Is there a more striking visual in horror than the Blind Dead, freshly awakened from their centuries of slumber, slowly plodding their way toward their victims? Not for my peseta. Well, they don’t make those any longer. Let me rephrase: not for my euro.

Night of the Seagulls (La Noche de las Gaviotas) is the fourth and final Blind Dead film, a series which began with 1972’s Tombs of the Blind Dead and continued with 1973’s Return of the Blind Dead and 1974’s The Ghost Galleon. Like those films, this was also written and directed by Amando de Ossorio.

Ossorio would lament the fact that these films’ budgets meant the final product could never live up to the vision inside his head. The end of The Ghost Galleon,  where a boat in a bathtub is supposed to be the Knights’ dreaded ship set ablaze, is prime evidence of this.

His iconic Templar Knights would later appear in two other Spanish horror films, Jess Franco’s film Mansion of the Living Dead and Paul Naschy’s The Devil’s Cross. These aren’t official sequels, but homages.

PS – If you catch this movie and think, “I saw a movie called Don’t Go Out at Night, or was that Night of the Death Cult, and that seemed a lot like this one,” you’re not crazy. Those are some of the wild alternate titles for this movie.

Night of the Seagulls shares the same Templars we’ve come to know, love and perhaps fear while not sharing continuity with any of the previous films.

Back in medieval times, we watch a young couple get attacked by the still human Knights Templar, who kills the man and sacrifice one of the women to their unspeakable god.

Centuries later, Doctor Henry Stein and his wife Joan come to the same town, where they’re shunned by the locals. Seriously — Joan can’t even buy apples at the only store in town without some attitude.

The reason why is that it’s Templar season. Yes, every seven years, the Templars rise and demand a virgin sacrifice for seven consecutive nights. Of course these outsiders are going to screw it all up for the town by trying to save one of the girls. Luckily — or unluckily — a village idiot attempts to aid them in their question, but all he’s really good at is being struck and thrown down hillsides.

While not on any of the official video nasty lists, this movie — under the title Don’t Go Out at Night — was listed on Greater Manchester Police’s original list of titles that were worth seizing. It took over a minute worth of cuts to enable this to be released again in 1987, but the Anchor Bay 2005 release was uncut.

Your enjoyment of this film will depend on how much you buy into the Templars, who appear to a haunting theme and then slowly make their way down the beach to expose a virgin and then do away with her. Some people find this movie slow and boring. We’re not in that camp.

Scream Factory has released this on blu ray recently, so you have no excuse not to check it out!

Steve Carver’s follow-up to Big Bad Mama, this Roger Corman-produced effort follows the life story of Al Capone, episodically tracking his life and control over Chicago. It stars Ben Gazzara as Capone, Susan Blakely (The Concorde…Airport ’79) as his girl Iris, John Cassavetes as Frankie Yale and Sylvester Stallone as Frank Nitti.

This being a Corman film, you also get a Dick Miller appearance. It’s as welcome as always. Corman had already made one Capone movie, 1967’s The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, but this movie features more than just that one event.

Years later, Stallone would tell Ain’t It Cool News that “I particularly enjoyed working on Capone, because it was like the cheesy, mentally challenged inbred cousin of The Godfather“.

The film follows the most important dates of Capone’s life, such as a May 16, 1918 bust that left Capone scarred after being thrown through a window; September 23, 1919, when he decided to kill his boss “Diamond” Jim Colosimo; September 20, 1926 when Nitti saves him from a hit ordered by Hymie Weiss; and February 14, 1929, when the aforementioned St. Valentine’s Day Massacre wiped out the Gusenberg brothers.

There was some controversy over the nudity in this film, as Susan Blakely goes beyond full frontal here, nudity that wouldn’t appear in mainstream Hollywood movies again until Basic Instinct.

It all ends with Capone suffering from syphilis, driven so mad that he doesn’t even recognize Nitti. The hitman finally opens up about how he felt about his boss, remarking how he only cared about killing people. As he leaves, Capone continues to get crazier, ending with him dying a year later. This scene was shot at Barbra Streisand’s estate.

I kind of love the alternate poster for Capone that shows that for many, Stallone would be the main draw for watching this movie.

If you’re hoping for a historically accurate film, you may want to skip this. After all, Capone’s car didn’t come from a window, but from a knife wound inflicted by Frank Gallucio over a remark Capone made to Gallucio’s sister. And the whole last part of the movie, where Nitti visits Capone, it would have been impossible. Nitti killed himself in 1943, three years before Capone died.

You can get this on blu ray from Shout! Factory.

This Raymond Chandler novel had already been filmed as The Falcon Takes Over with George Sanders in 1942 and Murder, My Sweet in 1944 with Dick Powell. But for me, Robert Mitchum is Phillip Marlowe. He just exudes a weariness with the world and the perfect grim mindset that works for film noir, much less neo-noir. And by returning to the role three years later in The Big Sleep, he became the only actor to play Marlowe twice.

Los Angeles, 1941. The police are corrupt. Life is cheap. And Phillip Marlowe is exhausted by it all. He doesn’t have much left. But then he goes through a string of cases, like being hired by Moose Malloy (Jack O’Halloran, Superman) to find his missing girlfriend Velma, whose trail only brings death. And then there’s Lindsay Marriott, a client killed over a jade necklace.

Those cases are connected and then there’s the very married and even more dangerous Helen Grayle (Charlotte Rampling), who Marlowe falls for. Plus, you get Joe Spinell, Sylvester Stallone and Harry Dean Stanton all showing up. And Judge Grayle is played by Jim Thompson, who wrote hardboiled fiction just as brutal as Chandler (The Grifters and The Getaway were made from his books).

In an interview with Roger Ebert, Mitchum minced no words about working with Rampling. “She was the chick who dug S&M in The Night Porter. She arrived with an odd entourage, two husbands or something. Or they were friends and she married one of them and he grew a mustache and butched up. She kept exercising her mouth like she was trying to swallow her ear. ” played her on the right side because she had two great big blackheads on her left ear, and I was afraid they’d spring out and lodge on my lip. There were no tea breaks on THAT set.”

Mitchum was back on the very streets he’d been on as a teen making this movie. One night, as Mitchum gave money to the homeless, an old beat cop walked up to him, took one look and said, “So you’re back”.

You can get this on blu ray from Shout! Factory or watch it on Amazon Prime.

It’s rare that I watch a movie that gets on the very verge of upsetting me. Poor Pretty Eddie is that rare film that pushed me pretty far and made me feel somewhat upset for watching it, which ended up making me keep going and enjoying the end results. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s amazing that this movie even exists.

Most of the makers of this film were employed in the world of adult films, with Poor Pretty Eddie representing their chance to go straight. Backing came from Michael Thevis, the notorious Atlanta-based “King of Pornography,” who owned a record company named GRC, a chain of sex shops and a company that manufactured peep show booths. In fact, the rock band Flood recorded the soundtrack for the martial arts movie Blood of the Dragon in his Sound Pit Studio on Atlanta’s Simpson Street, which also saw country singer Moe Bandy, dance sensation Loleatta Holloway and country songwriter and the author of the three million record selling “Chevy Van” Sammy Johns — as well as R&B acts like Ripple, the Rhodes Kids, King Hannibal and Sam Dees — all record there. He also published a series of pornographic novels that were written by Ed Wood under the name Donna D. Dildo.

Producing a legit movie allowed Thevis to launder money that he had made through shadier dealings, which brought the FBI in. Shortly after the film was released, he was jailed on a variety of charges and then escaped prison in 1978, ending up on the FBI’s most-wanted list. He had already put a contract out on the life of the man who had given the police all the info they needed to put him away. While on the lam, he tracked down that man — Roger Dean Underhill — and killed him and another associate. He bragged about it in prison and fellow prisoners ratted him out.

In 1980, Michael Thevis, the so-called “Scarface of Porn,” who once owned nearly half of the industry and made $100 million a year ($311 million today when adjusted for inflation) was sentenced to spend 28 years to life in the Oak Park Heights Correctional Facility, an underground penitentiary outside of Minneapolis and eventually United States Penitentiary in Atlanta. His palatial home was sold eventually to Whitney Houston. In 2013, he died of heart and respiratory failure. This Daily Beast article on his life is required reading.

Poor Pretty Eddie was written B. W. Sandefur, who is mostly known for his TV writing and producing. In fact, he was behind one of the oddest series of the early 1980’s, NBC’s Cliffhangers, which featured three different stories that all began in the middle of their stories. Stop Susan Williams, The Phantom Empire and The Curse of Dracula were all eventually turned into theatrical releases — along with extra material added — in Europe.

Loosely based on the Jean Genet play The Balcony and directed by David Worth (Kickboxer) and Richard Robinson (who has films like Is There Sex After Marriage and Adultery for Fun & Profit on his resume), this film is shocking even today.

The Turner Classic Movies article on the film hits it right on the head. They describe Eddie as such: “A sleazy exploitation thriller with artistic pretensions, the film manages to be offensive, crude and inept in equal measure while still succeeding as a compulsive viewing experience for connoisseurs of fringe cinema who think they’ve seen everything.”

