BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Chloe (Olive Borden) has escaped the swamps where she was raised and her family, including her mother Mandy (Georgette Harvey). Thanks to the light color of her skin, she’s passed for a white person. She’s in love with Wade (Reed Howes), who works for Colonel Gordon (Francis Joyner). The problem comes when her mother keeps bringing up — the swamps aren’t all that far — that Gordon led the lynch mob who hung her father.

This all leads to the wild truth that Chloe is really Gordon’s daughter and that he never ordered Sam’s death. Mandy takes her into the swamps and is ready to kill her as part of a voodoo ritual when she’s saved by Wade, who is really saved by Jim (Phillip Ober), a black man in love with Chloe, so romantically driven that he fights an alligator for her and then dies to save both her and her white man. Because Chloe is really white and man, this movie is really racist. It’s a tale of a black girl who hopes and dreams that she is white, that wish comes true and then her black mom tries to kill her while a black man sacrifices his life to save her and a white man. Then, she moves into a mansion.

The voodoo scenes look really scary, however.

Chloe was one of three films — along with Hired Wife and Playthings of Desire — that were made at Sun Haven Studios in St. Petersburg, Florida. The goal was to take back Florida as a filmmaking destination from Hollywood.

You can watch this on Tubi.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Lycanthropus was directed by Paolo Heusch (The Day the Sky Exploded) and written by Ernesto Gastaldi. Heusch used the name Richard Benson, as all Italian directors of that time had to have an American names.

If the title Werewolf In a Girls’ Dormitory isn’t good enough — and it is, it’s one of the best exploitation titles ever — it was also released as I Married a Werewolf, Ghoul in a Girl’s Dormitory, Monster Among the Girls and The Ghoul In School, which is the name of the song that Marilyn Stewart and Frank Owens wrote and that was sung by Adam Keefe. In case you wonder why a voice that sounds like Peter Lorre says, “Come with me to the corridors of blood,” that’s because this movie was on a double feature with Corridors of Blood. 

Director Swift (Curt Lowens) is trying to run a reform school that’s funded by Sir Alfred Whiteman (Maurice Marsac). Swift brings on a new teacher named Julian Olcott (Carl Schell, the brother of Maximilian) even though he’s aware of the fact that when Olcott was a doctor, some patients died.

One of the girls, Mary Smith (Mary McNeeran), is sleeping with Whiteman and also blackmailing him. She’s the first to die — shocking that the bad girl of all these reform girls is the first to die and that she’s also sleeping with the rich man paying for all of the school — and the police decide that she was killed by wolves. Priscilla (Barbara Lass, Roman Polanski’s first wife) believes that someone else did it, as she finds a note that was threatening Mary. Like a giallo main character, she ends up investigating the case herself with the help of the school’s handyman Walter (Luciano Pigozzi) and Whiteman. She soon learns that his wife Sheena (Annie Steinert) knows who killed the girl ruining her marriage but she won’t reveal the truth.

As you can tell by the title, there is a werewolf. It gets there and yes, it’s amazing when it happens. This movie looks so much better than you’d expect with its title. It’s also the only werewolf movie I’ve ever seen where the girls attacked by the monster have orgasms while in the jaws of the furry creature.

Want to see what Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum thinks? Check out what he has to say here.

You can get this from Severin.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Scream of the Demon Lover goes by many names. Blood Castle. Il castello dalle porte di fuoco (The Castle With Doors of Fire). El Castillo de Frankenstein. Killers of the Castle of Blood. Altar of Blood. El asesino del castillo sangriento (The Bloody Castle Killer). Scream of the Demon Lover. Le monstre du château (The Castle Monster). Murhaaja kauhujen linnassa (The Murderer In the Castle of Horrors, what a title!). Ivanna: El castillo de la puerta de fuego (Ivanna: The Castle With the Doors of Fire). Mördaren i skäcken hus (The Killer In the House of Horrors). Das Geheimnis von Schloß Monte Christo (The Mystery of Castle Monte Cristo).

In the U.S., New World Pictures cut it down to 78 minutes so it could fit on a double feature with The Velvet Vampire. It was also syndicated for television with all of the nudity missing, of course.

Biochemist Dr. Ivana Rakowsky (Erna Schurer, Strip Nude for Your Killer, Deported Women of the SS Special Section) is a very rare thing: a woman in an Italian gothic horror film who is capable and not just a damsel in distress — well, she is at times, but work with me here — but a capable scientist who travels to the castle of Baron Janos Dalmar (Carlos Quiney, who played Zorro in three films, Zorro’s Latest Adventure; Zorro, Rider of Vengeance and Zorro the Invincible) to assist him in his experiments.

