After Disney made their movies and before Robert Rodriguez turned the masked swordsman into a high-budget nineties blockbuster franchise, as well as decades after Tyrone Power slashed his way through Old California, the grindhouse circuit decided Johnston McCulley’s legendary hero needed way fewer rules, way more nudity and a healthy dose of European co-production madness.

Enter The Erotic Adventures of Zorro, an incredibly bizarre, softcore sex-comedy-meets-swashbuckler hybrid directed by David F. Friedman alongside co-director Robert Freeman. Though the Italian poster credits William Russel, make no mistake: this thing is pure American grindhouse royalty disguised as an Euro-sleaze import.

Don Diego de la Vega (Douglas Frey, who you might know from The Erotic Adventures of Robin Hood—talking about finding your niche and staying with it) returns home from Spain only to find Los Angeles under the thumb of the tyrannical Commandante Esteban (John Lawrence). Diego plays the usual effeminate, weak-willed dandy by day to throw off suspicion, but by night, he slips on the black mask, grabs his rapier and rides out to defend the helpless, liberate the peasants, and… get absolutely everybody in Alta California out of their clothes.

Frey is actually a surprisingly good Zorro when he’s allowed to fight, handling the swordplay with a lot more athletic grace than you’d expect from a film aimed squarely at the raincoat crowd. The movie borrows heavily from the classic 1940 Mark of Zorro structure, including a final duel between Zorro and the villain that has genuine kinetic energy.

But because this was released in 1972 to fill independent drive-ins and urban grindhouses, the action is constantly interrupted by bedroom farces, broad slapstick and a jaunty, whistle-heavy score that sounds like it was lifted from a lost Italian sex comedy. Whenever Zorro isn’t carving a “Z” into a wall, he’s helping the local señoritas liberate themselves from their corsets or dealing with an array of colorful characters like Luis, his mute servant who uses a puppet to communicate.

It’s as fun as a classical Hollywood swashbuckler colliding head-on with the total creative lawlessness of the 1970s adult film boom can be. I mean, it’s shot on the sets of Duel in the Sun and Bob Cresse playing one of the bad guys, Sgt. Felipio Latio! Plus, it was shot by Ferd Sebastian, who would later make Gator Bait.

Actresses in the cast include Jacqueline Giroux from Drive-In Massacre; Lynn Harris (Bust Out, Blood Sabbath); Starlyn Simone (Video Vixens); Becky Sharpe (The Boob Tube) and Kathy Hilton, who appears in another erotic take on classic movies, The Amorous Adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Also: The makers of Zorro the Gay Blade owe this movie well, just about everything.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

New York City in the mid-1960s is a gritty, gray, neon-lit concrete jungle and someone is making it a lot emptier. A brutal serial killer is stalking the rain-slicked streets of Manhattan, specifically targeting sex workers. Enter Detective Innes (Steve Hollister), a world-weary cop who looks like he’s fueled entirely by stale coffee and cheap cigarettes. He’s assigned to the case, diving headfirst into the city’s seedy underbelly to catch the psycho before the body count rises.

Meanwhile, we follow Mandy (Janine Lenon, who is great in this, but it’s her only acting role), a woman caught up in the life who becomes our emotional anchor. As Innes tracks the clues, the film shifts between a hardboiled police procedural and a voyeuristic, psychological look into the mind of a twisted killer with deep-seated mommy issues. It all builds to a tense, shadowy climax in a dingy apartment that feels entirely too close for comfort.

If you stumbled upon Aroused expecting a standard, sleazy exploitation flick based on the title alone, you’re in for a massive surprise. This is a fascinating missing link in American independent cinema. It’s a bridge that connects the classic film noir of the 1940s and 50s with the grimy, proto-slasher, and American giallo films of the 70s.

Director Anton Holden (Teenage Tramp) captures 1960s Manhattan with a documentary-like realism. There’s no Hollywood glamor here. The streets look cold, the apartments look cramped, and you can practically smell the exhaust fumes and cloying perfume. The black-and-white cinematography by Dejan Georgevitich is gorgeous, utilizing sharp contrasts, deep shadows, and tight framing that make the city feel like a claustrophobic trap.

