They delve into the world of exploitation films, with Doc expressing a preference for lower-budget genres such as horror and crime, while also noting the cultural differences in war films from various countries, especially between British and American perspectives during World War II. They highlight notable directors like Roger Corman, Jesus Franco, and Lucio Fulci, who are known for their contributions to exploitation cinema. The conversation also touches on the evolution of film distribution, particularly the transition from direct-to-video to streaming platforms, and the emergence of contemporary exploitation films.

Weird Wild Cinema

Bad AI Transcript

you know, people are like worried about what somebody’s doing as if all these people don’t do things themselves. I mean, chances are pretty good they have sex or they masturbate in their spare time. Everybody looks at pornography. We’ve all at one time or another looked at it. Right. I mean, as long as it’s not creeping into your… Exactly, yeah. you’re not at work doing these things in front of, you know, people who don’t want them to happen in front of them, then you’re probably okay. Right. Yeah, exactly. You know, I’m a great believer in that. What you do in private, as long as it’s legal ish, as long as you do it in private, you know, as long as it’s all between consenting adults, then no problem. Yeah. So, uh,
This is Bob, and this is Doc, and we’re doing a conversation. We’re going to talk about Doc Loves Movies, and I know Doc through The Overnightscape. So, Frank’s Overnightscape universe, can we call it that at this point? Now that everybody has their own universe, can Frank have the Overnightscape universe? Is that possible? I think he’s probably the only person I know who does. Because, you know, that’s what they’re branding all these, all these things as the, you know, the various universes. So there you go. I think we can call that the overnight. And, and so, yeah, I thought it’d be fun to have a chat and we were, we’re kind of jumped in the middle a little bit. Doc was just telling me about a person who had a horror
site and got themselves in a little bit of hot water because they worked in childcare and somebody’s like, you can’t, those two things are incongruous and can’t happen in the same world apparently. So I didn’t, I didn’t know that, but I mean, everything happens at the same time. So, you know, who knows what’s going on, but tell me doc, what’s, so if you had to say, these are my, films of interest, like genre-wise, or not even genre, but maybe it goes across genres. How would you describe your film intake? Probably the most basic description would be exploitation. Generally lower-budgeted films, but not always. The trade in genres that can range from, you know, horror, through science fiction, crime even, crime. Occasionally they do actually verge on pornography. Most exploitation does because I’m afraid nudity sex and nudity sells. Yeah, there you go. That’s, you know, that I’m afraid is a fact. As does violence. Sadly, it shouldn’t. Yeah.
Yeah, and there’s all sorts of sub-genres. There’s some I don’t like so much. I don’t like Nazi exploitation particularly. As far as them being the villain or them being the hero? Well, Nazi exploitation basically films, they’re set against the background of World War II. Ilse, what was she called? Oh, She-Wolf. She-Wolf. Yeah, She-Wolf. I really don’t want that sort of thing. Because, well, I’m old enough and not old enough to remember World War II. Obviously, it ended some time before I was born. But I grew up with relatives. Right, yeah. They served in World War II. And, you know, that was just something that was off. And it is a particularly unpleasant thing, I think. I just really don’t think that concentration camps
and genocide are a suitable subject for exploration. To put them as the backdrop of your film. Yeah. I mean, some of the films themselves, they’re quite interested in the background of making them. There was one made where all the Nazi concentration camp sets were actually the sets from Opens Heroes repurposed after the Soviet Union, produced by Bork and Kupfer, along with a lot of German uniforms. Right. Yeah. That’s bizarre. But Hogan’s Heroes is one of those bizarre tales in and of itself because of its history and twists and turns. Bing Crosby was the producer of Hogan’s Heroes, which is kind of a weird tangent as well, if anybody remembers who Bing Crosby is. But yeah, to have a sitcom basically of World War II POWs is just at a time when
at that time, a lot of the viewing public would have been veterans. They would have been POWs. Yes, they would have been there. If you watch British war films in the 50s and 60s, one of the predominant sub-genres is POW films. Because for the British soldiers, because of Dunkirk and so many captured there, that became the predominant war experience for a huge section of British war veterans. That’s what they remembered. So they made films about it. But isn’t that interesting, though? You would think that they would avoid that subject because it probably wasn’t the best. I can’t imagine that the Nazis were great hosts even to the people that they weren’t exterminating. Well, it depended, really. I mean, the thing that meant that they weren’t treated well
extremely badly at most Allied bases. We won’t kill you. We’ll just beat you a little bit. There were a lot of German POWs incarcerated in the UK and Canada and they didn’t want them to be mistreated. So it was a good pro quo. The Luftwaffe in particular, they ran the POW camps for Allied airmen who’d been shot down. Of course, there were a lot of lot of Luftwaffe crewmen incarcerated in the UK after the Battle of Britain. And they were mistreated. They mistreat the British and American POWs. Soviet POWs, different matter. They didn’t care about them because they were Slavs and therefore saw them as basically subhuman. Right. Yeah. Hey, that’s great. Well, Well, if people haven’t figured it out, uh, doc is British and he lives in great Britain. And so, I mean, even, so I had relatives, you know, like great, uh, uncles who were in the world war two, right. And so forth. And we’re still alive whenever I was little. And, um, and so, yeah, I mean, it is a different thing. And, and in America, we didn’t suffer, um,
the same way that the British did. Cause you know, if you watch the archives, the, you know, everything got bombed and, um, yeah, it was decimated in some areas. And so we did not get the, we got the experience, you know, you can’t have chocolate and you guys, uh, had to hide in the underground. So, yeah, exactly. It’s a, it’s a key thing that British and American war films, um, they reflect two different experiences of the war. So many of ours, there’s POW camps, and also it’s about the home front. It’s about being stoic in the face of this onslaught, which you couldn’t do anything about if you were a civilian. You got bombed whether you liked it or not. Convoys were being sunk. You didn’t get food. You didn’t get bananas. Bananas became unknown in Britain during the war. Of course, to the US, the US homeland wasn’t under threat. That wasn’t an experience.
