Golden Oldies Week (July 27 – August 3) Something Weird Video have released such a wide range of movies over the last 30 years that trying to categorize them can be tricky. They started out as a gray market mail order distributor (aka a bootlegger) not unlike the Cape Copy Center or Sinister Cinema and eventually moved into the niche se ploit titles that would set them apart. The movies on this list are the kind of cult genre titles that were the bread and butter of many of the bootleg companies of the 90s and most were not exclusive to SWV. If you look in the catalogs or on the website these would be under categories like “Nightmare Theatre’s Late Night Chill-O-Rama Horror Show,” “Jaws of the Jungle,” “Sci-fi Late Night Creature Feature Show,” or “Spies, Thighs & Private Eyes.” Many of these are currently available as downloads from the SWV site (until the end of 2024)!
Leonard Kirtman mostly directed adult, churning out titles like The Seduction of Cindy, Up Desiree Lane and Confessions of a Candy Striper, often using the name Leon Gucci. This is one of the few movies he made without penetration yet it has all the feel of a New York City-made porn from 1970.
Shot in Coney Island — I would not be surprised if there were no permits and no one had any idea they were even filming — this movie revolves around the people who are killed after winning a teddy bear at the booth of Tom (Earle Edgerton) and his hunchback-heaving assistant Gimpy (John Harris, the stage name for Burt Young!).
There’s a district attorney called Dan (Martin Barolsky) who gets called down to investigate, but he’s so dumb that he brings his fiancee Laura (Judith Resnick) along to the carnival and man, defund the slasher police.
No set dialogue. Scuzzy looking footage. Gore from the Herschell Gordon Lewis school of pause on the guts. A great moment where a tunnel of love ends with a screaming survivor and a headless blood spraying victim. So much repetition. Sound effects out of nowhere. Folk music. Cool jazz. A drunken sailor. Bad relationships. Death is everywhere.
Golden Oldies Week (July 27 – August 3) Something Weird Video have released such a wide range of movies over the last 30 years that trying to categorize them can be tricky. They started out as a gray market mail order distributor (aka a bootlegger) not unlike the Cape Copy Center or Sinister Cinema and eventually moved into the niche se ploit titles that would set them apart. The movies on this list are the kind of cult genre titles that were the bread and butter of many of the bootleg companies of the 90s and most were not exclusive to SWV. If you look in the catalogs or on the website these would be under categories like “Nightmare Theatre’s Late Night Chill-O-Rama Horror Show,” “Jaws of the Jungle,” “Sci-fi Late Night Creature Feature Show,” or “Spies, Thighs & Private Eyes.” Many of these are currently available as downloads from the SWV site (until the end of 2024)!
The Invisible Avenger is a compilation of two television pilot episodes of a planned Republic Pictures TV show called The Shadow. Yes, the very same hero whose radio show had just ended in 1954. The TV show didn’t get picked up and this movie was released, which. is kind of curious as none of the advertizing — or the name — lets you know this is about Lamont Cranston and his alter ego. It had new footage added and was released again as Bourbon Street Shadows, again barely letting you know that this was a movie about The Shadow.
Some of this movie was directed by cinematographer James Wong Howe, whose only other directing credit is for the Harlem Globetrotters movies Go Man Go. He had a strange life in the Hollywood system, as his marriage to Sanora Babb was not recognized by the state of California until 1948, as they banned interracial marriage (she was white). It was the first time he could admit that he was with his wife, as the morals clause prohibited him from saying he was with a white woman. They also lived in separate apartments due to his traditional Chinese views before she moved to Mexico City to protect him from the blacklist. He would go on to be one of the most recognized cinematographers of all time.