We start at the University of Georgia as Liz Wetherly (Leslie Uggams, who older readers will know from Roots and younger ones will know from the Deadpool movies), a famous singer, is performing the national anthem. There’s a cut to her car driving down a country road and we hear her say, “Look, I have two weeks before my next concert. Now I’m going to get in my car and drive until I find a nice, quiet hole to crawl into.”

Be careful what you wish for.

After he car breaks down, Liz rents a cabin for the night — so she thinks — while the gigantic handyman Keno (Ted Cassidy, who was Lurch on The Addams Family, as well as the second actor to play Bigfoot on The Six-Million Dollar Man after Andre the Giant. He was also the narrator for The Incredible Hulk and provided the voices for Godzilla, Frankenstein Jr., The Thing, Moltar, Metallus, Black Manta and Brainiac for various Hanna-Barbera cartoons.)

Somehow, she ends up stuck for days thanks to the machinations of Eddie (Michael Christian, TV’s Peyton Place), a lothario who has already ensnared motel owner Bertha (Shelley Winters, who was in so many movies where she ran a house of ill repute, at least in my imagination, as well as the killer mother of an alien child in a role that doesn’t add up in another astonishingly bonkers Atlanta-based movie, The Visitor). Strangely enough, in the filmed version of the aforementioned Genet play, WInters played nearly the same role. Yet here, she plays it as a once gorgeous showgirl stuck remembering the past through the haze of alcohol, trying in vain to hold on to her man. Of note, Winters was paid in cash for her role and nearly died when her private plane almost crashed upon landing in Atlanta.

Not only does Eddie want Liz for carnal reasons, he also thinks she can help him in his career as a country singer. He spends much of the film dressed in Elvis jumpsuits and warbling his way through ballads. And oh yeah — he eventually assaults our heroine and then subjects her to further torture like forcing her to please a traveling salesman and eating Keno’s dog.

Liz finally gets the courage to turn in Eddie, which leads to Sheriff Orville (Slim Pickens!)  asking her “Did he bite ya on the tittie?” and making her submit to a public trial in a crowded VFW/bar as locals gasp that a black woman is in their midst. Drunken proprietor Floyd (Dub Taylor, a cowboy star and former Clemson Tide football player, who is in all manner of redneck films like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, …tick…tick…tick…, Evel Knievel, Gator, Creature from Black Lake, The Great Smokey Roadblock and Moonshine County Express) then conducts a trial in front of an assembled crowd of drunken locals, many of whom appear disturbingly disturbed, that ends with Liz stripped nude and crying.

The film’s montage sequences are some of the most disturbing I’ve sat through, including Eddie assaulting Liz to the sounds of a country love song intercut with two dogs humping, as well as a scene where she takes photos of him near a waterfall, imagining her camera is a shotgun and that he is covered in blood and gore.

It all climaxes with a wedding where Eddie and Liz are to be wed, which ends up in a slow motion Sam Peckinpah gun battle, as Keno blasts his way in wanting revenge for his dog and everyone gets caught in the crossfire. The film ends with Liz, her life ruined and not enhanced by this escape from her busy life, raising a shotgun to murder Bertha.

Also known as Black Vengeance, The Victim, Heartbreak Motel and Redneck County Rape, the film played drive-ins and grindhouses for nearly a decade. The Heartbreak Motel version features plenty of differences, as Eddie narrates the movie and action scenes have been cut out and replaced with length soliloquies that don’t appear in any other version of the film. Instead of ending with the gun battle, Heartbreak Motel closes with Eddie leaving Georgia for Nashville and a recording contract. There are less scenes of Eddie attacking Liz, but strangely enough, there is a scene where Eddie and Bertha make, umm, third input love to the haunting strains of a bluegrass ballad.

To say that critics — especially in Atlanta — disliked this film is an understatement.

This article was taken from http://atlantatimemachine.com/misc/eddie15.htm

The 1970s were packed with films that you are kind of, sort of horror movies, yet feature no supernatural elements. They just made you feel like you needed to take an entire day’s worth of showers to clean off the scum after watching them. This is one hell of an addition to those movies. It’s not for everyone, but for those who want to see how low exploitation can go, it’s ready to attack your sensibilities.

You can watch this on Tubi and Amazon Prime.

American International Pictures — AIP — was formed in 1954 by Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson with the goal of releasing double features that appealed to young males, 19-years-old to be exact, as they found that was the optimum audience for their films. That was based on the Peter Pan syndrome, which their PR department believed went like this:

A. A younger child will watch anything an older child will watch;
B. An older child will not watch anything a younger child will watch;
C. A girl will watch anything a boy will watch
D. But the boy will not watch anything a girl will watch;

Therefore: to catch your greatest audience you zero in on the 19-year-old male.

