Joe Sarno week (June 16 – 22) Joe Sarno was called the Bergman of 42nd St, but don’t let that stop you from watching his movies! He was able to shape dramatic stories that were entertaining and of-the-moment while working with tight budgets and inexperienced performers but he never lost sight of why people were buying the tickets – HOT SEX!
After her mother dies, Inga (former ballet dancer Marie Liljedahl, who really hit the trifecta of late sixties sleaze being in this Joe Sarno movie and its sequel The Seduction of Inga, Massimo Dallamano’s Dorian Gray and Jess Franco’s Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion; she retired from acting by the time she was 21) goes to live with her aunt Greta (Monica Strömmerstedt), who only wants to set her up with a rich older man named Einar (Thomas Ungewitter) and make money off of her. Yet once Inga meets Karl (Casten Lassen) — her aunt’s younger lover — she runs from this rich world of decadence.
In November of 1969, the police busted into the Dakota Theater in Grand Forks, ND and arrested the manager and the projectionist, charging them with running an obscene film. They were found not guilty, which was a major step toward legally showing pornography.
That said — this is quite tame by today’s standards. And it’s filled with so much story and emotional content, it’s hard to compare it to what pornography has become.
There’s a gorgeous scene in the beginning of this as Inga, nude but for a diaphanous nightgown, takes a series of wind-up toys and lets them race across the floor in front of her. Inga continues to return to these toys as her sexuality is awakened and her innocence left behind.
The film is just as much about Greta, a gorgeous yet aging woman clinging to her youth by dating increasingly younger men which comes with it a price: these young men need money to stay around, not love or sex.
Sometimes, the feeling of sin is better than the sin itself.
Named in honor of the wild collections of short genre fiction curated by the luminary author Harlan Ellison, CFF’s Dangerous Visions block has long been the dark heart of their short film program each year, and this year, there were too many fantastic horror and sci-fi shorts for a single block to contain them so they’ve expanded things to include our virtual SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE DANGEROUS VISIONS block. No summer spent at Camp CFF is complete without the heaping helping of HOLY SHIT that are these two blocks!
13th Night (2024): Directed by Benjamin Percy, this is a film all about the lengths a father will undertake to save his daughter, who has become ill with a chronic condition. It starts with the subtitle “sounds of murder” and we see a man taking a Polaroid photo of someone he has killed via s shovel to the throat before cutting to the title.
The long haired man who did the killing comes home to his daughter, asleep in bed as cartoons play on the TV. He has a massive arsenal of bladed weapons, just as she has an array of prescriptions near her nightlight. He falls asleep after drinking — and checking the locks to the basement — before discovering that all of the locks have been removed. A strange man in a suit and American tie appears, says “Hello, Jacob. It’s time.” He passes the demonic figure the Polaroid of his last murder and is told on the 13th of the next month, he must kill again. The always smiling man passes pills to him and tells Jacob that he didn’t promise a cure for his daughter, but he did tell her that she will have a heartbeat. However, their arrangement can end tonight if he wants his daughter to die.
Then, the demon appears to his daughter and Jacob knows that he’s stuck in this arrangement.
This short has some confident camera work, gorgeous lighting and really solid sound design. In fact, I’d love to see this become a full length feature, as it feels like there’s so much more of the story to tell. You can learn more on the official site.
Butterscotch (2023): A young boy (Reid McConville) spends several moments in a nursing home tormenting a man (Clifford Deeds) who obviously can’t move and may not be aware of what is happening around him. As the child whistles and waves in front of his face, we notice that the entire room is blue and the only other color is provided by the comic book red hue of the kid’s hair. He steals a piece of butterscotch candy from the man — I’ve often heard only old people like this candy, so I must have been old my whole life — and then notices that the senior citizen is sticking his tongue out at him and bugging his eyes. I won’t spoil what happens next in director Alexander Lee Deeds’ short but sometimes, people get what they deserve.
