BOSS (1975)

 Way better known under it's original title of BOSS NIGGER (the DVD I own of this not only cuts "the n-word" from the title but also from the opening theme song) this is the story of a couple of black bounty hunters(Fred "The Hammer Williamson and that bad D'Urville Martin) in the old west. The story tales a sorta similar journey as Williamson's BUCKTOWN(also from 1975) where our heroes become sheriff of a town and pretty much take over. Unlike that film though it's still the olden days so things don't go very smoothly for our dark-skinned lawmen. They also have to contend with hulking, muscular badass William Smith and his gang of unruly outlaws who are not very progressively-minded to say the least.
 Directd by Jack "CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON" Arnold and written by Williamson himself this is a pretty interesting mash-up of blaxploitation and western that works really better as a novelty than a particularly good film but if you get sick of either of those 2 genres it's worth a watch. Also it makes a great double-feature with THE LEGEND OF NIGGER CHARLEY from '72 which also featured Williamson and Martin in an old west setting.

THE SECRET OF THE MUMMY (1982)

                                      "It's a mummy! What the hell kind of a motel is this?"



 Finally caught a showing of this Brazilian obscurity at the local weird-o theater over the weekend and it was well worth leaving the house for. This has got to be the strangest mummy movie ever made. It all starts off in black and white and looks like something from the 1950's before switching over to (mostly)color. The story deals with a psychotic professor/mad doctor-type who murders a bunch of people to find a mummy who he then injects with an immortality serum. He also has a bald sidekick named Igor who occasionally acts like a super spazzed-out version of Curly from The Three Stooges and likes to have his head licked for sexy fun times. The mummy proceeds to go on a murder/kidnapping-ladies-spree while random newsreel-type footage unspools intermittently.
 The closest thing I can compare this insane trip to is the 2 ANDY WARHOL monster films. Like what if in addition to ANDY WARHOL'S DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN they had also, at the same time, made a MUMMY flick but instead of Europe they made it cheaper down in South America and got ol' Coffin Joe himself to help(Joe's civilian alter-ego Jose Mojica Marins I believe was one of the producers of this and he allegedly appears but since he wasn't wearing his normal threads I musta missed him). There's also a bit of a ROCKY HORROR-vibe going on but without any of that singing and dancing to get in the way of the insanity. With the ample nudity, decapitated head-rolling scene, wacky sex romps and overall weirdness factor I would highly recommend this if you can find it anywhere.
 I will personally be looking for more of director Ivan Cordoso's other films. I know he made one of the later Paul Naschy Hombre-Lobo flicks, so that's probably the easiest to find even though I hear it's not all that great.



                                     Boob-filled Japanese trailer!:

CHINO (1973)

 This is one of those multi-country produced deals so I'm not sure if calling it a spaghetti-western(even though Italy was one of the countries involved) is technically correct so I guess I will just call it a fusion-spaghetti-western.
 This is the Charles Bronson flick where he plays a half-breed Indian(not to be confused with CHATO'S LAND which is the other movie from a year earlier where he does that also). He makes friends with a teen boy(Vincent Van Patten) who he puts to work on his ranch raising horses. Then it just stays a heavy drama and a romantic entanglement with Bronson's real life wife Jill Ireland for most of the movie up until the very end when we get a little bit of the more-typical Bronson-getting-revenge action that you would expect. Pretty disappointing if you're looking for the standard ass-kicking format and the ending is not all that triumphant but if you're a fan of melodramas in the old west and want to see Mr. Bronson in one go for it. AKA THE FREE SPIRIT, THE VALDEZ HORSES, WILD HORSES and VALDEZ THE HALFBREED

SASQUATCH: THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT (1977)

 70s fake-ass-documentary about a band of Bigfoot investigators who travel into the woods to find our elusive title creature. It's basically what would happen if you took that show IN SEARCH OF... and stretched out one of those reenactments that they would do to feature length and then threw in some random animal fights this is the result. Luckily I really liked that show as a kid and this movie probably woulda scared the crap out of me as a kid with it's rock-chucking not-very friendly monster(or monsters since there seems to be more than one on occasion). Watching it recently it does seem a bit dull at times but still an interesting look back at what people were obsessed with in the past before they all were hypnotized by their shiny phones.
 Not to be confused with THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT which was a different and allegedly more "truthful" documentary about ol' Sasquatch that came out a couple of years earlier.

