First things first: this movie has a major identity crisis. It was originally shot way back in 1975 under the title Wheeler by directors Jack Collins and Jim Feazell. But they didn’t just stop in Texas, as the production actually set up camp in El Dorado, Arkansas. Over the years, distributors kept shuffling the deck, re-releasing and re-titling this poor movie as The Mama’s Boy and The Hurting before it finally settled into its most infamous exploitation moniker: Psycho from Texas. They even dragged the movie back to the editing room in 1978 to shoot entirely new insert footage just to crank up the sleaze factor.
The story centers around a complete drifter and hitman named Wheeler (John King III, The House of the Dead). Wheeler is your textbook exploitation psycho, raised in absolute squalor by a violently abusive mother, which left his mind thoroughly scrambled by beating him and — as in all 70s and 80s psycho movies — sleeping around.
After he grows up, Wheeler gets hired by a local businessman to kidnap a wealthy oil baron. To pull off the heist, he teams up with a local backwoods hillbilly named Slick (Tommey Lamey). The oil baron manages to escape almost immediately, turning the entire second half of the movie into a chaotic, endless, slow-motion foot chase through the swamps and muddy backwoods of the South. It’s mostly just Slick screaming wildly into the wind while everyone gets covered in mud. Throw in a stereotyped, bumbling country sheriff (co-director Jack Collins himself) and a screaming maid named Joann Bruno, and you have a recipe for pure drive-in gold.
The absolute main attraction here is an incredibly early, pre-fame appearance by the future Queen of Scream herself, Linnea Quigley. During that 1978 pick-up shoot, they cast a young Linnea for a completely gratuitous, jaw-droppingly sleazy sequence where Wheeler holds her captive and forces her to dance naked while pouring beer all over her. Looking back on one of her very first film gigs, Linnea didn’t exactly have warm, fuzzy memories of the El Dorado shoot, later saying: “They made me take my clothes off and poured beer on me. It was stupid.“
Though this is listed first on Linnea Quigley’s filmography, it is not her first role, as that was Fairy Tales.
My absolute favorite piece of trivia about this movie has nothing to do with what’s on the screen and everything to do with how they tried to sell it. When the movie premiered in New York City back in 1976, the distributors ran a legendary cowboy-style promotional stunt. They hired a massive truck, plastered it with a giant Psycho from Texas banner, mounted a set of high-powered loudspeakers on the roof, and blasted threatening country-fried warnings at people walking the Deuce.
I rarely watch a movie that gets on the very verge of upsetting me. Poor Pretty Eddie is that rare film that pushed me pretty far and made me feel somewhat upset while watching, which ended up making me keep going and enjoy the end results. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s amazing that this movie even exists.
Most of the makers of this film were employed in the adult film industry, with Poor Pretty Eddie representing their chance to go straight. Backing came from Michael Thevis, the notorious Atlanta-based “King of Pornography,” who owned a record company named GRC, a chain of sex shops and a company that manufactured peep show booths. In fact, the rock band Flood recorded the soundtrack for the martial arts movie Blood of the Dragon in his Sound Pit Studio on Atlanta’s Simpson Street, which also saw country singer Moe Bandy, dance sensation Loleatta Holloway and country songwriter and the author of the three million record selling “Chevy Van” Sammy Johns — as well as R&B acts like Ripple, the Rhodes Kids, King Hannibal and Sam Dees — all record there. He also published a series of pornographic novels that were written by Ed Wood under the name Donna D. Dildo.
Producing a legit movie allowed Thevis to launder money that he had made through shadier dealings, which brought the FBI in. Shortly after the film was released, he was jailed on a variety of charges and then escaped prison in 1978, ending up on the FBI’s most-wanted list. He had already put a contract out on the life of the man who had given the police all the info they needed to put him away. While on the lam, he tracked down that man — Roger Dean Underhill — and killed him and another associate. He bragged about it in prison, and fellow prisoners ratted him out.