their experience of World War II focuses more on them being victorious. Right, yeah. We’re winning. We’re going to win. You start with Kasserine Pass in North Africa. But then after that, it was generally a more positive sort of experience. Yeah. Any war can be positive. Well, I mean, if you think about movies as a business… those movies made a lot of money. And so it was very positive in that regard. There are many, many good American war movies, but they do reflect a different perspective to British war movies. And if you’ve ever seen German war movies, obviously they have a very different perspective. They’re very perspective about why they followed the Nazi leadership for so long and all these moral questions. Japanese war movies…
were interesting because a lot of them were made by the same people who made Godzilla films. And they have lots of miniature ships and things in them and planes and these huge battles. That’s interesting because, you know, I don’t think that I’ve ever seen, personally, I’ve ever seen a German or Japanese war movie. They do turn up at Europe so often. The most schizophrenic are Italian war movies. because they were on the wrong side for most of the wars. So Italian war movies are full of Italian actors pretending to be British or American. And the villains were always Germans, never the Italians. The Italians very rarely feature in their own war movies. Interesting. Yeah. See, that’s why we don’t get that over here so much. Being in Europe, I think there’s a little bit maybe more access over the years. Yeah.
now it would be, I suppose there should be access with streaming, but it’s not, you know, we’re kind of past that that date and I the goopy thing, what really hits me in the head when you mentioned that was the fact that I took, I have a film degree and I took a class on war movies. And I was thinking back and I’m like, we never, I don’t remember ever watching a foreign war movie. We watched British movies, we watched American movies, but I don’t remember watching anything outside of that unless… And I’m pretty sure this was in the Japanese movie. I watched a movie called Hiroshima Mon Amour. I don’t know if a Japanese made that or not. It’s a very interesting movie about… French, okay. Yeah, but it was… Yeah, well, maybe the Mon Amour would have gave it away to me. But the…
about the, uh, atomic, uh, you know, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And it’s, it’s, you know, an extremely sad movie. Right. Uh, and, but it’s also quite artful if that’s possible. It was. Yeah. you see french different experience again with their war movies they’re all often about the resistance. Right. Oh, right. Yeah. Exactly. Why wouldn’t? They’re more like American movies, though, in a way, because they’re the victors, right? They persevered. But it’s also about the guilt of occupation and the number of Frenchmen who collaborated. This is the whole Vichy regime that existed in France. And, yeah, they very conflicted the French about the war as a result. Probably the best French war movie I ever saw was what translates into English as Army of the Shadows.
by Jean-Pierre Melville, and it’s about the French resistance. And it’s interesting because Melville, who became known for crime movies, actually was in the French resistance during the war. And so it’s very insightful about what went on and about how they spent so much of their time not fighting the Germans directly, but fighting French collaborators. Oh, yeah. And the Vichy regime, they spent so much of their time fighting against that. rather than the actual Germans. And it’s a fascinating film. That’s a lesson for today. I mean, you always spend more time fighting the corruption in your own system than you ever do the enemy. Doesn’t it seem that way? Absolutely, yes. It’s there. The other thing Army of the Shadows does is often in more recent times, post-1970s,
There’s been a lot made in about, they tried to show that there’s this terrible rivalry between the communist resistance and the Gaullist resistance who followed General de Gaulle. And according to Melville, he was on the Gaullist side. He said, you know, the fact is, while the war was on, there wasn’t because they had a common enemy. Right. Right, exactly. You know, they were fighting the occupation. And it was, you know. The enemy of an enemy, right? Yeah. Yeah, they disagreed on politics, but hey, who doesn’t? You know, that was their attitude. But that’s okay. We’ve got to get these Nazis. Exactly. That’s wild, though. But, I mean, that’s an interesting thing that’s happened with all that. Because, yeah, I know they, you know, historically, at least in Japan, you know, after the war ended finally, there was a huge…
push to industrialize Japan, right? I mean, it was a Herculean effort to get them, you know, being in the manufacturing and everything. And, of course, that had to do with film because, yeah, Godzilla was in 1959, I think, is the original Godzilla. Even earlier than that, I think about 55, wasn’t it? 55, maybe? Okay. And, I mean, and so, yeah, they, I mean, they had to do stuff before that, but I’m just saying that There obviously was a push to have them have their own film industry as well as part of that rebuilding. Of course, Godzilla was in part symbolic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They’ve kind of got away from that, I think, in the newer iterations of things. But yeah, when it first came out, that was the big thing was we irradiated the lizard and there you go.
