It’s rare that I watch a movie that gets on the very verge of upsetting me. Poor Pretty Eddie is that rare film that pushed me pretty far and made me feel somewhat upset for watching it, which ended up making me keep going and enjoying the end results. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s amazing that this movie even exists.

Most of the makers of this film were employed in the world of adult films, with Poor Pretty Eddie representing their chance to go straight. Backing came from Michael Thevis, the notorious Atlanta-based “King of Pornography,” who owned a record company named GRC, a chain of sex shops and a company that manufactured peep show booths. In fact, the rock band Flood recorded the soundtrack for the martial arts movie Blood of the Dragon in his Sound Pit Studio on Atlanta’s Simpson Street, which also saw country singer Moe Bandy, dance sensation Loleatta Holloway and country songwriter and the author of the three million record selling “Chevy Van” Sammy Johns — as well as R&B acts like Ripple, the Rhodes Kids, King Hannibal and Sam Dees — all record there. He also published a series of pornographic novels that were written by Ed Wood under the name Donna D. Dildo.

Producing a legit movie allowed Thevis to launder money that he had made through shadier dealings, which brought the FBI in. Shortly after the film was released, he was jailed on a variety of charges and then escaped prison in 1978, ending up on the FBI’s most-wanted list. He had already put a contract out on the life of the man who had given the police all the info they needed to put him away. While on the lam, he tracked down that man — Roger Dean Underhill — and killed him and another associate. He bragged about it in prison and fellow prisoners ratted him out.

In 1980, Michael Thevis, the so-called “Scarface of Porn,” who once owned nearly half of the industry and made $100 million a year ($311 million today when adjusted for inflation) was sentenced to spend 28 years to life in the Oak Park Heights Correctional Facility, an underground penitentiary outside of Minneapolis and eventually United States Penitentiary in Atlanta. His palatial home was sold eventually to Whitney Houston. In 2013, he died of heart and respiratory failure. This Daily Beast article on his life is required reading.

Poor Pretty Eddie was written B. W. Sandefur, who is mostly known for his TV writing and producing. In fact, he was behind one of the oddest series of the early 1980’s, NBC’s Cliffhangers, which featured three different stories that all began in the middle of their stories. Stop Susan Williams, The Phantom Empire and The Curse of Dracula were all eventually turned into theatrical releases — along with extra material added — in Europe.

Loosely based on the Jean Genet play The Balcony and directed by David Worth (Kickboxer) and Richard Robinson (who has films like Is There Sex After Marriage and Adultery for Fun & Profit on his resume), this film is shocking even today.

The Turner Classic Movies article on the film hits it right on the head. They describe Eddie as such: “A sleazy exploitation thriller with artistic pretensions, the film manages to be offensive, crude and inept in equal measure while still succeeding as a compulsive viewing experience for connoisseurs of fringe cinema who think they’ve seen everything.”

We start at the University of Georgia as Liz Wetherly (Leslie Uggams, who older readers will know from Roots and younger ones will know from the Deadpool movies), a famous singer, is performing the national anthem. There’s a cut to her car driving down a country road and we hear her say, “Look, I have two weeks before my next concert. Now I’m going to get in my car and drive until I find a nice, quiet hole to crawl into.”

Be careful what you wish for.

After he car breaks down, Liz rents a cabin for the night — so she thinks — while the gigantic handyman Keno (Ted Cassidy, who was Lurch on The Addams Family, as well as the second actor to play Bigfoot on The Six-Million Dollar Man after Andre the Giant. He was also the narrator for The Incredible Hulk and provided the voices for Godzilla, Frankenstein Jr., The Thing, Moltar, Metallus, Black Manta and Brainiac for various Hanna-Barbera cartoons.)

