Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!

Edward Earle Marsh started acting as a young kid, potentially playing of the Three Little Pigs in the Laurel and Hardy movie Babes in Toyland, with Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood and as a slave in The End Commandments. In the 60s, he recorded the album I’ll Sing for You with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. This was the first time he’d use the name Zebedy Colt and the record was probably shocking for its time, singing songs to men that were usually sung by women to men.

He would come back to that name when he was looking for a way to make money while struggling on Broadway (he was Anthony Newley’s understudy in The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd and was also in Dark at the Top of the Stairs, The Royal Family and Travesties). He was recognized by his fellow actors several times, include Sandy Dennis, who saw him in an adult film that she took her mother to see.

After appearing in movies like Sex Wish, The Story of Joanna and Barbara Broadcast, he started to direct — something he continued to do in New Jersey and Pennsylvania regional theater — from his Lambertville, New Jersey farm. His movies include Farmer’s Daughters (starring Spalding Gray), White Fire, Terri’s Revenge and Unwilling Lovers.

Strangest of those movies is The Devil Inside Her, a movie set in 1826, somewhere in New England. Two sisters, Faith (Terri Hall, Rollerbabies, which fortells that in the not too distant future, sex will be illegal. But there will be Rollerbabies) and Hope (Jody Maxwell, Neon Nights) are both in love with a farmhand named Joseph (Dean Tait). Their father, Ezekiel (Colt), hates this and flogs Faith for having lust in her heart.

Instead of waiting for the punishment from her father, Hope prays to the devil (Rod DuMont), who begins to possess each of the members of the family. You can tell because they have face paint on, just like he does. Satan ends up looking more like Moloch from CHiPs than KISS or King Diamond, but when you see what a few demons do to Annie Sprinkle later, you’ll know that he’s the real cloven hoofed deal. That’s what you get when you meet a witch in the woods and milk a young boy, unleashing “the human snake that grows to fill the void.”

Someone had to prove how smart they are and write this on IMDB: “The opening scene states that this film is set in 1826, however several actors are wearing modern denim overalls and blue jeans. Denim jeans were not patented and produced until 1873, by Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis.”

You’re expecting perfect costumes from an adult movie made in the 70s.

Anyways, this all ends with Joseph and father trying to save Hope — never mind that every family member has co-mingled more than every character in every V.C. Andrews book put together — and laying crosses on her. She responds by saying, “Go fuck yourself in Heaven! You have ruined it all with your cocks of impurity!” As she dies, it seems like this is an unhappy ending, until Satan is revealed, holding her under his cape.

If it all seems like Faith would like to live deliciously, well, this may not have influenced The Witch but damn it all if it isn’t really similar. Except, you know, one of them is a movie with a budget and this is an adult film shot in a few days on a farm. Somehow, this one ends with only one person dead, a father recognizing his daughter’s marriage and new husband, and the dead daughter achieving the true love she never had in life within the arms of Lucifer. “Love of God cannot be so oppressive that one forgets pure love and honest desire,” is spoken and somehow, a movie that is absolute filth — seriously, this goes below and beyond what even your internet connected dirty mind can look up — has a moral even in the midst of absolute immorality.