EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally watched this movie as part of our Not So Classic Monsters week on January 10, 2022. Thanks for checking out another appearance of this early Cannon movie.
Charles B. Griffith — the Quentin Tarantino-named “Father of Redneck Cinema” — is credited with 29 movies but he probably wrote plenty more. From 1955 to 1961, he was Roger Corman’s main screenwriter, starting with two unfilmed Westerns (Three Bright Bannersand Hangtown) and moving on to an uncredited rewrite on It Conquered the World and his first credit Gunslinger. He went on to make Not of This Earth, The Flesh and the Spur, The Undead, Teenage Doll, Naked Paradise, Attack of the Crab Monsters and Rock All Night before making two movies — Ghost of the China Sea and Forbidden Island — for Columbia (which didn’t go well).
Griffith reunited with Corman after and really went into the prime of his career of making movies, writing stuff like Beast from the Haunted Cave, Ski Troop Attack, The Little Shop of Horrors, A Bucket of Blood, Creature from the Haunted Sea and many, many more.
His films rank among some of my favorites of all time — The Wild Angels, Death Race 2000, rewrites on Barbarella — and he went on to direct, act and — as all must in the 80s — work for Cannon Films.
Beyond a script Cannon tried for years to get made — Oy Vey, My Son Is Gay — Griffith made this movie, which started as part of a series of joke movie titles that he shared with Francis Ford Coppola at a Christmas party. He showed them to Menahem Golan — half of all things Cannon — and after writing The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington didn’t work out, Griffith made up a story to go with the title, all about a hippie who creates a drug that makes anyone that takes it into an ad exec. Golan bought it, as long as the ugly guy became the good guy.
In typical Cannon fashion, Griffith had three weeks to write and do preproduction, four weeks to shoot and two weeks to edit. Then, as always, the rug was pulled out Cannon style: They wanted Oliver Reed. Great actor. Maybe not a comedic actor.
Griffith told Sense of Cinema, “Heckyl and Hype could have been a very good picture. Oliver was great as Heckyl. Wonderful. He played the part with a kind of New York accent and everything, but when he was Hype, he didn’t know how to do it… Reed played Hype as Oliver Reed, slow and ponderous.”
It’s a good looking movie, but man, it’s a movie that has no idea what it wants to be. Kind of like Cannon at the time, which had just been bought by two Israeli madmen who were about to take the small New York studio and make it into something so much bigger than it was supposed to be.
Boaz Davidson, the man who brought us Lemon Popsicle, the American remix The Last American Virgin and The Expendables, directed this early Cannon film, which is all about two kids who fall in love (Danny and Alice, played by Timothy Wead and Mary Cannon), move to New York City and watch it all fall apart.
There’s a good supporting cast — there’s nothing that I ever disliked Vincent Schiavelli , T.K. Carter and William Sanderson in — and hey look there’s Shirley Stolen from The Honeymoon Killers.
The kids fight, they reconcile, they work hard, they hit a wall, they nearly break up and almost lose their kid, but the end brings it all back together in a joyous courtroom moment that had me say, “You know, they’re still going to lose that kid to CPS, right?”
This really seems like an afterschool special made by maniacs that don’t really feel like giving you a moral or a lesson, which really seems to be a description of so many Cannon films when you get right down to it.
Julie (Marianna Hill, Messiah of Evil, The Baby) writes the lonely hearts column for a newspaper, but she’s suddenly getting more than letters from the lovelorn. An anonymous person is sending her letters threatening to murder people. And at the very same time, members of her group therapy session are getting stabbed and killed, one by one. Is there a connection?
Schizoid has all the markings of a giallo — the main character is in the middle of a murder investigation and has no idea who is behind it, while many of the killings are from the murderer’s POV. And let’s not forget the black leather gloves!
It’s missing the insane devotion to fashion and interior design, but we can’t hold that against it, as at least Dr. Pieter (Klaus Kinski, a legit real life maniac who always plays maniacs on screen) has an interesting home.
Right from the beginning, when the ladies of Dr. Pieter’s encounter group luxuriate in a hot tub, we get the idea that someone is watching. When one of them leaves, she is run off the road, chased into a farmhouse and repeatedly stabbed with a pair of scissors. Several days later, a couple that’s trying to have sex is surprised by the body.
