La ragazza del vagone letto (The Girl In the Sleeping Car) also goes by Terror Express and Horror-Sex im Nachtexpress. It’s directed by Fernando Bali, who also made Nine Guests for a Crime and Treasure of the Four Crowns. It’s writer? Luigi Montefiori, the lunatic best known as George Eastman.

It’s as if someone said, “Can we make Last Stop on the Night Train but somehow make it scummier and more upsetting?” And that someone was George Eastman and maybe people told him, “George, that movie is already pretty upsetting.” But this was the same year that George ate a baby on a Greek island in Antropophagus, so was telling him no? No one, that’s who.

You should never get on a night train in Italy. But if you do, if you see David (Werner Pochath, the vampire-like killer of Bloodlust), Ernie (Carlo De Mejo) and Philip (Fausto Lombardi). They lose their composure when Guilla (Silvia Dionisio, Andy Warhol’s Dracula), a sex worker who has a deal with the conductor (Gino Milli) to do business on the train, refuses to sleep with any of them. They harass everyone in the dining car and despite a frustrated married woman named Anna (Zora Kerova, prepping for how horrifically she would be killed in The New York Ripper) defending them and coming on to Ernie, two of them assault her in a bathroom.

It wasn’t like the train was all that great to start with, what with a family falling apart — the father (Roberto Caporali) wants his daughter (Fiammetta Flamini) and not his wife (Gianfranca Dionisi) — along with a dying elderly couple and a cop (Giancarlo Maestri) transporting Peter, a criminal  (Gianluigi Chirizzi) to prison riding this evening’s rails. The criminals free Peter and slowly ruin everyone’s life, including playing dice for the chance to deflower the teenager, making her dad throw the final roll to see who gets her. But that guy isn’t blameless, because he’s already paid Guilla to wear his daughter’s nightgown while he takes her.

These criminals should be killed in the most brutal way possible, which doesn’t happen, but nonetheless, if you want to see how far things will go — if this movie was made in an Italian exploitation high school, the mean lady teacher would say, “I expect this from you, Montefiori, but I can’t believe that you’ve corrupted Fernando like this.” — this movie will drag you there.

Blowjob has nothing to do with the sex act of its title and more to do with the works of Carlos Castaneda and Aldous Huxley. It was the follow-up to Blue Movie for director Alberto Cavallone, who said that it was a “deliberately pornographic film, but with political content. A movie about violence as a means of communication and knowledge in a repressive society.” Cavallone also claimed that it had no actual sex, which several performers dispute, as there were different cuts of the film. It was shot as The Naked Witch.

The idea of marrying a witch is a strong one. Generally in most cinema, it is treated as a positive, as seen in I Married a Witch, which was later stolen by television to become Bewitched. Only in Italy would such the start of this story feel as if it were closer to Black Sabbath than the adventures of Darren and Samantha.

The witch Finnicella (Eleonora Giorgi, Inferno) has been sentenced to being burned at the stake by the Catholic church but is brought back to life three hundred years later by her lover, the demon  Asmodeus (Helmut Berger). She is charged with making Emilio Altieri (Renato Pozzetto) fall in love with her — he’s the descendent of the cardinal who doomed her to the flames who would one day become Pope Clement X — and then kill him. Yet when she finally meets him, he’s already in love with Tania (Lia Tanzi, The Suspicious Death of a Minor). Even when she becomes his secretary and wantonly offers herself to him, Finnicella can’t win him to her embrace. He even fires her, at which point she kisses him, but he still stays pure.

That’s when Finnicella realizes that she’s in love with him, even if her demonic master decrees that Emilio must die.

At Emilio’s wedding, she slips a love potion into his champagne. He doesn’t drink, but he acts as if he has and leaves his soon-to-be wife, claiming to be in love with another. Finicella doesn’t believe him, as she thinks it’s just the magic. He proves it, as Tania drank the champagne and has remarried her ex-husband Roberto (Enrico Papa) in the moments they were speaking.

Emilio and Finnicella marry and honeymoon in Paris. As she flies him over the city, having revealed that she is a witch, Asmodeus appears. He reminds her of their deal and why she was brought back to life. She pleads that she is in love, but it gets her nowhere, as the demon guns her down and her husband is blamed for her murder. Finnicella’s ghost begs Asmodeus to fix all of this and he says that a witch could never make him lose his head and proclaims just how smart he is, which ends up with her cutting his head off with a guillotine. Now, holding his head, Asmodeus must release Emilio from prison, erase the crime and bring the witch back to life.

Directed and written by Franco Castellano and Giuseppe Moccia, this was a big success in the Italian box office. If you look closely enough, you can spot Rentao Polselli regular Rita Calderoni, as well as Serena Grandi, Shôko Nakahara (who years later would be in Tokyo Gore Police) and Maria Grazia Smaldone (Libidomania) in small parts.

