Oh René Cardona. Here you are remaking the lucha libre movie you did back in 1962, Las Luchadoras Contra el Medico Asesino, or The Wrestling Women vs. the Killer Doctor or Doctor of Doom, as it was called in the U.S.

While this was made in 1969 as La Horripilante Bestia Humana, or The Horrible Man-Beast, this one didn’t play in the U.S. until 1972. With alternate titles like Horror y Sexo and Gomar – The Human Gorilla, this is a fine blend of ladies wrestling with apes and, well, human heart surgery footage.

Rene is also known for his films Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy, the incredibly baffling Santa Claus and Survive!, a movie all about plane crashes and cannibalism.

Female masked wrestler, Lucy, dresses like the devil and wrestles at the arena — dare we say Arena Mexico? — every Friday, where she often knocks out other girls who dress like cat girls. She wants to retire for a life of leisure — and less stress — with her cop boyfriend.

However, Dr. Krellman (Jose Elias Moreno, who was Santa Claus in the aforementioned film in which he battled Patch the demon) wants to cure his son of leukemia. So he does what doctors have always said would work—puts a gorilla heart inside his boy. As we all know from health class, this turns his son into a deformed and murderous man-ape with the craziness of the organ donor to boot.

The inclusion of actual, grainy footage of a human heart transplant was a common shocker tactic in Latin American and European exploitation of the time. It provides a stomach-churning realism that clashes wildly with the rubbery, sweaty Gorilla-Man makeup.

You won’t be bored, what with the nudity, real open heart surgery and rampant murders. A monkey man that rips off dudes’ faces and the clothes of girls? Si, muchacho.

This made the Section 1 video nasties list, probably because its VHS cover art had a bloody surgeon’s hands holding a scalpel with the words “Warning: this film contains scenes of extreme and explicit violence.”

Night of the Bloody Apes is a bizarre cocktail of genres that shouldn’t work, yet remains endlessly watchable. It manages to be a sports movie, a medical thriller, a monster flick and a procedural all at once.

You can watch this for free on Tubi.

You know those movies that feel like a cold, damp fog rolling off the English Channel? The ones where everyone wears thick knit sweaters and looks like they haven’t seen a sunbeam since the late sixties? That’s Neither the Sea Nor the Sand. It’s a romance from beyond the grave flick that treats romance with the bleak, grey reality of a rotting corpse that just won’t quit you.

Anna Robinson (Susan Hampshire) is having a rough go of it. She’s ditched her husband and fled to the island of Jersey to get her head straight. While wandering the dunes, she meets Hugh Debernon (Michael Jayston). They fall into that kind of intense, us-against-the-world love that usually ends in a double suicide or a very awkward Thanksgiving. Speaking of awkward, Hugh’s brother George is a religious zealot who thinks Anna is basically the Whore of Babylon in a trench coat.

The lovers head to Scotland for some “Is this just an affair?” soul-searching. Hugh promises it’s the real deal, but then—boom—he drops dead on a beach while playing tag. The local doc checks the pulse, signs the papers and calls it a day. Anna, understandably, loses her mind with grief.

But then Hugh just… gets up and walks back into the house that night.

Anna is thrilled and thinks the doctor was a quack. The audience, however, sees Hugh’s thousand-yard stare and realizes he’s basically a flesh-puppet for Anna’s sheer willpower. The trip back to Jersey marks the end of the honeymoon. Hugh has stopped talking entirely. He just sits there, staring at Anna with eyes that say, “I’m currently decomposing.“

George isn’t buying the miracle story. He’s convinced Anna is a witch who conjured an evil spirit to pilot his brother’s meat-suit. To prove it, he literally burns Hugh’s hand to see if he flinches. (Spoiler: He doesn’t. Hugh starts “talking” to Anna in her head. He pretends to go along with George’s plan for an exorcism, but during the car ride to see the priest, Hugh uses his zombie-psychic powers to run George’s car off a cliff. There’s even some Bewitched sound effects!

The cops show up to tell Hugh his brother is dead, leading to a truly bizarre scene where Anna hands over Hugh’s own death certificate from Scotland while he sits in the corner acting like a very aggressive mannequin. Eventually, the reality of the situation—and the smell?—becomes too much. Anna realizes that if she wants to be with her man, she’s gotta go where he’s going. The film ends with the two of them walking hand in hand into the freezing ocean, while their friend Collie watches from the shore, probably wondering whether he should have called a mental health professional three weeks ago.

