Above are assorted issues of the lowbrow Elvifrance comic Mafioso, which lasted for ninety-six issues between 1982 and 1992. Elvifrance comics were a favorite target of French censors, and 176 releases of various titles were banned for sale, which is no surprise considering their emphasis on violence against women. You can read an issue of Mafioso here. If you read French, that is. 

Promo poster for The Sekkan, with Fujiko Suetsugu, 1985. 

Some people don’t get Roman Coppola’s 2001 retro-cool directorial debut CQ, and their criticisms are vehement enough that we started to question whether the film is actually any good, but we just watched it again this morning and reconfirmed its greatness. It’s about an American in Paris in 1969 working as a film editor on a sci-fi adventure called Secret Agent: Dragonfly. When the director and his replacement both leave the production, the editor—played by Lost’s Jeremy Davies—is tapped to finish the picture. He soon begins to fall for Dragonfly, but are his feelings for the ass-kicking fictional character or the fresh-faced actress who portrays her? With echoes of Blow Up, La Dolce Vita, Barbarella and Diabolik, as well as a convincingly sixties soundtrack provided by the group Mellow, CQ is an enchanting little piece of cinematic escapism. The only flaw we can find in it is that Secret Agent: Dragonfly isn’t a real movie. We’d line up to see it. CQ premiered at the Cannes festival in May 2001, and opened in the U.S. today in 2002. 

It’s been a while since we posted a comic book, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been reading any. Of late we’ve been enjoying Ramba, a sort of female revenge serial written and drawn by Rossano Rossi, Marco Delizia and Fabio Valdambrini. Ramba is filled with sex, castrations, murder, perversion and other pulpy goodness, all courtesy of the character of Ramba, who is basically an oversexed hitwoman. When she isn’t fulfilling contracts, she’s running afoul of random men and having to put them in their proper place—the grave, usually. In issue 1, for instance, she tries to masturbate in an alley and of course you know how men are—always sticking their noses where they don’t belong. After Ramba goes Benihana on them, it’s off to kill her target, who she stabs in the chest and then uses for a little sexual pleasure while his lifeblood is leaking out of him. Oh, and just for good measure, she also urinates in his face. It's fun for the whole family. Want to see men finally get what they deserve? One or two issues of this should do the trick.

Les yeux de la terreur, aka, Terror Eyes is an unremarkable little thriller about a serial decapitator on a college campus. It isn’t very scary, and it isn’t very entertaining, despite its deliberate resemblance to classic Italian giallo. But opinions vary, and as you can see by looking at the above poster, it won the Jury Prize at the 1981 Avoriaz Film Festival, which goes to show that horror fans are so desperate for anything that resembles art they’ll hear Edith Piaf in a victim’s screams and see Jackson Pollack in his blood splatters. But one thing you don’t have to look very hard for here is British bombshell Rachel Ward in her first film appearance. She would later star in the quirky but satisfying neo noir Sharky’s Machine, the somewhat less satisfying noir rehash Against All Odds, the noir send-up Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and the excellent modern Aussie noir After Dark My Sweet. That’s a lot of noir, which is why she’s a favorite actress around here. As a side note, she gave an interview a while back in which she confessed that as a result of aging a bit and losing some of her extraordinary physical beauty, she wished she’d done more nude scenes. Funny, we were thinking the same thing. Les yeux de la terreur—which would later become known in the U.S. not as Terror Eyes, but as Night School—premiered at Avoriaz in January, and in Paris today in 1981. 

We recently stumbled upon across a full-sized version of a promo still of Tawny Kitaen we posted last year from her fantastically cheesy 1984 adventure The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak. These new images come from a website that seems to be missing in action now, so we can’t link to it, but thanks guys, wherever you are. For those who haven’t seen this movie, we aren’t going to sully our reputations by describing it as good. But it does have a certain, how shall we say, je ne sais quoi, an intangible wonderfulness that derives mainly from watching Tawny Kitaen transform from buttoned-up schoolmarm to mostly-naked warrior vixen. Also, it helps to be young, desperately horny virgins when you watch it. Actually, maybe that’s the only reason we liked it. In any case, this Raiders-style thriller about a woman chasing a mythical butterfly in the exotic wilds of China, ably directed by Emmanuelle auteur Just Jaeckin, is erotica at its most highbrow. Gwendoline is now considered a cult classic. Virgins and non-virgins alike should give it a whirl. 

Assorted Super comics from the former Yugoslavia, circa late 1980s. 

We saw Sonatine a few years ago and were simply stunned by it. It’s a gangster drama that derives inspiration from the same Hong Kong crime films that inspired Quentin Tarantino. We’re talking about classics like Ringo Lam’s City on Fire and John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow. But the difference is Sonatine is doggedly introspective. There’s plenty of violence, but the overall pace is measured, and the film features a long interlude during which hired gun Aniki Murakawa—played by Takeshi “Beat” Kitano—enjoys some idyllic rest and recreation at the beach with his criminal cohorts. This interlude, wedged between the bookends of the film’s main story, was our favorite part by far, because it humanizes Murakawa, shows him to be a man capable of laughter, even dreams. But it also highlights his insatiable appetite for self-destruction, and the utter emptiness of his soul. In the hands of a lesser director these sequences could have been nonsensical, but Kitano, handling the chores himself, constructs the pieces perfectly and you come away with real feeling for his anti-hero Murakawa. When the problems Murakawa avoided finally come to roost, we can’t help but cheer for him to win. But nothing is as simple as it seems in Sonatine, and nothing about it is predictable. Maybe that’s why, after its spring premiere in Japan, it went on to create a sensation at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival and make Kitano an international sensation. Watch this one and you’ll see why. 

We were out barhopping not long ago when we spotted this promo poster on the wall of one of the many joints we visited. You’ll notice most of the text is in English. That’s because Ondarra sort of markets itself to the expat Brit crowd here. Anyway, after a couple of attempts to adequately photograph the poster, we just ripped it down and departed, because hey, just like that old rap group Naughty By Nature, in a pinch we’re down with o.p.p. This particular o.p.p. features the work of mid-century pin-up artist Peter Driben, who painted covers for the Robert Harrison-operated pulp mags Wink, Flirt, Beauty Parade, and others. Driben is one of the most important and prolific pulp illustrators who ever lived, so we’ll be posting—or, ahem, borrowing—some more of his work in the future. 

Japanese promo poster for the American porno flick Glitter, with an image of star Shauna Grant, 1983. Grant committed suicide a year after this film was released.