Black Sunday was an always on HBO film in my childhood — the HBO Guide from January 1978 confirms this, I would have been six years old — and it was pure childhood trauma. There were my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers under attack by a terrorist piloting the Goodyear blimp! It was too much for my young mind to handle and I had nightmares of seeing that happy little zeppelin turned into a tool of death.

Director John Frankenheimer was the only director who could make this. That’s because he had already built a relationship with Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company head Robert Lane while working on the movie Grand Prix. In fact, Lane once told the director,  “You’re the only person I’ve ever worked with who has kept his word.”

The film could use Goodyear’s blimps on four conditions: the terrorists couldn’t work for Goodyear, when the blimp blew up it couldn’t show the logo, the Goodyear logo couldn’t sell the movie and the blimp itself couldn’t kill anyone.

The other part of the deal that allowed this movie to capture the Thomas Harris — yes, the same man who created Hannibal Lecter — novel. That was the National Football League. Only one man could pull off the kind of carny hustle to get camera crews the access to not only shoot all around Super Bowl X — even during the final half hour of the game as the Steelers beat the Cowboys — and bring back the teams to the Orange Bowl two weeks later to get the footage of the blimp menacing the players and crowd. That would be Robert Evans, who also got the crowd from United Way volunteers, provided that Frankenheimer would make a movie for the charity and Robert Shaw narrated it. That said, those aren’t the Cowboys and Steelers in that final scene, it’s players from the Miami Dolphins.

Bruce Dern is incredible in this film, owning every scene he’s in as Michael Lander, a pilot who flies the blimp over NFL games while seething with anger, seeing all these free people when he spent years in a tiger cage as a Vietnam War POW, a time when he was court-martialed upon his return and soon left by his wife. His dream of killing himself and as many people around him as possible and his relationship with terrorist Dahlia Iyad (Marthe Keller) may be the way that he can make it happen. They have a plan of detonating a bomb and thousands of small razor-sharp objects into the Super Bowl audience to achieve her plan of calling attention to the plight of the Palestinians and punishing the U.S. for supporting Israel.

Major David Kabakov (Robert Shaw) kills all of her Black September terrorist cell except for Ilyad, as he finds her unarmed and naked. He comes to regret sparing her life once he learns the level of death and destruction that she has planned. He, his partner Robert Moshevsky (Steven Keats) and FBI agent Sam Corley (Fritz Weaver) get on the trail of the terrorists, who remain many steps ahead of them at every turn.

Black Sunday ends with a thriller helicopter chase and the blimp literally crash landing inside the Orange Bowl before Kabakov climbs onto the blimp and attempts to stop it. You have to keep in mind that these are real stuntmen in this scene without a green screen pulling off an incredible stunt, something we rarely see in cinema these days.

In Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino edited the scene where Elle Driver attempts to murder The Bride in the hospital as a homage to the nurse scene in Black Sunday. He also used the split screens in homage to the trailer for this film.

I definitely remember reliving this movie — as I usually did in my child years — through Mad Magazine. In issue #195, Dick DeBartolo and Mort Drucker redid the movie as Blimp Sunday.  

Paramount planned for Black Sunday to be their biggest blockbuster of the year. After all, it had the highest-ever pre-release scoring films from test screenings and they thought this would make more than Jaws. A few things went wrong. It was banned in Germany and Japan. The movie Two-Minute Warning came out before it played theaters. And the movie that became the biggest story of 1977 was Star Wars.

Another theory? Comment cards during Black Sunday‘s first showings in Los Angeles discovered that 91% of the audience was disappointed that the blimp didn’t blow up the Super Bowl and kill everyone.

The Arrow Video blu ray of Black Sunday has the film in a high definition 1080p presentation, along with extras like new audio commentary by film scholar Josh Nelson; It Could Be Tomorrow,“ a new visual essay by critic Sergio Angelini that explores the film’s adaptation and production, and its place within the pantheon of 70s terrorism thrillers; The Directors: John Frankenheimer, an hour-long portrait of the director from 2003, including interviews with Frankenheimer, Kirk Douglas, Samuel L. Jackson, Roy Scheider, Rod Steiger and others; an image gallery, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Peter Strain and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Barry Forshaw. You can get it from MVD.

Jess Franco and Erwin C. Dietrich go back to prison again, except that this is about a women’s prison camp that really is used to gather sex slaves to serve as comfort women for a revolutionary army. That means that while the soldiers are fighting for some level of equality, they also need inspiration of their own and that means women taken right off the streets and from their homes and even from their wedding and asked to be concubines for the glory of freedom.

