Directed by Chang Cheh and Pao Hsueh-li and written by Ni Kuang, this is about Wang Wu (Chen Kuan-Tai), the head of a bodyguard company. The work he does is noticed by Tan Si-Tong (Yueh Hua), who watches from a restaurant. As Wang Wu becomes more politically aware, Tan teams up with him to try to reform the laws of the Empress Dowager, who, of course, has none of that.

Tan and the reformists are eventually arrested and sentenced to be executed, with Wang Wu leading his fighting bodyguards in a daring rescue. This scene echoes the historical six gentlemen of the Hundred Days’ Reform, including Tan Si-Tong, who were all beheaded in 1898.

This was remade by Sammo Hung as Blade of Fury.

This Eureka release has a commentary track by East Asian film expert Frank Djeng (NY Asian Film Festival) and martial artist and filmmaker Michael Worth. You can get it from MVD.

An early effort by the Sebastians, The Single Girls has a TV Guide-style write-up on Wikipedia: “A group of men and women travel to a Caribbean resort to discover themselves sexually, but unfortunately one of them has also discovered that they like to murder people, too.”

Also known as Bloody Friday and Private School, this has a bunch of singles all having an encounter on an island and when they’re not balling or having dark room milling, which is when everyone touches everyone else, and no one knows who is who, there’s a killer on the loose. Yes, a nascent slasher, as they say.

There’s Lola (Joan Prather), a virgin who decides to go to this island to lose her virginity. Allison (Claudia Jennings) hates commitment, and, you know, her boyfriend is a loser, so she shouldn’t be into it. Also, she’s Claudia Jennings. Shannon (Cheri Howell) wants to have everyone on the island. Dr. Stevens (Wayne Dvorek) has made a pretty groovy scene, but like I said, someone has a knife. The sex in this is relatively chaste, but there’s a good idea going on here.

Plus, we got ‘Gator Bait out of this, as it introduced Jennings to the Sebastians.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Don’t Look In the Basement was on Chiller Theater on Saturday. March 3, 1979 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday. December 11, 1982 at 1:00 a.m.

We often refer to movies as “Brownriggian” when we watch films all night on Saturday nights with the Drive-In Asylum Double Feature on Facebook Live. There’s no better example of what this word means than S. F. Brownrigg’s 1973 shocker Don’t Look in the Basement AKA The Forgotten AKA Death Ward #13.

Dr. Stephens, the primary doctor at Stephens Sanitarium, has a theory that patients should be able to freely act out their insanities in the hopes that someday they will snap back to reality. You know, if I’ve learned one thing about asylum doctors from, well, Asylum and Alone in the Dark, it’s that they’re all just as insane as their charges.

Before one of the older nurses can retire, we have the Judge (Gene Ross) chopping the doctor with an axe and Harriet (Camilla Carr) smashing the nurse’s head inside a suitcase. So when Charlotte Beale (Rosie Holotik, the cover girl of the April 1972 Playboy, as well as appearances in Horror High and the ghostly hitchhiker in Encounter with the Unknown) shows up for a new job and things seem weird. Or Brownriggian. In short, everything feels off. Hallways and stairwells seem like passageways to other dimensions, and sweaty horror lurks, sleeping like some kind of Southern gothic force of dread and menace.

This is a place filled with human children, killer women obsessed with sex, an elderly woman who thinks that flowers are her kids, a military man who lost his platoon in Vietnam and more. Even the sane are driven mad just by being in their presence.

There are plenty of people who decry Brownrigg’s movies, but I’m certainly not one of them. They invite you to worlds that are not our own and seem to come from a dimension far from here. For that and the vacation to the psychotronic that they offer, we should celebrate them.

For an added treat, check out JH Rood’s journey to the set locations, which you can download from the Internet Archive.

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 The Gardener, 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.