Also known as The Cursed Medallion, this Italian ripoff was directed by Massimo Dallamano (What Have You Done to Solange?).

Richard Johnson (The Haunting and Dr. Menard from Zombi 2) is a BBC filmmaker working on a documentary about demonic images in paintings. His daughter Emily (Nicoletta Elmi, Who Saw Her Die?, Deep Red) is having nightmares about how her mother died in a fire.

Edmund Purdom (2019: After the Fall of New York) advises him to bring his daughter along to Italy for some bonding time, along with their governess Jill, who is love with her boss. But then so is Joanna (Joanna Cassidy, The Glove), the producer of his movie. It also seems like Emily is in love, like real love, with her dad too. Was everyone incestual in 1970’s horror?

Michael meets Contessa Cappelli, an expert on satanic paintings. She warns him not to use a painting in his work. It depicts a child — wearing a medallion just like the one his daughter has been wearing — watching her mother burn. Is it any wonder that demonic possession soon follows?

This movie looks gorgeous. You can see the difference when a real director takes on a ripoff and decides to make it his own movie instead of aping The Exorcist directly.

I’m shocked that more people don’t discuss this film. It really fits into the genre of 70’s occult film quite well. You should check it out for yourself on Amazon Prime or buy the Code Red version at Amazon or the Arrow Video reissue at Diabolik DVD.

According to The Weirdest Movie Ever Made, the book we reviewed at the start of the week, the Patterson-Gimlin film may have made Patterson rich, but Gimlin at first wanted nothing to do with it.

Yet according to author Phil Hall, “After Patterson’s death, Gimlin approached his former partner’s widow, Patricia Patterson, regarding the failure to provide him with the profits from the screenings of the Bluff Creek film. Unable to settle amicably with Mrs. Patterson, Gimlin filed a lawsuit against her…” with the end result being Gimlin was eventually “rewarded 100 percent of all past, present and future publication rights of the imagery connected to the film.”

After this victory, Gimlin was convinced that he should sue American National Enterprises, which is the company behind 1975’s Sasquatch: Legend of Bigfoot.

Turns out that while Bigfoot was difficult to find in the wild, he was easy to find in the courtroom. American National Enterprises was also suing our old friends  Sunn Classic Pictures, claiming that they were illegally using the Patterson-Gimlin film for The Mysterious Monsters. American National Enterprises and Sunn Classic Pictures may have settled out of court, but René Dahinden, author of the book Sasquatch, was bankrolling Gimlin’s legal battles.

Gimlin was, at heart, a cowboy and had little interest in the stress of these battles. You’ll have to read the book to learn more — I don’t want to give away more of Hall’s fine work for free — because it’s time that we get to Ivan Marx.

Don’t get confused. This is the second 1975 entitled The Legend of Bigfoot. And this one is all about Ivan Marx, created by Ivan Marx and narrated by Ivan Marx. According to Wikipedia, the film receives “praise focused largely on the nature footage and the new information about cryptozoology, but criticism largely focused on Marx’s rambling voice-overs (seen by some as self-promotion) and the poor-quality Bigfoot footage, that most have accepted as a hoax. However, to this day, there are many supporters of Marx, who consider him a true explorer and pioneer in the field of cryptozoology.”

If you watch this movie and come away thinking that Ivan Marx and his wife Peggy, who would go on to also make In the Shadow of Bigfoot and Bigfoot: Alive and Well in ’82, are the Ed and Lorraine Warren of the Bigfoot world, then you’re not alone.

Get ready for 70 some odd minutes of rambling raconteur Ivan Marx telling some tall tales. He opens facing the camera, telling us that this movie is the result of ten years of research and he stands behind every word. Seeing as how I had no idea who Ivan Marx was before this movie began, I was inclined to listen.

After explaining to us his pedigree as a tracker, showing us his wife and the cougar pups that live on their ranch and talking about the first men who told him of Bigfoot, Marx learns about the land of petrified wood from his brother-in-law, a place where carvings tell the tale of giant hand and foot having monsters stealing children.

After a series of cow murders and a dead bear near some large tracks, he begins trying to hunt and study something he barely believes in. This takes him to the Oh-mah statues in the redwoods and all along the Oregon coast to no avail.

While on a job filming a cinnamon bear, he’s able to capture footage of the beast. Nobody believes him and he becomes being questioned by science. Then he takes us on a tour of b-roll footage of injured squirrels, goats in the dirt, glaciers melting, the Trans-Alaska pipeline, Bigfoot painters, the Northern Lights and more.