There are interesting subjects in the Kaiju films. Apparently Mothra, the giant moth, apparently that is part of the beginning of a reassertion of Japanese traditional values within the context of the film. There’s a whole subtext there about how Japan needs to reassert its values in the face of this Western occupation, because there was a fear that Western culture was overtaking Japan completely, and they would forget wrong culture and in Mothra, Mothra is an interesting, because there’s this fictional country who are trying to exploit Mothra. And, um, it’s obviously meant to be the united States, but they can’t call it that. Yes. The United States it’s the whole of the west and western culture it represents and how, you know these they’re not inherently bad, but they’re, they’re, um,
Their values clash sometimes with Japanese values. Do you remember the name of it or they just never said the country? I can’t remember what they called it, but yeah, it was so clearly meant to be America. I remember watching Mothra. I’ve watched a lot of times when I was younger and not thinking about all this stuff. I haven’t watched it probably as a know an adult but uh but they i mean those were always the, I, I love those type of movies right the monster movie was what we would call it here. And they would have it on the funny thing for me, at least they’d have it on the weekends, right? At night after the news. But where i lived, they had this thing called the early show, which was on after school. And it was, they would play monster movies. And so i would see, I saw a lot of the monster movies after school, you’d come home from school.
You could watch King Kong, Godzilla, Monster Zero, all that kind of stuff after school because they had to fill that time until the news came on. So, yeah, it was slightly different. It was weird to have it on in the afternoon, but it happened. I think for the country, you know what I mean? I think in the U.S., monster movies were on late at night, but not in the market that I was in. Yeah, I think over here, monster movies were usually considered okay for kids to see. Right, yeah. They were all rated G, even though everybody was getting killed, but that’s okay. But horror films had to be shown later. Right, yeah. Formative influence on me. BBC Two in the 70s, and, wow, way beyond the 70s, must be the 80s, 90s, used to run on Saturday nights. During the summer, the horror double bill, where they would
Air up these old horror movies. And that’s where I got through most of the Hammer films, most of the Universal films, and sundry other horror movies from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. It was an education for me. It really was. Yeah, I mean, I grew up with the Hammer films as well, late at night. And I don’t know what I’m trying to think. It wasn’t they weren’t Hammer, but all the Edgar Allan Poe movies. Oh, they are. Yeah, they were part of the mix. We had the horror double bill. They were fun. Vincent Price and the pendulum and all that good kind of stuff. Now, you mentioned earlier you were into exploitation. I mean, would they fall into the exploitation genre very much? Yeah, when they’re made by American International, one of the primary forces in exploitation is
The funny thing, they did nature movies as well, which is the funny thing. They did a bunch of nature movies. The main business is based on churning out really quickly films, cheap films they could pair into double bills. There might be science films, there might be tea movies, hot rod movies, surf movies. Remember those? Oh, yeah. At least bang them up on double bills because that way you’ve got all of the revenue from the program. Hammer followed suit. In the UK, Hammer films used to go on double bills. They used to produce them as double bills. And of course, with the Edgar Allan Poe’s in particular, of course, it’s Roger Corbin directing them. He was the king of exploitation. I mean, lately I’ve watched a lot of films from his later company, New World. Right, yeah. New World Cinema, right? Yeah, oh, they’re magnificent in their cheapness
And actually, the entertainment value, they know not to run over 90 minutes. Most run about 80 minutes. They know not to go beyond that. And they throw everything into them. Have you seen the Fantastic Four version from Corman? Yeah, that was to keep the copyright on it. Right. Yeah, that was so funny. I mean, it never got released officially, I don’t think, but… The internet has a way, right? Absolutely, yeah. No, I mean, lately I’ve seen quite a few of the Corman produced, New World produced nurse movies. You know, The Young Nurses, Candy Strike Nurses. Okay. Titles like this. And they all concern like three girls who start a career as nurses and all that. And it throws everything and, you know, A bit of sex and nudity. Some crime is in the crime subplot. Medical subplots. Some of the early steps involved in getting involved with black revolutionaries. I have never seen any of those. Oh, they’re magnificent. They’re worth looking for. And they did a parallel series about student teachers, which same formula, just set in a high school. Yeah.
