TRUCKER'S WOMAN (1975)

 In the small genre of truckerspolitation I think only Sam Peckinpah's CONVOY is remembered by anyone besides lunatics like myself.  I myself would rate TRUCK STOP WOMEN highly also but that one's really more about boobs than big rigs.  This here forgotten flick is all about the life of a common truck-drivin' fella.  He gets into brawls that he always wins, gets the ladies, races his eighteen-wheeler for fun and solves the mystery of his trucker daddy's murder and he does all this while looking like a real schlub.  I'm sure this was very inspirational for any 70's men that caught it back in the day.  It really screams exploitation movie and for that I recommend it.  Complete with some of the worst read lines in cinema history and the guy who played DR. GIGGLES as a fat mechanic.  Also look for Sigourney's dad Doodles Weaver as an old truck drivin' son of a gun.  There's murder, ugly fashions, terrible hairstyles and a woman that's supposed to be a sex-object that I really didn't want to see naked(but you get a shower scene whether you like it or not!).  Good times.

THE BORROWER (1991)

 Though technically released in the 90's this is the kind of movie that I imagine would appeal to fans of stupid 80's horror flicks.  It's the story of some cockroach aliens who send one of their prisoners down to Earth instead of prison.  While he's here he keeps having to rip people's heads off to keep his body fresh.  See he's "borrowing" your head, get it?  Even the fucking title is stupid!  It's very similar in style to all those movies that I usually hate where the monster jumps from body to body(stuff like THE HIDDEN and FRIDAY THE 13th Part 9).  While it is full of splattery fx and gross stuff (like our main guy eating rat soup) I found this movie to be overly stupid and not all that exciting of a watch.  It's a shame cuz there's a really cool cast here including Antonio Fargas, Don Gordon and Tom Towles but they all seem pretty much wasted so look for them in earlier stuff.
 The director of this one is the guy who brought us HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER and it's pretty amazing how different these two films are in tone.  Stick with his masterpiece.
Known in Germany as ALIENKILLER.

THE BLOOD BROTHERS (1973)

 While I'm a big fan of a lot the classic Shaw Brothers kung fu films this one is not one of my favorites. The main problem I have with it is the running time which is around 2 hours long. I know this is an epic historical story and all that but I just couldn't help but feel it all went on a bit too long for me personally. It's filled with political stuff with three guys trying to gain power and you do get a guy who has his heart ripped out towards the end of the movie which was the most memorable thing for me but besides that I didn't care much about what was going on. Maybe this one had a little too dry and serious of a tone for me to enjoy it as much as I wanted to. It does look really good on the current widescreen DVD release though.
 A.K.A. DYNASTY OF BLOOD

 

THE AVENGING EAGLE (1978)

 AVENGING EAGLE has always been in my mind the greatest classic Shaw Brothers kung-fu flick.  It's got all the best features of this genre in one movie. You get betrayal, heroes that aren't always what they seem, an amazingly bad-ass villain, crazy weaponry(the only thing missing might be the flying guillotine) and some super bright red 70's blood to top it all off.  There's also an actual plot that goes slightly deeper than the usual "you killed my master and now I must get revenge"-bit although there is plenty of revenge to be found here also.  The acting is intense and star Ti Lung has probably never been better than in this.
 Now a lot of my love for this movie might just be nostalgia from having watched repeatedly as a kid every time it played on channel 5's Drive-In Movie on Saturday afternoon's and loving it but having recently caught an awesome-looking widescreen print I think it still holds up for lovers of old-school chopsocky action movies.  I'm sure fans of these types of movies already know that Celestial has been putting out some really great looking DVD's on their Dragon Dynasty line so check 'em out for some good stuff.

BEAKS: THE MOVIE (1987)

 Rene Cardona Jr. was responsible for tons of crappy Mexican exploitation movies over the years.  For this one I guess he took a trip to Spain and decided he wanted to do his own version of Hitchcock's THE BIRDS(and crazily enough this was actually released as a sequel to THE BIRDS in Italy).  While the plot might be sorta similar this movie doesn't quite live up to it's classic predecessor.  Maybe because the main killer birds in this movie appear to be played by pigeons or doves that look like they are being tossed at our victims.  This looks fucking ridiculous and destroys any kind of scares Mr. Rene might have been hoping to create.  He really shoulda stuck to the large hawks and whatnot that show up sporadically but I guess those are more expensive to get a bunch of.  There's also supposed to be a worldwide apocalypse happening with bird attacks everywhere but the most we see is a few random killings and not even that many birds seem to be involved!  The other obvious problem I have with this movie is that they title it "THE MOVIE" as if there was a TV show or perhaps a paperback novel that also existed.  I find that highly doubtful.  It's alternate titles of EVIL BIRDS and BIRDS OF PREY are way better.   I think one of my favorite scenes in this whole mess is when a guy is laying dead in the back of an ambulance with a couple of little scratches on his face and a cop comes over and covers him with a blanket and says "Torn to pieces. Just how we found him."  I would say skip this movie but it is so dumb that it might be worth watching at least once for a chuckle.  We also get to see eyes plucked out and our main actress gets naked and soapy for a brief instant so that's a plus and if you don't like birds you get to see a bunch of them get shot to bits right out of the sky.

I really shoulda just watched this 3 minute version:

THE LIVING DEAD GIRL (1982)

 Most people of a certain age probably know this as a Rob Zombie song but before it was that it was a French Jean Rollin zombie flick.  Rollin, who was sort of the French version of Jess Franco, took his stab at the living dead genre here and came up with something pretty unique and like most all of his films it incorporates that dreamlike quality that gives it that supernatural feel.
 It seems that some folks decide to dump chemical waste barrels right next to a corpse-filled catacombs and  during an earthquake our title character springs back to life.  She's a pretty strange example of a zombie since she mainly just pokes people in the neck with her long fingernails and drinks their blood (one dude even gets the ol' Moe Howard eye-gouge special!)  There is also some flesh-munching if you enjoy that sort of thing.  None of these people return to form an army of the undead as usually happens in these types of films and instead our zombie gal gets an old friend to help her get victims to snack on.  While some people might find the pace a little weird in Rollins films this one moves along pretty well and there's plenty of gore and ample euro-nudity on display throughout which helps.
 There was an extra gory French semi-sequel in '87 called REVENGE OF THE LIVING DEAD GIRLS but I don't recall it being very good besides the gore-content.

This is more of a collection of death scenes than any sort of an actual trailer:

THE BLOODY BROOD (1959)

 If you wanna see a young Peter Falk, best known as the star of COLUMBO, as a leader of a group of beatniks who end up involved in a murder this is the film for you.  Unfortunately this movie is a little short on the wild and crazy beatnik violence promised on the poster(there's really only one guy dying from having glass put in his hamburger and a final brawl)  and it's longer on the dramatic scenes when it switches to our murder victim's brother looking for the killer.  This movie is overall pretty forgettable and I can see why no one ever brings it up when discussing Falk's career.  There is some snazzy hep-cat dialogue though so at least that's something.

"Wake up man, will ya?  You're buggin' the tom-toms!":

EXORCISM (1975)

 EXORCIST-rip-off movie starring Paul Naschy as a devil-fighting priest.  According to Naschy he wrote this story before that other slightly more well-known devil-possession movie came out.  While that sounds to me like a load of horseshit and way too big of a coincidence there are a few slight differences in here, like a whole Satanic group that perform human sacrifices and have naked orgies, lots of LSD use going on and people getting murdered by a mysterious killer, so maybe he came up with a giallo-type film and the producers shoe-horned the more familiar EXORCIST-aspects into it later on.  Either way this movie is mostly just filled with boring dialogue and nothing very interesting happens besides maybe those fleeting Satanic cult sequences and the mimicking of stuff from the Linda Blair classic.  I think overall this is my least favorite Naschy film that I've seen so far.  I feel Naschy's best stuff is when he does straight up monster mash type stuff like THE WEREWOLF VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMEN or his blasphemous stuff like EL CAMINANTE.  Stick with those and if you want a way better Spanish EXORCIST-rip-off check out Amando de Ossorio's THE POSSESSED which features a nasty little girl ripping off a guys testicles.  That's exactly what this movie needed more of.

BRIDES OF BLOOD (1968)

 This was the first in a trilogy of "Blood Island" movies that starred John Ashley and were made in the Philippines pretty cheaply by director Eddie Romero.  This one features a bubbly-skinned, heavy-breathing monster who occasionally rapes and kills a few native women to satisfy himself.  The monster is a ridiculous bulbous-headed toothy fellow in an obvious rubber suit but he's definitely the highlight since most of the rest of the movie drags quite a bit.  There's also some trees that come alive and get a little grabby which reminded me a bit of THE EVIL DEAD except they leave the raping to the main monster.  You also get busty blonde Beverly Hills(a.k.a. Beverly Powers) playing a horny busty blonde lady.  There's some nudity and a little bit of blood here and there.  I imagine if this thing was ever screened uncut back in the late 60's it woulda probably been a bit shocking for the times.  I recall it being shown on TV a lot in the 70's but by then it was cut to shit and not quite as exciting of a watch.

 

BIGFOOT: THE MYSTERIOUS MONSTER (1976)

 Hosted by Peter Graves, who's probably best known today as the guy from AIRPLANE! and BIOGRAPHY but back in the 70's was mostly known as the guy from MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, this is basically an overlong episode of IN SEARCH OF... I would imagine, much like certain episodes of that show, parts of this this movie where they recreate encounters with various Bigfoot creatures woulda probably freaked me out as a little kid. Watching it today you can't help but notice that all the Bigfeet are just jackasses in rubber masks. Apparently lots of footage used here was taken from a TV-special about elusive monsters and then re-cut for a theatrical run. Because it's so long we also get a bunch of stuff about the Loch Ness Monster and the Abominable Snowman thrown in as a bonus. Overall it's a pretty goofy but fun throwback to a time when this stuff was a hugely popular fad and everyone and their mom loved the idea of Bigfoot running around out there somewhere.
  Looking back at this stuff from the vantage point of living in 2012 where everybody owns a cellphone, if any of this nonsense was even remotely real I'm sure we would have tons of pictures and movies taken of this creature but of course nowadays he's not all that popular so that never happens. I have heard there is some ridiculous TV series running currently where they search everywhere for our rascally hairy monster and, of course, find nothing but I'm sure it doesn't have anywhere near the camp value of this film.

SISTER STREET FIGHTER (1974)

 While this one doesn't live up to the viciousness of the Sonny Chiba original STREET FIGHTER flick it's still OK as far as stupid karate movies where a gang of killers politely wait their turn while fighting one person go.  The plot is about as simple as they come with our heroine looking for her kidnapped brother who's been turned into a junkie by our baddies.  The main draw here is the comic-booky villians on display.  I think it's always a tad more exciting when your bad-guys wear masks and you get a lot of that here.  There's a gang of masked ladies who dress like Fred Flintstone which were probably the highlight for me.  In addition to that you get a group who look like they're wearing some sort of black wicker baskets on their heads, a  fellow who shoots poison darts while wearing a superhero cape, a guy with steel claws like Wolverine and some more typical kung-fu villians like a strongman, nunchucks guy etc.  Sonny Chiba does appear here but he's not playing his Terry Suguri character from the original.  In fact in the dubbed print I watched he was just called Sonny.
 This would spawn three sequels which are of varying quality.  The first one being my favorite. Make sure you watch the uncut version of SSF instead of the cheap-shit dollar VHS/DVD since that one's missing about 6 minutes of the blood-spraying stuff.

HANZO THE RAZOR: WHO'S GOT THE GOLD? (1974)

 Rounding out the trilogy is this final installment in the Hanzo saga.  This time our big-dicked samurai-cop starts right out beating-up his meat then decides he really would enjoy banging a lady ghost, some ninjas get offed in a bloody fashion and from there it goes down pretty much the same path as the first two movies.  He pisses off a bunch of important people and helps out the common man while performing sex acts on nonparticipating ladies.  I would say part 2 is definitely the highlight but they all are fun watches as long as you don't take the whole rape thing too seriously since these movies are not super serious in any way and I think this one in particular has the most comedic feel of the 3.

                                                     Asian funk!:

 

HANZO THE RAZOR: THE SNARE (1973)

 I gotta say this sequel to the 1st Hanzo flick is even better since they up the blood-spraying content and the perversion content.  The most remarkable scene to me is where our hero rapes a woman just because she's nervous that she might get raped.  Amazingly this calms her right down due to the magical power of Hanzo's mighty meat.  It's not hard to see why some of the more feminist-leaning people I know are not fans of the Pinku-style of Japanese cinema after watching something like this but personally I found it all quite entertaining in it's obvious over-the-top sleaziness.  You also get an insane abortion-performing lady, a Buddhist priestess who gets tortured and then raped, some bondage & discipline and some of the more typical trappings of a samurai-type film thrown in there.  Also there's a strong anti-authoritarian streak that runs throughout these films which I find pretty atypical of Asian cinema for the most part.  Can't wait to watch part 3.

SWORD OF JUSTICE (1972)

 Even back in the rape-filled days of the 1970's I can't imagine there was an American movie where the hero of the film is a guy who went around raping women.  Even if he did it in the name of truth and justice and only to get vital information for a case like our Japanese cop Hanzo here I don't imagine it woulda went over very well.  It just goes to show how far ahead of us in crazy-ass cinema Japan has been for a long time now.
 In what's probably one of the most memorable scenes Mr. Hanzo goes through a vigorous workout to keep his cock(his "sword of justice"?) in tip-top shape.  This includes fucking bags of rice and beating his schlong with a big wooden stick.  Besides this we also get scenes of sexual assault and a great funky soundtrack that gives everything an extra sleazy blaxploitation-movie feel.  On top of that it's also a beautifully shot almost artsy-looking example of something that probably looks extra-awesome on a big screen.
 The weirdest aspect to this for me personally is that our main character is played by Shintaro Katsu who I recall mainly from playing Zatoichi The Blind Swordsman in that series of films and it really shows what a great actor that guy was since these two characters are like night and day.
 This is the 1st part of a trilogy of Hanzo flicks and I need to check out the rest of the series soon.

SWEET ALICE (1987)

 If you like terrible, grating folk music sung in between scenes of Seka fucking and sucking I think I found the perfect movie for you.  There's also a story about a cowboy(played by someone named Kevin James who's not the guy from that TV show) looking for his lost love(Seka) who has moved to Hollywood and become a porn star.  He cries like a baby when he finds out what she's up to.  It's all pretty lame unless you're into sensitive love stories that try to make you feel better about watching a filthy porn flick.  All the sex scenes featuring Seka, Paul Thomas, Desiree Cousteau, Jamie Gillis, John Holmes and others are from older movies and I'm pretty sure I've already seen them all before.  I'd say stick with the older stuff for a better time.


Seka + Johnny Wadd!:
Swedish Erotica 240 - Sweet Alice Seka, Porn 53: xHamster

THE LEOPARD MAN (1943)

When I first heard the title THE LEOPARD MAN and watched the trailer I had a feeling this would be some sort of cheap-ass rip-off of THE WOLFMAN or something along those creature-feature lines, but this is a production of the team of producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur who are best known for THE CAT PEOPLE and I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, so it's not anything like that and it doesn't play anything like you might think it would. What you get is more of a psychological murder mystery which uses shadows and leaves the murders to your imagination.  While I wouldn't put this up there with the classic CAT PEOPLE(some of the plot points didn't really make a lot of sense to me) it's still worth checking out if you're into the more atmospheric old-timey stuff.  Also there's some hot 40's showgirls on display which makes for good eye-candy.

 

ROBOT WARS (1993)

 So I guess, according to this movie, in the post-apocalyptic future giant robots will be used as mass transportation and they get attacked a lot so they build giant fighting robots instead of buses and trains and then they fight tanks and terrorists and whatnot. Sounds dumb already. The 90's were a terrible time even for low-budget campy B movies and one of the biggest producers of 90's garbage was Charles Band and his Full Moon Entertainment company. This stupid, pointless, badly-acted, sci-fi crap was directed by Charlie's dad Albert Band and that doesn't seem to have made this any better. You don't even get to see much of what the title promises us which is robots fighting up until the big finale. Barbara Crampton from RE-ANIMATOR is in this but she doesn't even have the decency to get naked so that also sucks.
 A.K.A. ROBOT JOX 2(from what I've read ROBOT JOX #1 at least has a lot of robots battling it out so it's gotta be at least slightly better than this).

FUGITIVE ALIEN (1987)

 So I guess in 1978 right after STAR WARS came out in Japan they threw together a TV rip-off show called STAR WOLF.  What you get here in FUGITIVE ALIEN is a direct to video thing which came out 9 years later and was edited together from that series.  This was done by Sandy Frank who was also responsible for bringing all those crappy dubbed versions of the GAMERA movies to VHS back in the 80's.  At least in those you get a giant flying fire-breathing turtle.  I'm sure he woulda made this one a lot better but he never shows up and instead we're stuck with a few boring laser gun fights and some really badly dressed aliens who wear red wigs for some reason and some other aliens that wear helmets that look like watermelons.  I watched this on Mystery Science Theater 3000 otherwise I'm pretty sure it would be really tough to get through.
 There's a sequel titled STAR FORCE: FUGITIVE ALIEN 2 which I'm sure is equally awful.

