Oh man, sometimes life is confusing. Like how 21st Century put out Challenge the Dragon in 1973 (Kuan-Chang Li’s  Meng hu chuang guan) and Cannon released Challenge the Dragon (Hai-Feng Wei’s Long hu tan) in 1973. To compound trivia here, Menahem Golen, while known for his time at Cannon would also later be the head of 21st Century.

That company was founded by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer who would later purchase the films of Dimension Pictures — not the Weinsteins — and release several movies for the VCR market on Planet Video and Continental Video. When they eventually filed for bankruptcy, 21st Century was purchased by Giancarlo Parretti, the new owner of The Cannon Group, which was renamed Pathé Communications. As part of Menahem’s agreement to leave, he was given 21st Century Film Corporation, along with the rights to Spider-Man and Captain America.

But that was years from now.

As China battles the invading armies of Japan, Chinese secret agent Huan (Michael Wai-Man Chan) attempts to discover who killed his uncle while fighting everyone he can find. This was directed by Hai-Feng Wei (Snake Fist Fighter) and written by Wai-Ming Cheng. They also call Huan the Dragon, so if you like Bruce Lee…

Arrow Video has restored three giallo films and provided their usual impressive range of in-depth bonus features with this new box set, featuring Smile Before Death, The Killer Reserved 9 Seats and The Weapon, the Hour, the Motive.

Smile Before Death (1972): Smile Before Death* was a revelation to me. I came in expecting nothing and was rewarded with a film that has multiple antagonists and a continually twisting close, a near race to the finish to see who will end up on top.

Marco (Silvano Tranquilli, Black Belly of the Tarantula; So Sweet, So Dead) and Dorothy are trapped in an open marriage that feels incredibly confining. To make things worse, her best friend Gianna (Rosalba Neri, Lady Frankenstein, The French Sex Murders) is his mistress.

Is it any surprise that Dorothy gets killed and it looks like a suicide and that Marco did it? Soon, he’s in charge of her estate until her daughter Nancy (Jenny Tamburi**, The Psychic, The Suspicious Death of a Minor) turns twenty. So Marco retires and lives a life of leisure with his mistress until Nancy returns home.

That’s when everyone starts playing each other, with Gianna trying to get Marco to kill his stepdaughter, Nancy seducing him and — spoiler warning — Gianna falling for her as well.

Silvio Amadio only made one other giallo and that would be Amuck! Much like that film, this one also proves that Silvio was perhaps more interested in filming gorgeous women misbehaving as he was showing the kills when it came to giallo. No matter. This movie has plenty of plot to go around and I was genuinely surprised by the conclusion of this caper.

Roberto Predagio’s theme song — with plenty of scat singing by Edda Dell’Orso — will be burned into your mind by the end of this.

*The translation for the Italian title is The Smile of the Hyena. I have no idea what that means in relation to the film’s story and blame the animal-themed demand for post-The Bird with the Crystal Plumage giallo titles.

**Tamburi won the femme fatale role of Graziella in La Seduzione because Ornella Muti, the original actress, was considered too attractive.

The Killer Reserved 9 Seats (1974): To celebrate his birthday, wealthy Patrick Davenant (Chris Avram, The Eerie Midnight Horror Show, Emanuelle in Bangkok) brings his friends to his family’s unused theater — empty for a century, which is how long his family has been cursed, which in no way is taken from The Red Queen Kills Seven Times.

There’s his sister Rebecca (Eva Czemerys, Escape from the Bronx) and her lover — look how ahead of its time Italian giallo in 1974 was — Doris (Lucretia Love, who was in The Arena and the astoundingly titled When Men Carried Clubs and Women Played Ding-Dong). And he’s also decided to bring his ex Vivian (Rosana Schiaffino, once called the Italian Hedy Lamarr) and her new husband Albert (Andrea Scotti, Horror Express), along with Patrick’s daughter Lynn (Paola Senatore, Ricco the Mean Machine, Emanuelle in America (1977) and Eaten Alive!; due to an unplanned pregnancy and being hooked on drugs, she ended her career by appearing in an adult film, Non Stop… Sempre Buio in Sala before being arrested for possession and trafficking of drugs) and her boyfriend Duncan (Gaetano Russo, Crazy Blood), as well as Patrick’s fiancee Kim (Janet Agren, City of the Living Dead), her ex-boyfriend Russell (Howard Ross, otherwise known as Renato Rossini, The New York Ripper) and finally, to finish off this cast of gorgeous people who all hate one another, some dude no one can really figure out where he belongs (Eduardo Filpone, Flavia the Heretic).

