In my experience, performance — whether in a band or as a pro wrestler — is a lot of things you don’t want to do at all. In fact, a good portion of it is the kind of work that you wouldn’t want to do if you were being paid for it. Non-stop practice in the worst of conditions for sets that last ten minutes in places where no one wants to see you perform, but you keep at it, and every few times you reach a level of transcendence that no drug can give you so you keep at it even when everyone thinks you’re dumb for caring so much.

Director Chûsei Sone directed many of Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno movies, which are not porn, but films that revolve around sex to tell narrative stories. His Angel Guts movies are well-regarded and he eventually moved away from the genre and even made a mainstream hit, Flying, before he died.

So while the draw of this movie may seem to be the groupies, the truth is that it’s incredibly realistic as to what it’s like to be in a band. Rehearsals are tense at times. Not everyone gets along. And it feels like it could fall apart and your loved ones would be happier if it did. And then you play a show and you’re high and staring at the lights and you remember being a fat kid in your room trying to do David Lee Roth spin kicks and there you are, the one on the stage, and for at least a few seconds, you’ve made it. You’re living your dream. And then it’s gone.

But at least you had it.

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 Banners and 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. But that’s a story for another time. Check back in March.

I worry at times, will the Italian exploitation industry of the 1980s ever run out of wonders to make me delirious with? Is there a bottom to this well of movie drugs? Well, sure there is, but every time I think I can’t get that high ever again, I put on something like Patrick Still Lives and walk away dazed. Seriously, well done, Mario Landi, you absolute maniac.

Full warning: This is the same lunatic that made Giallo in Venice, so if you think that this is something you can put on to babysit your kids while you do something in the other room, by all means, show your kids a movie where a woman is assaulted by a telekinetic powered poker.

Also, this is totally an unauthorized sequel to the Australian film Patrick, which has no scenes where the wind picks up and a blonde nurse paws at herself in gynecological detail and really, isn’t it a worse movie for it?

“You Need to Know … This Time Patrick Will Kill You!”

Oh man, do I ever.

Gabriele Crisanti produced this movie, along with Giallo in Venice, Savage World Today, Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror and Satan’s Baby Doll. Like any good producer, he put his girlfriend in the film, Mariangela Giordano (she’s the Countess in Killer Barbys, as well as making appearances in The Sect, Decameron n° 4 – Le belle novelle del Boccaccio and many more movies). In both this movie and the aforementioned Giallo in Venice, Giordano dies in ways that would potentially upset even Lucio Fulci. She said later, “Looking back I shouldn’t have done them. But I was in love with Gabriele. I would have done anything for him. Now I can see how the increasingly gruesome ways he had me killed in them was a reflection of the breakdown in our own relationship. This movie is the worst instance of how shocked I was in retrospect by something I’d done on film. That poker scene is so disgusting, so terrible, only Gabriele could have sweet-talked me into actually doing it! It took two days to film that scene, and because the poker had to keep thrusting between my legs before it came out of the top of my head, it got more and more painful as we kept going. And it was cold and freezing. I don’t know why Gabriele always insisted on making these movies during winter.”

This movie has lots of J&B, a better car decapitation than Hereditary, green glowing eyes, women stripping in front of coma patients, strobing lights, more nudity than most pornography, a ridiculous plan, dogs eating people, a scalding, a hook to the neck, a health spa that looks like a foreboding castle, Patrick wearing a blonde wig and looking even more ridiculous than I thought he would, a rocking Goblin-esque score by Berto Pisano and an origin story that involves a beer bottle.

I wonder how the people who live in the mansion — Villa Parisi, Via Mondragone, Frascati, Metropolitan City of Rome — feel, knowing that this film, Blood for Dracula and Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror were made there. Surely that place has to be Amityville haunted.

You can get this from Severin.

Paul (Richard Harrison) is researching a tribe when his wife (Nieves Navarro!) falls for one of their women named Haini (Lucia Ramirez, Porno Holocaust) and brings her back to civilization. And then, for some reason, Haini picks up a guy at a bar and has a fantasy of killing him with a machete because hey — this is a Joe D’Amato movie.

The main moral of Sex And Black Magic is if you’re a rich white couple and you try and have a three-way romance with someone with connections to the ancient world of the occult, you know, don’t throw her away.

Also known as Voodoo Baby, the real star of the show is the Stelvio Cipriani soundtrack which is way better than it has any right to be.

I mean, I’m doing an entire week of D’Amato movies so you know that I love him. One of the reasons why is movies like this that present to you two options at once. Most movies only give you cannibalism and human sacrifice or they are filled with erotic content. Only Joe would decide that you need to need to have both. You might not be ready for that, but you’re going to get it.

Joe D’Amato made an effective women’s revenge film with Emanuelle and Francoise, but this is in no way as good as that film. Another film from that burst of 1980 island-based adult films*, this one has four gorgeous young women take an island holiday, only to have three criminals — with writer George Eastman as the only one that has goodness in him — attacking them.

What sets this apart from every Italian movie — and several D’Amato ones like 1991’s Devil in the Flesh — is that there are hardcore scenes in between, which means that yes, I will see Mark Shannon nude again.

Of the actresses in the cast, Anj Goren would also appear in a few other D’Amato Carribean films like Sesso Nero and Porno Esotic Love, which was edited from the superior Black Cobra Woman. Dirce Funari one of the doomed actresses in the snuff sequence in Emanuelle in America and is also in Escape from Women’s Prison. And Lucia Ramirez appears in all of the D’Amato Carribean films.

*Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, Paradiso Blu and Porno Holocaust are also examples.

Unlike IMDB, we’d like you to know that this movie is not Adam and Eve vs. the Cannibals, which is a fine movie, but was directed by Enzo Doria and Luigi Russo, the same team that made another Blue Lagoon ripoff called The Blue Island.

No, this is Joe D’Amato’s Blue Lagoon ripoff, except he didn’t want this movie to be lumped into the many erotic films he had directed. He had higher hopes for this movie, seeing it as an erotic story in an exotic setting, which is semantics but there you go. Instead, he had star Anna Bergman — yes, the daughter of Ingmar — sign on as the director in the hopes that this would make the movie a success. It did not.

After a plane crash, the virginal Peter (Dan Monahan, Pee Wee from Porky’s) and the more experienced Karen (Bergman) are the only two survivors, ending up on an island where they sooner or later jam the clam, have some horizontal refreshments and, you know, have sex.

Yet what will happen when a swarthy stranger (John Richardson, Black Sunday) arrives? And just what’s happening with the cult on the island and their sacrifice Inez (Lucia Ramirez, who appears in all of D’Amato’s Caribbean movies)?

Written by Mimmo Cattarinich (who also wrote Little Lips and was in the camera crew for Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! which kind of blows my mind) and our good old friend Luigi Cozzi (do we even have to tell you his history?), Blue Paradise is way better than it should be and feels like a grab for some kind of mainstream success by a filmmaker better suited for the dirty minded.

EDITOR’S NOTE: They don’t come much rougher than this movie, which we originally posted about on August 5, 2018. As a bonus, there’s a cocktail recipe to go with the movie! Drink up!

I’ve recently been reading the book Satanic Panic: Pop Culture Paranoia in the 1980’s and reminded of my own misspent youth. In sixth grade, a teacher knew that I was religious and thought I could warn my fellow classmates about the dangers of evil music and movies. He gave me a mimeographed sheet of heavy metal (and non-metal) bands to study and by the time I got to Black Sabbath, my soul was sold to rock and roll.

By eleventh grade, I was squarely in the devil’s camp in the eyes of my teachers. My love for bands like King Diamond and Danzig, along with my predilection for drawing Leatherface in class, marked me as a subject of interest. Obviously, I was doing drugs and black mass rituals — I could easily discuss Dungeons & Dragons, too. I was to be more feared the dead-eyed athletes who would soon realize their lives were peaking at 17 while mine hadn’t even started yet.

It’s to those times in my youth, when I wanted to escape my hometown and sat in my room blaring Samhain’s “November Coming Fire” and reading Fangoria, that this movie perfectly fits in. It is disgusting. It is unrepentant. It has no moral or social value. It is filled with the kind of gore than makes churches throw VHS tapes into a blazing bonfire. In short, it is everything amazing and wonderful and metal about horror movies.

The movie starts with two Germans exploring a beautiful Greek beach. Someone emerges from the ocean and murders them. Meanwhile, five travelers are joined by Julie (Tisa Farrow, who some may know as the sister of Mia, but we all know her as Anne from Zombi 2), who asks for a ride to the island. However, Carol (Zora Kerova, Cannibal Ferox, The New York Ripper) uses her tarot cards to learn that something bad will happen. No one listens to her.

The pregnant Maggie (Serena Grandi from Delirium) stays behind on the boat and is abducted by the killer, who quickly beheads a sailor.

The island is in ruins and completely abandoned, except for a woman in black, who writes go away in the dust. Upon finding a rotting corpse that has been eaten, everyone runs back to the boat, which is floating unmanned, then goes to the house of Julie’s friends. There, only the family’s blind daughter Henriette has survived.

The young girl panics and attacks Daniel, but when she is calmed, she tells everyone of the maniac that is stalking the island. Daniel is wounded and needs medicine, so Andy and Arnold head to town. Meanwhile, Daniel flirts with Julie, which causes Carol to run into town and Julie to follow her. While all this drama is going on, the killer rips out Danel’s throat.

Everyone travels to a mansion that belonged to Klaus Wortman, who died along with his wife and child in a shipwreck. This caused his sister, the woman in black, to lose her mind. And to hammer that point home, we soon see her hang herself.

