Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

Frankie Lee (Rene Bond) and her boyfriend Johnnie Ellis (Ric Lutz) have a tough relationship. She’s becoming a big star as a singer and can’t be around whenever he wants her. He has a job she doesn’t understand as a computer programmer and when she comes to work, she’s so attractive that even his CPU hits on her. Come on, she’s Rene Bond. Of course a mainframe is going to fall in love.

The secret is that Johnnie is also sleeping with Alice (Cyndee Summers), Frankie’s best friend. They have a meet-up in her marital bed just in time for her husband Ray (John Barnum) to get home and put him in the hospital, where Frankie visits and give him an old fashioned as both of his arms are broken.

On another secret date, Johnnie tells Alice that he only keeps Frankie around for the money so that he can patent his computer invention. And despite him figuring out how to get both of them in bed at the same time, this story can only end in tragedy.

Rene Bond is amazing in this, singing, bring dramatic and doing comedy all in an hour of screen time. This is a softcore film, a rarity for almost everyone in the cast as well as director and writer Alan Colberg. It even has racing footage and feels like it was an attempt to make a real movie and not just a smoker.

I wish the whole movie was about that computer trying to have sex with Rene Bond.

Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

This was the first movie that Nicholas Meyer ever wrote. Yes, the same guy who wrote The Day After, Time After Time and the two good Star Trek films (two and four, if you’re playing at home) started right here. One day when he left to visit his parents, the script was altered and young Mr. Meyer wanted to take his name off of the project, but was convinced by his manager that he needed a credit.

Neil Agar (William Smith, Grave of the Vampire) is a special agent for the State Department sent to investigate the numerous deaths at government-sponsored Brandt Research.

It turns out that the scientists there are more obsessed with sex than their research to the point that some of them are literally getting balled to death. By the way, I’m on a quest to get the word balling and ball used in the vernacular again. Please help me.

The truth is the women of the research lab have all become Bee Girls through self-induced mutation. Now they have eyes that allow them to see like insects and the instincts of using and destroying men, several of whom totally welcome the end.

The main reason to watch this is Anitra Ford as Dr. Susan Harris. You may remember her from The Big Bird Cage and being a model on The Price Is Right. She’s in one of my favorite movies, 1972’s Messiah of Evil. If you haven’t seen that, you should probably just stop reading this right now and get on that.

Victoria Vetri plays the heroine, Julie Zorn. Using the name Angela Dorian, she was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for September 1967 and 1968’s Playmate of the Year. When Apollo 12 went to the moon, a photo of her and Playmates Leslie Bianchini, Reagan Wilson and Cynthia Myers was there, inserted into the activity astronaut cuff checklists.

She also appears in Rosemary’s Baby and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. In 2010, nearly a quarter-century into her marriage to Bruce Rathgeb, Vetri was charged with attempted murder after allegedly shooting her husband at close range after an argument. She received nine years in prison on a charge that was finally reduced to attempted voluntary manslaughter. Her husband claimed that she had been saying, “No more Charlie, no more Charlie,” as she’d been convinced that Charles Manson wanted her dead ever since her friend Sharon Tate was killed. In fact, the gun that she used was given to her by Roman Polanski, who her husband claimed that she often slept with along with Tate. Vetri is in a halfway house now and working on making her way back to society.

This movie is also known as Graveyard Tramps, which has nothing to do with what it’s really about. You should watch it anyway.

There are several Bee Girls — called Bee Ladies in the credits — and they include Colleen Brennan (who also used the name Sharon Kelly and is in Russ Meyer’s Supervixens and Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS), Kathy Hilton (If You Don’t Stop It… You’ll Go Blind!!!), Sharon Madigan (Truck Turner) and, perhaps most importantly, Rene Bond, appearing in one of the nineteen movies she made in 1973 and one of the few mainstream efforts. Actually the only one.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Here’s a drink recipe.

Invasion of the Bee’s Knees

• 2 oz. gin
• .75 oz. lemon juice
• .75 oz. honey syrup
• 1 oz. egg white
• Dash of honey

1. Place all ingredients in a shaker, then shake vigorously.
2. Pour into a glass and enjoy.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

The feature debut of Norman J. Warren, Her Private Hell came about producer Bachoo Sen approached Richard Schulman, owner of London’s Paris Pullman Cinema, with the idea to make their own films. This is how the production company Piccadilly Pictures started.

Schuman was the owner of London’s Paris Pullman Cinema and was showing Warren’s short film Fragment, so they made an offer for him to film two movies for them. The director would later tell Rock Shock Pop!, “I had no idea what the film would be, but to be honest, I would have said yes to anything. I was 25 and desperate to direct a feature film.

The story was written by Glynn Christian, a New Zealand immigrant who based his screenplay on his own experiences as a foreigner living in the swinging London of the 60s.

