Also known as Diamonds of Kilimandjaro and The Treasure of the White Goddess, this trip through the libido and madness of Jess Franco finds a diamond treasure — Jess loves diamonds almost as much as showing you the love of his life’s lady parts in zoomtastic details — and a lost white girl amongst the natives — naked, unafraid, with a pet monkey and all of 16 years old, as Katja Bienert was way too young to be in one of his movies at this point.

Filled with stock footage, an editing error that shows the same scene twice, a scene where the crew can be seen — another Franco trademark? — and as always, Franco had already made this movie kinda sorta as White Cannibal Queen, so if you’ve watched more than fifty of his movies in fourteen days — do not walk the left hand path I have stepped down — it all starts to blend together.

Katja’s dad leads the tribe, by the way, and he’s Scottish because he wears skirts and plays bagpipes and only leaves his room for whiskey. He’s also composer Daniel White, who for some reason decided that this movie needed bongos and synth, which is probably half right and all wrong.

Look, if you’ve never seen a Franco movie or want someone to watch one with you, don’t make it this one. Actually, if you’ve succeeded in life enough to have someone that wants to share movies with you, don’t screw it up. I mean, I can’t even think of what Franco movie to show them. Venus In Furs? That’s probably the best one, but it’s still deranged. So is Vampyros Lesbos. Still, if you find someone who’ll sit for 80 minutes of bad editing, landscape shots, tree swinging and Lina Romay in old woman makeup, you’ve won life.

Cecilia (Muriel Montossé, Isla the warden from Love Camp and Emmanuelle in Emmanuelle Exposed) is the wife of a rich diplomat named Andre (Antonio Mayans) and she’s bored by all of it. So filled with ennui that she often stages games when she gets nude in front of the servants and trying to seduce him, which backfires when their limo driver quits and his brothers all gang up to assault her.

This being an exploitation movie, that sexual violence is all that she needed to reawaken herself, both to wanting carnal pleasure and her husband. And, as these things happen in movies that follow the journey of Emanuelle, she soon embraces her free love nature and begins to explore being open to the ways of amour. But it always seems that in exploitation that too much of a good thing must be morally punished, right?

Aberraciones sexuales de una mujer casada (Sexual Aberrations of a Married Woman) was acquired by Eurociné, who had Olivier Mathot direct new flashback scenes, and released the movie as Ceceilia, which is the easier to find version of this film.

There’s nude horseback riding, a cave-set multiperson love scene and, in case you forgot Jess Franco directed this, Lina Romay playing a nightclub dancer who does an act in which she sucks her son’s thumb in a way that leaves nothing to your imagination. Some people would say that this is problematic; I’d say it’s a Jess Franco movie. When the Nationalist government of General Francisco Franco fell, years of making movies that only flirted with kink suddenly gave way to a tidal way of needing to show everything, to expose it, to confess it and then to cover it up with droning synth and shots of the scenery that seemingly always last way too long.

I’d say never change, but Jess Franco never did.

Black Boots, Leather Whip is another adventure of Al Pereira (Antonio Mayans), the detective hero of what I’m just going to start calling the Jess Franco Cinematic Universe.

This time, he’s hired by Lina (yep, Lina Romay, using the name Candy Coster), who wants to keep some damaging photos from her wealthy husband. So she sleeps with our protagonist and one by one, all of the blackmail suspects are eliminated, making him a suspect. But then he has to kill a few people, but hey, it’s Lina in a blonde wig so I guess maybe we can understand, right?

There’s also a scene of a blind doctor getting off by demanding that her slaves are whipped harder, but hey, if that has nothing to do with the plot, perhaps this should not be your first go-round into the late period films — and it gets later and weirder — of Jess Franco.

This would be his film noir movie, I guess, and while I’m used to his other repeated story arcs of madmen who have to keep their daughters alive or female armies or, well, just Lina Romay lying on a table in a hotel meeting room while the camera zooms all around, this has a pretty decent scuzzy story to hang its prurient content on.

You can get this from Severin.

So yes, if there is a Jess Franco cinematic universe, it’s one in which governments have decided that erotic dancers make the perfect spies and are always given the most dangerous missions, like how Moira (Lina Romay, who else) is the only person who can solve the riddle of the Nazi gold when she’s not torturing fellow dancers or doing floor work on the hood of an already crashed car.

Somehow, Franco was able to make a movie that has a curling iron scene that even Judy in Sleepaway Camp — also made in 1983, so which came first — would say was upsetting. This film also does not care if you think quick shifts in tone are disconcerting, so one second it’s a goofy comedy, the next there’s an assault, then a love scene, then some murders. Meanwhile, as always, there’s Romay just going for it.

Do you love your significant other? You can base how much on watching Franco film Romay, filling the screen with dirty magazines and still having her be the only focus, his feverish zoom dedicated to not only finding her most intimate regions but pushing your face into them. I can almost imagine him screaming like a lunatic, “I love her so much that I demand that you peer inside her!”

