The Big Combo (1955)

Director: Joseph H Lewis

Starring: Cornel Wilde, Richard Conte, Brian Donlevy, Jean Wallace, Robert Middleton, Lee Van Cleef, Earl Holliman

More info: IMDb

Tagline: The Most Startling Story The Screen Has Ever Dared Reveal!

Plot: Police Lt. Diamond (Wilde) is obsessed with nabbing the notorious Mr. Brown (Conte), a man he's suspected of wrongdoing for years yet has never been able to snare. But Brown's beautiful blond girlfriend (Wallace), a woman with shadowy desires, is an equally temping target.

My rating: 8/10

Will I watch it again? Yep

Damn fine film noir! It's got all the ingredients you need: a seedy jazz score (Bronislau Kaper), sharp and fast dialogue, a clever and nasty villain (Conte), a determined cop (Wilde), a sexy moll (Wallace), the mean streets of the big city and gay hitmen (Cleef & Holliman). Gay hitmen? Yup. Even though I've seen this before, I hadn't really given it much thought but it seems that Cleef & Holliman's characters are gay. I just figured they were really good pals. All of the clues are there, though. I'll have to pay more attention to that aspect the next time around. What's interesting is that making them gay could slice one of two ways. It'd be nice to think that writer Philip Yordan was being progressive and snuck it in but then it could have been just the opposite by making them even more degenerate (if one considers being gay that way). I'd like to think it's the former.


Richard Conte makes a great villain and the performances are great all around. It was especially nice to see Cleef with a sizable role with lots of dialogue. It'd be another ten years before he really made the big time. THE BIG COMBO is a great crime picture and it should be required viewing for fans of the genre.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

Director: Don Taylor

Starring: Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Bradford Dillman, Natalie Trundy, Ricardo Montalban, Sal Mineo, M. Emmet Walsh

More info: IMDb

Tagline: A New Generation Of Incredible Apes In The Most Exciting Suspense Film Of Them All

Plot: Landing in 20th century Los Angeles, three ape astronauts who have traveled back in time, are treated as curiosities and celebrities at first, but soon become hunted by a suspicious and fearful government intent on making them the subjects of an experiment that could alter the course of human and ape events.

My rating: 8/10

Will I watch it again? Oh, yeah.

This is my favorite of the APES sequels. The one preceeding it, BENEATH, is OK as sequels go but this one goes off the fucking charts; it's one batshit insane flick. I suspect it seemed ridiculously stupid on paper but Don Taylor makes it work. It's loaded with humor and a surprising amount of intelligence (trust me, it's there).


Ricardo Montalban is simply magnificent (has he ever not been?) and a delight to watch. The climax of the picture is tight, engaging and tragic. It's hard to believe you could get choked up about actors in monkey suits but it's possible. ESCAPE isn't perfect but Paul Dehn's outrageously fun script, Don Taylor's direction, Jerry Goldsmith's playful score and fun performances by the leads make this one helluva enjoyable picture.

Maniac (1963)

Director: Michael Carreras

Starring: Kerwin Mathews, Nadia Gray, Donald Houston, Liliane Brousse

More info: IMDb

Tagline: The maniac stalks his wife ... his daughter ... their lover!

Plot: An American painter has an affair with a bar owner is a French village and agrees to help her murderer husband escape from a prison for the criminally insane.

My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again? Nah.

#18 on Hammer Horror (1957-1976)



MANIAC suffers from being a reasonably engaging thriller all the way until the last ten or so minutes when it falls apart with a contrived, "there has to be a complex surprise ending". The performances are quite nice, though. It's neat seeing cinema's greatest Sinbad doing something different (Mathews was in THE 7th VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1958)). And since the title of the picture is MANIAC, I expected something more in line with that. I guess they were capitalizing on PSYCHO (1960). It's not that bad of a picture but it's too short (86 minutes) and I sure felt unfulfilled by the end, wanting to cleanse my senses with a really good thriller.

The Phantom of the Opera (1962)

Director: Terence Fisher

Starring: Herbert Lom, Heather Sears, Edward de Souza, Michael Gough, Thorley Walters

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Out of the hell-fire of horror unimaginable rises the figure of terror incarnate!

Plot: Herbert Lom plays the ghostly figure with deep pathos, filled with rage as his art is stolen by a greedy royal (Michael Gough). His revenge: to haunt the opera house where his music is played and where he meets a beautiful and talented singer.

My rating: 6.5/10

Will I watch it again? Maybe

#16 on Hammer Horror (1957-1976)

I've always been an avid movie watcher. Some people read voraciously; I watch movies. Most fiction I've read I did so after seeing the film. I'd like to read more but that would get in the way of my movie watching. I'd really like to check out Gaston Leroux's novel of PHANTOM because I've got a sneaking suspicion it's a shit ton different than this Hammer production.


This version is very good except that it's far too short (85 minutes) and the ending is rushed and idiotic.

PHANTOM OF THE SPOILERS...

I LOVED that Lord d'Arcy in effect stole Petrie's music compositions and published them in his name. That was fucking cold as hell and, as a musician, I can further understand how painful that would be if it happened to me. When you compose, you're putting a piece of yourself on that page so having someone steal something you created out of thin air is pretty fucking low. It's for that reason alone that d'Arcy should have died at the hands of Petrie. He didn't deserve to breathe anyway since he was a raging asshole so It was very disappointing that he didn't snuff it. Not cool. I can only hope that he was exposed as a fraud and was publicly humiliated to the point of suicide.


The other big contention I have is with the abrupt ending. Petrie is watching the hugely successful premiere of his opera from a theatre box. As ends and Christine is taking her bows, Petrie sees that the giant chandelier is about to fall on her so he leaps to the stage, pushing her out of the way, sacrificing his life for hers. I realize that it's an accident but I needed more character development in order for that scene to have any emotional weight.

END OF SPOILERS! YARRRRRRR!


So my biggest bitch, I guess, is that this PHANTOM should've been longer. There was an awful lot of time killed in the last couple of reels with the opera performance, an unusual amount, and the movie is still only 85 minutes. Unless I missed something, the ten or so minutes of the opera wasn't what was important for the climax. On the contrary, it felt like filler.


Since it's a Hammer production, the acting is far better than most every horror film at the time, the sets are spectacular, the cinematography, music, etc are great. Most Hammer films ran less than or very close to 90 minutes and, for a lot of them, that's a nice, digestible length but not here. It's as if Emperor Joseph II was present during the editing. "There are too many frames. Just cut a few and it will be perfect." Idiots.

Nazisploitation - An Exhaustive Look At One Sleazy-Ass Genre!

Nazisploitation has been on my radar for many years. The day I discovered it and watched a few trailers, I bought ILSA, SHE WOLF OF THE SS (1974). I'd watched the trailer off the DVD a gazillion times, showing it to unsuspecting friends and those who dared to see something potentially revolting and certainly in bad taste. Oddly, it was years later that I finally watched the damn thing. That was a year or so ago. Cut to a few weeks ago when I decided that I was going to dive into the uber-sleazy Women in Prison sub-genre of Nazisploitation. I gathered 27 films and spent the entire month of March watching them in chronological order. Do not attempt this without consulting your physician.

There were a lot of surprises along the way.

- The film that started it all wasn't too shabby.
- The film that ended it was.
- All of them featured full frontal, and many included men.
- All of them had several women who were not true blondes. See the previous statement for how I know.
- A surprising few were daring enough to make the prisoners Jewish.
- With one exception, LIEBES LAGER (1976), none were intentionally funny.
- I learned nothing at all about National Socialism.
- Not a single film had Hitler in it. Missed opportunity there.
- Elsa is WAY hotter than Ilsa.
- France can't make a decent Nazisploitation flick.
- The poster art, by and large, makes you want to take a bath.
- Too much of a bad thing is...bad.
- Nazisploitation trailers are the best!