Arkoff even believed that the perfect drive-in movie followed the ARKOFF Formula:

• Action (exciting, entertaining drama)
• Revolution (novel or controversial themes and ideas)
• Killing (a modicum of violence)
• Oratory (notable dialogue and speeches)
• Fantasy (acted-out fantasies common to the audience)
• Fornication (sex appeal for young adults)

For decades, AIP would find the exact double features that its audience was looking for. They had a stable of winning directors in their employee, like Roger Corman, Alex Gordon, Lou Rusoff, Herman Cohen, Bert I. Gordon and imported films from the UK, the Phillipines, Italy, Germany and more.

AIP would move on from science fiction to Poe adaptions to beach party movies to biker films to horror and anything else that would sell. They employed everyone from Jack Nicholson to Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Fabian and so many more.

In 1972, James H. Nicholson resigned from AIP to work on the 20th Century Fox lot, setting up Academy Pictures Corporation. They only had two released before he died of a brain tumor, sadly, which were The Legend of Hell House and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry.

As the 1970s went on, AIP would move into even more genres, like kung fu, gangster and blaxploitation films. They also started moving into the mainstream with movies like Cooley High, The Amityville Horror, Love at First Bite, Meteor, Force 10 from Navarone, The Island of Dr. Moreau and C.H.O.M.P.S., as well as the final film they imported, Mad Max. However, AIP started to price themselves out of business with higher budgets and finally combined with Filmways in 1980. Arkoff bought himself out and started a new production company soon afterward. Meanwhile, Filmways/AIP became Orion Pictures.

The films of AIP read like a laundry list of the greatest films in exploitation history. I could create an entire website just to chronicle their greatest. This is but one of them.

The best part of this movie is the poster, created by the venerable AIP PR team, screaming headlines at you like “Lookout… She’s Legal Now! She’s Out to Tear the Town Apart!”, “She’s got the boys glad and the sheriff mad!” and “She’s the pop top princess with the recyclable can.”

Somewhere in the south lies Titwillow, where our heroine Sixpack Annie Bodine (Lindsay Bloom, who was somehow both Miss Omaha and Miss Utah in her beauty pageant career before appearing in movies like this and eventually becoming switchboard operator Maybelle on The Dukes of Hazzard) is taking her friend Mary Lou to work at the diner.

You don’t get a name like Sixpack Annie drinking soda pop out of the bottle. She chugs a can of brew as she drives her pickup truck, earning the ire of Sheriff Waters (Joe Higgins, who resume keeps on saying Sheriff in everything from Green Acres to Sigmund and the Sea Monster, the TV show Annie and The Man from Clover Grove). He chases her into the diner and literally slips on a banana peels while all the old timers laugh their asses off. Among their number is Doodles Weaver, who was the uncle to Sigourney as well as being a comedian and character actor. His scene in 1971’s The Zodiac Killer is one I always point to as his strangest. He’s also in plenty of redneck movie fare like Bigfoot, Macon County Line, Trucker’s Woman, Road to Nashville and Li’l Abner. He’s also in The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock, the only movie Lou Costello made without his usual partner Bud Abbott, and Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood, Michael Winner’s cameo laden film about, well, a dog saving Hollywood.

But I digress. Aunt Tess, the owner of the diner, is $5,641.87 behind on the mortgage to Mr. Piker the banker. This is important to the plot, as when the sheriff arrests Annie and her man Bobby Joe (a pre-Tron and Scarecrow and Mrs. KIng Bruce Boxleitner) for swimming naked — which does not seem like such a punishable crime — he offers to pay the Aunt Tess’ debt if she marries him. She agrees, but it turns out he doesn’t have anywhere near that much dough.

Annie and Mary Lou decide to go to Miami next, where Annie’s sister Flora (Louisa Moritz, Myra from Death Race 2000 and one of the first women to come out against Bill Cosby) lives in splendor thanks to her escort business. She suggests that if the girls want to save the diner, they should get a sugar daddy of their own. That said, all of the potential GFE benefactors are losers, like a sneezing married man (Sid Melton, who would go on to play Alf Monroe on Green Acres and Sophia’s dead husband on The Golden Girls), a man dressed as Napoleon, a swindler named Oscar Meyer who steals all their money (Ray Danton, who was married to the lovely Julie Adams and would go on to direct plenty of episodes of Magnum P.I.) and a Texan (Richard Kennedy, Dr. Kaiser from Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks as well as appearances in The Witch Who Came From the Sea and Invasion of the Blood Farmers) with a jealous wife who nearly kills Annie.

The girls make it back to the diner with no money to help, just in time for a jewelry salesman named Mr. Bates (Stubby Kaye, Marvin Acme from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) who buys her necklace for $7,000. Just like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Six Pack Annie had the power to go home all along.

Six Pack Annie was the only movie that Fred G. Thorne ever directed, but one of the three screenwriters, David Kidd, would go on to write The Swinging Cheerleaders and Carter’s Army.

You can watch this movie on Amazon Prime.

Lee Frost was behind some strange films like Race With the Devil, Love Camp 7, Chain Gang Women and The Thing with Two Heads. None of those films will prepare you for this one. After all, how does one prepare for a movie where an army of black men get inspired by the wrong side of World War II and become the new master race?

General Ahmed (Rod Perry of TV’s S.W.A.T.) starts a People’s Army to protect the black people of Watts, but after chasing the drug dealers out of town, his second-in-command Colonel Kojah (Charles Robinson, who played Fabulous from Sugar Hill and would go on to be Mac on TV’s Night Court) takes over, turning the group into a fascist paramilitary outfit that controls every racket in town.

With a concept like that, you’d hope that the film itself would be more out of control. Sadly, it isn’t. That said, Uschi Digard shows up and really, that’s worth seeing the film in the first place. Comparing the Black Panthers to the Third Reich and castration are things that you don’t see in movies any longer. I’d argue that this is the lone movie that combines both.

You can get The Black Gestapo on Mill Creek’s new Soul Team Six DVD collection, along with five other films.

DISCLAIMER: Mill Creek sent us this set, but we were planning on buying it anyway. It has no bearing on this review.

Update: Kino Lorber is re-issuing The Black Gestapo to Blu-ray on January 5, 2021. The new 2K master from the original camera negative also features interviews with stars Charlie Robinson, Rod Perry, and Charles Howerton, while Robinson and Perry offer a commentary track. You can learn more about Kino Lorber’s complete roster of films at their official website and Facebook, and watch the related film trailers on You Tube.

Slade is a band near unfamiliar to American ears. This Wolverhampton band had 17 consecutive top 20 hits — three of those singles entered the charts at number one — and six number ones on the UK Singles Chart, making them the most successful British band of the 1970’s. They may have sold over 50 million records worldwide, but despite living in the United States in the 1970’s, they never really broke here.

That changed in 1983 when Quiet Riot released “Cum on Feel the Noize,” a Slade cover (they also would release a version of “Mama Weer All Crazee Now”), which broke the band in the US and led to their song “Run Runaway” charting in the top twenty. Despite numerous breakups, the band still plays today and has influenced artists as diverse as KISS, Nirvana, The Clash, The Ramones and Oasis.

But back in 1975, Slade was big enough to make a movie. Despite all their success, the band just found that they were doing more of the same and wanted something different. Manager Chas Chandler suggested a movie, but the band didn’t want to do a Beatles comedy film, despite the band’s happy-go-lucky image.

They almost made Quite a Mess, a comedy cover version of The Quatermass Experiment before deciding to make a gritty look at the underside of the music business.  Writer Andrew Birkin created the story of a fictional band named Flame, but the band felt it was missing something. They invited Birkin and the film’s director, Richard Loncraine, on tour. After seeing band life first-hand and hearing numerous anecdotes of things that had happened to them and other bands, the script was closer to the band’s vision. 

Lead vocalist Noddy Holder and bassist Jim Lea also pushed for the movie’s soundtrack to expand on the band’s formula and try new ideas. If the film wasn’t a success, the soundtrack was, hitting number 6 on the UK charts with two singles, “Far Far Away” (Hodder’s favorite Slade song) and “How Does It Feel,” a song that Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher says is “one of the best songs written, in the history of pop, ever.”

Slade in Flame, much like many of the movies we’ve covered this week, wasn’t met with initial success. The band’s fans didn’t expect such a downer of a movie and the band, out of the public eye working on the film for so long, were met with a decline in popularity.

As the film begins, the members of Flame are in two rival bands. Despite numerous pranks and fisticuffs, they form a new band and become an overnight sensation. However, tensions within the band develop just as immediately and the ghosts of their past — an old manager with thugs ready to cut the toes off of band members and threaten their children — doom our heroes before they even get started.

There’s a great sequence in this movie where the band appears on the pirate radio station Radio City that’s soon attacked during the Ricky Storm Show. I love how far the band has to climb to find their way to the studio and how this part contributes a bit of the surreal to what is otherwise a very earthbound affair.