Rachel (Rachel Sheppard, Mari-Cookie and the Killer Tarantula and nearly every Franco camcorder release from this era) is an American on holiday in Spain who loves horror movies enough to buy a t-shirt with the image of a female vampire, which is all Countess Irina von Murnau (Analía Ivars, also pretty much a Franco stock player) takes over her dreams, much like, well name the Franco female vampire movie of your choice. Can the warnings of Marga the Gipsy (Lina Romay) keep her safe?

Is there a bottom to this very deep barrel of Franco? Does the song repeated over and over and over wear on you? Do the video effects feel like ones done on public access shows? Or do you feel charmed with Franco himself shows up as a merchant?

I mean, who knew a threeway with an enchanted dildo was the right way to kill a vampire? I wonder what Bela Lugosi would have thought about that?

Gina (Lina Romay) and Tina (Christie Levin, Broken Dolls) are female private eyes who go from smuggling artwork to a kidnap and murder case, all while just trying to make enough money that they can get out of the business.

Why yes, Jess Franco is making Two Undercover Angels again.

There’s a rich guy who chains his wife up and makes his own snuff films and hey, if he dies, he dies, and the girls get rich off him but then wreck their car and wake up and it’s all a dream, so then they tell you — the viewer — how to hire them.

This was one of the One Shot movies that Franco made and man, there’s a Geocities quality website for when this came out and this makes me like this movie way more than I did before I saw the site.

Some people decry the quality of this movie. As for me, it makes me think of how lucky Jess Franco was. He found not only a way to get his partner to make out with younger women while he watched, he was able to make money — well, never enough — from it.

Jess Franco is Dr. James Wong, as well as this movie’s director and writer, and he’s bedeviling Rachel Sheppard, who plays Rita, while his long-time muse Line Romay plays his daughter Tsai Ming as well as his nemesis Nelly Smith (but only when she’s wearing the wig that allows us to know that she’s Candy Coster).

The whole thing looks like a comic book and Nelly is aided by stock footage* of Howard Vernon as the magician Cagliostro.

Still with me?

Then Analía Ivars does a fifty-minute long striptease while Jess goes wild with late 90s video effects which look as dated as that sounds. There’s also this cyberspace virtual reality thing about twenty years before anyone could actually explore that world, so as you can imagine, Jess Franco’s idea of VR is basically women dancing and dancing and then kissing tongues and then dancing some more.

Also: Jess Franco dressing up as an Asian stereotype about twenty or thirty years after people were like, “That’s a bad look.”

*It’s from The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein.

On an island near the coast of Maracaibo, ex-Shakesperean actor Don Martin (Paul Lapidus) has brought an entire family of followers with him to start a new society. The inhabitants of his kingdom include his wife Tona (Lina Romay), his lover Gina (Christie Levin, Snakewoman), his daughter Beatriz (Mavi Tienda, Helter Skelter) and Herbie (Exequiel Cohen).

Their days are all the same, mostly with Tona beating Beatriz while screaming at an ocean liner, Gina trying to pick up Herbie and Beatriz spying on her father having sex with Gina. Yet no one tries to leave and even follows the old actor when he buries a treasure on the island. And then, Mario (Guillermo Agranati) shows up and wants to marry Gina. The old man marries off his daughter instead, as he thinks that Mario can get him in with a composer.

And then Herbie finds the treasure, which reveals that maybe Don Martin wasn’t all that great of an actor. He proves that with a long soliloquy that he closes by stabbing Mario and Beatriz as they have sex on his bed before drowning himself, dooming everyone to never leave the island.

Pretty much a shot on video version of House of Lost Women, it’s a soap opera or maybe Franco working through his fascist father hating that he played jazz. But man, some days I do feel like LIna, standing on that island and screaming how badly I want to get out of here, so I get it.

If you make enough movies, eventually you remake your own movies. If you’re Jess Franco, you remake your remakes and than make new versions of them.

Jun Shirogane’s entire family was murdered by criminals while she was at a karate tournament, which makes her the perfect first member of the Japanese secret police branch known as the Fear of God, getting the secret identity of Jun Silver and becoming a pro wrestler. Are you shocked that I loved this movie or surprised that it came from Takeshi Miike?

The first mission to stop Mistress Nancy Otori, who likes to tie up bank presidents and abuse them and then blackmail them, but when she two-times a member of the Viper’s Nest, Silver gets the info she needs and is able to complete her mission.

