Sure, at its heart Vigilante is Death Wish, but both of those movies are really just westerns updated to fit the decade that they were created for. Plus, where Bronson’s film at least seems to end with some hope, this movie is a nihilistic, cynical and pessimistic journey into hell, which is really the only three ways to properly describe just such a trip.

Eddie Marino is played by Robert Forster in a rare lead role. You know how I always say that every movie should have William Smith in it? Well, let’s amend that by saying that if William Smith doesn’t want to do it, call Robert Forester. Despite living in the end of the world NYC of 1982, he has a good wife (Rutanya Alda, who between Mommie Dearest, The Stuff, Amityville II: The Possession and Girls Nite Out ends up being in so many of my favorite movies) and a cute little kid.

Sadly, he’s not in some coming of age tale or family drama. No, Eddie Marino has the bad fortune to be the hero of a William Lustig movie. And between scalp-lopping serial killers and zombified cops, every Lustig movie I’ve seen is full of tragedy, despair and a casual disregard for morality and the suffering of its characters.

Eddie’s co-workers, Nick (Fred Williamson, always a more than welcome sight), Burke (Richard Bright, Cut and Run) and Ramon (Joseph Carberry, Short Eyes) are fed up with crime, the cops and the system that keeps criminals out of jail. Now, the neighborhood tells them, instead of the police, who is behind the crimes that happen every day.

Eddie refuses to be a part of this, even when he comes home to find his wife stabbed and his son shot and killed. His wife had helped a gas station attendant who was being abused and that’s all it took for Frederico “Rico” Melendez (Willie Colón, a salsa king when not acting) and his gang to snap.

Assistant District Attorney Mary Fletcher (Carol Lynley*, The Night Stalker) tries to get him put away, but another gang member named Prago (Don Blakely), bribes the Judge Sinclair, allowing his defender Eisenburg (Joe Spinell!) to get him off with a plea bargain. Eddie flips out, attacks the judge and ends up being the one to go to the big house.

After being saved from a jailhouse assault by Rake (Woody Strode, the former pro wrestler who was also in Keoma and Once Upon a Time in the West; as if we need any reinforcement that this movie is a western), our hero does his time and emerges ready to get bloody revenge. His wife has left him, his son is dead and now, he has nothing left to lose.

While Vigilante was successful at the box office, Lustig never saw any profits from the film at all. First, Film Ventures International wanted to rename it Street Gang**. Then, as we all know, producer Edward L. Montoro ran away in 1985 with a million dollars in company money and was never seen again.

*This role was meant for Caroline Munro.

**It played in Detroit, Chicago and Pittsburgh with that title.

You can watch this on Tubi or do yourself a kindness and get the 4K UHD and blu ray set from Blue Underground. It has a 16-bit print from the original 35mm camera negative, with Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos audio, along with three different commentary tracks (Lustig and co-producer Andrew Garroni; Lustig and Robert Forster, Fred Williamson and Frank Pesce; Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson), trailers, TV and radio commercials, interviews with writer Richard Vetere, Rutanya Alda and associate producer/first A.D./actor Randy Jurgensen and a book with plenty of info on the film from Michael Gingold.

This movie is great. This release is even better.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Herbert P. Caine is the pseudonym of a frustrated academic and genre movie fan in Pennsylvania. You can read his blog at https://imaginaryuniverseshpc.blogspot.com.

Back in the early days of the slasher movie era, Siskel and Ebert hosted a special episode of sneak previews in which they attacked the new genre for what they perceived as its misogyny and tendency to revel in the deaths of its characters. They went so far as to claim there was an entire genre of “Women in Danger” films. These complaints remained a constant theme for the two critics throughout the 1980s, with Ebert writing in shock of going to theaters and seeing audiences cheer as Freddy and Jason slaughtered their victims.

With this in mind, it was perhaps for the best that neither critic, at least to my knowledge, ever got to see Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper, which takes all the gore, seediness, and latent misogyny of the slasher genre to their logical conclusions. Depending on your view, this giallo either confirms or refutes Siskel and Ebert’s condemnation of the whole genre.

