Jack Hill Movies

City on Fire, a disaster thriller filmed in Canada with dialogue in both French and English, tells the story of an oil-refinery explosion in a small town. Dr. Frank Whitman (Barry Newman) and his co-workers, including Nurse Harper (Shelley Winters) and Dr. Matwick (Donald Pilon), fight bravely to save the victims even when they, themselves are endangered by the fire. The film also features cameos by Ava Gardner and Henry Fonda. The film moves at a fast pace and creates a great deal of suspense as the fire closes in on the survivors. Director Alvin Rakoff uses creativity instead of a big budget and, aided by the splendid cinematography of Rene Verzier, succeeds in creating an exciting disaster film. ~ Linda Rasmussen, All Movie Guide

Blaxploitation icon Pam Grier stars as Foxy Brown, a sexy but streetwise woman whose ne'er-do-well brother Link (Antonio Fargas) is a drug dealer who owes mobsters 20,000 dollars. To get the hoods off his back, Link names Foxy's boyfriend as a government agent trying to wipe out organized crime, and the mob soon has him rubbed out. But Hell hath no fury like Foxy Brown scorned; posing as a hooker to get the inside scoop on the mob, she goes on a crusade to find out who murdered her man, and she exacts revenge with the help of a local activist group. The supporting cast includes cult figure Sid Haig as a bad guy (as usual) and Peter Brown and Kathryn Loder as a seriously kinky couple who rule the local mob. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Writer-director Jack Hill (Spider Baby, Switchblade Sisters) managed to beat Death Wish to the screens by a year with this violent tale of a citizen touched by crime and deciding to fight back. Her little 11-year old sister is a hopeless addict, the police can't help, and poor Nurse "Coffy" Coffin (Pam Grier) has no choice but to take the law into her own hands. Posing as a Jamaican prostitute, Coffy infiltrates the lairs of pimp King George (Robert DoQui) and kingpin pusher Vitroni (Allan Arbus). Eventually, after her childhood sweetheart is beaten into a coma and she finds out her politician-lover (Booker Bradshaw) is involved, Coffy kills everyone with a shotgun. However, by having a black woman named Coffy get injected with a sugar mixture (the crooks think it's heroin), one can only imagine the filmmakers cackling about Coffy with cream and sugar. In fact, the original ad line promised "Coffy...she'll cream you!" ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

Jack Hill directed this alternately brutal and campy look at desperate women behind bars. An American named Collier (Judy Brown) has been convicted of murder in the Philippines and is sentenced to a grim women's prison in the jungle, where a mysterious German woman, Miss Deitrich (Christiane Schmidtmer), is the warden, and her head guard, sadistic Lucian (Katheryn Loder), keeps her charges in line through intimidation and violence. Collier shares a cell with tough-talking bisexual prostitute Grear (Pam Grier), hard-boiled political prisoner Bodine (Pat Woodell), thick-skinned but good-humored Alcott (Roberta Collins), drug-addicted Harrad (Brooke Mills), and tight-lipped Ferina (Gina Stuart). Bodine's boyfriend is the leader of an underground revolutionary faction, and when she learns he and his comrades are in danger, she begins to plot an escape for herself and her cellmates, with travelling peddlers Harry (Sid Haig) and Fred (Jerry Frank) becoming her unwitting collaborators. Meanwhile, Lucian is stepping up her torture of the prisoners at the behest of a mysterious masked stranger, and Collier is determined to find out who is behind the systematic brutality. The Big Doll House was the first "Women In Prison" exploitation epic produced for Roger Corman's New World Pictures; it was a big hit on the dive-in and grind house circuit, and spawned dozens of imitations (which are still being produced today). By the way, that's Pam Grier singing the theme song! ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

A brilliant geologist sends a team to search the depths of the earth in an effort to learn the origin of some strange signals they've been picking up on their equipment. They discover a rock formation with an interior life that can communicate telepathically. They bring the mass to the surface and determine that the entity is "pure crystallized intelligence," and they believe many of the secrets of existence can be answered by studying the stone. However, the only message the mysterious rock is forthcoming with is what kind of food it needs, namely a particular chemical that can only be produced by the bodies of people in the throes of terror. To this end, Dr. Mantel (Boris Karloff) devises something called the Fear Chamber, where kidnapped prostitutes are frightened out of their wits with spiders, snakes, and faked Satanic rituals in order to obtain this precious chemical. Though the scientist and his assistants take pains not to physically harm their subjects, the weird living rock begins growing tentacles and soon learns how to capture its prey and extract the fluids itself, leading to the death of a lady burglar. The scientists realize what a deadly force they've unleashed on the surface world, though efforts to destroy the creature are complicated by its ability to control human minds and generate its own electricity. ~ Fred Beldin, All Movie Guide

