I think about Jess Franco and Lina Romay a lot. I’d like to feel that they had a great relationship — they were together for years — and they lived up to the title of this movie, The Voyeur and the Exhibitionist. Working together on this as co-directors, Lina sits in an apartment, in front of posters of Mick Jagger and Lou Reed, and for 54 minutes, she gets horizontal with Mari Carmen G. Alonso (who performed as Rossy Pussy in this and another Franco movie, Para las nenas, leche calentita) and another man while the exhibitionist watches and makes a mess of himself.
An early Spanish X film — Franco and Romay made ten really fast to get ahead of the censorship ending — this has no real story other than someone likes to watch and someone likes to be watched. Lina says, “Maybe I look like a maniac, but it’s a game that amuses me.” She’s the power bottom, the real one in control, as the male gaze only can see when she performs for it.
This is the magic of Jess Franco, that he can cause people to write long and hopefully poetic write-ups on movies that are really just dirty sex. Do we want them to be more than they are or are they more than they are I can’t answer, but like always, I think about Jess and Lina growing old together, two perverts who found each other’s yum in a world where that rarely happens.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this on Saturday, Jan. 18 at midnight at the Coolidge Theater in Brookline, MA (tickets here). For more information, visit Cinematic Void.
Initially intended for Michelangelo Antonioni, this film had the potential to be another Blow-Up. However, Carlo Vanzina and Enrico Vanzina created it with only a limited connection to the novel that inspired the title. The book, written by fashion journalist Paolo Pietroni under the pseudonym Marco Parma, generated significant controversy upon its release for naming prominent figures in Italy’s fashion industry.
The plot of this film, unlike any other, revolves around a serial killer prowling the streets of Milan, targeting glamorous models with a deadly pair of scissors, a weapon suggested by the renowned writer Franco Ferrini, known for his collaborations with Dario Argento. The initial choice of a gun as the killer’s weapon was quickly discarded, as it didn’t quite fit the unique essence of the Giallo genre.
Meanwhile, Yellowstone Park ranger Bob Crane (played by Tom Schanley) senses that his sister Jessica (Nicola Perring) is in distress. His journey takes him across the world, where he unexpectedly finds himself mingling with the rich and famous. Can he rescue her, or will he find himself in the crosshairs of the killer? And will Donald Pleasence ever turn down a film role?
One thing is certain: Barbara (Renée Simonsen), a model and friend of Jessica’s, is interested in Bob, but there are hints that she might also be obsessed with Jessica.
I often think about the connection between Dario Argento and Brian De Palma. This movie shares similarities with its murder scenes set in Italy and its modern American methods of death, which are reminiscent of the drill in Body Double and the psychic elements in Sisters.
Unlike many Giallo films, this one made a significant impact in Italy, sparking a small wave of comeback films set in the fashion world and the sequel Too Beautiful to Die. While I prefer that sequel and certainly think it surpasses the third film, the Vanzina brothers’ The Last Fashion Show, I’ve come to appreciate this film over time.
Never forget that this has one of the most amazing moments in Italian exploitation movies: Donald Pleasence going to town on a Wendy’s salad bar.
VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the Patreon for the Video Archives podcast. You can hear a preview here.
You have to feel bad for the Vietnam vets in this movie. They go back to Nam with the best of intentions, hoping to destroy the Golden Triangle’s drug empires, but when they get there they learn that their fellow soldiers are the ones behind it all.
How did they get there? Well, Chris Mitchum had a gas station that he stopped some criminals from robbing, so they responded by killing his adopted son and assaulting his wife. Instead of, you know, going through counseling and working through it, she decides that the best thing she can do is kill herself while he’s calling the cops. I’m not one to tell anyone how to deal with their grief, but somewhere between anger and bargaining and acceptance and hope is drawing up the plans for a mobile battle RV and building motorcycles with rockets on them.
I mean, this movie starts out as Death Wish, has our hero get arrested and then the authorities tell him to get together with his old commandos and go do some real killing. This feels like the kind of movie a bunch of strange children with too many G.I. Joes and perhaps too much knowledge of cocaine would film on their parent’s camcorder in stop motion. Inside their mind, the movie looks like the stuff of dreams. To adults, it looks like an action figure just standing there while children scream things about adopting babies in flashback sequences.
This is a movie that has a commando unit named the Rat Bastards and an adopted Vietnamese child named Charlie. If you can commit to that — and you love John Phillip Law as much as I do — then you really can’t lose.
Here’s how the hierarchy of renting movies worked in the 80s: Are all the Stallone, Arnold and Van Damme movies out? Then reach for some Michael Dudikoff. Oh, those are out? Does the store have any Cirio Santiago stuff? Good deal. No? They’re all out? Well, I guess Bobby A. Suarez will do. I recommend Cleopatra Wong and another movie he wrote, Bionic Boy.
Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.
In the days before the internet, we could build our own cults. Amongst my family, we were obsessed with Pee-Wee Herman. Just imagine, in a time that could only be predicted by TV Guide, Pee-Wee would randomly show up in movies like Cheech & Chong’s Next Movieand Nice Dreams, here he was only known as “The Hamburger Guy.” As the 80’s began, Pee-Wee started by performing five months of the live The Pee-wee Herman Show at the Roxy Theater in LA and getting a taped special on HBO.
That special dominated my eight-year-old mind, presenting a world that at once childlike and at the other end, strangely sinister and adult. I watched it so many times that I could recite every single word and still can. The end, where Pee-Wee finally learns to fly, can often reduce me to tears.
In the five years between that special and this movie, Paul Reubens pretty much became Pee-Wee, even asking his parents to go by the names Honey and Herman Herman. His David Letterman appearances — major surprises, as we stated before — were riotous bursts of anarchy on a show that was already breaking nearly every rule of television. So when a Pee-Wee movie was announced, we lost our collective minds.
Somehow, Pee-Wee Herman is the rarest of cases of someone who became famous without losing a single ounce of his weirdness. And much like the HBO show that came before, I can still recite every word of this movie, quote it at will throughout the day and get misty-eyed just thinking of moments within it.
The story is incredibly simple: Pee-Wee’s most prized possession — his bike — has been taken by Francis. Now, he must get it back. A psychic tells our hero that his bike is in the basement of the Alamo, so we’re off to adventure.
That’s it. It’s that easy.
From wrestler Silo Sam chasing Pee-Wee around dinosaurs to his speech to Dottie (I actually gave this exact same “I’m a rebel, a loner” speech to a date once and was convinced she was going to slap me; she cried and told me it was the saddest thing she’d ever heard, somehow never seeing this movie before), dancing to “Tequilla” at a biker bar while Satan’s Helpers (look for Elvira) look on and so much more, there are so many moments in this film that simply listing them would take on the feel of Chris Farley talking to Paul McCartney.
I mean, without this film, you may not have Danny Elfman and Tim Burton making big budget movies.
To write the film, Reubens, Phil Hartman and Michael Varhol purchased the book Syd Field’s Screenplay and were as literal as possible. “It’s a 90-minute film, it’s a 90-page script,” said Ruebens. “On page 30 I lose my bike, on page 60 I find it. It’s literally exactly what they said to do in the book.” In my crazed mind, I also wish that Ruebens had followed through with his plan to remake Pollyanna with Pee-Wee in the lead.
There are so many easter eggs in this film, like the magic shop owned being named after Mario Bava, the Chiodo Brothers animating Large Marge, the Aleister Crowley head in the aforementioned magic shop, James Brolin playing Pee-Wee, the start of my crush on E.G. Daily, Professor Toru Tanaka as Francis’ butler and even the first acting role for Darla the dog, who was Queenie in The ‘Burbs and Precious in Silence of the Lambs.
There are so many lines in this, too. I leave you with my favorite:
Simone: Do you have any dreams?
Pee-Wee Herman: Yeah, I’m all alone. I’m rolling a big doughnut and this snake wearing a vest…
PS: I have just one more ridiculous Pee-Wee story to tell. In 1989, Pee-Wee exchanged fake marriage vows with Chandi Heffner — the adopted daughter of Doris Duke, the richest little girl in the world. Chandi was a Hare Krishna devotee and sister of the third wife of billionaire Nelson Peltz and all of 35-years-old when she was adopted, as Duke believed that she was the reincarnation of her only biological child Arden, who died days after being born. Chandra and Pee-Wee were “married” by Imelda Marcos at Duke’s Honolulu mansion Shangri-La. If you think the world is not amazing and special, you’re a fool.
Note: Obviously, I liked this enough to watch and review it twice.
We all know and love Rankin/Bass Productions from our childhoods, but have we ever stopped to consider the nightmare world of bureaucracy that their Santa Claus operates? That he enables the abuse of Rudolph, even after the movie in the sequel, learning nothing? That he sends toys to basically die on an island and punishes elves who may dream of another career path? Is he the Santa that we wrote to in our youth or some Old Testament version?
This special is based on The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum, the writer of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and it goes even beyond that, asking us to imagine a Santa that comes from the world of Ronnie James Dio album covers.
The final Animagic special from Rankin/Bass, this first aired on December 17, 1985. It’s not in Rankin?Bass continuity and yes, that is a real idea.*
Long ago in the Forest of Burzee, the Great Ak tells the story of Santa Claus to all of the other Immortals in the hopes that the man who is Santa can join them. Ak found him as a baby sixty years ago, abandoned in the snow, and Santa was raised by a lioness before being stolen by a wood nymph. Oh, your parents didn’t teach you that about Santa? Or that the Great Ak allowed a lioness and a wood nymph to co-parent a human child?
Assisted by the many magical races of the forest, Santa starts making gifts for children. This alerts the Awgwas to him, as they want children to be bad and basically act like organized crime — the magical creature community would like me to inform you that there is no such thing as the mafia, despite what you may have seen in the media — and keep stopping children from getting gifts. How do you stop the Angwas? The Immortals, led by the Great Ak, go to war with them and later tell Santa that all of them have perished. That’s right. Santa started a war over gifts and had a better equipped army, kind of like how he was a banana republic working with the CIA, and the balance of power against Communism needed better toys.
Santa then dies, telling his friends to decorate a tree every year to remember him. Luckily, he has fought orcs and slayed a dragon with a laser axe, so the Immortals allow him to deliver gifts forever. The Angwa are maybe not orcs but instead gorillas with fangs and horns. This was made at the same time as Thundercats, so if you wonder why Santa sounds like Mumm-Ra (and Vultureman, Captain Cracker and Jaga) and Mon-Star from Silverhawks, that’s because it’s Earl Hammond. Earle Hymon, who is the voice of King Angwa, was Panthro and Russell Huxtable, Bill Cosby’s TV dad). The Commander of the Wind is Larry Kenney, who was Lion-O and Bluegrass on Silverhawks. Lynne Lipton, the voice of Cheetara and Wilykit, is Queen Zurline. Peter Knook, one of the characters that aids Santa, is Peter Newman, who was Tigra, Wilykat, Tigra’s brother Bengali, Monkinian and many other Thundercats characters. Bob McFadden, the Tingler in this, was Snarf, as well as Commander Stargazer and Steelwill on Silverhawks.
*Oz and Santa are in the same shared L. Frank Baum universe with Santa being the ambassador for the North Pole to Oz.
Blood Tracks will be available as part of Vinegar Syndrome’s Lost City of Black Friday sale. It will kick off at exactly 12:01 AM EST on Friday, November 29 and end at 11:59 PM EST on Monday, December 2 on Vinegar Syndrome’s site.
It stars Easy Action, the first Swedish band to ever get a worldwide record deal, which is a fact on their Wikipedia page that kind of smells fishy. Abba?
The band split up in 1986, a year after this effort, when guitarist and band leader Kee Marcello quit the band to join Europe. That band went on to sell 30 million albums, so he did pretty well. Singer Zinny J. Zan went on to join the band Kingpin, which you would know better by their later name, Shotgun Messiah.
American hair band Poison used the chorus of Easy Action’s 1983 single “We Go Rocking” in their song “I Want Action,” which led to a lawsuit that the Swedish band won.
The original lineup just played their hit album That Makes One at the Sweden Rock Festival. That makes me happy.
There’s a whole bunch of mayhem, hairspray and murder in this movie, including people getting their eyes eaten, axes to the head and impalings. It’s pretty grisly, which is great, because it juxtaposes the ridiculous antics of this band and its groupies trying to make a movie in the snow.
The best part of all of this is that Easy Action were all afraid to act, so director Mats Helge Olsson got them drunk. You can tell — they’re destroyed for most of the movie. I advise that you’re in the same condition when you watch this.
These two short films appear with Born of Fire on Severin’s All the Haunts Be Ours Vol. 2 set.
Towers of Silence (1975): Directed and written by Jamil Dehlavi, this is the life of a Pakistani boy’s and how his obsession with death starts after he watches the Zoroastrian rituals of purification and regeneration. It’s a black and white semi-autobiographical movie about the gulf between faiths and how someone attempts to become a man caught between them.
The tower of silence is a circular, raised structure that is used to expose human corpses to the elements and help them decompose without contaminating the soil. As the bodies are left to the elements, vultures consume them, then what is left is gathered into a pit where further weathering and continued breakdown happens.
This allows the nasu, or unclean, dead bodies to be kept from contact with earth, water or fire, all three of which are considered sacred in the Zoroastrian religion.
I loved getting to see this, as Born of Fire was such an incredible piece of film. Seeing where its creator came from made me even more fascinated by it.
Qâf (1985): Another short by Jamil Dehlavi, this is totally what I’m looking for, a wordless exploration of a volcano exploding set to the music of Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream. I mean, can it be more perfect? Just images of explosions and lava flowing down, shot while he was making Born of Fire. As strange and multilayered as that movie is, this is so simple. So mesmerizing. This may end up being something that I play when I need to write and just lose myself in music and motion. For something that I wondered why it was on the Severin box set, I have to say that this has become one of my favorite parts of it.
These short films are part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2.
Man, Nico Mastorakis made some crazy movies. Like this one, in which a bunch of teens on a Greek vacation discover an entirely new kind of drugs: audio cassettes that deliver orgasms via hallucination filmed music videos. No, really. What is this, The Digital Underground’s Sex Packets: The Movie?
It also has a soundtrack filled with songs by Chris de Burgh, the guy who wrote “Lady In Red,” so it has that going for it. Also, Seiko paid big money to get their Data 2000 watch into this movie, as if the people who watch Nico Mastorakis movies are looking to upgrade their digital watches.
This is a movie about an old man inside the cassettes trying to get the three heroes to find the second tape, which will weaponize the music video orgy inside. So basically Porky’s meets Videodrome but Debbie Harry never puts out a cigarette on her breast.
Yes, it’s exactly as odd as it sounds.
This is part of Arrow Video’s The Nico Mastorakis Collection and has an interview with Dan Hirsch looking back on his role in the film and a trailer as extra features.
EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.
James Bryan and Renee Harmon should have made a hundred movies together and it still wouldn’t be enough for me.
High class call girl or showgirl or lady from Las Vegas Claire Delaney (Tina Louise ) is trying to get her car to the big city when it breaks down, leading to her being attacked by the Hell Riders, who are led by Snake (Ross Alexander). Harmon is one of them, Knife, and they have spiritual guidance from former priest — maybe? — Father (Frank Newhouse). The rest of them have names like an off-brand G.I. Joe knockoff like America’s Defense or The Corps: Convict (Dan Bradley), Angel (Melanie Scott) and Rocky (Shawn Klugman). None of this gang matches, either in colors, logos, costumes or even seeming like they have the same goals.
Before they break into her car, another biker, Big Ed (David H. “Dutch” Van Dalsem) arrives and breaks it up. He has them leave and makes a member of his bikers, Ben (Kelly Green), drive her back to the highway. Then her car won’t start and the Hell Riders come back and piss all over her car, beat Ben straight to oblivion and drag her behind their motorcycles.
Claire makes it to the closest town, one with a sheriff (Jerry Ratay) who doesn’t want to deal with this situation, a mechanic named Joe (Frank Millen) who probably won’t fix her car well enough and Dr. Dave (Adam West), who is willing to stand up to the bikers and be as close as she gets to a love interest. So if you ever wanted to see Ginger get hot for Bruce Wayne, well, your TV dirty dreams get close to coming true. The only nudity is for Angel, who just walks around the town unclothed while the Hell Riders smash everything up.
Somewhere in the middle of all this mayhem, the sheriff’s daughter Suzy (Chris Haramis) decides that she no longer wants to marry Joe and needs to get out of this town.
Shot at a Western themed strip mall with Harmon’s acting students and only having Tina Louise and Adam West for one day of shooting, this is about as good as you’ll get. Other than the close-ups, most of the star’s scenes are played by doubles.
I knew I was going to love this and then when the credits at the beginning listed Lee Frost as one of the producers, I was completely won over. When you have the man who directed A Climax of Blue Power, Love Camp 7, The Scavengers and Witchcraft ’70 on your team, things just have to be good.
EDITOR’S NOTE: As the journey through Cannon continues, this week we’re exploring the films of 21st Century Film Corporation, which would be the company that Menahem Golan would take over after Cannon. Formed by Tom Ward and Art Schweitzer in 1971 (or 1976, there are some disputed expert opinions), 21st Century had a great logo and released some wild stuff.
You know, there’s lots to love in this goofy little movie, from Angelique Pettyjohn being a psychic used to bring objects out of another dimension to a monster played by director Fred Olen Ray’s seven-year-old son Christopher to Aldo Ray playing a general and songs by Johnny Legend. It’s a rubber suit monster romp that really has no interest in being anything else which you have to respect.
This was released as Space Gremlins in other countries and I love that name.
Psychic Materialization, drugs, monsters, busty psychics, the military industrial complex, bad computer graphics, a comedy relief hobo in love with the E.T. poster he’s found and a shock ending that mixes blood, boobs and beasts all at once — you know that Biohazard isn’t good for you but have you ever huffed paint? Let me tell you, it’s cheap and it hurts your head for days and you know that you’ll be slowed down for a few minutes, probably unable to stand and then you realize that you’re doing way more than smoking or drinking, you’re messing with your brain for life because that rag or bottle you’re sneaking smells out of makes you forget things, sometimes for so long that you never remember them again.
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