June 9: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Free Space!
Hey Derek Ford, thanks for making this movie, which is also called The Sexplorer. Man, it’s as scummy as I would expect from you.
Monika Ringwald AKA Marilyn Rickard was in Satan’s Slaveand British men’s magazines like Witchcraft and Health and Efficiency. Here she’s a girl from Venus who has come to our planet to explore, which leads her to a gym with naked people, an adult movie theater, a wedding and a balloon room, all guided by the voiceover of her leader.
Mark Jones would one day be an Imperial Officer, but he plays Lecher here. Prudence Drage would be the handmaiden in the Bible fantasy in A Clockwork Orange, but she was also in two of the Adventures of… movies, Virgin Witch and Eskimo Nell. Tanya Ferova played a stripper in this and Terror. Juliet Groves was also in Naughty Girls and Keep It Up, Jack, which also had Veronica Peters, who posed for plenty of men’s magazines in addition to being in this.
When this came to America, pun not intended, it had inserts.
June 8: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Heists!
Dillinger, Bonnie, Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and Ma Barker are the Doberman Gang, six Dobermans who join the gang of Eddie Newton (Byron Mabe), Sammy (Simmy Bow), June (Julie Parrish) and former Air Force dog trainer Barney Greer (Hal Reed). Oh yes — there’s also a bulldog named J. Edgar.
Eddie and June have been a couple, but she soon sees that he could throw her away at any time. She starts getting close to Barney, who soon learns that this is a criminal plan to train these dogs. He’s told that he’ll be killed if he tries to get away, so he works with them in the hopes that he can save the dogs and June. But he soon has second thoughts when he learns that the dogs will be killed.
Good boys. J. Edgar gets them to run off with the money. The bad news is that one of the dogs was hit by a car, and I could have done without that part. Except that in the sequel, The Daring Dobermans, that dog is fine. Whew.
There are also two more movies in the series, The Amazing Dobermans and Alex and the Doberman Gang.
I didn’t have to worry so much, as this was the first movie to have the “No Animals Were Harmed” onscreen credit from the American Humane Association.
This was directed by Byron Ross Chudnow and written by Louis Garfinkle, who also wrote I Bury the Living, Face of Fire, The Hellbenders, Little Cigars and The Deer Hunter—yeah, I know, wow—and Frank Ray Perilli, who wrote Mansion of the Doomed, the Michael Pataki adult Cinderella, End of the World, Dracula’s Dog, the adult Fairy Tales, Laserblast, The Best of Sex and Violence and co-wrote Alligator with John Sayles.
Dimension Pictures played this as a double feature with The Twilight People. I love that!
June 7: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Kung Fu!
Directed and co-written — is unleashed a better word? — by Hsin-Yi Chang (Snake In the Eagle’s Shadow 2, Kung-Fu Commandos), Thrilling Bloody Sword is a movie that can only be described by a run-on sentence of a paragraph: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves meets Russian adventure film plus Hong Kong wuxia with effects and colors that are a blend of Shaw Brothers horror, Mario Bava wizardry and cardboard magic, all infused with moments that would seem low tech even in the days of Georges Méliès while ideas and music are openly stolen in the ways of Bruno Mattei and Godfrey Ho, plus fighting bears, paper mâché demons, more borrowing from Flash Gordon than Star Wars, swords that shoot other swords, a BDSM costume for its heroic Prince that would have Chang Cheh wondering, “Is that too femme?” and a comet impregnanting a queen.
You know how when people talk up a movie and it never lives up to everything they’re telling you? This is not that movie.
Yaur-gi (Fong Fong-Fong) is the girl born from that comet, a princess to the King and Queen, who dies giving birth to a Cronenberg-esque lump with a beating heart. The King wants nothing to do with that “little ball of flesh” and sends her, like Moses, down the river where the seven dwarves find her. Prince Yur-juhn (Lau Seung-Him) falls in love with her and has to prove himself to the King, the same one who sent his daughter in a boat to her doom. That same dumb leader also has hired two magicians, Gi-err (Elsa Yeung Wai-San) and Shiah-ker (Chang Yi), to get all the demons out of his country. The problem is that they are collecting those demonic guys and getting ready to take over, as they also pray to a Satanic figure by the name of Spirit Ah-Ua.
Don’t worry, our heroes have a fairy who used to be a rabbit and a super magic user with a butt for a head to help them out. And the dwarves used to be generals who were shrunk down but could still fight. And fart. But mostly fight.
