Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!
Not enough people talk about Pete Walker, whose movies are mind destroyers and who is all over the map when it comes to output, making giallo-esque in England films like Die Screaming, Marianne; House of Whipcord and The Comeback.
One of his obsessions was to make a movie where actors die in a themed way by those older than them. This is the first time he explored that and it’s all about a mystery producer who has gathered a cast of unemployed actors to be in a mysterious play, rehearsing them in an abandoned theatre beside the sea.
Meanwhile, a black gloved killer is murdering everyone, a killing spree that started thirty years ago when he trapped his wife and her lover behind a wall. Now, everyone is going to deal with his pain as he works it out by you know, killing everyone in the play.
This movie lives up to the flesh part of its title, as no matter how cold that theater looks, nearly every female star feels the urge to doff her bra and show the world their ample gifts. Pete Walker may not have invented the male gaze, but damn if I can’t think of someone who was in its grip more.
Parts of this movie were even shot in 3D, which makes me happier than you’ll ever know.
Here’s a drink for this movie.
The Blood Show
2 oz. tequila
2 oz. blood orange juice (or 1.5 oz. orange juice and .5 oz. grenadine)
Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.
Sir Donovan (Gualtiero Isnenghi) has learned that a tribe in Kenyan has a white woman, Tarzana (Femi Benussi, Bloody Pit of Horror, So Sweet, So Dead), who he believes is his granddaughter Elizabeth. Somehow, she has survived the airplane crash that her parents died in over the African jungle. The rich elderly man and his niece Doris (Franca Polesello) hire Glen Shipper (Ken Clark, Gunman Called Nebraska) to find her. However, they’ve been joined by her cousin Groder (Franco Ressel) who plans on killing Elizabeth to remain the only heir.
The crew also has a native woman, Kamala (Beryl Cunningham, The Weekend Murders) who sends the men into lust pains with her dancing. All while Tarznna watches Glen and gets jealous of the way Doris is all over him. That said, Femi Benussi is perhaps one of the most gorgeous women of all time, even if somehow she found eye shadow in the jungle. She also has a chimp who is dubbed and tells her that she doesn’t need to put her clothes on.
Tarzana was directed by Guido Malatesta, who mainly made peplum like Maciste Contro i Cacciatori di Teste. A year before this, he made a very similar movie, Samoa, Queen of the Jungle. That one has Edwige Fenech in it as the jungle girl. I’m certain right now you’ve stopped reading this and gone off to find it. If you’re still here, this was co-written with Gianfranco Clerici, who would come back to the jungle years later and write Cannibal Holocaust.
Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.
Joan Denton (Jeanne Rainer, a model who went on to write several books, including The Beauty Trap, My Sundays with Henry Miller: A Memoir and Astrology For Lovers: An Astrological Guide to a More Fulfilling Sex Life) is the kind of evil woman I love in my movies. She’s rich, she hates nearly everyone and she also uses people, alternating between little girl and cruel adult sometimes in the same moment.
Somehow, she let working class orphan Eddie Mercer (Ted Marshall) into her bed. Maybe it’s all to upset her rich father Dr. Earl Denton (Charles G. Martin). How rich? He owns the entire town of Dentonville, Florida. However, she finds out that she’s pregnant and Eddie won’t go away. She wants an abortion. He wants her as his wife or to raise their child.
Family lawyer Sam Ingram (Robert J. Cannon) finds out about all of this, so he blackmails Denton, getting part of his estate and sets up an illegal abortion for his daughter. As for Eddie, he gets locked up and beaten by the cops. The only person who can help him is the fallen woman that he was kind to, Vicky Smith (Sue Ellis), who still wouldn’t give him an alibi. She’s trying to get her child back and working with her lawyer to make it happen. They met in the flophouse where they live, all working in the Dentonville laundry, cleaning the sheets and filthy clothes of the rich while they barely make enough to live. Eddie’s been an orphan his whole life, never adopted, the son of a sex worker who wants to belong, to have a family. Joan told him she loved him and that’s why he even made love to her in the first place. Now, she screams that he’s ruined her life.
This is a hard movie to find a person to make the protagonist, because so much of it feels like Florida in 2024. Joan should have the right to do whatever she wants with her body and the baby inside it, but she keeps dealing with men with unrealistic fantasies like Eddie or who tell her they will take care of it and are lying like her father. Eddie just wants to belong and has always felt like he has no worth. Vicky is a bad girl but not rich and amoral like Joan. She just wants to come to your apartment, drink and maybe take off her way too tight sweater on the outside, but on the inside, she’s just learned that she wants to be a mother, a fact that frightens her.
Jeanne Rainer is incredible in this, haunting and hunting Eddie down to the orphanage where he spent his childhood, shooting him in front of children, then following him to the swamp where she shoots him right in the eyes while he’s bleeding out in Vicky’s arms.
Director R. John Hugh came to Florida from England and made five movies. In addition to this movie, also called You’ve Ruined Me Eddie!, he made Fall Girl, The Meal, Naked in the Sun and Yellowneck. Writer Nancy S. Camp only has this movie on her IMDB and I really would love to see what else she could have done.
This is a movie that seems like it’s going to be a message or a hygiene film. Instead, you have a hysterical and deadly alluring rich black widow, a fallen woman trying to make good and a poor man who never had a chance all sweating, loving and going mental in the swampy nights of Florida. There’s no square up reel. Just brutal and unyielding death.
Also: One of the songs in this — it’s all library music — is the song that plays in the drive-in intermission where the hot dog and the bun do tricks under the big top.
Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.
Also known as Honey Britches, Moonshiner’s Women, Hillbilly Hooker, Little Whorehouse on the Prairie and its original title, Shantytown Honeymoon, this was originally directed by Donn Davison, who narrated trailers and radio ads, as well as managed the Dragon Art Theatre in Florida. He adirected the Asylum of the Insane inserts for She Freak, Moonshiner’s Woman and Blood Beast of Monster Mountain. Davison also acted in those last two movies, along with Crypt of Dark Secrets and Mardi Gras Massacre. Ah yes, he was also a magician and yo-yo expert. As if you need any more coolness for this man, he also got movies like Beyond The Door, Secrets Of The Gods and The Force Beyond into Southern drive-ins.
Fred Olen Ray later bought this movie, filmed a new introduction scene with John Carradine as the Judge of Hell, re-titled it Demented Death Farm Massacre and sold it to Troma. It’s claimed he made six times back the money he invested.
Shot in Alpharetta, Georgia, this is the story of Phillip (Jim Peck), Suzanne (Pepper Thurston, The Hidan of Maukbeiangjow), Kirk (Michael Battlesmith, who directs the milk commercial in Can’t Stop the Music) and Karen (Trudy Moore), who are on the run from a jewel robbery and end up in the cabin of too old for his wife moonshiner Horlon P. Craven (George Ellis, the same man who was TV horror host Bestoink Dooley and who made the baffling The Legend of McCullough’s Mountain/Blood Beast of Monster Mountain) and that way too young wife that he paid $200 for, Reba Sue (Ashley Brooks, whose only other acting role is the lead in Carter Stevens’ adult movie Tinseltown).
All of these people are stuck in a sweaty shack and when it comes out that Horlon has a fortune in there, much less that he has an attractive young wife, you can just imagine what is going to happen next.
When I had the opportunity to speak with Ray last year, he really didn’t want to discuss this film. Oh well. I kind of like just how weird it is and it’s a great story, if not a good movie.
Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.
Directed by Eber Lobato and Howard Veit and shot by Ray Dennis Steckler, this is all about the murder of Marla (Nelida Lobato), whose life is reviewed Rashomon-style by several detectives, then it goes into flashbacks to show you the truth.
Marla got hit by a car, which seems like a bad way to punch out, except that she was playing two men against each other, her rich husband Paul (William Turner) and beach stud David (Nick Novarro). While she claims to be a nymphomaniac, she still got killed for whatever happened next.
As the lawyers argue the truth — one even calls her Miss Sudsy Whudsy or Slutzy Whutzy — we find out the real curveball, especially for 1965. Spoiler here, so you can’t say I didn’t warn you. David is in love with a man, Christian (this film’s writer, Alan J. Smith) and is so confused over his identity that he’s become a killer. And if you like From Here to Eternity, good news. You’ll get to see that rolling on the beach scene several times.
Nélida made a few films before her too young death in 1982 from breast cancer. She started acting in Argentina and danced at the Champs Elysees and the Lido de Paris, as well as appearing in several films and plays in her native land. She came here to dance in Vegas.
Supposedly, Jim Morrison saw the title of this film on a marquee in Times Square and incorporated it into the song “When the Music’s Over:”
Before I sink Into the big sleep I want to hear I want to hear The scream of the butterfly
Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.
I’m a very simple man. I love a good hygiene movie. A square up reel? Pure excitement. If a movie starts with a scientist or a learned man of medicine explaining that this is a true story and that we need to be open to what we see, well, I’m on the edge of my seat.
Albert Rose (Leslie Marlowe) is the American ideal: handsome looks, comes from old money, can play sports and a smash with the ladies. Yet one day, he’s lured to a hotel and blackmailed by the proof that he deserted his platoon during a firefight over in Korea and he’s also slept with a prostitute. To get away with these crimes, he paid someone else to take the blame. Now, Dominita (Dorian Wayne) demands that he pay her twenty grand and be his slave for one year.
Also: He has to become a woman.
Ruth (Wendy Roberts), who trains him to be a maid and gives him four estrogen pills a day, insists that this is all a game. He becomes Rose Albert and Diminita claims that he wanted this punishment and was always a woman inside. When Ruth falls in love with him, it’s because she’s a lesbian and wants him to be a woman.
This sets up a really interesting situation, of a man who may or may not want to be a woman, yet has fallen for a woman who only loves him when he has subverted his sex. Yet it’s all forgotten when Albert realizes that Dominita and he have met before, as she’s really Dominique Festro, a soldier who also deserted in Korea that he shot in the leg.
We’re back at the end in the square up reel, as after this exploitation movie, the psychologist asks us to be tolerant of cross dressing and transvestites. That’s pretty open minded today, never mind in 1967.
Perhaps even more amazing is that this is the first movie by Bob Clark, years before he’d make the alpha and omega of holiday movies, Black Christmas and A Christmas Story.
Leslie Marlowe was one of the first American drag queens to perform in clubs and Dorian Wayne was known as the Queen of the Florida Queens. His real name was Rick Colantino and he performed at clubs throughout Florida before becoming a dresser for Broadway shows.
This is probably — definitely — offensive to people on both side of the LGBTQ+ spectrum, but it’s fascinating to see Bob Clark as John Waters.
Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.
Jennie (Beverly Lunsford) is married to a man old enough to be if not her father, surely her older uncle, named Albert Peckingpaw (Jack Lester). But when Mario Dingle (Jim Reader) starts working on their farm, she suddenly decides to perhaps lying under a wrinkled elderly gent isn’t the life she wants. He catches them, drugs them and throws them in a hole while going off to dig their graves. The only person that can save them is sex worker Lulu Belle (Virginia Wood), who is heading out to meet Albert for a reason yet to be found out.
Originally titled Albert Peckingpaw’s Revenge and Tender Grass, this once-melodrama was recut by Robert Carl Cohen, who added in Lulu Belle, added the strip tease scene, threw in the silent movie title cards and made it sleazy, basically. It was nearly a different movie than what original director and writer James Landis (The Sadist) had in mind.
Making this work harder are the soundtrack by Davie Allan and the Arrows and cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond. What other hicksploitation sex scandal film has that?
“RIVER BOTTOM YOUNG STUFF! she’s hitched to an old-man-husband, and he’s got a young stiff for a hired man–it’s what you call a triangle!”
Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.
I first watched this movie in the best of ways. On our weekly webcast, Drive-In Asylum, we had the great opportunity to have Bret McCormick, director of The Abomination, as a guest. This was the movie that he chose to watch with us.
Director, writer and producer John Parker started this film as a short and then expanded it. He had been inspired by a dream that his secretary, Adrienne Barrett, had and picked her to star in the film along with Bruno VeSota, who would go on to star in several Roger Corman films.
Barrett plays the Gamin, a young woman who wakes up from a nightmare to be in another one. Newspapers scream that there was a mysterious stabbing, men try to assault her only to be beaten into oblivion by police and a pimp buys her a flower, then asks her to accompany a rich man (Ve Sota) as she dreams back to stabbing her abusive father after he had shot and killed her mother.
After an evening touring the city’s bars and nightclubs, they enter his elegant apartment where he ignores her attempts at seduction as he gorges on a huge meal. He finally attempts to attack her and she stabs him with the same blade that murdered her father and he plummets to the street, holding her necklace in a death grip. She saws off his hand as people watch without caring and the same cop appears that saved her in the alley, only now with the face of her father as she runs away, clutching the severed hand.
The pimp comes back to pull her into a jazz club, soon followed by the cop and the dead body of the rich man, whose bloody stump points her out as his killer. The audience surrounds her, laughing, as she wakes up back where she began, in the hotel room. She goes to put on her necklace and finds that its being held by a severed hand.
Dementia was briefly released in 1953 before it was banned by the New York State Film Board, who deemed it “inhuman, indecent, and the quintessence of gruesomeness.” Perhaps that’s because it’s a movie that shows the violence and fear that women live with every day, but goes further to have a heroine who strikes back with the kind of strength that seperates a man’s body part. Today, this would be considered an art film, or maybe even elevated horror, but in the 1950s, the only genre it could fit into was horror. When it was re-released in 1955, theater employees submitted medical examinations of patrons to “heart specialists” who would assure the theatergoers that they would not be frightened to the point of death. One of the big reasons why the 1955 re-release was troubled was that some areas of the country weren’t ready for the interracial dancing in the jazz club.
Originally, Dementia has no dialogue and only sound effects and a score by composer George Antheil, with vocal effects by Marni Nixon and jazz musician Shorty Rogers and his band the Giants performing in the night club scene. Jack H. Harris, who had a habit of getting films and re-releasing them — Equinox, Dark Star — added narration by Ed McMahon and release it as Daughter of Horror.
When we showed this, Bret was worried that our audience would hate it. After all, The New York Daily News said, “The presentation, designed as a shocker, is enough to drive anybody crazy with alternate sessions of tedium and bedlam.” The good news is that it was received well, much like how Preston Sturges said, “It stirred my blood, purged my libido. The circuit was completed. The work was a work of art.”
Even if you haven’t seen this movie, you may have. It’s what’s playing in The Colonial Theater when The Blob attacks. And Faith No More used it as the inspiration for their video “Separation Anxiety.”
Supposedly, Aaron Spelling was one of the people in the nightclub. Did you see him?
The re-edit by Harris is strange to the ear, as you’re listening to the friendly voice of Carson’s sidekick saying things like, “Come with me into the tormented, haunted, half-lit night of the insane. This is my world. Let me lead you into it. Let me take you into the mind of a woman who is mad. You may not recognize some things in this world, and the faces will look strange to you. For this is a place where there is no love, no hope…in the pulsing, throbbing world of the insane mind, where only nightmares are real, nightmares of the Daughter of Horror!”
Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.
Filmed as Blood Money, this was a double feature as High School Big Shot as the first double feature release — with T-Bird Gang — for Roger Corman’s Filmgroup.
Marv Grant (Pittman) has a pretty desperate life. His father (Malcolm Atterbury) is an abusive drunk, his girl Betty Alexander (Virginia Aldridge) was using him because he would write her essays and when he gets caught, his teacher not only fails her, he also ruins Marv’s chance of getting a scholarship. Then, Betty leaves him and goes back to her real boyfriend, Vince (Howard Veit).
He also has a dead end job on the docks, where he learns that his boss is running a million dollar heroin deal. He decides to work with safecracker Harry March (Stanley Adams) and brother-in-law Sam Tolman (Louis Quinn) to take the cash, which he hops can get his dad off the sauce and win back Betty. He tells her the plan and she gets Vince involved to steal all the money.
This all ends in the most depressing way possible. Marv’s father kills himself, Vince shoots and kills Sam, Betty shows up only for Vince to kill her and then the real criminals show up and shoot up Vince before the cops arrest everyone, even Marv. Some high school big shot he ended up being.
Director and writer Joel Rapp also shot The Battle of Blood Island before a career in TV.
Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.
John Hayes was behind some truly wild movies, like Grave of the Vampire, Dream No Evil, Garden of the Dead, End of the World and Jailbait Babysitter. But here in 1961, he’s making a Hollywood done her wrong movie that stars Rue McClanahan as Sandy, an exotic dancer who thinks she’s tough enough to take on Tinseltown.
Also known as Walk the Angry Beach and The Unholy Choice, this also has a man named Tony (Tony Vorno) who wants to take Sandy away from all of this if he can just get one more score. As he tries and makes an honest woman out of her by being a thief. Also: This was originally made without the burlesque footage, which means that it was about twenty minutes long, as these scenes seem to go on for hours. Did you ever think you’d reach a point where women sexy dancing would get boring?
As a kid, speaking of Rue, The Golden Girls felt so old. Well, here I am and her character Blanche was a year older than me. It’s weird because I only see the older version of her when I see this movie, as I didn’t age into her, as with so many actresses who were teenage crushes and are now moms and grandmothers in movies. That said, I always worried that I wouldn’t find age appropriate women attractive when I was younger and now, white hair can turn my head. That’s personal growth.
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