Oh yeah — there’s also a caretaker played by Luigi Antonio Guerra from Spasmo.

Before you know it, everyone starts getting killed, including one death via stabs to the lady business and their cranium being nailed to a board. You’d think with all this mayhem, the movie would be pretty interesting, but sadly, it drags.

The mysterious stranger — when he’s not looking funky fresh in blue blazer and fancy medallion — is given to saying things like, “You know what I like about you people? … You’re so civil to each other as you tear each other apart.” and “I spent a night here a hundred years ago” and “The actors are present and now the play may start…”

Janet Agren gets to act out a scene from Romeo and Juliet before she dies at least.

You know how people decry American slashers because they punish anyone who enjoys sex or drugs or any behavior deemed aberrant? This movie takes that notion and delivers it in spades. Of course, it also presents sin in all its glory but uses violent death as the square-up reel.

This is the last movie that Giuseppe Bennati made. It fits in with post-Argento giallo, but doesn’t add much to the form other than a great title and poster.

The Weapon, the Hour, the Motive (1972): The Weapon, the Hour & the Motive examines not only murder but the idea that a Catholic priest — Don Giorgio — is having an affair with two different women — Orchidea (Bedy Moratti,  — Women in Cell Block 7) and Giulia Pisani (Eva Czemerys, The Killer Reserved Nine Seats) — and tries to break things off with both of them before he’s killed. Since Inspector Boito (Renzo Montagnani) has already fallen for Orchidea — whose husband has just committed suicide — what’s the hope for a fair inspection of who the killer could be?

The only person who may know is a young orphan who lives in the church named Ferruccio, who once watched while Don Giorgio self-flagellated, and who now is kept drugged and quiet. There’s also the matter of a skeleton-filled catacomb under the church in addition to nuns taking baths fully clothed and whipping one another fully nude.

This is the only film that Francesco Mazzei directed, while he also wrote This Shocking World, Sergeant Krems, Convoy of Women and A Girl Called Jules. He co-wrote the story with Marcello Aliprandi, who would direct a similar movie, Vatican Conspiracy, in 1982. Mazzi also wrote the screenplay along with Mario Bianchi, The Murder Secret), Bruno Di Geronimo (who wrote A Quiet Place to Kill, What Have You Done to Solange? and Puzzle) and Vinicio Marinucci (SS Experiment Love Camp). 

I can’t even imagine the reaction this movie had when it came out. Fulci had been abused by the way audiences, critics and social critics treated him after Don’t Torture a Duckling.

The Giallo Essentials: Black Edition from Arrow Video has new 2K restorations from the original camera negatives of Smile Before Death and The Weapon, the Hour, the Motive exclusive to Arrow and a 2K restoration from the original camera negative of The Killer Reserved Nine Seats.

The packaging has a rigid box with original artwork in a windowed Giallo Essentials Collection slipcover and reversible sleeves for each film featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Adam Rabalais, Peter Strain and Haunt Love.

Smile Before Death has new commentary by authors and critics Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson, the original Italian and English front and end titles, an image gallery, a new interview with Stefano Amadio, film journalist and son of director Silvio Amadio and never-before-seen extended nude scenes not used in the final film.

The Killer Reserved Nine Seats has new commentary by author and critic Kat Ellinger, interviews with Howard Ross and screenwriter Biagio Proietti, the Italian theatrical trailer and an image gallery.

The Weapon, The Hour, The Motive has new commentary by author and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, a new interview with actor Salvatore Puntillo, an image gallery,  and front and end titles for the lost English-language dub.

You can order this set from MVD.

Arrow Video continues its exploration of Italian cult cinema with a second volume of Giallo Essentials that has three fashion, murder and psychosexual madness-filled films.

