The fourth of five Tarkan films — based on the comic book barbarian created by Turkish cartoonist Sezgin Burak — this is a great place for anyone to enter the world of Turkish psychotronic cinema.

Tarkan was orphaned by Iranian nomads and raised by wild grey wolves. He travels with Kurt, a wolf, as he adventures in the service of Attila the Hun. Think of him pretty much as Conan and you can enjoy this film.

Tarkan goes up against a witch named Gosha who is revived by the blood of a dancer and a nun before using her evil powers to mesmerize our hero. She’s played by Sweden-born Eva Bender, recreating her role from 1970’s Tarkan and the Silver Saddle. She’s also in the Turkish version of The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, Thirsty for Love, Sex and Murder.

Can Tarkan save Attila’s son? Can he resist the charms of Gosha? Will anyone realize that his wolf is really a German Shepherd? Who cares! Just relax, turn off your mind and enjoy this on YouTube.

Also known as La Tumba de la Isla Maldita (The Tomb of the Cursed Island); Young Hanna, Queen Of The Vampires; Crypt of the Living Dead and Vampire Woman, this Spanish film was originally directed by Julio Salvador with new footage added by Ray Denton (Deathmaster, Psycho Killer). TV western-bred scribe Lou Shaw, who wrote The Bat People, tweaked the Spanish dialog for the less-gory U.S.-version.

Andrew Prine (Simon King of the Witches) stars as Chris Bolton, a man who has traveled with his sister Mary (Patty Shepherd, The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman) to attempt to remove his father’s body from where he died. It turns out that there was a heavy sarcophagus that he found inside a hidden tomb but now his body lies smashed under it. The townspeople refused to help, as inside that coffin lies Hannah (Teresa Gimpera, Lucky the Intrepid) and they don’t want her ever coming back.

The 70’s were filled with female vampires of all shapes and sizes, from the Hammer lesbian-tinged vampires of The Vampire Lovers, the Satanic Twins of Evil, Jean Rollins’ sexual starved bloodsuckers, Daughters of Darkness, the fairy tale world of Lemora, Lina Romay as Jess Franco’s Female Vampire and the future vampires of Thirst. Every one of these films makes me happy despite the darkness and gloom of these days.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

For the seventh appearance of Count Waldemar Daninsky, Paul Naschy threw out everything that came before and decided on a new origin for El Hombre Lobo. Now, his bloodline was cursed by Countess Bathory, a servant of Satan who one of Daninsky’s ancestors had burned at the stake.

Well, there’s that, and then there’s Daninsky killing a wolf on his grounds that transforms into a man. He’s cursed again by a gypsy witch who sends a young girl to seduce him and then bite him with the skull of a wolf while he’s sleeping.

I kind of love the alternate title for this, The Black Harvest of Countess Dracula, which really has nothing to do with this story at all. But the real joy of this is one of its taglines: “Damn the Exorcist! The Devil won’t let go!”

Insane murderers on the loose, Satanism, beheadings, gore, bad dubbing, Daninsky as a rich nobleman and witchfinder, more gore and, yes, the flesh that you expect when you watch a Naschy movie.

There’s nothing like a movie starting with the beheading of a Satanic knight and ending with Bathory being reborn from her grave to engage a werewolf in combat. Pure magic.

You can watch this on Daily Motion.

La Furia del Hombre Lobo is a 1970 Spanish horror film that is the fourth in the saga of werewolf Count Waldemar Daninsky, played as always by Paul Naschy. It was not theatrically released in Europe until 1975, yet an edited U.S. version played on television as early as 1974 as part of the Avco-Embassy’s “Nightmare Theater” package, along with Naschy’s Horror Rises from the Tomb and The Mummy’s Revenge.

For those that care about these things — like me — the other films were Marta, Death Smiles on a Murderer, Night of the Sorcerers, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Bell from Hell, Witches Mountain, Maniac Mansion and The Witch.

This time, Daninsky is a professor who travels to Tibet, only to be bitten by a yeti which seems like not the werewolf origin that you’d expect. He then catches his wife cheating on him, so in a fit of passion, he murders them both before being killed himself. But this being a Spanish horror movie, that’s just the start of the trials that El Hombre Lobo must struggle through.

Daninsky is revived by Dr. Ilona Ellmann (Perla Cristal, The Corruption of Chris Miller), who wants to use him for mind control experiments. Soon, however, our hero learns that she has a basement filled with the corpses of her failed experiments. To make matters even worse, she brings back his ex-wife from the dead and turns her into a werewolf too!