In 1980, Michael Thevis, the so-called “Scarface of Porn,” who once owned nearly half of the industry and made $100 million a year ($311 million today when adjusted for inflation), was sentenced to spend 28 years to life in the Oak Park Heights Correctional Facility, an underground penitentiary outside of Minneapolis and eventually the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta. His palatial home was eventually sold to Whitney Houston. In 2013, he died of heart and respiratory failure. This Daily Beast article on his life is required reading.
Poor Pretty Eddie was written by B. W. Sandefur, who is mostly known for his TV writing and producing. In fact, he was behind one of the oddest series of the early 1980’s, NBC’s Cliffhangers, which featured three different stories that all began in the middle. Stop Susan Williams, The Secret Empire and The Curse of Dracula were all eventually released theatrically in Europe — with extra material added.
Loosely based on Jean Genet’s play The Balcony and directed by David Worth (Kickboxer) and Richard Robinson (whose films include Is There Sex After Marriage and Adultery for Fun & Profit ), this film is shocking even today.
The Turner Classic Movies article on the film hits it right on the head. They describe Eddie as such: “A sleazy exploitation thriller with artistic pretensions, the film manages to be offensive, crude and inept in equal measure while still succeeding as a compulsive viewing experience for connoisseurs of fringe cinema who think they’ve seen everything.”
We start at the University of Georgia, where Liz Wetherly (Leslie Uggams, who older readers will know from Roots and younger ones will know from the Deadpool movies) is performing the national anthem. There’s a cut to her car driving down a country road, and we hear her say, “Look, I have two weeks before my next concert. Now I’m going to get in my car and drive until I find a nice, quiet hole to crawl into.”
Be careful what you wish for.
After his car breaks down, Liz rents a cabin for the night — so she thinks — while the gigantic handyman Keno (Ted Cassidy, who was Lurch on The Addams Family, as well as the second actor to play Bigfoot on The Six-Million Dollar Man after Andre the Giant. He was also the narrator for The Incredible Hulk and provided the voices for Godzilla, Frankenstein Jr., The Thing, Moltar, Metallus, Black Manta and Brainiac for various Hanna-Barbera cartoons.)
Somehow, she ends up stuck for days thanks to the machinations of Eddie (Michael Christian, TV’s Peyton Place), a lothario who has already ensnared motel owner Bertha (Shelley Winters, who was in so many movies where she ran a house of ill repute, at least in my imagination, as well as the killer mother of an alien child in a role that doesn’t add up in another astonishingly bonkers Atlanta-based movie, The Visitor). Strangely enough, in the filmed version of the aforementioned Genet play, Winter played nearly the same role. Yet here, she plays it as a once gorgeous showgirl stuck remembering the past through the haze of alcohol, trying in vain to hold on to her man. Of note, Winters was paid in cash for her role and nearly died when her private plane almost crashed upon landing in Atlanta.
Not only does Eddie want Liz for carnal reasons, buthe also thinks she can help him in his career as a country singer. He spends much of the film dressed in Elvis jumpsuits and warbling his way through ballads. And oh yeah — he eventually assaults our heroine and then subjects her to further torture, like forcing her to please a traveling salesman and eating Keno’s dog.
Liz finally gets the courage to turn in Eddie, which leads to Sheriff Orville (Slim Pickens!) asking her, “Did he bite ya on the tittie?” and making her submit to a public trial in a crowded VFW/bar as locals gasp that a black woman is in their midst. Drunken proprietor Floyd (Dub Taylor, a cowboy star and former Clemson Tide football player, who is in all manner of redneck films like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, …tick…tick…tick…, Evel Knievel, Gator, Creature from Black Lake, The Great Smokey Roadblockand Moonshine County Express) then conducts a trial in front of an assembled crowd of drunken locals, many of whom appear disturbingly disturbed, that ends with Liz stripped nude and crying.
The film’s montage sequences are some of the most disturbing I’ve sat through, including Eddie assaulting Liz to the sounds of a country love song intercut with two dogs humping, as well as a scene where she takes photos of him near a waterfall, imagining her camera is a shotgun and that he is covered in blood and gore.
It all climaxes with a wedding where Eddie and Liz are to be wed, which ends in a slow-motion Sam Peckinpah-style gun battle as Keno blasts his way in for revenge over his dog, and everyone gets caught in the crossfire. The film ends with Liz, her life ruined and not enhanced by this escape from her busy life, raising a shotgun to murder Bertha.
Also known as Black Vengeance, TheVictim, Heartbreak Motel and Redneck County Rape, the film played drive-ins and grindhouses for nearly a decade. The Heartbreak Motel version features plenty of differences, as Eddie narrates the movie and action scenes have been cut out and replaced with lengthy soliloquies that don’t appear in any other version of the film. Instead of ending with the gun battle, Heartbreak Motel closes with Eddie leaving Georgia for Nashville and a recording contract. There are fewer scenes of Eddie attacking Liz, but, strangely enough, there is one where Eddie and Bertha make, umm, third input love to the haunting strains of a bluegrass ballad.
To say that critics — especially in Atlanta — disliked this film is an understatement.
The 1970s were packed with films that you are kind of, sort of horror movies, yet feature no supernatural elements. They just made you feel like you needed to take an entire day’s worth of showers to clean off the scum after watching them. This is one hell of an addition to those movies. It’s not for everyone, but for those who want to see how low exploitation can go, it’s ready to attack your sensibilities.
Filmed in San Francisco for what looks like the cost of a couple of cases of cheap beer and a trip to the butcher shop and clocking in at just over an hour, Nick Imllard’sCriminally Insane is the opposite of its alt title, Crazy Fat Ethel. It’s lean, mean and ready to pounce.
Meet Ethel Janowski (Priscilla Alden). She’s just been released from an asylum into the care of her long-suffering grandmother. The doctors think Ethel is cured. The doctors are wrong.
Ethel doesn’t want to reintegrate into society; she just wants to eat. Constant, non-stop, uninterrupted consumption. Soft-boiled eggs, whole loaves of bread, chocolate syrup straight from the bottle — if it fits on a plate, Ethel is shoving it down her throat.
The conflict arises when Grandma, concerned for both Ethel’s health and her own mounting grocery bills, decides to put a padlock on the refrigerator door. Big mistake. Huge. You don’t get between Ethel and her snacks. What follows is a slow-motion, butcher-knife-wielding rampage where Grandma (Jane Lambert), a local delivery boy and anyone else who dares step into the kitchen gets brutally, systematically eliminated.
Ethel isn’t just killing people; she’s hiding the bodies in the bedrooms, leading to a house full of flies, stench and the absolute peak of mid-70s drive-in atmosphere. With her heavy breathing, intense glares, and total commitment to the bit, Priscilla Alden created an unforgettable slasher icon before the slasher genre even had its official rules written. She doesn’t need a hockey mask or a dream world. She just needs a sharp object and an empty stomach.
This movie is ugly, poorly lit and has a music score that sounds like someone dropping a synthesizer down a flight of stairs. In short — I love it. Plus, you get George “Buck” Flower as a detective, blood with no wounds and the material that Millard would recycle into the sequel and the films Cemetery Sisters, Death Nurse and Death Nurse 2.
“It was hardly the crime of the century…It wasn’t even the mugging of the month. It was just a rollicking rip-off!”
Professor (Robert Nichols, The Thing) is a man with a tweed jacket, a permanent squint and a foolproof plan that involves more geometry than common sense. His crew is a motley collection of losers and their target is Big Bertha’s, a sprawling, neon-lit roadhouse tucked away in the backwoods. To the Professor, it’s a vault of untaxed cash and liquid gold. To the rest of the county, it’s the only place to get a decent drink and a game of cards without being judged by the preacher.
Big Bertha (Hetty Galen, The Manitou) doesn’t need a security system. She has a six-gauge shotgun named Persuasion and a staff of girls who can outshoot, outdrink and outwrestle any man in three counties.
The Professor’s stealthy approach is doomed from the start. They arrive just as the local Sheriff’s Department is celebrating a birthday. The parking lot is a sea of squad cars, yet the Professor mistakes the flashing lights for grand opening decorations. Once the moonshine is discovered and the bullets start flying (mostly hitting vases and bottles), the movie devolves into pure physical comedy. It doesn’t take itself seriously. The film thrives on the absurdity of professional”criminals being outmatched by a house full of girls in nightgowns and a rowdy sheriff’s department. Somewhere in all of this is Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead.
This was directed by Peter Kares, the only film he’d helm, but he also produced Longshot and The Switch or How to Alter Your Ego. There were plenty of writers, including Robert N. Langworthy, who produced Preacherman and scored Sex and the College Girl, who came up with the concept; Robert Vervoordt and Albert T. Viola (Amos Huxley himself, the star of Preacherman) worked out the story and Viola and Harvey Flaxman (the writer of Grizzly!) wrote the script.
Nerd facts: An orphan in this is played by Paige Conner, who would go on to be Katy, the space devil child in The Visitor! There’s also Josie Johnson from Stigma (she’s also in Fingers, which has a dream cast of Harvey Keitel, Tisa Farrow, Jim Brown, Tanya Roberts and Danny Aiello) and George Ellis shows up. He was horror host Bestoink Dooley, who was in his own movie, The Legend of Blood Mountain. Mary Mendum is here as well. She used the name Rebecca Brooke for several of Joe Sarno’s films, such as Misty and Abigail Lesley Is Back in Town. Speaking of those movies, Bil Godsey was the cinematographer on them both, as well as this film. He also shot camera on Sisters and Deep Throat Part II.
First: Joe Don Baker was once presented as the kind of sex symbol who didn’t just get Linda Evans in bed, he was kind of angry about it.
Second: Mitchell was not intended to be riffed on. And yet here we are, with a movie that most people know from the final episode that Joel was on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Then again, critics hated this when it came out in 1975. Vincent Carnaby said, “Mitchell, starring Joe Don Baker as a hard-nosed Los Angeles detective named Mitchell, has a lot of over-explicit violence, some gratuitous sex stuff and some rough language, yet it looks like a movie that couldn’t wait to get to prime-time television. Perhaps it’s a pilot film for a TV series, or maybe it’s just a movie that’s bad in a style we associate with some of the more mindless small-screen entertainments.
Mitchell spends what seems to be the greater part of the film climbing in and out of automobiles, driving automobiles, chasing other automobiles, parking automobiles, and leaning against the body of automobiles that are temporarily at rest. Once he smashes a hoodlum’s hand in the door of an automobile.
The climax, for a giddy change of pace, features a police helicopter in pursuit of a high-speed cabin cruiser. Automobiles sink when driven onto water.”
He could have been right. After all, the cut that aired on the CBS Late Movie was heavily edited with scenes shot just for TV, eliminating most of the violence, nudity and profanity. It also has the death of John Saxon’s character happen off screen, where we hear about his death on the radio. Keep in mind that he’s presented as Mitchell’s arch enemy.
Mitchell (Baker) is after Saxon’s character, Walter Deaney, but learns from the Chief of Police (Robert Phillips) tells Deaney is wanted for “every federal law violation in the book” and “FBI property.” This doesn’t stop Mitchell, who wants to go after him instead of staking out James Arthur Cummins (Martin Balsam), a crime boss shipping in heroin. To get him off the case, Deaney hired $1,000 a night call girl Greta (Linda Evans) to keep him busy. Instead, Mitchell arrests her for possession and even turns down a bribe. Soon, Deaney and Cummins are working together to kill our slovenly hero.