Somehow, she ends up stuck for days thanks to the machinations of Eddie (Michael Christian, TV’s Peyton Place), a lothario who has already ensnared motel owner Bertha (Shelley Winters, who was in so many movies where she ran a house of ill repute, at least in my imagination, as well as the killer mother of an alien child in a role that doesn’t add up in another astonishingly bonkers Atlanta-based movie, The Visitor). Strangely enough, in the filmed version of the aforementioned Genet play, WInters played nearly the same role. Yet here, she plays it as a once gorgeous showgirl stuck remembering the past through the haze of alcohol, trying in vain to hold on to her man. Of note, Winters was paid in cash for her role and nearly died when her private plane almost crashed upon landing in Atlanta.

Not only does Eddie want Liz for carnal reasons, he also thinks she can help him in his career as a country singer. He spends much of the film dressed in Elvis jumpsuits and warbling his way through ballads. And oh yeah — he eventually assaults our heroine and then subjects her to further torture like forcing her to please a traveling salesman and eating Keno’s dog.

Liz finally gets the courage to turn in Eddie, which leads to Sheriff Orville (Slim Pickens!)  asking her “Did he bite ya on the tittie?” and making her submit to a public trial in a crowded VFW/bar as locals gasp that a black woman is in their midst. Drunken proprietor Floyd (Dub Taylor, a cowboy star and former Clemson Tide football player, who is in all manner of redneck films like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, …tick…tick…tick…, Evel Knievel, Gator, Creature from Black Lake, The Great Smokey Roadblock and Moonshine County Express) then conducts a trial in front of an assembled crowd of drunken locals, many of whom appear disturbingly disturbed, that ends with Liz stripped nude and crying.

The film’s montage sequences are some of the most disturbing I’ve sat through, including Eddie assaulting Liz to the sounds of a country love song intercut with two dogs humping, as well as a scene where she takes photos of him near a waterfall, imagining her camera is a shotgun and that he is covered in blood and gore.

It all climaxes with a wedding where Eddie and Liz are to be wed, which ends up in a slow motion Sam Peckinpah gun battle, as Keno blasts his way in wanting revenge for his dog and everyone gets caught in the crossfire. The film ends with Liz, her life ruined and not enhanced by this escape from her busy life, raising a shotgun to murder Bertha.

Also known as Black Vengeance, The Victim, Heartbreak Motel and Redneck County Rape, the film played drive-ins and grindhouses for nearly a decade. The Heartbreak Motel version features plenty of differences, as Eddie narrates the movie and action scenes have been cut out and replaced with length soliloquies that don’t appear in any other version of the film. Instead of ending with the gun battle, Heartbreak Motel closes with Eddie leaving Georgia for Nashville and a recording contract. There are less scenes of Eddie attacking Liz, but strangely enough, there is a scene where Eddie and Bertha make, umm, third input love to the haunting strains of a bluegrass ballad.

To say that critics — especially in Atlanta — disliked this film is an understatement.

This article was taken from http://atlantatimemachine.com/misc/eddie15.htm

The 1970s were packed with films that you are kind of, sort of horror movies, yet feature no supernatural elements. They just made you feel like you needed to take an entire day’s worth of showers to clean off the scum after watching them. This is one hell of an addition to those movies. It’s not for everyone, but for those who want to see how low exploitation can go, it’s ready to attack your sensibilities.

You can watch this on Tubi and Amazon Prime.

I discovered this movie thanks to Joe Bob Briggs’ How Rednecks Saved Hollywood presentation. The clips he showed were absolutely astounding and there was no way that the actual movie could live up to his speech about the film, right? Nope. This is one sordid piece of scummy moviemaking that does all that and more.

Director Gus Trikonis started his career as a dancer in West Side Story, playing Indio, a member of the Sharks. His directing work for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures led to Corman claiming he was one of the best young directors that he had worked with. His films run the gamut of hicksploitation, from The Side Hackers to The Swinging Barmaids, Supercock, The Evil, Moonshine County Express and the movie based on the Johnny Paycheck sung and David Allen Coe written song Take This Job and Shove It. He was also married to Goldie Hawn for awhile.

