvio Cipriani and this film’s score by DJ and soundtrack collector Lovely Jon; The Cutting Game, a new interview with Iguana’s assistant editor Bruno Micheli; The Red Queen of Hearts, which is an essential and thorough interview with actress Dagmar Lassander; the original Italian and international theatrical trailers; an image gallery; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Graham Humphreys and a collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Andreas Ehrenreich.

As always, Arrow’s standards are top notch, giving so much love and care to every movie that they release.

DISCLAIMER: I was sent this movie by Arrow’s PR company, but I would have bought it anyway. It’s that great of a release.

Daughters of Darkness is a good title, but its French nom de plume, Les Lèvres Rouges, is so much better. Look — if you’re going to have a 1970’s vampire movie, it should probably be a lesbian vampire movie while you’re at it. This one is Belgian. And director Harry Kumel claims that he based Delphine Seyrig’s character after Marlene Dietrich and Andrea Rau’s on Louise Brooks, so there’s that.

A newly married couple named Stefan and Valerie starts their honeymoon at a grand hotel on the Ostend seafront, intending to catch the cross-channel ferry to England. They’re there offseason, so the hotel is empty and their relationship already seems off to a poor start as Stefan doesn’t want to introduce his new wife to his mother.

When the sun goes down, Elizabeth Bathory arrives and with a name like that, well, you know what you’re getting into. Throw in the fact that the concierge says that she’s the same age as when he saw her as a little boy — I’ve actually had something similar happen in my real life and its scary as hell — and three murders of young women in Bruges last week and the plot thickens. Or congeals.

The more the Countess grows obsessed with the couple, the more sadism and violence we see, ending with Valerie taking over the role of the Countess and seeking new victims, the sole survivor of their games of sex and death.

This is high art masquerading as horror with some exploitation along for the ride. At the end of the 20th-century vampire film, even death and evil is exhausted, only finding solace in convincing the innocent of the ease by which they may fall into similar depravity.

You can watch this for free on Vudu. It’s also available with commentary from Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder. 

What do Blue Demon, Mil Mascaras, El Medico Asesino, La Sombra Vengadora, Tinieblas and Black Shadow do in their downtime when they’re not wrestling? They ride motorcycles. And when they’re not doing that, what do they do? They fight terrorists, mad scientists and monsters. As you do.

If you’re not prepared for the world of the Mexican luchador superhero film, let me warn you now: these movies are completely unhinged.

A mad scientist hates masked wrestlers, so he has imbued an army of little people with the power of ten great athletes and outfitted them with transistor radios that turn into guns. There’s also an incredible scene where the little men in red suits show up behind the scenes of a beauty pageant and slap every single beautiful girl into submission.

Let me sell you on this: masked men race boats, hang out with pretty girls and throw small men into the scenery at will. If that doesn’t convince you, there’s no real hope for your soul. You also get to see every lucha in here have an actual match, which is always nice.

I wish they still made these movies with today’s stars like Caristico and Dragon Lee Jr. battling against vampires, robots, werewolves and Bárbaro Cavernario. I would cry tears of blood and make my pilgrimage to Arena Mexico where I would kneel in supplication to the gods of lucha!

If I were the Mexican Joe Bob Briggs, I would end this by saying, “Cinco estrellas échale un vistazo.”

Andrew Prine is an exploitation superstar. Just look at a few of his films: Grizzly, a bonkers ripoff of Jaws with a bear instead; The Town That Dreaded Sundown, a movie that can’t decide if it wants to be a comedy or a brutal slasher and ends up being both while being awesome; Amityville II: The Possession, the scummiest movie perhaps ever put out by a major studio; and many more. Like this one, a film that skewers the youth culture of the early 1970’s.

In this crazy slice of lunacy, Prine is Simon Sinestrari, the king of the witches who lives in a  storm sewer. He sells his magic for money, just like his friend Turk sells his body. Together, they explore the world of drugs, parties and fake Satanic rituals thrown by Warhol superstar Ultra Violet. Meanwhile, Simon falls in love with a rich man’s daughter and has to decide whether or not he wants to ascend to godhood.

