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. 

Gold Is Where You Find It (1938)

Director: Michael Curtiz. Screenwriters: Warren Duff and Robert Buckner, from a story by Clements Ripley. Director of Photography: Sol Polito. Producers: Samuel Bischoff, Hal B. Wallis, Jack L. Warner. Music: Max Steiner. Actors: George Brent (Jared Whitney), Olivia de Havilland (Serena Ferris), Claude Rains (Col. Ferris).

Released in 1938, Gold Is Where You Find It is a California Western about the conflicts between the gold mining industry and the farmers whose fields are flooded with mud and other mining refuse. The political clash is channeled through star-crossed lovers: mining engineer Jared Whitney (George Brent) and Serena Ferris (Olivia de Havilland), the daughter of farmer Col. Ferris (Claude Rains). Whitney's innovations only intensify the dispute, bringing greater wealth to the mining company and further devastation to the land. Though the drama is finely acted (Rains, in particular, is terrific), it is the photography and setting, as well as the underly politics of the story, that are the most fascinating aspects of the film.

Horizons West (1952)

Director: Budd Boetticher. Screenwriter: Louis Stevens. Director of Photography: Charles P. Boyle. Producer: Albert J. Cohen. Music: Henry Mancini, Herman Stein. Actors: Robert Ryan (Dan Hammond), Rock Hudson (Neil Hammond), James Arness (Tiny McGilligan), Raymond Burr (Cord Hardin), Julie Adams (Lorna Hardin), Judith Braun (Sally Eaton). Universal. 81 mins.

Horizons West is emblematic of the anti-traditionalist direction that director, Budd Boetticher, would take the Western genre. The film is bursting with energy and ideas, much of which winds up feeling rushed, displaced, or pre-mature in its execution due to the film's brief runtime. At 81 minutes, it's far too short for its ambitions. Nonetheless, it is a flawed but fascinating Western that exemplifies the personal vision of Boetticher. 

Robert Ryan, Rock Hudson, and James Arness portray three friends returning to Texas after the end of the Civil War. Ryan and Hudson are brothers, while Arness is the family's ranch hand. The war has touched them all in different ways, dividing them by their distinctive and contrasting worldviews. Ryan is the cynic, Arness the naive optimist, and Hudson the realist. In a more conventional Western, Hudson would be our hero, with Ryan and Arness playing out some obvious, extremist moral counterpoint. However, Budd Boetticher doesn't direct typical Westerns, and Ryan becomes our main character, our unstable moral compass. Arness is practically forgotten after the opening scene, and Hudson is little more than a side note throeughout. Even in the end, when Hudson must rise to the occasion to restore justice and order to The West -- the key thematic values usually associated with the genre -- Boetticher shows next to no interest in his character or his ideals. Instead, it is Ryan, in all his corrupt and immoral rage, that is the object of Boetticher's fascination. 

Ryan can't stay at home for long. Itching for money and prosperity, he quickly rejects the traditional virtues of a Western hero and abandons farm and family to make it as a gambler. After losing big, however, Ryan is unable to pay his debt to local tycoon Raymond Burr. Ryan then rallies together the surviving scraps of the Confederate army and turns them into a gang of outlaws. Raiding local farms and robbing cattle, the gang becomes the scourge of Texas. Eventually, even Ryan's family -- led by Hudson -- picks up arms against him. The town's retribution, however, isn't given much sympathy from Boetticher. Ryan's amoral worldview, insatiable desires, and culture of violence are the director's focus. 

Unlike most Westerns, Horizons West's structure and pacing is more akin to the gangster genre -- the rise and fall of someone like Little Caesar, Scarface, or The Public Enemy. And, like in those films, whatever restoration of normality at the finale isn't a signal of good triumphing over evil, but all morality -- good natured, wicked, or otherwise -- is all-consuming, and self-destruction is inevitable.

It would be an understatement to describe the editing style of Horizons West as blunt. It is reckless and headstrong, well past the point of harming the narrative. What should be an epic story of family, economics and morality, symbolizing a larger shift in the American ethos -- something akin to Giant, or perhaps even Gone With the Wind -- is hammered out in just over an hour. Post-war turmoil is barely alluded to. Little time is given to the formation of the gang, their raids, or their dealings in Mexico; after Ryan rallies them for the first time, they almost disappear from the picture. Likewise, the family, the farm, and the love interests must have been left on the cutting room floor (if they were ever written or filmed at all). Even though the tempo, in some ways, limits the film from achieving its full potential -- the characters are thin, the plot full of gaps -- one cannot deny the overall relentless fever to the narrative, one that is perfectly in synch with Ryan's own raging whirlwind.

Horizons West is also notable for its complete lack of Western hokum. No fat amiable sheriffs, no cowpoke wisdom, no Main Street displays of virtue, no emblems of purity. Even the landscapes and sets are rendered without sentimentality. In contrast to his hard-edged characters and hell-bent for destruction tempo, Boetticher's compositions are lush and delicate, and his vibrant color palette blossoms in every frame. Unlike Ford's majestic long shots, there's something more intimate and immediate about Boetticher's shots. Ford's shots evoke eternity, while Boetticher's  suggest something more ephemeral and fragile, something grounded entirely in the moment. From the ground up to the characters themselves, Boetticher's natural order is one of life and death, always on the verge of creation and destruction.