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

Barry Mahon used the name T.A. Dee to direct this, which is kind of a bummer, because I’d put this on the good side of the Mahon film column. It was written by Forest Russell (using the name Russell Fore), who only wrote one other movie, Unholy Matrimony.

A hypnotist realizes that there’s more money — and women — if he starts a sex cult. He takes the name Brother Eros and starts to preach that “Love is all that counts.”

I dig the idea that there are old rich women who bankroll this cult because they’re elite perverts. But if you’re coming to The Love Cult expecting debauchery, this movie is near PG-13 in content.

I really do love the tagline for it, though: “Here’s a major motion picture that tells the inside story of phony religious groups that used the DEVIL for a preacher!”

Rita Bennett is in this. Despite appearing in movies for directors like Joseph W. Sarno, Barry Mahon, William Rose, and the Ameros during the nudie cutie and roughie eras, then appearing in plenty of mainstream movies like Raging Bull and All That Jazz, she never got her drinking out of control and was buried in a potter’s field, her body unclaimed after her demise.

Uta Erickson, who was in the Findlay’s Her Flesh trilogy, is also in this, as is Sharon Kent from Beware the Black Widow, Some Like It Violent and Carny Girl.

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

Crazy World…Crazy People was directed by Renato Polselli, who co-wrote the film with Giuseppe Pellegrini, who wrote and did second unit work on several of Polselli’s early movies.

A group of young musicians work with Maurizio, an older vaudeville actor (Posani), to organize a show that only gets on the stage thanks to girlfriends and Elvezia Allori, the actor’s wife (France Polesello). One of those musicians is Claudio Natili, who twenty years later would score Fulci’s The Devil’s Honey.

Thea Fleming also appears and is even on some of the posters. She showed up in several Eurospy movies like SuperSeven Calling Cairo, From the Orient With Fury and Operation Counterspy. Franco Latini is in the cast as well and he was the voice for Stan Laurel, as well as several muppets and the Italian dub voice of Skeletor and Donald Duck.

The film itself is a fake mondo about the concert and the issues of it getting to the public. It has none of the other outright insanity that you can find in Polselli’s other movies.

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

Barry Mahon must have been looking for any story he could shape into a narrative to get nude women into a story by 1963. He made so many movies like this, but this installment has some charm, as some of the guys will do anything to appear to be artists and get the attention of a girl willing to doff her duds.

Monica Davis (Rocket Attack U.S.A.), Jane Day (She Shoulda Stayed In Bed), Davee Decker (It’s All for Sale), Audrey Campbell (Olga herself!) and the Bennett sisters play the ladies in this, a movie that attempts to be a documentary while also making any opportunity to show off these girls.

I saw a modern picture of Chesty Morgan the other day. She looked like someone’s grandmother, a lady you’d see shopping at Walmart. I wonder about so many of the ladies in Mahon’s films who owned their beauty and appeared in these movies. Did their kids ever know? Their husbands? Were their lives better because of the experience?

I’d really like to know.

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

Emilio Vieyra also made The Curious Dr. Humpp but he may have created something even stranger here.

There’s a maniac loose, wearing a mask and wig, prowling the beaches of Argentina where he uses his haunting organ and rock and roll records to lure gorgeous women to his house where he uses them up, injects them with smack and dumps them back on the beach, dead to the world, before he drives away in his silver sports car.

The coroner, Dr. Bermudez (Alberto Candeau), says that the girls are all just drug addicts. And he should know, because his wife and her last lover had an affair with all manner of substances that ended with a car smashed and her dead. Maybe he’s drug obsessed. Maybe he’s the killer.

A handsome cop named Ernest Lauria (Mauricio De Ferraris) is in town to help solve this case, which gets even more deranged when women start to disappear and come back as complete zombies. Like every assassin with a copy of Catcher in the Rye, they all have the same record, jazz music by Silvio Valverde (Ricardo Bauleo), who also taught every one of the three dead girls to play piano.

This played double features as Feast of Flesh with Night of the Bloody Apes and man, if I saw that at the drive-in I would have just started crying from joy. This movie has acid that turns women into zombie acid fiends who have sex with a man in a weird mask, as well as a hero that berates his love interest — Baby! — for nearly getting assaulted.

https://www.zomboscloset.com/zombos_closet_of_horror_b/2013/04/night-of-the-bloody-apes-double-bill-pressbook.html

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

The Hooked Generation (1968): The films that William Grefé made in Florida feel sweaty and messy and filled with menace, just like the Sunshine State itself, the kind of place that could give you both the Happiest Place on Earth and bands like Deicide and, well, Creed.

This time around, Grefé is telling us the story of a group of three drug pushers who are no longer content to kidnap people and assault women. No, they’re in for the big score, killing their Cuban drug suppliers, an act that puts them on a one-way ticket to the kind of horrible end that can only be found in a regional drive-in movie.

Daisy (Jeremy Slate, The Born Losers, True Grit), Acid (John Davis Chandle, who is also in Grefé’s Mako: The Jaws of Death and Whiskey Mountain, as well as playing the lead bad guy in Adventures In Babysitting) and Dum Dum (Willie Pastrano, who Grefé hired for The Wild Rebels and The Naked Zoo) are absolute scumbags that spend the majority of this movie doing horrible things and talking as much as they can to pad things out.

Look for William Kerwin — who you may know from Herschell Gordon Lewis movies — shows up as an FBI agent.

The Psychedelic Priest (1971): Also known as Electric Shades of Grey and Jesus Freak, The Psychedelic Priest wasn’t really directed by Stewart “Terry” Merrill, but instead William Gréfe, who was paid for this movie in trading stamps, which he described in Brian Albright’s Regional Horror Films, 1958-1990: A State-by-State Guide with Interviews as “Instead of cash, if you owned a TV store and I owned a garage, and you needed your transmission fixed, you’d give me trading stamps. When I needed a TV, I could go get a TV from you.”

Gréfe got paid $100,000 in trading stamps to make this movie that was never released until thirty years later because everyone felt it would be a bomb. As for Gréfe, he was now the president of Ivan Tors Films, making family movies, so he realized that “I didn’t want some wild hippie drug movie with my name as writer and director.”

The cast and the crew were non-actors, mostly real hippies, and the story is rambling at best, as Father John realizes that he can no longer preach to the young people, so he goes on some sort of quest to learn how to fit into a world that doesn’t need religion any longer. He almost leaves the cloth for a woman named Sunny, but by the end of the movie, he’s come back to his commitment to the church.

This was shot on the fly, with scenes mainly being improvised, as well as a soundtrack that is really solid. It’s a great experiment and whether or not it works for you is, well, up to you. I dug what it was trying to do, even if it’s not always successful.

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

Barry Mahon is magic. And madness, too.

After volunteering for the Canadian Royal Air Force before America entered World War II, then getting shot down, imprisoned and escaping Stalag Luft III before getting captured again, then being saved by Patton’s 3rd Army and then becoming Errol Flynn’s personal pilot and manager, Mahon’s life was already crazy. Then he started making movies like Rocket Attack U.S.A., Cuban Rebel Girls and Fanny Hill Meets Dr. Erotico. 

That’s all before Barry set up shop at Florida’s Pirates World theme park — on the north side of Sheridan Street in Dania east of US-1 south of Ft. Lauderdale — and started throwing concerts when he wasn’t making some of the most ludicrous movies — and I mean that as a compliment — ever made, like The Wonderful Land of Oz and perhaps his finest movie, Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny.

I’ve been hunting for this film, where a pirate’s ghost convinces the staff of the park to put on a free concert, for literally years and years. I found it. And it pleases me to no end. In fact, it is my happening and it freaks me out.

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

Hakujitsumu is based on a 1926 short story by Junichiro Tanizaki that plays with the nature of reality.

An artist and a young woman are in a dentist’s waiting room and the man is too shy to even connect with her. In the same examining room, they’re both giving anesthetic as he imagines that she is being abused and tortured and even chased by a vampire. The uncut Dutch version even has a sexually explicit scene during which the woman is digitally attacked by the dentist.