One of four low-budget Mexican horror productions to star an ailing Boris Karloff in a supporting (but top-billed) role, this odd little number features the horror legend as the dying forebear of an eccentric family, whose heirs descend like vultures on his palatial home when they learn of his impending demise... which apparently occurs shortly after their arrival. Little do they realize that their plucky patriarch has laid some elaborate traps for them, employing his collection of life-size automatons. The cast wanders about through dimly-lit sets for what seems like an eternity before being slain by the wind-up robots in a variety of gory ways, but the violent, bloody climax comes far too late to rescue viewers from the endless drudgery. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide

Since the earliest days of motion pictures, exploitation filmmakers have known that nudity was a potent box-office draw, but prior to the advent of the rating system in the late Sixties it was also legally problematic. That began to change in 1955, when the producers and distributors of the film Garden Of Eden, set in a nudist colony, vigorously defended their movie in court, and a groundbreaking legal decision, Excelsior Pictures Corp. vs. Regents of the University, declared that depicting nudism as a lifestyle on screen was not obscene. A small flood of nudist colony pictures followed, but nearly all followed Garden of Eden's level of caution in avoiding full frontal nudity at all costs, with sun bathers standing behind shrubs, holding beach balls or towels or simply keeping their backs to the camera when not photographed from the waist up. 1966's The Raw Ones, however, was the first major nudist film push the envelope and show extensive full male and female nudity, albeit in a decidedly non-sexual context. In The Raw Ones, a handful of cheerful and healthy young adults visit the beach, go swimming, play shuffleboard, jump rope, enjoy a trampoline and enjoy all sorts of wholesome fun in the nude as a narrator lectures on the health benefits of the nudist lifestyle, the crippling effects of shame, the dangers of sexual repression and the wisdom of the First Amendment and the great men who drafted it. While The Raw Ones faced legal prosecution in its initial release, the introduction of the MPAA rating system in November 1968 paved the way for a more adult cinema in America, and The Raw Ones now seems like an amusing curio of the era before the acceptance of nudity in cinema. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

In this bizarre drama set in Venice, California, a professional thief and a crazed artist conspire to steal a valuable Titian painting. Unfortunately, they are thwarted by a courageous stripper who is almost killed in the process. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Exploitation titan Jack Hill, who went on to make such cult favorites as Switchblade Sisters, The Swinging Cheerleaders, and Foxy Brown, made his solo directorial debut with this fascinating, offbeat shocker. The three surviving children of Titus W. Merrye, who represent the end of his family's line, live in a dilapidated mansion where patient servant Bruno (Lon Chaney, Jr.) watches over the increasingly eccentric Virginia (Jill Banner), Ralph (Sid Haig), and Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn). All three Merrye siblings suffer from the same rare disease that felled their father and the other members of his family -- "Merrye Syndrome," a neurological ailment that begins to manifest itself at the age of ten, causing the brain to slowly decay and sending its victims into an alternately violent and infantile state. Bald, inarticulate Ralph is supposed to be a vegetarian, but "can eat anything he can catch," while Virginia, who seems to be in a perpetual dream state, imagines herself as a human spider and catches people in her "web" (a large net) and then kills them. While it might seem best to let nature to take its course and allow the family's sad legacy to die out, the Merrye siblings have two distant cousins, Emily Howe (Carol Ohmart) and Peter Howe (Quinn K. Redeker), who are interested in laying claim to the family mansion and any money remaining in the Merrye Estate. But not long after they pay a visit to Bruno, they start to have serious regrets about their decision to see the family. Shot in 1964, Spider Baby sat on the shelf until 1968, when it was briefly released as the second half of a horror double-bill on the drive-in circuit. But after it appeared on home video in the early '80s and was the subject of an enthusiastic essay in the book RE/Search: Incredibly Strange Films, the film began to develop a potent cult following and is now regarded as a minor classic of '60s horror. The film has also appeared under the misleading titles Cannibal Orgy and The Liver Eaters, as well as Spider Baby, or the Maddest Story Ever Told. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Every filmmaker has to start somewhere, and in 1961, years before making The Godfather, The Conversation, or Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola was a UCLA film student looking to get his foot in the door. He took footage from a short nudie film he'd made called The Peeper, added material from an unfinished Western set in a nudist colony, and threw in some sequences filmed by Jack Hill. The result was Tonight For Sure, a nudie-cutie comedy about a pair of hypocritical blue-noses who want to shut down a local burlesque house, even though they're secret smut enthusiasts. Many scenes are presented as dreams or flashbacks in order to give the disparate sequences a sense of continuity. The film features a score by Carmine Coppola, Francis' father, who also wrote music for many of his later films; the cast features Playboy model Virginia Gordon. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Held back from release for nearly a year, The Female Jungle finally received bookings on the strength of its "star", Jayne Mansfield. In fact, Jayne plays the relatively minor role of a trashy nympho; the emphasis is on neurotic police dectective Lawrence Tierney. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Tierney is responsible for the murder of a gorgeous film star--and since he was drunk at the time of the killing, even Tierney suspects himself. For a while, the number one candidate for the gas chamber is slimy gossip columnist John Carradine, but he's a bit too obvious to be culprit. Without giving away the ending, it can be noted that the murderer is played by a member of the film's production staff. Female Jungle was later reissued as Hangover. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide