This week, we have a big show for you. Jenn Upton joins Bill and Sam to interview Fred Olen Ray in two segments, plus we’ll be watching his movie Biohazard. Join us on the Groovy Doom Facebook and YouTube channels at 11 PM EST.
We do the segments live, then you can watch the movie on YouTube and Tubi. Then, come back for another segment where we’ll discuss the film with our lively chat room.
Joe Sarno week (June 16 – 22) Joe Sarno was called the Bergman of 42nd St, but don’t let that stop you from watching his movies! He was able to shape dramatic stories that were entertaining and of-the-moment while working with tight budgets and inexperienced performers but he never lost sight of why people were buying the tickets – HOT SEX!
A lot has changed in the decade between Joe Sarno’s monochromatic sex without sex movies. Porno chic has already arrived, movies need to be in color and sexual liberation was already growing boring to some but the specter of AIDS had not yet come to haunt us.
Quite literally, Abigail Leslie (adult star Jennifer Jordan, who used the name Sarah Nicholson and who also appears in Sarno’s Misty)is indeed back in Baypoint, a small town where her carnal nature is still whispered about.
Also: Baypoint is actually Sarno’s hometown, Amityville.
Abigail left after her scandalous affair with married man Gordon (Jamie Gillis). Now that she’s here again, his wife Priscilla (Rebecca Brooke, who is also known as Mary Mendum) wants her to leave all over again and is not shy about telling everyone just how much she absolutely loathes our heroine.
So what does Abigail do? Well, like some hurricane of sexual force, she sleeps with anyone and everyone she wants to, including Chester (Eric Edwards) and her Aunt Drucilla (Jennifer Welles, who left adult after marrying a rich fan but not before Sarno directed her film Inside Jennifer Welles). By the time she’s done with her old town, everyone is having sex with everyone. Even Priscilla gets over her anger.
Oh yeah — if you’re wondering who Drucilla’s man is, that’s Sonny Landham from Predator.
I think that every movie made — even today, not movies but scenes on adult websites — that has a woman watching in the doorway and getting worked up owes a debt to Sarno. Yet he also takes it even further, creating a movie where a woman’s orgasm is the most holy sacrament in all of reality and really, isn’t it?
That said, I don’t buy Abigail falling in love with Priscilla and getting her heart broken by her. Sure, it adds a twist to the ending — that I just spoiled, apologies I swear — but the Abigail who arrives in town and instantly begins getting everyone to be more open and less worried about morality would pick herself up and get under or on top of someone immediately.
Also: Every single woman in this movie seemingly is both gorgeous and has red or strawberry blonde hair. I respect Sarno for who he chose to be in it and that he would try with all his power to not go full adult when the rest of the world was showing everything.
Directed by Victoria Duley (Defying Death: Surviving Jaws, Love You to Death: Gabby Petito) and written by Savannah Lucas (Snapped, Gone Before His Time: Kobe Bryant), this documentary goes back and forth between how OnlyFans has created a place for normal women and men to be adult film stars and the case of Courtney Clenney, who may have stabbed her boyfriend Christian Obumseli.
While the police originally believed that this was a self-defense case, the model — who uses the name Courtney Tailor — was arrested and tried for the murder of Obumseli, a cryptotrader, who died from a knife wound to the chest. She admits that she killed him, but that he threw her to the ground and she threw the knife at him. There’s no way that a throw of ten feet could do the damage that this blade did unless Clenney is superhuman.
According to Investigation Discovery, when Clenney was arrested, “she was living at a rehab facility in Hawaii where she was undergoing treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse.”
This has all that you expect from a cable true crime show, like reenactments, but for a show about amateur pornography, it’s surprisingly chaste and blurs out all of the nudity.
If this was called, How O.J. Simpson Impacted Harvey Levin of TMZ, I doubt that many people would have watched it. But that’s what it’s about and to be honest, it’s kind of fascinating to hear one person’s life over two years be impacted by the case that would kick off the 24 hour news cycle and then give him the ability to start TMZ.
Levin found an interesting path into founding the site that more people turn to now than the National Enquirer for their celebrity news. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he graduated with a B.A. in political science and then got a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Chicago Law School. He was an attorney in the state of California for two decades and also wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times and was Dr. Law on a radio show.