Along with Ben Parker (Teen-Age Strangler) and John Sledge, he directed the episodes that make up this TV pilot. It’s very much torn from the headlines, as Pablo Ramirez (Dan Mullins), an expatriate to New Orleans from the Caribbean nation of Santa Cruz, is planning a coup against that country’s leader, the Generalissimo. The secret police of that country are trying to kill him and trumpet player Tony Alcalde (Steve Dano) summons Lamont Cranston (Richard Derr) and his mentor Jogendra (Mark Daniels) to help. They don’t get there in time, as Tony is killed, so they decide to help Ramirez as The Shadow.
Written by George Bellak and Ruth Jeffries, this is the sixth film that features this character. Again, it’s so odd that this is a superhero movie that wants to be sold as horror or anything but The Shadow.
Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!
Jane Tennay (Chesty Morgan) is Agent 73, given her name because of her, well, large bust. Her agency has sent her to kill heroin dealers one by one. After each murder, she has to take a photo as proof, using the camera that been inserted inside her left breast. And like Snake Plissken with bodacious ta tas, Agent 73’s sweater meat will explode if she doesn’t get her job done in time.
If that all makes sense to you, welcome to the cinematic universe of Doris Wishman, as this is the second appearance of Chesty Morgan, who might even be playing the same character she was in Deadly Weapons.
As she looks for the crime boss Toplar, she starts to fall for a fellow agent named Tim (Frank Silvano). But hmm…could Toplar be someone she’s already close to?
In 2002, Doris Wishman was on Conan with Roger Ebert — which had to be a thrill for him — and let the world know she was still making movies like Dildo Heaven. We should all be praising the woman who said, “After I die I will be making movies in hell!”
The furniture in this didn’t come from the past. It came from a place beyond , a world where everyone has fake eyelashes and too much makeup and is barely able to walk on the highest of high heels, where giant breasts can make a flash so huge it fills the entire screen. We’ll never live in this world but we can visit for a few moments at a time and watch a secret agent cover those boobs with poison so a guy licks them off and dies, never mind that she’s so much bigger in the chest than his girlfriend.
Also, in keeping with my theory that Doris has a lot of Bruno Mattei in her, this takes nudist footage from Blaze Starr Goes Nudist and has the same surgery scene from The Amazing Transplant. Unlike Bruno, Doris made those movies, so I guess she can take from her own work. Maybe that makes her closer to Jess Franco.
Jane’s boss in this, Bill, is played by Peter Savage. He was a boxer that grew up with Jake La Motta and wrote the book Raging Bull. He also made the movie Cauliflower Cupids, which has Jane Russell, Alan Dale and several boxers, including La Motta, Rocky Graziano, Willie Pep, Paddy DeMarco, Tony Zale and Petey Scalzo. Savage wrote, directed and stars, so this is a vanity production, but one very low on cost.
This is probably one of the more coherent of Wishman’s movies and it still makes no sense. And by that, I mean it’s incredible.
Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!
Allow me to play this broken record again, but it’s astounding just how much the moviemaking of Doris Wishman, Bruno Mattei and Jess Franco line up. At the end of all of their careers, there they are, making movies way past their contemporaries, even if it’s shot on video now. As Bruno would make Zombies: The Beginning and Franco would make so many movies in hotel conference rooms with quick zooms into the anatomy of his actresses, Doris would come back to make this film, one that is so close to her past movies even if it looks better when every other director who shot on video was supposedly taking a step down quality wise.
Doris was 89 when she made this and working at the Pink Pussy Cat in Miami — which is in the movie and so is Doris, as well as a photo of Chesty Morgan on the wall — and it allowed her to finally have synch sound in a movie and seemingly look back on her own career. Yet in this movie, she still does all the things you want: the apartment is needlessly over decorated, sex scenes often just show feet rolling around in the bed, dialogue feels like one of those Russian spy stations that are trying to read English phrases to send coded messages and all the men are jerks. And, as if ready to seem like another of my favorite warped directors, Claudio Fragasso, Doris places several stuffed animals in this and they are often zoomed in on.
This is the story of three roommates — Lisa, Beth and Tess — who all want to sleep with their boss. Only Tess has succeed so far, except she’s had to hide her short dark hair and wear a blonde wig to win him over. There’s also a teenage peeper who keeps looking in on the girls and fantasizing about them, which transforms into footage from The Immoral Three. Not to be outdone, but when a TV comes on later, it’s playing Doris’ Love Toy. Never mind that these movies were shot on film and the jump between media is jarring.
That peeping tom also has a dream where he has two penises, which reminds me of the creepy story where Bill Cosby told Keenan Thompson that after he played Fat Albert, “You know, life is good in the movies or whatever, but you just be ready, because when this movie comes out, you’re gonna need two dicks — because women are gonna be all over you.” That pervert also goes to Dr. Faust, who promises that his cream can make his small one eyes monster into a bigger beast. That reminds me of a joke that used to make my dad laugh, even when he was going through dementia.
“Dad, I finally got this penis cream. It’s going to make me so much bigger when I rub it on it.”
“Does it work?”
“They said it might take a few months. But my hands are huge!”
This movie made me overjoyed, as it feels like unlike so many directors, Doris got the opportunity to finish her career on her terms, making a movie that was uniquely hers. She never fit any mold, starting to direct movies much later in life than most and keeping it up way past nearly all of her nudie cutie contemporaries. I’ll think about this film and how the women finally discover that perhaps dildos are better than men — and then a new neighbor knocks on the door — more than any movie I’ll see made in this year or any other.
It feels and looks like sub-VCA porn and never gives you the payoff. And that’s the payoff. And it’s wonderful.
Thanks to the incredible theironcupcake on Letterboxd, whose Doris reviews were an inspiration to me. She even wrote down the lyrics to this film’s theme:
“When love has left and you’re bereft, reach for your dildo
When life’s a mess and fraught with stress, reach for your dildo
When a lover twice caught cheating
Says for you his heart’s still beating
Send him away, don’t let him stay
Reach for your dildo!
My dildo is very close to me, I keep it in my drawer
It’s HIV negative, it has no flaw
Someday I’ll find my love divine and I’ll be overjoyed
But ’til that fateful day, my dildo fills the void
Reach for your dildo!”
Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!
I’ll go anywhere Doris Wishman wants to take me.
Doris is able to be so many directors in her approach and yet remain herself. Here, she’s in the worlds of Ed Wood and Kroger Babb, making a movie that says that it wants to educate you, but really wants to show you graphic surgery of a man’s penis being sliced into a vagina in full detail. In fact, this same footage was used for the South Park episode “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina.”
It features Dr. Leo Wollman, founder of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, now the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which wrote its first Standards of Care for transgender health care. He was also the science and medicine advisor for this movie. You also get interviews and moments with other transgender individuals, include Deborah Hartin, who transitioned in 1970 and became one of the first divorces due to transitioning. She also sued the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene for refusing to update her sex designation on her birth certificate.
Wishman started filming this in 1971 and debated titles like Adam or Eve and Strange/Her. Then she found Leslie, an attractive trans person who would provide the main interview in this film, yet seems to hate nearly every other trans person she’s ever met, even comparing herself at one point to Anita Bryant. This movie has a total Yin/Yang-ness to it; for every positive thing, there’s something truly deranged or negative. You get Dr. Wollman leading a support group in the same movie where there’s a re-enactment where a trans woman can’t wait for her new vagina to heal, so she sleeps with a cab driver and sprays blood between her thighs in graphic detail. And oh yeah, the cab driver? That’s Harry Reems sleeping with Arlana Blue, who was also one of the caged victims in Bloodsucking Freaks, the second murder victim in Massage Parlor Murders! and an adult actress who was in Invasion of the Love Drones, The Vixens of Kung Fu and Joe Sarno’s Confessions of a Young American Housewife.
