We live in a magical reality, the kind of place where Michael Winner, the same man who made some of the roughest films ever — Death Wish, Death Wish 2, Death Wish 3, The Mechanic, The Sentinel — made this movie that’s a kind of, sort of biography of Hollywood star dog Rin Tin Tin.

It was originally called Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Warner Bros. before Paramount bought the film and, well, the movie had to change its name, right?

Estie Del Ruth (Madeline Kahn) has made her way to Hollywood, followed by a dog named Won Ton Ton. While she has dreams of being a star — and a director who continually and unsuccessfully pitches movies that will be made many years later named Grayson Potchuck (Bruce Dern) tries to help — the truth is that the dog has all the talent.

This is less a film than a collection of vignettes about the Golden Age of Hollywood, such as Ron Leibman’s effeminate take on Rudolph Valentino and Art Carney, Phil Silvers and Teri Garr as players in the tale of Estie and Won Ton Ton.

The draw for me — beyond how strange it is that Winner directed this comedy misfire — is the huge cast of Hollywood legends, many of whom made this movie their final role. Here are as many as I could remember:

Dorothy Lamour: One-time star of the Hope and Crosby Road movies, she shows up here as a visiting film star.

Joan Blondell: Often cast as a gold digger, Blondell’s career stretched back to vaudeville. She’d appear in two more movies after this: The Champ and Grease.

Virginia Mayo: Warner Brothers’ biggest box-office money-maker in the late 1940s, Mayo continued acting until 1997. She was one of the first actresses to be awarded a star on the Walk of Fame.

Henny Youngman: The rapid-fire standup who would always say, “Take my wife…please.”

Rory Calhoun: Readers of this site will definitely know Calhoun, as he reinvented himself in the 80’s, appearing in genre films like Motel Hell, Hell Comes to Frogtown and the first two Angel films.

Aldo Ray: Much like Calhoun, Ray appeared in just about every genre film he could in the later part of his career. Shock ‘Em Dead, Human Experiments, The Glove, Don’t Go Near the Park, Haunts…I can and will go on.

Nancy Walker: This star of Rhoda would go on to direct an even bigger bomb than this: Can’t Stop the Music, the unreal story of the Village People.

Ethel Merman: Playing Hedda Parsons here, Merman was considered the First Lady of musical comedy.

Rhonda Fleming: Her name in this movie is Rhoda Flaming, which is…par for the course of this film. She was known as the Queen of Technicolor for how well she filmed.

Dean Stockwell: If you only know him from Quantum Leap, I’d recommend you check out his roles in To Live and Die in L.A. and Married to the Mob.

Tab Hunter: Known for his clean-cut, boy next door looks, his later years are marked by interesting turns, such as playing Mary Hartman’s dad on the spin-off Forever Fernwood and appearing Divine in Polyester (1981) and Paul Bartel’s Lust in the Dust.

Dick Haymes: This big band vocalist sang in the session where Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters recorded both “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better).”

Robert Alda: Yes, he’s Alan’s dad. But you knew that. And you also knew that he played Father Michael in Mario Bava’s House of Exorcism.

Victor Mature: This would be the actor’s last major role; he also shows up in a cameo at the end of Winner’s film Firepower.

Edgar Bergen: As Professor Quicksand, this is one of his few roles not holding one of his trademark partners like Charlie McCarthy or Mortimer Snerd. He’s also in The Phynx, which still blows my mind.

Henry Wilcoxon: You may not know that he was very involved with the films of Cecil B. DeMille, but you do know him as the priest caught in a rainstorm in Caddyshack.

Yvonne DeCarlo: In 1950, the Camera Club of America voted her “Sexnicolor Queen of the Screen.” You know those guys — the pre-Internet creeps that’d hire women to pose for them as they stood around en masse. DeCarlo is better known as Lily Munster, she also appears in the kind of movies that this creep enjoys, namely Satan’s Cheerleaders, Silent Scream, Play Dead, Guyana: Cult of the Damned, American Gothic and Mirror, Mirror.

