I know that Carl Schenkel directed this film, but Jess Franco was on board — uncredited — for help and that’s good enough for me.

Yeah, the director of The Mighty Quinn and Tarzan and the Lost City worked with Franco, but hey, so did Orson Welles on Chimes at Midnight so anything can happen.

Dave (Dave Balko, the lead singer of Tempo, a band on the soundtrack of this movie) breaks out of a juvenile prison by staging his suicide and trying to find his pregnant girlfriend and get revenge on those that did him wrong — like Kowalski (Otto Sander) — and got him sent behind bars. Throughout, this has such a no future feeling — the ending will truly hammer that home — while showing you the New Wave scene in West Germany in 1981. I didn’t know the bands Blixa Bargeld, Rhe Neonbabies, Malaria, Thomas Voburka and Tempo before, but it was cool to discover them through this.

Why should you watch it? Well, there are some punk performances and man, that old Space Invaders pinball machine was awesome, wasn’t it? Also: Brigitte Wöllner, who plays Dave’s lover Corinna, was Playboy Germany‘s Miss August 1980.

Most of all, it makes Berlin seem like infinite death, doom and darkness. Man, that closing scene!

You can watch this on YouTube.

Three students — Juanita (Michele Hermet), Juan (Leonardo da Costa) and Hans (Jérôme Foulon) — have grown listless with life in Paris and go to Brazil in search of adventure. Seeing as how Jess Franco directed and wrote this, well, they find it. A coming of age film from Jess? Yes. After all, he had aleady made Tenemos 18 años 22 years before.

Of course, the three are in the midst of a love triangle, even if they may not understand that, but at a young age our hormones always confuse what is really going on. This trip to Rio is actually a few hotel rooms and a clever use of stock footage but this film has some slapstick and good humor and perhaps I was in the right mood to look back on teen sex comedies — from more than just America — with fondness on the day that I watched this.

I also enjoyed that Hans would rather read Voltaire than get all of the women coming his way for some time.

So yeah, a Lemon Popsicle from the same man who brought us the sex and death at once that is Venus In Furs and Lina Romay demanding a prisoner clean her culo in Ilsa The Wicked Warden. Speaking of Lina, she shows up in a small role here, as does Nadine Pascal.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally appeared as part of a Cannon Month on March 3, 2022. I’m excited to report that this once out of print film is now available on blu ray from Ronin Flix. It looks great and comes with an interview with Leon Isaac Kennedy and the film’s trailer. You can get it from MVD.

All the way back in his teens, Leon Issac Kennedy was a DJ in Cleveland, a job that took him to Los Angeles and finally into two films with Fred Williamson, Hammer and Mean Johnny Barrows. By this point in his career, he’d already become a star as Martel “Too Sweet” Gordone in Jamaa Fanaka’s Penitentiary and had married Jayne Kennedy, the former Miss Ohio USA and NFL broadcaster. Sadly, they’d break up just as this movie was being released and as part of their divorce case, a sex tape — decades before this became something that anyone knew of — that EBONY Magazine claimed that Kennedy had released. He later sued for a million dollars.

But back before all that ugliness, the Kennedys appeared in this remake* of Robert Rossen’s 1947 boxing move of the same name. Supposedly, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus – those who are all things Cannon — studied marketing research and discovered that Americans wanted to see one thing more than anything else: Leon Isaac Kennedy beating people up.

Leon is Leon “The Lover” Johnson, a boxer who we first meet dancing around an opponent and then getting a few more rounds in with a woman who caught his eye in the crowd. In a public bathroom, no less.

Despite the unclean nature of where Leon chooses to do his loving, he’s actually a somewhat decent man who only became a boxer because it can pay for the medical care of his sister Kelly (Nikki Swasey Seaton). To get to the top, he has to deal with a fight promoter named Big Man (Peter Lawford) and get trained by Muhammed Ali, which seems to be the right person to train you and wow, seeing The Greatest up close in the ring sparring reminds you of just how amazing he was, even this late in his career.

He also falls for Julie Winters (Mrs. Kennedy, of course) who ends up leaving him after all his groupie-loving shenanigans, telling him “I just wish you were double-jointed so you could turn around and kiss your own ass.”

Can he get it all together, get the girl, win the big fight and keep his sister as healthy as possible? I mean, have you ever seen a boxing movie before?

That said, this is like no other boxing movie you’ve seen, as Kennedy does near pro wrestling moves as he boxes, like windmill punches, multiple punches to the face piston style and even runs up the ropes to deliver a big punch near the end. Plus, his nemesis has a very pro wrestling name — the St. Louis Assassin — and is played by former WBC Light Heavyweight Champion J. B. Williamson in a role that demands that he grimace, destroy people and throw babies. Yes, he really tosses a baby in one scene.

