Released in Italy as Fango Bollente (Boiling Mud), Savage Three is a brutal example of the Italian crime and murder genre known as poliziotteschi. It stars Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro as Ovidio Mainardi, a man who pushes buttons all day in a factory and endures a marriage that finds his wife (Martine Brochard) giving her body to her boss to get ahead. There’s a scene early on where someone in his office explains why they keep the rats in a lab divided, as otherwise they will always attack one another. And there’s always one rat that starts biting the others.
He and his co-workers Giacomo (Gianfranco De Grassi) and Peppi (Guido Di Carli) go from starting riots at soccer matches to stealing cars to acts of outright insanity, including one scene where a nude Dallesandro chases a woman while driving a forklift, impaling her against a wall. Before long, the three of them are doing pretty much anything they want, as the police think the killings are politically motivated or the acts of southern Italians, exposing the racism within the country at the time.
The film tries to explain that blame away. Much like Ovidio and his marriage, Giacomo is overwhelmed by his crumbling home and abrasive neighbors, while Peppi is trapped in a home with generations of relatives living on top of each other. The film doesn’t make them seem innocent. But it does show how the modern world has dehumanized them and force them to explode into violence in a world that simply does not care.
Inspector Santagà (Enrico Maria Salerno, Inspector Morosini in The Bird with the Crystal Plumageand the Italian voice of Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s films) is a cop who has been demoted for his violent way of dealing with crime and is also a man on his way toward retirement. Only he’s able to see exactly who the killers are, which is a surprise to him, as he knows Ovidio from computer lessons he’s been taking to try to remain relevant as the world passes him by.
Vittorio Salerno only directed three other movies (No, the Case Is Happily Resolved; Libidoand Notturno con Grida), but I really enjoyed this and can’t wait to track down the rest of his films. This was written by Salerno with Ernesto Gastaldi (The Whip and the Body, The Sweet Body of Deborah and more than one hundred more movies).
Savage Three is a powerful and brutal film. It’s like a fantasy-free A Clockwork Orange that could happen at any time, even today.
Savage Three is one of five movies on Arrow Video’s Years of Lead: Five Classic Italian Crime Thrillers 1973-1977. These films are great examples of the Italian poliziotteschi genre and the set includes high def versions of this movie, Like Rabid Dogs, Highway Racer, Colt 38 Special Squadand No, the Case Is Happily Resolved. This disc has an interview with director Vittorio Salerno and actress Martine Brochard about Savage Three. You can get it from MVD.
The High-School Student was released internationally under the titles The Teasers, Under-graduate Girls, Sophomore Swingers and Teasers. It’s a commedia sexy all’italiana that introduced Gloria Guida, who would appear in four out of the five films in this series. She’s also in the movies Being Twenty and The Bermuda Triangle.
She plays Loredana d’Amico, a girl for whom sex is a tool to get better grades for herself and her classmates. Otherwise, it complicates her life, as her father is cheating with a series of younger women and her mother is with another man. Despite losing her virginity to an older man, she remains unable to determine what men want other than what all men want.
One of the girls in this movie, Monica, is played by Ilona Staller, who would eventually become Cicciolina, a world-famous adult film star and Italian politician.
The tagline may be “Banned in 36 Countries. You Can See It Now Without a Single Cut!” but other than the nudity, this is a pretty innocent coming of age teenage movie, albeit one with the relaxed morals of the Italian film industry.
This was directed by Michele Massimo Tarantini, who also made Confessions of a Lady Cop, the Edwige Fenech movie Taxi Girl and Massacre In Dinosaur Valley.
June 8: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is Blaxploitation.
FYI: This would also qualify for their upcoming June 14 topic of the day: Kung Fu(we did 1992’s Ninja Zombies, by the way).
The tale is a simple one: A jive-cool New York crime lord’s prized African artifact—a mystical voodoo doll—is stolen. And he wants it back. So he hires an all-black squad of martial artists to retrieve it at all costs, because, well, “it can’t fall into the wrong hands.”
The awfulness of this kung-fu battle begins with acting by graduates of the Ed Wood Thespian Academy, and goes downhill from there . . . with inept fight chorography, out-of-sync dubbing, and sound effects more ludicrous than all of the “punches” and “blows” in all Asian Kung-fu flicks combined. Basically, all the things you want in a Drive-In Kung fu marathon. Is this just inept or a homage to the films from the Orient? You decide.
Also known as Black Force, this big screen debut of Tanzania also served as the second and final movie of director Michael Fink, who made his debut with Velvet Smooth. And in a twist only a B&S About Movies reader can appreciate: Fink went on to become an acclaimed visual effects supervisor, choreographing the fight scenes in Stallone’s Tango & Cash and Mel Gibson’s Golden Globe and Oscar-winning Braveheart.
