After creating some of the best gialli of the ‘70s, director Sergio Martino entered the cannibal cycle here. When a British scientist disappears in the jungles of New Guinea, his wife hires an American anthropologist lead her deep into a green inferno of graphic violence, steamy nudity and several of the most notorious scenes in the entire genre. Scanned in 4K from the original camera negative with over 3 hours of special features, this has a new interview with Martino, audio commentary by Claire Donner of the Miskatonic Institute Of Horror Studies and more.

The sale will take place from 12:01am EST on 11/29 to 11:59pm PST on 12/2 at Severin’s site.

Also known as La Montagna del Dio Cannibale, Slave of the Cannibal Godand Prisoner of the Cannibal God, don’t be fooled by the pedigree of having big stars like Ursula Andress and Stacy Keach. This film may seem restrained at first, but it goes absolutely insane by the final ten minutes. I mean, when has Sergio Martino (All the Colors of the Dark, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key) ever steered us wrong?

Susan Stevenson (Andress, the original Bond girl) is looking for her husband Henry, an anthropologist who has gone missing in the jungles of New Guinea. Along with her brother Arthur and Professor Edward Foster (Keach), they travel to the mountain Ra Ra Me, a cursed place where the authorities will not allow expeditions.

Of course, they go there. What did you expect? They’re stupid white people. The jungle thanks them with attacks from spiders, snakes and alligators. And then Manolo (Claudio Cassinelli, What Have They Done to Your Daughters?), a jungle guide, joins their party.

Bad idea. Arthur has sex with one of the native girls, who is already married, but a cannibal attacks and kills both the husband and wife. A missionary makes them leave, as they have brought nothing but sin, adultery and death to his village. Don’t fuck in the woods. And don’t bring your Western values to the jungle.

It turns out that none of their reasons for coming to the island are altruistic. Susan and Arthur have no interest in finding her husband, but are instead looking for uranium deposits. Foster is there just to find the tribe of cannibals who had taken him captive in the past so he can wipe them off the face of the earth.

On the way, a waterfall takes Foster after Arthur doesn’t save him. And they reach the mountain, which isn’t just a uranium mine. It’s made from uranium. And how do we know that? Well, Susan’s husband’s body is being worshipped as a god because the Geiger counter he had keeps ticking, like a heartbeat.

At this point, the film rewards you by going completely off the rails, descending into chaos. A native attacks Susan, but is stopped by the tribe and castrated, then his penis is cooked and eaten. Another villager has sex with a giant pig. Meanwhile, the drums build in a hypnotic rhythm as another female villager masturbates (this is from the “director’s special selection” version, there are several cuts of the film). As this happens, Susan is stripped and smeared with orange honey by two naked female cannibals before being fed her own brother. Manolo is tortured. It feels like a nightmare you can’t wake up from, one of the only moments where the Martino who delivered a quick succession of giallo a decade or so before rears his artistic head.

Then, it’s over, with Manolo and Susan escaping. I mean, one would think that there would be years of therapy after this. But I don’t know. Perhaps she can get over this easier than most.

This isn’t a great movie. It might not even be good. It is entertaining for the last section, but there’s also the problematic issue of animal torture in the film — a monkey is slowly eaten by a snake and lizard being cut apart. Martino claims he tacked on these scenes at the distributor’s insistence. I guess the cannibal audience — an outgrowth of the audience for mondo films — needed more than just Ursula’s breasts and a dummy of Keach getting killed for their kicks.

Eagle Chief Yoh Xi-Hung (Ku Feng) leads Iron Boat Clan, a gang made up of orphans that he has raised to be his personal army — Eagles — of killers. His toughest “son” is Chik Ming-sing (Ti Lung), who loves combat. After being injured by Golden Spear Tao De-biu, he nearly dies and is nursed back to health by the family of lawman Wang An. Now, Chik Ming-sing sees that the life he has known since he was a child is a lie. He deserves love and to have a family.

Of course, the Iron Boat Clan then kills Wang An and Chik Ming-sing is targeted by them. As he wanders, he meets wrist knife fighting master Cheuk Yi-fan (Alexander Fu), who wants to destroy the Iron Boat Clan for killing his wife and children. He suspects Chik Ming-sing, but they make a good team as they both starts to fight back against the gang. Things take a turn when Chik Ming-sing reveals that he killed a man’s wife years ago — guess who? — and wants to be killed by that man to atone for his crime.

