Whether you call this La casa de las muertas vivientes (The House of the Living Dead), Night of the Scorpion, the Italian title Il cadavere di Helen non mi dava pace (Helen’s Corpse Gives Me No Peace or Helen Is Not Resting In Peace) or An Open Tomb… An Empty Coffin, this is a giallo made in Spain and Italy during the height of the genre. It’s directed by Alfonso Balcázar (Sartana Does Not Forgive, A Noose Is Waiting for You Trinity) from a script that he wrote with Giovanni Simonelli and José Ramón Larraz, the same team that made Watch Out Gringo! Sabata Will Return.

Oliver Bromfield (José Antonio Amor) has lost his father and wife Helen (Gioia Desideri), which causes him to move back to the gigantic ancestral home in the mountains far from the closest village. Despite the fact that they are isolated from anyone else, he makes a point to tell his new wife Ruth (Daniela Giordano) to not listen to what anyone says about his family. If that isn’t enough to freak her out, perhaps the way that Oliver’s stepmother Sarah (Nuria Torray) kisses him will do it. Or maybe it’s the maid (Alicia Tomás) who doesn’t answer questions or the sister who refuses to speak to her. Look, if you marry into a rich family in a giallo, your chances of encountering weirdness and death are absolute.

So yes, Sarah keeps trying to seduce her stepson as well as spying on him as he consummates his new marriage. His sister Jenny angrily stabs butterflies — oh post-Argento giallo and its obsession with animals — as she laments the loss of Helen, who she definitely had an affair with and when Oliver found out, Helen took a dive over the railing. Maybe. Who can say?

Ruth slowly starts going insane, what with being trapped in this house of depression. Wouldn’t you be worried if you watch a kitten die after drinking the poisoned milk that you were about to drink — yes, this movie makes a The Cat O’Nine Tails ripoff while having a cat figured into said theft — and then come back to life?

Everybody in this family wants someone they can’t have and Ruth starts to realize that maybe she shouldn’t have said yes to this marriage deal. She even brings in a private detective (Osvaldo Genazzani) who she says is her Uncle Edgar to figure out what’s happening.

That’s when a killer with black gloves and a blade remembers that we’re in a giallo and not a soap opera and starts stabbing people with just twenty minutes left.

This may not rank in the best of all giallo, but there is that awesome clock that the voyeur stepmother uses to peep through which gives the opportunity for some great shots. And once it picks up, it picks up.

Queen Doll is a film about the dangers of nostalgia. When Carlos (Enrique Rocha) comes back to his hometown, he starts to remember moments of his past that he’s long forgotten. A copy of Tom Sawyer — the movie even has scenes from the book filmed and presented almost as flashbacks — has a map inside it which shows him where the home of a girl he knew named Amilamia.

Despite his somewhat normal life, Carlos has grown obsessed about the girl and what happened to her. Any woman that he sees that’s his age could be her, yet he thinks that she might have not ever had the chance to grow up. He follows the map to the home of an old couple and invents a way to get into the house to learn more. The couple admits that she’s dead and shows him a room with a life sized doll of her in a glass coffin, surrounded by the things she cared about most.

Now, her spirit follows Carlos and he finds her becoming part of his life, a life that he begins to ignore, even becoming distant from his fiancee Laura. Obviously, he’s going down a path that won’t have a happy ending. The scariest part is that he no longer is concerned.

Director Sergio Olhovich is still making movies today, fifty years after making this, his first full-length movie. He also co-wrote the script with Carlos Fuentes and Eduardo Luján. This is one strange and wonderful movie. It’s one that I want more people to track down and watch.

You can watch this on YouTube.

A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die is also known as Massacre at Fort Holman. At the time that it was made, Italian westerns had begun to copy themselves, as this was shot on the same set as The Deserter, in the same Almería, Spain locations as Leone’s films — you can see the homestead from Once Upon a Time In the West and the fort in this film was also used in El Condor — and even takes songs directly from Day of Anger.

It goes even further into Xerox territory by doing what several other Italian westerns had done: take an existing property and make it a cowboy film. This time, that movie is The Dirty Dozen.

Is it any wonder this was released by K-Tel?

What it has over most of its competitors is star power with James Coburn, Telly Savalas and Bud Spencer in the cast.

Disgraced Union Colonel Pembroke (Coburn) — reduced to looting a church — is arrested and tries to commute his sentence by saying that he has a plan to recapture Fort Holman, which he had previously surrendered to Major Ward (Savalas) and the Confederate army without firing a shot. He assembles the army which will help him take it back out of prisoners, including a deserter named McIver (Guy Mairesse, a murderer — of his commanding officer — and rapist — of his commanding officer’s wife — named Pickett (Benito Stefanelli), Fred the horse thief Fred (Ugo Fangareggi), medicine thief and black marketeer Will (Adolfo Lastretti), half Native American — and killer of his fellow soldiers for selling alcohol to the Apache — Jeremy (Joe Pollini, who was also the assistant director), Sergeant Brent (Reinhard Kolldehoff) — who somehow is wearing the cross of Pembroke’s dead wife — and a looter named Eli Sampson (Spencer). Only one of the group refuses, a religious pacifist agitator, who doesn’t want this strange opportunity for freedom and would rather the certainty of the gallows.

Pembroke tells them that there’s gold inside and that he’s a convict just like them. The truth is that he only gave up the fort because Ward had taken his son and promised he’d be returned if he complied. He did and his son was killed.

By the end, everyone — save Pembroke and Sampson — is dead. War is bloody and ruthless and unforgiving, but so is revenge. Blake lies dead, killed with his own sword. Probably the same sword that killed Pembroke’s son. But even if he has vengeance, he’ll never have his boy back.

Director Tonino Valerii also made Day of Anger, My Dear Killer, My Name Is Nobody and the JFK assassination in the west film Price of Power. He’s pretty good, even if his name doesn’t come up much in the conversation on Italian directors. This was written by Rafael Azcona and Ernesto Gastadi, whose list of credits could fill our entire site.

You can watch this on Tubi.

A Spanish, French and Italian co-production, It Can Be Done Amigo was also called Saddle Tramps, which is a wonderful nom de plume for a movie. It also was called Bulldozer is Back Amigo, Hallelujah Amigo and The Big and the Bad.

Bud Spencer is Hiram Coburn and he’s very similar to the Bambino character that he became known for in the Trinity series. He’s being pursued by Sonny (Jack Palance), a gunfighter and procurer of women of ill repute who is upset that Coburn took his sister Mary’s (Davy Saval, Moon Pilot) virginity without marrying her. As part of their constant battles, the two meet an orphan named Chip who is soon fighting off the offers to buy the house he inherited from his uncle by a priest called Franciscus (Francisco Rabal), who soon brings in Sonny and Mary, then marries off Coburn to the pregnant young girl. Sonny tells Coburn that when his son becomes 21, he will finally shoot him. Hijinks, as they say, ensue.

How self-referential had Italian westerns become by 1972? This movie was shot on McBain ranch set from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West. Bud Spencer’s character says, “So this is the famous well” in reference to the well that caused the railroad to be built so close to that farm.

This is a movie that has a farm with mud people like to eat and where Bud Spencer puts on glasses every time he has to fight someone. If you haven’t gotten into the silly side of Italian westerns, your enjoyment of this may or may not occur.

It Can Be Done, Amigo was directed by Maurizio Lucidi (The Designated Victim) and written by Rafael Azcona from a story by Ernesto Gastaldi.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Cut-Throats Nine arrives at a time when Italian westerns were struggling to stand out. This film does so by being as mean as it gets and filled with shocking levels of blood and gore. There was even a William Castle-style promo item, a Terror Mask, made so audiences could hide their eyes during the bloodshed and mayhem.

A remake of the original posted on The Daily Grindhouse.

Sergeant Brown (Robert Hundar) and his daughter Sarah (Emma Cohen) are taking a chain gang of seven convicts to the other side of a mountain range and the prison of Fort Green. Bandits attacks, looking for gold, not realizing that the chains that hold the men are made from it. Then, things get worse. Much worse.

A throat is slashed, the daughter is assaulted, a man is stabbed so many times that his entrails are visible, someone is shot through the eye and a man is burned alive. Brown is also convinced that one of the men killed his wife, so perhaps he doesn’t see the need to get them to their destination alive. But who knows if anyone will get there.

Director Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent made movies until 1995 but the main films of his career were made in the early 70s and the western cycle. It’s also bleak beyond hope, as even the one character that cares for Sarah beyond her father, Dean, may be the absolute worst of all of the convicts who are being used simply to transport wealth, their lives meaningless.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Grand Duel was directed by Giancarlo Santi, who was Sergio Leone’s second unit director. He only directed two other movies on his own, Quando c’era lui… caro lei! and Con la voce del cuore, although he assistant directed on films like Death Rides a Horse and both of Luigi Cozzi’s Hercules movies. It was written by the man behind so many giallo films, Ernesto Gastaldi.

Philip Wermeer (Alberto Dentice) has been convicted of killing Ebenezer Saxon, the patriarch of Saxon City and also the man who killed his father. He escapes from prison and heads off to Gila Bend, a small town where he’s soon trapped by several bounty hunters all after the reward posted by Saxon’s sons. Sheriff Clayton (Lee Van Cleef) comes to town to take him back to jail, which means battling everyone after the price on Wermeer’s head.

