This movie centers on a search party looking for a white goddess named Jane (Elisabeth Knowles), who went missing in the deep, dark jungles of Africa. Leading the expedition is Private Detective Hamilton Hornee (“the e’s are silent”; Buddy Pantsari)) who has been hired by the Bank of Wabash to find the lost child of explorers who were slain in Africa by natives 15 years earlier. If the child is alive, she will be 21 and inherit her father’s multi-million-dollar estate.

Hornee leads the expedition to find her, accompanied by his assistant, Jane (Julie Conners, Night of the Witches and the movie that made Lash La Rue undergo a decade of penance, Hard On the Trail). Along for the search are the cousins of the lost girl, Max and Dorris Matthews (John Alderman, who shows up in adult, 80s TV like Dynasty and The Fall Guy, as well as movies like Superstition, Malibu Express and Luanne Roberts, Prison Girls), who want to inherit the money for themselves. There’s also a zoologist looking for a legendary white gorilla named Stanley Livingston (Fletcher Davies). He has no idea that the ape is really a German war criminal hiding out. There’s also gossip columnist Tender Lee (Elizabeth Knowles, using the name Lisa Grant; she was also in Wild Riders, The Dark Side of Tomorrow and Beyond the Green Door).

Hornee hires Kenya Adler (Brainerd Duffield, who wrote The Treasure of Lost Canyon) as their guide. However, Kenya has crawled into a bottle and ends up leading them into the Meshpoka tribe, who instead of eating them end up being led by the lost girl, now known as Algona (Deek Sills; before exploitation czar David F. Friedman found her, she was Deborah Stills and living a double-life: working as a hostess at the classy Hyatt Regency by day and slinging tickets as a cashier at an adult theater by night. Friedman, always a man with an eye for talent and a tight grip on his wallet, peeled off a cool $1,000 bill to cast this gorgeous, lean blonde as Algona, the sweet, innocent, and utterly luscious white jungle goddess. She did the work, she looked fantastic doing it, and she even showed up to hit the premiere circuit in glamorous spots like Columbus, Georgia and Cleveland, Ohio. And then? Poof. She took her one perfect credit, married a guy in the record business and walked away.

What follows is an episodic, psychedelic march through the brush that shifts gears from broad, Borscht Belt-style gags to softcore highjinks without a single care for traditional narrative pacing. It’s the kind of film where the jokes land with a thud, but the sheer, relentless energy keeps you staring at the screen. You have to marvel at how a movie this proudly silly managed to get a full theatrical release back when the grindhouses and drive-ins were hungry for anything with a bit of exploitation edge.

Directed by Tsanusdi (Jonathan Lucas, who also has credits for choreogroahy on an episode of The Ghost & Mrs. Muir and directing credits for an adult film, Urban Cowgirls, a pilot for a Dean Martin-hosted series, The Powder Room and A Family Things, a special about pop group The Cowsills) and written and produced by Friedman, this was so popular that it was recut from an X to an R so that couples could see it. And at the First Annual Erotica Awards in 1977, Trader Hornee received a retroactive Award of Merit from the Adult Film Association of America and the award for the Best Adult Film 1966-1970.

Don’t think of this as you would in the adult post-VHS era. Friedman spent money on it, and cinematographer Paul Hipp (who would go on to work on Sunn Classics movies like The President Must Die and The Boogens, as well as classic exploitation fare like Devil Times Five and Grave of the Vampire) makes the Hollywood Hills look like a lush jungle vista. It helps that there are some real animals in this!

We may no longer realize that this is an adult remake of 1931’s Trader Horn, which in turn was remade three years later. The X version has more BDSM; this has the least sex of any Friedman movie, but so much nudity you won’t miss it. Truly, this is what joyous filmmaking looks like.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Official synopsis: New York nightclub The Matador becomes the site of a high-profile murder that attracts the attention of an obsessive detective, a TV news reporter, and an elusive being living outside the realms of time and space. Their stories converge with that of a new-age cult operating at the command of an ultra-intelligent supercomputer named Bolero. 

Writer/director Jonathan Rosado plans to blow you away all the way back to the halcyon days of seventies and eighties underground cinema with his trippy feature Matador Bolero. Shot on Super 8, the film boasts a cornucopia of exploitation cinema elements and feels like something unearthed when a modern excavation under a former 42nd Street grindhouse theater discovered it in a well-preserved film canister.  

Yes, everything described in the official synopsis takes place in one manner or another, but nothing is as simple or as crystal clear as that synopsis seems to promise. Matador Bolero feels more like a series of vignettes ranging from plot elements to topless peep show performances to blasts of psychotropic visual patterns to . . . well, we don’t want to give everything away. You’ll see, if you choose to take the ride. And you should.

The performances range from head-scratching to good but the cast members are all-in throughout. The three most recognizable names are genre stalwart Kansas Bowling, Jack Irv, and musician Yves Tumor. The Suede Hello provides an excellent score that is heavy on synthesizers and distorted electric guitar. 

Matador Bolero is not for everyone. For some it will be exactly the kind of unusual fare that they seek. For others, it may feel like an endurance test. Adventurous viewers seeking an offbeat slice of weirdness crafted by a filmmaker who made exactly the film he envisioned will want to check this one out. 

Matador Bolero opens in New York on May 22 and Los Angeles on June 11, 2026 with a national expansion to follow.

Sweden, sex, Satanism, seventies. 

Many are the reasons I watched this.

Skräcken har 1000 ögon (Horror Has 1000 Eyes) was directed by Torgny Wickman and occupies a strange, atmospheric intersection between Gothic horror and the early 1970s erotic exploitation boom. While often dismissed as mere sexploitation, the film is surprisingly effective at building a claustrophobic, dread-filled environment.