Everything seems like its going to get better when a boat rifts to shore. On board, Julie finds Klaus’ journal. It turns out that he is alive…and the killer! Soon, Maggie is confronted by him and we learn that it’s George Eastman, who is in so many awesome Italian movies, such as Baba Yaga, 2019: After the Fall of New York, The New Barbarians, Blastfighter, Rabid Dogs, Hands of Steel, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, oh man! So many amazing films! This is his star-making role though and he really goes for it. He has a flashback where we learn how he accidentally stabbed his wife while trying to convince her that they should eat their dead son to survive. After eating his family, he went insane. Soon, Klaus breaks out of his flashback reverie, stabs Arnold and rips out and eats the unborn baby inside Maggie’s belly. Holy fucking shit, this movie!

I wish that those teachers who thought I was a Satanic terror in 1988 could see me now, jumping up and down with glee at 2:44 AM on a school night screaming “GEORGE EASTMAN!” while drinking a beer and holding a small dog.

What follows can’t really top that, but fuck it if Eastman isn’t going to try, including eating his own intestines after Andy hits him the stomach with a pickaxe! That’s a commitment to your role!

The American version of this film, The Grim Reaper, has 35 cuts in an attempt to get an R rating. That’s correct – nine minutes are missing, including the baby being devoured and the killer eating himself. It just ends when he is stabbed in the stomach. It also replaces the electronic Italian score with the music from Kingdom of the Spiders.

Director Joe D’amato and George Eastman would return in a spiritual sequel called Absurd. If you want to see this,  grab the insanely awesome Severin Video rerelease or watch it as The Grim Reaper on Tubi.

BONUS: Here’s a drink to go with the movie.

Tasty Baby on a Greek Beach

• 1 oz. rum
• 1 oz. Southern Comfort
• 1 oz. vodka
• 1 oz. grenadine
• 2 tbsp. lime juide
• 1.5 oz. orange juice

1. Mix and serve over ice.
2. Watch over your shoulder for Klaus Wortman.

Black Sex is also known as Sexy Erotic Love and Exotic Malice. That last title is probably best, because this is the scuzzier side of D’Amato, backed up with a script by George Eastman.

One of the first — if not the first — adult films to be shown in mainstream Italian theaters, this movie was made on the same 1979 Dominican Republic vacation that gave us Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, Porno Holocaust and Hard Sensation. In all, D’Amato made nine movies in this region in just one year.

The thing is, this movie may have adult sex in it, but it’s also the kind of movie that is just as ready to turn you off as it is to work you up.

Mark Lester — not the director but a businessman — has been diagnosed with an enlarged prostate requiring surgery in two weeks. Facing death — along with a syringe of painkillers — Mark decides to head to Santo Domingo, the place where he first met Maira (Annj Goren). She didn’t follow him because she felt that she was too poor, so she stayed behind on the islands, along with her voodoo-practicing family.

As the film unspools, Mark alternates between the genital discomfort and dreams of the woman he loved returning to life. It turns out that with her last breath, Maira cursed Mark’s name and now, her spirit — and those words — live in a bottle held by her father who claims that Mark will never leave the island alive.

Mark’s wife Liza — who claims that she owns him — arrives and fights with him about her sterility and the fact that his upcoming surgery will cost him the ability to ever become aroused again. Yes, this is certainly not a movie for the raincoaters. Of course — I mean, no of course because this is a film made of madness — Maira is really her younger sister who was raised to look and behave exactly like her because her father knew Mark would return and that he had to be ready to take everything from him.

So, after a movie of Maira cucking our protagonist, who is in turn cucked by his wife who hates him, and suffering agonizing pain throughout, decides to kneel down and slice off his manhood while he dies in the surf, held by the ghost of a woman who died because he left her so many years ago.

A feel good movie not to be watched with one hand!

That’s the funny thing. There’s a good story and potentially good movie here, but most audiences will never see this because, well, it’s a 1980 adult film from a director whose least sexual film still has a man have an oedipal relationship with his housekeeper and sleep with the corpse of his last wife. So yeah — this probably won’t connect with many.

I mean, who wants to watch a movie where the main character keeps shooting up drugs and getting drunk and lies in a hotel room in abject pain knowing he has to come home to get his penis removed so he just cuts it off himself and dies on his own terms, except that he’s a horrible person who caused the death of a girl who didn’t deserve it so her father ruined his other daughter’s life to transform her into a murder weapon?

I guess me.

EDITOR’S NOTE: While we just covered these movies on October 1, 2021 and October 31, 2021, you can’t do a week of Joe D’Amato without bringing up two of his most transgressive — and to be honest somewhat boring — movies. 

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980): I work in my basement from when I wake up until when I go to bed, writing all sorts of words for people, from health care to highed education, parent-teacher groups and all manner of businesses large and small. There are times when all that writing and the way the world has been acting for the last 18 months which feel like 18 years when it just seems hopeless. Why am I doing this? Who am I doing it for? Why do I feel compelled to keep on writing and then in my spare time write some more about movies?

Because of movies like this.

Make no mistake, Le notti erotiche dei morti viventi is absolutely the sleaziest kind of movie there is, a film that combines all of the oatmealed faced zombies and gore of Italian cinema with the sexual congress of, well, Italian cinema. It’s as if someone said, “What if we saw people screw before we kill them horribly?” And that man, friends, was Joe D’Amato.

Now, the man himself said that this was an utter failure, telling Spaghetti Nightmares that the movie was”…a total fiasco. I had endeavored to mingle my two favorite genres, tending more toward the erotic side in this case, but the film was rejected by the public.”

Made at the same time as Porno Holocaust — another movie with the same cast, the same plot and the same mix of sex and death — just thinking of the plot of this movie makes me laugh like some kind of maniac.

It stars Mark Shannon, whose main career was working as a travel agency correspondent, but would take breaks to make adult films. He plays John Wilson, who has come to the Dominican Republic to build a hotel on Cat Island, a place with a voodoo curse so dangerous that it causes one of the two prostitutes who’ve recently serviced him to run in fear. Don’t worry. He was smart enough to finish their bedsheet gymnastics first.

As he chases her down the hall, he meets Fiona (Dirce Funari, who was one of the women in the infamous snuff sequence in D’Amato’s Emanuelle in America), who has just left an elderly lover at sea. After doing an oral inspection of Georgia O’Keefe’s inspiration, they become a couple of sorts for the rest of the film. I think we can all appreciate a meet cute in an Italian pornographic zombie film, right?

Meanwhile, Larry O’Hara (George Eastman, who wrote this) is either a sea captain or in an insane asylum. He starts the film off having wild frolicking sex with a nurse and ends it with the same woman in the same style as the film makes a Jacob’s Ladder cycle back to the mental ward, complete with another patient slack jawed and enjoying their coupling with a one-handed ovation.

There’s an absolutely mindbending scene where Eastman sits inside a darkened club that makes it appear that he’s smoking and drinking and bored and trapped in the infinite regions of space when Liz (Lucía Ramírez, Sex and Black Magic) appears to dance for him. Eastman makes no attempt to engage with her at all, even when she brings a champagne bottle on stage to, well, yeah. You know what happens. What you may not know is that she opens the bottle for him and does not use his hands and man, Joe D’Amato, you know how to rescue a man from abject depression.

Meanwhile, Laura Gemser shows up as a woman who bleeds green blood and can transform into a cat and has a blind grandfather who follows her and then she has sex with Eastman on the beach through his buttoned jeans.

Finally, everyone drinks J&B and we come — pun unintended — back to the start of the film as orderlies drag Eastman to his cell.

My favorite part of this movie was watching the absurd — D’Amato pun not intended — lengths to which some of the bigger star’s lovemaking scenes were created in very Cinemax After Dark style, which Shannon just went balls out. Literally.

Orgasmo nero II – Insel der Zombies (1981):

So yeah, in Germany, Porno Holocaust was actually considered a sequel to Joe D’Amato’s Orgasmo Nero (we just called it Sex and Black Magic here) and everyone had to be content to a title that isn’t as in your face. Don’t worry — this movie is still as repellant as it gets*.

Back in the 50s, governments used to regularly blast an island with nuclear bombs just to see how they blew up and to test the idea that perhaps these weapons would split reality into pieces. Well, all they did was create a place filled with mutant animals and a monster — a giant appendaged monster — that a bunch of stupid, stupid scientists are going to visit and all die.

That creature was once Antoine Domoduro and much like another D’Amato/George Eastman epic — Antropophagus — he was once a man with a family that all died in the atomic bomb blasts and now, all he has are two speeds: fuck and destroy.

D’Amato made Papaya, Love Goddess of the Cannibals and Tough to Kill in Santo Domingo and had such a good time that he returned to make Paradiso blu, Sesso nero, Orgasmo nero, Hard Sensation, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and this movie all in July of 1979. That’s right — five movies in one month.

The first mainstream hardcore film in Italy, this movie ends with Tom Selleck look-a-like — and travel writer when he wasn’t making porn — Mark Shannon surviving and making sweet love to Lucia Ramirez on a very small boat in the middle of the ocean, which is more astounding than anything else in this movie, as I wondered how D’Amato was able to get all of his camera equipment onto this boat, shoot this scene and not have anyone fall off.

Italian movie directing at its finest.

*Or maybe not. The German softcore version is Insel der Zombies. Seeing how a full third of this movie is hardcore penetration, I can only imagine how short that movie is.