Here's the rundown for each picture in chronological order:

Title (Year) (Country) My Rating (out of 10)

Love Camp 7 (1969) (USA) 5
Torture Me, Kiss Me (1970) (USA) 2.5
Hitler's Harlot (1973) (USA) 4
Frauleins in Uniform (1973) (Switzerland) 6
Nazi Sex Experiments (1973) (USA) 5
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1974) (USA) 7
The Night Porter (1974) (Italy) 8
SS Experiment Love Camp (1976) (Italy) 4
Deported Women of the SS Special Section (1976) (Italy) 5.5
Salon Kitty (1976) (Italy) 5.5
Liebes Lager (1976) (Italy) 5.5
SS Girls (1977) (Italy) 5.5
Elsa Fraulein SS (1977) (France) 3.5
Achtung! The Desert Tigers (1977) (Italy) 4
Women's Camp 119 (1977) (Italy) 3.5
SS Hell Camp (1977) (Italy) 6
Nazi Love Camp 27 (1977) (Italy) 4
The Red Nights of the Gestapo (1977) (Italy) 7
Hitler's Last Train (1977) (France) 3
SS Camp 5: Women's Hell (1977) (Italy) 4.5
The Gestapo's Last Orgy (1977) (Italy) 7.5
SS Nazi Convoy (1978) (France) 3
Bordel SS (1978) (France) 2
Nathalie: Escape from Hell (1978) (France) 5
Nazi Love Island (1980) (USA) 5.5
Stalag 69 (1982) (USA) 2
Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69 (2008) (USA) 5

And here's a great Israeli documentary on the pulp novels that gave inspiration to these films...

Stalags (2008) (Israel) 7.5


I'm glad it's over and after 27 films, I'm Nazisploited out. For the record, there were two I watched that I was misled that they belonged on this list - CIALI IBO AVRUPA'DA (1970) & HOLOCAUST II (1980). And it's also worth mentioning that there was no way I was going to be able to watch nothing but Nazisploitation all month long so, to bring me out of the sewer, I took in lots of Spaghetti Westerns, Bond, 70s crime and the first season of BOARDWALK EMPIRE. There's no way I could have made it without them.

If you know of a film that belongs on this list and where I can get a copy of it (I've gone this far so I might as well see every damn one of them, right?), drop me a line.

Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69 (2008)

Director: Keith J Crocker

Starring: Tatyana Kot, Steve Montague, Wayne Chang, Minerva Borack

More info: IMDb

Tagline: A New Era of Nazi Terror!

Plot: Enter Stalag 69, where torture is just the Beginning for this bloody band of Nazi Butchers! Germany, 1945. Stalag 69, a POW camp ruled by the sadistic SS commandant Helmet Schultz, is nothing but a blood-soaked playground for this perverse Nazi monster who uses his American, Russian, and British prisoners in cruel and ghastly biochemical weapons experiments. When a group of young, wanton USO girls are captured and fall into the hands of Schultz and his battalion of butchers, the brutality is turned up and the unsuspecting girls are gored, gouged and ground up - all for the pleasure of Schultz and his SS brothers and sisters. Now it's up to the rag-tag survivors of the camp to strike back against their captors and Escape from Stalag 69, alive or on a slab!

My rating: 5/10

Will I watch it again? Nein.


This is it...the last of nearly 30 Nazisploitation flicks in 31 days. A low budget film maker in 2008 decided that the genre still had some mileage left; enough to make BLITZKRIEG. Boy, was he wrong.

Say, aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?

There really wasn't much else one could do with the genre. It's an offshoot of the Women in Prison genre which is pretty limited to begin with. There's just no place to take this genre where it hasn't gone before. That doesn't mean that you can't go out and make your own - it just means that you'd better bring something remotely interesting to the table or fans will walk out on you.




Meet our hero!

