First things first: this movie has a major identity crisis. It was originally shot way back in 1975 under the title Wheeler by directors Jack Collins and Jim Feazell. But they didn’t just stop in Texas, as the production actually set up camp in El Dorado, Arkansas. Over the years, distributors kept shuffling the deck, re-releasing and re-titling this poor movie as The Mama’s Boy and The Hurting before it finally settled into its most infamous exploitation moniker: Psycho from Texas. They even dragged the movie back to the editing room in 1978 to shoot entirely new insert footage just to crank up the sleaze factor.

The story centers around a complete drifter and hitman named Wheeler (John King III, The House of the Dead). Wheeler is your textbook exploitation psycho, raised in absolute squalor by a violently abusive mother, which left his mind thoroughly scrambled by beating him and — as in all 70s and 80s psycho movies — sleeping around.

After he grows up, Wheeler gets hired by a local businessman to kidnap a wealthy oil baron. To pull off the heist, he teams up with a local backwoods hillbilly named Slick (Tommey Lamey). The oil baron manages to escape almost immediately, turning the entire second half of the movie into a chaotic, endless, slow-motion foot chase through the swamps and muddy backwoods of the South. It’s mostly just Slick screaming wildly into the wind while everyone gets covered in mud. Throw in a stereotyped, bumbling country sheriff (co-director Jack Collins himself) and a screaming maid named Joann Bruno, and you have a recipe for pure drive-in gold.

The absolute main attraction here is an incredibly early, pre-fame appearance by the future Queen of Scream herself, Linnea Quigley. During that 1978 pick-up shoot, they cast a young Linnea for a completely gratuitous, jaw-droppingly sleazy sequence where Wheeler holds her captive and forces her to dance naked while pouring beer all over her. Looking back on one of her very first film gigs, Linnea didn’t exactly have warm, fuzzy memories of the El Dorado shoot, later saying: “They made me take my clothes off and poured beer on me. It was stupid.“

Though this is listed first on Linnea Quigley’s filmography, it is not her first role, as that was Fairy Tales. 

My absolute favorite piece of trivia about this movie has nothing to do with what’s on the screen and everything to do with how they tried to sell it. When the movie premiered in New York City back in 1976, the distributors ran a legendary cowboy-style promotional stunt. They hired a massive truck, plastered it with a giant Psycho from Texas banner, mounted a set of high-powered loudspeakers on the roof, and blasted threatening country-fried warnings at people walking the Deuce.

You can watch this on YouTube.

William Girdler said that Project: Kill was “…the beginning of what I can do if I’m given the opportunity. Here I’m not pinned down by cliches or lousy material. It’s the only picture I’m really proud of.”

John Trevor (Leslie Nielsen) has spent six years as part of an MK-ULTRA experiment that gives American soldiers better killing abilities through training, drugs and hypnosis. It’s kind of like a cult for killers, and now, he wants out. He even tells his second-in-command, Frank Lassiter (Gary Lockwood), that he’s about to escape. It’d all be great if the withdrawal didn’t make John incredibly violent, or if an Asian gang wasn’t looking for him in the hopes of taking the drugs from his system and using them for their own army.

Come for Nielsen dressed like a 70s dad despite being billed as an action star, stay for his romance with Nany Kwan and by all means, come back for his fight with Lockwood on a beach. It even ends a lot like Scorpio, where the older killer tells the younger one, “Now they’re going to come after you.”

On the William Girdler website, Girdler’s insurance man Joe Schulten said, “Project Kill was supposed to be distributed in a lot of countries. Nancy Kwan was an international star at the time, and it was booked up everywhere. But the man who was going to distribute the movie was either killed or committed suicide right before the film was scheduled to come out. So the release was tied up in an estate dispute. I don’t think Project Kill was ever released to movie theaters. I think it only showed up on cable in the eighties.:

Producer David Sheldon had the answer: “Project Kill was released in the theaters, though not a very wide release. It’s been on television quite a bit, and there’s a home video in stores. We pulled the picture from Arnold Kopelson (Inter-Ocean Films), who was supposed to distribute the film overseas, but was taking too long. A company called Sterling Gold tried to take it next, but the owner was found murdered in an organized crime style. Finally, I put it with Picturmedia, which released it theatrically and sold the home video rights. The CEO of Picturmedia is Doro Vlado Hreljanovic. Picturmedia has done a poor job in releasing the picture. It deserves more.”

That said, it does feature Vic Diaz.

Writer Galen Thompson went on to script Superstition, The Evil and several Chuck Norris projects, while David Sheldon was part of Grizzly, Lovely but Deadly and Foxy Brown.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Before Tom DeSimone became the guy who gave us the sleaze-pop masterpiece Hell Night, the iconic Reform School Girls and the Linda Blair-led Savage Streets, he made what the poster called “The First Real Adult Film in 3D!”

Let’s be honest: this is softcore. It’s the kind of movie you could maybe sit through with your dad, but you’d be sweating bullets if your mom walked into the room. 

We kick things off in the prison shower—because, of course, we do. We’ve got Gertie (the legendary Annik Borel, better known as the Werewolf Woman) trying to get intimate with Cindy (the queen of 70s adult cinema, Uschi Digard). But they get cockblocked by the warden, Dr. Reinhardt, who decides to let a group of inmates into the general population for two days as part of a rehab program.