Body and Soul was directed by My Tutor and Private Resort’s George Bowers, who edited Galaxina, The Stepfather, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Sleeping with the Enemy and A League of Their Own.

This is pretty much a perfect cable Sunday do-nothing movie. You know the kind — it comes on WTBS and you have no plans other than getting over that hangover and just watch how it all comes out. That’s high praise for a film, actually, as movies can be the balm that soothes your soul.

*Maybe I should say loose remake.

Shortly after Aberraciones sexuales de una mujer casada (Sexual Perversions of a Married Woman) was finished by director Jess Franco, it was sold to Eurocine. When they released it in France new scenes were shot by Olivier Mathot, using the name Claude Plaut, set in France and featuring him as Cecilia’s uncle.

Yes, that’s right. The heroine of this movie is named Emma Fangas (Muriel Montossé) but this is really the original version of Cecilia, which is the easier version of this movie to find.

You know how people say that some films are troubling? Yeah, they are probably discussing Franco’s films, like this one in which a wife who loves to tease the help ends up getting assaulted by them and she ends up enjoying it. She likes it so much that she explores her sexual freedom but has to decide whether or not she can handle her husband (Antonio Mayans) doing the same.

Shot in a national park in Portugal and featuring a gorgeous soundtrack by Franco and Daniel White, this feels like the most well-thought-out and best filmed of Franco’s erotica in some time, possibly a height that he would not return to. I mean, the zooms are limited, there’s a dolly shot and everything is just perfectly dreamlike. It’s nearly art while not forgetting that it should be hot. It’s on the right side of erotic versus just plain slamming the camera between someone’s thighs.

Also: Lina Romay shows up on stage in an erotic cabaret and you know, I always realize that Lina is going to show up in Franco’s films and I still get excited and laughing and audibly say things like, “Oh Lina,” because the couple that makes filth together quite obviously stayed together.

If you want to compare and contrast this film for yourself, you can download it on the Internet Archive.

Also known as Les paumées du petit matin (The Dawns of the Early Morning) and The Runaways, this begins in a mental asylum run by nuns. There, Michelle (Laurence Dubas) has returned after escaping and is placed in a straitjacket. She’s soon freed by a new patient named Marie (Christiane Coppé) and the two run off for a series of adventures, such as watching a burlesque show, meeting a thief named Sophie (Marianne Valiot) and becoming part of a sailor crew who promise to take them away. Yet at the bar of Madame Louise (Louise Dhour) a series of rich people — one of them is Brigitte Lahaie — take our heroines to a mansion and attempt to assault them. What follows is death, both murderous and suicidal, as the runaways attempt to escape a world that won’t allow them to.

I’m a big fan of movies where women find friendship and escape in doomed journeys. Beyond Thelma and Louise, we can also add Baise-moi and Times Square. There are many more, but this feels very close to the punk of the latter, as Jean Rollin leaves the beaches and castle behind but doesn’t forget to have doomed and dreaming girls as they wander and seek something, anything.

There are no vampires in the world of this film but can these two women find magic? Perhaps not. There is an incredible figure skating sequence which is not something that I thought I’d ever say about a Jean Rollin film.

EDITOR’S NOTE: You can read another take on this film here. 

Zombie Lake feels like someone watched Shock Waves and said, “Well, let’s make a zombie Nazi movie right where this stuff actually happened.”

It was supposed to be directed by Jesus Franco, who left the movie over its budget — just imagine how bad that budget had to be — and Eurociné got Jean Rollin on board with just a few days’ notice. It’s not in his official filmography, despite making money, so again — just imagine.

Julian de Laserna also directed parts of the film under the supervision of Rollin, which is why this movie is credited to J.A. Lazer. It was written by Julián Esteban and Eurociné producer Marius Lesoeur using the name A.L. Mariaux.

Twenty years after the second war to end all wars has ended, a small French village has a lake of the damned within it, yet women still skinny dip within it. I mean, if you knew Nazis had been drowned in a lake, would you even go near it? Like some kind of French Larry Vaughn, Howard Vernon keeps denying that there’s any problem.

That’s when reporter Katya Moore (Marcia Sharif) gets to the bottom of things: a woman (Nadine Pascal, you know you’re seen too many Eurotrash when you pick up the actresses without IMDB) in the village had nursed a young soldier back to life and returned this kindness by doing a little bisecting the triangle with her and leaving her with child just in time for him and his entire platoon to be shot to pieces and drowned in the river, as well killing that women moments after he gave birth to their daughter Helena (Anouchka, the daughter of Eurociné’s Daniel Lesoeur; she’s also in Franco’s White Cannibal Queen).

After an entire women’s volleyball team and two cops — including Rollin — are torn to pieces by the Aryan walking dead, the mayor decides to use Helena to lure her undead father and his troops into a mill where they can burn them up.

