In the book that inspired these Weird Wednesday posts, Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive, Lars Nilsen writes, “This was promoted as ‘the female James Bond.” There’s some truth to that. Both have two legs and carry a gun. But if I had to choose between a James Bond movie and Ginger, this would win nine throws out of 10. Unlike 007, Ginger is a hard-faced, bleached blonde biker chick from New Jersey who goes undercover to expose a marijuana and white slavery ring. This is about the most mean-spirited, merciless, joyfully cruel example of rough sexploitation you’re ever likely to luck into. It has a casually nihilistic “we’re all scum, but only some of us admit it” attitude that’s, well… refreshing. And it’s hilarious, particularly if you have an irredeemably sick sense of humor. In Ginger’s world, all men are scum who deserve to be killed and worse. And Ginger does much, much worse. With piano wire in one case.”

This stars Cheri Caffaro, who, no offense to Nilsen, was born in Pasadena. At a very young age, she won a Life magazine Brigitte Bardot look-alike contest, beating Portland Mason, James’s daughter. Her husband, Don Schain, may have eventually produced High School Musical for Disney, but he made three scuzzy Ginger movies with his soon-to-be wife: this film, The Abductors and Girls Are for Loving.

Ginger McAllister takes on a job of infiltrating a gang of criminals. This often means sleeping with men and women, which can often mean using piano wire on a dude’s tallywhacker and threatening to cut it off. This feels like porn without penetration, the kind of porn that was playing the Avon and the rougher theaters, as Ginger is tied up and assaulted several times, yet always comes out on top, even when bad guy Rex Halsey (Duane Tucker) rapes her. After all, the cut to her face assures us that she likes this.

If you’re expecting a 1971 grindhouse movie to have any morality… just wait for the scene where Ginger relates how three black guys assaulted her when she was young and how much she hates African-American men, using all the language you would hope she wouldn’t.

That said, this is Tracey Walter’s first movie, playing Ginger’s brother. One day, he would be Bob the Goon.

This is the kind of sex movie that makes no one want to have sex ever again. Bodies just fall onto one another, nudity seems like an attack on you and at no moment does anything feel arousing. Ah, the 007 of 42nd Street. I want to watch her fight Olga.

Tony Anthony played The Stranger in four films — Stranger in Town, The Stranger Returns, The Silent Stranger and this film — plus he’s also in the Zatoichi by way of Italy film Blindman (Ringo Starr is in it!) and wrote, produced and starred in Comin’ At Ya! and Treasure of the Four Crowns, movies that’d start a short 3D boom which ended with Anthony claiming that he made an estimated $1 million worth of lenses before Jaws 3D, the film that ended the trend.

This movie is just crazy — closer to a fantasy movie than a Western — and has no care at all about the fact that it doesn’t follow any rules at all. It’s directed by Ferdinando Baldi, who also made the Mark Gregory-starring Ten Zan: The Ultimate Mission.

The Stranger gets dragged into a ghost town by his horse, who promptly dies. That;s when a family of gypsies pays him to escort Princess Elizabeth Maria de Burgos (Diane Lorys, Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll) back to Spain. There, the Stranger does battle with Vikings, Moors, barbarians, ghosts, a bill and a hunchback. That’s when he lives up to the alternate title — The Stranger Gets Mean — and lets the guns and dynamite do his talking.

Raf Baldassarre is in this, who you may have seen in everything from Hercules In the Haunted World and Eyeball to plenty of Westerns like Dakota Joe, The Great Silence, Sartana Kills Them All, Arizona Went Wild … and Killed Them All! and even played Sabata in Dig Your Grave Friend … Sabata’s Coming. He’s also in both of Luigi Cozzi’s incredbly entertaining films based on Greek myth, Hercules and The Adventures of Hercules.

Morelia is played by Mirta Miller, who somehow unites so many film genres that I love — HBO After Dark semi-sleaze (Bolero), Mexican wrestling films (Santo vs. Dr. Death), giallo (Eyeball), shark movies (The Shark Hunter), sword and sorcery (Battle of the Amazons) and Spanish horror (Vengeance of the Zombies, Count Dracula’s Great Love and Dr. Jekyll vs. the Werewolf).

So yeah. An Italian Western with a four-barrelled shotgun carrying hero traveling through time who doesn’t respect the princess he’s trying to save. If this sounds like Army of Darkness at all to you, please remember that it came out 17 years before that movie.