There’s also a moment where a man uses a sharp blade and a hammer to attempt to remove his member, while you watch. And yes, that is Vanessa Del Rio and if you picked that up without IMDB, I’d shake your hand, but neither of us wants to know where our hands have been for so many years. And that john who gets picked up in the park? That’s Richard Towers, who used the name Greg Reynolds in Deadly Weapons, Tony Armada in Keyholes Are for Peeping, Joe Powers in Fleshpot on 42nd Street and Gaylord St. James when he played Dr. John Collingwood in Last House On the Left.
This ends with a long chroma key sex scene at the end that feels like the kind of images that Black Sabbath would perform in front of on a European variety show and then we’d watch it ten years later on Headbanger’s Ball.
I have no idea how to rate this movie. As a documentary, it’s not good. As trash, it’s amazing. I also understand that this is — at best — an embarrassing film for the trans community to watch. Yet without movies like this and Glen or Glenda, some audiences would have no experience with this community. Part of me would like to think this film’s heart is in the right place, but then again, this is also a movie padded out with softcore inserts. It really is almost a singular film, in the same way — oxymoron, anyone? — that Goodbye Uncle Tom is also trash yet is a fascinating document of how far you can push it.
I mean — when the weirdest part of your movie isn’t a penis gun that shoots fluid and that’s said to be an actual medical device — you know that this is the kind of thing you have to experience.
Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!
There is a Doris Wishman cinematic universe. This is the sequel to Double Agent 73, as Jane Genet (Chesty Morgan, who didn’t come back for this, as she upset Wishman when she cost her a full shooting day the last time they worked together; in her brief moment in the film she’s played by Cindy Boudreau) has died after being strangled while she was sunbathing and her three daughters — who had no idea each other existed — are brought together for the reading of the will by John Erikson (Robert S. Barba).
Ginny (also Boudreau), Sandy (Sandra Kay) and Nancy (Michele Marie) are charged by the will to get revenge for the death of their mother. If they kill her killer — killers? — in a year, they each get $1 million dollars. If one of them dies, they each get $1.5 million and, well, you can do the math if only one survives. If they all die, Erikson gets the money.
Is this a giallo? Holy shit, yes. There’s a black gloved killer on the loose!
There are four suspects for who the killer could be. All four of these men could also be any of their fathers. But before we get to all that story, Kay decides to fellate a banana in front of a gardener, then do the same to him while we see her banana-loving face superimposed over his. It’s mind-numbing in the way all Wishman’s movies can be and it’s just getting started.
Is Doris Wishman the American Jess Franco? Both have a banana lovemaking scene in their films. Or is she the American Bruno Mattei? Both have no issues just outright taking shots from other movies.
Sandy gets attacked by a grocery boy and Ginny makes love in an elevator for no reason other than the fact that she’s a character is a Wishman movie. Everyone has their feet focused on, slow moving on thick shag carpet or rolling in bed. Ginny does all the heavy lifting, heading off to Vegas and New York City, while the others stay in Fresno, but hey — Sandy has an “On Shit” belt buckle, so who are we to deny her lack of need to move this movie forward?
Written by Judy J. Kushner (who also wrote the first two movies in this series, Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73) and Robert Jahn (The Yum Yum Girls, Bloodrage), this is one of the most deranged movie I’ve ever seen and imagine the ground that covers. The whole thing ends like Shakespeare and by that I mean — spoiler warning — everyone dies, but not before you find the real dad, you get declarations of love and Doris’ apartment plays Munich.
Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!
I’ve seen some strange movies, but Doris Wishman’s films often feel like they belong to my favorite genre: movies made by beings not from our reality, beamed to us in the hopes that we won’t notice that there isn’t a single moment of normal human behavior in what they have created.
Arthur Barlen (João Fernandes) starts the movie by visiting his ex-girlfriend Mary (Sandy Eden) to propose to her. As she happily celebrates, he catches a vision of her earrings, loses his mind and chokes the life out of her in a way that only appears in roughies. The police are chasing him for the murder, while his mother Ann (Linda Southern, The Headless Eyes, A Night to Dismember) asks her police detective brother-in-law Bill (Larry Hunter) to find her son.