There’s a great alternate title to this movie: Wolfman Never Sleeps. How evocative! That’s the Swedish version that has all of the sex that Franco’s Spain would never allow.

Naschy claimed that director José María Zabalza was a drunk, which may explain how this movie wound up padded with repeat footage from Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror and some stunt double continuity antics that nearly derail this furry film.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime. It’s also coming out on blu ray from Ronin Flix.

Jack Beauregard (Henry Fonda) is an aging gunslinger who wants to retire. After quickly shooting three gunmen who attempt to ambush him in a barbershop — he has no chance to rest ever, constantly being challenged by people to prove themselves — the barber’s son asks if there is anyone in the world faster. The reply? “Faster than him? Nobody!”

There is a man named Nobody (Terence Hill), who dreams of being better than Beauregard. But instead of challenging the gunslinger, he plans on taking out all 150 members of the Wild Bunch — no relation — on his own. They’re led by Geoffrey Lewis, who was a character actor par excellence.

While this movie is a comedy, the idea at the end, where Nobody is now as chased and tested as Beauregard, speaks to the violent life of the Italian Western hero, who is continually threatened by not only death, but by the advent of the technological twentieth century, which will end his way of life.

Tonino Valerii, who was Leone’s assistant director on A Fistful of Dollars, directed this film. He also wrote The Long Hair of Death and directed films like My Dear Killer and Day of Anger.

There’s some dispute that Leone directed much of this film, which was made mostly in the United States. It arose when Henry Ford’s costumes were stolen, which would have delayed the movie by more than a week. Leone, who came up with the idea for the film, offered to shoot second unit to keep the movie moving.

Neil Summers, who played Squirrel, and John Landis, who claims to have been an extra, stated that Leone directed most of their scenes, often on horseback. However, screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi (Torso, Almost Human, All the Colors of the Dark, Once Upon A Time In America) told Robert Curti, the writer of Tonino Valerii: The Films, that “Tonino shot the whole film, absolutely ON HIS OWN” and that Leone “organized a second unit crew and shot a couple of sequences, which in my opinion are the weakest in the film…Nothing else.”

Sergio Donati expanded on this, stating that some photographers were sent to America and they asked Leone, on his lone set day, to sit behind the camera in a director’s pose. Donati said, “Inevitably, from that moment on, everyone, in and outside the movie business started saying “Yeah, actually the real director of the film was Leone, who saved it from the disaster of an incapable director”.”

Tobe Hooper and Tonino Valerii would have had a lot to talk about.

For anyone that thinks that Italian Westerns are dumb, I’d just like to raise one point. The title refers to The Odyssey, as Odysseus tricks Polyphemus into believing his name is “nobody.”

You can watch this on Daily Motion.

I have no idea why this is on the Savage Cinema set from Mill Creek, but man, when has anything these box sets have on them make any narrative sense? “We have all these Crown International movies and some maniac, somewhere, someday, is making a Letterboxd list about these movies no one other than he cares about!” I love you, Mill Creek. I do.

Back in 1929, John Ashley murdered a Seminole trapper named Desoto Tiger and dumped him in the site of what would someday be the Hoover Dike. Days later, in Miami, he sold some of those furs and got caught, but was repeatedly allowed to escape custody. So yeah, he was the first white man jailed for killing a Native American. But no one took it seriously and, go figure, he did a whole bunch of others crimes, including piracy on a British colony in the 1920’s, of all things. He also joined with Laura Upthegrove to become white trash heroes, defying banks and the government until he was jailed.

Their story gets even crazier, as Upthegrove married a member of Ashley’s gang named Joe Tracy in order to avoid testifying in his trial for murdering a taxi driver. Ashley then planned to rush the jail, act like he was saving Tracy and then planned to kill him in a fit of jealousy. So she todl the law, who killed everyone involved after handcuffing them and pretty much executing them in a move that was completely against the law.

Upthegrove hid out for a few years until she got in an argument with a man trying to buy moonshine from her. She ended up drinking Lysol and dying. Her mother decided that she was better off dead, so she never called for help.

Fabian Forte plays John and Karen Black plays Laura, so whoever casted this movie knows my heart. Ross Kananga, who is also Seminole, plays Tiger. Kanaga is the man who did the stunt where James Bond jumps over the alligators in Live and Let Die, getting 193 stitches before filing was done. He’s also where Yaphet Kotto’s character gets his name from. Also, Paul Gleason from The Breakfast Club, one of film’s greatest jerks, is the sheriff.

Luke Moberly, who was in the art department for Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things, wrote and directed this. It was the only film he’d ever direct. It was made in 1969 and didn’t come out for four years. It also has a debt to 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, but you probably figured on that. Fabian’s other gangster flick inspired by Bonnie and Clyde’s success was A Bullet for Pretty Boy, about Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd.

There’s no free or pay streams, but you can view the sign-in trailer on You Tube.

Thanks again to my friend Hoss for finding this one — early Mark Lester is not easy at all to track down!

Lester was able to get a bunch of stunt drivers — Dusty Russell, Buddy Love, Gene Drew, Dutch Schnitzer, Speed Stearns, Ed Ryan, Big Tim Welch and Dan Carter — and instead of making just a clip collection of stunts, he created a narrative around all the car damage.

Lester told The Pink Smoke, “I was at the Sacramento River on vacation, just river rafting. I ran into a group of guys there who looked like Hell’s Angels. And I said ‘What do you do?’ They said “We’re the Circus of Death.” They traveled the circuit putting on shows. So I went to some of those and just thought, “Wow.” Originally I wanted to make it as a documentary, then I realized “I know all the real people, I’ll just write a narrative around it.””

He also called this movie a post-Vietnam parable, with gladiators in cars. Kind of like Knightriders, except eight years earlier and no one holds Lester in the same esteem as George Romero. Well, you know. Except me.

I really dug the rambling nature of this film, as well as the open ending. If you can find it, take the time to enjoy it.

I have no idea how to properly convey how important this movie is to me.

Directed, written, produced, co-scored, co-edited, set designed, costumed and starring Alejandro Jodorowsky, this is a film that reduces me to tears at times if I even think about it.

Words will fail to explain what this means. This is an absolute movie, one that can only be explained by those that have experienced it, meditated on it and have been changed by it.

The story comes from Ascent of Mount Carmel by John of the Cross and Mount Analogue by Rene Daumal, an unfinished book that is nearly all allegory. The end — which is not an end but a beginning — is what Jodorowsky felt was the proper way to finish the story.

I find it hard to watch all of this film in one sitting, as the bursts of images unlock such deep emotions within me that I can only fully explain months after the watch is over.

Last year, I went through a professional divorce. In an attempt at trying to mend fences and rebuild the relationship, I gave away my blu ray of this film. It was, quite honestly, my most prized possession. It was an attempt to divest myself of material objects and destroy my ego, to lay myself bare and show that I was ready to continue the journey that we had started together. “I want you to have this,” I barely choked out. “This is my heart.”

I don’t know if my former co-founder ever watched this film. The fact that it never came up again told me what I needed to know. I’ve grown past this pain, which nearly ruined my love of film.

Instead, I have decided to move on, to take my own journey. The loss of this film was just the loss of a blu ray. Its lessons have not disappeared, the power that it has over me has not grown dim. If anything, I have reflected on my own path up and down the mountain and found that I have not regretted a step.

Please find this movie for yourself.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As we dive into all things Mexican horror this week, we brought back this completely wonderful and strange film, which would be a perfect one for you to discover or watch again. 

If all Juan López Moctezuma directed was Alucarda, he’d still be celebrated. Throw in the fact that he was behind the camera for El Topo and also created this little piece of strangeness and you can see that he’s someone to be celebrated.

A journalist has traveled to Dr. Maillard’s (Claudio Brook, Alucarda, The Devil’s Rain!) remote mental institution to write a story about the progressive treatment the doctor offers: patients are free to roam and fully live out their fantasies. However, when he gets there, the reporter learns from the doctor’s daughter Eugenie that he hasn’t met the real doctor, just one of the inmates that is quite literally running the asylum and randomly quoting Aleister Crowley. Even better — Susana Kamini, Justine from Alucarda, shows up as a cult priestess!

Imagine if Hammer or Amicus made a movie in Mexico, with all of the dialogue in English, and fed massive amounts of drugs to everyone involved. That’s pretty much how I imagine that this film was made. It’s also an Edgar Allan Poe story (The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether), but really, it’s also a costume drama with more powdered wigs than a British courthouse. And man, has there ever been so sensationalistic a title?

Will you like it? Not if you’re expecting a horror movie. Again, the Chilling Classics set confounds expectations, seeming like it will only feature the worst schlock and somehow embracing Mexican art cinema. I can only imagine that there’s a basement in the Mill Creek offices where the maniac that chose the films for this set signed off on it with a feather pen and a giant flourish, exclaiming, “I hope this makes someone’s brain melt!”

Beyond watching this on the Chilling Classics box set, you can also find it on Amazon Prime. If you want a much better looking copy of this film, Mondo Macabro released it as The Mansion of Madness, complete with a brand new digital transfer and Guillermo dl Toro discussing the director.1973