That’s funny. Yeah, it used to be here we had, you know, those would be like driving culture, right? So back in the, yeah, even into the 80s. So I saw Star Wars at the drive-in, believe it or not, if you can believe, you know. Yeah, along with the Isle of Dr. Moreau, the old one from 77. And that was the double feature at the drive-in. And that time period ran into the 80s a bit and then kind of driving culture. here kind of died in the eighties, I would say. And that was when the rise of the multiplex for us. And you didn’t really get that. Do you think though, you know, as far as exploitation picks and so forth, I guess they, I mean, they’re not the, they’re not quite the same as it was because I think production values for everything are so much better and, and you don’t get the, what I would call, you know,
obvious, you know, exploitation movies that come out. Now we have Quentin Tarantino is taking the exploitation movie and making it mainstream, right? So that’s what we have now. I mean, Cocaine Bear, for Christ’s sake, is an exploitation movie that’s not. It’s mainstream. I must admit, I surprised myself by enjoying Cocaine Bear when I saw it. It was really terrible, and I really enjoyed it. Because as you say, it’s an exploitation film and it follows all the rules of an exploitation film and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s very, very enjoyable. But do you think because of that they’ve kind of killed the exploitation? Oh, traditional exploitation, yeah. If you want to dig deep enough to the real crud, you can find the modern equipment, those direct to, well, they used to be directed
to DVD or direct-to-video. Now they’re direct-to-streaming movies. Look through the lower levels of Amazon Prime and things like that, you know, and you will find some dreadful, dreadful crud. Some of it, I’m ashamed to say, made in the UK. So I guess that’s true. I didn’t think about that because they don’t – They don’t take the moniker on. They don’t take it anymore. They don’t say, yeah, and be proud of it, you know? Yeah, I mean, I saw one. I can’t even remember all the details. It had something to do with dinosaurs suddenly reappearing. And it was shot in the UK. Well, it was actually shot in Northern Ireland. I got a tax break. Yeah, basically, they got a grant to film with it. It wasn’t Velociraptor or Velociraptor.
Oh, no, this one was terrible. It was populated entirely by non-actors, directed by a non-director, as far as I can see, because he had no idea. And it uses CGI, so effects of the dinosaurs. So obviously they’re better than they used to be. You know, some rubber glove puppet. Right. Still really clunky CGI. And, you know, the budget doesn’t even run to having the right equipment for the soldiers who appear in it. You know, I’m sorry, multiple soldiers, do you not carry what looked like Winchester rifles? You know. That’s what they had available. Well, I think somebody had a younger brother who still had a cowboy outfit, so I don’t know. That’s funny. You know, it really was dreadful. Unfortunately, not so dreadful it was entertaining. It was a real dreadful experience.
It wasn’t so bad. It was good. It was just so bad. It’s just so bad. It was bad. I mean, unfortunately that’s typical of a strand of filmmaking we have now because streaming has such a voracious demand for content and it doesn’t matter whether it’s any good or not. They’ll pay the films off. I mean, Oh, some get a cult following. I don’t know if you ever come across it. It’s another British film called zombies have fallen. I haven’t seen that. I’m not as big a zombie person. That’s just dreadful as well. Because it starts off as one thing, then decides it’s going to be a comedy towards the end. For no reason at all. And it’s just… The conversation in the background. We’ve been watching the dailies. I think you need to take a different tact. Yeah.
Maybe you can do this. I’ll be fair. They’re probably into amateur dramatics. And because it’s shot in the north of England, they’ve all got northern accents. I’m a southerner. So to me, it just always sounds more than ludicrous. People going around, ah, Bayek or whatever, you know, there’s a zombie. No, no, no. So have you caught any? good ones on the streaming that I hear recently that you would say, you know what, this is worth a look. I caught a couple of I felt very entertained. Last night I saw, finally caught up with The Arrival from 1979. Which is one of those Italian films that was shot in the US with a mainly American cast. And it’s absolutely insane. It’s a film made by a madman as far as I can see.
It’s fascinating because it’s obviously quite a good budget, but it takes all of these ideas from other films that have recently been successful. They clearly, they thought, oh, Star Wars has been successful. We need a science fiction. The Exorcist was popular. Omen was popular. There’s even a scene which seems to refer to the Hall of Mirror scene in the Orson Welles film, Woman from Shanghai. Lady from Shanghai. There’s a touch of the birds at the end. But they recast all in science fiction terms. So, you know, there’s this dude played by an uncredited Franco Nero who appears to be some kind of cosmic Jesus. Looking after these bald children on a far-off planet. And anyway, his emissary to Earth to try and round up the offspring of this evil entity who died
thousands of years ago and is continually trying to resurrect himself. He sends his entity, the visitor, played by John Huston, who was… John Huston getting a payday right there. Absolutely. And it’s… There’s this little girl who is the latest. She has telekinetic powers, like Carrie, another recent popular release. And she… She’s being dominated by her evil side. But funnily enough, the little girl playing her, she actually does the evil bit quite well. But it’s all undercut, certainly for a UK viewer, the fact she has the sweetest Georgia accent because it’s filmed in Atlanta. And she has this really sweet Georgia accent. She can’t be really evil with an accent like that when you talk like that. Hey, y’all, what are you doing? It’s like that.