While budget constraints are evident in some of the pacing and looping audio, the film elevates itself through sheer atmosphere. The jazz score keeps things moving with a restless, anxious energy. It’s a bleak, cynical, yet strangely artistic piece of grindhouse history that deserves a lot more respect than its title implies.

While director Holden worked in the sound department on many movies and TV shows, co-writer Richard B. Shull went on to have a massive career as a character actor. You’ve probably seen him in similar but higher-budget Klute, as well as Splash and Housesitter. 

The killer even has mannequin heads all over his apartment, a full decade before Maniac.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

If you love The Incredible Shrinking Man or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, you need to pay your respects to the granddaddy of them all. Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack, the same absolute legend who gave us King Kong, this movie is a landmark for a massive reason: it is the very first American horror film shot in glorious, full three-strip Technicolor.

Before this, we had two-color freakouts like Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum, but Dr. Cyclops brings the vivid, saturated, comic-book-pulp look right into your eyeballs.

We head deep into the Peruvian jungle, where Albert Dekker plays Dr. Alexander Thorkel, a bald, nearsighted mad scientist rocking some seriously thick glasses (hence the “Cyclops” nickname). Thorkel has discovered a rich uranium ore deposit and figured out a way to use cosmic radiation to shrink living things. Why? Because he wants to shrink all of humanity to reduce our carbon footprint! Is he really the hero?

Because his eyesight is shot, he invites a team of American biologists down to Peru just to look at a microscope slide for him. They point out some iron crystal contamination. He says, “Cool, thanks, now get out,” and tries to pack them home. Naturally, the biologists are pissed that they traveled thousands of miles to be the Geek Squad for a five-minute tech support gig, so they camp out to spy on him. Big mistake. Thorkel lures them into his radiation chamber and zaps ’em down to a mere twelve inches tall!

What follows is a wild jungle-survival game where our tiny heroes have to fight off giant house cats, hide in specimen boxes and plot to murder their giant tormentor by smashing his glasses and rigging his own shotgun against him.

Variety hated it at the time, calling it dull, but honestly? They missed the fun. It’s got that beautiful, dreamlike, pale Technicolor look that makes it feel like an ancient fairy tale come to life. It’s so gorgeous! Plus, looking back with 21st-century eyes, the movie is weirdly prophetic. Thorkel is mining uranium to power a weapon of mass alteration, and with his shaved head and thick glasses, he accidentally predated the wartime imagery of the era. 

You can watch it on Cultpix.

Filmed in San Francisco for what looks like the cost of a couple of cases of cheap beer and a trip to the butcher shop and clocking in at just over an hour, Nick Imllard’s Criminally Insane is the opposite of its alt title, Crazy Fat Ethel. It’s lean, mean and ready to pounce.

Meet Ethel Janowski (Priscilla Alden). She’s just been released from an asylum into the care of her long-suffering grandmother. The doctors think Ethel is cured. The doctors are wrong.

Ethel doesn’t want to reintegrate into society; she just wants to eat. Constant, non-stop, uninterrupted consumption. Soft-boiled eggs, whole loaves of bread, chocolate syrup straight from the bottle — if it fits on a plate, Ethel is shoving it down her throat.

The conflict arises when Grandma, concerned for both Ethel’s health and her own mounting grocery bills, decides to put a padlock on the refrigerator door. Big mistake. Huge. You don’t get between Ethel and her snacks. What follows is a slow-motion, butcher-knife-wielding rampage where Grandma (Jane Lambert), a local delivery boy and anyone else who dares step into the kitchen gets brutally, systematically eliminated.

Ethel isn’t just killing people; she’s hiding the bodies in the bedrooms, leading to a house full of flies, stench and the absolute peak of mid-70s drive-in atmosphere. With her heavy breathing, intense glares, and total commitment to the bit, Priscilla Alden created an unforgettable slasher icon before the slasher genre even had its official rules written. She doesn’t need a hockey mask or a dream world. She just needs a sharp object and an empty stomach.

This movie is ugly, poorly lit and has a music score that sounds like someone dropping a synthesizer down a flight of stairs. In short — I love it. Plus, you get George “Buck” Flower as a detective, blood with no wounds and the material that Millard would recycle into the sequel and the films Cemetery Sisters, Death Nurse and Death Nurse 2. 

You can watch this on Cultpix.