Yaur-gi is saved by the Prince, and she falls in love with him, but he’s off fighting a nine-headed dragon. When Yaur-gi comes to meet him after he defeats the monster, he’s turned into a bear and runs into the woods. So they put him in a barrel filled with healing chemicals, and he gets that really wild armor that looks like either something a bad guy feuding with Jushin “Thunder” Liger would wear or something out of an Italian peplum.
There are also literally hundreds of fights and a Magic Monster who lives in a coffin box like those Robobeast toys that Panosh Place put out for Voltron. What follows after this is a multiple sword battle with crystal, laser and shooting swords, people flying around on wires and music stolen from various movies, including Battlestar Galactica.
If that doesn’t make you love this, the production company was named Lusty Electric Industries.
Remember when Jademan Comics — man, the references in this one, sorry — and they were so strange and fascinating? This is even beyond that, a movie that cannot seemingly quit being weird, and it’s barely 80 minutes. Most films would not even go so far as to have a woman give birth to a thing after a comet hits her in the belly, but that’s where this starts. The highest and dankest movie drugs of all time. 999,999 stars out of 5.
Get this from Gold Ninja Video. Seriously, I will post a low-quality video link online, but you need to buy this.
June 6: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is giallo!
My Letterboxd list of Giallo movies is at 498, so I am running out of movies to watch and ones that are easy to find. Instead of diving into the world of erotic thrillers, I sought out Il Ficcanaso (The Nosy One).
Pippo Franco is usually in comedies, and this is really no different. He plays Luciano Persichetti, a man haunted by a killer known as The Guardian Angel. Well, that name doesn’t really give you an idea of how frightening the masked lunatic is.
After getting phone calls from the killer, a dead body is found in his apartment and the cops think he could be the murderer. Also: Pippo’s character is psychic.
Directed by Bruno Corbucci, the man who brought us Miami Supercops, Aladdin, When Men Carried Clubs and Women Played Ding-Dong, La casa stregata, The Cop In Blue Jeans and many more, and written by an entire room of people that included Aldo Florio, Mariano Laurenti, Sergio Martino, Raimondo Vianello, Aldo Grimaldi, Sandro Continenza, Corbucci and Franco, this is a comedy giallo that has way too many characters in it, but the girl that the protagonist is in love with, Susanna Luisetti, is played by Edwige Fenech. She realizes that this movie needs some help and has two nude scenes, adding literally every star in the firmament of heaven to the proceedings.
There’s also a scene where Pippo goes to the theater and watches City of the Living Dead! The bad guy also tries to kill him with a sewing machine, kind of like Goldfinger. For an Italian comedy, it’s actually good. I was surprised by this.
June 5: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Magic!
Lamberto Bava worked on a lot of TV, and instead of just horror, he had plenty of success with this series of films. Based on Italo Calvino’s short story “Fanta-Ghiro the Beautiful,” Bava also borrowed from movies like Legend, Ladyhawke, Willow, Disney cartoons and the fantasy films of his childhood.
It was lucky for all concerned that because the movie was so expensive, it ended up becoming a mini-series—it also aired as a 200-minute compilation, La meravigliosa storia di Fantaghirò and as forty episodes for its twentieth anniversary—and was a big success to the level that it had a cartoon that Bava co-wrote and even a theme restaurant.
Fantaghirò (Alessandra Martines) is one of three princesses born to the King (Mario Adorf). While Catherine (Ornella Marcucci) and Caroline (Kateřina Brožová) act like proper royalty, our heroine is rebellious, well-read and yearns for battle. She’s been training with a White Knight (Ángela Molina) somewhere in the forest and meets the enemy her father has been fighting for years, Romualdo (Kim Rossi Stuart), and he falls for her because of her eyes.
The problem is that he’s challenged her father to a duel, and he plans on sending his daughters, as the White Witch (also Molina) warned him that one of the girls can defeat Romualdo. Catherine and Caroline hate every moment, and Fantaghirò goes into battle alone. She defeats her enemy but can’t bring herself to kill him; her father allows him to keep his kingdom as long as he marries one of his daughters. You can figure out what happens next.
The second movie introduced the big bad for this series of films: Black Witch (Brigitte Nielsen). But that’s another story.