Of course our heroes get their revenge, even if Yoh Xi-Hung attempts to turn them against one another. The end, however, is still surprising and poignant, as our heroes are honor bound and have a path that they must follow. The last fight is astounding and both lead characters are so worthy of a movie on their own. Together, this is perfect.

Directed by Chung Sun, this movie knocked me out. Everyone’s weapons, from Yoh Xi-Hung’s claws and Chik Ming-sing’s staff to Cheuk Yi-fan’s wrist blades are so unique to each character and perfectly used. I can’t wait to watch this again.

This was remade in 1993 as The 13 Cold-Blooded Eagles.

The Arrow Video Shaw Scope Volume Three box set has a brand new 2K restoration of The Avenging Eagle as well as commentary by Frank Djeng, an English title sequence and a trailer.

You can get this set from MVD.

I love the description for Nan yang tang ren jie on IMDB: “Fantastic fighting sequences mark this kung fu action film.”

No shit.

That said, despite its title, this has nothing to do with Bruce Lee at all.

Bruce Li is in it, sure, but he’s the sidekick!

Oh man, I love that this was released under a misleading name that caused me to watch it nearly half a century later.

Cheng (Michael Chan Wai Man) is kicked out of a martial arts school and sent back home to Malaysia where he claims he will change his ways. By change his ways, he means to become a crime lord and cuck every man he meets. The fighting teachers send their best fighers — including Bruce Li — to teach him how to behave and somehow, that involves fighting men dressed as apes and Native Americans. I have no idea what it means but who cares? Sometimes nothing has to make sense any more.

I do know that this has a karate man hit a gorilla so hard that its eyeball pops right out. That’s enough, in my world, to give this all the Oscars and cancel future awards shows.

All of them.

Cheng has taken a liking to Wai Sin and when he isn’t running a casino and yes, also sleeping with all of his men’s wives, he’s kidnapped her. That’s another reason for the Shaolin Temple fighters to visit, with one being her cousin and I guess cousins doesn’t mean anything to martial arts masters, unless incest is the 37th chamber of the Wu Tang.

I love — again — that this is a Bruce Lee ripoff with Bruce Lee but the credits don’t even hide the true fact that his name is really Ho Chung-Dao. This also has the title Bruce Li the Invincible Chinatown Connection but come on, Bruce Lee the Invincible is shorter, sweeter and a better lie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Known in its native Czech language as Panna a netvor (The Virgin and the Monster), this was directed by Juraj Herz, who also made The Cremator, Morgiana, The Ninth Heart and Ferat Vampire.

Julie (Zdena Studenková) is the youngest of three daughters born to a widower (Václav Voska). Riding by horseback and looking for a flower for her, he falls asleep and awakens in front of the horrific castle of Netvor (Vlastimil Harapes), a half-man, half-falcon creature that condemns him to death for picking one of his flowers unless one of his daughter’s sacrifices herself to live forever with him. He should be worried. After all, his horse has already died, forcing him to walk and he’s also found the body of a dead woman. So when he asks his daughters to save him, the already married and wealthy Gábinka (Jana Brejchová) and Málinka (Zuzana Kocúriková) refuse, but Julie saves her father just as her beauty will soon rescue the beast.

Yes, just like a Disney film, this is based on La Belle et la Bête by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. Unlike that animated tale, this has no dancing table service. Instead, it’s a gothic and frightening movie, a film that Herz didn’t want to make as he saw the Jean Cocteau film as unapproachable in its perfection. Yet he does the same here, turning nearly every frame into a painting and having an otherworldly beast that is at once terrifying and sexual, with human eyes calling out from behind a bird’s face.

Beauty and the Beast is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including commentary with film historian Michael Brooke, archival interviews with director Juraj Herz and actors Vlastimil Harapes And Zdena Studenková and a short film, František Hrubín.

You can order this set from Severin.

Noel Black made his name with a short entitled Skaterdater and he made Pretty Poison, which is an incredible movie but died at the box office. Then, his career fell apart. He said, “The gold-plated nail in my career coffin was pounded when, after the box-office failure of Pretty Poison, I accepted a dreadful project, Cover Me Babe, that never should have been made. I reckoned that it was better to stay active than to wait for a project I believed in. That was a mistake. It was followed by another mistake, Jennifer on My Mind, one of the dozens of unsuccessful drug pictures at the time.”

After working in TV, he came back to the big screen — or tried to — with this film, which was originally called Marianne. It took six years to come out on video under the title Mirrors.

He also directed Mischief and Private School, two teen sex comedies that are way better than that genre may lead one to believe.

Marianne Whitman (Kitty Wynn, Sharon Spencer from The Exorcist) and her husband Gary (William Paul Burns) are on their honeymoon in New Orleans where she’s soon the concern of a voodoo group who want to put another soul into her. To get what they want, they’ll murder dogs and even her husband in a dust-delivered asthma attack which is really the wildest way someone dies in a 70s occult movie outside of The Omen‘s gore Rube Goldberg destructions of humanity.

Dr. Godard (Peter Donat) tries to help, but Marianne is trapped in a slow burn 70s possession film with an ambiguous ending. Visually, this is a great film. As for the story, well, it’s a mess. It does have a great party scene — every 70s occult movie should — with Willie Tee And The Wild Magnolias funking it out.

I love this in spite of its problems.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Here’s a drink.

Voodoo

• 1 oz. curacao
• 1 oz. 99 Bananas
• 1 oz. Midori
• 1.5 oz. Malibu
• 3 oz. orange juice

1. Mix all ingredients in a shaker with ice.
2. Pour over crushed ice and stay out of New Orleans.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Blue Sunshine was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 12, 1983 at 2:00 a.m.

You know why I’ve never done acid? This movie right here. After all, it has an “inspired by true events” square up in the end credits.

After a series of seemingly unconnected murders in Los Angeles, only one link keeps coming up — every single person took the same strain of LSD called Blue Sunshine.

Yep — the sins of the past decade are ready to come back and destroy the “Me” decade.

Zalman King — yes, the same man who got your mom all tingly after you went to bed with Showtime’s Red Shoe Diaries — plays Jerry Zipkin, a man accused of the murders who — in true giallo-style — must clear his name. That’s because he was at a party where the murders may have started, complete with a screaming Brion James and Billy Crystal’s brother singing Frank Sinatra songs before he starts throwing women into the fireplace.

If turns out that if you took Blue Sunshine, chances are that you’re about to lose all your hair, go crazy and start killing everyone in your path. Of course, no one knew this ten years ago when they were all dosing on it back in college. Chromosomal damage can be a real b, you know?

How can you not love a movie whose title is spoken by a parrot? One that has a climactic disco shootout? Or is so 1970’s that it ends up speaking for pretty much the entire decade?

Between the self-medicating Dr. David Blume, the hard-drinking and hair losing John O’Malley and Ed Flemming (Mark Goddard, Major Don West from Lost In Space) are all caught up in the grip of the bad trip. The effects pretty much sum up Flemming’s political campaign: “In the 1960s, Ed Flemming and his generation shook up the system. Now he’s working within it.” He has become the system. It’s as if the children in Manson’s famous quote — “These children that come at you with knives–they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.” — are even more dangerous when fully grown.

Goddard isn’t the only TV star that shows up, as Alice Ghostly (Esmerelda from Bewitched) makes an appearance.

Writer and director Jeff Lieberman would lend his strange style to other films like Squirm, Remote Control, Just Before Dawn and the odd true crime TV show Love You to Death that starred John Waters as a Grim Reaper attending weddings of partners that would soon kill one another.

The director claims that two major TV networks expressed interest in purchasing the film as a “movie of the week.” The opportunity to get double the budget was appealing, but after seeing the edits that the movie would need to be able to play on network TV, Lieberman decided to produce this for theaters.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Over the next several days, I’ll be covering movies either directed by Menahem Golan or produced by Golan and Globus before they bought Cannon.

You know how I always say that these Eurospy movies are like the UN? How about this one, which is an Israeli/German/Italian movie co-directed by Gianfranco Baldanello (Danger!! Death Ray) and one of my favorite insane people, Menahem Golan — the man who would soon enough direct the magnum opus The Apple.