If you enjoy larger men battling, this has Baker fighting Merlin Olsen. I mean, we’ve already imagined a world where a high priced sex worker wants to sleep with Baker for free. Why not?
Directed by Andrew V. McLaglen (The Wild Geese, The Sea Wolves, Sahara) and written by Ian Kennedy Martin, this also has a great theme song, “Mitchell” by Hoyt Axton.
“My my my my Mitchell
What do your Mama say?
What would she do
if she knew you
were fallin’ round and carryin’ on that way…
Crackin’ some heads, jumpin’ in and out of beds
and hangin’ round the criminal scene…
Do you think you are some kind of a star like the guys on the movie screen…
Well oh my my my Mitchell
What would your captain say?
If he knew you was hangin’ round
Eatin’ with the crooks and shootin’ up the town
Know you been out there, roundin’ up the syndicate
succeedin’ where the others have failed
Oh my my my Mitchell
You shoot ’em just to get ’em in jail
When they take a look in the record book, they’ll find you got a lot of class…
The whole shebang, arrestin’ painted ladies for a little grass
Oh my my my Mitchell!”
Supposedly, Baker was so upset by this being on Mystery Science Theater 3000 that he threatened to fight anyone from the show if he saw them. That didn’t stop them from also doing another of his movies, Final Justice — another movie in which he uses an orange to prove how he is going to destroy someone — on the show.
April 25: Bava Forever — Bava died on this day 43 years ago. Let’s watch his movies.
Mario Bava — or John Old — was the man who could make a studio backlot look like the gates of Gehenna. And while Lisa and the Devil was his heart and soul, it didn’t exactly set the box office on fire. But then The Exorcist happened, and suddenly every producer in Italy wanted their own pea-soup-spewing cash cow.
Producer Alfredo Leone had a masterpiece on his hands that nobody wanted to see, so he did the most exploitation producer thing imaginable: He asked Bava to chop it up, add some possession flavor and then he retitled it House of Exorcism. Now it was less of an art film and more, well, Exorcisty.
This flick is a Frankenstein’s monster of cinema. You’ve got the ethereal, dreamlike footage of Bava’s original cut smashed together with new scenes directed by Leone (and a helping hand from Lamberto Bava, aka John Old Jr.). To slap a name on this identity crisis, they credited Mickey Lion as the director.
Mario said, “Even though it bears my signature. It is the same situation, too long to explain, of a cuckolded father who finds himself with a child that is not his own, and with his name, and cannot do anything about it.”
So what is new? A lot. Enough to make you think that this is two movies joined together, which it totally is.
There’s a new framing device in which Father Michael (Robert Alda, father of Alan) is an exorcist trying to exorcise a demon from Lisa (Elke Sommer). She’s swearing more than Regan MacNeil, showing way more skin and also throwing up frogs. She’s also Elena, and all of Bava’s superior cut becomes a series of flashbacks to how she lost her mind, her life and her soul, eventually possessing Lisa.
Elena was stuck in an incestuous four-way relationship between her husband Max (Alessio Orano), a guy so impotent and tied to his mother’s (Alida Valli) apron strings it’s no wonder Elena looked elsewhere and found love — and some deep dicking — from her husband’s stepfather (Espartaco Santoni). It all ends in blood and with every in hell.
Somewhere in all of this, we have the priest get tempted by the ghost of his dead wife — she burned up in a car wreck — Anna (Carmen Silva), who is one of those Eurohorror women who seems like an android with a perfect body and fake eyelashes. Magic in its purest form. “Darling, don’t be embarrassed. You’re still a man. Take me.” You know, the devil works hard to convert those who have faith, but have you seen Carmen Silva? I get it. Man, I sure get it.
This feels like a weird U.S.-made exploitation rip-off of Lisa with bloodier deaths and a near-inserts level edit of Sylvia Koscina and Gabriele Tinti (and body doubles) getting it on. You know, I’m sure Gabriele Tinti was a good guy, but between this and him being married to Laura Gemser, I kind of despise the dude.
