If there is one thing you need to know about The Hammer, it’s that Fred Williamson doesn’t wait for permission. While most actors are content to sit in their trailers waiting for lighting setups, Fred was busy staging a cinematic heist.

The story goes that while filming Enzo G. Castellari’s The Inglorious Bastards (the one Tarantino loved so much he borrowed the title), Fred realized he had a crew, a camera and a weekend. Every Friday, he’d essentially kidnap the production equipment and go shoot his own movie. He spent the weekdays writing the script on the fly and Saturdays and Sundays playing the baddest man in Italy.

In Mr. Mean, Fred plays the titular character, a high-stakes hitman hired by a former Cosa Nostra heavy to take out a guy named Ranati (Stelio Candelli). Ranati is the kind of low-life even the Mob can’t stand. He’s running fake charities to steal from the poor. It’s bad for the brand, see? But once the job gets moving, Mr. Mean finds out he’s being set up by the very people who cut him the check.

This has that greasy, gritty Euro-crime aesthetic thanks to the Italian locations, but it’s injected with the soul of a Blaxploitation epic. Speaking of soul, The Ohio Players show up as themselves and provide a soundtrack that absolutely drips with funk.

Is the plot a little messy? Sure. That’s what happens when you write a movie on a Tuesday and film it on a Sunday. But you aren’t watching this for a tight screenplay; you’re watching it for Fred Williamson looking cool in a leather jacket, Raimund Harmstorf as a heavy named Rommell and the sheer audacity of a film made behind the backs of another production’s producers.

Mr. Mean is the ultimate DIY action flick. It feels like a beautiful accident, a collision between the Italian Poliziotteschi genre and the American badass archetype. 

You can watch this on Tubi.

Before Jonathan Kaplan was racking up critical acclaim for Heart Like a Wheel or The Accused, he was a king of the drive-in circuit. We’re talking a blistering run of exploitation gold: Night Call Nurses, The Student Teachers, The Slams, Truck Turner and White Line Fever. But even the best directors have a car crash moment. On an episode of  Trailers From Hell, Kaplan didn’t mince words, calling this movie “the biggest failure of his career.“

Written by Ken Friedman (who also wrote several other Kaplan films, such as Bad Girls and Death By Invitation), this was an attempt by Dino De Laurentiis to make an American movie starring Italian actor Terence Hill, who was already well-known to American audiences for They Call Me Trinity.

The plan? Put Hill in a big-budget, globe-trotting action comedy. The result? Total box office poison. Variety reported that Radio City Music Hall actually sued 20th Century-Fox for over $100,000 because ticket sales were so pathetic. When the Rockettes are looking for a refund, you know you’re in trouble.

”When a simple garage mechanic suddenly inherits a billion dollars, he gets more action, excitement, romance, and riotous adventure than money can buy!” Yes, Terence Hill is Guido Falcone, an Italian mechanic who is the only relative not to have begged his rich American uncle for money. When he gets the entire estate, his uncle’s business manager, John Cutler (Jackie Gleason), flies to Italy to try to con him. Despite his sweet nature, Guido is way smarter than he appears and wants to look over the estate; he has to be in San Francisco on a certain date to accept the offer. Cutler, wanting the money for himself, hires Rosie (Valerie Perrine) and her friend Bernie (Dick Miller) to distract Guido and keep him from signing his estate papers.

The movie was originally supposed to feature Lily Tomlin, but the studio gave her the thumb. Enter Valerie Perrine. As the urban legend goes, Perrine introduced herself to the famously modest and sweet-natured Hill by claiming she could light a cigarette with her vagina. Unsurprisingly, the chemistry evaporated instantly. The two supposedly despised each other, making the falling-in-love scenes feel about as romantic as a root canal.

The supporting cast includes R.G. Armstrong as a Southern sheriff, Chill Wills as a military leader, Slim Pickens as a rancher, William Redfield as a company lawyer, Sam Laws and Johnny Ray McGhee as a father and son with differing views on life, and even Leo Rossi as a kidnapper. As I say, it’s the kind of cast I personally would call an all-star, even if no one else would agree.

Hill would also appear in another box-office bomb that year, March or Die, which also starred Gene Hackman and Catherine Deneuve.

I have no idea why Hollywood would hire Hill to play in a movie that’s nothing like what he does best. At least he was able to work with Bud Spencer again and make plenty of late 70s and 80s buddy movies, as well as Super Fuzz as a solo movie three years later.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Dino De Laurentiis gave the world a $25 million remake of King Kong. A year later, Runme Shaw looked at that poster and said, “Hold my tiger bone wine.”

