EDITOR’S NOTE: Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein was on USA Up All Night on May 12 and July 13, 1990.
Joe Dallesandro is one of those nexus points for so many movies and parts of culture that I love. Born to a Navy man and a mother who was serving fifteen years in a federal pen for auto theft by the time he was five, Joe went from foster homes to knocking out his high school principal and stealing cars just like his mom. He got shot in the leg, and when his dad took him to the hospital, the cops arrested the fifteen-year-old and sent him to the Catskills, specifically the Camp Cass Rehabilitation Center. He escaped within a few months and made it back to New York City, where he went from nude modeling to being the star of Warhol’s films.
After roles in Lonesome Cowboys, Trash, Heat, and Warhol’s two monster films, Joe decided to stay in Europe, where he made a wide range of movies across various genres that I love. Yeah, there’s the American TheGardener, Serge Gainsbourg’s Je t’aime moi non plus, Savage Three, Killer Nun, Madness, Le Marge with Sylvia Kristel and many more. He even shows up somehow in Theodore Rex. Yes, the same man whose bulge is on the front of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, and the cover of The Smiths’ first album, was in a movie about dinosaur cops.
This is the movie that Joe, who never once gave it away, came to Italy to make with Paul Morrissey.
Baron von Frankenstein (Udo Kier) has made his sister Katrin his wife, yet ignores her as he works to create the perfect human being, going through corpses of men and women to craft his Serbian ideal. You know, when he isn’t literally having sex with the body parts of dead women while shouting, “To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life… in the gall bladder!”
He wants Nicholas (Dallesandro) to be the body of his creature, but he escapes and makes his way to the castle, where he begins to satisfy the Baroness. Once she reveals the fact that she only cares about herself, she betrays him and, in return, is given what she really wants: The opportunity to have sex with the Baron’s creation, who responds by loving her to death. Another even more graphic scene happens when lab assistant Otto literally screws the guts out of the female monster (Dalila Di Lazzaro, Phenomena), causing the angry Dr. Frankenstein to kill him.
I kind of dig that the end of this film echoes both A Bay of Blood and Manson’s quote about “These children that come at you with knives — they are your children” by having the Frankenstein children holding scalpels that they will either use to help or to hurt. The movie doesn’t tell you what happens next.
That A Bay of Blood comparison is easier to make when you realize that one of the kids is played by one of the adorable and murderous kids from that movie, Nicoletta Elmi. In the 70s, if you wanted a frightening Italian red-headed child, you went with Nicoletta, who also appeared in Baron Blood, Who Saw Her Die?, Deep Red and many more. She also played the redhead usher in Demons when she grew up.
Despite his name appearing in this film, Andy Warhol’s contributions were minimal. He may have visited the set once and briefly examined the editing. Perhaps a more involved talent was Antonio Margheriti—Anthony Dawson—who claimed to have directed some of the film. He may have just been there so that the film could claim to be Italian, as it would need a director from the country to obtain Italian nationality for the producers.
One can only imagine that Jess Franco sat in a theater as Ken Russell’s The Devils ended and thought to himself, “But where’s the sex? I want more of it. I demand more of it!
After watching a witch burn, we meet two nuns in a convent, the virginal Margaret (Britt Nichols AKA Carmen Yazalde, who appears in The Erotic Rights of Frankenstein, A Virgin Among the Living Deadand is sacrificed in Tombs of the Blind Dead) and her more sex-obsessed sister Kathleen (Anne Libert, House of 1000 Pleasures and Sins of the Flesh).
A rich woman named Lady De Winter (Karin Field, Target Frankie and Return of Shanghai Joe) believes that Kathleen is possessed by Satan and that the two are the daughters of that blackened witch, so she puts her top man, Thomas Renfield (Alberto Dalbés, A Quiet Place to Killand Espionage In Tangiers) after her. Of course, he falls in love and lets her escape. And even when Inquisitor Lord Justice Jeffreys (Cihangir Gaffari, Dick Turpin and Bloodsport) gives him another chance, Renfield runs back to her and the two are soon tortured into near oblivion.
Meanwhile, Satan himself appears in the convent and assaults Margaret, replacing her innocence with an overwhelming desire to punish anyone who harmed her mother or sister, starting with Lady De Winter, often by kissing them into skeletons. You know, no one loves female revenge more than Jess Franco and he’s going all out here, with Margaret seducing her Mother Superior right into suicide and then leaving no man or woman safe from her vengeance.