What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (1974): By 1974, the giallo was waning and the poliziottesco was starting to win over the Italian box office. This offering is a hybrid of both — unlike many giallo, the police are not presented as ineffectual or non-essential. Instead, they’re followed for most of the film.

Massimo Dallamano (The Night Child) made What Have You Done to Solange?, a giallo that exists outside of the Argento archetype. He’d follow it with this rougher and much darker — somehow that’s possible! — semi-sequel.

Deputy Attorney Vittoria Stori (Giovanna Ralli, The Mercenary, Sex with a Smile) is a rarity in giallo. She’s a woman in command of the police and never presented as a victim. She’s in charge of the murder investigation of Sylvia Polvesi (Sherry Buchanan, Dr. Butcher M.D.).

Found hanging in an attic, her suicide is anything but, as Inspectors Silvestri (Claudio Casinelli, Murder Rock, Hercules) and Valentini (Mario Adorf, Short Night of Glass Dolls) soon discover. And oh yeah — there’s soon a leather jacketed biker using a meat cleaver to gorily off his or her victims. And a peeping tom, too! And teenage prostitution! And Farley Granger, showing up to class up the proceedings!

Obviously, the look of the killer in this movie would influence a movie that has no interest in classing up the giallo — Strip Nude for Your Killer — and an American movie that gets so close to a giallo but is missing the murderous set pieces — Night School.

It’s a shame that Dallamano died in a car accident at the somewhat young age of 59. As the cinematographer for Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, he certainly had an eye for action and movement, as evidenced by the hallway chase scene in this film that seems as steady as, well, a Steadi-Cam shot (it isn’t!).

The Giallo Files site compared this movie to an episode of Law and Order. That’s an apt comparison. It’s a good movie to introduce someone to the genre with, as while it has some twists and turns, it doesn’t descend into plot hole jumping or an abundance of red herrings as some films of this genre.

Torso (1973): Torso is such a simple title. I’d rather call this film by its Italian name: I Corpi Presentano Tracce di Violenza Carnale, or The Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence. Either way, it was directed by Sergio Martino and features none of the cast that he had come to use in his past films like George Hilton, Ivan Rassimov or Edwige Fenech.

It does, however, star Brtish actress Suzy Kendall, who played the lead role of Julia in Dario Argento’s seminal The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. She’s so associated with giallo that she appeared as the main character’s mother in 2012’s ode to the genre, Berberian Sound Studio.

This is a film that wastes no time being strange. Or salacious. A photographer is shooting a soft focus lovemaking session between three women amongst creepy, eyeless baby dolls. By the time we register what is happening, we’re now in a classroom, where swooping pans and zooms refer us to the main cast of the film as we overhear a lecture and later a discussion about Pietro Perugino’s painting of Saint Sebastian. Did he believe in God? Or was he just trying to sell sentimentality? Could an atheist find himself able to translate religion to those with faith?

We cut to a couple making out in a car as a figure stalks them through the eye of the camera, making us complicit in the act of the killer. Quick cuts reveal the white-masked face of this maniac. The man runs after him while the girl doesn’t even care that they had a voyeur watching. As she waits for him to return to the car, but grows impatient. The headlights of the car cast her shadow large across the columns of a bridge. And their light is quickly extinguished by black-gloved hands. The camerawork here is really striking, keeping us watching for the killer, as we’re no longer behind his eyes. His attack is swift and ruthless, juxtaposed against the images of fingers penetrating the eyes of a doll.

The art professor (John Richardson, Black Sunday, The Church) and Jane (Kendall) meet by chance at a church where she challenges him to change his views on Perugino. As she returns from their somewhat romantic afternoon, Jane spies her friend Carol arguing in the car with a man who she believes is married.

Meanwhile, ladies of the evening walk the street, ending up with Stefano, a student who has been stalking Julie. He has trouble performing and the prostitute he’s with tells him that all the men with hang-ups always come her way. That said — even if he’s queer, he better pay the money. He flips out and attacks her, but she makes her escape.

