June 27: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Barbara Steele! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Michael Reeves only directed three movies: this film, The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General. He also had something to do with Castle of the Living Dead* and assisted Don Siegel, worked for Jack Cardiff on The Long Ships and for Henry Levin on his movie Genghis Khan.

Made in 21 days for hardly any money — even when Barbara Steele made $1,000 for one day of work, that day was 18 hours long — and most of the crew is in the movie. Reeves also wrote the script, along with F. Amos Powell and Mel Welles (the director of Lady Frankenstein), under the name Michael Byron.

Two hundred years ago in Transylvania, a witch named Vardella was burned at the stake, but not before threatening to come back for revenge. This would end up ruining the honeymoon of Philip (Ian Ogilvy) and Veronica (Barbara Steele) and that’s not even counting the squalid hotel owned by Ladislav Groper (Welles).

As they enjoy breakfast, Count Von Helsing (John Karlsen) delights in sharing the legend of Dracula and the story Vardella. Well, those foreigners have no interest in this weird old man and blow him off. That night, Phillip catches Groper peeping on his wife and beats him into oblivion. If that doesn’t make this a rough wedding getaway, he wrecks their car into a lake and when they pull out his new bride, it’s the dead body of the witch instead of the gorgeous Steele.

Now, Phillip has to make nice with Von Helsing and be part of his plan to take this dead body, drug it and perform an exorcism to get his wife back. It seems like a lot of work, but I’ve done so much more for women who couldn’t stand in the brightness of Steele’s flawless alabaster skin.

How do you kill a witch? You drown it. That’s also how you find out if someone is a witch.

This played double features in America — distributed by American-International Pictures — with The Embalmer. 

*Depending on who is asked, Reeves either did minor second unit work, a polish on the script’s dwarf character, a complete takeover of the movie or nothing at all.

You can watch this on YouTube.

June 25: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Vigilantes! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

The Punisher used to be the kind of comic book character whose t-shirts you could wear but today, just like conspiracy theories, it’s all been ruined. He’s also never really had a fair shake at a movie, as The Punisher, The Punisher and Punisher: War Zone are all fine but missing a lot of what makes the character work when the right creative team is on it. Yes, I realize that the character is also on Daredevil and had two seasons of his own show. Jon Bernthal has the right look for Frank Castle and he has said that he used this short as inspiration for how he portrays the character.

Yet the best interpretation of the Punisher is this short, directed by Phil Joanou (Three O’Clock High, Rattle and Hum) and written by producer Adi Shankar, Chad St. John and star Thomas Jane, who had already played the role in The Punisher.

When he played this movie at San Diego Comic Con, Jane said, “I wanted to make a fan film for a character I’ve always loved and believed in — a love letter to Frank Castle & his fans. It was an incredible experience with everyone on the project throwing in their time just for the fun of it. It’s been a blast to be a part of from start to finish; we hope the friends of Frank enjoy watching it as much as we did making it.”

The story is simple. All Frank wants to do is wash his clothes, but the neighborhood he’s in won’t allow it. A pimp named Goldtooth (Sammi Rotibi) is abusing his girls and attacking a young boy named DeShawn (Karlin Walker). As he watches his clothing spin, he tries to get away by grabbing a Yoo-Hoo. A disabled veteran named Big Mike (Ron Perlman) reveals that he tried to stop them once and that’s how he ended up crippled. Frank buys a bottle of whiskey from him and proceeds to do what he does best, kill every single person in his way.

It’s exactly who the character is, someone you wouldn’t want to be around and a man who is only kept alive by a war that he fights alone.

It’s around ten minutes and definitely worth a watch.

You can watch this on YouTube.

June 25: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Vigilantes! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

I’m consumed by the idea that African American movies on Tubi flow from the same filone as American giallo or sex thrillers without their filmmakers ever having seen a traditional giallo. Heaven’s Revenge feels like the direct to video softcore murder movies of the 90s but infused with the viewpoint of a filmmaker who may have read about them but again, didn’t experience them.

This started as a 22-minute short before being expanded to a full length movie. It was directed, written and produced by LaNease Adams, who was the first African American women e to be a contestant on The Bachelor. She also stars as Heaven, who falls in love with professional wrestler Jackson Davis (Marcus Nel-Jamal Hamm).

