The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Mary! Mary! (1977)

Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

Somehow, this is one of the better shot movies I’ve seen in some time and I was shocked that it was an adult movie. It also has some generally creepy moments in it to the point that if this was a mainstream movie, it would definitely have a cult audience.

Constance Money, fresh from The Opening of Misty Beethoven, is Mary and the movie opens with her swimming, filmed with underwater cameras and creating some arty ways of exploring her. Soon, she and her husband Ned (John Leslie) are making love poolside and he finishes too soon, enraging her. It seems he has a habit of this, but you know, he’s married to Constance Money. Ned screams to Heaven for help, then when there’s no answer, to Hell. He’s soon met by the shadowy Arranger (a man only listed as Andre), who is almost always in shadowy and constantly doing tai chi moves. He gives Ned a special paste that can be put on his body or eaten and soon, he’s able to satisfy Mary. The problem is that he can’t stop being aroused, which leads to him passing on this Satanic ingredient to so many of his friends and everyone starts having the kind of sex that even makes the Devil jealous.

Soon, Eric (Jon Martin), Jane (Sharon Thorpe, Sodom and Gomorrah: The Last Seven Days), Bonnie (Sandy Pinney, Long Jeanne Silver), Kate (Angela Haze, Devil’s Playground), Briscoe (Tyler Reynolds), Ben (Kent Hall), Diane (Lucia Lenki), Helene (Kristine Heller, Confessions), Ned and Mary are all having an orgy, devouring a pink cake and smearing it all over a table, mixing it with the occult powder and basically doing coke with it and smearing it all over one another.

This is a strange one as it starts happy and full of free love, but there are quirky moments that suggest that this could become a horror movie at any time. By the last two minutes, that’s what it is, as the colors start to warp, people start to have little deaths and big deaths during a gigantic lovemaking session between the cast and the Arranger dances around all of them to the bongo beat of Hands Benedict. Then, as everyone lies dying or dead, he picks up Mary and tells her that he saved her, as he has plans for her as they disappear into the Hollywood hills.

Mary! Mary! was directed and written by Bernard Morris, which is a pseudonym. Another alter ego is cinematographer Hans Kristian, who is really Henning Schellerup, the cinematographer of Silent Night, Deadly Night; Kiss of the Tarantula and The Lincoln Conspiracy, as well as the director of In Search of Historic Jesus and Beyond Death’s Door.

Most incredibly, this has the kind of car chase that should be in a 70s action movie instead of pornography. As Hank, Bonnie and Kate speed to the party nude, they’re nearly arrested by the police, played by a blink and you miss her Rene Bond and Ken Scudder from Thundercrack! I couldn’t believe just how amazing this film gets in this scene and in the psychedelic ending, as each person dies and the screen looks like a black light poster. There’s even a scene where Mary and Ned eat steak while having sex, rubbing greasy cuts all over one another. It’s just weird and I mean that in the way that this movie becomes fascinating and even disturbing as they Ned showers her with red wine, making it seem like the two are devouring raw flesh.

This movie blew me away.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Please Don’t Eat My Mother (1973)

Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

We live in the magical kind of world where someone can make a sexy version of Little Shop of Horrors and I think that’s great. By someone, I mean director Carl Monson (The Acid Eaters, Legacy of Blood), writer Eric Norden (A Scream In the Streets) and produced Harry Novak.

Henry (Buck Kartalian, Julius from Planet of the Apes) is a lonely man who lives with his mother Clarice (Lyn Lundgren) who finds a plant that he turns into his friend. That plant has a voice like a sexy woman and likes to eat meat, starting with bug, then frogs, dogs, cats and people. It wants pretty ladies, like the centerfolds — Karen Christy (Miss December 1971) and Danielle De Vabre (Miss November 1971) — hanging up in Henry’s room.

Despite the title, his mother does get chowed down on, as does a cop (Monson), a next door neighbor (Rick Lutze) and that man’s wife, who decides to take Harry’s virginity before the now male and female plants eat her. Seeing as how she’s Rene Bond, this is quite a loss.

Harry decides he’s going to kill his plants — Eve and Adam — but once they have babies, he lets them live. I guess it’s back to being a peeping tom for him, as long as the plants don’t decide to make a meal of him.

You have to laugh at a movie that has Rene Bond worry that her husband is going to leave her because she’s flat chested. If she is, this must be Earth-Russ, the planet where every woman has mammaries that are half their body weight. Also known as The Hungry Pets and Sexpot Swingers.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

SHAWGUST: Fangs of the Cobra (1977)

Ah Fen (Hsiao Yao) is best friends with Xi Xi. Just look at them having fun in the fields together.