We’re then taken to a hippy party that looks like it’s taking place inside Edward Lionheart’s Theater of Blood. There’s weed, there are acoustic guitars, there are bongos, there are dudes with neckerchiefs, there are motorcycles. Truly, there’s something for everyone. But after leading on two men, Carol just walks out into the mud. They try and chase her, but she makes her escape into the foggy night. We hear her footsteps through the swamp as she walks, exhausted and covered in mud. What better time for our white-masked killer to return? We see glimpses of him through the fog and then he is gone. Whereas in past films Martino ignored the murder scenes instead of story, here the violence is extended, placing the killer and his actions in full view. After killing the girl, he rubs mud all over her body before stabbing her eyes — again intercut with the baby doll imagery. Her blood leaks into the mud as the score dies down.

This scene really feels like what the first two Friday the 13th movies were trying to achieve, but of course several years before they were made.

A police detective is in front of the art class, showing images not of art, but of the crime scene. A piece of cloth has been found under the fingernails of one of the murdered students, Flo. And that same scarf was found on Carol’s body. It’s their duty to report seeing anyone who wore this scarf to the police, who want to cooperate with the students who normally riot and throw rocks at them.

Two of the men in the class — Peter and George — were the last two people to be seen with Carol, the ones who she turned down at the party. Meanwhile, Stefano continues to stalk Jane. The music in this film is so forward-leaning — tones play when the killer shows or during moments of tension.

A man calls Daniela and tells her that if she ever tells where she saw the red and black scarf, she’s dead. Fearing for her life, she tells her uncle, who lends his country home to her and her friends so that they can get away from the city while the killer is at large.

Oh yeah — I forgot the pervy scarf salesman, who the police are leaning on. Right after talking to the police inspector, he calls someone and asks for money to buy his silence. Whoever it is, they bought the scarf from him and wouldn’t want anyone else to know. They’ll also get out of town and head to the country. Coincidence? I think not!

Stefano is all over Dani, telling her that he needs her. She wants nothing to do with him. When she stares at him, she remembers seeing him wear the red scarf. She escapes — slamming the door in his face. She tells Jane that she remembers seeing him wear the scarf — and never again — the day Flo died. The whole time, the creepy uncle is watching the two girls. Jane offers to speak to Stefano, then meet the girls at the vacation home.

The street vendor is flush with cash, creeping along in the dark. A car starts to follow him. We see the black-gloved hands again as the car hits its victim again and again, bright red gore pouring all over the screen.

Jane goes to speak to Stefano, finding only strange baby dolls and letters to Dani asking her to love him and remember the promise that she made as a little girl. Jane is surprised by Stefano’s grandmother, who tells her that he left town.

The other girls are asleep on the train as someone watches them. A strange man enters their train car and sits down.

The camerawork in this movie feels as predatory as the perverts and killers that exist within it. Speaking of pervs, when the girls arrive in the countryside, the local men pretty much lose their minds, particularly over Ursula (Carla Brait, the man wrestling dancer from The Case of the Bloody Iris). She and Katia make out as a peeping tom watches, only for the killer to show up and off the leering man. There’s an amazing scene of the killer dumping the pervert into a well, shot underwater and staring upward as the body falls toward the lens.

Man, every man in this movie is scum. They’re either frightened boys or perverts wanting one chance to knock up a woman or scarred from past sexual encounters. None of them are positive, as even the uncle who gives Dani the villa seems way too interested in her. Every man is a predator at worst and a leering pervert at best.

Jane hurts her ankle when she gets overly excited about breakfast. A doctor arrives — the mysterious man from the train — and he gives her a pill, which knocks her out.

The girls go sunbathing while Jane recovers. Dani thinks she sees Stefano — complete with the red scarf — watching them. They return home and drink champagne, which Jane uses to wash down her sleeping pills.

A few minutes later, the door rings. It’s Stefano — the girls all scream — but he’s dead — the girls scream again — and the killer is behind him, holding the red scarf — now scream even louder! Instead of showing us the murders, Martino switches form, cutting to a ringing bell and Stefano being buried.