The best thing about this movie, for me, was the soundtrack. It’s by Detto Mariano, who also did the soundtracks for Miami Golem, War Bus and Titanic: The Legend Goes On. Giorgi sings the title song “Magic” and so much of the feel is disco with distorted guitar; it’s an absolute treat!

You can watch this on YouTube.

This film was made due to director Silvio Amadio (Il Sorriso Della Iena, Amuck!) and his interest in the occult. He had learned of it through his friendship with Demofilo Fidani, the director of four different Sartana ripoffs (One Damned Day at Dawn… Django Meets Sartana!, Passa Sartana… è l’ombra della tua morte, Four Came to Kill Sartana and Django and Sartana Are Coming… It’s the End) and the giallo A.A.A. Masseuse, Good-Looking, Offers Her Services.

By the 1980s, Amadio was more known for his work with esoterism, which is a combination of pagan philosophies, the Kabbalah and Christian philosophy. According to Roberto Curty in Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1980-1989, the director worked with a group known as Circolo di spiritualisti (Circle of Spiritualists) and became a well-respected occult writer and a devotee of conjuring the dead to visit him.

An American composer Paul Robbins (Guido Mannari, Caligula) who uses the dodecaphone twelve-note technique has come to Rome with his ten-year-old son Alan (Stefano Mastrogirolamo) to work on a new opera. He hires Laura (Sherry Buchanan, Eyes Behind the Stars) to look after the boy who has an imaginary friend — a raven-tressed woman dressed in white — whose voice starts showing up on tapes, just as his father is attacked by a dog. The woman eventually possesses Alan as part of a revenge plot; Daniela (Martine Brochard, Eyeball) believes that her sister Eleonora’s death — Paul’s wife and Alan’s mother — was brought about by the composer. Now, he must rely on Professor Power (Philippe Leroy, The Laughing Woman) to save his son through a psychic duel fought — as Chris Claremont would write — not in the physical realm, but the astral plane, no quarter asked, none given.

It’s the first movie written by Claudio Fragasso, who told Fangoria, “Silvio Amadio came to me with an actual medium and told me that the dead had told them I should write the script.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Airplane was on USA Up All Night on March 12, 1994 along with Airplane II.

If you combined Zero Hour! with Airport 1975, you get Airplane, a movie that changed lives. Seriously.

The ZAZ team — Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker — were part of the Kentucky Fried Theater and they’d often record late night TV and watch the tapes to get ideas. They recorded Zero Hour!  and thought that it was the perfect structure for them to do jokes around. Originally calling the movie The Late Show, their script borrowed so much got the rights to create the remake from Warner Bros. and Paramount for about $2,500.  They couldn’t get it sold but learned how to make movies when they made The Kentucky Fried Movie with John Landis.

Eventually, the script found its way to Paramount through Michael Eisner. They made the ZAZ team shoot it in color instead of black and white and on a jet instead of a plane. If they followed those rules, they would be allowed to cast serious actors for the film rather than comedy performers.

The ZAZ casting is what changed lives. Or careers, really.

David Zucker said, “The trick was to cast actors like Robert Stack, Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves and Lloyd Bridges. These were people who, up to that time, had never done comedy. We thought they were much funnier than the comedians of that time were.”

It wasn’t easy. To get Stack to play the role the way they wanted, they showed him a tape of John Byner impersonating the actor, so in effect, Stack was doing an impression of John Byner doing an impression of Stack. While Bridges’ children advised him to take the part, Graves rejected the script at first, as he thought so much of it was tasteless.

As for Neilsen, his career has been serious leading roles but he wanted to work in comedy forever. He was just looking for a film to help in the transition. For years, he had pranked actors with a fart machine on set and he took to being in the film quite well. He’s lucky Christopher Lee turned the role down to be in 1941.

That’s why this movie works. No one is acting like it’s a comedy, no matter how ridiculous it gets. Even the Elmer Bernstein score gets the joke and plays its part.

It’d be stupid to just recount the movie and every joke, but let me tell you, this is a movie I can watch from any point and just not be able to stop watching. I think I watched it hundreds of times as a kid and my love of stupid humor comes from this. Any time Stephen Stucker was on screen, I’d laugh like a maniac, the same as everything Bridges does.

In fact, my love of the original Airport movies comes directly from how much I adore this movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Friday the 13th was on USA Up All Night on August 13, 1993 and May 13, 1994.

After the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween, every studio wanted a piece of the horror pie, which to this point had been exploitation fodder. Paramount Pictures was first. Sure, critics salvaged the film, but after $40 million in profit, no one really cared.

Produced and directed by Sean S. Cunningham (Last House on the Left), this movie was envisioned as a roller coaster ride. The script came from Victor Miller, a soap opera scribe. And spoilers — but this movie doesn’t even really have Jason in it!

The movie starts in the summer of 1958 at Camp Crystal Lake, where two counselors sneak off and have sex before being killed. This sets up one of the many rules of slasher films: never fuck in the woods.

The camp closes for 21 years, but on Friday, June 13, 1979, that’s all about to change. That said, no one in the town wants it to happen. When Annie Phillips arrives in town, everyone treats her strangely or acts like Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney, who shows up in the next film and was the narrator for Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood). She lasts for about five minutes, as she gets killed after her third hitchhike of the day. I’d say this is more of a warning against hitching in the late 1970s than I would serial killers in the woods.

The other counselors — Jack (Kevin Bacon!), Ned, Bill (Harry Crosby III, son of Bing), Marcie, Alice and Brenda (Laurie Bartram, The House of Seven Corpses) — and owner Steve Christy all show up to get the camp ready. This is where you’ll notice just how different fashion is. Becca and I have seen this live several times in a theater now and everyone laughs as soon as Steve shows up in his short shorts and bandana.

Ned is killed pretty quickly, then Jack is killed with an arrow and Marcie takes an axe to the face. Brenda is murdered as she responds to the voice of a child. Steve gets killed on the way to camp. Before you know it, Alice and Bill are the only ones left, but Bill lasts pretty much seconds. Then we have another future slasher trope: every body is discovered, hung like trophies.

Now, we have our Final Girl: Alice, who ends up meeting Mrs. Vorhees, who tells the tale of how her son Jason drowned and the horrible counselors who allowed it to happen. Much like the giallo/pre-slasher film Torso, the movie now focuses on the battle between Alice and the real killer. Alice ends up beheading her and sleeping in a canoe. As the police arrive, she has a dream that Jason rises from the water to kill her. This scene wasn’t in the script, but special effects king Tom Savini thought a Carrie-like ending would be more powerful.

Another way that the film pays sort of homage to Italian filmmaking is in the snake scene. It was another Savini idea after an experience he had in his own cabin during filming. The snake in the scene? Totally real, including its on-screen death — someone alert Bruno Mattei!

Some trivia: the film was shot just outside Lou Reed’s farm. The rock star performed for the cast and even hung out with them! Sweet Jason?

To me, the film works because of how great Betsy Palmer is as Jason’s mom. It’s a fine film, but nowhere near the excesses that the series would grow into. This was also the start of critics really hating on slasher films. Gene Siskel was so upset about Betsy Palmer being in the film that he published her address in his column and encouraged people to write her and protest. Of course, he published the wrong address.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This weekend is the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama! Get more info at the official Drive-In Super Monster-Rama Facebook page and get your tickets at the Riverside Drive-In’s webpage.

Did Roger Corman sit in a room screaming, “Make me more amphibian monster movies NOW!” into the telephone? Because this week, that’s the feeling that I’m getting. This time, Barbara Peeters got the call (Joe Dante turned this one down), although the final film was nothing like she wanted it to be and she tried — and failed — to get her name removed from the credits.

Fishermen catch what looks like a monster. Then, the son of one of them is dragged under the waves by an unseen beast. Another fisherman fires a flare gun that sets the whole boat on fire, killing everyone. Pre-credits, this movie is already meaner and better than most of what we’ve watched this week.

Jim Hill (Doug McClure, TV’s The Virginian) and his wife Carol (Cindy Weintraub, The Prowler) see the boat blow up and then their dog gets eaten (and his remains thrown up on their porch). So yeah. Things are off to quite the start.

Meanwhile, Jerry and Peggy (Lynn Schiller, Without Warning) are swimming and fooling around, but Jerry ends up torn apart and a fishman rapes the girl, causing the director to want to leave the picture. Seriously — they kept her name on the film. Time’s up, Roger Corman.

That scene is repeated with Billy (future ventriloquist David Strassman) and Becky, with yet another fish on female rape. All manner of folks are attacked, but Peggy somehow survives.

Meanwhile, Canco is opening their new canning operation in town. It turns out that the monsters that are fucking everyone to death are the result of Canco using HGH on salmon that were in turn eaten by larger fish who then turned into humanoids. From the deep? Yes. Humanoids from the Deep.

Luckily, Jim and Dr. Susan Drake are on the case. Their big plan? At the town’s fish fest, when the beasts attack, they dump gasoline in the lake and set it on fire. So not only is there no safe zone for women, fuck the environment, too. While all this is going on, Carol is attacked by two monsters but survives. Oh yeah! Vic Morrow is in this mess, too. And if you think Peggy is going to give birth to a fish baby, then you haven’t been watching this film.

Actress Ann Turkel chose to do this film — originally titled Beneath the Darkness — because: “It was an intelligent suspenseful science-fiction story with a basis in fact and no sex.” She was enraged as well at what the final film ended up being.

Corman remade this film for Showtime in 1996, with the sex and violence scaled down. That said, he of course reused the Salmon Festival footage for the remake. Why actually shoot something new?

Well, if you’re looking for a grimy, fishy film, this is it.

Won’t be at the drive-in? You can watch it on Tubi.