Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Ray Dennis Steckler directed this — oh, I mean Sven Christian — and co-wrote it with Herb Robins, the director of The Worm Eaters and The Brainsucker. The two had worked together on The Thrill Killers and The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters. He also plays Lucifer.

Steckler was having a hard time casting the lead, but when Ted Roter, who plays Sinthia’s father, had car trouble, he was picked up by a Sunday school teacher who got the part.

There’s not really any other movie like this.

Look at this description: “Cynthia Kyle enters puberty with a vengeance, murdering her parents as they make love: she’s wanted her father to love only her. Eight years later, she’s free and wants to marry, but nightmares plague her so she seeks psychiatric help. The doctor asks her to describe a dream: it’s long and elaborate with dreams within dreams of Lucifer, Hell, and her parents in various guises. To shed her guilt, the shrink recommends that she commit suicide in her next dream. In it, she falls in love with an artist who reminds her of her father, responds to a woman who finds her attractive, and celebrates her first school-yard kiss. The dream takes her back to her parents’ bedside. Is any cure possible?”

Anyways…

Cynthia, or Sinthia, is played by Shula Roan, AKA Bunny Allister. The only other movie she’s in is The Curious Female. That night, when she goes to sleep, she dreams that she’s in an orgy where everyone starts yelling “Sinthia loves her father!” like she’s Jamie Lloyd trying to get through lunch at Haddonfield High School. That’s because she’s in a special underworld, the hell of people who killed their parents.

She meets Carol (Brett Zeller, The Doll Squad) on a lonely road and follows her home to a mansion in the middle of nowhere that is filled with art painted by Lennie (Ted Royer, using the name Boris Balachoff). She gets a tarot card reading, has a sapphic encounter with Carol and then marries Lennie, who she thinks is her father. Then, she wakes up at her therapist’s office and he tells her to kill herself in the next dream — remember that chestnut? — and Carol and Lennie refuse to allow that to happen.

Somehow, this is not the goofball Steckler but some kind of Kenneth Anger on the cheap and I mean that in the best way I can possibly mean it. It has a heroine that wanted her father so much that she stabbed her parents and burned their house down and now is somehow cured. Except that, well, her new fiancee looks just like her dad once we get to see him.

How do you get out of Hell? You learn to love yourself. One handed.

If you can make it through the wild camera angles and Sinthia yelling, “Daddy!” every few moments, there is something here. Something Weird released it with Satanis: The Devil’s Mass and that’s beyond wonderful. Steckler shows some knowledge of cinematography here and the colors are psychedelic. This is the kind of movie that I love but I also know that when I recommend it to people, they don’t ask me to tell them what I’m watching any longer.