Hi! You Are Currently Being Recorded (2023): Kyle Garrett Greenberg and Anna Maguire directed and wrote this short, which stars Maguire. She plays Anna, who is visiting a new lover in Los Angeles. We notice that her kitchen has wine and weed, which she uses before she goes out the door and talks on the phone with a friend, discussing how easy it is to get lost here, how everything feels so extra. Before too long, all the neighborhood watch signs seem to come alive and the idea that everyone is filming her becomes too much to bear. This takes the horror in the mundane, the everyday and shows how we can feel like an alien within our own world, even if it’s just in a different city. I once got lost in Tokyo trying to make a pay phone call and couldn’t remember which of the many similar apartment buildings my friend lived in. I just wandered the streets until he found me and he just laughed. This is sort of like that and kind of like how I tried to take a video of a cute dog last week to show my wife and a neighbor — with faith over fear and Trump flags all over her house — came out and accused me to potentially stealing her dog. Have you ever tried to steal a chihuahua?
Let’s Go Disco (2024): Austin Lewis, along with writers Jake Gates Smith, Alexis Stier and Megan Stier created this tale of a woman trapped inside, you guessed it, a disco. The colors as if they’re living in a Mario Bava nightmare and the pulsing beat was enough to set my dog barking. Fog fills the air as the disco ball spins and soon, she finds her way to a table of people who know her but she has no clue who they are. She overhears stories of people getting killed by an axe murderer as laughter fills the soundtrack and even drinks being delivered feel sinister. The cab ride home is no escape either and she comes back all over again, as the girls become more violent with her, saying that she’s going to stay there and do whatever they say.
Wow. Just wow. This movie knocked me out. You have to see it whenever you get the opportunity because it looks and plays perfect, getting more done in its 12 minute run time than any film that I’ve seen go over two hours. If you’ve ever felt trapped in public, this will make your hands shake as much as it did mine. Also: So much screaming.
Accidental Stars (2024): Aspiring actress Nerissa (Madeleine Charmaine Morrell) has been attending David’s (Kyle Minshew) acting class as part of her dream of being a star. But it’s not enough and if she wants to have him love her work, she needs to be part of his private lessons. Yet all the pressure is seemingly too much for her. After all, this starts with the T.S. Elliot line from Hysteria, “As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill.”
Directed and written by Emily Bennett, this makes the experience of acting feel like being a captive. I wonder if that’s what it’s like. I’ve found that being a writer is like having homework every day for the rest of your life, so maybe dreams kind of come true, even if you’re not ready for what they are.
Maybe I’m glad I never became an actor.
The Influencer (2023): Director and writer Lael Rogers has made a tale of a social media influencer whose dream day is being able to harvest the eyes and minds of her followers as she reaches for immortality. I mean, all those numbers on the live stream have to go somewhere.
This not only embodies the influencer characters that the characters — Ivy (Deisy Patiño), Shea (Laura Hetherington) and Madison (Mackenzie Wynn) — are all about, but the film effortlessly makes the switch over to horror with no issues, as the true influencer (Bria Condon) rises from the sea and guides the women to the sea.
Now I understand why”You all give me life” sounds so horrifying.
Pitstop (2024): A prisoner, Quinn (Emily Sweet) and a guard, Hannah (Mary Rose Branick) are stranded and out of gas. I’d say this only happens in movies, but it used to happen to my in laws all the time. The dialogue suggests that the world they live in is split between a walled-off city run by the government and a resistance who lives outside the walls. Quinn tries to reach out to Hannah and explain what she believes to be the truth, but she refuses to listen.
Quinn has been playing with a paperclip and is able to unlock her handcuffs, which causes the two to fight. As Hannah discharges her weapon, they hear a growl which belongs to a creature (Deryk Wehrley) that can embody your worst fear. Somehow, this brings the two closer or at least able to talk to one another. I really liked how director and writer David A. Flores has put together this story and I’d love to see where these two characters go next.
Souling (2023): An unsuspecting woman (Jacquelyn Ferguson, who also directed and wrote this with Jason Anders, who is one of the disturbing people who gather) finds herself at the center of an ancient Pagan tradition when she was just trying to take a bubble bath.
According to the filmmakers, this modern-day folk tale was inspired by a medieval practice that led to trick-or-treating. There’s a banquet put in front of the woman, who stares at the sack masked faces of those who have sat around her table, finally grabbing fistfuls of food and devouring it before enlightenment arrives.
While I’m not entirely sure what it all means, but I did learn that Souling was done during Allhallowtide and Christmastide. It included eating soul cakes (“sets of square farthing cakes with currants in the centre”) singing, carrying lanterns, wearing a costume, setting bonfires, playing divination games (including one that has been slightly altered to become bobbing for apples), carrying a horse’s head around and performances.
I kind of want to try Souling now.
The Thaw (2023): In 19th century Vermont, a young woman named Ruth (Emily Bennett) watches as her parents Alma (Toby Poser) and Timothy (Jeffrey Grover) drink sleeping tea in order to survive the harsh winter. They can only be awakened in the spring and she will be left alone, allowed to slaughter the sheep if she needs to. However, seeing as how this is a New England folk horror story, things don’t work out as they planned as there’s an early thaw.
Directed and written by Sean Temple and Sarah Wisner, this finds Ruth in this situation because her husband has returned her to her family. She speaks to her mother and cries, “He said I wasn‘t worth the cost of my keep.” Men are uniformly horrible to women in this, blamed for everything, including making the tea incorrectly, which keeps Alma asleep as if she were dead. Now, Timothy is filled with a hunger that can’t end and as they run out of canned and live food, he may start turning his eye to the living. Or, in the case of Alma, the asleep.
Filmed in black and white, this is stunning. Its monotone look and setting will remind some of Robert Eggers, but this can definitely stand on its own. In fact, it deserves to be its own full length feature.
Dream Creep (2023): David (Ian Edlund) and Suzy (Sidney Jayne Hunt) are asleep when she wakes him up. Someone is in their room and wants to attack her. However, they soon learn that the sounds that she hears are coming from inside her ear. The voice soon tells him that if he wakes her up, she’ll die. Well, what happens if she stays asleep?
Director and writer Carlos A.F. Lopez does so much with sound design and pacing in this. This is the kind of movie that you’ll wake up and think about as you watch your partner sleeps and hope that you never go through the horrific moments that these two do. It saves the grisly parts for the close but don’t worry. They’re coming.
You can watch so many of the films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. I’ll be be posting reviews and articles over the next few days, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
New Line was doing so well with Freddy that they thought that they could do the same with Leatherface, not realizing that while he’s the most out front member of the Sawyer Family, there is an entire brood to tell the stories about.
The final film to get an X before NC-17 was created, I will say that this movie brings the gore, even after the battle between the MPAA and New Line. I mean, the movie starts off with Leatherface taking off a woman’s face, so know what you’re getting into. Yet this was submitted eleven times for a review and most of the gore was lost; this was after the original script by David J. Schow (who also wrote the scripts for The Crow, Critters 3 and 4 and many other movies) had a naked man being literally sliced into two pieces. I assume the MPAA had more issues with seeing a nude man than the gore.
The original trailer for this might be better than the actual movie — that’s Kane Hodder as Leatherface! — but you can’t deny a movie that has Ken Foree and Viggo Mortensen in the cast. And hey — Caroline Williams shows up in a cameo as Stretch, now a reporter.
This starts off going for it, as Leatherface kills a woman and skins her face for a mask while her sister Sara (Toni Hudson, Denise in Just One of the Guys) watches. We then meet Michelle (Kate Hodge), Ryan (William Butler) and Benny (Foree), who will be menaced by this film’s version of the Sawyer family, which includes Edward “Tex” Sawyer (Viggo Mortensen), Tinker “Tink” Sawyer (Jow Unger), “Mama” Anne Sawyer (Miriam Byrd-Nethery), Alfredo Sawyer (Tom Everett) and a little girl (Jennifer Banko).
Before long, Leatherface has killed Sara — after murdering her entire family — and caught Ryan in a bear trap. Michelle is taken into the Sawyer home and saved only when Benny shoots like ten thousand bullets into it, but hey, we still have Leatherface with a golden chainsaw that has “The saw is family written on it.
Burr wanted to shoot the film in Texas using 16 mm film just like the original, but New Line turned him down, as they had already built the house in California. I mean, they also shot that trailer before they had a script or a director, so all they cared about was money. That same house was used in Alice Cooper’s “House Of Fire” video. They also wanted Peter Jackson to direct.