She has some problems getting there. The only person that will give her a ride to the castle, Fedor (Ezio Sancrotti), tells her that she’ll die in there and then tries to assault her. The Baron isn’t very kind to her either. Not at first, as he believes no woman can be a scientist. She shows him that she can handle it, even if his housekeeper Olga (Cristiana Galloni) has issues with her. Also, seeing as how this is an early 70s Italian/Spanish horror movie, there are also plenty of psychosexual moments. You see, Dr. Ivana sleeps in the nude and she has dreams where a scarred man visits her bedside and tortures her. Somehow, in the midst of all this, these two mismatched leads fall in love after science fonds them.

Castle Xenia has many secrets. After all, Igor Dalmar, the last owner, blew himself up real good and the Baron is his brother. Igor’s body is in a milk bath and he wants Dr. Ivana to help him bring Igor back to life. Olga, in case you didn’t guess, used to be with the Baron. And the new maid, Cristiana (Agostina Belli, who somehow went from being in movies like this and The Eroticist to being in the original Scent of a Woman), seems to want the lady doctor more than any man in this movie that still has his skin on.

As you can imagine from the town in the open of the film, young women are dying and everyone thinks it’s the Baron. The man who keeps torturing the good doctor with a red hot poker and fumes while whispering, “Stay pure,” hints that these girls have all died because they weren’t virgins. And even more to the case of whodunit, each of these young ladies has lost their innocence to the Baron before they were killed. So who is it? Olga, who hates every women who gets near her forever lost lover? Cristiana? Or is Igor perhaps not so bereft of life? And why does the Baron have a library of werewolf and occult books that rivals Danzig’s?

Director José Luis Merino also made the Paul Naschy movie The Hanging Woman, another movie with a ton of other titles but I prefer Beyond the Living Dead.

This movie hits all my buttons. Foggy castle. Strange science. Gorgeous young scientists with diaphanous see-through gowns carrying candelabras through a cobwebbed castle. Gnarled up monsters sneaking their way through the countryside with dogs howling in the Bava-esque moonlight. Man, I’ve been thinking about this since I watched it and every review I read that says that it’s a boring dubbed Italian piece of schlock makes me want to conduct sinister experiments in the night and get this thing up to a higher rating on IMDB while unleashing my hound — a five-pound chihuahua — on anyone with the bad taste to dislike this epic.

This movie is part of Severin‘s Danza Macabra box set along with The Monster of the Opera, The Seventh Grave and Lady Frankenstein. It’s exciting to be able to get the full version, uncensored, with the kind of quality that Severin delivers for this movie.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

James Granilla (Steve Vincent) just wants to read his science fiction magazines in bed until his wife Marge (Bambi Allen, who is in everything from Day of the Nightmare to the title role in Miss Nymphet’s Zap-In and Terror At Orgy Castle; she should be a Something Weird hall of famer) seduces him, revealing that his back is quite hirsute. Then he goes to sleep and despite what he’s like while awake, dream James in horny, as he becomes Planetarian Colonel Granilla , who has stowed away as a spy on the Terranean ship Supreme Erection.

His job is to study the crew, led by the whip-carrying lesbian Captain Mother (Cara Peters as Legs Benedict; she’s also in a ton of movies, including Massacre Mafia Style), but he keeps getting yanked into their sexual hijinks. There’s Connie (played by Karla Conway using the name April Playmate; she was not only the April 1966 Playboy Playmate of the Month, living up to her stage name, but is tied with Sue Williams as the shortest Playmate ever at just 4′ 11″),  Portia (Merci Montello, who would soon use the name Mercy Rooney once she married Mickie Rooney Jr.; she was the December 1972 Playmate of the Month and provided the costume for Bigfoot) and Astrid (Fancher Fague, The Head Mistress). They all have stage names here because producer and co-director David F. Friedman didn’t want the actresses them to get famous by their names, as if they became known, he was worried that they would charge him more money to get naked in his movies.

This was co-directed by Byron Made, who also made The Bushwhacker, She Freak, The Acid Eaters and A Smell of Honey, A Taste of Brine. The best part of this would be the credits — and that’s no insult — as they are painted on the legs and breasts of several women.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Rita Hayworth spent the last few years of her life not knowing who she was anymore, painting when she did, and mostly staring out her window at Central Park. She died with many people thinking that alcoholism had robbed her of her career when the truth was Alzheimer’s had impacted her final years and back then, the world didn’t understand that disease at all.

Before she slipped away, she made a movie with William Gréfe, which blows my mind, and that movie is 1970’s The Naked Zoo, which was originally called The Grove, named for Coconut Grove, a former artist’s colony in Miami.

So how did Gréfe — the maker of movies like Sting of Death and Whiskey Mountain — get a big star like Hayworth into a movie made for just $250,000? Well, her agent originally wanted all of that cash, but they were able to make a deal for $50,000 for two weeks of shooting. Her parts were shot in a deserted house near the Pirate’s World theme park (of my dreams, as well as movies like Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny and Musical Mutiny).

Once known as “The Great American Love Goddess,” Hayworth’s life was filled with men who wanted her to be the seductive woman she was in films only to learn that she was a real person. Or, perhaps even worse, men who only sought to control her, like first husband Edward Charles Judson, a twice her age businessman who remade her into a sex symbol that he could buy and sell to Hollywood. Her marriages to Orson Welles, Prince Aly Khan, Dick Haymes and James Hill were also marked with mental and physical abuse, with only Welles not outright beating and humiliating her in public*.

By 1972 — two years after this film — her health and mental state was so bad that she had to read her lines one at a time while making The Wrath of God. She was to be in Tales That Witness Madness, but left the set before she appearing in one scene.

Back to Willian Gréfe. He had hoped to make a movie closer to The Graduate, but you know, as seen through the Florida drive-in movie haze of sex, drugs and crime. And still, this was edited by its distributor, with cuts made to add a masturbation scene and the band Canned Heat playing at a party. Those scenes were filmed by Barry Mahon, pretty much making this movie a team-up of Florida’s two top exploitation experts.

The film itself concerns Hayworth playing Mrs. Golden, a rich woman who lives with her cockolder, wheelchair-bound husband Harry (Ford Rainey, Dr. Mixter from Halloween II!). She sleeps with an author named Terry Shaw (Steve Oliver from Peyton Place) and when her husband finds out — and tries to gun them down — Terry stops him, but despite the death of the old man being in self-defense, Mrs. Golden starts blackmailing him.

That’s really the whole story, although there’s also plenty of party scenes and romance between Terry and Nadine (Fleurette Carter, who was also in The Hookers) and Pauline (Fay Spain, Dragstrip Girl).

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Cindy (Cindy West) is not having a good day. She’s been drugged and assaulted by Dean Carlson (John Buco), who has made her pregnant. She runs to tell her mechanic boyfriend Willie Joe (Davey Jones), but after making love and telling him that he’s the father, he dumps her. She runs to her father, the only man who never let her down, only to discover that he’s balls deep in her best friend Barbie (Lisa Grant). She screams so loud that she has a miscarriage and loses her voice.

Cindy runs again, this time to the big city, where she moves in with Dawn (Andrea True, who would go on to sing “More, More, More) and Nicky (Darby Lloyd Rains), two lesbians who say that she’s the best thing that ever happened to them.

This wouldn’t have this title if it wasn’t for Kampala (Gus Thomas, who would go on to become Cortland, New York District Attorney Mark Suben) and his sex cult. Cindy soon sees right through the leader, as men have ruined her life. The girls all conspire to take over the sex group — Jamie Gillis is also a member, along with Marc Stevens, Georgina Spelvin (the same year that she was in The Devil In Ms. Jones) and Tina Russell — and this movie rewards us with dialogue like,  “You may find this kind of strange, Cindy, but I work for the Devil!” and “You must kiss the cock of Satan!” Also: Death by poisoned nipples.

Devil’s Due is really influenced by the Church of Satan photo layouts that often appeared in men’s magazines. Directed by Ernest Danna and written by Gerry Pound, it’s not great but it is fun if you enjoy the occult of the 70s.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Bill (Christopher George, taking a vacation from his wife, who is in nearly every movie with him), Jamie, Dan (Preston Pierce, Angels’ Wild Women) and Diana (Roberta Collins, Matilda the Hun from Death Race 2000) are on a treasure hunt deep in the Southern backwoods, seeking an inheritance of prices Civil War rifles. Sure, why not?

After thirty minutes of more of travelogue and dirt bike footage, you may wonder, “Has slasher month gone to Sam’s head? When are we going to get to the senseless violence?” Patience, slashawan.

The deeper into the South our protagonists find themselves, the less hospitality they get from the locals, but hey, there’s plenty of money on the other side of the rainbow on Whiskey Mountain, right? Well, there’s also a drug operation that runs everything around, even the cops, all headed up by Rudy (John Davis Chandler, probably the only actor I know that appeared in both Adventures In Babysitting and High Plains Drifter).

This is a movie that has all real marijuana as props and a soundtrack by the Charlie Daniels Band, along with the exact kind of horrors you know await them yankees when they ask too many questions and push too hard. It’s also filled with Peckinpah-esque slow-motion — most effectively when George is double firing shotguns — to go with a brutal scene where we only hear the assault on the girls and see still evidence as it develops on Polaroids. Also — it’s 1977 and technically a motorcycle movie. so that means that it also has a potential downer ending freeze frame.

You can watch this on YouTube.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Lucifer U. Devil (Max Gardens, AKA Manny Goodtimes) is mad that Hell hasn’t seen any new arrivals of note since Hitler. He wants the soul of Ben-Hur Ova (Jack Little) and is trying to figure out how to lure him away from his wife Miassis (Bea Reddy). So the first of the fallen bets his wife Saturna (Ima Ghoul) that he can get the man who won the “World’s Most Faithful Husband” by Ladies House Companion to break the Seventh Commandment.

This movie has those really tiny pools that only existed when nudie cuties were being made. These pools are so miniature than only one or two women can fit at the same time. I wonder who made these are what their purpose was other than to show off the breasts of young starlets?

Directed and written by Peter Perry Jr., who uses the name Seymour Tokus, this has a dance by famous burlesque queen Candy barr, as well as appearances by actresses with names like Carry Meoff, Lotta Partz and Evan less. More famous actresses include Carol Baughman, Monica Liljistrand, Gaby Martone, Barbara Nordin, Adele Rein and Karen Wyatt, many of whom turn up in Mondo Keyhole.

The secret of Ben-Hur Ova? He’s a sheik and has a hundred wives, so he’s faithful to all of them. Now I ask, who was Ima Ghoul and what is she up to?

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Fredric Hobbs made some strange movies, that’s for sure. Only three are available — this one, Godmonster of Indian Flats and Alabama’s Ghost — and none of them are alike other than the fact that all three are movies made by either someone who was an artist, borderline insane or probably both.

Adam (E. Kerrigan Prescott) is a rock star — his big song is “You Cannot Fart Around With Love” — who has become obsessed with the Hieronymus Bosch painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. It’s led to him becoming unable to perform sexually and, as such, he must steal pornography.

So he does what any sex addict shouldn’t and gets a job at a burlesque theater, which ends with him stripping down to just his panties, which leads to him going into the psych ward. He can’t pay for therapy, but he doesn’t have a singing career without going through it. But suddenly, he falls for a nurse and we have a way too long softcore scene between them.

That’s when things get weird.

Hieronymus Bosch, who is now black and played by Christopher Brooks (Alabama from Alabama’s Ghost), arrives for exposition that tells us that it’s really the future and our hero — or whatever he is to us — is the new Adam after a future war and the painting is really his future, once he escapes from the doctor, who is now spraying the world with deadly gas. It ends as it must. with Adam and Eve making love on a giant flower and repopulating the world.

Say what?

This movie is totally 1971, an art film that hasn’t made any more sense with age. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Every Hobbs experience has made me question my own sanity, which is more than you should expect for an exploitation film about the evils of pornography.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Lisbeth Olsen — not the first crossover this movie will have with The Sinful Dwarf — plays a woman whose husband (Bent Rohweder) has been drafted. Feeling lonely, she decides to hang out with a lesbian friend (Estelle Peters) who goes from removing Lisabeth’s wedding ring and making sapphic love to her to giving her over to multiple men and then selling her into sexual slavery. By the end of the movie, she’s become a street walker and she ends up servicing her drunken husband, who doesn’t even recognize her, but soon tells her — after he finishes, mind you — that he will always love her.

Directed by Svig Sven and written by Max Sundsen, this was supposedly produced by the same group that brought that perverted lil guy to you. This is so scuzzy that if you derived any pleasure from it, I may have to doubt your sanity. That said, it is on the Severin blu ray of The Sinful Dwarf, along with another adult film that shows mini star Torben Bille cattle-prodding the oyster ditch with his lap rocket.