Does this work out? Of course not. The outside world is just as messed up as the slammer. But you didn’t come here for the plot, did you? You came for the 3D experience. And the sleaze. So you want body painting? You got Candy Samples getting turned into a living canvas. You want a cast that reads like an exploitation “Who’s Who“? Feast your eyes on Jacqueline Giroux  Trick or Treats and Drive-In Massacre), Tracy Handfuss (A Clockwork Blue, Psyched by the 4D Witch), Maria Arnold (Fantasm), Liz Wolfe (Fantasm Comes Again), Linda York (A Scream in the Streets), Marsha Jordan (Teen-Age Jail Bait) and Neola Graef (Cries of Ecstasy, Blows of Death).

Critics might argue that The Stewardesses beat it to the 3D adult punch by three years, but who cares about semantics? They could also say that this is less a movie and more a series of softcore lovemaking scenes strung together by the thinnest thread of plot imaginable.

Who listens to them?

Lee Marvin—the man who makes granite look like playdough—goes to Kansas to turn a meatpacking plant into a graveyard in Michael Ritchie’s Prime Cut.

Marvin plays Nick Devlin, a Chicago mob enforcer sent to Kansas City to collect a $500,000 debt from Mary Ann (Gene Hackman). Mary Ann isn’t just running a wholesale meatpacking plant; he’s running a human trafficking operation. He buys desperate young women, keeps them sedated on drugs and sells them off to the highest bidder. This grim setup creates a dark, unsettling atmosphere that contrasts sharply with the sunny, Americana backdrop of the Kansas county fair, where much of the film takes place.

It’s a dangerous job. After all, one of Devlin’s predecessors gets turned into a hot dog by Weenie (Gregory Walcott). But Nick is the ultimate cool professional in a world that’s gone completely sideways. And Hackman? He’s playing Mary Ann with a mix of reptilian charm and total instability that reminds you why he’s one of the best to ever do it. Keep an eye out for Angel Tompkins as Mary Ann’s wife and a young Sissy Spacek in her screen debut as Poppy. She’s the soul of the film in a sea of absolute scumbags.

The story might be a mess, but there’s a wheat thresher used as a murder weapon and some of the best actors in an action movie. So yeah, it goes nowhere. But it’s a cool ride. 

Based on Pretty Maids All in a Row by Francis Pollini, this combination of sexploitation, comedy and murder mystery — let’s just call it Giallo — was directed by Roger Vadim from a screenplay by producer Gene Roddenberry.

It was sold on the idea that eight new actresses were making their debut- all young and quite fetching. They were Brenda Sykes (Mandingo, Black Gunn), Joy Bang (Night of the Cobra Woman, Messiah of Evil), Gretchen Burrell (wife of Gram Parsons), Joanna Cameron (Isis), Aimée Eccles (Lovelines), June Fairchild (a member of the Gazzarri Dancers on the syndicated variety show Hollywood A Go-Go; she invented “The Statue Dance” with dancer Mimi Machu; she’s also in Up In Smoke, sniffing Ajam powder), Margaret Markov (Run, Angel, Run; The Hot Box) and Diane Sherry (Lana Lang in Superman).

Further sexy moments came from a feature in the April 1970 issue of Playboy, which featured an interview with the director and a nine-page pictorial of stars Angie Dickinson, Burrell, Eccles, Markov and Playboy bunny Joyce Williams, who was also in the film (and Soylent Green). Maybe they should have told the teachers at University High School in West Los Angeles, who would later complain about how dirty — and violent, but this is America, so mostly dirty — the movie was.

Oceanfront High School has seen many of its most beautiful teens killed by a serial killer. Could it be Ponce de Leon Harper (John David Carson), who is surrounded by sexually available women all day and is being driven mad by them? Or football coach and guidance counselor Michael “Tiger” McDrew (Rock Hudson), who has probably slept with all of the school’s best-looking ladies by now? That’s what Detective Sam Surcher (Telly Savales) wants to know.

Tiger and Ponce strike up a friendship, as Tiger wants to get Ponce laid. After all, the kid claims that he has a constant erection. He conspires to set the student up with the new teacher, Betty Smith (Angie Dickinson). As this goes down — literally — more women are being killed every day. I mean, Ponce finds a dead body in the men’s room when all he wants to do is jerk off!

Vadim is well-known for his relationships with Brigitte Bardot and Jane Fonda, as well as for his movies. Perhaps having this many good-looking women on set at the same time—Roddenberry was no saint either, having affairs with Nichelle Nichols and Majel Barrett during Star Trek and supposedly harassing several others—just short-circuited his brain.

But hey, despite how all over the place this is, it has Keenan Wynn as a lawman, Roddy McDowall as the principal and Barbara Leigh as Tiger’s wife. Hudson plays his role well, a man who has won so many times that he starts to think that he can kill and escape the law. Maybe he does. James Doohan even shows up, getting a role from his old boss as one of Savales’ assistant detectives.

Quentin Tarantino included this in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll of the best movies of all time. I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s the type of movie that isn’t good, but is definitely entertaining.