Androids with four arms! Curvaceous, lifelike inflatable women! Bald interplanetary kidnappers dressed in dark raincoats and wearing shades! Human mutants and laboratory rejects! A bizarre space-age cabaret where all of the performers are dressed as giant butterflies! These are just a few of the sights you’ll see on The Wild, Wild Planet (1966), a groovy Italian science-fiction adventure directed by Antonio Margheriti.
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One of countless Eurospy actioners released in the wake of the James Bond film craze in the sixties, Secret Agent Super Dragon (aka New York chiama Superdrago, 1966) has been mercilessly ridiculed on MST3K but served straight up, it’s often funnier in its own poker-faced way and has some oddball flourishes to set it apart from its fellow spy wannabes. I know it denotes a certain immaturity in the writer to even do a post on this, yet I am compelled…I must!
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Often relegated to the ranks of sexploitation filmmakers, French director Jean Rollin has enjoyed a critical reassessment in recent years that he never experienced during his prolific filmmaking years in France, where he was mostly dismissed by the country’s leading critics. Many of his films utilized horror film conventions (graveyards, vampires, zombies) as well as exploitation tactics (gore and nudity) but combined them in a way that were uniquely his own. The Iron Rose (1973, aka La rose de fer), however, was a complete departure from Rollin’s previous efforts and was unlike anything he would ever attempt again. Closer in form to an experimental film than something that would fit comfortably into the horror genre, the movie is a macabre mood piece with poetic touches that recalls the films of Jean Cocteau and Georges Franju. Continue reading
This one sentence synopsis should sound familiar. A group of travelers are stranded during a severe storm at a creepy mansion where the hosts are the most unsettling part of the experience. It’s an audience-pleasing premise has served countless mystery thrillers and horror-comedies from James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932) to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) to Stuart Gordon’s Dolls (1987). But The Unnaturals (1969), directed by Antonio Margheriti, is one of the few dark and stormy night movies that stands out from the pack by virtue of its genre resistant narrative which begins as a decadent character study, slowly morphs into a supernatural thriller and signs off as an apocalyptic morality tale. Continue reading
Cinema Sojourns 