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WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Darktown Strutters (1977)

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George Armitage wrote Gas-s-s-s, Private Duty Nurses, Night Call Nurses and Vigilante Force before scoring mainstream success with Miami Blues and Grosse Point Blank. He told Film Comment, “I wrote Darktown Strutters in three days, and the script form is all one sentence, the entire script is one sentence.”

While he had wanted to direct this, William Witney ended up making it. Witney was a Hollywood veteran, starting all the way back at Republic, where he worked on movie serials. He worked extensively with Roy Rogers and, at the end of his career, made a few movies with Gene Corman, including I Escaped from Devil’s Island and this movie.

This is less a narrative film and more a collection of hijinks as a gang of black bikers interacts with the police, all until Syreena starts to search for her missing mother, Cinderella. Turns out an evil barbecue chain — with an owner in full Klan regalia — has her.

Trina Parks from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Diamonds Are Forever is Syreena, backed up by a cast featuring former Ikette Edna Richardson, Roger E. Mosley (TC from Magnum, P.I.), Stan Shaw (Detective Sapir from The Monster Squad), Alvin Childress (Amos of the Amos ‘n Andy TV show), Zara Cully (Mother Jefferson!) and, this being a Corman family film, Dick Miller.

Get ready for a fairy tale mixed with blaxploitation, basically, with plenty of great tunes from The Dramatics, as well as John Gary Williams and The Newcomers.

And remember: “Any similarity between this true life adventure and the story Cinderella … is bullshit.”

Where Is Juan Moctezuma? (2025)

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According to the filmmakers, “Legendary 1970s Mexican horror film auteur Juan F. Moctezuma II reportedly influenced the work of mega-directors Guillermo del Toro, Robert Rodriguez, Sam Raimi and more. But the last film Moctezuma made and his first in Hollywood, produced by Roger Corman, 1000 Paths of Death, was surrounded in mystery because it was shot in complete secrecy. And then he disappeared with the footage. Did his nemesis, the famous luchador Scorpion, sabotage his work yet again? Discover the truth in this fun film that delves into every level of the Mexican exploitation industry as it unfolds its obsessive tale.”

Obviously, Juan F. Moctezuma II doesn’t exist, even if someone went and made an IMDB page, adding credits for his films Una mujer sin precio 1961, Las fieras 1969, Demonoid 1971 and 1000 Paths of Death, films that he shares directing credits with the director of this film, Alaric S. Rocha. I appreciate this ruse, as they added him as a key grip on The Black Gestapo and Scream Bloody Murder, as well as an assistant art director credit for Sisters of Death.

There’s also a Fandom page, which goes into the story beats of the life of the director, such as his found footage — well, more to the point taking footage from other movies — film Tiempo de morir, which reads a lot like the plot of Cinema Paradiso, as well as working on a Cantinflas movie, losing the love of his life to luchador El Escorpión, working with Alejandro Jodorowsky on Fando y Lis, trying to win Lisa back on the set of Demonoid — not that Mexican Demonoid — and how his script for The Legend of Hell House (the movie claims Horror Express) was stolen by the real filmmakers. And hey — a Geocities-looking fansite, too!

