Cugini Carnali translates as First Cousins, but this movie was also titled The Visitor, Hot and Bothered, La Prima, Loving Cousins, and High School Girl.

This is the story of Nico d’Altamura (Alredo Pea, who was also in two other commedia sexy all’italiana, the Dagmar Lassander-starring Classe Mista and the Edwige Fenech movie The School Teacher), who is a shy sixteen-year-old who falls in love with his city-born cousin Sonia (Susan Player, Invasion of the Bee Girls, Malibu Beach).

This comes from director Sergio Martino, who you may know better from his early 70s master class on making giallo — Your Vice Is a Locked Room, and Only I Have the Key, All the Colors of the Dark, Torso, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail — or his sexy bedroom movies with Edwige Fenech.

Nico comes from a more provincial family than Sonia, and while his parents are strict, they have their secrets. His father is sleeping with the family maid (Rosalba Neri, Lady Frankenstein) and also waiting for their uncle to die, but he keeps alive either out of spite or to keep sleeping with prostitutes. When Sonia comes to town, she causes a scandal by wearing miniskirts to church and sunbathing nude, but let’s face it, Nico has no idea what he’s in for.

Martino was a genre hopper. The year after this movie, he made two poliziotteschi (Gambling City and Silent Action), a giallo (The Suspicious Death of a Minor), and Sex With a Smile, which features Barbara Bouchet, Fenech, and Marty Feldman. This may not be his best movie, but it’s not his worst.

I’m still trying to figure this out.

Made as Nightmare at Blood Castle, this is about Dr. Arthur Blackwood (Bill Greer, who co-wrote the script with Deedy Peters, who were a comedy team; he would go on to write and produce House Calls, Goodnight Beantown and Charles In Charge; she would be in 17 episodes of House Calls), who runs his own sanitarium and is doing experiments on the forces of evil. Deedy also plays his wife in this, who is working with the sheriff (Jim Dean) to figure out why some teens have been killed. She should be looking inside her own house, as her husband has a hunchback (Pierre Agostino) and they’re whipping girls and locking people up in cages.

This is the kind of movie that has a wig budget, a spaghetti monster, guillotine suicide and dialogue with lines such as “When I saw Mr. Zolak’s head severed from his body, I felt a definite sexual thrill. I must be very careful.” Also snakes.

Somehow, this is PG. 1970s PG. You know what that means.

Director Charles Nizet also made The Ravager, Voodoo Heartbeat and Rescue Force. There’s nothing like this, a regional movie in the desert that has women put in coffins with poisonous snakes and it feels perverted but it’s not as dirty as it feels, which means that it’s really deranged.

A cave blows up at the end. I still, as I said, have no idea why.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Here’s a drink.

Spaghetti Monster (based on the drink from Strawbs Bar in Leeds, England)

• 1 oz. vodka
• 1 oz. gin
• 1 oz. rum
• 1 oz. tequila
• 4 oz. orange juice
• .5 oz. grenadine

1. Shake up everything with ice in a cocktail shaker other than the grenadine.
2. Pour in a glass and top with grenadine.

Based on The Face of Night by Bernard Brunner, this is the last film for director Henry Hathaway, who directed True Grit, The Sons of Katie Elder and Call Northside 777. It’s a blaxploutation film that was distributed by American-International Pictures; amazingly, Hathaway had turned down Rooster Cogburn.

Re-released as Super Dude, this is all about heroic black cop Ken Ramsey (William Elliott) and Julie (Marki Bey), who has been addicted to heroin and forced to do sex work. She used to be the girl he loved back in high school; now he wants to save her from Richards (Michael Lerner).

This is competently made and the fight scenes look good. That’s not why one usually watches blaxploiutation. Still, an interesting footnote in a great career.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Snakes on a submarine! Yes, imagine being sunk to the ocean floor, with reptilian beasts everywhere!

Directed by Russ Mayberry and written by Leslie Stevens, this idea is that seaman Compton (Frank Bonner) would purchase a bunch of poisonous snakes and then just set them loose in the claustrophobic confines of an undersea vessel. Is it ironic or just plain dumb universe magic that the sub is named the Fer-de-Lance?

David Janssen plays sub captain Russ, a man so tough that he keeps battling the snakes even during the credits! Ivan Dixon shows up, as he has in more than one movie I’ve watched this week. I see you, dude. And then there’s Hope Lange as one of the few women on this here sub.

Jason Evers, the doctor who made The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, is on hand. So is George Pan Andreas, who made one of the best vanity projects ever, Crime Killer. Sherry Boucher from Sisters of Death, you’re here too. Robert Ito, Professor Hijita from Buckaroo Banzai, and Sam Fujiyama from Quincy, M.E., appear, which gives me the opportunity to remind you that a mixed drink called the Quincy, M.E., is two Vicodin and an ounce of vodka. 

This moves at the glacial pace that I demand from a TV movie. It’s a perfect Sunday afternoon on the couch, take a nap, and it’s still on movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Les Tremayne, who was one of the most popular and well-known voices of the Golden Age of Radio, working on shows like The Jackie Gleason/Les Tremayne Show, Ford Theatre, Inner Sanctum, The Whistler and more. He even had a breakfast show with his second wife. As entertainment moved into television, he was all over the dial, as well as showing up in movies like The War of the Worlds, The Monolith Monsters, The Monster of Piedras Blancas, The Fortune Cookie, Forbidden Planet, The Angry Red Planet, King Kong vs. Godzilla and The Slime People. He even played Big Daddy Hogg on The Dukes of Hazzard, Dr. Frankenstein on The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo and the titlular mentor on Shazam!

None of those roles could have prepared him — or us — for Fangs.

As Snakey Bender, Tremayne plays a man of obsessions, obsession that we as mortal people just may not understand. There’s one day a week that he cares about and that’s Wednesday. On that day, he makes his journey into town where he visits the attractive schoolteacher Cynthia (Bebe Kelly, If You Don’t Stop It… You’ll Go Blind!!!), whose students perform the task of hunting down small rodents for him so that his beloved pets — he claims to be part snake by the way — have some food for the week. Then he harasses the general store employees before meeting up with his one true friend, Burt (Richard Kennedy), and they have a concert where they blast the music of John Philip Sousa.

Basically, Snakey is one of those people who seem harmless but if one thing impacts their life’s routine, the mental damage will not be visited upon him. No, it will be meted out to everyone in his path.

The first chinks in his armor appear when Brother Joy starts preaching against him, saying that snakes are the devil’s animals and that he’s making the children play on the left hand path.

And then Burt marries Ivy (Janey Wood, Pamela from Terror at Red Wolf Inn).

Unlike Snakey, Burt realizes that he’s old and that if he wants to marry a showgirl who really only cares about his money but will give him the kind of companionship a life of hard work deserves, well, he’s going to do it. And sure, the Wednesday concerts will end for awhile, but what’s the harm in that?

You can just imagine how Snakey reacts.

Actually, you can’t. Because things get worse.

It turns out that that schoolteacher likes having the snakes around because those visits are conjugal. That’s right, while Snakey is out with the kids, she’s doing whatever one does with a snake in a Biblical way. Her secret gets outed to the general store owners Bud and his lesbian sister Sis, who is played by Alice Nunn, who really has the best cameo of all time as Large Marge in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure who start blackmailing her, cutting off Snakey’s rodent supply and therefore pushing him on the path to no return.

The weirdest thing about this movie is that it has such a level of scum and sleaze all over it yet has no nudity and little to no violence. Heck, it barely has all that many snakes in it. But what it has is a man who realizes that the world is changing around him and no matter what he does, it keeps moving past him. And people use his snakes as sermons or for pleasure but never really see him as anything other than that old weird man from the desert that lives with all the serpents. Except the kids, and when the kids aren’t allowed to see him and hunt vermin, well, I mean, how dare you take away vermin-gathering little ones from an old man ready to explode?

Somehow, Snakey becomes a Bond villain, able to kill people with all manner of objects and traps and, yes, snakes. All along, he told the townspeople how moronic they were and now, he’s proving it. You should have let him keep air conducting and marching around the house and paying kids for mice and just let him be. But some people have Hell inside them and you should just keep them on their maze-like path so that they don’t solve the riddle inside their head and realize that they’d be better off if they just went and killed you.

Also known as Snakes, Snakelust and the wonderful title Holy Wednesday, this was directed and co-written with John T. Wilson by Art Names, who was mostly a sound man on all sorts of movies, including being the post-production sound guy for The Astrologer, which had to be the kind of experience that destroys your mind. Actually, his sound resume is packed with aberrant films that I adore, such as Alligator; Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker; Savage Streets and The Jesus Trip. He and Wilson also co-wrote Girl in Gold Boots and The Black Klansman, so their partnership wasn’t a one and done on the weird writing ability.

By direct, I mean he put the camera down and said action, really. You don’t really consider the direction or cinematography in this, but that’s the best part of it. It just plays out in front of you, with you as the casual observer to one man’s meltdown. He just wants to be alone with his snakes and needs the help of others. And he needs that one night of marching band concerts. I guess it really was too much to ask, huh?

There are weird movies that have been made to be weird and there are weird movies made because someone had a vision that perhaps nobody could ever understand. This would be the latter and that’s perfect. My dream is to go back in time and sit in a drive-in where the blockbuster baiting tagline for this movie got some cars in the lot and then this starts playing and people start wondering, “What is this? Who is this for? Why did they make this?”

Movies are awesome, everyone.