A man is strangled by a transvestite prostitute in his home.

A woman is killed on a bus by a man holding a wrench.

The only thing that ties these crimes together is an illustration from a children’s book by the name of Der Struwwelpete.

Inspector Gaspare Lomenzo (Michele Placido) is on the case, reporting to higher ups played by Tom Skerritt and Eli Wallach. By sheer luck, he meets Jeanna (Corinne Cléry), who witnessed the death of a sex worker that may be part of this case. She was also at a party being held by a group called Wildlife’s Friends — led by Hoffmann (John Steiner) — that hired a prostitute for one of their events and had to kill her after she learned that it was all a front for diamond smuggling. Now, one by one, members of this group — also a front for swinging, not just gems — are being killed off.

This also has a filthy cartoon by Gibba in the middle of all this, as well as the idea that perhaps Loemnzo shouldn’t trust anyone, as Jeanna is a total noir character and the remaining members of the club contact Wallace for protection. And hey — didn’t Heinrich Hoffmann write and draw Der Struwwelpete?

Director Paolo Cavara may be best-known for working with Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco E. Prosperi to create Mondo Cane, but he’s not as celebrated as he should be for making two great giallo — this movie and one of the meanest in the entire genre, Black Belly of the Tarantula. He also wrote the script with Bernardino Zapponi (who wrote seven movies for Fellini and co-wrote Deep Red) and Enrico Oldoini.

The first in a series from Vinegar Syndrome, these sets allow you to discover three giallo films that have been rare until this release.

The Killer Is One of 13 (1976): Not a lot of nudity and little blood, this giallo is closer to Agatha Christie than Edward Wallace. That said, it does have Paul Naschy in it and it’s directed by Javier Aguirre, who made Count Dracula’s Great Love.

Patty Shepherd (Edge of the Axe) stars as Lisa, who has gathered twelve of her husband’s closest friends and informs them that she believes that one of them is the killer. That said, there are really seventeen suspects when you add in the butler, chauffeur, maid and gardener.

All the phone lines get cut, people start getting killed off and secrets are revealed. There aren’t many Spanish giallo that I can think of, other than Clockwork Terror, The House That Screamed, Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, The Corruption of Chris Miller and A Dragonfly for Each Corpse. Come to think of it, I know way more of these movies than I thought I did.

The Police Are Blundering In the Dark (1975): A young nude-model is stabbed to death with a pair of scissors, the third in a series of victims who had all had their photos taken by Parisi, a potentially mentally unhinged individual who claims that his camera can photograph people’s thoughts.

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

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

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

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

Trauma (1978): This isn’t Red Rings of Fear, a similarly titled 1978 Fabio Testi movie that is also a giallo-type film. Not is it the 1993 Dario Argento movie. Instead, it’s a Spanish film directed by Leon Klimovsky (The Vampires Night Orgy, The People Who Own the Dark).

This is all about a gorgeous inn in the country that seems like the perfect place for Daniel (Heinrich Starhemberg, who was also the executive producer, which means that he gets to be the hero and have a love scene with Lys) to do some writing. However, from the moment he meets Veronica (Ágata Lys), nothing will be as it seems. She’s always taking care of her wheelchair-bound husband who is never seen and who lives in one small room.

All of the other guests are busy making love, which seems to be perfect for the film’s other character, a razor-slashing black-gloved killer. As he kills each couple, whoever they are also gets rid of the luggage of each person, as if they weren’t ever there. One of them is Antonio Mayans, which made me happy to see him.

You can get all three movies on blu ray in a great box set from Vinegar Syndrome.

This film begins with dancing women, native Brazilian drummers and an old man who chants over a coffin which opens to reveal…begins chanting over a closed coffin. The coffin opens and a man rises. Zé do Caixão! Coffin Joe!

At an isolated inn — “Hospedaria dos Prazeres” (Hostel of Pleasures) — the owner (Jose Mojica Marins, who is also Coffin Joe) turns away some and allows others already in the guest book to stay. Those without a place to stay are enraged, as after all, there’s a storm outside. Yet he has room for hedonistic Hell’s Angels, a couple sneaking out on their respective partners, a man ready to kill himself, gamblers out to bankrupt someone and criminals escaping their last robbery.

When they wake up in the morning, all of the clocks and their watches are set to midnight. That’s because they’re all in Hell and the absence of time is one of the many things they must deal with, as well as having to watch their deaths again and again. The owner warns them all that they don’t want to see his evil side — Coffin Joe.

One of the rich men who argued about getting to stay the night before leads the police to the hotel. In its place is a graveyard, where we eventually see the owner. As the camera zooms in, his face is replaced by a skull with bleeding eye sockets.