Are the letters connected? Why do they mention a gun when the murders are done with a knife? Who is the killer? Is it Gilbert (Christopher Lloyd, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension), the weirdest person in her therapy group? Is it her ex-husband, Doug (Craig Wasson, Body Double) who argues with her every day because they work in the same place? Or how about Dr. Pieter, because he’s Klaus Kinski? Beyond that, he’s having sex with every single one of his patients, including a stripper named Pat (Flo Gerrish, Don’t Answer the Phone) who he takes against a hot water heater! And hey — his relationship with Alison, (Donna Wilkes, Jaws 2, Angel) his daughter, feels super incestual. Maybe that’s who the killer is!
This film also follows the giallo tradition by having police officers that are so ineffectual that they depend on the heroine to do her own investigation with no protection and only a special phone line to help her.
Alison and Dr. Pieter argue repeatedly, especially after he grows closer to Julie, bringing her home to dinner. She begins to dress in her mother’s clothes or as a little girl and even steals her father’s gun.
The police put in the phone line, but every single call seems to be cranky readers who are angry about Julie’s column. Then, Alison calls her from a payphone, gun in hand. Julie gets Alison to come visit her at her house, where her husband (she doesn’t call him ex-husband) is doing some repair work. Alison throws out a whole bunch of the letters and brandishes her gun, but it’s unloaded. Then, the phone rings.
It’s Dr. Pieter, who demands to know where this number reaches Julie. He comes to visit, but someone takes a shot at him. We don’t see who, but he assumes that it is Alison. The lights go out and we have no idea who is in the room with him. The phone rings again, but it’s not Alison or Julie on the line. They’re both tied up and a man is on the other line — but who!
Should I reveal it here? I won’t. But I will say that this movie is truly a giallo because it’s the person that is the least likely suspect and the police come running at the last moment. And by that, I mean just in time for the credits.
Director David Paulsen also brought Savage Weekend to the screen, but is more well known for his primetime soap opera work on shows like Knots Landing, Dallas and Dynasty.
Want to see this one for yourself? Vinegar Syndrome has just released this on 4K with X-Ray.
You can also listen to The Cannon Canon episode that discusses this movie here.
There aren’t many movies that have a scene where Adam West is nude in an Austin Powers way and has a famous madame go down on him while he takes a long satisfying puff on a cigarette, but here with this early Cannon film, which was the third and final in the series* of films about Xaviera Hollander, a Dutch call girl who grew up in a Japanese-run internment camp and going on to be New York City’s top madame before writing the best-selling The Happy Hooker: My Own Story, acting in My Pleasure Is My Business, releasing a board game and recording the album Xaviera! which has spoken word thoughts on sex, her singing The Beatles’ “Michele” and then some early JOI content including her having audio sex with Toronto rock star Ronnie Hawkins.
Martine Beswick (Zora in From Russia With Love, Paula Caplan in Thunderball, a cavewoman named Nupondi who battles Racquel Welch in One Million Years B.C., Sister Hyde in Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, the Queen of Evil in Oliver Stone’s Seizure, plus From a Whisper to a Scream, Critters 4 and the Fred Olen Rey movie Cyclone; more people should be worshipping her) is Xaviera, who has been flown to Hollywood to discuss the movie of her life that she doesn’t want to make. She’d rather just have fun with her business, which she’s still a very hands — and other body parts — on part of, servicing a cop played by Dick Miller in the first scene. Martine may be following Lynn Redgrave and Joey Heatherton in the role, but if she can’t measure up to their acting — actually, she totally does — she’s more willing to toss off her clothes.
Warkoff Brothers Studios — run by Phil Silvers! — wants to get the signature from her to make this, but they want it cheap, so they use Lionel Lamely (West) to get her to fall in love. Come on, people. This is the Happy Hooker! She turns the tables by getting her girls to make the movie cheap and bringing young Warkoff Brothers exec Robby Rottman (Chris Lemmon) to her side, making an independent version of her film financed by horizontal assets.
Her ladies are Tanya Boyd from Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks; January 1977 Playboy Playmate of the Month Susan Kiger from Death Screams; 1969 Miss Utah Lindsay Bloom who was Maybelle on The Dukes of Hazzard; twins Candi and Randi Brough and Dana Feller, who was only in one other movie, the Cannon weirdness that is Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype.
This is the kind of movie that has Army Archerd play himself and satirize Hollywood while completely being Hollywood. But it’s fun, all of the women have way more brains and agency than the men and maybe we can overlook that the end of the movie has Richard Deacon — yes, Mel Cooley from The Dick Van Dyke Show — and West dressed as women. And hey — Edie Adams is in this, too.
It’s total fluff, but the kind of fluff that makes me happy. There’s never any real tension, nothing other than the trans jokes at the end that are troublesome and carefree late 70s nudity. 15 year old me gives this movie unlimited stars; 49 year old me can’t believe that I still watch and write about stuff like this.
*There are two other movies inspired by her, The Life and Times of Xaviera Hollander and The Best Part of a Man.
Joe (Walter Olkewicz, Jacques Renaul from Twin Peaks) is worried that he’s going to close his bar, which seems more like an Italian family place than a place to drink, but who knows, right? Anyways, just as he thinks everything is at its lowest, he heads to a disco nearby that’s packed and learns that it’s not the mirrorball or the coke or 135 bpm remixes or the dancing, it’s the wet t-shirts.
Hot T-Shirts comes at the line between the old Cannon and the Golan-Globus version that’s better known and was directed and written by Chuck Vincent, whose show business career took him from managing the Yale Repertory and the Negro Ensemble Company to hardcore (Roommates, Visions) and more mainstream movies like Hollywood Hot Tubs, Deranged, Warrior Queen and Bedroom Eyes II.
Therefore ensues several scenes of disco music overlaid with women getting water all over their chests because in 1980, that’s what entertainment was, I guess. Corinne Wahl, who was once married to Ken, is in this, as the ringer in the wet t-shirt contests, which, as I’ve said before, constitute most of this movie’s intricate storyline.
For the raincoaters — or streamers now, right? — Randy West shows up.
That said, this movie proves that nude college students can actually be boring. Who knew?
EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally watched this movie on July 7, 2021, but as it’s the first Golan-Globus Cannon 1980s list on the voluminous wikipedia list of Cannon’s movies, this feels like a great place to start.
Based on the 1976 novel of the same name by Bernard Taylor, this film pulls no punches if you’re thinking that children are safe in a movie.
Alan and Kate Marlowe are walking with their four children — Davy, Lucy, Sam and Matthew — when a pregnant stranger (Angela Pleasence — yes, Donald’s daughter) follows them home, staring oddly and doing strange things like cutting their telephone line before giving birth in their home. The next day she disappears — I guess hospitals weren;t around in 1980 England — and keep her child, who they name Bonnie. I also figure that the adoption system wasn’t a thing either.
Within days, Matthew is dead while lying in the same playpen as the mysterious baby. The Davy drowns in a creek, supposedly saving Bonnie’s life, which makes sense, until then Sam dies in a barn and Bonnie’s ribbon is nearby. Suddenly people are calling the Marlowes child killers. Then, Bonnie gets the mumps and kisses him, giving him the illness as well as a dream where he realizes she has killed all of his children other than Lucy.
By the end of the film, Bonnie has claimed the Marlowes’ unborn child when she trips Kate, broken up their marriage and used mind control — wow, where did that come from? — to make Lucy walk out a window. This ending is nothing like the book, so I’ve heard. I do like the close where Alan sees the woman in the park who started all this insanity, but nobody will listen to his prophecy of doom.
This was directed by Gabrielle Beaumont, working from a script by her husband Olaf Pooley. She was the first woman to direct an episode of Star Trek and also made Death of a Centerfold, He’s My Girl and Beastmaster III: The Eye of Braxus.
EDITOR’S NOTE: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. This article originally ran on September 24, 2021.
Oh, call it what you will, you ol’ ’80s “Midnight Movie” and VHS-renting road dogs: Mondo Cannibale, CannibalWorld, Cannibals, White Cannibal Queen, A Woman for the Cannibals, or Barbarian Goddess. All we known is that, once again, Jess Franco, casts himself as the patron saint of the video nasty, as he sticks his hands into the boiling native vats and fucks up a genre. While shooting, this soon-to-be U.K.-banned ditty was titled Rio Salvaje, aka Wild River, probably as an ersatz sequel to Umberto Lenzi’s 1972 progenitor, Man from Deep River. As if we’d be duped by a Franco joint.
White Cannibal Queen
Ah, the VHS clamshell sleeve I remember. Heaven.
