If you’re looking for a fairy tale that trades in moral lessons for, well, other kinds of lessons, The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio is exactly the kind of sleazy, weird and profoundly goofy artifact you seek. Directed by Corey Allen — who, in a bizarre twist of fate, went on to direct episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Murder, She Wrote as well as the Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow movie Avalanche and who appeared in Rebel Without a Cause — this is a softcore sex comedy that makes you wonder what exactly was in the water in 1971. Maybe we should ask writer Chris Warfield, who also played an adult as Billy Thornberg.

Our story begins with Gepetta (Monica Gayle, my beloved Patch from Switchblade Sisters, as well as the titular Nashville Girl), a lonely hippie woodcarver who just wants a companion. Thanks to a visit from a fairy godmother played by the legendary sexploitation icon Dyanne Thorne (who would go on to be the Ilsa of Nazi exploitation fame), her life-sized wooden puppet (Alex Roman, who died after scuba diving into a kelp bed) becomes a real man.

The twist? It’s not his nose that grows when he tells a lie. It’s his other equipment that grows whenever he engages in loveless sex. Naturally, the film turns into a surreal picaresque journey where our wooden protagonist wanders into a life of male prostitution and live sex shows, serving as a biological facsimile of a man who is essentially a puppet for everyone else’s desires.

The cinematography was handled by none other than drive-in hero Ray Dennis Steckler (under his pseudonym, Sven Christian), and his wife, Carolyn Brandt, can even be spotted in the audience of one of the film’s performances. It’s a true family affair if your family happened to be the bedrock of the 70s grindhouse circuit.

This is very softcore, meaning there is very little actual nudity compared to what modern viewers might expect. Instead, you get a lot of strange faces, loud orgasm sounds that resemble a roller coaster malfunction and a narrative that manages to be both deeply cynical and aggressively stupid at the same time.

You also get appearances by Karen Smith (Candi from H.O.T.S.), Debbie Osborne (The Toy Box), Neola Graef (Cries of Ecstasy, Blows of Death), Sandy Dempsey (A Clock Work Blue), Uschi Digard (my dreams, really the whole movie is worth watching for her to show up; she was also in Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, Fantasm and Ilsa Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks), Casey Larrain (Nympho Cycler), Barbara Mills (Sinthia: The Devil’s Doll), Ruthann Lott (Zero In and Scream) and Lynn Harris (The Erotic Adventures of Zorro).

Piranha, Piranha isn’t the Joe Dante creature-feature you’re likely thinking of, but rather a sweaty, low-budget Venezuelan adventure. Wildlife photographers Art (Tom Simcox) and his sister Terry (Ahna Capri, Enter the Dragon) head into the Amazon, presumably to capture some stunning shots of nature. They hire Jim Pendrake (Peter Brown), an American guide who presumably knows his way around the bush. However, the travel itinerary goes to hell once they cross paths with Caribe (William Smith), a local hunter who has decided that humans are just as fun to track and kill as the local wildlife.

It’s essentially The Most Dangerous Game set against the backdrop of the rainforest, where the characters have to worry about both the guy with the rifle and the titular flesh-eating fish waiting in the murk.

The film is a curiosity, directed by William Gibson (no, not that techomancer; this is the director’s only movie) and written by Richard Finder (also his only work on IMDb). While these names aren’t exactly household staples in the pantheon of cinema greats, they delivered a flick that serves as a perfect time capsule of 70s grindhouse adventure. The production is a scrappy international affair, filmed on location in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Colombia, giving it an authentic, rough-around-the-edges grit that you just can’t replicate on a soundstage.

You’ve got William Smith, a legendary tough guy of B-movie cinema, chewing the scenery as the villain. He makes every movie better. Pairing him with Peter Brown is a treat for fans of the 1960s show Laredo, where the two played Texas Rangers.

The setup is classic grindhouse comfort food: an expedition gone wrong, deep in the South American jungle. You’ve got the requisite crew of researchers, some high-stakes tension, and, of course, the ever-present threat of being reduced to a skeleton in mere seconds by a swarm of hyper-aggressive, aquatic pests. What makes Piranha, Piranha truly special in that specific, battered-print-from-a-drive-in kind of way is the commitment to the danger of the jungle.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Shot entirely on location in Monroe, North Carolina, and produced by the local Preacherman Corp, the film is a product of the early 70s Southern Dixie filmmaking boom. Of the seventeen actors on screen, eleven were local Carolinians, lending it a certain authentic regional grit. The whole operation was the brainchild of Albert T. Viola, a Brooklyn-born transplant who decided to write, produce, direct and star as the titular con man, Amos T. Huxley. He clearly had a blast, though he and co-star Ilene Kristen (the future Ryan’s Hope soap star who plays the target, Mary Lou) are essentially the only ones who saw a career beyond these woods.

