BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

The Hooked Generation (1968): The films that William Grefé made in Florida feel sweaty and messy and filled with menace, just like the Sunshine State itself, the kind of place that could give you both the Happiest Place on Earth and bands like Deicide and, well, Creed.

This time around, Grefé is telling us the story of a group of three drug pushers who are no longer content to kidnap people and assault women. No, they’re in for the big score, killing their Cuban drug suppliers, an act that puts them on a one-way ticket to the kind of horrible end that can only be found in a regional drive-in movie.

Daisy (Jeremy Slate, The Born Losers, True Grit), Acid (John Davis Chandle, who is also in Grefé’s Mako: The Jaws of Death and Whiskey Mountain, as well as playing the lead bad guy in Adventures In Babysitting) and Dum Dum (Willie Pastrano, who Grefé hired for The Wild Rebels and The Naked Zoo) are absolute scumbags that spend the majority of this movie doing horrible things and talking as much as they can to pad things out.

Look for William Kerwin — who you may know from Herschell Gordon Lewis movies — shows up as an FBI agent.

The Psychedelic Priest (1971): Also known as Electric Shades of Grey and Jesus Freak, The Psychedelic Priest wasn’t really directed by Stewart “Terry” Merrill, but instead William Gréfe, who was paid for this movie in trading stamps, which he described in Brian Albright’s Regional Horror Films, 1958-1990: A State-by-State Guide with Interviews as “Instead of cash, if you owned a TV store and I owned a garage, and you needed your transmission fixed, you’d give me trading stamps. When I needed a TV, I could go get a TV from you.”

Gréfe got paid $100,000 in trading stamps to make this movie that was never released until thirty years later because everyone felt it would be a bomb. As for Gréfe, he was now the president of Ivan Tors Films, making family movies, so he realized that “I didn’t want some wild hippie drug movie with my name as writer and director.”

The cast and the crew were non-actors, mostly real hippies, and the story is rambling at best, as Father John realizes that he can no longer preach to the young people, so he goes on some sort of quest to learn how to fit into a world that doesn’t need religion any longer. He almost leaves the cloth for a woman named Sunny, but by the end of the movie, he’s come back to his commitment to the church.

This was shot on the fly, with scenes mainly being improvised, as well as a soundtrack that is really solid. It’s a great experiment and whether or not it works for you is, well, up to you. I dug what it was trying to do, even if it’s not always successful.