June 22: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Teenagers!
Stephanie Fondue, who stars in this as Jeannie, had an even more incredible real name. Enid Finnbogason. She was in Hollywood from Winnipeg, got hit up at lunch to try out for this movie and got it. She’d never been a cheerleader. She was twenty. Also: A nude model, so disrobing during the audition was no big whoop.
In the film, Amarosa High School is the kind of high stakes place where lives depend on football games. Along with Jeannie, Bonnie (Jovita Bush), Debbie (Brandy Woods) and head cheerleader Claudia (Denise Dillaway, who eventually did the makeup for 2000s reality specials Exposed! Pro Wrestling’s Greatest Secrets and Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets as well as the VHS release of Party Games for Adults Only), the girls try and help the men win. Except that Claudia is catty and is trying to get Jeannie deflowered by the end of the season. It’s a backward teen sex comedy bet.
But hey, everyone goes to see I Drink Your Blood at one point. So there’s that.
Director and co-writer Paul Glicker also made Running Scared (the one with Ken Wahl) and adult movies Parlor Games and Hot Circuit. Other writers were Richard Lerner, Tad Richards and Ace Baandige, a name for someone who claims to have been a Presidential scriptwriter named David. David Gergen seems too clean for this, David Shipley is too young and David Frum was 11 when this came out. I am looking at Presidential writers and comparing them to someone who made a sex film.
Speaking of sex films, Suzie is played by Sandy Evans, but that’s Clair Dia, who was in Lucifer’s Women and 3 A.M. — the only porn with an Orson Welles-edited scene — and directed Screwples and The Health Spa. Patty, played by Kim Stanton, who is also Kimberly Hyde, was also in The Young Nurses and Candy Stripe Nurses. There were a lot of nurse movies. There are even sequels to this one: The Swinging Cheerleaders, Revenge of the Cheerleaders and Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend.
Directed and written by Alberto Sedano — who produced Jess Franco’s 2010 Paula-Paula — Severin goes deep into Spanish cinema — well, at least the kind we all want to watch — with this doc. Here’s what they have to say for themselves: “Under the Franco dictatorship, Spain’s rigid censorship laws had repressed any form of sexuality outside of Catholic marriage. But following Franco’s death and the consolidation of democracy, Clasificada “S” films–restricted to those over 18 years old, with the warning that their content may offend the sensibilities of the viewer–embodied a period in Spanish history when sex went from being a sin to becoming a cinematic expression of political freedom.”
This film “…explores the history behind the rating, the battles it fought, and the distinctive dramas, thrillers and horror shockers that subverted the values of the former dictatorship. Narrated by Iggy Pop, featuring revealing interviews with actors, directors and historians, and showcasing clips from films by Jess Franco, José Ramón Larraz, Ignacio Iquino, Eloy de la Iglesia and many more, Exorcismo tells the incredible true story of a film movement that rocked Spanish culture, changed the face of genre films, and left its transgressive mark on global cinema forever.”
If the names of any of those directors got you all hot and bothered — look, I’m cuckoo for Franco and lunatic for Larraz — this is for you. And even if you have no idea who they are, there’s a lot to learn here about how sometimes extreme cinema can have a lot to say about the world that it escapes from.
As much as I love Italy, and it will always have my perverted movie heart, Spain has been neglected too long. Italy’s violent films of the 1970s often were reactions to Anni di Piombo. Spain was finally emerging from a time when everything was forbidden, when two versions of nearly every movie had to be filmed—one for Spain, where women were nearly fully clothed, and where violence was held back, and another for the rest of the world.
Where this film really sings is when it allows the talking heads to expand on movies that they love from Spain—Bloody Sex, Beyond Terror, Satan’s Blood, Morbus, Mad Foxes—and three of the country’s most unique directors, José Ramón Larraz, Ignacio F. Iquino and Jess Franco.
