Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Hans Weimar (Tristan Rogers, Robert Scorpio from General Hospital) is a journalist in London writing about au pair girls who starts to investigate Greta (Leena Skoog), a teenage girl who has gone missing. Everyone he meets knows a different version of her, which the movie shows with 3D sequences that the poster promises will put a girl in your lap.

England’s first 3D movie and it’s a Pete Walker sex film. How amazing is culture? Interestingly, the alternate version Three Dimensions of Greta is Four Dimensions of Greta with most of the naughty bits removed, so the fourth dimension is nudity.

Robin Askwith (Confessions of a Pop Performer) is a soccer player, Greta is trapped by gangster Carl Roberts (Alan Curtis), Richard O’Brien shows up years before The Rocky Horror Picture Show and this is totally Akira Kurosawa in that it goes Rashomon and asks us to attempt to determine who Greta really is.

I prefer Pete Walker movies that mix sex and violence. Then again, I do love 3D, even if it’s just a gimmick.  Then again, if the gimmick gets you into the theater — or makes you buy the blu ray — then it’s a good one. I kind of wish that everyone had more, well, dimension to them, which sounds like the kind of thing that someone who watches porn for the plot would say.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Two spy groups, M.A.F.I.A. and S.I.N. — they never tell what those mean — are at war. On the side of good, or M.A.F.I.A., we have Agent Silk Suit (Sal Rogge). The evil, or S.I.N., is led by Dr. Sexus (Bob Oran) and his henchmen Poontang Plenty (Joyana Frederics, The Brick Dollhouse), Bigjob (Rick Wright) and several women wearing the finest lingerie of 1966. Everyone seems like they get along well enough and are all after and his assistant Karen (Lisa Ryan), who uses their invisibility formula to disappear and show up naked. And before long, the good guys and bad guys are on the same side and trying to find that invisibility pill.

This is a world where women suck toes with champagne on them before killing people. 1966 spying was way different, I guess. This was directed by C. Davis Smith, Doris Wishman’s cinematographer, and is like a radio play about Fu Manchu played over softcore action that never really gets all that sexy, except for the aside where a naked woman (June Robert, The Beast Who Killed Women) poses while drinking all that pasteurized liquid.

Knowing that Wishman actually had a cinematographer may short out your central nervous system. This also has some roughie action with a steam torture that doesn’t get all that upsetting. You know how old wrestling magazines used to tell you about the secret world of apartment wrestling? This is like that, shot in New York City places where rent was cheap.

Smith also directed the sex scenes in Wishman’s Satan Was a Lady and Come With Me My Love. Beyond this movie, he also directed File X for Sex: The Story of the Perverted, Graffiti and All My Men under his name and In Flight Service and To Turn a Trick as Charles Andrew. He also edited the video for Run-DMC’s “KIng of Rock.”

I love The Rialto Report, which interviewed Smith, who said of this movie, “People loved spy films at that time. … James Bond movies, I Spy, Get Smart. I figured a sex version would be a good money-maker. And it did ok. I stole all the ideas. The title came from TV series, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and I stole the name of our heroine from the Bond movie, Goldfinger. Except our heroine wasn’t called Pussy Galore but Poontang Plenty! Special Agent 0069, of course.”

He added, “The budget for S.I.N. was $5,000 and I got that from these two stunt men – Sam Stewart and Bob Oran. In fact we shot most of it at Bob’s apartment, which he used as a basic film studio. Sam and Bob were part of the same repertory company that existed making sex films in the 1960s. Sam had an acting part in S.I.N. too. He married one of the regular actresses, Sheila Britt, and they’ve been married ever since.”

Joyana Frederics is like an East Coast Tura Satana, doing karate movies and appearing vaguely Asian. Other than the two adult films she acted in, she appeared in two episodes of Adam-12 and an episode of Ironside.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Ray Dennis Steckler directed this — oh, I mean Sven Christian — and co-wrote it with Herb Robins, the director of The Worm Eaters and The Brainsucker. The two had worked together on The Thrill Killers and The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters. He also plays Lucifer.

Steckler was having a hard time casting the lead, but when Ted Roter, who plays Sinthia’s father, had car trouble, he was picked up by a Sunday school teacher who got the part.

There’s not really any other movie like this.

Look at this description: “Cynthia Kyle enters puberty with a vengeance, murdering her parents as they make love: she’s wanted her father to love only her. Eight years later, she’s free and wants to marry, but nightmares plague her so she seeks psychiatric help. The doctor asks her to describe a dream: it’s long and elaborate with dreams within dreams of Lucifer, Hell, and her parents in various guises. To shed her guilt, the shrink recommends that she commit suicide in her next dream. In it, she falls in love with an artist who reminds her of her father, responds to a woman who finds her attractive, and celebrates her first school-yard kiss. The dream takes her back to her parents’ bedside. Is any cure possible?”

Anyways…

Cynthia, or Sinthia, is played by Shula Roan, AKA Bunny Allister. The only other movie she’s in is The Curious Female. That night, when she goes to sleep, she dreams that she’s in an orgy where everyone starts yelling “Sinthia loves her father!” like she’s Jamie Lloyd trying to get through lunch at Haddonfield High School. That’s because she’s in a special underworld, the hell of people who killed their parents.

She meets Carol (Brett Zeller, The Doll Squad) on a lonely road and follows her home to a mansion in the middle of nowhere that is filled with art painted by Lennie (Ted Royer, using the name Boris Balachoff). She gets a tarot card reading, has a sapphic encounter with Carol and then marries Lennie, who she thinks is her father. Then, she wakes up at her therapist’s office and he tells her to kill herself in the next dream — remember that chestnut? — and Carol and Lennie refuse to allow that to happen.

Somehow, this is not the goofball Steckler but some kind of Kenneth Anger on the cheap and I mean that in the best way I can possibly mean it. It has a heroine that wanted her father so much that she stabbed her parents and burned their house down and now is somehow cured. Except that, well, her new fiancee looks just like her dad once we get to see him.

How do you get out of Hell? You learn to love yourself. One handed.

If you can make it through the wild camera angles and Sinthia yelling, “Daddy!” every few moments, there is something here. Something Weird released it with Satanis: The Devil’s Mass and that’s beyond wonderful. Steckler shows some knowledge of cinematography here and the colors are psychedelic. This is the kind of movie that I love but I also know that when I recommend it to people, they don’t ask me to tell them what I’m watching any longer.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Before Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman made this movie, adult films were black and white smokers played in the back rooms of men’s clubs and social clubs. They were hired by film distributor Alfred N. Sack to make a “color 35mm film of cute girls carousing around with beach balls, or whatever.” Sack made most of his money working with his brother distributing black cinema at a time that it barely existed. He paid the two $7,000.

Comedian Billy Falbo plays Lucky Pierre, who mainly walks into situations where he sees women naked. Unlike many of the nudist films — in which people may have been nude but were engaged in volleyball or other games — this was the first of the nudie cuties, a film where pretty girls got naked in a comedy. In his book A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King, Friedman estimated that there were six hundred ripoffs over the next decade.

You can see a pre-gore film William Kerwin as a man hiring a plumber and Lewis regular Lawrence J. Aberwood’s voice as the announcer as well as pretty ladies including Kay Montie, Pat O’Farrell, Linda Cotton, Dorothy Holbrook, Toni Carroll (her last role; she also appeared on some television and was the first wife of producer David L. Wolper), Gail Jordan and Ginger Hale, who would appear in two other movies for the team,  Goldilocks and the Three Bares and Boin-n-g, as well as Peter Perry Jr.’s The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill.

Filmed in Cutie Color and Skinamascope, this feels like Benny Hill but somehow slow, as if naked women can be boring. In 1961, this was obviously volcanic in its intensity, but today it is a reminder of the wars of the sexual revolution. However, so much of adult moves on from here, so we should look at it as a monument.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

J.G. “Pat” Patterson Jr. only directed and wrote one other movie, The Body Shop, yet he also acted in the movies Moonshine Mountain, Preacherman and Whiskey Mountain, produced Just for the Hell of It, How to Make a Doll, She-Devils On Wheels, The Gruesome Twosome and Axe, and did makeup for Three On a Meathook. He also was the assistant director of Moonshine Mountain.

Born Jr. Junius Gustavious Patterson, he started his entertainment career as Don Brandon, doing an onstage horror show before playing movies, as well as hosting Shock Theater in Charlotte, NC as The Mad Daddy and The Monster of Ceremonies.

Sadly, he died in 1975 from metastatic malignant melanoma but he did leave behind these two films, which are right up my alley, movies made specifically for the Southern drive-in circuit featuring people from North Carolina in stories that folks from that state might be able to relate to.

Unlike The Body Shop, this avoids the heavy gore that you’d expect — well, the opening is intense — and is really about how a murder trial tears apart a small town. Rev. Samuel Moss (Barry Bell, who also was in the Earl Owensby movie Chain Gang 3D and has small parts in Maximum Overdrive and Trick or Treat) is in a loveless marriage with the older Clair (played by Patterson’s wife Nita; she also did makeup for this). He is taken by a young parishioner with a troubled marriage, Marilyn Howard (Katherine Cortez, who was much later in Critters 3) and this leads to — some may claim — their deaths. But who did the killing?

Is it cucked husband Joss Howard (Kenneth G. Sigmon)? A strange man named Mose Cooper (Patterson)? The religious man’s wife? Or someone totally unknown? Whoever it is, they’ve shot up the holy man and as for his lover, “someone ripped her tongue, right out of her head, and damn near ripped her head clean off her body!” And hey, is that Larry Drake in the courtroom? Yes. Before he became a star on L.A. Law, the actor broke in with movies like This Stuff’ll Kill Ya! and Trucker’s Woman.

Reissued as High Voltage, the selling point of this movie is the death device. It makes two appearances, once at the middle of the story and again at the end. This is exploitation, but the chair is never played as anything but the most horrifying invention of all time. Grown men get sick and almost cry, the switch is on for a long time and the final person who gets electrocuted goes out like an unrepentant killer. That’s after a big courtroom reveal and gun battle! Worth Keeter, who would go on to direct Unmasking the Idol, L.A. Bounty, The Order of the Black Eagle, Tales of the Third Dimension in 3-D and numerous episodes of Power Rangers, is one of the people who gets killed.

The strangest thing is that most of the cast is made up of locals who never did another movie, along with professionals like Don Cummins, who wrote the dialogue and also appears in Slithis and Axe as the announcer on the radio and television. He plays District Attorney Grover in this and is one of the better talents, which is faint praise when you can pick up when most of the actors are reading off crew cards. That said, this film is authentic even in how amateur hour the execution ended up.

Cinematographer Darrell Cathcart has the kind of resume that makes me crazy in the greatest of ways, as he was behind the camera for Trucker’s Woman, Death Screams, Final Exam, Lady Grey, Living Legend: The King of Rock and Roll, Wolfman, Seabo and Dark Sunday. A lot of the crew also worked on Axe, which is a movie that I hope that more people watch.

There are some reviews that hate on this film. That feels like punching down. Instead, I found this an incredibly interesting document of a time in film when regional movies could be made, even ones outside of horror.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Note: Images and information in this article come from the J.G. “Pat” Patterson Jr. Tribute Page.