 You never know what you'll find if you go far enough up the Amazon.  
Written, produced, and directed by Curt Siodmak, who was behind numerous monster features, including Bride of the Gorilla and Curucu, the tropical adventure Love Slaves of the Amazon, which premiered today in 1957, is a full color production about the search for a lost realm of warrior women and their priceless treasures. In order for the expedition to take place, semi-crazy Eduardo Ciannelli must convince staid Don Taylor that the Amazons exist. He reveals a golden statue as proof, which he'd obtained on a previous foray into the jungle, and after some back and forth, sufficient funds for the journey are obtained. Unfortunately, rumors of gold and diamonds have piqued the interest of local ruffians, who plan to hijack the expedition.
Are there actually Amazons? You bet. French actress Anna Maria Nabuco is their queen. Are there love slaves? Yup, one poor exhausted one, anyway, and Taylor looks ripe as a replacement as far as Nabuco is concerned. And is there treasure? There's that too. The movie's plusses include a pitched battle between the expedition and the hijackers while both their boats are mired in river mud, and various exteriors actually shot in Manaus, Brazil and the nearby rain forest. Additionally, the poster art by Reynold Brown is tops. On the minus side, we felt that intermittent veerings into comedy were pointless and unfunny. But on the whole, Love Slaves of the Amazons was better than we expected. Does that mean it was good? Define “good.”
              
 There's no better place to try something new. 
This is an interesting but uncredited Italian poster for the Alberto Cavallone directed and written Africasploitation flick Afrika (clever name, right?), which premiered in Italy today in 1973. By now you know exactly what to expect. What's amazing about these set-in-Africa movies, whether Italian, German, British, French, or what-have-you, is that they portray the continent as lawless and cruel (cue gratuitous shot of ox being decapitated) in a way that's bemusingly lacking in self-awareness coming from cultures that murdered one-hundred million inhabitants of those lands in the pursuit of profit.
On the lighter side, if we'd been customs agents anywhere in the tropics during the 1970s, we'd have taken aside every white arrival, looked over their paperwork, and said with a straight face, “It indicates here you boarded the flight with your usual inhibitions, but I notice you don't seem to have any with you now.” If only we had a time machine. With luck we'd have “processed” Anita Strindberg and Yanti Somer. At this point we accept whites-in-the-tropics movies as cinematic exercises in behavioural guardrail smashing. Sometimes those exercises are actually good, loaded with cliché though they may be. However Afrika, while suffering from the same old blind spot, attempts a serious story with a modicum of depth.
Set in Ethiopia, it's about a painter played by Ivano Staccioli who's tempted to stray from his wife when he meets a handsome gay college student played by Andrea Traglia. The studious and poetic Traglia is bullied in school, even raped at one point, and finds sympathy and understanding with Staccioli, and a job as his live-in secretary. This is not an easy household in which to live because its occupants are decadent and neurotic. Staccioli and Traglia's relationship is the sanest thing going on, but needless to say, it will lead to trouble and tragedy. This is all framed by a murder-or-suicide and police investigation, which means the central drama of a forbidden gay affair is told in flashback during interrogations.
We appreciated Cavallone taking a swing at a serious drama, and we enjoyed seeing Maria Pia Luzi, one of Italy's many exploitation stars (Women in Cell Block 7, White Slave Ship), given a chance to act rather than strip, but we can't call the movie good. It isn't the performances—everyone does pretty well in that department, considering the level of writing. It's just that the film is portentous and uninvolving. Take away the anti-Africa bias and it's a noble attempt at important subject matter, but in cinema you don't get points for trying. In our opinion you can give Afrika a pass.          
 He's 111 times better than 007—in the filmmakers' dreams. 
Here you see a poster for the Italian spy movie Agente segreto 777 - Operazione Mistero, known in English as Secret Agent 777. This is an alternate promo. Like the first one we showed you, it was painted by Mario de Berardinis. Sadly, the movie is extremely not great, but the other poster is. Check it out here.
 What was her real name? It's a Short story.   
Above are three photos of British-Burmese actress Seyna Seyn, who in our view has one of the greatest names in show business history. But as we asked above, could such an exotic and alliterative handle be real? Sadly, no. She was born Sylvia Short, which strikes us as a perfectly serviceable show business name, but when you come up with something like Seyna Seyn you have to go with it. Seyn's filmography includes Casanova 70, I marziani hanno 12 mani, aka The Twelve-Handed Men of Mars, Agente segreto 777 - Operazione Mistero, and Se tutte le donne del mondo... (Operazione Paradiso), aka Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die. As those titles suggest, she mostly worked in Italy. We figure we'll get around to one or two of her movies pretty soon.
 Strindberg, Tamburi, Bisera and company wip it good in Italian sexploitation drama. 
We ran across this poster for a movie we watched years ago, the exploitation drama Diario segreto da un carcere femminile, which premiered in Italy today in 1973 and is known in English as Women in Cell Block 7. Such films, for the uninitiated, are thought of by b-movie fans as belonging to a sub-genre known as women-in-prison or WiP. In honor of today's post we've gone back through the website and keyworded for them, so you can see what we've done on this unusual style of cinema by clicking “women in prison” at bottom.
The art on the poster is by Enzo Nistri, which makes it worth a share. The movie is sort of interesting too, though perhaps not exactly good. However, we've never been able to forget Olga Bisera's naughty correctional facility finger. You can see her using it in a couple of the production photos below, and following those are some of the stars, who comprise a who's-who of 1970s European exploitation cinema: Anita Strindberg, Eva Czemerys, Jenny Tamburi, Paola Senatore, Maria Pia Luzi, Gabriella Giorgelli, Olga Bisera, and Valeria Fabrizi.
                        