Maybe you won’t feel like you’re seeing uncles you haven’t heard from in too long when Jack Taylor and Antonio Mayans show up to speak, but if you do, again — this was made for you. You will also come back with a list of movies you need to check out. Mine are Poppers, Morbus and Dimorphic.
Also: Holding back from showing Jess Franco until an hour and forty-four minutes in is the very definition of edging.
You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
Leng Rushuang (Shih Szu) is hunting for a criminal, Chief Jiao Tianhao (Lo Lieh), who was once the security for a convoy. Yet the Forest’s Four Evil Spirits gang have kidnapped his son, as well as framed him for rape and murder. Sure, Leng thinks he could be innocent, but she’s also looking to get him back in custody no matter what it takes.
We get promised a flaming dagger technique that I’d love to see more of, but hey — I’m all for the Shaw Brothers movies where a female fighter is the lead. I wish she were in it more, but at the end, she does a high wire fight, and it’s incredible. I wish this had more of that! At least there’s a scene where she fights an entire harem packed with warrior women, so I can’t say that I wasn’t entertained!
Both Stanley Siu Wing and Shen Chiang are credited for this film, which may have been finished as early as 1971 and Shaw Brothers hung on to it for some time.
The 88 Films release of Lady of the Law has a commentary track by David West, a stills gallery and new artwork by Rob Bruno. You can get it from MVD.
Directed by actress Kao Pao-shu, this finds Feng Fei Fei (Lily Ho) facing a challenge. She wants revenge on the three men who killed her sister and almost ended her nephew. Getting that bloody payment isn’t the hardest thing in the world for her, as she’s the fiercest swordsperson in perhaps all of the martial world.
The problem is that one of the killers appears to be Chin Lien Pai, the man to whom she has been promised. All the fighting skills in the world can’t get past family obligations and love.
I love that this had a female director. After this, she started her own company with her husband, making this the only film she would direct for Shaw Brothers.
This wasn’t dubbed when it was released in the U.S., instead appearing with subtitles, which wasn’t usually the way these movies came out here. I wish they’d given it a better title.
The 88 Films release of Lady With a Sword has awesome new art by R.P. “Kung Fu Bob” O’Brien, as well as commentary by David West and a stills gallery. You can get it from MVD.
One of the last films produced at Hong Kong’s legendary Shaw Brothers studio, this is the story of a poet named Yu (Patricia Ha, Nomad) who refuses to comply with the way that ladies should behave in the conservative time that she has been born into. She becomes a Taoist priestess so that she can do whatever she wishes, but can society allow her to love nomadic warrior Tsui Pok Hau (Alex Man) and her maid Lu Chiao (Lam Hoi-Ling)?
Directed by Eddie Ling-Ching Fong, this is more of an art film than exploitation, regardless of the title. It’s based on the life of Tang Dynasty poet Yu Xuanji and was Fong’s first film, with the original cut said to be almost three hours long.
Once she leaves the convent, Yu expands on how she feels about free love and falls for a rich man, Yung (Poon Chun-Wai). Yet Tsui Pok Hau is never far behind. Her love for him could doom them both.
I wasn’t expecting anything with this film and was really knocked out by its scope and just how incredible it looks. It’s definitely nothing like anything that Shaw Brothers put out. Well worth seeking out.
The 88 Films release of this film comes with four art cards, commentary by David West, a stills gallery, a trailer and a gorgeous slipcover with art by Justin Coffee. You can order it from MVD.
Detective Mitchell Morse (Albert Jones) seems to have been on this case forever, but it doesn’t seem like that. He may really have been.
Directed and written by Neal Dhand, this begins with a body and a foot washing up on a beach in Jacksonville. The foot doesn’t belong to that body. And there just might be a serial killer on the loose. Morse has an unraveling relationship with his wife Emily (Keesha Sharp) and doesn’t really trust his younger partner, Dreyfus (Tom Lipinski). These are all the things that you expect from a neo-noir detective story, but this is setting up for a rug pull near the end.
