VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the July 19, 2022 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

Filmed at Andy Warhol’s summer home in Montauk — he also shows up as himself — Cocaine Cowboys is the story of Dustin (Tom Sullivan), who starts the movie being interviewed by Warhol, who acts like he doesn’t know the tale we’re about to hear even if he’s the one that saves the day.

In his November 1, 1978 diary, Warhol said, “Tom Sullivan came by to show Cocaine Cowboys to us on a Betamax. He was smoking marijuana, and it was funny to smell it at the office. Paul Morrissey watched a little of it and said it was too slow, and Brigid was in and out and thought so, too, but I liked it. And I decided I’m not so bad in it. They only let me do one take and I think if I’d been able to do more I would have gotten better. But I was better than in my first film, The Driver’s Seat.”

Sullivan had come into the orbit of the Warhol Factory during the days of Studio 54. The story of his life in this movie is, well, pretty much the story of his life. He was described as having a “pirate-king image” and having “pockets overflowing with wads of cash and a black-leather-gloved hand disfigured in a fiery plane crash.” He was sleeping with both Warhol’s personal assistant Catherine Guiness and former First Lady of Canada, Margaret Trudeau.

He also brought “two German geeks” with him: producer Christopher Gierke and actor turned director Ulli Lommel, who would use the Warhol connection in his resume for the rest of his life, endlessly remaking and remixing The Boogeyman and making serial killer movies. Ah, maybe I’m being disingenous. He did work with Fassbinder and again with Warhol for the film Blank Generation.

Writer Victor Bockris said, “Sullivan and Lommel cooked up a story about a drug smuggler who tries to get out of the business by turning himself into a rock star. A band was rounded up and, in imitation of the Rolling Stones, Montauk was used as a base for their rehearsals. The veteran actor Jack Palance was made a cash-in-advance offer he could not refuse to star as the band’s manager and shooting commenced in June.”

During the filming, the police busted the movie for weapons possession and took $25,000. The night before, Albert Goldman claimed that “the Colombians had shown up and threatened to kill him (Sullivan) and he gave them a million in cash.”

The movie is an attempt to tell the real story of Sullivan’s life. His band is ready to make the big time, but their manager (Palance) makes them move cocaine to make extra money. One day, while traveling by plane, they notice a cop car at the airport just as they’re about to land with enough powder — more on powder in a minute — to go to jail beyond the end of time. They toss it near an estate and head out on horses to get it back.

They don’t try all that hard. They just hang out, play music, convince a maid to have a baby powder-aided makeout session and then Andy solves the case like an animated cartoon dog.

So yeah: a marijuana dealer’s vanity project that has the man who gave Indiana Jones his hat (Richard Young), Lacey from The Boogeyman (and Olivia, too), Palance proving he didn’t know the meaning of the word no and Warhol getting paid four grand to use his house and show up and take Polaroids of people while playing himself.

Sullivan died two years later at the age of 26. Needless to say, it was sudden and mysterious.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Sources

Warhol Stars. Cocaine Cowboys. Accessed May 11, 2023.

Once he established himself as the premier action choreographer in Hong Kong, Sammo Hung directed the Iron-Fisted Monk for Golden Harvest and followed it up with a movie that would give Yuen Baio his first starring role.

Yuen Biao is Yipao while Bryan Leung is Taipao. Things are looking up as they cheat everyone around them with con games, but that’s until they meet Jia Wu Dao (legendary Shaw Brothers fight choreographer Lau Kar-Wing) who decimates them in a two on one fight. They ask him to train them so that they can become great fighters, but Yipao soon discovers that his new mentor is a murderer. When he tries to kill the young man to keep his secret, Taipao takes the fatal strike in his place.

Yipao escapes and wonders how he will ever avenge his brother when he meets a large beggar played by Hung. Will the new monkey style kung fu he’s learned be enough to stop Jia Wu Dao’s snake style?

I kind of love this tagline when this was released in the U.S. as The Jade Warriors: “His name is Samo Hung, Bruce Lee’s fattest contender in Enter the Dragon. Juan Biao is Jackie Chan’s toughest Kung Fu opponent ever. Together Samo Hung and Juan Biao will go up against the odds… And then the evens.” Were they trying to sell Yuen Baio as Latino? Or did they figure no one could pronounce his name?

And no, your ears do not deceive you. This has the theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in it.

The Arrow Video blu ray release of Knockabout has 2K restorations from the original elements by Fortune Star of both the original HK Theatrical Cut and the shorter Export Cut. Commentary on the HK Theatrical Cut is by martial arts cinema experts Frank Djeng and Michael Worth, while the commentary on the Export Cut by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema. It also includes interviews with Hung, Bryan “Beardy” Leung Kar-Yan and Grandmaster Chan Sau Chang (aka The Monkey King), a master of Monkey Style kung fu. There’s also a deleted “Red Room” scene, featuring stars Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung in a teaser promo for the film’s Japanese release and the original theatrical trailer. It comes in a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Ilan Sheady and with an illustrated collectors’ booklet featuring new writing by Simon Abrams and original press materials. You can get it from MVD.

