EDITOR’S NOTE: Here’s another take on this film but for this week of José Ramón Larraz, I wanted to  cover each of his movies myself.

Also known as Scream… and Die!, Please! Don’t Go in the Bedroom and Psycho Sex Fiend, this José Ramón Larraz movie has some amazing taglines like “Are You Planning an Affair? We Can Give You 7 Good Reasons Not to Have Your Next Affair at The House That Vanished And They’re All DEAD!! 1. George 2. Marsha 3. Ted 4. Linda 5. Ronnie 6. Alice 7. Larry” and “Is it too soon to talk about ’72…that time Paul and Valerie fell in love at first sight and began searching for a place to have an affair — and they kept searching until they found…The House That Vanished.” I mean, they did tell us that it was “In the Great HITCHCOCK Tradition!”

Picked up by American-International Pictures in the U.S., trimmed by 15 minutes and given a really similar campaign – actually, it’s the exact same — as The Last House On the Left, this find Larraz playing with his favorite toys: fashionable women in danger, pervy photographers, houses in the London countryside, sexual menace and murder. He kept going back to this well for a bit before throwing Satanism into the stew and, if anything, increasing the sheer levels of filth in his movies. And we were all the better for it.

Valerie Jennings (Andrea Allan) is one of those gorgeous women continually threatened by nearly every frame of this movie, starting when she and her photographer boyfriend Terry (Alex Leppard) travel to a shuttrered hovel of a home deep in the London woods, a place that’s empty save for a room filled with womens’ passports. As they hide in a closet when a new couple arrives, they don’t get to enjoy watching them make love; instead the male dispatches the female with a switchblade. She runs and Terry does too but she never finds him, narrowly escaping to the safety of the big city.

She does find Terry’s car and a modeling portfolio with the images of one girl missing. She asks her friends Mike (Lawrence Keane) and Stella (Annabella Wood) what to do next, but they tell her that she and Terry have committed a crime and need to not tell the police. Meanwhile, Mike introduces her to Paul (Karl Lanchbury, a Larraz villain in numerous entries), a mask maker who invites her to dinner with his aunt Susanna (Maggie Walker). If you’ve seen enough Larraz movies by now, you know that aunt and nephew are soon to engage in the act of darkness.

Life starts falling apart, as Terry’s car keeps disappearing and reappearing; Valerie’s roommate Lorna (Judy Matheson) — who also sleeps nude with her pet monkey — is assaulted and killed, an old man with pigeons moves in downstairs and when she heads out of town to meet with Paul again, she realizes that his house is the same abandoned house she’s been in before thanks to the strange taxidermy inside. Seriously, if you go on a date and someone has a lot of taxidermy, please run.

There, she finds the bodies of those missing and Paul’s aunt appears and demands that he kill Valerie. He responds by stabbing her as our heroine runs outside screaming, directly into the police, while Paul just sits in the void.

Writer Derek Ford also wrote The Legend of Spider Forest, Secret Rites, Corruption (which is not a women’s picture) and Don’t Open Till Christmas as well as directing I Am a Groupie, Blood Tracks, The Urge to Kill and The Girl from Starship Venus.

Larraz comes from Spain to England to make movies that seem like they’re from Italy that have their origins in Germany and England. If that doesn’t make you look movies, then I have no hope for you.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally was on the site on May 10, 2022, but as this is a week of José Ramón Larraz’s movies, it’s back with some minor edits.

José Ramón Larraz may be best known for Symptoms, Vampyres, The House That Vanished, The Coming of Sin, Black Candles, Rest In Pieces, Edge of the Axeand Deadly Manor, but he also made this giallo.

Clive Dawson (Antonio Molino Rojo) returns to India with his new bride Brenda (Mary Maude, who also is in The House That Screamed and Terror) which upsets his old lover Shaheen (Rosalba Neri, Lady Frankenstein, Amuck, The Devil’s Wedding Night, The Girl in Room 2A, 99 Women) to the point that she kills herself, but not before placing a curse on the new marriage. This being the 70s — not the 30s as the flashbacks claim — incest rears its head as Brenda and Clive’s son Rupert soon find themselves realizing that they’re young, Clive is old and that he thinks he’s being chased by his ghost ex in the form of a tiger, so they should just have rough sex.

“I’ve satisfied all your desires. You’ve taken advantage of me,” says Shaheen, but the real mystery of this movie is why would any man leave Rosalba Neri. Outside of perhaps only Edwige Fenech, no one in this genre — maybe this world in 1973 — offers such a smoldering presence that is as much frightening in its intensity as it is arousing.

The Three Supermen — George (Jorge Martin), Sal (Sal Borgese) and Brad (Frank Braña) — accidentally use Prof. Aristide Panzarotti’s (Luigi Bonos) time machine and find themselves in the American West.

Directed, produced and co-written with Anthony Blod and Martin by Italo Martinenghi (who made the Cüneyt Arkin-starring Three Supermen Against the Godfather and that movie’s sequels Three Supermen at the Olympic Games and Three Supermen in Santo Domingo; he also produced The Three Fantastic Supermen and 1970’s Supermen), this starts with a time travel to see the dinosaurs and Pompeii erupt which has to be footage taken from other movies.

Working for the FBI, the Supermen have been tasked with taking the time machine for the U.S. government. Of course, they screw up and end up using it to take them through time, finally ending up in the west where they decide to stay after meeting Agata (Ágata Lys, Sexy… amor y fantasía).

The time machine also shows up in Three Supermen Against the Godfather.

Obviously by 1973 there had been so many Italian westerns that the genre needed fresh ideas or, more to the point of how the Italian exploitation industry made movies — weirder ones. That’s how we get Bad Kids of the West, a movie in which most of the cast are under the age of ten, foremost amongst them Kid Terror O’Hara (Andrea Balestri), the leader of the group of kids who actually do something constructive with their afternoons and create their own town within the abandoned buildings of Torque.

When Kid hears that criminals are about to rob the bank of River City, they get their first — I mean, their plan has a child smuggling into a suitcase, so it can’t help but succeed — but they probably didn’t figure on the gang hunting them down for the cash.

Seeing as how this is an Italian comedy, you know that at one point that one of the kids will urinate in a mug and it will be served as beer to the outlaws. You may not figure that one of the boys is called Lollipop and plays with gender all the way back in 1973. That said, the chubby kid is nicknamed Butterball because he eats butter sandwiches covered in butter and farts constantly (I see so much of myself in him; a hero) so it’s not all — actually not at all — politically correct.

There’s also a young kickboxer, because by this point, martial arts films were getting big worldwide. So yes, an entire Children of the Corn — but positive and nice — in the Italian west with the son of a sheriff and the son of a gunfighter as the heroes.

This was directed by Tonino Ricci, who would go on to make A Man Called Rage, Rush, Night of the Sharks, Encounters in the Deep, Thor the Conqueror and a bizarre western called Robin Hood, Arrows, Beans and Karate. It was written by Mario Amendola (The White, the Yellow, and the Black, Fulci’s Dracula in Brianza), Roberto Amoroso and Bruno Corbucci, who wrote 148 movies (Django is one of them) and directed Superfantagenio, Miami Supercops and When Men Carried Clubs and Women Played Ding-Dong.

I love when movies for kids are filled with swearing, bad taste jokes and violence, so this one’s a winner!

You can watch this on YouTube.

Not an Italian western — no matter how many YouTube channels tell you so — this movie was also released as Pursuit and A Man Called She. It stars Ray Danton, once the husband of Julie Adams and the narrator of Psychic Killer, as Yellow Shirt.

Shot under the title Sh’e ee Clit Soak (The Man Who Wore the Yellow Shirt in Apache), Yellow Shirt seeks revenge against the U.S. Calvary who killed most of his people.

Some sites report this as being directed by Tom Quillen, who could also be Vern Piehl or Vincent Powers. Vern Piehl was also the producer of this movie. They could be the same person. Or Quillen could be a stage director associated with the Arizona Repertory Theater and the Phoenix Musical Theater Guild. It was written by Dewitt and Jack Lee, who also wrote The Legend of Jedediah Carver.

Honestly, the question of who directed this is way more interesting than what they directed.

You can watch this on Tubi.

We’ll get to Death Game later today, but what’s amazing is that that film has been made so many times, including this movie, which came out years before Death Game itself.

Little Miss Innocent (1973): Directed by Pittsburgh native Chris Warfield and written by E.E. Patchen — potentially from a draft of Death Game that was making the rounds at that time — Little Miss Innocent begins when Carol (Sandy Dempsey, who appeared in more than sixty adult films and used just as many names; there’s a theory that she died in a boating accident at the age of 26 that has never been proved correct) and Judy (Terri Johnson, who was also in Flesh Gordon) are picked up by record producer Rick (John Alderman, Superstition) in his fancy convertible.

Judy is a virgin, a fact that Rick didn’t know. Seconds after he takes her, Carol shows up and makes love to him. It’s nearly any straight man’s fantasy, except that the girls are insatiable and while that may make a great title for a Marilyn Chambers movie, it’s another thing for a man in his late 40s to live up to.

