EDITOR’S NOTE: Have I ever told you that I like Andy Sidaris? This was originally on the site on May 12, 2019.

Before he made Stacey, Andy Sidaris was known as a pioneer in the world of sports television, directing thousands of hours worth of football, basketball, Olympic games and special events for ABC’s Wide World of Sports. He eventually won seven Emmy Awards, but is perhaps best known for his invention of the “honey shot,” where he’d zoom in on the cleavage of female audience members and cheerleaders.

After helping make Monday Night Football into a ratings powerhouse and working on shows like Kojak and Gemini Man,  Sidaris moved into making his own movies by partnering with Roger Corman, raising half the funds for his debut film, Stacey. This is not truly his first film, as that would be The Racing Scene, a documentary about actor James Garner’s racing team.

Stacey Hanson (Anne Randall, May 1967 Playboy Playmate of the Month) has two jobs: private eye and race car driver. Wealthy older woman Florence Chambers hires her to determine whether or not her three family members are worthy of being in her will: the secretly gay John, his adulterous wife Tish (Anitra Ford from Messiah of Evil!) and Pamela (Cristina Raines from The Sentinel!), who is in a Manson-esque cult.

Meanwhile, houseboy Frank, who has been sleeping with and blackmailing everyone in the family, has been killed and no one is safe. This is the movie where I learned that none of Sidaris’ heroes and heroines knows how to shoot a gun, yet the villains are easily able to shoot everyone around them resulting in spectacular crimson geysers of gore.

If this all seems rather close to a later Sidaris film, Malibu Express, that’s because other than a few characters, they’re largely the same film. The sad fact that I can logically discuss Andy Sidaris films and know enough facts about them that I can drop at will either makes me feel like I’m doing the right thing or ponder where it all went wrong. There’s a thin line between madness and genius. The films of Andy Sidaris make me confront that head on.

Whereas the later films of Sidaris postulate a shared universe of L.E.T.H.A.L. Ladies and various drug dealing enemies that eventually become friends, this is a self-contained affair. But as he’d move on from doing TV — he was still working on shows like The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries and ABC’s Monday Night Football — Andy was ready to embrace the world of film completely. Yet one thing never changed: Sidaris loved showing off gorgeous women, but don’t write off his films as simple exploitation. His women are always capable, empowered and intelligent.

Despite being directed by Cirio H. Santiago (so many movies to pick from, but today I’d mention Vampire Hookers and Wheels of Fire), Roger Corman didn’t want this movie to look like it was shot in the Philippines. That’s why it has that opening with Toby (Pat Anderson, Bonnie’s Kids) getting picked up by Dick Miller and taken to LAX. It was shot by Curtis Hanson. Some of the kung fu scenes were shot by Johnathan Demme, so man, three directors!

There’s also Sherry (Lyllah Torena) who juggles men at every destination and sneaks drugs everywhere she goes, which ends up getting her trapped in white slavery. Then there’s Andrea (Lenore Kasdorf), who is kung fu fighting through Hong Kong while Toby is hounded by her mom (Naomi Stevens) and pursued by a hunky doctor (Richard Young, who was the man who gave Indiana Jones his hat at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).

In case you were wondering, yes, Vic Diaz shows up. As a cop, no less!

Yet another in the series of Roger Corman female occupation movies, this one is quite episodic and ends, as one imagines, with all the ladies meeting up to save one another’s days. I imagine most people were watching this through steamed up windows at a drive-in in 1973 and weren’t thinking of the story structure or multiple directors.

The fourth of the five movie New World Pictures nurse cycle — preceded by The Student Nurses, Private Duty Nurses, Night Call Nurses, The Young 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.

Also known as A Kiss from Eddie and The Arousers — that’s a title! — this is the first film that Curtis Hanson (The Little Dragons, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Eight Mile) directed. He also wrote The Silent Partner and The Dunwich Horror.

The star of this movie, Tab Hunter, was a huge deal at one point. He was in Battle Cry, The Girl He Left Behind, Damn Yankees and West Side Story and had a music career, with “Young Love” going to number one for six weeks in 1957. Realizing that Hunter was a crossover star, Jack L. Warner banned Dot Records from working with his talent and established Warner Brothers Records just to originally release Tab Hunter records. After his career winded down to summer stock and dinner theater, he moved to France and was in a few Italian films, but his career finally came back when he was in Polyester, Lust In the Dust and Grease 2.

But at the time of this movie, he was struggling. That’s probably why he was open to being in a movie where he plays Eddie Collins, a man who can’t get aroused unless he’s killed someone and is next to their dead body, which is pretty wild for 1973. The original script had a woman being the killer, which Roger Corman didn’t get. His note on the file? It needed a reshoot because there weren’t enough bare breasts.

Hence the alternate title — The Arousers — and Roberta Collins (Death Race 2000), Cherie Latimer (Angels Hard As They Come), Linda Leider, Brandy Herred and Angel Fox billed and Hunter nowhere on the poster. That said, there was a free sexual stimulation test offered free at the theater. Corman also had Hanson shoot two more days of sex scenes just for this new cut of the film.

The best part is that Collins figures out what Hunter’s character needs. He used to peek at his mother in his teen years, so she dresses like the dead woman and just lies unmoving on the bed while Hunter strips her clothes off and molests her. Yes, if you think this is for the kids, just remember that new title.

Even better, this was called Sensualità morbosa (Morbid Sensuality) in Italy.

You can watch this on Tubi.

A Fifteen-Year-Old Captain is based on a novel by French writer Jules Verne and when I think “classic Jules Verne book” I would pick Jess Franco to make the movie. I mean, I’d pick Jess to make a lot of movies, to be fair.

The hero is Dick Sand (José Manuel Marcos) and he’s a sailor on the Pilgrim, which soon becomes a ship without a captain, a role Dick ends up taking over. Other than En busca del dragón dorado, this would be the only kid-friendly movie in the Jess Franco Cinematic Universe but who knows, there could be a stash of never seen movies that will prove me wrong.

That said, it’s a kid movie with plenty of death, actual real whaling stock footage, Howard Vernon and William Berger as slave traders, Edmund Purdom as an admiral and a score by Bruno Nicolai and Daniel White.

Sometimes when I encounter one of the many Franco outliers, I think to myself, “This is the same man that zoomed cameras directly into the female anatomy and made Venus In Furs and Vampyros Lesbos and so many movies set in one hotel ballroom where women dance in slow motion.” Isn’t that great? We can jump all over the timeline and watch Franco’s film from any era and be amazed that they are all from him, as time no longer has meaning once he crossed over and all of his work exists all over cyberspace and on the shelves of my home.

I love that watching Jess Franco movies teaches you all sorts of secret facts, like how this movie is not Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion, an adaptation of de Sade’s book Philosophy in the Bedroom as this is based on the book Eugénie de Franval. They’re totally different albeit similar movies because, well, look, Franco can be difficult before you even get into him making three cannibal movies in a year that are all rather alike or remaking Exorcism in a bunch of different cuts.

It’s worth it.

Eugenie (Soledad Miranda) starts the film on her deathbed, explaining her sordid life to, well, Franco as she relates the story of how she fell in love with her stepfather Albert (Paul Muller) through the books that he wrote and how that leads her into a world of perversion. At first, that’s just, you know, incestual BDSM, but that’s never enough and before you know it, they’re taking photos of Alice Arno all tied up and killing her. But when her father demands that she kill a jazz musician, she falls in love and starts on the road to her demise.

It goes without saying that the reason why this movie works is Miranda. She’s a force of nature, someone who can devastate the lives of men and women while putting herself on her knees in front of a man who sees cruelty as love. She’s devoted to him at her own peril and yet, when the lure of the carnal darkness enters her soul, she can’t help but submit.

Don’t go into this expecting a sexy bit of froth or a good time. Sure, there are gorgeous bodies on display but there’s also an understanding that nothing good or lasting can come from the union of Albert and Eugenie. A drinking game between father, stepdaughter and hitchhiker (Greta Schmidt) is filled with menace even when it seems like it’s about to be a sex scene because even now we’re predisposed to the conventions of adult film. Leave it to Franco to break this up by making it deadly.

Miranda didn’t want to shame her parents by appearing nude so she used the name Susan Korday, a combination of Valley of the Dolls writer Jacqueline Susann and the director Alexander Korda. As this movie was made in 1970 and not released until 1973, by the time the world saw it, she was dead, the victim of a car crash. Her hold over us — not just Franco — was frozen in ember by her demise.

The Other Side of the Mirror is about Ana (Emma Cohen, Horror Rises from the Tomb) is a jazz singer who calls off her engagement to Arturo after her father (Howard Vernon, I mean, this is a Jess Franco movie) kills himself. She calls off the wedding, leaves behind her hometown and soon figures out that when any man comes close to her, she feels the urge to murder them, driven on by the image of her father hanging in any reflection she sees. The same image she saw as she tried on her wedding dress for the first time, looking back into her room to see the man self-lynched behind her.

There are tones of past Franco films here; the father and daughter relationship — also Howard Vernon as the dad — from A Virgin Among the Living Dead, the jazz protagonist lost in a world of sex and death from Venus In Furs, but it’s definitely its own movie.

Ana is beyond this world, trapped by something beyond, something that causes her to destroy anyone that could change her from daddy’s little girl and no matter how many miles from the island she grew up on, things can never change. It’s an endless cycle, even if she plays the above it all jazz chanteuse, even if tries to fit in with a group of people younger than her, this can only end one way.

This film has very few of the Franco-isms that most associate with him; it’s sexy but not pornographic; it’s deep but more easily understood; more f-giallo than giallo. Emma Cohen is dead center in this, a force of pure nature even when surrounded by Jess-related obsessions like jazz and dancing women.

Of course, so many men have to pay along the way, like Bill the trumpet player, Miguel the play director and even Pipo, the married man who falls in love with her. Each finds their way into the blade of her letter opener. Is she deranged? Or can her father’s love — and if you didn’t guess it goes beyond that, welcome to Eurosleaze — damn her from beyond death?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally posted February 1, 2022.