Jane wakes up, asking where her breakfast is. She’s obviously slept late as a result of the pills. She walks around the apartment, looking for Dani, Ursula and Katia, only to find a mess. Tossed chairs, bottles of beer and every single one of her friends murdered. Suzy Kendall is amazing in this scene, caught between fear and nausea. Unlike so many wooden giallo performances, she’s actually believable.

She hides as the killer comes back, forced to stay quiet and watch as he saws her friends into pieces. Even the ordinary world routine of the milkman arriving cannot stop the butchering of her friends, with her trapped just feet away.

This final act is completely unexpected, as up until now, the film had played by the rules of the giallo, the large number of victims versus a large number of red herrings.

In fact, this film is so packed with red herrings, even the cast had no idea who the killer was. Martino wouldn’t tell them who it was, so each of the actresses had her own theory as to who the killer was. And in the original script, the killer survived.

Now, instead of that traditional giallo structure as I mentioned above, it is the last survivor — a near prototype for the final girl — against a killer. Throw in that Julie can’t move well due to her leg and Martino has set up quite the suspenseful coda.

Trapped in the house, Julie tries to signal with a mirror, using Morse code. But it totally misses the heroic doctor’s sight. He places a call, but it doesn’t seem like it’s to Julie. She looks out the window and sees the killer coming back.

It turns out that the killer was the professor, who saw a childhood friend die trying to reach for a doll. He compares the other kills to dolls, with only Julie as a flesh and blood person. Everyone else was a bitch or played games with him or blackmailed him. He hacked Ursula and Katia to pieces like dolls as a result. Dani saw him. Carol may have seen him. And he killed Stefano when he saw him in the village. Death, he says, is the best keeper of secrets and then he sees Julie as a doll and tries to hang her. She’s saved at the last second by the doctor.

They battle into a farmhouse, across the yard and to a similar rock where we saw the younger professor watch his friend die. We hear a screen and have no idea who has been killed — but luckily for Jane, the doctor survives.  He discusses that whether fate or providence had kept him in town, where he could save her. Perhaps it was written in the stars. Julie replies that Franz, the professor, would have been a realist and called it a necessity. Franz is dead and the dreamers live on.

The more times that I’ve watched this film, the more that I appreciate it and how it flips the genre conventions on their head and moves toward more of a slasher, with many of the giallo elements feeling tacked on somewhat to stay within the expected pieces of the form. A real clue that it’s really a slasher? The killings are more important than who the killer is.

Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975): When a movie starts with a fashion model dying during a back alley abortion and it being covered up as a drowning, all before the opening credits, you know that you’re in for something demented. When you realize that the film was written and directed by Andrea Bianchi, who brought us Burial Ground, then you’re either going to run screaming or sit down and pay attention.

The doctor who performed the operation is killed by a motorcycle suit wearing maniac, but nobody at the Albatross Modeling Agency cares. All Carlo, the head photographer, cares about is using his modeling connections to pick up women. That’s how he meets Lucia (Femi Benussi, Hatchet for the Honeymoon), who he takes from the steam room to the modeling agency.

Magda (Edwige Fenech looking better than I’ve ever seen her look in any movie ever) is jealous, so she surprises Carlo with some black lace and they begin an affair. We then see a photo of the main agency members, like Mario, Magda, Carlo, Stefano, Dorris, Maurizio and his wife, and the owner of the studio Gisella. There’s one other person in the photo — Evelyn, who we saw die in the beginning.

Mario heads home and the killer shows up. When their helmet is removed, Mario knows the killer. But it’s too late. He’s dead now. The killer takes the photo so that he or she has a checklist of who to kill.

So then there’s Mauirizio, who is cheating on his wife with a prostitute. He takes her on a crazy ride through the streets and then takes her back to his place, when he begs and threatens her life before she suddenly wants to have sex with him — because you know, that’s how things worked in the 1970s — before he lasts all of a minute and starts embracing his blow up doll. Honestly, what the fuck? Of course, he’s killed right afterward. Good riddance.

Carlo later witnesses Gisella being murdered and even photographs the attack, but he’s hurt in a hit and run accident. While he’s recovering, Magda develops the film but the killer ruins the negatives.