Supposedly, there’s a Disney+ remake coming. It was news to Bava, who told Super Guida TV, “I read it in the newspapers a few months ago, but nobody told me about it, and nobody asked me to cooperate. If they want to make a great Italian production, that’s fine, but if they want to re-propose the same characters, that was our lot because Calvino’s fairy tale is only four pages long.”
In director Tom Lin’s Worth the Wait, “a group of Asian-American strangers’ lives fatefully intertwine as they navigate budding love, confront profound loss and encounter old flames.”
Written by Maggie Hartmans, Dan Mark and Rachel Tan, this begins with Kai (Ross Butler) grabbing an Uber when he suddenly has Nathan (Osric Chau), the ready to drop Teresa (Karena Ka-Yan Lam) and Teresa’s mother Mary (Kheng Hua Tan) all jump into his ride, diverting it to the hospital where he meets and falls in love with a nurse — or ER doctor, the movie is never sure — by the name of Leah (Lana Condor), who believes that life has a way of “connecting everything and everyone in ways we don’t even see.”
Along the way, we also learn about the romantic lives of Blake (Ricky He) and Riley (Ali Fumiko Whitney) — she’s the niece of the rideshare diver Curtis (Sung Kang) — as well as an actress, Amanda (Elodie Yung), who decides to take another chance with an old lover, Scott (Andrew Koji). Can these people all find love and make their stories work, no matter what the fates of life throw their way?
Set in Seattle but filmed in British Columbia, this glossy romcom feels classy for a Tubi Original. There are times when it tries to have tragedy right next to comedy, which doesn’t always feel right, but if you’re looking for a simple film that won’t put too many demands on you while you’re entertained, you could do worse.
The Sage Treatment Center may be the last stop for Rodney (Jasper Cole) before jail or the ground. The only problem is that this is the kind of place that could kill him before it helps him get clean. It’s run by Louise “Nanny Lou” Stamey (Charlene Tilton of Dallas fame; her daughter Cherish Lee plays Tonya) and Rodney, who rooms with young Dustin (Damien Chinappi) as they suffer through group therapy and all of the other steps toward getting back out into the world. There’s also an insane doctor (Richard Tyson) who may as well be one of the patients and the sneaking feeling that Nanny Lou may just be getting rid of people instead of making them well.
Directed by Harley Wallen (Ash and Bone) and written by Jerry Lee Davis and Nick Theurer, this film shows that addiction gets into everyone’s lives, from Rodney’s ex-wife and young daughter to Dustin’s sister and even Nanny Lou, whose childhood was decimated by an addict. But then the film somehow becomes a dark horror film — complete with a chainsaw — in the last twenty minutes, changing it all up.
Tilton is good, everyone seems doomed and this makes me glad that I never went to rehab.
Beware! The Blob or Son of the Blob is a big idea to get your head around. While the original was presented as horror, this film pretty much leans into how ridiculous it all is. Written by Anthony Harris and Jack Woods from a story by Richard Clair and Jack H. Harris, a lot of this was improvised on set, and the script—even though it took all those people—was mostly ignored.
Harris was also the producer, and Anthony was his college graduate son. They were next door neighbors with Larry Hagman — who had previously directed episodes of I Dream of Jeannie and The Good Life — who had never seen The Blob. Harris screened his print for the actor/director, who loved it and said that he could get a lot of his Hollywood friends to show up and get blobbed, as long as he could direct.
Fifteen years after the original Blob destroyed parts of Pennsylvania, Chester (Godfrey Cambridge) has brought a piece of that creature from its frozen grave in the North Pole, where he does the sensible thing and puts it in the fridge. It grows in size as it eats a fly, a kitten, and then his wife, Marianne (Marlene Clark). Finally, while Chester watches The Blob on TV, it eats him too, just in time for Lisa (Gwynne Gilford) to watch him get claimed by the creature.
As she tries to get her boyfriend Bobby (Robert Walker Jr.). to believe what she’s seen, the red jelly eats its way through Los Angeles, claiming the lives of two hippies (Randy Stonehill and Cindy Williams) in a storm drain — were they looking for Simon? — as well as officer Sid Haig, chickens, horses, a bar, a gas station, Scoutmaster Dick Van Patten, a barber (Shelley Berman) and even some home-displaced folks (Hagman, Burgess Meredith and Del Close, who is wearing an eyepatch as his cornea was scratched by a cat previous to filming; he’d return with a similar look as Reverend Meeker in perhaps the best horror remake of all time, 1988’s The Blob).
