Gekitotsu! Satsujin Ken is the story of Terry Tsurugi (the legendary Sonny Chiba). Terry isn’t a hero. He doesn’t have a heart of gold. He’s a mercenary, an assassin and a deeply unpleasant human being who lives in a world of pure, unadulterated machismo.

When a wealthy oil magnate dies, the Yakuza tries to hire Terry to kidnap the billionaire’s daughter, Sarai. Terry demands a king’s ransom. The Yakuza says no and tries to kill him instead. Big mistake. Huge.

Terry decides to protect the girl out of spite and greed, leading to a non-stop gauntlet of severed limbs, crushed windpipes and a climax on a rain-slicked ship that defines the word overkill.

The Street Fighter is pure, uncut 1970s grindhouse. It’s loud, it’s sweaty, and it has a fuzz-guitar-and-horn soundtrack that will make you want to buy a leather jacket and punch a wall. Chiba doesn’t just fight; he animalistically snarls, gasps, and hyperventilates before exploding into violence. If you’ve ever wanted to see a man’s teeth knocked out in slow-motion X-ray vision or an actual eyeballs-ripped-from-sockets moment, you are in the right place. In fact, the X-ray shot of a skull being crushed was achieved using a medical skeleton and some creative lighting. It became a staple of the franchise and was later homaged in games like Mortal Kombat.

If Terry Tsurugi sounds familiar, you probably remember Clarence and Alabama watching a Chiba triple-feature in True Romance (written by Quentin Tarantino). Tarantino later cast Chiba as Hattori Hanzo in Kill Bill.

The first film to receive an X-rating in the U.S. for just violence, which led the newspaper ads to scream NOTICE: The MPAA has rated this film unsuitable for viewers under the age of 17 because of its extraordinary fight sequences.

There are two sequels, Return of the Street Fighter and The Street Fighter’s Last Revenge, as well as the Sister Street Fighter spinoff series. There was another spinoff, Kozure Satsujin Ken, released in America by Silverstein Film under the title Karate Warriors.

Beyond its influence on Mortal Kombat, The Street Fighter would obviously be a major source of inspiration to Capcom. Their fighting-game franchise, Street Fighter, was originally going to feature a protagonist named Terry Sugury, but that name was changed in favor of Ryu and Ken. SNK would use the name Terry character in Fatal Fury: King of Fighters and with a character named Takuma in Art of Fighting 2.

This movie has a hero — kinda, we cheer for him — who rips another man’s dick clean off.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

If you ever wanted a collision of two absolute titans of mid-century exploitation cinema, Blaze Starr Goes Nudist is your holy grail.

First, you have Blaze Starr (born Fannie Belle Fleming), the undisputed Queen of Burlesque. Blaze wasn’t just a dancer; she was a master marketer and an American icon who famously caught the eye of Louisiana Governor Earl Long (a romance later immortalized in the 1989 film Blaze starring Paul Newman). She was known for her explosive red hair, her couch routine and a gimmick in which her G-string would literally catch fire, thanks to clever stage pyrotechnics. Blaze’s famous smoking gimmick was achieved using a hidden battery pack and a small piece of flash paper. She actually brought a version of her stage show to the film, giving audiences a taste of the act that made her rich.

Behind the camera, you have the legendary Doris Wishman. A true anomaly, Doris was a female director ruling the male-dominated, sleazy world of 1960s sexploitation. Wishman’s style is instantly recognizable, as she often shot without sound and dubbed everything in later. Watch as her camera stares at ashtrays, feet, light fixtures or the back of a character’s head while they are speaking to avoid having to match lip-syncing! It creates a dreamlike, disorienting and utterly fascinating watch.

Let’s be honest: nobody was buying a ticket to Blaze Starr Goes Nudist for the gripping narrative. The plot is a clothesline — pun absolutely intended — designed to do two things: showcase Blaze’s charisma and fill the runtime with footage of people living the nudist lifestyle.

The film falls squarely into the nudist colony documentary subgenre that was wildly popular in the early ’60s. Legal loopholes at the time allowed for onscreen nudity as long as it was presented as a healthy, educational lifestyle choice. So, Wishman gives us plenty of wholesome, naked activities, like naked volleyball, naked badminton and naked lounging by the pool.

Nudist colony movies are as boring as it gets, but it’s a boredom I invite into my life. A calming, serene boredom, a time when it seemed like all we had to worry about was sitting naked in the grass, which seems like a horrible idea.

This was filmed at the  Sunny Palms Lodge in Homestead, Florida. The same location was used for Doris’ The Prince and the Nature Girl, Diary of a Nudist, Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls and Playgirls International, as well as E.S. Seeley Jr.’s Shagri-La, which stars Sammy Petrillo!

Blaze herself is incredibly charming here. She possesses a natural, easygoing screen presence that outshines the stiff, community-theater acting of the supporting cast. The story is simple. Blaze is tired of her agent, Tony —who is also her fiancé—running her all over the country doing her act, so she goes to a nudist colony to relax, using her real name—Belle Fleming—as an alias. She soon gets quite close to the director of the colony, Andy Simms, who is played by Ralph Young, the singing partner of Belgian-born Tony Sandler, performing as Sandler and Young. His songs “The Moon Is the Lamp of Love,” “Moon Doll” and “Hideout In the Sun” all appear in Wishman movies.

While the film has that distinct, low-budget Wishman grime around the edges, it’s surprisingly lighthearted, breezy and innocent compared to the darker, sleazier roughies Wishman would direct later in her career (like Bad Girls Go to Hell). It’s basically a 70-minute vacation video with a burlesque superstar.

Like most Wishman films, the audio was recorded entirely in post-production. However, Blaze Starr didn’t dub her own voice! Another actress was brought in to provide Blaze’s lines, giving her a slightly different vibe than her actual Maryland/West Virginia twang.

To keep the film from being seized by vice squads, Wishman had to adhere to the era’s strict censorship rules: plenty of bouncing and bare skin were allowed, but showing pubic hair was a one-way ticket to a courtroom. The cast spent a lot of time strategically standing behind bushes, holding volleyballs or framing shots from the waist up. You do get to see two dudes run, wangs swinging, however.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

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.