Sal Watts wasn’t a movie star.

He came from poverty and racism in Mississippi to California where he launched the Sal/Wa and Marsel record labels to showcase the music of local black performers, hosted local music show Soul Is, had several restaurants and owned Mr. Sal’s Fashion Stores, where he sold clothing made by local black fashion designers.

Then, in 1974, while Hollywood was making blacksploitation often with white directors and writers, Sal was the director, writer, producer and star of Solomon King.

Sal’s widow Belinda Burton-Watts said, “Sal was an extraordinary man who remained humble throughout his life and just wanted equality for all. He loved all people and wanted to live in a world that treated people fairly. He would be grateful to know that his film will see the light of day once more.”

This film was lost for decades with only a faded print in the UCLA Film & TV Archive. Dennis Bartok, who runs Deaf Crocodile with Craig Rogers, found the rare soundtrack that was released on Watts’ own label. Once he learned more about the film, he had to save it.

After several years of searching for rights and elements, he and Craig finally connected with Sal’s wife and collaborator, Belinda who manages his estate. They took the UCLA print, did a 4K restoration and matched it with the score and soundtrack elements that had been in a closet for decades.

Shot with a cast of mostly non-professional actors, all wearing clothes from Watts’s store, Watts himself is Solomon King, an ex-CIA operative/ex-Green Beret/nightclub owner whose Middle Eastern lover Princess Oneeba (Claudia Russo) gets killed, just as he uncovers a global conspiracy and heads off to a castle to cut the head off the snake that is Prince Hassan (Richard Scarso).

It’s synchronicity that Scarso is in this — as well as Louis Zito — as they were also in another movie made to cash in on a trend yet one that made a more honest film in the genre, Duke Mitchell’s Massacre Mafia Style. Both Watts and Mitchell came from worlds outside of Hollywood yet had dreams of being part of it and did it on their terms. Sure, the world didn’t know when these films got made but decades later, their work was rediscovered.

This ends with King getting his old army buddies together and using grenades when they could have just used knives but hey, if you have firepower, use it. Then go explore all the amazing clubs of 1974 throughout Oakland and rock out to that soundtrack.

Thousands were spent to make this real again, hours of hard work, but the joy I felt watching it meant that it was all so very well spent.

Solomon King is available from Deaf Crocodile. In addition to the new restoration by Deaf Crocodile from the only known complete 35mm print, you get commentary tracks by film critic and historian Walter Chaw and another one from author, journalist, and documentary film producer Steve Ryfle, a new  three-part video interview with Belinda Burton-Watts (widow of director/star Sal Watts), a new booklet essay by Josiah Howard, the July 18, 1976 episode of The Jay Payton Show (executive produced by Sal Watts), a reproduction of the pressbook and a restoration demo video featuring the original faded print and the newly restored feature. You can get it from Deaf Crocodile.

Directed by John Peyser, who mostly worked in TV, and written by Bob Peete (who wrote for Good Times, What’s Happening Now and Amen) and Arthur Marks (Bonnie’s Kids, Friday Foster), this is the story of Clement Dunne (Andrew Prine), a man who hates nude women in magazine, cutting off their heads in print and then in real life.

This is broken up into three stories. In the first, Jackie (Jaime Lyn Bauer, who was on 1,556 episodes of The Young and the Restless and 523 of Days of Our Lives) is menaced by nearly everyone she meets, like the hippies who break into her house, cover her in makeup and try to assault her. She runs to a motel where she has to deal with the strange owners (Aldo Ray and Paula Shaw) before finding her way into the not so loving embrace of Dunne.

Next, Melissa (Francine York, who was Marilyn Monroe in the Night Train to Terror spinoff Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars) is in the midst of a photo shoot at a seaside hotel when Dunne arrives. Ruthy Ross, who plays Glory in this scene, was actually the June 1973 Playboy Playmate of the Month. The caretaker in this is Mike Mazurki, who came to America from the Ukraine, graduated from college to be an attorney and ended up being a pro wrestler, Mae West’s bodyguard and a tough guy in plenty of movies; he’s the bodyguard who knocks out Rod Stewart when he stalks Kay Lenz in the “Infatuation” video).

In the last story, Vera (Tiffany Bolling, Wicked, Wicked) is stalked by Dunne over the phone and he kills her roommate thinking it’s her. She goes on the run and gets assaulted by two sailors before finding herself as the final girl all alone in a burned out forest facing off against the black suit-wearing Dunne.

Prine had the idea to have his character dress in all black and live in an all white house, essentially seeing things only as black and white. He’s creepy beyond belief, sitting there listening to old 78 records and collecting the shows of the women he’s cleansed from this existence. Then, he starts phone stalking his next target.

This movie is scummy, but I think if you made it this far, you’re probably going to watch it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

From Tombs of the Blind Dead to The Ghost Galleon and Night of the Seagulls — let’s not mention Curse of the Blind Dead — few images of Eurohorror are as striking as the Satanic and zombiefied Knights Templar riding out to their strange theme.

I kind of love that Spanish horror doesn’t seem to care all that much about continuity. How many ways did Waldemar Daninsky become a werewolf? Well, Amando de Ossorio tweaked the way the Knights came to be in nearly every movie, adjusting how they arrived and what they wanted, but the main idea is the same: they worshipped Satan, they were burned, they’ve come back to drink virgin blood.

As a village prepares for a festival celebrating the 500th anniversary of the defeat of the Templars — what a dumb idea — the village idiot Murdo sacrifices a young girl and brings them back from the dead. Any of the romantic drama between fireworks man Jack Marlowe (Tony Kendall) and his Vivian (Esperanza Roy), his ex-lover and now fiancee of the town’s mayor, will have to wait until the Knights kill everyone.

De Ossorio wrote, directed and designed the Templar make-up for this. The Spanish version, El ataque de los muertos sin ojos, has more gore, like the Templars straight up devouring a human heart. That’s how you do it!

If you’re someone that complains that this movie has day for night errors and has a slow pace that seems glacial, I’m going to hate you forever. This is doom metal on film. Tune in, drop down, drink blood, smoke up.

We all have dreams but Professor Nolter’s (Donald Pleasence) is to get to the next level of evolution by crossbreeding Venus flytraps with students from his class, which seems like the worst of ideas but hey, I don’t have tenure. When he’s done with them, he sells them as freaks to Mr. Lynch (a pre-Dr. Who Tom Baker) who has quite the collection in his sideshow, including real acts Willie “Popeye” Ingram, “Pretzel Boy” Hugh Baily, Félix Duarte the frog boy, Alligator Girl Esther Blackmon and Wild Wild West star Michael Dunn.

Jack Cardiff was mostly known for his work as a cinematogapher but as a directed he was nominated for Best Director for 1960s Sons and Lovers and also made Girl On a Motorcycle. Here, he combines strange time lapse sequences, stop motion, interesting practical effects and a fantastic color scheme to great effect, taking what could be a one-note rehash of Freaks and making something if not good then definitely interesting.

Brad Harris, the star of this movie, mostly worked in Italian movies, such as playing Capt. Tom Rowland in the Kommisar X series, as well as appearing as King Augeias in Luigi Cozzi’s Hercules. Former Penthouse Pet Julie Ege was in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Finally, Jill Haworth was in Tower of Evil and the TV movie freakout Home for the Holidays.

Stephanie Rothman studied film at USC, was the first woman to be awarded the Directors Guild of America fellowship and wanted to make “highly thoughtful, European-like small films” that were inspired by Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. After her first movie for Roger Corman, who hired her as his assistant, she got to make her first movie, It’s a Bikini World.

It wasn’t really what she wanted to make.

“I had very ambivalent feelings about continuing to be a director if that was all I was going to be able to do. So I literally went into a kind of retirement for several years until more than anything in the world, I wanted to make films,” Rothman said to Film Comment.

She return to making movies on Corman’s Gas-s-s-s and then directed The Student Nurses for Corman’s New World Picture. That’s when she kind of figured it out, telling Interview about how she came to some level of peace — or at least understanding — with making an exploitation movie: “”I had never heard that term before. Roger never used it. So that’s how I learned that I had made an exploitation film. Then I went and did some research to find out exactly what exploitation films were, their history and so forth, and then I knew that’s what I was doing, because I was making low-budget films that were transgressive in that they showed more extreme things than what would be shown in a studio film, and whose success depended on their advertising, because they had no stars in them. It was dismaying to me, but at the same time I decided to make the best exploitation films I could. If that was going to be my lot, then that’s what I was going to try and do with it.”

The Working Girls was one of three movies — along with Terminal Island and Group Marriage — that Rothman would make for Dimension Pictures. While she never got to make the movie she wanted in her career, she did infuse her films with female desire which broke from what was on most drive-in and grindhouse screens at the time.

It’s about Honey (Sarah Kennedy, who was also in The Telephone Book), Denise (Laurie Rose) and Jill (Lynne Guthrie), three young women who have to escape the traps that men put them into — and women, what with a rich woman trying to pay off Honey to kill her husband — and emerging smarter and better off through their own intelligence. The men are almost universally users and get their comeuppance, which is so different than anything else on the screen at the time.

I could tell you all that or I could also let you know that Cassandra “Elvira” Peterson is nude in this movie, which may destroy all of the good will this has built. That said, perhaps sometimes guys needed a spoonful of sugar to take all this medicine.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This isn’t a Cannon movie, but as I finish out the month, I’m posting the pre-Golan 21st Century movies. 

When Toad (Hugh Keays-Byrne, Immortan Joe!), a member of the GraveDiggers outlaw motorcycle club, watches an environmentalist get killed by a hitman and several of the members of the club get killed, Detective Stone (Ken Shorter, Dragonslayer) gets assigned to the case. The gang allows Stone to join them and as you can imagine, seeing as how this is a biker movie, he soon begins to leave behind the normal world with his high class girlfriend Amanda (Helen Morse, Picnic At Hanging Rock) and embrace the nomadic motorcycle lifestyle along with the leader of the GraveDiggers Undertaker (Sandy Harbutt, who directed and wrote this movie, which was a huge success and he never made another; he was also married to Morse at the time), Hooks (Roger Ward, Mad Max), Vanessa (Rebecca Gilling), Dr. Death (Vincent Gil, Nightrider from Mad Max!), Captain Midnight (Bindi Williams) and Septic (Dewey Hungerford).

Meanwhile, the GraveDiggers battle their rivals, The Blackhawks and their leader Birdman (Tony Allyn, The Stud). And that hitman has an idea: a mass murder of The GraveDiggers under the cover of intergang violence. Stone has to solve the case or all of the gang will be in coffins standing up, as that’s how they get buried because this gang rides for Satan.

If you couldn’t guess, I absolutely love this movie. It takes everything great about American biker movies and applies it to the wide-open country of Australia. Real life bikies and bikers were paid with beer for participation as actors and extras in this picture and four hundred of them are in the biker funeral scene. This movie seems as much a Western in theme as it is a biker film. Between that idea, the fuzzed guitars and the slow-motion scenes, there’s so much to love here.

Producer David Hannay said that the most “negative experience” he had as a filmmaker was not being able to get finance for Harbutt to make another film, stating: “Why have I failed? What is wrong with me? I have failed this person who is such an important part of my life, this person with enormous talent, this extraordinary human being, and I have failed him totally and absolutely. It really is the major low point in my life; if I really dwell on it, I get very angry. I should have made a difference. Because I should have been able to make it happen. He is far more talented than 999 of the 1000 other people I know.”

If you get the Severin blu ray, you also get Stone Forever, a doc made in 1999 and a soundtrack on CD. I mean, you should totally be buying that right now.

EDITOR’S NOTES: 21st Century imported this Italian movie which you may know as Sexorcist, The Tormented, Devil Obsession, L’Ossessa, Enter the Devil or its post Rocky Horror title, The Eerie Midnight Horror Show. It’s one of my favorite movies — it’s also total junk in the best of ways — and I originally wrote about it on October 20, 2017.

This movie is literally the center of the Venn Diagram that would be made of the movies that I love the most.

Italian ripoff of a successful film — This movie is obviously trying to be The Exorcist.

Satanism — This film has some of the goofiest and most awesome devil tricks of any of I’ve seen.

Exploitation — No one in this film acts like a normal human being and reality has been supplanted by insanity before the demons even get involved.

Multiple titles — This film is also known as Sexorcist, The Tormented, Devil Obsession, L’Ossessa and was later re-released post-Rocky Horror midnight movie success in 1977 as The Eerie Midnight Horror Show.

And the title card that comes up before the movie begins: THIS FILM IS BASED ON A TRUE STORY.

Daniela is an art student in Italy who is so respected by her teachers that she gets to join them as they acquire religious sculptures from a church due to be torn down. That church was deconsecrated way back in the 1700’s because the priests and nuns decided that they would turn against God and start having orgies in the church. And one of the statues, an incredibly lifelike display of one of the thieves crucified next to Jesus, catches Daniela’s eye. She is told that it was pulled directly from a tree, that it was already inside the wood and all the sculptor had to do was bring out the details. However, many tourists have had mental breakdowns just looking at this sculpture.

Daniela’s life is weird even before the crazy gets started. Her rich parents throw a party and we learn that her mother isn’t just cheating on her husband, she’s doing it pretty much in public. Yep — Daniela catches her mother getting whipped by the thorns of a rose — a scene that Becca just randomly walked into and asked, “What are you watching?!?”

Our heroine leaves for her studio at the university. As she paints, the sculpture comes off the cross in a scene that can only come from the deranged mind of Italian exploitation filmmaking (director Mario Gariazzo wrote Sister Emanuelle and directed Very Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind). Of course, that revived religious icon then has sex with her, sex that appears to be a dream as she runs from the studio.

Later that night, as Daniela climbs the stairs to her family’s apartment, she keeps thinking she is alone, but the sounds of her footsteps don’t match up. She hears a demon whisper her name and she runs in fear before the demon overcomes her, forcing her into a state of sexual mania and a dream where she is crucified. She spends the rest of the movie trying to get anyone to have sex with her while stigmata appears on her hands and she does all of the tropes of exorcism rip-offs.

And then Ivan Rassimov (All the Colors of the Dark, Shock/Beyond the Door II, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key ) shows up as Satan, giving Daniela her beauty back so that she can work with him to tempt all of the priests, like Father Xeno (Luigi Pistilli, Oliviero from Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key). She tries to seduce him, so to forget that she has tempted him he self-flagellates.

The priest dies and the girl is saved, after she pukes out the demon. But you knew that, right? You’ve seen this film repeated before. But that doesn’t mean that this film isn’t great. And by great, I mean the scummiest version of everything you love about films like this. No matter title you refer to it by, it is everything you want to see.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cannon didn’t produce this movie but did release it on video in Germany as Cannon Screen Entertainment.

Ah, the Cold War.

Well, it never really ended, but let’s look back on when it was really being fought in 1974.

An accident causes two KGB agents to be mistakenly killed during a failed attempt to help a Russian athlete named Sevitsky (Michael Petrovich) defect to the West. That means the U.S. has to have two agents killed to settle the scales of political justice with Bruland (Donald Sutherland) and Griff (Elliot Gould) picked as the patsies. They aren’t friends but must learn to work together if they want to survive.

S*P*Y*S* was directed by Irvin Kershner, who made way better movies than this like The Empire Strikes Back, The Eyes of Laura Mars, Never Say Never Again and RoboCop 2. I kind of love that he played a waiter in Steven Seagal’s only directorial effort, On Deadly Ground.

This was written by Lawrence J. Cohen and Fred Freeman, who wrote Start the Revolution Without Me together, as well as Malcolm Marmorstein, who along with writing Pete’s Dragon was also a writer on Dark Shadows.

Originally called Wet Stuff, this was changed to have those stars in the title to attempt to get back the magic of Gould and Sutherland in M*A*S*H*. Kershner wasn’t happy and said, “I started to make a film that was a little black comedy, and I empathized that it had no relationship to Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H*, in which, of course, they’d been teamed so brilliantly. The original title was Wet Stuff meaning blood, and the studio promised that there would be no attempt to compare it to M*A*S*H* in the publicity. Because it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t that kind of freewheeling film. There was no time, nor the budget to do that sort of film anyway. Now, there were many places where they hadn’t seen M*A*S*H*, like parts of South America, Scandinavia, or Germany. In those areas they lovedS*PY*S*. Actually, the film made a lot of money, and it got some great reviews in countries where it wasn’t compared to M*A*S*H*.”

I mean, they even used the same voice over artist in the trailer!

I also love that Variety cut to the chase with what this was all about: “a series of bomb explosions, lavatory homicide, police torture, kinky sex, a car chase, a search through canine feces and a disrupted church wedding ceremony.”

It is, however, the only movie that Joss Ackland and his daughter Melanie appeared in together. And hey — Zouzou is in it, a style icon, a friend of rock stars, a relentless nightclubber and the female Marlon Brando whose career was derailed by heroin.

Xiangang xiao jiao fu was released in the U.S. by Cannon as The Godfather Squad.

Cops and Interpol agents are being killed all over the world by the Carrol crime family. Wang Liu  (Bruce Leung) saves one of them in Hong Kong and gets targeted by the Carrols, who decide to make a kung fu movie in Italy and cast Wang Liu in what they hope is a snuff film.

The best part of this movie? Gordon Mitchell showing up as Carrol’s adopted son Duke, a man who still has his German army uniform. It’s wild seeing someone I knew from giallo and westerns fighting in a kung fu movie.

Shirley Corrigan (The Crimes of the Black Cat, Dr. Jekyll vs. The Werewolf) shows up, as does Maria D’Incoronato (Concorde Affaire ’79).

Big exploitation points for having the Pope appear by way of shooting him outside of a Vatican office and then using stock footage and editing to get him into the film. Also: someone gets kicked into a fireplace and I am all for that.

You can watch this on Tubi.