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

Qualcosa Striscia nel Buio may mean Something Crawls in the Dark, but the inexact translation of the original title is what this played in the U.S. as.

A series of travelers are headed out into a foreboding evening — it was a cold, dark night — when they realize that a washed-out bridge means that they’re all finding shelter in the same house that was once the home of a lady occultist. The cars contain all manner of individuals with their own reasons for being out in the storm, like the two detectives transporting a restrained Farley Grainger, a fighting husband and wife, and a surgeon and his assistant.

Of course, one of these folks will decide to conduct a seance and that’s the point where everything falls to pieces. The result of this occult ritual is that everyone becomes possessed and starts acting like Ecstasy-loving maniacs. And with the phone lines not working, the bridge out and a storm outside — and now inside an emotional weather outburst happening — the movie transitions from giallo to outright gothic horror.

There’s also a butler named Joe who just happens to keep a pantsless woman who he occasionally makes love to, as well as a POV camera view that keeps happening, making this film stand out from the giallo pack somewhat as the ghost takes over each person, making them give in to their desires and even stopping clocks dead.

“Exorcism…the Occult…A Horror-Filled Night In A House Of Terror!” Writer and director Mario Colucci only directed one other movie, Revenge for Revenge, that he also wrote, directed and acted in. There are some interesting actors other than Granger here, such as Italian Neorealist actress Lucia Bosè (she’s also in Arcana), Giacomo Rossi Stuart (Kill, Baby, Kill; The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave), Angelo Francesco Lavagnino (who is in Fulci’s Beatrice Cenci as well as Orson Welles’ Othello and Chimes at Midnight) and Loredana Nusciak (Maria, the lover of Django) appearing as the photo of the lady of the house, who we are to believe is the ghost.

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

Count Gabor Kernassy (Walter Brandi) lives in a castle surrounded by darkness and a forest, so when an entire group of exotic dancers, their piano player and their manager ends up on his doorstep, it all seems like a buffet. Yet one of those dancers, Vera (Lyla Rocco), is the reincarnation of his long lost wife Margherita Kernassy. How does this keep happening to these vampires? Well, maybe he isn’t the undead one. Ever think of that?

Directed by Piero Regnoli, who was one of the writers of I Vampiri as well as Patrick Still Lives, Burial Ground, Demonia, Nightmare City and so many great films, has made a movie that seemingly shares so much with The Vampire and the Ballerina. This film, however, has more of a lost romanticism and had the original title L’ultima preda del vampiro (The Vampire’s Last Prey). It was released in the U.S. as an adult movie and then edited for TV as Curse of the Vampire.

Regnoli co-wrote this with cinematographer Aldo Greci, who shot this and so many other movies including Play Motel.

This has a good vampire and a bad one, so to speak, as well as a housekeeper Miss Balasz (Tilde Damiani) and groundsman Zoltan (Antonio Nicos) who are on the side of good. But still, this is a movie where Katia (Maria Giovannini) can die and get buried and everyone keeps on dancing because, I mean, why stop dancing? It’s also the kind of early exploitation that has her get a stake to the heart and blood pours all over her shapely legs. Didn’t Russ Meyer say it best? “While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains… sex.”

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

Also known as Any Body…Any Way, this movie was exactly what I wanted it to be: fucking weird.

When Terry Wilson (Joyce Danner) and Ann Henderson (Eve Reeves) go to the middle of nowhere for a barn party, Ann is nearly raped but saved by the middle-aged, British and oh-so-strange Mr. Bradley (Daniel Garth). They ditch the party and Ann’s man, but then run out of gas because otherwise we wouldn’t have a movie.

In the middle of nowhere, they walk up to a house — on the suggestion of a drifter (Ivan Agar, Laughing Crow from Shriek of the Mutilated) who is more than he seems — that just so happens to belong to Mr. Bradley and his sister Ida (Irene Lawrence). They have no phone and their car isn’t working either, so they stay for dinner and a bed for the evening. Ida needs the company. She’s been there for two years, ever since her mortician brother retired.

So why are there bars on the windows? Why did their door lock behind them? Why are the closest filled with women’s clothing of all sizes? Why would Terry pick this exact and terrifying time to finally get sapphic with her office buddy?

The Bradleys wake them up and let them know that they’re in control and must play their demented games with them or end up like all the embalmed bodies in the basement. Mr. Bradley just wants to discover the perfect way to make love, so if he has to tie up women and then kill them, that’s how his laboratory of libido operates.