With incredible photography by Charles Ackley Anderson, I wanted to love this more than I did. Dhand is making his first film and went all out, which you have to commend. I’m not sure how well it all came together, however, as it wasn’t until the last few moments reveal that what I saw as the flaws in the film were explained. The acting is good, the idea is right, but something just didn’t add up for me. That said, your mileage will always vary, and I could see others loving this.
You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
A triple feature of anime in the middle of the night. What better way to spend the evening?
Baoh the Visitor (1989): This movie takes over a year of manga and makes it fit into a 45-minute original video animation (OVA). Created by Studio Pierrot and distributed by Toho, this is an early release by Hirohiko Araki, who would go on to make JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.
17-year-old Ikuro Hashizawa has been taken by Doress and given a parasitic worm which transforms him into BAOH (Biological Armament On Help), giving him incredible superpowers which will also kill him in 111 days when the worm eats his brain. RFK, eat your stupid heart out.
BAOH is trying to escape along with 9-year-old psychic Sumire and her marsupial, Sonny-Steffan Nottsuo. They are being watched by Dr. Kasuminome, who created — perhaps too well, as he says — BAOH, along with his assistant Sophine and an army of monsters, including Number 22, Colonel Dordo and Walken, a psychic killing machine who melts objects before they can reach him. He sees BAOH as a worthy target and even burns the sigil for the creature onto his chest like some deranged Dr. Manhattan.
Hideaki Anno, who co-directed Shin Godzilla, was an animator on this movie.
Call Me Tonight (1986): We’ve all been there before, right? Phone sex girl Natsumi Rumi decides to actually meet one of her callers, Sugiura Ryo. The problem? When he gets worked up, he turns into a monster. She tells him that she’s familiar with Freud and decides to work out his issues.
So yeah, an anime, My Demon Lover, but also one that has references to Fright Night. It also doesn’t skimp when it comes to the transformation parts, as each time it’s almost a totally different monster. For all the promise of tentacle sex that you would expect in this, it’s more about titillation, as Natsumi wants to keep teasing Sugiura until he can control his transformations. Then what? We never find out, as another girl — and some bikers — ruin everything.
Dragon’s Heaven (1988): In the year 3195, humans and robots have gone to war. During one of the battles, a sentient combat suit named Shaian loses its pilot and shuts down for a thousand years. His enemy, Elmedin, is still alive, but Shaian has found Ikuru, a junker, who joins him as his new partner.
Obviously, creator Makoto Kobayashi loves Moebius, as this looks like his art come to life. He was also a major name in Japan’s scratch-build model world, which means that in this, he decided to make human-sized versions of the robots and have them fight in a live-action opening to the film.
Since making this, Kobayashi has worked as a mechanical designer on Space Battleship Yamamoto 2199 and on everything from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure toGiant Robo, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and Urotsukidôji: Legend of the Overfiend.
I’ve never seen anything look this gorgeous in an anime. Thanks to the Chattanooga Film Festival for introducing this to me!
June 16-22 SNL Week: Saturday Night Live is celebrating 50 years on the air, can NBC last for another 50 years??
The Groove Tube comes from SOV sketches that were shown at the Channel One Theater on East 60th St. in New York. They took the best sketches on tour and whatever ones got the greatest reaction on college campuses were reshot on film and then put into this movie.
It starts with a 2001 recreation of the apes meeting a TV set. Then, music supervisor Buzzy Linhart plays a hitchhiker; director and writer Ken Shapiro plays Koko the Clown, who reads Fanny Hill as part of Make Believe Time; Chevy Chase and adult star Jennifer Welles (Abigail Leslie Is Back In Town, Inside JenniferWelles) in a Geritol parody; a news program that has Shapiro playing Indira Ghandi in brownface; the International Sex Games, which has adult stars Paul Norman (who directed the Bi and Beyond series) and Rebecca Brooke, who was in Chuck Vincent’s Grace’s Place as well as several Joe Sarno films like Confessions of a Young American Housewife and Little Girl, Big Tease and Chase and Shapiro singing “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.” Oh yeah — Richard Belzer is here and in blackface.
“Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow” was later used by Chevy Chase on Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live, although he doesn’t say the line in this. Shapiro would go on to work with Chase again, as he directed and wrote Modern Problems. Co-writer Lane Sarasohn would go on to work on Not Necessarily the News and Chevy Chase’s first post-SNL special and the other co-writer, Rich Allan, also worked with Shapiro and Sarasohn on a series of films that would be collected in 2024’s Poems Without Words.
Oh, and an aside: Shapiro started his entertainment career as Kenny Sharpe on live television and appeared often on Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater as “The Kid” and on George Scheck’s Star Time Kids Show with Connie Francis. His assistant in Hollywood, back in the 1970s, was Gus Van Sant. I almost spelled his name Gus Van Zandt because I like thinking about the director of the bootleg Psycho being in Lynyrd Skynyrd.
June 21: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Westerns!
“One night, you will see a red star overhead. It will shine like a great diamond. On the night, you will go far away. Further than where you came from. You are a legend, Little Rita. A beautiful legend. You arrived from the void and you’re returning to the void.”
Little Rita wasn’t even five feet tall and weighed around 86 pounds. The Italian/Swiss singer and actress was known as la Zanzara di Torino (The Mosquito of Torino) and Pel di carota (Carrot Hair). Yet she sold 50 million records worldwide and is one of the few Italian singers to score on the UK pop charts. Her release of “Remember Me”, sung in English, with “Just Once More” on the other side, reached #26 in the U.S. and she was a frequent guest of The Ed Sullivan Show. But in Spain, other than Italy, she has the most success.
In the 60s, she’d make six films — this movie, Clementine Cherie, La Feldmarescialla (The Crazy Kids of the War), Rita the American Girl, Rita La Zanzara (Rita the Mosquito) and Non Stuzzicate la Zanzara (Don’t Sting the Mosquito) — with the latter three directed by Lina Wertmüller.
Like all great Italian singers, she had a scandal. She married Teddy Reno, the man who organized the first song contest she won, a man who was still married. They were married in Switzerland in 1968 and officially in Italy in 1971, a country that had no official divorce law at the time.
In this, she’s Big Little Rita, somehow the fastest and deadliest gunfighter around, the “bestest in the West,” who is helping Silly Bull (Gordon Mitchell, who I imagine loaned his Western ranch set to this) to destroy the white man’s gold, which he believes has ruined the good nature of the world. Somehow, just a few years into the Italian West and not only is it being parodied, it’s also being called out for its anti-authoritarian bent.
This brings her into combat with both Ringo (Kirk Morris, who was really Adriano Bellini, a star of peplum and fumetti) and Django (Enzo Di Natale, who only made this movie, which is odd as I’m shocked more Italian directors didn’t cast him as a fake Franco Nero) in this comedic West. There’s also a character named Zorro, played by Romano Puppo, who was the leader of the zombies in Zombie 4: After Death, as well as showing up in Cop Game, Robowar and Escape from the Bronx as Trash’s father.
After Rita is taken by Sancho (Fernando Sancho, who was in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the rebels and would go on to be in several Italian Westerns, as well as playing the corrupt mayor in Return of the Blind Dead) and his men, she’s rescued by a dashing young cowboy named Black Star, who is Terrence Hill, four years before making what many consider the first Italian comedy Western, They Call Me Trinity.
Yet when they fall in love, that first night, he does what every other white man does and steals the gold. When caught, he’s sent to the Native Americans for punishment, but Rita talks them into letting him go. He feels bad for how he’s treated her and keeps turning himself in to be hanged. It takes him telling her he loves her for this all to end, at which point all the gold is destroyed, and Rita goes somewhere, following that deep dialogue about being a legend. He goes into the stars to get her back.
