Directed by Joseph Losey and written by Evan Jones, These Are the Damned is taken from the novel The Children of Light by H.L. Lawrence. It has Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey) arriving in England, fresh off a failed marriage, and meeting Joan (Shirley Anne Field), who lures him into a mugging by her brother King (Oliver Reed). Not the way to start a romance, but still, it’s a start.

Simon gives Joan another chance and they stay a step ahead of King and his motorcycle gang but running into some caves. They finally make love in an abandoned house and are chased again, finding a military base where nine 11-year-old children live, all cold to the touch and highly intelligent. Held by a man named Bernard (Alexander Knox), they are observed at all times as they have survived a nuclear blast that killed their parents. They are all born on the same day and perhaps the next step in evolution.

While Simon, Joan and King try to help the children escape, they are all overwhelmed by the radiation that lives inside them and Bernard wipes out the evidence, even killing his girlfriend Freya (Viveca Lindfors) when she refuses to be part of his plot to raise the children to survive the war that he knows is coming.

Losey was an anti-war director blacklisted by Hollywood, working for Hammer in England. They made him tone down the incest between King and Joan, as well as changing the end where a helicopter would kill Freya and not Bernard. Cut to 77 minutes when it played in the U.S., it’s an incredible film that was inside the guise of a simple horror film.

You can watch it on YouTube.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence, the word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains… sex. Violence devours all it touches, its voracious appetite rarely fulfilled. Yet violence doesn’t only destroy, it creates and molds as well. Let’s examine closely then this dangerously evil creation, this new breed encased and contained within the supple skin of woman. The softness is there, the unmistakable smell of female, the surface shiny and silken, the body yielding yet wanton. But a word of caution: handle with care and don’t drop your guard. This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs, operating at any level, any time, anywhere, and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist… or a dancer in a go-go club!”

You know how I always say, “They could have stopped making movies after this?” This is the movie at the center of my argument. I really don’t know how any movie gets any better than this, unless Russ Meyer is directing it.

The three worst women you’ve ever met — and also the finest — finish their dance routines at a club and then head out to the California desert where they race their car and verbally abuse one another. They are Billie (Laurie Williams), Rosie (Haji) and Varla (Tura Satana, perhaps the finest thing Satan ever made for the Lord). They follow that up by sizing up the guy mansplaining things to his girl and snap his neck before drugging his woman, Linda (Susan Bernard).

Stopping to fill up, they learn that a wheelchair-bound man and his feebleminded son are literally sitting on a treasure. So they do what you or I would do — manipulate, manhandled and murder everyone in their way.

Originally known as The Leather Girls and then The Mankillers, this isn’t a movie as much as a religion to me. No less a cultural giant as John Waters said, “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is, beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.”

Tura Satana is the kind of woman that if she wasn’t born, we would have created her and made her into a goddess. There have been many pretenders to her throne, but none will ever ascend it.

Seriously, I wore the t-shirt of this movie for most of the 90s before it fell apart. If you dislike this movie, we can never, ever be friends.

The art for this comes from this site.

As late as 1997, when it was re-rated NC-17 “for a wide range of perversions in explicit detail,” Pink Flamingos keeps on offending people in the best of ways.

A movie that has the dedication “For Sadie, Katie, and Les- February 1972” — Manson Family members Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten discovered in February 1972 that the death penalty was abolished in California, reducing their sentences — director and writer John Waters and star Divine announced themselves to the world here, despite already making the movies Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Roman Candles, Eat Your Makeup, Dorothy, the Kansas City Pot Head, Mondo Trasho, The Diane Linkletter Story and Multiple Maniacs, films that didn’t escape Baltimore and small screenings.

The filthiest person alive Babs Johnson (Divine) lives with her mother Edie (Edith Massey), son Crackers (Danny Mills) and traveling companion Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce) in a trailer with pink flamingos in the front yard. Her title is challenged by Connie (Mink Stole) and Raymond Marble (David Lochary) who come to regret ever invoking her wrath, costing them their baby stealing empire and eventually their lives.

Banned in Switzerland and Australia, as well as in some provinces in Canada and Norway as well as Hicksville in Long Island, this movie is less about the plot and more about the urge to shock you. It’s Waters using filth in the same way that his hero William Castle used gimmicks to bring you into the theater. If Joan Crawford was the ultimate gimmick for Castle, Divine served the same role for Waters. She even ate dog feces for the movie (followed by her calling a hospital emergency hotline pretending to be a mother whose son ate the same thing to make sure she would survive). And yet somehow, it’s all rather heartwarming, even if it’s a movie punctuated by Divine’s rants that include incendiary words like “Kill everyone now! Condone first degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat shit! Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!”

Pink Flamingos is as old as me but retains its wild edge when everything else feels dulled down. I often think of it when I am down and am amazed that it exists, a movie that is endlessly watchable and quotable. I’ve resisted writing about it for so long because what else can I add to it? But I feel that I must celebrate it and why it keeps on meaning so much, a movie that I watched people walk out on 25 years after it was made, angry that the movie was just so wrong.

Vernon, Florida has about 732 people living in it and was once known as Nub City because of how many limb loss insurance claims were made in the area. More than two-thirds of all insurance claims for people who lost their arms or legs in the fifties and sixties lived there, so director Errol Morris decided to make this movie. He was threatened by the people who lived there so he made this instead.

You’ll watch 55 minutes of the people of the small town, like turkey hunter Henry Shipes, who speaks with such excitement about the hunt, saying “Listen to that sound? Hear that sound? Getting in an out of trees? That flop-flop sound? Mm, that sound will sure mistake you for turkeys. Listen. Hear that flop-flop. Limbs breaking. Hear that good flop, then? Listening to that gives me the turkey fever. Mm, I wish there were as many turkeys as there are buzzards.”

You also get a worm farmer, a preacher and a cop who is happy that nothing ever happens. Then again, who shot the cop’s windshield?

Nearly nothing happens and I had so much fun watching that nothing. What a fun movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Is a biker movie not enough action for you? What if I told you that a biker gang named The Devil’s Advocates happen upon some warlocks and then one of them is bitten by a female werewolf and transforms under the full moon? How’s that sound?

I literally just told you the entire plot of this movie. Soon after the cult members cast a curse on the biker leader’s (Stephen Oliver, who was married to Lana Wood, sister of Natalie Wood and also the star of Motorpsycho and Angels from Hell) girlfriend that makes her turn into a werewolf, she turns him as well. Soon, the bikers are being killed one by one until they see their leader and his girl transform.

The bikers head back to the church for revenge, but suddenly stop when they see themselves in the cult lineup.

This movie has been sampled by Rob Zombie repeatedly, including the line “We all know how we’re going to die, baby. We’re gonna crash and burn.” It’s also better than anything he’s done since The Devil’s Rejects. Actually, it’s probably better than that, too.

Real bikers were used for all the stunts in this movie, so it has a real authenticity to it. And the weirdness of the cult’s rituals breaks into that so nicely, giving this movie a real air of pure strange. The cult leader, One, is played by Severn Darden, who played Governor Kolp in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes. He’s so great in this movie!

The soundtrack is also so good. It’s very blues country rock with a bit of doom. It’s perfect for the action on the screen. This movie gets a very high recommendation!

You can watch this on Tubi.

Jill Winters (Norma Eberhardt) runs away, become thieves and live “a sin-steeped story of the rise of the Beat Generation.” Directed by Paul Henreid (the Cardinal from Exorcist II: The Heretic) from a script by Allen Rivkin and Ib Melchior, they find themselves working with Rick (Mike Connors) and Artie (Troy Donahue) and go from slipping guys a mickey when they take them back to their motel rooms to knocking over a post office to get six figures worth of jewels.

Meanwhile, Jill’s sister Kim (Mary Murphy) gets sick of their drunken father and decides to find where her sister is, getting mixed up in all this crime. She’s just lucky that she meets a truck driver named Jerry (Sheridan Comerate) who treats her well and helps her forget that her dad’s drunken friend once tried to touch her.

These girls are supposed to be teens but are instead in their late 20s. Such is the juvenile delinquent film. It played with Girls On the Loose and you can often see pictures of Eberhardt being worn by Slash from Guns ‘n Roses.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Known as Dragon Zombies Return, this movie is the kind of movie I just let wash over me.

Polly Shang Kuan Ling-Feng plays East Sea Dragon, a woman who has spent a year in a cave to study her fighting style and now is searching for the other, well, zodiac fighters like Rooster, Rat, Ox, Snake, Horse, Ram, Monkey, Dog, Pig, Tiger and Rabbit. Everyone has a costume that ties into their sign and martial arts to match.

Their enemy? Tiger Shark, played by Lo Lieh, who has an army of crab men, a boat that launches rubber sharks and the Five Elements, Fire, Wood, Water, Air and Gold. You thought there were only four elements? You aren’t ready for this.

From http://tarstarkas.net/2012/11/the-zodiac-fighters/

This is the story of a professional mourner who finds a magic cave and unites all of the animal forms of combat to battle rubber sharks. I have no other way to explain it. It’s one of the oddest movies I’ve seen — and just think about that and all that I have watched — and it’s so blobby and grainy and a bad transfer and you know, I kind of want it that way.

Want me to convince you?

Morricone’s theme from Exorcist II is in this.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Filmed and released within four months of the late-1966 Sunset Strip curfew riots, this American-International Pictures film was directed by Arthur Dreifuss and written by Orville H. Hampton. It even has its own song, “Riot on Sunset Strip”, written by Tony Valentino and John Fleck of the Standells.

It has some of the same cast from another AIP movie, Hot Rods to Hell. In that film, Mimsy Farmer was the bad girl and Laurie Mock was the virgin. Here, they switch roles, as Farmer is Andrea Dollier, a young girl seduced by LSD and evil hippies. Aldo Ray plays Sgt. Walt Lorimer, a cop who has been trying to get along with the kids on Sunset but when he finds his daughter sexually assaulted, he goes wild on a bunch of flower children. If only she hadn’t taken that drink laced by Herbie (Schuyler Hayden), she wouldn’t have been attacked by five boys that same night.

Beyond the music of The Standells, The Enemies and The Chocolate Watchband, we also get a long sequence of Farmer tripping out. Perhaps in my cinematic universe, her character Andrea goes on to become Estelle from More, which was made just two years later and is much franker about drug use. Maybe if her parents stayed together, maybe if her mother Margie (Hortense Petra) wasn’t a drunk, maybe if her dad wasn’t so driven to clean up the streets all of this would have never have happened.

I realize I love Mimsy Farmer on film because she’s always in trouble. Or causing it, freaking out about slashing her father, a man who always wanted a boy and got her instead or dealing with a conspiracy that wants to eat her or sunspots and autopsies. Her movie life is a nightmare and she’s a dream, what can I say?

This movie is ridiculous, made by out of touch people for kids probably far away from Los Angeles who want a piece of the action. Therefore, I love every minute.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Howard W. “Kroger” Babb called himself America’s Fearless Young Showman and lived by the belief, “You gotta tell ’em to sell ’em.” The name Kroger either came from working at the grocery store as a kid or the fact that his dad loved B.H. Kroger coffee. He worked numerous other jobs all through his teens, even showing up in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not for refereeing a record number of games. After working as a reporter, he did publicity for the Chakeres-Warners movie theaters and found out he had a gift for working people into the movies.

In the early 1940s, Babb joined Cox and Underwood. This distributor bought movies too controversial to advertise and took them on the road, four-walling theaters. Babb went on the road to sell Dust to Dust, which was High School Girl with a childbirth scene added. He made Cox and Underwood so much money that they retired. He decided to make his own company, Hygienic Productions.

After Babb somehow was invited to a meeting that discussed how many young girls were getting pregnant by soldiers from Sheppard Air Force Base, he worked with his future wife Mildred Horn to write a screenplay. He got twenty investors and Willian “One Shot” Beaudine to direct the movie.

Costing $62,000 to film and make 300 prints, it went on the road, often with Babb presenting the movie. He had a devotion to profit: expenses were estimated at 5% for selling and distribution overhead was 7%, resulting in some of the highest returns in movies. He believed that it made $63,000 for every $1,000 the twenty investors put in, while  the Los Angeles Times estimated in 1977 that it made $40 million to $100 million in profit.

He also had renowned educator Elliot Forbes show up, along with a shapely nurse, to talk during the movie and sell books about hygiene. There wasn’t really an Elliot Forbes but there were at least a hundred of the man with that name constantly going around the country for decades showing the film. Depending on the morality of each city, Mom and Dad could be shown as a cautionary film, a controversial one, an educational opportunity or the chance for men to see a woman’s private parts. The fact that a baby was coming out of them was just the price perverts paid to see a vagina bare on the big screen.

The book that was sold, Man and Boy and Woman and Girl, cost 8 cents to make. He sold it for a dollar, making around $40 million. The IRS came after him throughout his life and he was always sure to never give the same figures. He also claimed he lost a hundred pounds on the Astounding Swedish Ice Cream Diet, so Babb was the best of what I love about old movies: a carny flim-flam snake oil salesman who was always looking to make money and was always selling.

Sure, he got sued 428 over the movie, but wasn’t it all worth it?

Mom and Dad is about Joan Blake (June Carlson), a good young girl who sleeps with pilot Jack Griffin (Bob Lowell) after he sweet talks her into the backseat of his car. She’s soon pregnant and her parents, Sarah (Lois Austin) and Dan (George Eldredge) can barely pay attention to her. Her brother (Jimmy Clark) finally gets her to talk to Carl Blackburn (Hardie Albright), a teacher kicked out for teaching sex education, and explaining what is happening to her.

Depending on the print that was in your theater, you also saw a variety of sex hygiene movies, including one that showed childbirth, whether normal or caesarean, as well as one that graphically shows what syphilis does to the human body. Also, your ending would either have Joan have the baby, lose it when it was stillborn or have it adopted. If you saw the film in a black theater, Olympic athlete Jesse Owens would be there.

Exploitation films would not be what they were without Kroger Babb.

You can watch this on YouTube.