The Schoolteacher is the first of the five-film Insegnante series, three of which have Edwige Fenech in the lead (the others have Nadia Cassini and Anna Maria Rizzoli). The story is always pretty simple and as they say, ne derivano cose stupide.

Fefe Mottola (Vittorio Caprioli) wants his son Franco (Alfedo Pea) to graduate, so he hires a private tutor, Giovanna Pagaus* (Fenech). As you may have learned from watching her in oh so many commedia sexy all’italiana movies, the very existence of Edwige Fenech is enough to send men into fits of foaming at the mouth. Franco realizes that he can’t be around her without incident, so he tries to convince her that he’s gay. And yes, that’s worrisome but this is a 1975 Italian sex comedy and this kind of thing tends to happen.

Director Nando Cicero made twenty movies of this quality while writers Tito Carpi (Thor the Conqueror, Tentacles) and Francesco Milizia (The Teasers, Erotic Exploits of a Sexy Seducer, so many other movies where gorgeous women destroy men’s wills and teenage boys have fart-related issues) made plenty more films. That said, this is a fine film for this genre, which is quite simple and obviously rather silly, but there are worse things than watching Edwige Fenech for 95 minutes.

*Giovanna comes from Fenech’s other big sex comedy success, Giovanna Long-Thigh.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

Evil Eye was made in Italy and stars Mexican exploitation hero Jorge Rivero, oddball cowboy icon Anthony Steffen and an American actor known best for being in The Godfather, Richard Conte.

Rivero — who of course was Mace in Fulci’s fog-obsessed Mexican vacation Conquest — is a playboy whose sleeping hours are filled with nightmarish visions of occult rituals and nude  dead women who come screaming back to life. One evening, during a loud thunderstorm, he ends up meeting one of these women, Yvonne (Lone Fleming, Tombs of the Blind Dead) and their evening climaxes with him choking her into oblivion.

Or did he? Ah yes, that giallo chestnut — a murderer who may not be a murderer and then the body turns up. More people show up in Peter’s deadly dreams, then die and he may be an avenging angel of sorts from the world of the shadows. Or maybe he just needs to stay in that insane asylum.

There’s a gorgeous cast — Pia Giancaro (The Red Queen Kills Seven Times), Daniela Giordano (Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key), Pilar Velázquez (Naked Girl Murdered in the Park) and Eva Vanicek — along with stalwart Eurohorror talents like Luciano Pigozzi and Eduardo Fajardo.

There’s also a crazy scene in which Peter tries to save a woman from a mob only for a crane to drop a load of bricks directly on her in a kind of low rent proto-The Omen. That’s also one of the few moments in this movie without full frontal nudity, as this movie goes all in on the sleazier side of Satanic splendor. It also has Fajardo throwing up a frog in one of the most disgustingly wild things I’ve seen before a possessed gun blow him away. And yes, the ending makes no sense, but I kind of demand that.

Director Mario Siciliano also made Alleluja & Sartana Are Sons… Sons of God and Trinity and Sartana Are Coming as well as Erotic Family and Orgasmo non-stop, so you know you’re in good, if not slightly filthy hands. It also has a score by Stelvio Cipriani that makes hippie devil worship nightmare logic feel free and breezy.

Jay Wagner (Robert Duvall) has been framed for murder by his grandfather (John Huston). and is looking at three decades of hard labor in a Mexican jail, unless his wife Ann (Jill Ireland) is able to convince Nick Colton (Charles Bronson), his partner Hawk (Randy Quaid) and Myrna (Sheree North) to take the impossible job of getting his broken out of jail in a daring helicopter mission.

Original director Michael Ritchie didn’t like the idea of the female lead being played by Bronson’s wife Jill Ireland, so you can imagine that’s why Tom Gries (who had already made Breakheart Pass with Bronson) took over. Mexico also had an issue at how their country would be shown in the film, so it was shot at Fort de Bellegarde, France with local gypsies standing in for Mexican people.

Strangely enough, Breakout was based on a true story. Joel David Kaplan was a New York businessman and nephew of molasses tycoon Jacob Merrill Kaplan as well as a potential CIA asset used to funnel money and build relations with governemnts in Latin America. He was connected with the murder of Dominican Republic leader Rafael Trujillo and that man’s godson, Luis Melchior Vidal Jr., who had at one point worked with Kaplan to work as arms dealers for the CIA. And man — you thought politics was complicated now! Anyways, Kaplan went to Mexican jail for 28 years — just like Jay in Breakout — and his wife Judy worked with San Francisco attorney Vasilios Basil “Bill” Choulos to fly a Bell helicopter flying Mexican colors directly into the jail. Joel and his cellmate Carlos Antonio Contreras Castro escaped and were never recaptured.