Marisa (Lucia Modugno, LSD Flesh of the Devil, Danger: Diabolik) has come to London to be a model and the first magazine she works for decides to keep her in a fancy high rise apartment along with their top photographer, Bernie (Terry Skelton). They explain its for her protection and not to be the sole owner of her image, which she soon realizes as the magazine begins to control her every move.

While Marisa sleeps with Bernie, she also falls for Matt (Daniel Ollier, who beat Udo Keir for the role), a young photographer whose avant-garde nudes end up in Margaret — one of the magazine’s owners — possession and get sold to a foreign magazine. The film then becomes all about who Marisa will leave with — Bernie, Matt or alone. And perhaps Margaret and Bernie aren’t strangers to one another, as it turns out.

At once a naive girl done wrong film mixed with a movie about the literal swinging 60s morals, Her Private Hell isn’t the Norman J. Warren you may know and love. This is closer to French New Wave than anything else he’d make.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Directed by Vicente Aranda (The Blood Spattered Bride), who wrote the story with Antonio Rabinad, based on the short story Bailando para Parker by Gonzalo Suárez, Exquisite Cadaver starts with a girl committing suicide by laying down headfirst on train tracks.

We meet a man (Carlos Estrada) who is the publisher of pulp horror — giallo — and someone who has become quite successful as a result. He gets a severed human hand in the mail, which he buries in a park. Another package is sent, this time with a torn dress and a photo of a woman. He also gets a telegram, which his wife (Teresa Gimpera, Hannah Queen of the Vampires) reads and it ends with the promise of sending a forearm. He lies and says its for work, but as she follows him, she notices that he is also being stalked by a woman in a black veil.

The woman is Parker (Capucine, The Pink Panther), who lures the man to her house where she gives him LSD. He staggers through her villa, following the sound of her voice, which leads him to a woman’s body inside a refrigerator. He passes out and wakes up at home, his wife having been called by Parker to get her husband.

The man reveals to his wife that he had an affair with a woman named Esther (Judy Matheson, The House That Vanished; is it too soon to talk about ’72?) who told him “I’d die so that my love for you will last. So that indifference will not kill it” before she laid down on the train tracks, as we saw as the movie began. Except that a detective that the man’s wife hired saved Esther.

As she tried to get her life together, Esther fell for a doctor before meeting Parker, who she soon began an affair with. Parker was in love with her, trying to save her, but Esther never stopped loving the man, finally killing herself. Parker then made this plan to get revenge for her lost love, even cutting. her corpse to pieces, sending each one until finally, the head arrives. The man looks for his wife but she is gone, leaving for Paris and a new relationship with Parker, who has seduced her.

After filming ended, Aranda gave Matheson the silver hand pendant that her character wore in the film. She still has it to this day and even established a trademark of wearing it in her subsequent films.

As for the director, he had an accident on the set which led to him directing much of this movie from a stretcher.

Thanks to Theater of Guts, I know that this was released in the U.S. by Gadabout-Gaddis Productions, who released The Man from Nowhere, Find a Place to Die, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, One On Top of the Other and Marta. According to the site, it played drive-in screens as late as 1983 as a double feature with Twilight Zone: The Movie.

The title Exquisite Corpse comes from the game created by Surrealism founder André Breton that has a collection of words or images collectively assembled by several creators who have no idea what has come before other than a line, which is added to until a complete art piece emerges. The name comes from the phrase that was part of the first work created by the game, “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.”

The Spanish title, Las Crueles (The Cruel Ones), is meant to sound like Les Diaboliques. It was not the title preferred by Aranda.

This was partially shot in the same house as Patrick Still Lives and Burial Ground. Thanks Erica from Unsung Horrors!

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

“See…Vala, the voluptuous cave babe! See…Mota, the mighty war-lard! See…Dino, the plastic-eating dinosaur!”

Directed by Ed De Priest — who was making adult films as Jules Martine all the way up to 1998 — and written by Akdon Telmig — which is one letter away from being Vodka Gimlet, which Ed Wood drank a lot of and yes, he wrote this one — One Million AC/DC is a movie where people are menaced by someone in an ape suit and a rubber dinosaur when they aren’t having making softcore love.

Stuntman Gary Kent is the leader of these cave people, it’s shot in Bronson Park and Gary Graver was running the camera. All of these facts may be more interesting than the movie. But man, who else other than Graver could work with Orson Welles and Wood, who wrote the phrase “Tyrannosaurus style” for this. Then again, the line “Nothing has changed, right down through the ages. Man has to kill. Man has to eat. Man has to have his woman.” is pretty solid.

You know who is listed as the historical consultants? Bob Cresse and Lee Frost. I laughed for about five minutes reading that.