She told Heart and Soul, “My new feature film Heaven’s Revenge was inspired by classic films such as Misery, Fatal Attraction, Unfaithful and A Thin Line Between Love and Hate. We wanted to make a film that was a thriller, but with strong passion, strong dialogue, and a film that leaves the audience with an opinion on what they’ve just seen. A lot of the feedback has been different from men, than women. Men tend to believe that Heaven Bailey, our leading character, was crazy. But women overwhelmingly see the issue with how Jackson Davis treated Heaven in the relationship, which made her act crazy.”

Both actors wrote the script with Miranda Bowden and it feels like a lot of this movie is ad libbed. It’s really strange because so much is them arguing and every time it feels like they’ve reached some kind of accord, a screaming match ensues. I mean, yes, Heaven did break into Jackson’s house and shoot him, then convince his family — if not the police — that she saved him and is nursing him back to health when she’s really throwing him in the shower and slapping him around while he makes crying noises like that burned up guy played by Jordan Peele in the crowd that cries as Keegan-Michael Key makes fun of him. She also lures his new girlfriend Sarah (Jeni Jones) to his house, gets her drunk and then flips out and murders her.

The democracy of Tubi movies is so pure to me. It seems like nearly anyone can tell the story that they want to tell and it can air there where just about anyone can find it. It’s the closest thing to the video store that today’s streaming world has.

You can watch this on Tubi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. In addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and has been a guest on the Making Tarantino podcast. He also contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine. His most recent essay, “Of Punks and Stains and Student Films: A Tribute to Night Flight, the 80s Late-Night Cult Sensation,” appeared in Drive-In Asylum #26.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks to A.C. for sending this. It would fit Junesploitation on June 12, which was New World day. This was also covered in “Exploring: 10 Tangerine Dream soundtracks.”

These days, we live lives of great convenience. Just about any movie we want to watch is only a few clicks of the remote control or keyboard away. Yet, even with this luxury, I yearn for the days of old when I used to scour the catalogs of mail-order businesses like Video Search of Miami and Sinister Cinema or the dealers’ tables at cons in search of elusive films. Those treasure hunts were thrilling when you unearthed a gem that had never been released on home media in the United States, such as Death Line a/k/a Raw Meat (my blurry VHS dupe bore the title Tren de la Mort and had Spanish subtitles) or Jess Franco’s The Bloody Judge a/k/a Night of the Blood Beast (my copy was
entitled The Throne of Fire and was in French with no English subtitles).

But I realized those fun times were over when even Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos, a film never released theatrically in the United States, got a special edition DVD. For years, I’d stared at the same three stills from that film in books on horror films. But now, it was mine to own. Today, everything, no matter how obscure, gets an official home-media release. Well, almost everything. Wavelength, a science-fiction film from 1983, still has never been released to DVD or streaming in this country.

Robert Carradine is a down-on-his-luck musician. One day, when things are looking bleak, he meets an attractive young woman in a bar. She’s played by the estimable Cherie Currie of the groundbreaking rock band The Runaways. They quickly hit it off, hook up, and become a couple. He soon learns that his new girlfriend is psychic. She starts hearing strange voices, leading them to an underground bunker in the desert where the evil government is experimenting on three captured aliens. With the help of a drunken old coot played by Keenan Wynn (of course), they work to free the child-like aliens so that they can return to their mothership and go home. In other words, it’s the same plot as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial with bigger ambitions, but on a fraction of the budget. The beautiful special effects shot in the finale delayed the film’s release until after E.T. had become a box-office behemoth. Perhaps in an alternate universe, Wavelength came first. One can only imagine.

Sincerely written and directed by Mike Gray, a former documentary filmmaker who wrote The China Syndrome and Chuck Norris’s Code of Silence, charmingly acted by Carradine and Currie, with a typically great score by Tangerine Dream, Wavelength was once a staple of HBO. Now it’s fallen into the black hole of forgotten films. (A soft-looking rip from an old VHS tape is available on YouTube.) It’s not a world-beater, but it’s a well-done B-movie, which was released theatrically by New World Pictures with little fanfare and even less box-office success. (I saw it in an empty theater during its original run.) Here’s to Wavelength’s rediscovery. Like an artifact from a film grail quest in the good old days, it’s a tiny gem.

June 23: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Free Space! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Oliver Drake may have started as an actor, but he’s probably best-known as a prolific screenwriter (151 movies!) and director (41 films, including two adult movies — Angelica: The Young Vixen and Ride A Wild Stud as Revilo Ekard and he was not fooling anyone with that Alucard scam) of low-budget Western films.