The ad campaign is what killed this movie. It promised a Manson-like Satanic sex orgy and the movie delivers only brief nudity and no blood. I personally adore it, as it’s such a time capsule of when it was made and such an accurate depiction of magic.

That may be because screenwriter Robert Phippeny was an actual practicing warlock. I can’t find much other information about him, only that he only wrote one other movie, 1969’s The Night of the Following Day. Director Bruce Kessler did much more, with a rich career in TV, including being behind the Night Stalker episode “Chopper,” as well as the TV movie Cruise Into Terror.

As for Andrew Prine, he’s beyond perfect in this movie. He considered his time making as if he were in the circus. The fun he was having is infectious.

Simon represents perhaps one of the most Satanic heroes the screen has ever witnessed. He lives up to nearly all of the Nine Satanic Statements as well as being aware of the Nine Satanic Sins. He fights against stupidity, pretentiousness and herd mentality.

Magus Peter H. Gilmore of the Church of Satan was kind enough to weigh in on this film: “The producers actually approached Anton LaVey and offered for him to play the part of Simon. They didn’t grasp LaVey’s own ideas of pride and self-deification, so the prospect of playing a homeless warlock living in a storm drain with a naïve male hustler was really not a role he’d have relished. That Simon attends a neo-pagan rite and mocks the stilted ceremony would have echoed some of LaVey’s feelings about contemporary occultists.”

You can watch this on Amazon Prime or order it from Ronin Flix.

I mentioned some time back how many movies I learn about because they’re sampled by My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. In their song “Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness” from Confessions of a Knife, the words “Blood! Blood!” and “Drown our useless age in blood!” come from the film.

I’ve always loved the box art for this movie and never gave it a chance. I’m glad I did!

Ben, his girlfriend Nicky (Ahna Capri, Han’s secretary from Enter the Dragon), and Ben’s daughter K.T. (Geri Reischl, the fake Jan Brady!) are on their way to K.T. grandmother’s house on a highway that takes them through the American Southwest.

They come across an accident and report it to the sheriff (L.Q. Jones, who wrote and produced this movie) before the locals go crazy and almost kill them. That’s because no one can leave town and nearly all of their children have gone missing.

It turns out that a coven of old Satanists have been taking the children, teaching them to follow the left hand path and are trying to use their bodies as receptacles for their elderly souls. If anyone gets close, they use the kids’ toys to murder them. A local priest figures it all out, but he’s driven crazy after seeing a murder.

It turns out that kindly Doc Duncan — played by Strother Martin who said “What we have here is a failure to communicate” in Cool Hand Luke — is either the leader of the cult or Satan himself. There’s an awe-inspiring scene where hooded men with flaming swords kill the old people so they can go inside the children’s’ bodies. When their parents finally get there to save them, it’s too late. Everything goes to blackness, with only the words “Come in, children” on the screen.

When Brotherhood of Satan was shown, audience members were given a packet of “Satan’s Soul” seeds. Each envelope — illustrated with the movie’s logo — contained two seeds, which were, according to the instructions, supposed to provide protection from the Black Magic of The Brotherhood of Satan. If you think movies are better in 2019 than they were in 1971, I have news for you.

Much like Evilspeak, this is a film on the list that presents the powers of Satan succeeding against the forces of good. It’s pretty much exactly as the rest of the world perceives how Satanists act. Of course, Anton LaVey encouraged this type of shadow play and making fun of the rest of the straight world.

Yeah, we love this film and then some . . . that’s why R. D and Dustin Fallon from Horror and Sons also reviewed it with their takes. Watch it.

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 and the son of Dr. Vesalius

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

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 the Dr. Anton Phibes character and that of Dr. Anton LaVey – they even share the same first name, and certain propensities.”

Gregory Moore (Jean Sorel, Perversion Story) has a problem. His body has been found in a park in Prague, but the American journalist is anything but dead. His heart is still beating and his mind is still able to replay the sinister events of the last few days, a story that started with the disappearance of his girlfriend Mira (Barbara Bach) and ended even more horribly than he could have imagined.