This also has a lot of crossover with the casts of two movies from 1968, The Kiss Off and The Kill (which was directed and written by Graver).

If you can get past all of this, well, dark and unsexy sex, you will come to the realization that this is the same dinosaur toy that was in David L. Hewitt’s The Mighty Gorga.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Directed by Irwin Meyer (who wrote the Hollywood Babylon TV series) and written by Alexander Panas, this is quite literally about a terror-filled post-wedding between Lilli (Abbey Heller) and Emile Duvre (Robert Parsons). People start dying and the killer could be anyone from Emile to his servant Hajmir (Vincent Petti), his mistress Helene (Beverly Lane), or his brother Max (Panas). It could also be any of the maniacs that Emile hangs out with or perhaps the person who keeps calling and hanging up.

This movie was filmed in the home of Sepy Dubronyi, a Hungarian born sculptor who fled to Cuba and then to the U.S. He was famous for sculpting celebrities, like his former fling Anita Ekburg. He had plenty of famous women, including Linda Christian (the first Bond girl in the TV version of Casino Royale), Brigitte Bardot and Ava Gardner.

The tagline promises “A honeymoon of ecstasy turns into a nightmare… Shock upon shock brings a thrilling, chilling blood-curdling tale to the screen!” I have no idea what that script was, because this really has no plan, feeling like a Miami based void where characters appear and fade away at whim. It’s also known as Orgy of the Golden Nudes, The Golden Nymphs and Orgies, which are great titles, but again have nothing to do with the actual film.

Lilli says at one point, “Even in my dreams, I hadn’t dreamt of it as wonderful as this. For me, it was a stairway to heaven, and Emile’s eyes were filled with stars.” That’s before she’s almost killed by a sculpture while trying to swim and having to hear her new husband exclaim, “The circle leads from life to death. The power of life is the power of death. And I have that power, to take life from death and immortalize it forever. That’s why I had to kill, to give life to my statues.”

This is the kind of movie that lunatics will enjoy. Like, well, me.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Hollywood Babylon, the book by filmmaker Kenneth Anger, was banned shortly after it was first published in the U.S. in 1965. It wasn’t reprinted for ten years and when it came back, it was filled with photos of Jayne Mansfield’s car crash, Carole Landis and uncensored images of the Black Dahlia’s destroyed body.

I read it a hundred times in my teens and twenties, a book that taught me the Crowley quote “Every man and every woman is a star,” as well as so many urban legends that probably weren’t true, but who cares? Clara Bow never slept with the entire USC football team, including John Wayne. Mansfield wasn’t decapitated. It finally led to a sequel and a 1992 syndicated series hosted by Tony Curtis.

But before that, there was this, an unauthorized film.

Directed by Van Guylder (The Bang Bang Gang and a later sequel, Hollywood Babylon II, taken from the TV show) and written by L.K. Farbella, this plays just as loose with reality as its inspiration. Fatty Arbuckle was exonerated for the death of Virginia Rappe and paid for it with his career. Here, he gets away with assaulting her with a bottle of champagne. Rudolph Valentino inspired gay clubs and had a fondness for butch women. Erich von Stroheim got off watching women get whipped. And yes, Clara Bow wears out those Trojans. The football players. They all went in bareback.

Yes, Olive Thomas killed herself, but she died in a hospital instead of a hotel room. Wallace Reid was probably addicted to drugs before this movie claims that he was. Charlie Chaplin slept with Lita Grey when she was 15, but did he have other women give him fellatio while she watched, so that he could train her to never have actual sex with. him again? And why does no one look like the actors they’re supposed to be and while this mentions nearly everyone, it gets shy about William Randolph Hearst?

That said, Uschi Digard is in this and sometimes that’s enough to get past any issues with quality and the very judging narration. That’s Jane Ailyson from The Godson and A Clock Work Blue getting whipped. A party scene also has Suzanne Fields in it, Dale Ardor from Flesh Gordon.

That narration — listen to this prose: “This was Hollywood, once considered a suburb of sprawling Los Angeles – destined, perhaps doomed, to become it’s very heart. In 1916, however, it was just a junction of dirt roads and a scattering of orange groves. If there was sin, it was not to be seen. Scandalous sin that is, for what was going on at the studio on Sunset Boulevard was merely play-acting, a Babylonian orgy involving hundreds, nay thousands of actors and extras, portraying the doom Belshazzar. This passion play, D.W. Griffith’s most ambitious epic, was titled “Intolerance” and it set the tone for Tinseltown… something to live up to, something to live down. The shadow of Babylon had fallen over Hollywood. Scandal was waiting just out of camera range.”

There could be an amazing version of this book. Anger would probably be the right choice to have directed it. This ends up being that rare softcore movie that is boring despite having everything it needs to be so exciting.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

La Donna nel Mondo hustled its way into theaters months after the success of Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi’s Mondo Cane. Where the first film was unfocused and just shows, quite literaly, a dog’s life, the sequel lives up to its name: you are going to see women all of the world.

We start in Israel, where we see women start training for their military service, which is soon juxtaposed with the island of Roger Hopkins, who has 84 wives and 52 children.

That difference bwteen women is the highlight of much of the footage, showing women longing for statues and their mates, who instead parade about in full regalia in New Guinea ritual.

There’s a trip to Cannes — this happens in so many mondos that I’ve lost track by this point — as well as a camera club (that’s where Bettie Page got her start, allowing men to pay her to take photos of her as she posed; incel weirdos did not get their start via the internet, dear friends), dude ranches where divorcees get the marital bliss they were missing, prostitution, Japanese women diving for pearls and getting their eyes more Westernized, plastic surgery, forced tattoos, Thalidomide babies and women screaming at God in Lourdes. There’s all that and so much more, all concentrating on, yes, the women of the world, but mostly wanting to show you plenty of flesh along the way.

This movie is dedicated to Italian exploitation films Belinda Lee, who died in a car crash that also injured her boyfriend Jacopetti: “To Belinda Lee, who throughout this long journey accompanied and helped us with love” appears on screen with ten seconds of silence. Jacopetti would be buried next to her thirty years later, never falling out of love with her, despite a lifetime mired in the sheer muck and grime of the mondo.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

As far as I’m concerned, Marisa Mell can be in every giallo. She can be in every movie, actually.

In this one, originally called La encadenada, she plays the live-in psychologist of millionaire widower Alexander’s (Richard Conte, wow what a get!)  slightly — well, perhaps completely — insane silent son. Within a few moments of plot time, she’s marrying the father, disposing of him and then moving on to his son. But then, of course, her evil ex (Anthony Steffen, who somehow played Django more than Franco Nero) shows up to ruin everything.

There are some wild ideas here — Alexander owns the Holy Grail, the real cup and it’s treated with all of the excitement that another Alexander gets when he shows off his magic window — but the film suffers from a lack of style. It needs the sex, the sizzle, the score, the everything that makes a giallo a giallo.

But man, the ending is slam bang great and Mell is awesome in this, an actress in search of a movie. And it’s got a really great supporting cast. Manuel Mur Oti never really directed that I’ve seen before, but his style here seems very point and shoot. That could be the result of the horrible print that is out there. But hey, let’s be honest: you could do worse than to watch Marissa Mell ruin men for 87 minutes.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Gerard Damiano is probably best known for making Deep Throat, the movie that created porno chic, even if the trend of adult films being accepted was happening for some time. It just so happened that his film had a great title and came along at the right time. Before he made it, he made this, a mondo movie that explains how the world is changing and accepting more sexually oriented entertainment.

While the film mainly concentrates on the titillation of meeting sex workers and female adult performers, it does have Damiano interviewing Mary Philips of N.O.W., gay magazine publisher and activist Arthur Irving, and Jack Nichols and Lige Clark from Gay Magazine. That’s pretty much as far as it goes for showing homosexual material. It does, however, spend more time with Screw publishers Al Goldstein and Jim Buckley, as well as Patrick and Tally Wright having hardcore sex for several seconds along with several female models masturbating.

Somehow, this movie uses Marmalade’s “Reflections of My Life,” which went gold in 1971. I have no idea how they got the rights, which is me saying that Damiano just used it.

Adult stars that appear in this include Tallie Cochrane (Can I Do It ‘Till I Need Glasses?, Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman), Rita Vance (The Kiss of Her Flesh), Kim Pope (The Amazing Transplant), Suzzan Landau (Keyholes Are for Peeping), Alex Mann (I Drink Your Blood), Linda Southern (The Headless Eyes), Patrick Wright (the truck driver at the beginning of Graduation Day), Linda Lovelace, who would soon become a big star in Damiano’s next film.

There’s also an appearance by Damiano’s son, in case you’re wondering if this is still exploitation, and early plaster caster Nancy (who is also in Pornography In New York), who is absolutely stunning as she appears as a normal sexual being in a world of idealized bodies.

So much has, pardon the silly pun, changed since Changes was made. Times Square is now all cleaned up and you can find incest porn in the privacy of your home online. Yet the right still pushes to censor whatever they determine as pornography, as that’s a major part of Plan 2025. Who determines what is art and what is porn? Surely the sex shows in this are filth, but they’re also made for consenting adults. Could the films I love that aren’t pornography be considered porn under these rules? Will owning Jess Franco movies be a crime, the video nasties all over again? This movie makes me consider how far we’ve come but how often we slide back, as even young people today are frighteningly puritanical.