Rachel Foster (Linda Haynes) is a country singer making her way through the United States who gets caught in the clutches of bar owner Mat Tibbs (Aldo Ray, paging Bill Van Ryn). As she hurries to escape, she wrecks her car and walks into a murder scene that she gets blamed for by Tibbs’ brother, the town’s Sherriff (Jackie Coogan).

If this was any other decade than the 70s, this would be the story of her escape. But nope, the 70s were nothing if not relentlessly downbeat. And scummy. Which is kind of what you expect when a movie ends up being a section 2 video nasty. Geoffrey Lewis excels at playing Dr. Kline, the villain of all the many villains in this film.

Director Gregory Goodell moved on to make TV movies after this which makes perfect sense. Sadly, Haynes quit acting and didn’t resurface until Quentin Tarantino started looking for her.

You can get this from Ronin Flix.

Look, when one of the titles for your movie is Atrocious Tales of Love and Death, I get a little excited. But as soon as I saw Marcello Mastroianni, I realized that I was going to hate this movie. He plays a mandolin player, which is totally not the giallo I want, but I can be a small man and tell you that seeing Ornella Muti’s name in the credits kept me watching. I think watching her in Flash Gordon repeatedly on HBO kickstarted me into puberty much sooner than I was ready for.

French model and actress Capucine is in this as well, which makes me happy, as she also did Jaguar Lives! in 1979 before taking a three-year break and showing up in American TV like Murder, She Wrote and Hart to Hart. Luckily for junk film lovers like me, she also found the time to be in Lamberto Bava’s Delirium: Portrait of Gloria, a movie that is surely beneath her.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that this is a Sergio Corbucci film. I mean, the man who made Django? Oddly, I can totally accept him making fun movies with Terrence Hill like Super Fuzz but not this.

Maybe I expect too much. I mean, this is certainly a fine film for people that want a comedy. Me, I wanted the kind of kick I only get from black gloves and the flash of the blade. Oh well!

In 1977, a middle-aged nun named Cécile Bombeek committed a series of murders in a Belgium geriatric hospital and inspired this piece of Italian scuzzy filmmaking.

It is a nun’s vocation to suffer, so when Sister Gertrude (Anita Ekberg) returns to ministering to the elderly after surviving a brain tumor, she begins to worry that she will become sick all over again. Only Sister Mathieu — who is in love with her fellow bride of Christ — believes her. And even when Gertrude murders Mathieu’s grandfather, she keeps covering for her and even getting her the drugs she needs to keep up her life of sleeping with random men in the city and reading horrifying accounts of the sacrifices of martyred saints to the kindly old folks dying in her care.

Some of those old people still like to get it on and much like teenagers at a sleepaway camp that let a young boy die, they pay the price for getting some. Also, another little old lady literally gets mutilated and no werewolves of London are even close by.

So who is the killer? And can one achieve the same ecstatic state as a saint by taking heroin or going cold turkey from it? And how angry do you think this movie made Catholics? And how does Joe Dallesandro keep showing up in so many movies and genres that I adore?

A section 2 video nasty, I kept from watching this for some time, sure that I would need it on some depressing day to break through the bleakness of life. Now, the fact that I pick movies where nuns have crisises of faith and murder old people may say more about me than I’d like to admit.

You can watch this on Tubi.

You may have realized, by now, that I love when great actors get caught up in making bad movies. Olivier in The Jazz Singer? Elizabeth Taylor in The Flintstones? Bruce Willis, Al Pacino and Robert Deniro in everything after 1995?

Amazingly, Audrey Hepburn avoided making a horrible movie until very late in her career as she essayed the lead in this Sidney Sheldon adaption. Sure, Jacqueline Bisset was to play the lead, but the much younger role of Elizabeth Roffe in the novel was rewritten to accomodate the star. Also, John Frankenheimer was originally set to direct, but left the project to work on Prophecy — imagine something being so bad you’d rather make that movie — and being replaced by James Bond director Terence Young.

When Sam Roffe, President of Roffe & Sons Pharmaceuticals, dies in a climbing accident, the entire company goes to his ingenue daughter Elizabeth, which is strange as Hepburn was fifty when this came out. Everyone on the board is a suspect, including the man that Elizabeth has just married, Rhys Williams (Ben Gazzara). There’s even a Man in Black!

This sets off a chase across Europe with a murderous snuff movie making maniac killing to the sounds of Ennio Morricone, just like any number of giallo we’ve enjoyed. Except this movie has people like James Mason and Omar Sharif in it and cost $12 million to make in 1979, which would be around $43 million today.

Supposedly Hepburn was in the throes of her second divorce and needed money, so she couldn’t walk once she realized that she was in a movie where a race car driver burns alive using real footage, so this is kind of snuff within snuff. She honored her contract and made $1 million plus a percentage of the gross, so she made a million dollars.

John Travolta…By an Unusual Fate* is the translation of this title, but you may also have heard it called The Face with Two Left Feet. It was written and directed by Neri Parenti, whose main claim to fame is making cinepanettoni, which are comedy films that are screened during the Christmas season.