Xi Xi is a snake.

Ah Fen is his owner.

Rich college boy Tang Shi-De (Tsung Hua) is in love with Ah Fen.

And then there’s Man-Ling (Dana), who has a plan with her lover Hu Lin (Frankie Wei Hung) where she’ll seduce Shi-De and steal his family’s money.

Hu Lin has some of his gang kidnap Man-Ling and Tang Shi-De, but they get Ah Fen instead. The poor daughter of a farmer and child of high caste fall in love and get married, so Hu Lin tries to blow up their limo, but the bomb gets foiled by the snake. Yes, this really happens.

But Shi-De hates Xi Xi.

He hates all snakes.

A snake killed his mother.

Now he’s forced his wife to leave her reptile friend forever, just in time for Hu Lin to try and kill her again.

As if that’s not enough, it feels like there’s a sex scene between Man-Ling and Hu Lin every few seconds.

Ah, Shaw Brothers, you are more than just martial arts. You have directors like Sun Chung, who also made Human Lanterns and The Devil’s Mirror, creating movies where gorgeous actresses handle cobras and a mongoose vs. snake scene is the best fight in the whole film. Actually, this movie, if anything, needs more Xi Xi and less humans.

SHAWGUST: Five Elements Ninjas (1982)

Chang Cheh directed ninety movies from 1965 to 1993*, as well as all of the lyrics to the songs within his films. The majority of his most well-known movies in the west feature the Venom Mob of Kuo Chui, Lu Feng, Chiang Sheng, Sun Chien, Lo Mang (along with Wei Pai), a group of martial arts masters who appeared together and separately across numerous Shaw Brothers films.

Also known as Super Ninjas, Chinese Super Ninjas and Chinese Super Ninja, this movie seems as if the weirdest and most violence obsessed kid in your grade school class was suddenly given enough money to stop scribbling in his notebooks and instead allowed to make a movie that is pretty much non-stop ninjas horribly murdering one another.

This is quite frankly the highest praise that I can give to a movie.

I mean, let me sum up the first five minutes: Chief Hong (Chan Shen) has challenged his rival Yuan Zeng (Kwan Fung) for the title of martial arts master, which mostly entails sending each others’ students after one another in battles to the death. Hong has cheapened these wars of honor by inviting a foreign samurai to the contest. He kills one of Zeng’s students before being stopped by Liang Zhi Sheng (Lo Mang). Before he commits seppuku, he throws a spiked ring to Zeng, which poisons the master and keeps him from doing kung fu until he heals.

There’s no time to heal, as a new challenge arises from the Five-Element Ninjas. Zeng asks Sheng and Tian Hao (Cheng Tien Chi) to fortify the school while ten of his best men answer the challenge. What follows is a series of increasingly brighter colored ninjas basically showing you every Mortal Kombat fatality nearly a decade before the game came out. The ninjas also send Senji (Chen Pei-Hsi) to infiltrate the school. Yes, Hong and Mudou (Michael Chan, who didn’t just play triad gangster roles, but left the police to become one), the leader of the ninjas, are pretty much the winners before the fight even gets started.

Within a few weeks, she has mapped out the entire school and Mudou’s ninjas attack as she offers herself to Sheng. He refuses her, but allows her to play the flute for him. As she entertains him, everyone in the school except for Hao, who escapes and visits his old ninja master. Joined by four other fighters, he challenges the Five-Elements Ninjas and Mudou, who has killed Hong and taken the title of master.

This movie is quite frankly amazing. It blew my mind throughout and never lets up, like a children’s show that has wall-to-wall gore. As the first movie in our week of Hong Kong films, it has set a high bar which other films will really have to battle to scale and exceed.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*The Legend of the 7 Golden VampiresFive Deadly Venoms and Crippled Avengers to name a few.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Angel Above – The Devil Below (1974)

Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

The adult films of the 70s and the occult cross over pretty often, inspiring movies like The Devil In Miss JonesHigh Priestess of Sexual WitchcraftSex Ritual of the Occult and so many more. In director Dominic Bolla and writer Jon Cutaia’s Angel Above — The Devil Blow, a teen named Randy Maldemar (Linda York, using the name Brittany Laine; she’s also in A Scream In the Streets and Panorama Blue) conjures up Satan (Lamar Gilbert) with the Necronomicon — the Simon one? — and black candles on her bedroom table. She proclaims that the devil isn’t attractive enough, so she spurns him, which leads to him infiltrating her holiest of holes and speaking through it, as this becomes The Exorcist but, you know, with more penetration even though the inspiration also has crucifix diddling.

Her mother Turgid (Starlyn Simone, Video Vixens!) attempts to help her by talking to her about sex, but when your daughter has a pre-Chatterbox possessed vagina that can’t be satisfied, the problem needs more than just the talk. Even modern medicine and psychiatry — Dr. I.M. Moribund (Chesley Noone) and Dr. Max Wanker (Nimrod Sappho), come on down — aren’t enough. She nearly eats Wanker’s tongue and launches another man down the stairs. Meanwhile, her mother is too busy sleeping with handyman George (Robert Bedford) and politician Lucius Watergag (John Keith), using the same trick of bending over and looking for the booze they’ve asked for. I was half expecting her to pull out a bottle of J&B at this point.

The only people who might be able to help her are Bible salesmen Peter (John Barnum) and Dennis Harp (Robbie Roberson), who arrive just in time. Sure, Registered Nurse Prudence Enfusoria is being assaulted by the handyman downstairs, but somehow Dennis falls in love with the devil-owned Randy and his strong, confident and romantic lovemaking is enough to push the Devil out of her and…into the nether regions of se Prudence. And she’s played by Rene Bond, so of course if I were a demon who could infiltrate the anatomy of women, that’s exactly where I would enter the devil, so to speak.

Beyond just Chatterbox, this predates another talking ladyparts movie, Le sexe qui parle. I have no idea who wanted this in the 70s, but someone did.

Bolla only made this movie, while Cutaia would go on to make the adult film Judgement Day in which Saint Peter stands before Heaven and reviews the final sex acts of numerous dead people. It has an actress named Morning Star in it, which is another name for Lucifer, in case you want to get hellish.

It’s kind of incredible that this movie exists, another version of the possession movies that I love so much, except, you know, with adult moments. I laughed out loud quite a few times during this and it actually has some cool effects, using slow motion and its small budget to be way more effective than it should be.

The amazing Barefoot and Independent YouTube page has posted a PG cut of this, which is about a quarter of the film’s length. But hey — you could watch it at work. Maybe.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: A Name for Evil (1973)

Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

I know Bernard Girard more for the movies he didn’t finish — he was replaced with Lee H. Katzin on What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? by producer Robert Aldrich and started the movie We’re All Crazy Now with The Runaways that was completed by director Alan Sacks and released as Du-beat-e-o — but he did actually direct some efforts, including The Rebel SetThis Woman Is DangerousThe Happiness CageThe Mad Room, Gone With the West and Dead Heat On a Merry-Go-Round. He also directed and wrote this movie and man, why are people not clamoring for this to get a blu ray release?

John Blake (Robert Culp) is dissatisfied with the rat race and dealing with the pressures of his family’s architecture business. So he takes his wife Joanna (Samantha Eggar) and moves into his great grandfather’s home The Grove in the countryside and you know what happens when city folk go back to their roots in 1970s movies.

Distributed by Cinerama Releasing Corporation — who also released AsylumWalking TallThe Vault of Horror, The MackAnd Now the Screaming Starts!Terror In the Wax MuseumThe Harrad ExperimentYour Three Minutes Are UpDr. Death: Seeker of SoulsThe PyxArnold and Marco all in 1973 — and produced by Penthouse — which will make sense in a little — this starts strange when everyone back home refers to John’s grandfather as The Colonel and many of them want nothing to do with him. Even the man he hires to renovate the house — Clarence “Big” Miller (blues singer Big Miller, who was the title character in Big Meat Eater) — seems to think that The Colonel doesn’t want John there. His wife doesn’t want to be there either, but there are times that it seems that she loves him and others like she might as well be a ghost.

This was shelved by MGM because it made so little sense. It was based on a novel by Andrew Lytle and that book was a definite ghost story. This can’t make up its mind. That voice saying “Go away” also feels the same way. Just when everything feels dreary, John walks out of his house and finds a white horse that brings him to town and soon has him participating in an orgy set to a live performance of Billy Joe Royal singing “Mountain Woman.” Soon, he’s making love to Luanna Baxter (Sheila Sullivan, AKA Sheila Culp, the wife of our lead actor at the time) and running through the woods completely naked. Yes, Robert Culp, star of I Spy, dashing full dong through a meadow and making love in a waterfall.

