#Alberto De Martino

[weirdlookindog]

Horror (1963)

[rhetthammersmithhorror]

MST3K 903| The Pumaman | 1998

[gatutor]

Sydne Rome "El hombre puma" (L´uomo puma) 1980, de Alberto de Martino.

[suspiria76]

THE ANTICHRIST

Italy

1974

Directed by Alberto De Martino

[mariocki]

Horror (The Blancheville Monster, 1963)

"Emilie will recover soon if we help her, you'll see."

"Not in this gloomy castle, never. Emilie needs to feel young, that's her illness. But here everything is old: the furniture, the walls, the people. Everywhere, even in the air that you breathe, there's an omen of death."

[hibiscusbabyboy]

1960s and 1990s movies watched on February 2023:

♡ What Happened to Bobby Earl?/Murder in a College Town (1997, dir. Bradley Wigor)

♡ A Violation of Trust (1991, dir. Charles Correll)

♡ The Wrong Girl (1999, dir. David Jackson)

♡ Obsessed (1992, dir. Jonathan Sanger)

♡ Special Mission Lady Chaplin (1966, dir. Sergio Grieco & Alberto De Martino)

♡ Pretty Poison (1968, dir. Noel Black)

♡ Secret Ceremony (1968, dir. Joseph Losey)

♡ The Servant (1963, dir. Joseph Losey)

♡ Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness (1995, dir. Shimako Sato)

♡ Eko Eko Azarak II: Birth of The Wizard (1996, dir. Shimako Sato)

♡ Eko Eko Azarak III: Misa the Dark Angel (1998, dir. Katsuhito Ueno)

[the-nightly-film]

January 5th, 2025

Pumaman, he flies like a moron!

I saw that Peacock has a very small amount of MST3K episodes and just as I was about to say, "wow, they have none of the good ones" BAM! My favorite episode of all time pops up.

The Pumaman (1980) is a truly terrible movie. However, its cheap budget, clear cultural appropriation, and under acting allowed it to become one of the funniest hour and a halves of television of all time. This episode has some of the best jokes of the whole show. Including Crow's parody of The Greatest American Hero theme song:

"Believe it or not, this movie's still on. It should have ended two hours ago."

Also I think this is the 3rd time I've watched this episode and I just realized freaking Dr. Loomis is the crazy guy trying to take over the world??? Genuinely gobsmacked.

I'd like to do a few more MST3K movies on this blog, although I'll be pulling them from a much larger library.

[cinemaquiles]

O exorcista italiano: "O anticristo" ("THE ANTICHRIST", 1974)

[haverwood]

Holocaust 2000 Alberto De Martino UK/Italy, 1977 ★★★ Can you imagine how they pitched these ideas?

– We need to put some of THE OMEN in there. – Of course! – And a little THE CHINA SYNDROME too. – Hasn't been made yet. – Right. But how do we one up Peck's chin? – Let's get Kirk Douglas! – Brilliant!

A masterpiece of schlock, plain and simple. It's got everything: melodramatic italian acting, cold british acting, Kirk Douglas giving his all, Ennio Morricone doing the score.. I would rate it 5 stars if I weren't such a chicken!

By the way, when that scene with the helicopter came up (you know which one), I instantly remembered watching it as a kid, in the old VHS days. Cool stuff.

[andersonvision]

The Blancheville Monster (1963) [Blu-ray review]

Gothic cinema gets its moment to shine in Gothic Fantastico. “The Blancheville Monster” (1963), a haunting Gothic horror that continues to captivate audiences with its eerie atmosphere and timeless themes. Directed by Alberto De Martino, this Italian-Spanish co-production delves into the depths of family curses, ancient legends, and the terrors that lurk within the walls of an old mansion. One…

[weirdlookindog]

[gatutor]

Walter George Alton-Sydne Rome "El hombre puma" (L´uomo puma) 1980, de Alberto De Martino.

[suspiria76]

THE ANTICHRIST

Italy

1974

Directed by Alberto De Martino

[pierreism]

'Louise' by Armando Trovajoli

From the motion picture soundtrack to Shadows In An Empty Room a.k.a. Una Magnum Special per Tony Saitta (1976)

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | Operation Kid Brother (De Martino, 1967)

I assume that the James Bond franchise was big enough that there were a number of obvious cash-ins alongside the Eurospy genre that it no doubt inspired. I'm not familiar with those to make any broad sweeping statements, but my guess is that none of them fall into as neat a proto-Bruceploitation template as this one. A lead actor who resembles the real deal? Check. A bunch of peripheral actors from the actual movies? Check. Discount versions of the same thrills? Check. Crazier and sometimes more fun? Sadly no.

But instead of Bruce (Lee), the guy we're ripping off here is Connery, and to this movie's credit, it does have a real Connery. Neil Connery, brother of Sean. What's interesting is that it doesn't try to pass him off as the original, but as the brother of the more famous secret agent, who in the universe of the movie, would be going by his real last name. (Although one must point out that Bond does as well, making him a pretty lousy secret agent in most respects.) Neil plays a plastic surgeon who also can read lips and has the power of hypnosis. Apparently he was a plasterer in real life, and I assume the screenwriters got confused and wrote in the plastic surgeon job in an attempt to make him feel more at ease onscreen. I also assume the hypnosis angle, which bears limited fruit in the pursuit of the mission, was an excuse to give the star a bunch of dramatic closeups in an effort to wring a better performance out of him. Neither is successful. If anything, the movie demonstrates the classic Bruceploitation lesson that you can't fake star power, no matter how much your actor looks like the real deal.

The movie is also not remotely thrilling, and this is an area where it compares unfavourably to Bruceploitation. It's still possible to do entertaining martial arts sequences on the cheap, but the more elaborate set pieces of the Bond movies are harder to replicate when you're pinching pennies. To be fair, the movie doesn't look impoverished, and we do bounce around different locations, although whatever travelogue qualities the movie might have attempted were not done justice by the awful transfer I watched on YouTube. But making up for that is a pretty nice Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai score, including a theme song replete with lush instrumentation and sometimes breathy, sometimes soaring vocals, as well as the actual Bond actors in the cast. (I assume there was nothing in their contract stopping them from acting in rip-offs.) We get Adolfo Celi and Bernard Lee doing more boring versions of their actual roles. But the ladies fare better, with Daniela Bianchi wearing any number of red or orange outfits that proved retina-scorching in the copy I watched, and Lois Maxwell, who is normally stuck behind a desk in the Bond movies, actually getting to go out into the field and get in car chases and shootouts. Now if we had a Moneypenny-centric rip-off, we'd be on to something.

[alephskoteinos]

I have got to see this movie

The Antichrist (1974)  Dir. Alberto De Martino