TOWER OF SCREAMING VIRGINS (1968)

 When I think of the title TOWER OF SCREAMING VIRGINS the last thing I would think of would be an old-timey swash-buckling epic that takes place in the middle ages with a bunch of political intrigue and double-crosses.  I would think maybe horror and they do call the queen here a witch a few times but she's not actually a witch and never does anything really witchy at all besides having people killed after she bangs them which I think makes her more of a black widow spider than a witch.  There are a few murders but it's never scary or all that spooky in any way.  I might also think sexploitation and although there's a few nudie scenes here and there and even one bit with some unexpected incestual sex, I wouldn't call this a sexploitation flick.  What you basically have here is the dreaded drama disguised as an exploitation film.  While it's well done enough for what it is, it's really not my kind of film.  Maybe if it was called something else it wouldn't feel so disappointing but as it is I can't help but feel that they wasted a great title.

BRUCE LEE IN NEW GUINEA (1978)

 This starts out with some funky soul music and then Bruce Lee-imitator Bruce Li beats up some bullies.  From there it's off to some kung fu island adventures.  Apparently everyone in New Guinea does snake-style kung fu and is part of a tribe of snakepeople led by a guy who wears the occasional skull mask and has a pit of poisonous snakes right in the middle of his living room.  The great Bolo Yeung is part of our evil gang.   A very racist depiction of a black man shows up about halfway through the movie and has one very memorable line of "I knows dat dey keeps dat snake pearl hidden dere" before falling into the snake pit like a jackass.  There's also a couple of white guys that suck at kung fu to even out the racism scales a bit.  An ape, or a guy in an ape suit if you wanna be technical, helps out the princess of the snake people with his martial arts and acrobatic skills and lots of people get chop-sockied to death.  This ones just wacky enough to separate itself  from some of the more boring kung fu flicks of the past.  
 I wonder what year they stopped making these Bruce Lee rip-off films and if anyone anywhere was ever fooled into thinking the real Bruce would show up in any of them.  AKA BRUCE LI IN NEW GUINEA, LAST FIST OF FURY and BRUCE LEE IN SNAKE ISLAND

In-a-gada-da-vida-baby!:
   

THE REBEL ROUSERS (1970)

 After EASY RIDER was a big hit there came a whole slew of these outlaw biker flicks and many of them, like this one here, had an all-star cast.  Cameron Mitchell is our main main, not looking nearly as bloated as I'm used to seeing him, as a fellow who runs across some bikers led by Bruce Dern who he went to college with.  This doesn't stop the gang from beating the shit out of him just for the hell of it.  These are the kind of bikers that I don't think are necessarily evil but they don't really give a fuck about what they have to do to have a good time or a cheap thrill.  Dern is the only one of them who has any kind of conscience at all regarding his actions and this leads to some bickering and bike-racing on the beach.  Their disregard for decency  might eventually lead our gang of knucklehead hog-riders into the neighborhood of rape and murder as the movie goes on and things get more serious.  Diane Ladd, who is in a few of these biker flicks and later on the mom in WILD AT HEART, is Cameron's lady friend and the object of Jack Nicholson's molesting hands and tongue.  Nicholson is pretty awesome here as a sleazeball in awesome stripey-pants who will fuck over his best friend for a thrill.  Harry Dean Stanton is also part of the gang in a stupid-looking suit and pork-pie hat.  While overall this film teases a lot more violence than you actually get onscreen(you mostly just get a lot of general mayhem and anarchy) it's still a neat little low-budget, time-capsule, throwback, drive-in semi-classic that would play all the time on TV back when I was a kid and broadcast TV had a reason to exist.    
 This was actually filmed in '67 and not released until after EASY RIDER to cash in on the Nicholson connection.

“With the unbridled passion of men possessed, they blasted their way through all opposition in a campaign of sexual self-indulgence that left nothing but burned-out shells of humanity strewn in their path.”:

THE WILD RIDE (1960)

 
 A young Jack Nicholson stars here as a beatniky leader of a gang of juvenile delinquents.  He spends his time racing hot-rods, playing chicken with cars(and a motorcycle cop who he ends up killing), dumping an older married woman who's been having an affair with him and being an all around bully(or "top stud" as he's called over and over) to his gang of followers.  It all ends in tragedy and heartbreak and old people have their view of the horror of young people reinforced once again.  This is a pretty standard J.D. film that coulda came out in the 50's and probably seemed dated a few years after it was released.  Some of the weird slang is cool to hear today though.       
 Strangely enough I own this on a biker movie DVD triple feature disc and there's no bikes or bikers anywhere to be seen.    
 This is a black & white film but there's a newer colorized version of this titled VELOCITY which has some modern wraparound scenes added where a guy(who is supposed to be Nicholson) is talking about his youth and then it flashes back to the real movie.  I haven't seen that version but I've read that it's pretty awful. 

SCHOOLGIRL REPORT: WHAT PARENTS DON'T THINK IS POSSIBLE (1970)

                                    "Think of what you can do with sausages"

 So apparently there's 13 of of these German Schoolgirl Report movies so I guess they were kinda popular and from what I see here they seem to be sexploitation flicks mixed with a mondo movie/documentary style.  So what you get is little silly sex vignettes inter-cut with German citizens being interviewed about their ideas on sex and a voice-over narrative explaining what all these sexual hijinks might mean to society.  I suppose this was all a lot more shocking when it originally was released and I think overall I'm more of a fan of the more comedic and less academic type German soft-core sex flicks but I do like it's strong stance on truth which I'm personally a big fan of and naturally you still get tons of naked boobs and loads of Germanic Eurobush so that's nice.  Also many of the girls depicted are supposed to be playing schoolgirls under the age of 18 and you get a clip of some horses fucking so that might make you feel like more of a pervert while watching which might be a plus for some viewers.  It also reinforces the idea that Europe is a much more open, less puritanical place than America even back some 40 years ago.  Perv on!
 AKA THE SCHOOL GIRLS and CONFESSIONS OF A SIXTH FORM GIRL(this is the U.K. title and I have no idea what the hell it means??)

SUPER KUNG FU KID (1973)

                            "The fellow is good at kung fu.  Who is he actually?"

 I'd heard comedian Joey Diaz rave about this movie recently, under it's U.S. release title KARADO: THE HONG KONG CAT, along with all the Bruce Lee classics and since he's never steered me wrong before I figured I would check it out.  Apparently it was a very inventive idea back in the early 70's to put metal tips on your nun-chucks  and that's what our hero does here.  While this isn't the most original movie you could see I suppose it's decent enough in this genre.  Of course the Bruce Lee classics from this era are way superior in comparison.  This is your basic revenge tale that puts super-long fight scenes in place of an actual plot.  Strangely a few characters seem to have been dubbed by Grover from Sesame Street which seems like an odd choice for a voice-over guy.  You get the great Chinese Hercules himself, Bolo Yeung, here in a sweet 70's mustache and perfectly parted hair as our bad guy and a lot of fighting on a boat.  Only really recommended for hardcore kung fu nuts.  AKA KARADO: THE KUNG FU FLASH and SUPERIOR YOUNGSTER

I SAW THE DEVIL (2010)

 Similar to the movies of Park Chan-Wook, this Korean horror/serial-killer movie is a really well done and well-acted film about what happens when revenge becomes all-consuming and turns a victim of a crime into what may be the equal force of evil in combating it.  It features Choi Min-Sik(who was also the titular star of Chan-Wook's OLDBOY) as our psychopathic/rapist/all-around deviant fellow and he's perfectly creepy in that role.  While I wouldn't say this is as good as Chan-Wook's films I think it works great as a revenge story that mixes horror elements along with more standard Hong Kong-style action bits and is worth a watch.  I also felt that this plays like a great bloody Asian version of The Punisher story but with more knives and kung fu and less guns.
 The Korean censors made director Kim Jee-Won cut about 10 minutes of gore footage from this to get a release and this theatrical version is the one I've seen.  A longer cut played at festivals and is supposed to be super graphic but that would bring the total run-time up to over 2 and a half hours which seems a little excessive for a story that I think could have played out in a shorter form pretty easily.

WOMEN IN CELLBLOCK 9 (1978)

 While this doesn't top 1975's BARBED WIRE DOLLS as my favorite Jess Franco-directed women in prison flick, it is a pretty similar adventure in the land of ultra-sleazy sex and violence behind bars in South America.  Loaded wall to wall with full nudity, our main female prisoners here don't even get prison outfits of any sort.   There's a wicked lady warden in the mold of ILSA and Howard Vernon as a crazy, torture-happy doctor.  You get a hamster shoved into a vagina, a rhino horn in an ass and other abuses to sensitive female private parts.  Rape, of the living and dead, happens and there's a completely nihilistic ending which is usually my favorite type of ending.   
 Allegedly one of the actresses here, Susan Hemingway, was under 18 when this was filmed which caused this movie to be banned in England.  From what info I can find she was actually most likely 18 at the time of shooting but I guess the censors in England didn't bother finding that out and just went by her young looks.  Because of this some versions have scenes featuring Hemingway deleted.  AKA TROPICAL INFERNO and ESCAPE FROM THE ISLAND OF DEATH

A CANDLE FOR THE DEVIL (1973)

 "there are only two kinds of men: the righteous, who think they are sinners; and the sinners, who think they are righteous."

