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.

The final film in Godzilla’s showa era which lasted from 1952 to 1975 and is made up of fifteen movies. They include the original two films, the revival films that ends with Destroy All Monsters and is followed by the Champion series that starts with All Monsters Attack and ends with this film.

Obviously, this was the least successful of all the films.

Yukiko Takayama wrote this movie after winning Toho’s story contest for the next installment in the Godzilla series. Director Ishiro Honda spoke highly of her work, saying that having a “woman’s perspective was especially fresh.”

It’s also one of only two Japanese Godzilla films with nudity, as Katsura’s breasts are shown when she has an operation to have Mechagodzilla 2’s control device placed inside her body.

The alien Simeons are back and they have a mad scientist who has access to another kaiju, Titanosaurus. His role is to guard the remains of Mechagodzilla long enough for the aliens and their new colleague Dr. Shinzô Mafune to take control of it and destroy the planet.

There’s more spy action than I’d prefer in this movie, but Mechagodzilla looks absolutely awesome. Sadly, he’s so tied to Katsura that the only way she can stop it is to end her own life.

This came out in the U.S. using a Toho-made dub distributed by Bob Conn Enterprises under the title The Terror of Godzilla. Henry G. Saperstein, who kept the TV rights, sold it it to UHF stations as Terror of Mechagodzilla and added a ten-minute opening with stock footage from past films that explained Godzilla’s history.

Meanwhile, in Germany, this was called Konga, Godzilla, King Kong – Die Brut des Teufels (Konga, Godzilla, King Kong – The Brood of the Devil). They were referring to Mechagodzilla as Kong — not in the film itself but in the advertising — and Titanosaurus as Konga. This is the same country that continually tied Dracula into Godzilla movies.

In Italy. this was called Distruggete Kong! la Terra e in Pericolo (Destroy Kong! Earth is in Peril), Titanosaurus was renamed Kong. To further tempt lawsuits, the actual King Kong was is on the poster yet doesn’t appear in the movie. Well, I guess King Kong was in Italian theaters at the time.

This would be the last Godzilla movie until 1985 and the last time he would be seen as a hero until 2004’s Godzilla Final Wars. It would also be the last time that Ishirô Honda would direct a Godzilla movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Probably one of the greatest movies ever made, we really should have had this as part of the first Kaiju Day. If you love Mystery Science Theater 3000, you can see the influence of this movie on Kinga’s henchmen. We originally ran this movie on April 22, 2019.

Inspired by the huge success of the Japanese superhero versus monster fare such as Ultraman and Kamen Rider in Hong Kong, the Shaw Brothers produced the first Chinese superhero in 1975, which they called Infra-Man. However, they pushed the envelope created by the Japanese even further, inventing a world where a school bus can crash, Hong Kong can be destroyed, an earthquake can happen and monsters appear all within the first minute of the film.

Let me see if I can summarize the blast of pure odd that I just watched at 5 AM: Princess Dragon Mom (known in the original version of this film as Demon Princess Elzebub) is a ten million-year-old mother of monsters who wants to destroy the Earth. She carries around a whip and has a dragon head on her hand, but can also turn into a monster herself. She also has an entire legion of beasts ready to do whatever she asks, like her assistant She-Demon (Witch-Eye in the original), who is an Asian girl with a hand that has an eyeball in the middle of it. Also: both of these ladies wear metallic bikinis with skulls all over them and have several costume changes. They also have an army of cannon fodder dressed in skeletal costumes, which was obviously the influence for the Skeleton Crew in the new episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

They’re battling with Science Headquarters, led by Professor Liu Ying-de. He’s used the BDX Project to transform Lei Ma (Danny Lee, The Killer) into the bionic kung-fu kicking motorcycle riding Infra-Man, who has whatever powers he needs for any situation. He’s also really good at getting tall and stepping on monsters until their green blood pours out. Bruce Lee tribute actor Bruce Le also appears as Lu Xiao-long, another member of the team.

You get all manner of monsters in this one — the Emperor of Doom, the Giant Beetle Monster, an Octopus Mutant, the Driller Beast, a Laser Horn Monster and the Iron Fist Robots. All of them are given to dramatic pronouncements, overacting and blowing up real good.

Believe it or not, Roger Ebert said, “When they stop making movies like Infra-Man, a little light will go out of the world.” Twenty-two years later, he went even further: “I find to my astonishment that I gave Infra-Man only two and a half stars when I reviewed it. That was 22 years ago, but a fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that film. So, in answer to those correspondents who ask if I have ever changed a rating on a movie: Yes, Infra-Man moves up to three stars.”

He’s right — this movie is completely unhinged, with dragon witch women who threaten to throw little girls down volcanos, blotting out the sun and rocket fists. They should have made five thousand sequels to this.

So easy to love. So hard to kill. Man, if there’s such a thing as a perfect movie, put Switchblade Sisters on the list.

Maggie (Joanna Nail, the mother of The Visitor!) has moved to a new high school run by the Silver Daggers and their women, the Dagger Debs. Maggie gets caught up in an arrest and when she’s in hail, she attacks a lesbian warden (Kate Murtagh, The Car) and gets the Dagger Debs on her side.

While Lace, (Robbie Lee, who went on to do voices on cartoons like Rainbow Brite and The Smurfs) the leader of the gang, is in juvenile hall, Maggie runs errands for her. One of them, delivering a love note to Lace’s boyfriend Dominic, leads to that boy assaulting Maggie. And the second-in-command of the gang, Patch (Monica Gayle, the star of Nashville Girl!) already doesn’t trust her. After all, Patch gave her eye to be a Dagger Deb.

Once Lace gets out, she gets back with Dominic. She’s thrilled to tell him that she’s pregnant and he all but drives her to get an abortion. Her payback comes in selling him out to the new gang in town, one run by Crabs. She wants them to hurt Dominic and kill Maggie, but one of the girls gets assaulted and Lace herself gets attacked and loses the baby. Only Patch knows the secret that the gang’s leader went against the gang.

Maggie kicks the boys out, adds in black girls* that she grew up with and deals with Maggie in the only way possible: she stabs her in the throat. The new gang, the Jezebels, are soon arrested by the police, including a maniacal Maggie, face covered in blood and screaming at the cops. It’s an amazing visual and even more striking when every girl yells that they are a Jezebel and that Patch doesn’t belong.

Our heroine screams that the Jezebels will be back, but sadly, there was never a sequel. That’s a shame because I could have watched ten more of these films.

I love every movie that Jack Hill has ever made. From his work with Boris Karloff (House of Evil, Fear Chamber, The Snake People, Alien Invasion) to Spider Baby, The Big Doll House, The Big Bird Cage, Coffy, Foxy Brown and Sorceress, he’s always someone who can reliably make something entertaining.

The girls in this feel real, even if they have names like Donut (that’s Lenny Bruce’s daughter) and go to school to basically have a place to beat up men. My favorite scene in the movie is when they roundly thrash a guy just so that the teacher can finish teaching a lesson on the meaning of laissez-faire.

This is a movie that has its roots in the teenage girl gang 50s, but its brain and heart are in the end of the world 70s, as these girls have nothing and everything to live for all at the same time. It’s pretty obvious why Quentin Tarantino would choose to champion this movie.

“You can beat us, chain us, lock us up, But we’re gonna be back, understand? And when we do, cop, you better keep your ass off our turf or we’ll blow it off! You dig? We’re Jezebels, cop. Remember that name. We’ll be back.” – Maggie

*Marlene Clark from Ganja & Hess!

Louis Malle’s Black Moon is one of those movies that I’ll be watching and Becca comes in and gets mad about.

“What the hell is that unicorn in this movie for?” she asked.

“It’s art” is always my answer. She doesn’t care that Malle made stuff like Pretty Baby, Atlantic City and My Dinner with André. No, she just sees someone breast feeding a goat.

Lily (Cathryn Harrison, Images, Eat the Rich) escapes a gender on gender civil war*, barely avoiding getting murdered by a firing squad, as well as encountering a flock of sheep standing around their lynched shepherd, militarized women torturing a boy and falling asleep on flowers that scream out in pain.

She then finds a château that is filled with animals and a strange woman who lies in bed, yelling at her pet rat Humphrey. She then begins making fun of Lily to someone on the other side of the shortwave radio before trying to strangle our heroine, who promptly slaps her so hard that she dies.

Then, she meets Lily (Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro) and Lily (Alexandra Stewart, The Uncanny), who breast feeds the old woman back to life. For some reason, they all share names and communicate telepathically. Then, a bunch of nude children run into the house and the unicorn tells her that the old woman is not real.

This is also a movie that goes on to feature male Lily beheading a hawk, a chorus of naked kids singing Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and a woman attempting to give a unicorn her mother’s milk.

Black Moon was shot in Malle’s own 200-year-old manor house and considered it a sexual awakening inspired by Alice In Wonderland. He called it his “mythological fairy tale taking place in the near future.” It failed at the box office and went unseen for many years.

*Malle referred to this battle as “the ultimate civil war…the war between men and women…the climax and great moment of women’s liberation.”

You can get this as part of the Criterion Collection.

A young nude-model is stabbed to death with a pair of scissors, the third in a series of victims who had all had their photos taken by Parisi, a potentially mentally unhinged individual who claims that his camera can photograph people’s thoughts.

Director and writer Helia Colombo made one giallo and here it is, rarely seen outside of Italy until today. It really has the best title — The Police Are Blundering In the Dark — because if you think about it, the police never do a great job in these films.

Now, reporter Giorgio D’Amato meets his friend Enrichetta at the photographer’s villa, but when he arrives, he learns that she’s the model we watched die at the beginning of the movie.

She’d been begged by Parisi — who is in a wheelchair and looks quite frail — to come to speak to him about his magical camera. And just like Clue — you know, but with plenty of graphic murder and no short supply of nudity — we meet the suspects, ranging from Alberto the butler to the photographer’s lesbian wife Eleonora, his niece Sara and the sexed-up maid Lucia, who is the next to be killed.

I have no idea why that camera figures in, but maybe the filmmakers thought that Four Flies On Grey Velvet was going to force everyone to have science fiction photography as part of their plot, so they ripped it off. There’s also little police involvement, but it’s not like there’s an actual rule that giallo titles have to make sense. I prefer when they don’t.

You can get this as part of the Vinegar Syndrome Forgotten Gialli Volume 1 set.