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.

Before the internet made celebrity downfall a 24-hour commodity, there was Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. First published in the U.S. in 1965 and promptly banned for a decade, the book was a psychedelic fever dream of Tinseltown’s “true” history. When it finally returned to shelves in 1975, it brought with it the grisly receipts: the mangled wreckage of Jayne Mansfield’s Buick, the tragic stillness of Carole Landis, and the horrific, bisected remains of Elizabeth Short (The Black Dahlia).

Anger, a filmmaker and devotee of Aleister Crowley, viewed Hollywood through an occult lens, popularizing the quote “Every man and every woman is a star.” He traded in urban legends like a currency: Clara Bow and the entire USC football team (including a young John Wayne) or the myth of Mansfield’s decapitation. Most of it was debunked long ago, but as the saying goes: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The book led to a sequel and a 1992 syndicated series hosted by Tony Curtis.

But before that, there was this, an unauthorized film.

Directed by Van Guylder (The Bang Bang Gang and a later sequel, Hollywood Babylon II, taken from the TV show) and written by L.K. Farbella, this plays just as loose with reality as its inspiration. Fatty Arbuckle was exonerated for the death of Virginia Rappe and paid for it with his career. Here, he gets away with assaulting her with a bottle of champagne. Rudolph Valentino inspired gay clubs and had a fondness for butch women. Erich von Stroheim got off watching women get whipped. And yes, Clara Bow wears out those Trojans. The football players, if not the rubbers, because they all went in bareback.

Yes, Olive Thomas killed herself, but she died in a hospital instead of a hotel room. Wallace Reid was probably addicted to drugs before this movie claims that he was. Charlie Chaplin slept with Lita Grey when she was 15, but did he have other women give him fellatio while she watched, so that he could train her to never have actual sex with him again? And why does no one look like the actors they’re supposed to be, and while this mentions nearly everyone, it gets shy about William Randolph Hearst?

Yet for fans of 70s exploitation, the cast is a who’s who of the era’s “it” girls. Uschi Digard—the queen of the Super-Vixens—is present, which for many viewers is the only endorsement needed. You also get Jane Ailyson (The Godson and A Clock Work Blue taking the whip and Suzanne Fields (Dale Ardor from  Flesh Gordon) lighting up a party scene.

That narration — listen to this prose: “This was Hollywood, once considered a suburb of sprawling Los Angeles – destined, perhaps doomed, to become its very heart. In 1916, however, it was just a junction of dirt roads and a scattering of orange groves. If there was sin, it was not to be seen. Scandalous sin that is, for what was going on at the studio on Sunset Boulevard was merely play-acting, a Babylonian orgy involving hundreds, nay thousands of actors and extras, portraying the doom of Belshazzar. This passion play, D.W. Griffith’s most ambitious epic, was titled “Intolerance,” and it set the tone for Tinseltown… something to live up to, something to live down. The shadow of Babylon had fallen over Hollywood. Scandal was waiting just out of camera range.”

There is a masterpiece to be made from Anger’s book, a surrealist, high-budget exploration of the dark energy beneath the palm trees. Ideally, Anger himself would have directed it. Instead, we have this: a rare specimen of a movie that contains all the ingredients for a riotous time: scandal, nudity, and historical blasphemy.

Yet somehow manages to be a bit of a slog. It is a “Babylonian orgy” that feels more like a long afternoon at a dusty swap meet.

If you’re looking for the exact moment the “Summer of Love” curdled into a ditch of despair, look no further than this output from the husband-and-wife filmmaking duo Beverly and Fred Sebastian. The same pair that gave us the swampy vengeance of ’Gator Bait and the heavy-metal slasher Rocktober Blood decided to take a stab at social relevance and, in typical Sebastian fashion, they used a rusted scalpel.

The film stars Misty Rowe (the bubbly blonde icon from Hee-Haw) as Maggie, a small-town girl who discovers she’s pregnant and decides that running away is her only prenatal plan. She quickly trades her rural innocence for the asphalt jungle, falling in with a group of hippies who are less about peace and love and more about crime.

What are they living for? To finance a school bus and live their nomadic dream.

How are they gonna do it? By seducing and robbing truck drivers.

For the first half, it plays like a lighthearted road movie with lots of flashing panties to secure rides and the kind of carefree hitchhiking montages that make you forget the era was actually crawling with serial killers. But then, at the switch of a reel, the vibes are assaulted by a gruesome, back-alley abortion scene. It’s a jarring, visceral sequence that feels like it belongs in a completely different film, designed to shock the audience out of their seats (or backseat, if they’re still watching). By the final act, our fun hippy family has gone the way of Manson, as the social consciousness remembers that it’s in an exploitation film.

Somewhere in here, there was a good movie, but the Sebastians aren’t the people to make it. I mean, they try to make a message movie while all we want are frolicking moments of stealing cash from truckers and making it on the road.

I guess in a way, this is a very realistic film about the seventies.

You can watch this on Tubi.

PS: Thanks to Alan for noticing I had the wrong poster art.

“Did you mean to review Amos Sefer’s The Hitchhiker which is known as An American Hippie in Israel? Either the photo for the review for The Hitchhikers is wrong or you reviewed the wrong film. You have no credibility. Bad enough you plagiarizer copy from everywhere with click bait visual vengeance buy now posts. Now images that dont go with the film.”

Thanks!

After pretty much creating the nurse cycle for Corman with The Student Nurses and then directing The Velvet Vampire, Stephanie Rothman and her husband Charles Swartz left New World for Larry Woolner’s new Dimension Films. It was still exploitation, and she didn’t have much creative control, but it was more money and the opportunity to own some of the movies that she was making.

Rothman directed Terminal Island and The Working Girls, wrote the script for Beyond Atlantis, offered some creative ideas to Sweet Sugar and re-edited The Sin of Adam and Eve. After stops and starts, as well as writing Starhops and taking her name off it when the film didn’t reflect what she wrote, she eventually left movies.

We’re all the worse for this, as her films are progressive in 2024 and had to be incendiary in the 1970s.

This starts in a rental car office, where we meet Chris (Aimée Eccles, Ulzana’s Raid, Paradise Alley) and Judy (Jayne Kennedy!). Well, Judy isn’t in this, but Jayne Kennedy is always a welcome actress in any film. Chris has issues with her boyfriend, Sandor (Solomon Sturges, son of Preston, who is also in The Working Girls), who pretty much berates her at any opportunity and is only concerned with writing acerbic bumper stickers. He flips out that he doesn’t have a working car, so she has to hurry home and fix it — the women in this movie don’t just have agency, they’re all more capable than the men — and that’s when she rides in the same taxi as Dennis (Jeff Pomerantz). This leads to Dennis trying to get them to stop fighting, staying overnight, having his girlfriend Jan (Victoria Vetri, Playboy Playmate of the Month for September 1967 and 1968 Playmate of the Year; she’s also in Rosemary’s Baby, playing Terry Gionoffrio, and in Invasion of the Bee Girls) break up with him and sleeping with Chris.

Before you know it, Dennis is introducing Jan to the couple, and all four are in an intertwined relationship. That soon becomes five when the women — who are just as in charge of their sexuality as the men — fall for a lifeguard named Phil Kirby (Zack Taylor, The Young Nurses). Yet he feels a little lonely and starts looking for someone else. At this point, I was marveling at how beautiful everyone in this movie is. And that’s when Phil’s partner, Elaine (Claudia Jennings, there’s a reason to watch this!), is introduced. Sure, she’s a lawyer representing his ex-wife in the divorce, but she wants him.

Everyone decides to get married, but Jan doesn’t want commitment, even if they have the opportunity to be with different people within their poly group. But then people start showing up trying to be part of the group, and some go wild and try to firebomb their house. Dennis even loses his job. Elaine decides to figure out how to make group marriage legal, which leads all five to get married. And wow, I lied before, because Judy ended up with Dennis, so now there are six. I mean, seven! Chris is pregnant.

How progressive is the California of Stephanie Rothman? Not only can these people all create their own marriage, but their gay neighbors Randy (John McMurtry) and Rodney (Bill Striglos) are also able to be husband and husband, 22 years before the first legal same sex marriage in America.

Other than the John Sebastian song “Darling Companion” and the stereotypical mincing gay couple, there’s a lot to celebrate here. It’s erotic, sure, but never feels filthy or even exploitative. This is at once a humorous but thoughtful take on the good and bad of being married to six people. As always, Rothman’s work is nearly current today, and many of her movies were released before I was born.

This was re-released by 21st Century as a double feature with The Muthers.