 A great little slice of Euro-horror from Spain made by Eugenio Martin, who also did the great HORROR EXPRESS.  This film concerns a couple of self-righteous religious wackos running a hotel who accidentally kill a gal they deem to be a whore because she's committing the unpardonable sin of sunbathing in a bathing suit.  Then they decide they are the avenging hand of god and go on a kill-crazy, slut-snuffing spree.  One of their victims' sisters shows up and people start getting suspicious about all these missing persons.
 Great acting, blood, boobs and great atmospheric eurotrash chills make this one worth checking out.  I'm kinda surprised that it's not better known but that might be due to it's kinda bland titles.  AKA IT HAPPENED AT NIGHTMARE INN

MINNESOTA CLAY (1964)

 The great thing about spaghetti-westerns is that they're generally not the same as old time boring American westerns.  So when you get one like this here that's basically in the same exact mold as a typical U.S. western it always feels like a bit of a letdown to me.  This one covers all the bases and you get the expected nasty Mexican bandits, including the great Fernando Sancho who's always good in the role as the scummy bandit here as our head bad guy.  In the role of revenge-seeking hero we get Cameron Mitchell as a slowly-going-blind gunslinger and he does a decent enough job but overall you're probably better off watching director Sergio Corbucci's later films(including one of the best Eurowesterns ever in DJANGO) for a better time.

 

PREHISTORIC WOMEN (1950)

 This is a weird one.  A tale of cave-women who are sorta history's first feminists, except this is the 50's so the feminist message gets a little skewed when they encounter some hunky cave-fellows.  They take these beefcakes hostage and boss them around so it all seems like some sorta weird fetish movie for guys who wanted to submit to ladies in skimpy loincloths.  The other strange thing is the whole movie has people talking in silly caveman-talk while a narrator tells use what the hell is going on.  There's a giant prehistoric man who fights a tiger, another guy who wrestles a black panther and at one point the monster bird from THE GIANT CLAW shows up.  It's all shot in primitive color and while it's not a particularly exciting movie it's at least watchable once as a weird curiosity piece. This was re-released, in black and white, as THE VIRGIN GODDESS.

NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES (1969)

 
 Caught an awesome theatrical showing of this last night hosted by sleaze/rockabilly wild-man Johnny Legend.  Although it doesn't feature the great Santo or Blue Demon this one is probably my favorite of the lucha-libre/horror movies from Mexico.  It covers all three bases as far as blood, breasts & beasts go.  You get a half-man/ half-gorilla going around tearing the clothes off women, attempting rape and also tearing people apart with his bare hands.  Heads roll, eyes roll and there's some masked lady wrasslin' to break up this "orgy of terror".  Thanks to director Rene Cardona, who is basically just remaking his earlier film DOCTOR OF DOOM, this piles up the 70's blood and crazy over-the-top gore, including real scenes of some heart surgery, enough to make fans of later splatter-filled movies happy.  Thank you Mexico!
 AKA GOMAR: THE HUMAN GORILLA & HORROR AND SEX .

RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR (1984)

 Italian shlock-master Bruno Mattei here gets the brilliant idea of combining the post-apocalypse action film with the animals-gone-nutso horror flick.  While not a great example of either genre it at least has enough goofy moments to make for a fun, head-scratchingly dumb watch.
 The plot involves a biker gang roaming around after the holocaust who take shelter in a deserted scientists lab that is full of nasty rodents that occasionally fly into people's faces and eat them.  Most of the rat attack scenes involve someone off-screen dumping a bucket full of rats on someone's head, which I find pretty humorous.  One of the stranger scenes is when one of our gang members gets attacked by rats and instead of trying to help the poor guy they figure it's best to first shoot him with a flame-thrower and then, after a few minutes of being burned alive, he's finally put out of his misery with a gunshot.  It's all topped off with a ridiculous ending and you also get the hooker gal from DEMONS, Geretta Geretta, as what appears to be a mentally-challenged black chick ingeniously named Chocolate, then again pretty much every character in this acts like a complete retard and that might be it's biggest charm.  AKA BLOOD KILL and THE RIFFS III(in Germany this is the 3rd part of the Bronx Warriors saga following 1990: BRONX WARRIORS and ESCAPE FROM THE BRONX)

RATS!: