EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on March 23, 2023.

Candy Morgan (Claudia Jennings, Playboy Playmate of the Month for November 1969 and Playmate of the Year for 1970 and quite literally the most perfect actress for movies just like this) busts out of prison and goes right back to robbing banks with sticks of lit dynamite. She inspires Ellie-Jo Turner (Jocelyn Jones, Tourist Trap), a bank teller who has just been fired for lateness and total lack of character, who joins up. Wearing tight outfits and waving around them lit sticks of TNT, they spread mayhem everywhere.

Director Michael Pressman also directed Some Kind of Hero, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, Doctor Detroit and numerous episodes of Law and Order: SVU. Mark Rosin (Chatterbox) wrote the script from a story by Peter Macgregor-Scott, who would go on to produce Revenge of the Nerds and Batman and Robin amongst many other movies.

The best part of this movie is that it’s really about the friendship between the two women and how they aren’t getting back at banks for any reason. They just need money and are willing to take it. Sure, there’s a guy named Slim (John Crawford, who once dated Sharon Tate’s sister Debra, as well being one of the original Mousekateers and playing Chuck Connors’ son on The Rifleman. He also had four Top 40 singles, reaching #8 with “Cindy’s Birthday” and #12 with “Rumors”) that joins up with them and falls in love with Ellie Jo, but these ladies are the main focus.

This film is also known as Dynamite Women, in case the poster misleads you. Sadly, the queen of the B movies, Claudia Jennings, wouldn’t live to see her thirtieth birthday.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Eat My Dust perfectly fits the cultural zeitgeist at the end of the 70s, which matches the end of the 60s, as culture looked toward southern influences and maybe never stopped. During the 1970-71 season, CBS famously canceled all of its rural programming — Mayberry R.F.D., The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction and Green Acres — despite it being highly rated but not as appealing to those that bought commercials. Ironically, by 1979, the network would return to the same shows it turned its back on when The Dukes of Hazzard became a ratings success.

Star Ron Howard had written a comedy with his dad Rance called Tis the Season. He already half the budget and if Corman put up the rest, he’d be in this movie and direct and star in another, which ended up being Grand Theft Auto.

Charles B. Griffith, who directed and wrote the movie, suggested the title as a joke. He’d know about car films, as he wrote Death Race 2000. 

Hoover Niebold (Howard) is the son of the sheriff who is in love with Darlene (Christopher Norris, yes that’s her name) but she’s really in love with the car owned by Bubba Jones (Dave Madden). Hoover steals it and that’s pretty much the movie. All the Howards — including Clint — are in this and it’s more episodic humor than an actual narrative, but that’s perfect for what the kind of movie it is. This is meant to play drive-ins and be just enough entertainment but not enough distraction for what the drive-in is really all about to younger audiences.

But yeah — back to my point. Hollywood will always return to being inspired by and courting southern audiences and those that want to be part of what that audience is all about.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on July 30, 2019.

As you may have learned by now, I absolutely love movies that are based on true stories that aren’t really true. This is yet another, directed by Michael Miller, who also brought us National Lampoon’s Class Reunion, a slasher spoof written by John Hughes, the martial arts/slasher Chuck Norris-starring Silent Rage and the TV movies A Crime of Innocence, Danielle Steele’s Daddy and Roses Are for the Rich, a movie that would fit right into our redneck week, as Lisa Hartman plays an Appalachian widow who vows to destroy Bruce Dern, the man who got her husband killed.

Dinah Hunter (Yvette Mimieux, The Time Machine, Snowbeast) is an ad exec in LA who has just about had it. She quits her job after arguing with a client and leaves for NYC after catching her man having some aggressive cuddling in the swimming pool with another woman.

As she drives across our great nation, Dinah picks up Bobby Ray (Robert Carradine, Revenge of the Nerds) and his pregnant girlfriend Lola (Nancy Lee Noble, Honey Pot from She-Devils on Wheels). They end up robbing her for everything she’s got, so she walks to a bar and asks to use the phone. This being a 1970’s drive-in movie, the bartender (character actor Britt Leach, who was in the Jerry Lewis comeback movie Hardly Working that I endured as a child, as well as The Last Starfighter and Silent Night, Deadly Night) ends up assaulting her and then calls the cops when she defends herself. This isn’t the big city — the police believe the local, not her.

Dinah ends up in Jackson County jail — go figure, with a title like that — right next to Blake (Tommy Lee Jones), who awaiting extradition to Texas on a murder charge. Seeing as how Dinah has no ID, she has to wait until someone gets back to her from New York or Los Angeles. Deputy Hobie can’t even deal with her being in a cell for one night before he too attacks her, but she ends up killing him with a wooden stool and Blake helps her escape by stealing the keys. Sheriff Dempsey (Severn Darden, an original member of Second City and Kulp in the Planet of the Apes films) chases after them before running into a drunk driver in an accident that kills both of them.

Blake and Dinah go on the road, chased by the cops after being charged for Hobie’s death. She wants to turn herself in as she still believes in the law, even after everything. He lets her know that every small town cop is corrupt and that no one will believe that she acted in self-defense.

The police finally catch them during a parade in Fallsburg, gunning down Blake in the street, with him bleeding out all over the American flag. We’re left watching our heroine in the back of a cop car, going back to jail for what presumably is more hell on earth. And that’s it — were you expecting a happy ending from a 1970’s Roger Corman deep fried crime movie?

Jackson County Jail was written by Donald E. Stewart, who would go on to win an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for the movie Missing. He also wrote the films Deathsport, The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger and the TV movie Death of a Centerfold – The Dorothy Stratten Story.

Roger Corman would remake this movie in 1997 as Macon County Jail with Ally Sheedy and David Carradine as the leads and Charles Napier as the sheriff.

You can watch this for free on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on May 24, 2020.

I was telling someone who doesn’t watch movies like I do — well, that could be just about anyone — that this film has a cast packed with stars. That’s when I realized that Hollywood Boulevard has a cast that is all famous to me and probably me alone. I don’t care. These are my people. Join me as I celebrate them.

Candice Rialson, the inspiration for Bridget Fonda’s character in Jackie Brown, stars as Candy Wednesday, new in town and ready to be a big star. She gets an agent named Walter Paisley (Dick Miller, with the same name as his character in A Bucket of Blood) who can’t get her any work until she gets mixed up in a bank robbery.

Those of you who read the site know that I watched this movie specifically because Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov are in it. What kept me around was the fact that this movie is basically making fun of every Corman movie of this era, with the three girls formula and a script pretty much taken from the Bela Lugosi movie The Death Kiss.

Seeing as how this was directed by Allan Arkush and Joe Dante, there are a ton of inside jokes. Bartel’s director character, Eric Von Leppe, is the name of Boris Karloff’s character from The Terror. John Kramer’s character, Duke Mantee, is named for Bogart’s character in The Petrified Forest. Tara Strohmeier’s Jill McBain is named for Claudia Cardinale’s character in Once Upon a Time in the West. You also have a movie named Machete Maidens, as well as almost every Corman director showing up in cameos, plus Forrest J. Ackerman and Robby the Robot popping up.

This movie was the result of a bet between producer Jon Davison and Roger Corman. Davison believed that he could make the cheapest New World Pictures movie ever, so he was given $60,000 and ten days.

Consider it a greatest hits collection, with scenes taken directly from Battle Beyond the Sun, The Terror, The Big Bird Cage, Night of the Cobra Woman, The Hot Box, Night Call Nurses, Unholy Rollers, Savage!, Caged Heat, Big Bad Mama, Death Race 2000 and Crazy Mama all here.

Let me sum this up: Candice Rialson looks better in the Frankenstein costume than David Carradine.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Godfather of Mexican independent cinema, Arturo Ripstein got his start working for Luis Buñuel and this film has a very similar feel to that director’s work.

Before World War II begins, Romanian count Liviu (Peter O’Toole) and countess Julia (Charlotte Rampling) have set up an Art Deco tent on a deserted island in the hopes of escaping their past and the war. All of their servants have come along and all of the conveniences of their palatial home, but before long, their friends start to arrive and take most of the servants and kill every animal that is near the island. They leave Liviu and Julia without supplies and without anyone else but Larson (Max von Sydow) and their servant Eusebio (Jorge Luke). There are no supplies coming but there is a war simmering between the three men and the one available woman.

Irish writer H.A.L. Craig was a contributor to the recut Lisa and the Devil known by the name House of Exorcism. He wrote the script along with Ripstein and José Emilio Pacheco. This was re-released with more sex scenes as The Far Side of Paradise and The Other Side of Paradise.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on August 3, 2019.

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 had 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 or go all out and grab the Scorpion Releasing blu ray from Ronin Flix.

François Truffaut started collecting tales from and about children since he made The 400 Blows and used them in this film, including the story of his first kiss. The main kid is the motherless Patrick Desmouceaux (Geory Desmouceaux) and his friend Julien Leclou (Philippe Goldmann), who is dealing with abuse at home. Yet most of the movie is episodic, with kids getting in trouble, learning about love, going on dates, watching a cat in peril, bad haircuts and yes, that first kiss.

It ends with Julien’s abuse becoming known to all and a teacher telling the students, “Of all mankind’s injustices, injustice to children is the most despicable! Live isn’t always fair, but we can fight for justice. It’s the only way. It’s a slow process, but we do move forward. All people with power like to claim they are impervious to threats. But they do give in to pressure. A show of strength is the only way to get results. Adults understand that and they obtain what they ask for by demonstrating. I want to show that when adults are determined they can improve their lot. But children’s rights are totally ignored. Political parties are not concerned. With kids like Julien or you. Do you know why? Because children don’t vote! If kids had the right to vote, they would have better schools and sports facilities. You would get them because the politicians need your vote. You could come to school an hour later in winter instead of rushing out before daylight. I also want to say, because of my own childhood, I feel kids deserve a better deal. That is why I became a school teacher. Life isn’t easy. You must steel yourselves to face it. I don’t mean ‘hard-boiled’. I am talking about endurance and resilience. Some of us, who had a difficult childhood are better equipped for adult life than those who were overprotected by love. It’s the law of compensation. Life may be hard, but it’s also wonderful. When we are confined to the sickbed, we cannot wait to get out and enjoy life. We sometimes forget how much we really love it. Time flies. Before long, you will have children of your own. If you love them, they will love you. If they don’t feel you love them, they will transfer their love and tenderness to other people. Or to things. That’s life! Each of us needs to be loved!”

The translation of this movie’s French title L’Argent de poche is Pocket Money, but it was Steven Spielberg who came up with this title. He also directed Truffant in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

This movie feels like childhood does, small moments that begin to add up, many faces and friends finally giving way to one set group of friends and eventually, when you grow old and look back, memories. As I read back on that speech above, I see so much honesty in it.

How amazing that again, Roger Corman was the one to release this in America. There was even a paperback of the script, which Truffaut wrote with Suzanne Schiffman.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on July 23, 2020.

George Armitage wrote Gas-s-s-s, Private Duty Nurses, Night Call Nurses and Vigilante Force before scoring mainstream success with Miami Blues and Grosse Point Blank. He told Film Comment, “I wrote Darktown Strutters in three days, and the script form is all one sentence, the entire script is one sentence.”

While he had wanted to direct this, William Witney ended up making it. Witney was a Hollywood vet, starting all the way back at Republic where he worked n movie serials. He worked a lot with Roy Rogers and at the end of his career, made a few movies with Gene Corman, including I Escaped from Devil’s Island and this movie.

This is less a narrative film and more a collection of hijinks as a gang of black bikers interacts with the police, all until Syreena starts to search for her missing mother, Cinderella. Turns out an evil barbecue chain — with an owner in full Klan regalia — has her.

Trina Parks from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Diamonds Are Forever is Syreena, backed up by a cast featuring former Ikette Edna Richardson, Roger E. Mosley (TC from Magnum, P.I.), Stan Shaw (Detective Sapir from The Monster Squad), Alvin Childress (Amos of the Amos ‘n Andy TV show), Zara Cully (Mother Jefferson!) and, this being a Corman family film, Dick Miller.

Get ready for a fairy tale mixed with blaxploitation, basically, with plenty of great tunes from The Dramatics as well as John Gary Williams and The Newcomers.

And remember: “Any similarity between this true life adventure and the story Cinderella … is bullshit.”

Tomorrow’s Hope is about The Beethoven Project, a school in the middle of the South Side of Chicago and one that tried to — as the title says — give hope to students who otherwise had none. It eventually became a project called Educare and this film is about three students from the first class: Crystal, who is about to go to college with the dream of being a psychiatrist; Jalen, who hopes to be a pediatrician and Jamal, who has a future in music.

Directed by Thomas A. Morgan (Storied Streets, Scrum) and produced by The Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation, this movie is just 45 minutes but instills a promise for tomorrow. For a program that began in the largest public housing project in America, this program has found committed teachers and students willing to put in the work to not only transform their lives, but the lives of everyone around them.