 Hello? Is anybody there? Santa? Is that you? 
Our sprint through movies this December continues today with the Italian Christmas favorite—Estratto dagli archivi segreti della polizia di una capitale europea, for which you see a festive yule themed poster above. It was painted by Mario Piovano and just oozes holiday spirit. Right. Well, obviously not. This couldn't be a Christmas movie unless Christmas makes you want to kill everyone around you. But it qualifies as a gift from us to you, because we're going to save you the time you might have spent watching it.
The title translates as, “extract from the secret police archives of a European capital,” but was shortened to Tragic Ceremony for its English language release. The Italian title would seem to indicate that this is a giallo flick, but it's actually more in the realm of gothic horror. Basically, a quartet of carefree hippies stumble upon and must survive assorted evils, including a black mass, a phantom gas station, and spurts of megaviolence, all loosely related somehow to a string of possibly cursed pearls.
The movie stars Camille Keaton, who's not well known today, but headlined perhaps the most infamous grindhouse offering of the 1970s—Day of the Woman, better known in some quarters as I Spit on Your Grave. Keaton appears here six years earlier, and is stranded with her hippie-hedonist friends in a creepy old manse where she's seized upon by the loony, aristocratic occupants as a potential sacrifice. She escapes, but the aftereffects of her close call are numerous and gory.
Critics hindered by their own knowledge of niche cinema to the extent that they can't see the forest for the trees tend to describe this movie as underrated, but it really isn't, even if you accept it as a sly commentary on the generational clash between the counterculture and the gentry. At one point a distressed Máximo Valverde asks, “What's happening? What's going on?” Well, you've ended up in a below average horror movie, Max. It happens. Revisionist critics can't help you. Estratto dagli archivi segreti della polizia di una capitale europea premiered in Italy today in 1972.
             
 Ouch! Oof! I get it! I get it! You don't want to pick on someone your own size! 
Above is another fun cover from Société d'Éditions Générales, or SEG, for its series Service Secret 078. Graine d'espion translates as “spy seed,” another inscrutable title, which by now you know is par for the course when it comes to French paperbacks. Francis Richard was in reality Paul Bérato, who you can learn a little bit more about here. As usual with SEG, the art is uncredited.
 Okay, in she goes. Now I just need some bubble wrap and a dozen or so pine air fresheners and she's good to ship. 
This is such a macabre image, a man stuffing a woman's corpse in a crate, that we probably should have posted it around Halloween. 1958's Et un cercueil pour Cecilia was written by Francis Richard, aka Paul Bérato, for Société d'Editions Générale and its collection Service Secret 078. This is one of those tales where the author pretends to be the hero. In other words, it was written by Bérato as Francis Richard, but the main character is also named Francis Richard, and he's a globetrotting spy who heads to Chile on a mission, where the villains apparently crate up corpses. Though the grim art on this is not attributed, others in the series were signed E.G. or F.G. and the style here is similar. Unfortunately, we don't know who E.G. or F.G. is.
 French paperback illustrators could teach real world spies all about leaving no clues or evidence behind. 
When it comes to French pulp, the cover art will often be uncredited. Such is the case with this attractive front for the thriller Quadrille d'Espions, published in 1956 by Société d'Éditions Général, aka SEG, for its popular series Espionnage/Service-Secret. The book was written by Francis Richard, which was a pseudonym used by Paul Bérato, who also wrote as Yves Dermèze, Paul Béra, er al. We dug deeper into the identity of this artist, to no avail. Someone out there knows, though, and with luck, we'll hear from them.
 There are 777 ways to make a bad 007 movie. 
Above you see a Mario de Berardinis poster painted for the Italian spy thriller Agente segreto 777 - Operazione Mistero, known in English merely as Secret Agent 777. The plot of this revolves around a doctor's cell regeneration process—i.e. he can bring people back to life, a miracle somehow made possible through nuclear physics. No, it didn't make sense to us either. But all you need to know is that basically Agent 777 is a low rent James Bond rip-off with a touch of updated Frankenstein mixed in.
It's as silly as it sounds, and has too many problems to enumerate, but we did enjoy the Beirut setting, and it rather amused us when a character spoke of going to the “Portuguese colonies to find his fortune.” Back then that meant going to Angola or Mozambique and extracting something of value that rightfully belonged to the local people—oil, antiquities, jewels, anything. The sequence struck us because at the time Agent 777 was extracting something of value from us—our patience. It premiered in Italy today in 1965.
 Help! I'm trapped in this terrible film and I can't get out!
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1923—Yankee Stadium Opens
In New York City, Yankee Stadium, home of Major League Baseball's New York Yankees, opens with the Yankees beating their eternal rivals the Boston Red Sox 4 to 1. The stadium, which is nicknamed The House that Ruth Built, sees the Yankees become the most successful franchise in baseball history. It is eventually replaced by a new Yankee Stadium and closes in September 2008. 1961—Bay of Pigs Invasion Is Launched
A group of CIA financed and trained Cuban refugees lands at the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro. However, the invasion fails badly and the result is embarrassment for U.S. president John F. Kennedy and a major boost in popularity for Fidel Castro, and also has the effect of pushing him toward the Soviet Union for protection. 1943—First LSD Trip Takes Place
Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann, while working at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, accidentally absorbs lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, and thus discovers its psychedelic properties. He had first synthesized the substance five years earlier but hadn't been aware of its effects. He goes on to write scores of articles and books about his creation.
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