SHOCK WAVES (1977)

  Pretty decent underwater nazi-zombies flick starring John Carradine and Peter Cushing.  Carradine really only appears for the first third or so of the film and I always end up staring at his creepy arthritis-riddled hands whenever he's onscreen.  Cushing pops up later on with a German accent and looks very thin and skeleton-esque.
  The main drawback this film has is that it's rated PG and the fascist zombies prefer drowning and/or choking their victims to death instead of the more popular gut-munching which makes this flick totally gore-less so don't bother with it if that's all you're looking for.  The other minor quibble I have with the plot is how the first thing they do is show us the sole-survivor of the zombie attack so we know how it's all going to end up right from the opening.  Talk about destroying any sense of suspense.  Besides these things though I think the movie is off-kilter and different enough to at least give it a look if you're a horror fan.
  I always assumed, due to Cushing's involvement, that this was a British film but apparently it was filmed in Florida.  The director Ken Wiederhorn went on to do KING FRAT which is probably the stupidest ANIMAL HOUSE rip-off movie ever made so that's something to be proud of.

One of the working titles of this was DEATH CORPS but I guess since a poster exists it mighta been released as that also:

THE FEMALE: SEVENTY TIMES SEVEN (1962)

 I'm really only familiar with Argentinian sex goddess Isabel Sarli from the amazing film FUEGO where she plays an uncontrollable nymphomaniac.  It was directed by and starred her lover in real life Armando Bo and he seemed to know exactly how to show off this well-endowed lady to the fullest.  That film was from 1969 while this one was made 7 years earlier by someone else and is completely tame in comparison.  Sarli does play a prostitute as the movie opens but from there she flashes back to her boring life living with some dullard well-digger/farmer and unfortunately that's where most of the plot takes place.  I use the word plot pretty loosely too since there isn't much of anything going on and this has to be one of the most boring exercises in tedium.  Occasionally we get a few scenes back at the whorehouse where Sarli works were we glimpse some quick toe-sucking and very softcore humping.  I think I may have seen a millisecond of nipple but I'm not sure.  To make things even worse it seems these only mildly interesting nudie/sex scenes were filmed and added later on so I can't imagine how boring this movie was in it's original form.  I think I'm just gonna stick to Sarli's films directed by Bo for maximum entertainment value.

     

KILINK VS. THE FLYING MAN (1967)

 From what admittedly little bit I've seen of Turkish-cinema it seems to consist of rip-off movies of big American blockbusters like RAMBO and THE EXORCIST and movies where they take actual footage from Hollywood hits like STAR WARS and STAR TREK and just splice it into their own movies.  They also all seem to be edited by a madman with a meat-cleaver.  This here is the oldest example of trash cinema from Turkey I've viewed so you get pieces of the film, and the whole finale which is recreated using still-pictures!, missing due to deterioration over the years which just adds to the madness.
 This is actually a sequel to KILINK IN INSTANBUL which I've never seen but the filmmakers were nice enough to give me a rapid-fire recap which make up the first 20 minutes of the playing time.  It's quite a jolting introduction to the world of our titular master criminal with shit flying at you at breakneck speed until you start to feel a little dizzy from it all.  It finally settles into the origin story of comic-book hero Shazam(who dresses a lot more like Superman for some reason and is called Shajam and more frequently The Flying Man) and then switches back to more bad-guy hi-jinks with the skeleton-suited badguy.  It all culminates in a big battle between these two opposing forces atop a tower which we only get to see pictures from as a narrator tells us what happens.  It looks to me like ol' skull-face gets killed but apparently he brushes that off and returns for KILINK STRIP AND KILL which sounds very sexy.  It's very strange that they produced a whole series of flicks about an evil villain, I can't think of anything equivalent in American films,  but I guess the guy was popular enough for it.  I can see why because he is, in fact, a very suave motherfucker who gets the ladies and doesn't even bother taking off his mask to make out with them.  He also enjoys torturing and killing folks when he's not trying to take over the world.  This whole thing is very mind-melting but in a good way and I need to check out the rest of this series to broaden my view of world history.
  While Kilink seems to me to be at least a somewhat original character since this is Turkey we're talking about even he was ripped-off from a series of  Italian adults only  photo-books where he was called Killing and which I guess appealed to perverts who wanted to see scantily-clad women tortured by a creep in a Halloween-costume.  This character was also ripped-off from another Italian skull-faced comic-book villain named Kriminal who also had a couple of films made  about him and one of them was by the great Umberto Lenzi which looks worth seeing.