If there is one thing Shaw Brothers knows how to do, it’s take a Western trend, give you some cinematic LSD and feed it through a meat grinder until it comes out as something ten times more insane than the original. 

But don’t let the title—or the alternative name, Goliathon—fool you. This isn’t some dry anthropological study. This is a sweaty, neon-drenched, nihilistic masterpiece of Hong Kong exploitation that asks: What if King Kong were a giant, flammable suit actor living in India and had a crush on a blonde girl in a buckskin bikini?

After an earthquake in the Himalayas (which apparently moved the mountains to the middle of the Indian jungle), a giant ape emerges. Enter Lu Tien, an entertainment mogul who is basically what would happen if Carl Denham were an even bigger scumbag. He wants the ape for a world tour or to turn it into a very large rug. Why do these dudes always want to put these giant monkeys on stage? Anyway, he hires Chen Zhengfeng (Danny Lee, long before he was a John Woo regular), a guy with a broken heart because his girlfriend, a diva named Wang Cuihua, slept with his songwriter brother just to get a hit record. Fame is a fickle mistress.

Chen leads the expedition into the jungle, which is a gauntlet of stock footage, rubber snakes and elephants that look annoyed to be in this movie. Maybe they were warned by monkeys, snakes and alligators about the excesses of Italian film crews. Regardless, just as Chen is about to be monkey meat, he’s saved by Ah-wei (Evelyne Kraft, The French Sex Murders), a wild girl who was raised by the ape, whom she calls Utam, after her parents died in a plane crash. She’s like Jane from Tarzan, but her outfit is held together by hope and cinematic glue.

Naturally, Chen and the wild girl fall in love, because nothing says romance like hiding from an enormous primate. He convinces her to bring Utam back to Hong Kong. This goes about as well as you’d expect. Once they hit the city, the movie shifts to pure kaiju carnage. Lu Tien attempts to assault Ah-wei, triggering Utam’s protective instincts. The ape goes on a rampage through Hong Kong that makes the 1933 Kong look like a disciplined Boy Scout. He’s smashing buses, stomping on extras and eventually climbing the Connaught Centre (the one with all the circular windows that looks like a giant cheese grater; it was the largest building in Hong Kong at the time).

The finale is a pyrotechnic nightmare. While the 1976 Kong died with a whimper on the pavement, Utam goes out in a literal blaze of glory, being blasted by tanks and helicopters while the world burns around him. It’s bleak, it’s loud, and it’s glorious. You will believe that a monstrous monkey can get set on fire.

It’s a Shaw Brothers movie, so the production value is weirdly high while the logic is delightfully low. The special effects were handled by Sadamasa Arikawa, who worked on the original Godzilla films, so you get that authentic man-in-a-suit, miniature-city vibe that warms my cynical heart. It makes me even happier to know the lengths that special effects artist Keizô Murase went to. When the original stuntman refused to be set on fire at the end of the movie, Murase personally doused himself with oil, was set ablaze and jumped off a miniature building three different times, sustaining several injuries from the wood, cement and glass used to make the set. Good news: He was given a gold watch from the film’s producer as payment.

Danny Lee emotes like his life depends on it, Evelyne Kraft spends the entire movie looking like she’s in a shampoo commercial* while holding a baby leopard in a way that says that she’s never seen Roar and the Peking Man himself looks like he’s having a permanent bad hair day (the suit was made from actual human hair, donated by 300 Hong Kong citizens). It’s a movie about the cruelty of civilization, the fickleness of show business and the fact that if you’re a giant ape, you should never, ever fall in love with a white blonde or leave your homeland.

According to Kraft, unlike King Kong vs. Godzilla, this had two endings. In the Indian cut, where it is considered bad luck to fake a death, her character lives. But her character dies at the end of all the other versions of the film. I have seen many Indian movies where someone dies, so this feels like IMDbs.

Only in Hong Kong would the heroine die a bloody death at the end of a film.

Beyond Quentin Tarantino, who re-released this movie in 1999, Roger Ebert was also a fan, saying, “Mighty Peking Man is very funny, although a shade off the high mark of Infra-Man, which was made a year earlier, and is my favorite Hong Kong monster film. Both were produced by the legendary Runme Shaw, who, having tasted greatness, obviously hoped to repeat. I find to my astonishment that I gave Infra-Man only two and a half stars when I reviewed it. That was 22 years ago, but a fellow will remember things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that film. I am awarding Mighty Peking Man three stars, for general goofiness and a certain level of insane genius, but I cannot in good conscience rate it higher than Infra-Man. So, in answer to those correspondents who ask if I have ever changed a rating on a movie: Yes, Infra-Man moves up to three stars.”

*Speaking of IMDbs, I learned from that site that The Peking Man wasn’t the only thing turning heads in India. Kraft’s fur bikini proved so distracting that male extras were repeatedly slapped by their wives mid-scene. This battle of the gazes forced the frustrated crew to reshoot the sequence until the cast finally focused on the monster instead of the star.

Kraft claimed that her fur bikini in the film was so skimpy that her top kept popping off while filming, especially during the action scenes. Everything would then stop while she fixed the wardrobe malfunction, but after it kept happening, she just ignored all the male actors and the film crew staring at her breasts. She suspected, but could not prove, that Shaw Brothers had the wardrobe department deliberately make her top that way so that everyone could see her topless and possibly even have footage of it to use in the film.

You have to admire the balls of the makers of this movie. Actually, you can probably see them from space. They bought footage of Sir Christopher Lee from another movie and used it as the beginning and end of this movie, then said the film stars the venerable thespian. Learning that a lawsuit would be long and expensive, he just had to fume. I wonder if he was as angry as when he walked out of A Bay of Blood?

Lee’s speech has nothing at all to do with the rest of the movie. Let’s all admire his plaid slacks, however.

Anyway, the real meat of the movie involves the death of a dog named Poopers, four college students killing one of their professors and lots and lots of paintings, then Morak, an evil force, comes out of the possibly dead professor.

You’ll be forgiven if this movie seems like it makes no sense because it doesn’t. And that’s probably why I liked it: I watched it five drinks into a bender, and it was perfect for that moment when alcohol goes from tasting wonderful to tasting like way too much.

This was probably made in 1975, but who cares? How many movies do you know where dead teachers command cacti from beyond the grave to kill their students? I can think of one, and I’m writing about it right now.

Seriously, Christopher Lee spent as much time looking at contracts as all my favorite horror stars. Work is work, but I have no idea how he thought reading a script about a shaman convention inside a wood-paneled room was going to work out all that well.

Evan Lee made one movie. This was it. If he made any more, the world would have exploded.

In case you need to know just how odd and weird and whatever other descriptors you need for it, Ed Wood himself shows up in a cameo. Now that’s a guy who knew how to throw a non-sequitur speech directly into a movie. Pull the string!

If you’re looking for the ultimate example of Shatner vs. Nature, look no further. This isn’t just a movie; it’s a masterclass in how to take a humble Arizona town and turn it into a literal web of madness, all while the Shat wears the hell out of a Canadian tuxedo.

Directed by John “Bud” Cardos and written by Richard Robinson and Alan Caillou, whose real name was Alan Samuel Lyle-Smythe MBE, M.C. and who was an author, actor, screenwriter, soldier, policeman and professional hunter.

Despite the initial fright they may cause, it’s worth noting that tarantulas’ venom is about as dangerous as a bee sting. They mostly cause itching from the shedding of their bristles, which are used to make itching powder. This fact, coupled with the humorous association of itching powder with comedy-movie mischief, adds a delightful touch of humor to the film.

This film features 5,000 tarantulas in its cast, a staggering number that took up 10% of the film’s budget. It’s safe to assume that star William Shatner was compensated more than his eight-legged co-stars. Interestingly, these spiders, being cannibals, had their own set of demands. All 5,000 of them had to be kept in separate containers, which posed a unique challenge for the production process.

They’re also very shy, so to make it appear that the spiders were attacking people, fans and air tubes were used.

Let’s take a trip to Camp Verde, Arizona.

That’s where Dr. Robert “Rack” Hansen (Shatner) practices. He’s heading out for a house call to see Walter Colby (Woody Strode), whose prize calf dies for reasons that puzzle Hansen. Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling) comes down from the big city of Flagstaff to blow his mind: spider venom killed the cow.

It gets worse. Walter’s wife, Birch (Altovise Davis, Sammy Davis Jr.’s third wife), soon discovers that their dog is dead and that a giant spider nest is in the backyard. Thanks to pesticides, spiders have lost their natural food source, and instead of turning on one another, they’ve decided to eat larger meals.

Their big scientific plan is to burn the spider hill, which doesn’t go well because the arachnids escape into tunnels and display advanced intelligence, carrying out a revenge attack on Walter, his wife, and Hansen’s sister-in-law, Terry (Marcy Lafferty).

The mayor (Roy Engel) gets Sheriff Gene Smith (David McLean) to spray the town with pesticides, which is how things got this bad in the first place. Ashley says rats would have been a better idea, but obviously, the mayor met Larry Vaughn at a mayor’s convention in Las Vegas and saw his seminar on never canceling the county fair, no matter what common sense tells you. More pesticides are planned, but the spiders deal with that by crashing a crop duster.

One of the most effective parts of the film is the ending, a bleak, The Birds-esque finale that subverts the typical happy ending of the era. The use of country music on the radio as a backdrop to the town’s total isolation is a stroke of low-budget genius. It suggests that while we’re all going about our business, listening to the latest hits, an entire civilization could be getting cocooned just down the road. It’s also basically a painting.

In 1998, Shatner told Fangoria that he was working with Cannon Films in the late 1980s to produce a sequel, but he probably meant Menahem’s 21st Century, which did run trade ads for Kingdom of the Spiders 2. Shatner would direct, write and star in the film, in which a man would be tortured with spiders. As you can imagine from Menahem’s playbook, this ad was just a photo of Shatner and the movie’s title.

Producers Igo Kantor and Howard James Reekie, using the name Port Hollywood, planned a sequel in the 2000s that promised Native American myth and spiders driven mad by secret government experiments involving extremely low-frequency tones.

I love this movie because you can tell that the spiders want nothing to do with anybody, much less feel the need to attack them. The entire cast fights an octopus Bela Lugosi-style, if you will, and the emotion of fear is present, but no one is ever in danger. Sure, this was made by dumping buckets of spiders on people, but that warms my heart.

Directed by John Landis and written by the ZAZ team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (who would go on to Airplane! and The Naked Gun), this movie is a complete mess, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve probably watched this film more than any other, thanks to a taped-off HBO copy I had throughout my teenage years.

Containing a number of exploitation films produced by Samuel L. Bronkowitz (a combination of everyone from Samuel Bronston and Joseph L. Mankiewicz to legendary American International Pictures producer Samuel Z. Arkoff), this movie just never stops or lets up. If a scene isn’t funny for a little bit, stick around. Something really comedic — or strange — is right around the corner.

How can you not adore a film that begins with a news anchorman warning you, “The popcorn you’ve just been eating has been pissed in?”

Starting with a commercial for Argon Oil, the first real segment of the film is an extended watch of A.M. Today, as a gorilla (special effects master Rick Baker) goes wild on set. That’s followed by a trailer for Catholic High School Girls in Trouble, which is pretty much every softcore sexploitation movie the late 1960’s and early 1970s foisted on drive-in and grindhouse screens. The sound effects alone make this segment worthwhile.

A segment titled ” See You Next Wednesday” features a theater that offers Feel-A-Round technology. It’s really just an excuse for Landis to get this catchphrase into one of his films, which he repeats throughout his career. It’s the last line that Frank Poole’s father says to him in a letter from home in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And Landis has used it in movies from Schlock and The Blues Brothers to the video for Thriller, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Trading Places and Spies Like Us (among many of his other films). It also shows up in Amazon Women on the Moon, which is pretty much a spiritual sequel to this. It’s called The Cheeseburger Movie, while the original is called The Hamburger Movie in France, plus they both end with the song “Carioca.”

There are so many moments here that it’s hard for me to list them all. I’ll try. Big Jim Slade, making the album The Wonderful World of Sex much better for the ladies. Building “a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude” in the film’s longest movie-within-a-movie, the Bruce Lee ripoff A Fistful of Yen. That’s Armageddon, an Irwin Allen-style movie that stars George Lazenby and Donald Sutherland as “the clumsy waiter,” a part that never fails to make me laugh. A Leave It to Beaver in court sketch that predates the way modern comedy would reinvent old shows, even bringing original Wally, Tony Dow, along for the ride. The blacksploitation (and jewsploitation) film Cleopatra Schwartz. Danger Seekers, which could never — and probably should never — be made today. And literally so much more.

The humor was going to extend to the film’s title, which was going to be either Free Popcorn or Closed for Remodeling, either of which would have led to total chaos.