On paper, this is about a crime boss named Mr. Winter (Roger Darton) who leaves Hong Kong during a gang war and sets up a new shop in Paris where he gets busy doing what he does best: kidnapping women and getting them to become sex workers who make him money.
The strange part is figuring out how much of this movie was directed by Jess Franco and how much was by Marius Lesoeur and other Eurocine directors. There’s a scene in a cabaret with a Jess cameo which is definitely all him but the shootout that opens this movie is way too much action for him, as he often struggled with showing action movie basics in his work.
At least Alice Arno (Kiss Me Killer) is on hand as Winter’s henchwoman.
My hunt for info on this movie at. least led me to a site that — for some reason — has Jess Franco’s horoscope birth chart. What can we learn from this?
According to Robert Monell, “Franco was called in to direct some of the stage shows while footage from other Eurocine films (Paul Naschy’s Crimson) and new scenes directed by Eurocine founder Marius Lesoeur told the tale.” He used the name A.M.F. Frank, which is also a name that Lesoeur used on other movies.
Directed by Alain Cavalier, Fill ‘Er Up with Super is the story of Klouk (Bernard Crombey), a young auto salesman who has to cancel a vacation with his wife so that he can personally deliver a Chevrolet station wagon to a rich owner on the Riviera. He decides to make it a more fun trip by inviting his friend Philippe (Xavier Saint-Macary) and picking up a two other men on the road by the names of Charles (Etienne Chico) and Daniel (Patrick Bouchitey).
All four of these actors were friends and along with Cavalier, they wrote this film and filmed it on the road, away from the studio, with the freedom to make it be about anything they wanted. The guys really aren’t going anywhere in life or on this journey, but it’s times exactly those kinds of voyages teach you who you are and where you may end up. It’s an exploration of what makes these men, well, men, as they ride inside a giant symbol of masculine American virtue, a gas guzzling car that has to seem out of place as they drive through the small towns on their way from the north to the south of France, from Lille to the Cote d’Azut.
The Radiance Films blu ray release of this movie has a 2K restoration of the film from the original negative. three short films with the cast directed by Cavalier; an interview with Bernard Crombey; an appreciation of Fill ‘Er Up with Super by Cahiers du Cinema deputy editor Charlotte Garson; newly translated English subtitles; a reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters and a limited Edition booklet featuring new writing on the film. You can get it from MVD.
Countess Edna Luise Von Stein (Pamela Stanford, Lorna the Exorcist, Cannibal Terror) once had a stud in bed that was surprised by her sister Millicent (Karine Gambier, but you can also call her Simone Samson like they did in Caged Women and Secrets of a French Maid). That man ended up assaulting Millicent while Edna watched and now, Edna keeps her all tied and drugged up with the help of Dr. Barrios (Jack Taylor) all in the hopes that if she can get the lawyers to say that Millicent is legally insane, then she’ll get everything.
Milly has one hope. Her sister has brought many men to her room — and watched — but only Joe (Kurt Meinicke) ever gave her pleasure. He’s in love with her, but can he rescue her? Is there anything left? And will Edna let her go, seeing as how her pleasure is dependent on seeing her sister remain unfulfilled?
This also has the much better title Satanic Sisters even if there are no occult things happening. Just weird sex, the kind of stuff that Erwin C. Dietrich wrote and there’s no Lina around but there’s Jess, shooting things through curtains and that’s about all we can hope for at this stage.
Around the World In 80 Beds is a collaboration between Erwin C. Dietrich (who took all the credit; he also made Secrets of a French Maid, Six Swedish Girls in a Boarding School, She Devils of the SS and you can get a feel for what he specialized in by those titles; Franco made 17 movies for him) and Jess Franco (no credit, but hey, I’m not doing a month of just any director’s films, much less for the second year in a room), this is not Mondo Erotico except in Germany, so don’t get it confused with the 1973 Filippo Walter Ratti-directed Mondo Erotico; nor the Joe D’Amato-directed, Amanda Lear-starring Crazy Nights which is also called Mondo Erotico and certainly not the Osvaldo Civirani-directed Tentazioni proibite, which also played in Germany as Mondo Erotico.