I mean, this is a movie that starts with fifteen minutes of go go dancing in a barn — I played in a band that practiced in a barn and it’s hard to sing when all you can smell is shit, so I can’t even imagine go go dancing while smelling cow feces — and ends with that same barn and Ann going off with the guy who tried to rape her and Terry finding another young lady to enjoy a game of flats with. Yes, I used a 17th century term — lesbian sex was thought to look like two playing cards rubbing together — in this article. I bring you quality euphemisms, my friend.

Did you not see the signature of Harry Novak hanging above this? Behind Locked Doors came from director and co-writer Charles Romine, who would go on to make Mysteries of the Gods, while producer and uncredited co-writer Stanley H. Brassloff made one of the most upsetting of all softcore movies, Toys Are Not for Children.

This movie looks way better than it should with great lighting and bright colors and a room full of gorgeous and very dead women — or are they? — posed seductively, along with an off the rails room destroying catfight and an ending that blew my mind, as deceased denizens of the strange mansion come back for one last dance with brother and sister into the inferno. This is the kind of movie that makes you stay for all that barn dancing and you wonder, “When does it get weird, Sam promised me it would get there” and when it does, you’ll text me and say, “I can’t believe that this is a real movie.” Well, it is, pal. It sure is.

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

How many Barry Mahon movies can you watch in one week? How about twenty-five or so?

Judy Adler (Satan’s Bed) plays Judith, a new girl in town who goes from the camera clubs and cheesecake photos to the big time of adult films and loses her innocence along the way. She’s probably one of the best actresses I’ve seen in one of Mahon’s films — not the highest of bars, but credit where credit is due — and her story is actually pretty gripping.

This being Barry Mahon, much of this film’s 63 minutes is given over to another kind of gripping, but you expected that. Actually, the majority of this movie is pretty PG-13.

You can also look for Dawn Bennett (The Singles), Anna Karol (Censored), Byron Mabe (he directed The Acid Eaters), June Roberts (Death of a Nymphette) and Marlene Starr (Bad Girls Go to Hell).

The self-loathing — maybe I’m projecting — of Mahon is on full display here, as the world of adult entertainment is presented as not always the brightest or sweetest place in the world. Well, you know what they say. No one tunes in to a movie that is all about being nice.

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

Harry Novak, welcome back to B&S About Movies!

You brought us The Child. You brought us Wham! Bam! Thank You, Spaceman! You brought us Dr. Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks, The Sinful Dwarf and Toys Are Not for Children, not to mention Suburban Pagans, Please Don’t Eat My Mother! and Indiscreet Stairway.

The Sultan of Sexploitation! The King of Camp! And as H. Hershey, you directed early 80’s hardcore like Moments of Love. You were scum and I say that with the kind of infection I usually reserve for small animals. I wish you were alive so I could hug you.

How can you not love any movie that starts with two young boys getting repeatedly bitten and killed by an entire pit of angry rattlesnakes after their parents pretty much ignore them for cans of beer?

Soon, the local sheriff has to call on underpaid college professor and herpetologist Dr. Tom Parkinson to learn why the snakes are just so darn aggressive. Of course, Dr. Tom can barely keep his own cobras in their cages.

Parkinson and war photographer Ann Bradley soon learn that the military base has authorized the disposal of a nerve gas called CT3 and it’s causing all this commotion. Colonel Stroud, the guy behind it all, ends up killing the base’s medical officer before the cops close in and gun him down, too. The snakes, presumably, are still on the loose.

Director John McCauley waited nine years to make another movie, 1985’s Deadly Intruder. The movie also features Darwin Joston, who was Napoleon Wilson in Assault on Precinct 13 and Dr. Phibes in The Fog.

You can watch the Cinematic Titanic riffed version of this movie on Tubi.

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

Oh Harry Novak just seeing your name makes me realize that I am about to see something incredibly scum-sodden. You have such a fancy signature and make movies filled with such pulchritude. Let’s all have a moment to think of all Mr. Novak has done for us.

Like this movie, which is exactly what I was looking for when I started this week of drug movies.

Lila (Susan Stewart, The First Nudie Musical and credits for additional voices on Scooby-Doo, which really could be the best IMDB credits listing ever) is a go-go dancer who gets turned into a literal mankiller thanks to C₂₀H₂₅N₃O. All she wants to do is make it with the men she picks up on the Sunset Strip, but once they get back to her pad, she hears her theme song and sees an old man with a huge stack of money and a handful of bananas. That’s when she must kill them with garden tools and then she imagines that she is chopping up fruit while she’s really dismembering their bodies to dump off into cardboard boxes. I kid you not!

