After The House with the Laughing Windows, Pupi Avati decided to make fun of the giallo while also sending out gothic horror and Agatha Christie while bringing back most of the cast from that past giallo masterwork.
The results are…mixed to say the least.
An author named Dante is trying to sell a book all about the noble families of Emilia-Romagna to the descendants of the very rich and elite he’s written about. Yet when he arrives at their castle, he learns that one of their number has already died. Seeing as how his book has a dreadful prediction that there will be nine deaths and only one of the family will survive. That survivor will gain the key to a treasure, which seems to be the reason why the killing has started.
The writers — Avati along with his brother Antonio and Gianni Cavina — and the actors were trying to outdo one another with outrageousness, but a lot of the slapstick falls flat. Maybe it was a much more fun movie to make than it is to watch.
Alternatively known as Nine Deaths a Week and All Deceased Except the Dead, this movie feels like if it had been a bit more serious, it would have been a lot better. Too bad Avati was mad about being compared to Polanski, so he decided to make his own The Fearless Vampire Killers.
I get it — 1977 is late for the category and Ferdinando Baldi is better known for making weird westerns — like Get Mean and Blindman with Tony Anthony, not to mention two 3D movies with the very same actor, Comin’ At Ya!and Treasure of the Four Crowns — than giallo. But hey. when you’re trying to watch every one of them made, you watch them all.
Known in Italy as A Scream in theNight, in Spain as Death Comes From the Past and Nine Guests for a Crime in other markets, this movie follows the Agatha Christie model of nine people — wow the title actually is logical — showing up on an island that has a killer stalking about.
Well, get this. There are thirteen murders in a movie with nine guests, so how about that?
A wealthy family has departed for a two-week break at their private island estate, which primarily involves plenty of balling, as The Pink Angels trailer would say. Ubaldo (Arthur Kennedy, who won a Best Supporting Actor Tony for Death of a Salesman and was nominated for five Oscars before making movies like The Humanoid, The Sentinel, Cyclone and being one of the worst cops ever in The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue) has taken his new wife Giulia (Caroline Laurente, who played three different roles in Emmanuelle2, 3 and 7) along with his sister Elizabeth (Dania Ghia, Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye), his sons Michele (Massimo Foschi, Holocaust 2000) and his wife Carla (Sofia Dionisio, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man), Walter (Venantino Venantini, Beast in Space) and his bride Patrizia (Loretta Persichetti) and Lorenzo (John Richardson, Black Sunday) and Greta (Rita Silva, Gunan, King of the Barbarians).
Michele has been doing two-person pushups with his stepmother. Walter has been threading the needle with Greta. But then Baldi goes from ripping off Bava’s Five Dolls for an August Moon — which yes, is also a Christie pastiche — into full A Bay of Blood and even the supernatural theory that Elizabeth’s dead lover Carlo is back from the dead (and the Tarot reading sequence, which gets stolen even better in Antropophagus).
This movie has reminded me that I want nothing to do with rich people or island vacations. Nothing ever works out and I’d rather stay alive and undramatic for the short period I do have left in this dimension.
Everyone knows Santo. Most people may know Blue Demon. But this one has Superzan in it.
Superzan* was created by Rogelio Agrasánchez to be a movie luchador, but don’t judge him. Aftet all, Huracán Ramírez, Neutrón and Sombra Vengador all got their start in the movies before they became real wrestlers.
Tinieblas was originally cast to play the character in Superzán El Invencible, yet delays led to wrestling becoming more important for him. He introduced the producers to Alfonso Mora, who took over he role for half of the first movie and then totally became Superzan. He was trained by Dick Medrano and El Gladiador, often teaming with Tinieblas and wrestling in Guatemala. After a short comeback to introduce El Hijo de Superzan, a wrestler who was not truly his son. Instead, it was Rafael Garcia Sanchez, whose father was the exotico Bello Greco and later Karis La Momia in AAA. He eventually got the gimmick that made him an international star as Super Calo (he also wrestled as El Greco Jr., El Diabólico Chucky, Love Warrior and Jordy Stone, as he is the brother of Chris and Alan Stone).
Anyway, Superzan and Blue Demon teamed up in this movie to battle Satan himself, who was quite ably assisted by a literal cadre of mummies. More than seven, let me tell you that much.
We start at the funeral of Sofia’s father, during which she is dismayed to hear her father begin narrating the story of his life. If you think it’s kinda crazy that obviously Laurie Strode can hear the music in Halloween 2, just imagine how absolutely extraña it is to hear a dead man give exposition and one of the characters be able to hear it!
The curse that cost his life has now been passed on to his daughter. And to make matters worse — or more interesting — she’s also inherited his mansion, which sits on top of a treasure chest full of cursed gold. Yes, anyone who claims that gold must give his or her soul to Satan, who totally wants people to come and get it.