So what I’m saying is that Jess Franco is a lover. And a maniac. And someone who had no problem turning an Indian restaurant into a strip club for one of his movies.

You can get this from Severin.

“…”

Man, if you were a kid in the 80s, you were lucky if you had Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode for the NES, a game that somehow had sniper rifle murder, conspiracy, bioterrorism and a sex scene that gives you back your energy. How did we get this game?

After two live action attempts* at telling the story of Dick Togo, the world’s greatest killer, Golgo 13: The Professional was made. It isn’t just an animated film. It’s also one of the first animated films to incorporate CGI animation.

After killing Robert Dawson, the son of oil baron Leonard Dawson and the heir of Dawson Enterprises, as well as liquidating a mob boss named Dr. Z, Golgo 13 finds himself hunted by the Pentagon, the FBI and the CIA, as well as Snake, their genetically-enhanced supersoldier named Snake. It seems like he’s finally killed the wrong target, one who has a father who wants him dead.

Dawson is willing to put everyone in his family into the line of fire to kill Golgo 13. He gives Robert’s wife to Snake to use and abuse, while sending his granddaughter Emily and butler Albert to assassinate the killing machine. They fail. He just walks away.

So why isn’t Dawson going after the people who ordered the hit? Is he rich enough to shut down America? And will the government release the terrifying criminals Gold and Silver to kill Golgo 13?

If you’ve never experienced Golgo 13 before, you may wonder, how can a man just keep getting shot, stabbed and beaten over and over again, yet have women throw themselves at him, and he never changes his expression? If you get it, you get it, I guess.

* 1973’s Golgo 13 and 1977’s Golgo 13: Assignment Kowloon. There’s also a sequel to this animated movie, 1987’s Golgo 13: Queen Bee.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Endgame isn’t just my favorite Joe D’Amato movie, it’s also my favorite post-apocalyptic movie ever made. It’s absolutely out of control for the entire movie with blind ninjas being led video game-style by psychics, fishmen all over Laura Gemser and George Eastman not being a bad guy for the whole film. It’s as good as it gets. You can get it from Severin.

I think it’s best that I watch some movies by myself. Like this one. That’s because the minute George Eastman showed up on screen, I let out an audible cheer of pure bliss. No one needs to hear me screaming like that.

2025. A nuclear war has left New York City in ruins, populated by scavengers and telepathic mutants who are hunted and killed by the elite. To keep the people of this world from revolting, the reality game show Endgame has been created, where hunters and gladiators battle to the death in the place of warfare.

Lilith (Black Emanuelle herself, Laura Gemser, credited as Moira Chen!) is a psychic who wants protection for her band of mutants. She hires the best Endgame player ever — Ron Shannon (Al Cliver from Zombi and The Beyond!) — to help. Shannon has his own problems, as he’s in the middle of Endgame and facing off against professional killers like Kurt Karnak (the much loved Eastman, who also co-wrote this film), who was Shannon’s childhood friend and has now become his greatest rival. The last time Shannon and Karnak battled in an Endgame, time ran out before they could determine which man was the best player.

Lilith helps Shannon defeat Karnak, at which point his sponsor and the cameramen show up and ask him to drink Lifeplus on screen. Lilith reaches out to him and he rushes to save her. That’s when he agrees to help her and the mutants she protects.

Karnak has lost his mind due to losing, shooting targets obsessively. Colonel Morgan and his men try to recruit him to their cause while Shannon tries to recruit his own team, including Ninja (Hal Yamanouchi, who in addition to playing Silver Samurai in 2013’s The Wolverine also appears in Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, 2020 Texas Gladiators and 2019: After the Fall of New York as the Rat Eater King!) and Bull (Gabriele Tinti, who was married to Gemser and appeared in nearly every Black Emanuelle movie).

“You’re too famous to disappear in a city that grows smaller every day,” says Colonel Morgan when he catches up to Shannon, asking him to give up Lilith. This leads to a firefight where he’s saved by Karnak! George Eastman as a good guy? Holy shit, I’m fucking in!

If you haven’t guessed by all the shouting and exclamation points, this movie is the perfect combination of everything I look for in film — it’s a ripoff, it’s post-apocalyptic, it shares Italian genre favorites and it’s in a ridiculous world where everyone either dresses like a viking or Dump Matsumoto (1980’s Japanese women’s wrestling bad girl supreme).

Meanwhile, in the wasteland, our heroes come upon mutants, which Professor Levin (oh yeah, he takes care of the telepaths) explains have combined man’s primordial caveman past with feral instincts. Which means, in layman’s terms, that they look like human fish or apes.

Think that’s crazy? They then come upon holy monks who have blinded themselves so that they can be guided by psychics and kill anyone who offends their conception of God. What follows is a scene of black-robed maniacs fighting with machine guns and grenades and knives and motorcycles and man…a cast of hundreds gets killed until Shannon finds the captured psychic and instead of saving him, tosses an axe at his head. All the monks have no idea where they are, wandering around yelling that they are blind as our heroes make their escape. If you think they aren’t going to drive over the head of one of the monks, well, you haven’t been watching Italian genre cinema!