That’s funny. She calls a detective to try and get rid of him. She says, you’re a child molester. The way she says it is, you know. You, sir, are a child molester. And it’s a recognizable act as you come and go. They’ve obviously only been signed on for a few. Glenn Ford is the detective and then gets killed off very quickly. Or he quit, yeah. Yeah, and he actually reckons it was the worst film he ever made. And he and the rest of the cast only signed up because the studio work was done in italy and they got a free trip to Italy. But that was i love that so many times, you know, Michael cain I think has said something the same way for jaws 4. he’s like, well, I got to go
stay in the Bahamas for, you know, two months for free. And so many actors will be, you know, at some point in their career, we’re like, well, they paid me and I got to go to, you know, wherever. Well, I remember, what’s his name? David Warbeck, British actor. He’s actually a New Zealander, but he lived in the UK. If you watch Italian films in the seventies, you’ll know him because he became a huge star in Italy. in exploitation films. And he always said it wasn’t the money. He actually made, because he also used to be a male model for clothes catalogues. And he said he made more money from the modelling than he ever did from these films. He said, but the thing was that he used to, he and his wife, he took his wife with him and they used to get like these free holidays in Italy while they’re being shot. And sometimes more exotic locations than he’d go to. And so that’s why he kept doing them.
It’s like free vacations. Yeah. That was the brilliant thing. They were always fun to me. Yeah. That’s wild. And I mean, but I mean, it happens over and over and over again. But I think the, you know, back to this idea of the streaming thing with where exploitation has kind of landed, you know, gone from gone from being called exploitation to being drive-in fare to being VHS straight to video, DVD, and now what we call the long tail of streaming. It’s interesting how it keeps following, right? But I don’t think straight to video. Funny enough, I worked at a video store in the heyday of video rental. And, you know, straight to video was the bad word, right? Well, that’s a straight to video. You don’t want that. But people would rent them. I literally watched people come in. You could only rent seven. Think about the, I mean, now it’s not that big a deal because you have it streaming to your house, but they would rent, you could rent seven movies was the maximum. And I don’t know how many people would come in and rent seven movies. And they were, they’re like,
know in the video store walking around they’d be like well we got six we want to get one more oh well i think okay there’s this movie called the lift which is a british movie that i don’t think is very good um it’s about some killer elevator and and it got rented out every week what’s that it was a dutch movie that was remade in the oh really I just remember, because I just knew it from the title being called The Lift, but people would rent it. And I’m like, to me, that was kind of like, you’re on the bottom rung at this point with your rentals, when you’re grabbing The Lift, because we have five copies of it. That’s directed by Dick Mars. You’re a fan now. I feel bad by saying that. No, Dick Mars is fascinating. I’ve got some of his films on DVD, actually. Yeah.
He has directed, he’s based in obviously the Netherlands, and he has directed some truly wild exploitation, what we call exploitation films there. And they are quite bonkers, a lot of them. So you haven’t seen The Lift or you have? I’m wondering. I have actually, I think I have. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it. It’s very low budget, obviously, because it uses this very small location, limited location. But the lead actor, and I can’t remember his name, but he was in a lot of Dick Mars films. And he’s best known as Amsterdammed, the same leading man, about a serial killer frogman in the canals of Amsterdam. And that is an insane film. Well, they couldn’t convince him to throw the bikes back up onto the
It’s quite arbitrary. Oh, it was this guy, really? This guy we’ve never met before? The English language version is dubbed with Dutch actors who could speak English, but with these really thick accents. And there’s a bit where the mayor of Amsterdam is complaining, there’s a serial killer. It’s like from a bad British war movie. You know what I mean? That’s brilliant. The lead cop in it, he really should have been prosecuted by child services. He’s a single father to a 13-year-old girl who he leaves at home on her own so often. And most of the time she keeps going. She has this nerdy male school friend who unfortunately has been dubbed with an actress who sounds 30 years old. It’s ridiculous. Stay away from him. Stay away from him. Where’s your dad at tonight, Amy? Oh, my God. That’s wild. But it’s fascinating that kind of the transition, because it seems like it’s a harder transition or frequent transition than
know the mainstream has had, so they’ve really had to kind of fight for space, as it were uh because you know, each one of their outlets have been shorter lived perhaps well this is it direct the video interestingly i’m not going to make the claim it’s a british invention, but one of the first people, certainly in the UK, to ever make films specifically for release on video, was a guy called Cliff Twemlow, who, to those of us who love exploitation films, is something of a hero died some years ago, but he was from Manchester. And basically, he built up his own tiny empire of incredibly low budget filmmaking he had this group of people he worked with and anyway he he was very forward thinking and he saw, you know, video was coming in and he thought, you know, what they need, someone needs to do is to make films because the demand for films is going to be great. And of course, first of all, the big studios and distributors didn’t want to release their films onto VHS. Right. Oh, there was a big, big fight. I was, I was in the, during that time where, you know, a video would, if you had, so the video store, everybody always wondered, the video store would buy a video. It would be like,
$80 to $120 for one copy. And then during my time there, it went from that and then they finally relented to where you were buying them for, you know, $15, $20 off the shelf. Yeah. So Cliff Twemlow, this guy, he produced this film made in Manchester. It’s a gangster movie for director video release. Because as he said, what people, the people who rent these and want to watch them, as he figured, would people have just come home from the pub with their mates. They’ve got a curry they’re going to eat at home. And so he produced these films which catered to this. And actually, I have to say, they show the lack of resources, but they’re surprisingly well made, bearing in mind that they have budgets like a 50 pence. He was actually quite a charismatic leading man in them.
And it was, yeah, they’re very enjoyable films, the Cliff Twemlow films. But, yeah, he was very much ahead of his time. That’s interesting. Because he also experimented in releasing films directly on computer, you know. And, you know, that was one of the last things he did before he died, he experimented with that. So he was way ahead of anybody else doing that. Right, yeah. Way ahead of the streaming wave that we’re… Yeah. He was a very interesting guy. He was actually a nightclub bouncer at one time who parlayed into being an extra in films. And that’s where he made contacts in the filmmaking business. He’s quite a character. That’s interesting. So if you had to name kind of the top five exploitation creators, I mean, we talked about Roger Corman and he talked about some others.
Who would you name them? Who would they be? Well, there’s obviously people like Roger Corman. Do more obscure ones, perhaps. Look to the continent for some of the best. Jesus Franco. You can’t go wrong with a Jesus Franco directed film. And he directed hundreds of films, literally. Most of them are terrible. Most of them are terrible. There are some just brilliant. And Yeah, I mean, his… And again, he went across all genres and, you know, he threw everything. You’d always guarantee there’d usually be some nudity, there’d usually be some sex, there’d be violence, there’d be horror. You know, he’d throw it all in. And, you know, I mean, his Dracula Prisoner of Frankenstein is verges on being hallucinogenic. It’s just so… I mean, you know.
That’s interesting. He also made a film, it’s called Venus and Furs, although it has very little to do with the novel, that title. But that is quite brilliant. It’s almost an arty exploitation film. Really? And that’s quite brilliant to watch. And this is the thing about Frank, when he took more time over his films, because Venus and Furs was a pet project, the result is always very, very good, very intriguing and watchable. And, yeah, there’s Jesus Franco, Lucio Fulci from Italy. Oh, another one. What was it? He’s infamous for, well, in the States it was called Zombie 2. Zombie Flesh Eaters, we call it in the UK, which was an unofficial sequel, of course, to Dawn of the Dead. Oh, okay. It’s set mainly on an island kind of.
But yeah, Fulci was the master of gore films, but also sometimes directed a far settler, but he directed in every genre imaginable in Italy before he wound up with horror. He used to direct comedy films, spaghetti westerns, and then he got drawn into horror and he just turned out these, The Beyond’s another good one of his, that’s with David Warbeck. And that’s quite something, The Beyond. strange goings on in a Louisiana hotel. Although you could tell it wasn’t actually filmed in Louisiana because all the signs, they’re supposed to be in English, but it’s obviously painted by an Italian stagehand who didn’t speak English because the spellings are, you know, way off. Lucio Fulci, Jesus Franco, The trouble is that a lot of them hide behind pseudonyms on their films. In Italy, particularly, there was a stigma attached to home-produced, low-budget films. So they used to anglicize their names to try and fool people into thinking they’re watching an American or British film. And a lot of them would be set in the UK or sometimes actually filmed here.
But yeah, people like Ricardo Freyda, who sometimes billed as Robert Hampton. But if I remember rightly, he wrote, he directed Tragic Ceremony, which again is absolutely borders on surrealism at some points. And it’s supposedly set in the UK, but it’s so, I mean, if you’re from the UK, it is so obviously filmed in Spain. All the cars are left-hand drive for one thing. And you know, But it is quite bizarre. It really is. I mean, it just builds this absolutely weird conclusion. And it stars Camille Keaton, who is most infamous now for being in I Spit on Your Grave. Okay. I know that one. I don’t know if I’ve actually seen all of it, but yeah, I do know that one. Tragic Sirens is never released in English, but there’s now a subtitled version. I think Tubi have got it.
Oh, okay. Yeah, Tubi seems to have a lot. Their catalogue is very, very deep. I’ve caught up with a lot of Jesus Franco films there lately. Yeah. Yeah, so there’s Riccardo Freyda, another Italian. Oh, oh, of course. How could I not mention him? Paul Nashy, Spanish horror star. In Spain, Paul Nashy was what, I don’t know, Boris Karloff was to the English-speaking world. Mm-hmm. He was amazing from the late 60s onwards. He loved horror films. He loved Universal films. He loved Hammer films. And so he made his own equivalents in Spain. His usual character was a Polish werewolf called Waldemar Daninski. Say that three times fast. Yeah. The films are magnificent. He gets to battle witch women and the yeti in one film he battles uh it’s it’s they’re amazing films and he didn’t just play daninsky he also played dracula in one film um
Cat Murphy played Frankenstein’s monster. He played a mummy, I think, in one film. Rightly, yes, he did. And, yeah, they’re magnificent films. I mean, they’re very Spanish, you know. They’re very much in the era, but they’re wild and insane. Absolutely insane films. Yeah, he used to write them under his real name, Jacinto Molina. Jacinto Molina. Excuse me if I’m pronouncing it wrong. I don’t speak Spanish. Yeah, he was known as Paul Massey. And funny enough, in his later years, he became known as a very respectable character actor in Spain. And he made these fantastic, wrote and starred in these fantastic movies, which are prime exploitation. They are just like, they are like, The Universal movie, you know, things like House of Frankenstein and things like that. But shot in color with Hammer-style sex and gore in them. It’s wild to watch. That was one of my favorites, Dr. Jekyll and the Wolfman. Just sticking two together, right? So just say, oh, well, vampire, yeah.
He comes to London and bumps into the great grandson of Dr. Jekyll, who’s still experimenting and experiments on the Wolfman and injects him with a serum. And he also takes between being normal Valdemar, the Wolfman, and Mr. Hyde. Okay. I like that. That was a good meeting there. What can we do? We can do three things. There you go. Yeah, there’s a scene where he’s Mr. Hyde. He runs around Piccadilly Circus with people looking up at him and said, who is this freaking lunatic? They didn’t tell anyone they were filming there. They just shot it. Oh, the guerrilla style that just went out with the camera and went for it. I was seeing an interview with one of his sons who was there when he shot it. He said, yeah, we just saw all these people looking at things, some crazy Spanish guy running around us. Yeah.
That’s funny. Well, I guess, you know, that’s the way you save money. You don’t get permits. Yeah. Well, it’s notoriously difficult to have a permit to film in London. And what was it? There was a Paul Nashy film. Oh, Vengeance of the Zombies. That’s very widely available in an English version. That also was shot mainly in the UK. And that is amazing. He plays a triple role in it. That is just wild. Absolutely, and it’s the grooviest musical score, you know, because it’s made in the 70s. And it’s absolutely wild, the stuff that goes on in it. It’s, you know, people having strange dreams involving Satan, played by Nashie, or Nashie playing an Indian swami or guru or whatever, and his evil twin brother. And it’s, oh, God, it’s just… Who saves on money? He doesn’t have to hire anybody to play these roles. And, of course, there are zombies.
zombies in it. It has this fabulous battle between zombie women and British Scotland Yard detectives. That’s funny. I had to check it out. Goodness. Like all Spanish films in that period, they had this assumption that we like very bad wallpaper in the UK and our interior decor. Many Spanish in the European They’ve seen some people supposedly at somebody’s office in Scotland Yard. There was garish wallpaper. I lived through that. I don’t remember. In fact, wallpaper is going out of fashion in the UK. Very weird. Yeah. I guess either they had that available and they just shot it or they’re like, okay, this is the way the British look. This is the way it looks, you guys. We all got red hair as well.
Really? Okay. Oh, yes. That’s a trait you’ll see in a lot of Italian films. English women are usually portrayed by red-haired Italian actresses. I don’t know why they have this thing. They think that’s what British women look like, their red hair and blue eyes. Very nice. I don’t know. There’s only one who fits that description out of all the women I know. But, you know, there is one. It’s pretty uncommon, I think, really. Italians in their films, they favour non-Atlantic. We have a stereotype view of what Italian women look like, you know, olive skin, dark hair, dark eyes. In Italian forms, they favour as their leading ladies fair-haired, blue-eyed women. Really? And they also have that for leading men are often fair-haired, blue-eyed. Franco Nero, Gianno Gialli, Terence Hill, despite his name, is Italian. All of them are fair-haired guys. Although in Terence Hill’s case, or Mario Girotti, to give him his proper name, to be fair, he is half German, so…
There you go. But yeah, I mean, I was trying to think of someone else who was, oh, there’s a, oh, what’s he called? He’s billed in English as Anthony M. Dawson. His name’s got on my head. But anyway, very prolific Italian director who was directed in all genres. And again, if you see his, if you see the name Anthony M. Dawson on a film as director, it’s a good, it’s going to be a fun exploitation film. because he was one of those Italian directors in the 70s and into the 80s, they jumped on to the exploitation film bandwagon. They churned these films out. Often anything that had been popular in the States, they made imitations of, or their version of, their interpretation of. Right, yeah. And Anthony M. Dawson, Antonio Margretti, that’s his real name, he was one of the most,
prolific directors of doing this, you know, like this week, zombies are in the, okay, I’ll make a zombie film. Okay, I’ll make a post-apocalyptic movie. And it was like that. And they’re always fun. There’s a, you know, as I say, it’s the continent really since the seventies where the real hardcore exploitation was done in that period. Now, of course, it’s moved on to, direct-to-streaming and whatever, which can be made anywhere. Right, yeah. I’m surprised that there’s not more in other places, you know. We still haven’t moved past the point of having kind of these hubs of entertainment creation, you know. I’m surprised there’s not, you know, somewhere in Africa they’re not making movies because it’s cheaper. It’s Nollywood, as it’s known. African made and usually Nigerian made exploitation films. They increasingly, I see examples of those, but they, they, they seem, I know people who are really into them, these Nollywood movies, but to me, because of the cultural difference, it just seems baffling. They seem baffling to me often because it’s just the cultural difference for me. And I mean, you know, I say that I know enough people of Nigerian descent, but it still seems,
baffling to me. Their films and their film, their cinematic conventions but yeah yeah but they haven’t, I would say that, but they’re not like on what i would call the mainstream stage, I suppose, where, you know, you know, other things didn’t make it. So, you know, that like, you know, Roger, the roger cormans of the world made it into the mainstream stage and, and, uh, and so forth. And, well, if you, if you even think about it, the um, Mad Max was an exploitation movie of some sort back then. It’s made itself for Australian cinema. Absolutely. Ausploitation, as it was known at the time. There was a huge exploitation film industry in Australia at one time. Again, Mad Max is the best known example of that. But there were so many others which got churned out there.