He then started to work for KNBC and KCBS as an investigative reporter and legal analyst. The O.J. trial was his major story before he was the co-executive producer and on-air legal anchor for a revised version of The People’s Court. He also created the show Celebrity Justice. In 2005, AOL and Telepictures Productions launched TMZ, which has had Levin as the founder and managing editor ever since.
So what really happened on June 12, 1994? That’s what this special tries to explain and to my surprise, Levin is the perfect person to tell this story. He covered O.J. Simpson’s murder trial from start to finish. There are insider parts about untold lie detector tests and even speculation about who helped Simpson get away with the murders.
TMZ spoiled some of this special by reporting “O.J. Simpson went back to the scene of the crime — where he killed his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman — and our own Harvey Levin happened to be there and a wild chase ensued.”
In this TMZ special, Harvey claims that he drove a friend to Nicole’s condo where the murders occurred. They saw a limo in the alley and as soon as the driver made eye contact with him, he drove away.
If you haven’t had enough O.J. — and Tubi has been full of O.J. stories lately — here’s one more way to get your Juice fix.
This is the fourth year I’ve participated in the F This Movie! month-long event.
For those of you new to Junesploitation, here’s how it works: each day of the month has its own theme, and you’re supposed to watch a movie that ties into that theme. How you interpret the connection is entirely up to you, which means if you have no interest in exploitation or genre movies that’s ok and you can still join in!
This is the second episode of three that will break down every movie that I watched. It’s a long one!
June 20: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Blacksploitation! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
Born Walter Gordon, Jamaa Fanaka was one of the leading directors of the L.A. Rebellion film movement, a new generation of young African and African-American filmmakers who studied at the UCLA Film School in the late-1960s to the late-1980s. They created a new form of black cinema that was an alternative to Hollywood. Fanaka was, however, “very much fascinated by Hollywood and averse to the contentious ideological and artistic discussions that were fundamental to the formation of the school.”
Independently produced, written, directed and edited by Fanaka as an undergraduate project at UCLA that took seventeen months of weekends, all of his savings and some of his parent’s as well, Fanaka’s advisors at the school told him to not even try a feature film as his class project. He ended up creating one that won a national theatrical distribution deal with Crown International Pictures. The director would complete his thesis film, Emma Mae, and Penitentiary while still in college.
Sure, it was re-released on video as Soul Vengeance but this movie isn’t the typical blacksploitation movie, despite beginning with its hero Charles (Marlo Monte) being arrested by corrupt white police and nearly castrated. When he’s released, all Charles wants to do is forget the past. He wants to move past the life of crime he once led. He can’t even have Twyla (Jackie Ziegler), the girl he loves, who is now the woman of his former best friend, N.D. (Jake Carter).
Sounds like a typical blacksploitation movie and I promised you that it wasn’t.
That’s because while Charles was in prison, he was experimented on, like Luke Cage in Marvel Comics, but instead of getting skin knives and that bullets can’t touch, he gets a murderous and prehensile penis. Seriously, it’s feet, not just inches long. It’s the kind of penis that frightens the white male establishment way more than the typical African American member, because when he’s not using it to seduce the white wives of the cop who tried to slice off his prick, Officer Harry Freeman (Ben Bigelow), as well as the prosecutor and judge who set him up. He’s also strangling those men with it, which has to be the worst way for a straight white racist man to die.
Despite trying to find some form of comfort with Carmen (Reatha Grey), prison has destroyed Charles. And what he’s done to Freeman’s wife (Tiffany Peters) has ruined that cop, as if he needed any help, telling his wife that she’s contaminated. That’s because even before he gained his monstrous member, Charles was cucking the law. And that’s why Freeman tried to take a knife to our hero while he was in handcuffs. I have no idea why he’s stayed married, as one evening he wakes her up by choking her back into oblivion and she looks him in the eye and snarls, “You think you’re a man? You didn’t even have the guts to destroy the object of your humiliation. Me!”
Also, maybe I didn’t mention it, but his new penis — who would do this experiment, what was it for and why would they be authorized? — can hypnotize white women.
I love that this movie exists, that it has sloppy moments where we just watch people dancing in the streets in footage that had to be just the camera running and capturing what these small Los Angeles neighborhoods used to be like. As wild as this movie gets, it only hints at just how far Fanaka would push reality with the Penitentiary series.
