Tucson, Arizona. The insane killer Ray (Jason Williams, Flesh Gordon) and the whiny sad guy Alex (Bill Osco, The Being) get five kilos of cocaine, run into some police, kill those officers — the title is a spoiler — before they steal a frozen lemonade truck, shotgun blast another policeman, murder a gas station worker, ice another guy and kidnap his girl, Karen (Diane Keller, one and done). Then, they hide out in a motel in the hopes that everything blows over.

Alex gives Karen some coke, they ball, then they sell the drugs to Collins (Michael D. White) and his girlfriends Lena (Donna Stubbert) and Becky (Judy Ross) before things go straight to Hell.

Almost everyone other than Flesh Gordon and Bill Osco are one and done, even director Walter R. Cichy. The biggest star out of this movie would be Rick Baker, who went directly from this movie to Star Wars, changing it from a grimy 16mm drive-in film where you can see the crew in the back of the car at one stage.

This cost $50,000, money that was raised by Ted Dye, a Texas-based owner of X-rated theaters looking to make something mainstream. Another reason? Flesh Gordon had been confiscated in a police bust, so its producer, Cichy, needed money. He got Williams to make this. The director of that film, Howard Ziehm, wrote the story for Cop Killers with Osco and Cichy, who finished the screenplay.

You can watch this on YouTube.

According to the opening credits, “this story is true, but actual names and places are fictitious.” That’s because Pete Walker read a story in the tabloid News of the World and got inspired. And unlike movies of this era like Permissive and More, the degenerate lifestyle he envisioned wasn’t tragic.

Joe (Robin Askwith, the Confessions of… series) and Carol (Janet Lynn*, Twins of Evil) have left behind their small town for swinging London, where Joe struggles to find work and she quickly becomes a model.

Before you can open the newspaper to Page 3, Carol’s involved in the scummier side of entertainment — the photoshoot for a dirty magazine was shot in Mayfair photographer Philip O. Stearn’s studio and the stills were in the July 1970 issue — with dirty old men all wanting a piece of our heroine.

There’s some great casting here, with Stubby Kaye (the owner of Acme in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?), Harry Baird (The Four of the Apocalypse), Chris Sandford (who was also in Walker’s Die Screaming, Marianne), radio DJ Pete Murray, Carry On star Eric Barker, Pearl Hackney (who was in four Walker films, including Four Dimensions of Greta, Tiffany Jones and Schizo) and Martin Wyldeck (Walker really liked using the same actors, as he also was in several of his movies).

This never gets as dirty as the American title — The Dirtiest Girl I Ever Met — promises. It exists in a different time of sexuality, where Robin Askwith’s butt and innuendos are enough. But man, all those scenes of old men licking their lips in slow motion make me realize that Walker really was created to be a horror director.

*Susan George was initially considered for this movie.

Directed and co-written — with T. Gertler — by Joseph Adler, who also made Sex and the College Girl and Scream Baby Scream, Convention Girls is a movie that I can’t find. The Alamo Drafthouse refers to it as a “Florida-shot indie obscurity — a super rare 35mm print of a movie never released on DVD or video!”

They went on to describe this movie as a “Nashville-inspired multi-character drama set in a Miami Beach hotel during a weekend-long toy manufacturers convention. The smart screenplay by Trudy Gertler uses the handful of prostitutes working the convention as a structural device to tie together the various subplots and character arcs. Originally titled Conventions, this offbeat regional indie pic — more slice-of-life than sexploitation — was acquired by producer/distributor M.A. Ripps, the huckster responsible for the notorious ’60s shocker Poor White Trash, who retitled it Convention Girls and gave it a full-blown exploitation makeover. After playing the drive-in circuit for half a dozen years, the film pretty much vanished, rarely (if ever) showing on TV and never receiving a home video release.”

This seems like a sex movie, but from all accounts, it’s actually the story of a toymaker trying to keep from being a sellout. There’s also a sex worker falling into a depression and self-directed death in a bathtub, affairs, horrible male-to-female behavior and the dirty side of the toy industry.

Actors include Nancy Lawson (God’s Bloody Acre), Anne Seward in her debut, Roberta White, Carol Linden, Robert Gallo, Naomi Fink (also in Adler’s Sammy Somebody), Clarence Thomas (not that one) and William Kerwin. I think legally, you couldn’t make a low budget movie in Florida without him.

Does anyone know how I can see this?

We first encountered The Child at a Halloween party thrown at the palatial Mexican War Streets home of Mr. Groovy Doom himself, Bill Van Ryn. While some folks drank in the kitchen or enjoyed the mix of Goblin and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult blasting in the sitting room, I was entranced by a film that was playing on the TV. The sound wasn’t turned up, the images all felt like transmissions from beyond, and nothing really added up in the movie. “What the hell is this?” I asked. “Oh, The Child!” exclaimed Bill, hurriedly running in to try and explain why he was growing more and more obsessed with multiple rewatches of the film.

Sometime in the 1930s — which you’d only know from the old 1930s as this film feels like an anachronism lost in no particular time — Alicianne has been hired to be the caretaker for Rosalie Nordon, the titular child, who has just lost her mother. Along with her father and brother Len, she lives in a house on the edge of the woods.

Even the trip to the house is strange, with Alicianne’s car breaking down after she drives it into a ditch. A journey through the woods brings her to Mrs. Whitfield, who warns her about the Nordon family. She probably should have listened, as everyone in this family — hell, everyone in this movie — is touched, as they say.

When Alicianne first meets Rosalie, the jack-in-the-box suddenly moves by itself. It’s a very subtle scene that hints that things might not be right here. After all, people have seen Rosalie wandering the cemetery late at night, a place where she brings kittens so that her friends there will do anything she asks. And even dinner is strange, as her father relates a story of Boy Scouts eating a soup stirred with oleander that caused them all to die. Father and daughter have a good laugh at that while Len just seems embarrassed by his family.

Then there are the drawings — Rosalie has been sketching everyone who was at her mother’s funeral, marking them for death. And if she does have psychic abilities, is she using them to reanimate the dead or control them? Or do they just do whatever she wants? The Child wasn’t made to give you those answers. It just screams in your face and demands that you keep watching despite your ever-growing confusion.

Mrs. Whitfield’s dog is taken first, then that old busy body pays the price, with her face getting off as the zombies mutilate her. That gardener has some of mommy’s jewelry, so he has to pay, too. And Alicianne, who was supposedly here just for Rosalie, has started to spend too much time with Len. She’s next on the list.

There are some really haunting scenes as we get closer to Halloween, like a scarecrow come to life and a jack-o-lantern that keeps relighting itself and following our heroine around the room.

Finally, Mr. Nordon starts to discipline his daughter, which leads to Rosalie unleashing all of her powers. She decimates her father, crashes Alicianne’s car and sends zombies to chase her governess and brother all the way to an old mill. Len tries to fight them while Alicianna just screams and screams, but he can’t stop them from dragging him under the building and tearing his face to bloody pieces. As the attack of the zombies stops, Rosalie walks through the door just as our heroine hits her with an axe. She walks outside into the dawn’s light and everything is still. The threat is over.

Written by Ralph Lucas as Kill and Go Hide, The Child isn’t a great movie, but it’s an interesting one. If you ask me, that’s way more important. Some people will get tied up in things like narrative cohesion, good acting and a soundtrack that makes sense. None of those people should watch The Child with you, as they’ll just ruin what can be an awesome experience. This is the kind of magic that takes over, kind of like one of those dreams you have and try to write down the moment you wake up, but it gets lost in the ether of reality. For most of the film, the zombies are barely glimpsed, just seen in the shadows, so they really could just be tramps that live in the cemetery. Or something much worse.

Producer Harry Novak acquired this film and made his money on it, even if director Robert Voskanian and producer Robert Dadashia saw no profit. It’s a story we’ve seen hundreds of times — an interesting movie taken, used and abused by conmen who have no interest in art.

Yet I wear a Harry Novak shirt all the time.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Carol (Rebecca Brooke) is in the middle of a steady swinging relationship between her husband Eddie (David Hausman), next door neighbor and best friend Anne (Chris Jordan) and her partner Pete (Eric Edwards). But when her widowed mother, Jennifer Robison (Jennifer Welles), comes to live with her, she worries that they will have to hide their open lifestyle. Yet soon enough, mom is making it with a grocery boy, engaging in forbidden love with her daughter and maybe even running away with her son-in-law.

Joe Sarno’s movies are filthy but they’re also classy, which is something that usually never makes sense and never really works. He always pulls off this balancing act and does the same here, as the wood-paneled suburban 70s household turns into a pit of sin, a place that unlocks passions once put away.

There’s an uncredited Peter Gallagher in this.

Some maniac posted this with all the sex cut out on YouTube. What’s the opposite of an insert?