I’m trying not to make this a thousand words about how gorgeous Claudia Jennings was. Born Mary Eileen “Miomi” Chesterton in Milwaukee — eventually moving to Evanston, Illinois, where her father was the advertising director for Skilsaw — she was a receptionist at Playboy before appearing in a centerfold (November 1969) and becoming the Playmate of the Year for 1970, in less than thirty years. She was an incandescent star, appearing in movies like Unholy Rollers, The Single Girls, Sisters of Death, Moonshine County Express and Deathsport, to name a few. IMDB may tell us that she took her stage name from the character that Angelique Pettyjohn played in The Touch of Her Flesh — debatable, but I wish this was true — and that Aaron Spelling wanted her to replace Kate Jackson on his show Charlie’s Angels but her four Playboy nude appearances scared network executives off, but the truth is, she was here for a brief time and nearly fifty years after her death, I’m still staring at her in any movie she’s in and sighing.

In the July 20oo issue of Femme Fatales, Ari Bass wrote in the article “Claudia Jennings: The Drive-In Diva,” that she had taken to wearing a gold-plated bracelet that said bitch on it. “That’s what I always play in the movies,” Jennings explained. “Though it’s the opposite of what I am really, I’m cast as a spitfire. Bad girl types. I suppose because being submissive is completely alien to me. There aren’t many good female roles in films nowadays, so I figure I’ll come into my own when I’m about 30. At this point, I can’t play kids or hippies, and I sure as hell can’t play the wronged wife because you wouldn’t believe a man cheats on me.”

Ferd Sebastian said the film was written for Jennings, with whom he and his wife Beverly had worked on The Single Girls. “She wanted to do a film with not a lot of dialogue, so ‘Gator Bait was it,” said Sebastian. “I really like to work with the Cajun people. We all piled into our motorhome and left LA… We were headed for the swamps, Myself, Bev, Claudia, our two boys, a dog and a pregnant cat. It was by far the most fun shoot I have ever been on.”

It’s a simple movie. Desiree Thibodeau (Jennings) lives in the swamps, a barefoot girl at one with nature, yet who looks like, well, Claudia Jennings. Ben Bracken (Ben Sebastian) and Deputy Billy Boy (Clyde Ventura) catch her trapping gators and decide that instead of arresting her, they’ll just assault her. That doesn’t work, and as they chase her, Billy Boy accidentally kills Ben. He tells Sheriff Joe Bob Thomas (Bill Thurman) that Desiree did it. So the cops do what they do worst and head into the swamps to arrest her, along with Ben’s father, T.J. (Sam Gilman), and his son Leroy (Douglas Dirkson), a man who was already castrated by Desiree. They even attack her family—Big T (Tracy Sebastian) and Julie (Janit Baldwin)—before she destroys them.

There’s a twist at the end — T.J. might be closer to Desiree than we believed — but really this is all about men being morons and getting turned against one another by a sheer force of femininity. 

The time Claudia Jennings spent in our reality was short. But she lived a life, and we can only wish that she were still here to know just how well-remembered she is.

The Garbage Pail Kids were created by Art Spiegelman and released by Topps in 1985. Yes, the same cartoonist who made Maus. He and Mark Newgarden worked together as the editors and art directors of the project, with Len Brown — the same person who Wally Wood named T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agent Dynamo after and one of the creators of Wacky Packages and Mars Attacks — as the manager and art by John Poundart for the first series, then Jay Lynch, Tom Bunk, James Warhola — the nephew of Andy Warhol — and more.

These cards were a huge success and sold worldwide (they’re called Mr. Creepy in Japan, Totally Broken Kids in Germany, The Filthies in France, Snotlings in Italy and The Garbage Gang elsewhere). They were quite controversial and banned in many schools. And then Original Appalachian Artworks — the same Xavier Roberts who stole the look of Martha Nelson Thomas’ soft-sculpture dolls that came with a birth certificate — sued, and they had to change the logo. But by 1988, the kids were gone. Yet they came back in 2003 and never went away. You can even get blockchain-backed high-end versions of them now.

Look, I’m someone who doesn’t believe in “so bad it’s good” and has found the light in the darkness of so many so-called bad films. This one challenged my will to live, but there are times during it when the overwhelming badness of the film approaches surrealist art, and I laughed so hard that my head began to throb and I was sure this was the stroke that would wipe out my lifelong hard-earned knowledge of Mattei, D’Amato and lesser scumbag directors.

Dodger (Mackenzie Astin) works in the junk store of magician Captain Manzini (Anthony Newley) and is also the target of a gang of toughs led by Juice (Ron MacLachlan) while loving that bad dude’s girl, Tangerine (Katie Barberi), from afar.