This is one of the more gorgeous films Franco would make — it was shot by Raul Artigot (The Ghost Galleon, The Cannibal Man, The Pyjama Girl Case) — and he makes excellent use of his budget. And he lives up to those dreams of a movie that somehow answers, “What if Witchfinder Generalwas more about lesbians?”
From Vinegar Syndrome: “Italian horror in the 1960s and 70s went through several popular tonal and thematic phases. From Gothic thrillers in the early to mid-1960s, psychedelia and monster mayhem in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and, of course, all manner of gialli and other assorted murder thrillers. But what of those films that offer a form of narrative bait and switch, luring the viewer in with the pretense of one genre while slowly revealing themselves to be something else entirely? Presented here are a trio of 70s Italian horror features which play with, combine, subvert, and surprise with their genre leanings, all newly and exclusively restored from their 35mm original negatives and all presented on English-friendly home video for the very first time, from Vinegar Syndrome.”
Obscene Desire (L’osceno desiderio) (1978): Obscene Desire is the story of Amanda (Marisa Mell, a goddess if there ever were one and someone who immediately changes any movie from maybe to definitely; my favorite of her films are Marta, Danger: Diabolik and Perversion Story, a movie in which she has one of the most fabulous outfits not only in the history of Italian film but perhaps all movies ever), an American woman ready to marry the rich Andrea (Chris Avram, Enter the Devil) and move into his vast mansion.
Within the walls of that gothic expanse lies something evil, something that has possessed Amanda’s soon-to-be husband to indulge in black magic and ritual murder. In fact, the only way that he can keep his soul from being taken by his domicile is to keep killing prostitutes.
This movie should teach you to never trust a gardener (Victor Israel) and that the Italian film industry would keep on making Rosemary’s Baby rip-offs ten years after that movie was unleashed. Or The Exorcist five years later. Or The Omen two years later.
Look, I’m a simple man. Marisa Mell, with short, dark hair, looking not unlike Mariska Hargitay, is possessed by the devil and writhes on a bed, revealing that her tongue is superhumanly long. Do I even care that this movie has no real story and really goes nowhere?
Extras on the Vinegar Syndrome release include a commentary track with film historians Eugenio Ercolani and Troy Howarth, interviews with director/writer Giulio Petroni, daughter of Giulio Petroni and script supervisor Silvia Petroni, grandson of Giulio Petroni and film historian Eugenio Ercolani, censorship expert Alessio Di Rocco and director Pupi Avati, as well as alternate and extended scenes from the Spanish version and the original Italian trailer.
The Bloodstained Lawn (Il prato macchiato dirosso) (1973): The Red-Stained Lawn, also known as The Bloodstained Lawn, was initially titled Vampiro 2000 and combines science fiction, Gothic horror, and giallo genres in a wacky package with a bloodsucking robotic twist.
The film takes place in Emilia-Romagna, Italy. There, a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization agent finds a bottle of wine containing blood. How could this happen to such a well-known vintage from Michelino Croci? What if the winery is a front for a blood smuggling scheme? And how would blood stay good in bottles? So many mysteries!
Dr. Antonio Genovese (Enzo Tarascio), his wife Nina (Marina Malfatti, All the Colors of the Dark, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, Seven Blood-Stained Orchids) and her brother Alfiero (Claudio Biava) look for people with no ties — hippies, drifters, prostitutes and literally gypsies, tramps and thieves — to lure to an all expenses paid getaway at their castle. Folks like freewheeling musician Max (George Willing, Who Saw Her Die?) and his lover (Daniela Caroli), who have accepted an invitation to spend some time in the Genovese estate, along with the alcoholic tramp (Lucio Dalla, who would become a major singing star in the 80s), a gypsy (Barbara Marzano, The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance) and a sex worker (Dominique Boschero, Argoman the Fantastic Superman).
The bloodsucking machine is literally right out in the open, treated like a piece of pop art. You have to admire that level of out in the open when it comes to an Italian film killer. You also have to love that the killers have a shower that sprays wine, and this doesn’t bother Max or his never-named girlfriend, nor does the hall of mirrors bedroom seem strange to anyone else. There’s also a curtain between rooms that resembles female anatomy, and even more so, a scene taken right out of The Laughing Woman.
Director and writer Riccardo Ghione made only four movies: this one, a documentary called Il Limbo, the hippy drama A cuore freddo, and La rivoluzione sessuale, a film in which seven men and seven women perform an experiment inspired by the sexual orgone energy theories of Wilhelm Reich. If that was crazy enough, it was co-written by Dario Argento. He would go on to write several other films, including the Joe D’Amato film Delizia.
