Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.

Joan Denton (Jeanne Rainer, a model who went on to write several books, including The Beauty Trap, My Sundays with Henry Miller: A Memoir and Astrology For Lovers: An Astrological Guide to a More Fulfilling Sex Life) is the kind of evil woman I love in my movies. She’s rich, she hates nearly everyone and she also uses people, alternating between little girl and cruel adult sometimes in the same moment.

Somehow, she let working class orphan Eddie Mercer (Ted Marshall) into her bed. Maybe it’s all to upset her rich father Dr. Earl Denton (Charles G. Martin). How rich? He owns the entire town of Dentonville, Florida. However, she finds out that she’s pregnant and Eddie won’t go away. She wants an abortion. He wants her as his wife or to raise their child.

Family lawyer Sam Ingram (Robert J. Cannon) finds out about all of this, so he blackmails Denton, getting part of his estate and sets up an illegal abortion for his daughter. As for Eddie, he gets locked up and beaten by the cops. The only person who can help him is the fallen woman that he was kind to, Vicky Smith (Sue Ellis), who still wouldn’t give him an alibi. She’s trying to get her child back and working with her lawyer to make it happen. They met in the flophouse where they live, all working in the Dentonville laundry, cleaning the sheets and filthy clothes of the rich while they barely make enough to live. Eddie’s been an orphan his whole life, never adopted, the son of a sex worker who wants to belong, to have a family. Joan told him she loved him and that’s why he even made love to her in the first place. Now, she screams that he’s ruined her life.

This is a hard movie to find a person to make the protagonist, because so much of it feels like Florida in 2024. Joan should have the right to do whatever she wants with her body and the baby inside it, but she keeps dealing with men with unrealistic fantasies like Eddie or who tell her they will take care of it and are lying like her father. Eddie just wants to belong and has always felt like he has no worth. Vicky is a bad girl but not rich and amoral like Joan. She just wants to come to your apartment, drink and maybe take off her way too tight sweater on the outside, but on the inside, she’s just learned that she wants to be a mother, a fact that frightens her.

Jeanne Rainer is incredible in this, haunting and hunting Eddie down to the orphanage where he spent his childhood, shooting him in front of children, then following him to the swamp where she shoots him right in the eyes while he’s bleeding out in Vicky’s arms.

Director R. John Hugh came to Florida from England and made five movies. In addition to this movie, also called You’ve Ruined Me Eddie!, he made Fall Girl, The Meal, Naked in the Sun and Yellowneck. Writer Nancy S. Camp only has this movie on her IMDB and I really would love to see what else she could have done.

This is a movie that seems like it’s going to be a message or a hygiene film. Instead, you have a hysterical and deadly alluring rich black widow, a fallen woman trying to make good and a poor man who never had a chance all sweating, loving and going mental in the swampy nights of Florida. There’s no square up reel. Just brutal and unyielding death.

Also: One of the songs in this — it’s all library music — is the song that plays in the drive-in intermission where the hot dog and the bun do tricks under the big top.

You can watch this on YouTube.