So, one of Satan’s men makes a challenge to Sofia that she must conquer three challenges in order to obtain her father’s inheritance. And oh yeah, go into the Mansion of the 7 Mummies. If only her wrestling boyfriend Rodrigo just hadn’t been wacked about the head by a hunchback with a shovel! Luckily, his friends Superzan and Blue Demon show up to help.
The first challenge to Sofia is choosing one of seven doors. Only one has the jeweled scepter that will allow her into the mansion. The other six? Death. I mean, those are bad odds, yet our heroine and her friend Isabella go for it. Just when Sofia finds the right door, seven mummies appear out of nowhere and descend on her and her friend. And that’s when our masked men show up and save the day, bringing the joy to our hearts that can only come from luchadors beating the sand out of mummies before Sofia finally grabs the scepter.
I neglected to reveal that there is also a bad guy who is an old woman in a wheelchair and that there is a horrible comic relief character named Manolín whose death you will beg for.
So where did these mummies come from? Well, it turns out the Sofia’s ancestor — back in the days of the conquistadors — had made a pact with the devil to gain wealth at the cost of his people. He tried to stop the pact with an exorcism, but his seven most trusted servants all turned on him and they are the mummies we’re up against today. Oh yeah — in case you wonder why Sofia wants the treasure so badly, which seems against character, she hopes that by giving it back to the descendents of who the money was originally taken from, she can break the curse. Hey, get that. Reparations actually make sense. Hmm — what a concept.
Without any further exposition, our heroine must cross a swamp to grab the head of her long dead ancestor, while also battling her now possessed boyfriend. Yes, a flying zombie mummy head that wants to kill her!
As for the last challenge, well, it’s basically a battle royal against Satan and all the mummies. The odds are, as always, never on the side of good.
Director Rafael Lanuza also made Superzan y el niño del espacio and El triunfo de los campeones justicieros. He’s working from a script by Rogelio Agrasánchez, who was behind plenty of lucha movies, but you should seek out his totally weird Macabre Legends of the Colony.
You can watch this on YouTube on the White Slaves of Chinatown channel, which always has something interesting.
If you wonder, haven’t I seen a movie where luchadors fight mummies, you may have been watching Los Momias de Guanaujuato, ElRobo de los momias de Guanajuato, El Castillo de los momias de Guanajuato, Las momias de San Ángel or even The Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy. Or perhaps Mil Mascaras vs. the Aztec Mummy.
Take a look at that poster for this and ask yourself: Is Dean Jones giving Don Knotts a physical or mental stroke?
Dean is back from the first movie as Jim Douglas and Knotts is his mechanic Wheely Applegate and together with the car who can kinda be a person, Herbie the Love Bug, they’re racing in the Trans-France Race from Paris to Monte Carlo, a distance of 594 miles.
Somehow, this movie was such a big deal that Mayor of Los Angeles Tom Bradley proclaimed July 11, 1977 as “Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo Day” and a parade on Hollywood Boulevard led to Mann’s Chinese Theater where the car’s tire prints were made in the cement.
The opponents in this race include Bruno Von Stickle (Eric Braeden, Victor himself), Claude Gilbert (Mike Kulcsar) and feminist Diane Darcy (Julie Sommars). Herbie pretty much has a car boner for her car Giselle, which leads to all manner of hijinks that include Herbie trying to lose the race to win that car over.
Can cars be people? You have to accept that if Herbie is going to work for you. How do these cars get human feelings? Have they become self-aware? Are they the possessed souls of dead race drivers trying to win one more race so they can get to the other world? Am I reading too much into a Disney formula comedy from 1977?
Not only do the humans and the cars get together, but there’s also a jewel theft subplot. I am certain that when I saw this at the drive-in as a five-year-old, I could care less about the humans holding hands and the cars holding doors and just wanted Herbie to drive through a lake and upside down through a tunnel. Things were simpler for movie-watching Sam back then.
Based on the Michael Innes novel Christmas at Candleshoe, this live action Disney movie is all about con artist Harry Bundage, who is looking for lost pirate treasure inside Candleshoe, the country estate of Lady St. Edmund (Helen Hayes in her last role). He gets street-smart American orphan Casey Brown (Jodie Foster) to pretend that she’s the rich lady’s granddaughter, who has been missing since she was four years old. The estate is actually barely holding on, except that its lone servant Priory (David Niven) and four foster kids have been hustling to pay the bills. Of course, our heroine will figure out that she really belongs at Candleshoe and stay in England, but the treasure hunt is still pretty fun.
Director Norman Tokar made plenty of Disney movies like The Happiest Millionaire, The Ugly Dachsund, The Apple Dumpling GangThe Cat from Space and No Deposit, No Return, which also has Niven in the film).
