Based on three Henry James stories — “The Altar of the Dead,” “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Way It Came” — this was Francois Truffaut’s seventeenth film and the third in which he’d also act. He plays Julien Davenne, a newspaper editor who specializes at obituaries and who keeps a special room in his house to pay tribute to his decade-gone wife Julie.

A thunderstorm destroys the room and Julien finds an abandoned chapel that he transforms into a celebration of all the people he has lost in his life — the room is actually filled with photos of people from Truffaut’s life — yet refuses to include a photo for his friend Cécilia Mandel (Nathalie Baye), who wants to include her lover Paul Massigny’s image. At one point, Paul and Julien were best friends, but something happened.

When the relationship between Julien and Cécilia ends, he locks himself in his home and refuses to eat. She writes him and urges him to forgive Paul. He does and they visit the chapel one more time, at which point he dies and she leaves behind a picture and candle for him.

Truffaut had watched his movie Shoot the Piano Player and suddenly saw that half the cast was dead and it was only seventeen years old. He wondered why we could not have the same affection for the dead as those that were alive when he made this. This ended up being one of his best reviewed films but one of his biggest financial failures.

Poliziotto senza paura also known as Fearless, Fatal Charm, Fearless Fuzz and A Matter of Honour is directed by Stelvio Massi (Convoy Busters, Highway Racer), who wrote the screenplay with Gino Capone from a story by Fulvio Gicca Palli.

In the lead role of Walter Spada is poliziotteschi star Maurizio Merli, who was encouraged by Massi to act like Phillip Marlow and only shoot his fun once in the entire film, to which the actor replied, “Come on, he must be shooting like mad, or else nobody’s going to watch this movie!”*

Wally and his partner Benny (Massimo Vanni) are off the police force and now private detectives who make their own kind of law for criminals. This takes them to Austria, where a child prostitution ring has already taken one of his friend’s daughters. Unlike other Merli films, Wally is more of a fan of action movies than one himself, as he smiles and laughs more in this movie than in all of his others put together, even if this gets really grim.

Once Walter saves Annalize von Straben (Annarita Grapputo, Don’t Look In the Attic, Like Rabid Dogs) twice — criminals take her back from his apartment at one point — he gets on the case of a dead girl and her still-living friend Renata (Jasmine Maimone, Nancy from Demons) and gets seduced by the mystifying Brigitte (Joan Collins). And yes, if you love Joan Collins, well, this is the movie for you, as she’s not only an evil seductress, she actually does an exotic dance, the kind that never showed up in  I Don’t Want to Be Born even though her character is a stripper.

This has Merli wearing overalls, which is certainly odd, in the beginning action scenes. After an entire movie waiting for him to go nuts, man, he sure does, busting through windows and fist fighting his way through an entire film’s worth of bums. Even after — again — all this darkness, it still has a wacky sitcom ending too.

I loved this movie so much that I yelled out loud at one point and my wife thought I was having some kind of medical emergency.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*Credit to Roberto Curti’s Italian Crime Filmography, 1968-1980.

Based on the Mills and Boon/Harlequin Romance Leopard in the Snow by Anne Mather, this movie was directed by Gerry O’Hara (The Bitch, Fanny Hill) and written by Jill Hyem.

Helen James (Susan Penhaligon, Patrick) wrecks her car in the small English town of Cumberland Falls and is rescued by a man hiding from the world, former race driver Dominic Lyall (Keir Dullea), who by the way has a pet leopard. They both have problems — he has a limp from a crash — but their romance soon comes into full flower.

This also sounds like the opening from a giallo, but this takes a turn for the dramatic love movie style.

I really don’t understand why this wasn’t a bigger deal, as it was the first Harlequin book that became a full movie. It seems like the kind of idea that can’t miss, you know?

By the way, Miss Framley is played by Tessa Dahl, who is the daughter of author Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal. She dated Peter Sellers, David Hemmings, Bryan Ferry, Brian de Palma and Dai Llewellyn, and the thing that worries me is her appearance on a This Is Your Life episode starring Gary Glitter.

The cast also includes Billie Whitelaw, the nanny who did it all for Damian, and Gordon Thomson, who was Adam Carrington on Dynasty.

Pai Wu Lang (Dragon Lee or Bruce Lei) — or the Silver Ninja — has come to town looking for the killer of his father but ends up learning that there are jewels hidden in this town. He also saves flower seller Xue Hua (Yuen Qiu, who studied at the Peking Opera School and master Yu Jim-yuen just like Jackie Chan) and her father from thugs before learning that the old man may have accidentally caused the death of his father.

This was directed by Shi-hyeon Kim and Godfrey Ho, so somehow, Roger Corman released movies by Truffaut, Bergman and the director of Ninja Terminator. 

A Korean martial arts film that has a hero who looks like a luchador. The world is truly a magical place. I love the ending, where we get a male and female Silver Ninja and dual battles against the final boss. This feels like it comes directly between when ripoffs went from Bruce Lee as inspiration to Jackie Chan and that nexus is incredibly interesting to the point that I wonder if there are any other films like it.

Alternate titles include Dragon the Master, Deadly Silver Ninja, Eighteen Martial Arts and Dragoneer 8 – The Unbeatable. Yes, there are no Dragoneeri 1 through 7, in case you wondered.

Earl A. Smith was the writer of The Legend of Boggy Creek and The Town That Dreaded Sundown, but he only directed this one movie.

It’s a Western horror, which is rare, and one that places Confederate soldier Wishbone Cutter (Joe Don Baker, who yes, was a 70s lead and near sex symbol) into a treasure hunt after he learns of a cave filled with diamonds from dying soldier Virgil Caine (Slim Pickens).

Wishbone assembles a team that includes Amos Richmond geologist (Ted Neeley, once Jesus Christ), Native American Half Moon O’Brian (John N. Houck Jr.) and eventually Drusilla Wilcox (Sondra Locke), a woman they find after a massacre. The Arkansas mountain is guarded by a demon bird, so of course everything gets strange by the time they get there. Wishbone is already haunted as his wife Rosalie (Linda Dano, who was on more than 1,300 episodes of Another World) has left him for a Yankee soldier.

Wilcox claims that the men that killed her people were silver naked beings and O’Brian claims that they’re being attacked by demons. The movie never gives in and reveals to you what it’s really all about and for that, I like it even more. It’s also got the same crew that Charles B. Pierce used, so it gets the authentic Arkansas rough feel down right. Even the ending makes little to no sense, but hey, I kind of adore that.

The only downer I’ll reveal is that there’s a lot of real animal abuse in this, as several horses plunge off a cliff and I have no idea if any survived. Just know that going in.

On the positive side, somehow, the filmmakers got The Band to let them use “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

Also known as The Ballad of Virgil Cane, Thunder Mountain, Wishbone Cutter, The Curse of Demon Mountain, Demon Mountain and Shadow Mountain, this is a movie that combines the end of the Western 70s darkness with occult themes and a relentless downer edge. I’d never seen it before and it’s definitely a film I plan on exploring again.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Jess Franco already made Eugenie…The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion and How to Seduce a Virgin, which are pretty much the same movie based on the same De Sade story. Those were made in 1970 and 1974, but by 1978, hardcore porn was legal and making money. And Franco had just stopped working with Erwin C. Dietrich. Despite making sixteen movies that did pretty well for the Swedish impresario, Franco was poor. And if it takes sex to make money, well, there you go, and Franco was back working for Marius Lesoeur and Robert de Nesle.

Martine de Bressac (Aida Vargas) and her brother Christian (Mel Rodrigo) have a major thing for Eugenie (Beni Touxa). Martine is able to take the girl thanks to the relationship she has with her father Raymond (Jean Perrat). In case you think that Franco is going to half step here the movie was originally called Le goût de sperm before censors had to get involved. Yes, a title so rough that censors had to stop a hardcore porn movie and change its name. So yeah — the movie has an initiation that involves Eugenie drinking a cocktail made with alcohol and some very Jess Franco bodily fluids.

It’s also a movie that ends with a masked bacchanalia that ends when Eugenie happily realizes that she’s servicing her own father.

It also has a Daniel White and Jess Franco song that has the words, “The taste, the taste, the taste of your sperm.”

Anyways…

Eugenie…The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion is pretty much a classic, when it comes to Franco, and How to Seduce a Virgin is pretty well made. Those movies may have been forever ago compared to this.

Maurizio Merli is, for me, the face of poliziotteschi, taking on a similar role as Clint Eastwood as a judge, jury and executioner of criminals that lives by his own strict code and must follow it, no matter how much it destroys his life. Whether he’s Commissario Betti in Violent Rome, Violent Naples and Special Cop in Action or Inspector Leonardo Tanzi in The Tough Ones and The Cynic, The Rat and The Fist or out of the badge roles in Mannaja and Highway Racer, Merli comes across as a man of action and principle.

In Convoy Busters, he plays Inspector Olmi, a rough cop who uses brutish methods to discover who killed a young girl with a professional-looking slash to the throat and dumped her in the river. His case leads him to the highest chambers of the corrupt Rome government, which outs him in the crosshairs of those officials, organized crime and the media. An attempt to take him out leads to the death of an innocent bystander, which is enough for the powers that be to send him away to a small fishing town and out of their lives.

Olmi, of course, can’t shut off his need to be a cop and soon discovers that there’s a smuggling operation going down right in his new home. That’s when the real title of this movie — Un Poliziotto Scomodo (An Uncontrolled Cop) — makes more sense, but one assumes that Convoy was a big deal in  1978 and if it got more people to see this movie, then that’s the name in foreign markets.

There’s a great brawl in a bar, a helicopter chase and plenty of great scenery between the two halves of this story, which nearly feel like they give you two films. The beginning, as the girl is taken from the water, feels almost giallo.

