While on vacation in Colorado, New York City cop Reuben Castle begins a romance with sheriff Harriet Perdue amidst a wave of inexplicable cattle mutilations that is sweeping the area. Great atmosphere and location photography throughout this environmental conspiracy theory thriller.

The Night of the Hunted begins, as many of Jean Rollin's films do, in the forest. A young woman is wandering in a nightgown without memory of how she got there. A man gives her a ride back to the city, and it is here that the film takes a different turn for Rollin. A victim of amnesia, she resides in a modernist high-rise building populated by others similar affected by memory loss. As the young woman's memory problems increase, she begins to question whether she and the rest of the building's inhabitants are suffering from the same disease or whether they are victims of some experiment.

In The Grapes of Death (Les Raisins de La Mort) (1978), a pesticide is turning people into zombies. They are not Romero-style zombies; instead, their flesh is slowly melting, it almost pours off of their frame. Elizabeth is riding a train en route to her fiance, who works at a vineyard. She is chased off the train by a zombie. She flees into the woods and encounters many persons, some infected and some not, as she struggles to get back to her fiance.

 

Renato Polselli's Delirium (Delirio caldo) (1972) is absolute perverse pandemonium. Mickey Hargitay is an impotent doctor by day, and psycho sex maniac by night. His wife has dreams of Mickey being a dungeon sex master who tortures women. Their maid is so infatuated by Mickey that she sucks her shoulder to get off. And then Mickey is assigned to help the police find the killer of his own victims.

Renato Polselli's The Reincarnation of Isabel (also known as Black Magic Rites) (Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel trecento ...) (1973) is a nearly incomprehensible fever dream of cinematic imagination. Mickey Hargitay purchases a castle that is occupied by a group of vampires waiting for enough virgin blood to bring back to life the queen witch, Isabel. He throws a housewarming (castle-warming?) party, and the film begins its descent into lunacy. Alternating between past and present, we're shown glimpses of Isabel's torture and execution. For the rest of the movie, Polselli offers a nightmarish montage of abduction, torture, and ritual as the vampires accumulate enough virgins to complete their ceremony.

Bloody Pit of Horror (Il Boia Scarlatto) (1965) stars Mickey Hargitay, one-time Mr. Universe. It was made one year after his divorce from Jayne Mansfield. Here, he plays Travis Anderson, an actor who has retired from movies for a life of solitude and moral purity, and now lives as a recluse in a castle previously owned by The Crimson Executioner, a Medieval madman whose body and spirit were entombed in the basement of the castle. When a group of sleaze publishers show up at the castle looking to take some lurid photographs for the cover of their books, they accidentally open the tomb and unleash the wrath of The Crimson Executioner who is none too happy with their perverse and sordid ways.

Directed by Massimo Pupillo, it was written by Romano Migliorini and Roberto Natale and supposedly based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade. It is campier than Corman's Poe movies, but also far sleazier and more violent. Where Corman suggested perversity, director Massimo Pupillo revels in graphic depictions of devious pleasures. Plenty of gothic torture chambers and scenes of lurid violence. Great set design (the whole movie takes place in the castle). Occasional moments of goofiness, such as the killer monster spider who makes even Sam Katzman's monsters look realistic, but even that has its charm and is enjoyable. The highlight, of course, is Hargitay and his monomaniacal zeal. Every scene he is in is brimming with batshit psychosis. Overall, a good, sleazy, low-budget, sick, fun movie.