The Krauts in this picture didn't have to worry about digging.
This guy's not going through any tunnels.

Those are fake, by the way...just like grandma used to have back in dubya dubya two!

BLITZKRIEG is a very low budget movie which means the effects will probably suffer, the acting is going to be OK at best (one can only hope it won't be humiliating) and it will probably run too long. Under the circumstances, the effects are quite good and much better than I expected. Kudos, kids!



While it's clear the actors aren't pros, most do appear to be earnest in their performances but there are a few who are so bad/under experienced that they couldn't begin to hide their thick NJ/NY accents which is kinda funny. The standout performance by far was Jonathan Brown as Berkenholtz. He's very good and one wonders how someone with acting chops made it into the flick.

Don't get too attached to that thing!

Awwwww. Too soon?

And here we have an example of authentic period pubic grooming habits...




That leaves the running time. It's two hours and 15 minutes long! That's an awful lot of movie even for a big budget flick. I've got an awful lot of respect for anyone who makes a movie, especially one like this and while it's not that great of a film, there are a few spots that are enjoyable.

Listen to this clip at the :47 mark for something truly special...

Jonathan Brown (right): Good actor in a not-so-good picture.

Did Crocker make this because he's a fan of the genre and thought he could bring something to the Nazisploitation table? Or perhaps he saw this genre as an easy way to get noticed which translates into actually making money. Who knows and, really, who cares. Nearly 40 years after the genre was born, it's evident that some people just won't let go of the past.

Liebes Lager (1976)

Director: Lorenzo Gicca Palli

Starring: Karl Koenig, Red Ascott, Ronny Coster, Luciano Pigozzi

More info: IMDb

Plot: The German officers who run a camp for the wives and girlfriends of traitors of the Nazi regime are fearing for their lives with the impending Allied forces closing in. They need a lot of money to buy fake IDs and for transportation out of the country so they prostitute the prisoners to a nearby POW camp.

My rating: 5.5/10

Will I watch it again? Nope.







I'm beside myself. This is fucked up. LL is a comedy...about raping and prostituting women!!!!!! Sure, it starts out innocently enough with the hanging of three female prisoners with one of the German officers espousing the merits of the science of hanging. I thought maybe it was just a little bit of dry, dark humor but most of the movie goes from serious drama to broad slapstick. I was rightfully unsure what to think throughout the entire picture.


THEN they start raping the women! Now I'm really confused. The picture plays out like an adult, misogynistic feature length episode of SGT. BILKO with Phil Silvers only Silvers is a real douchebag to women. This is a bizarre flick.


The playful music is laughably bad and the comedy isn't funny. I'd probably respect the film makers for daring to do something different, bold and controversial if only the gags were funny. It's an Italian production so broad, unfunny comedy is nothing new (they and the Japanese have a lock on that kind of thing). Man, I can't get over the raping. It was horrifying and it's made worse because of the lightheartedness of the shit before and after it.



Then the prostituting happens (the title is German for Love Camp) and eventually the camp is attacked by the Allied POWs that came for the action. A huge gun battle ensues with the women getting the upper hand on their captors and going apeshit with guns on not just the Germans but the Americans. Remember that these are German women who had ties to traitors (through marriage, relations, etc) so they not only want their captors dead but the enemies of Germany. THAT was fucking badass awesome!





In one spot there were several seconds of the greatest first person shooter video game never made! Nice!!!


The battle at the end is the best part and that's what keeps it from getting a lower score. The film's 104 minutes long (!!!) and it definitely needs some trimming. This is one bizarre flick, one whose tone I've never seen before. The strangely placed jokes among the raping and general unpleasantness really put me ill at ease. I guess it's because I couldn't figure out what to think about it. LIEBES LAGER is definitely alone in the Nazisploitation genre as the only (intentional) comedy. Not exactly a surprise considering the subject matter but then again, it's the lowest of the low sub genres of sleaze and only one movie dared to go there? I kind of felt let down.