This movie makes so many mistakes — like being filmed at all, to start with — that it becomes charming. If the war was twenty years ago, how does 1980-1945 = 35 years? Why did they pretend that the water in the beginning is a lake when we can clearly see that it’s a swimming pool and even view an exit sign? Did no one notice that the zombie makeup was rubbing off? Did no one notice that Daniel White just was remixing songs from other movies like Jess Franco’s Female Vampire and The Awful Dr. Orloff? Can you believe that they shot clothes and unclothed versions of this movie? With Antonio Mayans showing up as a one-eyed zombie, can we play six degrees of separation here with Rollin and Franco as well as consider this a Eurociné all-star film? How amazing would this have been if Franco did stay on and made this as another Orloff movie? Isn’t Oasis of the Zombies this movie all over again? Was Charles Band that hungry for content that he bought both those movies for his Wizard Video imprint? If this is not set in the 80s, why are all the roads, signs and buses modern?

If you’re looking for a movie where the crew shows up as often as the cast, this is it. Crew members wander into some shots, show up in mirrors and often leave their cables lying around in nearly every shot.

Yet you know, it’s kind of adorable, if a movie about the French killing soldiers who rise back up at some indeterminate time can be cute. There are bright green men wandering about, mauling nude women and getting their green skin all over everything, all while you can obviously see Howard Vernon in one scene waiting for his cue.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I wanted to have a New Year’s movie to end 2022, but how many times can I repost New Year’s Evil and Bloody New Year? This one which was originally posted on October 24, 2019.

Filmed in Banff, Alberta and using the Canadian tax shelter rules that have produced so many of our favorite films, Ghostkeeper rises above its unstable finances and near-unseen theatrical run to become a fun piece of somewhat forgotten slasher fun.

This one is all about the Wendigo, even if it spells the monster’s name Windigo. It’s a monster that lives off human flesh and is one of Canada’s few unique monsters, but the movie doesn’t spend all that much time discussing it.

Basically — if you wanted another snowmobile slasher after The Chill Factor, here it is.

Jenny, Marty, and Chrissy spend New Year’s Eve in the Rocky Mountains but end up seeking shelter from a blizzard in an abandoned hotel. There’s an older woman who claims to live there with her two sons.

Of course, one of the sons named Danny ends up drowning Chrissy, slitting her throat and putting her in a freezer. That’s also where the Wendigo lives in the body of her other son.

By the end, Jenny has shotgun blasted the old woman and assumed her mantle of the Ghostkeeper, which takes hours to happen and plenty of darkness to wade through. But the end is really effective, so if you have the patience to take it this far, the movie is totally going to reward you.

The music for this comes from Paul Zaza, who also composed music for My Bloody Valentine, Curtains and Prom Night. In fact, most of the music in that Jamie Lee Curtis disco dancing slasher was recycled from this film.

I just want someone to explain to me why the UK VHS of this movie has a mutant chicken rising from an Incan temple under the hot sun. Because…I kind of want to watch that movie, too.

You can watch this for free on Tubi or order it from RoninFlix.

Directed by Lau Kar Leung, My Young Auntie introduces us to Cheng Tai-nun (Kara Hui), who has married her master, an elderly landownerm so that the old man could keep his estate from ending up in the greedy hands of his brother Yung-Sheng (Wang Lung Wei) and instead go to his favorite nephew Yu Cheng-chuan (Lau Kar Leung) and his son Yu Tao (Hsiao Ho).

Everyone Cheng Tai-nun meets expects her — an auntie, as the title says — to be an old woman and she’s continually upset by the rudeness of modern China, rudeness that she returns in kind by beating grown men into whimpering pulps. Because this auntie is also a martial arts champion, or course.

The centerpiece of this film is a costume party in which Cheng Tai-nun fights an entire room full of evildoers while dressed in the finest of clothes, using swords, kicks and near-dance like moves to easily best numerous men. It’s like a musical sequence with violence and such a thrill.

Kara Hui is really wonderful in this. She had trained as a dancer, which will be obvious when you watch it, as she’s incredibly graceful even when she’s brutalizing dudes. It’s also kind of awesome to see a Shaw Brothers movie where the entire story revolves around the modern world and how the China of the past must come up to speed with it, including redefining the role of what had been seen as the weaker sex. That said, it’s not a boring message movie. Instead, it’s totally fun.

The Arrow Video Shaw Scope Volume Two box set has select scene commentary by film critic and historian Tony Rayns; an Interview with star Kara Hui; Cinema Hong Kong: The Beauties of the Shaw Studios, the final installment in the three-part documentary produced by Celestial Pictures; the alternate standard-definition VHS version; a Hong Kong theatrical trailer and an image gallery.

You can get this set from MVD.

You can also stream this movie on the Arrow player. Visit ARROW to start your 30-day free trial. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Android TV and mobile devices, Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc), and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.