A mysterious woman, dressed all in black, is killing beautiful women. 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.
Burlesque, body-painting, snake-eating, mud-wrestling, alien landings, a gay wedding, and Satanism. Yep, director John D. Lamond (Felicity, Nightmares) pretty much watched Mondo Cane and said, “I borrowed a 16mm print of it and ran it on a closed circuit cinema thing and stopped and started the projector and looked at it. It ran on a sort of cycle – pathos, humour, oddity, nudity. I thought okay, what I need to do is shoot about fifty sequences, cut it into something coherent and pacey, and made it on the same sort of thing. I’d have something sexy, then something odd, then something really way-out, then something light hearted. And always do it tongue in cheek, and not have any sequence in the film run longer than about two minutes. And anything sexy, I’ll make it way-out or pretty.”
The British cut of this movie is twenty minutes less than the Australian one. That should tell you exactly how much content is in this for maniacs who need to watch Kiwi girls dance nude underwater or gratuitous milk baths.
Yes, body painting, alcoholism amongst the Aborigines, black masses and strip clubs are all side by side Down Under. I love that one of the people in this movie is named Count Copernicus. Ah, mondo!
Uh, oh. The Constanzaian Worlds are colliding once again at B&S About Movies, as “Kaiju Week” rear ends April’s “James Bond Month.”
Yes. There’s a Godzilla movie with James Bond-styled spies. And Apes. And not just one movie, but two movies. And my love for each, especially the first, is unbound.
Toho Studios had Godzilla. 20th Century Fox Studios had Pierre Boulle’s apes. And the American studio was kicking the Big Green One’s ass in the Pacific Rim box office. So what does Toho Studios do? They created their own race of sentient humanoid-ape aliens to introduce into the series.
Toho Studios celebrated the Great Green One’s 20th anniversary in style with this everything-plus-the-kitchen sink monster romp featuring the return of Anguirus from Ishiro Honda’s first Godzilla sequel, 1955’s Godzilla Rides Again, a new monster in the form of the good kaiju dog-deity, King Caesar, and a James Bond-inspired Interpol superspy to defeat the aliens. (Angie and King C returned in 2004’s 50th Anniversary blowout, Godzilla: Final Wars, and they should: director Ryuhei Kitamura cites Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla as his favorite Godzilla film.)
And if that wasn’t enough: they brought on the apes.
Toho’s new breed of intelligent apes, who hail from the “Third Planet from the Black Hole,” built a secret, underground high-tech base in Okinawa. And they have the ability to build robots. And they construct Mechagodzilla, a robotic doppelganger of Godzilla equipped with a wide array of weapons and flight capabilities.
Oh, yeah. And these apes enjoy their wine. And they can morph into human form.
The fun begins as an Oriental priestess has a vision of Japan’s destruction by a giant monster. Cue to a spelunker who discovers a chunk of never before seen metal in a cave. A subsequent archaeological excavation to find more of the metal unearths a chamber with a biblical-like prophecy of a forthcoming battle between huge monsters on the Earth.
Of course that errant hunk of metal is the work of The Simians and was used to construct Mechagodzilla to spearhead their conquest of Earth.
As crazy as it seems, it wasn’t 20th Century Fox who sued over this—but Universal Studios. When the film was released in the U.S in March of 1977 under the title Godzilla vs. the Bionic Monster, Universal took issue over the use of the word “Bionic,” as they owned the rights to The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman TV series. That led to the title that we U.S kiddies saw it under: Godzilla vs. The Cosmic Monster.
Those were the UHF-TV days. . . .
Keeping with their “borrowing” of the 20th Century Fox franchise, another race of Toho aliens from the third black hole planet returned in the 1975 sequel, Terror of Mechagodzilla. This time the aliens “aped” the underground disfigured mutants from Beneath the Planet of the Apes—and hid their disfigurement under rubber masks. Oh, and they brought along another, new monster-partner: the aquatic, non-mechanical Titanosaurus. The Mechagodzilla sequel would prove to be the last of the films until the Big Green One’s 30th anniversary started a new wave of Godzilla films.
If you must have Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla in your collection, there’s the 1988 restored Japanese cut with English audio on a 1988 VHS, a 2004 DVD with both English and Japanese audio, and a 2019 Showa-era Blu-ray issued by the Criterion Collection alongside 15 other Godzilla films released from 1954 to 1975. Terror of Mechagodzilla also appears in that collection, along with its three singular DVD forms issued in 1998, 2002, and 2007.
The epic battle! This stuff rocks no matter how old you are!
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 review first appeared on January 3, 2020 as part of our “Ape Week” retrospective.
Here’s some of the other Kaijus (and sort of Kaiju) that we’ve reviewed. For the rest that we’ve recently reviewed to commemorate the March 2021 release of Godzilla vs. Kong, enter “Kaiju Day Marathon” in our search box to the left to populate that list of films (you may see a few reposted Godzilla reviews, but many new film reviews concerning Godzilla, Kong, and other creatures from the Lands of the Rising Sun).
An entry in ABC’s Wide World of Mystery (Rock-a-Die, Baby) this quick burst of shot on video is way ahead of its time and way worth watching. Produced by Dan Curtis, directed by Lela Swift (who also helmed Dark Shadows and several of these ABC mini-movies) and written by George Lefferts (whose made for TV career includes several of the 1960’s Special for Women specials and episodes of afterschool specials for both ABC and CBS), it’s all about an orphan (an incredibly young Kate Mulgrew) who discovers an alien TV signal and falls in love with Marc, a man from another dimension played by John Ventantonio (Private Parts).
Sure, she may have just left the mental institution, but who is to say what’s real and what is not in her world? And man, if you only knew Pernell Roberts as the kindly Trapper John, get ready to be upset.
Sadly, so many of these genre TV shows have never been released and many of them are lost. Thanks to YouTube, you can watch this.
Here’s another winner from the awesome “Big Three” network TV movie-era of the ‘70s. Also known as End of the Line in its overseas theatrical and later U.S TV syndication runs, A Cry for Help stars Robert Culp (Calendar Girl Murders, The Gladiator, Spectre) as Harry Freeman, a cynical and acerbic, Don Imus-styled radio talk show host who abuses his on-air callers. When one of those callers, a troubled young runaway, threatens to commit suicide, Harry dismisses her, but informs the police anyway. However, when the cops dismiss him, he comes to realize his mistake. So he recruits his audience to help him track down the girl—but is it to assuage his own guilt or as a ratings gimmick?
Involved in the mystery are lots of familiar ‘70s and ‘80s TV faces with Bruce “I’m not Bruce Jenner” Boxleitner, Gordon Jump (WKRP in Cincinnati), Michael Lerner, Chuck McCann, and Ralph Manza (you’ll know him when you see him; his career goes back to the mid-‘50s), and Ken Swofford (Black Roses and Hunter’s Blood). You’ll also notice TV actor Julius Harris (Cannon, Ellery Queen, Harry O) from his Blaxploitation resume with the likes of Black Caesar, Friday Foster, Let’s Do It Again, Shaft’s Big Score, and Superfly, and as Tee Hee alongside James Bond in Live and Let Die. (Look out! April is “James Bond Month” at B&S About Movies.)
What is all that stuff? Well, those are carts, cart decks, reel-to-reel decks and VU meters, you adorable, little Spotify youngins. The “radio” in this is, of course, excellent, and Robert Culp did his homework.
If this ABC-TV production plays like a ‘70s TV detective yarn, only with a disc jockey instead of a private eye, that’s because Executive Producers William Link and Richard Levinson were behind the popular TV series Columbo, Ellery Queen, Mannix, and Murder, She Wrote. Writer Peter S. Fincher wrote and directed episodes of Baretta, Columbo, and Kojak, while director Daryl Duke came from the Columbo family as well. Duke also directed the highly-rated 1973 TV movie The President’s Plane is Missing* and the 1978 Elliot Gould-starring theatrical The Silent Partner. And for the country music fans: Duke directed 1973’s Payday** starring Rip Torn as a burnt-out country singer.
You can watch A Cry for Help for free on You Tube. Caveat emptor on those grey market DVDs, as this has never been officially released on video. There’s no trailer, but you can watch a 14-minute film clip on You Tube.
What’s that? Where can you get more TV movies? Not a problem, we love the TV movies of the ‘70s and ‘80s here at B&S About Movies. Be sure to visit our “Week of Made for TV Movies,” “Son of Made for TV Movies Week,” and “Grandson of Made for TV Movie Week” explorations. And there’s even more TV movies to be had with our upcoming “Dan Curtis Week” on March 22 through March 28. And again: April is “James Bond Month,” so join us, won’t you?
* Ugh. Too many movies! How did we miss that one during any of our “TV Movie Week” blow outs or our “Airline Disaster Week” homage?
** Once again! How did we miss that fers errs countryfied “Hicksploitation Week” of reviews?
This is the last of Martino’s giallo and doesn’t feature his usual cast, like Edwige Fenech or Ivan Rassimov. It does, however, have Claudio Cassinelli, who was in Murder Rock and What Have They Done to Your Daughters?
Cassinelli plays police detective Paolo Germi, who meets a girl named Marisa (Patrizia Castaldi, in her only acting role before becoming a costume designer) who is soon murdered. She was a prostitute and now, Germi is haunted by her death and wants to find the killers. Unfortunately, Marisa was in way over her head and getting the answers won’t be simple. After all, there’s a man with mirrored shades killing everyone that gets close to the truth.