Three couples have rooms at the Free Love Hotel: a short man and a tall woman who have met through the personal ads of a porn magazine, a shy man with a domineering wife and a couple on their honeymoon. The ladies are all unfulfilled but the hotel can take care of that with room service, so to speak, but the best help comes from Nina (Lina Romay), an adult star staying in the hotel while practicing a role for a movie.

Directed by Jess Franco and written by Franco, producer Robert de Nesle and Lucette Gaudiot, this movie may seem familiar to you. That’s because Franco remade it as El hotel de los ligues four years later.

Beyond Lina — performing as Candy Coster — there’s also Aida Vargas (who appears in four other Franco movies, Cocktail spécial, Je brûle de partout, Swedish Nympho Slaves and Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun), Susan Hemmingway (Sinfonia Erotica, Two Female Spies With Flowered Panties), Martine Fléty (Blue Rita), Beni Touxa (Cocktail spécial) and Marina Hedman (Satan’s Baby Doll, Erotico 2000, Images In a Convent, Play Motel).

You just have to decide if you want to see the adult version of this story, which would be this movie, or the softer one, which is El hotel de los ligues.

Jenny (Susan Hemingway, whose entire acting career consists of being in Jess Franco’s Voces de muerte, Erotic Symphony, Two Female Spies with Flowered Panties, Elles font tout, Women in Cellblock 9 and Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun) is the virginal daughter of a prominent industrialist.

Tom (Didier Aubriot) and Lorna (Brigitte Lahaie, a woman that Jean Rollin described as perfect; she’s in so many films but let’s go with Faceless and Fascination) kidnap her and sell her into white slavery, but once they learn what she’s really worth, they steal her back and ransom her to her father.

Stephen Thrower says that this movie is Jess realizing just how boring making sex on film is and feeling trapped. How strange and sad is it that he’d have nearly thirty more years to go and that this can be a high point against where he’d go in the years that follow?

The Jess Franco Cinematic Universe is a proven fact. Here, we can see an aphrodisiac gas that traps women in sexual servitude, which also happens in Shining Sex and Blue Rita. It’s the feeling that that gas gives that leads to the title of this film, which is either I’m Burning Everywhere or Burning Up Inside.

The second moment of the JFCU is when Al Pereira shows up, played by Jean Ferrère.

This is one dark and grimy film, a movie that feels like the scummiest porn you’ve ever seen and yet doesn’t show anything explicit. It just feels rough, it feels wrong, it feels greasy and slimy and gross. Then again, any excuse to spend time with Lahaie is worth it, right? And I say all of the above with admiration because how else would I have watched 69% of all Jess Franco movies by now?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally posted on October 11, 2017.

Jean Rollin was a master of the fantastique, the way that the French refer to a mixture of science fiction, horror and fantasy. What’s the difference between fantastique and fantasy? The former is more concerned with the intrusion of supernatural phenomena into an otherwise realist narrative. In this genre, the supernatural may be met with doubt, disbelief and fear; yet it always exists.

After a decade marked by working under a pseudonym in the porn industry to make ends meet, Rollin saw Fascination as an attempt to return to his roots. It’s based on Jean Lorrain’s Un verre de sang (A Glass of Blood), a poem about rich people drinking the blood of bulls in order to cure anemia. It’s also a tribute to a French magazine that explored eroticism in art.

In 1905, a group of wealthy women waits for bulls to be slaughtered so that they can drink their supposedly curative blood.

A gang of thieves pursues Mark (Jean-Pierre Lemaire), who is trying to leave France for London with a bag of gold coins. He finds a secluded mansion in the mountains that is empty, save for two chambermaids, Elizabeth (Franca Maï) and Eva (Brigitte Lahaie, who started working with Rollin on adult films before memorably appearing in his last movie, The Grapes of Death), who await the arrival of their Marchioness and her servants.

The women, who are lovers, aren’t afraid of Mark. Instead, they seem attracted to him. Eva eventually sleeps with the thief, making Elizabeth jealous to the point that she puts a gun in her mouth.

A shot rings out, but it is not Elizabeth’s death. The thieves have found where Mark is hiding and have begun shooting at the house. Eva goes out to give the men Mark’s gold. While they count it, a female thief demands her dress.

Eva makes love to one of the thieves before stabbing him, then wiping out the rest with a scythe. Once the film tastes blood, it picks up in intensity and purpose. Eva returns to find the woman who stole her white dress, now clad in black and carrying the giant bladed weapon. Single frame close-ups of their eyes, lips and blades show the difference between the women. While the thief was once in control and confident, now she is facing death. Her outstretched knife is tentative and finally drops as Eva laughingly decimates her, the former virginal white dress awash with blood as the camera pulls back from the drawbridge to show the carnage.