Monica Gayle (The Stewardesses, Switchblade Sisters) stars as Jamie, the Nashville Girl of the title (the film also played under the titles New Girl In Town and Country Music Daughter in an attempt to convince people it something to do with the Loretta Lynn bio Coal Miner’s Daughter). She’ll do anything to make it in Nashville after leaving town when she’s assaulted by a boyfriend and abused by her father. It doesn’t get any better in music city, trust me.

Somehow this movie goes from jailbait in trouble to massage parlor receptionist to women in prison to young girl getting pawed by every man in town in very short order, ending with her under the thrall and ownership of big time country star Jeb (Glenn Corbett of TV’s Route 66) and enduring the attentions of Kelly (Roger Davis, TV’s Dark Shadows, as well as Ruby and Killer Bees).

Judith Roberts shows up as Jeb’s long-suffering wife. She’d go on to star in things like Orange Is the New Black, but we know her best as Mary Shaw in Dead Silence.

Singer Johnny Rodriguez and songwriters Rory Bourke, Gene Dobbins, and John Wills all show up here and contribute music. None of this makes Nashville look like a great city to live in or be a rising female artist. There are more #metoo moments in five minutes of this movie than in pretty much everything Hollywood will release this year. It gets to the point that you honestly worry about Monica Gayle’s personal mental health. She might change her name to Melody Mason and get a whole new life story, but she can never escape the past that got her here.

Somehow, there’s a novel version of this movie that has even more sex in it. It’s written by Gary Friedrich, who co-created Ghost Rider. So there’s that.

You can watch this on Tubi and Amazon Prime. Or go all out and grab the Scorpion Releasing blu ray from Ronin Flix.

In the post-Halloween slasher universe, dentists and podiatrists who wanted to become “film producers” realized all you needed to make a movie was a patch of woods, well-endowed amateur females with a good set of pipes for screaming (and racks for gawkin’), and some guys with ironically bad dental work and gnarly bare feet with a penchant for some good ‘ol fashioned, down home rapin’ n’ killin’. Ya’ll don’t be needin’ no stinkin’ script or character development ‘round ‘ere. Cum on, Uncle Jed. We’s be headin’ to the hills to make us Jethro BoDean into a bonerfide movin’ pickture star.

Looking back on the rednecksploitation (you can call it backwoodsploitation or hicksploitation if you like) era that ignited with John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972; based on the James Dickey novel), you begin to realize it was Deliverance—and not Halloween—that served as the jump-off point for Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th. Outside of F13’s Michael Myers-clone in Jason Voorhees and the accoutrements of Italian Giallo-inspired gore, it’s Boorman’s Deliverance that served as the true antecedent to most of the product from the ‘80s slasher cycle—for the true terror lurks in the woods.

However, while Deliverance has an underlying social statement about America’s class structure and questions who is stronger in a battle of wills between primitive man vs. civilized man (a message also found in Sam Peckinpaw’s Straw Dogs; 1971), all the films produced in its backwash threw away plots (that were cookie cutter n’ boilerplated anyway), character development and underlying themes, and amped the violence—even more so in a post-John Carpenter world. Macon County Line (1974), Death Weekend (1976), Rituals (1977), Just Before Dawn (George Kennedy, The Uninvited) and Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort (both 1981) each own their debt to Boorman’s backwoods-terror vision. In fact, in some overseas markets, Rituals was marketed as Deliverance 2.

At their core, most redneck flicks are just darker versions of the ‘ol fish-out-of-water masterplot where the protagonists—in this case, an obligatory group of four or five dick-swinging intellectuals, with at least one testosterone-jacked jock in tow—look and act differently that the surrounding protagonists—i.e., inbred redneck poachers—and don’t understand their foreign-backwoods environs as well as their citified arrogance leads them to believe. Of course, the additional twist: When the city-fishies are out of water in a thriller-cum-suspense horror environ: they must piss off the locals. Oh, and there has to be at least one stupid woman that wasn’t invited on the woodland adventure who decides to “surprise” her husband, because, well, Cletus and Bocephus ain’t bin wid no whimin’ fer a lerng, lerng time.

