Lindsay Finch (Mary Charlotte Wilcox, The Beast of the Yellow Night and Psychic Killer) loves to go to funerals, where she mourns and then kisses the dead men passionately after everyone else leaves. Throw in a theme song that sounds like it comes out of James Bond while we see flashbacks of her relationship with her dead father and visiting his grave and pigtails and I’m all in.

She has swinging hippie parties at her pad and her friend Wade (Christopher Stone, the late husband of Dee Wallace who appeared with her in Cujo and The Howling)  tries to get with her. Just when it seems she’s giving in to his makeout moves, she screams at him to stop and he calls her a bitch, because this is 1973. She dreams of her father in yellow hued flashbacks and hugs a stuffed animal.

Later, she goes through the funeral notices to find the services for young men. We then meet Fred McSweeney, a mortician, as he picks up a male prostitute. That job is just a cover for his true love — a Satanic coven that meets at night, inside the mortuary, where they have orgies with dead bodies. McSweeney takes the young man to his workplace where he pumps the manwhore full of embalming fluid while he’s still alive, all while Lindsay goes to another funeral where she tries to make out with Bobby. She’s surprised by Alex (Lyle Waggoner, TV’s The Carol Burnett Show and Wonder Woman, as well as the honor of being the first nude centerfold in Playgirl and the appointed mayor of Encino, California), the man’s brother.

Speaking of that embalming scene, it goes on and on and on, with the young man screaming, “I’m blind!” over and over. It’s nearly campy instead of frightening. To say this film has an issue with tone is an understatement.

Lindsay sneaks out to Bobby’s funeral, where she starts to associate Alex with her father. He’s a rich gallery owner and they begin a romance — one she refuses to consummate, even after they are eventually married. Every time she sees him, we get yellow hued flashbacks with a music box soundtrack of her playing with her father. But more about that in a little, OK?

McSweeney speaks to Lindsay after he catches her at a funeral, telling her that he has a group that she should join. Yet she tries to remain normal, even going on a date with  Wade that fails. That’s when she decides to see what McSweeney’s group is all about.

She walks into an orgy with the dead, which freaks her out enough to go back home. Then she and Alex fall in love with no dialogue, just a montage. It’s a strange part of an incredibly strange film, with this happy go lucky relationship coming out of nowhere in a film otherwise about sex with dead people.

Lindsay keeps talking to the cult and ends up getting a dead body of her very own. But Wade follows her and is killed by McSweeney. She screams in horror. This scene wasn’t n the original script, nor was the Satanic group in the one that follows, but were used to pad out the film and add more horror elements so that it would potentially play drive-ins better.

Again — tone being all over the place — we’re treated to a nude cult disrobing Wade’s corpse and having their way with it before Lindsay awakes screaming. But the marriage isn’t working out well, with Alex following her all over town and their maid — complete with the most stereotypical Irish accent ever — telling him that his wife spends her days at her father’s grave, wearing pigtails and dressed like a little girl. You should see the look on Alex’s face when he catches her as she yells, “This is not your place, go away!”

Alex tries to get Lindsay to go on a holiday to visit his mother, but he discovers a registered letter from McSweeney to his wife for a meeting at 10 PM. He follows her to the mortuary where he discovers his wife surrounded by nude devil worshippers as she makes love to a dead body. She looks frightened and then McSweeney murders Alex, which calms her.

McSweeney drugs her as she lies in her bed, then brings in her husband, now embalmed so he can last forever, finally a man who she can be attracted to: the combination of her father — who we see in flashback being shot accidentally by her — and the man she fell in love with. The editing here — combined with dissonant instruments and a remix of the title theme — is crazy, like this film has suddenly become Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

We see intercut shots of Lindsay getting under the covers with her dead husband and her getting in the coffin with her father as everything goes sepia tone and the theme song returns.

Love Me Deadly isn’t for everyone. It’s one of those films that I hesitate to recommend to normal folks. But it is the kind of movie I text people about in the middle of the night.

Code Red has released this film on DVD, but it’s still rather hard to find. It’s up on YouTube, where I found it. It’s…well, it’s something. If you enjoyed The Baby, well, then you’re on the right wavelength of this one.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I think more movies should have exclamation marks in their titles. I also believe that more movies should have Brother Theodore in them, so hey — Message Parlor Murders! is two for two.

Detective Rizotti and O’Mara are hunting the killer of numerous massage parlor workers — one of them, Rosie, often gave Rizotti the rub down — and now O’Mara is getting close to Rosie’s roommate Gwen (Sandra Peabody, The Last House on the Left, Legacy of Satan, Teenage Hitchhikers). Of course, she’s the kind of girl who only appears in movies, someone who doesn’t rub nor tug, but instead acts like an analyst for her clients. Maybe their co-pays didn’t cover therapy or we hadn’t yet worked out the mental health side of care in 1973, but going to a massage girl at the Lust Lounge for psychotherapy seems like not the best idea I’ve heard today.

Maybe the killer is a man they call Mr. Creepy. It could also be someone trying to work out the seven deadly sins 22 years before Kevin Spacey. That theory seems to work, but hey, the seventies were a downer time and perhaps not everyone makes it out of this alive.

Somehow, this was also released as Massage Parlor Hookers! with the horror parts cut out. How long was that movie, 22 minutes?

You can and should order this from Vinegar Syndrome.

NOTE: I have this in my notes as an early Cannon movie, but some lists online have it being distributed by Film Ventures International. I can’t even find a poster! Anyone have any ideas on this?

Directed and written by Vittorio Schiraldi (who also wrote Watch Me When I Kill), this was based on a novel that Schiraldi wrote.

Stefano (Joshua Sinclair), the son of Don Angelino Ferrante (Arthur Kennedy) has been shot in the back by the brutal Gaspare Ardizzone (John Saxon) — who is the start of a more violent and ruthless breed of criminal — for refusing to sell him land. Ferrante sends for a killer from America hoping for revenge.

The death of Stefano leaves behind a widow, Mariuccia (Agostina Belli), who is both protected and impregnated by a bodyguard named Massimo (Pino Colizzi). Meanwhile, Ardizzone goes to America and starts wiping out the New York bosses too and Don Ferrante still refuses to put a hit on him. Will his family and way of life survive?

Pretty much The Godfather with a different cast and some subtle changes, Family Killer still boasts an amazing Saxon performance as a total psychopath.

Also known as Blood Ceremony, The Female Butcher, The Bloody Countess and Ceremonia Sangrienta, this Jorge Grau-directed (The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue) Eurohorror film is a real classic.

The people of 19th century Europe aren’t ready to let go of their fear of vampires just yet, so they head out into the night and conduct trials over the graves over those who have recently died and are rumored to the undead.

As for Countess Erzebeth Bathory (Lucia Bosè, Fellini’s Satyricon), all she cares about is her quickly fading beauty and her husband’s lack of attention. But there are methods to bring her looks back and him back to bed which involve the dark practices of the ancestor she shares a name with. Blood is the secret and shockingly, her husband is only too willing to get it for her.

Where you’d expect a film awash in blood and gore, this is a movie more about how women deal with aging and men that only see beauty in youth. And yes, there’s still plenty of bloodbathing along the way.

Ewa Aulin (Candy, Death Laid an Egg) is also in this. Sadly, Aulin didn’t enjoy acting and was done by the age of 23.

I get it. This movie isn’t a giallo. But what is it, really? It was sold under so many titles, from the more horror-centric Cauldron of Death (complete with completely insane poster) to the more crime-oriented Gangland, the great Italian title Un Tipo Con una Faccia Strana ti Cerca per Ucciderti (A Guy With a Strange Face Is Looking for You to Kill You), The Dirty Mob, Mean Machine and even O Exolothreftis (The Terminator) in Greece.

It was written by Jose Gutierrez Maesso, who wrote Django and was an uncredited writer for the magical Pensione Paura. He’s joined by Santiago Moncada, who wrote A Bell from Hell, Hatchet for the Honeymoon and The Corruption of Chris Miller, along with Mario di Nardo (The Fifth Cord, Five Dolls for an August Moon). Directing all of this mayhem is Tulio Demichelli, who made the utterly insane Assignment Terror, as well as The Two Faces of Fear,  Espionage in Lisbon and the well-named There Is Someone Behind the Door.

Make no mistake — this is a movie awash with exploitation, gore, aberrant behavior and no real heroes. In short, it’s exactly the kind of movie you come to this site to read about.

Rico Aversi (Chris Mitchum) has just got out of jail, two years after Don Vito (Arthur Kennedy, the inspector from The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue) killed his father. Everyone wants Rico — notice that his named is spelled completely unlike the title of the movie — to kill the boss off, but Rico just wants to enjoy life outside of prison.

Malisa Longo (Cat in the Brain) plays his girlfriend — and who used to love Rico’s woman — and she enjoys sleeping with the hired help, which gets one unlucky member of the workstaff castrated in shocking detail. Then, his John Thomas gets shoved in his mouth and he’s dipped into acid and turned into soap. This movie is not interested in being unoffensive. Plus, you get Paola Senatore (Eaten Alive!) as Rico’s sister, whose death sets him finally on the path to revenge.

Robert Mitchum is one of my favorite actors ever, so it kind of pains me to admit this his son kind of slumbers through this leading role. But then again, everyone else in this movie is going to seem boring next to Barbara Bouchet, who pretty much sets the screen on fire, dances on the flames and sets it ablaze all over again in this movie. Anyone could show some leg to get the attention of some criminals. Bouchet goes all in, dancing nude on the roof of a car, covered in fog, giving her all no matter how grimy this scumfest gets. Without her, this movie would be passable. With her, it’s transcendent.

So yeah. It’s not a giallo. But man, if you’re coming in looking for bad behavior, gorgeous women and great clothes, it has all of that covered.

I read a great article, “A Genealogy of Italian Popular Cinema: the Filone,” on Offscreen in which Donato Totaro explained that the filone is not easily categorized. We can see the term to mean not just a genre, but if you will, a body of water that flows into other streams. To quote the article, “…the filone is more flexible than genre or subgenre, taking in the idea of cycles, trends, currents, and traditions.”

It also breaks down the main years of the Giallo as 1962-1982 and the Poliziottesco as 1968-1978. Of course, movies in these filone were made after — if not before — and there are different versions of both.

This is all to explain that 1973’s Long Lasting Days fits into the time periods of both of the above genre and can have a little of both, a combo plate, if you will.

I’m going to get it out of my system so this entire article isn’t about me gushing about Sue Lyon, but I am not made of stone. With only two previous acting roles, she was cast in the lead of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita at just 14 years old. The book’s writer, Vladmir Nabokov, who also wrote the screenplay and said that she was the “perfect nymphet.” Compounding his cringe was that he wanted the 12-year-old Catherine Demongeot to play the role. Man, dudes were weird about this movie — Otto Preminger would not permit Jill Haworth to take the lead nor would Walt Disney let Hayley Mills, even not allowing her to see the movie — and I would like to think things are different, but no, they aren’t.

Now back to me waxing on and on about Sue Lyon.

After winning the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer—Female and releasing a single on MGM — “Lolita Ya Ya” which was written by Nelson Riddle — Lyon would later say that her life fell apart early: “My destruction as a person dates from that movie. Lolita exposed me to temptations no girl of that age should undergo. I defy any pretty girl who is rocketed to stardom at 14 in a sex nymphet role to stay on a level path thereafter.”

She signed a seven-year professional services contract to Kubrick, producer James B. Harris and production company Seven Arts Productions, making The Night of the Iguana, 7 Women, The Flim-Flam Man and Tony Rome before being released from her deal. She went to Italy in 1970 to make Four Rode Out and Evel Knievel before two of her marriages — the first to African American football player Roland Harrison in 1971 just four years after interracial marriage was passed by the Supreme Court and another in 1973 to imprisoned murderer Cotton Adamson — ruined her box office appeal, at least to people in the U.S.

At this point, she started making Spanish genre movies like this and Murder in a Blue World, a wild ripoff of A Clockwork Orange starring a Kubrick ingenue. She also made the TV movie Smash-Up on Interstate 5 and Charles Band films such as Crash! and End of the World as well as the baffling The Astral Factor and the last movie she’d make, Alligator.

In this film, Lyon draws on her sex appeal as she plays Angela, a woman who has married a rich older blind man named Arthur (Fernando Rey) for his money. It’s a pretty good deal because she gets a life of luxury and also gets to take advantage of the attractive young hired help in Marc (Christian Hay), who actually set the whole thing up.

You know who isn’t happy with this motorcycle-riding, tarot-dealing blonde American taking her man Marc? One of the other servants, Natalie (Gloria Grahame, Mansion of the Doomed).

Also known as Autopsy — no, not that Autopsy — as well as Game of Murder, Angela and The Magician, this was directed by José María Forqué (he also wrote Un omicidio perfetto a termine di legge and directed It’s Nothing Mama, Just a Game), who wrote the story with James M. Fox (Stoney) and Rafael Azcona.

Lest you think that this is all high class, inserts with Claudine Beccarie were added to the French version. And hey, when else can you see a classic film noir actress like Grahame act in a quasi-giallo with Anne Libert, the Queen of the Night from A Virgin Among the Living Dead?