Yet when he gets home, his wife claims that he had rough sex with her that night and couldn’t stop touching himself. Was it him? Or was it The Colonel? Or could it be all of those things, as this movie seems to have multiple timeline all within one movie. It all ends with Eggar slashing Culp with a straight razor and him throwing her out the same window that he tossed their TV out of at the beginning of the movie.

I’m not saying this is a good movie, but I am saying that it’s a film with an orgy scene that feels like it could be in The Wicker Man except that everyone eats spaghetti — to be fair, I was once a guest at an OTO lodge party where everyone was eating bowl after bowl of guacamole with no chips, just spoons — before doing a line dance and then having sex and hey, there’s Rene Bond to remind you that Penthouse bought this three years after MGM threw it away. It’s like Antichrist without the cock violence, Dark August but horny, the 70s hippy aesthetic fighting with a movie that wants to be to be something more than it is but possibly made by a director who has no idea how to bring the movie inside his head onto the celluloid. He claimed that it was about “a modern man’s attempt to get away from his contemporary hang-ups by returning to his ancestral home.”

As for Culp, he told The Bucks County Courier, “This is the kind of picture you wait for your whole life.” He also said, “The story is that I decided to do it because I couldn’t understand it. “It’s true, I didn’t understand it. But that was because there were 3 pages of the climax missing!”

The amazing caligula.org site has a great article on this film, which explains how Caligula wasn’t really Penthouse’s first movie.

“There is no telling what condition the movie was in when Penthouse Pictures acquired it. It may or may not have still been the authentic version. It may well have been tampered with by Stone et al or some emissary thereof. But it is unquestionable that Penthouse commissioned a firm to film something new, and it was actually quite beautiful to look at: a psychedelic multiple exposure of a topless dancer, as well as a dancer in a skeleton outfit, all accompanied by an acoustic guitar. That footage was intercut into a domestic scene, as though it were a flashback of some sort. But by the time the movie finishes, we realize that it was not a flashback after all; it was merely meddling by Penthouse. Penthouse further enhanced the film with a country singer surrounded by three nude women.”

Billy Joe Royal’s performance was force-fitted into the scene of the hoedown, but the footage simply did not match, and the intercutting is rather jarring. I wish I could see how the scene originally played. Penthouse then hired an editor to simplify the movie, cutting it down to 74 minutes. In this short version, characters and relationships were never developed or explored, leaving so many loose ends that it’s no wonder people had trouble following the narrative. I would guess that the original was far more ambiguous and a bit challenging, and that the haunted-house story was a suggestion, planted into disordered minds, that flowered under duress. It was surely not only the Robert Culp character who was affected, but the Eggar character too, as well as many others.”

Penthouse replaced the credits with some crazy paintings, then this played theaters and drive-ins on double features with Asylum and The Vault of Horror. Penthouse Pictures Inc. went out of business after this and was replaced by Penthouse Productions, Ltd., which put out Good to See You Again, Alice Cooper and Watched, which were four-walled. They also invested in ChinatownDay of the Locust and The Longest Yard.

You can watch this on YouTube.

SHAWGUST: Corpse Mania (1981)

Not all slashers are domestic, as we again test the “Is it giallo or is it slasher?” game with the Shaw Brothers-produced 1981 film Corpse Mania. It’s directed by Chih-Hung Kuei, who would go on to create the strange Curse of Evil and the “I don’t have a word good enough to properly convent the level of strange” film The Boxer’s Omen.

Inspector Chang is beginning to figure out that all of the dead bodies in his area all were visitors to the brothel of one Madam Lan and all fingers point to Mr. Li, a man who has already been jailed for defiling corpses, which really doesn’t seem like the kind of crime you get out of jail for due to good behavior.

Sure, you might know who the killer is from the moment the movie starts, but give this points for his bandaged get-up, inventive stalking scenes and not shying away from the gore, including a scene where the killer gets a corpse ready for, well, love and then admires it the more it draws maggots.

From real maggots crawling all over its actresses and astounding blasts of blood to a dummy thrown off a roof that’s so fake that Lucio Fulci would stand up and laugh out loud, this movie has it all. It’s fog and mood suggest a Hong Kong Blood and Black Lace if  Bava decided to take a break from all the sexualized violence to deliver a kung fu sequence.

SHAWGUST: The Convict Killer (1980)

Also known as Iron Chain Assassin and Iron Chain Fighter, this Chor Yuen-directed revenge movie about Teng Piao (Ti Lung), who has been released from jail after 15 years for a crime he didn’t commit. He wants revenge on the person who sent him behind bars, Black Leopard and his seven killers, and teams with Shang Lin (Li Ching), a widow who lost her husband to the same killer, to find him.