Even after Wermeer’s innocence is shown and the Saxons are shown to be horrible people — massacring an entire silver mine worth of people, including their own men — they still want revenge. They even strip Clayton of his star and disgrace him.

By the end, Clayton must duel all three Saxon brothers and as a gentleman, he refuses to draw first. Like the best of Italian western heroes, he’s putting his life on the line to keep true to his beliefs.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Arthur Bishop (Charles Bronson) is an artist. He listens to classical music, he loves the finest in artwork and knows the best wines. Yet he can’t trust anyone. He can’t have any emotions. Because his art is murder and that puts him under so much stress that he passes out at times. The only love in his life is paid for, as a call girl (Jill Ireland) writes letters and meets him for a girlfriend experience that ultimately is meaningless.

For the first sixteen minutes of The Mechanic, he moves in absolute quiet to make his kill.

After completing the job of killing a high ranking official in his own group, “Big Harry” McKenna (Keenan Wynn), he meets the man’s son Steve (Jan-Michael Vincent). He has the same aptitude for murder, so Bishop begins training him against the wishes of his superiors, which makes them doubt the older killer. And when Bishop finds notes on himself in Steve’s papers, has he let the wrong person into his life?

The second movie that Bronson would make with Michael Winner, but it was originally intended to be Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop) making the movie. The script was also altered, as it was about the sexual relationship between the two men and there’s no way that Bronson was going to make that film.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Chato’s Land first was on the site on November 10, 2021. You can get the blu ray from Kino Lorber. It has a brand new 2K master of the film, as well as new audio commentary by film historians Howard S. Berger and Steve Mitchell, an interview with screenwriter Gerald Wilson and reversible cover art. You can order it from Kino Lorber.

After shooting the racist sheriff in self-defense, Apache Chato (Charles Bronson) heads back home, far away from the affairs of the white men. However, former Confederate Captain Quincey Whitmore (Jack Palance) has put back on his uniform and brought together former soldiers demoralized by the end of the war — look at what year this movie came out and you can see what this movie really is saying — and begins hunting down Chato, who much like the Vietcong knows the land better and is fighting for his family, not for pride or because he’s been peer pressured.

That means he kills every single one of them.

Also, this is when you realize that Michael Winner directed this movie, because not only do four of the posse — Elias (Ralph Waite), Earl (Richard Jordan), Hall (Victor French) and Lansing (William Watson) — gang rape and leave Chato’s wife for dead, they also string up his best friend and set him on fire.

Yes, Michael Winner, the man who brings you the patriarch of The Waltons assaulting a woman.

The first victim afterward is Earl, who is obsessed with Chato’s wife. Like a slasher villain, Bronson’s character dispatches the men one after the other and leaves their bodies to be found. He’s gone full Apache, no longer wearing the clothes of the Europeans and the men begin to turn on one another, even killing Whitmore, who has long become disgusted by their actions.

Still, the odds are against Bronson. Then again, that’s usually how it is.

The first of six movies that Winner would make with Bronson, this was shot on some of the same Spanish sets as Once Upon a Time in the West. Winter would say, in the book Bronson’s Loose, that this was the only of their films that Bronson enjoyed watching.

Leopoldo Savano also made Death Falls Lightly so he had experience with the giallo. This movie may be set in the 19th century yet seeing as how it’s about a series of murders and the investigation mentions a strange three-bladed weapon, it most definitely has strains of the giallo mixed in with the gothic.

Savona based the demonic part of the film on the demon Beleth, which he read about in the book Pseudomonarchia Daemonum. Beleth or Byleth is a king of Hell who has eighty-five legions of demons under his command. When he appears, he is usually riding a pale horse and his physical form is proceeded by music. He was first invoked by Noah’s son Ham, who wrote a math book with the help of this demon. Beleth appears as a fearsome demon and will test the magician who has invoked him, demanding respect and potentially even killing them if they can’t gain control over him. When they do, he will reveal his — its? — true form of a beautiful woman who can seduce anyone and bring them into the bed of its conjurer.

Lionello Shandell (Mark Damon, The Devil’s Wedding Night) has been in love with his sister Barbara (Claudia Gravy, Two Undercover Angels) since they were children. After a year away, he returns to find her married to Giordano (Aldo Bufi Landi).

Each night, he watches them make love and then takes off for the countryside, killing a series of women who have the same red tresses as his sister. Once the maid Gisella and Giordano’s cousin Floriana are killed in the same way, Lionello becomes the main suspect. We all know he’s found his warlock father’s occult library, we know he’s the killer but we’re still surprised by the end of this film.

Byleth is the kind of Eurohorror sleaze that I love to have on in the background to remind myself that life is more than just sitting in a room writing all day, never seeing the outside world. 1972 was a wild time to be making movies in Italy and I love that this film exists.

You can get this from Severin.