Stan Lee said of his experience with the 70s live action Marvel films, particularly Dr. Strange, “I probably had the most input into that one. I’ve become good friends with the writer/producer Phil DeGuere. I was pleased with Dr. Strange and The Incredible Hulk. I think that Dr. Strange would have done much better than it did in the ratings, except that it aired opposite Roots. Those are the only experiences I’ve had with live action television. Dr. Strange and The Incredible Hulk were fine. Captain America was a bit of a disappointment, and Spider-Man was a total nightmare.”

Director and writer DeGuere was crushed when this series wasn’t picked up and all we got was the TV movie, but he ended up creating Simon and Simon, so he did alright.

Morgan Le Fay (Jessica Walter, who was in Play Misty for Me and Arrested Development and this is not anywhere near those) possesses Clea (Eddie Benton, Prom Night, The Boogens) and has her shove Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme Thomas Lindmer (John Mills) off a bridge. He survives and Clea ends up being cared for by Dr. Stephen Strange (Peter Hooten, 2020 Texas Gladiators, Just a Damned Soldier and most importantly, Night Killer), who has magical powers inherited from his father, which leads Lindmer and his friend Wong (Clyde Kusatsu) to meet Strange and teach him the path that he really should be on. I mean, why help people deal with mental illness when you can battle the demon Balzaroth (Ted Cassidy, who wasn’t just Lurch, he was also the voice of Galactus on the first Fantastic Four cartoon and the narrator of the original opening to The Incredible Hulk).

Le Fay and Clea are both interested in Strange, which leads the Nameless One to threaten Le Fay with old age if she doesn’t destroy the young magic user. She sends the shadow form of Asmodeus — a Ghost Rider villain — to capture Lindmer and lure Strange into her trap. She attempts to seduce him and fails. Then, Strange accepts the responsibility of being the new Sorcerer Supreme.

After all that — and despite being abandoned by the Nameless One and becoming wrinkled and aged, Le Fay is on TV as a self-help star, teasing the series that was never made.

This is a pretty slow moving movie, but as a kid, I loved it, because I just wanted more comic book stuff on TV. It would have been nice to see where the TV show would have gone.

Here’s a strange trivia question: Who is the first Marvel supervillain to be adapted to live action?

Yes, the villainess of this movie, Morgan LeFay. The Arthurian villainess was one of Spider-Woman’s main enemies and somehow, she beat every other villain to the screen.

Sure, she acts a bit more like Umar, the daughter of Dormammu, but there you go.

Wei Fung (David Chiang, King Boxer, The Boxer from Shantung) has been given an assignment from the Emperor himself: work his way into the Tien Clan rebels, gain evidence of their connection to a series of enemies and report back. If he fails, his entire family will be punished. Complicating the mission is the fact that he’s already fallen for one of his enemies, Tien Chi-Chi (Huang Hsin-Hsiu), the granddaughter of the rebel leader.

The rebels have already learned that Wei-Fung is a spy, yet Chi-Chi has already fallen for him. Her grandfather Tien (Lau Kar Wing, the choreographer of so many movies, including Master of the Flying Guillotine) doesn’t want to break her heart, so if she can gain Wei-Fung’s hand in marriage — and he pledges to never leave — he may live. However, if he doesn’t come back with the list of spies, his entire family will be decapitated. And what does the praying mantis have to do with an entire new style?

Unlike so many Shaw Brothers martial arts movies, the fighting is part of the story instead of the entire tale. It naturally comes out of the human drama within the movie, making Shaolin Mantis a movie worth discovering. It also has a shock ending that made me love this film.

88 Films U.S. blu ray release of Shaolin Mantis has a high definition 1080p presentation of the movie with both English and Mandarin audio, along with newly translated English subtitles. There are two audio commentaries, one with Asian cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema as well as one with Frank Djeng. There’s a feature on the film with David West, an interview with actor John Cheung, the Hong Kong trailer and the U.S. trailer for its western title, The Deadly Mantis. You can get it from MVD and Diabolik DVD.

Any time you don’t see a poster in a Jess Franco month post, realize that I share these on Facebook and I’d like people to be able to see them. Seeing as how this is also called Wicked Women and Women Without Innocence, you can imagine that there was no poster that really was safe for posting.

Margarita (Lina Romat) is the only witness of a murder so brutal — it was in the midst of a romantic thruple situation — that it’s given her shock and amnesia, sending her to a psychiatric clinic where another masked man — or is the same one? — assauts her and kills another woman. He promises to return to murder her, so she better get those memories back in a hurry.

If you think you’ve seen bad doctors before, well, these ones just scream at Lina and one of the female doctors decides to take a bath with her, which doesn’t seem like the kind of bedside manner that gets taught in college. I don’t know, maybe the Jess Franco universe has very different rules than our own.

So in short: women in prison but in a sanitarium with diamond smuggling and giallo.

How many Jess Franco movies concern diamond smuggling? All of them, sometimes.

German officer Erich von Strasse (Jean-Marie Lemaire) was wounded in battle but has come back to Berlin to be awarded the Iron Cross before heading to the Russian Front. A woman that he loved before he became a hero, Ronata (Brigitte Parmentier), has been forced to work in a brothel and her father sent to a concentration camp after they’ve been discovered hiding a Jewish woman. Now confronted by the evil of the Third Reich first-hand, Erich decides to save her.