It’d be troubling but not the kind of movie that Jess Franco would make until we meet Isla (Muriel Montossé, using the name Nanda Van Bergen; she also used the names Vicky Adams and Anna Marc), the lesbian warden –with a talking parrot which is something I have yet to see in a women in prison movie — who is here to enact all the things expected from the WIP genre as well as something beyond that. Decapitations, sure. How about nude women tied to crosses and shot full of holes by a topless firing squad?

Beyond Franco naming one of the revolutionaries after Spanish Socialist Labour Party leader, you have to wonder what the moral is when heroine Angela (Ada Tauler) leaves her husband for the revolutionary leader who turned her and most of her friends out. And then Isla gets away without punishment?

Why am I looking for a moral in a Jess Franco movie? I should just stare at Monica Swinn and forget about things like morals when the revolution needs a love camp.

Death Whistles the Blues was 15 years ago, but Jess Franco loves jazz and understands the refrain and sometimes his universe opens to revise films that he has already made to try — sometimes with success — to recreate them now that he has more experience in this world.

Alberto Dalbés is Freddy Carter, which would be Federico de Castro from the original, a role much better acted by Conrado San Martin.

So yeah, Freddy’s dead after a crime gone bad and his two co-criminals — Paul Radeck (Francisco Acosta) and Carlos Moroni (Olivier Mathot) — have run away and assumed those new names. Even more of a punch in the heart is that Radeck also stole away Freddy’s wife Linda (Alice Arno). Now, Moiry Ray (Lina Romay, astounding and rubbing against a stone statue and somehow making it…ah, you get it) is at the Radeck’s club and so is the maybe still alive Freddy.

Really, you don’t have to make a choice between the two films. You can enjoy them both for what they are and the fact that Spanish censorship was gone at this point and we can enjoy Lina lapping at a statue’s granite genitals. Yes, we may have seen it before, but Franco welcomes us and asks us to see it all again through a set of eyes that has seen so much since he first brought this to the screen.

Also known as Escape from the Island of Death and Tropical Inferno, this Jess Franco directed and written film has — trigger warning — lots of nudity from its sixteen at the time lead actress Susan Hemingway (Two Female Spies with Flowered Panties, Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun).

She’s Maria, one of four girls in cellblock 9, along with Karine (Karine Gambier, who would graduate t warden by Caged Women), Aida (Aida Gouveia, Sinfonia Erotica) and Barbara (Esther Studer, who would endure Ilsa the Wicked Warden the same year this movie was made), all forced to go through the indignities of a women in prison film — nudity, interrogation, torture and being menaced by Dora Doll, Howard Vernon and I shit you not, a gerbil. If you’re going to be in any cinematic women’s prison, I mean, the most experienced jailer is going to be Franco, who also made Isla the Wicked Warden, Justine, The Lovers of Devil’s Island, Barbed Wire Dolls, Women Behind Bars, Love Camp, Sadomania and 99 Women.

They use their beauty to lure a guard into their embrace and kill him, fleeing into the jungle and leading an entire army of killer after them, as well as a stock footage alligator. This is an exceedingly mean-spirited film, perhaps mitigated by the fact that all of the women are rebels trying to escape the chains of opression and yet finding more of it at every turn. Maybe it’s an allegory. Maybe Franco was just making movies for people who liked to see young women get tortured. Maybe it’s somewhere in the middle.

This one is bleak, like doom-laden scream at the ending bleakness with little to no hope other than a quick sunbathing scene. Much like probably Jess himself, I missed Lina Romay and I’m certain he couldn’t wait to be back in her arms. Or thighs. Both, I guess.

Directed by Fernando Di Leo, who wrote Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man, A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars and Massacre Time, as well as the director of Naked Violence, Slaughter Hotel and Caliber 9, Blood and Diamonds is a poliziotteschi about Guido Mauri (Claudio Cassinelli), a thief who has spent the last few years in prison and just wants to go legit.

That’s not going to happen, because days after a mob boss named Rizzo (Martin Balsam) and his right-hand man Tony (Pier Paolo Capponi) kill Guido’s girl Maria (Olga Karlatos) over some jewels that never got to Rizzo. Guido hatches a revenge plot but so does Maria’s orphaned son Enzo (Alberto Squillante) who was already upset that Guido was a criminal because he’s a rich snob of a child.

If that’s not enough, well, Guido’s other old flame Lisa is played by Barbara Bouchet and generally, that’s enough to get me on board. There’s also a good score by Luis Bacalov, so good that Bruno Mattei ripped it off for Hell of the Living Dead (thanks to Ian Jane from Rock! Shock! Pop! for that knowledge).

The 88 Films blu ray of Blood and Diamonds has a brand new remastered 4K transfer from the original camera negative, audio commentary with Troy Howarth, a documentary on Fernando Di Leo, Blood and Di Leo – A Portrait by Luc Merenda, the Italian opening, intermission and credits, the trailer and a slipcase with a poster and booklet. You can get it from MVD.

