Jefferson Bailey (Scott McGinnis, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock) owns the hottest business in 1983: a video arcade. It’s driving local business tycoon Joseph Rutter (Joe Don Baker, a man whose name I screamed into the ear of a sleeping girlfriend once, which is a long story I should really get to sometime) nuts, so he gets his two nephews and plans on shutting down the arcade. Mean! Unfair! No!

Bailey’s too smart for Rutter and has two pals named Eugene Groebe (Leif Green, Davey Jaworski from the legendary bomb Grease 2) — who is molested by swimsuit girls before he even gets to the arcade — and McDorfus, who are ready to deal with this affront.

This movie was such a big deal that Midway allowed the image of Pac-Man, their new game Satan’s Hollow, and the as-yet-unreleased Super Pac-Man to be used during the big showdown at the movie’s end.

Corinne Bohrer, who is pretty much teen movie royalty thanks to appearances in films like Surf II, Zapped! and Stewardess School, shows up, as does John Voldstad, who played “my other brother Daryl” on TV’s Newhart.

There are two real reasons to watch this movie. One is the theme song, which has beeps, boops and promises “video to the max” and “totally awesome video games!” This song will infiltrate your mind and not leave, trust me.

The other big reason is John Gries, who completely owns every scene he appears in as King Vidiot, a punk rock maniac surrounded by punker girls who communicate only in video game noises when they’re not all riding miniature motorcycles. In a more perfect world, King Vidiot would be the star of the film. Every other person pales in comparison to his greatness. Gries would go on to steal the show in plenty of other films, including Real Genius, Napoleon Dynamite, Fright Night, The Monster Squad, and TerrorVision.

This all comes from Greydon Clark, who directed The Uninvited — a movie where George Kennedy does battle with a house cat — Without Warning and Wacko, as well as appearing in movies like Satan’s Sadists.

The saddest part of this movie was that, even though the good guys won, arcades would be dead by the mid-1980s. So really, the bad guys did win. King Vidiot? Well, no one knows what happened to him.

René Clément, fresh off the success of Purple Noon (another Delon vehicle), opted to shoot iJoy House in lush black-and-white. This choice turned the Mediterranean villa into a labyrinth of shadows. While the plot sounds like a standard potboiler, Clément treats the house itself as a character—a gilded cage where everyone is both predator and prey. Clément also wrote the script with Pascal Jardin and Charles Williams, which was based on the book Joy House by Day Keene.

Marc (Alain Delon) is a gambler on the run, not too many steps ahead of gangsters who want him for sleeping with their boss’s wife. He ends up getting work for Barbara (Lola Albright, Peter Gunn‘s girlfriend) as a driver. Of course, her young niece Melinda (Jane Fonda) becomes attracted to the roguish man, but soon they learn that Barbara is hiding another man, Vincent (André Oumansky), in her house, keeping him almost as a slave after he killed her husband for her. They plan on killing Marc and using his passport to get away from the police. Marc and Barbara are also sleeping together, so Vincent kills her, and the gangsters mistake him for Marc and kill him. Whew!

That’s not the end of things. Melinda helps Marc get rid of the bodies, but when she figures out that he’s leaving town, she calls the police and keeps him, just like she learned from Barbara. Fonda’s performance is pivotal. She starts as the ingénue, but the film tracks her evolution from a curious girl to a cold-blooded successor. By the end, she isn’t just saving Marc; she’s collecting him. The cycle of the house remains unbroken; only the warden has changed.

A few years ago, Fonda revealed that Clément tried to have sex with her, but she refused. He was 51 at the time, while she was only 27. He wasn’t the only one who tried this; she was asked by Delon as well. Clément’s move was that “he wanted to do it because her character had to have an orgasm in the movie and he needed to see what Fonda’s orgasms were like.” Afterward, he was kind for the rest of filming and never asked again. As for Delon, he was at the height of his “most beautiful man in the world” fame. His off-screen reputation for being difficult and predatory often bled into his roles, making his portrayal of the desperate Marc feel uncomfortably authentic.

