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.

As an adaptation of Lovecraft, it’s a wash, even if you happen to like the film. Despite the source material, nothing of Lovecraft’s ominous mood makes it into the movie. Gone is the sense of of some sort of cosmic doom lurking just on the other side of our reality, ready to leap through the tiniest of rips in the fabric of reality and unleash misery upon humanity. Instead, we have a very standard issue devil cult. But it has its moments. If you don’t mind creaky, old fashioned horror movies (despite the hip young mods jazzing it up in the parlor, it’s obvious from their dialogue that this is an old fashioned movie) who don’t live up their potential, that aren’t really scary, and aren’t particularly impressive, then you might appreciate Curse of the Crimson Altar as much as I do.

Con Licencia Para Matar is the second of a pair of films featuring Las Tigresas, a trio of catsuit-wearing female secret agents for hire. The first Tigresas film, Munecas Peligrosas (aka Dangerous Dolls) was a barely-there affair. Con Licencia Para Matar, by contrast, would seem to be packed with enough plot for the both of them, complete with two competing sets of villains, including a beatnik scientist with a trio of super-powerful, green-faced androids at his command, and a blonde bombshell revolutionary who conceals her true designs under her cover as the owner of a posh go-go club. Despite all of this business, the film still manages to devote plenty of time to what seems to be the Tigresas films’ first order of business, that being the inclusion of lots of random musical numbers and scenes of the Tigresas lounging around their well-appointed bachelorette pad in various stages of undress.

All in all, the plot of Kill, Panther, Kill is more appropriate to an episode of Columbo than a Eurospy film, which makes the movie by far the most pedestrian in the Kommissar X series thus far. Which is not to say that I didn’t find it completely entertaining nonetheless. Then again, I firmly believe that prolonged exposure to any movie series can actually alter the brain’s chemistry, and, as such — while the strains of “I Love You Jo Walker”, or the masked face of Santo might, for me, serve as endorphin triggers — for others they might simply serve to tell them that its time to turn off the TV and pick up a book, or to put one’s head in one’s hands and slowly shake it from side to side while murmuring disconsolately about the fate of mankind.

More than any of the other examples of Turkish pulp cinema I’ve watched, Casus Kiran seemed to have a sort of dreamlike quality. Even after repeated viewings, I still had difficulty maintaining a grasp on its details, as if it had somehow eluded comprehension by way of its combined surreal velocity and faded, ghost-like appearance. A state of hypnosis seemed to set in soon after I pressed “play”, as if I was watching less a movie than a screen saver featuring men in black hats and skinny ties being perpetually hurled back and forth to a soundtrack of pilfered surf music. Given this, I have to marvel anew at what is one of the true wonders of world genre cinema: that an inspiration as prosaic as old American movie serials could result in an experience so strange and almost uniquely un-movie like in its effect as Casus Kiran.

Release Year: 1968 Country: Italy Starring: Mauro Parenti, Lucretia Love, Gordon Mitchell, John Karlsen, Carla Romanelli, Cyrus Elias, Charles Miller, Mario Cecchi, Agostino De Simone, Teresa Petrangeli, Spartaco Battisti, Bernardo Bruno, Mario De Rosa, Pieraldo Ferrante, Enrico Marciani. Writer: Ruggero Deodato Director: Ruggero Deodato Cinematographer: Roberto Reale Music: Bruno Nicolai Producer: Mauro Parenti Original Title: [...]

At 177 minutes (nothing out of the ordinary for a Bollywood film), the film may meander a bit too much for some viewers. I thought it was great, and entertaining throughout. Even with the breaks for filler and a woman on her knees singing to Krishna, we still get a film that fills most of its running time with sneaking about, secret chambers, spying, and gun fights. It was a big budget production for Bollywood at the time, and they make sure every penny shows up on the screen. I mean, we’re not talking a Ken Adams hollowed-out volcano or anything, but the film is at least as slick and jet-set looking as your higher echelon of Matt Helm or Eurospy films, and the combination of typically overblown Bollywood opulence with psychedelic sixties pop-art is a sure-win situation.

1968, Italy. Starring John Phillip Law, Marisa Mell, Michel Piccoli, Adolfo Celi, Claudio Gora, Mario Donen. Directed by Mario Bava. Available on DVD (Amazon). This lavishly colorful and thoroughly enjoyable comic book romp features what is without a doubt one of the swankest moments in all of cinema, if not the swankest. Having just completed [...]

1968, England. Starring Christopher Lee, Rupert Davies, Veronica Carlson, Barbara Ewing, Barry Andrews, Ewan Hooper, Marion Mathie, Michael Ripper. Directed by Freddie Francis. Available on DVD (Amazon). When a creature is so vile, so evil, so much an affront to the nature of the world and of God himself as is the vampire Count Dracula, [...]

1968, Great Britain. Starring Christopher Lee, Charles Gray, Nike Arrighi, Leon Greene, Patrick Mower, Sarah Lawson, Paul Eddington, Rosalyn Landor. Directed by Terence Fisher. His names are legion. His name is Legion. But maybe you know him as Scratch, or Ol’ Gooseberry. The Devil himself, if you will. He’s one of the most compelling literary [...]

1968, France/Italy. Starring Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot, Terence Stamp. Directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini. Uh-oh, it’s Roger Vadim again. Man alive that cat sure is popping up a lot around here these days, isn’t he? Brigitte Bardot has been showing up a lot lately as well, though [...]

Although I would have appreciated a little more in-ring action from a wrestling superhero movie, the action when it arrives overall is pretty good. The fights are well-choreographed, with only a few of those horribly telegraphed stunt set-ups. I wonder why the only time Superargo uses his super strength is when he throws the tree at the robots. Maybe I’m wrong and that wasn’t a super power at all. Maybe it was one of those surges of adrenaline you read about in the papers. The rest of his powers are pretty useless. He gets to levitate once, but he misses the chance to really piss off Dr. Wond by using mental powers to shatter the madman’s assortment of antique vases.