When two bandits steal gems and other valuable pieces of fine art from a museum in the Dominican Republic, they don’t even get a moment to moment to celebrate their ill-gained treasures. Instead, their American partner Todd (Paul Benson) who is hiding at the home of his girlfriend Margaret (Rosa Valenti) and her girlfriend Jacqueline (Verónica Miriel). Oh yeah — they also have an alligator in the back so if he needs to disposes of any bodies to keep all those stolen museum relics, he has them.

Directed and written by Amando de Ossorio, this has little of his trademark slow motion or supernatural moments, but is really about the horror that man can visit on other men. Or women on men. Or alligators on humans. You know what I mean.

Shot in Madrid, the Dominican Republic and Miami, as well as a museum in Santo Domingo, this is a movie that ends with every single person paying the price for their crime. It’s a dark film, which is the one thing that ties it to the rest of de Ossorio’s work. It’s not easy to find, but hey — I am always, if anything, a completist.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on January 28, 2022. It was suggested for today by Kris Erickson. 

Also known as Blood Type: Blue, this movie is somehow way ahead of its time, as UFO abductees return to Japan with blue blood, which upsets everyone else because, well, do racist people really need a reason? And this also has a deeper story inside it, a remembrance of at least 17 Japanese citizens that were taken by the North Korean government.

Maybe it’s the time I’m watching this in — then again, you could have felt the same way at the start of AIDS or in how Japan and Korea view one another — but this is hitting too close to home. Reporters struggling to reveal the truth, lovers on opposite sides of a conflict united only by their hearts, human lives reduced to blood and organs under the scalpel, prejudice and feelings presiding over facts.

Director Kihachi Okamoto was drafted during the last years of World War II, into the very worst fighting, and was alone among his friends in that he survived. Most of his films have a very cynical edge, even his gangster films and it’s wild that this movie is from Toho.

There’s also the professor who broke this story, why he disappeared and where all the blue blood people are going. As for the UFOs, unlike most other Toho science fiction, they’re never seen.

Sure, this is long at 133 minutes, but it’s so strange, nearly shot like a parody yet dark in its tone. The closest thing I can compare it to is either Eyes Behind the Stars or Footprints on the Moon, but neither is anything like this. To be honest, the end of this has stuck with me for some time and this feels like another strange film that I’ll have to go back and watch several times.

Inspired by the life of French brothel madam Madame Claude, this Just Jaeckin-directed film has a soundtrack by Serge Gainsbourg. I really don’t know how much sexier a movie can be to be perfectly frank, because I think if you put those two guys together, you might get pregnant just handling this blu ray even if you are a guy.

Madame Claude (Françoise Fabian) has a veritable army of high-class call girls always on call, ready to serve the needs of the elite businessmen of the world. She’s not above getting involved in politics or business or even blackmail, which may come back to hurt her when photographer David Evans (Murray Head, yes, the guy who sang “One Night In Bangkok”) starts taking photos of her ladies as they meet up with their clients.

You know who else is in this? Klaus Kinski, who hated being in the film despite seemingly living a wild life while making it. In his book Kinski Uncut, he claimed “It’s an insult that I have to do the movie Madame Claude, and here in Paris to boot. The salary is also wretched. But we need the money. The girls who play Madame Claude’s prostitutes in the movie **** like professionals. Especially the very young ones, but also the married ones, whom I can **** only if their husbands are briefly out of town. A very young extra has a tiny, almost naked **** like a mouth, very tiny *** cheeks, and very tiny ***. I always have to telephone her ***** mom before I can **** the daughter.”

He’s the first client of the woman who Madame Claude is transforming from innocent to wise to the ways of love, Elizabeth (Dayle Haddon, who was in Spermula, Sex with a Smile and is also Pearl Prophet in Cyborg). He wants her to seduce his son and then he breaks his son’s heart by taking her as well.

Jaeckin makes dirty movies, but he also comes close to art. This also gets into conspiracy, U.S. Presidents being serviced by call girls, a chase through Kinski’s home as the photographer is finally caught by numerous agents and — as always — gorgeous women like Fabian, Haddon and Vibeke Knudsen-Bergeron (who was also in Jaeckin’s The Story of O).

The Cult Epics blu ray release of this movie has a 4K HD Transfer from the original 35mm negative supervised by cinematographer Robert Fraisse, as well as commentary by Jeremy Richey, author of the upcoming book Sylvia Kristel: from Emmanuelle to Chabrol. There’s also an interview with Jaeckin, a French trailer, a promotional gallery and a CD of the soundtrack by Gainsbourg. You can get it from MVD.