                                      Back when G-rated movies could still be scary!!:

     

ONE BODY TOO MANY (1944)

 I only really watched this movie because of Bela Lugosi which is unfortunate because he's just portraying a supporting character here and he spends most of the time trying to get people to drink coffee which may, or may not, have rat poison in it. This is one of those old creepy house mysteries where people are getting bumped off left and right except here it's mostly all played for laughs. There's a bungling insurance salesman(Jack Haley, best known as The Tin Woodsman from THE WIZARD OF OZ) who gets most of the screen time and he spends that acting pretty stupid. He also manages to get completely nekked at one point but since this is 1944 there is a handy spot for him to hide his shame. This probably will not make too many people laugh these days but it did help me fall asleep one late night so it does serve a purpose.

 

THE BEGUILED (1971)

 In my seemingly never ending quest to watch everything that Clint Eastwood was in during the 60s and 70s I came across this. It's not something I would typically be into from ol' Clint since it's not a western or action flick in any sense. What you get is basically a drama about a Northern Civil War soldier who gets injured and winds up in a Southern all-gals school. While this seems like it might be the perfect set-up for an 80s sex-comedy that's exactly the opposite route this film takes. It's all really  heavy and  also quite pervy as Eastwood either hits on or is hit upon by pretty much everyone regardless of their age and that goes down to a 12-year-old. There's also one slightly jarring dismemberment scene which I was not expecting. All in all a really well done film for what it is which is not surprising since the director is Don Siegel who, of course, is know for the original INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and working a bunch with Eastwood including the great DIRTY HARRY which came out right after this and made everyone forget it existed.
 At the time this was released it flopped since people wanted tough-guy action star Clint and not creepy kid-kissing, romantic guy but for something different it's worth a look.
 There was a 2017 remake of this with Nicole Kidman that looks way too glitzy and polished and I never want to be subjected to it.

This trailer makes it seem like we're getting a way more exploitative experience than you actually get!:

THAT GANG OF MINE (1940)

 The 3rd movie in the East Side Kids series.This one is before they got Huntz Hall so the comedy is not as over-the-top yet and it goes a little heavy on the melodrama at points. The story deals with Muggs(Leo Gorcey) attempting to become a horse-racing jockey and then being a big scaredy cat. It sets up the next movie PRIDE OF THE BOWERY where Muggs decides to be a champion prize-fighter. It's only about an hour long so if you want to see what's basically a more grown-up and slightly more serious version of The Little Rascals on horseback here ya go. I'm more of a fan of the later Hall stuff myself.

POSSESSED (1974)

 Not to be confused with Amando De Ossorio's Spanish EXORCIST-rip-off, or any of the other similarly/generically titled horror flicks, this one is a horror/porn mix. Decidedly heavy on the porn and also surprisingly on the racial-insensitivity(or is it a tale of bringing the races together?). The story, as slight as it is, deals with a couple that move into new house that is haunted by the spirit of a rapey black ghost. If you've ever heard the term 'spook' used to describe black folks this film takes that term quite literally and makes our naughty African-American culprit an actual spiritually malevolent entity. Later on his mate?, a rather large black woman, also shows up to join in the screwing fun while some spooky music plays over the dubbed-in moaning. So basically it's a really shitty porn version of that movie THE ENTITY where Barbara Hershey gets raped by a ghost except that movie didn't come along until the 80s so maybe it's the other way around. Either way it's pretty dull and repetitive and even though the version I viewed was only about an hour long I found myself fast-forwarding to stay awake. AKA THE POSSESSION

The whole filthy mess of a film!