I love that this movie stands on the line between arthouse and grindhouse, with every decision it makes leaning away from the artistic and toward the prurient and bloody. Sure, there’s a message about how the rich subjugate the lower classes, but it’s also a film where Malfatti gives speeches about Wagner and how meaningless her victims are, all. At the same time, a gigantic cartoony machine literally sucks young blood.
Extras on the Vinegar Syndrome release include commentary by Rachael Nisbet and interviews with film historian Enzo Latronico and filmmaker/film historian Luca Rea.
Death Falls Lightly (La morte scende leggera) (1972): Death Falls Lightly begins when Georgio Darica (Stello Candelli) comes home from a crime-related business trip only to find that his wife has been killed. So his lawyer suggests that he grab his girlfriend, Liz (Patrizia Viotti, Amuck) and head off to a hotel. Still, when he gets there, the owner (Antonio Anelli) has also killed his wife, so he asks him to help bury her, but then George remembers that the hotel was abandoned. So is he going insane? Are these people real? Did he actually kill his wife?
The next part of this movie gets absolutely ridiculous in the best of ways, as people appear, get murdered and come back to life. At the same time, someone commits suicide on a Satanic altar, invisible killers attack George, prog rock blasts, and a monkey shows up out of nowhere. It also features the most ridiculous of all giallo police, which is saying something. There’s a very low bar for giallo cops, and these ones may be the worst.
Director Leopoldo Savona also made Byleth: The Demon of Incestthe same year I was born, which probably means something.
Extras on the Vinegar Syndrome release include commentary with film historians Eugenio Ercolani and Troy Howarth, interviews with actor Alessandro Perrella and filmmaker/film historian Luca Rea, and a then and now location featurette.
This 3-disc region-free Blu-ray set features all the movies newly scanned and restored in 2K from their 35mm original negatives, along with newly translated English subtitles and reversible sleeve artwork. You can get it from Vinegar Syndrome.
Marc Lawrence had a career filled with playing the heavies, mostly gangland types. In fact, his autobiography was entitled Long Time No See: Confessions of a Hollywood Gangster.
Lawrence found himself under scrutiny for his political leanings. He was the son of Polish and Russian parents and was married to Odessa-born novelist and screenwriter Fanya Foss. Once called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he admitted he had once been a member of the Communist Party and named Sterling Hayden, Lionel Stander, Anne Revere, Larry Parks, Karen Morley and Jeff Corey as fellow Communists. Blacklisted, he continued to make films in Europe before returning to America.
He’s probably best known for playing gangsters in Diamonds Are Forever and The Man With the Golden Gun, but he also shows up in plenty of genre films like From Dusk Till Dawn and Dream No Evil. He directed several episodes of TV shows before helming Nightmare in the Sun, which was written by his wife and stars Ursula Andress and Aldo Ray. This was the only other film that he’d direct. He also wrote the movie, and it stars his daughter Toni. It’s also one of the strangest movies you’ll find.
Also known by many, many names — The 13th Pig, Daddy’s Deadly Darling, Horror Farm, Daddy’s Girl, The Strange Exorcism of Lynn Hart, The Strange Love Exorcist and Roadside Torture Chamber — Pigs is all about Lynn Webster (Toni Lawrence), who has escaped a sanitarium and hides out in the diner owned by Zambrini (Marc Lawrence).
Behind the diner lies a pigpen of swine that have been taught to eat human flesh. Zambrini soon has a partner in murder as Lynn begins to kill any man who reminds her of the father who assaulted her. She kills him and she’ll kill anyone else who gets in her way.
This movie is pretty much the 70s — complete insanity and murderous intent, capped off with off-kilter camera angles. Suffice to say, I loved every single moment of it.
Toni Lawrence would go on to appear in several TV shows and the Final Destination inspiration Sole Survivor. She was also, once married to Billy Bob Thornton, who honestly has some amazing taste in ladies.
Jesse Vint plays the sheriff who tries to see the good in everyone. He shows up in plenty of redneck cinema with appearances in movies like Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw, Black Oak Conspiracy, the Walking Tall TV series and Macon County Line. He also stars in the absolutely incredible science fiction weirdo film Forbidden World.
Marc Lawrence’s original cut of the film is the one released as The 13th Pig. However, there are two additional versions. The Love Exorcist / Blood Pen titled versions begin with another actress playing the role of Lynn Webster, who runs away from an attempted exorcism. The Daddy’s Girl version, which was released on VHS, started with Lynn’s father attacking her. She stabs him to death, ends up in the asylum, but escapes when a nurse takes off her uniform to make love to a doctor. She wears those clothes, takes that amorous caregiver’s keys and runs away. Multiple actresses play Lynn in these scenes, and all wear completely bonkers wigs.
