EDITOR’S NOTE: Mr. Billion was on the CBS Late Movie on September 22, 1982 and July 1 1983. 

Jonathan Kaplan started his career by making movies like Night Call Nurses, The Student Teachers, The Slams, Truck Turner and White Line Fever. He’d eventually make acclaimed movies like Heart Like a Wheel and The Accused. On an episode of Trailers From Hell, he called this movie “the biggest failure of his career.”

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

The result? According to Variety, Radio City Music Hall in New York sued 20th Century-Fox for $107,123 because the tickets sold so poorly.

”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 that didn’t beg 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 and 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 for signing his estate papers.

Lily Tomlin was supposed to be in the movie, but the studio didn’t want her. And Perrine, as urban legend tells us, introduced herself to the sweet natured Hill by telling her that she could light a cigarette with her vagina. They did not get along after that and had to play that they were falling in love.

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 lawyer for the company, 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 all-star, even if no one else would agree.

Hill would also appear in another box office bomb the same year, March or Die, which also had Gene Hackman and Catherine Deneuve in the cast.

I have no idea why Hollywood would hire Hill and have him play in a movie that’s nothing like what he did 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.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Moonshine County Express was on the CBS Late Movie on September 21, 1979 and October 16, 1981.

The Hammer Sisters are the kind of tough Southern girls that deal with their daddy’s murder by taking over his moonshine business, grabbing some weapons and being way tougher than any of the men they battle. Is that enough to get you to watch this movie?

What if I told you that it was directed by the same man who brought us The Evil, The Side Hackers and the movie based on the song Take This Job and Shove It?

Not yet? How does John Saxon playing a Southern stock car racer and moonshine runner sound? Not yet?

How about Susan Howard, former Dallas actress turned 700 Club host and NRA supporter?

William Conrad? Jeff Corey? Len “Uncle Leo” Lasser? Maurine “Marcia Brady” McCormick? Still not sold?

I get it. John Saxon was enough for me. But then I thought, I bet this movie has Claudia Jennings in it. And I was right. And that’s all it took.

What was it about American pop culture that took hicksploitation from the drive-in to the mainstream? I remember it myself — everyone had a CB radio, we all turned into The Dukes of Hazzard and watched Smokey and the Bandit on HBO. Heck, I even had a silver NASCAR jacket that made me look like a 5-year-old pit crew member.

From the very first moment that John Saxon appears on screen and does his best version of a Southern accent, I was thoroughly entertained by this silly trifle of a film. It’s a Roger Corman 1970’s drive-in movie, so you’re going to get plenty of cars getting smashed up, scummy bad guys and “100 proof women” like Candice Rialson (Chatterbox, Pets).

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Holocaust 2000 was on the CBS Late Movie on February 29, 1984.

Of all the things the devil’s done, I wonder exactly how he was able to get Kirk Douglas — KIRK DOUGLAS! — to be in an Alberto De Martino ripoff of The Omen? I mean, this is the same director who made The Antichrist and Miami Golem! What horrifying secrets does the First of the Fallen have to make one of the lead actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age appear in this burst of Satanic majesty?

Holocaust 2000 (AKA the Chosen and Rain of Fire) was written by De Martino, Michael Robson and Sergio Donati, who wrote some of the script for Once Upon a Time In the West and Duck, You Sucker! as well as Orca, early Arnold vehicle Raw Deal and the original version of Man On Fire.

You gotta hand it to Robert Caine (Douglas). No matter how many people protest, no matter the fact that his wife was stabbed in front of him at a party or the killer went nuts in a mental institution and sliced his own wrists in front of him, he’s not giving up his plan to build a nuclear power plant near a sacred cave in the Middle East.

He soon learns that he has bigger problems. His son Angel (Simon Ward, The Monster Club) is the Antichrist and the plant he wants to build looks just like the evil beast that the Whore of Babylon will ride at the end of the world.

Seriously, after a bit of crumpet, Caine falls asleep next to his way too young new girlfriend (Agostina Belliand, who was in the original Scent of a Woman) watches the nuclear plant rise from the sea, with multiple heads rising from the currents.

An Italian and UK co-production, this movie also features Ivo Garrani (Bava’s Black Sabbath) as The Prime Minister, Alexander Knox (who nearly won an Oscar for 1944’s Wilson before his liberal views got him chased out of Hollywood during the McCarthy era), Adolfo Celi (who wasn’t just Emilio Largo in Thunderball, he was also the Captain in Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man and the villainous Ralph Valmount in Danger: Diabolik), Geoffrey Keen (Minister of Defence Frederick Gray in six James Bond movies and one of the three noblemen using Dracula in Taste the Blood of Dracula), Peter Cellier (Sir Frank Gordon from Yes, Prime Minister), Denis Lawson (Wedge Antilles!) and Tony Clarkin, who played a stormtrooper in the second and sixth Star Wars movies, as well as appearances in The Monster Club as a vampire and Outland.

In Europe, this movie ends with Caine living in exile with his newborn child, as Angel begins developing the plant intended to cause Armageddon. But in the U.S., Douglas returns to his company and blows everybody up real good.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Psychic was on the CBS Late Movie on May 27, 1981 and June 25, 1982.

Before Fulci became known as the godfather of gore, he made movies in nearly every genre. This is the next to last film he’d make — Silver Saddle follows it in 1978 — before 1979’s Zombie announced to the world that he was here to tear eyeballs, unleash bats and provide dazzling if incomprehensible odes to mayhem.

Fulci is no stranger to the Giallo, with some of his most important films being A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin and Don’t Torture a Duckling and the unappreciated Perversion Story. The title refers to the film’s exploration of the duality of human nature, a theme that Fulci often revisits in his work. Here, he’d team up again with writer Roberto Gianviti and begin his long partnership with writer Dardano Sacchetti, who sought to lend a touch of Argento to the original script’s traditional mystery.

What emerged was a film shrouded in mystery and darkness—a rumination where death is inescapable and always close, a world where doom hangs over every moment, captivating the audience with its enigmatic atmosphere.

The film is set in Dover, England, in 1959, a time of social change and upheaval. A woman commits suicide by literally diving from the Cliffs of Dover. Forgive the harmful effects — Fulci tends to use wooden bodies in his films for some reason, much like the end of Duckling. The main point is that her daughter Virginia may be living in Italy, but she can clearly see her mother’s day.

Today, Virginia (Jennifer O’Neill, Scanners) lives in Rome and is married to a wealthy businessman named Francesco (Gianni Garko, Sartana himself!). As she drives him to the airport for his next business trip, she begins to see visions. An older woman is being killed. A wall is torn down. And a letter is under a statue. How strange is it that the house she is beginning to renovate looks precisely like the one in her visions?

When she tears down the wall that looks like the one in her dreams, she finds the skeleton of her husband’s ex-lover and the police want to charge him with the murder. Virginia becomes the detective of the story, obsessed with saving her husband with the help of psychic researcher Luca Fattori. Soon, they believe that the real killer is Emilio Rospini (Gabriele Ferzetti, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service).

So who is the woman? Why was her body in that room, which was once her husband’s bedroom? Why is the woman’s face on the cover of the magazine that Virginia buys? That’s because Virginia’s visions aren’t the past but premonitions of the future.

Meanwhile, she’s given a wristwatch that plays a haunting theme every hour in the house. This eerie soundtrack, composed by Fabio Frizzi, adds a layer of suspense and tension to the film and was reused to incredible effect in Kill Bill. The growing knowledge that the victim isn’t dead yet—and that Virginia may be that victim—darkens every frame of Fulci’s epic.

Quentin Tarantino was so in love with this film that he intended to remake it with Bridget Fonda sometime in the 2000s, but this never happened.

Perhaps just as interesting as the film is the life of its star, Jennifer O’Neill. Possibly best known for her long career as a Cover Girl model, she has been married nine times to eight husbands (she married, divorced, and remarried her sixth husband, Richard Alan Brown). By the age of 17, she’d already attempted suicide so as not to be separated from her dog, had a horse break her neck in three places and married her first husband. She’s also had a horrible history with guns, having accidentally shot herself in 1982 and being on the set of the TV show Cover Up in 1984 when co-star Jon-Erik Hexum accidentally killed himself. While waiting for a delay, he had been playing Russian roulette with a prop gun and was unaware that the discharge could still cause damage. Placing the gun to his temple, he fired and caused so much damage to his brain that he died six days later.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Crash! was on the CBS Late Movie on November 6, 1981 and August 13, 1982.

