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!  

Before we start, I have to explain.

As I look for movies that feature matriarchal societies, it seems like so many of them end up being straight-up male gaze fuelled fantasies. Or so you’d think, because while this movie was made by Anthony Brooks and O.O. Miller, only one of those names belongs to a man.

Brooks may have been Raymond Phelan (the writer, director, editor and one of the main actors of Too Young, Too Immoral), but Miller is really Doris Wishman, who Joe Bob Briggs referred to as “The greatest female exploitation film director in history.” From a series of nudist colony movies to movies with incredible names like Bad Girls Go to Hell, Satan Was a Lady and Let Me Die a Woman, as well as A Night to Dismember and two Eurospy films (Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73) starring all 73-inches of the woman with the largest bust on record, Chesty Morgan.

The truth is, this movie does introduce us to a female-run society on the moon, which for some reason is the occult-created Coral Castle near Miami, but they’re all topless. Yet like many of the nudist films of the early 60’s, this comes off as quite innocent. And unlike so many of them, this movie isn’t boring.

Dr. Jeff Huntley (Lester Brown in his one and only role) has inherited millions in his uncle’s will and is finally going to the moon with his mentor, Professor Nichols (William Mayer, who shows up as in several of these movies, like Blaze Starr Goes Nudist, which was not much of a life change).

Nichols sees Huntley like a son and worries about how dangerous the moon will be. He’s old, so he’s ready to die. But he wants Huntley to live and find a wife. After all, their secretary Cathy (Marietta) is in love with him and he doesn’t see it or doesn’t care. All he wants to do is go to the moon.

They get there, wearing brightly colored spacesuits with plenty of spaces for the lack of environment on the lunar surface to kill them. But instead, you know, they end up at Coral Castle and meet an entire planet of clothing-free ladies who are led by a Moon Queen (also Marietta) who uses her psychic powers — or maybe Dr. Jeff has never seen breasts before in person — to make our young moon-obsessed friend get obsessed over her mountain peaks.

Perhaps this explains why Jack Parsons blew himself up after falling so hard for Marjorie Cameron. I mean, you become besotten with one literal Whore of Babylon and you lose your security clearance but still get a peak on the dark side of the Moon named after you.

But I digress.

For two guys who planned a trip to the moon for years, they didn’t bring enough oxygen and also leave their camera behind, so no one will believe them that the lunar surface looks more like the aforementioned Blaze Starr’s 2 O’Clock Club.

It all works out, because that’s when the hood doctor discovers that his secretary — who he’s been ignoring forever, who sits and types the same letter all night long hoping that he will notice her — looks just like the Moon Queen. They embrace, the camera dollys back to give them some privacy and then the Professor walks in on them and just looks on approvingly. He just stands there and watches and smiles to the camera.

Keep an eye out for Shelby Livingston, who just three short years later would be chopped to pieces –just a few towns away in Kissimmee, Florida — in Two Thousand Maniacs! Lacey Kelly, who was in Bunny Yeager’s Nude Camera and Common Law Wife, is also on the Moon.

There’s also a moment where the two space-loving men discuss Dr. Jeff going to a movie, as they drive past the Variety Theater, which is showing Wishman’s Hideout in the Sun. Did Dr. Jeff recognize Pat Reilly when he also saw her up there in space?

This movie also has its own theme song, which is pretty cool when you think about it. “I’m Mooning Over You (My Little Moon Doll),” which was warbled by Ralph Young over orchestration that had been arranged by — but not credited to —  Doc Severinsen.

While not the most feminist leaning film ever, we can still point to the fact that the Moon Queen does rule her planet and you know, if you can breathe the lack of air on the lunar surface — to be fair, at the end the scientists have no idea where they’ve really come back from — you can forget puritanical mumbo jumbo and just walk around unencumbered.

After all, it worked for Blaze Starr, who was smart enough to get 4% of the profits for the 1984 movies about her life, Blaze.

Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation  – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!

Dr. Percy Corly (Robert Wood) teaches sex education and he’s still a virgin. If that makes sense, this movie might. He and Dr. Hamilcar West(Jim Vance) build a machine that creates women — well, it makes a rabbit instead of a Playboy Bunny and a gay man, which they soon erase — and they both become addicted to it.

There is no nudity in a sex movie. Herschell Gordon Lewis has flim flammed you, making you think you’re going to see a man create his dream women and have orgies. No, he just kisses them. Well, he is a virgin. And that’s not a computer, it’s a Lady Schick Consolette Portable Hair Dryer Model 307.

The point of this movie was to get marks into a theater and not really to entertain anyone. This movie, however, entertained me because it’s just so strange. Lewis told Bleeding Skull how it was made in one sentence: “I had a partner named David Chudnow. His peculiar wife, Rosamond, wrote that script. What the heck.”

Seriously, I can only imagine how angry people were watching this when it came out because there are still people who get mad about it today and they weren’t going to an art theater to see some nudity. Instead, they watched a movie that is baffling on nearly every level, one that challenges you to keep watching it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!

Boojie Baker (Dan Conway) has been screwing bands — like Charlie — and ruining their dreams. He discovers the band The Faded Blue and renames them The Big Blast. To get them the best studio in music, he and his assistant Gordy (Ray Sager) send women to make out with the engineers and blackmail them. This group of musicians is smarter than the others and they confront Boojie about where their money is. He then sets them up with a drug bust, but they figure out a way to get back at him.

A non-nudie or gore movie from Herschell Gordon Lewis, this movie is probably most famous for featuring Colonel Sanders, who Lewis often used for catering on his movies. His scene was filmed in a Cleveland Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant with Sanders requesting multiple takes, his own billing in the credits and even wanting to direct his moment in the movie!

Here’s the dialogue:

Gordie: Hey, man. Do you serve fried chicken?

Harland Sanders: Do we serve fried chicken? Whoo-wee! We DO serve fried chicken!

Gordie: I got five hungry musicians in the parking lot wanting five buckets of fried chicken.

Harland Sanders: Musicians you say? Hey, I love music! If you let them play some music outside, I’ll let you have lunch for free.

Gordie: You got yourself a deal, buddy!

With a name like Blast-Off Girls, you might be hoping for some of the nudie cutie movies that Lewis did just a few years before. Instead, you get garage bands and fried chicken.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!

Chicago private detective Russell Harper (Scott Osborne) and his assistant Diana (Louise Downe, using the name Vicki Miles; she wrote several of Lewis’ films such as Linda and Abilene, Just for the Hell of It, Blood Feast and The Girl The Body and The Pill. She was a student at the University of Miami, where she studied to become a psychiatrist. She dropped out of premed school because she couldn’t handle cutting up things in anatomy class, which is funny, because again, she wrote Blood Feast. She was married to Lewis from 1962 to 1971.) are looking for a missing husband, which leads them — as these things happen and most often happen in the movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman — to a Florida nudist camp.

Is there a trampoline? Yes.

Is there a swimming scene? Yes, in a muddy body of water that I wouldn’t swim in wearing a hazmat suit.

Will a woman get naked and then put back on her high heels? Yes. Doesn’t that happen all the time?

Perhaps I have seen too many nudie cuties by this point but they have also become the warmest of blankets at the end of a stressful day.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!

Sheldon Seymour is Herschell Gordon Lewis. Miss Nymphet’s Zap-In is Laugh-In. The difference is that this has nudity and the jokes aren’t as good. Then again, to younger people who never watched Laugh-In, this is going to seem strange. And really, it may only be important to hardcore fans of the Godfather of Gore.

The song “Miss Nymphet (Zap!)” by The Zaps, who are really Herschell’s son Robert, plays throughout the movie and you get jokes like this:

Go-Go Dancer #1: Do you know how to catch one of us topless dancers?

Go-Go Dancer #2: I’ll tell you. With a booby trap!

It’s also a lot like the cartoons that would be in a rip off of Playboy like Cavalier or Flirt. 

Actresses in this include Dixie Donovan (Angelica: The Young Vixen), Luanne Roberts (Bonnie’s Kids), Phyllis Stengel (Take It Out In Trade), Julie Conners (Night of the Witches and the adult movie that nearly ruined Lash LaRue, Hard On the Trail), Bambi Allen (who plays Miss Nymphet; she was also in Lash of Lust), Mary Jane Shippen (Don’t Just Lay There) and Debbie Osborne (The Cult).

I’m going to watch all of Lewis’ movies, so sometimes you have to work your way through some rough ones. The rounder 1970s bodies helped.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation  – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!

You know, if Herschell Gordon Lewis only made his nudie movies or just the gore, he’d be celebrated still, but for my money, the real good Lewis movies are the ones that almost frighten you by their incoherence or ability to fully create a world that is unlike any we will ever live in, like how She-Devils on Wheels gives us a reality — in 1968 — where female bikers are the alpha predator of all creation. Or the nihilistic mind blast that’s Just for the Hell of It which ends with a character saying, “Who cares man” when everyone he knows is dead.

Then there’s Something Weird.

Everything starts when Cronin Mitchell tries to help a man who has fallen from an electrical pole and gets rewarded with a face full of electricity which burns his face off. He wants to die — and why wouldn’t he — but he’s also gained ESP thanks to all that pure energy blasting him right in the brain.

At this point, most people would step back, see that their work is good and then finish the movie. But Lewis is a trickster god who felt the need for more, more, more.

Mitchell has become a bandaged hermit who gives psychic readings when the Bible of the Witches ends up in his hands, followed by a literal witch who promises that he can have his face back if he agrees to be her lover. Now he’s handsome again, but a slave to the sorceress.

She becomes his assistant Ellen and now Mitchell is hunting serial killers along with a karate chopping government agent who is in love with Ellen because he has no idea that she really looks like the cartoonist witch but hey, maybe love is blind. To find this elusive killer, it’s going to take some LSD.

But before that, Mitchell levitates for an audience and then finds a ghost inside a church. These side stories just pad the 80 minutes of running time but honestly, I’d pay whatever money is needed for more adventures of Mitchell being weird.

Anyways, Jordan can’t deal with the fact that he can’t have Ellen, so he goes nutzoid and attacks her. She escapes and demands that her psychic slave murder the government agent, so Mitchell psychically attacks him with several blue blankets which somehow the misogynistic loverboy escapes and what is this movie?

Then this whole thing goes proto-giallo as Mitchell takes the LSD and discovers that the cop that’s been leading them through the case is the killer, but the trip he’s on leads directly into a bullet between the eyes and our hero is dead.

The movie keeps going.

So now Jordan can be with Ellen and sees her, but at that moment he sees the witch and runs into traffic and burns his face off, which she heals but…

Time is a flat circle.

This is a movie that obsesses me. Like I can’t stop thinking about it. Who was it for? Why was it made? Yeah, Lewis was in it to make money, but who would pay to see this (me)?

All these Film Twitter kids writing about how movies stick in their head for life and how things are fever dreams and they’ve never had the moment where you randomly put on this movie and are not ready for its power. About as perfect a movie that’s filled with imperfections can be.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!

A Miami businessman, John Stone (Bill Rogers) gets a package from England with two dusty and cobwebbed bottles of plum brandy from a recently dead ancestor. He drinks them both and, as these things happen, he becomes a vampire. He puts his wife Helene (Elizabeth Wilkinson) in a trance and heads off to England.

There, he fights Howard Helsing (Otto Schlessinger), the last survivor of the Van Helsing family. Well, as much England as Miami.

This was Herschell Gordon Lewis’ attempt to go mainstream, filled with better acting, less gore and, well, way too much running time. At least the makeup on the vampire version of Stone is cool, there is some nice lighting and unique camera angles. It was good enough for Roger Corman to offer Lewis a job, which he politely turned down.

In case you’re wondering where the music is from, it’s from the Dr. Who episode “The Tenth Planet.”

While not a bad movie, I come to a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie to be upset, shocked and nauseated. This did none of those things, but at least he stretched a bit.

Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!

Reverend Roscoe Boone (Jeffrey Allen, who was the Mayor in Two Thousand Maniacs!) isn’t really a man of the cloth, but don’t tell the people in his deep southern town, who he rules over as he sells moonshine and keeps the law — Agent Colt (Tim Holt) and Markel (Prentis Smithson) — at bay by getting them wasted under threat of death and then taking compromising pictures of them with underage girls.

I mean, you can see why they follow him. He gets everyone in town drunk, gives them work and then is given to fiery sermons like “Corinthians done sayeth: “It is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.” Now, all you boys with passion get in line there.” And then all the young boys get to make out with the hottest women in town.

This is the kind of place where tourists like Sandy (Dana Demonbreun) and Jane (Joy Smothermon) come to visit and get crucified and one of the girls who set up the feds decides to tell the law that she lied, which leads to her getting stoned. There’s also a head that gets blown off that’s so brutal that I was like, “Oh yeah. This is a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie.”

It’s also Larry Drake’s first movie.

If you’re into scummy Southern movies with lots of blood and aberrant sexuality — and who isn’t — this will satisfy your urges. Kind of like moonshine, this stuff won’t kill you but enough might make you blind.

Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!

In the opening credits, Herschell Gordon Lewis is referred to as Lewis H. Gordon and David Freeman is listed as Davis Freeman. They’re also who William R. Johnson and William Kerwin based their roles on in this, two normal guys who decide to start shooting naked women on film. To make it even more meta, they’re inspired by a Lewis and Freeman double feature of Daughter of the Sun and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre.

Some of those models include Linda Cotton (who was in The Adventures of Lucky Pierre), Louise Downe (who would go on to write several films, including Blood Feast, The Gruesome Twosome, She-Devils On Wheels and Linda and Abilene, as well as acting in Diary of a Nudist as Bunny Downe, Scum of the Earth as Vicki Miles and uncredited in The Beast That Killed Women; she also was the second unit director for The Wizard of Gore, A Taste of Blood, How to Make a Doll and more), Christina Castel (also in Scum of the Earth), Joanne Stuart (Hollywood’s World of Flesh), Marge London (The Bare Hunt), Marlene Gage and Ginger Hale (The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill).

It’s goofy, but you know, in 1963, this was how guys got to see women nude.

Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!

Before treating the world to the delights of Blood Feast, the team of Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman would introduce us all to the world’s first nudist musical. Before Something Weird Video found this movie, it had been lost for 36 years. In the book Taste of Blood: The Films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, author Christopher Wayne Curry said that he hoped the film would be found one day, to which Lewis replied, “Oh my, I hope not.”

Nightclub singer Eddie Livingston is after press agent Alison Edwards until he learns the dark secret that she’s a nudist. However, his friend, the comic (I use that term incredibly loosely) Tommy Sweetwood sees the joy of the nudist life and plays Cupid to the couple, getting Eddie and Alison to enjoy all manner of activities in their birthday suits, like riding on a boat, swimming ,water skiing and even riding a horse. Soon, they’re in love and all is aces, baby.

This film sadly displays little of the fun that Lewis would later employ in his films. It’s almost like you’re waiting for Faud Ramses to show up and start eating tongues.

That said, I kind of love that former light heavyweight champion Joey Maxim is presented as such a big deal in the film. Watch as he reads his lines off the cuff of his shirt! That said, Maxim had a pretty great boxing career, including defeating British boxer Freddie Mills in a match for the aforementioned title. That match was the last of Mills career, as Maxim hit him so hard that three of Mills’ teeth became embedded in one of his gloves.

How strange that what was taboo and sexy in 1963 is quaint and nearly boring today. But hey — a nudie-cutie musical! That’s something, right?