Trash Humpers (2009)

The Trash Humpers are running through the streets of Nashville, causing chaos everywhere they go, which mostly means making people eat pancakes covered in soap, choking out baby dolls with plastic bags and killing a poet. They’re also all mostly old men or men wearing old man masks. They are very dada; nothing means anything. Momma (Rachel Korine), the only female member, kidnaps a child to add some meaning to her life, while the man recording all of this, Hervé (Harmony Korine), at least tries to explain to the viewer the ethos of the group.

One night, as he looked at trash cans in the moonlight, Korine remembered a gang of old men peeping toms who would come out at night, referring to them as “the neighborhood boogeymen who worked at Krispy Kreme and would wrap themselves in shrubbery, cover themselves with dirt, and peep through the windows of other neighbors.” Using video — yes, SOV — made the images softer and less sharp, which he was looking for. It was even edited on two VCRs.

The tracking errors and static make the viewer feel like a voyeur watching something they aren’t supposed to see. A snuff film of human dignity, I guess. This feels like the kind of movies we filmed as kids and then realized we’d get arrested if anyone found them.

I’d like to say that when the Trash Humpers scream “Make it, make it don’t fake it!” or cackle while smashing televisions, they aren’t protesting society; they are simply existing outside of it. They’re celerating the discarded: people, formats (VHS) and things. Did I go too A24 with this? Korine said, “I wanted to make a film that looked like it had been found in a bag of trash on the side of the road, or buried in a basement.” 

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

GET WILD WITH DIA!

This Saturday on the Groovy Doom Facebook and YouTube channels at 8 PM EDT, Bill and I are back.

Want to know what we’ve shown before? Check out this list.

Have a request? Make it here.

Want to see one of the drink recipes from a past show? We have you covered.

Our first movie is The Headless Eyes and it’s on YouTube.

Here’s the first drink recipe.

Irish Eyes

  • 1 oz. Irish whiskey
  • .25 oz. creme de menthe
  • 2 oz. half and half
  1. Shake all ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker.
  2. Pour in a glass and watch your eyes.

The second movie is The Curse of Bigfoot which is on Tubi.

Patterson Gimlin

  • 1.5 oz. Ole Smoky® Salty Watermelon Whiskey
  • 3 oz. lemonade .
  • 25 oz. cranberry juice
  • Crushed Lemonheads
  1. Mix over ice.
  2. Stir and savor, but top with Lemonheads first.

See you Saturday!

The Witch’s Sabbath (2005)

Why yes, I am trying to watch every Jeff Leroy movie.

A coven of witches open a sexy strip club called the Sin and Skin.

That would be enough for some filmmakers.

But no, here Leroy adds the wrinkle that they must kill 666 men by Halloween so that their dark lord can rise and they can maintain their power.

Imagine, if you will, that all these fratboys show up to get laid and just end up dead. I am all for that, especially when you have a cast of actresses that includes Christine Cowden, the sadly deceased Syn DeVil, Gina Valona, adult actress Lisa Sparxxx, April Betts and Annmarie Lynn Gracey. I could do without seeing Ron Jeremy as a Bible salesman, but what can you do?

This could have lost a few minutes of running time, but maybe I was pausing to see some of the actresses more clearly. Yeah, that’s it.

Leroy takes a premise that could have been a 20-minute short and stretches it into a neon-soaked odyssey of digital gore and high-heeled havoc. It’s bloated, but you don’t watch a Leroy film for tight editing; you watch it to see how many CGI explosions he can fit into a scene with a coven of scream queens.

You can watch this on Tubi.

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: Eat Your Heart Out (2008)

New York City is a concrete jungle where the neon lights don’t reach the shadows and the shadows have teeth. Something is stalking the midnight streets, leaving a trail of shredded suits and empty veins behind. The NYPD is baffled, the morgues are overflowing, and the local news is calling it a massacre.

The victims? All are looking for a little company. Want to party?

In this world, we have Jeffrey (Jack Dillon), a nobody in a city of millions. He’s a sad sack with a dead-end job and a heart full of dusty dreams who has gone incel to the point that he spends money on lovemaking instead of dating. But then he falls in love with Pandora (Melissa Bacelar), a sex worker who finally does pay attention to him, at least when she isn’t luring other men to their deaths, seemingly lulling them into unconsciousness while she chomps big bites right out of their skin. 

Also known as Skinned Alive, this was directed by James Adam Tucker and written by Joshua Nelson. This is an interesting take not just on relationships, but on women, as we wonder whether Pandora is a vampire, a cannibal, a zombie, or just a normal person with a taste for earth pig.

Jeffrey represents a specific brand of modern isolation. He isn’t just lonely; he’s hollow. By bypassing the work of dating for the transaction of sex, he’s already treating human connection as a commodity. Pandora is his perfect mirror. She takes people’s consumption literally. While Jeffrey wants to consume her time and body for emotional validation, she wants to consume his literal vitality.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The Daughter: I, a Woman Part III (1970)

Directed by Mac Ahlberg and written by Peer Guldbrandsen, this film promises, “NOW the sexual revolution is complete.”