As for Breakout, it was one of the first movies that used saturation booking instead of a traveling print, opening on 1,300 screens on its first day. It also had 17,000 radio ads. This strategy would be used to even greater effect later that year when Jaws came out.

It’s a fun movie and odd to see Bronson so lighthearted throughout, particularly as this movie follows Death Wish.

The Kino Lorber blu ray release of Breakout has commentary by the king of all Bronson knowledge Paul Talbot, as well as trailers, TV and radio ads. You can buy it directly from Kino Lorber.

Whether you watch this as Calling All Police Cars or Without Trace, this is a movie that reminds us that men have always wanted to own the choices of women and their bodies. The film literally starts with the victim in a bikini posing for photos by a photographer who we’re led to believe is an older pervert. As she wanders the pool, surrounded by rich old men, she asks their drink orders and flirts with each.

As for the photographer, it ends up being her father and hey, Italian cinema, no one thinks this is weird. What follows is teenage prostitution, abortions that require the patient to be fully nude, a murder and a killer who is the giallo sauce in this poliziotteschi pasta.

It’s also about class, as if the father — Professor Andrea Icardi (Gabrielle Ferzetti) — wasn’t a rich doctor, the police would never handle the case so quickly and efficiently.

Director Mario Caino also made Nightmare Castle, Eye in the Labyrinth and Shanghai Joe. His films are always interesting yet he’s rarely mentioned within the usual names of the Italian exploitation directors. Antonio Sabato is good as the lead officer and Luciana Paluzzi (Thunderball, Tragic Ceremony, 99 Women) is also great as female inspector Giovanna Nunziante.

If you’ve already watched What Have You Done to Solange?, What Have They Done to Your Daughters? and Red Rings of Fear, you can consider this another part of the Schoolgirls in Peril movies.

An Italian/Spanish co-production directed by León Klimovsky and written by Ricardo Muñoz Suay and Paul Naschy, who also stars as Inspector Paolo Scaporall, A Dragonfly for Each Corpse is about a killer taking out the junkies and sex workers of Milan and leaving behind a dragonfly sculpture on each body living up to the title of the movie.

Where most giallo films have five murders or so, this one goes wild with 15 murders, several of which are done with an umbrella knife. Scaporalla and his high fashion wife Silvana (Erika Blanc) follow this vigilante killer — who the police debate may be doing their job for them — and she gets so focused on the case that she studies crime scene photos in bed. Naked.

God bless giallo.

Alley brawls with Nazi bikers, chasing transvestite suspects through Luna Park (the site of a major part of Naked Girl Killed In the Park and an endearing relationship between Naschy and Blanc — I dream that they made several sequels of them as a Thin Man series of psychosexual whodunnits — pushes this movie toward the top of the list of giallo, even if it isn’t made in Italy or even played there. It’s also committed to sleaze, at least in the non-Spanish version. As the country was still super restrictive, Klimovsky shot a version that has every nude scene clothed.  As someone that hates censorship, I have to exclaim how horrible the morals that keep Erika Blanc clothed are.

PS: Your ears do not deceive you. This movie takes liberally from the soundtracks of Bava’s A Bay of Blood and Blood and Black Lace.

The Three Supermen series somehow has been remixed around the world, starting as an Italian superhero series, making its way to Turkey and now becoming a Hong Kong film also known as Bruce Lee Against Supermen.

When a Chinese scientist learns how to accomplish the grindhouse alchemy of making food from petroleum — maybe learn how to make food from something that’s less scarce than what you’re replacing, this is like turning diamonds into gold — some criminals kidnap him, so Green Hornet gets called in. He politely declines and sends Kato (Bruce Li), who sticks around long enough to send Carter (also Bruce Li) who dresses like Game of Death Bruce Lee.

Also, that’s not Superman that Bruce Li, not Bruce lee fights, but the Italian Supermen, except only one is in it. Anyways, you have to love a movie that outright steals Emerson Lake and Palmer’s “Karn Evil 9” for a car chase, because why not?

Also, Bruce Li has a love scene with Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” playing.

You can watch this on YouTube or Tubi.