Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!

Boojie Baker (Dan Conway) has been screwing bands — like Charlie — and ruining their dreams. He discovers the band The Faded Blue and renames them The Big Blast. To get them the best studio in music, he and his assistant Gordy (Ray Sager) send women to make out with the engineers and blackmail them. This group of musicians is smarter than the others and they confront Boojie about where their money is. He then sets them up with a drug bust, but they figure out a way to get back at him.

A non-nudie or gore movie from Herschell Gordon Lewis, this movie is probably most famous for featuring Colonel Sanders, who Lewis often used for catering on his movies. His scene was filmed in a Cleveland Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant with Sanders requesting multiple takes, his own billing in the credits and even wanting to direct his moment in the movie!

Here’s the dialogue:

Gordie: Hey, man. Do you serve fried chicken?

Harland Sanders: Do we serve fried chicken? Whoo-wee! We DO serve fried chicken!

Gordie: I got five hungry musicians in the parking lot wanting five buckets of fried chicken.

Harland Sanders: Musicians you say? Hey, I love music! If you let them play some music outside, I’ll let you have lunch for free.

Gordie: You got yourself a deal, buddy!

With a name like Blast-Off Girls, you might be hoping for some of the nudie cutie movies that Lewis did just a few years before. Instead, you get garage bands and fried chicken.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.