Esther Moser is the host of this film and just in the year 1977 she’d appear in Franco’s Ilsa, the Wicked Warden; Die Sklavinnen; Blue Rita and Die teuflischen Schwestern. Instead of eighty beds, as promised, the viewer instead is given several stories in an anthology-style film, starting with a black mass in Greenwich Village — yes, five people can be a black mass, one figures, one for each point of the pentagram — and then jet sets us if not all over the world then at least to different small sets to show what the naughty are doing in San Francisco (where an eighty-year-old Elisabeth Bathory claims she stays young by bathing in male-made fluids), Copenhagen (for incest live on stage and you thought this was a new thing the weird kids that search Pornhub are into), Hamburg (where a dominatrix known as the Bride of Satan does her dastardly work), Agoa (where the elders of a tribe take a new bride before her husband; yes, remember that all mondo movies must have a jungle scene that defines racism); Amsterdam (where a sex class experiments with toys, including a man being penetrated, so this is ahead of time at least sexually) and Istanbul (for yet another live sex show).
Who knew all this sex could be so boring?
I guess sometimes, Franco needed money, but this is a rough one to get through. At least there’s one funny moment when a love doll looks bored by sex, if an inanimate toy can be turned off. You may also notice Eric Falk (Stiletto from one of Dietrich’s wilder movies Mad Foxes) plus several of the girls who show up in Franco’s movies from his time with Dietrich, like Esther Studer, Pilar Coll, Lorli Bucher and Yvonne Eduser .
But seriously, unless you’re someone whose ADD demands that you see every Jess Franco film and have a Letterboxd list and a whole month on your site devoted to him, you may not need to see this.
The themes of childhood memories and wanting the world of fairy tales over real life empowers Lips of Blood and it was disconcerting to see so many of those scenes remixed and placed into and around clinical pornography in this movie, which was forced upon creator Jean Rollin, who used the name Michel Gand to make this.
Instead of an image of the past reminding Frédéric of a lost past, here he reads through a book and explains how vampirism is just another perversion. I realize that Rollin had to make this to make back the money that Lips of Blood lost at theaters, but it had to be just pain upon pain for him to prostitute his memories and his beloved vampires for just a simple suck and fuck.
Where in the last movie Claudine was taking photos of a nude model, here she’s filming a couple that has nothing to do with the first film as they make boring love. That same Asian woman ends the film going down on our hero and maybe he should watch out for her fangs.
I guess you could see that this fits within the first movie but I really feel sad about all of this. And it’s not for some puritanical reason. If someone like D’Amato or Franco did the same — hell Franco did the same — I would understand and realize that those guys moved past the question of art and commerce and decided mostly on the latter. I feel empathy that Rollin had to answer that as well.
Jean Rollin is Michel Gentil, this film’s director and writer (he also appears for a few moments) and this was one of the many periods in his life where he found himself making adult films and not for the love of it like Jess Franco or the understanding that he was a capitalist like Joe D’Amato but because he wanted to survive when the films he really loved making just didn’t make him enough money.
Martine (Tania Busselier, who was also in Franco’s Ilsa the Wicked Warden and Countess Perverse) is a writer of erotic novels who can’t find peace, quiet or inspiration until she stays at a hotel and the guests give her more than enough to write down.
Those guests include Eva Khris, Eva Kwang (who is in several of Rollin’s adult films and shows up uncredited in Madame Claude), Martine Grimaud (the doomed photographer from Lips of Blood) and the Castel twins, Catherine and Marie-Pierre. Yes, this is an adult film with them, yet their participation isn’t as full as others.
Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, who wrote the narration for this, would play Orloff in Franco’s Female Vampire and also shows up in Killing Car, The Demoniacs, The Living Dead Girl and The Grapes of Death.