To break up all that preteen angst, a garbage can falls from the sky containing green ooze and the Garbage Pail Kids: the always snotty Messy Tessie; the Hawaiian shirt-wearing flatulent Windy Winston; the throw up on command Valerie Vomit (played by Debbie Lee Carrington, memorable as the small-statured Martian rebel in Total Recall); the whining baby Foul Phil; the acne-scarred superhero Nat Nerd and the toe eating reptilian hybrid nightmare called Ali Gator.  None of these characters are in any way endearing, cute, or ugly. They’re borderline upsetting, and the more I think about it, the more I love this movie for being so dead and vacant.

After having our protagonist covered with sewage and abused by the gang, only to be saved by the Kids, it still has Dodger in love with Tangerine, who wants to be a fashion designer and puts the GPK into service as pretty much slaves. The kids steal a Pepsi truck — I can’t imagine Pepsi would have loved how they’re presented in this — and then go to a Three Stooges festival, which makes them so insane that they drink beer with bikers, and Ali Gator gets to eat some toes. Despite being babies and children, the GPK get drunk on beer, which is encouraged by the film, and sing songs so inane that I again started to laugh the kind of frenzied guffaws that only happen when I endure severe physical pain.

Despite the kids being put into the State Home for the Ugly, a place where Gandhi and Santa Claus are executed because this is a movie for children, they escape, ruin a fashion show and refuse to go away, not even following the rules of Mr. Mxyzptlk.

If it seems like Dodger and Tangerine seem on again, off again and ill-matched, well — Astin and Barberi dated and broke up mid-movie. That wasn’t Austin’s only issue. He got the movie without telling his father, John Astin, who tried to get his son out of this film.

Rod Amateau directed and co-wrote this, and his career was, well, something. He started his career doing stunts in movies like Rebel Without a Cause and Mighty Joe Young (he was also a stunt driver for Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker and Thunder Run after this directing career took off) and then wrote and directed episodes of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, produced and directed 78 episodes of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, produced and directed The New Phil Silvers Show, directed nearly every episode of My Mother the Car and also made The Statue, one of the few movies Roger Ebert ever walked out on, as well as High School U.S.A., the movie that convinced Joel Robinson to leave Hollywood; Son of Hitler, a Peter Cushing movie that never played outside of Germany; and he also wrote Sunset, one of the many Blake Edwards films — and mistakes — that a nascent Bruce Willis would make.

I can’t even imagine the horror movie that John Carl Buechler — who did the effects for this as well as TerrorVision, Dolls, Hard Rock Zombies, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and many, many more, as well as directing Cellar Dweller, Watchers 4 and Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood — had planned.

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie grossed just $661,512 during its opening weekend and eventually $1.6 million on a $1 million budget, but was still seen as a major disappointment. Astin told Mental Floss, “The heroes of the entire experience are the seven little people actors in costumes every day in triple-digit heat in the San Fernando Valley. They couldn’t see or hear. There was only so much time they could have the heads on before they ran out of oxygen.”

Effects artist William Butler went even further: “I think it was a stupid idea of a stupid screenplay, with stupid designs, that made for a cacophony of stupidity.”

Also known as The Horror Star and Body Snatchers, this is the tale of Conrad Razkoff (Ferdy Mayne), a horror film star who fakes his death or maybe not, but definitely exists beyond life and death as he wipes out a drama class.

Before that, Ragzoff is in a dentures commercial, and the director argues with him over his acting, so Ragzoff shoves him off a balcony. Then, he visits the drama school and faints from excitement, revived by one of the students, Meg (Jennifer Starrett).

That night, he decides to die and tells his director, Wolfgang (Leon Askin), what he wants for his funeral. As he expires — or fakes it — Wolfgang says, “The world is rid of you, and I am rid of you. Good night, sweet prince of ham!” The great actor rises and kills the disbeliever with a pillow.

Meg, Saint (Luca Bercovici, the director of Ghoulies), Bobo (Scott Thomson, Copeland from the Police Academy series), Eve (Carlene Olson), Donna (Donna McDaniel, Angel), Oscar (Alan Stock) and Stu (Jeffrey Combs, cast for his hair color, really) go to the cemetery after dark to see Ragzoff’s tomb. A film begins, cursing them, before they steal the body and head off to an old mansion in time for the coffin to explode and all sorts of murder, including tongue ripping, black magic and crypt gas.

By the end, the police show up to find Meg surrounded by her dead friends and Conrad rising from his grave to kill a fake psychic and joins his wife, at which point we see the video inside the tomb with the actor saying how much he enjoys being in Hell.

I’m obsessed with the films of Norman Thaddeus Vane, like The Black Room and Midnight. Plus, the scenes of Conrad being a horror star are really Christopher Lee in Uncle Was a Vampire. It’s strange and wonderful. That’s what I want in all my movies.

The Troma “Tromatic Special Edition” Blu-ray includes extras such as the DVD Intro featuring Lloyd Kaufman and Debbie Rechon, an archival audio interview with director Norman Thaddeus Vane, historical commentary with David Del Valle and David DeCoteau, audio commentary from The Hysteria Continues, the original trailer, artwork gallery, an interview with DP Joel King, Troma behind-the-scenes and music videos. You can get it from MVD.

Not just a blaxploitation, not just a comic strip movie, not just a Pam Grier movie, this is also her last movie for AIP that ties in race identity, being a woman and, most essentially, Pam Grier kicking ass for 90 minutes.

Friday Foster comes from an American newspaper comic strip, created and written by Jim Lawrence — who wrote the James Bond strip — and illustrated by Jorge Longarón that ran from January 18, 1970, to February 17, 1974. She was one of the first African-American women characters to star in her own strip with only Jackie Ormes’ Torchy Brown coming before it (that strip ran in the Pittsburgh Courier, which makes me quite happy to know that my hometown sometimes does things ahead of the rest of the world). Friday started as an assistant to high-fashion photographer Shawn North, but soon became an international supermodel leaving her troubled life in Harlem behind her. Since her strip ended, Friday has shown up in Dick Tracy.

Foster (Grier) has witnessed an assassination attempt on the wealthiest African American, Blake Tarr (Thalmus Rasulala) and then her best friend Cloris Boston (Rosaline Miles) is murdered. Soon, not listening to her boss’ warning to stay out of her stories, she finds herself targeted for death.

Arthur Marks already had some comic strip experience, directing three episodes of the Steve Canyon TV series. He also directed Bonnie’s Kids, Detroit 9000, Bucktown, A Women for All Men, J.D.’s Revenge, Class of ’74, The Roommates and the “Find Loretta Lynn” episode of The Dukes of Hazzard. Writer Orville H. Hampton worked on everything from Rocketship X-M and Mesa of Lost Women to The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake, Jack the Giant Killer and episodes of Flipper, Perry Mason, Super Friends, Fantasy Island and The Dukes cartoon.

There are some great people in this, like Yaphet Kotto as private detective Colt Hawkins, Earth Kitt as fashion designer Madame Rena, Scatman Crothers, Godfrey Cambridge, Ted Lange and Jim Backus as a racist Senator. There’s even a scene with a young Carl Weathers as one of the bad guy’s goons.

The real joy of this film is the agency it affords Friday. She’s gorgeous, sure, but she can easily best any man. And when she beds more than one over the running time of the film, she’s never judged. Best of all, her blackness is central to who she is and not an afterthought.

Supposedly Marks was trying to turn this into a TV series. I wish that had happened because one Friday Foster adventure is nowhere near enough.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I hate when people make lists of the worst movies ever made, because stuff like this always ends up on it.

Whether you see it as this title or as Duel of the Space Monsters, Frankenstein Meets the Space Men, Mars Attacks Puerto Rico, Mars Invades Puerto Rico or Operation San Juan, you’re going to see something that is absolutely ridiculous. But why else do you watch movies?

Also: there is no Frankenstein in this movie.

Martian Princess Marcuzan (Marilyn Hanold, the June 1959 Playboy Playmate of the Month who is also in In Like Flint and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die) is in this, the last female survivor of an atomic war who has brought Dr. Nadir (an amazing Lou Cutell, who was Amazing Larry in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure) with her to screw with Earth.

Oh yeah and abduct women in bikinis. And drive around a lot. And deal with an android astronaut named Colonel Frank Saunders whose face gets all burned up and he ends up fighting a mutant named Mull to the death.

Look, 65% of this movie is stock footage and I wouldn’t have it any other way. So much of this just hits me in the right places. Sure, if it got made today, it would be on digital video, the stock footage would be watermarked and I would hate every single minute of it. But I love what this is.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Eww, look — that rat has a woman in its mouth,

Man, what a poster.

Directed and written by Bert I. Gordon, The Food of the Gods was ever so loosely based on H. G. Wells’ novel The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth.

The food of the gods does indeed appear to Mr. and Mrs. Skinner (John McLiam and Ida Lupino), who feed it to their chickens. Bok bok, those things grow bigger than a person, but so do the rats, wasps and even worms that eat it, so soon enough their island near British Columbia is filled with dangerous human-sized creatures.,

Meanwhile, professional football player Morgan (Marjoe Gortner) — wait a second here, what position does Marjoe Gortner, no offense, play in American football? Punter? — is hunting with his friends when one of them is killed by a giant wasp. He’s so into this that he comes back to see even more, meeting up with a dog food CEO named Jack Bensington (Ralph Meeker) who wants to sell these gigantic animals for food, his assistant Lorna (Pamela Franklin) and the pregnant Rita (Belinda Balaski) and her husband Thomas (Tom Stovall).

Giant rats killed almost everyone, but then Marjoe drowns them all because they’ve become too big to swim, which is the most BS science ever, but sure, why not Bert I. Gordon. Of course, man screws up again and lets cows use the formula and they get huge and so do the kids, eventually but not in this, that drink their milk. Doesn’t pasteurization take care of giant drugs?

This did so well for American-International Pictures that they decided to make H.G. Welles movies, such as Empire of the Ants and The Island of Dr. Moreau. They were lucky Welles was dead, because if he were alive, they’d also have to pay for using a lot of his book Mysterious Island in this, not just the source book of the same title.

Hsiang Ying (Chia Ling) has been betrayed by her master, who tells her that he killed her father before tossing her off a cliff and when she survives that and a battle with wolves, he locks her inside a cage. She’s saved by Ku (Chiang-Lung Wen) but it turns out that the real killer is his uncle, a maniac who has two skulls that sit on his shoulders and, when called upon, can fly around and bite people.

Now known as the Heartless Woman, she goes on episodic adventures that have her battling ripoffs of other martial arts movies, such as a one armed boxer (Phillip Ko!) and a monkey king. Like many kung fu films from Taiwan, the budget is low and the imagination is high. I wish it spent all the time with its heroine instead of going into comedy, but I still had a blast watching it. Seriously, the final bad guy may have the most amazing weaponry ever.

Also known as Revengful Swordswoman, this was released by 21st Century.

You can watch this on Tubi. You can also get it on blu ray from Gold Ninja Video.

You remember that interview where Vanilla Ice tried to explain why he didn’t steal Queen/David Bowie’s “Under Pressure?”

I’d like to hear whoever did the music for this movie to explain how they added a “da na na” to the theme from Halloween. Then again, there’s plenty more that this movie owes to that film.

A killer with a kitchen knife is on the prowl, killing off college kids. And he’s on the way to Lanier College during finals.

Meanwhile, a fraternity stages a mass shooting to help their members pass a chemistry test. How does this plan work? Who comes up with such a plan?

While students prepare for the end of the year, the killer is hiding among them. We have Courtney, who is the Final Girl, of course. Her roommate is Lisa, who is all into the hot professor. Well, not really hot. He’s a professor, though.

For some reason, all of the pledges can’t dare anyone. But Gary is in love with Janet and pins her, so he gets punished by being tied up to a tree, his underwear filled with ice and then sprayed with shaving cream. What? Where did this ritual come from? Who goes through with this? Even the rest of the town, like the security guard, follow these rules. What is the deal with this school?

Well, he’s tied up and the killer gets him. Then it gets his girlfriend, too. While that’s going on, Wildman, a frat guy, is looking for pain pills when he gets killed by a Universal weight machine. His friend Mark tries to find him and he gets killed.

Then we have Radish, who isn’t gay in the movie but would totally be a proud out character if this was made after 1981. He’s constantly looking for killers and has a great poster collection of old films. All his knowledge of murder doesn’t help, as he’s instantly killed.

Lisa tries to model for her boyfriend in the nude, but she gets killed, too. And now we’re down to one and the killer even catches an arrow and stabs the coach with it when he tries to save Courtney. But then he falls into a hole and she stabs him to death. That’s it. That’s the fight he puts up.

Written and directed by Jimmy Huston (My Best Friend Is a Vampire), this is pretty much Halloween with a killer who was too lazy to get a mask (he was also the fight coordinator for the film).

That said, I wasn’t bored, I laughed out loud at many of the things that Radish did and said, and I enjoyed the arrow catching scene. You’ll be filled with questions. Like, how much chaffing did the short shorts of the 80’s cause?