We reviewed the entire, unofficial “Nisei Goju-Ryu” karate trilogy, since all three films utilize the martial arts form developed by Hanshi Frank Ruiz, in our “Drive-In Friday: Karate Blaxploitation” feature with the sequels Velvet Smooth and Devil’s Express. Oh . . . we got inspired this Junesploitation month courtesy of the folks at F This Movie, so we reviewed, get this, another Karate Blaxploitation’er produced and directed by Al Adamson Cirio H. Santiago: Dynamite Brothers. Yes, by Uncle Al and Uncle Cy. And it rocks, watch it.
As for Force Four, you can watch it as a free-with-ads stream on TubiTV.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.
Dr. Carol Evans (Edy Williams!) keeps having these short affairs but they leave her unsatisfied. She’s just dumped her latest boyfriend (William Smith!) but ends up injuring two kids — David (Harvey Jason) and Brian (Randy Boone) — who somehow end up falling for her. There’s also the bulldozer death of her husband to deal with and a blackmailer as well. And yeah, Smith is not pleased at all that she’s sleeping with a teenager.
But yeah. Most people just watched this to gawk at Edy Williams.
Director Howard Avedis loved making movies about older women deflowering teenage boys. This is also 1975, so get ready for a bleak ending! I think by the 80’s, Avedis figured out how to make thrillers that really thrilled. But here, he’s doing what he can to entertain the audience.
Dr. Minx was Avedis’s follow up to The Teacher (1974), which starred Jay “Dennis the Menace” North. He also released the Adam West-starring The Specialist in 1975 and followed that with Connie Stevens in Scorchy (1976).
Editor’s Note: This review ran on February 8, 2021, as part of our Mill Creek B-Movie Blast month of reviews. We’re bringing it back for our “Hikmet ‘Howard’ Avedis Week” of reviews.
Mill Creek fans have listed Sly Stallone’s The Specialist from 1994 directed by Luis Llosa (of Crime Zone and Anaconda fame) on their lists for Mill Creek’s B-Movie Blast 50-Film pack. Others noted on their lists — uh, oh, there’s that friggin’ plural “S” again, the same “S” that bit me in the arse during out big, British-produced Satan’s Slave (1976) vs. the Indonesian-produced Satan’s Slaves (1982) snafu with our Mill Creek Pure Terror Month review back in November 2019 — that the film included on the B-Movie Blast set is Sergio Corbucci’s The Specialists (1969; starring French rock singer Johnny Hallyday (French rock singer; later of 1987s Terminus) — a film that we didn’t get around to during our “Spaghetti Western Week”* of reviews.
So, plural “S,” damn you, for ye almost deprived us of an Adam West . . . yes, THE ADAM WEST . . . spy thriller directed by Howard Avedis, he who gave us the epics of Connie Stevens as a rogue cop in Scorchyand ex-Waltons frolicking through the supernatural in Mortuary. Yeah, you know us all to well: we feel a “Howard Avedis Week” coming on, too. I mean, with film titles like The Stepmother and The Teacher (sexploitation time!!!!), and movies starring the B-Movie elite of Sybil Danning, Karen Black, Bo Hopkins, Patrick Wayne, Edy Williams (Dr. Minx!!!), and Angel Hopkins (!) with Jay “Dennis the Menace” North — how can we NOT have a “Howard Avedis Week” of reviews?
But. let’s get back to Adam’s West’s B-Movie milieu (Omega Cop, One Dark Night) in the Avedis schlock oeuvre.
As you can see from the theatrical one-sheet, this is all about Budapest, Hungary-imported bombshell Ahna Carpi, who blazed through 70-plus U.S. TV credits (The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is my fondest Carpi-ory) before retiring from the business. But you know her film work in . . . YES . . The Brotherhood of Satan and Piranha (oops, the 1972 one that Joe Dante didn’t direct — damn you, multiple titles) and . . . YES . . . as Tania in Enter the Dragon. And, would you believe she was a child actor in two episodes of the now Antenna oft-run ’60s series Leave It to Beaver (I just got done watching “Beaver’s Sweater” a few days ago!), but, back then, she was “Anna Capri” and not the more porny-reading Ahna, which is the proper, Euro-ethnic spelling of her first name. Oh, and to continue that Brotherhood of Satan degree of separation: Alvy “Hank Kimbel” Moore is in The Specialist (as blackmailing court bailiff) as well, and Avedis’s Mortuary (and a few others) . . . and Cotton Candy (but no Avedis or Capri on that one).
So, there’s your movie trivia for today: What two movies starred a Hungarian child actor and a Green Acres cast member?
See? Reposting that old Sly Stallone review, in error, would have robbed us of all this fun! But, alas . . . I know, I know . . . get to the friggin’ movie, already, R.D. Hey, I’ve haven’t seen this one either, so, let’s go, Adam West fans! Hit the play button!
