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.

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.

Also known as Honey Britches, Moonshiner’s Women, Hillbilly Hooker, Little Whorehouse on the Prairie and its original title, Shantytown Honeymoon, this was originally directed by Donn Davison, who narrated trailers and radio ads, as well as managed the Dragon Art Theatre in Florida. He adirected the Asylum of the Insane inserts for She Freak, Moonshiner’s Woman and Blood Beast of Monster Mountain. Davison also acted in those last two movies, along with Crypt of Dark Secrets and Mardi Gras Massacre. Ah yes, he was also a magician and yo-yo expert. As if you need any more coolness for this man, he also got movies like Beyond The Door, Secrets Of The Gods and The Force Beyond into Southern drive-ins.

Fred Olen Ray later bought this movie, filmed a new introduction scene with John Carradine as the Judge of Hell, re-titled it Demented Death Farm Massacre and sold it to Troma. It’s claimed he made six times back the money he invested.

Shot in Alpharetta, Georgia, this is the story of Phillip (Jim Peck), Suzanne (Pepper Thurston, The Hidan of Maukbeiangjow), Kirk (Michael Battlesmith, who directs the milk commercial in Can’t Stop the Music) and Karen (Trudy Moore), who are on the run from a jewel robbery and end up in the cabin of too old for his wife moonshiner Horlon P. Craven (George Ellis, the same man who was TV horror host Bestoink Dooley and who made the baffling The Legend of McCullough’s Mountain/Blood Beast of Monster Mountain) and that way too young wife that he paid $200 for, Reba Sue (Ashley Brooks, whose only other acting role is the lead in Carter Stevens’ adult movie Tinseltown).

All of these people are stuck in a sweaty shack and when it comes out that Horlon has a fortune in there, much less that he has an attractive young wife, you can just imagine what is going to happen next.

When I had the opportunity to speak with Ray last year, he really didn’t want to discuss this film. Oh well. I kind of like just how weird it is and it’s a great story, if not a good movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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.

Directed by Eber Lobato and Howard Veit and shot by Ray Dennis Steckler, this is all about the murder of Marla (Nelida Lobato), whose life is reviewed Rashomon-style by several detectives, then it goes into flashbacks to show you the truth.

Marla got hit by a car, which seems like a bad way to punch out, except that she was playing two men against each other, her rich husband Paul (William Turner) and beach stud David (Nick Novarro). While she claims to be a nymphomaniac, she still got killed for whatever happened next.

As the lawyers argue the truth — one even calls her Miss Sudsy Whudsy or Slutzy Whutzy — we find out the real curveball, especially for 1965. Spoiler here, so you can’t say I didn’t warn you. David is in love with a man,  Christian (this film’s writer, Alan J. Smith) and is so confused over his identity that he’s become a killer. And if you like From Here to Eternity, good news. You’ll get to see that rolling on the beach scene several times.

Nélida made a few films before her too young death in 1982 from breast cancer. She started acting in Argentina and danced at the Champs Elysees and the Lido de Paris, as well as appearing in several films and plays in her native land. She came here to dance in Vegas.

Supposedly, Jim Morrison saw the title of this film on a marquee in Times Square and incorporated it into the song “When the Music’s Over:”

Before I sink
Into the big sleep
I want to hear
I want to hear
The scream of the butterfly

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.

I’m a very simple man. I love a good hygiene movie. A square up reel? Pure excitement. If a movie starts with a scientist or a learned man of medicine explaining that this is a true story and that we need to be open to what we see, well, I’m on the edge of my seat.

Albert Rose (Leslie Marlowe) is the American ideal: handsome looks, comes from old money, can play sports and a smash with the ladies. Yet one day, he’s lured to a hotel and blackmailed by the proof that he deserted his platoon during a firefight over in Korea and he’s also slept with a prostitute. To get away with these crimes, he paid someone else to take the blame. Now, Dominita (Dorian Wayne) demands that he pay her twenty grand and be his slave for one year.

Also: He has to become a woman.

Ruth (Wendy Roberts), who trains him to be a maid and gives him four estrogen pills a day, insists that this is all a game. He becomes Rose Albert and Diminita claims that he wanted this punishment and was always a woman inside. When Ruth falls in love with him, it’s because she’s a lesbian and wants him to be a woman.

This sets up a really interesting situation, of a man who may or may not want to be a woman, yet has fallen for a woman who only loves him when he has subverted his sex. Yet it’s all forgotten when Albert realizes that Dominita and he have met before, as she’s really Dominique Festro, a soldier who also deserted in Korea that he shot in the leg.

We’re back at the end in the square up reel, as after this exploitation movie, the psychologist asks us to be tolerant of cross dressing and transvestites. That’s pretty open minded today, never mind in 1967.

Perhaps even more amazing is that this is the first movie by Bob Clark, years before he’d make the alpha and omega of holiday movies, Black Christmas and A Christmas Story.

Based on a story by Harris Anders, Clark wrote the script with Jeff Gillen, who would act in his movies Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, Deathdream and, one day years later, as Santa in A Christmas Story.

Leslie Marlowe was one of the first American drag queens to perform in clubs and Dorian Wayne was known as the Queen of the Florida Queens. His real name was Rick Colantino and he performed at clubs throughout Florida before becoming a dresser for Broadway shows.

This is probably — definitely — offensive to people on both side of the LGBTQ+ spectrum, but it’s fascinating to see Bob Clark as John Waters.

You can watch this on YouTube.