He was joined by Massimo Franciosa (Spasmo, The Four Days of Naples) and Giovanni Simonelli, who in addition to directing the “Fulci presents” movie Hansel e Gretel wrote Special Mission Lady Chaplin, Any Gun Can Play, Have a Good Funeral, My Friend… Sartana Will Pay, Seven Dead in the Cat’s Eye, The Ark of the Sun God, Jungle Raiders and Cat in the Brain.

And on what a tale these men are ready to spin, as a hotel worker named Gianni uses his Travolta-esque face to woo a disco queen played by Ilona Staller, the woman who one day soon would become not only adult star Cicciolina, but also a member of Italian Parliament and an international woman of interest.

Another sex symbol, Sonia Viviani, appears in this as well. She was thought to look like Princess Caroline of Monaco, which lead to appearances in the foreign editions of Playboy and Penthouse as well as roles in Nightmare City, The Blood Stained Shadow, The Return of the Exorcist, Bruno Mattei’s Women’s Camp 119 and Luigi Cozzi’s The Adventures of Hercules.

Not many people — well, Jesus and Bruce Lee — get their own exploitation category. Somehow, a few years into his career, John Travolta joined that group of very special people. Even the disco in this movie is called John’s Fever.

Those that love Italian movie music will be overjoyed to discover that the song “Baby I Love You” is by Italian disco pioneer Giancarlo Meo with Claudio Simonetti from Goblin under the name Easy Going, which was named after a gay disco. They had a song called “Fear,” which was about a man wanting to commit a crime so people would stop thinking he was a homosexual, as well as songs called “Little Fairy” and “Gay Time Latin Lover.”

The cover of their first album was an actual photo of the Easy Going club dancefloor.

There’s also a song called “Go Away” by Linda Lee, who is also Rossana Barbieri and appears on the soundtracks of Zombi, Inferno and The Psychic.

*This is a reference to the film Swept Away. Not the Madonna remake, FYI. It also has the title The Lonely Destiny of John Travolto.

Return of the Dead is a Shaw Brothers horror anthology in which three patients in a mental hospital — hey it worked for Asylum — tell their stories.

In the first story, a family who owns a bean curd farm get an amulet with three monkeys that can give any wish. Yes, The Monkey’s Paw works in every langauge. In the second story, a dead woman comes back from her watery grave to lure her lover into the world of the dead. In the final tale, a young rickshaw driver gives a ride to a beautiful woman who looks exactly like a rich woman who has recently died after a night of pleasure with her new husband. She pays for the trip with her pearl necklace. The next time he gives her a ride, she tells him of a casino where he can become rich. He only has to sell his rickshaw. Once her does — and becomes rich — the police arrest him for taking the necklace from the grave of the deceased woman. And the money he won? It’s all fake.

Director Li Han Hsiang made plenty of soft core films for Shaw Brothers, often in the form of supernatural anthology horror like this movie and The Ghost Story. This was the third movie he made in 1979 and he would make up to five in a busy year. Unlike later movies from this studio, this is light on gore but heavy on nudity, almost an erotic ghost story.

Amos Tucker (Tim Conway) and Theodore Ogelvie (Don Knotts) have gone straight and try to start over when they get robbed and then blamed for a series of thefts that were actually committed by the very men who stole their money.

Trying to stay on the right side of the law leads them to the United States Cavalry at Fort Concho and as part of Jack Elam’s plan to rob a train. Luckily, they have army intelligence operative Jeff Reed (Tim Mattheson) to help them. All ends well and they end up right where the last movie finished, as they go to Russell Donovan’s farm to try and get some work.

Your enjoyment of this movie is directly in proportion to how much you enjoy the antics of Conway and Knotts.

How similar were Disney’s 70s films? They had to put a sticker on the posters for this movie ensuring audiences that it was a new movie.

I’m certain I saw this at a drive-in as A Spaceman in King Arthur’s Court, because I am sure I saw nearly every Disney 70s movie at the drive-in. As for kids born later than me, you can be forgiven for thinking that this movie is A Kid in King Arthur’s Court as they are the same movie down to the role of Merlin being plated by Ron Moody.

Dennis Dugan plays Tom Trimble, the astronaut who goes back in time, but today he makes movies like Jack and Jill, Grown Ups and You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. But here, he’s a dude going back to Camelot and wowing them with stories of Uncle Miltie, which seems dated even when I realize that this film is 42 years old.

Also — why is Merlin the bad guy in this? Maybe I shouldn’t be wondering these things and just enjoy myself, which is pretty much what I’ve been doing with Disney week. I wonder what post-Star Wars kids thought of this.

Pat Roach shows up. That guy — between being a German mechanic, a guard and a gestapo that fights Indiana Jones, General Kael in Willow and the Toth-Amon in Conan the Destroyer — is the best bad guy ever.

Russ Mayberry, who directed this, is probably better known for his TV work. The only theatrical movie he made outside of this — that I can think of — is the biker movie The Jesus Trip.