After killing Doris and Stefano, the murder tries to kill Carlo and Magda, but the killer is knocked down the stairs. So who is it? New model Patrizia — Evelyn’s sister — who blames him for her sister’s death. However, she dies before she can tell the police of his involvement.

The movie ends with Carlo playing around by mock choking Magda before initiating anal sex with her, as she tells him not to, in a scene meant as comedy but lost in translation and the fact that forty plus-year-old giallo could never anticipate the #metoo movement.

Seriously, the title of this film pretty much says it all. It’s the most nudity I’ve ever seen in a movie. And it’s pretty much one of the most lurid I’ve seen, too. I have no idea if Bianchi intended this as a comedy, but it certainly feels like one.

It’s almost amazing that a movie with this much nudity and mayhem moves at such a glacial pace. It felt like the first hour of the film was the entire running time! Even worse, this movie is pretty much wall to wall misogyny. I know, I know, that’s the majority of giallo, but here it feels so overwhelming and so alien when seen with today’s eyes. I mean, should I be shocked that a movie called Strip Nude for Your Killer is so sexist?

Arrow Video’s Giallo Essentials: Yellow Edition has 2K restorations from the original negatives for all three films, as well as rigid box packaging with new artwork by Haunt Love in windowed Giallo Essentials slipcover.

What Have They Done to Your Daughters? has commentary by giallo expert Troy Howarth, a video essay by Kat Ellinger, interviews with Stelvio Cipriani and Antonio Siciliano, unused footage, alternate English opening titles, the Italian theatrical trailer and an image gallery.

Torso has two versions of the film, the original 94-minute Italian cut and the 90-minute English cut. It also has commentary critic by Kat Ellinger, interviews with Sergio Martino, Luc Merenda, Mikel J. Koven, Ernesto Gastaldi and Federica Martino, daughter of Sergio Martino. There’s also an option to view the film with the alternate US opening title sequence, as well as the Italian and English theatrical trailers.

Strip Nude for Your Killer has commentary by Adrian J. Smith and David Flint, a video essay by Kat Ellinger on Edwige Fenech, interviews with Nino Castelnuevo, Erna Schurer, Daniele Sangiorgi and Tino Polenghi, two versions of the opening scene, the original Italian and English theatrical trailers and an image gallery.

You can order this set from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: For another point of view on this movie, check out this article.

It feels like nearly every movie José Ramón Larraz had made up until this point was getting him ready to get this one right. While similar to Repulsion, it has Larraz explore the territory that he loved so much: haunted heroines who may not be so heroic, houses filled with dread in the midst of the London countryside, forbidden sapphic relationships and an atmosphere of looming menace.

Starting with flashes of love and death — and always a lake with Larraz, this time filled with the floating dead body of some female body — we meet Helen Ramsey (Angela Pleasence) and Anne Weston (Lorna Heilbron). Helen has just returned to England after working as a translator overseas, Anne has just broken up with her boyfriend and they spend an evening in Anne’s ancestral manor deep in the British woods, a place overtaken by nature. Before they go to bed, Helen asks what happens after death.

There was once another woman named Cora Porter, there is also a mysterious man named Brady (Peter Vaughan) who Helen says disgusts her even as she spies on him, there’s also a lake that a woman drowned herself in. These are moments that feel like Larraz has explored before, but never with this level of care or craft. As good as his movies have been, Symptoms is where they come together. Helen is not well; an understatement; but the way the movie takes her on as its lead and then inverts her into becoming the antagonist is masterful.

Jean Seberg was originally cast in the role of Helen — I don’t know if I could have handled this, my joy would have been too immense! — but as she was not part of the British Actors’ Equity Association, she had to drop out. However, Pleasence is astounding. She referred to Larraz as controlling and she was hospitalized after an accident on set with a falling light, but she’s the strong center of this incredible film. She and Heilbron remained close personal friends after making this.

This is the slowest of slow burns, a movie made really about two people and a house and that’s all it needs. Pleasence is that most perfect of doomed women, unsure of where she is in space and time, only assured that no matter the love she tries to bring into hers, she will lose it, she will destroy it and the cycle will begin again.

A masterwork.