There are literally dozens and dozens of stars here, so get ready…

Edward Le Veque (the last surviving member of The Keystone Kops); William Benedict (Whitey of The Bowery Boys); Huntz Hall of The Dead End Kids; silent stars Carmel Myers, Dorothy Gulliver, Maytag repairman Jesse White; comedians Jack Carter and Shecky Greene; Marilyn Monroe rival Barbara Nichols; Variety columnist Army Archerd; Fernando Lamas; Zsa Zsa Gabor; Cyd Charisse, whose legs were once insured for $5 million dollars; Doodles Weaver (who also shows up in plenty of insane movies like The Zodiac Killer); cowboy actor Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez; Dick Van Dyke Show co-star Morey Amsterdam; Monroe/JFK scandal magnet Peter Lawford; Eddie Foy Jr.; Patricia Morison; The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok star Guy Madison; John Carradine as a drunk (yes, I realize that this is an easy target; I also realize that I watch at least one movie with Carradine in it a day); Regis Toomey, who is also in another dog of a film C.H.O.M.P.S.; Ann Rutherford (Gone with the Wind); Milton Berle (once perhaps the most famous person in entertainment); Keye Luke (a founding member of the Screen Actors’ Guild as well as the original Brak on Space Ghost and Mr. Wing from Gremlins); Walter Pidgeon (he’d be in one more movie, the Mae West vehicle Sextette); character actors Phil Leeds and Cliff Norton as dogcatchers; Winnie the Pooh’s original voice Sterling Holloway; two of the Ritz brothers; Edward Ashley (Professor Sutherland from Waxwork); Fritz Feld (who is also in The Phynx); George Jessel; Ken Murray; Stepin Fetchit (considered to be the first African-American to have a successful acting career, now seen as an example of how Hollywood treated minorities); Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller; Louis Nye; Dennis Morgan; William Demarest (Uncle Charley from My Three Sons); Billy Barty who plays an assistant director; Ricardo Montalban; Jackie Coogan; Roy Rogers’ sidekick Andy Devine; Broderick Crawford (of his many movies, I’ll let on that Harlequin is one of my favorites); Richard Arlan; Jack La Rue; former pro wrestler “Iron” Mike Mazurki; as well as singers Dennis Day, Janet Blair, Jane Connell, Ann Miller, Rudy Vallee and Gloria DeHaven.

When Augustus von Schumacher attended the premiere — he was the dog who played the lead role — he walked in with Mae West. Now that’s how you become a star.

As for the movie — unless you’re someone like me that gets excited about cameos, you’re going to hate it.

I was telling someone who doesn’t watch movies like I do — well, that could be just about anyone — that this film has a cast packed with stars. That’s when I realized that Hollywood Boulevard has a cast that is all famous to me and probably me alone. I don’t care. These are my people. Join me as I celebrate them.

Candice Rialson, the inspiration for Bridget Fonda’s character in Jackie Brown, stars as Candy Wednesday, new in town and ready to be a big star. She gets an agent named Walter Paisley (Dick Miller, with the same name as his character in A Bucket of Blood) who can’t get her any work until she gets mixed up in a bank robbery.

Those of you who read the site know that I watched this movie specifically because Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov are in it. What kept me around was the fact that this movie is basically making fun of every Corman movie of this era, with the three girls formula and a script pretty much taken from the Bela Lugosi movie The Death Kiss.

Seeing as how this was directed by Allan Arkush and Joe Dante, there are a ton of inside jokes. Bartel’s director character, Eric Von Leppe, is the name of Boris Karloff’s character from The Terror. John Kramer’s character, Duke Mantee, is named for Bogart’s character in The Petrified Forest. Tara Strohmeier’s Jill McBain is named for Claudia Cardinale’s character in Once Upon a Time in the West. You also have a movie named Machete Maidens, almost every Corman director showing up in cameos, Forrest J. Ackerman popping up and Robby the Robot.

This movie was the result of a bet between producer Jon Davison and Roger Corman. Davison believed that he could make the cheapest New World Pictures movie ever, so he was given $60,000 and ten days.

Consider it a greatest hits, with scenes taken directly from Battle Beyond the Sun, The Terror, The Big Bird Cage, Night of the Cobra Woman, The Hot Box, Night Call Nurses, Unholy Rollers, Savage!, Caged Heat, Big Bad Mama, Death Race 2000 and Crazy Mama all here.

Let me sum this up: Candice Rialson looks better in the Frankenstein costume than David Carradine.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This movie is astounding. It starts with a hairy old woman named Luba, queen of the werewolves, asking a young blonde woman to stab her and take her place as the new leader of the lycanthropes. As the wolves howl around her, we’re taken to an arena where Santo battles his foes.

After the match, the new queen comes to see our hero in his locker room and offers her body to him. Just as he’s politely asking her to leave, a detective arrives and tells our hero that the Harker family needs to meet him. As they speak, we follow the new Luba down a hallway, trailed by wolves.

Yes, imagine if you infused a Santo wrestling movie with the Gothic horror look of a Paul Naschy film and made things as dark as possible. That’s exactly what this movie is and I loved every second moment of its footage.

Why would werewolves come after Santo? It’s simple: only silver can destroy them. And our hero is quite literally the silver symbol that can destroy them all. But what if they can turn him to their side? And what if the werewolf queen has a king?

There’s nothing better than a movie where the most famous wrestler to ever emerge from Mexico bodyslams a werewolf woman to death as children are menaced. I love that this movie exists. I want you to be part of my excitement.

You can find this movie for sale on Etsy or watch it on YouTube:

With Blue Sunshine, Just Before Dawn and Remote Control, Jeff Lieberman has proven himself a reliable creator of horror that doesn’t fit into any neat box. Speaking of not being neat, this entire movie will upset any clean freak, as it deals with worms that climb up from the dirt to destroy human beings. Lieberman was inspired to make this movie thanks to a childhood event involving the ground being electrocuted and worms coming out.

September 29, 1975. Fly Creek, Georgia. A transformer knocks into the ground and the worms are turned evil by 300,000 volts of electricity, including a shipment of 100,000 bloodworms and sandworms.  escape the truck. That’s when we meet our hero Mick (Don Scardino, Cruising, He Knows You’re Alone), just as he finds one of those worms in his egg cream — a cold beverage consisting of milk, carbonated water and flavored syrup, as a substitute for an ice cream float. Despite the name, the drink contains neither eggs nor cream.

(Thanks to reader MH for pointing out this typo.)

At least he has an attractive girlfriend named Geri, played by Patricia Pearcy from Cockfighter, who believes him when all the local yokels make fun of our man Mick. Before long, those worms are doing more than just pranks — they’re eating people, dropping trees on them and even crawling into someone’s face to possess them. Rick Baker used prosthetic makeup for the first time in his career on this film.

This movie used so many sea worms — ordering a quarter-million at a time — that they wiped out New England’s supply of Glycera fishing worms for the rest of the year. And if everyone looks freaked out when the tree crashes into the room while everyone is eating dinner, that’s because Lieberman actually launched a real tree through the window from a crane and as everyone runs, they really believed that they were running for their lives.

Think people love this movie? Pittsburgh musician Weird Paul made the album Worm in My Egg Cream all about the worm in my egg cream scene, with all sixteen songs titled “Worm in My Egg Cream.”

You watch this movie for free on Tubi.

Known in Italy as Una Magnum Special per Tony Saitta (A Magnum Special for Tony Saitta) and Blazing Magnum in the UK, this movie caught my attention with Stuart Whitman as a “Dirty Harry” type detective named — you guessed it — Tony Saitta solving the giallo-esque murder of his sister.

She was played by Carole Laure, a Quebec singer whose first major acting role in Sweet Movie nearly ended her career. She plays a Miss Canada who is married off to a milk tycoon on the basis of her virginity. The film has coprophilia, emetophilia, implied child molestation and footage of remains of the Polish Katyn Massacre victims. And Laure left the production after growing increasingly upset over what was required of her, especially after a scene where she had to give a handjob. Ah, art! At least she’d go on to be in the Pele, Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone movie Victory.

Well, she doesn’t last too long in this movie. At a party where people are faking their deaths to get a reaction, she ends up getting poisoned and really dying at the hands of Dr. George Tracer (Martin Landau!). Working with Ned Matthews (John Saxon!), Tony’s on the case of his sister’s death. And damn anyone who gets in his way.