Then, we get lots of drug use, topless dancing and strobing and zooming camerawork. I’m in. I’m all the way in. And hey look — it’s Pat Barrington from Orgy of the Dead! Yay!

Speaking of Pat, she dated Melvin Rees at the time that he was arrested for mass murder. She was working as Vivian Storm in mob-owned go go clubs and he was a jazz musician. Pat’s life really could have been made into a movie, as she kept on dancing until the mid 1990’s when she was in her fifties. Rees? Well, he was arrested for at least five murders and numerous other crimes.

As for Mantis In Lace, it’s a film awash in sin and debauchery. They don’t, can’t, won’t and maybe even shouldn’t make them like this anymore.

Here’s a cocktail.

Praying Mantis

• 1.5 oz. tequila
• 5 oz. cola
• 1 tsp. lemon juice
• 2 tsp. lime juice

1. Shake the tequila and juices with ice.
2. Pour into a glass and top with cola.

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

Directed by Ray Dennis Steckler — who said he had nothing to do with it — this adult film is on AGFA’s Smut Without Smut: Satanic Horror Nite. You can get it from Vinegar Syndrome. It also has Hotter than Hell, Satan’s Lust, Sacrilege, Satanic Sexual Awareness and The Devil Inside Her.

Cassandra the witch and schoolteacher (Jane Tsentas, Evil Come, Evil Go as well as two adult Jekyll and Hyde movies, The Jekyll and Hyde Portfolio and The Adult Version of Jekyll and Hide) seduces Jay (Gerald Broulard) by being able to talk about magic with him. Later, she get his girlfriend Maria (Ruthann Lott) to visit, drink possession tea and get tied to a table just in time for the devil (Charles Smith) to appear. Cassandra says, “My sacrilege is complete” as the couple runs from the horror they have just endured.

This feels like a softcore movie that had inserts put in for the hardcore. That said, Tsentas is gorgeous and you have to love when a witch shows up wearing a cape. I mean, I know that I do.

69 EsSINtial SWV Titles (September 15 – 21): Klon, who came up with this list, said “This isn’t the 69 BEST SWV movies, it isn’t my 69 FAVORITE SWV movies, my goal was to highlight 69 of the MOST SWV movies.” You can see the whole list here, including some of the ones I’ve already posted.

Under the working titles Jayne Mansfield Reports, Mansfield Reports Europe and Mansfield By Night, this mondo was shot from 1964 to 1967 as Mansfield toured Europe. It has to be a mondo, because the movie really is all over the place, with the star meeting Italian roadside prostitutes, running from the paparazzi and attending the Cannes Film Festival, where she pretty much runs toward the paparazzi.

Complicating matters was that Mansfield died in a car accident in June 1967.

That didn’t stop producer Dick Randall, whose career took him from the Catskills as a joke writer for Milton Berle to producing all manner of movies that I obsess over, such as Pieces, Mario Bava’s Four Times That Night, The French Sex Murders, The Girl In Room 2A, For Your Height Only, Slaughter High and the only movie he directed, the absolutely ludicrous and completely awesome Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks.

Randall did what you’d expect. He hired Carolyn De Fonseca, the actress who often dubbed Mansfield in European movies like Primitive Love and Dog Eat Dog. So yeah. That’s not even Jayne talking in a movie that’s supposedly all about her deepest and darkest thoughts.

De Fonseca’s voice is all over the movies covered on this site. She’s a tourist in Eyeball. That’s her doing Barbara Steele’s voice in Terror-Creatures from the Grave. Marisa Mell in Secret Agent Super Dragon. She’s Florinda Balkan’s English voice in Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling. And she makes vocal appearances in The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, The Case of the Bloody Iris, Torso, The Eerie Midnight Horror Show, Strip Nude for Your Killer, Emanuelle in America, Inferno and so many more. Her voice comes out of Sybil Danning’s mouth in The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, Daria Nicolodi in Deep Red and Phenomena, Barbara Magnolfi in Suspiria, Tisa Farrow in Antropophagus, Dagmar Lassander in The House by the Cemetery, Laura Gemser in Ator the Fighting Eagle, Sabrina Siani in Throne of Fire and Corinne Clery in Fulci’s The Devil’s Honey.

That’s why I write about movies. I would have never known otherwise that one person was the sound that I heard in so many movies that I count amongst my favorites, much less a mondo all about Jayne Mansfield.

