Simon Andreu Movies

A waiter (Amparo Munoz) with the personality of a house plant but not quite that intelligent, gets by on his good looks as he enjoys the favors of women. A duchess lands him a job as a gardener in the palatial spread of one of the ministers of Adolfo Suarez (Prime Minister in Spain at this time). The wife of the minister (impotent himself) seduces the mindless gardener, and apparently finds something lacking because then she goes after the minister's secretary. Unbeknownest to her, the gardener has just converted her into a budding mother. Meanwhile, terrorists decide to kidnap the gardener as a kind of bait (or practice run) for kidnapping the minister. Although it is not revealed until later, the secretary is in league with the terrorists, but then so is the minister. The whole lot of them, in fact, is really controlled by an international ring of corporate types promoting the use of nuclear energy. In brief, an impotent, secretly terrorist minister with a pregnant wife, stupid yet randy gardener, and lesbian, terrorist secretary is running part of the Spanish government, apparently about to be taken over by nuclear energy. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Karate champion Joe Lewis stars as a special agent on a worldwide mission to put the skids on a drug cartel. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi

A married professional man and an equally married woman become lovers in the last days of Franco's rule in Spain. The two were an item when they were in college, and both of them are bored with their married state. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

On long summer weekends, Juan (Alfredo Landa) is in the habit of hopping on his motorcycle in Madrid and driving for many hours to Torremolinos, a popular hangout for foreign tourists. There, he indulges in his fondness for romancing foreign girls. In this movie, which won a Gold Prize at the 1977 Moscow Film Festival, the people he meets on his journey form a microcosm of modern Spain. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

An Israeli doctor (Helmut Griem) is working with guerrillas at an enclave when the Palestinians attempt to blow up a dance-hall. The doctor is stunned to discover an old friend among the terrorist dead. ~ John Bush, Rovi

The real star of this police action/adventure is the "Guardia Civil" or Spanish national police force. In the story, a robber who consistently eludes capture by the police by crossing over the border into France, taunting the lawmen mercilessly, is cornered in a border farmhouse and receives his just desserts. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Stephen Boyd spent the latter stages of his career in foreign actioners, of which Those Dirty Dogs is a prime example. Boyd plays a soldier of fortune, hired to stem the activities of Mexican revolutionaries. He is aided and abetted by bounty hunter Gianni Garko, who like Boyd is no more trustworthy than he has to be. A blood-splattered gunfight climaxes this outing. Those Dirty Dogs wasn't exactly art, but it paid its way. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Sheridan LaFanu's classic vampire tale Carmilla has been filmed (faithfully or otherwise) as Vampyr and Blood and Roses. The 1972 Spanish production Till Death Do Us Part is the most recent adaptation of the LaFanu original. This time, Maribel Martin plays the virginal young bride who falls under the influence of a seductive female vampire (Alexandra Bastedo). The lesbian subtext of Carmilla is handled with reasonable taste, though more blatantly than in earlier filmizations. Simon Andreu and Dean Selmier costar. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

A favorite among fans of outrageously bad films, this bloody, convoluted thriller deals with a model named Val (Nieves Navarro), whose tabloid-reporter boyfriend, Gio (Simon Andreu), talks her into experimenting with drugs. While she hallucinates, Val looks out the window and sees a man in dark glasses smashing a spiked iron glove into a woman's head until blood splashes into the camera lens. When Gio publishes the story, Val gets fired and is stalked by a psychopath. Before it's all over, there are trips to mental hospitals and graveyards, as many as four different killers taking part in three separate frame-ups, a cat with a slashed throat, and a ludicrous rooftop fight scene featuring choreography rarely seen outside of bad Asian karate films. The high point has a hitman (who laughs like a hyena) throwing a knife between two buildings only to have Gio catch it in a shovel-handle. Most of the film consists of people calling Val crazy or stupid, only to have Val slap them or knee them in the groin, spitting "Go to Hell!" before marching out of the room. The remaining scenes have Val herself being slapped around, followed by all the men she previously told to go to Hell smashing each other through skylights and pushing each other's faces into bags of quicklime. The screenplay (by Ernesto Gastaldi, Sergio Corbucci, and others) makes very little sense, but is such laughably camp fun that it doesn't matter. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi

Like his more famous La Morte Accarezza a Mezzanotte (1972), this delirious Italian-Spanish co-production from filmmaker Luciano Ercoli is a star vehicle for his wife, Nieves Navarro, who appeared in several giallo thrillers (among other genre roles) under the name Susan Scott. Navarro plays Nicole, a famous French stripper whose father is stabbed to death on a late-night train. The police question her about some missing diamonds, she begins receiving threatening phone calls, and the poor woman is even assaulted in her own bedroom by a masked maniac with frighteningly blue eyes. Nicole's personal life is hardly less complicated, as she runs off to the seashore with a British eye surgeon (Frank Wolff), causing her insanely jealous boyfriend (Simon Andreu) -- who happens to own a pair of blue contact lenses -- to follow in a murderous rage. The loopy Ernesto Gastaldi screenplay is loaded with some outrageously contrived set pieces, and bears more than a passing resemblance to another one of his scripts, Lo Strano Vizio Della Signora Wardh (1970), in its concluding intrigue. The similarity is notable precisely because that film starred Edwige Fenech, whom Navarro was doing her best to unseat as the queen of giallo heroines at the time, as the lady in distress. She does a fairly good job here, burdened as she is with a demented screenplay and her husband's often overreaching direction. The overall effect isn't likely to win much crossover viewership, particularly in light of an avalanche of the genre's more noteworthy examples on DVD in the early 2000s. Giallo devotees, however, are likely to enjoy the film for its very artifice, as well as a nice score by Stelvio Cipriani and a cast including genre regulars Jorge Rigaud, Jose Manuel Martin, and Luciano Rossi. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi

This '70s film depicts an unhappy marriage where the wife finally decides to forgive her wandering husband for his many infidelities when he convinces her that his sideline sweety has left him. Before long the unfaithful hubby is back at the same old well. ~ Rovi

The night before WW II erupted, the Spanish Civil War was still on. This actioner chronicles an event during the latter in which an elite group of bombers converge upon a strategically important bridge to surprise their enemies. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi