BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Barry Mahon was shot down over Germany and escaped — and was recaptured — at Stalag Luft III before being freed by Patton’s 3rd Army. Once he got back to the U.S., he became the personal pilot and later the manager for Errol Flynn. Then, he learned how to use computers to predict the future box office for films, which does not explain how he made movies like Cuban Rebel Girls, Fanny Hill Meets Dr. Erotico, The Wonderful Land of Oz and Santa’s Christmas Elf (Named Calvin).

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Dr. Ann Foster (Lindis Guinness, playing the film’s writer, who also was behind another adult movie made that year, The Flanders and Alcott Report on Sexual Response) is trying to get the Johnsons — Bob (John Keith) and Marie (Susan Westcott) — to have better sex while poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning are read by Peter Forster.

Then, just when the story seems boring — in an old porn movie — suddenly we get couple after couple in a variety of poses and positions, all while on a clear table that the camera zooms all over, under and around as old 60s LSD lighting like we’re at the Fillmore East except people are making sweet love as you watch.

One of those actors is Luanne Roberts, appearing as Christine Murray. She also shows up in Bonnie’s Girls, Prison Girls and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Also: Annette Michael, Aunt Fanny from Psyched by the 4-D Witch!

Director Eric Jeffrey Haims also made The Mislayed Genie, A Clockwork Blue, The Jekyll and Hyde Portfolio, Sessions of Love and the previously mentioned The Flanders and Alcott Report on Sexual Response.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

You know, this movie isn’t very good, but I just want to talk about Bunny Yeager, so indulge me.

Linnea Eleanor “Bunny” Yeager was born in Wilkinsburg, one of the suburbs of Pittsburgh, and moved to Florida when she was 17. There, she got the nickname she’d use for the rest of her life. It either came from Lana Turner’s character Bunny Smith in Week-End at the Waldorf or because Yeager played the Easter Bunny in a school play.

Just a few years out of school, Bunny won plenty of beauty pageants, including Miss Army & Air Force, Miss Personality of Miami Beach, Queen of Miami, Florida Orchid Queen, Miss Trailercoach of Dade County, Queen of the Sports Carnival and Cheesecake Queen of 1951.

She never wore the same outfit twice and made plenty of the clothes that other girls wore for their shoots. She’s even been credited with being one of the influencers that made the bikini a hot number in the mid 50’s.

Originally, Bunny went to school to be a photographer so she could save money and make her own prints. However, one of her class projects ended up being the March 1954 cover of Eye magazine and she went pro. Bunny was one of the first photographers to shoot girls in natural light.

She’s probably best known for popularizing Bettie Page (she shot her January 1955 Playboy centerfold) and her work in Playboy, including discovering the very first centerfold, Lisa Winters. She also appeared in the magazine herself five times and was photographed by Hugh Hefner in a pictorial named “Queen of the Playboy Centerfolds.”

Once sexy movies got more gynecological, Yeager moved into mainstream magazines and even took the famous photo of Ursula Andress in her white bikini from the set of Dr. No.

Before the sexual revolution, Bunny Yeager was working within the male gaze to be a trailblazer. She’s one of my heroines and deserves so much more credit and interest than now. Check out her photos today and you’ll see imagery that remains incredibly alive.

As for the movie, there’s no story, it’s just Bunny taking photos of girls and it will make you sad, because it’s shot in the wonderful old Las Vegas, filled with neon and tiki bars and everything magical that the world threw away.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

There are nine Sūpā Jaiantsu (Super Giant) movies that were first shown in Japan. Takeo Nagamatsu’s 1930 kamishibai The Golden Bat (Ōgon Batto) may have been Japan’s first modern superhero and Gekkō Kamen (Moonlight Mask) the first hero to be on TV, but the first actual super hero movie in Japan was this one.

It was bought for distribution to U.S. television and edited into four films by Walter Manley Enterprises and Medallion Films. The first two original Japanese films, Super Giant and Super Giant Continues, have been cut, edited and have library music instead of the original soundtrack. Also, Super Giant became Starman.

The Mysterious Spacemen’s Demonic Castle and Earth on the Verge of Destruction were turned into Invaders from Space, while The Artificial Satellite and the Destruction of Humanity and The Spaceship and the Clash of the Artificial Satellite was released in the U.S. as Attack from Space. The last film, Evil Brain from Outer Space, is edited together from three movies, The Space Mutant Appears, The Devil’s Incarnation and Kingdom of the Poison Moth.

The films were also sold to France and Italy, where Super Giant is known as Spaceman.

Ken Utsui plays the hero and he always downplayed this movie when interviewed. Some say he was upset about the costume, which had a stuffed crotch. In the first installment, he fights to save the Earth from the country of Metropol and their nuclear arsenal. You’ll notice the connection to sentai shows like Power Rangers with this, but it’s also very similar to the American TV version of Superman. I loved it when I was a kid and still do.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Rescued by Something Weird, Alice In Acidland starts as a nudie cutie before its black and white sequences go full color once that acid gets dropped.

Alice (Sheri Jackson, The Babysitter, Love Camp 7) is a good college girl who goes to a party with her not-so-good friend Kathy (Janice Kelly, Run, Swinger, Run!) being thrown by their French teacher Frieda (Julia Blackburn, The Ramrodder). What follows are baths, nudity, sex, more drugs, orgies, more nudity, more sex and more drugs for an hour and a few extra minutes. None of the sex is hardcore, but mainly the titilation that pre-Deep Throat films usually end up having.

Donn Greer, who directed and produced this, also is the narrator, saying things like, “Removing her clothes, Alice changed into a costume more befitting her new personality. She now belonged to another society, another world. A world of Pot, LSD and Free Love. Alice Trenton, as her father knew her, was dead. Long Live Alice. She had now become a wild and provocative twinight hippie. Complete with the Indian beads and moccasins.” and “Here was her chance to prove that she belonged in the sex-for-pleasure inner circle, and prove it she did.”

This was written by Gertrude Steen, which has to be a Greer pen name.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

The Witch’s Mirror is why I love 1960’s Mexican horror. Some movies of that era only hint at witchcraft and the occult and this one goes full in, showing rituals and all manner of Satanic mayhem. Ah, Mexico. Long may your movies live on.

It’s directed by Chano Urueta, who also made the confoundingly wonderous El Baron del Terror and the Blue Demon films.

If you’re going to steal, I always say to steal big. Chanto takes from so many sources here — Edgar Allan Poe, Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Eyes Without a Face — while somehow synthesizing them into his own out there narrative.

Deborah (Rosita Arenas, Xochitl from the Aztec Mummy movies) is the new wife of Dr. Eduardo Ramos (Armando Calvo), but she has no idea that years ago, he poisoned his first wife, Elena (Dina de Marco).

The thing is, Elena may be dead, but her spirit will not rest. She calls out to her aunt, a witch named Sara (Isabela Corona), whose spells and incantations place Deborah directly in the path of revenge, starting with her face being burned in a fire.

Luckily — or maybe not — Dr. Ramos ends up being somewhat of a mad scientist, so he starts stealing dead bodies to take their skin and attempt to give his new bride her beauty back.

Somehow, in all of this, the witch comes off the best of all of them. This movie is nightmarish in ways that movies made outside of Mexico just can’t pull off, because I get the idea that the filmmakers have one foot in believing that everything in this movie is possible.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

This is the definition of scuzz: Barry Mahon did not put his name on this movie.

Tony works in a mannequin factory and can’t connect with anyone, despite people trying to include him. Instead, he spies on sunbathing women with binoculars until he’s finally motivated enough to murder them, which the stuttery black and white camera of Mahon documents without any viscera, just an oddball not from this dimension detachment.

Of course, once he takes home the heads of one of the mannequins that he’s made, Tony feels a bit better about life. I mean, he’s still a killer and a necrophile. But isn’t it nice that he finally has someone who can understand him?

Made a year before other NYC-based scumtastic murder films like Anton Holden’s Aroused, eight years before Shaun Costello’s Forced Entry and more than a decade ahead of William Lustig’s Maniac — which also has plenty of mannequin-related mania — this movie has no aspirations of being art, yet succeeds in spite of itself. While Mahon can barely focus his camera at times, he somehow made something captivatingly creepy.

The weirdest thing is there’s barely any upsetting violence and no graphic sexual content, but the whole thing feels like the grossest, greasiest, sweatiest nightmare movie. And that, my friends, is the magic of Barry Mahon. You write him off and then he smacks you right in the face with something memorable.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Shot in a historical castle in the small village of Crêvecoeur, Requiem for a Vampire finds director Jean Rollin’s fourth female vampire movie. The castle was nice — it was filled with expensive antiques — but Rollin was more interested in the dungeons that overlooked the entire region.

Marie-Pierre Castel, who starred in Rollin’s The Nude Vampire and Shiver of the Vampires along with her twin sister Catherine, stars and is joined by Mireille Dargent, whose agent was stealing her wages for the movie and Rollin figured that out and got her paid.

They play Marie (Castel) and Michelle (Dargent), who first appear as clowns on the run from unseen pursuers. Their driver is killed and they race into the woods where they are nearly buried alive in a cemetery and then an ancient castle filled with bats and a cozy bed to make love in. The castle is filled with skeletons and a male and female vampire. Of course, the male has designs on them, wanting them for his virginal eternal vampire brides, but Michelle ends up sleeping with another man which ruins those plans and almost destroys her relationship with her true love Marie.

He was learning however and got past censors by shooting a version where the girls stayed clothed, even when being whipped and while they engaged in a sapphic embrace. Most countries can handle horrific violence; the form of a nude woman is where the problems begin.

This is the only movie I’ve ever seen where a vampire bat goes down on a woman, so for that alone, Jean Rollin has my respect if not obsession.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

You’ve never seen more! Let us prove it to you when the monsters meet the girls! The nudies meet the nasties! No monster ever had it so good! See Frankenstein do the twist with Miss Hollywood! The gayest girlie spree of all time! Everything’s off when the horror boys meet Granny Good’s girls! The biggest bevy of beauties ever laid before your eyes! For adult adults only!

Get ready for 62 minutes of sheer wildness as directed by Lee Frost and Wes Bishop. If you wonder, with scumbags — and I say that term with the utmost of respect, admiration and love — like this were at the wheel, how far away was Harry Novak? Oh, he was there. He was there.

Granny Good’s School for Good Girls is really a front for girls to get naked and make booze for Granny Good, who is played by producer Bob Cresse. She also employs a werewolf named Krakow. Yes. A werewolf. And when the girls throw a party, that’s when Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster show up.

Ann Perry, who plays Sally in this, was originally going to be a nun before she met her first husband Ron Myers. After starting her career in Cresse’s softcore films, she went fill hardcore and started her own production company, Evolution Enterprises, in the 1970’s, becomingone of the only women to write, direct, and produce her own hardcore movies. She was also the first female president of the Adult Film Association of America (AFAA).

The adult films of 1962 are incredibly odd affairs today, featuring little to no sex and mostly women taking off their clothes and doing things like reading topless. I find them incredibly charming, almost time capsules of a more innocent time, a place where small movies like this could find an audience of raincoaters who found something, anything erotic in what we would now see as just plain silly.

Sadly for Frost and Cresse, the advent of hardcore would put an end to their films. Then again, Frost would go on to produce and direct one of the oddest — and roughest — films of the golden age of adult films, A Climax of Blue Power. He kept on working right up until 1995’s direct to video softcore thriller Private Obsession. I’d also recommend his mondo films Witchcraft ’70 and Mondo Bizarro. Oh yeah! He also directed The Thing With Two Heads and The Black Gestapo. He also made Love Camp Seven, which also features Cresse acting as a commander of a German prison camp. Wow. I know more about Lee Frost than some members of my family.

You can download this on the Internet Archive. Even better, Nicolas Winding Refn’s ByNWR site has a totally cleaned up version straight from the director’s archive. Man, I want to sit down and talk to that dude someday.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Known in Italy as Terror! Il Castello Delle Donne Maledette (Terror! The Castle of Cursed Women), this movie was released as Terror Castle, The House of Freaks, The Monsters of Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks in the U.S., while it was named Frankenstein’s Castle in the UK.

According to Roberto Curti’s Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1970–1979, no one can even agree on who the director of this movie is.

Suspects include Spanish actor Ramiro Oliveros (The Pyjama Girl Case), producer Oscar Brazzi (The Loves of Daphne), cinematographer Mario Mancini (who ran camera on Blood and Black Lace, as well as acting as the director of photography for The Girl In Room 2A and directing Frankenstein ’80), producer Dick Randall (who produced Mario Bava’s Four Times That Night, as well as For Your Height Only, Don’t Open ‘Till Christmas and Slaughter High) and screenwriter William Rose (who wrote Pamela, Pamela, You Are… and shows up in the film as the Devil and in Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo).

Although director Robert H. Oliver was a pseudonym of Mancini, actor Gordon Mitchell claims that the director was Robert Oliver, while actress Simone Blondell remembered that the director “spoke English, he wasn’t Italian.” Perhaps the best answer comes from assistant director Gianlorenzo Battaglia (the cinematographer for A Blade In the Dark, Blastfighter, Demons, Witchery and so many more films — he was also the underwater camera operator for Popeye, Cozi’s Hercules, Alligator, Screamers and Phenomena!) said that “the American director left the film because of disagreements with the producer, and so Mario finished it on his own. I’m not 100% sure though!”

After a Neanderthal man named Goliath (Salvatore Baccaro, billed as Boris Lugosi) is lynched by villagers, Count Frankenstein (Rossano Brazzi, who was in Krakatoa, East of Java) brings the monster back to life.

Man, let me tell you about Rossano Brazzi. In 1940, he married Baroness Lidia Bertolini. They never had children, but he did have a son with Llewella Humphreys, who was the daughter of American mobster Murray “The Camel” Humphreys. At a young age, Llewella had shown fine musical talent, so her father sent her to Europe to study. After all, her father would do anything for her. There’s a story that when she went to the prom, she wanted to take Frank Sinatra. One phone call later and “Old Blue Eyes” was her date.

While in Rome, Llewella fell for Brazzi and they had that aforementioned son. When she returned to America, she changed her name to Luella Brady, an anglicization of Brazzi. Humphreys sent her and George, the baby, to live with her mother in Oklahoma, but she was so mentally unstable by this point that she was institutionalized. Man — her dad was the man who said, “If you ever have to cock a gun in a man’s face, kill him. If you walk away without killing him after doing that, he’ll kill you the next day,” taught mobsters how to plead the Fifth and inspired Tom Hagen in The Godfather and here’s the married Brazzi getting her pregnant!

After his wife’s death from liver cancer in 1984, Brazzi married Ilse Fischer, a German woman who had been the couple’s housekeeper for many years who had met the actor when she was a twenty-four-year-old fan.

But I digress…

Michael Dunn also shows up as Genz, an evil dwarf who indulges in necrophilia. Perhaps you know Dunn from Dr. Miguelito Loveless from The Wild Wild West or as Dr. Kiss in The Werewolf of Washington. Also invited to this Castle of Freaks party are Edmund Purdom (Pieces), Gordon Mitchell playing Igor (you may recall him as playing Dr. Otto Frankenstein in Frankenstein ’80), Loren Ewing (Big John from the Batman TV show as well as, get this, the transportation department for the movie Idaho Transfer), Walter Saxer (who would later produce Herzog’s films), Simonetta Vitelli (who was in four totally unrelated Sartana movies), Luciano Pigozzi (Pag from Yor Hunter from the Future) and Xiro Papas, who is, of course, Mosaic from Frankenstein ’80, the vampire monster from The Devil’s Wedding Night and Lupo in The Beast In Heat.

Somehow, all of this depravity got a PG rating.

This movie is not great, but gets many points for having 19th-century villagers wearing modern blue jeans.

Want to read more? You can check out our list of Edmund Purdom movies on Letterboxd because yeah — we’re just that crazy. And for more movies that were rated PG that don’t quite make sense, check out this list.

You can watch this on Tubi or the Internet Archive.