Let me see if I can explain why this happens, if I can do the narrative of this movie justice. Dr. Cyril Meade (Bernard Marcel) treated Arthur because the young man was upset about being a virgin. Dr. Cyril also had an assistant, Felix (Sam Stewart). He loved Felix to the point that he glows when he talks about him. He also introduced Arthur to Felix, who tried to set him up on a double date and ended up having sex with both women (Linda Boyce, The Curse of Her Flesh, and Uta Erickson, The Ultimate Degenerate) at the same time while Arthur helplessly watched. Yet Arthur also loved Felix and once he realized that his friend was dying, he was surprised that Felix wanted to live on, giving Arthur his gigantic penis to replace his micro cock. However, once the surgery — which trust me, if it was a real surgery it would happen every day — is complete, the sight of golden earrings makes Arthur insane with lust and anger.
If that isn’t strange enough, keep in mind that every environment has just a touch of strangeness happen. When we first see Mary, she’s naked and playing a zither, a stringed instrument that looks kind of like a miniature harp. Some of the apartments have paintings that look cursed, another has a moose head, yet another has a gigantic saddle, which causes Bill to ask the owner of the place, “Do you ride horses?” and she nonchalantly says, “It came with the apartment.” An entire wall of riding equipment, like how Ponderosa used to have that crap up on the wall, and she didn’t take it down or redecorate?
Speaking of Bill, he’s just as creepy as his nephew, often eyeing women as they cross and uncross their thighs while telling him of the horrifying assault they have endured at the hands and transplanted wang of his brother’s son.
You know, Wishman also made Let Me Die A Woman and you’d expect this movie to have a gory trouser snake transplant moment, but no. It’s like a lone moment of self-restraint in a movie that starts with black and white images of its protagonist attacking women and has a scene where he attacks a lesbian, causing her to throw up all over the place.
Speaking of that young lady with the saddle on her wall, that’s Ms. Evans. She’s played by Kim Pope, who appeared in many of the Golden Age of adult films like The Passions of Carol, White Slavery In New York and Deep Sleep, which was the first movie of Alfred Sole. Janet Banzet plays another victim, one who comes on to Arthur in the stairwell before he notices those earrings. Always those earrings. She was also in The Party at Kitty and Stud’s, the movie that started the urban legend of Stallone being in a hardcore movie. Suzzan Landau (Keyholes Are for Peeping) also shows up.
Is this kind of a giallo? Is it a remake of The Hands of Orlac that could only be named The Cock of Orlac? Why is there happy jazz playing over the sexual assaults? How bad can the dubbing get? Why is every home in this movie festooned with bric a brac? Why are there ransom shots of shoes and carpet? Why does a child choir sing along when one of the victims turns Arthur’s attack into lovemaking? How did raincoaters feel when they thought they were getting something to jack off to and were confronted by this blast of dada?
Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!
After years of softcore, Doris Wishman directed two hardcore pornographic features. We already covered Come With Me, My Love and Wishman directed another movie — this one — with that film’s star, Annie Sprinkle. Wishman made more films than any other female director of the sound era and she didn’t really enjoy making hardcore; she denied these movies for years.
Claudia (Bree Anthony, also known as Gloria Hadott, Lauri Suesan, Bree Anthony Fredericks, B. Anthony Fredericks and Sue Richards, the name she used as the editor of High Society) and Victor (Tony Richards, the Tweedledee to Anthony’s Tweedledum in Bud Townsend’s Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy) are engaged, but that won’t stop her sister Terry (Sprinkle) from sleeping with her sister’s fiancee. He’s not exactly innocent, as he’s also sleeping with C.J. Laing — and who would blame him? — while Terry’s mother and Claudia’s stepmother Ada (Sandy Foxx, who also used the alter egos Diana Ames, L’il Annie, Sandy Morelli and Sandy Sludge; she was married to director Lawrence T. Cole) is ready to cheat everyone out of their inheritance.
