Flint, Michigan’s renowned coronary specialist, Dr. James Arnold (Cal Seely), could be having a better week. The international medical community is skeptical of his research into heart transplants. His molasses-slow elderly benefactor, Mrs. Woodruff (Roz Kramer), is threatening to freeze funds if she doesn’t see results before her heart sputters out. And back home, his coulda-been-a-contender brother, Tom Arnold (!), is allowing his rentable tramps to raid the doc’s liquor cabinet.

Things look up when Tom (Dick Grimm) accidentally kills some broad, giving Dr. Arnold a chance to take that girl’s ticker and give it to Mrs. Woodruff. Cue the title: Night of the Bloody Transplant, which we see in about two minutes of footage of an actual open-heart surgery. Never mind that it doesn’t match; how a 20-something woman suddenly has the chest of an 80-year-old man is not on director David W. Hanson’s mind.

What is, one assumes, is stealing wholesale from Mexico’s then-recent Night of the Bloody Apes and hitting the magical feature-length mark. With no working knowledge of plot, Hanson (whose only other pic is sexploitation’s Judy) packs a whole lot of nothing into 71 minutes, with such filmed-in-full bar entertainments as several crooned songs, body-painting performance art and a hoochie-coochie striptease down to the pasties.

Although a few scene transitions verge on cleverness, Hanson has little business operating a camera, just as his all-amateur cast has no business standing in front of one. Given its nonexistent sound mix and predominance of wood paneling, Transplant reeks of smut, but isn’t. More crime film than horror, it also isn’t on the level of Herschell Gordon Lewis, following the man’s low-budget template of gore, but ignoring the knowing sense of humor that usually overcame all technical deficiencies. —Rod Lott

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Between the first two Smokey and the Bandit movies, Hal Needham directed one of network television’s more memorably titled prime-time pics: Death Car on the Freeway.

To clear up any potential viewer confusion, it begins with a death car on the freeway: a blue van, in fact, with windows tinted to ensure the driver remains anonymous. With murderous intent and an 8-track tape blasting what sounds like electric bluegrass music playing at double speed, the van runs a little Honda off the 405, nearly killing the bit-part actress behind the wheel (Morgan Brittany, The Initiation of Sarah) and definitely making her late for her 8 a.m. call on Barnaby Jones.

No worries, California: KXLA anchorwoman Jan Clausen (Shelley Hack, two weeks after her debut episode of Charlie’s Angels) is on the case! Repped by Peter Graves, the cops assemble the hilariously named Fiddler Task Force, but the so-called Freeway Fiddler keeps at his work in terrorizing women drivers, all in broad (no pun intended) daylight.

Victims include tennis pro Dinah Shore, who survives, and Night Killer’s Tara Buckman, who does not. Jan’s investigation takes her to the Street Phantoms biker club, where Sid Haig, ever the genial host, shames their leader into offering her a soda. Other familiar faces among Death Car on the Freeway’s cast of “Cameo Stars,” as the credits put it, are Frank Gorshin as Jan’s boss, George Hamilton’s as Jan’s ex and Abe Vigoda, who just sits in a hospital bed.

Needham’s direction may be unimaginative, but most of the driving stunts are terrific, which is really all that’s called for. Suspense is hampered less by Needham’s hand than the surprisingly clumsy editing by Frank Morriss, who expertly cut Steven Spielberg’s Duel, which this telepic does its damndest to resemble without investing much effort. —Rod Lott

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In mid-2019, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite stunned Hollywood as a masterstroke marriage of clockwork suspense and class-war satire, making the South Korean picture a shoo-in to win foreign-film honors at the Academy Awards.

In early 2020, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite stunned Hollywood again, not for winning that International Feature Film Oscar as expected, but for winning three other Oscars in categories it wasn’t “supposed to,” including Best Director and, most controversially, Best Picture.

On that historic night, many watching at home may have heard Bong’s name and asked themselves, “Who?” Some of us, however, had another question in mind: “What took you so long?”

Judging from the likes of The Host, Snowpiercer and Okja, Bong demonstrating considerable skill and confidence is neither new nor novel. You can see it even in his second film, 2003’s Memories of Murder, briefly re-released following Parasite fever (and during COVID-19 fever, unfortunately).

As police inspector Park, Parasite papa Song Kang Ho investigates the sexual assaults and murders of several schoolgirls in the area in 1986. Memories opens with the most recent victim discovered discarded in a cement ditch alongside a nondescript road to, seemingly, nowhere. A local mentally disabled man (War of the Arrows’ Park No-shik) is brought in for questioning — which is to say bullied, abused and coerced into a confession he doesn’t understand. It’s only after the pragmatic detective Seo (Kim Sang-kyung, 2013’s The Tower) joins the force from Seoul that Park begins to look beyond the boundaries of his closed mind.

More introspective than inspective, what could have been an escapist serial-killer thriller instead feels a bit too realistic, as if actual evil were somehow captured on film, the way David Fincher did with Seven (and soon would again with Zodiac). Bong exhibits a similar command of the camera, shooting long, complicated shots with each corner of the screen crammed and carefully choreographed to bristle with the activity of chaos.

With expert performances all around, Bong manages to keep Memories of Murder at a consistent level of greatness until the final scene. In that coda, which leaps nearly 20 years forward, he not only offers no easy answers, but gives viewers a divisive final shot — one I don’t think works, even if almost all of the two hours before it does. —Rod Lott

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After having a brain tumor removed, Sister Gertrude (Anita Ekberg, The French Sex Murders) hasn’t been the same. She thinks she still has cancer and cries out for a syringe filled with sweet, sweet morphine. At the psych ward where she works, the staff doctors (with Andy Warhol fixture Joe Dallesandro as a newbie M.D.) assure her that her thoughts are simply stress-induced and psychosomatic, so her jonesin’ for smack is misguided. However, out of lesbian love, Gertrude’s much-younger roomie, Sister Mathieu (Paola Morra, already a nunsploitation vet with Walerian Borowczyk’s Behind Convent Walls), procures her the fixes she desires.

Gertrude’s bad behavior hardly ends there. First, she becomes so revolted by a patient’s dentures, she crushes them under her foot. This escalates to stealing from patients, and going into town dressed all slutty to sell the fenced jewelry and then copulate with a complete stranger. As the Killer Nun title promises, worst among all her sins is murdering a few patients, most notably in a cringing scene of extreme acupuncture; those with an aversion to ocular trauma, you have been warned.

In his second and final feature as director, Giulio Berruti (who edited and helped script 1973’s Baba Yaga) weaves a wavering hallucinatory narrative of a nun on the run from her own demons. It’s not an indictment of the Catholic Church, but rather an anti-drug tale, however bizarre a route it takes. There’s nothing flashy to it, and it just kind of ends, but if you’re going to dip your toe in the nunsploitation waters, you may as well start here … unless it’s graphic nudity and sexuality you’re after, because this one is rather tame compared to its sisters. If that’s the case, venture elsewhere.

Ekberg couldn’t have been happy having to don habit in a cheap Euroshocker several leagues below fountain-frolicking for Fellini, but Berruti has nothing to be ashamed of, beyond Killer Nun’s hokey title. While not high art, the movie never was meant to be; as a B-level thriller with blood on the brain, it works — perhaps as comforting as palms wrapped in rosary beads. —Rod Lott

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I have never seen Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, but I have seen Bruno Mattei’s Cruel Jaws close to 10 times. While I know that might make me a terrible cinephile, I have to counter with this question: Does Jaws end with the mayor getting pushed into a body of water by a wisecracking seal?

I didn’t think so.

As that famous John Williams-esque theme song plays in the background — Star Wars — a shark made up of mostly stock footage is killing the residents of Beach Town or some other wholly generic name. Shark professor Billy shows up in time to help the police solve these murders, with help from a Hulk Hogan look-alike and his handicapped daughter who run a dolphin park.

Unfortunately, the mayor and his son aren’t buying these terrific tales of shark murder because the big sailing regatta is coming up. When all hell breaks loose, he’s forced by the sheriff to offer a reward for the head of the shark, which leads to a mad, mad, mad, mad chase for this underwater monster. At one point, a character quips, “We’re gonna need a bigger helicopter!”

Did I mention that the mafia is in on this, too, somehow?

Titled Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws overseas (this time … it’s economical), this is famed director Mattei’s rude Italian hand gesture to both the sharksploitation genre and international copyright laws, with characters who scream a badly translated script at each other, usually while pretending to look at a shark.

And so, after hearing all that, once again I have to ask: Does Jaws have that? —Louis Fowler

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