EDITOR’S NOTE: H.O.T.S. aired on USA Up All Night on May 11 and September 15, 1990; March 2, 1991; January 4, 1992; February 19 and March 20, 1993; March 4 and October 22, 1994 and May 5, 1995.

Honey Shayne (Susan Kiger, Playboy Playmate of the Month for January 1977; Angels Revenge, Galaxina, Death Screams), O’Hara (Lisa London, Savage Beach), Teri Lynn (Pamela Bryant, Playboy Playmate of the Month for April 1978; Don’t Answer the Phone) and Sam (Kimberly Cameron,) have come together to start the H.O.T.S. after Honey fails to pledge the Pi sorority and is publicly ridiculed by its president Melody Ragmore (Lindsay Bloom, a former Miss Utah who was in Sixpack Annie, The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood and Terror At London Bridge). Their goal? Steal all the Pi girls’ boys.

Oh Fairenville University. God old F.U. This is the kind of school where pranks happen all day long, where there are kissing booths, where public strip football is attended by a huge crowd. Is it any wonder why college for real would disappoint so many of us raised on movies like this? And we had to pay for it for the rest of our lives?

At one point, Melody Ragmore says, “Everyone knows what H.O.T.S. stands for, and it’s disgusting!” What does it mean? Well, it could stand for Hands Off Those Suckers. Or Help Out The Seals. Maybe Hold On To Sex. But it really is the first names of the four main girls.

This is a movie where someone is naked — well, someone female, come on — every scene while two old criminals (Dick Bakalyan and Louis Guss) are digging through the house for stolen money. The plot is so thin but then again, it also has a scene with a naked parachute girl — Boom-Boom Bangs (Angela Aames, Bo Peep in Fairy Tales; she’s also in Chopping Mall and Bachelor Party) — skydiving into the pool of the dean while an unfortunate opera singer (Bunny Summers, Mrs. Boone from The Last Starfighter) is performing, a moment that made me stare at the screen and forget work and life and the crushing ennui of trying to make it in the midst of crushing disappointment. Thanks, H.O.T.S.!

The cast also includes Mary Steelsmith as the too large for most sororities Clutz (she’s also in Death Valley and Weird Science); Marjorie Andrade; Karen Smith (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, X-Ray, Freaky Friday); K.C. Winkler (The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood — a movie that has a lot of the same actresses as this movie — and Armed and Dangerous); Sandy Johnson as Stephanie (she started posing nude to pay for her father’s cancer bill; you probably know her best as Judith Myers; she’s also in Jokes My Folks Never Told Me, Surfer Girls and Gas Pump Girls); Donald Petrie (who would go on to direct Mystic Pizza, Welcome to Mooseport, Miss Congeniality and How To Lose a Guy In 10 Days); Larry Gillman (Final Destination); Danny Bonaduce, who of course gets to sing; Marvin Katzoff (who played a geek in Hardbodies and Delta Pi; he’s also in Lovely but Deadly); Steve Bond (Massacre At Central High, Gas Pump Girls); Tallmadge Scott (who fought Jackie Chan in Battle Creek Brawl and was a zombie in Shock Waves); Slinky the seal and Sugar Bear as the bear Honey Bear.

This was directed by Gerald Seth Sindell, who also made the way better than it should be film Teenager. It was written by producer W. Terry Davis, Joan Buchanan and associate producer Cheri Caffaro. If her name sounds familiar, that’s because she’s Ginger McAllister from Ginger, The Abductors and Girls Are For Loving. She was also in Savage Sisters and Too Hot to Handle. So yes, this may be a basic T&A movie, but it made money for the woman who wrote and produced it.

Turin Headquarters of Vice also known as Lust* has Jones Brown listed as its director on some posters, but that’s a combination of Bruno Vani, who was a production manager on movies like Oscenità and Mania, and the man who made those movies, Renato Polselli. Vani also made several other films afterward, mostly adult films like Oh…Angelina!, Angelina Superporno, Dyane, Teresa altri desideri (also with Polselli) and the mainstream Mia nipote Emilia and Ragazzi de’ borgata.

Actor Sandro Moretti is also credited with the screenplay.

Mirko (Raúl Martínez) and Helen (Rita Calderoni, who seems game for whatever Polselli had for her in many movies) are in love. He’s a journalist, she’s, well, we don’t know what she does. Maybe she dealt drugs. Maybes she was a sex worker. She does all she can to convince Mirko that she’s the wrong person for him, telling her that she was a lesbian, that she sold herself, that she was a criminal. Well, she’s everything to him and he won’t hear it. They get married and live happily ever after until one day she just disappears.

This sends Mirko into the dark side of Turin and Rome, as he gets too close to the organized crime that still has his beloved in its grip. Or maybe it’s all in Mirko’s head? Who can say. There is a fight scene at the end with a pitchfork and a rake, which feels right for Polselli, even if this movie doesn’t go as hard as his other films. I have a suspicion that the cut I’ve seen is missing inserts or rougher footage. There is some pretty rad Stelvio Cipriani blasting over all of this, which makes it all go down a lot smoother.

*It should not be confused with another 1979 movie also called Lust, Raniero Di Giovanbattista’s Libidine which has a scientist’s daughter fall in lust with his snake. It also has an awesome Stelvio Cipriani score.

The description of this movie on IMDB: “The seven sisters of the outcast LeFleur family try to survive in a post-Civil War Deep South.”

My wife’s description: “What is all that screaming downstairs?”

There’s a version of this movie online and it’s as complete as it can be. Milligan ran out of money before he could film the last scenes and the ending. So how should it have ended? No one is sure, as the only surviving shooting script ends at the same point the film does. So who is the killer? Who knows! The only part of the ending that is known is that the mansion was going to burn down.

In 2019, this premiered on byNWR, Nicolas Winding Refn’s free cult movie streaming website. Jimmy McDonough, Andy Milligan’s biographer, had the only surviving copy of the workprint, given to him by the director before he died. Whatever survived was restored, along with another unfinished Milligan movie, Compass Rose.

Who else would film a Southern gothic in Staten Island other than Milligan? And who else would have people stabbed in the neck with a pitchfork, a face burned with acid and decapitated heads rolling around in the midst of a talky — well, screamy? — blast of a family in decline, repeatedly slapping and spitting and yelling at each other? Not to mention voodoo and costumes that are so good that they stand in defiance of the actors attempting to get all they can out of the overly detailed dialogue!

Seven sisters try to survive the South with a serial killer on the prowl. Write your own ending while you’re at it. You’ll get an Andy Milligan No-Prize or something.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed by Naki Yurter and written by Recep Filiz, Intikam Kadini (Revenge Woman) is the story of Aysel (Zerrin Dogan), One evening, four men had their car break down and her father generously allowed them to stay at their home. Later that evening, their assaulted her and killed him.

By the end of this movie, Aysel will have cut, chopped, broken and burned four men beyond recognition… but no jury in Turkey would ever convict her! That’s because Intikam Kadini is inspired by the film whose tagline I just quoted: I Spit On Your Grave. Well, by inspired, I mean that Aysel goes to the city and seduces and kills each of the men one at a time. She doesn’t race a boat or castrate a man on camera like Camille Keaton did before her.

This film barely survived the purge of Turkey’s seventies sexploitation films and all that survives is a multiple generations removed videotape that has been uploaded to the web again and again.

Between the Muzak-sounding “Penny Lane” and Vangelis’ “Pulstar,” this has the music thievery that I demand in my movie watching. It’s just that I’ve never really gotten into rape revenge movies. The act itself is a real-life horror and so often, it seems like the movies wallow in the crime more than than they show the retribution. They should be empowering but they come off as shallow; I get that this is all exploitation but I have no interest in seeing women get treated this way unless they’re going to set people ablaze and go even further.

A lot of people — me included — get excited about Turkish riffs on films, even if Turkish Star Wars is so much more its own movie — Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam — than just slavish devotion to remaking Lucas’ movie. Yet most of the movies that are being remade, remixed and ripped off are ones that people have some level of affinity for. Creating a new version of Mr. Majestyk is a much bigger swing.

Directed by Yilmaz Atadeniz and written by Ahmet Ündag, Karpuzcu starts with an incredibly long scene of men picking fruit — yes, this is also about watermelons, just like the Bronson-starring inspiration — with star Dilber Ay sweating under the sun as a woman holds two large melons to her chest, laughing.

Whereas Vincent Majestyk’s main concern was getting his crop in on time so he can survive another season, this has our hero’s woman abducted and sexually assaulted in a scene that goes on forever and worse, it’s pretty close to hardcore — indeed, this movie has inserts from another reel with the exact same actors — and it causes Dilber Ay’s character to get his revenge. He has a little over an hour — well, like half of that by the time the scene is over — to kill them all.

The name of the movie, according to the translation site I am using, is Watermelon Maker.

You can download this on the Internet Archive.

Never forget that Brian De Palma started in the underground and initially had setbacks in Hollywood before coming back to be a success. He didn’t forget the fight.

He didn’t forget his alma mater Sarah Lawrence College either.

Home Movies was created as a hands-on training exercise for students he was teaching at Sarah Lawrence. They were given the responsibilities of raising money, arranging the shooting schedule and editing the film, all under De Palma’s supervision. Students like Gilbert Adler (the producer of Tales from the Crypt for HBO and the House On Haunted Hill remake), Sam Irvin (Oblivion, Elvira’s Haunted Hills), Mark Rosman (The House On Sorority Row) and Charlie Loventhal (My Demon Lover) all went on to produce and direct their own films.

Kirk Douglas plays The Maestro — he’s credited with the film — a teacher tor loosely modeled on De Palma while Keith Gordon is one of his pupils who films everything that happens. So much of this movie — and what happens to Gordon’s character, much like what would later happen to him in Dressed To Kill — were modeled on events from De Palma’s young life, particularly his sibling rivalry, having a mother prone to dramatic outbursts and a father who was always cheating.

He was able to get Vincent Gardenia as dad, Geritt Graham as the older brother and Nancy Allen as his fiancee.

In addition to De Palma, it had six writers: Loventhal, Kim Ambler, Dana Edelman, Robert Harders, Stephen Le May and Gloria Norris, who was Woody Allen’s assistant on Stardust Memories, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy and Zelig.

It’s ramshackle and often self-indigent, but still an interesting reminder of where De Palma came from.

At the end of the 1970s, Toru Murakawa’s Game Trilogy launched actor Yusaku Matsuda as the Toei tough guy for a new generation. Sadly, he would die from cancer at the way too early age of 40 after appearing in Black Rain.

As Shohei Narumi, he’s a killing machine who speaks little, shoots often and never falls for anything. The new Arrow Video set of these films is the first time these movies have been released outside of Japan and man, I loved every minute of these movies.

The Most Dangerous Game (1978): You first meet Shohei Narumi when he’s being roughed up after he contests a game of mah-jong. mah-jong game. He recovers from that in time to find and rescue a kidnapped businessman, at least for a few minutes before that guy is killed in the middle of a gun battle. Narumi is saved by Kyoko (Keiko Tasaka), the mistress of one of the men he’s trying to stop. He gets another job once he’s back on his feet: kill the boss of the kidnappers, which he does. Twice.

How twice? The guy has a public double, so they both have to go. But even the cops are on the take, setting an ambush, but he escapes and, well, kills everyone except one car of criminals who kidnap Kyoko and drive her across Tokyo while somehow, incredibly, Narumi keeps up while wearing cowboy boots. Look, I’ve been on Japanese streets and even though they are clogged with traffic, there’s no way you can chase a car on foot.

The one issue I have with the movie is that it’s kind of hard to like the hero. I mean, he isn’t even a hero, for one. He wins over Kyoko by assaulting her. But then, the film almost demands that you become a fan of him, what with the cool as cool gets clothes, him drinking gin when shot in the stomach instead fo going to the hospital and just being an all around amoral killing machine. Because you never see anything the bad guys do or plan because the movie moves from action moment to action moment like an ADHD kid playing with his toys, you eventually have to concede that he is the protagonist that you must be in favor of.

Directed by Tôru Murakawa and written by Hideichi Nagahara, this film has literally a slam bam pace that never slows down. Ever.

The Killing Game (1978): Shohei Narumi has been in hiding for five years after a major assassination assignment. He’s poor, no longer able to afford his fancy lifestyle. He can’t even get a drink at the hostess bar he gets pulled into.

We don’t have anything like a hostess bar in America. They aren’t places of prostitution but instead a modern version of geishas, providing entertainment and flirtation to lonely salarymen.

While there, Shohei Narumi runs into two women from his past. A hostress named Akiko (Kaori Takeda) was the daughter of the man our protagonist killed five years ago. Yet she doesn’t hate him for it. The other is the mama-san — the boss of the place — named Misako (Yutaka Nakajima). As he shot everyone he could five years ago, she is the one person he let live. Now she’s dating another boss, Katsuda (Kei Sato), and he wants Shohei Narumi to start killing for him. So does another boss. That means that everybody is going to die, many of them from bullets that Shohei Narumi shoots.

What comes across at the end of this film is the fact that without someone to kill, his existence is pointless. He’s like an unfired gun. All he knows in this life is how to end others.

The Execution Game (1979): Shohei Narumi wakes up alone in a filthy room. All he can remember is a girl, a car and a hit to the head, but now he’s hanging from a ceiling and finds out that this is all a trial to test his skills for a new client. They want him to kill their current hitman, who has started acting strangely, but that’s just the start of his new work.

He also has a relationship in this movie, even if she betrays him, and tells a young woman to avoid shady men at one point. This is in contrast to how he acted in the first film, so is this growth? I believe so, as is the idea that he sees the ocean as where he wants to return, growing up close to it and its ebbs and flows symbolize the way his life goes: bloody bursts of ultraviolence mixed with solitude, sometimes for years.

The past films have seen him exhausted and nearly passed out as women strip around him or frantically trying to pay for everyone in a hostess club, knowing that he has nearly nothing. Here, he’s a man that knows his job and what he has to do. That means always being ready to be sold out, always prepared to be in the sights of someone’s weapon and constantly willing to kill someone, anyone, at any time.

The limited edition Arrow blu ray box set of The Game Trilogy has a high definition blu ray version of each movie with new English subtitles. You get a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tony Stella, a double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tony Stella and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the films by Hayley Scanlon and Dimitri Ianni.

The Most Dangerous Game has new audio commentary by Chris Poggiali and Marc Walkow, a 30-minute interview with director Toru Murakawa, the original Japanese theatrical trailer and an image gallery.

The Killing Game has commentary by Earl Jackson and Jasper Sharp. The Execution Game has new commentary by Tom Mes. Extras include an interview with Yutaka Oki, film critic and personal friend of Yusaku Matsuda; an interview with screenwriter Shoichi Maruyama, the original Japanese theatrical trailers and image galleries for both films.

You can get the set from MVD.