It’s a cute idea, to be honest, in how it takes the world of Mexican cinema and American exploitation film through the years and weaves in this Zelig-like director, except that for all it gets right, there’s plenty that seems off. The movies that we’re shown pieces of appear to be modern-looking low-budget streaming cinema efforts, which ruins the illusion that the movie works so hard to craft that this is an actual documentary. And for all it gets right, claiming that Lloyd Kaufman, Yoram Globus or Roger Corman wanted to make Moctezuma’s last film, 1000 Paths of Death in 1977 rings hollow. Kaufman hadn’t even started to produce that much, Globus — with his cousin Menahem Golan — was still making films for AVCO-Embassy, and the two wouldn’t purchase Cannon until 197,8, and this movie claims that Corman was American-International Pictures when, in truth, he left AIP with his brother Gene to form New World Pictures in 1970. And as for AIP ripping off The Legend of Hell House, that was made by James H. Nicholson working out of 20th Century Fox as Academy Pictures Corporation. By 1977, AIP wasn’t even making the kind of movies that a Mexican horror director would come to the U.S. to make. Instead, they were putting out bigger budget films like C.H.O.M.P.S., Meteor, The Amityville Horror and Cooley High. As for Mexican horror cinema, movies as diverse as Tintorera, The Bees, The Bermuda Triangle, Mary Mary Bloody Mary, The Mansion of Madness (under the name Dr. Tarr’s Horror Dungeon) and Cyclone all played American grindhouses and drive-ins (and some multiplexes). Strange Mexican cinema could get played here.

I hate taking a movie to task like this — as well as showing off what a huge nerd I am — but I am the audience for this. If I can see through these moments, it makes me reconsider how much I like it. And that’s before the film explains to us that when El Escorpión and Moctezuma had their mascara contra mascara in Arena Mexico — in a year where Fishman, Mil Mascaras, Alfonso Dantes, Perro Aguayo, and El Faraón were the headliners — Moctezuma refused to shake hands… and then they show them shaking hands.

Also, while I’m being a geek, they mention selling a film to K. Gordon Murray by including full frontal nudity. That wouldn’t have gotten played on mainstream screens in the mid-60s, and other than Shanty Tramp, Murray was known as the King of the Kiddee Matinee. As for the Mexican films he did buy, he’d chop them up into one film and ensure they were sold to creature feature TV horror hosts. Full frontal would not have worked for him.

Getting a movie made is a miracle, much less one that has so many moving pieces and has to look and feel authentic. And many will look past that at this film, which gets Brian Yuzna, Isaac Ezban, Arturo Ripstein, Álvaro Rodríguez, John Penney, Paul London and others to speak at length about a filmmaker and where he fits in. It’s also a film that can’t decide if it’s subject was a maverick filmmaker who would go in debt to the cartels and destroy politicians all in the name of love, yet appear to be a slovenly rudo in the wrestling match at the end, almost a comedic figure (who would have instantly been DQ’d in the first fall for that low blow and why is a mask vs. mask match just one fall?) and not the heroic ideal we’ve been told that he was?

The ideas behind this are laudable, as is much of the execution. I just wish that it had gone all the way, because good is the enemy of great. Maybe I’m just upset that this isn’t about Juan Lopez Moctezuma, who made The Mansion of Madness, Alucarda and Mary Mary Bloody Mary. He also worked with Jodorowsky on Fando y Lis and El Topo, just like the director in this.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Dark Star (1974)

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As a kid, I was obsessed with seeing Dark Star. This film, which combined the talents of John Carpenter, Dan O’Bannon, Ron Cobb, Greg Jein, and Bob Greenberg, was frequently featured in the pages of Starlog.

When I finally saw it — it played theaters until 1980, and then I was able to rent it when I got older — it didn’t live up to what I wanted it to be. Now, watching it as an old man instead of a kid just starting his life, I get it. It finally makes sense to me: even a job in space is totally going to suck, no matter how fantastic the worlds we get to travel to.

Twenty years into their mission to destroy unstable planets with Thermostellar Triggering Devices so that these worlds don’t threaten future colonization of other planets, the crew of the Dark Star has all gone insane. Or dead, as Commander Powell — voiced by Carpenter — is just a voice from cryostorage.

Lieutenant Doolittle dreams of surfing. Sergeant Pinback — O’Bannon — claims to be Bill Frug, a liquid fuel specialist, and says that the real Pinback is dead. Corporal Boiler has grown obsessed with his mustache. And Talby just watches the universe go by. None of them will be able to escape the crushing ennui of this voyage or a ship that is falling apart, filled with talking bombs that have learned Cartesian doubt.