Johnny Firecloud (Victor Mohica, Don’t Answer the Phone) just got back from Vietnam and made his way back home to New Mexico. If he thought it sucked before he left, well, it sucks even more now. Colby (Ralph Meeker) runs the town and has a mad on for Johnny, probably because his daughter June (Christina Hart) lost her virginity to him and never got over the Native American getting drafted. The cops, like Sheriff Jesse (David Canary), are bought and paid for. So when the one person who believes in Johnny, his drunken grandfather and tribal chief White Eagle (Frank DeKova) is killed by the cops and some alcoholic rich punks and then the virginal teacher Nenya (Sacheen Littlefeather, who accepted the Oscar for Brando) gets assaulted in a way too long scene, well, Johnny is going to take everything he learned in the white man’s army and go nuts. 

Imagine: Billy Jack and Paul Kersey with no budget or restraint.

Produced by David Friedman, directed by William Allen Castleman (Bummer) and written by Wilton Denmark, this is a movie filled with wild moments like Johnny scalping people, slicing their eyelids off so they fry in the son, burying a dude neck deep and letting snakes crawl around him, putting George Buck Flower’s head inside a sack filled with poisonous snakes, blowing up trailers and plenty of bar fights. There’s also a bad guy who threatens, “One of these days, you and me gonna tangle assholes,” and I have no idea how to answer that.

I would 200% play this in a fancy art theater as a double feature with The Farmer, and that’s why no smart movie place should ever give me a chance.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Much like the Italian western, after so many years and so many movies, the blaxploitation film needed to be more than just comedy or crime. Horror — witness Blacula, Sugar Hill and Abby, as well as Ganja and Hess, Scream Blacula Scream, and Dr. Black and Mr. White — could also be made for black audiences.

Isaac “Ike” Hendrix (Glynn Turman, who is absolutely incredible in this movie) is a hard-working taxi driver and law student in New Orleans who takes a break from studying for the bar and heads out with his girlfriend, Joan Pringle (Christella Morgan), for an evening. He’s hypnotized at a show, and immediately after, everything is different. That’s because he’s become the host for the spirit of murdered hustler J.D. Walker, changing completely from a quiet man struggling to change his life to a love machine ready to slay on the dance floor, in the bedroom and on the killing floor. The transformation is astounding, as is the backstory: J.D. was once tied to Elijah Bliss (Louis Gossett Jr.), now a preacher; his older brother, Theotis (Fred Pinkard); and the woman they all loved.

There’s a powerful scene at the end as brother battles brother and J.D. — fully owning Ike — dances and laughs like a demon who has taken this proud holy man and city leader back to their roots as simple criminals, a microcosm of the black experience of attempting to climb out of the horrors of poverty reduced to falling back down the chasm of violence. It’s really something else.

Director Arthur Marks also made Detroit 9000, Friday Foster, Bonnie’s Kids and Bucktown. The script is by Jaison Starks, who also wrote The Fish Who Saved Pittsburgh. It also has a doctor who tells his patient that he’d probably get better if he smoked some weed, which is quite forward-thinking for 1976.

There’s also the absolutely wild scene where J.D. picks up a woman at a bar — this is after he’s dominated Joan, who Ike had such a sweet and mutually giving relationship, having rough sex with her, saying “Daddy’s doing you good baby” and then beating her just to show who is in charge — and gives her “the best fucking she ever had” before her boyfriend gets home. She’s in a panic. J.D. simply says, “You better go talk to him then,” before grabbing a straight razor and slashing the man’s throat with no effort at all.

Everything wraps up way too neat and clean, but who cares? Getting there features some great performances and an interesting story that must have influenced later black horror like Bones.

I’ve been pretty fascinated by the filmography of John Hayes lately. The man who gave us the atmospheric dread of Garden of the Dead and Grave of the Vampire takes a hard turn here, trading in gothic horror for the neon-and-pavement grit of the exploitation circuit, though he also directed adult films.

The story centers on Vicki March (played with a mix of wide-eyed innocence and questionable judgment by Therese Pare). At just seventeen, Vicki is navigating the hormonal minefield of teenage life. Her boyfriend, Robert (Roscoe Born), is practically turning blue in the nether regions because she won’t go all the way.