Now, based on this still from the film (or promo pack from the film) posted by the Digital Content Management Team at the IMDb, you’d think you’re getting a spy thriller with Adam West as a B-Movie James Bond or as an ex-war vet now a kick ass private eye. Oh, ye Mill Creek grazer of the digital divide, how wrong are ye. For this is a Crown International Pictures — serious — court room drama. I know. I never thought I’d type that sentence in a review either. This from a studio that gives us a steady stream of boobs, vans, cheerleaders, female basketball coaches who have sex with male students, and any -sploitation variant you can imagine.
But this ain’t your granddad’s or great grandad’s Perry Mason, Owen Marshall: Attorney at Law, or Matlock (especially not with Nancy Stafford in the cast). This court room caper, again, looking at the rendering of Ahna in that dress, is an R-rated potboiler. But a Joe Eszterhas Jagged Edge neo-noir legal thriller this is not, Motion Picture Association Ratings to protect us youngins, be damned.
West is “The Specialist,” aka defense attorney Jerry Bounds, who’s in a court battle against fellow attorney Pike Smith (western actor John Anderson), an attorney who wants his job back on the board of a (corrupt) water company. So, to assure he wins the case, Pike recruits a sleazy P.I. (is there any other kind), Alec Sharkey (aka Howard Avedis aka’in as actor Russell Schmidt), who, in turn, recruits Londa Weyth (Ahna Carpi), his blonde-n’-hot operative serving as a juror-ringer on the trial, to seduce Bounds and get a mistrial declared.
So, in case you haven’t figure it out: The “Specialist” isn’t West as a cool-as-steel spy or ex-Special Forces-now-an-Attorney (or P.I.) bad-ass; the well-endowed Londa is the special forces sex kitten in these proceedings. Another sultry kitten in our midst is Playboy and Max Factor model Christiane Schmidtmer, you remember her as the hot stewardess from Boeing Boeing (1965) that got Jerry Lewis and Tony Curtis all hot-n-bothered.
I am sure West, looking to be taken seriously as an actor (and deserved, IMO), was hoping this adaptation of the best-selling novel Come Now the Lawyers, would become a box office hit and thrust him into a legit theatrical career with the bigger studios. As did author Ralph Bushnell Potts, himself a Seattle-based Attorney-at-Law (learn more about Potts’s interesting life with his 1991 obituary in the Seattle Times). But, alas . . . Potts’s serious book about Washington State’s early courts system was turned into a Crown International exploitation fest that is not the least bit titillating and fails on the salacious scale that Crown in known for via these Mill Creek box sets. In the annals of Crown International public domaindom, The Specialist is a truly odd duck in the Crown celluloid pond.
There’s no freebie rips online to share, but you can check out the trailer and a scene clip on You Tube. Of course, you can enjoy The Specialist as part of Mill Creek’s B-Movie Blast 50-Film Pack.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He also writes for B&S Movies.
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 Pussycatto 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 inFascination) 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.
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
“That right! You’re just a horny, little bitch!” — Let the desert hair-pullin’ chick fight games begin
Now, unlike The Young Graduates, which is included on Mill Creek’s B-Movie Blast 50-Film Pack (which we also unpacked this month), this entry on their Gorehouse Greats 12-Film Pack may sound like a softcore T&A romp, but it really is a sexploitation frolic (that’s also out in the wilds of the public domain as Deadly Field Trip). And if that title doesn’t clue you in: this is more horror than sexploitation (thus the reason for it being packed under a “Gorehouse” moniker by Mill Creek). But, knowing Mill Creek, this will eventually pop up on a “Biker Flick” set, as we have psycho bikers in our midst. And truth be told: there’s more bikers than blood here, more hippie than horror.
In the end, this is just another sleazy, ’70s drive-in take-a-shower-after flick (that reminds of 1973’s The Candy Snatchers, less that film’s ultra-violence) with more slobbering idiots livin’ it up by kidnapping, raping, and terrorizing (four) teenage girls. (One of the bad-girl students — in yummy, yellow shorty-shorts and matching halter top, natch — is Dina Ousley, later of the mainstream sex romp Shampoo with Warren Beatty and American Hot Wax; you’ve seen her spray-painted go-go girls make-up work in the Austin Powers movies.)
As usual, the girl’s bus driven by their teacher, Miss Tenny (Brenda Fogarty), breaks down in the desert on their way to Los Angeles; a trio of bikers (lead by B-Movie stalwart Zalman King of Galaxy of Terror fame) decides to harass them. Of course, these bikers are like the hear-see-speak-no-evil monkeys: one good, one bad, and one that is a confused mess of good and bad, because of his bad, bullying brother (King).
There’s a reason why this sleaze bag of a Russ Meyer-wannabe celluloid programmer was choreographer Earl Barton’s only directing effort — and ended up in public domain. Barton also acted in the requisite, ’50s rock ‘n’ roll flick, Rock Around the Clock, with Bill Haley and the Comets, a film which he also choreographed. Star Fogarty’s biggest claim to fame was starring in the sex comedy Chesty Anderson: U.S. Navy — and that’s a movie that must be seen to be believed.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.