And that’s the plot of Robert C. Hughes’ Hunter’s Blood: Five city slickers go-a deer huntin’ and meet up with Redneck Local Rotary 666 and, well, anyone with a G.E.D would get the fuck out of the woods, go back to suburbia, bang Kim Delaney, and then fire up their copy of Arcadia’s Deer Hunter Skeet Shoot projection video game. And if you got no one to do the shimmy-sham: find yourself a nice, citified wings n’ ribs grill with Big Buck Hunter in the corner by the restrooms, pop a quarter, and call it day. Nope. Not in Hunter’s Blood country.

“Hey, Pop. How come we didn’t buy beer and stock our coolers in the city before we left for inbred country,” ask David (Sam Bottoms, Up from the Depths by the guru of redneck cinema, Charles B. Griffith).

“Shut up, you’re ruining the plot, son,” head smacks Mason (Clu Gulager, Burt from Return of the Living Dead!!!). “Now pull into that general store so we can buy beer and I can kick some redneck ass and unleash their wrath before Kim Delaney shows up to be raped.”

“Tobe’s Gas Stop? Hey, that’s funny. They named it after Tobe Hooper, the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” says Marty (John Travolta’s less-talented brother, Joey).

“Shut up and quit trying to act, Joey. Just sit over there and wait to be killed,” yells Al (Ken Swofford of Black Roses and a snake-bag load of American TV series). “Look at my IMDb resume, I know what I’m talking about. Now go get a real estate license and quit irritating me, kid.”

All joking aside: What makes Hunter’s Blood the type of hicksploitation classic we love here at B&S Movies is its who’s who of B-movie badassery backing up Clu and Ken (both appear in Terror at London Bridge): You have Lee De Broux as “Red Beard” (Salvage 1 and Robocop), Charles Cyphers as “Woody” (Carpenter mainstay; Assault on Precinct 13), Billy Drago as “Snake” (Invasion U.S.A), and Bruce Glover as “One Eye” (Yep, Crispin’s dad!) . . . and Mickey Jones (!) as “Wash Pot” (Slingblade, Total Recall, National Lampoon’s Vacation . . . the dude was Bob Dylan’s and Kenny Rogers’s drummer and earned 17 gold records!).

And wid-a cast like that, ya’ll don’t be needin’ no stinkin’ script or character development. Bend over and squeal like a pig, and enjoy it, son.

Need more Robert C. Hughes-backwoods terror? He returned with Memorial Valley Massacre (1989). The unrated, pseudo-Eurotrash cut of the film, Son of Sleepaway Camp, marketed as a bogus sequel to 1983’s Sleepaway Camp, goes all “Jess Franco” with hardcore sex and amped gore scenes inserted.

About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.

Marsha Jordan (Count Yorga, The Toy Box) is Sweet Georgia, the sexed up wife of rancher Big T (Gene Drew, Truck Stop Women, Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw), an abusive drunk who she denies carnal pleasure, instead finding it in the arms of ranchhand Cal and even the arms of her stepdaughter Virginia (Barbara Mills, who also used the stage names Leona Tyler and Barbara Caron for movies like Executive Wives and Fire In Her Bed).

The final straw is when Georgia sleeps with the slow switted Leroy, which leads to her getting trampled by a horse and the farmhand getting stabbed with a pitchform before Cal and Virginia cattle prod the oyster ditch, so to speak. Then, of course, Cal is killed by Big T and we cut to Virginia enjoying herself in a room that is so red lit that it must have been in Mario Bava’s house. In case you think that the once virginal Virginia isn’t going to dance the forbidden polka with her old man, then you haven’t seen a Harry Novak film. Is there a square up reel? Of course there is.

This is another Harry Novak affair. Yes, the producer of such stalwart offerings as Suburban Pagans; Country Cuzzins; Wham! Bam! Thank You, Spaceman!; The Child and   Tanya, perhaps the only sexploitation comedy romp about Patty Hearst. If you think I’m not hunting down that last one right now, you don’t know me all that well.

Should you watch this? Honestly, other than the song that plays throughout the film, there’s not much I can recommend. You’d probaby get more out of it just looking at the poster for an hour.

