Severed is a great title for this movie. Not because of anything that it has to do with the movie — honestly, I can think of better titles. No, it’s perfect because it describes the way that it was just fucking tearing me apart inside to watch this film. My frustration stems from the fact that this movie could have been truly excellent, and instead crapped it up with derivative idiocies and poor choices, making it a movie that I can at best offer a neutral recommendation on. “Yeah, sure, I guess you could watch that.”

It’s easy to dismiss a film like Naked Killer. But, to me, it’s only the subpar exploitation films that give sex and violence a bad name, while the ones like Naked Killer put sex and violence back on the pedestal where they belong. Rather than the nihilistic sleaze-fest that one might typically expect from the Cat III genre, Naked Killer is a film that rages with vitality, and offers about as good an example as I can think of of cinema’s unique ability to show us a vision of our waking world merged with that of dreams.

Hsiao-Chien catches Ning’s attention with her guzheng playing, painting, and poetry composing — all artistic pursuits that are near and dear to the scholar’s heart. Ning gets busted sneaking into Hsiao-Chien’s room to help complete an unfinished poem, and the young woman doesn’t take too kindly to the lad’s prowler behavior. Still, after a stormy start, the two become closer, eventually even falling in love — which would be sweet if Hsiao-Chien didn’t turn out to be a ghost, her well-appointed villa an illusion covering a decrepit haunted house, and her mistress a demanding old ghoul with a taste for the flesh and souls of young scholars.

It quickly becomes clear that our visit to Curtain Guy’s office is for the purpose of a little pregame exposition, which is all pure 1960s spy movie boilerplate: A kidnapped scientist; a new kind of atomic device that could “destroy all human life” if it should fall into “the wrong hands”; a one week window to recover the device before those wrong hands that it’s fallen into start touching all over it; a clandestine atomic laboratory — perhaps located beneath the Mediterranean Sea — that needs to be located before it’s too late. The superior then outlines for the attendant anonymous functionary those attributes that the agent assigned to the job must possess: “Perfect understanding of Italian, French, and a complete understanding of nuclear science. And the man must also be an expert sailor.”

Even though the cast and crew are making a lark of a movie, Hasebe never lets it collapse under the weight of its own self-awareness. He understands that the best spoof of the campy spy film of the 1960s also has to be a very enjoyable spy film, and Black Tight Killers doesn’t forget to entertain. Kobayashi, as usual, throws himself into the role’s physical aspects with gusto, and he and the girls who make up the black tight squad get to have frequent fights with fists, feet, guns, bamboo bazookas, and of course more mundane weapons like killer albums and ninja chewing gum. The whole thing is light, frothy, and totally ridiculous. Black Tight Killers looks like some scamp replaced the crew’s cameras with kaleidoscopes

I’ve always felt that movies with certain titles have an obligation to live up to those titles. For instance, any movie with a title like The Werewolf and the Yeti needs to be a movie full of scenes where a werewolf fights a yeti. If the movie doesn’t live up to that title, then you’ve just ruined humanity’s chances of getting an awesome movie in which a werewolf fights a yeti. It’s just unfair to use up an awesome title/concept on a crappy movie. So when I first heard that a movie called The Werewolf and the Yeti existed, I was both excited and reticent. Excited because — well, come on. Werewolf versus yeti. Reticent because I couldn’t help but think, “if this movie isn’t any good, then it ruins my chances of seeing the movie a title like The Werewolf and the Yeti deserves.”

One of the oft cited complaints about this film is that The Abominable Snowman doesn’t get much of a look in during the film, and that is very true. Director, Val Guest has said that makeup and costumes at that time were not really up to the task of creating an effective and frightening looking monster. He therefore believed that ‘what was not seen’ was actually going to be more frightening than anything the special effects, wardrobe and makeup departments could create. Subsequently he chose to only show the snowman in small glimpses, allowing the monster to live in the ‘theatre of your mind’, rather than being unconvincingly paraded in front of your face.

If jungle adventure movies have taught us anything, it’s that modern man, with all his so-called “refinement” and “civilization”, is the most dangerous animal of all. Whatever perils the jungle may hold, it is those city folk — greedy, thoughtless, and cruel — who step within its borders who pose the greatest threat. Even though those city folk ultimately fall prey to quicksand, cannibals, and hungry wild animals. Hey, the jungle was just defending itself. The 1968 international production The Face of Eve documents the skullduggery and rottenness of just such a group of cultured scoundrels, while at the same time dishing out some of the type of mildly saucy, comic book hijinks associated with campy contemporaries like Barbarella.

Therein probably lies the reason that many of the older Bollywood films, that many would consider B-grade, are worth investigating. Here I am foolishly trying to apply conventional film analysis to a Bollywood film, and what’s it doing? It’s screwing right out from under me. It can’t be pigeonholed and broken down like some piece of pre-fabricated, production line entertainment. They aren’t made that way. Earlier, I compared Wanted: Dead or Alive to Leone’s westerns and the Trinity films, and while those influences are definitely in this film, it is still a very different beast to those cited films. Fistful of Dollars never had mirror balls and chorus lines of cowboys grooving away to a disco beat.

So, have I mentioned that I love Lady Terminator? LOVE it. It’s dialog is ludicrous. It’s action is frenetic, and also ludicrous. It’s gore is gratuitous to the point of being… well, ludicrous. Everything about it is so much more than it needs to be that it takes one past the point of feeling satisfied to feeling engorged. So generous is its bounty that to merely sing its praises seems like inadequate thanks. Like the Queen of the South Seas, it should be worshiped, with palms upturned to the heavens and mouth agape. We should give our bodies to it, and let it make of us soulless meat puppets for the purpose of whatever unholy errands it sees fit. In short, Lady Terminator is just a really, really awesome movie.

I was surprised by Neon City. I didn’t expect much from it, but it really entertained me. I like sci-fi films that have nothing to say, and I like sci-fi films that are so preposterously ham-fisted with what they have to say that it becomes absurd. Neon City is the rare sci-fi film that has a little to say and says it well. Not a whole lot, but just enough to give it that extra bit of depth. Mad Max was really the opening salvo in the Reagan era post-apocalypse boom, even though it’s more outrageous sequel became the template. It’s debatable whether or not Neon City is the last film in the trend, but regardless, it’s fitting that it would be among the last and is, in spirit so much more similar to Mad Max than it is Road Warrior.

I watched Rani Mera Naam in the only form that I could find it: on a DVD-R made from a wobbly, Greek-subtitled VHS tape. Although I know a lot of its dialog must be priceless, it is a film that requires no translation. For one thing, the silent movie level histrionics insure that you are never in doubt as to the characters’ feelings and intentions, and, furthermore, given the film’s mandate, those feelings and intentions are little more than a formality, anyway. What’s more, like all of Doss’s action films, the director’s signature combination of — and I’m going to say it again — cartoon-ish style and nonstop carnage is enough to leave you in a state of “did I just see that?” disbelief even in the immediate aftermath of watching it, thus making it a prime candidate for compulsive re-viewings.