Joe Sarno week (June 16 – 22) Joe Sarno was called the Bergman of 42nd St, but don’t let that stop you from watching his movies! He was able to shape dramatic stories that were entertaining and of-the-moment while working with tight budgets and inexperienced performers but he never lost sight of why people were buying the tickets – HOT SEX!
Cannon was making money on Joe Sarno’s films, getting them into theaters as Sarno divided his time making movies in the United States and in Sweden, Germany and Denmark. His early films are stark black and white affairs and life is never easy for anyone within them. Also, the phrase Deep Inside is the greatest adult title ever and would eventually be used along with the names of actresses, such as Sarno’s uncredited X-rated Inside Jennifer Welles and Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle.
Millicent Redmond (Peggy Steffans, the Findlay Flesh trilogy) is a woman who is frigid in bed and therefore gets her pleasure manipulating others, like seeing what kind of trouble she can get Lina (Mary Park) into; plays around with the relationship between her old lesbian roommates Neva (Tia Walter) and Jean (Sheila Britt, The Swap and How They Make It); heats up older lesbian who loves younger women Mavis (Bella Donna, not the Belladonna whose retirement still makes one wistful) and gets Pam (Lara Danielli) involved with the absolute wrong man.
Sarno’s movies have an existential sadness that I absolutely love. I can only imagine what raincoaters felt about these movies, already worried about being in public watching filth, worried about the cops coming in and then the movie they went up against so much just depresses them beyond comprehension. They are sexy without sex, a fascinating idea that feels like the ruined orgasms that so many unfortunate of today’s cyber perverts are so obsessed by.
June 19: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 80s Horror! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
I’ve made a real 180 on Lamberto Bava. Maybe it’s because the first of his movies that I watched was Devilfish. I should have really started with Macabre, A Blade In the Dark or any of his TV movies and then I’d feel a lot different. And years ago, I unfairly compared him with his father instead of allowing him to be judged on his own merit.
I am sorry, John Old Jr.
The Prince of Terror has never been released in the U.S. on VHS, DVD or blu ray. That’s a shame.
It pulls the Body Double fake out as soon as it starts, as you get the jump scare of a woman — Magda (Marina Viro) — escaping an RV only to see her boyfriend drown in a swamp and become an inflated zombie and begin stalking her through a swamp.
This isn’t happening.
Instead, it’s the set of director Vincent Omen’s (Tomas Arana, The Church) latest movie. He hates the script from his longtime writer Paul Hilary (David Brandon, who was the director in Stage Fright so dumb that he let his cast stay in the theater where a killing machine was hiding), so he gets him fired before heading out to play golf. While he’s hitting the front 9, he’s interviewed by a reporter (Virginia Bryant, The Barbarians) who asks him about the rumors that he’s much older than 37 and his public perception as the “Prince of Darkness.”
He holds up one of his golf balls, which has 666 on it. Obviously, he’s into this personna.
After he finishes playing, he goes home to his wife Betty (Carole Andre, Yor Hunter from the Future), daughter Susan (Joyce Pitti) and dog Demon. Yes, he is definitely into this demonic side. That evening, he and his lovely spouse are supposed to join his producer (Pascal Druant) and Magda for dinner. And then, golf balls explode into their home, sinister phone calls start and end only when the phone lines are severed and their cute little dog is killed — by having his fur removed and then he’s just thrown in the garbage — because this is an Italian movie. Then, a bald killer with a huge knife (Ulisse Miniverni) appears.
By the end of the movie, Omen gets shot, his wife gets her leg ensnared in a bear trap and his daughter gets buried alive in the basement. Plus, the toilet flushes blood and the security guard is replaced with a robot. It’s an all over the place plan from Paul the writer and actor Eddie Felson– the bald monster — who both want to get back at Vincent.
Special effects maestro Sergio Stivaletti got a workout here, as when Vincent gets his revenge, he starts attacking people with golf balls, including one that blows up a man’s wrist and another that goes Fulci and blows up an eyeball. There’s also a good Simon Boswell score.
I wonder how much of this story was writer Dardano Sacchetti getting his scripting revenge on former friend and co-creator Lucio Fulci. That scene where he’s accused of stealing ideas and it becomes obvious that Omen has no ideas of his own, as well as a bloody script emerging from a toilet, seem to lead one to feel that way. It’s fun in a TV movie way — I love this era of Italian TV movie horror — but it certainly doesn’t aspire to the heights that Fulci reached.
This is part of a series of movies that aired on Italian TV as Alta tensione. The other episodes are L’uomo che non voleva morire, in which a man is near death in a hospital and trying to recall how he got there; Il gioko, a story of a teacher thinking her students murdered the instructor she has replaced and the giallo Testimone oculare. All were directed by Lamberto Bava.
I hope that American boutique labels follow the lead of Cauldron Films and release movies like this and the House of series that they just put out instead of just releasing the same movies in new formats. There is so much out there!
Joe Sarno week (June 16 – 22) Joe Sarno was called the Bergman of 42nd St, but don’t let that stop you from watching his movies! He was able to shape dramatic stories that were entertaining and of-the-moment while working with tight budgets and inexperienced performers but he never lost sight of why people were buying the tickets – HOT SEX!
In the sex films of the 60s and 70s, the line between sex and the occult is as thin as the flimsiest of garments. Carla (Laurene Clair, who was also known as Patricia McNair and is also in director and writer Joe Sarno’s Deep Inside) goes from visiting a Tarot card reader with her friend Enid (Carol Holleck, who was in Sarno’s The Swap and How They Make It) to joining The Cult of Pan,a coven of sexually open ladies led by card reader Martha (Helena Clayton, Suburbia Confidential) and who draw on the power of red roses for their psychosexual energy.
What she doesn’t know is that Enid and Martha have worked together to bring her into the orbit of these women, all to get her away from living with her dominating Aunt Julie (Liz Love, also known as Bella Donna — and not Michelle Sinclair — and who was in Sarno’s My Body Hungers and the Joseph Marzano version of Venus In Furs) and cousin Tracey (Laura London), who is constantly reminding people that she’s met a nice boy and plans on marrying him.
That’s not the life that Carla wants but she has no idea how to get there.
“Once you have tasted the wine of Delphi and touched a rose from the garden of Pan to your breast, you will forever be a priestess of Pan.” That’s what the ladies say and soon, they’re drinking, rubbing flowers all over their barely clothed bodies and everyone gets as kinky as a one room shot 1966 softcore movie can get. I mean, the very idea that women had that secret garden and weren’t dependent on men for their pleasure, much less could get even more orgasmic bliss alone or with another woman, takes the very idea of fantasy and makes men force head on that they really aren’t necessary unless they rise above their normal roles and become enlightened.
Even the suburban women so ready to spend the rest of their lives in a minute every few nights of the missionary position soon realize that striking one another with thorned blooms and committing blasphemy as they praise Pan. Before the end of this movie, Aunt Julie and Tracey have abandoned their chaste ways and are after every man they can get, as well as becoming addicted to those roses that come every day to their door.
How amazing is the world of Sarno, another below the Hollywood budget filmmaker who created black and white worlds of dubious women who are content to not live in the world of black and white, no matter how they’re shot, and become something else, something other?
June 18: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Gangsters! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
Weapons of Death comes from the Commissioner Betti (Violent Rome, Violent Naples and Special Cop in Action) cinematic universe as a spin off of the character Gennarino (Massimo Deda). Betti is also in this, except now he’s played by Leonard Mann instead of Maurizio Merli. And now, in the place of Umberto Lenzi, there’s Mario Caiano (Nightmare Castle) in charge of the show.
The villain is the main reason to watch this. Henry Silva is always absolutely perfect and here he’s as awesome as you’d hoped as a hit man named Santoro. He has the protection of crime boss Don Alfredo (Tino Bianchi). He’s able to train so many people to do robberies and murders that he puts not just Belli job in jeopardy, but his reputation. That’s because the one time that Santoro gets a gun on him, he lets the policeman live, telling him, “You go your way and I’ll go mine.” That’s how smart he is, as he gets more out of not killing Betti as he would have shooting him.
At the same time, the other crime families all begin to hate Santoro for how out of control he is — one of his major crimes has masked men running wild in the streets, shooting people and kicking women in the stomach — and they try to rub him out.
This movie lives up to the poliziotteschi madness that its fans want, as it has kids turned into young gangsters, a motorcycle rider getting beheaded and a man being castrated in prison. Also, Ida Galli. Or Evelyn Stewart. You know, whatever name you prefer. And it looks out of control because a lot of this was filmed without permits, closing streets or even informing the crowds of people in some of the scenes that they were filming. Instead, they had the camera inside a box on a truck. Italy, I will always love you.
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