The vicarage in Northern Sweden serves as more than just a setting; it’s a pressure cooker. Wickman utilizes this holy location to great effect, contrasting the stark, pious exterior of the priesthood with the simmering pagan rituals occurring behind closed doors. You can feel it in the air, a mix of religious repression and burgeoning occultism that feels genuinely stifling.

Hedvig the maid (Solveig Andersson, The Lustful Vicar)  is the undisputed engine of the plot. Unlike many horror antagonists of the era who are motivated by simple madness, Hedvig’s malice is methodical and ritualistic. Her self-mutilation (the bloody cross) serves as a physical manifestation of her rejection of Sven’s (Hans Wahlgren) religious world. I wonder, is it really her sliding into his bed or just a dream?

The tragedy of the film lies in his wife Anna’s (Anita Sanders, who was in Tinto Brass’s Nerosubianco, Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, Silvio Amadio’s That Malicious Age and Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales) perspective. She wants Hedvig but has no idea why. She isn’t just fighting a witch; she’s fighting her own trauma after losing their baby, which makes her an unreliable witness in the eyes of her husband.

The Sensuous Sorceress is a quintessential example of folk horror. While the erotic elements are front-and-center, the cases of violent death and the mystery of the question marks left behind provide enough narrative weight to keep it from feeling hollow.

This is one of the few movies I know of where a man is killed by a piece of bread.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

Before this movie, director Pim de la Parra and producer Wim Verstappen were the kings of Dutch sleaze. Operating under their legendary Scorpio Films banner, these guys were cranking out high-energy, low-budget, skin-filled exploitation flicks like Blue Movie and Frank and Eva. They knew how to put butts in seats. But then, after Suriname gained independence from the Netherlands in 1975, Pim got a massive dose of national pride and decided it was time to make art with a capital A.

The result was Wan Pipel. The very first feature film produced in the newly independent nation of Suriname. And holy hell, did it ruin them. Pim completely lost his mind over the budget, blowing past every financial guardrail, which caused a massive, permanent blowout between “Pim and Wim.” The movie tanked at the box office, Scorpio Films went belly up, and a glorious era of Dutch grindhouse cinema died right then and there.

But man, what a way to go out.

The plot plays out like a sweaty, politically charged daytime soap opera. Borger Breeveld stars as Roy, an Afro-Surinamese student living the good life in the Netherlands with his blonde Dutch girlfriend, Karina (Willeke van Ammelrooy). Roy gets a telegram saying his mother is dying, so Karina lends him the cash to fly back home.

Once Roy touches down in Suriname, the tropical heat and the cultural awakening hit him like a freight train. He forgets all about his studies and the Netherlands and falls head over heels for Rubia (Diana Gangaram Panday), an Indo-Surinamese Hindu nurse. The problem? The local Afro-Surinamese and Hindu communities are locked in deep-seated, conservative cultural divides. The romance starts a literal community revolt. Even when Karina flies in from the Netherlands to drag Roy back to reality, he refuses to leave. He’s home, he’s staying, and he’s going to build “One People” if it kills him.

For a guy like me, who usually watches movies about people getting eaten by mutated swamp monsters, Wan Pipel is an absolutely fascinating watch. It has that raw, sun-baked, mid-70s aesthetic where everything feels intensely real, sweaty and slightly dangerous. It’s a movie caught between two worlds — just like Roy. On one hand, you have the gorgeous, lush backdrops of Paramaribo and the Surinamese landscape, and on the other, you have the heavy, heartbreaking weight of post-colonial trauma and racial tension.

Willeke van Ammelrooy is fantastic as the jilted Dutch girlfriend, bringing a weirdly tragic European perspective to a movie that is actively trying to break away from Europe. Borger Breeveld plays Roy with an earnest, stubborn intensity that makes you root for him even when he’s being an absolute disaster of a human being.

The Cult Epics release of this film features a new restored 2K transfer; commentary by film historians Lex Veerkamp and Bodil de la Parra; an introduction by Pim de la Parra; the making-of; an interview with Willeke van Ammelrooy by Guido Franken; and a bonus short film, Aah… Tamara, a gallery; trailers; new artwork design by Juan Esteban R.; a double-sided sleeve with original poster art and a slipcase. You can get it from MVD.

The sophomore feature from Celine Song, the director who had everyone crying into their popcorn with Past Lives, Materialists is all about the high-stakes, maximum-dollar world of New York City matchmaking. Dakota Johnson stars as Lucy, a professional love-broker who fixes up wealthy elites but can’t seem to sort out her own damage. She finds herself locked into a classic, agonizing love triangle between Harry (Pedro Pascal), a ridiculously smooth, billionaire unicorn client who represents the ultimate material jackpot and John (Chris Evans), her rough-around-the-edges, emotionally raw ex-boyfriend who is still dreaming about growing old, getting wrinkles and having kids together.

Song uses this glossy, high-society setup to deliver a deeply cynical, yet strangely hopeful examination of how modern capitalism has basically colonized our love lives. It’s a rom-com where people actually talk about the financial math of marriage, the cost of a twelve-million-dollar apartment and the cold reality of trading youth for security.

The pacing can be incredibly deliberate, and some dialogue-heavy scenes drag out just a few beats longer than they need to. But if you appreciate a movie that takes a trashy, daytime-television plot structure and elevates it into a sharp, beautifully shot critique of modern existence, it’s well worth the entry fee.

The A24 Blu-ray has a director commentary, a making-of feature, a composer deep dive with Japanese Breakfast and six postcards. You can get it from Deep Discount.