A modern Shaw Brothers film — set in the early 20th century, but there are even guns — this has a true bad ass hero in Teng Piao, a man in a black hat who has taken the chain that kept him stuck in his cell all these years and now uses it as a weapon. He has no idea who the Black Leopard is, other than he has a tattoo on his chest of a jungle cat. There’s also a knife thrower named Mr. Du (Liu Yung) who may or may not be on the side of our hero and Zhou Bai (Jason Piao Pai), the boss of the town who may be one of the seven killers along with his six brothers.

This feels close to a hardboiled detective story as much as a martial arts movie. I’d love to see more with this style; there are some that feel this has too much exposition and not enough combat, but I enjoyed every moment.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Heads or Tails (1973)

Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

Directed and written by James Chiara in his only filmed work, Heads or Tails is Harry (Matt Hewitt, Hollywood Babylon) as a virginal office worker whose life is pretty much the worst. His boss Mr. Bennett (John Barnum, The Cremators) treats him like garbage and even his secretary Marsha (Rene Bond) is rude to him. When client Yolanda Wainwright (Uschi Digard) tells him how dumb he is, he’s at rock bottom.

That night, he meets a magician (Harvey Whippsnake) who gives him a pill that he claims will fix his life. Back home, he takes it and four women — Do-It (Becky Sharpe appearing as Becky Pearlman; she was in Angie Baby), Right-Guard (Starlyn Simone, using her Michelle Simone stage name, she’s also in A Climax of Blue Power as Linda Harris), Delicious (Sandy Carey, Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman) and Show-Me (Kathy Hilton, Poor Cecily) — show up and make sweet love to him before disappearing. He finally gets lucky and ends up making love to all of them at the same time.

That’s the softcore version.

A couple of years later, this was re-released as Honey Buns and has a totally inserted scene in which a businessman (John Seeman, who had 116 adult roles and had to be exhausted) has a meeting of sorts with Joan Devlon (Night Caller) and Monique Cardin (who was in a movie called Baby Rosemary). There are other inserts that make it seem like Bond is having sex — not that she didn’t on film — but it’s not her.

That magician looks like Temu Dr. Demento.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Country Cuzzins (1972)

Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

Billie Joe Peabody (Rene Bond) is gorgeous, so perfect and beautiful — look, it’s Rene Bond — that her male relatives chase her all day long, hoping to get to touch her. Breaking up these shenanigans is when Grandma Peabody (Zena Foster, The Corpse Grinders) decides she wants the entire family to get together before she dies. That family would be Leroy (John Tull, the assistant director of C.B. Hustlers, Drive-In Massacre and The Witch Who Came from the Sea), Jenny (Pamella Princess), Jeff (Mark Buckalew in his only acting job; he was a gaffer, best boy or assistant director on productions like ButterflyJust Before DawnMasters of the Universe and Sweatin’ to the Oldies 2), Jeeter (Steven Hodge) and Fester (Jack Richesin), as well as Prudence (Ellen Stephens), who left the country for the big city.

Prudence ends up having a great time — the moonshines helps — and drunkenly asks the family to come visit her for a party, if they’re ever in town. Well, they soon are. And she regrets it, as she thinks they’ll embarrass her. So all her friends dress like hillbillies and the Peabody family shows up looking normal. Fester tells her not to worry, as they’re still family. He also brought the goat that she won in a chicken chase at the party.

At the party, Billie Joe meets agent Walter Wimpy, who is George “Buck” Flower doing a Paul Lynde impression, except that he’s trying to get her naked and doesn’t care about her singing career. No matter what Flower did in his career — and he did so much — he got to do a simulated sex scene with Rene Bond which has to be like walking on the surface of the moon or being able to read minds for real. His character has a bad heart and dies and you know, I’m exhausted by life and nowhere close to as old as Flower looks here — he’s 17 years younger when this was made than I am now — but if you’re going to go into sweet oblivion, how else should you leave this reality?

Director and writer Bethel Buckalew lived to be 94 and made nine movies — Tobacco RoddyMidnite PlowboySouthern ComfortsBelow the BeltThe Dirty Mind of Young SallySassy Sue, Mag Wheels (a vansploitation movie I haven’t seen!) and My Boys Are Good Boys — with most of them being filmed for producer Harry Novak.

There are so many country softcore movies and you know, I’ve seen a lot of them. I could blame Cinemax After Dark but I know that only I am to blame.