Meanwhile, Lilith explains to Shannon that she keeps one of the young psychic kids basically autistic, because if he starts to experience emotions, he’s liable to wipe out everyone around him.

Then, the professor gets killed in a trap, but asks Shannon to save all of them. But that means Bull discovers that she’s psychic, which means that the entire team learns that everyone is a mutant. Everyone starts arguing before Karnak shows up to let them know that more enemies are on the way. Monkey-faced enemies! And a fish-faced leader who has two women with roped up bare breasts on his modified golf cart! What is going on with this movie?

Ninja and Kovack get killed and Lilith is captured. Karnak offers to help Shannon save her. Lilith reaches out to Shannon, telling him that Karnak only wants gold and then to kill him. Then, the fishman leader tears off Lilith’s clothes, yelling “Look at me while I rape you, dammit!” Shannon asks if she’s OK because he’s seeing flashes and she’s all like, “Yeah, I’m fine,” while a fish mutant slobbers all over her. Umm…

When the guys get there, Lilith is fully clothed and the mutant is passed out on the bed. So are we to believe that she enjoyed it? Or that she just went with it? I guess if you’re looking for woke feminism, a Joe D’Amato movie is probably the last place one should root around.

Then they find Kovack, who the mutants have left inside a wall. They can’t help him escape and he wants to die, so Karnak breaks his neck. He faces off against an entire room of mutants while Shannon and Lilith escape. She can tell that Karnak is in trouble, but not dead, to which Shannon replies “Fate decides the winner of Endgame, not me.”

Lilith reunites with the children and everyone celebrates that they are only ten kilometers from the rendezvous. Of course, the government is waiting to take everyone out. SS logo adorned stormtroopers show up and just start shooting, but Shannon talks Tommy, one of the mutant children, into creating wind storms and telekinetically using a machine gun and an avalanche to kill all of the soldiers. He even levitates a car that crushes several of them and sets a fire that wipes out even more. Then, he forces Colonel Morgan to kill himself.

Lilith asks Shannon to come with them, but he says “She is the future and he is the past.” She leaves while he stays behind in the wasteland with the gold. As he goes to pick up his gold, Karnak comes back and tells him they haven’t played the final round yet. He throws away his gun as we get an awesome long shot of both men, like something out of a western. They rush at one another with knives and the credits roll.

The poster for this film promises “For An Endgame Champion In The Year 2025, There’s Only One Way To Live. Dangerously.” And this film more than lives up that. If you only know D’Amato from his adult work or gorefests like Beyond the Darkness and Antropophagus, you should totally check this one out. Movies like this are why I went from worrying about the end of the world to wishing that it would happen!

Using the name Jim Black and Robert Hall — as well as Dirk Frey — Joe D’Amato really went all out to get as many names as possible into this movie.

Nadine Roussial plays Livia the Arena Queen, a virgin who must win one more battle inside the arena to get her freedom. It’s an adult movie — hey there’s Mark Shannon in a cameo — and was probably made on sets from another at the same time D’Amato movie like The Emperor Caligula: The Untold Story or Messalina… orgasmo imperiale which saw Joe use the name OJ Clarke.Nadine Roussial is in the latter, so it makes a little too much sense. Look — when you have a set, use it.

Diary of a Roman Virgin used the D’Amato named Michael Wotruba name here. It’s the story of Livia (Lucretia Love, who may have been born in Texas but made her way to Italy to be in everything from  The Killer Reserved Nine Seats to Enter the Devil) who has made her way from a tragedy involving stock footage from The Last Days of Pompeii and who rise in power.

This also has scenes from Triumph of the Ten Gladiators and The Arena in it, because why let stuff go to waste, right?

These films are at the opposite sides of D’Amato making Roman epics. Of course, after the 80s, the sex would go even further in his films, as he’d make Sodoma e Gomorra, Caligola follia del potere and Antonio e Cleopatra as adult movies.

This movie actually played on Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater on April 16, 1994 and that fact alone makes me beyond happy.

It’s Joe D’Amato — as Alexander Boroscky — working with a lot of people I’ve never seen or heard from before or since other than Mark Shannon and I’ll be frank with you dear reader. I’ve seen way too much of Mark Shannon’s ballbag in the last week.

I take that back. Thanks to Adrian  on Letterboxd, I recognize Marianne Aubert from some Erwin Dietrich movies.

The colorful Tiger Balm Gardens, the world-famous Aberdeen Harbor and the spectacular Ocean Park Fair Ground! These are the places where we will go and see some horizontal hijinks in Hng Kong!

Will Julie keep her newspaper job? Why was this made? How did it get made? Why did Joe only make one movie in Hong Kong? Who dubbed this?

So many questions!