Huxley is a roving grifter whose primary hobbies are shaking down congregations and seducing farm girls. After getting booted from White Oak County for sleeping with the Sheriff’s daughter, he’s left for dead, only to be scooped up by the dim-witted but well-meaning farmer Judd Crabtree. Huxley immediately sets his sights on Judd’s daughter, Mary Lou, a girl so pathologically eager to please that she’s already juggling four local boyfriends.

Huxley manages to convince the entire family that he is a divine emissary. To keep the father distracted, he sends him on errands to hunt for the angel Leroy, a celestial cover story for when Huxley wants to sneak into the barn or bedroom. The film reaches peak absurdity when Huxley realizes the family’s true business isn’t farming but moonshining. He pivots from a bogus preacher to a bootlegger, convincing the locals, including the corrupt Sheriff Zero Bull, that they should launder their illicit corn whiskey profits through a new, tax-free church operation.

The insanity didn’t stop there, either. Bill Simpson, who played the villainous Sheriff Zero Bull, actually reprised his role in a 1973 sequel, Preacherman Meets Widderwoman. That follow-up, which saw our hero tangling with a five-time widow, never received a national release, languishing instead in the regional Southern drive-in circuit.

Released at the dawn of the 1980s, Pinball Summer (also known as Pick-Up Summer or Flipper Girls in Germany) follows the Crown International beach movies and precedes Porky’s. Most of the action revolves around a place called Pete’s, an arcade hosting a pinball competition and a Miss Pinball pageant, which I really hope was a thing at some point.

As the competition heats up, our group of heroes finds itself in an escalating rivalry with a local biker gang. The conflict, which involves everything from burger joint antics to high-speed amusement park chases, revolves around winning the coveted pinball trophy. While the premise sounds like classic exploitation fare, the film is surprisingly lighthearted, focusing on the harmless hijinks, budding romances and the neon-soaked culture of the era.

Despite being filmed in Quebec, the movie successfully masqueraded as a California-based production, fooling many American audiences at the time. Film Ventures International acquired the film for the U.S. market but was initially nervous about the subject matter. They believed the pinball craze was dying and attempted to rebrand the film to distance it from the arcade theme, unaware that the film would perform quite well regardless of the title change.

Speaking of movies leading to something more, director George Mihalka and cinematographer Rodney Gibbons would make My Bloody Valentine after this, a movie much better remembered than this teen summer comedy revolving around disco, burger joints, amusement parks and hijinks between a biker gang and our heroes over the pinball trophy.

The film acts as a bizarre rehearsal for that horror classic. You’ll see several faces that migrated from the arcade to the coal mines, such as Helene Udy (Sylvia in My Bloody Valentine), Thomas Kovacs (Mike) and Carl Malotte (Dave) all appear in Pinball Summer, providing a strange continuity between this sunny teen comedy and the brutal slasher that followed.

When you see a poster featuring young women in dog collars and chains, you are braced for a sleazy, depraved descent into S&M nightmare territory. But Raphael Nussbaum’s Pets is a far more bizarre beast. It is a fragmented, episodic odyssey of a young runaway that feels less like a cohesive narrative and more like a fever dream of mid-70s exploitation cinema.

Based on a series of one-act stage plays by Richard Reich, the film follows the perpetually charming Candice Rialson (Candy Stripe Nurses, Summer School Teachers, Chatterbox) as Bonnie, a naive runaway whose presence acts as a catalyst for the ruin of everyone she encounters. The film is structured in three distinct, tonal-shifting acts:

• Act I: Grimy Sun-Drenched LA: Bonnie falls in with a bad girl named Pat (Teri Guzman). They attempt to rob a wealthy man on the beach. This segment captures that specific, palpable 1970s Los Angeles desperation before ending in a botched escape.

• Act II: Counterculture Muse: Bonnie becomes the muse and lover of an eccentric artist, Geraldine Mills (Joan Blackman). This act shifts into a heady, late-60s artsy vibe, which is violently punctured by a senseless, jarring home invasion. In a bizarre twist of logic, Bonnie opts to keep the intruder in her room for intimate purposes, forcing a jealous, desperate Geraldine to commit murder, sending Bonnie fleeing once again.

• Act III: The Menagerie: Finally, the film delivers the “pets” promised by the marketing. Bonnie is ensnared by Vincent Stackman (Ed Bishop), a wealthy, whip-wielding sadist. This act feels like an entirely different film stapled onto the back of the first two—a claustrophobic dive into the actual depravity hinted at by the promotional art. Stackman treats women as literal pets, housing them in his mansion alongside actual canines.

Pets is an odd duck. It has a legit theater background, which gives the dialogue an occasionally stilted quality. It’s not quite a horror movie, not quite a drama and it’s arguably too slow for some. Not for me. I loved the sheer weirdness of it all and how firmly Rialson keeps everything held together. 

Mike Cartel, who played Rialson’s brother, assisted Nussbaum when it came down to casting the lead. He acted in twenty video-taped G-rated romantic scenes with other actreses before Rialson got the role.

Warning: A dog gets thrown to its doom.

You can watch this on Tubi.