On the plus side: Franco gives us the always welcomed Al Cliver (The Beyond) and Sabrina Siani (Conquest and The Throne of Fire). According to Franco, he did this movie and fellow cannibal romp Devil Hunter (1980) for the money and had no idea why anyone would enjoy these films. (Is it just me, or does Franco have a lot of those type of films in his career? He said the same thing about his NaziZom rip, Zombie Lake.) Franco also went on record that Sabrina Siani was the worst actress he ever worked with and that her only good quality was her “delectable derrière.”
Whatever, Jess. Pedophilic Pig.
However, to Franco’s credit, he does change it up a bit: Instead of looking for the usual lost tribes or oil, or whatever vegetable or mineral MacGuffin we need to steal from a peaceful native tribe to make a better life for the white man, our civilized man — with one arm, who lost it during the first expedition — returns to the jungle where he lost his family to rescue his now teenage daughter — who’s become the blonde white cannibal queen of the tribe.
Cannibal Terror
It’s another Jess Franco joint: it’s different, but the same.
Now, don’t let Jess Franco bamboozle you with Cannibal Terror, aka Terreur Cannibale (1981). While Franco penned the script, it’s actually a way-too-late French entry into the genre directed by Alaine Deruelle, and not a repack of White Cannibal Queen, aka Mondo Cannibale. But it does raid that Franco film for stock footage. As result, we see Sabrina Siani, the White Cannibal Queen, while not starring in the film, appearing in a bar scene (oops); several shots of the dancing cannibals from Franco’s film are redux, here; a background actor (said to have a distinctive, Mick Jagger-type face) appears in three roles, here: as two cannibals, a border guard, and a third cannibal eating Al Cliver’s wife; the guitar player at the bar, here, found Al Cliver after he had his arm cut off in White Cannibal Queen (oops).
White Cannibal Queen and Cannibal Terror also share actors Olivier Mathot and Antonio Mayans, both whom have starring roles, as well as porn actress Pamela Stanford, who has a major role in Cannibal Terror, but a support role in White Cannibal Queen by way of stock pillaging. The leading woman change up is Silvia Solar from Umberto Lenzi’s Eyeball(1975).
As far as the “plot” goes in the French remake/ripoff: Two criminals take their kidnapping victim to their partner’s jungle hideaway. The local cannibal tribe hunts them down one by one.
Devil Hunter
Where I have I seen you before? Oy! Another Jess Franco cannibal joint!
And don’t let Jess Franco hornswoggle you with Devil Hunter (1980), aka, Sexo Canibal, The Man Hunter, and Mandingo Manhunter, for he is director Clifford Brown and writer Julius Valery, incognito; his second wife, Lina Romay, co-directed, while his first wife, Nicole Guettard, edited.
And since Devil Hunter was shot back-to-back with White Cannibal Queen, Al Cliver returns in the leading hero role. And Antonio Mayans, from it’s-not-Franco’s-film-but-it-is Cannibal Terror, returns as Cliver’s co-star. The change up, here, is that Ursula Buchfellner, a German model who became Playboymagazine’s “Playmate of the Month” in October 1979, stars as our resident damsel-in-distress. Did you see the Euro-adult comedies Popcorn and Icecream (1979), Cola, Candy, Chololate (1979), and Hot Dogs in Ibiza (1979), and Jess Franco’s women-in-prison romp Hellhole Women, aka Sadomania (1981)? Well, now you know four more Ursula Buchfellner’s films than most (normal) people. Do you feel blessed by B&S?
As far as the “plot” goes, well, it’s pretty much a retread of Cannibal Terror: After the kidnapping by white bandits of a top model/actress (Buchfellner) on a jungle shoot/location scouting trip, an ex-Vietnam vet (Cliver) and his mercenary pal (Mayans) head into the deep jungle of the island nation to rescue her, not only from the kidnappers, but from cannibals who worship a “Devil God.” And (snickering) the “God” is a tall African dude with ping-pong eyes falling out of his head.
And get this: Jess Franco claims the makers of Predator stole their idea from this movie.
Whatever, Mr. Franco. Ye who commits celluloid theft, himself.
Needless to say: All of the stock footage padding from White Cannibal Queen and Cannibal Terror, along with the expected Franco-sleaze, and awful dubbing, is back — to lesser . . . and lesser effect. Wow, Jess, thanks for making White Cannibal Queen look even better than it’s allowed to be. But it does “splatter” nicely to make the U.K.’s “Video Nasties” list, which is the whole reason we’re reviewing this film this week for our “Video Nasties Week.”
