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.

Let’s get this out of the way. This is a movie made by maniacs who have nothing less than the goal of decimating your sanity. View this movie at your own peril.

René Cardona — who also brought us La Momia Azteca contra el Robot Humano — originally crafted this movie, which was remixed for American audiences by K. Gordon Murray, known as the “King of the Kiddie Matinee.” Ever wondered why Santo was called Samson in the U.S. dialogue? You can thank Murray, who also provides the near-manic voiceover for this film.

On Christmas Eve, Santa prepares for his big night, as always. He plays his organ while children all over the world sing. They hope to glimpse him as they leave his Toyland castle in space.

If you’re already wondering why anyone would change Santa’s basic character beats, buckle up. Have we got some Christmas magic for you?

In Hell, Satan tells Pitch, his main demon, to go to Earth and make kids hate Santa. Why? Who knows — we wouldn’t have a movie otherwise.

Pitch asks five kids to help him enrage Santa Claus. Four of them are complete assholes — three brothers who like to start shit and Billy, the son of wealthy but absent parents. They break some windows, but Pitch fails to talk Lupita, a poor girl, into stealing the doll she wants. An angry Santa watches from space with the help of his magic telescope and children’s helpers. Remember that part of Santa’s songs?

Santa also has a device that allows him to watch children’s dreams, further creating a police state only dreamed of by elves on shelves and Tom Cruise in Minority Report. Lupita dreams of adult-sized dancing dolls demanding that she learn how to steal.

The three brothers then break into Billy’s home and steal his toys. They then have the temerity to write to Santa and tell him they have been good all year, but his voice takes over their minds and informs them that he can see everything.

Let me see if I can process what happens next: Santa can deliver gifts to everyone on Earth because of his most trusted henchman, Merlin the Wizard. No, not Ringo Starr from Son of Dracula. No, this friend of Saint Nick gives him sleep powder, a flower that allows him to disappear, a magic key that will open any door on Earth and mechanical reindeer. But oh no — the three evil boys are plotting to enslave Santa. Enslave Santa — that’s how dark this movie is ready to get.

Want to get really dark? One of Santa’s helpers, Pedro, is played by an actor named Cesáreo Quezadas, who was also known by the stage name Pulgarcito, thanks to appearing in the popular film of the same name. This would be like us calling Bela Lugosi Dracula for the rest of his life. He often played plucky orphans, but as he hit puberty, his acting career suffered, leading to him holding up a shoe store in 1971. After some time in jail, he got married and had four kids, but ended up leaving his wife for his secretary, Claudia, and having two kids with her. Those two boys, Gridley and Guillermo, found a video of their father having sex with their stepsister, Mariana. He’s still in jail today, over a decade later.

Remember Lupita? She and her mom pray that she gets not just one baby doll but two — one of which she will give to Baby Jesus, which is kind of like when you ask your parents for money so you can buy them a gift at the Santa shop at school, and all they get is a piece of shit covered with glitter or a cheap screwdriver set that you wonder why they never use.

Santa just wants to get gifts to everyone on Earth, but Pitch keeps screwing with him. And Billy? His parents go out to eat and just leave him all alone. Santa helps out there and even has time to give the three bad kids coal after they try to steal his sleigh.

Pitch is finally lucky enough to empty all of Santa’s dream powder, and then the jolly old man drops his magic flower. He’s fucked. A dog chases him up a tree, and the devil’s majordomo calls the fire department to come so everyone can see Santa and ruin his magic. Merlin helps our hero escape and blasts the demon with a fire hose.

Don’t worry about Lupita. She gets her doll as Santa goes back to his castle. Whew.

This movie won the Golden Gate Award for Best International Family Film at the 1959 San Francisco International Film Festival. I can only imagine that this was one of the early LSD experiments and not a film festival based on artistic merit.

This movie has so many insane ideas that it’s difficult to summarize. From learning that demons primarily eat hot coals to the fact that every child who works for Santa must wear a racist costume that denotes their country of origin (all Japanese children wear kimonos, and all Americans are cowboys), this is a movie brimming with barely concealed menace.

But here’s what’s really weird: Even though Santa has modified all of his children’s countries, none of them know anything about their countries of origin. What is happening?

This is how Santa can be everywhere at once: he is from the Fifth Dimension, and, as we all know from reading Grant Morrison comics, that is the dimension of imagination. Therefore, as a fifth-dimensional being, Santa can see the reality of our dimension and do things that would break our minds if we contemplated them for so long — just like I am doing when I write this. I am putting your brain in danger right now by forcing you to reason with the fact that the physical properties that ground us in the Third Dimension can be pushed beyond the infinite. Merry Christmas.

Santa Claus can also feel physical pain when his mechanical manifestations are hit with rocks. This makes even less sense. Why, in a world where Lucifer is constantly trying to murder him, would Santa put himself in such mortal peril?

This is a movie that raises more questions than it answers. You ask, “Where does Santa come from?” Knowing that he comes from the North Pole, you are shocked to learn that everything you know — including the universe and its laws are governed — is a lie. This movie is meant to keep children occupied, whether on TV or in the movie houses where it ran yearly for three decades while parents try to get a merciful break. However, a central point of the film is for parents to stop ignoring their children, so any child ignored in such a way will have to feel lost in the maelstrom of emotional pain that this movie wields like a scalpel.

I get this for watching Santa Claus vs. the Devil at 4 AM. Pure pain, questions that chatter at my mind and the slowly evolving knowledge that this motion picture could have only been created by the eldritch powers of the Ancient Ones who wait for us Behind the Wall of Sleep, where their madness will infect our souls and cause our children to eat their way from their wombs.

VCI has released this movie on Blu-ray.

You can also watch this movie on Amazon Prime or on YouTube.

BONUS: Here’s some art that ran in Drive-In Asylum Special #3.

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.

In The Golden Turkey Awards, the Medveds claim that Arch Hall Jr.’s performance as Tommy is “one of the low points in the history of American cinema” and that he has “a face only a mother could love.” He was sixteen when he made this movie, so that feels like a lot of punching down.

Well, maybe they were mad that their dad never put them in a movie.

Well, Arch Hall Sr. thought his son was going to be a star — even if that son said that he couldn’t sing — and made an Elvis movie starring his boy.

Roxy Miller (Marilyn Manning) drives out and accidentally hits Eegah (Richard Kiel) with her car. When she tells her boyfriend Tom Nelson (Arch Hall Jr.) and her father Robert (Arch Hall Sr.), her dad runs out into the desert to try and get a picture. He disappears, she finds him and he’s learned how to speak to the creature and has learned how it has stayed alive all this time. Of course, Eegah wants to marry his daughter, so he says alright, hoping that they can escape.

When they do, Eegah runs after them and dies at a pool party, but not before Ray Dennis Steckler gets thrown into the water. He would go on to make the next Arch Hall Jr. movie, Wild Guitar.

This was shot in the same Bronson Canyon area that Robot Monster was filmed at. In fact, Ro-Man’s base is the same cave that Eegah makes his home.

My favorite thing in this movie was that the sound recorder screwed up his job, so when Robert yells, “Watch out for snakes!” his lips never move.

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.

José Mojica Marins directed movies for six years before making At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, the first appearance of Brazil’s national boogeyman, Zé do Caixão, or Coffin Joe.

Joe is a man with no morals but a devotion to Nietzschian philosophies and absolute hatred for religion with the goal of achieving immortality through the birth of a perfect son. And while he does not believe in the supernatural, he often finds himself walking through visions of the otherworld.

Coffin Joe came to Marins — the man who would often be referred to as the character interchangeably — in a very magic way. “In a dream saw a figure dragging me to a cemetery. Soon he left me in front of a headstone, there were two dates of my birth and my death. People at home were very frightened, called a priest because they thought I was possessed. I woke up screaming, and at that time decided to do a movie unlike anything I had done. He was born at that moment the character would become a legend: Coffin Joe. The character began to take shape in my mind and in my life. The cemetery gave me the name, completed the costume of Joe the cover of voodoo and black hat, which was the symbol of a classic brand of cigarettes. He would be a mortician.”

Awakening of the Beast begins in black and white, as a series of vignettes of the ways that drug users debase themselves are shown in lurid, sweaty detail. A TV panel debates the idea that sexual perversion is caused by the use of illegal drugs, with more stories that illustrate this point. The TV show needs an expert on depravity, so they ask Marins to appear on the show.

Afterward, the doctor who conducted the experiment doses four volunteers and asks for them to stare at a poster of The Strange World of Coffin Joe. Supposedly Marins didn’t know much about using drugs, but he intended this movie to speak against the fact that the uses of drugs are treated worse than the suppliers and that the Brazilian film industry saw him as no better than a long-nailed drug dealer.

The acid trip that follows is highlighted by Coffin Joe, ranting against anyone and everyone. Of course, this film was banned by the very establishment it rails against. So basically, Coffin Joe is a self-fulfilling prophecy; the maniac attacking belief structures created by an artist who only believes in the power of film.

“My world is strange, but it’s worthy to all those who want to accept it, and never corrupt as some want to portray it. Because it’s made up, my friend, of strange people, though none are stranger than you!”

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.

“Let all the spirits hear. I am the first born Son of Satan. He commands my thoughts. I speak his words. The Book of the Dead! Sons and daughters of Satan. Put aside your worldly things and come to me. Let it be known, sons and daughters, that Satan was an acid head. Drink from his cup; pledge yourselves. And together, we’ll all freak out.”

Has a movie ever started better? I don’t think so. I Drink Your Blood will take you prisoner, stab in the stomach with a fork and write on the walls with your blood!

In fact, I watched that opening at last year’s April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama in the middle of the night, surrounded by fog and inebriated on a variety of vices. It was a transcendent moment.

Horace Bones leads a cult that worships Satan and drops acid. A young girl, Sylvia, watches from the woods but is caught, then raped by the cult members before she escapes. She’s found the next morning by Mildred, a baker, and Sylvia’s brother Pete. They get her back to her father, Doc Banner, the town’s veterinarian. And oh the town — it’s been abandoned due to dam project. The hippies break down and decide to stick around.

The only food in town? Meat pies from Mildred’s bakery, which Horace and family take as they set up their home in a house scheduled for demolition. And when Doc comes for revenge, the gang smashes his glasses and force him to take LSD.

So how do you get revenge? Well, if you’re Pete, you kill a rabies infected dog and inject the blood into meat pies, which infects the gang and makes them go crazy. They begin to attack one another as Molly runs away, finding the mill workers, who she ends up having sex with all night long until she bites one of the men.

Horace goes full-on insane, even more insane than the beginning of the film, attacking two of the construction workers. Only Andy from the group is not infected and he finds Sylvia and Pete. Meanwhile, the infection spreads to the rest of the town.

Banner gets impaled. Horace is stabbed by Rollo, the African-American member of the family. Mildred is barricaded inside her bakery and Andy is beheaded before they get in. The Japanese member of the family sets herself on fire. Everyone other than Mildred, her boyfriend Oaks (who comes to save them), Sylvia and Pete dies horribly.

Director David Durston worked with producer and CEO of Cinemation Industries Jerry Gross to write and direct this film. He said that “wanted to make the most graphic horror film ever produced, but he didn’t want any vampires, man-made monsters, werewolves, mad doctors, or little people.” The director couldn’t come up with an idea until he read an article about a village in Iran where a pack of rabid wolves infected several villagers, making them insane and homicidal. Dunston found a doctor who had been to the village and that had filmed the evidence. He was further inspired by the Manson family trials.

This is the first film to be given an X rating for violence instead of sex. And while originally entitled Phobia, the name change to I Drink Your Blood and pairing with  1964’s Zombies, also retitled as I Eat Your Skin, proved a potent blend for audiences. The two movies are almost always thought of together.

This film is unafraid to be the exploitation junk that normal people avoid. It’s grimy, filthy and ultimately entertaining as hell. It takes everyone’s worst fears of the hippies and shows you in graphic detail what happens when those fears come true.

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.

Shot with new permits or budget on the very real streets of New York City, Fleshpot on 42nd Street starts with two sex workers, Dusty Cole (Laura Cannon) and Cherry Lane (Neil Flanagan in drag), trying to make it in the world. But it all gets to be too much for Dusty, who quits the nightlife and tries to move on to the straight life with Bob (Harry Reems!). But as you know — or you should — this is an Andy Milligan movie. Things have a way of not working out.

Once Dusty and Bob hook up, this movie moves from a realistic world where two sex workers rob everyone they can to stay alive while being truly honest with one another about it to another where a man comes in and seemingly saves the day but not caring about his lover’s past.

Maybe that brief respite from a tough world of fighting to stay alive every day is echoed by how Milligan felt, back from London and still making movies for nothing that hardly anyone would see on the rough streets of NYC. But even 42nd Street was about to change, going from simply dangerous in places to absolutely harrowing in the wake of crack by the end of the decade. And even in 1972, the movies playing there went from just plain old exploitation to full penetration.

If you hear some people discuss the films of Milligan, they’re either dismissive or outright mean. I don’t know what they’re looking for, but unlike his horror work, this feels authentic and true. It’s got a downer ending that 1972 Hollywood would have embraced, even if there’s no way they ever could have.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

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.