This is a Cinema da Boca do Lixo (Mouth of Garbage films), called that because they were made in that downtown neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil. These films — Killed the Family and Went to the Movies, The Red Light Bandit, Awakening of the Beast — are down and dirty exploitation films that are close to American exploitation of the 70s with sex and violence often in equal measure.

This is worth watching just for the opening speech from Coffin Joe: “Live to die or die to live? Is there an answer? No! Only doubts! Only deductions… Only the conviction of emptiness… of loneliness… the desperate search for the whole and the nothing in the vastness of the dark. The unveiling of this enigma would be the end of the mystery. The end of the secret of eternity. The apogee of happiness. The mission is accomplished! Men would be facing his biggest conquest… the awakening of his own origin.”

Arrow Video’s limited edition collection of Coffin Joe walks with you when it is night. The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures has a new interview with Dennison Ramalho (co-writer of Embodiment of Evil), footage of Marins at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and A Blind Date for Coffin Joe, a short film by Raymond “Coffin Ray” Castile.

Here’s the review for that movie.

On Raymond Castile’s website, he posted some photos dressed up like Coffin Joe. They looked incredible.

In April of 2006, he learned that the real Coffin Joe — Jose Mojica Marins — had visited this page and loved it. Even better, in October of that year, Mojica and Dennison Ramalho, assistant director of the upcoming Encarnacao do Demonio asked Castile to be in the movie, playing the younger Ze do Caixao in a scene that would connect the final film in the trilogy with This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse.

Check out Diary do Demonio, his diary about traveling to Sao Paulo, Brazil to play Coffin Joe.

After this, he made The Blind Date of Coffin Joe in which Coffin Joe moves to America and starts his own reality dating show. If you’ve never seen a Coffin Joe movie, you probably won’t get the jokes. If you have, it’s absolutely hilarious with Castile looking, sounding and acting exactly like Ze do Caixao as he faces modern dating, all in the hopes of finding a superior woman to give birth to his child.

You can get this set from MVD.

In 1926, Randolph (Jeffrey Hurst) catches his wife (Ursula Austin) making love to his best friend (Terry Austin). He kills them, then himself, and remains trapped in the apartment, his spirit unable to move on.

Fifty years later, Abby (also Ursula Austin) moves into the apartment, a place where sex is always happening, mostly between her neighbors Patrick (Robert Kerman, who would go to Italy and make Cannibal Holocaust), his unnamed blonde lover (Nancy Dare) and Lola (Vanessa Del Rio), who is the one who told Abby to move here. There’s also Tess Albertino (Annie Sprinkle).

Abby can’t sleep and magically, sleeping pills show up. She takes them and we see the sky, the wind picks up and Randolph emerges from the wallpaper to make love to her, which we see as Abby being thrown around the bed with no one else there. The problem, well besides the lack of consent in this scene, is that every man who has sex with Abby gets killed from here on our. There’s even a radio thrown into a bathtub which I love to no end. Anny deals with this by wandering through a blizzard before coming home to discover that she has a wedding ring stuck on her hand.

The credits say that this was directed by Luigi Manicottale — when has an American taken on an Italian name, that’s the exact reverse of how this works — but that’s really Doris Wishman. The ghost effects of this movie, the strange snowy park walking scene, the murder after murder without stopping the nonstop lovemaking — this is one strange movie. I have no idea who would be turned on by it and I don’t think Doris cared at all.

Annie Sprinkle recently posted about this movie on Instagram, saying “I was just interviewed for a documentary film about cult filmmaker, Doris Wishman. Amazingly I was in two of her movies almost 50 years ago. Satan Was A Lady and Come With My Love. I had not had a single acting lesson. (Still haven’t. ) I didn’t like acting. I liked the sekx scenes. When I thought about it, Doris was the first woman director I worked with. She was in her 60s and when we shot the dirty bits she would leave the room! The films are partly on YouTube. I was 20 years young and had very bad hair! Most everyone else in the film is dead now. I’m still here! Dori’s would be amazed I’m now still making films and am a Guggenheim Fellow even. Doris is gone but not forgotten.”

The effect of the man emerging from the wallpaper scares me.

You can get this from Vinegar Syndrome.

Kids scare the living shit out of me.

When I was young, my neighbor used to have her grandchildren visit over the holidays and we always had to play with them. One of them was very young and while sled riding, he lost his tiger. I thought that it was a stuffed one but after we walked the entire neighborhood, he told me it was invisible.

But what if it were real?

Directed by Marcello Aliprandi and written by Nicolò and Maria Teresa Rienzi, A Whisper In the Dark comes out of movies like Don’t Look Now, Who Saw Her Die? and The Haunting of Julia.