A big budget example of a pinky violence movie, this film even dared to show female pubic hair, a major cultural crime in Japan. Most instances — even in the most hardcore of films — are digitally fogged or have a mosaic over them.

Director and writer Tetsuji Takechi was nearly 70 when this was made. He’d already filmed Day Dream once before in 1964, after starting his career in kabuki theater and having his own TV show, The Tetsuji Takechi Hour, during which he reinterpreted Japanese stage classics. His next film, 1965’s Black Snow, saw him arrested on indecency charges and fighting a public battle over censorship between the intellectuals of Japan and the country’s government. Takechi won the lawsuit, which opened the way for the pinky films of the 60s and 70s.

Black Snow may be more controversial for its themes than its sex: its protagonist is a young Japanese man whose mother serves the U.S. military at Yokota Air Base as a prostitute. He’s impotent unless making love with a loaded gun in his hand and before long, he’s killed a black soldier before being cut down by several Americans. The film is also fiercely nationalist with Americans — most pointedly the black man who is killed — shown to be nothing but sex-wild animals.

In the journal Eiga Geinjutsu, Takechi said, “The censors are getting tough about Black Snow. I admit there are many nude scenes in the film, but they are psychological nude scenes symbolizing the defencelessness of the Japanese people in the face of the American invasion. Prompted by the CIA and the U.S. Army they say my film is immoral. This is of course an old story that has been going on for centuries. When they suppressed Kabuki plays during the Edo period, forbidding women to act, because of prostitution, and young actors, because of homosexuality, they said it was to preserve public morals. In fact it was a matter of rank political suppression.”

The remake of Day Dream comes a full decade after newspapers would not advertise his movies and the director was only writing. That film is literally Japan’s first hardcore pornographic movie and it was a big budget movie played on big screens.

Yet while Westerners see his influence, in Japan, Takechi was an outsider in the mainstream and pinky world, so he’s forgotten. His right wing politics clash with the protest ethos within other pinky films, so all in all, he’s lost in many ways.

Female star Kyoko Aizome — who plays Chieko– would gain notoriety from this film and become a star in the worlds of feature dancing (being arrested for indecency for her on-stage behavior) and hard and soft AV (adult video) movies. According to an article on The Bloody Pit of Horror, she had her hymen surgically repaired so she could lose her virginity again on camera and also had her own King Kong vs. Godzilla moment when she starred in Traci Takes Tokyo opposite an underage Traci Lords.

As for the vampires, the dentist’s assistants (Saeda Kawaguchi and Yuri Yaio) have fangs and the dentist himself is Kwaidan actor Kei Sato, a mainstream talent appearing in a movie that is anything but. Even after Chieko runs over the dentist and decapitates him, he comes back as a traditional film vampire.

After the original movie was made, South Korean director Yu Hyun-mok remade it as Chunmong (Empty Dream) and was arrested because there was a rumored nude scene. There were also rumors that actress Park Su-jeong had been humiliated by appearing nude on the set. The truth was that she wore a body stocking. Supposedly, the Korean film, which was kept off screens until 2004, is a superior piece of surrealist art.

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

Edward L. Montoro, the man who was the heart and soul of the main era of Film Ventures International, only directed one other movie — Platinum Pussycat — and wrote two others — again, Platinum Pussycat and Day of the Animals — other than this movie.

Heaven (Marie Marceau, which is hilarious, because who else would mistake Uschi Digard with that body and accent?), Sin (Jennie Lynn, who played four roles on My Three Sons before this) and Karen (Phyllis Stengel, who was in tons of early adult, like Ed Wood’s Take It Out In Trade) are out to become movie stars, even leaving behind Heaven’s cop man Bernie (Scott Cameron).

This leads him to Mr. Salacity (Miles White), a Hollywood producer who gets them on the casting couch. It’s pretty much what you expect, except for the fact that the men never show anything while the women show it all. There’s also a scene where Uschi gets a cold and to heal herself, she has one of her friends cover her breasts with Vicks VapoRub. I love Vicks so much, so this scene meant a lot to me, particularly when you realize that it takes two gigantic tubs of the stuff to even get close to covering the pride of Saltsjö-Duvnäs, Sweden’s 48 F bosom.