Rick expects the girls to leave but they end up moving right in, which seems fine if strange at first, but Carol also has a mean streak that starts showing up. All Rick wants to do is sleep on the couch, his Penthouse Forum letter seemingly out of control as the biological humor of men being out of their prime as they age being displayed throughout. The girls’ carnal needs have sapped him of his ability to work and even stay awake, almost vampiric in their need for continual gratification.

With camera work by Ray Dennis Steckler and second unit direction by George “Buck” Flower, this is a curiosity that goes beyond just being IMDB trivia fodder. Despite the girls blackmailing him and claiming to be underaged, Rick is suffering under the male delusion that he is the alpha in this situation, continually bedding two attractive women. Yet again, what should be a dream is shown to be a nightmare, as that very alpha nature is sapped. Every orgasm needs a refractory period that takes longer and longer for him, an issue the girls never need to deal with. Performing under the pressure of being arrested can’t be good for the libido either.

Warfield didn’t fall out of love with this story. In 1987, he’d remake the film under the same title, keep the same song and much of the script, only going all out with the hardcore — and then some for some straight and uptight men — with Eric Edwards playing Rick, Summer Rose as Judy and Sheri St. Claire as Carol.

Originally released by Vinegar Syndrome, Little Miss Innocent is also available as an extra feature on the new release of Death Game from Grindhouse Releasing.

Little Miss Innocent (1987): Writer Chris Warfield believed in his pre-Death Game remake — yes, somehow that’s possible, theories abound that he knew of that film’s synopsis and made his first — that he made a second version of it, this time an all-out adult version with actual sex.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review originally appeared on the site on February 3, 2022 as part of a review for the Mill Creek Through the Decades: 1970s Collection. You can get that set from Deep Discount.

Between The Mechanic, this movie and Death Wish, Michael Winner and Charles Bronson were firing on all cylinders in the early 70s*. Based on A Complete State of Death by John Gardner — a book with a message that was, of course, made into a Michael Winner movie — there are so many car crashes at the end of the film that Hertz Rental came back in a huff to reclaim their cars, met by an angry Winner who yelled, “You should be glad we’re crashing your fucking awful cars. You’ll be able to write them off completely and get nice new ones.”

I love the reviews for this movie, which mostly say things like, “I don’t want to admit that I like a Michael Winner movie.”

Back in 1931, an event called The Night of Sicilian Vespers saw the murder of several mob leaders and Al Vescari (Martin Balsam) hasn’t forgotten. He sets up a plan to get revenge forty years or more later by killing off every Italian and Jewish leader across the country by using “stone killers,” or non-mob-affiliated hitmen. His plan? Hire Vietnam vets to do the work.

Detective Lou Torrey (Bronson) is a New York cop who figures out that the killing was an inside job after taking a witness to Los Angeles and having him killed nearly on arrival. He starts to look deeper and begins to discover exactly what’s going on, but is it too late to stop the plan?

Released in the wake of Dirty Harry, this was sold with the tagline “Take away his badge and he’d top the Ten Most Wanted list!” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I worry about the militarization of our police force and the issues of police brutality, but when it comes to movies, I’m all about cops breaking the rules and getting the job done. That said, Bronson’s character is incredibly open about the “white walls” of society arebukesing racism on the force.

This has a great supporting cast, including David Sheiner (Oscar’s accountant and poker buddy in The Odd Couple), Norman Fell (as the leader of the police force; he’d reunite with one of the younger cops in this, John Ritter, on Three’s Company), Ralph Waite (who was John Walton Sr. on The Waltons and ran against Sonny Bono once and his wife twice for a seat in the California senate), Paul Koslo (who told Shock Cinema “My first day on the set, I sat in his (Bronson’s) chair. The first joke I ever told him was “Hey, Charlie, did you hear the one about the Polish actor?” He said, “No, what?” I said, “Charles Buchinsky!” “Do you think that’s funny?!” Being Polish myself, I thought it was hilarious, but it went over like a lead balloon with Charlie. He’s really Polish, that guy!”), Stuart Margolin (The Rockford Files) and Jack Colvin (who would go on to be one of my most hated characters ever, Jack MgGee, the man who ruined Dr. David Bruce Banner’s life on The Incredible Hulk).

If you’re someone that’s only seen movies from this century and need a warning on your movies, here’s one: this is a Michael Winner movie. Go in with that knowledge.

*Before this, they’d make Chato’s Land and also made Death Wish 2 and Death Wish 3 together.