Directed by Fred Burnley and written by Rosemary Davies, based on a book by Gordon Honeycombe, this is the kind of romance movie for people who like the fog and the grave. You know who you are.

You can get it from Vinegar Syndrome.

Call it Il paese del sesso selvaggio (The Country of Savage Sex). Or refer to it as Deep River Savages and Sacrifice! Or just say it by the name most of the U.S. saw it as, Man from Deep River. Whatever title you see it as, you can claim to have seen the first movie in Italy’s cannibal cycle, which, like all filones, takes another, the mondo, and goes even further.

British photographer John Bradley (Ivan Rassimov, who was Serbian) has been photographing the Thai wildlife. A boxing match is more interesting to him than the woman he’s with and soon, he’s so drunk that he’s stabbing a man in a bar fight. Then, it’s time to go into the heart of darkness and go down the river. He wakes up, and his guide is dead, and he’s been taken, as the natives believe him to be a merman thanks to his wetsuit. 

After some torture, the chief Luhanà agrees to release John to Maraya (Burmese/British cannibal movie queen Me Me Lai), who has shown an interest in him. Her governess, Taima, speaks English and decides to help him escape. That night, a helicopter comes close, and John tries and fails to get away, killing Maraya’s fiancé, Karen. This, for some reason, makes him seem like he could be a member of the tribe, so they start to torture him all over again to see if he belongs. In case you’re wondering, yes, this would like you to think it’s A Man Called Horse.

By the end of the film, he’s had a child with Maraya, but she doesn’t make it. When the helicopter comes to rescue him again, he hides and goes deeper into the jungle, having left the world of civilization behind.

This film was a huge success in New York City’s grindhouses, but it ran into problems when it tried to cross the pond. Even though the BBFC took one look at the celluloid in ’75 and slammed the door on a theatrical release, the flick pulled a fast one, sneaking into UK homes under the title Deep River Savages. But you can’t keep a good exploitation film down for long without the moral crusaders noticing. By 1983, when the DPP was busy clutching their pearls and drafting the infamous Video Nasties list, Lenzi’s opus was right there in the crosshairs. Once the Video Recordings Act of 1984 became the law of the land, the UK government dropped the hammer. Deep River Savages wasn’t just trimmed. It was banned in its entirety until 2003, when three minutes were cut. In 2016, another release saw three more minutes chopped with the same disdain that animals are sliced to bits in this. In the U.S., this got an R rating.

Director Umberto Lenzi really hit almost every filone Italy had to offer, from peplum (Samson and the Slave Queen) and Eurospy (008: Operation Exterminate, SuperSeven Calling Cairo) to comic book movies (Kriminal, Tarzan In the Golden Grotto), giallo (Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, Eyeball, Spasmo), pliziotteschi (The Tough Ones), Conan rip-offs (Ironmaster), horror (Ghosthouse, Nightmare Beach) and even VHS era cash-ins (Primal Rage, Hitcher In the Dark). He also made two more cannibal films, Eaten Alive! (which takes scenes from this film) and Cannibal Ferox, which was released in the U.S. as Make Them Die Slowly. 

In case you’re wondering about that scene where Me Me Lai gets raw-dogged on the ashes of her dead fiancé, it’s based on truth and isn’t just the kind of transgressive imagery we expect in Italian movies. It’s based on a traditional African ritual known as widow cleansing. In the internal logic of the culture, a woman becomes dirty when her husband dies. She’s essentially a walking biohazard of bad luck and grief, supposedly possessed by the lingering spirit of the deceased. To stop this curse from spreading like a supernatural virus through the rest of the village, the widow has to be scrubbed clean and the only way to wash away the shadows of the dead is through a three-day marathon of unprotected sex with a purifier, who is usually the dead guy’s brother.

A warning: For many fans of cult and exploitation cinema, scenes of real animal death are often the ones that make the movie difficult to revisit. Here is the breakdown of the animals killed on screen in this film:

• A Crocodile: This is one of the film’s more protracted and famous scenes. The animal is dragged from the water, bound and then cut open and gutted while still alive.
• A Python/Large Snake: The snake is decapitated during a sequence intended to show the dangers of the jungle.
• A Monkey: In a scene that reflects the survival tropes of the genre, a monkey is killed and its brain is eaten by the characters.
• A Mongoose vs. Cobra: True to the mondo style that influenced Lenzi, there is a sequence featuring a fight between a mongoose and a cobra that ends with the snake’s death.

