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.

Originally called Teenage Girl Gang or Teenage Killers, this movie is everything I want out of film. If you’ve ever heard the Ministry song “So What,” you’ve heard pretty much the best lines in the movie, most importantly “I shot a cop — SO WHAT!”

This was anonymously written by Ed Wood and was the most financial successful film that he was ever associated with. It was directed by William Morgan, who mainly worked as an editor.

Paula Parkins (Jean Moorhead, Playboy Playmate of the Month for October 1955) might be the rich daughter of a newspaper editor and a socialite, but she gets her kicks by getting her galpals together and dressing like men to rob gas stations and terrorize lover’s lanes. In fact, they go so far as to assault a young man after tying up his girl Shirley. Yes, that was also Ed Wood’s cross-dressing alter ego name, which features prominently in many of his films. And yes, that woman side is being tied up so that the male side can be abused.

These girl gangsters, however, are beyond forward-thinking. You could consider them actual riot-causing girls. In another Wood-written trick, they all have names that can easily be switched from female to male: Paula could be Paul, Geraldine is Gerald, Phyllis or Phil and Georgia can easily change her name to George.

After a makeout party with some male gangsters, the girls decimate a school and even desecrate the flag, totally anarchic behavior for 1956. The cops get called in and two of the girl gang are shot and killed before Paula kills a cop in cold blood.

Finally, after a car chase, Paula crashes through a window, killing the last member of her crew and winding up in the hospital herself, where she dies giving birth to her bastard child. Her parents are denied custody because they’re unfit parents and that child goes into the system, where probably she will turn out just as bad as her mother. So what!

I watched this movie for the first time when I was a teenager and it made me murderously happy and wished that Paula and her gang were real, in my school setting things on fire and ready to slap me around.

God bless you, Ed Wood.

You can watch this on Tubi and download it from The Internet Archive.

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.

A Carolinas regional wonder by one-time director Jim Cinque, this is what happens when our blonde heroine — is her name Bev or Beth, because the audio in this is as bad as you want it to be — takes a few karate classes and puts on a black wig to avenge her sister, killed by her pimp Mr. Demmins.

So she’s kind of like a cat woman, but the movie doesn’t go so far as to challenge copyrights. Instead, she mostly battles a larger gentleman by the name of Doug. Now, the pimp supposedly has a fear of cats, but this never comes up after its mentioned once, which is very unlike Batman’s origin where a bat crashes through a rich man with PTSD’s window and he says, “You know, instead of trying to get to the root cause of crime, like systemic poverty, I’m just going to dress up in black and beat up street punks.”

I kind of love that they said that this movie had a $100,000 budget, which is around $600,000 in today’s money. Did all of that money go to hire Nick Dennis, who somehow went from Spartacus, East of Eden and A Streetcar Named Desire to being in films like this?

Let me tell you how weird this movie is. We never see our heroine dress up in her costume. She shows up in it after a few scenes and we are just to assume that it is her. This movie doesn’t have plot holes in that it just asks you to write your own story so that it all makes more sense.

The poster, however, is amazing.

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.

Luigi Scattini’s directing career is all over the place, hitting all the various genres of the 60’s and 70’s. There’s comedy — War Italian Style, which unites silent film legend Buston Keaton with the Italian comedian duo of Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia (more on them in a bit). There’s mondo — Sweden Heaven and Hell, narrated by Edmund Purdom and featuring Piero Umiliani’s “Mah Nà Mah Nà, which would be used by Benny Hill and The Muppets. And more mondo — the magical Witchcraft ’70, as well as Questo Sporco Mondo Meraviglioso (This Dirty Wonderful World) and Sexy Magico. There’s Eurospy — the Richard Harrison-starring Ring Around the World. And plenty of sexual themed films like La Ragazza dalla Pelle di Luna (The Girl with the Moon Skin), La Ragazza Fuoristrada (The Off-Road Girl), The Body, La Notte dell’alta Marea (The Night of High Tide, which has Pam Grier) and Blue Nude. He’s also the father of Monica Scattini, the only actress I know who could be in both One from the Heart and Ruggero Deodato’s Concorde Affaire ’79.

Saying this is an uneven film is being generous to uneven films. The moronic antics of Franchi and Ingrassia, who play bellhops, play out around Mansfield lounging about and gradually getting undressed. Her husband at the time, Mickey Hargitay, also shows up.

Yes, a movie where Jayne is a doctor — of sexual relations — whose film of mating rituals around the world is an excuse to show mondo footage. These are the movies I fill my life with and bring to you.

Credit — or blame — goes to Massimo Pupillo, who would make Bloody Pit of Horror with Hargitay, and Amedeo Sollazzo, who worked with Franchi and Ingrassia throughout their long careers.

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.

Predating Night of the Living Dead by seven years, Santo was already battling zombies before it was cool, then played out.

That’s because the police can’t deal with the shambling walking dead, so they turn to the man in the silver mask to drop elbows on them.

There’s one harrowing scene where the zombies set an orphanage on fire, then decide to beat up every child inside. Luckily, Santo jumps through a window — wearing a cape no less — and starts hitting chops on them. He battles nearly all of them, who can’t be stopped by bullets, even when two cops get felled by just a punch. One of the zombies seems to favor stomps and he does so to, as they say, stomp a mudhole in our hero. Don’t worry — he gets a big babyface comeback.

Look for luchas Black Shadow, Gory Guerrero (father of Eddy and inventor of so many wrestling moves) and El Gladiator.

This was Santo’s first starring role — at the age of 41 no less — and he makes the most of it. He’s pretty much Batman in the best of ways, except he refuses to wear a shirt and has, as mentioned before, a glamorous cape. I can’t even quantify how much I love this movie. The funny thing is, somehow Santo’s films would grow even stranger, encompassing spy films, whatever was hot in horror at the time and femme fatales who just had to possess our masked hero. He made over fifty of these films and I wish he’d made five hundred more.

You can watch this on YouTube:

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.

As A.P. Stootsberry, Peter Perry Jr. made The Notorious Cleopatra, The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet and The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill. He used his real name to make this and Honeymoon of Terror.

This movie explores the Sunset Strip in 1966, which is everything from bars like the Pandora’s Box, Gazzarri’s, the Whisky A Go-Go and the Fifth Estate to learning about karate, surfing, pot, protests and go-karts.

This movie stars “The Youth of the World,” which seems to be every kid alive in 1966, but trust me, it’s a select crew here.

It’s all narrated by Humble Harve Miller, who was a huge star at Los Angeles’ KHJ-AM, the same station that “The Real Deal” Don Steele was at. However, in 1971, Harve had a major tiff with his wife that ended with him shooting and killing her. He was able to get his charges lowered to second-degree murder, claiming that in a fight over the gun, she was accidentally shot.

He spent three years in jail, teaching other inmates how to succeed in radio and recording books for the blind. When he got out, he went right back on the air. At the height of his career, one in four people in LA was listening to him and he has a 21.4 share, a number no one will ever get ever again.

The cinematographers of this movie, Lazlo Kovans and Vilmos Szigmond, would go on to make some pretty influential films like Easy Rider and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

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.

Paul Frees really did it all. Actor, voice actor, comedian, impressionist, screenwriter and even writer and director, at least for this one movie. He’s even the “Ghost Host” in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland and Disneyworld.

Originally intended to be called Sideburns and Sympathy, this movie is all about Eddy Crane, a small-time crook who gets discovered by a music exec. However, his old gang can’t give up their ways. Then there’s the worry of his old girl, Iris, who is getting left behind for the music exec’s secretary. Things won’t end well.

So yeah. The movie is really bad. But let’s judge Paul Frees, who did so many other cool things, like the films of George Pal (the voice over for the rings in The Time Machine, the reporter in War of the Worlds, the narration that starts Doc Savage), the voices of John Lennon and George Harrison in The Beatles cartoon, the voice of The Millionaire, as well as the vocal chords behind Colossus: The Forbin Project. He’s also the man behind the narration that apocalyptically ends Beneath the Planet of the Apes: “In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead”.

You can watch this on YouTube. You can also download it on the Internet Archive.

Findlay Week (August 18 – 24) Husband and wife Michael and Roberta Findlay made mean-spirited films. They collaborated on films like Take Me Naked, The Ultimate Degenerate, and the notorious Flesh Trilogy, plus they actually looked like criminals – walking mug shots! You expect to see them glowering on the cover of one of those tabloids next to a headline like “KIDNAPPER COUPLE COLLECTED VICTIMS FINGERS.” Instead they were pornographers which did make them like criminals in their day. A lot of the filmmakers of their era would claim they only made this kind of movie because there was money in it, but Michael and Roberta were sincere adherents. Even when audience tastes changed and the couple were divorced they continued to make their own films that mixed in elements of kink and cruelty. 

Michael (Michael Findlay, who co-directed and co-wrote this with his wife Roberta) wakes up in ancient Greece. Why? Who cares. The important thing is that the first woman that he runs into (Maria Lease, fated to one day direct Dolly Dearest), well, he beats into oblivion because he’s Michael Findlay.

Set to the poetry of Pierre Louys, we see Linda Boyce, Maria Lorello, Rosine Martinque, Denise Lemaine and Uta Erickson, the lesbians of this past time, playing in the woods. It tends to go on and on, but this feels like an attempt to be arthouse instead of grindhouse, except that Roberta shoots the women like Jess Franco in a Spanish ballroom in the mid 2000’s, her camera invading right into gynecology instead of the kind of fare that critics would pontificate upon.