Check out Bill Van Ryn from Drive-In Asylum as he breaks down the advertising history of Pigs with a collection of newsprint images for this film.
Also known as On the Run and One for the Money, Two for the Show, Country Blue has the balls to rip off a Janis Joplin song for its tagline, “For Bobby Lee and Ruthie, Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”
I like this one more: “Young and in love, she broke the law…the law broke her.”
Bobby Lee Dixon (Jack Conrad, who also directed, co-wrote, produced and edited this film; he’s not the only Hicksploitation director to make an auteur project as the entire genre is predicated on movies like Billy Jack) has just been released from jail and wants to make a better life for his lover Ruthie Chalmers (Rita George). But she can’t even afford to leave her husband, so her father, J.J. “Jumpy” Belk (Dub Taylor) and Arneda Johnson (Mildred Brown) convince them that crime is the easy way to get what you want.
IMDBS says “Negotiations with Jeff Bridges and Robert Blake to play the role of Bobby Lee broke down because of budget limitations, so Jack Conrad had the choice of canceling the shoot or playing the role himself.” I bet Conrad brought it up to them at a bar. They said, “Call my agent.” That was it.
This was filmed in the least affluent parts of the U.S. and has a hard scrabble, doomed feel about it. It’s not a great find, but it’s still interesting, made at a time when Bonnie and Clyde and essays on the downtrodden and their ruined lives were big screen fodder. Bank robberies, bad decisions, short tempers…you know how the song goes.
Flower Child Coffin (Pam Grier) is Coffy, who saves lives as an emergency room nurse but also takes them as she gets revenge for her sister Lubelle, murdering the people who got her hooked on heroin. Once her friend Officer Carter (William Elliot) gets crippled by those very same people, she decides to up her need to kill everyone in her way.
She thinks her boyfriend, Howard Brunswick (Booker Bradshaw), is on her side, working to make the community better. But he’s just as bad as her targets, King George (Robert DoQui) and Arturo Vitroni (Alan Arbus). He even tells them that she’s just another whore, sending her to death at the hands of Omar (Sid Haig) before she pulls a weapon out of her hair and stabs him in the throat over and over again.
All that’s left is to, well, kill everyone. Yet Howard almost wins her back. He tells her how they’re going to change the community. And then a white woman asks him to come back to bed. What else can she do but blow his manhood off with a shotgun?
Jack Hill directed and wrote this, and everything he touched — Switchblade Sisters, Spider Baby — became the kind of movies that transcended their drive-in and exploitation beginnings. Coffy isn’t the kind of woman who needs to be rescued; she’s a force of sheer violence, unstoppable even when things look at their worst. By the end, she walks the beachfront alone; you half expect her to walk into the ocean like Godzilla.
“The First Sex-Rated Whodunit” combines softcore sexual content — appearing as if it were originally shot hardcore with scenes later edited out — with a murder mystery, and possibly even a vampire element. This film, directed by Sean S. Cunningham and Brud Talbot, is also known as Case of the Full Moon Murders. It features many of the same cast and crew from The Last House on the Left. There’s no Wes Craven or David Hess, and for some reason, the production moved to Miami.
The film raises intriguing questions: Is Emma (played by Sheila Stuart) a voyeur, a vampire, or perhaps both? Why are so many men, whom she engages with intimately, found drained of blood and lifeless, yet smiling? Will the Dragnet-style detectives, led by Joe (portrayed by Fred J. Lincoln), manage to solve the case?
The film was such a success in Australia that discussions about a sequel continued as late as 1977.
Possibly inspired by the kidnapping of Barbara Jane Mackle, The Candy Snatchers gets its name because Eddy (Vince Martorano), Jessie (Tiffany Bolling) and Alan (Brad Davis) have kidnapped a young girl named Candy (Susan Sennett) from her Catholic school. They keep her buried alive — with a pipe for air — in a field somewhere in California. Only the autistic Sean Newton (Christopher Trueblood) knows that she’s there, but he’s a little kid who can barely communicate, trapped with parents — Dudley (Jerry Butts) and Audrey (Bonnie Boland) — who seemingly hate him.
Candy will inherit $2 million from her late father when she turns 21. But if she dies before that, her stepfather, Avery (Ben Piazza), gets half, and his wife, Katherine (Dolores Dorn), receives the other. So he doesn’t even tell her that Candy is gone.