Emma (Susanna East, Permissive, Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter) has been in an accident in London — we’re already two for two on the list of José Ramón Larraz’s favorite things in put in movies — and must be confined to the home of her Sylvia (Perla Cristal). As she recovers, her brain has changed, leaving her prone to moments of extreme rage, propelled by the thought that everyone is against her, like the maid who keeps putting frogs under her pillow.

Made shortly before Symptoms, this feels like a trial run for that movie.

Emma (Susanna East) had been living in the psychiatric hospital in the care of Dr. Donovan (George Rigaud), but Sylvia’s guilt — she’s the one who hit her — is why she moves in, which worries Steve (Ángel Menéndez), as he isn’t too excited about having a mentally deranged young girl who already survived getting hit by his wife’s car. So he plans a trip to Bermuda to get away, but Emma kills him first and Sylvia does everything but outright thank her, even getting rid of the body.

Emma soon kills the woman and makes her way to an abandoned hotel in the woods — Larraz trademark! — and when two hippie hitchhikers with bad intentions with the names of Cleo and Woody (Marina Ferri and Andrew Grant) show up, as does Emma’s friend Lupe (Hélène Françoise). Things don’t go well for anyone who gets in the way of our young lady with a razor.

Conceived while Larraz made La muerte incierta and based on a story by Carlo Reali, who was the editor of Larraz’s Deviation, this was made in England as Larraz was still afraid to make his movies in the still Fascist Spain, although parts of this were made in Barcelona.

Director of Photography Antonio Millán and camera crew Juan Prous and Ricardo González — Millán and Prous were vets of working with Jess Franco — make sure that this looks gorgeous, even though it makes no sense and doesn’t need to explain itself. Yet who cares? Larraz wasn’t interested in making anything other than these absolute movies that you need to figure out for yourself.

Also: we have entered the post-Manson era when nearly all hippies in horror are deranged maniacs out to do harm. Act accordingly.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on January 14, 2022 and has been updated for this post.

José Ramón Larraz went to school for philosophy, became a comic book writer and then made some wild movies, like Whirlpool, which Roger Ebert negatively reviewed — I mean, I love it — by saying that it was ga enuinely sickening film. It has to do with various varieties of sex, yes, but its main appeal seems to be its violence… The violence is not, however, the cathartic sort to be found in The Wild Bunch or the comic strip spaghetti Westerns. It’s a particularly grisly sort of violence, photographed for its own sake and deliberately relishing in its ugliness. It made me awfully uneasy.” He also directed the Spanish Western Watch Out Gringo! Sabata Will Return, The House That Vanished (which had so many titles, including Scream…And Die! and Please! Don’t Go in the Bedroom, as well as a campaign that made it look like Last House on the Left), Symptoms, Stigma, Black Candles (AKA Sex Rites of the Devil) and three American co-productions before the end of his career, the underrated Edge of the Axe, Rest in Pieces and Deadly Manor.

The film starts with its leads, Fran (Marianne Morris) and Miriam (Anulka Dziubinska, billed here as Anulka; a former Page 3 girl who was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for May 1973, she was once married to Soupy Sales’ son Tony, who was in Tin Machine with David Bowie, Reeves Gabriels and his brother Hunt Sales) in bed together, which was probably quite shocking in 1974, but perhaps even more shocking is when they’re machine gunned before the credits.

They’re brought back as vampires that roam the British countryside and take in wayward male motorists, draining them of more than blood before disposing of these conquests. They have a different form of vampirism than you may have seen before, making grisly arm wounds that they continually feed from, closer to cannibals than bloodsuckers.

Morris and Anulka make quite the pair; the film is in love with everything they do. Beyond the gorgeous leads, the scenery is just as inviting, as this was not around Oakley Court, which Hammer used for The Man in Black, The Lady Craved Excitement, The Brides of Dracula, The Reptile and The Plague of the Zombies. William Castle shot The Old Dark House there and you’ll also see it in films like Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly; And Now the Screaming Starts! and perhaps most famously, it was the home of Dr. Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. While it had no heat or running water when that movie was filmed, it’s now a luxury hotel.

This played double features with The Devil’s Rain! in England, which is my kind of night.