With breathy narration, Mansfield visits nudist colonies, strip clubs, a gay bar and a massage parlor because this was the mid-60’s and people were losing their minds over the sexual revolution. She also judges a transvestite beauty pageant, meets the topless girl band The Ladybirds and does the Twist to a song by Rocky Roberts & The Airedales.

You also get shots of Mansfield in Playboy — the equivalent of someone filming a magazine — as well as nude scenes from her in Promises! Promises! and moments with her husband Mickey Hargitay in the movies Primitive Love and The Loves of Hercules.

With Mansfield dying before the movie could be complete, you just knew that news footage of her car accident scene would show up in this. There’s also a tour of her home, the Pink Palace, by Hargitay. He was a plumber and carpenter before becoming a star, so he made her the heart-shaped swimming pool at the center of the all-pink landmark.

In the 1980 TV movie, The Jayne Mansfield Story, Arnold Schwarzenegger played Hargitay, who pretty much demystified and popularized bodybuilding for young athletes. He and Mansfield’s daughter Mariska can be seen pretty much 24 hours a day now on the Law and Order TV shows.

One of the directors of this movie, Joel Holt, is also the narrator in Olga’s House of Shame and Olga’s Girls. Yes, that’s the kind of movie you’re about to revel in. Enjoy it. Wade in it. Experience it.

This was released on blu ray release from Severin along with Wild, Weird, Wonderful Italians.

69 EsSINtial SWV Titles (September 15 – 21): Klon, who came up with this list, said “This isn’t the 69 BEST SWV movies, it isn’t my 69 FAVORITE SWV movies, my goal was to highlight 69 of the MOST SWV movies.” You can see the whole list here, including some of the ones I’ve already posted.

Sold as a double bill with William Grefé’s Death Curse of Tartu, this is Florida regional drive-in exploitation at its absolute best. I mean, sure there are plenty of movies where sea creatures rise to the beach to menace near-nude girls, but do any of them have Neil Sedaka* belting out “Do the Jellyfish?”

Shot on the very same Rainbow Springs that were once attacked by the Creature from the Black Lagoon, this starts off hot, with a hand reaching up from the depths of the ocean to murder an innocent young girl who just wants to listen to her radio.

A bunch of college kids — well, one of them is a doctor and his assistant, but come on, this is basically a slasher in the swamps — just want to drink orange drink and make fun of Egon, their host’s helper with the scary face. Why, it’s enough for a man to turn himself into a half-human, half-jellyfish maniac who knows how to use an axe when he isn’t sending an entire armada of Portuguese Man O’ War jellyfish to kill everyone.

And yeah, he does have a giant jellyfish in a tank and a head shaped like one. This is that kind of movie. That kind of awesome movie where the killer has obviously flippers on and a giant inflatable head.

*They may have advertised special singing star Neil Sedaka, but they never promised you he’d show up, did they?

You can watch this on Tubi.

69 EsSINtial SWV Titles (September 15 – 21): Klon, who came up with this list, said “This isn’t the 69 BEST SWV movies, it isn’t my 69 FAVORITE SWV movies, my goal was to highlight 69 of the MOST SWV movies.” You can see the whole list here, including some of the ones I’ve already posted.

Known as Brainiac in the U.S., this was directed by Chano Urueta, who helped Blue Demon get on the silver screen and was written by Federico Curiel, who would make The Champions of Justice, several Santo movies and Neutron.

All the way back in 1661, Baron Vitelius was burned at the stake during the Inquisition and claimed that the next time a certain comet passed by the Earth, all of the children of those that did him wrong would pay. I mean, you would think a bunch of religious folks would treat a necromantic sorcerer better, but such is life in ancient Mexico.

Three hundred years later, Baron Vitelius rides back in on that comet and is now able to change at will into a monster able to suck out the brains of his victims via a gigante forked tongue, which is incredibly easy to do thanks to his ability to hypnotize his victims.

How bonkers is this movie? No less than Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart paid tribute to it in their song “Debra Kadabra,” saying “Turn it to Channel 13 / And make me watch the rubber tongue / When it comes out! From the puffed and flabulent Mexican rubber-goods mask / Next time they show the Binaca / Make me buy The Flosser / Make me grow Brainiac Fingers / But with more hair!”

In America, we’d be satisfied with an evil alien. In Mexico, they added the fact that he was a wizard who brought people back from the dead before he was burned alive and took a ride on a heavenly body for three hundred years. Viva la peliculas de terror!

You can watch this on Tubi.