Vicki isn’t exactly a prude, though. In a sequence that feels less like a teen romp and more like a low-rent Joe D’Amato Caligula rip-off, she throws a party while babysitting that quickly spirals into hedonistic chaos. This leads to a harrowing moment where a partygoer attempts to assault her, only for Vicki to be rescued by the sophisticated Lorraine (Lydia Wagner), who claims to be an executive liaison, a title that sounds prestigious until you realize it’s just 1970s shorthand for high-end sex work.

Eventually, Vicki tries to get into the trade but doesn’t charge her first client, who has a heart attack just trying to sail the seas of mayonnaise. 

This has a van called The Desert Fox, a story that comes around to having Vicki’s man knocking out her would-be rapist and a title that promises filth and does not deliver. Yet I enjoyed it. It could be the strange line readings, the dialogue like “No way was I training you to be a hooker, but I can teach you how to watch out for dog shit!” and an appearance by Mariwin Roberts, Penthouse Pet Of The Month April 1978. And is that Michael Pataki? It sure is. And Billie Mae Richards, the voice of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

You can watch this on Fawesome.

Produced by Screw Magazine founders Jim Buckley and Al Goldstein and what was to be the first of several movies from the New York City magazine, this was directed and written by Peter Locke, who produced The Brave Little Toaster, The Hills Have Eyes, Freeway, the cartoon Spiral Zone and lots of adult films, which he also directed. 

This is shot on 35mm, has a theme song — “Porno Queen” by Liz Torres, who was married to Locke at the time and would one day be Miss Patty on Gilmore Girls and this is a a far cry from the town square of Stars Hollow, yet the fact that she sang that and apepars in a non-sex role speaks to the “anything goes” hustle of New York’s theater and film scene at the time — and Wes Craven was the assistant director and editor. 

It’s a simple story. Felicity Split (Melissa Hall, a one-and-done actress who is actually more conventionally attractive than many 70s porn queens) is great in bed and turns that into a career. First, it’s her boyfriend Elliot (Harry Reems without facial hair!) — well, she also urinates on a human bidet (Peter Bramley, the first art director of National Lampoon with Bill Skurski), proving that early 70s adult is way filthier than 2026 smut — and then gets hooked up with an agent named Peter Pull (Marc Stevens) and getting into a $4 million dollar adult movie about the Bible, three years before the Mitchell Borthers made Sodom and Gomorrah: The Last Seven Days and six years before Caligula.

Other actors include Cindy West (who was also known as Susan Sands, Terri Scott, Joy Otis, Cindy Travcrs, Helen Highwater, Linda Terry, Laura Bentley, Teri Reardon, Laura Lake, Terry Ruggiera and here appearing as Tammy Twat; she’s also in Alfred Sole’s adult movie, Deep Sleep), Jamie Gillis (billed as Buster Hymen and acting just like you’d hope Jamie would), Roger Caine (who was in Martin as Al Levitsky), Gus Thomas (who went on to be a District Attorney for Cortland County, New York, and an adjunct professor for 17 years at Syracuse University Law School), Tanya Tickler (she’s given the thankless job of orally servicing Goldstein), Mike Sullivan (he also did props on this movie and would go on to do effects for Mortal Kombat, Star Trek V and Little Shop of Horrors, as well as play Dippy in Madman), David Buckley (who directed Saturday Night at the Baths) and Jim Buckley (AKA Jim Clark, director of Debbie Does Dallas).

What’s wild is the talent working on this. Music by Ronald Frangipane (The Holy Mountain, The Greek Tycoon, All the Kind Strangers, Joe Zito’s Abduction and Summer of Laura, as well as the keyboard player for Midnight Cowboy and Barbarella). Cinematography by Steve Bower (Joe, Who Killed Mary Whats’ername?, The Groove Tube, Cry Uncle). Bill Meredith (Madman, Communion, The Nesting, Scalpel, The Premonition, Ganja & Hess) on sound. On camera crew, Martin Andrews, who ran the camera on New Jack City and Mo’ Better Blues. Dan Newman (assistant director on movies like Teenage Hitchhikers, Stripes, This Is Spinal Tap, The Beastmaster, Hot Moves) was an electrician. Liz Argo as the script supervisor (she also worked on Case of the Full Moon Murders and The Children). And Harry Narunksy built the miniatures. He’d go on to make the models for Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity. 