If you’ve ever wanted to see Stuart Whitman get thrown out a plate glass window by a karate-kicking transvestite, good news. This movie was made for you. And me. Because man, it’s absolutely bonkers.

Seriously, this entire scene is insane. But let’s go back a little bit.

After University of Montreal student — and Tony’s sister — Louise (Laure) gets in a battle with her married lover Dr. Tracer (Landau), she tries to call her brother but he’s in the middle of a busy case. So she turns to her ex-boyfriend Fred and they come up with a scheme to get back at the perhaps not-so-good doctor.

That night, as everyone parties at the home of Professor Margie Cohn (Gayle Hunnicutt, The Legend of Hell House), Louise becomes sick and Tracer is frantically called. He gives her a stimulant and everyone laughs when she reveals she was faking. But soon, after a heart attack, no one is laughing.

Tony comes in from Ottawa for the funeral and despite being 200 kilometers (124 miles) from home, Detective Ned Matthews (Saxon) just decides to let him do whatever he wants, which includes the aforementioned transvestite party fistfight, which starts with one of their number saying, “Cinderella, answer the door,” before Tony beats one into oblivion and announces that everyone needs to settle down. Spoiler: They don’t, tossing him out a window before he violates another with a hot curling iron and throwing the surviving ladyman into a swimming pool. This scene is incredibly baffling, perhaps because I’m viewing it through the lens of 2020 films.

Blind university music teacher Julie Foster (Tisa Farrow!) is the only person who may have a clue as to what’s going on, but there’s also a little person crime boss, several car chases, a graphic stabbing, the aforementioned Ms. Farrow wandering down the street blind through traffic and so much more.

This movie was written by Vincenzo Mannino (Phantom of Death, Murder Rock, The Last Shark) and Gianfranco Clerici (Don’t Torture A Duckling, The New York Ripper, Cannibal Holocaust), so you know that there’s no way that this movie isn’t going to involve depravity and mayhem.

It was directed by Alberto De Martino, who also was behind Operation Kid Brother, The Antichrist, Holocaust 2000, The Pumaman and Miami Golem, a movie I keep meaning to get to.

This is a movie devoted to entertaining you by any means necessary. It’s all wood-paneled 1970’s, mixing the Canadian tax shelter magic with some of that good old fashioned Italian blood and guts. What a recipe!

Jack Starrett may be best known for Blazing Saddles, but he was also in plenty of biker movies like The Born Losers, Hells Angels on Wheels, Angels from Hell and Hell’s Bloody Devils. He moved on to directing, making films like Run, Angel, Run; Nam’s Angels; Cleopatra Jones; Race With the Devil and Kiss My Grits. 

William Smith is an actor that’s been in oh, somewhere around three hundred films. Let me topline some of his roles: Conan’s dad in Conan the Barbarian, the captain in Maniac Cop, C.C. and Company, Grave of the Vampire, Hammer, Seven, Hell Comes to Frogtown, Terror In Beverly Hills, Uncle Sam and he shows up as Pharaoh in two of the Roller Blade Seven movies. He was also the father to Lorenzo Lamas’ character on the TV show Renegade. Smith also produced this film, one of only three movies he put his money behind (Prologue to Wounded Knee and Body Shop are the other two).

This might be autographical — Smith plays Hollywood action film star Rafe Stoker, who has sunk $130,000 of his own money into a movie but can’t get the cash to finish the film. The mob investor agrees to pay, as long as Smith ponies up some big collateral. Then, he hires Harvey and his bikers to sabotage the movie. Plus, the cops are also on Stroker’s case. He can’t win as he and his girl get gunned down by thugs after finishing the movie.

I can’t lie — I only watched this movie because Mary Woronov was in it. Also appearing are Tom Simcox (Grim Prarie Tales), Don Stroud (The Amityville Horror), Carmine Caridi (who was in second and third Godfather films; he was also the first person to be expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for bootlegging Oscar screeners), Clay Tanner (who played Satan in Rosemary’s Baby), former pro wrestler and bullfighter Don Sebastian (Super Fuzz, Mako: The Jaws of Death) and wah wah pedal innovator Charles Pitts (he’s also in Truck Turner).

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and The Internet Archive.