Who would star, some would wonder? Fabio Testi from One Damned Day at Dawn… Django Meets Sartana! and Fulci’s The Four of the Apocalypse and Contraband. Oh yes.

The love interest? Janet Agren from City of the Living Dead! Oh man!

That’s most of the excitement of the film, which promises a Bond-like experience from its poster and description and does not deliver, except for an incredible boat chase in Amsterdam. You can tell Golan was excited about the action scenes and not so much anything else. But hey! The soundtrack by Coriolano Gori (The Legend of Wolf Woman) and Dov Seltzer (Night Terrors) is pretty good. Cannon Bros will also rejoice to see the face of Yehuda Efroni. If you know, as they say, you know.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

When you see Dick Randall’s name on a movie, you are going to get sleaze.

Directed by Conrad Brueghel, who is really Italian actor Giovanni Brusadori, who wrote the script with Bruno Fontana and George Eastman — speaking of sleazy — this starts with some young tennis players on their way to a meet when they come across four escaped female convicts — Marina (Lilli Carati, L’alcova), Betty (Artemia Terenziani), Diana (Marina Daunia) and Erica (Ada Pometti) — who have already shot their own bus driver, Pierre. As Marco (Francesco Ferracini), the bus driver for the tennis team, lets them on the bus, they soon discover that these are the escaped killers and a terrorist!

One of the girls, Terry (Ines Pellegrini, Giorni damore sul fil de una Lama), knows a place they can hide out, the home of a judge (Filippo De Gara). It’s a gigantic place and soon, the girls are assaulting each of the men — and women — as well as forcing the judge to wet himself. Anna (Zora Kerova, The New York Ripper) seems to be the only tennis player that doesn’t freak out — like Claudine (Dirce Funari) — or join the enemy, as Terry does. Terry even pistol whips her and nearly shoots her, but can’t bring herself to kill someone.

This movie goes through some wild changes, like the judge becoming one of the bad guys as he assaults Monica, the other three girls trying to shoot their way out instead of going to jail, case after case of J&B, tennis girls getting drunk while being abused and facing death by cop outside and no one really getting out of this alive because the cops somehow are even worse than everyone, even the Communist terrorist who finally gets to explain her point of view and mellows out, instead of being the final boss.

This isn’t really a women in prison movie, but a warden does get shot in the head, so it gets the end of the WIP story correct.

The end credits say, “In spite of the evident close correspondence with day reality, the facts, events and characters are completely fictitious. The director thanks co-workers, technicians, crew, actors and all those who cooperated with enthusiasm and dedicated themselves in the best tradition of cooperatives, making the production of this film possible.” That’s because this was based on a true story.

21st Century licensed this to Continental Video, where it lost ten minutes so it could be on a double feature tape with Sweet Sugar.

You can get this from Severin, who promise a “new 4k scan of a dupe negative seized from notorious NYC distributor 21st Century Film Corp.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.

45 years ago, Greydon Clark decided that he was going to direct and write a movie that would bring together a cast that would make me lose my mind. Well, he did it. Mel Ferrer as the conflicted sheriff. Darby Hinton as race car driver Mark. Mel Ferrer and Ralph Meeker play small town cops. Neville Brand plays a bartender. Stephen McNally is the angry dad whose kid gets killed in a race and uses the cops to crack skills. Stuntwoman Diane Peterson plays Mark’s engine obsessed girlfriend Lynn. And it’s all shot by Dean Cundy, so it looks way better than it should.

Adult Darby Hinton without a mustache is a weird thing. He looks like John Schneider.

The Hi-Riders like to race, they like to drink and they like to smash stuff up. But yeah, when a race between Billy (Brad Reardon) and McNally’s son goes bad, they’re in for trouble. Leader T.J.  (William Beaudine, Jr.) and Mark have to fight their way out, if they can, after the rest of the gang are murdered.

If you’re watching movies just for the cars, Mark has an amazing 1968 Pontiac Firebird, while T.J. has a 1968 Dodge Charger R/T. It also has a twisty ending, which I am all for, as it ends with a crazy stunt after all the double crosses.

Sadly, when you see “Vic Rivers – We Loved Him” in the credits, you should know that Rivers was one of the stuntmen who died doing a stunt in this film.

This was originally released by Dimension Pictures and bought by 21st Century.

You can watch this on YouTube.