In the end, all you can do is surf out into nothingness and burn out instead of fading away.

This started as a 45-minute 16mm student project with a $6,000 budget, but to get it into theaters, it needed more footage and to be pushed to 35mm to be shown in theaters. John Landis got the filmmakers in touch with Jack H. Harris, who padded the film some more. O’Bannon would later say that, somehow, “the world’s most impressive student film, ” it became the world’s least impressive professional film.”

Beyond writing and starring in the movie, O’Bannon also designed several of the film’s special effects, including one of the first usages of hyperspace in a movie. The influence of this movie goes beyond that, as O’Bannon would use the sequences with the evil ball to write Alien and the British show Red Dwarf would take the ball — pun unintended — and run with an entire series based on the themes of this movie.

As for influences on the movie, Phillip K. Dick’s idea of frozen dead people communicating from beyond definitely informs the commander. O’Bannon would later adapt We Can Remember It For You Wholesale and Second Variety as Total Recall and Screamers. Plus, while I don’t want to give away the ending, it’s the exact same way that Ray Bradbury’s Kaleidoscope wraps up.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Darker Than Amber (1970)

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Travis McGee was created by John D. MacDonald and is neither a police officer nor a private investigator. He claims to be a “salvage consultant” who reclaims others’ property for a fee of 50 percent. He lives on a 52-foot houseboat, The Busted Flush, named for a thirty-hour poker game in which he won the floating home. The character has been in 21 novels, but only this movie and The Copper Sea have adapted McGee for the screen.

The film starts as Travis (Rod Taylor) and his friend Meyer (Theodore Bikel) are fishing. They’re surprised as a woman, Vangie (Suzy Kendall), is tossed off a bridge with her legs bound. He saves her and, as you imagine, falls in love. I mean, it’s Suzy Kendall in 1970, the same year she was in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.

Vangie soon tells Travis that she was part of a sex and murder scheme on cruise ships, where she would lure rich men to their rooms, and after she drugged them, her partner Terry (William Smith) would toss them into the ocean. She got out because she thought they were just stealing money, not killing people. Of course, Terry tracks her down and kills her, which sends Travis after her and his new partner Del (Ahna Capri), as well as teaming with a woman who looks just like Vangie named Merrimay (Kendell).

The fight between Travis and Terry at the end of the movie was real. Taylor broke three of Smith’s ribs. who, in turn, smashed his nose.

MacDonald disliked the film. saying that it was “feral, cheap, rotten, gratuitously meretricious, shallow and embarrassing.”

Robert Clouse, of course, went on to make Enter the Dragon. This is very much a 70s man’s novel movie, a place where men may get turned around by women, but they’re always correct, and everyone always wants to fall in love with them. Or in bed. Or fight them.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Dark Age (1987)

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Poachers want to kill a 25-foot alligator, and it turns the tables on them, with only John Besser (Max Phipps) surviving. Ranger Steve Harris (John Jarratt), Aboriginal leader Oondabund (Burnum Burnum), and his second-in-command, Adjaral (David Gulpilil), come to save the man, who decides that he must kill the gator.

After the alligator kills a kid, Rex Garret (Ray Meagher) Steve’s boss, demands that the giant be killed. Oondabund tells Harris that it’s more than a living creature. It’s really Numunwari, who holds the souls of the dead of his village. They’re able to capture it and take it down the river, but Besser and his men show up, guns and all, killing the old man and nearly getting Harris and his girlfriend Cathy Pope (Nikki Coghill) too. Luckily, the gator snatches the man, biting off his arm and then taking his entire body below the water.

So, yeah, it’s Jaws in Australia, but what’s the big deal? Arch Nicholson also made Fortress , and writer Sonia Borg mostly wrote movies for the little ones. This would not be one of those movies.