A former cattle rancher, he brought his own trained horse with him to Hollywood. 1917, appearing with his trained horse. After acting in silent films, he directed, wrote and produced films for Gene Autry, Tex Ritter and others for RKO, Monogram and Republic. He was so invested in the Western film genre that he used his Pearblossom, California ranch for location shooting.

But by 1969, he was pretty much done in Hollywood. He’d moved to Las Vegas and decided to make a horror movie. Many claim that he didn’t ever work in horror before, but he wrote the 1968 proto slasher No Tears for the Damned AKA Las Vegas Strangler as well as The Mummy’s Curse, Riders of the Whistling Skull, the giallo-esque Sinister Hands and Weird Woman.

In Tom Weaver’s Interviews With B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers, this movie’s star Anthony Eisley (Dracula vs. Frankenstein) said, “The director was quite senile at the time — the absolute epitome of total confusion.”

That claim is denied by the director’s daughter, who said on IMDB, “Oliver Drake would have agreed with these reviews. I should know because he was my father. He was his harshest critic & did not enjoy watching this after it resurfaced on VHS. It is also incorrect that this was the only monster movie he ever made, The Mummy’s Curse comes to mind. But I completely disagree with comments by Anthony Eisley that my father was senile during the making of this film! Its true that this film was never finished and sat on the shelf for years. My father went on to write two books, both of which were very well received by critics. He attended many Western Film Festivals as the guest of honor and gave very informative and entertaining speeches about the early days of film-making.”

The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals was written and co-produced by William C. Edwards. He only has three movies on his IMDB page with one being the aforementioned Ride A Wild Stud (“When men were men — and women didn’t forget it!”) and Dracula (The Dirty Old Man), another movie that has a jackal-man, as Dracula — using the Alucard name, see it never gets old — enslaves Dr. Irving Jekyll, making him a werejackal and forcing him to bring women to his cabin. It’s the kind of movie where you can see the stick that’s holding up a vampire bat.

Man, Edwards loved the Alucard trick. After all, this has a mummy named Sirakh instead of Kharis and the Ananka character — yes, he also adored Universal horror movies — is Akanna. Well, guess what? This movie is kind of, sort of a sequel to that movie, as it brings back the werejackal under the name Irving Jackalman.

So how did this get made? Well, Drake ended up in Vegas and Edwards was working with Vega International Pictures. According to an article in The Las Vegas Sun, this was just the first of many films the studio had in the works: “The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackal is designed as a breakaway from the high camp and pseudo-intellectual spook picture. Said one Vega executive, “There’s no social comment and no hidden meaning. The horror characters were designed to scare the hell out of the audience and that’s that.””

Supposedly, the production ran out of financing before it was completed and all of the footage was confiscated by an unpaid contractor, which is how it ended up on VHS when Academy released a decimated looking copy in 1985, complete with sitar music — I guess that’s Egyptian, said someone — and surf rock instrumentals instead of whatever music the filmmakers intended. Or maybe Drake himself was looking to sell it at one point. There are also vague reports of it playing in 1969 at an L.A. theater for investors and on a horror UHF show. Somehow, Drake sold They Ran for Their Lives to the CBS Late Movie, so anything is possible.

Maybe I should tell you the story of this movie now.

The sarcophagus of Princess Akana (Marliza Pons, who was a famous belly dancer in Las Vegas and supposedly had an uncredited part in Cleopatra and is also in Did Baby Shoot Her Sugardaddy? along with Rene Bond) is being displayed by controversial archeologist Dave Barrie (Anthony Eisley), along with another mummy. She’s remarkably well-preserved and he falls in love with her, falling for the curse of the jackal, which transforms him into a jackal by the light of the full moon. And by jackal, I mean he looks a lot like my chihuahua.

Let me tell you, the place that he stores these mummies is in no way hermetically sealed or scientific minded. It’s a shack probably in Hendersonville and it looks like a total mess.

The princess wakes up and Dave falls in love with her, taking her on dates and teaching her how to put on a bra, which is a modern invention that she doesn’t understand. I have to tell you, I’ve seen a lot in movies but nothing prepared me for a movie where a werejackal by night explains to an undead Egyptian how a Maidenform works. They also go see a Vegas show, at which point the other mummy awakens and attacks an exotic dancer before blasting his way through a wall.

I was wondering, how could this get better? And then John Carradine shows up for all of a minute to say scientific things like, “I can tell from the mold accumulation that this casket is 4,000 years old.”

