Lindsay Shonteff may be better known for his James Bond homages than the rest of the films he’s made, but this 1970 groupie saga shouldn’t be passed by. Made in the year after his kinda sorta British giallo Night After Night After Night, this film tells the story of Suzy and Fiona, groupies for the band Forever More*.

With a director like Shonteff at the helm and a title like Permissive, you’d expect this to be a fun sex comedy about just how awesome it is to sleep wth bands. But no, it’s nothing of the sort, just a long dark crawl through boredom and addiction to anything, like moving up the ladder of sleeping with a band.

If anything, I learned in this movie that being a groupie pretty much means driving your best friend to suicide.

As for the director, he pretty much remade this movie as his next film, The Yes Girls, without the music angle.

*Forever More was a real band. Their members appear in the film in other roles and not as themselves, which is strange enough. One of their members, Alan Gorrie, was also in Average White Band. You can also hear other bands of this era like Titus Groan and Comus.

Frank Davis (John P. Ryan), the father of the child in the original It’s Alive, is trying to make up for his part in the life and death of his child by warning parents of the conspiracy to murder their mutant children. Parents like Eugene (Frederic Forrest, The Conversation) and Jody (Kathleen Lloyd, The Car), who are met at the hospital not by doctors and nurses, but by police officers. She’s rescued by Frank just before she goes into labor and delivers her child in a specially made vehicle.

The trouble is, even the calmest of people can spook these mutant children, who are nature’s most perfect apex predator. Now that there are three of these babies, things are even more intense than the first film.

Like always, Larry Cohen can take an idea that sounds ridiculous when read and make a movie that completely works. He’s honestly one of the directors I depend on most, because no matter the genre or budget, his movies are always something that entertains and makes you think.

Of course, there would have to be a third film in this series and, spoiler warning, I ended up enjoying it even more than this one.

Tom DeSimone is a maniac and I say that in the kindest of ways. Chatterbox, Hell Night, Savage Streets, Angel III: The Final Chapter…the dude knows exactly what I want to watch and delivers.

Seeing as he already made two women in prison films, Prison Girls and The Concrete Jungle, DeSimone decided that it was time to make a parody.

Yet this movie is a force of nature. I mean, Wendy O. Williams*, the lead singer of the Plasmatics, plays Charlie Chambliss, the top dog of the reform school who sleeps with Edna (Pat Ast, Halston’s muse and the star of Warhol’s Heat), the head of the ward, for special privileges.

Jenny (Linda Carol, who may have been 16 when they shot this, making her nudity underage) is our heroine, a girl who gets caught in a shootout thanks to a bad boyfriend and ends up becoming the newbie who runs afoul of, well, everybody.

And to make this even better, Sybil Danning plays Warden Sutter, a religious zealot with a radio tower that she uses to blast the Word of God while the girls try to sleep.

Sherri Stoner, who plays Lisa, who would go on to write for Animaniacs and voice Slappy Squirrel. Other actresses** that appear in this are Denise Gordy (D.C. Cab), Tiffany Helm (Friday the 13th: A New Beginning), Darci DeMoss (Friday the 13th Part VI), Michelle Bauer, Julia Parton and Leslee Bremmer (Hardbodies).

The only sad thing I can say about this movie is that Mary Woronov was originally cast to play Dr. Norton. Unfortunately, DeSimone thought she played the role too hard during the first cast reading. Any movie that would have had Woronov, Williams and Danning in the same story may have been too much for my fragile mind to deal with.

*Williams was 36 when she played this teenage role. She also refused any outfits that were suggested for the movie, providing her own clothes and refused to take off her boots, even for the shower scenes.

**Linnea Quigley is on one of the posters, yet isn’t in the film.

Released on a double feature with Shake, Rattle and Rock, Reform School Girl is the story of Donna Price (Gloria Castillo, whose song Joshua Kadison wrote the song “Mother’s Arms” about her), a girl in the wrong place who went on the wrong date with the wrong man at the wrong time. He leaves the scene of a hit and run, telling her that he’ll kill her if she tells the cops he was there. This leads her to, you know it, reform school.

Meanwhile, that wrong man remains convinced that Donna is going to tell the police what really happened, so he makes it seem like she’s a police informant. This leads to a girl on girl battle over a pair of scissors with even badder girl Roxy (Yvette Vickers, whose Playboy Playmate of the Month centerfold for July of 1959 was shot by Russ Meyer).

Reform School Girls is an American-International Pictures film directed by veteran Edward Bernds, who started his career with Three Stooges shorts (he struggled with the first few, as Curly’s health was in bad shape and it was difficult to work around) and films in the Blondie, Gasoline Alley and Bowery Boys series. He’d go on to direct Queen of Outer Space, Return of the Fly and 59 episodes of the new Stooges TV show and two of their full-length movies, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules and The Three Stooges In Orbit.

Keep an eye out for Luana Anders (Easy Rider), Diana Darrin (The Incredible Shrinking Man), Edd Byrnes (Vince Fontaine!) and Sally Kellerman in her first acting role.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Betsy Russell stepped into the role of Molly “Angel” Stewart for the second movie in this series as  the producers could not meet Donna Wilkes’ salary demands. This would start the trend of a new Angel in each movie.

This time, our little girl has grown up and is in law school. She learns that Lieutenant Andrews (no longer played by Cliff Gorman, now it’s Robert F. Lyons), the cop who got her off the streets, has been killed. Luckily, her old street family are all around and played by the same great performers as the original, with Steven M. Porter as Yo-Yo Charlie, Rory Calhoun as Kit Carson and Susan Tyrrell as Solly.

Only one person knows who killed Andrews and that’s another street performer named Johnny Glitter (Barry Pearl, Grease). It turns out there’s a scheme to buy up Hollywood Boulevard and Andrews got caught in the middle. Solly also has a baby that she found and that infant gets caught up in the craziness, nearly getting killed in a shootout and then almost thrown off a building. Avenging Angel has no qualms about being a neon-soaked nightmare world of street people with hearts of gold shooting, killing and playing Weekend at Bernie’s with dead mobsters, much less babies being constantly in death’s grasp.

There’s also product placement — in an exploitation movie! — for Adidas.

Avenging Angel was written and directed by Robert Vincent O’Neil, who in addition to writing the first movie, also wrote Vice Squad, which is a thematically similar and perhaps better movie, as well as Wonder Women, Deadly Force and the third film in this series. He also directed the first film in this series and Blood Mania.

You can watch this on Tubi.