Originally filmed as La nuit des étoiles filantes (The Night of the Shooting Stars), Jess Franco felt that this movie was one of his favorites and he even appears as Basilio, a man who wanders the movie speaking to a chicken’s head, and his wife Nicole Guettard is also on hand as a nurse.

But then, remixes started happening that had nothing to do with the original work Franco created.

It was released twice — as Christina, Princess of Eroticism in 1973 and in Italy in 1978 as The Erotic Dreams of Christine, both versions cwith  porn inserts directed by Pierre Querut — before Jean Rollin was hired to shoot zombie footage, the porn inserts removed and a new title A Virgin Among the Living Dead.

Christina von Blanc (The Dead Are Alive) is Christina Benson, who has come to Europe for the reading of her father’s (Paul Muller, a Franco regular) will. Soon learning that her relatives — like Howard Vernon as Uncle Howard — are all the living dead, she sees them as a way to avoid her loneliness and invites them to stay. But her father committed suicide, so the Queen of the Night (Anne Libert, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein) owns his soul forever unless she can save him.

You know how Lisa and the Devil has another world that takes over our own? Franco does that here but, being Franco, it’s filled with zooms, nudity and a gigantic phallus that all live in their own world, a place where things like logic, pace and common sense are cast aside much like the clothing of his actresses.

We should all commit to the joys of walking into the ghostly swamp.

You can watch this on Kino Cult.

A Virgin Among the Living Dead is also on the ARROW PLAYER. Head over to ARROW to start your 30-day free trial. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Android TV and mobile devices, Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc), and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.

So yeah, that title sounds like this is going to be totally a sexploitation movie — and it totally is — but Jean Rollin directed it so that means there are going to be times where things move so slow that you’re sure you just drank a whole bottle of 70s cough syrup from back when that stuff was really a drug and you had to drink NyQuil in bed because it would knock you to the floor otherwise and it’s the only movie I know that has a torture gazebo with stained glass windows.

So much of the popularity of Rollin’s movies was the sex scenes, so he became Michel Gentil and started making sexy films but couldn’t forget the horror or the weirdness. Monica (Joëlle Coeur, who made twenty movies in four years, many with Rollin, then retired because she had no problem with going nude or doing sex scenes but hated hardcore; I imagine she is very much into Tales of Ribaldry) and Jackie (Gilda Arancio) wander the woods and come upon an abandoned house and before you can say José Ramón Larraz they’re in trouble.

Before that trouble, they make love, then Monica makes love with a man who just wanders in (Pierre Julien), then there’s a threeway when Jackie comes back, then they run afoul of that man’s partner Beatrice (Marie Hélène Règne) who is sure they stole the treasure that they were there to steal in the first place. A private detective and his assistant show up and fumble about while Beatrice whips the girls like she’s a French Olga before the day is saved and our lovely ladies hold hands and skip into the woods all innocent but we just watched them endure a lot over the running time of this film.

Oh yeah — that’s totally Rollin as the owner of the house.

I’d like to pretend to be above these matters, but one of the things that struck me about Jean Rollin’s The Iron Rose is just how supernaturally gorgeous Françoise Pascal is and when you accept that, you’ll understand why anyone would follow her not just into a maze of a cemetery but toward death itself.

Born in Mauritius, a one-time colony of the United Kingdom, Pascal had already appeared in Norman J. Warren’s Loving Feeling, Pete Walker’s School for Sex, Incense for the Damned, Burke & Hare and There’s a Girl in My Soup, as well as having had a short singing career and being selected as the Penthouse Pet of the Month for August 1970 and being the first cover girl for Club International in 1972. She moved to France where she’d star in her first of several movies with Rollin; she’s also in The Grapes of Death.

In this film, she’s an unnamed woman who meets a man for a picnic and bike ride. As you do, they see a cemetery and decide to go inside. He lures her inside a crypt — a place of death — and together they engage in the act of making new life as a clown places flowers on a grave, a strange man (Rollin) watches and an old woman closes the gates.

What follows is deep dialogue — “They say that the stars are gods sending us signals.” — as they stroll through the graves, gradually going mad as they find their way at the city of the dead’s center, a place filled with small coffins and even smaller skeletons. He gives no concern to where they are, smashing and attacking the headstones as she quickly goes mad. As she gives into sheer insanity and an acceptance of the world of the dead, she draws him into a crypt and leaves him to die as she dances past the rememberences of people long gone, life and beauty and art giving way to decay, entropy and the void. She lowers herself into that same grave as the sun rises and those gates are opened again.

Also known by the just as great if not better titles The Crystal Rose, Friedhof der toten Seelen (Graveyard of Lost Souls) and La Nuit du cimetière (The Night of the Cemetery), this film finds Rollin attempting to move past the vampire horror that he was known for and trying a more adult and artistic way of making horror. It failed — this is not a new thing to Rollin — and he was making adult films for years before trying again. Yet he did try again and that’s the real magic.