They even had a Kung Fu Australian crossover film called The Man from Hong Kong, which with a Hong Kong police agent who’s an expert in Kung Fu, because aren’t they all? I think I’ve watched The Man from Hong Kong, to be honest with you. I think I’ve recognized that title. Yeah, the fight sequences are fantastic. And, of course, it had George Lazenby, James Bond himself, as the villain. And, yeah, he gets to have a kung fu fight with someone. And, yeah, he gets his arm set on fire. I remember him talking about that, Phil, because he allegedly punched someone out while they were making it. And that’s where he denied it. And then he said, but if it did happen, it’s because that bastard, he didn’t warn me. He just set my arm on fire for the sequences. LAUGHTER
That sounds, there’s a George Lazenby documentary that I watched maybe a year or so ago on Netflix, I think it was. Anyway, it sounds very George Lazenby-esque. It’s a good documentary if you’re interested. It talks a lot about, you know, his, the kind of the crest, you know, he became James Bond and then he kind of threw it all away in a way because he could have made more He decided not to. He had an option to do Diamonds Are Forever. Yeah, but he didn’t. He gave it up. He thought he could make it without it, and then after that, it kind of fell. Yeah, he’s seen a few films, but he never reached the heights of being one. No, not the note of that, yeah. That was the pinnacle at that point. He ended up doing at least one film for Al Adamson. Another great exploitation director and producer you should look up
I know I have friends who cannot stand our albums and films. They think they’re dreadful. And I can understand why. But he fascinates me. He really does. He used to make a film and then he’d take it apart, basically. He’d release it under one title and film new footage and re-edit it all together to make another film. And he’d keep on doing it. Making more money that way. There you go. I did enjoy his Dracula versus Frankenstein, despite the fact the guy playing Dracula was his accountant or something. Anyway, it was surprisingly enjoyable. There’s a couple of others of his that I enjoyed. But he had a bizarre life. He had a bizarre death. He went missing, and then he was found, eventually his body was found buried underneath the hot tub that had just been installed
in his house and it turned out he’d had a falling out with the plumber installing it. And the plumber had killed him and in a panic buried the body under the new hot tub. He even had a bizarre death. You know, I mean, he couldn’t do anything. But yeah, it’s the sort of thing you put in one of his films. There you go. No budget, weird exploitation films. You can do a lot worse than watching Al Adamson films. He directed across several genres. Black Samurai was one of his. A blaxploitation kung fu crossover, which is interesting to watch. Well, a kung fu blaxploitation James Bond crossover. Oh, wow. It has all those elements in it. And how was his name? Fred Williamson in the lead? Oh, Fred Williamson. Oh, yeah. Okay.
another guaranteed you’re going to get a good exploitation film with Fred Williamson’s in it. Red the Hammer, Williamson. Red the Hammer, yeah. Actually, my co-host for the show that I do regularly, he met Fred Williamson yeah at a autograph signing thing. Yeah, he said he was just as interesting in person as you would see him in the movies or anything. Mentioning him brought to mind another bizarre, very bizarre, very weird film I saw and refused to watch again called War and Fire, made in the 70s. Because Fred Williamson’s in it. And it was shot in Turkey by an American director. And it starred Robert McGinty. Remember him? He was the exterminator. Yeah. The film, you can tell it’s shot in Turkey because everybody has wild facial hair in it. But the plot, there’s this really weird undertone in it. Robert McGinty, he has a sister, a younger sister in it, played by the British actress, Belinda May. Some people remember she was in Delta and the Banner Man, a Doctor Who story. But she, it becomes clear, you just think that he,
he makes the, when she, she’s swimming naked in the pool and one’s seen, he starts making these comments to her. You think, Jesus Christ, he wants to bang his sister. That sounds about right. It is really creepy. And then she, her character is killed and he finds to carry out this scam. He finds a girl who looks like a play by different actress. And he, he then gets her to have plastic surgery. So she’s back to being Belinda Maine again. And of course he then does have sex with her. And I think this is, this really is, he’s made a look like image of his dead sister who he wanted to bang anyway. Right. And, you know, I mean, then the plastic surgery job is amazing because obviously we’ve seen Belinda Maine naked in the film before. And I tell you,
When she said that, it’s not just her face, it’s the whole body looks like. The whole body, yeah, everything. It’s absolutely amazing, you know. Well, you know, there you go. Well, Cher, you know, she’s all been redone from head to toe. Yeah, I just don’t want to watch that film again because of the creepiness of the implied incest in it. It’s just too much. It’s an insane film in its own right. But to do a diamond robbery, a diamond blind, and, you know, oh, it’s… Well, Doc, I hate to wrap it up, but maybe we should do this again. Unlike Frank, I’m not a four-hour guy. I really appreciate you doing this. And we will. We need to do another one of these because it’s such fun to talk about. And we’ll see where it goes from here. We went from
War movies to Fred Williamson banging his sister. Yeah. That’s a gambit right there. Yeah. All right. Hold on just a second, Doc.