Spare a thought for poor Elke Sommer, who had to come back two years later just to contort on a hospital bed and projectile vomit neon green slime. It’s a far cry from the gothic beauty of the original, but there’s a greasy charm to it that you just can’t find in modern horror. I can’t help but kind of love the balls on this concoction of a movie.
Also: In Annie Hall, Alvy Singer (Woodie Allen) walks past a marquee playing Lisa and the Devil and Messiah of Evil, and he kind of scoffs. For this and so many more reasons, I hope Tisa kicked him right in the dick at Passover, and it was no accident.
Brian Trenchard-Smith is the patron saint of go-big-or-go-home. For his feature debut (along with action scenes directed by star Jimmy Wang Yu), he didn’t just walk through the door. No, he kicked it down, set it on fire and then hang-glided over the ashes. The Man from Hong Kong (aka The Dragon Flies) is the ultimate East-meets-West collision, a 50/50 co-production between Australia and Hong Kong that plays like a James Bond flick on a steady diet of adrenaline.
Originally, this was supposed to be a Bruce Lee vehicle. Can you imagine? But after the Dragon passed, the production pivoted to Jimmy Wang Yu (The One-Armed Swordsman himself). He plays Inspector Fang Sing Leng, a Hong Kong cop who lands in Sydney to extradite a drug courier and ends up tearing the city apart to get to the man at the top. That man? None other than George Lazenby.
Yes, the guy who played Bond once gets to play the heavy here, Jack Wilton, and he is clearly having the time of his life being a total bastard. He’s joined by an Ozploitation who’s who, including Hugh Keays-Byrne and Roger Ward (both of whom you know from Mad Max). Even a young Sammo Hung, billed as Hung Kam Po, shows up to get into a scrap on top of Uluru!
If you’ve seen Stunt Rock, you’ve seen the action from this movie, as legendary stuntman Grant Page hang-gliding over Sydney Harbor like it’s no big deal. This is a stunt show with massive automotive carnage designed by Peter Armstrong that rivals anything coming out of Hollywood at the time. In the final showdown, Lazenby actually gets set on fire. Not movie fire. Real fire. He even got singed during the take, because that’s just how they rolled down under
And let’s not forget the theme song. “Sky High” by Jigsaw is a soaring, majestic piece of 70s pop that has absolutely no business being the intro to a movie where people are getting punched in the throat, yet somehow, it’s perfection. It was also the theme song for Mil Mascaras and his brother Dos Caras in Japan.
If you want to see what happens when you mix martial arts mastery with a complete lack of regard for human safety, make The Man from Hong Kong your destination. Also: No permits were used to film this.
Rings of Fear (1978): This is the third entry in a loosely linked series of films that are known by the pervy and wonderous title of the Schoolgirls in Peril trilogy, a run of movies that take the already queasy obsessions of giallo and crank them into something even more uncomfortable. These are films where the camera lingers just a little too long, where morality is nonexistent and where the punishment for youthful sexuality is swift, brutal and usually wrapped in plastic.
The series starts with What Have You Done to Solange?, directed by Massimo Dallamano, one of the absolute high-water marks of the giallo form, a movie that balances sleaze, sadness, and a genuinely upsetting mystery in a way most of its imitators can only dream about. He followed that up with What Have They Done to Your Daughters?, which dials up the nihilism and leans harder into the idea that the world is an uncaring machine designed to chew up the young and spit them out. Sadly, Dallamano would die before this movie was made, but his fingerprints are all over it thanks to his screenplay credit, which means you still get that same mix of procedural grit and moral rot.
This time around, the film wastes no time getting to the good stuff. A teenage girl’s corpse is found wrapped in plastic, which feels like a grim premonition of Twin Peaks and the whole Laura Palmer thing by over a decade. Inspector Gianni DiSalvo, played by Fabio Testi with the kind of weary, seen-it-all expression that giallo cops are contractually obligated to have, starts digging into a group of schoolgirls known as The Inseparables. You know right away that any group with a name like that is going to be nothing but trouble.
These girls attend one of those prestigious all-girls’ schools that only seem to exist in Italian genre cinema — the kind of place where education is secondary to whispered secrets, coded glances, and the constant threat of violence lurking just outside the gates. Among them is Fausta Avelli, played by Barbara Bach, who had already been orbiting the genre in films like Don’t Torture A Duckling, The Psychic and Phenomena — basically a resume that screams “you’re in for something good” You also get Helga Liné, one of those faces that shows up in everything from classy Euro-thrillers to absolute bottom-shelf horror like So Sweet…Perverse and Nightmare Castle to The Vampires Night Orgy, Horror Rises from the Tomb and Black Candles. If European exploitation cinema had a frequent flyer program, she’d have lifetime platinum status.
Then there’s that ending. You get one killer casually offing himself like it’s just another item on the to-do list, and just when you think the movie is winding down, it pulls the rug out and reveals who’s really been behind everything. It’s mean, it’s cynical, and it’s exactly why you sat through all the recycled sleaze in the first place. In true giallo fashion, justice doesn’t feel like justice. It feels like just another ugly secret getting buried along with the bodies.
Reflections In Black (1975): A mysterious woman, dressed all in black, including stockings, is killing other beautiful women with a razor. Tano Cimarosa — usually an actor — directs this film, where we soon learn that all of the women are connected to affairs that they had with another woman, which was quite shocking in 1975.
This is really just for those who have to see every giallo ever made. Which would be me. Probably you, too, if you’re reading this. I mean, you’re going to buy this set, right?
A.A.A. Masseuse, Good-Looking, Offers Her Services (1972): Cristina (Paola Senatore*, Emanuelle in America, Ricco the Mean Machine) is a call girl, and for that, every man that has ever partaken of her services must pay, in some sort of role reversal for every other giallo and slasher.
Much like how his leading lady was known for westerns, so was director Demofilo Fidani, who made movies like Coffin Full of Dollars (how’s that for a title?), Django and Sartana Are Coming… It’s the End, One Damned Day at Dawn…Django Meets Sartana!, His Name Was Pot… But They Called Him Allegria and His Name Was Sam Walbash, But They Call Him Amen. As you can tell, many of his films were titled and treated like either sequels or — let’s be fair — rip-offs of better-known characters and movies.
So when everyone else started making giallo, Fidani was sure to follow.
You know how people on Twitter like to use the term problematic? Well, they’d lose their brains all over those, which presents leaving home to enter the sex industry to be a loveable lark, even when your clients get their throats slit the minute they leave her flat. It’s also a film that wants its cake — Vitelli is gorgeous and frequently involved in increasingly kinkier situations — and eat it too, as the whole moral of the story is that the world is falling into decay because of all this sex. So let’s show some more sex! And violence!
Also known as Caresses à domicile (Caresses at Home), the funny thing is that her life gets better when she leaves her father’s house — well, despite the fact that her daddy gave her everything that she ever wanted — to live with a friend, Paola (Simonetta Vitelli, who is the daughter of the director). So there’s not really any drama here, other than you know, all the murder.
*Sadly, she became addicted to heroin late in her career. After making two softcore films for Joe D’Amato, she made her one and only hardcore film, Non stop… sempre buio in sala. She was then arrested for drug smuggling, went to prison and disappeared.
The movie opens with a high-stakes military heist that feels more like a war film than a mafia flick, as Vincenzo (Peter Lee Lawrence) and his crew ambush an army convoy to steal a crate of rifles. Vincenzo’s fatal mistake isn’t just stealing from Don Carmelo (Adolfo Celi); it’s his arrogance. He believes he can outmaneuver the seasoned Don by selling the hardware to a group of Arab insurgents.
