EDITOR’S NOTE: You can watch this movie this weekend at the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama! Get more info at the official Drive-In Super Monster-Rama Facebook page and get your tickets at the Riverside Drive-In’s webpage.

The Wicker Man begins with Christopher Lee, a Hammer star, talking to writer Anthony Shaffer about more interesting roles. Shaffer had read the David Pinner novel Ritual — which had first been written as a script for Michael Winner, and I can’t even imagine what he would have done — and turned that inspiration into his own story.

Shaffer’s vision for the film was unique. The story delves into the intersection of modern religion and ancient pagan practices. It departs from the typical blood and gore of horror, opting instead for a creeping, unknown terror that lurks in the shadows. This unique approach is what we now refer to as folk horror.

The Wicker Man stands at the crossroads of art and horror, somewhere between movies like Performance and The Devil Rides Out, but with a twist, as the traditional rules of horror no longer apply. The concepts of good and evil, as defined by Judeo-Christian beliefs, are absent in this story. Instead, it’s a journey into the unknown, exploring ancient ways that have existed long before the modern era.

Christian Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) is initially presented as the virtuous hero. He is on the island of Summerisle investigating Rowan Morrison’s disappearance, yet the villagers refuse to admit that she ever existed.

He’s shocked at these people’s ways, which include putting frogs in their mouths to cure illness and dancing around phallic maypoles. He finds images of past May Queens. He meets Lord Summerisle (Lee), who leads this village. And he sees the answers that he seeks, despite perhaps not liking them.

There’s also tempted by Willow MacGregor (Britt Ekland, who was three months pregnant; she was dubbed by Annie Ross, and her body double was dancer Rachel Verney), and there’s a scene where she dances with a wall between her and Howie that is volcanic. It has no nudity, but it’s filled with sensual energy.

Director Robin Hardy also made The Fantasist and The Wicker Tree, a very loose sequel to the original movie. Hardy first published the sequel as a novel, Cowboys for Christ, about American Christian evangelists who travel to Scotland and end up in a similar situation. Lee plays the Old Gentleman, who is either Summerisle or not.

Shaffer also wrote The Loathsome Lambton Worm, a direct sequel that begins immediately after the ending of The Wicker Man. In it, Howie is saved by his fellow police officers. The movie features a fire-breathing dragon and is much more fantastic than the first one.

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.

On D-Day, a mixed group of forced labourers being held by German forces take shelter from the bombardment inside a bunker which gets blocked in by a bombing run. They have enough food to last for years and it turns out that they’re trapped there for the rest of their lives, as they wait and wait for help that never comes.

Based on Le Blockhaus by Jean-Paul Clébert, this was directed by Clive Rees, who co-wrote the script with John Gould. That book was based on a true story, as in 1951, two German soldiers claimed to have been trapped for six years in an underground storehouse in Babie Doły, Poland. They died within days of being rescued.

Aufret (Peter Vaughan), their leader in the world above, before they were trapped in this storehouse and inside the darkness, loses his power over the men and isolates himself while the others, like Visconti (Charles Aznavour) and Grabinski (Jeremy Kemp) try to play games and keep their spirits up. By the end, the survivors dwindle — Rouquet (Peter Sellers) and Lund  (Per Oscarsson) are the others — and even their matches and candles have started to run out. All that remains is a life trapped in a small space and no light will find them again.

This is a rough movie — not a bad one, but a bleak entry — and also one that should be discussed more.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The UK movie Secrets of a Door-to-Door Salesman was released in the U.S. by Cannon as Naughty Wives, which is definitely a dirtier if not better label for this.

David Clyde (Brendan Price, who was also in the British sex comedy The Amorous Milkman) gets a job as a vacuum salesman and soon finds that he’s being chased by women.

Director Wolf Rilla is best known for Village of the Damned while writers Joseph McGrath shot some of the first music videos with The Beatles and Denis Norden wrote a lot for David Frost.

This is pretty much true to form for most British sex comedies — a funny line here and there, some nudity there. Today it seems quaint but I’m sure in 1973 pulses raced.

Man zhou ren was released as The Godfathers of Hong Kong in the U.S. by Cannon.

According to the Lost Media Wiki, the Cannon English dub of the film is just about lost. The only known home video release with English audio was a heavily abridged 8mm print release by Ken Films. It’s on YouTube courtesy of Kerrie O’Keefe.

Kin Jin Pai plays a detective and wanderer called Man Tshu who comes into a town and challenges the crime family that owns it, burning their opium and taking away one of their prostitute wives as his love interest.

