VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the January 31, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

The fourth of the five movie New World Pictures nurse cycle — preceded by The Student Nurses, Private Duty Nurses and Night Call Nurses and followed by Candy Stripe Nurses — this was directed by Clint Kimbrough, who played Dr. Bramlett in Night Call Nurses, and written by Howard R. Cohen, whose awesome output includes Unholy Rollers, Cover Girl Models, Vampire Hookers, Fighting Mad, Saturday the 14th, Space Raiders, Stryker, Deathstalker, Barbarian Queen, Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell, Barbarian Queen 2, Deathstalker IV and Lords of the Deep. He also directed Saturday the 14th, Space Raiders, Saturday the 14th Strikes Back, Time Trackers, Deathstalker IV and Space Case.

As usual, there are three nurses: Kitty (Jeane Manson, Terror Circus, 10 to Midnight), Joanne (Ashley Porter, who other than an uncredited role in The Student Nurses was never in another movie) and Michelle (Angela Elayne Gibbs, Cleopatra Jones, Party Line).

They all have their own storylines. Kitty falls in love with a boat racer named Donahue (Zach Taylor), even though there’s never a moment where he seems charming or even likable. Plus, his father who pushes him to be a sailing man seems like too much to deal with. Joanne is sick of the doctors failing at their jobs and hurting patients, so she starts to do their work for them. And Michelle discovers that patients are overdosing on bad drugs and investigates for herself.

Beyond these dramatic moments, this film is filled with cameos, with Sally Kirkland, Dick Miller, Mantan Moreland and Samuel Fuller all showing up.

My favorite part of this entire movie is when Joanne is dealing with probably losing her job as a nurse by tearing her clothes off on a beach and diving into the ocean. It’s just so out of nowhere and an excuse to get a gorgeous young actress nude, which you know, is kind of everything Roger Corman was about.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on December 27, 2022. It’s back because Cauldron has re-released — this is the mass market version without slipcase — an absolutely stunning version of it on blu ray featuring a 2K restoration from the negative, both English and Italian audio options, CD soundtrack with music from Bruno Nicolai, and brand new extras including an interview with Master Katsutoshi Mikuriya, a visual essay by film historian Eric Zaldivar, commentary with film historian Mike Hauss from The Spaghetti Western Digest, a trailer, poster and high-quality slipcase. You get buy it from MVD.

According to the Spaghetti Western Database, lead actor Chen Lee may have been a Japanese karate instructor, but according to director Mario Caiano (Eye In the Labyrinth), he worked in a laundry, not in a dojo, and was picked because he looked like a young Dustin Hoffman. Some think his real name was Mioshini Hayakawa, which is Japanese, not Chinese. That said, if that being racist — not knowing the difference between two countries nearly 1,900 miles away from one another — then this movie is not for you.

Seriously, nearly every race gets denigrated in this movie audibly and physically. Luckily, Shanghai Joe ends up killing every single offender.

Also — the Bruno Nicolai music — recycled from Have a Good Funeral, My Friend… Sartana Will Pay — is so good you’ll want to stick around for the whole movie.

Shanghai — or Chin Hao — has come to this country and instead of finding whatever it is he’s looking for — he has tattoos much like Kwai Chang Caine — he’s found that aforementioned racism and a love interest in Cristina (Carla Romanelli, Fenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankamen, The Lonely Lady).

Our hero’s skills as a fighting man make their way to cattle rancher Stanley Spencer (Piero Lulli, Kill, Baby…Kill!), who is really enslaving Mexicans to do his work. That means that the bad guys decide to kill him, but none of them can get it done.

Spencer ends up hiring four different killers, much like video game bosses, to do his work for him. There’s Tricky the Gambler (Giacomo Rossi Stuart, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave), Pedro the Cannibal (Robert Hundar, Sabata), Buryin’ Sam (Gordon Mitchell, who improvised and sang the song “Chin-Chin Chinaman” while carrying a shovel to try to kill Shanghai) and Scalper Jack (an astonishing Klaus Kinski, who is obsessed with hair and you genuinely fear for the life of Romanelli in their scene).

Finally, Mikuja, the only person who has the same martial arts technique and tattoo as our hero, is hired to kill him. Their battle may not be a fight on the order of a Shaw Brothers technical battle, but it’s still fun.

This movie is incredibly strange, because every time I thought it was going to be normal, it would go from slapstick to our hero plucking out a bad guy’s eye and blood spraying all over the place. It’s closer to a horror film set in the West with martial arts than a straight-up Italian Western, but it’s better for that difference.

Totally recommended.

In Italian, a m’arcord means I remember and this is what Federico Fellini does in this film which recounts his childhood and the life of his childhood best friend, Luigi Titta Benzi, who is the inspiration for Titta, the main character. Fellini took efforts to say that this was not an autobiographical film, but thoughts of his past.

What’s amazing to me is this Oscar-winning film — Best Foreign Language Film and nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay — was brought to the U.S. by Roger Corman.

Titta (Bruno Zanin) and his friends would rather be involved with pranks and attempt to lose their virginity than studying under fascism. This film has a scene where four of them masturbate in a car while discussing women like Bardot that may shock U.S. audiences, not because there’s any nudity, but the frankness and idea of boys exploring their sexuality in the same confined space is something that Americans would deny ever doing.

Many of Titta’s fantasies revolve around Gradisca (Magali Noël), the most beautiful woman in town who is due to be married to a fascist officer, as well as an encounter with a well-endowed tobacconist (Maria Antonietta Beluzzi) who nearly overwhelms him with her bosom.

This is an episodic film, filled with moments like Titta’s institutionalized uncle climbing a tree and screaming, “I want a woman!” as well as his father’s past as an anarchist, a winter family tragedy, the town coming together for a festival and an ocean liner passing by and everyone meeting it by boat. It’s charming and perhaps the most accessible of Fellini’s films, even if the Italian sexuality of it all may be too much for American puritanical eyes.

How important of a movie is this? It was the first film released in the letterboxed format when it came out on a RCA SelectaVision CED videodisc.

I have no idea what American audiences thought when confronted by the Robert Fuest directed and written The Final Programme, released here as The Last Days of Man on Earth.

Based on the novel of the same name by Michael Moorcock, this is the story of physicist, secret agent and dandy Jerry Cornelius (Jon Finch, Frenzy, who replaced Timothy Dalton at the last minute), who first attends the funeral burning of his father, a man who created the titular Final Programme, which will create the ultimate self-replicating immortal human. The world is ending, but a series of scientists and government types want this to come to pass while all Jerry wants to do is rescue his sister — and quite possibly lover — Catharine (Sarah Douglas) from his drugged-out brother Frank (Derrick O’Connor), all the while avoiding the man devouring secret agent Miss Brunner (Jenny Runacre, Jubilee).

Let me put this out there: this is a film that is all about its look more than caring if you understand the story. Either you’re going to love the ideas and Cornelius or you’re going to quit before its over. If you stick around, you’ll get a gigantic arcade filled with nuns playing slot machines for fruit (look for Moorcock and Hawkwind hanging out), needlegun battles, a hero addicted to drinking and biscuits, and an ending that really defies a conclusion, something that had to infuriate anyone not familiar with the source novel, which would be less than a handful, I believe.

Plus, you get Sterling Hayden as military man Major Wrongway Lindberg; Graham Crowden, Basil Henson and George Coulouris as the doctors; a Patrick Magee cameo; Fuest going wild creating sets and scenes that don’t always work (but who cares) and a strange feel that really makes this unlike any other movie I’ve seen.

It would be two years until Fuest got to make another movie — The Devil’s Rain! — and that didn’t work out so well either, sending him back to where he began, directing episodes of The New Avengers. He’d spend the rest of his career in TV, making ABC Afterschool Specials (Make-Believe Marriage, A Movie Star’s Daughter, A Family of Stranges and My Mother Was Never a Kid), The Big Stuffed Dog, Revenge of the Stepford Wives and episodes of Worlds Beyond, C.A.T.S. Eyes and The Optimist. He also made Aphrodite, a film that had both softcore and hardcore cuts.

In a perfect world, Fuest would have had great success, but who knows? Maybe he was happy that after two Dr. Phibes movies he wasn’t typecast as a horror director. Perhaps he was even happier than the failure of The Devil’s Rain! put a nail in that coffin. His movies are challenges, with sets her decorated himself, films that never tell the audience all — or often any — of what’s happening, that are anything but wallpaper to have in the background.

Dr. Gerald Appleby (Michael Greene) starts to believe that he’s been cloned. That’s because he barely escaped his lab’s explosion and everyone in his life thinks that they’ve seen him in places that he knows that he hasn’t been. He goes on the run, not only chased by mad scientist Carl Swafford (Stanley Adams, Cyrano Jones from the original Star Trek), but also violent thugs Sawyer (Otis Young, Blood Beach) and Nemo (Gregory Sierra, which is disconcerting, because I am used to seeing him as the face of goodness from his role as Det. Sgt. Chano Amenguale on Barney Miller).

Directed by Paul Hunt (he also directed Twisted Nightmare and produced Demon Wind) and Lamar Card (who directed Supervan and Jukebox AKA Disco Fever, as well as the producer of Nashville Girl, Savage Harvest and Project: Metalbeast), who co-wrote the film with Steve Fisher, who started writing movies back in 1938 with Nurse from Brooklyn. He also wrote the novel and screenplay for I Wake Up Screaming, Hell’s Half Acre, Johnny Angel and episodes of Peter Gunn, McMillan & Wife, Cannon and Fantasy Island.

Most people will watch this movie and see a slow moving film that goes nowhere, filled with fish-eye lens addled drug scenes and an overwhelming sense of conspiracy doom. As for me, I read that sentence and only see the positives. Young and Sierra seem to be having a blast, the ending is as cynical as it gets and a lot of the ending takes place inside an amusement park that seems to run itself. It’s a movie that came out on VHS, has had no major DVD release and has never come out on blu ray. It’s almost as lost as a movie gets these days.

You can watch this on Tubi.