After the success of his gore epics, Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs!, Herschell Gordon Lewis made this, the first of several country fried films. But just because this is supposed to be a sexy comedy romp doesn’t mean that Lewis won’t hit us with plenty of strangeness and lots of the red stuff.

Charles Glore, working here as Chuck Scott, is a country western star who heads back to the hills of the Carolines where within days, he’s in the middle of a feud between the government and the moonshiners. Glore also was the musical director for Two Thousand Maniacs! and wrote this movie.

The title card says “directed by Herchell Gordon Lewis, who ought to know better, but don’t.” Lewis just can’t help himself, as in the midst of the country fun, a psycho named Asa Potter is refused sex from the singer’s girlfriend and then kills her. Keep in mind that he’s also the town’s sheriff and also assaults multiple women in the film, including one mentally challenged girl that eventually fells him with an axe, which is how it works in the universe of Lewis.

This leads to the sheriff shooting people off a watertower, Charles Starkweather-style. Keep in mind this movie was made only six years after that shocking event.

Lewis also wrote and sings the main theme, “White Lightning.” As much as he would live up to the quote “I see filmmaking as a business and pity anyone who regards it as an art form,” you can tell when the man is having a good time. Moonshine Mountain isn’t a good film, but it sure is interesting in parts and it’s pretty short. More films should aspire to both points.

There was also a novelization of the film, which blows my mind. It’s a collector’s item today. I miss the time when every movie had a book that would go with it. Somehow, having this movie written into a novel legitimizes it.

You can watch Moonshine Mountain on Amazon Prime. I’d advise some grain alcohol to speed up the slow parts.

Before he made his first movie — Troika — in 1969, Frederic Hobbs was an artist who went from the traditional to a whole way of presenting art, creating parade sculptures that took art from the museum to the people. That’s when he figured it out — to get the people to see something as art, you should hide it in a film. He also created the films Roseland and Alabama’s Ghost before this one. And honestly, nothing can prepare you for this.

Imagine if David Lynch made a 1950’s nuclear warning monster film. But before you go see it, you get in a car crash and suffer a really bad concussion. Cool. Then, someone spikes your Icee with a dose of LSD that would cripple Owsley “Bear” Stanley. You now have a very, very small idea of just how crazy things are about to get.

There are two stories happeninghere: a scientist is trying to crack the code on a mysterious sheep-like creature while a conservative landowner fights being bought out by prospectors. All in Virginia City, Nevada, which was once the richest city in America after the silver and gold rush. The mines went dry, the people went away and the only people left are tourists staring at a dead husk.

I have to tell you, you’ve never quite seen a creature quite like the Godmonster. At once it appears to be the most real and yet fakest creature ever seen on the silver screen. It very well could be one of Lovecraft’s ancient ones for all I know, as it saunters and stumbles and falters across the frame, scaring children at birthday parties and blowing up gas stations.

There’s also a subplot with a fake dog funeral. Don’t ask me how any of this ties together, because all of it has blown my mind sky high, like a Jigsaw song from 1975.

Imagine a movie where the creature doesn’t do a single thing until more than one hour into the run time of a movie under ninety minutes, all while the nonprofessional actors can’t act and the professional ones chew scenery like they’re the godmonsters of the fringe festival.

I get real down sometimes when I think the world could be a better place than it is. The Godmonster of Indian Flats proves to me that somewhere out there, at some time, in some corner of the cosmos — let’s say a drive-in that smells like skunk weed and MD40 — some brave souls had no idea what the actual fuck they were getting into when it started playing. That fact makes me happy, imagining people driving away before the movie even ends, telling their friends and family that they suffered their way through a movie where a lamb emitted smoke and gave his life so that an entire town could die. There aren’t enough stars in the galaxy and every reality ever to properly review this movie. I’ll have to go back to college to invent some kind of formula so that my fragile mind can try and quantify it.

You can get this on blu ray from the amazing and astound folks at Something Weird and the AGFA. It’s also on Amazon Prime, if you’re brave. Or stupid. But probably you should be both.