Four years later, Coffin Joe has returned from the end of At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul and has recovered from shock, blindness and being accused of a series of murders. Now it’s time to get back to finding his perfect woman and continue his blood.

Together with a hunchbacked assistant named Brono, he kidnaps six gorgeous women and puts them all through a horrific series of tasks to determine who will bear his child. Only Marcia doesn’t scream in the face of the madness Coffin Joe puts them through, so only she can be the one. Yet even though he takes her to his bed — and kills the other five with snakes — she refuses him. He releases her, claiming he knows that she will never tell anyone what she has seen.

That’s when he meets the Colonel’s daughter, Laura, who actually returns his affection. The military man and his son try to break off their union, but Coffin Joe acts as only as he can to such an offense: he has Bruno kill Laura’s brother and blames the colonel’s henchman Truncador.

Yet now comes the dark night for the man who has no soul, as he goes to Hell after learning that one of his six brides was pregnant when he killed her. Dooming her child, he wanders the technicolor nightmare that is the abyss and comes upon Satan himself, who is also Coffin Joe. Our world’s version renounces his ways in light of this revelation.

Coffin Joe resists all the killers the colonel and his men send after him and finally impregnates Laura, just as Marcia kills herself by drinking arsenic. Yet before she dies, she tells the townsfolk of Coffin Joe’s crimes and they form a lynch mob just as he must decide who will survive, his bride or the baby, as the pregnancy has complications. Together they agree that the child must live, but fate is cruel and both Laura and Joe’s scion die. Destroyed by this, he is no match for the lynch mob that arrives, shooting him in the cemetery where he drowns in the same pond where he drowned so many of his victims.

At the point of death, a priest offers to hear Joe’s confession. He accepts God as his Savior and drowns as the skeletons of his victims claim him.

Brazilian censors forced filmmaker — and the human avatar of Coffin Joe — Jose Mojica Marins to recut and redub the end of this movie. That’s why the strange ending of salvation is in here. It enraged Jose Mojica Marins and put a curse on his career, or so he felt, to the point that he could never finish his planned trilogy of three Coffin Joe movies. It took until 2005 and filmmakers who grew up as his fans before Embodiment of Evil closed out the story and showed how Coffin Joe survived.

In The Wizard of Oz, a better world is in color instead of black and white. In This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, Hell itself is the only place to get the full color gel Mario Bava treatment and that says something about the nihilistic worldview of its creator and his creation. I grew up in a small town too, Coffin Joe, but I wasn’t brave enough to grow out my fingernail to absurd lengths, go on and on about my superiority and make out with a woman while throwing snakes at others. I can only watch you and see how it could have been.

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.

Frank Henenlotter is an instrumental figure in grindhouse and exploitation film lore. In addition to rescuing many low-budget sexploitation and exploitation films from being destroyed, he made three Basket Case movies and Brain Damage. This is one of the few movies that upsets Becca so much that she refuses to watch it.

Duane Bradley arrives in the grimiest and scummiest New York City with a locked wire basket that contains his formerly conjoined twin, Belial. They were separated against their will and Belial has always resented it, pushing his brother to get revenge on the doctor who cut them apart.

Our hero — well, such as it is — falls in love with a nurse named Sharon, but Belial tries to rape her, can’t perform and kills her instead. Is it any more frightening if I tell you that Belial is basically a rubber glove on Henelotter’s hand? Duane attacks his brother and they fall out of the apartment to their death.

Don’t worry — the brothers survived to make it to the sequel, as well as another film after that where Belial got a powered exo-skeleton. The brothers also show up in the subway in Henenlotter’s Brain Damage.

Critic Rex Reed’s was quoted on the poster for this movie, saying “This is the sickest movie ever made!” He had heard how gross the film was and sought it out. As he left the theater, someone asked him what he thought. He didn’t realize that that person was Henenlotter and as a result, he was furious that he was being used to promote this movie.

The bar scenes were shot in The Hellfire Club, an S&M bar in Manhattan. The crew had to hide all the sex toys and swing, but left behind the buzz saw that killed the boys’ father as a gift. That very same crew was so offended by Sharon’s death scene that they all walked out rather than continue filming it.

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.

I’m proud to say that Herschell Gordon Lewis was born in the same town as me, Pittsburgh, PA. He was lured from a career as an educator into being a radio station manager and then, well, advertising got him. I can relate. I’ve spent the better part of 25 years doing the same. But then Lewis got smart. He learned how to make money.

He began making movies with David F. Friedman, starting with Living Venus. Their nudie cuties would be innocent today, but showed way more skin than mainstream films. These weren’t high art. They were made to turn a profit and they sure did, from movies like Boin-n-g! and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre to the world’s first — and probably only — nudist camp musical, Goldilocks and the Three Bares.

Once nudie movies got boring, Lewis needed another tactic. He found it. Oh wow, did he find it. Gore. Blood everywhere, guts all over the screen and no limits to the depravity that he’d fester on drive-in screens nationwide. It all started with Blood Feast.

This is a pretty simple film: Faud Ramses wants to make sacrifices to the Egyptian goddess Ishtar to resurrect her, so he kills beautiful young socialites when he’s not catering their coming out parties. He’s also wiping out anyone who requests a copy of his book, Ancient Weird Religious Rites.

Shot in Miami, Florida — where life is cheap! — in just four days for just $24,000, Blood Feast used all local ingredients for the gore, except for a sheep’s tongue that came from Tampa Bay. Friedman was a genius at publicity, helping the film succeed, giving out vomit bags at screenings and even applying to get an injunction against his own movie in Sarasota so that it couldn’t be shown.

Lewis and Friedman didn’t stray too far from their sexy roots, bringing in June 1963 Playmate of the Month Connie Mason to star in the film. She would come back for Lewis’ even more astounding Two Thousand Maniacs!

As for Lewis, he left filmmaking in the 1970’s, served some jail time for fraud and then began copywriting his way to even greater success, a second — maybe even third or fourth career — later in life. He wrote and published over twenty books, including The Businessman’s Guide to Advertising and Sales Promotion, Direct Mail Copy That Sells! and The Advertising Age Handbook of Advertising. His books were all over the place at my first agency job and I was shocked to discover that the author of these books — one of the godfathers of direct mail and eblasts — was also the American godfather of gore. Sometimes. life makes sense.

In 2016, Arrow Video released a huge box set of his films and the man whose work was often in grimy drive-ins and Something Weird video cassettes finally began to be appreciated as an auteur. Funny, as he was the man who said, “I see filmmaking as a business and pity anyone who regards it as an art form.”

You know those movies that they warn you about and tell you that they’ll warp your mind and make you a maniac, how you’ll never be the same again? This is that movie. You should probably watch it right now.

Can’t make it this weekend? Blood Feast is available on Tubi or on Shudder with and without commentary from Joe Bob Briggs.

Dragon Art Theatre Week (September 8 – 14) Pssst. Hey…buddy… you wanna see some naked movies with your mom in em? This stuff here is premium split tail in action, my friend, straight from the vaults at Something Weird Video. It’s all the HARD X stuff on the SWV site that I could find on Letterboxd and let me tell you, when I say HARD X I mean it! These movies show it all baby, whatever sort of freaky shit you’re into, these movies have got it. Nipple clamps, ice cubes on the balls, lesbos, homos, cumshots, whips, leather, you name it! Plus we got air conditioning and the cleanest bathrooms on the deuce. Just step inside … and if you need some luudes or a lid talk to my man Shifty over at the popcorn counter. Tell him Klon sent you.

Directed by Joe Davian and star Vanessa del Rio, this is a women in prison movie that goes beyond the teases of mainstream films in the genre. I mean that, as this is an Avon release, as rough as it gets.

A new warden (John Buch) allows his head guard (Holly Bush) to abuse all of the inmates, but specifically destroy Trixie (del Rio), Wanda (Sharon Mitchell), Bernice (Paula Morton) and Rose (Solange Shannon). Just like the WIP movies you have come to love, the women all have their own reasons for being here, like Wanda being a junkie who was assaulted before being caught shooting up in a bathroom (that scene is a rough watch, as Mitchell had a history of addiction, just watch Kamikaze Hearts), another killing someone, another who is doing the time for a crime her man committed and a prostitute.

When the warden isn’t being abused by his favorite guard, he’s having her decimate the girls. Also: one of them uses a Barbie doll for reasons it should never be used for.

How wild is the soundtrack? It’s all early Pink Floyd, like “Astronomy Domine,” “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party (Entrance),” “Careful with That Axe, Eugene,” “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” and more.

This is a dark and scummy movie with a brutal ending. I have no idea who could get off to this, but man, Avon really knew how to make these.