This is about a family who have fractured dynamics to say the least. Alex (John Phillip Law) is sleeping with everyone but his wife Camille (Nathalie Delon). The twins, Milena (Susanna Melandri) and Mathilde (Simona Patitucci) are horrible to their sensitive brother Martino (Alessandro Poggi). Alex’s mother (Zora Velcova) only makes everyone more on edge and the governess Françoise (Olga Bisera, The Spy Who Loved Me) trying to keep it all together. There’s also a visit from America, Susan (Lucretia Love, Enter the Devil) who is in the house seemingly only to be nude in a few moments.

There’s also Luca, who is either Martino’s imaginary friend or the ghost of Camila’s miscarriage. Only Martino can see him and a famous psychologist (Joseph Cotten) is determined to learn if this is a mental or supernatural problem.

This movie feels at times like it’s from another dimension, such as the scene where the children throw confetti in the air as a boat with a wicker man is set on fire in the lake. As snow and fog roll in, Camille is chased through their grounds by Luca and she decides that she must finally keep her family safe from her lost son. She can no longer keep him and she sends him away from her with the camera moving upward. Her husband finds her in tears and they finally come back together to make love.

The next day, everything has moved back into the routine of family as finally, all of the busy people run away from the breakfast table, leaving Camille alone.

I really enjoyed this, as it’s so different from what you expect, a slow and sad rumination over family life and loss that may or may not be fantastic in nature. You can watch it from either the thought that everyone is mad or that Luca exists.

The Pino Donaggio score is great, too. He also shows up as a singer at the children’s ball.

This is one of the many movies in which Independent-International used comic book artist Gray Morrow to do the art for the posters. He also did the poster and sales art for Brain of Blood, Cinderella 2000, Dracula vs. Frankenstein, Nurse Sherri, Five Bloody Graves, Blazing Stewardesses and Dynamite Brothers.

This film, produced by Sam Sherman and remixed by Al Adamson, was once Captain Roughneck from St. Pauli, which was directed and written by Rolk Olsen. In that movie, Captain Jolly (Curd Jurgens) and his men have been hired to smuggle a vaccine within a shipment of booze. When government officials try to take that booze from him, he destroys it and the vaccine gets stolen, which gets him blamed for taking it. There are also some nurses — they had to come in somewhere — kidnapped in the jungle.

It’s a little over an hour long and the new material from Adamson has some of the nurses making out. One of them is Swedish model Lenka Novak, who is also in Moonshine County Express, Coach, The Great American Girl Robbery, Vampire Hookers and was one of the Catholic high school girls in trouble in The Kentucky Fried Movie.

Tim Brown played football and acted, but because of the success of Jim Brown, who did the same things, he had to change his name to Timothy Brown. He stars in this as “Kicks” Carter, a Vegas cop fighting Ziggy’s (Russ Tamblyn) gang. He has to get revenge for his partner’s death and handle TV reporter Stephanie Adams (Tanya Boyd). Also: fight gun runners and save women from a house of ill repute. That’s a lot of work.

Directed by Al Adamson and written by John D’Amato, Sheldon Lee and Budd Donnelly, this is also known as The Murder Gang and Girl’s Hotel.

Regina Carroll shows up — well, she was Adamson’s wife — and so does Jana Bellan (Mary Lou from Sixpack Annie) and Adamson stock player Geoffrey Land. It seems like Tamblyn is having a lot of fun being an absolute lunatic and he makes this worth watching.

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Adult films probably never had as big of a budget or as rich of a look as this movie, which was shot in New York City, Rome and Paris.

Dr. Seymour Love (Jamie Gillis) is our Dr. Henry Higgins because this is Pygmalion or My Fair Lady. He is transforming common streetwalker Dolores “Misty” Beethoven (Constance Money), a woman whom Love believes he can make into an elite and elevated lady who will impress Geraldine Rich (Jacqueline Beudant), the Colonel Pickering of this movie.

The goal will be that by the time of a party thrown by magazine publisher Lawrence Layman (Ras Kean) and his wife Barbara (Gloria Leonard), Misty will be the most wanted woman in the world. That’s not Kean in the threeway scene that follows. Instead, the female on male penetration has the stunt body of Casey Donovan. He’s also the homosexual art dealer who Misty seduces.

This was shot by cinematographer Paul Glickman, who used the name Robert Rochester. He was also the cinematographer for The Stuff and God Told Me To, as well as the director of photography for Al Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein. He was also nominated for the Best Animated Short Film Oscar for Calypso Singer and El Salon Mexico.