You can watch this on Tubi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

You know you’re in for a wild ride when the opening lines of dialogue in a horror film — heck, just about any genre of film — are, “Hey, what kind of a freak are you? Why are you singin’ hymns when I’m tryin’ to give you head?”

Depending on your politics, it’s a toss-up as to whether writer/director Walt Davis’ Evil Come, Evil Go was meant to be a horror film with softcore porn or a softcore horror porn with horror. The amount of deliberate humor vs. unintentional comedy is probably up for debate, as well.

Filled with adult film actors and crew including Davis himself, the movie is a real mind-bender. Sarah Jane Butler (Cleo O’Hara) travels the country living her very personal version of following the Bible, ridding the world of what she considers evil men and pleasurable sex by picking random dudes up at seedy bars and then having sex with them, slicing them up just as they are about to achieve orgasm. In Los Angeles — where you could get a hot dog and a soft drink for 53 cents in 1974, as captured for posterity here — she meets up with lesbian silver spooner disowned by her family Penny (Sandra Henderson) and indoctrinates her as the first member of Sarah’s “Sister Sarah’s Sacred Order of The Sisters of Complete Subjugation,” which basically means she now has a partner in crime. The two knock off men together in nasty ways, and Penny’s girlfriend Junie (Jane Louise AKA Jane Tsentas) isn’t off limits, either.

It’s hard to say which is the worst in this movie: the acting, the nominees for least sexiest sex scenes in the history of horror and possibly adult cinema (including multiple zoom-ins to vulvae that come across as more clinical than anything erotic), or the poor ADR. The wildly inappropriate score, which changes randomly from one style to another — I counted at least 3 times during a single sex scene that wasn’t long enough to warrant that — is also a head scratcher.

Everyone except O’Hara, is marvelously over the top, is acting like they’re merely reciting memorized lines — with a couple of instances of lines evidently forgotten and then immediately repeated correctly. With as many flubbed lines as there are, I wouldn’t be surprised that many scenes were single takes.

If you are easily offended by, well, just about anything, this movie should press at least a couple of your buttons. If you are not yet sold into experiencing Evil Come, Evil Go at least once, know that there is a cat that randomly jumps into and out of sex and bondage scenes, not to mention a recurring soft rock theme song that has a hilarious, if question-raising, payoff.                     

The version shown at Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival is a restoration courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome and the American Genre Film Archive, which looks and sounds quite impressive.

Evil Come, Evil Go screens as part of South Korea’s hybrid Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, which takes place in Bucheon and online July 7–17, 2022. For more information, visit http://www.bifan.kr/eng/

All the Horrors of Satan is the kind of movie title that you only get from Mexico or Italy and God bless them for it, totally Catholic countries that know how to get only the finest in Satanic sleaze directly into your brain. This doesn’t go as hard as some Mexitrash, but it is The Fall of the House of Usher as made by director Julián Soler.

Eric Gerard and his sister Isabel have been afflicted with a mysterious disease that impacts them both in different ways, as Eric’s senses have become incredibly sensitive and Isabel has become comatose. They’re victims of the Gerard curse, as when there is more than one child, they must go insane and die horribly.

This is a really talkative movie, so if your Spanish isn’t that great and you dislike subtitles, you should probably find something else. That said, Poe probably never intended for his movie to have black magic rituals and I have to say that this is all the better for it.

Vipers Shed Their Skin is also known as Guns and Guts and it’s not an Italian western. It’s a Mexican one, directed by René Cardona Jr. (Tintorera…Tiger Shark, Night of 1000 Cats), and stars Jorge Rivero (Operation 67, Conquest) as El Pistolero, a killer who wants to finish one last job before he settles down with Chiquita (former vedette Zulma Faiad).

He’s joined by Esposo Abandonado, which means abandoned husband (Pedro Armendariz Jr.) and Prisionero Escapado, which means escaped prisoner (Rogelio Guerra) to hunt down a sheriff (Quintin Bulnes) who is hiding in a monastery.

The end of this movie is totally The Wild Bunch. To get there, you get a guy getting shot in the neck and bleeding everywhere and tons of female nudity, but the movie meanders on the way.

You can watch this on Tubi.