It was directed by Katy Chin Shu-mei — her only film and it’s rare to see a Hong Kong martial arts movie from a woman — and a young John Woo was the assistant director.

The end of this film gets incredibly intense and quite violent, which is why Cannon supposedly picked it up.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Are you ready to get your guts kicked out?

With those words, Cannon would release the Wing Cho-Yip film Yi wang da shu. Released in Germany as Der gelbe Teufel mit dem Superschlag (The Yellow Devil with the Super Punch), this is the story of Wong Kai Tai, a man looking to free his hometown of Wantchao from the Gang of Dragons and the three brothers Chun Tsi, Shing and Wang.

Despite his friendship with kung fu fighter Chi Sien (Chin-kun Li), Wong Kai Tai refuses to ask for help and pays the ultimate price, which means that now Chi Sen has to take up his battle. It’s not the most mindblowing martial arts movie you’ve ever seen, but hey, Bolo Yeung is in it and that’s always a good time.

But man — how good is that tagline? And who does want to get their guys kicked out?

Also known in the U.S. as Fist to Fist, Dragons of Death and Hong Kong Face-Off, Chu ba is directed, written and produced by Jimmy L. Pascual, who was assisted by a very young John Woo. It also has fight choreography by Yuen Woo-Ping.

With fifteen minutes cut from its runtime, it played American theaters with a running time of around 70 minutes.

It’s a simple story of Henry Yu Yung, a young cop who is sent to arrest a man in the same village where the man who killed his father lives.The fights are brutal and without a lot of the flash that American audiences may have been expecting from a Hong Kong movie.

There’s also the opportunity to see a very young Jackie Chan as a guard.

Bad Man, Trained to Kill and Trained to Kill USA to some, The No Mercy Man was the first and last film for director Daniel Vance, as well as Dean Cundy’s first movie ever.

Prophet (Rockne Tarkington, Black Samson) and his gang of carnies have come to the home of the Hands and nearly killed their patriarch Mark (Richard X. Slattery) and assaulted young Mary (Heidi Vaughn). And even after she stabs one and escapes into the desert, her Vietnam vet brother Steve Sandor — a Greenville, PA native as well as Darkwolf in Fire and Ice and the man himself in Stryker — just says that the cops can handle it.

Two of Olie’s fellow vets visit and we soon discover just how withdrawn Ollie has become, not even telling his family that he had been a decorated commander of an Army Ranger LARRP (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol).

Meanwhile, Prophet, Dunn (Ron Thompson), their men and Pillbox’s (Sid Haig) motorcycle gang plan on breaking back into the Hand house, stealing their guns and killing pretty much everyone in town.

This movie also has its own theme song “The No Mercy Man,” which was written by Lois Vincent and Don Vincent (the composer of the music for Blood Mania and The Night God Screamed) and performed by Al Gambino and Glory, with these lyrics: “Love and lust are the same to him, like being raped by the devil.”

Pretty much a Western — and a Tarantino favorite — this may have come out a month before Walking Tall, but later posters had no problem putting this movie in the same cinematic universe, saying “Like Billy Jack and Buford Pusser, he stood tall!” You could also consider it a proto-Missing In Action, except Chuck Norris’ PTSD was soon forgotten so that he could sidekick the Vietnamese villains that still had American POWs into another dimension (they also come from the two versions of Cannon).

Also known as Pushing Up Daisies, this was directed by Ivan Nagy (a former bookmaker for the mob and boyfriend of Heidi Fleiss; he also directed episodes of CHIPs and HBO’s The Hitchhiker, as well as the movies Captain America II: Death Too Soon and Skinner) and co-written by Ross Hagen (who wrote and directed The Glove and Click: The Calendar Girl Killer, as well as acting in 89 movies including this movie).

Four criminals — Maddux (Hagen), Kelly (Kelly Thordsen), Wilber (Hoke Howell) and A.J. (Eric Lidberg) — have just successfully broken two of their members out of jail, killed a whole bunch of cops via machine gun and make a big score while dressed as nuns. Soon, they’re on the run again, killing even more cops on the way to the Mexican border, if they make it.

Yet this is no normal movie, as the editing is jarring, the montages are frequent and there are even sequences made out of still photos. It also has a two-minute-long sequence of heavy reverb audio and slow motion of a racist prison guard stabbing a black jailbird that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie and has credits running over it.

It’s really something else and I have no idea who this is for or how they hoped to sell it. Not every movie can be Easy Rider, which only seems slapdash. A lot of movies learned just how difficult it is to make a movie that seems like it wasn’t all that difficult to make.