Director Stelvio Massi was the cameraman on A Fistful of Dollars and director of photography for The Case of the Bloody Iris, as well as the director of Emergency Squad and Magnum Cop as well as two giallo, Five Women for the Killer and the berserk Arabella the Black Angel. The script was written by Stilvio’s son Danilo (who was also the assistant director), Gino Carpone (Conquest) and Teodoro Corrà (Body Puzzle).

The Cauldron Films blu ray of  Convoy Busters features a 2K restoration from the original camera negative with both English and Italian audio options as well as new featurettes like Maurizio Merli: A Lethal Hunter of Subtle Variation with tough-guy film expert Mike Malloy and interviews with Maurizio Matteo Merli and Danilo Massi, who also has a Stelvio Massi video tribute. Archival extras include the alternate Convoy Busters, interviews with journalist Eolo Capacci, Ruggero Deodato, Enzo G Castellari , Maurizio Matteo and Enio Girolami, plus an image gallery, trailer and a poster, all inside a gorgeous slipcase with artwork by Haunt Love. Get it from Cauldron Films.

The difference between a Jean Rollin zombie adjacent movie and one made by any other director should be obvious: this is going to be a descent into madness and an exploration of how the end will come not because of the supernatural or a virus, but because humankind is, well, humankind.

All Élizabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal, incredible and sadly lost way too soon and way too senselessly) wants to do is get the vineyard her fiancee Michel (Michel Herval) owns, but the train to get there soon turns into insanity thanks to a man with a boil on his neck, which near instantly destroys a woman she’s just become friends with named Brigitte (Evelyne Thomas). From there on, nearly everyone she comes upon is either covered with horrific boils, has gone insane or has already been killed.

One of those people is Brigitte Lahaie, who shows up long enough to make us think she’s going to help our heroine only leaving her to die. She then dramatically disrobes to show others that she isn’t one of the insane group of people killing everyone, only to do exactly that.

Lahaie had worked with Rollin in his adult films before making horror with him. He felt that she had a “strange presence” which turned into a sort of fascination for him. He described her as “the perfect example of womanhood” and the way he captures her in this warms my heart like when Franco would worship his Lina with his lens too. Why else would he capture her in the same way Bava did Barbara Steele when he showed her off in Black Sunday?

She was also so cold in that scene where she disrobes that she couldn’t get her lines out.

When Élizabeth finally gets to her man, she discovers that this was all his fault. He invented the pesticide and worse, he employed illegal workers so he never told the police what was happening. Now, it’s too late, much too late, with the movie ending with our heroine going mad, killing everyone around her and allowing her lover’s blood to pour all over her face.

I guess this is as much a zombie movie as The Crazies is. That’s a compliment.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks to Chris Fisanick for suggesting this movie.

Based on the Anders Bodelsen novel Think of a Number, this Daryl Duke-directed (The Thorn Birds) and Curtis Hanson-written (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, L.A. Confidential, Sweet Kill) was an early Carolco film and also one of the earliest films to take advantage of Canada’s Capital Cost Allowance incentive plan, which gave production companies tax inducements to make commercial films in Canada. It’s probably the best-regarded film to ever take advantage of that tax shelter, as most are the slashers that we love.

Oh yeah — Duke walked off the film due to creative differences and Hanson, who had originally wanted to direct the film, took over the remainder of the shoot and handled all the post-production on the film, which is why that decapitation — no spoilers — and head in a bag show up in the film.

Miles Cullen (Elliott Gould) is a bank teller inside a large mall — Toronto’s Eaton Centre — is on to robber Arthur Reikle’s (a deranged Christopher Plummer) plan to rob his bank, so in advance of the man holding the bank up, he’s been stashing money and shorting the till. When it happens, he shorts Reikle, who is dressed as Santa, and keeps the money for himself. That should be all, until Reikle learns from the news that the bank has reported that more has been stolen than he took. He figures out the scam as Cullen makes his move — now that he has more confidence — on co-worker Julie Carver (Susannah York), who is actually having an affair with their boss.

Miles and Reikle engaged in a game of wits — and violence — that ends for a time with the criminal in jail and using his lover Elaine (Celine Lomez, The Ivory Ape and nearly Curtains before she was replaced by Linda Thorson) to get info on his rival. Of course, they fall in love and of course once he gets out of jail, Reikle brutally murders her.

Obviously, only one of these two men is going to make it out of this movie alive.

The third adaption of this story — 1970 Danish theatrical film directed by Palle Kjærulff-Schmidt and starring Henning Moritzen and Bibi Andersson and a 1972 West German TV movie directed by Rainer Erler and starring Klaus Herm and Edith Schultze-Westrum — this is one dark watch for the holidays, yet one that rewards the viewer. Roger Ebert went so far as to say that it was worthy of Hitchcock. Gould allegedly had a screening of the film of Hitchcock who was said to have loved it.

Oh yeah! John Candy is in this! I totally forgot!