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, it sounds great to me — by saying that it was genuinely 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.

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.

If you’re trying to be the king of voodoo, don’t bring the bones of Prince Mamuwalde back to life. Maybe voodoo queen Mama Loa knew what she was doing when she chose Lisa Fortier (Pam Grier) as her successor instead of her son Willis (Richard Lawson, Poltergeist).

Sadly, this movie has murky lighting, bad direction and a dumb story, but no matter what, William H. Marshall gives Blacula a dignity beyond this movie and Pam Grier is, well, Pam Grier. So if we just go with the magical power of this movie’s two main actors, it’s a success in spite of itself.

That said, I fully do not believe in the ending that has Lisa get upset when she sees Blacula take out some policemen.

The Medveds claimed that this was the Worst Blaxploitation Movie of All Time. Come on. In a perfect world, we also would have seen Taste the Blood of Blacula, Blacula On Sugar Hill and Blacula Sunday.

You can watch this on Tubi.

“She’ll suck more than your blood!”

You kind of know what you’re getting into.

But how many Canadian vampires do you know? I mean, outside of the post-modern ones sex organs in their armpits or living in strange apartment complexes?

Then again, thanks to Rabid and Marilyn Chambers, the erotic and the vampiric and the Canadian have gone hand in gland before, correct?

A woman and her boyfriend find an old diary at the mansion home of her family and read about how Dr. Fallatingstein created Frank, the man from a lab to satisfy all of her womanly needs but ended up with an impotent monster. So she calls up her cousin Countess Sexcula to try and Emanuelle that sewn together lab man and transform him into the lover she needs.

Nothing works. Romance, hypnotism, strippers, nothing. So Sexcula has to harvest some sex cells — look, this movie isn’t based on science and don’t expect it to be — and then finally he gets his mojo because the movie is about to end, just as Secula is chased by Orgie the lab assistance and the ape that they keep in the lab.

Then the camera pulls back like the end of The Holy Mountain.

That whole chapel sex scene at the end feels like an insert from another movie and is some of the lone sex in the film, if that’s what you’re looking for. I mean, you’re not going to find anything scary. Strangely enough, the 1985 movie Overnight is about a Czech director named Vladmir Jezda making a porn that has a sex robot unable to get it up for Countess Sexcula.

Sexcua was lost for awhile, it was found and perhaps it should have stayed buried. But how many movies combine porno chic with gothic Universal horror? Not enough.

Written, directed and filmed by Joe D’Amato — using the name Michael Wotruba — this film wasn’t seen much in the U.S. until Lightning Video released it in 1985 as Heroes In Hell.

Look, I saw the poster and I know that this was the second movie in a row that D’Amato made with Klaus Kinski, but I have to tell you, when Klaus strode on screen as SS-Brigadeführer Kaufmann, dressed in the finest death’s head costume that a beyond low budget Italian film can get, I jumped out of my chair and yelled, “Klaus Kinski is here!” Honestly, it’s such a good thing that we moved to the country and not the city where neighbors heard frequent screams of “Kinski! It’s Kinski!” and “I love Joe Don Baker!” and “I want to be George Eastman’s best friend!”

A group of American POW’s played by mostly Italians* have escaped from a German POW camp into the French countryside and are part of a plan to capture Kinski that involves stolen uniforms and escaping the very same soldiers that captured them before. And like Shakespeare, well, nearly everyone dies.

But you know, for forty minutes of B-roll footage, you get ten minutes of Kinski flipping out over Renaissance artwork, so you know, I’ll pay that fee.

*I mean, Lars Bloch — AKA Carlos Ewing — is Danish. Paul Muller is Swiss. And Rosemarie Lindt is German. The funny thing is, Both Block and Ewing’s names are in the credits even though they’re the same person. But hey — Kinski’s name is listed as Klaus Kinsky.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Back on January 28, 2019, we wrote about this movie but now it’s time for Joe to take over B&S About Movies and we’re here for all of it. Here’s The Arena!

The assistant director of Johnny Got His Gun, as well as the director of Big Bad Mama, Lone Wolf McQuaid and Eye for an Eye, Steve Carver directed this exploitation roughie, where slave girls become gladiators and rise against their masters. But hey — it has Pam Grier in it! And you know why it’s probably so sleazy? I blame the director of cinematography — Joe D’Amato!

Actually, in Italy, they said that this movie was made by Michael Wotruba. You know who that is? That’s right, the same man who is Joe D’Amato, Aristide Massaccesi. In the book Erotismo, orrore e pornografia secondo Joe D’Amato, the man of many names said that Italian producer Franco Gaudenzi didn’t trust Carver, who was sent by Roger Corman, so he sent D’Amato to help as needed. Carver did the talking, D’Amato did the action and we have a movie.

Speaking of Corman, he offered this movie to Martin Scorsese after Boxcar Bertha. Let that rest in your brain for a bit. Instead of making Mean Streets, Scorsese would have been working with Raf Donato. Or David Hills. Or maybe Boy Tan Bien.

In the time after Spartacus, in the ancient Roman town of Brundusium, a group of slave girls is sold to Timarchus (Daniele Vargas, Eyeball), a promoter who puts together the fights in the Colosseum. After the girls engage in a fight, she gets a big idea: make them fight to the death.

That’s when Mamawi (Pam Grier) and Bodicia (Margaret Markov) — who had just teamed up in Black Mama, White Mama — decide to team up again and get out alive. Rosalba Neri (Lady Frankenstein herself!, as well as Lucifera: Demon Lover and Amuck!) is in this too!

Markov met her husband, producer Mark Damon, while making this movie, but couldn’t date until production was over, as director Steve Carver had made a rule regarding cast and crew intermingling.

Your enjoyment of this will depend on how much you enjoy watching women battle as gladiators. I wrote that a while ago and come on, everybody loves that. They didn’t call this movie Naked Warriors for nothing.

Directed by Richard Fleischer (Compulsion, Fantastic Voyage, Soylent Green, Mandingo, The Jazz Singer) and written by Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty, Out of Sight), this film finds our pally Charles Bronson playing Vincent Majestyk, an ex-con, former U.S. Army Ranger instructor and current watermelon farmer who just wants to get his crop in on time.

Bobby Kopas (Paul Koslo, Vanishing Point) tries to get Majestyk to pay protection money and ends up on the end of his own shotgun. He turns the table on our hero by bringing assault charges against him and Majestyk goes to jail before he can harvest his crops, potentially ruining his finances. So he does what you or I would: when gangster Frank Renda’s (Al Lettieri, The Godfather) men try to busy him loose, he kidnaps the crook himself and holds him for hostage. All he wants is to pick his melons.

The rest of the film finds the two men continually going at one another. Well, to be fair, Majestyk is only concerned with melons, whether in the field or owned by his love interest Nancy Chavez (Linda Cristal, who was on the TV show The High Chaparral and in the TV movie The Dead Don’t Die). Every time Renda, Kopas or any of their underlings try to take him down, he just laughs and gets over on them. Hey — it’s Bronson, you know?

I also love Lee Purcell in this movie, playing the gangster’s moll who carries a Bible everywhere she goes.

You have to love the tagline for this film: “Last year Billy Jack became one of the most popular pictures of our time. Walking Tall thrilled audiences across the nation. Now the movie everyone’s talking about is Mr. Majestyk.”

They also tried: “Why are they saying it’s the one movie you should see this year? Ask anyone who’s seen it. Anyone.”

This came out the same month as Death Wish and to show what a star Bronson was, when The Man with the Golden Gun underperformed, Mr. Majestyk played as a supporting feature underneath that Bond picture. I mean, there’s even a Turkish remake of this movie, Karpuzcu, which shows you just how big Bronson’s appeal was worldwide.

The Kino Lorber blu ray of this film has a gorgeous brand new 2K master, commentary by film historian Paul Talbot, the author of Bronson’s Loose*,  interviews with Director of Photography Richard H. Kline and Lee Purcell, TV commercials and a trailer. You can get it from Kino Lorber.

*Check out our interview with Paul here.

After suffering numerous defeats at the hands of the Qing kung fu experts, five patriots return to the ruined Shaolin temple — that burned down at the end of Shaolin Temple — to perfect their kung fu and take revenge.

Hu De-Di (David Chiang), Cai De-Zhong (Ti Lung), Fang Da-Hong (Mang Fei), Ma Chao-Xing (Alexander Fu Sheng) and Li Shi-Kai (Chi Kuan-Chun) must now become their own masters, training themselves and overcoming self-doubt in order to become legends.

However, one of their number is a traitor, which adds some intrigue to the proceedings. The best part of the movie is the huge battle and escape at the beginning, as each hero gets an introduction and a freeze frame with their name as we rock out to their theme song. Better than that, the villains get the same treatment, including a villainous song for them to do evil to.

Chang Cheh directs this and Wang Lung-Wei again plays the traitorous villain, which is pretty astounding as he died at the end of the last film, but you can’t keep a great heel down. There’s also a bad guy in this that can snap necks with his ponytail, which is definitely the kind of martial art that you don’t see in many films.

The Arrow Video Shaw Scope Volume One box set has Five Shaolin Masters in uncompressed Mandarin and English original mono audio, as well as newly translated English subtitles and English hard-of-hearing subtitles for the English dubs.

There are also alternate opening credits from Five Masters of Death, the US version of Five Shaolin Masters, and U.S. and German trailers.

You can get this set from MVD.

You can also stream this movie on the Arrow player. Visit ARROW to start your 30-day free trial. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Android TV and mobile devices, Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc), and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.

The Old School Kung Fu Fest is back and the Museum of the Moving Image and Subway Cinema will co-present eight newly restored films and one fan favorite classic by Kuo on glorious 35mm. Four titles will be available exclusively online, December 6–13, and another five films for in-person big-screen viewing at MoMI, December 10–12. 

To see any of these shows, visit the Museum of the Moving Image online or Subway Cinema.

Lin Fung carries people with his rickshaw tirelessly to provide for his blind wife, but when a new and evil team of rickshaws comes to town with Tong Yan in charge, our hero starts a series of fights that leads to his wife being taken and a trap being set for him. Up until now, Lin Fung was held back by his wife’s ban on fighting, but now he’s going to take out everyone in his way.

Revenge is rough, though. Yan’s son is killed, so everyone Lin Fung loves must die as well, so while our hero remains triumphant, he honestly has nothing to show for it. That’s why I love martial arts movies and get upset — I seethe inside like Lin Fung wanting revenge — when people make fun of the bad dubbing and think they’re jokes. They’re melancholic musings on the fragile existence that we live in and the feeling that the only way out is through fists, feet and brutal death.