The debut movie from director Alan Lado, Short Night of Glass Dolls subverts the giallo genre to move slowly into the supernatural. The only other giallo Lado created was Who Saw Her Die?* which, much like this movie, doesn’t seem keen on following the Argento giallo formula like just about everyone else. Lado would also make the baffling Star Wars clone The Humanoid many years later.

Moore resolves to find Mira when the police can’t, so he joins forces with his co-workers Jessica (Ingrid Thulen, Salon Kitty) and Jack (Mario Adorf, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage). Never mind that he’s just had an affair with Jessica.

By the end of the film, we’re left wondering if our paralyzed narrator is really an unreliable one and whether or not he made his own girlfriend disappear. We needn’t feel that way for long. The truth is that she’s fallen into the claws of Klub 99, a black magic group made up of Prague’s social elite that uses the life force of the young and beautiful to stay powerful.

This is one dark giallo that feels like a swirling nightmare that the protagonist can’t wake from. Even when he’s moving and alive, he feels out of place, a man away from not just America, but from reality itself. The scene where he moves behind the audience and red curtain as they watch a man play piano is particularly striking as it separates him from everything else that is going on around him.

There’s only one on-screen murder and Lado really shows that he’s an artist here instead of a slavish follower of giallo convention. It reminds me of a much more downbeat All the Colors of the Dark where the cult is much more powerful. The end scene of the gallery watching the autopsy is a brutal finale.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

*I guess you could also consider Last Stop on the Night Train to kind of, sort of be a giallo.

After The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Cat o’Nine Tails, Argento had one more movie left in his “Animal Trilogy.” Luigi Cozzi (Starcrash) would both write and assistant direct the film and the results are…interesting. It’s a lot funnier than his other giallo and was considered his swan song to the genre until his movie The Five Days failed at the box office.

Rock drummer Roberto Tobias is being stalked and as he finally catches up to his pursuer, the man pulls a knife. A struggle ensues and Roberto accidentally stabs the man while another masked figure laughs and takes photographs.

The next day, Roberto reads about the man’s death — Carlo Marosi — and gets a letter with a photograph of him murdering the man. He begins having reoccurring dreams that he’s being decapitated. Even worse, he wakes up to a masked man attacking him, who tells him that he won’t kill him because he isn’t finished with him.

Roberto’s wife Nina (Mimsy Farmer, Body Count, Autopsy) returns home and he confesses the murder to her and tells her that he can’t go to the police to stop the harassment. He does turn to his artistic friend “God” Godfrey (Bambino from They Call Me Trinity) and a con artist named the Professor (Oreste Lionello, The Case of the Bloody Iris and the Italian voice for Woody Allen) for help.

Whoever is behind Roberto’s stalking and harassment is a troubled soul who had a horrific childhood and spent some time in an insane asylum. Roberto’s maid Amelia knows who it is, but she pays for it with her life, as the killer uses a straight razor to slice her apart.

Later that night, Dalia (Francine Racette, Donald Sutherland’s wife, so well done Donald) comes to stay with Nina and Roberto, despite him wanting her not to be there. It also turns out that our hero never really killed Carlo, who has been working with his blackmailer, who dispatches him with razor wire.

Roberto then hires Arrosio, a flamboyant investigator who has never solved a case, but hopes that this is the one that he will solve. Amelia’s murder has been discovered and the cops are on the case, so Nina says that she’s leaving town, feeling unsafe in her own house.

It turns out that Dalia has always loved Roberto, so they have sex. As you do. Look, it’s a giallo. Other strange things are afoot, like Roberto’s cat getting kidnapped and beheaded, Nina getting an inheritance, strange photos of Nina and Dalia’s family and more nightmares.

That’s when giallo science intrudes: the killer was in a mental institution called Villa Rapidi, where they were considered dangerous until their father died. This knowledge — and discovering the killer’s identity and finally cracking a case — leads to Arrosio’s death.

Dalia then notices that Roberto and someone in a photo with his wife look quite similar. Just as she puts it all together, she’s stabbed and killed.

Ready for more giallo science? The police perform an optographical test that takes a photo of the retina to show the last image that Dalia saw before she died. Even Argento — a man who made a movie about a girl who can physically speak to insects and becomes friends with an orangutan — thought this idea was stupid until Carlo Rambaldi showed him how the special effect would look.

The last image that Dalia saw? Four flies on grey velvet. No one knows what this means.

Roberto waits for the killer to come for him but then Nina arrives. He tries to get her to leave because the killer is coming when he notices her necklace: a fly. As it swings, he sees it: four flies. In true giallo fashion, the killer is someone who we obviously didn’t ever consider.

A fight breaks out and she repeatedly shoots her husband as she explains how she was placed in the asylum by her abusive stepfather — who raised her as a man — and was only cured when the man died. When she met Roberto, what she felt wasn’t love, but the madness that her stepfather caused within her. She finally would get her revenge by using Roberto as the replacement for the man she couldn’t get back at.

Nina runs away as Godfrey arrives to save Roberto, but she rams the back of a truck. She’s decapitated as the car explodes.

Deep Purple almost did this movie (several members of the Beatles were considered for the role of Roberto), but their schedule didn’t allow it to happen. Ennio Morricone, who worked with Argento on The Bird with the Crystal Plumage worked on the film, but had a huge argument with the director about the score. Goblin would come in and work with Argento for the first time here. Morricone and Argento finally reconciled and worked together on The Stendhal Syndrome.

This film wasn’t commercially released for the home market until 2009, other than an incredibly hard-to-find French VHS version. That’s because the rights to this film in America are owned by Paramount Pictures, which had chosen not to release it. Shameless did put out a UK release that is all region a few years back.

This is one strange giallo. The ending car crash took twelve cars to get right and combined with the music in the scene, it’s really unsettling. This is also one of the first movies to use high speed cameras to shoot bullet time, years before Hong Kong movies and The Matrix. I love the killer’s rant at the end of the film, particularly because big chunks of it are still in Italian! This might be hard for you to find, but it’s worth tracking down.

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.

You can watch this movie for free on Vudu and on Amazon Prime.

Toshiya Fujita comes back to finish off the Stray Cat Rock series with one last tale. In this one, Meiko Kaji also returns to play Furiko, a girl in love with Ryumei. They want to live together as hippies, but his politician father Mayor Araki wants him to be a businessman. So he does what any dad would do: have a gang of bikers abduct his son. However, Ryumei kills one of them in self-defense and Meiko ends up being blamed for the crime. What’s a girl to do?

Furiko escapes prison whole her hippy friends stage all manner of scandalous behavior for the press while the boss Piranha plays spaghetti western music. It’s all for money, which seems alien to the hippy ideal, but what do I know? So does holding them up for more money.

The gang argues about Furiko killing the man and realize that it was all for her man’s sake. She took the fall while he returned home. As soon as she busts out, she goes to find him. But now he’s gone straight and his family kidnaps her.

So that means that the gang of hippies leave Shinjuku and bicycle up to the countryside to save Furiko. The trailer those hippies live in is pretty happening and they mostly pose on top of it and show off for reporters who come by.

I mean, they had nothing better to do after Nekuro had sex with a jackhammer and died of an orgasm induced heart attack. What is going on with this installment of Stray Cat Rock!?!

If you can guess that Ryumei’s father runs the town and that even if he loves Furiko that everything is going to end badly, you’ve been watching the Stray Cat Rock series. I did love the sacrifice that Piranha makes at the end so that his gang can live, though.

After this movie. Meiko Kaji moved to the Toei studio and started work on the Female Convict 701 Scorpion series. It’s just as well as she’s an afterthought in this movie and deserved way better.

Should you watch the Stray Cat Rock series? How do you feel about motorcycles and random music numbers? Enjoy 1970’s fashion? Want to get to know people only to have them killed by the end? Then by all means, it’s time to get into them.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime or get the entire Arrow Video box set.