Category Archives: Movie reviews

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Dildo Heaven (2002)

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Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!  

Allow me to play this broken record again, but it’s astounding just how much the moviemaking of Doris Wishman, Bruno Mattei and Jess Franco line up. At the end of all of their careers, there they are, making movies way past their contemporaries, even if it’s shot on video now. As Bruno would make Zombies: The Beginning and Franco would make so many movies in hotel conference rooms with quick zooms into the anatomy of his actresses, Doris would come back to make this film, one that is so close to her past movies even if it looks better when every other director who shot on video was supposedly taking a step down quality wise.

Doris was 89 when she made this and working at the Pink Pussy Cat in Miami — which is in the movie and so is Doris, as well as a photo of Chesty Morgan on the wall — and it allowed her to finally have synch sound in a movie and seemingly look back on her own career. Yet in this movie, she still does all the things you want: the apartment is needlessly over decorated, sex scenes often just show feet rolling around in the bed, dialogue feels like one of those Russian spy stations that are trying to read English phrases to send coded messages and all the men are jerks. And, as if ready to seem like another of my favorite warped directors, Claudio Fragasso, Doris places several stuffed animals in this and they are often zoomed in on.

This is the story of three roommates — Lisa, Beth and Tess — who all want to sleep with their boss. Only Tess has succeed so far, except she’s had to hide her short dark hair and wear a blonde wig to win him over. There’s also a teenage peeper who keeps looking in on the girls and fantasizing about them, which transforms into footage from The Immoral Three. Not to be outdone, but when a TV comes on later, it’s playing Doris’ Love Toy. Never mind that these movies were shot on film and the jump between media is jarring.

That peeping tom also has a dream where he has two penises, which reminds me of the creepy story where Bill Cosby told Keenan Thompson that after he played Fat Albert, “You know, life is good in the movies or whatever, but you just be ready, because when this movie comes out, you’re gonna need two dicks — because women are gonna be all over you.” That pervert also goes to Dr. Faust, who promises that his cream can make his small one eyes monster into a bigger beast. That reminds me of a joke that used to make my dad laugh, even when he was going through dementia.

“Dad, I finally got this penis cream. It’s going to make me so much bigger when I rub it on it.”

“Does it work?”

“They said it might take a few months. But my hands are huge!”

This movie made me overjoyed, as it feels like unlike so many directors, Doris got the opportunity to finish her career on her terms, making a movie that was uniquely hers. She never fit any mold, starting to direct movies much later in life than most and keeping it up way past nearly all of her nudie cutie contemporaries. I’ll think about this film and how the women finally discover that perhaps dildos are better than men — and then a new neighbor knocks on the door — more than any movie I’ll see made in this year or any other.

It feels and looks like sub-VCA porn and never gives you the payoff. And that’s the payoff. And it’s wonderful.

Thanks to the incredible theironcupcake on Letterboxd, whose Doris reviews were an inspiration to me. She even wrote down the lyrics to this film’s theme:

“When love has left and you’re bereft, reach for your dildo
When life’s a mess and fraught with stress, reach for your dildo
When a lover twice caught cheating
Says for you his heart’s still beating
Send him away, don’t let him stay
Reach for your dildo!
My dildo is very close to me, I keep it in my drawer
It’s HIV negative, it has no flaw
Someday I’ll find my love divine and I’ll be overjoyed
But ’til that fateful day, my dildo fills the void
Reach for your dildo!”

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: The Horsemen (1971)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Horsemen was on the CBS Late Movie on October 26, 1973; September 20, 1974 and June 11, 1976.

Uraz (Omar Sharif) is the son of Tursen (Jack Palance), a stable master and retired buzkashi player, a sport in which horse-mounted players attempt to place a goat or calf carcass in a goal. He has lost his honor when he breaks his leg in a game that his father has bet all of the family’s money on, which means he has to learn how to ride and play again, despite most of his leg.

Based on Joseph Kessel’s Les cavaliers, this was scripted by Dalton Trumbo and directed by John Frankenheimer, who loved the movie even if it wasn’t a financial success.

There’s a lot of animal violence in this, so be warned. I mean, it’s a game played with a dead animal, after all. The same game is played in Rambo III, in case you wondered. Like that movie, the Afghanistan of this film is long gone.

It’s a big Hollywood film about a sport and a place that I can imagine very few people were interested in, which makes me interested in it.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: The Blood Beast Terror (1967)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Blood Beast Terror was on the CBS Late Movie on March 8, 1974.

When you mention 1960’s British horror films, most people are going to think of Hammer. Or Amicus. But there’s also Tigon, the very small studio who could, and by could, I mean make some astoundingly strange movies.

Witchfinder General, The Curse of the Crimson Altar, The Blood on Satan’s Claw…these are the movies that make me think that England in 1967 was an insane place to be.

Vernon Sewell directed this thriller about young and good looking men having their throats torn open and drained by a killer so frightening that whomever it is has driven the last eyewitness mad, claiming that a horrible winged creature with huge eyes is the killer.

Detective Inspector Quennell (Peter Cushing) responds by thinking that a giant eagle — no, not the Pittsburgh-based grocery store — has to be the murderer.

If this development has you happy, then good news. This is the kind of stiff upper lip British low budget fun you’re looking for. Yes, I struggled to include this in either the werewolf or vampire weeks we’re planning because it features a weremoth who lives on human blood. A weremoth! What will they think of next!?!

Cushing considered this the worst of his many films. Scanning his vast resume should tell you just how low this must be, but he was acting in as many films as he could to pay for the care of his wife Helene, who was suffering from emphysema. She would die four years later and by all accounts, he never recovered.

This played on double bills with the 1962 Italian film Slaughter of the Vampires.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde was on the CBS Late Movie on February 8, 1974.

Hammer had already made two adaptions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — The Ugly Duckling and The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll. But what if they combined that story with the historical Jack the Ripper and Burke and Hare cases? And what if Jekyll turned into a female Hyde? Now we have a movie!

Dr. Henry Jekyll (Ralph Bates, Lust for a Vampire) has been trying to cure all known illnesses but his friend Professor Robertson (Gerald Sim, Dr. Phibes Rises Again) laughs that by the time his experiments are discovered and used, he’ll be long dead and unable to enjoy his achievements.

Jekyll then abandons his altruistic aims and starts looking for the elixir of life, which he feels uses female hormones that he takes from the bodies of women supplied by William Burke and William Hare, real life murderers that killed people and sold them to doctors for anatomy lessons. Never mind that those murders happened sixty years before the timeline of this film.

Meanwhile, Susan Spencer lives above him and they’re attracted to one another. However, he’s too absorbed by his work to do anything about it. Soon, he’s created a serum that not only changes his character, but transforms him into a gorgeous and amoral woman (Martine Beswick, who is in the first two Bond movies, plays the Queen of Evil in Seizure and was Xaviera Hollander in The Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood) that he calls Mrs. Edwina Hyde. Susan instantly hates her, but her brother Howard (Lewis Fiander, Who Can Kill a Child?) falls for her.

Dr. Jekyll soon learns that his serum requires more female hormones than Burke and Hare can acquire for him. And when they’re finally caught, he’s forced to commit the crimes that the rest of London believes were those of Jack the Ripper. Jekyll hates what he has become, but Hyde loves it, even killing the Professor when he dares question her.

The male and female sides of his/her/its body all go to war with one another with Susan as the prize. Seriously, this is a movie that demands to be remade today.

Sadly, Caroline Munro was nearly Mrs. Hyde, but dropped out when she realized that the film required nudity. That said, Martine Beswick is pretty great in this. She was initially asked to do full frontal nudity and wouldn’t talk to director Roy Ward Baker (Asylum, The Vault of Horror) for a week.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: The Killer Bees (1974)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Killer Bees was on the CBS Late Movie on February 13, 1976.

When I was a kid in the 70s, killer bees were all we heard of. They were obviously going to get us and a story on the news every night for years and then, well…nothing ever happened.

The ABC Movie of the Week on February 26, 1974, The Killer Bees, directed by Curtis Harrington and written by former lawyer John William Corrington and his wife Joyce Hooper, who teamed to write the scripts for Von Richthofen and Brown, The Omega Man, Boxcar Bertha, The Arena and Battle for the Planet of the Apes, as well as several soap operas and the syndicated show Superior Court.

Edward Van Bohlen (Edward Albert) has stayed away from his wine making family until his girlfriend Victoria Wells (Kate Jackson) asks him to go back home and try to reconnect. We all know that you can’t go home again and when your family uses African bees to make your wine better, well, you really should in no way go back home again.

Madame Van Bohlen (Gloria Swanson) not only runs the family and the winery, but the bees as well. She’s able to command them to kill everyone that she sees as a threat, but when she dies, who will the bees follow?

Bette Davis was originally going to be the star of the movie, but her doctor worried that she’d go into anaphylactic shock if she was stung by a bee. As for Gloria Swanson, she was so game for this movie that she agreed to have bees put all over her body. To create this moment, the bees were placed in a dry ice room to make them tired, then gradually warmed once they were put on Ms. Swanson’s costume.

The wine that got made by the Van Bohlen’s must have been good, because their home is now the place where noted winemaker — and yes, director — Francis Ford Coppola lives.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Let Me Die a Woman (1977)

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Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!  

I’ll go anywhere Doris Wishman wants to take me.

Doris is able to be so many directors in her approach and yet remain herself. Here, she’s in the worlds of Ed Wood and Kroger Babb, making a movie that says that it wants to educate you, but really wants to show you graphic surgery of a man’s penis being sliced into a vagina in full detail. In fact, this same footage was used for the South Park episode “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina.”

It features Dr. Leo Wollman, founder of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, now the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which wrote its first Standards of Care for transgender health care. He was also the science and medicine advisor for this movie. You also get interviews and moments with other transgender individuals, include Deborah Hartin, who transitioned in 1970 and became one of the first divorces due to transitioning. She also sued the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene for refusing to update her sex designation on her birth certificate.

Wishman started filming this in 1971 and debated titles like Adam or Eve and Strange/Her. Then she found Leslie, an attractive trans person who would provide the main interview in this film, yet seems to hate nearly every other trans person she’s ever met, even comparing herself at one point to Anita Bryant. This movie has a total Yin/Yang-ness to it; for every positive thing, there’s something truly deranged or negative. You get Dr. Wollman leading a support group in the same movie where there’s a re-enactment where a trans woman can’t wait for her new vagina to heal, so she sleeps with a cab driver and sprays blood between her thighs in graphic detail. And oh yeah, the cab driver? That’s Harry Reems sleeping with Arlana Blue, who was also one of the caged victims in Bloodsucking Freaks, the second murder victim in Massage Parlor Murders! and an adult actress who was in Invasion of the Love Drones, The Vixens of Kung Fu and Joe Sarno’s Confessions of a Young American Housewife.

There’s also a moment where a man uses a sharp blade and a hammer to attempt to remove his member, while you watch. And yes, that is Vanessa Del Rio and if you picked that up without IMDB, I’d shake your hand, but neither of us wants to know where our hands have been for so many years. And that john who gets picked up in the park? That’s Richard Towers, who used the name Greg Reynolds in Deadly Weapons, Tony Armada in Keyholes Are for Peeping, Joe Powers in Fleshpot on 42nd Street and Gaylord St. James when he played Dr. John Collingwood in Last House On the Left.

This ends with a long chroma key sex scene at the end that feels like the kind of images that Black Sabbath would perform in front of on a European variety show and then we’d watch it ten years later on Headbanger’s Ball.

I have no idea how to rate this movie. As a documentary, it’s not good. As trash, it’s amazing. I also understand that this is — at best — an embarrassing film for the trans community to watch. Yet without movies like this and Glen or Glenda, some audiences would have no experience with this community. Part of me would like to think this film’s heart is in the right place, but then again, this is also a movie padded out with softcore inserts. It really is almost a singular film, in the same way — oxymoron, anyone? — that Goodbye Uncle Tom is also trash yet is a fascinating document of how far you can push it.

I mean — when the weirdest part of your movie isn’t a penis gun that shoots fluid and that’s said to be an actual medical device — you know that this is the kind of thing you have to experience.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: The Immoral Three (1975)

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Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!  

There is a Doris Wishman cinematic universe. This is the sequel to Double Agent 73, as Jane Genet (Chesty Morgan, who didn’t come back for this, as she upset Wishman when she cost her a full shooting day the last time they worked together; in her brief moment in the film she’s played by Cindy Boudreau) has died after being strangled while she was sunbathing and her three daughters — who had no idea each other existed — are brought together for the reading of the will by John Erikson (Robert S. Barba).

Ginny (also Boudreau), Sandy (Sandra Kay) and Nancy (Michele Marie) are charged by the will to get revenge for the death of their mother. If they kill her killer — killers? — in a year, they each get $1 million dollars. If one of them dies, they each get $1.5 million and, well, you can do the math if only one survives. If they all die, Erikson gets the money.

Is this a giallo? Holy shit, yes. There’s a black gloved killer on the loose!

There are four suspects for who the killer could be. All four of these men could also be any of their fathers. But before we get to all that story, Kay decides to fellate a banana in front of a gardener, then do the same to him while we see her banana-loving face superimposed over his. It’s mind-numbing in the way all Wishman’s movies can be and it’s just getting started.

Is Doris Wishman the American Jess Franco? Both have a banana lovemaking scene in their films. Or is she the American Bruno Mattei? Both have no issues just outright taking shots from other movies.

Sandy gets attacked by a grocery boy and Ginny makes love in an elevator for no reason other than the fact that she’s a character is a Wishman movie. Everyone has their feet focused on, slow moving on thick shag carpet or rolling in bed. Ginny does all the heavy lifting, heading off to Vegas and New York City, while the others stay in Fresno, but hey — Sandy has an “On Shit” belt buckle, so who are we to deny her lack of need to move this movie forward?

 

Written by Judy J. Kushner (who also wrote the first two movies in this series, Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73) and Robert Jahn (The Yum Yum Girls, Bloodrage), this is one of the most deranged movie I’ve ever seen and imagine the ground that covers. The whole thing ends like Shakespeare and by that I mean — spoiler warning — everyone dies, but not before you find the real dad, you get declarations of love and Doris’ apartment plays Munich.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Dragonslayer (1981)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Dragonslayer was on the CBS Late Movie on February 13, 1987.

After Popeye, this was the second joint production with Paramount of films that were more mature than the expected Disney offerings. That meant that Drahonslayer’s violence, themes and even brief nudity ended up being controversial, despite only being rated PG.

Set the film after the Roman departure from Britain, prior to the arrival of Christianity, the film shows a world of sorcery unlike many others in the genre. Co-writers Hal Barwood (who also wrote The Sugarland Express, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, MacArthur and Corvette Summer, as well as writing and directing Warning Sign and creating video games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis) and Matthew Robins (who wrote Crimson Peak and wrote and directed Batteries Not Included and I would be remiss not to mention that he also directed The Legend of Billie Jean) were inspired to make something new. Barwood said, “our film has no knights in shining armor, no pennants streaming in the breeze, no delicate ladies with diaphanous veils waving from turreted castles, no courtly love, no holy grail. Instead, we set out to create a very strange world with a lot of weird values and customs, steeped in superstition, where the clothes and manners of the people were rough, their homes and villages primitive and their countryside almost primeval, so that the idea of magic would be a natural part of their existence.”

Vermithrax is also one of the best dragons ever made, even forty years after the film’s release. More than 25% of the movie’s budget went to realizing the dragon. This was the first movie to use go-motion, which had parts of the mechanical dragon be programmed and filmed by computer. The forty-foot tall beast was brought to life by sixteen puppeteers. Its full name — Vermithrax Pejorative — means The Worm of Thrace Which Makes Things Worse.

As for the story, it’s all about Galen Bradwarden (Peter MacNicol, who is embarrassed by this movie, perhaps because you can fully see his ween in it) saving Valerian (Caitlin Clarke) from being a virgin sacrifice to the dragon. She’s no damsel in distress, however, as she’d hid her gender identity to help create the sword that can destroy the beast.

But yeah. It’s worth watching for just the dragon.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: It’s Alive (1974)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s Alive was on the CBS Late Movie on July 11 and December 22, 1986 and September 30, 1987.

The TV commercial for It’s Alive terrified me. The music, the slowly turning bassinet, the fact that a demon baby was inside — it was too much for my child brain to handle. I would cover my ears and yell every single time I saw it. The power and memory and latent fear for this thirty seconds created stayed with me for decades, ensuring that I would never watch this film.

Frank and Lenore Davis are excitedly expecting the birth of their second child. They’ve been waiting for years and properly planned the child’s birth, with Lenore using birth control pills until the time was right. However, their infant is a monster, a deformed creature with fangs and claws that is so horrifying, one of the doctors instantly tries to suffocate it. The baby kills the team who delivered it before escaping, leaving a crying Lenore and frightened Frank.

The baby goes on a murderous rampage while Frank denies that the child is his, as a parallel is made to Frankenstein and how Dr. Frankenstein abandoned his creation. It turns out that the birth control drugs Lenore was on may have caused the mutation. To protect their bottom line, they want the child destroyed.

The baby finds its way home, where Lenore embraces her child. Their first son, Chris, becomes homesick (he’d been staying with Charley, a family friend) and returns home, where he meets his sibling and promises to protect him. Frank discovers that the child is being hidden and shoots at it, but the baby escapes and kills Charley.

The police and Frank track the child to the sewer, where the father realizes that the beast is his flesh and blood. Hiding the baby in his coat, Frank tries to escape, but he’s caught by the police. Then, his child leaps from his arms to kill the pharmaceutical company representative who is with the cops. The police open fire, killing the child and the man who he is attacking.

As the police take the Davis family home, we learn that another deformed child has been born in Seattle.

When Larry Cohen completed the film, he learned that the executives who had produced the film were all gone. It’s Alive got a paltry one week run in Chicago and a limited release. Three years later, after that team of executives were replaced, Cohen convinced Warner Brothers to re-release the film with the ad campaign featured above, leading to a successful run.

It’s Alive preys on our worst fears — that our children will grow to become monsters. However, Cohen takes it a step further. These children instantly are monstrous killers.

Two sequels — It Lives Again and It’s Alive 3: Island of the Alive — followed, as well as a remake. The original — shot at the same time as Hell Up in Harlem by a crew that was doing day and night shoots 7 days a week — is an impressive film. Like all Cohen’s work, the idea is stronger than the budget and the final product looks so much better than the dollars it cost to create would suggest.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Embryo (1976)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Embryo was on the CBS Late Movie on February 25 and December 2, 1983 and March 17 and December 8, 1976.

Directed by Ralph Nelson (Charly) and written by Anita Doohan and Jack W. Thomas — who had stopped screenwriting for more than a decade to become a Los Angeles County deputy probation officer and write a series of books on troubled youth — Embryo finds Dr. Paul Holliston (Rock Hudson) living a life of solitude after losing his wife in a car accident, a fact that his sister-in-law/assistant Martha Douglas (Diane Ladd) reminds him of near daily.

One night, he runs over a dog — maybe he should stop driving — and ends up taking that dog’s unborn child and bringing it to healthy — if murderous — life in his lab. If he can play God like that, well, why not bring the unborn child of a suicide victim to life and have her become just about instantly 22 years old and named Victoria (Barbara Carrera)?

Despite how smart Victoria is, she’s also quickly dying as her body is addicted to the immune suppressant drug methotrexate and has no issue killing Martha to keep her origins a secret. And oh yeah — making sweet love to the much older doctor.

The end of this movie is ridiculous and I love it. I mean, rapidly aging clones drinking dead fetus fluids, the doctor watching her kill his son and chasing after her only to learn that she’s having his baby? 70s science fiction carny BS at its finest.

It goes without saying: Barbara Carrera really must have been grown in a lab. I don’t know if that kind of perfection can come from the coupling of a man and woman. It must have some kind of science added to it.

This also has a party scene with Roddy McDowell and Joyce Brothers during which chess is the main source of fun, not drinking. Sure.

Somehow, due to Cine Artists Pictures going out of business this movie is in the public domain.

You can watch this on Tubi.