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The Lightning Bug — voice by DJ Machine Gun Kelly, not the Cleveland waste of time rapper but the host of seven weekly programs who also shows up in The Fifth Floor, Roller Boogie and Voyage of the Rock Aliens — is taking over the world with sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll and five different costumes. Five costumes? That’s because this movie uses footage from Undersea Kingdom, The Fighting Devil Dogs, Mysterious Doctor Satan, Adventures of Captain Marvel, Spy Smasher, Captain America, The Masked Marvel, The Crimson Ghost — someone alert Glenn — as well as The Black Widow and Zombies of the Stratosphere.

Also known as The Day the Earth Got Stoned and The Second World War, this has Firesign Theater members Peter Bergman as The Chief and Philip Proctor as Agent Barton. They explain what’s going on as the J-Men battle evil. Yes, thrill to the adventures of Yank Smellfinger,  James Armhole, Buzz Cufflink, Agents Spike, Claire and Lance, Rocket Jock (Commando Cody from Radar Men from the Moon), the Lone Star (Captain America), the Caped Madman (Captain Marvel), Spy Swatter (Spy Smasher), Sleeve Coat, Juicy Withers and Admiral Balzy, who work with the FCC (Federal Culture Control) to battle the evil army of MUSAC (Military Underground Sugared Airwaves Command).

Even if it seems like the J-Men have died, don’t worry. They get out of everything by the end of the movie.

Using music by Budgie, The Tubes, Head East, Billy Preston and Badazz, this movie became a cult favorite thanks to how many times it was shown on USA’s Night Flight. It was directed by Richard Patterson, who made a Western film like this in 1976 titled Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch. He also made documentaries on Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. It was written by Bergman and Proctor.

You can watch it on Tubi.

Directed and written by Enzo Milioni, That Strange Desire is the story of two aliens from the planet Alpha 4 who have been on the game show Cripto-Tivvu and won a trip to our planet. They possess the bodies of  Casimiro (Nico Salatino) and Peppino (Gianni Ciardo) and learn that while their race has not had sex for thousands of years, it’s still an act here on our planet.

Filmed almost entirely at the former Grand Hotel Ambasciatori in Bari, this comes from the director of The Sister of Ursula, so you should not be surprised when it feels a bit scuzzy. Most of the movie feels like he turned the camera on and filmed whatever happened and then threw some wacky music over it.

For some reason, this movie has two very quick moments of hardcore inserts, which seem even more gratuitous than usual. I also wonder how this made it on the list of Italian Gothic films I’ve been working from, but at least I made it through this one.

The cast also includes Antonella Antinori (who did some adult as well as mainstream movies like Maya, Play Motel and Burial Ground), Marina Hedman (again, lots of adult but also appeared in Images In a Convent and La bimba di Satana, as well as Jess Franco’s Elles font tout and an Amazon in Starcrash), Maria D’Alessandro (Hotel Fear, Concorde Affaire ’79) and Dirce Funari (Porno Holocaust, Blue Movie and also an Amazon in Starcrash).

According to Roberto Curti in his book Italian Gothic Horror Films 1970-1979, director and writer Pupi Avati refused to “oblige to the rules of commercial film-making” and this movie — thought of as improvisational film jazz, mostly written and shot on the spot — was him trying yet again to create his own vision. While his previous TV movie Jazz Band was well-received, none of his movies had made money (there’s a moment in Curti’s guide to 1980s Italian Gothic where Lamberto Bava, while speaking about his film Macabre, says “…a week after the film’s release, the producer told me it was the first Avati production that made any money.).

This begins with a ratcatcher (Ferdinando Orlandi) staying overnight at a farmhouse and telling a young girl a bedtime story. There was once a house in the swamp and in it lived a family — father Giove (Adolfo Belletti) and his sons Silvano (Lino Capolicchio), Marione (Gianni Cavina), Marzio (Giulio Pizzirani) and Bracco (Carlo Delle Piane) — in a place where no woman had been for years. Possibly, this was because Giove’s wife died while giving birth to his fourth son.

One night, a pianist named Olimpia (Roberta Paladini, What Have They Done With Your Daughters?) appeared and in time, each member of the family asked her to marry them. She accepted each of their engagements and the marriages were celebrated throughout the day and night. But the next day, she was gone and they were all dead in a tableau reminiscent of Leornardo’s The Last Supper.

As the ratcatcher finishes his story, we notice that the girl looks just like Olimpia.

Pizzirani remembered that it was not an easy movie to make. “We did not know anything about the story. Pupi showed up at morning, gave us a sheet of paper and we had to study our lines. Sometimes the dialogue lines were not call and response, and I recall having to learn very long parts, deadly difficult speeches which later on I would repeat, improvising upon them a bit. It was traumatic.”