STRAY CAT ROCK: BEAT '71 (1971)

 The fifth and very last of the 'Stray Cats' films. This one is a bit different because instead of a bad-ass female biker gang our heroes now are a bunch of hippies. One of them does carry a gun though and they're not above resorting to violence, or crazy-gluing a guy's ass to a chair, when necessary. I was gonna rank this one as my least favorite for this and also that they introduce a kid that they travel around with but then right in the middle of the film my favorite Japanese garage-rock band The Mops show up and perform a song on the back of a truck in a completely random scene that made me reevaluate the whole movie. Also there's a pretty explosive finale with a cool shootout in an old-western town. AKA STRAY CAT ROCK: CRAZY RIDER '71


 These films are really hard to rank since they are all almost equally entertaining but here is my list at the moment from best to worst:
 1. STRAY CAT ROCK: SEX HUNTER - This is the first and only one of the films that I've re-watched multiple times now. I think it gets the combination of snazzy music and groovy visuals down the best out of them all and is probably the one newbies should start with.
2. STRAY CAT ROCK: WILD JUMBO - I think when I first watched this one I wasn't sure how I felt about it but after thinking about it more I give it extra points for melding in a heist plot to end things up in a, standard for this series, downbeat fashion.
3. STRAY CAT ROCK: BEAT '71 - Even with all the hippies and a kid we still get a bad-guy biker gang and some of the best garage rock from Japan!
4. STRAY CAT ROCK: MACHINE ANIMAL - Making me hate the girls right from the start was a bit of a downer for me with this one and also the ending seems a bit abrupt.
5. STRAY CAT ROCK: DELINQUENT GIRL BOSS - Strangely enough the very first film in the series is probably the one I found the least exciting. Glad they kept going though.

STRAY CAT ROCK: MACHINE ANIMAL (1970)

 The 4th film in the Japanese STRAY CAT ROCK series of girl gang flicks. This one starts out by throwing me a curveball and making me hate the girls after they rob some poor LSD-peddlers of their stash and, to add insult to injury, steal their car and slash up the seats. Things do settle down in a more predictable way and you do get back on their side before the plot is really set into motion. Having been filmed all in the same year this does have a lot of similarities to the earlier 3 films with the male gang, The Dragons, being the main villains. There are also some differences with the leader of The Dragons being a handicapped lady(Bunjaku Han) and some political ideas thrown in as one of our "heroes" is a military deserter who wants to escape Japan and The Vietnam War. Things do end pretty nihilistically which I'm usually a fan of but it did seem a bit disjointed here with the tone of the rest of the movie. I'm not exactly sure where I would rank this one but it was interesting and artfully shot. I still have one more film in this series to catch and then maybe I can make some kinda list.

                                                     LONG LIVE LSD!

 

CRIMINAL AFFAIR (1968)

 I originally bought this DVD for 50 cents about 15 years ago so I figured it was about time I gave it a spin. What you get is an Italian crime-caper/comedic drama that starts out with this criminal fellow(writer/director/star Rossano Brazzi) getting berated by his mom because he has no money even though he is a master thief. Then later-on Ann Margret shows up and things get a bit sexier. Ann goes skinny-dipping at one point but I'm guessing they probably used a body-double for those scenes since we never see her face and bare-ass in the same shot. Then finally there's this big robbery at an opera which involves using electricity to put people to sleep somehow. Not much of this made a whole lotta sense and it's all pretty dumb. There's some stupid THREE STOOGES-esque fight scenes and that, along with some scantily-clad 60s ladies, were the only things that made this even slightly interesting. Give it as look only if you really like nonsensical Eurocheese.
 The Italian title translates to 7 MEN AND ONE BRAIN.

THE SENTINEL (1977)

 There's some very disturbing imagery that pops up in this decidedly strange Hollywood horror flick of the 70s including most notably an old man getting an UN CHIEN ANDALOU-esque eyeball slicing and then having his nose hacked off for good measure. It also has a really heavyweight cast that you wouldn't think would show up in something like this including Martin Balsam, Burgess Meredith, Eli Wallach, Christopher Walken, Ava Gardner etc. I guess only in the 70s would you get talent like that in a movie that also features a bunch of real-life sideshow freaks and a freakily made-up John Carradine. The plot itself, dealing with demons and guardians of hell, seems like something you might appreciate more, and find more scary, if you were more of the religious-type but the weirdness factor makes this one an interesting oddity to check out.
 Director Michael Winner, who previously made the original DEATH WISH, would go on to make a couple more DEATH WISH flicks with the great Bronson so he's top-notch in my book.