The inner voices of the sisters comes from Wishman; this also has an ending — spoilers! — where Terry gets Victor a poisoned glass of water, putting Claudia into shock for the rest of her life. Who in the raincoats on 42nd Street realized they were watching Wishman cover Diabolique?
Also: none of the bodies in this movie look like women in adult today and Annie Sprinkle to this day remains as wild and incredible as she was then.
Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!
In 1926, Randolph (Jeffrey Hurst) catches his wife (Ursula Austin) making love to his best friend (Terry Austin). He kills them, then himself, and remains trapped in the apartment, his spirit unable to move on.
Fifty years later, Abby (also Ursula Austin) moves into the apartment, a place where sex is always happening, mostly between her neighbors Patrick (Robert Kerman, who would go to Italy and make Cannibal Holocaust), his unnamed blonde lover (Nancy Dare) and Lola (Vanessa Del Rio), who is the one who told Abby to move here. There’s also Tess Albertino (Annie Sprinkle).
Abby can’t sleep and magically, sleeping pills show up. She takes them and we see the sky, the wind picks up and Randolph emerges from the wallpaper to make love to her, which we see as Abby being thrown around the bed with no one else there. The problem, well besides the lack of consent in this scene, is that every man who has sex with Abby gets killed from here on our. There’s even a radio thrown into a bathtub which I love to no end. Anny deals with this by wandering through a blizzard before coming home to discover that she has a wedding ring stuck on her hand.
The credits say that this was directed by Luigi Manicottale — when has an American taken on an Italian name, that’s the exact reverse of how this works — but that’s really Doris Wishman. The ghost effects of this movie, the strange snowy park walking scene, the murder after murder without stopping the nonstop lovemaking — this is one strange movie. I have no idea who would be turned on by it and I don’t think Doris cared at all.
Annie Sprinkle recently posted about this movie on Instagram, saying “I was just interviewed for a documentary film about cult filmmaker, Doris Wishman. Amazingly I was in two of her movies almost 50 years ago. Satan Was A Lady and Come With My Love. I had not had a single acting lesson. (Still haven’t. ) I didn’t like acting. I liked the sekx scenes. When I thought about it, Doris was the first woman director I worked with. She was in her 60s and when we shot the dirty bits she would leave the room! The films are partly on YouTube. I was 20 years young and had very bad hair! Most everyone else in the film is dead now. I’m still here! Dori’s would be amazed I’m now still making films and am a Guggenheim Fellow even. Doris is gone but not forgotten.”
The effect of the man emerging from the wallpaper scares me.
Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!
Doris Wishman produced and directed at least thirty films over four decades, mostly in the usually male-dominated genres of sexploitation and pornography. Her film career began as a hobby after the death of her husband in 1958 and her feature debut was 1960’s Hideout in the Sun.
She’d already had experience in the film industry, as she worked for her cousin Max Rosenberg as a film booker for his art and exploitation films. The 1957 New York appeals court that allowed nudism to be shown in movie theaters inspired her to make that first film, which she followed in 1961 with Nude on the Moon, a film that was banned in New York because nudist colonies were legally permissible but nudism on the moon was not. She also worked with the legendary burlesque dancer Blaze Starr but as the nudie cutie genre started losing money, she moved into sexploitation.
That’s when some of her most famous — well, amongst lovers of ridiculous cinema like me — films got made, like Bad Girls Go to Hell and the Chesty Morgan vehicles Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73, films in which Morgan kills people with her monstrous 73-inch breasts.
Wishman also produced 1972’s Keyholes Are for Peeping, which starred comedian Sammy Petrillo, a Brooklyn nightclub performer who eventually made Pittsburgh his hometown in the 1990’s. He’s probably better known for his teaming up with singer Duke Mitchell (yes, the guy who made Massacre Mafia Style and Gone with the Pope) as the poor man’s Martin and Lewis. They teamed up for Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, which also somehow rips off Abbott and Costello monster films at the same time.