While Man from Deep River is often praised for its lush cinematography and for being more of a fish-out-of-water adventure than the later, more mean-spirited cannibal films like Cannibal Holocaust (intended as a Lenzi-directed sequel, but he turned it down twice), the inclusion of these non-simulated animal deaths remains its most controversial element.

Westchester County played host to a veritable army of maniacs, including Ed Adlum (Shriek of the Mutilated), the Findlays (Snuff) and Ed Kelleher (Prime Evil), who were armed with a camera, $24,000, some stage blood and cases of beer to pay off the cast. The result is a movie that seems like it could fit in with Motel Hell at first before you realize that these farmers are druids out to raise their queen from the dead with the blood of the stupid.

These Sangroids are bringing back Queen Onhorrid and they won’t let anyone stand in their way and that includes puppies. It’s a movie that doesn’t care if it’s shot in the day, the night or day for night. It is also relentlessly devoted to being weird without being a try hard movie. This is just plain weird.

Throw in an atonal soundtrack, the chunkiest blood you’ve ever seen and a woman in a glass case who gets to come back from the beyond and rule for all of 45 seconds and you have a movie.

If you watched Manos: The Hands of Fate and were hoping to find something just as odd and as poorly realized, this would be the spiritual East Coast sequel that you crave. If anyone else wrote that sentence, it would be a put-down. Coming out of my typing fingers, it’s the highest of compliments.

You can watch this on Tubi or get it from Severin.

While many “Euro-horror” films of the 70s feel like fever dreams, Horror Express (originally titled Pánico en el Transiberiano) is a remarkably tight, imaginative, and eerie locked-room mystery. It’s a film where the science is baffling, the religion is terrifying, and the mustache on Christopher Lee is legendary as he played Professor Sir Alexander Saxton — or is that Sir Professor — a British anthropologist taking the Trans-Siberian Express from Shanghai to Moscow. He’s not alone. He has the frozen remains of a caveman he found in Manchuria, which he believes are the missing link. Peter Cushing plays his rival, Dr. Wells, who is also on board.

The creature, however, isn’t just a caveman. It’s a vessel for an ancient, formless extraterrestrial that absorbs memories and knowledge through its victims’ eyes, leaving them with milky-white orbs and smooth brains. As the body count rises, the train becomes a claustrophobic pressure cooker involving a Russian Count and Countess, a mad monk named Pujardov and an alien that eventually decides a zombie uprising is the best way to catch its ride home.

Captain Kazan (Telly Savalas) is able to stop it for some time, but Pujardov believes that the alien is Satan and pledges his soul to it, allowing himself to be possessed. Then, it raises all of the past victims as zombies.

Phillip Yordan supposedly made this movie because he had bought the miniature train from the film Nicholas and Alexandra. Director Eugenio Martín said,  “He came up with the idea of writing a script just so he would be able to use this prop. Now, at that time, Phil was in the habit of buying up loads of short stories to adapt into screenplays, and the story for Horror Express was originally based on a tale written by a little-known American scriptwriter and playwright.”

However, producer Bernard Gordon, who also worked with Martin and Savalas on Pancho Villa, claimed that the train was made for that movie.

Lee and Cushing were the big draw for this movie, but Cushing nearly quit, as this was made during the first holiday season since the loss of his wife, Helen. According to an article by Ted Newsome, “Hollywood Exile: Bernard Gordon, Sci Fi’s Secret Screenwriter,” Lee fixed this by placing Cushing at ease, “talking to his old friend about some of their previous work together; Cushing changed his mind and stayed on.” It’s also said that he suffered from night terrors, so Lee would sleep in the same bed as him.

If you grew up watching this on late-night TV or a $5 bargain-bin VHS, you likely remember it as incredibly dark and muddy. This was less an artistic choice and more a legal hostage situation. Because the U.S. distributor, Scotia International, came up $50,000 short on the budget payment, the original camera negative was impounded in Spain. For decades, American audiences were watching bootleg quality prints struck from the workprint, obscuring the film’s actually quite handsome cinematography.

Of all the great things about this movie, the fact that they can look inside a caveman’s mind and see dinosaurs is the most charming.

Also: As we all know, Phillip Yordan also made the best train movie of all time, Night Train to Terror.

You can watch this on YouTube.