Foster passed up Pretty Baby to make this movie, only getting a few days off after finishing Freaky Friday.
Based on the 1975 novel of the same name by Frank De Felitta — who also wrote the screenplay, as well as The Entity andDark Night of the Scarecrow — this is the story of Bill and Janice Templeton, who are being hounded by a mysterious stranger who just wants to meet their daughter Ivy. That man is Elliot Hoover (Anthony Hopkins), a lost soul whose wife and daughter — Audrey Rose — died eleven years ago on the night that Ivy was born. He believes that she is his daughter.
Man, the 70s, huh? This movie takes that decades love of reincarnation and the occult — before we backtracked into the Satanic Panic of the 80s — and concocts a world where Higgins — John Hillerman plays a prosecutor — must deal with holy men claiming past lives are possible and hypnosis bringing Ivy back to her last incarnation. And then it ends with a quote from the Bhagavad-Gita? Ah man. What a decade.
Poor Robert Wise. He had to follow this one up with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He made much better movies before that, like The Curse of the Cat People, West Side Story, The Haunting, The Sound of Music and The Andromeda Strain. However, as goofy as this gets, I kind of admire this movie. It’s cornball psychic hokum, but the best kind of carny BS — because it believes its own BS.
By the way, Brooke Shields tried out for this movie and even had the claim that she posed for the art of the paperback cover, which wasn’t BS.
As for De Felitta, he tried some BS to sell his book sequel For Love of Audrey Rose to the rubes, claiming that he’d heard his five-year-old son suddenly be able to play ragtime music on the piano.
June 29: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is gangsters.
In Italy, they call this movie Il cinico, l’infame, ilviolento, which means The Cynic, the Infamous, the Violent. This poliziotteschi is a sequel to another Umberto Lenzi film, 1976’s The Tough Ones, with Maurizio Merli playing the role of Inspector Leonardo Tanzi in both movies.
Luigi “The Chinaman” Maietto (Tomas Milan, The Big Gundown, Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!) escapes from prison and sends two of his men to kill the man who put him away — Tanzi. He’s left for dead and even the newspapers print that he’s dead, but he’s just biding his time, waiting to get revenge.
Tanzi just wanted to stay retired — it looks like he’s become a giallo author — but now he’s a vigilante who comes up against Maietto and American syndicate boss Frank Di Maggio (John Saxon).
Editor’s Note: Bill Van Ryn, the man, the myth, and the legend behind Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum contributed this November 15, 2020, review when we unpacked Mill Creek’s Sci-Fi Invasion box set. We’re bringing it back for our “Norman J. Warren Week” of reviews.
Norman J. Warren’s unique brand of low budget bat shittery is all over the damn place. While not always totally satisfying (I’m looking at you, Inseminoid), when he’s hot, he’s hot. 1977’s alien freakout Prey is one of the hot ones. It’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach blends elements of D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a dash of Night of the Living Dead thrown in for the hell of it, and this is no accident — the script was being written while filming was progressing, with Warren taking on the project based on the premise alone.
And oh, what a premise. Prey gives us the story of an alien creature who arrives on Earth in a spaceship (unseen by us, other than a colored light show that could have just been a groovy light from Spencer gifts) and immediately encounters two Earth people who are having a romantic tryst in a parked car. He murders both of them, assuming the identity of the man, whose name is Anderson. This being capable of interstellar travel uses a futuristic walkie talkie to communicate with some home base (apparently off-world, which…wow! That’s some wi-fi!), and appears to be on a mission to observe us in our natural habitat. He also likes to eat meat, and that’s it. Total carnivore, this alien.
He moves on and discovers a large secluded estate nearby, where lovers Jessica and Josephine are living an isolated life together. They encounter some mutilated rabbits, which Jo attributes to the work of a fox. They also find our space-hopping buddy “Anderson” (wink wink), seemingly injured, and even though Jo reacts with immediate total hostility, Jessica is excited to finally get someone to talk to other than Jo, who is suspiciously dedicated to making sure Jessica never, ever goes anywhere on her own. They take him back to the house and allow him to stay, which turns out to be a really bad idea on so many levels.
I adore the fact that this movie is so low budget that it doesn’t even attempt to present any convincing alien technology, but it does have some built-in style that expensive effects could never buy. The manor where most of the action takes place is a fantastic location, with wooded areas bathed in muted green and overcast skies — this is England, after all — and amid all these earth tones are a few scenes with shockingly bright red gore. And for sheer “What the hell am I watching?” kicks, just wait until you see the weird slo-mo scene where Anders and the women roll around screaming in a shallow pond. There’s something almost S.F. Brownrigg about Warren’s work, despite their visual style being different. They both have the ability to create a memorable atmosphere in their films, despite having no visible budgetary advantages.
Anderson mostly stumbles around in a daze, acting like he has no idea what parrots are, or plants, or why people bring them into their homes for decoration. He doesn’t know any locations, either, claiming to be from London after he hears one of the women suggest it. When they press him for his first name, he says “Anders”. His hostesses serve him a vegetarian dinner — Jo goes total OG meatless preachy on him — but he responds by vomiting and rushing out of the house to find some more animals to mutilate for dinner. He also doesn’t know anything about sex, and he spies curiously on Jessica and Josephine having screaming sex together. Jo develops a theory that Anders is an escapee from a local mental institution, and later on we come to realize she may have been doing some projecting when she came up with this idea.
That’s one of the interesting things about this weird movie, there is actually an intriguing relationship between these two women, and the script ends up surprising us about one of them, but it exists uncomfortably alongside the fact that one of the characters is a flesh-eating alien, which sort of steals the spotlight. For this reason, I suggest multiple viewings of Prey. In fact, it should be a tradition.
* Be sure to check our “Exploring: Amityville” feature where we look at all of the legit Amityville films — and even more of its bogus sequels.
The basics of this movie: Fire-and-brimstone preacher Estus W. Pirkle gives a sermon to his followers, explaining what Heaven looks like.
Yeah, that’s kind of what it’s about, but that’s like me saying Edwige Fenech is a girl. The Believer’s Heaven is the kind of insane cinema that secular filmmakers could only dream of conceiving.
Pirkle made three movies — If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? and The Burning Hell are the first two parts of the trilogy — and all three of them have stuck in my mind way longer than any blockbuster I will see this year. Or any other year.
To get his gospel into the world, he relied on a former sinner. Ron Ormond started his entertainment career as stage magician Rahn Ormond, married a vaudeville dancer named June Carr, wrote books about psychic surgery and then made a string of movies that are just as odd as these movies, including Please Don’t Touch Me, Girl from Tobacco Road and the astoundingly unhinged The Exotic Ones, which is also known as The Monster and the Stripper. It took multiple near death experiences for Ron to find the Lord, but once he did, he started making the same kind of grab you by the balls cinema that he did for weirdos like you and me, but now he was doing it to save our souls.
This film isn’t filled with the brutality of the first two films but is just as odd and that’s a blessing. From views of a decidely science fiction heaven to moments where Pirkle’s congregation and Ormond’s family act out psychodrama to an ending where those not whole on Earth — like three children with leprosy — are brought Tod Browning style center screen to sing.
“Don’t you get so tired and worn out sometimes? The work hours are so long and the night’s rest is so short, the labor is so strenuous that you don’t feel like you can take it much longer. Or perhaps sickness and suffering have so weakened your body that you even long to die. Have you not wrestled with sin and temptation so long that you welcomed relief? Thank God that there is a place where the Saints of God shall rest from their labors.” So says this film, but man, when you have Pirkle basically berate you for an hour, do you worry that maybe you might spend eternity with him? Man, I hope so. That would be my Heaven, getting to make a fourth movie with Ormond and the reverend.
I’m beaten down by life some days, but when nothing else would do, this movie lifted me.
Yet another example of the end of the world New York City of the late 1970s, Death Promise — not a threat, but a death promise — is all about the residents of a tenement building (but not Tenement) are being forced out of their homes by a realty company who goes past shutting off the air conditioning, power and water to murder, not to mention lighting fires in the hall and releasing rats, the bad guys kill off Charley’s old man boxer father, the man who was trying to keep the tenants all together in the face of these slumlord tactics.
Fortunately for the audience — and bad for the antagonists — Charley (Charles Bonet, Way of the Black Dragon, The Black Dragon Revenges the Death of Bruce Lee, Don’t Go in the House) and his friend Speedy (Speedy Leacock) are martial arts experts, making this movie the result of a one night stand between Enter the Dragon and Death Wish.
Beyond just ruining the board members of Iguana Realty’s lives, our friends are now planning on murdering each and every one of them. Well, it wasn’t called Maim Promise, so that makes sense.
To get his revenge, Charly’s master Shibata (Thompson Kao Kang, who was the action director of this movie, as well as a stuntman who appeared in movies like The Karate Killers; sadly he was killed by a Hong Kong cop in what was called a “trivial street quarrel”) reads him a letter from the dead dad, which sends him to study under Ying (Tony Liu, who was in The Big Boss, Enter the Dragon, Fist of Fury and many more), where he learns how to take out everyone in his way. That means throwing stars, arrows to the head and death by rats.
Brought to theaters by Howard Mahler Films, the same people who brought From Beyond the Grave, The Big Doll House, The Killer Must Kill Again, Deep Red and Devil’s Express to your grindhouse, this movie boasts an incredible Neal Adams-drawn poster.
You can watch the Rifftrax version on Tubi or get the Vinegar Syndrome blu ray at Diabolik DVD.
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