What emerges is a story made of stories and each of those tales deals with how we confront the story we don’t know the ending of. Our own. Avati said, “I have a problem with death and so I tried to make it beautiful, sunny, warm.” Is Olimpia even real? Did the mother die or leave the men alone to their own lives? How much is allegory and how much is actual? Avati always makes me ask so many questions.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Andrea Bianchi, you lunatic. You made Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror and for some directors, that would be enough. But you also made Cry of a Prostitute and Strip Nude for Your Killer, so I know that you aren’t kidding. You really have your heart in the wrong place. And I love you for it.

A seance has been held to contact the spirit of a murdered woman but instead, it calls forth the spirit of Lucrezia who possesses the quiet and restrained Bimba (Katell Laennec), who is the daughter of master of the house Andrea (Enzo Fisichella) and the woman who has just been killed. The spirit within her wills the young girl to sexual mania and exposes the many affairs within her family. And oh yeah, going down on her invalid uncle Adolfo (Giuseppe Marrocu) and throwing furniture around like she’s Regan.

They hope that Sister Sofia (Mariangela Giordano, who Bianchi would abuse in Burial Ground; she was dating producer Gabriele Crisanti and also appeared in his movies Giallo In Venice and Patrick Still Lives, later saying, “I shouldn’t have done them. But I was in love with Gabriele, I would have done anything for him.”)  can tame the flames of passion that are inside Bimba. The opposite comes true, as women become lovers and decimate the entire house.

Malabimba was remade as the even more sexually themed — is that possible? — La bimba di Satana.

You can get this from Vinegar Syndrome’s dirty older brother Mélusine.

Enzo G. Castellari wasn’t too happy with how this movie was made or how it ended up.

According to Robert Curti’s Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1970-1979, he had become friends with a young writer named Jose Sanchez, who he was mentoring and had hired as an assistant. The script for this film was being produced in Spain and if they used Castellari’s name, there was a better chance the film would be made. However, in the credits, Jose Maria Nunes is the credited writer and Sanchez is an actor. But who are we to test the memory of the man who made Great White?

Castellari said, “Distributor Rodolfo Putignani and his associate Curti finished it their own way. But my name as director stayed.” They changed the name to Sensivita and it was released as Diabla in Spain. But they weren’t done. Seven years later, Alfonso Brescia was brought in to shoot new scenes, which Castellari saw years later at a horror convention. He laughed it off, saying, “After six minutes I walked out of the theater, horrified.” That new edit was released under the title Kyra – The Lady of the Lake.

Whatever the end result is, you know that I’m going to get excited by a movie that starts with a bloody hand that rises from a lake and drowns a woman, much less one about the occult secrets of a home being investigated by Lilian (Leonora Fani, Hotel Fear) who wanders the lake where her mother drowned and then finds a toad in her bed.

There’s also her sister — well, spoiler warning, sorry — Lilith (Patricia Adriani) who is a witch who lives in a cave that is constantly studying all of the symbols all over the area. She’s also connected to her sister in the way that all Italian exploitation films connect people. Yes, it’s sex. As Lillian makes love to a man, Lilith feels what she feels. They both pass out from a movie orgasm while the man drives off and immediately dies in a car crash. This is cinema.

Lilith can also speak to the woman inside the lake, who is named Kyra. There’s also a little blind girl who has more headless dolls than she knows what to do with, an axe murderer, Vincent Gardenia as a painter, a village filled with people in giant masks and Antonio Mayans shows up in a non-Jess Franco movie. I was beside myself with sheer happiness and that’s before the ending where the two leads have a clothes-destroying girl-on-girl fight to the death.

Why has this not yet been placed on blu ray and upgraded and presented with scholarly commentary tracks that pretend that it’s art instead of lurid Italian exploitation filmmaking — which is art, so this is a double positive and hey, physical media companies, I will totally record that commentary track — and man, I’ve been super down as of late and then a movie like this crosses my path and I have to think, “I live in a world where the cosmic coincidences or simulation that created my reality eventually led to thousands of years of evolution which eventually produced this, a film of staggering achievement that literally ones of people are obsessed over.”

Dr. Jekyll (Paolo Villaggio) is the director of the powerful multinational food company PANTAC. He’s unleashed so many harmful products on the world, but when he drinks the serum of good, he becomes the much nicer Mr. Hyde.

Directed by noted Italian comedy director Steno, who wrote the script with Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Giovanni Manganelli, Franco Castellano and Giuseppe Moccia, this finds the doctor telling his servant Pretorius (Gordon Mitchell) that he secretly wants to be good. Well, it just so turns out that the real Dr. Jekyll lives in the basement and can turn him into a good version of himself, the one that his secretary Barbara (Edwige Fenech) falls for.

The commedia sexy all’italiana movies seem strange and maybe not funny to American audiences, but you know, Edwige Fenech is in it and isn’t that good enough? It’s good enough.

As for the film, well, it never really gets going past that major twist of having Hyde become good.

You can watch this on YouTube.

As a seven-year-old in a small Western Pennsylvania town, my only window into New York City was the noon news on WOR. And NYC seemed like the end of the world, like The New York Ripper and Maniac in real life.

The Warriors goes even further, never telling us that it takes place after the end of the world but it sure doesn’t have to.

This is a movie so violent that Paramount Pictures temporarily halted their advertising campaign and released theater owners from their obligation to show the film. In 1979, it frightened people. Today, it’s a beloved cult hit.

Cyrus (Roger Hill), leader of the Gramercy Riffs has asked each of the five hundred gangs of the city to send nine unarmed people to Van Cortlandt Park. He asks for a truce among the gangs. Since they outnumber the cops three to one, he believes that they can run the city.

The Warriors, a gang from Coney Island, include leader Cleon (Dorsey Wright), his second-in-command Swan (Michael Beck), Fox (Thomas G. Waites), graffiti artist Rembrandt (Marcelino Sánchez), Snow (Brian Tyler), Cowboy (Tom McKitterick), Cochise (David Harris), Ajax (James Remar) and Vermin (Terry Michos).

As they listen to Cyrus, a shot rings out. It’s fired by Luther (David Patrick Kelly), the insane leader of the Rogues. He blames the Warriors, as Vermin watches him fire that killing bullet, and the entire city of New York City is suddenly against the Warriors, who must fight the whole way back to Coney Island. Cleon is killed and the gang doesn’t even know how much trouble they’re in.

On the way home, they encounter the Turnbull ACs, the Orphans — their member Mercy (Deborah Van Valkenburgh) sees something in Swan and leaves — as well as the Baseball Furies, the Lizzies and the Punks. The gang is separated and some of them are arrested and injured, but everyone makes it back home, just in time to have to battle the Rogues, just as the Riffs arrive, having learned that the Warriors weren’t the ones to blame. Cue “In the City” and a walk down the beach.

Sounds simple, but it isn’t. The Warriors transcends gang movie formula of the past and presents the gangs not as a social problem but as a belief and protection system. The book that it’s based on — Sol Yurick’s The Warriors, which was based on Xenophon’s Anabasis — almost was an AIP movie in 1969. I can only imagine how incredible that would have been.

Director Walter Hill, who wrote this with David Shaber, wanted this movie to be a living and breathing comic book with splash pages introducing each scene. The budget wasn’t there for that but unlike so many comic book movies, this film understands the spare narrative of comics. The subway scene, where rich kids get on and sit across from Swan and Mercy and he makes her stop fixing her hair…that’s incredible. It says everything, that he has pride and finally accepts her and wants her to have it as well.

What I love most is the influence this movie has had on Italian films, from the DJ that voices the action in Zombie 3 to the near-sequels of Enzo Castellari, 1990: The Bronx Warriors and Escape the Bronx. Often, those movies are seen as post-apocalyptic films but in truth, they recapture the look and feel of The Warriors. 1990 was even shot in New York and has some of the same energy on an even smaller budget.

The Arrow Video 4K UHD and blu ray releases of The Warriors are overflowing with extras that will add to your love of this movie. You get exclusive new 4K remasters of both the Theatrical Cut and the 2005 Alternate Version of the film sourced from the original camera negative, supervised by Arrow Films and approved by director Walter Hill. In fact, the theatrical cut has never been in the correct aspect ratio before.

Inside limited edition packaging with a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Laurie Greasley, you get a double-sided poster of that art, six postcard-sized reproduction ar tcards, gang logo stickers and a 100-page perfect-bound collector’s book containing new writing by film critic Dennis Cozzalio.

There’s new audio commentary for the theatrical cut by film critic Walter Chaw, author of A Walter Hill Film, a new interview with Hill in which he’s quite honest about the film and how much others contributed, a roundtable discussion between Josh Olson (A History of Violence), Lexi Alexander (Green Street) and Robert D. Kryzkowski (The Man Who Killed Hitler and then Bigfoot) discuss their love of The Warriors and the work of director Walter Hill, new interviews with editor Billy Weber and costume designer Bobbie Mannix — which is worth the price of this set, as she explains how she outfitted all of the gangs, as well as another feature that shows all of the actual work — as well as an appreciate of the score, that score isolated from sound design, a new look at the film locations and archival extras.

If you love film, you owe it to yourself to own this.

You can get the 4K UHD and blu ray from MVD.

I’ve been thinking about Hardcore since I watched it.

The weird thing is, I can honestly say that I disliked nearly everyone in this movie except for one character yet I am still a fan of this movie.

Director and writer Paul Schrader partly based the story on his own experience growing up in the Calvinist church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he studied theology at Calvin College. Calvinism is a Protestant faith that follows the theological tradition and forms of Christian practice set down by John Calvin and is steadfast in the belief of the sovereignty of God and the authority of the Bible.

As explained in the movie — and with help from Learn Religions — Calvin based his theology on the Bible alone. The five points that the church lives by is summarized by the world TULIP, which means T- Total Depravity, U – Unconditional Election, L – Limited Atonement, I – Irresistible Grace and P – Persistence of the Saints. In short, sin pervades all areas of life and human existence. People cannot independently choose God or save themselves. Only God can intervene and do all the work. God also chooses who will be saved. Those are the Elect, who God has selected not on merit, but out of his kindness and sovereign will. It also means that election for salvation is not based on God’s foreknowledge of who would come to faith in the future. Since some are chosen for salvation, others are not. Those not chosen are the damned to Hell for all eternity. And when Jesus died, he didn’t die for all of mankind but just foe the Elect (there are four point Calvinism that believes that Jesus did die for all men). Finally, Calvinism teaches that the Elect cannot lose their salvation.

You have to understand that or at least get your head around it to understand some of this.

Back to Pauil Schrader.

After writing Taxi Driver, he worked with executive producer John Milius at Warner Bros. until Warren Beatty came on. He clashed with Schrader, as he wanted the story to change so that he was searching for his girlfriend and not a daughter. Warren Beatty couldn’t be old.

George C. Scott could be.

He played Jake Van Dorn, a businessman from Grand Rapids, Michigan — you can spot Schrader’s childhood school and parents in these scenes — who is a Calvinist. When his daughter Kristen (lah Davis) goes missing at Knott’s Berry Farm, he gets help from Andy Mast (Peter Boyle), a private detective in Los Angeles, to find her after she’s been missing for several weeks.

Five weeks later, Mast brings him some news. Calling him Pilgrim, he has rented an adult theater to show Jake a loop of his daughter in an adult film called Slave of Love. Now calling herself Joanne, it appears that Jake has lost his little girl.

But he won’t let her go easily.

Following Mast to Los Angeles and throwing him out of the home he’s been paying for, Jake pretends that he’s a porn producer, beating everyone he finds nearly to death. Everyone except Niki (Season Hubley), a sex worker and adult star who promises to help him. Their relationship is strange. She listens intently while he discusses religion but compares it to being sold on bestiality by a client. Yet it’s intriguing that she’s the first person he can open up to about his wife leaving and she feels safe around a man that doesn’t see her just for sex. She says that he doesn’t see any need for sex so it’s not a big deal while she can have sex with anyone and it’s not a big deal, so they have something in common.

He says they have nothing in common.

By the end of the movie, Jake has gone deep into the underworld of pornography which, predictably, has snuff movies and has his daughter dating the creator of those movies. There’s a gun battle and Jake finds his daughter who tells her she did everything on her own and no one forced her to do anything. She refuses to go home with him and he breaks down, which changes her mind. I found the end of this movie really artificial in that she gives in so easily. No one has learned anything, as Jake had to basically beat Niki to get what he wanted from her. But he’s saved. She won’t ever be.

I was mad, at the end, because she felt like he would be the person to take her away from all this. There’s a look between them and she’s smarter than anyone else in the film. She realizes she’s been lied to again, lied to by religion that she almost believed in and she walks away. Jake wonders if there was some way he could pay her. But if he got his daughter back, he lost the faith of perhaps the one honest person in this entire film.

Also, her Rorer 714 shirt is incredible.

The story originally had Scott’s character discover that his daughter has been killed in a totally unrelated car crash. He feels like this choice messed up the ending.

This is one of those movies that exposes porn and yet has no idea what the industry is. Marilyn Chambers auditioned and the casting director said she was too wholesome to be cast as a porn queen. 99 44/100% pure, right? They were looking for something fake, not the reality of what existed.

Speaking of real life, George C. Scott and Schrader did not get along, so much that at one point Scott refused to come out of his trailer and threatened to quit the film. Scott told Schrader that he was a good writer, a terrible director and “this movie is a piece of shit.” Supposedly, he only agreed to come out after forcing Schrader to promise that he would never direct again.

The first meeting between the director and his star should have let him know what he was in for. Scott never showed up but he was found in a bar. Schrader said, “George came out, and he was just wearing his undershorts, and he saw me in the distance and says “Where’s that cocksucker who thinks he can direct?” At which point I said “That would be me George.””

The Kino Lorber blu ray release of this movie has two commentaries, one by director and writer Paul Schrader and the other by film historians Eddy Friedfeld, Lee Pfeiffer and Paul Scrabo. You can get it from Kino Lorber.