It’s alright; it certainly wasn’t going to ride the wave of porn chic, but then again, is Deep Throat a good movie?

It Happened In Hollywood is perhaps best known for a live read on WMCA 570 AM in New York by “Long John” Nebel. Nebel was ahead of Coast to Coast AM by decades, taking calls from people who wanted to learn more about UFOs and the weird things that go bump in the night. During this moment, Nebel was trying to read an ad for this movie and, well, things got out of hand.

Westchester County played host to a veritable army of maniacs, including Ed Adlum (Shriek of the Mutilated), the Findlays (Snuff) and Ed Kelleher (Prime Evil), who were armed with a camera, $24,000, some stage blood and cases of beer to pay off the cast. The result is a movie that seems like it could fit in with Motel Hell at first before you realize that these farmers are druids out to raise their queen from the dead with the blood of the stupid.

These Sangroids are bringing back Queen Onhorrid and they won’t let anyone stand in their way and that includes puppies. It’s a movie that doesn’t care if it’s shot in the day, the night or day for night. It is also relentlessly devoted to being weird without being a try hard movie. This is just plain weird.

Throw in an atonal soundtrack, the chunkiest blood you’ve ever seen and a woman in a glass case who gets to come back from the beyond and rule for all of 45 seconds and you have a movie.

If you watched Manos: The Hands of Fate and were hoping to find something just as odd and as poorly realized, this would be the spiritual East Coast sequel that you crave. If anyone else wrote that sentence, it would be a put-down. Coming out of my typing fingers, it’s the highest of compliments.

You can watch this on Tubi or get it from Severin.

Based on Ray Russell’s novel of the same title, Incubus is all about demon rape. There’s really no other way to say it. If you’re looking for the definitive word on the subject, this movie would probably be your best choice. And hey, John Cassavetes is in it!

The film opens in a rock quarry where Mandy and her boyfriend are swimming. More likely, they’re fooling around until an unseen force caves in the dude’s head and attacks her, putting her in the hospital with a ruptured uterus. While all this is going on, Tim Galen, a local teen, dreams of hooded men tying a woman down and torturing her.

Dr. Sam Cordell (Cassavetes) is treating the girl and we soon learn a lot about his life. His wife has recently died, he’s relocated to the town of Galen following a scandal and his daughter, Jenny, doesn’t really get along with him. Oh yeah — and she’s also dating Tim.

Sheriff Hank Walden (John Ireland, whose career stretches from classics like All the King’s Men and I Saw What You Did to Satan’s Cheerleaders) and reporter Laura Kincaid are on the case too, which expands when a librarian is killed and murdered. It turns out that she has red semen inside her body — so much semen that she’s literally been filled up and destroyed by it. If you’re thinking this is a totally scummy storyline, well, buckle up.

The rapes and murders continue and every single time, young Tim is having the dream while they happen, including an attack at a movie theater where he’s gone to try and distract himself. Look for an appearance by a really young Bruce Dickinson singing for his pre-Iron Maiden band Samson in this scene!

What is Dr. Sam doing? Oh, you know, showing Laura photos of his recently deceased second wife — the reason why he left wherever it was he lived before — and she looks exactly like the reporter. She has some news, too. The town of Galen has a long history of Satanic activity and these rape crimes are nothing new.

Is Tim the killer? Was his mother a witch? Or is his family part of a long line of witch hunters? Is the real killer a shapeshifting incubus, which rapes women in their dreams?

We get our answers pretty quickly. Sam tries to induce Tim’s demonic state while Laura takes Jenny up to bed. Tim tries to attack Laura with a witch hunting dagger his grandmother has given him, but Sam stops the boy and kills him. That’s when we learn that Laura had been the incubus all along. As she lovingly holds Sam, he looks to the bed where his dead daughter is bleeding between the legs.

Yes. That’s really the ending. I warned you that this film was rough, didn’t I?

Incubus was directed by John Hough, who was behind one of my favorite movies of all time, Twins of Evil. He also helmed The Legend of Hell House and both of Disney’s Witch Mountain movies. It’s written by Ray Russell, who also wrote plenty of other horror fiction that was made into movies and screenplays, including X the Man with the X-Ray Eyes, Mr. Sarndonicus, Zotz! and Roger Corman’s The Premature Burial.

While this movie moves slow and some subplots go nowhere, the last few minutes are exactly what you want the movie to be and Cassavetes is — as always — better than the material.

Satanic Harassment

• 1 oz. Absolut Citron or citrus vodka
• .75 oz. Midori
• .5 oz. Chambord
• 2 oz. orange juice
• 2 oz. pineapple juice
• 1 oz. margarita mix

1. Shake everything in a shaker with ice.
2. Pour out and be careful at the rock quarry.

When a movie has the working title Want A Ride, Little Girl? you know it’s going to be scummy. What may surprise you is that William Shatner — who director William Gréfe met at an airport — is in the lead role.

Don’t be fooled by the supernatural looking poster. No, this is a slasher with Shatner’s Matt Stone as the bad guy picking up young women, freaking out Shat-style and getting rid of their bodies. He’s being trailed by a detective named Karate Pete (Harold “Oddjob” Sakata), which is, pardon the pun, pretty odd. He’s on the trail because Stone keeps bilking and killing old women for their money.

Jennifer Bishop (who is also in Gréfe’s Mako the Jaws of Death) plays the daughter of one of these older women who suspects that the leisure suit-wearing Stone is a shyster. And oh yeah — Ruth Roman is in this!

Sakata almost died making this, as the rig that was used for his hanging death failed and he was nearly hung for real. Shatner saved his life — breaking a finger in the process — and the entire accident can be seen on the He Came from the Swamps documentary.

This movie belongs to Shatner. As a child, his character kills William Kerwin with a sword in a kind of pre-Pieces opening, then murders a puppy and gets so worked up in one scene that he supposedly farts on camera. His assortment of 70’s fashions are pretty astounding and every single frame of this feels as sweaty and gross as a night in the Everglades.

Directed and written by Walerian Borowczyk, Immoral Tales is four stories that each have a different tale of lovemaking, starting with “The Tide,” the story of André (Fabrice Luchini) getting head from his 16-year-old cousin (Lise Danvers) in concert with the waves of the ocean. This is taken from a story by surrealist writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues.

It’s followed by “Thérése the Philosopher,” an adaptation of the 1748 novel of the same name that was written by either Jean-Baptiste de Boyer or Marquis d’Argens. Thérése (Charlotte Alexandra) becomes locked out of her room, freeing her to mix her love of Christ with need for sex. There’s an incredibly sacrilegious moment filmed in actual church, which had the director exclaim “Thérèse was played by an English actress. She was only seventeen years old, I remember, and very shy. We had to film her nude scenes in complete seclusion, only my assistant and I were allowed to be there, and he was only twelve! We got permission to film in a real church, a very beautiful and quite famous one, an historical monument. There were no difficulties with the priest; I was very surprised. The man was very tolerant indeed, in spite of all this pipe organ business ! The film was even shown in the church cinema of the village, if you can imagine that!”

The third tale is probably the most famous, as it concerns Elizabeth Báthory (Paloma Picasso) bathing herself in the blood of the young virgins of her kingdom. Picasso is really bathing in 30 gallons of pig blood in this part of the movie. Borowczyk was inspired by surrealist poet Valentine Penrose and the way she related the legend of Bathory.

Finally, Pope Alexander VI’s daughter  Lucrezia Borgia (Florence Bellamy) indulges her passions with her male relatives. There was a fifth story, which ended up being the film La Bête. When Arrow released this on blu ray, they added that film into this one as the third chapter.

Despite being a movie all about sex, this is a gorgeous act of cinema, filled with lush imagery and gorgeous camerawork. There was a time when non-hardcore movies could be made as art and this is a prime example, a film that was second place in the French box office behind another example of softcore, Emmanuelle.