Movie Ads of the Week: The Many Faces of SOLANGE (1974-1977)

Massimo Dallamano's COSA AVETE FATTO A SOLANGE?, featuring Fabio Testi and Camille Keaton, was picked up for U.S. distribution by Hallmark Releasing Corporation in 1973 and apparently screened as both WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? and then SOLANGE before arriving in Pittsfield, MA as BLOOD RELATIONS on April 5, 1974. Like other Hallmark horror releases of the period, the ads recycle the "It's only a movie" tag line from the company's most notorious hit, Wes Craven's LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. Craven later borrowed the BLOOD RELATIONS title for a screenplay that eventually became his second film, THE HILLS HAVE EYES.

At the same time this beloved giallo was playing some areas as BLOOD RELATIONS, American International was sub-distributing it as TERROR IN THE WOODS. The ad above is from Louisville, KY on April 17, 1974.

If you've watched Garagehouse Pictures' Blu-ray TRAILER TRAUMA, then you already know that THE RAH RAH GIRLS is yet another title for Dallamano's '72 thriller (That trailer came from the Temple of Schlock Archives, by the way). The ad above is from Bloomington, IL on July 17, 1977. SEX ON THE GROOVE TUBE (1976), another Hallmark release, is a downright fraudulent re-titling of THE CASE OF THE FULL MOON MURDERS (1973) a.k.a. THE CASE OF THE SMILING STIFFS, with voiceovers added to trick viewers into thinking it’s a sequel to THE GROOVE TUBE. It's also heavily edited from a self-applied X rating to an MPAA-approved R.

Yet another title for the film is THE SCHOOL THAT COULDN'T SCREAM, seen above playing in Chicago on October 21, 1977 co-billed with LAST HOUSE PART II, a reissue of Mario Bava's BAY OF BLOOD, which Hallmark had already released as CARNAGE and TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE.

Since Hallmark sometimes used the same title for more than one movie (DON'T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT and HORROR HOSPITAL were both released as DEATH WARD #13, for example), we'll assume in the ad above that THE RAH RAH GIRLS is another Hallmark release and not the Massimo Dallamano film mistakenly booked with itself as THE SCHOOL THAT COULDN'T SCREAM in Limerick, PA on June 3, 1977. Our guess is that it was PRIVATE SCHOOL GIRLS (GEFÄHRLICHER SEX FRÜHREIFER MÄDCHEN).

Movie Ads of the Week: The Many Faces of HORROR HOSPITAL (1974-1978)

Richard Gordon's comic-horror production HORROR HOSPITAL (1973) -- directed by Antony Balch and starring Michael Gough, Robin Askwith, Vanessa Shaw and Dennis Price -- was acquired for the U.S. by Hallmark Releasing in late '73 and retitled EASTWORLD to capitalize on the success of Michael Crichton's WESTWORLD. The ad above is from Kokomo, IN where American International was handling Hallmark's releases, while the ad below is from Poughkeepsie, NY (Both are dated January 25, 1974).

Simultaneous with the film's release as EASTWORLD, Hallmark was also circulating prints under the title COMPUTER KILLERS, using the same ad campaign.

Middletown, RI - February 8, 1974

Two months later (April 19, 1974) the film surfaced in Louisville, KY as DEATH WARD #13, a title Hallmark had used the previous year for S.F. Brownrigg's DON'T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT.

HORROR HOSPITAL was re-released in 1978, despite being sold to television two years earlier, this time under its original title and with a tag line that took aim at another Michael Crichton film, COMA (also 1978). The ad above is from St. Louis, MO on December 1, 1978.

Movie Ad of the Week: ANGELS FROM HELL w/ THE NAME OF THE GAME IS KILL (1968)

By the time the double bill of ANGELS FROM HELL and THE NAME OF THE GAME IS KILL arrived in Chicago on November 1, 1968, both movies had already played throughout the country to widely different box-office results. ANGELS FROM HELL had its world premiere on May 29, 1968 at the Meadow Lark Drive-In in Wichita, KS, where it set the house record as well as the all-time city record, and continued to rake in dollars for American International Pictures everywhere it played, all summer long and into the fall. On the other hand, THE NAME OF THE GAME IS KILL opened in New York, Los Angeles, and several other major cities on June 5, 1968 -- a few hours before Robert Kennedy's assassination -- and played to mostly empty seats until relegated to second-feature status a few months later.

Movie Ad of the Week: Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre in New Rochelle (January 1963)

Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre appeared at the RKO Proctor's theater in New Rochelle on Saturday, January 26, 1963 to promote the release of THE RAVEN, the fifth of eight movies Roger Corman made for American International Pictures based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Radio and TV announcer Fred Robbins, best known for CBS Movie Nights, introduced Karloff and Lorre that afternoon.

Movie Ads of the Week: TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS (1968) and THE MAN WHO LIES (1970)

Back in December we had the pleasure of seeing Alain Robbe-Grillet's TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS (1966) and THE MAN WHO LIES (1968) in watchable, sub-titled versions -- and on a decent-sized screen to boot! -- thanks to a one-day-only double bill shown as part of the Film Forum's salute to actor Jean-Louis Trintignant. The series, while hardly exhaustive (Where was THE SLEEPING CAR MURDERS? THE LIBERTINE? WITHOUT APPARENT MOTIVE? DEATH LAID AN EGG? THE FRENCH CONSPIRACY? DEADLY SWEET? THE CROOK?), did offer the chance to see these two mind-twisters as well as a couple of other obscurities, like the uncut AND HOPE TO DIE. The word on the street is that a certain company shelled out big bucks (thus outbidding our friends at Mondo Macabro) on the U.S. rights to release these and three other Robbe-Grillet movies on DVD, so sometime before the end of the year we should be upgrading our blur-o-vision DVD-R of TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS and viewing THE MAN WHO LIES, EDEN AND AFTER (1970), N TAKES THE DICE (1971) and SUCCESSIVE SLIDINGS OF PLEASURE (1974) in the comfort of the Temple screening room.

Now, about these ads: TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS made its Big Apple debut on May 12, 1968 through the AIP subsidiary Trans-American Films, while Grove Press' Evergreen Films opened THE MAN WHO LIES in New York on April 13, 1970.

Movie Ads of the Week: HELL UP IN HARLEM vs. THAT MAN BOLT (both 1973)

How big of a star was Fred Williamson on Friday, December 21, 1973? Big enough for two of his action vehicles to open in New York on the same day! American International unveiled HELL UP IN HARLEM, their quickie sequel to BLACK CAESAR, opposite Universal's internationally shot karate/superspy flick THAT MAN BOLT. The Daily News even pitted the two films against each other by running their opening day ads on the same page.

Movie Ad of the Week: STAG MODEL SLAUGHTER (1975)

Mike Decker of Just For the Hell of It! (J4HI!) sent us this cool ad mat a couple of weeks ago to use for a future "Updating the IMDb" entry, but the title is so rare that we thought it should get its own post. American International Pictures released Pete Walker's HOUSE OF WHIPCORD beginning in November 1974, but by July '75 it had been retitled STAG MODEL SLAUGHTER by United Producers for select territories like Texas, where we found it co-billed with HELL HOUSE GIRLS, a re-release of SCHOOL FOR UNCLAIMED GIRLS (AIP's version of Robert Hartford-Davis' THE SMASHING BIRD I USED TO KNOW). United Producers performed another facelift on Walker's film and in December '75, a year after its stateside debut, it was re-released again as THE PHOTOGRAPHER'S MODELS, paired with HOOKERS REVENGE (a retitling of THEY CALL HER ONE-EYE) on a double bill that played successfully through the rest of the decade.

Movie Ad of the Week: BREAKFAST AT THE MANCHESTER MORGUE (1975)

Almost a year before its May 1976 rollout in New York, Los Angeles and St. Louis as DON'T OPEN THE WINDOW...

...with an advertising campaign that ripped off Avco Embassy's marketing for SOMETHING TO HIDE (1976), including unlicensed images of co-stars Shelley Winters and Linda Hayden...

...American International Pictures and Hallmark Releasing slipped Jorge Grau's NON SI DEVE PROFANARE IL SONNO DEI MORTI / LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE (1974) into one 42nd Street theater as BREAKFAST AT THE MANCHESTER MORGUE, with a completely different (and more original) ad campaign.

Marquee Gazing: SAVAGE SISTERS at the Woods

Eddie Romero's action-packed fighting femmes flick SAVAGE SISTERS (1974), now available as an MGM Limited Edition DVD-R, has been a TOS favorite since its occasional appearances on Commander USA's Groovy Movies beginning in August 1986. So imagine our surprise when we spotted it on the marquee of Chicago's legendary Woods Theater during a recent viewing of the Michael Keaton-meets-Maria Conchita Alonso romcom TOUCH AND GO (1986).

About an hour into the movie, 12-year-old Louis DeLeon (Ajay Naidu), streetwise son of single mom Denise DeLeon (Alonso), skips school to see SCARFACE in one of the last of the Loop theaters.

However, the establishing shot in this open matte VHS source reveals the actual program at the Woods that week: THE BOUNTY (1984), starring Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins and released by Orion Pictures, paired with the decade-older AIP release SAVAGE SISTERS.

We knew Orion had kept many of the '70s AIP films in theatrical circulation until 1987, so the appearance of SAVAGE SISTERS on a marquee with a then-new Orion release didn't surprise us.

What did surprise us was the realization that TOUCH AND GO -- an August 1986 release evidently filmed during the spring of 1984 -- was in theaters at the same time we first caught SAVAGE SISTERS on the USA Network!

Movie Ad of the Week: THE DIRTY DOLLS IN KATMANDU (1971)

LES CHEMINS DE KATMANDU (1969) is a French exploitation film starring Jane Birkin, Serge Gainsbourg, Elsa Martinelli, Arlene Dahl, Renaud Verley, and Pascale Audret, directed by André Cayatte (LE MIROIR À DEUX FACES) and based on a novel by René Barjavel (author of the groundbreaking sci-fi work Le Voyageur Imprudent). United Producers acquired it for U.S. release through American International Pictures beginning in 1971, first under the title THE DIRTY DOLLS IN KATMANDU and later as THE STRANGE WORLD OF KATMANDU and THE PLEASURE PIT. Its frequent co-feature was KAMA SUTRA (1970), a United Producers/AIP recut of the West German sex documentary KAMASUTRA, VOLLENDUNG DER LIEBE (1969), which featured an early screen appearance by Persis Khambatta (STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, NIGHTHAWKS, MEGAFORCE). First released by AIP with an MPAA-awarded X rating beginning in December 1970 (with the Italian pickup BORA BORA as its co-feature), KAMA SUTRA was cut for an R rating in 1971 when paired with THE DIRTY DOLLS IN KATMANDU.

Marvel spoofs FROGS and BLACULA

Our statistics went through the roof last week after we posted the Crazy magazine spoof of the SHAFT tv series (thanks in part to the referrals from our friends Marc Edward Heuck and Marty McKee on Facebook and Twitter, respectively), so we decided to dig one year deeper into the archives for this pair of parodies from an earlier Marvel Comics attempt to ride Mad's wave of success. The color comic book Spoof was only around for 5 issues, but it stood apart from its influences and competitors in that it seemed to eschew studio films in favor of ribbing the smaller but no less popular indy releases of the day, including 2 horror films from American International Pictures, FROGS and BLACULA. So without further ado, here's F-F-FROGS! from issue #3 (January 1973).

And heeeeeere's BLECHHULA! from issue #4 (March 1973). Enjoy!