The New York Ripper traces the efforts of a hard-bitten NYC detective, played by British actor Jack Hedley with his voice dubbed over by Edward Mannix, to catch a vicious serial killer who is mutilating the city’s women. The killer starts taunting the detective over the phone in the voice of a cartoon duck who is totally not named Donald. The suspects soon narrow down to two: a sleazy, drug-addicted loner who frequents 42nd Street sex shows and the clean-cut boyfriend of a surviving victim.

The film owes its notoriety to its explicit scenes depicting the murders. In one scene, a sex show performer, played by Zora Kerova from Cannibal Ferox, gets a broken bottle shoved up what the film’s coroner colorfully refers to as her “joy trail,” resulting in the bottle filling up with blood as Kerova screams. In another memorable scene, a prostitute is tortured to death by having a nipple sliced off and, in an inevitable scene in a Fulci film, her eye cut with a razor.

On one hand, it is entirely understandable that the film is often regarded as misogynistic, given its level of violence towards women and general aura of sleaze. The killings in the film go far beyond anything even Camille Keaton experienced in I Spit on Your Grave. Aside from the sex murders, the film focuses heavily on the degradation of women, as in the scene where a promiscuous woman who records her sexual adventures for her kinky husband gets a non-consensual foot job from two men she meets in a bar. Furthermore, the film conforms all too well to the feminist critique of slasher movies in which sexually liberated women (prostitutes, swingers, strippers) get butchered while the comparatively “pure” character survives. Even the film’s gritty rock theme lends an air of sleaziness.

However, I would argue that the film actually subverts those slasher film tropes. For example, the murders are portrayed so graphically that it is hard to imagine anyone other than a straight-up pervert cheering them, even to praise the special effects. The killer’s sadism is portrayed uncompromisingly, with no attempts to soften it for the audience. Furthermore, the film’s ending highlights the human cost of the killer’s actions. Without spoiling too much, the last human sound we hear before the end credits run is a child crying, a sound that gradually fades into the traffic noise of an uncaring city. Fulci gives the ending a genuine emotional impact that takes this a notch above your typical slasher film.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Herbert P. Caine is the pseudonym of a frustrated academic and genre movie fan in Pennsylvania. You can read his blog at https://imaginaryuniverseshpc.blogspot.com.

When I was a young child, roughly nine or ten years old, my parents decided to put on a Saturday afternoon movie showing on one of the local broadcast channels, The Scorpion with Two Tails. The film held little interest for me initially, until one very “special” scene came on. In it, a woman has a vision of some of her friends being murdered by an unseen figure who snaps their necks from behind. Meanwhile, the eyes of an ancient statue fall out with the sockets spewing maggots. My parents were unimpressed, with my mother grumbling, “This is gross.” Young me, however, was scared and quickly left the room.

Roughly thirty years later, I sought out The Scorpion with Two Tails, also known as Assassinio al cimitero etrusco (Murder in the Etruscan Cemetary). It proved to be a largely unmemorable giallo, albeit with some good atmosphere and brief appearances by well-known actors. The film revolves around a young woman (Elvire Audray) investigating the murder of her husband, played in an all-too-brief appearance by John Saxon. Saxon’s character, an archeologist, is briefly seen investigating an Etruscan tomb in the Italian countryside, which he thinks may be the find of the century. Unfortunately, his neck is broken by a hidden assailant after a phone call with his wife, who has a premonition of his death.

When Saxon’s wife travels to Italy, her visions intensify, culminating in the scene that scared me as a child. She gets a pendant that her late husband retrieved from the tomb, a scorpion with two tails. She soon learns that she perfectly resembles an ancient Etruscan painting of an immortal woman. Could she be the woman’s reincarnation? More importantly, are the murders connected to the heroin she finds hidden in the tomb, or is something supernatural afoot?

The film wavers between supernatural horror and real-world suspense, never finding a balance between the two. The main story following Audray’s character and her visions is grafted to a sub-plot involving drug smuggling, with the two plot lines never really gelling together. Spooky scenes in the Etruscan tomb are juxtaposed with gunplay and car chases. Furthermore, in the last five to ten minutes, there are scenes implying that the Etruscans had some sort of advanced technology involving anti-matter and anti-gravity, an element that is never really developed. (To be fair to the director, Sergio Martino, the film was originally intended as a miniseries, so it may just be suffering from the truncation.)

