Shameless Self Expression

Phyllis Davis is Sugar, a tough young woman on a trumped-up dope charge who is sent to cut sugar cane at some nasty prison plantation deal. There she will lock horns with chief warden Cliff Osmond and a lunatic prison doctor (Angus Duncan) a sadistic pervert conducting bizarro experiments on the women prisoners. Needless to say, escape is on her mind instantaneously. Ellaraino (credited as Ella Edwards) plays a fellow prisoner whose boyfriend (Timothy Brown) is a male prisoner with supposed voodoo powers (!).   While it may not overly please fans of the more harsh films in the Women in Prison genre, for me this 1972 Michel Levesque (mostly an art director he also helmed the dreadful “Werewolves on Wheels” ) WIP film is one of the better ones. I will admit that some of it makes no sense, security seems wildly uneven at the prison, and Angus Duncan’s experiments seem far too reckless. However, one doesn’t go into a film like this for logic so it’s probably silly to carp that the ...

A plague has besieged the city of Icalia, Hercules (Reg Park) arrives to find even his beloved Deianira (Leonora Ruffo) in a virtual zombified state. The Oracle informs Hercules that he must venture to the depths of Hades, the land of the dead in order to lift the curse. Christopher Lee plays the treacherous Lyco, who wants Deianira for himself and to rule Icalia unimpeded with his forces of darkness. George Ardisson and Franco Giacobini play Hercules chief helpers, the latter as the rather bumbling but well-meaning Telemachus.   Mario Bava ( “Black Sunday” , “Black Sabbath” , “Kill, Baby…Kill” , “Danger Diabolik” ) making a Hercules movie with Christopher Lee was always going to be something I needed to check out even though I knew going in that Lee didn’t do his own English-language dubbing (nor did he for Bava’s “The Whip and the Body” ). This colourful 1961 film is insane but lots of fun. How insane? At one point a dead guy says to a dead girl he just met two minutes ago: ‘...