He even gets the promise that he’ll see Bigfoot from an Eskimo and while he gets the footage of some shining eyes, he doesn’t see the creature…because he disappeared behind a rainbow. You can’t make this stuff up. Well, you can.

We then watch more nature footage of salmon, geese, moose, caribou and more until we see a young Bigfoot in the stream. The other animals — all from other b-roll footage of course — aren’t afraid. “Bigfoot is a benevolent creature!” Yep, Marx also figures out that the creature is mostly a vegetarian with occasional fish meals. Yes, this movie taught me that Bigfoot is a pescetarian!

Luckily, Marx isn’t giving up here. He’s figured out Bigfoot’s migratory patterns and he’s on the search for the creature…all in the hopes of protecting him from mankind.

This film was directed by Harry Winer, who would go on to direct two of Becca’s favorite movies, the Jamie Lee Curtis starring House Arrest and SpaceCamp. It’s a shambling mess of a film and your ability to enjoy it will be solely determined by how much of Ivan Marx’s carny spirit you can stomach. As for me, I’ve spent more than half my life as a professional wrestler, so I was all in for this.

You can watch it for free on Amazon Prime and at the Internet Archive.

This movie lies to you from the very moment it begins. First off, it’s barely a movie, clicking in around 59 minutes. And when you get to the real heart of the movie, it’s not even about Bigfoot! It’s really about a mummy coming back from the dead.

A high school biology class — filled with stoners — spends much of the opening of the movie discussing cryptozoological creatures like the griffin. What school is this? Who approved this lesson plan? Nonetheless, this class is interrupted by a good friend of their teacher, who frighteningly warns that he took his class to search for Bigfoot 15 years ago, a field trip where parents bemoaned signing the permission slips, as nearly everyone involved ended up in mental institution.

That’s when we cut to footage of a completely different movie — a student film made in 1958 called Teenagers Battle the Thing — where that class travels to Native American burial ground where a mummy attacks the kids.

This is a movie that redefines the phrase bad movie. It has it all — B roll travelogue footage, amateurish acting from two different decades, day for night footage that’s explained away by the moon being so bright and a climax that explains that the only way to stop Bigfoot is to set him on fire. Even better, the print I watched was completely blobbed out and orange. This is not a movie that demands a blu ray or 4K transfer. It belongs beaten up and hard to watch.

You can check this out for free at the Internet Archive.

Let’s step away from Bigfoot to speak on werewolves. Specifically, a werewolf named Count Waldemar Daninsky. Over twelve movies, his origins have changed as many times as his films have alternate titles. Here, in the eighth film in the series (also known as The Curse of the Beast, Night of the Howling Beast and Hall of the Mountain King), Waldemar becomes a werewolf when he’s bitten by not only one, but two vampire woman.

Wait — a vampire can turn you into a werewolf? And how does a yeti get involved? Oh man, welcome to the fever dream that is a Paul Naschy film.

Waldemar Daninsky is in Tibet looking for the legendary yeti when those two vampire women we alluded to before capture him and keep him in their cave. While they’re having sex with him and biting him and making him a werewolf (which seems to be the best way to be transformed), his friends are being captured and tortured by Tibetan pirates.

With eight minutes left in the movie, Waldemar becomes a werewolf and battles a yeti one on one. By the time I got that far — keep in mind I was at a drive-in — I was so inebriated that I was in and out of consciousness. Or perhaps this film is that strange, seeing as how it’s filled with skin being ripped off people’s backs, neon glowing caves, nudity, rituals and stock footage. In short, it’s great.

You’ll find this movie — in way better quality than the night I saw it — in the Paul Naschy Collection volume 2 from Shout! Factory.

At the start of this movie, Peter Graves looks right at the camera and totally bullshits you: “Scientists representing the world’s most foremost research centers took part in the examination of the evidence. The facts that will be presented are true. This may be the most startling film you’ll ever see.”

Get ready for another piece of Sunn Classic Pictures magic. Yes, the same people who forced you to watch Chariots of the Gods and Hangar 18. This one reached an even bigger audience thanks to being broadcast in prime time on NBC.

Director Robert Guenette, according to Wikipedia, “was an American film producer, screenwriter, film director, television director and television producer, recipient of the Directors Guild of America Award. Guenette is considered as one of the first documentary directors to introduce the “newsreel style” in documentaries. He and his son, Mark, were co-founders of the International Documentary Association.”