The film’s performances are mixed. John Saxon does his usual good work, but his part is little more than a cameo. Elvira Audray, who plays our protagonist, has a tendency to overemote, although that may simply be the way her character was dubbed. Although some might claim that you shouldn’t watch a giallo for the acting, this ignores the role acting plays in keeping us invested in the story. If we care about the characters, we feel greater suspense.

These plot difficulties are to some degree alleviated by the film’s good use of atmosphere. The Etruscan tomb, which figures prominently in Audray’s visions, is genuinely creepy, with lots of shadows and a sulfurous fog emanating from a pit. The visions themselves are disturbing, even as an adult, with necks being broken all too realistically. The film also boasts a good soundtrack, although some themes seem to have been lifted from Fulci’s City of the Living Dead.

The Scorpion with Two Tails is available on YouTube.

Also known as Assassinio al Cimitero Etrusco (Murder in the Etruscan Cemetery), this is one of the few Sergio Martino giallo films that I had not seen. It was originally to be an 8 episode TV series called Il Mistero Degli Etruschi (The Mystery of the Etruscans) or Lo Scorpione a Due Code (The Two-Tailed Scorpion) before it was made into a full-length film, which was then cut down again to air as a two-part movie in Italy.

Working from a script by Ernesto Gastaldi and Dardano Sacchetti (with screenplay work by Maria Chianetta), Martino tells the story of Joan (Elvire Audray, Ironmaster), who foresees that her husband will die in the Etruscan tombs that they have been exploring. And with that, her husband Arthur dies in just enough time to get John Saxon a special guest star title.

Now, she wants to find the killer, working with her friend Mike (Paolo Malco,  Escape from the Bronx, The New York Ripper) and going up against her father (Van Johnson), who may not be involved for altruistic reasons.

I always loved this Enzo Sciotti poster, which looks just like the one for The House by the Cemetery.

Everyone feels like they’re going through the motions here, which is kind of sad. It’s a great idea, mashing up ancient rituals and giallo murders. It should work, but it doesn’t. Even the Fabio Frizzi score sounds a bit like The Beyond, a much better film.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Despite the worries of this past year and my normal thoughts that this is existence can be a prison, the truth is that the world can be a magical place at times. Case in point, I just learned that one of my favorite actors, Michael Moriarty, made a giallo with one of the great ripoff artists, Alberto De Martino. Who knew?

Beyond making movies that take a Hollywood idea and going wild with his own craziness — witness The Antichrist, OK Connery, Holocaust 2000 — this movie goes so far to feature a poster that blatantly lifts from The New York Ripper.

Credit Meathook Cinema (https://meathookcinema.com/2020/10/02/31-days-of-halloween-2020-day-1-blood-link-1982-out-of/) who pointed this out. The poster may be ripped off, but I’m not stealing their find.

Michael Moriarty plays Craig Manning, a doctor who has visions of women being killed somewhere in Germany by someone who he believes is his thought burned to death twin brother Keith — yes, also played by Moriarty — who he feels that he must stop, despite his girlfriend Julie (Penelope Milford, Coming Home).

How can we make this more of a movie that I’d enjoy? By having Cameron Mitchell play an ex-boxer goaded into a boxing match that Keith kills him in, that’s how. The good twin falls for Mitchell’s daughter. After they aardvark, the bad twin shows up, kills her and lets his brother take the blame for all the killing.

I totally love the ending of this, which leaves it up in the air whether or not Keith had psychic control over Craig, or whether he is calling to him from the grave, or whether they’re all insane or if — my personal feeling — is that there was only one of them all along.

Made in Germany with an all-Italian crew and a Morricone score, this is the kind of movie that you’d rent when the store was closing and the sales clerks were looking annoyed and then when you watched it, you’d be the only one of your friends who liked it and then for years, they’d all make fun of you for enjoying it so much. Hey — it has Moriarty and Mitchell, two guys I thought I’d never see in a movie together. To be fair, when you make as many movies as Mitchell did, those odds aren’t all that high.

You can watch this on YouTube.

This movie failed at the box office and nearly ruined the career of John Carpenter. Think of that as you watch it. But did it really fail? It made nearly $20 million on a $15 million budget, but audiences must have expected more. Studios certainly did.

Was it because E.T. came out at the same time, as well as so many other science fiction and fantasy films? Did the recession make people not want to watch something so nihilistic? Did the sheer level of gore turn people off? Were people upset that he remade a film some considered a classic*?