I mean, you kind of have to see that, you know?

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

Both of the titles of this movie reference others: Kiss Me Quick! is a takeoff of Kiss Me, Stupid and the original title, Dr. Breedlove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love, is obviously taken from Kubrick.

Sterilox is an alien who has come from the Buttless galaxy. He’s played by Frank A. Coe, using the name Fattie Beltbuckle. He ends up in the lab of Dr. Breedlove (Max Gardens), seeking a perfect woman to become the housewife for their planet. Yes, not for breeding. Who are we to not respect the command of the Grand Glom? Yet, one wonders, why is the alien Stan Laurel? And why. is Dr. Breedlover more Bela Lugosi than Peter Sellers?

“Dance! Dance, my little sex bombs!” yells the mad scientist as women gyrate all around the alien and then Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula and a mummy show up. This is like Famous Monsters if it had a few pages from Leg Show in it, what with all of the stockings being slowly removed.

Director Peter Perry Jr. has the kind of resume that I get obsessed over (and so did Something Weird). Revenge of the Virgins, Honeymoon of Terror, Mr. Peter’s Pets, Knockers Up, My Tale Is Hot, The Wondrful World of Girls, The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill, Mondo Mod, The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet, The Notorious Cleopatra, The Joys of Jezebel, Cycle Vixens, A Woman’s Dream and many years later, an uncredited job on Taboo VII, long after the fun days of porno chic had become dead and buried.

This was the first movie produced by Harry Novak. He was hands on, as he and Perry did a talent search at strip clubs, looking for women who could act and who would also take their clothes off. This was the start of him getting a roster of actresses looking for work who had been bumping and grinding under wigs and assumed names. Novak’s Boxoffice International Pictures would go on to make more than fifty movies after this.

This is also the first movie in the U.S. for cinematographer László Kovács, who had been in the U.S. for two years and not been hired. He couldn’t speak English and wasn’t in the union. Novak met him and hired him for several of his films — this is the best looking nudie cutie that you will ever see — before he became an in-demand cinematographer in Hollywood.

Coe also played the Frankenstein Monster and did sound, while Max Gardens was the other producer. Also known as Manny Goodtimes, he played Lucifer in My Tale Is Hot and was a men’s club owner.

The ladies in this include Boobra (Natasha, also in The Kill and One Million AC/DC), Kissme (Jackie De Witt, No Tears for the Damned), Barebra (Bibi), Hotty Totty (Claudia Banks), Gertie Tassle (Althea Currier, Sinderella and the Golden Bra), Gigi String (Donna, The Forbidden), Lotta Cash (Lucky) and Gina Cathchafanni (Pat Hall).

What a strange little movie. Pure joy!

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

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

After Castle of Blood‘s disappointing box office, Antonio Margheriti felt he could remake the film in color and have it be more successful.

Edgar Allan Poe (Klaus Kinski) is our narrator and Kinski shows up for the beginning and the ending of the movie. He’s interviewed by Alan Foster (Anthony Franciosa), who challenges him as to the truth of his stories. This leads to a bed with Lord Blackwood (Enrico Osterman) about spending a night in his castle, a place where he soon meets Elisabeth (Michèle Mercier, Black Sabbath) and quickly falls into love — and bed — with her before she announces that she’s no longer alive.

There’s also Julia (Karin Field), William Perkins (Silvano Tranquilli) and Elisabeth’s husband,Dr. Carmus (Peter Carsten). The ghosts need his blood to come back to life, but Elisabeth helps him to escape, only for him to impale himself on the gate, dying just as Poe gets there.

I adore that the tagline of this is “Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s Night of the Living Dead.” He did write a poem “Spirits of the Dead” and the 1932 movie The Living Dead was based on Poe’s “The Black Cat” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club. But no, he has nothing to do with Romero’s movie.

I really like the soundtrack by Riz Ortolani but this can’t compare to the black and white — and yes, Barbara Steele appearance — in the original. That said, Kinski is awesome in every second he’s on screen, looking like a complete madman.