While this film doesn’t reach the lunatic heights of Martino’s finest works, it’s still a gleaming example of how great 1970’s Italian genre film can be.
You can watch this movie on Amazon Prime or get the blu ray from Arrow Video.
Former test pilot Will Zens found himself a maker of hicksploitation movies, thanks to movies like this, The Road to Nashville, Hell on Wheels and Hot Summer in Barefoot County. It was originally called Truckin’ Man until the producers thought a woman’s name would draw more money.
This movie was acquired in 1983 by Troma, who released it to home video. They have nothing to do with it. Thank God.
Shot in Florence and Society Hill, South Carolina, this movie isn’t about anything that’s on the poster. Instead, it’s all about a middle-aged man who drops out of college — maybe he was a non-traditional student — to go undercover as a truck driver so that he can solve the mysterious murder of his trucker father. I’ve noticed in so many trucker movies that the mob has killed dads, which seems like their chief job in this reality.
Michael Hawkins plays that trucker. He’d go on to play in plenty of soap operas, like Ryan’s Hope, where he was Frank Ryan for 272 episodes. He’s also a state trooper in The Amityville Horror and a Pepsi executive in Mommie Dearest — he’s literally one of the people Joan screams “You drove Al Steele to his grave and now you’re trying to stab me in the back? Forget it! I fought worse monsters than you for years in Hollywood. I know how to win the hard way! Don’t fuck with me, fellas! This ain’t my first time at the rodeo” to — but he may be best known for being Christian Slater’s dad.
Larry Drake, who would later play Durant in Darkman (and eventually turned up as a detective in the direct-to-cable thriller Power 98), is Diesel Joe here. Comedian Doodles Weaver also shows up. If you haven’t seen his near-manic performance in The Zodiac Killer, I urge you to do so at the first opportunity. Actually, I shared it in our review of Bigfoot, so just click over there. Screenwriters Joseph Alvarez and W. Henry Smith also penned the hicksploitation-centric romps Preacherman and Redneck Miller.
Perhaps most strangely, at around the one-hour eight-minute mark of this movie, trucker Mike Kelley goes to the back of his rig and reaches for his break line. For a split second, an image of a pepperoni pizza flashes on the screen. Due to the vignetting effect which was applied to it, several people believe that the insertion of this frame was not accidental, but instead a subliminal message to suggest o drive-in audiences that they should get up and go buy some pizza.
Man, I’m hungry for some pizza.
You can watch this with Rifftrax commentary on Tubi.
When I was first writing this site in earnest, this was one of the films I watched and never took the time to write about. It’s not because I don’t love it. Au contraire, it’s probably my favorite late-model Hammer film next to Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, another film I’ve failed to discuss on this site. It’s everything a movie should be. It has horror, amazing performances, plenty of sex and lots of Satan. All hail the Karnstein family!
The third and final film of the Karnstein Trilogy — The Vampire Lovers and Lust for a Vampire are the other two, although the aforementioned Kronos is also tied in — this movie is all about twin sisters, Frieda and Maria Gellhorn. One is good. One is evil. Both are played by Playboy‘s October 1970 Playmates of the month, legitimate identical twins Mary and Madeleine Collinson. Born in Malta, the twins appeared in five other films: Some Like It Sexy, Permissive, Groupie Girl, She’ll Follow You Anywhere and The Love Machine, which was based on the book by Jacqueline Susann, who also wrote Valley of the Dolls.
After their careers in entertainment, Madeleine married a British Royal Air Force officer and raised three children before dying in 2014. Mary has two daughters and now lives in Milan with an “Italian gentleman,” whom she has been with for more than two decades.
Think gorgeous twins are a one in a million miracle? Not in the Gellhorn family, as their former model mother gave birth to another set of twins years after the girls were born.
The girls have been recently orphaned and come to live with their puritanical witch-hunting uncle Gustav Weil (Peter Cushing, destroying everything in his path). Maria (played by Mary) is content to be a normal teenager. Her sister Frieda (played by Madeleine) becomes fascinated by wicked Satanist Count Karnstein (Damian Thomas, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger), who probably makes her refer to him as daddy and says things like, “Good girl.”
Oh yeah — he also calls Countess Mircalla Karnstein (Katya Wyeth, Hands of the Ripper) back from the grave and she rewards him by making him a vampire. Ingrid Pitt was supposed to play this role but didn’t do the cameo.
Maria falls for the handsome and virtuous teacher Anton (David Warbeck, The Beyond), who knows all about killing vampires. At the same time, Frieda is feasting on naked virgin women chained to walls, because every 1970’s vampire movie has lesbian moments.