We start in another dimension, as an upside-down woman writhes, and then we get an erotic snake scene, and part of me was like, “Yes, this is what I was looking for,” all before such an inconvenience as a plot rears its ugly head.

Siv (Gun Falk) is dtf as the kids say, and I don’t mean Danish Talking to Fjords. Her daughter, Birthe (Inger Sundh), is shocked, just absolutely gobsmacked by her mom’s antics, such as the toys she’s been gifted by Dr. Leo Smith (Klaus Pagh), which pushes her between the thighs of erotic dancer Lisa (Ellen Faison) and then Lisa’s brother Stephen (Tom Scott).

Come for the sex, try not to leave for the endless hippies smoking pot and fighting bikers scenes.

Ahlberg is still a cinematographer to this day, working on Full Moon movies, as well as being behind the camera for films like Innocent BloodStriking Distance, the first three House movies and Re-Animator. He also directed Nana, Fanny HillAround the World with Fanny Hill and the other two movies in this series.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The Human Tornado (1976)

After coming off yet another successful comedy tour, Dolemite (Rudy Ray Moore, a cultural force) has a party at his mansion that soon gets gate-crashed by the fuzz. They’re racist, they’re angry, they’re reactionary: they’re cops. They also want to kill Dolemite for sleeping with the sheriff’s wife, so they shoot her just in time for him to kill a deputy. He did not shoot the sheriff, so to speak.

The story changes up to have Dolemite head out to save Queen Bee (Lady Reed) from a pimp named Cavaletti (Herb Graham), all while the sheriff (J.B. Baron) pins the murder of his wife on our hero.

Like many of Moore’s films, this was directed by Cliff Roquemore and written by Jerry Jones, Moore and Jimmy Lynch, who is Mr. Motion in the film. A young Ernie Hudson appears, as does the Bronson Cave, the same place Batman lives. Watch this and know: no permits were necessary. Rudy Ray Moore famously operated on Dolemite Time, which meant filming until the cops showed up or the money ran out.

Like a deranged Tom Jones, scenes of male-on-female oral sex are intercut with fried chicken eating, as well as moments when Dolemite services a woman so effectively that the entire house falls down around the bed. Dolemite breaks the fourth wall, pausing and rewinding the action, and there are evil female torturers with witch makeup. This feels like the product of the stickiest of the icky, and I would have it no other way.

There’s an anachronistic moment where Dolemite screams at an effeminate man, played by Doug Senior, who appeared on our live stream this weekend. Doug may not enjoy this part, as it’s really homophobic, but he had great things to say about Dolemite, who he said was soft spoken and kind when the cameras were off, but barking and wild when he needed to be.

This scene is part of the hyper-masculine, often reactionary tropes found in 1970s street comedy. However, the contrast between Moore’s onscreen persona and his off-screen kindness is a well-documented part of his legacy. He was a savvy businessman who played a character to empower a specific demographic, even if that character carried the prejudices of its time.

Made for $150,000, this made back $4.5 million. Talk about return on investment.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: How Come Nobody’s on Our Side? (1974)

Directed by Richard Michaels (Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean) and penned by Leigh Chapman, the former actress turned screenwriter who wrote the Chuck Norris cult hit The Octagon, this film is a strange cocktail of industry cynicism and low-budget grit.

The film stars Adam Roarke as Person and Larry Bishop as Brandy. If those names sound familiar, they should; both were staples of the leather-and-chrome biker circuit (Hells Angels on Wheels, The Savage Seven). Here, they play two stuntmen who have finally had enough of the shallow Tinseltown grind. Trading the movie set for the open road, they decide to pivot into the high-stakes world of international narcotics. Joined by Person’s sister Brigitte, played by the ethereal Alexandra Hay (Skidoo), the trio heads south of the border to move weight across Mexico.

There’s no real story to speak of, but it does feature early roles for Penny Marshall and Rob Reiner as the couple the bikers are buying drugs from. Despite being filmed in 1971, it sat on a shelf for three years. When it finally emerged, it felt less like a hard-hitting crime drama and more like a nihilistic, 84-minute sitcom episode where the punchlines are replaced by dust and desperation.

There isn’t a traditional story to cling to. Instead, the film functions as a vibe-heavy road movie. It’s a hazy journey through the desert that feels exactly like the era it was born in—unfiltered, aimless, and slightly hungover. Whether that’s your jam or a total drag depends entirely on how much you value vibe over plot. As they say, your mileage may vary.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The House That Vanished (1973)

Also known as Scream… and Die!, Please! Don’t Go in the Bedroom and Psycho Sex Fiend, this José Ramón Larraz movie has some amazing taglines like “Are You Planning an Affair? We Can Give You 7 Good Reasons Not to Have Your Next Affair at The House That Vanished, And They’re All DEAD!! 1. George 2. Marsha 3. Ted 4. Linda 5. Ronnie 6. Alice 7. Larry” and “Is it too soon to talk about ’72…that time Paul and Valerie fell in love at first sight and began searching for a place to have an affair — and they kept searching until they found…The House That Vanished.” I mean, they did tell us that it was “In the Great HITCHCOCK Tradition!”

Picked up by American-International Pictures in the U.S., trimmed by 15 minutes and given a really similar campaign – actually, it’s the exact same — as The Last House On the Left, this finds Larraz playing with his favorite toys: fashionable women in danger, pervy photographers, houses in the London countryside, sexual menace and murder. He kept going back to this well for a bit before throwing Satanism into the stew and, if anything, increasing the sheer levels of filth in his movies. And we were all the better for it.

Valerie Jennings (Andrea Allan) is one of those gorgeous women continually threatened by nearly every frame of this movie, starting when she and her photographer boyfriend Terry (Alex Leppard) travel to a shuttered hovel of a home deep in the London woods, a place that’s empty save for a room filled with women’s passports. As they hide in a closet when a new couple arrives, they don’t get to enjoy watching them make love; instead, the male dispatches the female with a switchblade. She runs, and Terry does too, but she never finds him, narrowly escaping to the safety of the big city.

She finds Terry’s car and a modeling portfolio with one image of a girl missing. She asks her friends Mike (Lawrence Keane) and Stella (Annabella Wood) what to do next, but they tell her that she and Terry have committed a crime and need not tell the police. Meanwhile, Mike introduces her to Paul (Karl Lanchbury, a Larraz villain in numerous entries), a mask maker who invites her to dinner with his aunt Susanna (Maggie Walker). If you’ve seen enough Larraz movies by now, you know that the aunt and nephew are soon to engage in the act of darkness.

Life starts falling apart, as Terry’s car keeps disappearing and reappearing; Valerie’s roommate Lorna (Judy Matheson) — who also sleeps nude with her pet monkey — is assaulted and killed, an old man with pigeons moves in downstairs and when she heads out of town to meet with Paul again, she realizes that his house is the same abandoned house she’s been in before thanks to the strange taxidermy inside. Seriously, if you go on a date and someone has a lot of taxidermy, please run.

There, she finds the bodies of those missing, and Paul’s aunt appears and demands that he kill Valerie. He responds by stabbing her as our heroine runs outside screaming, directly into the police, while Paul just sits in the void.

Writer Derek Ford also wrote The Legend of Spider Forest, Secret Rites, Corruption (which is not a women’s picture) and Don’t Open Till Christmas, as well as directing I Am a GroupieBlood Tracks, The Urge to Kill and The Girl from Starship Venus.

Larraz comes from Spain to England to make movies that seem like they’re from Italy that have their origins in Germany and England. If that doesn’t make you look at his movies, then I have no hope for you.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The House on Bare Mountain (1962)

You’ve never seen more! Let us prove it to you when the monsters meet the girls! The nudies meet the nasties! No monster ever had it so good! See Frankenstein do the twist with Miss Hollywood! The gayest girlie spree of all time! Everything’s off when the horror boys meet Granny Good’s girls! The biggest bevy of beauties ever laid before your eyes! For adults only!

Get ready for 62 minutes of sheer wildness as directed by Lee Frost and Wes Bishop. If you wonder, with scumbags — and I say that term with the utmost of respect, admiration and love — like this were at the wheel, how far away was Harry Novak? Oh, he was there. He was there.

Granny Good’s School for Good Girls is really a front for girls to get naked and make booze for Granny Good, who is played by producer Bob Cresse. She also employs a werewolf named Krakow. Yes. A werewolf. And when the girls throw a party, that’s when Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster show up.

Ann Perry, who plays Sally in this, was originally going to be a nun before she met her first husband, Ron Myers. After starting her career in Cresse’s softcore films, she moved into hardcore and started her own production company, Evolution Enterprises, in the 1970’s, becoming one of the only women to write, direct, and produce her own hardcore movies. She was also the first female president of the Adult Film Association of America (AFAA).

The adult films of 1962 are incredibly odd affairs today, featuring little to no sex and mostly women taking off their clothes and doing things like reading topless. I find them incredibly charming, almost time capsules of a more innocent time, a place where small movies like this could find an audience of raincoaters who found something, anything erotic in what we would now see as just plain silly.

Because of strict censorship laws, these films often featured “nudist colony” logic. People could be naked, but they couldn’t be doing anything. This led to topless reading or a werewolf watching girls dance.

Sadly for Frost and Cresse, the advent of hardcore would put an end to their films. Then again, Frost would go on to produce and direct one of the oddest — and roughest — films of the golden age of adult films, A Climax of Blue Power. He kept working right up until 1995’s direct-to-video softcore thriller Private Obsession. I’d also recommend his mondo films Witchcraft ’70 and Mondo Bizarro. Oh yeah! He also directed The Thing With Two Heads and The Black Gestapo. He also made Love Camp Seven, which features Cresse as the commander of a German prison camp. Wow. I know more about Lee Frost than some members of my family.

You can download this on the Internet Archive. Even better, Nicolas Winding Refn’s ByNWR site has a fully cleaned-up version straight from the director’s archive. Man, I want to sit down and talk to that dude someday.