After one market research screening, Carpenter asked the audience what they thought. One answered, “Well what happened in the very end? Which one was the Thing…?” When Carpenter said that the answer was up to their imagination, the response was, “Oh, God. I hate that.”

How could audiences respond to a movie that did not spoon feed them any of the story beats? That doesn’t have a single character to root for or get behind? That is influenced by Lovecraft — as our the other Apocalypse Trilogy installments Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness — in that ordinary people face off with supernatural horror that they are doomed to be destroyed by, which isn’t really what mainstream America wants from a popcorn film?

Yeah, it could be all of those things. Or perhaps, the world was not ready for it. But watching the end of this film, as everyone sits around wondering who has a disease that they can barely understand and know will eventually impact them, yeah. I think the world of 2020 is ready for it.

I wonder what it’s like to watch this movie when it screens every year at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. I bet it feels pretty real there, too.

In an interview with the AV Club, Carpenter said, “If The Thing had been a hit, my career would have been different. I wouldn’t have had to make the choices that I made. But I needed a job. I’m not saying I hate the movies I did. I loved making Christine and Starman and Big Trouble in Little China, all those films. But my career would have been different.”

As it was, Carpenter was reluctant to make the film** and nearly quit before it ever started filming. A lifelong fan of Howard Hawks***, he felt that his version of the story — both are based on Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr. — was unbeatable. But as he re-read the original story — spurred on by co-producer Stuart Cohen — he saw how he could make a movie with a vision for his time, just as Hawks had thirty years ago.

Beyond Carpenter, so many talents make this film work. Of course, there are the actors on screen, like Kurt Russell, Keith David, T.K. Carter, Wilfred Brimley, David Clennon and Richard Dysart. But there’s also the astounding production design and storyboards from Man-Thing artist Mike Ploog and Mentor Huebner, which were so detailed that several of the shots from this look like carbon copies of their sketches. There’s Dean Cundy working to make every shot look amazing — this is his first major studio movie with Carpenter. Want it to get even better? Sure, Carpenter could have done the score, but he got Ennio Morricone****. And finally, the Rob Bottin-lef effects team were pushed to the brink of exhaustion — Bottin was only 21 years old and ended up going to the hospital for  exhaustion, double pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer after working for an entire year on the film, sleeping on set — but the work they created will never be duplicated and puts any CGI efforts to remake this film to shame. Carpenter thought that having someone in a suit — like Alien — cheapened the film. He wanted something more. Well, he got it. In the last battle with the Thing, fifty different artists are operating the monster.

We’re lucky that this movie exists. I saw it at the drive-in this year and it felt like it could have been made today. It was too imaginative, too nihilistic and too good for most people, even nearly forty years later.

*One of the reviews that upset Carpenter the most came from the co-director of the original, Christian Nyby, said, “If you want blood, go to the slaughterhouse. All in all, it’s a terrific commercial for J&B Scotch.”

**Originally, Universal was going with Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel as the team for this movie, but were unhappy with their take. John Landis was also considered, but the film was really greenlit when Alien was such a big deal in 1979.

***How big of a fan is Carpenter? You can see scenes of The Thing from Another World during Halloween.

****Morricone’s score for this film was nominated for a Razzie, while his score for The Hateful Eight — which has some unused music from this film in it — won him his only Best Original Score Oscar.

Jess Franco wrote, directed, produced, acted and scored approximately 173 feature films and I have been cursed to watch all of them. This one, he made for French producer Marius Lesoeur and its also known as L’Abîme des Morts-Vivants* (The Abyss of the Living Dead).

I kid, actually. Sometimes, I kind of like what Franco does. This would be one of those times, when he somehow lulls you into a fuzzed out haze, helped by a bad looking print, as you wait and wait and watch and hope and dream of the moment when the zombies that guard some Nazi gold will emerge and kill the treasure hunters.

Tubi has a print that looks like a VHS that has been rented thousands of times, which makes this so much better of a viewing experience than a pristine version would be.

*It’s also known as Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies, El Desierto de los Zombies, The Grave of the Living Dead, The Treasure of the Living Dead and for having a Spanish version called La Tumba de los Muertos Vivientes that is blessed with Line Romay as the Nazi doctor’s wife.