Now I bet you $3 that Mark Guenette or someone else in the family wrote this Wiki page, because we’re also talking about the same dude who directed the movie that gave me nightmares every time HBO aired it (which is to say, nearly every afternoon for three years) The Man Who Saw Tomorrow.

From Bigfoot to the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti and, well, that’s it — this movie is a mix of dramatic reenactments and Peter Graves going all over the world to get the story. It’s like no one told the future host of A&E’s Biography that he could simply do all his narration from the studio.

This is a movie replete with lie detectors, hypnosis, the Patterson-Gimlin footage, Bigfoot hunters, blurry photos and incredulous scientists forced to debate the existence of monsters with Jim Phelps from Mission: Impossible. In one of these instances, Graves wonders why the cops are good with verbal statements and scientists aren’t. The incredulous scientist responds with the simple fact that we know humans exist so it’s simple to believe the things they say. I was waiting for Graves to say, well, you I believe that my brother is The Thing.

To you kids with your streaming channels and cable TV, I opine that this movie was once awesome. We had to go to the theaters to see ridiculous stuff like this. There wasn’t an entire channel or ten devoted to it. In the 1970’s, we took what we could get and we liked it!

You can grab this at Amazon.

Also known as The Devil Within Her, The Monster and Sharon’s Baby, this mid-70’s film plays it so straight that it can’t be anything but a parody of The Exorcist. Yet here it is — screaming in your face, full of bad accents and horrible sex scenes, so earnest that it makes you want to believe that you can’t help but hold it tight and tell it that yes, everything will be OK.

Directed by Peter Sasdy, who also brought us Taste the Blood of Dracula, the Ingrid Pitt starring Countess Dracula, Hands of the Ripper, Welcome to Blood City and, of course, The Lonely Lady, this is probably the only film you’ll ever witness where Joan Collins and a little person engage in occult warfare.

Lucy (the lovely Ms. Collins) is a dancer and not the kind that does modern or ballet. Her stage act includes a routine with Hercules, played by George Claydon from Berserk!, a dwarf strongman. She invites him for a drink one evening but he declines, instead feeling like giving her a rubdown in the dressing room. Our heroine feels uncomfortable just as he goes for her breasts, making her scream and bringing in Tommy (John Steiner, Shock and, of course, The Overlord from Yor, Hunter from the Future), the stage manager, who kicks his ass out and then makes sweet, sweet love to Lucy. As she leaves the club that night, the dwarf curses her: “You will have a baby…a monster! An evil monster conceived inside your womb! As big as I am small and possessed by the devil himself!”

If you didn’t say, “Holy shit, I am all in,” after the above paragraph, you have no soul and no sense of what makes a horrible movie worth watching.

Months pass and Lucy has given up the exotic dancing lifestyle, settling down with wealthy Gino (Ralph Bates, The Horror of Frankenstein and Lust for a Vampire), who has set her up in a fancy townhouse. She has a long, arduous and painful delivery of her baby, who weighs in at 12 pounds (.86 stone for the British fans out there). Said baby is also fond of ripping at her with his nails, but Dr. Finch (Donald Pleasence, who never turned down a role ever) assures her that it will all be alright. Tell that to housekeeper Mrs. Hyde (Hilary Mason, Don’t Look Now and Dolls) when the baby almost bites off her finger!

The baby just won’t get along with anyone, a fact that Lucy relates to her galpal Mandy (Caroline Munro, livening up the proceedings) and Gino’s sister Albana (Eileen Atkins, a British stage star who deserves way better), a nun. Despite a series of tests — both religious and medical — the baby will not be stopped, even smashing and drowning his nurse (Janet Key from The Vampire Lovers).

Lucy even tries to talk to Tommy, saying that he may be her son. The baby reacts by punching the gangster in the nose, which makes Lucy happy until her son gets the face of Hercules.

Her husband tries to take her mind off everything with a night of, as they said in the 1970’s, sweet whoopie. After the most unsexual sex scene ever filmed, the baby lures him outside where he’s lynched and stuffed down a storm drain. Oh no, Gino! It gets worse! The infant also beheads Pleasence and stabs Lucy in the heart! Don’t let kids play with scissors, parents!

Albana finally realizes what she must do — rip off the ending of The Exorcist. As she goes through with the rite, Hercules is dancing on stage, but the moment she touches the baby’s head with a crucifix, he dies in front of the audience.