Frieda is captured by the Brotherhood, the group of witchfinders that Gustav leads, but the vampires switch out Maria and she nearly gets killed. This leads to a battle throughout the castle complete with vampire heads being hacked clean off. It’s wonderful.
Australian-born actor Alex Scott — he’s also in Next of Kin, The Asphyx and The Abominable Dr. Phibes — shows up, as does Dennis Price (who was in plenty of Jess Franco movies), Judy Matheson (Lust for a Vampire), Kirsten Lindholm (The Vampire Lovers) and singer-actress Luan Peters/Karol Keyes, who hit the 70’s vampire trifecta by being in Lust for a Vampire, Vampira and this film.
Twins of Evil was adapted into an 18-page comic strip for the January–February 1977 issue of the magazine House of Hammer. You can check it out on the Internet Archive for free.
Director John Hough would go on to direct The Legend of Hell House, Escape to Witch Mountain, Return from Witch Mountain, The Watcher in the Woods, The Incubus, Lady and the Highwayman, Biggles: Adventures in Time, American Gothicand more.
Shot on the same sets as Vampire Circus, Twins of Evil is everything I love about movies. And if you’re into metal, the band Hooded Menace used a sample from this film in their song “In the Dead We Dwell.”
Runaway teen Bobby Douglas (Stephen White, Gas-s-s-s) is given shelter by a cult of Satanists, but both his presence and questionable sexuality leads to conflicts within the group.
To be fair before we begin — The Church of Satan statement on homosexuality is that they “fully accept all forms of human sexual expression between consenting adults. The Church of Satan has always accepted gay, lesbian, bisexual and asexual members since its beginning in 1966. This is addressed in the chapter “Satanic Sex” in The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey.”
Made by filmmakers from the gutters of Tampa on short ends as AGFA tells it — Joe Wiezycki also made the movie Willy’s Gone — Satan’s Children was made with students from the University of South Florida drama department.
Bobby escapes his father’s insults and his stepsister’s sexual suggestions — you thought incest only happened like this via Pornhub — to unknowingly end up at a gay bar. All the horror stories from Cruising are true — he’s soon having a train run on him in the grimy backseat of a car against his will. Yep, they drive all around while yelling things as they roger him, then leave him face down and ass up in a field.
So what would you do? Well, if you’re Bobby, you’d join a Satanic coven and get your revenge. After all, Florida may be the home of Disney resorts, but it’s also the birthplace of bands like Nasty Savage, Marilyn Mansion, the Genitorturers, Deicide and, well, Creed.
Everybody in this movie is too sweaty, too pale and too frightening to behold. This is all you need to know of Florida to beware of its darkness. The gay bars even look like a diner and not any place that I’d imagine them to appear like. Every scenario here is concrete block and wood-paneled, covered in years of filth, dust and scum.
The first time I saw legit non-Playboy VHS porn was a movie that later research would tell me was 1984’s I Like to Watch with Lisa De Leeuw, Mike Horner, Herschel Savage and Bridgette Monet. It was upsetting. The people looked too strange, too slovenly, too unsexy — exactly the opposite that I thought porn would be.
This movie brought back that queasy feeling, which kind of made me nostalgically happy for films that can still upset me. It’s wonderful to know that that can still happen.
You can watch this for free on Tubi or grab the double disk of this film and Satanis from AGFA/Something Weird video. You can buy it from Amazon or Diabolik DVD.
Also known as Death Kisses and Shudder, this gender and species swapped cover version of Willard is all about Susan Bradley, a little girl who can control spiders, which she does to kill her mother — well, she was gonna kill daddy — before taking out anyone else who displeases her. Susan really loves her spiders — to the point that one scene almost suggests that she loves them biblically. Oh 1975, what a magical time you were to be alive.
The big issue is Walter, Susan’s creepy uncle and a dirty cop. He has evidence that his niece has killed at least two people, but he covers it up and even kills to protect her, all so he can get the chance to aardvark with this little arachnophile. Guess what? She’s not having it. Oh yeah — Walter was also sleeping with her mom and helping her plan to murder his own brother. Whew!
You kind of have to love a movie where a little girl kills an entire VW worth of teenagers at the drive-in. This movie checks almost all the boxes for our site: murderous children and animals gone wild. If only there was an acid sequence, a Satanic ritual and George Eastman dressed as a big hairy tarantula.
Writer and producer Daniel Cady would go on from this to write and produce several adult films, such as Soft Places, Reflections and Tomboy under the name William Dancer. He also produced the regional shocker Dream No Evil.
Director Chris Munger would also direct Black Starlet and The Year of the Communes, a documentary narrated by Rod Steiger.
You can watch the Rifftrax version of this movie on Tubi and Amazon Prime.
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