Also known as East of Berlin and Convoy of Girls, this was supposedly directed by a mix of Pierre Chevalier and Jess Franco, but I must tell you, the fact that this has scenes in a house of ill repute and there’s no zoom shots into female anatomy, thirty-eight-minute lesbian love scenes or people being whipped or electrified says to me that either Jess did some pick up shots or had nothing to do with this.

Franco had to be saying, “Look, Monica Swinn and Pamela Stanford are right there, can they just kiss tongue or something?”

Eurocine movies really had no concern for who directed their movies or where footage comes from, as this one features cribbed scenes from Heroes Without Glory, Hitler’s Last Train, Captive Women 4 and Nathalie: Escape from Hell. Nearly all of those movies — and this one — were also inserted into another Franco World War II movie, Night of the Eagles.

Every generation gets the Invasion of the Body Snatchers they deserve.

The fifties got the McCarthy referencing pod people.

The nineties got alienation and a bleak final scene.

And I guess the 2000s got The Invasion.

But the seventies?

The pre-millennial tension and end of the world coming soon seventies got director Phillip Kaufman’s blast of pure dread, working with talents like cinematographer Michael Chapman (who ran the camera on The Godfather and Jaws before creating the look of movies like Raging Bull, The Fugitive and directing All the Right Moves and The Clan of the Cave Bear) and sound designer Ben Burtt, the man who gave Star Wars all its well-remembered noises. As for the effects, as many of them as possible were done in camera.

A species has made its way to Earth and one of the first people to notice is Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), who wakes to find her husband Dr. Geoffrey Howell (Art Hindle) is no longer the man that she’s spent so many days and nights with. The species — do I have to spoil it for you — takes over humans and assimilates them.

A co-worker, Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) wants to introduce Elizabeth to self-help author Dr. David Kibner (Leonard Nimoy) as a way of helping her handle this strange situation, but on the way, a man runs through the street screaming, “They’re coming! You’ll be next!” before being chased by a crowd and killed by a car.

That mystery man is Kevin McCarthy, the star of the original film, who one supposes has been running through America since the end of the last film. Even before the movie was finished, McCarthy told Kaufman that this movie was better than the one he was in. You can also see original director Don Siegel as a taxi driver later in the film.

The seventies were the me decade. So David believes that people behaving so different is their response to stress while Elizabeth just thinks this is how she’s being told her relationship is over. The truth is so much weirder as people begin to find partially formed doppelgangers of themselves and their friends.

By the end of the film, children are being taken for duplication, strange priests (Robert Duvall) swing as the world ends, dogs appear with human heads, women disintegrate in their lovers’ arms — the film takes the basic ideas of the original and makes them as horrifyingly real and unreal as they can be at the very same time.

Plus, there’s Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright, who between this and Alien really was on the forefront of late 20th century science fiction movies.

While Pauline Kael said that this “may be the best film of its kind ever made” and Variety wrote that it “validates the entire concept of remake,” Roger Ebert derided Kael’s love for the remake. But over time, this has become the example of a sequel that’s beyond the original in so many ways.

The true terror of this movie is the ending, which upset me utterly as a child. I’d never seen a movie end this way. Only Kaufman, writer W.D. Richter and Donald Sutherland knew how the film was going to end, so when Sutherland screams at Veronica Cartwright, her reaction is genuine. The hopeful ending that was scripted was never shot, because Kaufman knew that if the studio had the option, they’d pick that, just like they did with the first version of this story.

I’m so excited to have Invasion of the Body Snatchers in my library. It’s a movie that transcends era and genre and one I recommend that you view now if you haven’t and even if you have.

Kino Lorber’s re-release of Invasion of the Body Snatchers includes everything you need to fully savor this film, including a newly restored HD master from a 4K Scan of the original camera negative approved and color graded by director Philip Kaufman, who also provides a commentary track. There’s another track from author and film historian Steve Haberman, as well as interviews with Brooke Adams, W.D. Richter, composer Denny Zeitlin, Art Hindle, Jack Finney expert Jack Seabrook and featurettes such as Re-Visitors from Outer Space, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Pod, Practical Magic: The Special Effects Pod, The Man Behind the Scream: The Sound Effects Pod and The Invasion Will Be Televised: The Cinematography Pod. There are also TV and radio spots and the trailer. 

You can get this movie on blu ray or 4K UHD from Kino Lorber.

Since his first starring role in Breaker! Breaker!, critics have made light of the acting ability of Chuck Norris, something that he’s taken in stride, because what Chuck lacks in acting ability, he makes up for in hard work.

Chuck told The New York Times, “I was the worst thing in 50 years. Well, I wasn’t good, but my feelings were hurt. I’m not trying to be Dustin Hoffman; I just want to project a strong positive hero image on the screen. I went to Steve McQueen, and he said, ‘In Good Guys you talk too much. Too much dialogue. Let the character actors lay out the plot. Then, when there’s something important to say, you say it, and people will listen. Anyway, you’ll get better as an actor. You should have seen me in The Blob.”

In These Fists Break Bricks, Grady Hendrix and Chris Poggiali share the story of how Norris went from a name in the world of martial arts to small parts in films* to suddenly ruling the box office of the 80s and the TV ratings of the 90s.

You can watch this on Tubi.