“A movie should have a happy ending, or no one would go see it.”
That’s what Francis Fitzgerald Grawz, the piano-playing singer from Germany, played by Lucio Dalla, says at the end. His talent caused Pupi Averti to give up music for directing, inspiring his movie Ma quando arrivano le ragazze. Another singer, Teddy Reno, plays the sheriff. Yes, the same Teddy Reno who had the scandal with Rita.
It was shot by Enzo Barboni, the cinematographer on Django(and Nightmare Castle), so it looks just like the films it’s making light of. Of course, he would go on to make They Call Me Trinity, perfecting what started in this.
In France, after the success of the Trinity movies, this was re-released as T’as le bonjour de Trinita (Hello from Trinity). It was called Enas trellos… trellos Trinita (Crazy, Crazy Trinity) in Greece and Crazy Westerners in the U.S.
How about the fact that Fernanda Dell’Acqua — thanks Spaghetti Western Database — the sister of stuntmen Alberto, Ottaviano and Roberto was Rita’s stunt double? This movie ended her career, as her horse ran toward a ravine and didn’t stop. She barely got off in time, but ruined her leg. She was told, weeks later, that the horse died from regret. But this is Italy…
At one point, Gordon Mitchell’s Chief tells Rita, “You will return to nothingness, because from nothingness you came.” That’s a very sage — and saga — thing to say to a heroine. Also very Catholic.
A musicarello Italian Western with Pink Panther credits with an anti-capitalism streak, golden hand grenades, evil versions of cowboy icons and a gorgeous leading lady who, despite being tiny, gives it her all. I had no expectations and came away inspired.
I love the CFF Red Eye movies and honestly, they’re the start of my summer. This is a perfect movie for the weather that is heating up, a film that won’t make too many demands on your brain and goes well with, well, drugs.
Shot in two weeks for $50,000 outside Stamford, Connecticut by local producer/director Del Tenney, The Horror of Party Beach was advertised as “The First Horror-Monster Musical.” Tenney would also direct I Eat Your Skin, a movie that we all know as the much worse half of the famous double bill with the utterly astounding I Drink Your Blood.
The Del-Aires just want to play a party on the beach for the kids, but radioactive waste transforms a skeleton into a shambling monster. Hank Green just wants to get with Tina, but she’s drunk and wants to hook up with a biker. A fight ensues, but dudes are dudes and get along and end up shaking hands. So The Del-Aires play “The Zombie Stomp” and everyone has a swell time until that monster — remember him? — kills Tina and her bloody body washes up at the party.
Meanwhile, Dr. Gavin and the cops are on the case, but the doctor is more on Hank’s case, but he just knows that his assistant is the object of his older daughter’s affection. And then there’s some voodoo, because you know, why not. And then there’s a slumber party, because that’s what girls do when they’re in their early twenties. But never mind, the monster has found friends and they decide to wipe out all of these nubile young somnambulists.
Through some buffoonery, we learn that sodium can kill these monsters. There are also many, many more songs by The Del-Aires, who can’t seem to grasp the fact that monsters are rising up and mostly killing attractive women. Perhaps they could put their guitars down, pick up some table salt and get to work wiping out whatever the hell these creatures are?
This movie even got a photo comic book tie-in from Warren Publishing, the home of Famous Monsters, Eerie and Creepy. Wally Wood and Russ Jones worked on it and it’s a great collectors’ item.
Beyond all those groovy tunes by The Del-Aires, Edward Earle Marsh composed the soundtrack. You may know him better as Zebedy Colt, who started his career in Laurel and Hardy’s Babes In Toyland before releasing a series of gay cabaret songs before embarking on a career in pornography which would lead him to being in movies like Barbara Broadcast and directing films like The Devil Inside Her, which has nothing to do with the Joan Collins film of the same name.
You can watch this for free on Tubi or buy the Severin blu ray to get the best possible experience.
You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
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