As the industry moved from softcore to hardcore, Wishman directed two Annie Sprinkle features, Satan Was a Lady and Come With Me, My Love. She wasn’t really excited about the shift and denied working on these films. As the 70’s were coming to a close, she released a film she’d been working on since 1971, Let Me Die a Woman, a groundbreaking semidocumentary on transgender issues filtered through the lens of exploitation.
That brings us to today’s movie, A Night to Dismember, which she started filming in 1978 to cash in on the slasher craze begun by Halloween. Wishman was ready to direct and produce the film from a screenplay by Judith J. Kushner. Most of the shoot took place in 1979 in New York at Wishman’s home.
From there, things get weird. Wishman claimed that multiple reels were destroyed in the photo processing lab, resulting in her having to reshoot several scenes and use stock footage to make a releasable final film. After four years (!) of post-production, the film would remain unreleased until MPI Media Group put it out in 1989.
There’s also an entirely different version of this film that was released in August 2018 on YouTube by the film’s cinematographer, C. Davis Smith. This version features actress Diana Cummings in the lead role and an entirely different plot, as adult film actress Samantha Fox replaced Cummings after the destruction of Wishman’s film.
According to Smith, Fox paid Wishman $2,000 to get the starring role of Vicki Kent. He said he doesn’t know for sure, but he believes that Wishman faked the story that the original print was destroyed in a fire and reshot the film with Fox. You can read more about that story here.
Whew! That’s a lot of history to cover, but this is a film that has plenty of it. Let’s get into what it’s really all about!
The Kent family suffers from an ancestral curse that has caused nearly all of them to be murdered, often by one another. Bonnie was first, hacked to pieces by her sister Susan, who was upset that her father favored her sister. After the murder, she slipped on the blood and was killed by the very same axe.
Broderick Kent’s wife Lola is next, murdered in the bathtub. While Kent tries to proclain his innocence, he eventually hangs himself.
That’s when we get to Vicki Kent (Samantha Fox), who has just ben released from an insane asylum after killing two boys. Her brother and sister, Billy and Mary, want her to be committed again.
Despite wanting to rekindle her relationship with her ex-boyfriend, she struggles to make it in the real world, constantly hallucinating. Then again, with Frankie getting decapitated and his head burned in a fireplace, that relationship seems doomed.
Vicki tries to visit some relatives who turn her away before they’re all killed by hatchet and by car. Even a trip to the lake is fraught with horror, as a zombie chases her around, only to be revealed to be her brother Billy who has been trying to frighten her back into the sanitarium.
This is the kind of movie that rewards your lack of attention with shifts in characters, hairstyles and clothing all within the same scene. It doesn’t help that there is next to no voiced dialogue and only a narrorator’s voice to carry us through every scene and change in tone. We go from Vicki performing a sexy dance and trying to seduce a detective to Vicki’s sister Mary actually being the one behind all the killings.
The detective makes his way to the house where he finds a confused Vicki holding a hatchet. Despite hitting him several times with it, he manages to strangle her to death. That’s when we get the voice over from the detective, telling us that Mary was the real guilty party, but she’s escaped after killing a cab driver. And that’s the movie, I guess.
To put it bluntly, A Night to Dismember is a mess. It’s got songs that stop and start, horrible acting, bad gore and footage that appears to be the quality of a 1970’s super 8 home movie. It’s the kind of movie that if I watched it with a roomful of normal folks, they’d scoff and laugh. And that’s why I woke up at 4 AM so that I could enjoy it all by myself, away from the insults of people not ready to cheerful enjoy a movie that combines the insane and the inane. There’s also plenty of 1970’s fashion and an unhinged voiceover to love, which continues over the credits, making me adore this piece of film even more.
Back to Wishman. Before her death in 2002, she was finally honored for her groundbreaking work, with John Waters featured a clips from her films in Serial Mom, appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, appearances at the New York and Chicago Underground Film Festivals and a showing of her films at Los Angeles’s Nuart Theatre entitled “Doris Wishman: Queen of Sexploitation.”
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