If you love 1990s Japanese women’s pro wrestling, Shinobu Kandori and Rumi Kazama — who formed Ladies Legend Pro-Wrestling — play themselves in this movie. This is also based on the manga by Hisao Maki, who also created Bodyguard Kiba and WARU, as well as the writer for the wrestling-related Lone Tiger, which has Richard Lynch as a promoter, and a man trying to find the man who killed his tiger mask-wearing wrestling father, which is funny, because Maki was the brother of Ikki Kajiwara, who created Champion Joe and more importantly, Tiger Mask, a character so famous that there’s still a real-life version who is a member of the New Japan Pro Wrestling roster.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxld

Kikujiro is a heart-warming comedy with an amazing soundtrack by Miyazaki regular Joe Hisaishi about a foul-mouthed ex-Yakuza asked to accompany a quiet neighborhood boy to visit they boy’s mother who has abandoned him. On their journey, the man and boy meet up with some interesting characters, have a few adventures, and discover that they are not so different after all.  

Masao (Yusuke Sekiguchi) is a lonely little boy who lives with his grandmother and finds himself with nothing to do for summer vacation. Kikujiro (played by Kitano and whose name is only uttered once at the very end of the film) and his wife live in the neighborhood and pretty much just hang out all day. When Masao decides to go visit his mother who has abandoned him, Kikujiro’s wife sends him along to watch over the boy on the long journey (and probably to get rid of him for the summer.) 

In the beginning, Kikujiro takes advantage of the boy and uses him for gambling and to hitch rides. After a series of mishaps, all of which are the fault of Kikujiro, the pair arrives at their destination with unpredicted results. 

It is at this point in the film that things really take off. It turns out that Kikujiro has some maternal issues of his own and soon realizes that he and the boy share a lot in common. The boy is becoming a man and the man is getting in touch with his inner child. The two spend the rest of the film with two kind-hearted bikers and a traveling poet they have met on the road playing children’s games, fishing, stealing crops from nearby farms and camping out in beautifully photographed rural Japan at the height of summer complete with cicadas whirring away in the background. It is largely through the wonderful performances that writer/director Takeshi Kitano has perfectly captured what it is to be a kid. They have no money, very little food, no video games or tech of any kind and still manage to have the best time of their lives playing in the woods. 

Of course, there is also the painful side of childhood and in this film, as in life, it boils down to the fact children are very often at the mercy of adults. One scene even features Kikujiro putting the smack-down on a would-be pedophile with designs on Masao. 

There is a lot of symbolism involving angels in this film, with artwork painted by the director intercut throughout although it was hard to distinguish which character is supposed to be the savior of whom. Both man and boy give each other something they need to make each other’s lives richer. 

This is a wonderful film that is sure to leave the viewer feeling warm and tingly inside. It is a testament to the prolific talent of Takeshi Kitano that he can just as easily make a film of this nature as he can a violent Yakuza story.  

A roadie named Iggy has dug up the bodies of the long-dead rock and roll stars, using the hands of Hendrix, the guts of Buddy Holly, the legs of Keith Moon, the penis of Jim Morrison and the head of Elvis. Where are the Plaster Casters when you need them?

Speaking of Elvis, we covered this back in our list of Elvis Fantasy Flicks.

I wanted to love this movie, but it just feels forced. The fact that Jim Morrison’s penis gets substituted for Liberace’s, which is shortly in conflict with the brain of Elvis, taking over his body and then murdering the men he makes love to sounds like a movie I should love, but this has the stench of a Troma film about it, one that is so proud of being so bad it’s good when it should aim for its cult status on its own strengths.

UK adult actor and director Ben Dover is in this and yes, I’m kind of ashamed — no, I’m not — that I immediately recognized him.

You can watch this on Tubi.

With apologies to Don Henley:

Remember when Julian Sands was Warlock
And made lots of Christians die?
Didn’t have a care in the world
With Satan as his daddy standing by
Cutting out Mary Woronov’s eyes
And making Lori Singer look all old
But this time, there’s one small detail
Since Julian Sands had to fly

Oh, we can all wish that he didn’t go
But we have to get used to Bruce Payne
Yes, Damodar from those movies about D&D
And the Passenger 57 bad guy
You can lay your head back on the couch
And let your taste fall all around you
Offer up your best defense
But this is Warlock 3
This is the end of the innocence

Actually, for a third movie in a series, much less one made in a Roger Corman studio in Ireland, this is way better than it has any right. Director and writer Eric Freiser has some skills, so it’s sad that he didn’t get to make too many movies. He did make another sequel, the TV movie Another Midnight Run.

Although this is a sequel, this Warlock is not related to the Julian Sands one. But hey — you probably already rented this on a big stack of five for $5 for five day movies and you won’t know that until you get home.

You can watch this on Tubi.