Is this heaven? Yes, if heaven has a werejackal and a mummy battling on Fremont Street back when Vegas was seedier and cooler and filled with tourists who just look and keep gambling, because yeah, sure, you see monsters fighting every day but you only get the chance to do Vegas once every few years.

Can it get better? Well, the mummy is played by a man named Saul Goldsmith, which is the least frightening mummy name ever.

This is eighty minutes of film with two sentences of plot, which is just how I like it. You come here wanting to see monsters and man, you get monsters. It also completely rips off the Universal version of The Mummy but adds in a Herschell Gordon Lewis-style tongue ripping out effect. It also has a scene where Dave takes Akana — who also has a magic ring that can hypnotize people — on a double date where he claims that “She’s not from here. She comes from … back east.”

The cinematographer of this was William G. Troiano, who also worked on the Vegas productions Ride a Wild Stud, They Ran for Their Lives and No Tears for the Damned. He’d follow this by going to work on Horror of the Blood Monsters. He also shot She Freak, The Devil’s Messenger and The Wild World of Batwoman. What a career!

The makeup effects — such as they are — are by Byrd Holland, whose credits stretch across the gamut of my cinematic obsessions, working on everything from Rabid and The Baby to Lemora, The Undertaker and His Pals and Terror Circus. Supposedly, he spent days doing a transformation scene that was cut from the film. He was assisted by Jack Shafton (the creature developer for The Intruder Within and effects on Jennifer) and Tony Tierney (effects for Dracula vs. Frankenstein and The Astro-Zombies). Its effects come from Harry Woolman, who was also on Evilspeak, Hangar 18, In Search of Historic Jesus, The Incredible Melting Man, Rattlers, Supervan, Love Camp 7, Dolemite, Don’t Go Near the Park and so many more movies. Again, what a career!

This movie really is a nexus point for my fascinations.

It has no fewer than four assistant directors. Wyott Ordung shot second unit for The Navy vs. the Night Monsters and wrote Robot Monster. Willard Kirkham was on second unit for The Dark and Plan 9 from Outer Space. Russell Hayden only worked on this film, but Robert Farfan was an assistant director on Rebel Without a Cause, which is classy, and more movies I’d be proud to say I worked on, like Bride of the Monster and Moonfire.

This is a movie filled with werejackal murders of winos and cops. I’ve oversold it beyond belief so when you watch it, you may wonder why I love it so. I love the idea of it, I adore the fact that it exists and this to me is why movies are made in the first place. It has Carradine solemnly intone, “We can’t just stand by and let a 4,000-year-old mummy and  a jackal man take over the city!” It was made by people who had astounding careers both before and after. And here we are, in a world where we can say, “I know I could watch a movie that critics worldwide agree is true cinema that makes the blind see and the lame walk, but I’m going to watch The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals and disappoint everyone.”

Severin is releasing this as a totally cleaned up version that I can’t wait to watch. They found a print at Ewing “Lucky: Brown’s Los Angeles estate sale and added two hours of special features, including another Vega International Pictures film, the once lost movie Angelica, The Young Vixen.

Until then, you can watch the battered original VHS version on YouTube and Tubi.

A lot of the info for this post came from the amazing Monster Kid Classic Horror Forum.

June 21: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 200s Action! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

“Through analysis of thousands of recorded gunfights, the Cleric has determined that the geometric distribution of antagonists in any gun battle is a statistically-predictable element. The gun kata treats the gun as a total weapon, each fluid position representing a maximum kill zone, inflicting maximum damage on the maximum number of opponents, while keeping the defender clear of the statistically-traditional trajectories of return fire. By the rote mastery of this art, your firing efficiency will rise by no less than 120 percent. The difference of a 63 percent increased lethal proficiency makes the master of the gun katas an adversary not to be taken lightly.”

If a movie has dialogue like this, I’m going to love it.

After World War III, the survivors founded the totalitarian nation of Libria, a place that outlaws all emotion, forces the population to take the emotion-suppressing drug called Prozium II and hunts down anyone who goes against this, labeling them Sense Offenders, who are soon hunted by the Grammaton Clerics. When they show up, you’re dead, and they’re also going to destroy any art, music or books you have before shooting you a thousand times.

Yet Libria, the its leader, Father (Sean Pertwee) and the Tetragrammaton Council are being challenged by the Underground.

John Preston (Christian Bale) is one of the clerics and he’s a single father after his wife was killed for being a Sense Offender. When his partner Errol Partridge (Sean Bean) saves a book of poems and takes them to the Nether — you know, the Cursed Earth or the Forbidden Zone — to read, he tells Preston that now that he has felt emotion, he can die. So Preston kills him.

The poem that he reads is “He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” by William Butler Yeats. Here’s the poem: “Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

His new partner, Andrew Brandt (Taye Diggs), looks up to him. Yet since killing his partner, Preston has stopped taking the drugs and spares a Sense Offender, Mary O’Brien (Emily Watson). He soon meets the leader of the Underground, Jurgen (William Fichter), who convinces him that he must kill Father. At the same time, he’s also been charged with finding a conspiracy within the clerics by Vice-Counsel DuPont (Angus Macfadyen).

When O’Brien is terminated, he has an emotional breakdown and is arrested by his partner. He soon learns that DuPont is the new Father, having started a new group within the Tetragrammaton Council of those who don’t take the drugs either. As you can imagine, this leads our hero to killing everyone he can with a sword and guns. It’s why you came and saw this movie. I mean, the hero kills 118 people in this movie.

Equilibrium was produced by Jan de Bont’s production company, Blue Tulip Productions. The budget was covered by tax incentives thanks to de Bont’s Dutch citizenship and the international sales paid for this movie’s budget. So when critics didn’t like it and it only had a limited release, it didn’t matter.

When he was told about those reviews, director Kurt Wimmer said, “Why would I make a movie for someone I wouldn’t want to hang out with? Have you ever met a critic who you wanted to party with? I haven’t.”

This movie has been forgotten but I’d love if more people watched it. Sure, it takes a lot of inspiration from other literature, but it also has warrior monks who have guns that form the logo of their country when they fire them and it takes place in some side future that looks like a gothic world.

June 22: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 2000s Action! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Kurt Wimmer directed the Brian Bosworth movie One Tough Bastard and wrote the remake of The Thomas Crowne Affair and Sphere before he directed Equilibrium, the first movie of his I took notice of. He created a style of fighting, Gun Kata, for the film and it just stands out from so many of the 2000s science fiction action movies. I was beyond excited for Ultraviolet, but wow it had so many problems that I was sure I’d never see it.

Shot digitally on high-definition video, this movie was Wimmer’s attempt at making a comic book movie. There are even tons of Ultraviolet comic covers to give the idea that we’re in the middle of a much longer story. The basic idea is sometime in the near-future, a super soldier experiment leads to the creation of hemophages, vampiric humans that are stronger and smarter than normal humans. Like mutants…keep that in mind.

The war between humans and vampires leads to the end of civilization. There is now only the ArchMinistry, a powerful corporation and joint world government. There’s a resistance that is fighting back and one of their soldiers is Violet Song Jat Shariff (Milla Jovovich). Her latest mission is to break into a blood bank and steal a weapon that can kill her kind. It ends up being a child named Six (Cameron Bright) who is a clone of Vice-Cardinal Ferdinand Daxus (Nick Chinlund) and filled with a virus that can destroy the hemophages. Despite this, Violet is sentimental and allows him to live despite hating all of humanity.

By the end of the movie, it’s revealed that Daxus and the hemophages are working together to create a new virus that will allow them to control even more of the world. William Fichtner also shows up and if I ever make a movie, that guy has to be in it.

Not a lot of it makes sense, but really, we’re here to watch large battles and gun fights. In the post Matrix world, everyone was making movies like this. I just happen to like this one because, well, it’s fun. Who cares that Six spends most of the movie living in a briefcase? Do I need to know motivations? Rotten Tomatoes said, “An incomprehensible and forgettable sci-fi thriller, Ultraviolet is inept in every regard.”

Um…this is a movie where you watch Milla Jovovich in various cool outfits, she has color changing hair and she shoots a whole bunch of religious zealots when she isn’t racing around on a motorcycle. I mean, you tell me that’s what I’m going to see and I’m going to see it.

Anyways…

Wimmer and Jovovich were locked out of the edit by Sony, who said that the movie was too emotional and it needed to be PG-13. They cut it from 120 minutes to 88 minutes. Because of this, the visual effects are visibly unfinished and use incomplete temp-renders that were never meant to be seen outside of the editing room.

Everywhere in the world, this didn’t do well. Well, Japan loved it. They even made an anime sequel, Ultraviolet: Code 044.

In the very same year, Cameron Bright played Leech in X-Men: The Last Stand. His role is to cure mutants, which is just like this movie. He would play a vampire again once he got older. He’s Volturi vampire Alec in Twilight New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn Part 2.

An aside: Gun Kata was taken from Gun Fu. Wikipedia refers to it as a “style of sophisticated close-quarters gunfight resembling a martial arts combat that combines firearms with hand-to-hand combat and traditional melee weapons in an approximately 50/50 ratio.” This martial art first shows up in A Better Tomorrow, directed by John Woo, and gives guns the same style that open hand combat and wuxia movies had within Hong Kong cinema. In the 1990s, it came to America in movies like Desperado, The Replacement Killers (which had Woo’s star Chow Yun-fat in it) and The Matrix. Today, John Wick has taken Gun Fu as far as it can go, but in 2002, Wimmer would use it in Equilibrium.

After the failure of this movie, Wimmer didn’t direct for years until he made Children of the Corn. While he was recovering from this, he wrote Street Kings, Law Abiding Citizen, Salt, the remakes of Total Recall and Point Break, Spell, The Misfits, Expend4bles and The Beekeeper. I hope he gets the opportunity to make another movie and prove his talent to his detractors.

June 21: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is AIP! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Also released as Twinky and London Affair, Lola has the kind of story that only a movie made in 1970 could have.

Scott Wardman (Charles Bronson) falls in love — or something — with Sybil Londonderry (Susan George), who also goes by Twinky and Lola. The problem is that he’s 38 and she’s 16. He seemingly knows the age of consent and any guy that can instantly tell you that is a creep.

Then Scott gets busted for being married to a child and forced to leave England. He says, “I make one uncool move with a nutty 16-year-old kid, and suddenly my whole world is turned upside down.” Now this pornographic author has to go back to the United States.

If you think this couldn’t happen, well…

Norman Thaddeus Vane wrote this and its based on his own married to 16 year-old model Sarah Caldwell, who he married when he was also 38. In an interview with the astounding Hidden Films, the writer — and later director — would claim, “There was a reason I wound up marrying Sarah Caldwell (who was 16 at the time and later cast in Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter which Vane scripted; Vane later based the script for Lola on this scandalous marriage). I was a good-looking kid on King’s Road in Chelsea, I had a sports car, I had money, I had a beautiful flat.”

Vane also pretty much explains the plot of this film in that interview: “I met her at a party. She was stunningly beautiful. I had a small flat on King’s Road in Chelsea, and she used to come over secretly on the way back from school, and we used to fuck. And she told her parents that she was seeing me — I was probably about 38 or something—and they were angry. Her father was head of the East India Trading Company. The only way we could see each other was if we got married, and in Scotland, you could get married at 16. So we eloped there. I had been sleeping with a Scottish girl from Glasgow. You had to spend three days in residence in Scotland before you got married, so I asked her if we could use her family’s address and she said yes. Sarah called her parents and said “I’m very sorry to tell you this, but I got married today!” The newspapers wrote columns about her, it was like a front page story, for months afterwards. They called me “The Cad of the Year.””

This entire interview is wild and I urge you to read it, as he claims that director Richard Donner immediately slept with Susan George, that the movie was financed by an Italian baron and Bronson superfan who later committed suicide over Britt Ekland, that Bronson’s wife Jill Ireland wanted to play the teenage girl and that Bronson couldn’t be controlled by Donner and he ruined the movie.

Lola is fascinating because why would Scott and Lola ever get together — well, sex — or stay together? There’s nothing that suggests that they have a single thing in common other than her schoolgirl crush on him and well, yeah, she’s Susan George in 1970, I get that. Yet Bronson comes off as, well, Charles Bronson, a man who speaks little and is quick to violence. Maybe that’s how I see him as I’ve watched so many of his action movies, but when you see the posters and VHS covers for this, you’ll see that I wasn’t the only one who saw Bronson just as a force of violent nature.

Lola ends up getting an apartment for the couple while Scott is in jail over a misunderstanding, then she doesn’t realize that he has a job as a writer and needs to be left alone while he’s working. As a jerk of a writer myself, I get it. She also acts like a kid because she is one. Finally, after running away and coming back, she goes back to England for good.

This is not the last movie that Vane would make that references his life. The Black Room is about how he cheated on his wife in his own black room with Penthouse centerfolds that he met while working at that publication. It remains to be discovered if any of those women were vampires. Vane also made the absolutely baffling Club Life, a movie that I want everyone to watch.

I wonder if Susan George met with her agent and said, “Can I do something not so scuzzy for my next movie, like sleep with a guy twice my age?” And the agent said, “Susan baby, have I got a movie for you. It’s classy. It’s called Straw Dogs.”

You can watch this on Tubi.