This one is a real crowd pleaser. Seriously, it may be talky and boring in parts, but you have to admire its drive to do anything to shock and surprise you. It keeps trotting out attractive British genre stars only to off them in ludicrous ways, all while Joan Collins screams her head off. Writing about this movie only makes me want to watch it again.

You can get this at Ronin Flix.

There are people that say there’s no such thing as a perfect movie. Those people have never seen Death Race 2000, a film that’s packed with pop culture references, ultraviolence, black humor, political commentary and great character moments.

After the “World Crash of ’79”, the United States government declares martial law. To keep the people happy, the Transcontinental Road Race is created. It’s a race across the country — ala Cannonball Run — except that drivers score points for killing people.

This is the twentieth race and each driver has their own character and themed car, including the mysterious champion Frankenstein (David Carradine, Kill Bill) who has been torn apart and rebuilt so many times, no one is sure what parts of him are real any longer; Machine Gun Joe (Sylvester Stallone, Rocky), a Chicago gangster who calls people mashed potato and will even drive over his own pit crew for points; Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov, Night of the Comet), a tough cowgirl; Nero the Hero (Martin Kove, Kreese from the Karate Kid!) and Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins, Eaten Alive, Caged Heat), a Nazi. They each have a navigator who is also generally their sexual partner.

Covering the race is a parody of network news coverage — that would become even more true in today’s Fox News and CNN climate — which includes loudmouth Junior Bruce (Don Steele, Rockin’ Ricky Rialto from Gremlins), Harold, who is pretty much Howard Cosell and Grace Pander, the gossip columnist who refers to everyone as her close personal friend.

Meanwhile, Thomasina Paine, the great great great great and maybe even great-granddaughter of American Revolutionary Thomas Paine is sabotaging the race to rebel against the President. These revolutionaries have even placed Annie, Thomasina’s granddaughter, into the race as Frankenstein’s new navigator. That said — the government keeps covering up all of the deaths of the racers and blame it all on the French — who have already destroyed the country’s phone system — one of director Paul Bartel’s (Eating Raoul) favorite jokes. In fact, the film was packed with even more silliness before Roger Corman chopped out most of the strangeness that Bartel loved so much.

Everyone but Machine Gun Joe and Frankenstein are left in the race. Before the final day of the race, Annie learns that Frankenstein isn’t even the original man — he was a ward of the state who was raised from birth to compete in the Death Race. When he’s used up, another will take his place. And he’s closer to the spirit of the rebels than Annie would ever think — he plans on using his fake right hand to blow up the President. Of course, that was the plan. But Annie saves Frankenstein using this “hand” grenade in the final battle

Frankenstein is injured, so Annie takes his place and tries to stab the President. But her own grandmother shoots her, as she wants revenge thinking that the champion Death Racer had killed her granddaughter. And this all takes place after the President declares war on the French and appoints Frankenstein to lead his armies!

The real Frankenstein recovers and runs over the President to the roar of the crowd. He becomes President, marries Annie and runs over Junior Bruce as he puts an end to the Death Race.

This film may have been remade (and there are several sequels to that franchise) and Corman finally put out Death Race 2050, his own sequel to the film, in 2017. But do we need anything else when the original is so epic? It’s so much fun, punctuated by moments of sheer lunacy. Viva la Death Race 2000!

Ōkami no Monshō was a two-volume manga published in 1970 and then re-created in 2007. This film version — which wildly differs from its inspiration — hit Japanese screens in 1975 and stars Japanese actor, singer, film producer, film director, and martial artist (and the inspiration for a marijuana nickname) Shin’ichi “Sonny” Chiba. And it’s one of the wildest, strangest films I’ve ever seen.

Let me see if I can come close to summarizing the batshit insanity that is this movie: Akira Inugami (Sonny Chiba, of course), our hero, is the last survivor of a clan of werewolves. As a child, he watched his village and people get destroyed. Today, he uses his werewolf abilities to help him solve crimes — but never transform into a wolf.

His new case begins when a man is yelling in the street about being attacked by an invisible tiger that soon tears him apart. At the center of his investigation is Miki, who was abused by The Mobs, an evil rock band, and now only cares about heroin and killing everyone who hurt her. Now, a phantom government agency uses her to kill those they deem necessary of elimination.