I have a real weakness for Charles Band’s movies. I think any study of the past articles on this site will point to this, but today’s example is 1977’s Crash!, a movie where Sue Lyon plays a wife who has to deal with a jealous husband played by José Ferrer who keeps trying to kill her. So she does what any one of us would do. She uses black magic to get back at him.

Will the burned visage of Reggie Nalder show up? How about John Carradine? What about the gorgeous Leslie Parrish, who pretty much created C-SPAN and was a major activist in addition to being a frequent talk and game show host? As you can see, Mr. Band knows exactly what I want, which is possessed cars and occult 1970’s buffoonery.

You have to love that Band has a best of montage right before the end of the movie, reminding us of all the vehicular non-driver homicide that we’ve already watched, which includes a giant dog against a possessed wheelchair.

This movie just barely beat The Car to theaters, but that movie blows it away in almost every way, except that this has Carradine cashing a check and Sue Lyon making my heart flutter. Otherwise, I’ll stick with Anton LaVey’s gas guzzler in the desert, if you make me pick. You didn’t, so I’ll just let you know that I enjoyed this, but I’m also a sucker for things blowing up real good and Satanic shenanigans.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Uncanny was on the CBS Late Movie on May 29, 1980 and December 11, 1981.

In 1977, legendary Amicus co-founder Milton Subotsky joined with  Canadian producer Claude Héroux (Scanners, Videodrome) to create a portmanteau movie in the grand Amicus style. The uniting story for this concerns a paranoid writer played by Peter Cushing who is trying to convince a publisher (Ray Milland) that cats are evil and that his book is the only way to save the human race.

Directed by Denis Héroux (Naked Massacre, Valerie) from a screenplay by Michel Parry (Xtro), this is a film that I’ve neglected over the past few years and can happily say lived up to my hopes for a fun anthology film.

The film begins the Montreal of 1977, as writer Wilbur Gray (Cushing) visits publisher Frank Richards(Milland) to discuss his new book. The writer is convinced that cats are actually Satanic creatures here to destroy humanity. He tells three stories to explain:

London 1912: Miss Malkin rewrites her will, leaving everything to her cats instead of her ne’er do well nephew Michael. The maid Janet, who is in love with Michael, tries to steal the will, but Miss Malkin catches her. Janet kills her, but the cats avenge her death.

Quebec 1975: Lucy (Katrina Holden Bronson, the adopted daughter of Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland) is an orphan who now lives with her aunt Mrs. Blake (Alexandra Stewart, who is also in Because of the Cats, which is appropriate). Her parents have died in a plane crash so she is allowed to keep her cat Wellington, who is an awesome fat black cat. However, her cousin covets the cat and any attention she can get. She’s played by Chloe Franks, who was the go to young girl in horror for this era, with appearances in Trog, The House That Dripped Blood (she’s Christopher Lee’s daughter), Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? and Tales from the Crypt (she’s Joan Crawford’s daughter). This section combines two of my horror loves — evil kids and Satanic hijinks.

Hollywood 1936: Actor Valentine De’ath (Donald Pleasence) replaces the blade of a fake pendulum to kill his actress wife, which gives him the opening he needs to give his young mistress a chance at acting. He didn’t count on her cat avenging her. This chapter features Samantha Eggar (Demonoid, Welcome to Blood City), Sean McCann (Starship Invasions) and the always awesome John Vernon (Curtains, National Lampoon’s Animal House).

This story has one of my favorite movie tropes, as when Cushing discusses Pleasence’s character, he holds up a photo that is in truth a publicity still of the actor as Blofeld and his cat Tiddes from You Only Live Twice.

For all the cat love in this, cinematographer Harry Waxman (The Wicker Man, The Beast In the Cellar) threatened to leave the film when he felt that the production was abusing cats.

That said — this is pretty much everything you want from an anthology. Modern filmmakers littering on demand services with their short films all assembled into one movie should take a moment and watch this to see how it’s done.

