St. Elizabeth’s Refuge seems like a place that helps the downtrodden women of Victorian England by placing them into the homes of the upper class where they gain fulfilling careers that last for their entire lives. Or, you know, they disappear forever.

Now, a rebellious charge named Leonore (Sandra Mozarowsky, Hitler’s Last Train) is trying to discover the secrets of this place and when a movie starts off with a girl’s brain being opened up and sliced against her will, you know that there’s nothing good here. Once her friend Sylvia (Victoria Vera, Monster Dog) becomes one of the missing, her mission becomes even more necessary.

The headmistress Miss Wilkins (Norma Kastel, Tender and Perverse Emanuelle) and her assistant Miss Colton have no problems whipping the girls into shape or pushing them into the unloving arms of Dr. Krueger (Dean Selmier, The Blood Spattered Bride).

More of a gothic romance than the exploitation movie that the first scene may leadd you to believe, School of Death takes its time to give you the rewards you’re looking for. But they’re there and worth the time.

Director Pedro L. Ramírez also made The Fish with the Eyes of Gold, a giallo more concerned with mystery than kills. If you liked that, well, this will be your speed. I kind of love that this movie sets up a totally pervy premise — sex slaves created through brain surgery — and then it’s pretty much a movie that could play on TV.

The Mondo Macabro blu ray of School of Death is the first time that this movie has ever been released on disc. It features a 1080p presentation from a new 4K restoration of the original camera negative, as well as commentary by Kat Ellinger. You can get it from Mondo Macabro.

Also known as Sexy Erotic Jobb — yes, that’s how it’s spelled on the poster — this movie has Count Roland (Fred Williams) leaving behind his boring life to a rich wife to become a butler to the also rich and famous, which allows him to go back to his youthful days of being on top or under or behind anything in kneehighs.

I always wonder about Franco movies, when we see the set and the crew and Jess himself directing at the end, are we having a meta “We began in a fairytale and we came to life, but is this life reality? No. It is a film. Zoom back camera. We are images, dreams, photographs. We must not stay here. Prisoners. We shall break the illusion. This is Maya. Goodbye to the Holy Mountain. Real life awaits us.” The Holy Mountain moment or is Jess just saying screw it or is this his tribute to all the times that boom mics appear in film?

That said, if you want to see what France’s 42nd Street looked like in 1975 — presumably shot with no permit out of a car window, the way it should be — then the last ten minutes of this are for you. The rest is a light comedy and at no time do you worry for your sanity and what kind of Franco movie is that?

Can Al Pereira (Jess Franco) ever catch a break? Stuck in Puerto Rico, down on his luck and broke, he finally gets a job seeing if Carlos Ramos (Eric Fauk) is cheating on his wife Cynthia (Lina Romay), who soon falls into bed with our detective hero and pins the murder of her husvand on him, as he was the last person to see Carlos alive.

Yet when he explains this to the police, they offer to bring him to meet with the dead man’s wife to confirm the story. That’s when the truth comes out. She wasn’t his wife. Olga (Monica Swinn) is, yet she still clears his name.

And soon, Cynthia is back in his life all over again.

Is this Jess Franco’s Chinatown? No, no. It’s just an excuse to use the the pulp detective framework to get down and dirty, featuring numerous dance moments and Lina drinking a Coke in a way that will instantly induce puberty or work better than any little blue pill.

Also, Adrian on Letterboxd shared the lyrics to the song that Lina sings, “Keep It Cool,” and man, it’s really something else, sung phoentically in something approaching English. I’ll summarize a few lines:

“Keep cool, if I come to you,
Keep cool, if I’m kissing you,
Keep cool, if I’m sucking you,
Keep cool, my love, my sweet, keep cool…”

The Great Chase is a blast. Etsuko Shihomi — Sister Street Fighter herself — stars in a spy film from Norifumi Suzuki (School of the Holy Beast, Roaring Fire, ten Torakku Yarō movies which are caper films in the world of dekotora, highly decorated trucks) that was exactly what I needed on a winter day filled with post-holiday ennui.

She plays Shinobu, an agent charged with stopping drug smugglers who put their heroin into the bodies of dead girls, a gang connected to her father, who was framed for a similar crime five years ago and died in prison. This mission involves battling bad guys who can smash rocks on their heads, one with killer playing cards, another with a whip and singing female wrestler Mach Fumiake, a real Japanese pro wrestler who was also the Kilara leader in Gamera Super Monster.

Shinobu is also super famous as a race car driver and even has her own fan club, plus she seems to be some kind of Buckaroo Banzai-esque polymath, as she’s also a master of disguise and a martial artist. This brings her up against Onozawa, a man who enjoys arrdvarking while dressed in a cat suit as he listens to Mozart under a photo of Hitler and his gang of men dressed as nuns moving drugs though a convent who totally must have been exchanging tips in some kind of drug gang peer group with the baddies in They Call Her Cleopatra Wong.

This movie doesn’t want to be normal. And that’s why I love it. In my dreams Suzuki made a whole bunch more movies as Shinobu.

Make your day great. Watch this on YouTube.

Better known as Dracula in the Provinces, this 1975 film was directed by Lucio Fulci four years before Zombi would change his fortunes and anoint him the Godfather of Gore. Made directly after The Four of the Apocalypse, which is as dark as it gets, this is an example of the comedic side of Fulci and would be among his favorite movies.

It was written by Sergio Corbucci’s brother Bruno (who directed The Cop in Blue Jeans and Miami Supercops) and Mario Amendola (who wrote The Great Silence), along with help from Pupi Avati (The House with the Laughing Windows, Zeder), Enzo Jannacci (a cardiologist by day and one of the most important creative forces in Italian rock ‘n roll by night) and Giuseppe Viola.