Along the way to solving this mystery, Inugami will battle ninjas, the Yakuza, the Japanese CIA, assassins and more. It’s also worth noting that Wolfguy sleeps with more women in this movie than James Bond, but everyone he touches usually ends up dead. There’s one bonkers sex scene near the end with his true love, Taka, that has him remember sucking on his werewolf mother’s breast while doing the same to the woman he claims is his wife. Alright there, Wolfguy.

Sonny Chiba didn’t form the Japan Action Club for nothing. This group, created to develop and raise the level of martial arts techniques and sequences used in Japanese film and television, has him at its center. In this film, he has a multitude of battles and even gets thrown down a cliff and somehow front flips directly onto his feet, a stunt that completely astounded me.

Directed by Kazuhiko Yamaguchi (Sister Street Fighter) and written by Fumio Konami (Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion), this is the only Japanese werewolf that’s not a werewolf scored by Japanese jazz noise rock that sounds like Goblin featuring blood gushing FX that I have — and probably will ever — see. Imagine Wild Zero but played completely straight. I’ve also never seen a movie where the hero is able to control his intestines and pull them back into his body.

Imagine this: loud guitars, neon colors, dizzying camera angles, werewolf fistfights against ninjas and a love scene every fifteen minutes. This is a gloriously scuzzy, scummy, silly and majestic piece of film. It blew me away from start to finish and I can barely comprehend much of what I watched!

Credit for getting this movie back into the pop culture consciousness belongs to Arrow Video, which put out a gorgeously cleaned up release. You can grab that at Diabolik DVD. Even better, if you have Shudder, you can watch it now! It’s streaming and ready to blow your fucking mind.

When a movie starts with a fashion model dying during a back alley abortion and it being covered up as a drowning, all before the opening credits, you know that you’re in for something demented. When you realize that the film was written and directed by Andrea Bianchi, who brought us Burial Ground, you will either run screaming or sit down and pay attention.

The doctor who performed the operation is killed by a maniac in a motorcycle suit, but nobody at the Albatross Modeling Agency cares. All Carlo, the head photographer, cares about is using his modeling connections to pick up women. That’s how he meets Lucia (Femi Benussi, Hatchet for the Honeymoon), whom he takes from the steam room to the modeling agency.

Magda (Edwige Fenech looks better than I’ve ever seen her look in any movie) is jealous, so she surprises Carlo with some black lace, and they begin an affair. We then see a photo of the main agency members, like Mario, Magda, Carlo, Stefano, Dorris, Maurizio and his wife, and the owner of the studio, Gisella. There’s one other person in the photo—Evelyn, who we saw die in the beginning.

Mario heads home, and the killer shows up. When their helmet is removed, Mario knows the killer. But it’s too late. He’s dead now. The killer takes the photo so that they have a checklist of who to kill.

So then there’s Maurizio, who is cheating on his wife with a prostitute. He takes her on a crazy ride through the streets and then takes her back to his place, where he begs and threatens her life before she suddenly wants to have sex with him — because, you know, that’s how things worked in the 1970s — before he lasts all of a minute and starts embracing his blow up doll. Honestly, what the fuck? Of course, he’s killed right afterward. Good riddance.

Carlo later witnesses Gisella being murdered and even photographs the attack, but he’s hurt in a hit-and-run accident. While he’s recovering, Magda develops the film, but the killer ruins the negatives.

After killing Doris and Stefano, the murderer tries to kill Carlo and Magda, but the killer is knocked down the stairs. So who is it? New model Patrizia — Evelyn’s sister — blames him for her sister’s death. However, she dies before she can tell the police of his involvement.

The movie ends with Carlo playing around by mock choking Magda before initiating anal sex with her, as she tells him not to, in a scene meant as a comedy but lost in translation and the fact that forty-plus-year-old Giallo could never anticipate the #metoo movement.

The title of this film says it all. It’s the most nudity I’ve ever seen in a movie. And it’s one of the most lurid I’ve seen, too. I do not know if Bianchi intended this as a comedy, but it feels like one.

It’s almost incredible that a movie with this much nudity and mayhem moves at a glacial pace. It felt like the film’s first hour was the entire running time and contained wall-to-wall misogyny. I know, I know, that’s the majority of Giallo, but it feels so overwhelming and alien when seen with today’s eyes. I mean, should I be shocked that a movie called Strip Nude for Your Killer is so sexist? And why do I love it so much? Maybe it’s because Edwige Fenech makes me watch anything that she is in.