Benny and Leatherface both died in the original cut, but New Line shot a new ending with editor Michael N. Knue in which both characters survive after test screenings replied well to Foree’s character. Burr was shocked when he saw this in the movies, as he was never told there was a new ending.
This was also shot so close to a Six Flags that you can hear screaming all over the movie even when it may not need it.
This was cut to pieces — and not like how the Sawyers want to slice things up — to avoid an X rating. That’s why it had to be exciting to see Jeff Burr’s work print of this at CFF.
Speaking of the fest, you can watch so many of films by buying a pass on their website. I’ll be posting reviews and articles over the next few days, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
This film was described as “An exploration of one’s relationships with food, sexuality, and revenge.”
Director and writer Aimee Kuge wrote this movie while experiencing a period of disordered eating and the end of toxic relationships. That led to a movie about an introverted nerd — Mark — who finds himself dangerously deep inside the crazy world of mukbanging after he falls head over heels for a mysterious woman named Ash. She’s super into mukbanging so he finds himself getting into it.
Also: Murder.
What is mukbanging?
The term is from South Korean and means “eating broadcast.” There, professional mukbangers make up to $10,000 a month not including sponsorships from food and drink brands. Basically, they eat huge amounts of food while interacting with their viewers.
Cannibal Mukbang is one strange movie and it looks really gorgeous. I’m excited to see what Kuge does next.
You can watch this and so many of the films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. I’ll be posting reviews and articles over the next few days, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
At 67 minutes, Obsession packs more wildness into every second than nine other movies that you’ll see this year.
Madisyn (Aubrey Madisyn) and Paris (Payton Pinkston) are best friends and cousins. Every day, they wake up, get on social media and post their getting ready videos. Today is Madisyn and her fraternal twin brother Mason’s (Darius Brantley Jr.) birthday. Meanwhile, Paris is driving her sister Paige (Janaya Durham) and father Brandon (Hakeem Sharif) crazy with her pranks, yelling “Caught you simpin’, pimpin'” when she puts honey in her sister’s hair product and hot sauce in her dad’s mouthwash. Her mom Kim (Robyn Rose) gets everyone in line and the kids get on the bus where Mason gets bullied and protected by his sister.
It’s just another day in the lives of this family until Ingrid Snow (Velda Hunter) gets involved.
Back in high school, Ingrid was in love with Madisyn and Mason’s father Sean (Lemastor Spratling) but he has no idea who she is. She even thought at one point she was pregnant with a baby and it was pseudocyesis, an emotional false pregnancy. Her sister Nica (Deborah Lane Spencer) has supported her through all of this and now is trying to talk her out of dating her new boyfriend, who she claims is married and has children.
Back to the family. Everyone is so busy that Sean and his wife Deja (Ebony Tates) are hiring a nanny. That nanny ends up being Ingrid, who has already started scouting the kids and believes that she’s Madisyn’s mother. So she does what any rational woman who thinks that a man who can’t remember her is still in love with her when his wife is ridiculously attractive. She kidnaps both girls and gives Paris enough poison to kill her.
You have to see the scene where she pours dry drugs into the girls’ milkshakes in a milkshake store and says, “That little bitch got to die.”
The film jumps all the place with time like a deranged Tarantino, often showing the same scenes multiple times which is an ingenious way to pad a movie that’s just an hour. But whatever, it’s on Tubi and I’m here for it. Detective Grimes (Hiram Robinson) and Robinson (Sarah Evalt) show up and start walking the parents through things, but by this point Sean is missing because Ingrid attacked him and has drugged him as well and he’s lying on a bed covered with photoshopped photos of them together.
Can Mason, who is so nerdy that he reminds us multiple times that he’s in chess club, and Paige use the internet to find their sisters? Of course they can. Will there be a shock ending? Totally. Do I watch movies like this all day and scream at the screen and then force my wife to listen to me break them down as if they got a 17 minute standing ovation at Cannes? You know it.
This was directed by Dennis L. Reed II (all three First Lady movies) and written by Denora M. Boone. Amazingly, it was produced by Aubrey Madisyn, Darius Brantley Jr. and Payton Pinkston. Yes, the child actors. I learned from Aubrey’s Instagram that she’s an executive producer, actor, model, influencer and CEO of Mini Millyoungaire. Payton is an actress, model, dancer, singer and owner of the Payton P Collection. Look, you can say whatever you want about this film, but were you a 12-year-old producer of a movie?
June 21: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is AIP! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
Also released as Twinky and London Affair, Lola has the kind of story that only a movie made in 1970 could have.
Scott Wardman (Charles Bronson) falls in love — or something — with Sybil Londonderry (Susan George), who also goes by Twinky and Lola. The problem is that he’s 38 and she’s 16. He seemingly knows the age of consent and any guy that can instantly tell you that is a creep.
Then Scott gets busted for being married to a child and forced to leave England. He says, “I make one uncool move with a nutty 16-year-old kid, and suddenly my whole world is turned upside down.” Now this pornographic author has to go back to the United States.
If you think this couldn’t happen, well…
Norman Thaddeus Vane wrote this and its based on his own married to 16 year-old model Sarah Caldwell, who he married when he was also 38. In an interview with the astounding Hidden Films, the writer — and later director — would claim, “There was a reason I wound up marrying Sarah Caldwell (who was 16 at the time and later cast in Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter which Vane scripted; Vane later based the script for Lola on this scandalous marriage). I was a good-looking kid on King’s Road in Chelsea, I had a sports car, I had money, I had a beautiful flat.”
Vane also pretty much explains the plot of this film in that interview: “I met her at a party. She was stunningly beautiful. I had a small flat on King’s Road in Chelsea, and she used to come over secretly on the way back from school, and we used to fuck. And she told her parents that she was seeing me — I was probably about 38 or something—and they were angry. Her father was head of the East India Trading Company. The only way we could see each other was if we got married, and in Scotland, you could get married at 16. So we eloped there. I had been sleeping with a Scottish girl from Glasgow. You had to spend three days in residence in Scotland before you got married, so I asked her if we could use her family’s address and she said yes. Sarah called her parents and said “I’m very sorry to tell you this, but I got married today!” The newspapers wrote columns about her, it was like a front page story, for months afterwards. They called me “The Cad of the Year.””
This entire interview is wild and I urge you to read it, as he claims that director Richard Donner immediately slept with Susan George, that the movie was financed by an Italian baron and Bronson superfan who later committed suicide over Britt Ekland, that Bronson’s wife Jill Ireland wanted to play the teenage girl and that Bronson couldn’t be controlled by Donner and he ruined the movie.
Lola is fascinating because why would Scott and Lola ever get together — well, sex — or stay together? There’s nothing that suggests that they have a single thing in common other than her schoolgirl crush on him and well, yeah, she’s Susan George in 1970, I get that. Yet Bronson comes off as, well, Charles Bronson, a man who speaks little and is quick to violence. Maybe that’s how I see him as I’ve watched so many of his action movies, but when you see the posters and VHS covers for this, you’ll see that I wasn’t the only one who saw Bronson just as a force of violent nature.
Lola ends up getting an apartment for the couple while Scott is in jail over a misunderstanding, then she doesn’t realize that he has a job as a writer and needs to be left alone while he’s working. As a jerk of a writer myself, I get it. She also acts like a kid because she is one. Finally, after running away and coming back, she goes back to England for good.
This is not the last movie that Vane would make that references his life. The Black Room is about how he cheated on his wife in his own black room with Penthouse centerfolds that he met while working at that publication. It remains to be discovered if any of those women were vampires. Vane also made the absolutely baffling Club Life, a movie that I want everyone to watch.
I wonder if Susan George met with her agent and said, “Can I do something not so scuzzy for my next movie, like sleep with a guy twice my age?” And the agent said, “Susan baby, have I got a movie for you. It’s classy. It’s called Straw Dogs.”
Joe Sarno week (June 16 – 22) Joe Sarno was called the Bergman of 42nd St, but don’t let that stop you from watching his movies! He was able to shape dramatic stories that were entertaining and of-the-moment while working with tight budgets and inexperienced performers but he never lost sight of why people were buying the tickets – HOT SEX!
A lot has changed in the decade between Joe Sarno’s monochromatic sex without sex movies. Porno chic has already arrived, movies need to be in color and sexual liberation was already growing boring to some but the specter of AIDS had not yet come to haunt us.
Quite literally, Abigail Leslie (adult star Jennifer Jordan, who used the name Sarah Nicholson and who also appears in Sarno’s Misty)is indeed back in Baypoint, a small town where her carnal nature is still whispered about.
Also: Baypoint is actually Sarno’s hometown, Amityville.
Abigail left after her scandalous affair with married man Gordon (Jamie Gillis). Now that she’s here again, his wife Priscilla (Rebecca Brooke, who is also known as Mary Mendum) wants her to leave all over again and is not shy about telling everyone just how much she absolutely loathes our heroine.
So what does Abigail do? Well, like some hurricane of sexual force, she sleeps with anyone and everyone she wants to, including Chester (Eric Edwards) and her Aunt Drucilla (Jennifer Welles, who left adult after marrying a rich fan but not before Sarno directed her film Inside Jennifer Welles). By the time she’s done with her old town, everyone is having sex with everyone. Even Priscilla gets over her anger.
Oh yeah — if you’re wondering who Drucilla’s man is, that’s Sonny Landham from Predator.
I think that every movie made — even today, not movies but scenes on adult websites — that has a woman watching in the doorway and getting worked up owes a debt to Sarno. Yet he also takes it even further, creating a movie where a woman’s orgasm is the most holy sacrament in all of reality and really, isn’t it?
That said, I don’t buy Abigail falling in love with Priscilla and getting her heart broken by her. Sure, it adds a twist to the ending — that I just spoiled, apologies I swear — but the Abigail who arrives in town and instantly begins getting everyone to be more open and less worried about morality would pick herself up and get under or on top of someone immediately.
Also: Every single woman in this movie seemingly is both gorgeous and has red or strawberry blonde hair. I respect Sarno for who he chose to be in it and that he would try with all his power to not go full adult when the rest of the world was showing everything.
If this was called, How O.J. Simpson Impacted Harvey Levin of TMZ, I doubt that many people would have watched it. But that’s what it’s about and to be honest, it’s kind of fascinating to hear one person’s life over two years be impacted by the case that would kick off the 24 hour news cycle and then give him the ability to start TMZ.
Levin found an interesting path into founding the site that more people turn to now than the National Enquirer for their celebrity news. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he graduated with a B.A. in political science and then got a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Chicago Law School. He was an attorney in the state of California for two decades and also wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times and was Dr. Law on a radio show.
He then started to work for KNBC and KCBS as an investigative reporter and legal analyst. The O.J. trial was his major story before he was the co-executive producer and on-air legal anchor for a revised version of The People’s Court. He also created the show Celebrity Justice. In 2005, AOL and Telepictures Productions launched TMZ, which has had Levin as the founder and managing editor ever since.
So what really happened on June 12, 1994? That’s what this special tries to explain and to my surprise, Levin is the perfect person to tell this story. He covered O.J. Simpson’s murder trial from start to finish. There are insider parts about untold lie detector tests and even speculation about who helped Simpson get away with the murders.
TMZ spoiled some of this special by reporting “O.J. Simpson went back to the scene of the crime — where he killed his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman — and our own Harvey Levin happened to be there and a wild chase ensued.”
In this TMZ special, Harvey claims that he drove a friend to Nicole’s condo where the murders occurred. They saw a limo in the alley and as soon as the driver made eye contact with him, he drove away.
If you haven’t had enough O.J. — and Tubi has been full of O.J. stories lately — here’s one more way to get your Juice fix.
June 20: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Blacksploitation! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
Born Walter Gordon, Jamaa Fanaka was one of the leading directors of the L.A. Rebellion film movement, a new generation of young African and African-American filmmakers who studied at the UCLA Film School in the late-1960s to the late-1980s. They created a new form of black cinema that was an alternative to Hollywood. Fanaka was, however, “very much fascinated by Hollywood and averse to the contentious ideological and artistic discussions that were fundamental to the formation of the school.”
Independently produced, written, directed and edited by Fanaka as an undergraduate project at UCLA that took seventeen months of weekends, all of his savings and some of his parent’s as well, Fanaka’s advisors at the school told him to not even try a feature film as his class project. He ended up creating one that won a national theatrical distribution deal with Crown International Pictures. The director would complete his thesis film, Emma Mae, and Penitentiary while still in college.
Sure, it was re-released on video as Soul Vengeance but this movie isn’t the typical blacksploitation movie, despite beginning with its hero Charles (Marlo Monte) being arrested by corrupt white police and nearly castrated. When he’s released, all Charles wants to do is forget the past. He wants to move past the life of crime he once led. He can’t even have Twyla (Jackie Ziegler), the girl he loves, who is now the woman of his former best friend, N.D. (Jake Carter).
Sounds like a typical blacksploitation movie and I promised you that it wasn’t.
That’s because while Charles was in prison, he was experimented on, like Luke Cage in Marvel Comics, but instead of getting skin knives and that bullets can’t touch, he gets a murderous and prehensile penis. Seriously, it’s feet, not just inches long. It’s the kind of penis that frightens the white male establishment way more than the typical African American member, because when he’s not using it to seduce the white wives of the cop who tried to slice off his prick, Officer Harry Freeman (Ben Bigelow), as well as the prosecutor and judge who set him up. He’s also strangling those men with it, which has to be the worst way for a straight white racist man to die.
Despite trying to find some form of comfort with Carmen (Reatha Grey), prison has destroyed Charles. And what he’s done to Freeman’s wife (Tiffany Peters) has ruined that cop, as if he needed any help, telling his wife that she’s contaminated. That’s because even before he gained his monstrous member, Charles was cucking the law. And that’s why Freeman tried to take a knife to our hero while he was in handcuffs. I have no idea why he’s stayed married, as one evening he wakes her up by choking her back into oblivion and she looks him in the eye and snarls, “You think you’re a man? You didn’t even have the guts to destroy the object of your humiliation. Me!”
Also, maybe I didn’t mention it, but his new penis — who would do this experiment, what was it for and why would they be authorized? — can hypnotize white women.
I love that this movie exists, that it has sloppy moments where we just watch people dancing in the streets in footage that had to be just the camera running and capturing what these small Los Angeles neighborhoods used to be like. As wild as this movie gets, it only hints at just how far Fanaka would push reality with the Penitentiary series.
Joe Sarno week (June 16 – 22) Joe Sarno was called the Bergman of 42nd St, but don’t let that stop you from watching his movies! He was able to shape dramatic stories that were entertaining and of-the-moment while working with tight budgets and inexperienced performers but he never lost sight of why people were buying the tickets – HOT SEX!
Cannon was making money on Joe Sarno’s films, getting them into theaters as Sarno divided his time making movies in the United States and in Sweden, Germany and Denmark. His early films are stark black and white affairs and life is never easy for anyone within them. Also, the phrase Deep Inside is the greatest adult title ever and would eventually be used along with the names of actresses, such as Sarno’s uncredited X-rated Inside Jennifer Welles and Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle.
Millicent Redmond (Peggy Steffans, the Findlay Flesh trilogy) is a woman who is frigid in bed and therefore gets her pleasure manipulating others, like seeing what kind of trouble she can get Lina (Mary Park) into; plays around with the relationship between her old lesbian roommates Neva (Tia Walter) and Jean (Sheila Britt, The Swap and How They Make It); heats up older lesbian who loves younger women Mavis (Bella Donna, not the Belladonna whose retirement still makes one wistful) and gets Pam (Lara Danielli) involved with the absolute wrong man.
Sarno’s movies have an existential sadness that I absolutely love. I can only imagine what raincoaters felt about these movies, already worried about being in public watching filth, worried about the cops coming in and then the movie they went up against so much just depresses them beyond comprehension. They are sexy without sex, a fascinating idea that feels like the ruined orgasms that so many unfortunate of today’s cyber perverts are so obsessed by.
B&S About Movies 
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