Soon, the Marchioness later arrives, whom Mark refers to as the grand danger. She tells him that death often takes the form of seduction (and Elizabeth had said that death itself would be coming). If Mark stays — and she knows he will — he’ll be the only man there…except for Satan, of course.

Mark jokingly says, “Midnight! Satan! Death!” as he finds the situation very amusing. Mark tries to take her by force, as she intimates that he’d like to try, but she responds by biting his lip.

Four more women arrive, excited at the possibility of Mark being at their annual reunion. They go to meet him as Elizabeth and Eva light a room full of candles. Mark asks if it’s for the arrival of Death, but gets no answers.

As music plays, one of the women tells Mark that he is about to learn what seven women can do to one man. He takes the music from slow to fast, dancing with a near mania. Suddenly, he has the attention of every woman in the room, dancing with each of them one at a time. He is blindfolded and spun around until he has no idea where he is, laughing and seeking the touch of each woman as they begin to disrobe him. He staggers around the room, blind, seeking to touch each woman.

They’re playing a game, where if Mark can pick out the woman by touch, she can be his. Mark finds the Marchioness and tells her that he wants her to be his slave for fifteen minutes. She tells him to meet her in the study.

All of the women confront Elizabeth, who wants to save Mark as she feels something for him. The other women taunt her before handing out the costumes for midnight.

Mark meets the Marchioness, who undresses for him. He makes her get on her knees and teases her with a cigar. She rises and tells him that the fifteen minutes are over. He walks outside where he finds the body of the final thief, covered in blood. He presents it to the women, who are all wearing veils that barely cover their nudity. He demands to know their secrets and says that he belongs to the real world and their world.

The Marchioness tells Mark to go to the stables, where she has a horse waiting for him. Yet the stables are empty. Eva was waiting for Mark, but Elizabeth shoots her several times. Eva asks why, telling her that she loved her before dying. She crawls back to the house where the rest of the women converge on her and devour her.

Elizabeth and Mark hide in the stables, where he confesses that he loves her. She does not return that love and kills him. Then, she and the Marchioness walk into the sunrise.

Is Fascination a vampire movie? Maybe. It’s more the tale of a ritual, repeated year after year. It’s about how love and sex and madness can be intertwined and how fickle it can all be. It’s about man’s sexual power being laughable when faced with a powerful woman. “The blood cult is strange and bizarre. The love of blood is stronger than the body in which it flows,” says Elizabeth as she shoots Mark. “I never loved you, but what I liked about you was…” she trails off, eyes mad.

After his hit The Grapes of Death, it looked like Fascination would be a change of fortunes for Jean Rollin, lifting him from the porn gutter. Sadly, all of the screenings were canceled at the last minute and the film went from something everyone was dying to see to a film that no one could find. Again, Rollin would lose nearly all of his money and return to adult films.

That’s a shame because this is a film that’s literally brimming with dread, doom and otherworldliness. It starts slow, but by the end it really gets going.

You can watch this on Kino Cult.

Despite being billed so often as Bruce Li as he led the pack of Brucesploitation actors, Ho Chung Tao used his own name for this film. He plays a cop visiting Hong Kong who finds himself in the midst of a case, as a number of martial arts masters have been found dead with two puncture wounds in their necks. This isn’t the work of a vampire, but instead a masked martial arts madman played by Ku Feng that has used his secret skill to turn his entire skin into steel, an act which has robbed him of his ability to make love, so he’s gone even crazier. I mean, he will die if he has sex and screams that at one point.

Ho Chung Tao also fights — and then teams up — with fellow replacement Dragon Bruce Leung. Yet the real joy of this movie is that yes, it is somehow a kung fu giallo set on the grimy streets of 1979 Hong Kong and has a bravura performance by Lee Hoi Gei as Ku Feng’s woman LuLu. She’s obviously unsatisfied by her man, so she keeps cucking him by bringing so many fighters back to their bed, getting them all worked up and then having her man come on in and penetrate them — in the neck — with his iron fingers. Sure, LuLu is also involved in human trafficking and a horrible person, but I was charmed by the fact that she never wears anything in this movie that isn’t see-through and at one point rides a man like a pony around their small apartment and then puts a cigarette out in his mouth.

As if I couldn’t love a movie that unites fake Bruce Lee cinema with giallo, well, this also liberally steals from the soundtrack of Death Wish. Also: this was called Bruce Lee Dominator in Italy, which is incredible.

I guess director To Lo Po has as much right as anyone to make a Bruce Lee ripoff, as he was as assitant director om Enter the Dragon.

You can watch this on Tubi.