It takes an ice rink — which was torn down shortly after filming — to stop the monster — maybe — this time. As for the bowling alley in this movie, it’s Jack Rabbit Slims from Pulp Fiction.
In the first movie, the Blob was made of silicone and dyed red. It had to be stirred throughout the movie to keep its color. This Blob was made from a red-dyed powder blended with water, as well as a big red plastic balloon, red plastic sheeting and a red drum of hard red silicone spun in front of the camera. Tim Baar and Conrad Rothmann created these effects, and beyond working on the second unit camera, Dean Cundey helped, years before he’d become such a force in filmmaking.
In 1982, when Hagman was on Dallas and the shooting of his character J.R. Ewing was the biggest moment in pop culture, this was re-released with the headline “The film that J.R. shot!”
I knew the song “Ben” better than Ben the movie, but now, I know both.
Remember when Willard Stiles was killed by Ben and all the rats when he finally tried to kill them? Well, you get to see it again when this movie starts and we follow Ben until he meets Danny Garrison (Lee Harcourt Montgomery, Burnt Offerings), a lonely boy with a heart condition. They become best friends — until now, Danny only has his mother, Beth (Rosemary Murphy) and sister, Eve (Meredith Baxter) — and Danny does fun stuff like write songs for them, put on marionette shows for their amusement and create a train ride for them.
Rats are rats, however, and they go nuts, attacking food trucks, grocery stores, and people, all while they help Danny get over bullies, loneliness and probably dying soon.
Directed by Phil Karlson (The Wrecking Crew, Walking Tall) and written by Gilbert Ralston (the creator of The Wild, Wild West), this has an ending where you will care about a rat more than you thought was possible. Seriously, I got weepy. Over a rat. A rat that got to ride in a train, dammit, not I’m crying again.
Also known as Any Body…Any Way, this movie was exactly what I wanted it to be: fucking weird.
When Terry Wilson (Joyce Danner) and Ann Henderson (Eve Reeves) go to the middle of nowhere for a barn party, Ann is nearly raped but saved by the middle-aged, British and oh-so-strange Mr. Bradley (Daniel Garth). They ditch the party and Ann’s man, but then run out of gas because otherwise we wouldn’t have a movie.
In the middle of nowhere, they walk up to a house — on the suggestion of a drifter (Ivan Agar, Laughing Crow from Shriek of the Mutilated) who is more than he seems — that just so happens to belong to Mr. Bradley and his sister Ida (Irene Lawrence). They have no phone and their car isn’t working either, so they stay for dinner and a bed for the evening. Ida needs the company. She’s been there for two years, ever since her mortician brother retired.
So why are there bars on the windows? Why did their door lock behind them? Why are the closest filled with women’s clothing of all sizes? Why would Terry pick this exact and terrifying time to finally get sapphic with her office buddy?
The Bradleys wake them up and let them know that they’re in control and must play their demented games with them or end up like all the embalmed bodies in the basement. Mr. Bradley just wants to discover the perfect way to make love, so if he has to tie up women and then kill them, that’s how his laboratory of libido operates.
I mean, this is a movie that starts with fifteen minutes of go go dancing in a barn — I played in a band that practiced in a barn and it’s hard to sing when all you can smell is shit, so I can’t even imagine go go dancing while smelling cow feces — and ends with that same barn and Ann going off with the guy who tried to rape her and Terry finding another young lady to enjoy a game of flats with. Yes, I used a 17th-century term — lesbian sex was thought to look like two playing cards rubbing together — in this article. I bring you quality euphemisms, my friend.
Did you not see Harry Novak’s signature hanging above this? Behind Locked Doors was directed and co-written by Charles Romine, who would go on to make Mysteries of the Gods. In contrast, producer and uncredited co-writer Stanley H. Brassloff made one of the most upsetting softcore movies, Toys Are Not for Children.
This movie looks way better than it should, with great lighting, bright colors, and a room full of gorgeous and dead women — or are they? — posed seductively, along with an off-the-rails room destroying catfight and an ending that blew my mind, as deceased denizens of the strange mansion come back for one last dance with brother and sister into the inferno. This is the kind of movie that makes you stay for all that barn dancing, and you wonder, “When does it get weird? Sam promised me it would get there,” and when it does, you’ll text me and say, “I can’t believe that this is a real movie.” Well, it is, pal. It sure is.
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