Costante Nicosia (Lando Buzzanca, who was in two James Tont movies) is a businessman who married for wealth, inheriting a toothpaste factory and a local basketball team. He’s also a horrible person, abusing his employees and taking particular delight in attacking Peppino, a hunchback whose hump is rubbed daily for luck. And he’s so superstitious that a black cat in his path means finding a virgin to urinate on broken glass, which I’ve never heard of before, but sure, I guess.

He also hates his wife Mariu (Sylva Koscina, Deadlier Than the Male), her family and her brother, whose lazy work ethic leads to a firing which ends up having an aunt curse Nicosia. This will come to haunt him, as a plane ride to Romania introduces him to Count Dragalescu (John Steiner), whose castle will end up where Nicosia will cavort with three of the count’s naked girlfriends and wake up in bed next to the naked noble.

Now, Nicosia is not only a vampire, he’s also become a homosexual. For an Italian man in 1975, this had to have been quite a curse. Not even a magician (Ciccio Ingrassia of the comedy duo Franco and Ciccio) can cure him. The only way that he can escape is to rehire the brother-in-law. But what happens if he accepts his thirst for blood?

Fulci also made another comedy, The Eroticist, with Buzzanca, in which he was a man compelled to punch women’s rear ends. This time, he just takes a bit out of Koscina’s.

EDITOR’S NOTES: We originally featured this kind of, sort of Emanuelle film back on May 17, 2021. It’s a movie that George Eastman claims he did instead of going to get a cappuccino that morning. It’s way better than that.

This movie is quite literally the Batman and Superman of Italian sleaze filmmaking uniting to create some art. Those two men have many, many names, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll use the names that they used most often: Joe D’Amato and Bruno Mattei.

Producer Franco Gaudenzi wanted to bring the movie The Wild Pussycat to Italy, but it would have never made it past the Italian censors. For some reason, if the movie was made in Italy, it would pass. This is the country where it’s legal to call your movie Zombi 2, but illegal to use Mrs. Ward’s name. Let’s forget the complexities of law when it comes to exploitation cinema and move on.

D’Amato and Mattei took up the challenge of remaking this movie for Italian audiences with both writing the script and co-directing the picture, even if only D’Amato got directing credit. What was important for the producers was that the film could play theaters and it passed the Italian censorship board on November 5, 1975 after some lesbian elements and scenes with sodomy were removed.

Ironically, when this was brought to Switzerland by Erwin C. Dietrich, he added in actual hardcore scenes with French actress Brigitte Lahaie (who is in Fascination) and dubbed it into German, releasing it as Foltergarten der Sinnlichkeit (Torture Garden of Sensuality) and Die Lady mit der Pussycat (The Lady with the Pussycat).

Truly, scumbag pictures bring all the nations of the world together, do they not?

Francoise (Patrizia Gori, The Return of the Exorcist) has had enough of the abuse from her gambler cad of a husband Carlo (George Eastman!), so she jumps in front of a train. Her sister Emanuelle — no, not Laura Gemser just yet, she’s played here by Rosemarie Lindt from Salon Kitty — gets revenge by drugging Carlo and restraining him in a soundproof room. There, she teases him through two-way mirrored glass as he’s forced to watch her make love to numerous men and women, all while he’s repeatedly dosed with LSD.

Finally, Emanuelle enters the room and attempts to castrate Carlo, who has been repeatedly fantasizing about killing her and finally does so for real. His joy is short-lived as while he’s hiding in the secret room, he gets locked in and the police closed down the crime scene for thirty days, basically leaving him to die.

Also known as Emanuelle’s Revenge, Blood Vengeance and Demon Rage, this is exactly the kind of movie that you’d imagine D’Amato and Mattei would make together, filled with numerous sex scenes, frequently spinning and zooming camera angles and a cannibalistic feast sequence.

Back when we reviewed Emanuelle In America, the guys at Severin said, “If you thought that was rough, watch this one.” Their release has a great George Eastman interview in which he says that  D’Amato had the ability to do bigger and better things, but preferred doing ten B movies a year than one A film. You can get the Severin edition of this film and see just how good-looking a completely irredeemable piece of trash — I say that with love — can look.

Do you think that when Jack Palance bounded to the stage, ready to do one-arm pushups and accept his Best Supporting Oscar for City Slickers after being nominated for Sudden Far and Shane, that he had a flashback and said to himself, “I’m in the A list tonight, but man, how can it compare to being in a movie where Laura Gemser dances with snakes?”

Seriously, the man who would become a star again at the age of 73 has a wealth of roles in aberrant movies in his past, but playing Judas Carmichael in a Joe D’Amato movie may be the pinnacle. Or the pit.

Gemser plays Eva, a snake dancer who obsesses Judas, because he has a snake collection at home — as you do — and he wants to show it to her. So she finally gives in and moves in with him while confining her horizontal dancing to the ladies — including Candy (Ziggy Zanger, who Gemser would go on to appear in Black Emanuelle, White Emanuelle with, along with Nieves Navarro, and just writing that sentence made me a little faint). Judas’ brother Jules (Gabriele Tinti) wants Candy all for himself, so he messes around with the snakes with her — which seems ill-advised — and she gets killed by a mamba. And then he doubles up and kills off Eva’s lover Gerri (Michele Starck, Forever Emmanuelle) and ends up taking Eva from his brother!

Of course, that’s not the end of matters. Eva’s more devious than she looks. And so is Judas. I mean, if your mom names you Judas any time in a year that doesn’t have BC in it, you’re not going to turn out all that great.

Bruno Mattei edited this movie — a fact that makes me love it so much more — and it was also called Emmanuelle And The Deadly Black Cobra, Hot Pants and finally and most awesomely Emmanuelle Goes Japanese, which makes no sense for a movie set in Hong Kong.