The middle act shifts the tension to a claustrophobic hotel in North Africa. This change of scenery distinguishes the film from other Italian crime movies of the era that rarely left the streets of Rome or Milan. TheMiddle Easternsubplot adds a layer of political cynicism, suggesting that Vincenzo is out of his depth not just with the Mafia, but with international arms dealing.
But you know how these Italian crime movies end. Not always well, you know? Maybe he should have just stayed at that hotel with his girlfriend, Sabina (Erika Blanc), and forgotten about a life of crime.
Nardo Bonomi (sometimes credited as Leonardo Bonomi) is a ghost in film history. This is his only officially released directorial credit. While he brings a surprisingly energetic eye to the action, this is one mean-spirited film. Vincenzo isn’t a hero, but an amoral social climber who uses his girlfriend Sabina’s jewelry to fund his escape.
His other project, Sortilegio, remains one of the greatholy grails of Italian cult cinema. The fact that it was co-directed by Corrado Farina (the visionary behind the psychedelic Baba Yaga) suggests Bonomi had a foot in the more avant-garde side of Italian filmmaking before disappearing from the industry entirely. This movie starred Erna Schürer as a woman given to waking nightmares. It was completed, assembled and dubbed, but never arrived for censorship approval and went unpublished. Four Flies Records released the soundtrack, saying, “One of the most mysterious movies that came out from the golden age of Italian cinema, its soundtrack was recorded in 1974. The movie had never been officially distributed and was probably never taken to the final stage of post-production. The film is lost, gone forever apparently.”
Peter Lee Lawrence was often criticized by contemporary critics for being too pretty or wooden, but in The Long Arm of the Godfather, his youthful, clean-cut looks work perfectly. He plays Vincenzo as a man whose ambition far exceeds his intelligence. At the time of filming, Lawrence was already nearing the end of his prolific but short career. The headaches — he died in 1974 at the age of 30 — he suffered during his final years make his frantic, high-energy performance here feel somewhat haunting in retrospect. He was married to Cristina Galbó, who may be best known for playing Elizabeth in What Have You Done To Solange?
Nora Green (Ursula Andress) is a flight attendant who is asked to deliver a letter to a circus led by Silvera (Woody Strode) when she lands in Naples. This gets her in the middle of a gang war. She’s beaten up and thrown to what should be her doom, but she somehow survives. Working with a former circus acrobat, Manuel (Marc Porel), she puts multiple bad guys — there’s Silvera, as well as Don Calo (Aldo Giuffrè) and the mysterious Americano — against one another and looks gorgeous doing it. Luckily, they find another partner in Rosy (Isabella Biagini), who has been the lover of nearly all these gangsters.
Known in Italy as Colpo in canna, this is a fascinating departure for director Fernando Di Leo. While he is the undisputed master of the gritty, nihilistic Poliziotteschi genre — he made Caliber 9, The Italian Connection and Blood and Diamonds and wrote one of my favorite parodies of the genre, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man — this film sees him blending his signature violence with a lighter, almost comic-book tone that leans heavily on the charisma of its lead.
While Di Leo’s “Milieu Trilogy” (Caliber 9, The Italian Connection, and The Boss) is defined by cold-blooded betrayal and urban decay, Loaded Guns feels more like a colorful caper. Di Leo pivots Nora into a femme fatale superwoman archetype. Unlike the doomed protagonists of his other films, Nora is proactive and resilient; she isn’t just a victim of the gang war. She becomes its architect, deliberately whispering in the ears of rival bosses to ensure they wipe each other out.
This ends with a fun brawl that involves the entire cast, including Andress, who did her own stunts. She’s beyond ravishing in this, reminding you that she was not just a Bond girl, but the first of them all. She plays Nora with a wink to the camera, balancing the high-fashion glamour of a flight attendant with the grit of a woman who can take a beating and come back swinging.
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