It’s not really all that erotic or well-made, but it is another Rollin film to watch and explore. If anything, it seems like when women have their clothes on, he’s more interested and therefore, their scenes actually live up to being arousing. But once it gets down to the basic push and pull, he checks out and starts thinking of beaches, always beaches, and his beloved vampires and asks if they’re done yet.
I saw someone whining that the new A Christmas Story Christmas recast the mother and was a sequel to a movie that didn’t need a sequel. Little did they know that it was the ninth — if you count the A Christmas Story Live! TV movie — story of the Parker family, a series of films that began seven years before its best-remembered installment.
All of these stories are based on the writing of Jean Shepherd, who often told stories of his childhood in the fictional town of Hohman, Indiana (he grew up in Hammond) on the radio. After publishing those stories in Playboy, but he never intended to be a writer.
Hugh Hefner claimed that The Giving Tree author Shel Silverstein asked Shepherd to write down his radio stories, but he never saw himself being a writer. So Silverstein recorded the shows off the radio, transcribed them and worked with Shepherd to turn them into written works.
His first book, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, contains many of the stories of the Parker family, stories that despite having the names of real people and real places, are all from Shepherd’s imagination. These memories come in the form of Ralph, who has returned to his home town as an adult, telling these stories to his friend, Flick, who now runs the bar where their fathers used to drink.
Four of the stories in the book — “Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid,” “The Counterfeit Secret Circle Member Gets the Message, or The Asp Strikes Again,” “My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award That Heralded the Birth of Pop Art” and “Grover Dill and the Tasmanian Devil,” as well as “The Grandstand Passion Play of Delbert and the Bumpus Hounds” from Shepherd’s second book Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories make up A Christmas Story.
But before that, on December 23, 1976, The Phantom of the Open Hearth aired as an episode of PBS’s anthological television series Visions. It features Shepherd as the adult Ralphie and David Elliot as the teen version in a story of Ralphie trying to decide between taking Daphne Bigelow (Tobi Pilavin) or Wanda Hickey (Roberta Wallach) to the school dance, all while his father (James Broderick) anticipates winning a major award that this film explains is a leg lamp because the contest was sponsored by Ne-Hi Soda and that was their logo. While all thatis going on, Randy (Adam Goodman) annoys Ralphie and mom (Barbara Bolton) is obsessed with getting free fine china from the movie theater.
Directed by Fred Barzyk (Jean Shepherd’s America, The Lathe of Heaven) and David Loxton (Countdown to Looking Glass) from a script by Shepherd, this led to another PBS movie, The Great American Fourth Of July and was almost a TV series in 1978. The pilot was directed by John Rich and written by Shepherd and was also called The Phantom of the Open Hearth. That’s where the line “Oh, fudge (but I didn’t say fudge)!” comes from.
Its a little jarring to see the adult adventures of Ralphie while still interesting to get a different perspective.
I had a priest as a kid who would start a sermon every month or two with, “The story is told…” and then would recount the story of this movie. Why a priest loved a Rene Cardona grindhouse movie about cannibalism enough to tell a small congregation the grisly details of it is still beyond me, but it’s a more fun church than you usually get.
Based on the 1973 book Survive! by Clay Blair, which is based on the true story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, this movie was somehow number one at the U.S. box office for one week, which blows my mind even further. Yes, people showed up to watch Rene and his son Rene make a movie about soccer players trying to decide between eating their dead teammates or starving to death and being eaten by their alive teammates.
Roger Ebert said, “Survive! is a fairly awful movie, but the essential heroism of its subject matter somehow emerges intact. That makes it a difficult movie to review — you can’t just dismiss it with cheap shots, you have to deal with the fact that it does have an emotional impact. It’s not a good movie or even a very professional one, but it does respect its subject matter and so we have to also.”
That’s why I loved Ebert, because even if he disliked a movie, he’d approach it as one to investigate.
The Cardona family never ran from crazy movies — showing real surgery in Night of the Bloody Apes, confronting terrorism and the CIA in Carlos the Terrorist, throwing celebrities into the meat grinders that were Cyclone and Bermuda Triangle and making Guyana: Cult of the Damnedmonths after Jonestown — taking their movies to an international audience who was hungry for, well, pure insanity usually.
All hail Hugo Stiglitz! All hail Norma Lazareno, once the luchadora heroine of Night of the Bloody Apes! All hail José Elías Moreno, who is in this and was Santa in Rene’s berserk Santa Claus! All hail Father Joe, who could barely out ashes on your forehead without making you look like you should be in Immortal!
Can you even imagine what it was like to be in Led Zeppelin in 1973? This movie gets you as close as you’ll probably ever get, seeing as how the band was one of the last of the mysterious rock stars that kept most fans at arm’s length instead of constantly giving away their own stories. This movie was described as “the band’s special way of giving their millions of friends what they had been clamoring for – a personal and private tour of Led Zeppelin. For the first time the world has a front row seat on Led Zeppelin.”
The Pittsburgh part of the movie comes in as the band arrives in America at the old county airport in their private jet The Starship and travel by motorcade to their concert at Three Rivers Stadium on July 24, 1973.
With parts directed by Joe Massot (Wonderwall) and others by Peter Clifton, who was brought in when Zeppelin manager Peter Grant was unhappy with the progress of the film. When asked to leave, Massot was offered a few thousand pounds in compensation and Grant sent someone to Massot’s house to collect the film. Massot had hidden the film elsewhere and so Grant’s employee stole an expensive editing machine owned to use as collateral. It all worked out, but Massot wasn’t invited to attend the premiere of the film at New York. He came anyway and bought a ticket from a scalper to get in.
Beyond the Madison Square Garden shows that were shot, any holes in the performance were filled by a stage show shot with no audience at Shepperton Studios. Jones is wearing a noticeable wig in the new footage and Plant’s teeth are fixed.
The band wasn’t happy with the movie, with Page saying “The Song Remains The Same is not a great film, but there’s no point in making excuses. It’s just a reasonably honest statement of where we were at that particular time. It’s very difficult for me to watch it now, but I’d like to see it in a year’s time just to see how it stands up,” John Paul Jones stating it was “a massive compromise” and Robert Plant calling it “a load of bullocks.” The Jimmy Page fantasy sequence outside his home Boleskine — once owned by Aleister Crowley — was laughed at by John Bonham.
In 1976, the idea that the Living Dead films would continue were way in the future. So if these guys were going to make another movie, why not a sex comedy? Russell Streiner also came on board to produce — and show up as a masked rapist — so this is definitely of interest for those who watch everything connected with Pittsburgh film.
You know. Like me.
Ricci also plays the lead, Marcello Fettucini, a sex machine who works for Joyful Novelties Inc., a company run by Thelonious Suck (N. Detroit, actually Sam Schwartz) that creates the dildos, blow up dolls, French ticklers, lubes, sex dolls and anything it takes to keep America balling. Cherry Jankowski (Sharon Joy Miller) also works there — the alternate title of this is The Liberation of Cherry Jankowski — and she’s also a tester of their equipment. She’s dealing with some rough times as she keeps getting prank calls, getting assaulted by her next door neighbor and has a boyfriend named Herman Longfellow (Doug Sortino) who prefers to dress as a woman and is really into religion.
Marcello isn’t doing all that great. He’s lost his ability to get it up, his father has disowned him and his brother (Dawn of theDead actor David Emge) laughs at him. Of course these two are goingn to wind up together and then I realized there was ten minutes left, so there’s a whole bunch of sexual hijinks with an industrial film feel. You never see any male nudity, in case you wondered, but according to Russo, some actresses would show their butt, some would only go topless and there’s one brave actress that in no way cares near the end and goes full 70s full frontal.
There’s a rapist too dumb to be able to take his pants off, worries of erectile disfunction in the days pre-Viagra and when Marcello gets sad, he goes to the lagoon at Kennywood. Russo also had sticker shock when he tried to buy all the marital aids and decided to just make them himself. That explains why a real woman plays the blowup doll and somehow looks as unsexy as possible despite being sold as the pinnacle of sex.
How wild is it that Gray Morrow did the poster for this?
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