So, there you go. Now you’re an educated Euro-cannibal flick consumer in-the-know that Cannibal Terror and Devil Hunter aren’t alternate titles to White Cannibal Queen, but three distinct — as distinct as a Franco joint can be — separate films . . . that are different, but the same. Sorta. Kinda. Oh, Franco!
But you know Franco: He’s a magnificent, maniacal bastard and we love him for it. What would our youth have been without Franco flicks and Venom tunes?
We did a whole week of cannibal films with our “Mangiati Vivi Week” tribute back in February 2018. You can also learn more about the genre with our review of the documentary Me Me Lai Bites Back (2021). And there’s more “nasties” to be found with our “Section 1,” “Section 2,” and “Section 3” explorations.
You can purchase White Cannibal Queen from Blue Underground or watch it as a free-with-ads-stream on Tubi.
You can purchase Cannibal Terror from 88 Films or watch it as a VOD on Amazon Prime.
You can purchase Devil Hunter from Severin Films or watch it as as free-with-ads-stream on Daily Motion.
Based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade — that can be said about a lot of other Jess Franco movies — this is all about the rich Martine de Bressac (Lina Romay, but really Candy Coster, because she has on her blonde wig), who has just returned to her husband Marques Armando de Bressac (Armando Borges) after spending some time away and by away, I mean that she was in a sanitarium.
Yet when she gets home, she learned that her husband has been sleeping with men and women, but mostly with a nun named Norma (Susan Hemingway, who is also in Franco’s Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun) who has conspired with Armando to murder Martine and live off her money.
The only problem is that Norma is also in love with Flor (Mel Rodrigo), the bisexual boy that Armando is also lying with, so things are complicated.
Lit by candles, scored by Franz Liszt and a flirtation with the supposed death of Martine and even a Bay of Blood double stabbing and you have a movie that looks, feels and plays better than a lot of what Franco would do in the decade to come. Soft focus and lens flares make this look like a trip through a dream, but one that’s trapped in a home where everyone wants something carnal of their own and the death of its protagonist, who can be overcome and murdered by orgasm if the desire is pushed to its limit.
This is the only Franco movie I’ve seen that balances a sapphic encounter between Coster and Hemmingway with a male on male love scene between Borges and Rodrigo.
A criminal organization somewhere in the Canary Islands with friends in high places is kidnapping famous women and selling them to their fans, which is pretty much the most illegal and immoral version of OnlyFans ever.
Who can stop them?
Two dancers — actually Two Female Spies with Flowered Panties — with the names of Cecile (Lina Romay) and Brigitte (Nadine Pascal) who are currently in prison, but the police ask them if they’d like to solve the case.
If all this movie gives you is Lina in high heels and a gold bikini being chased by a helicopter, is your life so bad?
Also: a magic ring that can hypnotize women.
I’d like to see the script to one of Franco’s movies, because I can only imagine it says, “Diamonds are stolen. Strippers become detectives. Zoom in to honeypot. The end.”
Also known as The Cannibals, Die Blonde Göttin, White Cannibal Queen*, A Woman for the Cannibals and Barbarian Goddess, this cannibal film — did you get the context clues — has director Jess Franco doing his best to make an Italian movie, what with Al Cliver (who is also in Franco’s Devil Hunter) and Sabrina Siani (Conquest, The Throne of Fire, Quest for the Mighty Sword) in the cast and its appearance as a category 3 video nasty.
Franco only did these movies for the money, but he still takes some time to make this film look halfway decent. He luckily has Siani as Lana, a girl whose mother was killed before she was kidnapped and made into, well, a white cannibal queen. Now, Cliver — her father — has to come back to the jungle and rescue her.
Franco wrote this with an uncredited Jean Rollin and co-directed it with Francesco Prosperi who made the aforementioned The Throne of Fire as well as Gunan, King of the Barbarians with Siani.
So while Franco disliked everything about this movie, I loved the slow motion blood and guts munching, the fact that the cannibals all looked like movie punks and that for being, well cannibals, they all wore very civilized looking sandals. It’s a good idea to have support and protection for your peds in the green inferno.
Also. Cliver only has one arm because these guys already ate it before, you know, killing his wife and stealing his daughter and turning her into their blonde goddess. Franco himself shows up in this and somehow, he has the worst dubbing of any character in the movie, which endears him to me even more and makes me think, well, at least everybody equally gets painted with the same brush.
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