The super edited-down version!!:

SPAWN OF THE SLITHIS (1978)

 Being a big fan of movies like THE MONSTER OF PIEDRAS BLANCAS and sea-born monster flicks in general I've been wanting to check out this 70's ocean-monster flick for a long time now, unfortunately it doesn't really live up to my anticipation.  What you get here is a chubby CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON monster who's brought to life by radioactive waste.  He's supposed to be born from the muck and mud of the swampy canals of Venice, CA but doesn't look anything like the SWAMP THING and looks very much like a guy in a pretty dry rubber suit.  There is a bit of gore here and there since our creature is fond of slashing his victims and chowing down on their intestines for nutritional purposes.  There's also a couple of boobs if you look closely enough since ol' SLITHIS also digs popping tops now and then.  One memorable scene has a bunch of drunks in a bar racing turtles which I though was neat. Besides that though this flick comes complete with stupid jump scares and the typical expected non-ending ending which was annoying.
 For a similar but less talky and way more entertaining viewing experience I would recommend checking out HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP instead of this.

Get your SLITHIS survival kit!:

KID VENGEANCE (1977)

 Very late into the whole spaghetti-western cycle(technically it was shot in Israel so I guess it could be called a matzo-western?, but it sure plays like a typical spag) this one is a pretty simplistic revenge tale about a young Leif Garrett(before becoming a big teeny-bopper pop star) who sees his parents murdered right before his eyes and as a bonus his mom gets raped by Lee Van Cleef. This leads to a trail of revenge. You might have to suspend your disbelief for a bit watching this little boy take out a bunch of bandits but it's done realistically enough and he uses the hunting skills that his pops taught him earlier on. We also get Jim Brown who gets his hard-earned gold ripped-off by some other more goofy bandits and he needs that shit back. These two stories come together and it has a decent explosive pay-off with many expected casualties. While I wouldn't say this is a bad western it is sorta unmemorable and I know that for a fact because I've seen this a couple of times now and after a short while the only thing I can recall is young Leif Garrett stars in it. You can find this on a bunch of spaghetti-western compilations and old dollar-store discs without looking too hard.
 I don't think I've ever seen a movie before where the title at the beginning of the movie is different than the title at the end of the movie but my copy of this has KID VENGEANCE as the opening title and VENDETTA as the closing title so that's kinda weird. A.K.A.'s=VENGEANCE and ANOTHER HARD RIDE(which tries to make this seem like a sequel to TAKE A HARD RIDE(which also starred Brown and Van Cleef along with Fred Williamson and Jim Kelly and was a sort-of spaghetti-western version of THREE THE HARD WAY))

DEATH LAID AN EGG (1968)

What you have here is a giallo that's slightly more on the artsy side of things. It starts right out with a bloody black-gloved slashing and from there we go to a chicken farm where a lot of this movie takes place, hence the title. There's lots of strange dialogue about chickens, a weird soundtrack which consists of everything from scat to what sounds like a maniac pounding on piano keys and all types of jazzy stuff in between. Gina Lollobridgida and Ewa Aulin both look extra sexy throughout and Ewa even wears a dress that reminded me of teenage Pebbles Flintsone which I'm adding bonus points for.
It's hard to go into the plot of this much without giving everything away since there's a big twist towards the end which ties everything together and makes sense of what seems like a very muddled mess upon first viewing. Full of double crosses and sleazy affairs, and although it's not nearly as gore-filled as the later Italian horrors, and it drags for a while in the mid-section of the film, this is still a decent example of an early offbeat giallo worth checking out for fans of weirder euro-trash.

TRICK BABY (1972)

 Iceberg Slim, along with the similarly awesome Donald Goines, is one of my favorite authors when it comes to lowdown sleazy pimp, whore and gangster tales. Iceberg's works were obviously a big influence on the whole genre of blaxploitation flicks made throughout the 70's. Amazingly this is the only actual film based off of one of his books. It's an interesting tale of a couple of con men doing the whole flim-flam scoot and scam thing. The one big flaw in this flick is the guy they got to play the title role of the son of a black whore, Kiel Martin. His character is supposed to be half-black but inexplicably looks about as white as can be. The black part of this team is played by Mel Stewart who I remember as one of the Jeffersons on ALL IN THE FAMILY. You also get to see Isaac The Bartender from THE LOVE BOAT in his first appearance as a pimp.
While it's a bit heavy on the melodrama, light on the funky action and all feels kind of middle-of-the-road it was still cool to see some 70's-era ghetto scenes and urban sprawl and there's worse you can do in this sub-genre. It is a damn shame Iceberg wasn't adapted more in the golden era though.