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.

Gerard Damiano is probably best known for making Deep Throat, the movie that created porno chic, even if the trend of adult films being accepted was happening for some time. It just so happened that his film had a great title and came along at the right time. Before he made it, he made this, a mondo movie that explains how the world is changing and accepting more sexually oriented entertainment.

While the film mainly concentrates on the titillation of meeting sex workers and female adult performers, it does have Damiano interviewing Mary Philips of N.O.W., gay magazine publisher and activist Arthur Irving, and Jack Nichols and Lige Clark from Gay Magazine. That’s pretty much as far as it goes for showing homosexual material. It does, however, spend more time with Screw publishers Al Goldstein and Jim Buckley, as well as Patrick and Tally Wright having hardcore sex for several seconds along with several female models masturbating.

Somehow, this movie uses Marmalade’s “Reflections of My Life,” which went gold in 1971. I have no idea how they got the rights, which is me saying that Damiano just used it.

Adult stars that appear in this include Tallie Cochrane (Can I Do It ‘Till I Need Glasses?, Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman), Rita Vance (The Kiss of Her Flesh), Kim Pope (The Amazing Transplant), Suzzan Landau (Keyholes Are for Peeping), Alex Mann (I Drink Your Blood), Linda Southern (The Headless Eyes), Patrick Wright (the truck driver at the beginning of Graduation Day), Linda Lovelace, who would soon become a big star in Damiano’s next film.

There’s also an appearance by Damiano’s son, in case you’re wondering if this is still exploitation, and early plaster caster Nancy (who is also in Pornography In New York), who is absolutely stunning as she appears as a normal sexual being in a world of idealized bodies.

So much has, pardon the silly pun, changed since Changes was made. Times Square is now all cleaned up and you can find incest porn in the privacy of your home online. Yet the right still pushes to censor whatever they determine as pornography, as that’s a major part of Plan 2025. Who determines what is art and what is porn? Surely the sex shows in this are filth, but they’re also made for consenting adults. Could the films I love that aren’t pornography be considered porn under these rules? Will owning Jess Franco movies be a crime, the video nasties all over again? This movie makes me consider how far we’ve come but how often we slide back, as even young people today are frighteningly puritanical.

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.