Even when presented with a severed ear — the criminals go to a morgue and cut one off a dead body — Avery doesn’t care. He’s already sleeping with an employee, Lisa (Phyllis Major), and doesn’t care that Alan seduces his wife. He cares even less when they kill her.
These horrible people are all determined to destroy one another. I won’t ruin the end of this, only to say that you will have to create your own conclusion to the story.
Bolling hated this, saying to TCM Underground, “I was doing cocaine…and I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I was very angry about the way that my career had gone in the industry…the opportunities that I had and had not been given…. The hardest thing for me, as I look back on it, was I had done a television series, The New People, and so I had a lot of young people who really respected me and… revered me as something of a hero, and then I came out with this stupid Candy Snatchers movie… It was a horrendous experience.”
Director Guerdon Trueblood — that’s his son playing Sean — and co-star Vince Martorano had been best friends at George Washington University in Virginia. They made a bet about who would get into filmmaking first. Trueblood became an in-demand writer for TV series and movies of the week. When he got the job of directing this movie, he asked writer Bryan Gindoff to create the character of Eddy specifically for Martorano, who was working as a commercial fisherman at the time.
William Allen Castleman directed Johnny Firecloud and The Erotic Adventures of Zorro, as well as composed the music for The Swinging Cheerleaders, The Adult Version of Jekyll & Hide, the 1974 The Wrestler, The Big Bird Cage, Trader Hornee, The Ecstasies of Women, Thar She Blows!, Space Thing, Nude Django, The Lustful Turk, The Acid Eaters, Ski on the Wild Side, She Freak, The Defilers, The Devil’s Mistress, Starlet!, Trader Hornee, ‘Gator Bait and At the End of the Rainbow. He also produced 7 Into Snowy and Chorus Call, so he was busy.
Written by Alvin L. Fast, who also wrote Moonshine Girls, Tom, Eaten Alive, Black Shampoo, Satan’s Cheerleaders and Angels’ Brigade, Bummer is about a rock band called The Group who are, well, out getting groupies. Their bass player, Butts (Dennis Burkley), goes nutzoid and starts killing people. First, he throws two of the girls in a shower and slaps them while calling them pigs. But you know, he owns the touring van. The limit comes when he kills people, starting with a groupie and the lead singer Duke (Kipp Whitman) before the other band aids get their revenge.
One of those girls is Carol Speed from Abby! Other ladies include Connie Strickland (The Centerfold Girls), who plays Barbara, the girlfriend of drummer Gary (David Buchanan); Dolly, who is Diane Lee Hart from The Pom-Pom Girls and Morely, The Group’s manager, who is Leslie McRay (Cleopatra in Death Race 2000).
Shot by Gary Graver, which makes this way better than it should be. It also has one of the most misogynistic taglines ever: ““You don’t have to rape a groupie… You just have to ask!”
David F. Friedman, the other producer, and Bob Cresse show up as cops at the end. As Herman Traeger, Friedman produced Ilsa and he was behind much of the soft core — and some hardcore — exploitation that made up the best of the form. Cresse wrote and produced most of those and shows up in them, often as a love camp commandant or as Granny Good in House On Bare Mountain. Cresse had a reputation for being tough, often carrying guns and with two bodyguards on his payroll. His career ended when he was walking his dog and saw two men beating a woman on Hollywood Boulevard. He pulled out a gun and ordered the men to stop. One of them said he was a cop and shot Cresse before killing his dog. The hospital stay that followed — he had no health insurance — ruined him.
Ned (David Hartman) and Vickie Bliss (Jess Walton) are newlyweds who get into an argument. He shoves her, she leaves, yelling, “You’ll never see me again.” He expects her back that night. She never comes home.
The next day, he goes to see her parents, Will (Ralph Meeker) and Mary Alden (Jane Wyatt). Strangely, he’s never met them before. Yet they can’t answer any of his questions, whether it’s about where their daughter is or about her childhood. Are they even her folks?
The cops start to get the idea that maybe Ned killed his wife. After all, he’s constantly going into a rage. However, the truth is that he blames himself for Vickie leaving. He’s their top suspect, so he has to escape custody and try to find the truth, kind of like he’s trapped in a giallo. The ending? Amazing.
Hartman would go on to host ABC’s morning news show Good Morning America, so for me, he was the man who told me my news before school. It’s disconcerting to see him screaming at people and getting into fights with the police.
In 1986, Juan Luis Buñuel, Luis’ son, directed a UK TV movie based on the same story.
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