Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!
Jack Weis directed Quadroon, Storyville, Death Brings Roses, Mardi Gras Massacre and a Melissa Etheridge concert video.
That makes sense.
Written by his director of photography Irwin Blaché — who also shot The Legend of Blood Mountain — this movie is less than an hour and worth all of your time. A good chunk of this movie is devoted to Damballa (Maureen Chan, who is supernaturally gorgeous) as she covers herself in oil and dances in graveyards, even mounting graves and writhing on them in a manner that Linnea Quigley would be jealous of.
She falls in love with Vietnam vet Ted (Ronald Tanet) and when three thieves learn that he has money, they kill him for it. Of course, there’s no way you can do that to a voodoo priestess, so she dances all around his dead body and literally humps him back to life, bring the Mick Jagger lyric “You can make a dead man come” to living, breathing undead life. She also levitates at one point, a trick from the spookshow career of previous director and producer Donn Davison that was also used in Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Magic Land of Mother Goose.
The origins of this movie are that Davison had made this as a PG voodoo movie and then approached Weis to improve it. He did a talented search for a woman to play the voodoo woman and Chan, who had no inhibitions at all, was perfect. Once he saw how relaxed she was being naked in front of, well, everyone, he created several scenes where she’d get even more nude.
This is a movie of swamp vibes, voodoo exposition flashbacks, denim fashion and a woman who can transform into a snake. They say there are no perfect movies, but what do they know?
Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!
There are two movies with the name Devil Woman. This one and 1973’s She yao jing AKA Bruka Queen of Evil, which is the sequel, at least spiritually I guess. The 1970 Devil Woman was directed by Jose Flores Sibal. It begins with the birth of a young girl who has snakes for hair. Her father throws she and her mother into the rainy night and we catch up with them years later when she has grown into the teen Manda. She keeps her head covered at all times and the children often bully her. One day, they try to pull the wrap off and many of them end up dying by snake bite. The townspeople set her mother’s house on fire and again, she runs off into the night.
When she grows to adulthood, Manda (Divina Valencia) has become a snake goddess who takes over a gang, which brings her into conflict with a martial artist named Su Wen when she kidnaps his girlfriend. This movie, as you probably expect, has tons of human on snake violence and has a very similar story to its sequel. Also, there’s no transaction, which means you’re working your way through it Tower of Babel style.
Can you believe that you live in a reality that has not just one but two Filipino snake-haired woman movies?
Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!
Director Zoltan G. Spencer also made The Satanist and Terror at Orgy Castle. This time, he’s telling the story of the Hand of Pleasure, a secret organization of robotic women under the command of Dr. Dreadful (Spencer). He looks like the kind of thing if you saw it outside your home, you’re be terrified, wearing one of those old plastic see-through masks of an old man. Then again, he does say “Please excuse the mask… my face is the greatest horror of them all!” He wants to have his women sleep with spies and learn their secrets while a Sherlock Holmes-looking man — also old — tries to figure out what is happening.
Joe (William Howard, Brides of Lucifer)is one of those spies and his spying consists of watching strip club dancers and sleeping with Jill (Terri Johnson, Blood Sabbath). They end up at the doctor’s wax museum, where he claims “If my sex-transference machine can turn a woman into a man-hating robot, just think what it will do to a man!”
There’s unsynced sound, softcore performances that are so fun that everyone is smiling even when they’re whipping and choking the life out of each other, crazed narration, music that feels like it came from another dimension that we can only dream of listening to more of, stock footage, female and male full frontal, a hero that ends up making love to several women at once at the end even stacking them up as they pass out, a brainwave scanner that seems like something Cobra’s Dr. Venom would make yet only have a metal strainer to use and evil robot women who kill with their pleasurable mouths.
This movie is as wild as you’d hope and also filled with glorious padding, from nude bathing scenes that may still be playing and horse races. I’d go watch it right now if it was in a theater.
Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!
The 70s and its obsession with Bigfoot is something I’ve written about several times. But little did I know The Geek existed, a movie that has no known director that was shot in Oregon and has Lynn Holmes (The Undergraduate), Nora Wieternik (Flesh Gordon) and Rene Bond’s husband Ric Lutze in it. No one is sure who the other actors are, either. They play three couples who are looking for Sasquatch in the woods or as this movie refers to it, The Geek.
Of course, as you expected, all the couples have sex. Perhaps you didn’t think one would say that his sister allowed him to fondle her breasts, but look, this is 1971 sleaze and there aren’t any rules like good taste. We haven’t even gotten to the monster, who looks like Andre the Giant on The Six Million Dollar Man if he got stuck in the costume and kept pissing himself inside it.
This movie is 50 minutes long and finds time to have two crypto sexual assaults in it, which had to be what some people were looking for. I learned that Bigfoot has a small pink member and that he prefers it doggy style. Squatchy style?
This is the kind of adult film that is just so squalid and sweaty and disgusting and you know I had to watch it. There are some things in this life you need to live through, like Bigfoot pornography.
Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!
Herbert S. Altman directed one other movie, the Lenny Bruce film Dirtymouth, and co-director Robert Worms was the director of Terror On Tape. Together with writer Bill Boyd — one and done — they made what may be the strangest take on Richard Connell’s story. They go by the name Eve. This is the first time an adaptation would have a female hunter.
Actor Charles Freeman (Dick Lord), druggie Buddy (Frank Geraci) and former pro wrestler Rocco (Jake LaMotta, the raging bull!) have all been acquitted of murder — Charles killed a lover’s husband, Buddy gave a girlfriend an overdose and Rocco wouldn’t stop beating on another fighter — at some time in their lives but are now on the skids. They’re gathered by Virginia Marcus (Eileen Lord, a one and done as well and that’s a shame because she’s beyond bonkers in this), a wealthy woman who offers them $100,000 each if they can survive for one day with her hunting them throughout New York City.
None of them make it. Charles gets the acting role he’s always wanted, but it’s a set-up to be shot with an arrow. Rocco gets treated like a bull as Virginia dresses like a matador and uses the traditional bullfight weapons to murder him. Buddy gets away, but just for a few hours and soon dies, killed looking for a fix.
Those are the original 55 minutes of this movie. The other 15 minutes that were added later are nude women, added so that this could play in art theaters. Virginia is unhinged, becoming a hunter after her brother threw her dog off the roof — “I was glad when it died!” she barks at her psychoanalyst — and she ends up screaming in a straightjacket, back to being a little girl by the end.
Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!
La Noche de Walpurgis (released in the United States as The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman and in the UK as both Shadow of the Werewolf and Werewolf Shadow) was the fifth time that Paul Naschy played the doomed lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky.
Written by Naschy and directed by Leon Klimovsky (The People Who Own the Dark, The Dracula Saga), this film seems like it came from another planet, perhaps because so much of it is in slow motion. It also kicked off a horror craze in Spain that maniacs like me are still enjoying to this day.
After the last film — The Fury of the Wolf Man — Waldemar Daninsky is brought back to life during his autopsy. After all, you don’t remove silver bullets from a werewolf’s heart and expect him to treat you nicely. He kills both for their trouble and runs into the night.
Meanwhile, Elvira and her friend Genevieve are looking for the tomb of Countess Wandessa de Nadasdy. Coincidentally, as these things happen, her grave is near Daninsky’s castle, so our dashing werewolf friend invites them to stay. Within hours, Elvira has bled all over the corpse of the Countess (Patty Shepard, Hannah, Queen of the Vampires), who soon rises and turns both girls into her slaves.
But what of the werewolf, you ask. Don’t worry — he shows up too, after we get our fill of the ladies slow-motion murdering people in the forest. Also, as these things happen, Waldemar must fight the Countess before the only woman who ever loved him, Elvira (Yelena Samarina, The House of 1,000 Dolls) finally kills him again.
There’s also a scene where our furry friend battles a skeleton wearing the robes of a monk in the graveyard. Some claim that this scene inspired Spanish director Amando de Ossorio to write Tombs of the Blind Dead just a few months later.
Daninsky’s lycanthropy is not explained in this one. Was it the bite of a yeti that made him howl at the moon? Is he a college professor or a count? Who cares!
Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!
Mondo Cane 2 (1963): New Guinea, Germany, Singapore, Portugal, Australia, America and beyond, no country is safe when Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi have their cameras rolling. Paolo Cavara, who helped make Mondo Cane, had moved on to make other films, including Black Belly of the Tarantulaand Plot of Fear.
This time around, their journey takes us through vivisections, lynchings, tranvestitites, sex clubs, alligator hunts and a trip to a mortician’s school. Everything in this consists of cutting room footage of the first film, including a scene where a monk sets himself ablaze that was totally faked with the help of special effects wizard Carlo Rambaldi.
As the mondo had grown beyond their film, this time Jacopetti and Prosperi go abti-establishment, even laughing about how the dog scenes in the original movie kept them off screens in England. They’re incredulous and probably desensitized over all that they have seen.
Mondo Freudo (1966): Mondo Freudo is all about “a world of sex and the strange & unusual laws that govern it,” as told by two absolute maniacs: the producer/director/distributor team of Lee Frost and Bob Cresse, with Cresse himself ranting as we try and make it through another swing through the world of mondo.
Hollywood strippers, Tijuana hookers, London lesbians, Asian sex shows, Times Square Satanists and topless Watusi clubs. Hidden cameras have recorded everything from teenagers making out to a Mexican slave market, a Black Mass near Times Square, while we also see people get painted, beaten and wrestle in mud.
Cresse would go on to make Love Camp 7 and plenty of other upsetting — or awesome — movies before his life fell apart one day while he walked his dog. Coming across two men beating a woman in broad daylight on Hollywood Boulevard, Cresse pulled his gun and ordered the men to stop. Turns out they were cops and shot him in the stomach and then killed his dog. He’d spend seven months in the hospital with no health insurance, losing most of his fortune.
Frost would make The Black Gestapoand put sex inserts into a foreign mondo all about the occult, creating the near-classic Witchcraft ’70. He was smart enough to not fight any police.
Ecco (1963): Offsetting the globetrotting shock of this film — watch a woman bite off a reindeer’s scrotum with her bare teeth! — is the voice of George Sanders, perhaps way too sophisticated a man for such an endeavor. That said, money is money, and it’s time for Gianni Proia to take us all around This Shocking World (the other title for this mondo).
Beyond the expected lesbians and strippers — show me a mondo that doesn’t have those and it’s amazing that I am seeing them as commonplace at this point — you also get a trip to the original Grand Guignol and get to watch a man repeatedly impale himself.
The US version — re-edited with a new commentary by absolute maniac Bob Cresse and with an Italian title that means “look here” — adds scenes from World by Night No. 2, another Proia mondo, with bodybuilding showgirls, Roller Derby and some vacation footage. Consider it like watching snaps from holiday, except the vacation goers have no compunction showing you absolute filth.
Mondo Balordo (1964): Albert T. Viola — yes, the same man who wrote, directed, produced and starred in Preacherman— completed the American version of this film, known as A Fool’s World in Italy. There, it was directed by Roberto Bianchi Montero, who also made the mondos Africa Sexy, Orient By Night, Sexy Nudo, Sexy nel Mondo, Universo Proibito and Superspettacoli nel Mondo. He would go on to make So Sweet, So Dead.
Imagine a world “throbbing and pulsing with love, from the jungle orgies of primitive tribes to sin-filled evenings of the London sophisticate.” Now imagine those very same words coming out of the mouth of Boris Karloff.
Here are just some of the folks you will meet and sights you will see: a dwarf singer, bodybuilders, bedouin pimps, Japanese models for rent, Indian exorcists, people who can’t stop smoking, Jehovah’s Witnesses, lottery players, a clone of Valentino, high end rich dogs, a Borneo version of Romeo and Juliet, cults, nightclubs, Luna Park, London after hours and so much more.
Mondo Bizarro (1966): “To the worm in the cheese, the cheese is the universe. To the maggot in the cadaver, the cadaver is infinity. And to you, what is your world? How do you know what is beyond the Beyond? Most of us don’t even know what is behind the Beyond.”
Mondo Bizarro blew my mind and it hadn’t even started yet.
Much like all of the Lee Frost and Bob Cresse mondos, this is a mix of both documentary and faked footage. Sure, that one way glass in a changing room is fake, but hey, Frederick’s of Hollywood is real, even if it shows up in so many mondo films that I lose track of which one is which.
This one also has a man sticking nails in his skin and eating glass, the hippies of Los Angeles, Germans watching a Nazi play. Cresse must have been, umm, Cresse-ing his jeans, seeing as how he played a German officer in Love Camp 7 with such aufregung.
The duo also used a high-powered lens to capture what they describe as a Lebanese white-slavery auction. Never mind that it’s obviously Bronson Canyon, the setting for everything from Night of the Blood Beast to Equinox, Octaman and, most famously, the entrance to the Batcave in the 1960’s TV show.
Make no bones about it. This is junk. But it’s entertaining junk.
Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!
Olga (Audrey Campbell) is the meanest and the best at her job, which is turning out women like Frenchie (Gigi Darlene), plying them with marijuana and if that doesn’t work, just beating them into submission, all so that they turn tricks for her and the syndicate. The syndicate! You will hear their names so many times.
A film made with all voiceovers, White Slaves of Chinatown was directed and written by Joseph P. Mawra, who directed Fireball Jungle and may or may not have directed Shanty Tramp and Savages from Hell. Probably not.
There’s opium everywhere and this feels like those black and white detective magazines you used to see on the newstand that seem way more perverted than any porn magazine, always with women being threatened on the cover and in every story.
Olga would return for four more movies: Olga’s House of Shame and Olga’s Girls with Campbell and Mme. Olga’s Massage Parlor with no Olga showing up and Olga’s Dance Hall Girls with Lucy Eldredge as Olga.
In 1964, this movie was probably as offensive as can be. Today, it’s still pretty scuzzy but you can’t help but find it adorable.
Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!
Everything was going so well at the nudist camp. People were playing volleyball and shuffleboard and running and doing all manner of things that happen in a nudie-cutie movie and then, well, a dark stranger intrudes and starts killing women. And that’s when the typical Barry Mahon gets weird.
This is the kind of movie where the evil ape that is the titular The Beast That Killed Women gets shot with ten minutes left and we’re supposed to hang around and wait for the credits.
Barry always rounds up a better-looking cast than many of his contemporaries and this time he has Judy Adler (who starred in another good Mahon movie, Confessions of a Bad Girl), Janet Banzet (who shows up in the Sylvester Stallone softcore movie The Party at Kitty and Stud’s), Darlene Bennett (Nudes On Tiger Reef), Dolores Carlos (Diary of a Nudist), Gigi Darlene (The Love Statue), Louise Downe (who would write She-Devils On Wheels), Marlene Eck (Crazy Wild and Crazy), Christy Foushee (Blood Feast), Marlene Starr (Bad Girls Go to Hell), Sandra Sinclair (Blaze Starr Goes Nudist), June Roberts (All Men Are Apes!) and Joni Roberts (The Girl with the Magic Box).
The ironic thing is one of the women who stayed clothed in this movie, Juliet Anderson, went on to become one of the most iconic adult stars of all time, Aunt Peg. She didn’t start acting in those films until she was 39. She also discovered Nina Hartley, another seemingly ageless actress.
As for the beast that is killing women, if you guessed that Barry is in that suit, you’ve seen as many of his movies as I have.
Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!
There’s a gang of wreckers who lure ships to the rocks on a foggy shore that destroys them, led by The Captain (John Rico), and including Le Bosco (Willy Braque), Paul (Paul Bisciglia) and Tina (Joëlle Coeur). The latest ship they’ve smashed has two survivors — played by Lieva Lone and Patricia Hermenier — who are dazed and damaged as they struggle down the beach and into the arms of the crew that’s already taken so much from them. They’re assaulted and left for dead as the pirates drink away their cares, but The Captain keeps seeing the girls, so they go back and trap them in a ship and set it on fire.
Yet that’s still not enough to put them away. They run to some ruins where a clown (Mireille Dargent) takes them deeper into the grounds where a demon (Miletic Zivomir) is imprisoned and if they allow him into their bodies, he will give them a limited time to have his power and gain the revenge they desire.
Jean Rollin is the only director who I could say was inspired by his childhood to make suce a strange and upsetting movie. Yes, it’s another return to the beach but there are no vampires, instead the ghostly hauntings of victims and the sheer insanity of Tina. Seriously, Coeur is an absolute force in this movie, as seductive as she is frightening, demanding more carnage and becoming sexually aroused by the death and horror that she helps create.
This is at once a film filled with sex and one desperate to destroy your desire. Rollin was challenged by how big this production was and yes, there are some pacing issues, but it’s another journey through bleak unending sadness on a beach and my feet are soaked and the sand is in every pore.
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