Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) was one of the most controversial films of the 1970s, rated X upon its original release for nudity and sexuality (since rerated NC-17). The drama of a widower who escapes his anguish and despair after his wife’s suicide in a purely physical relationship with a free-spirited young beauty […]
Death Walks at Midnight (Italy, 1972) is not actually a sequel to Death Walks on High Heels (1971) but in the proudly opportunistic tradition of Italian genre pictures it recalls an earlier success and director Luciano Ercoli he reunites his team of collaborators.This time around, Nieves Navarro (under the screen name Susan Scott) is a […]
The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (Italy, 1972) is the second of only two gialli made by Emilio P. Miraglia (the first, The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave, is reviewed on Stream On Demand here). More indebted to the Gothic tradition in his brief engagement with the giallo, his two features are more […]
Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (Italy, 1972), directed by Sergio Martino and ostensibly inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” stars the voluptuous, dark-eyed beauty Edwige Fenech, the sex bomb of giallo, in what was (in the words of genre film historian Justin Harries) “Her finest and […]
The women in prison genre has never been so much fun as the Female Prisoner Scorpion series from Japan. Gonzo doesn’t begin to describe this mad mix of outrageous exploitation, flamboyant art movie, and energetic comic-book craziness. Meiko Kaji gives a near silent performance as Nami Matsushima, aka Scorpion, a woman framed for a crime […]