Elsa Gidow, who wrote the first book of openly lesbian poetry published in North America, has a poem by the same title:

I shall not harm you at all nor ask you
        for anything,
You need have no fear;
I am only very tired and would like to
        rest awhile
With my head here
And play with the long strands of your
        loosed hair,
Or touch your skin,
Feel your cool breath on my eyes,
        watch it stir
Those rising hills where your breasts begin;
And listen to your voice whispering
        tender words
Until, perhaps, I fall asleep;
Or feel you kiss my forehead to comfort me
        a little
If I should weep.
That is all, just to lie so beside you
Till dawn’s lamp is lit.
You need not fear me. I have given
        too much of love
Ever to ask for it.

As for Mnasidika, she’s one of the characters in Pierre Louÿs’ The Songs of Bilitis, Translated from the Greek. Pretty cultured stuff for a movie made after the Supreme Court permitted genitals in movies and the Findlays went for it. This movie is, at times, just genitals. It was new at the time, I guess, and you didn’t need a baby coming out of it like Mom and Dad so that raincoaters could watch.

That said, the Findlays love ruined orgasms before that became a thing on Pornhub, so this ends with the women hunting down Michael and castrating him. That’s wild, because if you dwell on it, he had his wife filming a scene where his cock got cut off. As always, a maniac.

Findlay Week (August 18 – 24) Husband and wife Michael and Roberta Findlay made mean-spirited films. They collaborated on films like Take Me Naked, The Ultimate Degenerate, and the notorious Flesh Trilogy, plus they actually looked like criminals – walking mug shots! You expect to see them glowering on the cover of one of those tabloids next to a headline like “KIDNAPPER COUPLE COLLECTED VICTIMS FINGERS.” Instead they were pornographers which did make them like criminals in their day. A lot of the filmmakers of their era would claim they only made this kind of movie because there was money in it, but Michael and Roberta were sincere adherents. Even when audience tastes changed and the couple were divorced they continued to make their own films that mixed in elements of kink and cruelty. 

“Whatever she put in that tea hit me like a concrete lullaby.”

Man, the poetry that exists inside this film is kind of like finding a diamond in a shit-strewn toilet and I mean that as a compliment.

Richard David (Michael Findlay, still working through his issues and maybe some new ones as he directs, writes and stars in another, well, epic) has already killed his wife (that’s his real life wife Roberta, whose voice sticks around) and is barely on the run before he picks up hitchhikers Maggie (Uta Erickson) and Jackie (Linda Boyce). While Jackie engages in the kind of behavior that can cause a driver to crash his car, Maggie finds the bloodied body of Mrs. David in the backseat. They take him to their home, which is protected by Bruno (John Amero) and contains another lesbian, Belle (Janet Banzet), and their child of sorts, Baby (Kim Lewid) who is always naked in her crib. They plan on using Richard as their sperm bank to create new children and keep him in line through torture and constant sex with their maid Anna (Donna Stone), who he refers to as Boobarella.

Finally, she warns Richard to run, but it’s too late. The ladies burn him and beat him until he loses what’s left of his mind, strangling and slashing his way to a freedom that he doesn’t find, as Anna uses her massive mammaries to asphyxiate him into oblivion. This would be a climax in any other roughie, but we’ve already had a scene where two of the ladies breast feed Baby while whipping her bloody, then force her to puke up all of the milk. That’s commitment to the bit.

Sadly, Michael Findlay was killed by a helicopter on the roof of the Pan Am Building, literally cut to pieces in some reports, lacerated in others. He left behind quite a history of some of the most truly transgressive movies ever made. Much of the credit should go to his partner Roberta, whose cinematography elevates these from trash to trash with noir aspirations.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

Findlay Week (August 18 – 24) Husband and wife Michael and Roberta Findlay made mean-spirited films. They collaborated on films like Take Me Naked, The Ultimate Degenerate, and the notorious Flesh Trilogy, plus they actually looked like criminals – walking mug shots! You expect to see them glowering on the cover of one of those tabloids next to a headline like “KIDNAPPER COUPLE COLLECTED VICTIMS FINGERS.” Instead they were pornographers which did make them like criminals in their day. A lot of the filmmakers of their era would claim they only made this kind of movie because there was money in it, but Michael and Roberta were sincere adherents. Even when audience tastes changed and the couple were divorced they continued to make their own films that mixed in elements of kink and cruelty. 

For two movies, Richard Jennings (director and co-writer Michael Findlay, who did the story with his wife Roberta) has attacked women to get back at his now dead wife. Now, however, he is the one being hunted by Steve’s — the dead boyfriend of his dead wife — sister Maria (Uta Erickson, Electric Lover) and her boyfriend Don (Earl Hindman, appearing as Leo Heinz).

All the while, Richard is killing off women like Cleo (Donna Stone), who he beats with a tire iron on a snow-covered beach before torturing her with crab claws before electrocuting her through her earrings, followed by picking up a hitchhiker (Rita Vance) who he burns with a blowtorch and then wraps in blankets and sets on fire. Can that be topped? Well, he also douches another woman with acid and his sperm has become so filthy that it poisons an unlucky woman who swallows his fecund seed.

Maria, Don and her sister and lover Doris (Alice Grant who is also Suzzan Landau, Keyholes Are for Peeping) all conspire to get Richard into their trap, which involves her tying his member to a string connected to the trigger of a gun that will shoot him in his sex if he gets erect while watching her have sex with her boyfriend.

Yes, all of this happens and more. There’s a beach battle where Richard screams “I’ll slice you in two like a piece of cheese!” and Maria inserting beads into Don’s back door, which is even more astounding when you realize that he’s Wilson from Home Improvement. No wonder he never showed his face to that narc, Tim Allen! And I totally forgot that the sisters canoodle while Doris’ girlfriend Moana (Janet Banzet AKA Marie Brent and Pat Barrett; The Amazing Transplant) is recovering from the flu. The morals of this movie, I tell you, of which there are none.

There’s a theory that Findlay was abused by priests while he was a child and a lot of his movies are him working out his issues. “I do a service to all mankind with every Jezebel I kill,” he snarls at one point. Richard has gone from kind of, sort of the hero of the first film in this tragedy, a slasher villain in the second and now a complete lunatic with an eyepatch he may not even need, another crime of playing a doctor to women who don’t need his fingers all over and inside them, and a German accident that goes away as often as the patch he keeps taking off.

This was lost for years until Something Weird found it. I can’t even imagine what raincoaters in 1968 thought when attacked by this movie. For every moment of gorgeous women cavorting, you have Richard yelling, “My poisoned semen should take care of you well enough. So long, sucker!” A roughie made by lunatics, for lunatics and yet one that looks way better than it should.

You can get all three of these movies in one set from Vinegar Syndrome.

Findlay Week (August 18 – 24) Husband and wife Michael and Roberta Findlay made mean-spirited films. They collaborated on films like Take Me Naked, The Ultimate Degenerate, and the notorious Flesh Trilogy, plus they actually looked like criminals – walking mug shots! You expect to see them glowering on the cover of one of those tabloids next to a headline like “KIDNAPPER COUPLE COLLECTED VICTIMS FINGERS.” Instead they were pornographers which did make them like criminals in their day. A lot of the filmmakers of their era would claim they only made this kind of movie because there was money in it, but Michael and Roberta were sincere adherents. Even when audience tastes changed and the couple were divorced they continued to make their own films that mixed in elements of kink and cruelty. 

Who destroyed Richard Jennings’ (Michael Findlay) life? Was it his wife Claudia (Angelique Pettyjohn)? Or Steve (Ron Scardera), the lover she cheated on her husband with? Does it even matter to Richard any more? After all, he’s returned from the dead, like a demented 42nd Street grindhouse Jason Vorhees, How do you get over being stabbed in the heart? Well, maybe when your heart has been broken, you just go on.

After watching credits quite literally written on a bathroom wall and hear Roberta Findlay’s voice on the radio, recounting everything from the first movie, but never explaining how Richard came to own an art theater that presents live sex on stage and screens movies like Squash Crazy that is, to borrow a phrase from Pieces, exactly what you think it is.

He’s also become a degenerate Dr. Phibes, inventing all manner of weapons to kill his those on his perceived enemies list, like a dildo that kills and poisoned g strings. Richard also doesn’t need the eyepatch, in the same way that Dr. Doom really doesn’t need his mask, if we follow the ideas of Kirby over Lee . It appears and reappears at will, whether that’s a statement or just Findlay not caring about continuity when he has so much female flesh to show and a machete fight in a moving truck that ends with a castration to entertain you.

As if this is a proto-MCU movie, this even teases more over the end credits: “Will This End the Bloody Career of Richard Jennings? Has His Lust for the Blood of Naked Girls Been Satisfied?? Don’t Fail to See The Kiss of Her Flesh Coming Soon to This Theatre.”

As “The Right Kind” by The Jaybirds keeps playing on the soundtrack, this only gets more depraved. I know that fans of this movie like me romanticize the terrifying real life nature of what New York City was at this time, but who cares? It gave birth to this movie, in which a nude woman holds a cat over her sex and Richard hits her with this pillow talk: “Yes, this little pussy is really a primordial, carnivorous beast waiting to tear apart anything it can touch.”

You can get all three of these movies in one set from Vinegar Syndrome.