You can get this from Severin and watch it on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Orca was on the CBS Late Movie on May 19, 1982.

If you read comic books in the summer of 1977, there’s no way you didn’t know about Orca. Despite everything that nature — and SeaWorld — could teach us, it was time to meet a predator even more deadly to man than the great white shark. To quote Neko Case: “You know they call them killer whales.”

Orca raises the Jaws rip-off stakes: if the name Orca can be Quint’s boat, here, it can be an entire movie. Dino De Laurentiis called writer Luciano Vincenzoni (he also wrote The Good, The Bad and the Ugly) in the middle of the night and told to find a fish tougher and more terrible than the great white to make a movie that could go up against Spielberg’s. Vincenzoni’s brother told him all about the killer whales and the rest is scumtastic movie history.

Directed by Michael Anderson (Logan’s Run, Doc Savage), Orca is the kind of movie that critics have assaulted for years. I’m here to tell you that every single one of them is wrong. It’s a completely ridiculous film, a shameless reboot of both Jaws and Moby Dick, but by no means is it not entertaining as hell. And it has an incredible Ennio Morricone score, something that so many fish films could only wish they aspired to.

Captain Nolan (Richard Harris, who nearly died doing his own stunts and also would grow enraged if anyone dared compare this movie to any other film) catches fish and marine animals so that he can pay off his boat. His crew is looking for a great white, which comes after crewmember Ken (Robert Carradine, Lewis from Revenge of the Nerds). An orca saves Ken and Nolan decides to repay its kindness by capturing it. After he harpoons the whale, he learns that he’s killed its mate, which miscarries and drops a fetus onto the deck of the ship that the callous captain hoses off into the ocean while our titular hero/villain/sea mammal screams in anguish. This is when you wonder: how did this movie get a PG rating?

Novak (Keenan Wynn, The Dark, Piranha), another crew member, cuts the female loose and its mate drags her dead body to shore. The villagers all rise up against the crew, who demand that Nolan kill the orca, who has gone wild and is ruining local fishing. When Nolan refuses to put the fish out of its misery, it retaliates by sinking all of the fishing boats and breaking all of the town’s fuel lines, because of course killer whales can hold grudges.

That’s what brings Dr. Rachel Bedford (Charlotte Rampling), a whale expert, into the movie. She believes that orcas are like humans, a fact that Nolan can understand. He sees himself as one of the whales, as his wife and unborn child were killed by a drunk driver. He promises not to fight the whale, but it kills Novak, attacks Nolan’s house and then bites off the leg of his injured worker, Annie (Bo Derek in her film debut).

Nolan and his crew, including Paul (Peter Hooten, who was also in Derek’s first actual filmed movie, Fantasies, as well as the 1970’s Dr. Strange TV movie and Just a Damned Soldier with Mark Gregory), all take off after the orca, along with Native American Jacob Umilak (Will Sampson, the magical Native American in films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Poltergeist II). That’s when the orca goes buckfutter and wipes out nearly everyone by either grabbing them, biting them, crushing them and tossing icebergs at the boat.

The orca throws Nolan all the lace like a ragdoll, killing him, but leaving Bedford alive. We watch as Nolan sinks into the water in a crucified pose and the killer whale decides to swim under the ice. Now, there’s some conjecture here: is the killer whale trapped or has it decided that with its revenge complete, all it can do is die when faced with the path or revenge that it has wrought? I can see the poetry of this thought, but then I realize that I’ve just watched a film filled with no subtlety whatsoever, so perhaps the orca swam on, discovered a new mate and remains ready to wipe out all of humanity at a moment’s notice.

Orca is everything I love about movies: it’s big and dumb and bloody. It’s the kind of movie a fine actor like Richard Harris chews the scenery with just as much viciousness as a killer whale devours one of Bo Derek’s shapely gams. It also takes shark films to the next level. Every single one of the humans in this movie are amongst the dumbest people ever, doomed by the fact that they even know Captain Nolan. The moment he hoses Orca’s son into the icy waters, he’s sealed his fate. This is one of the few films where you root for the beast and savor its revenge.

You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll be amazed at Bo’s bloody stump. I want more people to love this movie even a fourth as much as I do.