You can watch this on YouTube.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The Dark (1979)

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Bill Van Ryn from Groovy Doom/Drive-In Asylum explained this movie short and sweet: “It’s like an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker without Kolchak.” It’s also about the press freaking out about an eight-foot-tall alien who is killing people who eyebeam lasers in the dirty and dingy streets of Los Angeles. It was initially about an autistic child who had never met people before. It was also originally to be directed by Tobe Hooper. Things didn’t quite happen that way.

John “Bud” Cardos (Kingdom of the Spiders, Gor II) stepped in to direct. And realizing that his movie now featured an alien instead of a child, he hastily put together an opening narration that discussed electric eels and Venus flytraps. If our planet has those, what about other worlds? What that has to do with the rest of the film, well, your guess is as good as mine.

What we end up with is a monster that beheads people while someone chants, “The dark! The dark!”  William Devane (Greg Sumner from TV’s Knots Landing) and a TV anchorwoman (original Wonder Woman and That’s Incredible host Cathy Lee Crosby) finally figure out how to catch the monster. Oh yeah — there’s also an ancient psychic who believes that a young actor will be the next to be killed, so we get some 7’70sHollywood parties along the way. Casey Kasem shows up. Keenan Wynn and Richard Jaeckel, too.

Roger Ebert referred to this movie as “the dumbest, most inept, most maddeningly unsatisfactory thriller of the last five years. It’s really bad: so bad, indeed, that it provides some sort of measuring tool against which to measure other bad thrillers. Years from now, I’ll be thinking to myself: Well, at least it’s not as bad as The Dark.”

I really didn’t think it was that bad. It’s not the best movie ever, but I was certainly entertained. Not riveted. But entertained. But how can you hate a film where a giant alien shoots laser beams out of his eyes and rips people’s heads off so that the coroner can put them in body bags (along with mini head bags)?

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: Babygirl (2024)

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Sept 1-7 John Waters Best of the Year Week: To be fair, these movies aren’t ALL funny, but JOHN WATERS is funny. He’s become more of a writer and public commentator these days. Still, he helps keep the arthouse from taking itself too seriously with his annual top-ten lists, while celebrating the comically serious.

I’m Sam and my kink is movies where Nicole Kidman gets railed.

Yeah, I said it.

She’s totally not my type. She’s too wealthy, too skinny, too elite. Yet I love that this phase of her career has been in shows like Big Little Lies, where she Facetime sexted her abusive husband before shoving him down the steps (spoiler, yeah) and Nine Perfect Strangers where she had both male and female lovers, as well as in movies, like when she urinated on Zac Effron in The Paperboy (well, it was a jellyfish sting, but let us live), pretended to be knocked out so her husband could indulge his kink in The Killing of a Sacred Deer and reminded us that “Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”

Maybe I like it when rich and famous people do scandalous things.

Babygirl is another one of those movies where a gorgeous woman like Nicole Kidman is bored with sex with a handsome man like Antonio Banderas and ends up hooking up with a way too young boy who doesn’t understand the difference between being a dom and being a jerk, ala 50 Shades of Grey. She gives her the sexual experience that she’s only seen on Pornhub when she’s frigging herself, when her husband finishes too quickly.

Anyways, in this, she plays CEO Romy Mathis, whose husband Jacob is a theater director. She ends up hooking up with her intern, Samuel (Harris Dickerson), who immediately becomes a jerk when he visits her family, disrespecting her boundaries. He also keeps threatening her job to get her to say what he wants her to say, which is another way of just being a jerk instead of being a dom.

Directed and written by Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies), this has the kind of empowerment that finds Kidman on all fours like a dog, which unlocks her ability to tell her husband that he’s never gotten her to orgasm, but then he does. Still, then she’s really thinking about her younger former lover playing with his dog. Man, that needle drop of “Father Figure” was way too on the mark, huh?

Kidman is good in this, and the idea of choosing between the life of power that you’ve built and the sex that you really want. Or maybe when you’re rich, you can have everything you want. Also, I think it’s hilarious that Samuel has a bad haircut and mumbles much of what he says, but he has a powerful woman fawning all over him. Whatever it takes to unlock what you’ve trapped inside, I guess.

If anything, this movie has given us Nicole Kidman angrily texting to the tune of “Deceptagon” by Le Tigre.

John Waters said of this, “Okay, heteros are cutting edge this year, too. Nicole Kidman continues taking big chances in her career, and she deserves our salute. Here, she howls, she moans. She’s a verbal power-bottom cougar at the top of her business-executive career who meets a dominant, lowly intern top who makes her lap up milk from a bowl like… like… well, like a pussy.”

USA UP ALL NIGHT: Pretty Poison (1968)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Pretty Poison was on USA Up All Night as one of the third movies. I can’t find the date — do you know when it aired?

Dennis Pitt (Anthony Perkins) wants a life of adventure, and he gets it.

On parole from a mental institution — he set the fire that accidentally claimed the life of his aunt — he works a menial job watching bottles go through the line at Sausenfeld Chemical Company. So when he sees the gorgeous Sue Ellen Stepanek (Tuesday Weld) march across the field in her majorette uniform, he brings her along into the games in his head, pretending to be a CIA agent and having some fun with a young and innocent teenager.

Except that Dennis goes from being the antagonist to the protagonist.

Directed by Noel Black (Private School) and written by Lorenzo Semple Jr. (the TV Batman, Flash Gordon) from the book She Let Him Continue by Stephen Geller, Pretty Poison spends so much of the movie making us think that Dennis is the same kind of killer that Perkins played in Psycho — the last film he was in before going back to the stage — and he’s really just a scared little boy being shocked by the evil inside a gorgeous young lady.

Semple told Shock Magazine, “It was very hard to cast. Tuesday was excellent for it, but Tony was much too obvious for it. We really tried to find somebody young to do it. We never could find a new, young actor the studio would go with.”

Weld had tremendous issues with Black. She told Rex Reed it was “The least creative experience I ever had. Constant hate, turmoil and dissonance. Not a day went by without a fight. Noel Black, the director, would come up to me before a scene and say, ‘Think about Coca-Cola.’ I finally said, ‘Look, just give the directions to Tony Perkins, and he’ll interpret for me.” She further hated the movie, saying, “I don’t care if critics like it; I hated it. I can’t like or be objective about films I had a terrible time doing.”

The movie largely disappeared from theaters, and any reputation it had stemmed from critics like Pauline Kael, who vilified Fox for its failure to market Pretty Poison effectively. 1968 was a strange year. However, it was a time when the country felt like it was falling apart, and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both assassinated. A film that has a young woman gleefully accepting murder and even turning a gun on her mother (Beverly Garland) was going to have a hard time.

But wow — this movie. It really took me by surprise, and I loved the turn Perkins gives to his character; at the end, he is so frightened of Weld that he willingly goes to prison for her crimes. She’s learned nothing and is already moving on to her next victim, yet the end teases that parole officer Morton Azenauer (John Randolph) has figured her out. At one point, it seems like Dennis has all the answers, but when the world cracks on him, he becomes a child.

By the way, Dennis and Sue Ellen go to see The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, directed by Roger Corman.

USA UP ALL NIGHT: My Chauffeur (1986)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: My Chauffeur was on USA Up All Night on January 17 and December 20, 1997.

Deborah Foreman is my favorite 1980’s comedy girl. From Real Genius to Valley Girl, April Fool’s Day and Waxwork, she’s always dependable, always cute and always real. She’s the kind of girl that 80s dorks like me wish we’d get as girlfriends. And people noticed, with one critic comparing her to a “New Wave Carole Lombard crossed with early Shirley MacLaine.” Sadly, she never really broke through to the mainstream. She has said that My Chauffeur is her favorite film in which she has appeared and that it was the most fun she ever had making a movie.

In My Chauffeur, she plays Casey Meadows, a free spirit who somehow ends up working for the Brentwood Limousine Service, which brings her into conflict with the company’s manager, McBride (Howard Hesseman!). At first, the older drivers all treat her like dirt, but her plucky spirit and hard work soon win them over. Even when they set her up with nightmare client Cat Fight, a goofball, drugged-out rock star, she succeeds.

Casey soon starts driving around Battle Witherspoon (Sam J. Jones, Flash Gordon), the son of limo company owner Mr. Witherspoon (E.G. Marshall, Creepshow). She helps him through a breakup, but he’s a heel, a rich boy unable to be kind to anyone — until Casey breaks through.

However, she soon runs afoul of an oil sheik and a con artist who take her for a ride even more ridiculous than the band at the start of the movie. It turns out they’re wanted men, which results in Casey being fired. Penn and Teller play them, and this was at the very start of their career.

Battle becomes a better person, and he and Casey fall in love. He takes her home to meet her father, and when she is in her house, she has deja vu. That’s because her mother was a former employee, and she played in the house. And Battle’s dad is actually her real father. But whew — luckily for those who don’t want a Flowers in the Attic situation — Casey’s real dad was Giles, one of the other limo drivers. That means our young couple can get married and all ends happily.

USA UP ALL NIGHT: Glitch! (1988)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Glitch! was on USA Up All Night on May 3 and 4, and December 14, 1991; September 11, 1992, and March 27, 1993.

Julius Lazar (Dick Gautier) and his secretary, Missy (Amy Lyndon), have finished planning his next movie, Sex and Violence, when they decide to get away for the weekend and go to Hawaii. She has no idea what she’s doing, so that allows T.C. (Will Egan) and Bo (Steve Donmyer) to break in at the exact same time as two of Lazar’s disgruntled employees, Paco (Fernando Garzón) and Lee (John Kreng). Luckily, Bo has a second personality named Simon who is super strong — look, you’re watching a Nico Mastorakis movie, these are the plot twists you grow used to — and he’s able to defeat the two of them, setting T.C. up as Lazar and himself up as a director as young and morally unencumbered actresses show up to become famous in the next big movie from Hollywood’s most popular exploitation director.

If you’re looking for a movie just for nubile and often nude women, well, Mastorakis knew what you wanted. There are ninety women in this, including Bunty Bailey (Dolls, a-ha’s “Take On Me), Teri Weigel (one of the few women to be both a Playboy Playmate and Penthouse Pet, as well as an adult movie star), Roxanna Michaels (Caged Fury), Penny Wiggins (who was The Amazing Jonathan’s assistant Psychic Tanya), Marjean Holden (Sheeva from Mortal Kombat Annihilation), Christina Cardan (Chained Heat) as a non-SAG actress, Kahlena Marie (Streets of Death) as a SAG actress, stuntwoman Laura Albert, Heidi Paine (Wizards of the Demon Sword), Debra Lamb (both Stripped to Kill movies), Jesae (who became adult actress Elise di Medici), Becky Mullen (who was Sally the Farmer’s Daughter in GLOW and is also in the Van Halen video “Poundcake”) and Donna Spangler (Amityville Witches).

While all the women are trying to get a part, DuBois (Ted Lange) shows up with several members of the mob to reclaim the money Lazar took from them for his new movie, Pink Thunder. There’s also Michelle Wong (Julia Nickson, Rambo: First Blood Part II), who comes to audition just to tell Lazar how much she hates his movies and ends up becoming T.C.’s dream woman.

This has so many ridiculous scenes, including gay bodyguard ninja Brucie (Dan Spreaker) beating up an entire collection of bad guys and Bo getting his brains back from a hypnotist (Ji-Tu Cumbuka). None of it is politically correct; much of it is goofy. Mastorakis shot this because he was looking for somewhere fun to live. He stayed in the mansion where this was shot for three weeks.