Sizzlin’ Summer of Subterranean Psychotronica 2026: Satan’s Storybook (1989)

Week 1 (June 21 – 27) – Welcome to HELL

The summer’s here, so get ready to broil!

Satan’s Storybook prefigures the streaming horror anthology films that litter our streaming services today, yet it’s miles above them, not just in its two tales, but in a connecting story that makes you want even more.

Directed and co-written by Michael Rider, who was also a zombie in the shot on video Hororama, this movie starts with the bride of Satan (Leslie Deutsch) — who by the way looks amazing and just like a late 80s heavy metal album cover come to life — being abducted by ninjas, one of whom is her sister, who is played Ginger Lynn, so of course I was beyond in love with this segment. This upsets Satan so much that he demands that his jester tell him some stories to keep his mood light. This segment hints at a third story, as well as more of the story that is never delivered, and honestly, that’s the only thing about this movie I dislike, because it leaves you wanting so much more.

“Demon of Death” is all about Zeek Heller (co-writer Steven K. Arthur), a serial killer who abducts metal and horror fans — she has a Scared Stiff poster on the all-black walls of her room — Jezebell Jones (Leesa Rowland) and even wipes out her family before being sent to rot in jail. He’s just like so many metal dudes I knew in 1989, except, you know, he randomly looks up girls in the telephone book — placing this firmly in 1989 — and kills them. Then he gets arrested by the law, who say things like “The only thing that stands between you and Old Sparkey is us, and we don’t give a lizard’s dick if you do fry, you buttplug!” The trial goes on and on, and right before they throw the switch, Jezebell does some black magic that doesn’t turn out the way she planned. It’s grimy and grainy, and you can see people reading their lines off scripts, which some reviews proclaim as the sign of a bad movie, as if they’d never watched SOV before.

The second segment, “Death Among Clowns,” has a clown named Charlie (Grady Bradner, the writer of The Howling and Cameron’s Closet in his only movie as an actor) hanging himself in his dressing room and then engaging in lengthy dialogue with another clown named Mickey La Mort, who is played by this film’s director and writer, Rider. This is the segment that usually makes people hate this movie, as it seems to go on forever, yet I love it. Mickey the clown keeps getting more demonic as the segment moves on, and basically this is two writers putting together endless dialogue in one location — with a Howling IV: The Original Nightmare poster no less — and no twist ending. Exactly what you think is going to happen — a clown dragging another clown to Hell — happens. It’s. Kind of fascinating, like a near murderdrone with no murder.

This movie has so much fog throughout that one wonders if it was considered a pack-in with fog machines so people could learn of their power.

Satan’s Storybook has the feel of Night Train to Terror, and I mean that in the best of mind-melting ways. There are so many moments in this that make little to no sense at all, and that’s what I demand from my films. If anything, this is a movie where Ginger Lynn magically transforms from a ninja to a barbarian princess, and if you can’t find some wonder in that, I think you should give up watching films and reading this site. Bring on the synth and distorted voices. Bring on the rubber-masked demons. Bring on the fog, the glorious fog.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Psycho from Texas (1975)

First things first: this movie has a major identity crisis. It was originally shot way back in 1975 under the title Wheeler by directors Jack Collins and Jim Feazell. But they didn’t just stop in Texas, as the production actually set up camp in El Dorado, Arkansas. Over the years, distributors kept shuffling the deck, re-releasing and re-titling this poor movie as The Mama’s Boy and The Hurting before it finally settled into its most infamous exploitation moniker: Psycho from Texas. They even dragged the movie back to the editing room in 1978 to shoot entirely new insert footage just to crank up the sleaze factor.

The story centers around a complete drifter and hitman named Wheeler (John King III, The House of the Dead). Wheeler is your textbook exploitation psycho, raised in absolute squalor by a violently abusive mother, which left his mind thoroughly scrambled by beating him and — as in all 70s and 80s psycho movies — sleeping around.

After he grows up, Wheeler gets hired by a local businessman to kidnap a wealthy oil baron. To pull off the heist, he teams up with a local backwoods hillbilly named Slick (Tommey Lamey). The oil baron manages to escape almost immediately, turning the entire second half of the movie into a chaotic, endless, slow-motion foot chase through the swamps and muddy backwoods of the South. It’s mostly just Slick screaming wildly into the wind while everyone gets covered in mud. Throw in a stereotyped, bumbling country sheriff (co-director Jack Collins himself) and a screaming maid named Joann Bruno, and you have a recipe for pure drive-in gold.

The absolute main attraction here is an incredibly early, pre-fame appearance by the future Queen of Scream herself, Linnea Quigley. During that 1978 pick-up shoot, they cast a young Linnea for a completely gratuitous, jaw-droppingly sleazy sequence where Wheeler holds her captive and forces her to dance naked while pouring beer all over her. Looking back on one of her very first film gigs, Linnea didn’t exactly have warm, fuzzy memories of the El Dorado shoot, later saying:They made me take my clothes off and poured beer on me. It was stupid.

Though this is listed first on Linnea Quigley’s filmography, it is not her first role, as that was Fairy Tales

My absolute favorite piece of trivia about this movie has nothing to do with what’s on the screen and everything to do with how they tried to sell it. When the movie premiered in New York City back in 1976, the distributors ran a legendary cowboy-style promotional stunt. They hired a massive truck, plastered it with a giant Psycho from Texas banner, mounted a set of high-powered loudspeakers on the roof, and blasted threatening country-fried warnings at people walking the Deuce.

You can watch this on YouTube.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Project: Kill (1976)

William Girdler said that Project: Kill was “…the beginning of what I can do if I’m given the opportunity. Here I’m not pinned down by cliches or lousy material. It’s the only picture I’m really proud of.”

John Trevor (Leslie Nielsen) has spent six years as part of an MK-ULTRA experiment that gives American soldiers better killing abilities through training, drugs and hypnosis. It’s kind of like a cult for killers, and now, he wants out. He even tells his second-in-command, Frank Lassiter (Gary Lockwood), that he’s about to escape. It’d all be great if the withdrawal didn’t make John incredibly violent, or if an Asian gang wasn’t looking for him in the hopes of taking the drugs from his system and using them for their own army.

Come for Nielsen dressed like a 70s dad despite being billed as an action star, stay for his romance with Nany Kwan and by all means, come back for his fight with Lockwood on a beach. It even ends a lot like Scorpio, where the older killer tells the younger one, “Now they’re going to come after you.”

On the William Girdler website, Girdler’s insurance man Joe Schulten said, “Project Kill was supposed to be distributed in a lot of countries. Nancy Kwan was an international star at the time, and it was booked up everywhere. But the man who was going to distribute the movie was either killed or committed suicide right before the film was scheduled to come out. So the release was tied up in an estate dispute. I don’t think Project Kill was ever released to movie theaters. I think it only showed up on cable in the eighties.:

Producer David Sheldon had the answer: “Project Kill was released in the theaters, though not a very wide release. It’s been on television quite a bit, and there’s a home video in stores. We pulled the picture from Arnold Kopelson (Inter-Ocean Films), who was supposed to distribute the film overseas, but was taking too long. A company called Sterling Gold tried to take it next, but the owner was found murdered in an organized crime style. Finally, I put it with Picturmedia, which released it theatrically and sold the home video rights. The CEO of Picturmedia is Doro Vlado Hreljanovic. Picturmedia has done a poor job in releasing the picture. It deserves more.”

That said, it does feature Vic Diaz.

Writer Galen Thompson went on to script SuperstitionThe Evil and several Chuck Norris projects, while David Sheldon was part of GrizzlyLovely but Deadly and Foxy Brown.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Prison Girls 3D (1972)

Before Tom DeSimone became the guy who gave us the sleaze-pop masterpiece Hell Night, the iconic Reform School Girls and the Linda Blair-led Savage Streets, he made what the poster calledThe First Real Adult Film in 3D!

Let’s be honest: this is softcore. It’s the kind of movie you could maybe sit through with your dad, but you’d be sweating bullets if your mom walked into the room. 

We kick things off in the prison shower—because, of course, we do. We’ve got Gertie (the legendary Annik Borel, better known as the Werewolf Woman) trying to get intimate with Cindy (the queen of 70s adult cinema, Uschi Digard). But they get cockblocked by the warden, Dr. Reinhardt, who decides to let a group of inmates into the general population for two days as part of a rehab program.

Does this work out? Of course not. The outside world is just as messed up as the slammer. But you didn’t come here for the plot, did you? You came for the 3D experience. And the sleaze. So you want body painting? You got Candy Samples getting turned into a living canvas. You want a cast that reads like an exploitationWho’s Who? Feast your eyes on Jacqueline Giroux  Trick or Treats and Drive-In Massacre), Tracy Handfuss (A Clockwork Blue, Psyched by the 4D Witch), Maria Arnold (Fantasm), Liz Wolfe (Fantasm Comes Again), Linda York (A Scream in the Streets), Marsha Jordan (Teen-Age Jail Bait) and Neola Graef (Cries of Ecstasy, Blows of Death).

Critics might argue that The Stewardesses beat it to the 3D adult punch by three years, but who cares about semantics? They could also say that this is less a movie and more a series of softcore lovemaking scenes strung together by the thinnest thread of plot imaginable.

Who listens to them?

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Prime Cut (1972)

Lee Marvin—the man who makes granite look like playdough—goes to Kansas to turn a meatpacking plant into a graveyard in Michael Ritchie’s Prime Cut.

Marvin plays Nick Devlin, a Chicago mob enforcer sent to Kansas City to collect a $500,000 debt from Mary Ann (Gene Hackman). Mary Ann isn’t just running a wholesale meatpacking plant; he’s running a human trafficking operation. He buys desperate young women, keeps them sedated on drugs and sells them off to the highest bidder. This grim setup creates a dark, unsettling atmosphere that contrasts sharply with the sunny, Americana backdrop of the Kansas county fair, where much of the film takes place.

It’s a dangerous job. After all, one of Devlin’s predecessors gets turned into a hot dog by Weenie (Gregory Walcott). But Nick is the ultimate cool professional in a world that’s gone completely sideways. And Hackman? He’s playing Mary Ann with a mix of reptilian charm and total instability that reminds you why he’s one of the best to ever do it. Keep an eye out for Angel Tompkins as Mary Ann’s wife and a young Sissy Spacek in her screen debut as Poppy. She’s the soul of the film in a sea of absolute scumbags.

The story might be a mess, but there’s a wheat thresher used as a murder weapon and some of the best actors in an action movie. So yeah, it goes nowhere. But it’s a cool ride. 

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Pretty Maids All In a Row (1971)

Based on Pretty Maids All in a Row by Francis Pollini, this combination of sexploitation, comedy and murder mystery — let’s just call it Giallo — was directed by Roger Vadim from a screenplay by producer Gene Roddenberry.

It was sold on the idea that eight new actresses were making their debut- all young and quite fetching. They were Brenda Sykes (Mandingo, Black Gunn), Joy Bang (Night of the Cobra Woman, Messiah of Evil), Gretchen Burrell (wife of Gram Parsons), Joanna Cameron (Isis), Aimée Eccles (Lovelines), June Fairchild (a member of the Gazzarri Dancers on the syndicated variety show Hollywood A Go-Go; she invented “The Statue Dance” with dancer Mimi Machu; she’s also in Up In Smoke, sniffing Ajam powder), Margaret Markov (Run, Angel, Run; The Hot Box) and Diane Sherry (Lana Lang in Superman).

Further sexy moments came from a feature in the April 1970 issue of Playboy, which featured an interview with the director and a nine-page pictorial of stars Angie Dickinson, Burrell, Eccles, Markov and Playboy bunny Joyce Williams, who was also in the film (and Soylent Green). Maybe they should have told the teachers at University High School in West Los Angeles, who would later complain about how dirty — and violent, but this is America, so mostly dirty — the movie was.

Oceanfront High School has seen many of its most beautiful teens killed by a serial killer. Could it be Ponce de Leon Harper (John David Carson), who is surrounded by sexually available women all day and is being driven mad by them? Or football coach and guidance counselor Michael “Tiger” McDrew (Rock Hudson), who has probably slept with all of the school’s best-looking ladies by now? That’s what Detective Sam Surcher (Telly Savales) wants to know.

Tiger and Ponce strike up a friendship, as Tiger wants to get Ponce laid. After all, the kid claims that he has a constant erection. He conspires to set the student up with the new teacher, Betty Smith (Angie Dickinson). As this goes down — literally — more women are being killed every day. I mean, Ponce finds a dead body in the men’s room when all he wants to do is jerk off!

Vadim is well-known for his relationships with Brigitte Bardot and Jane Fonda, as well as for his movies. Perhaps having this many good-looking women on set at the same time—Roddenberry was no saint either, having affairs with Nichelle Nichols and Majel Barrett during Star Trek and supposedly harassing several others—just short-circuited his brain.

But hey, despite how all over the place this is, it has Keenan Wynn as a lawman, Roddy McDowall as the principal and Barbara Leigh as Tiger’s wife. Hudson plays his role well, a man who has won so many times that he starts to think that he can kill and escape the law. Maybe he does. James Doohan even shows up, getting a role from his old boss as one of Savales’ assistant detectives.

Quentin Tarantino included this in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll of the best movies of all time. I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s the type of movie that isn’t good, but is definitely entertaining. 

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Preacherman Meets Widderwoman (1973)

After the original film, Preacherman raked in a cool $5 million. Albert T. Viola brought back the character of Amos Huxley, a backwoods con man posing as a man of the cloth, to stir up more trouble. In this installment, our hero finds his match in five-time widow Alzena Suggs (Marian Brown). It’s classic grindhouse structure: take a guy who thinks he’s the smartest person in the room, throw him into a situation where he’s totally out of his depth and watch the sparks fly. 

So yeah, this starts right where the last one ends, asuxley (Viola), fresh off a motel getaway with the mysterious lady in red, runs from the police. Soon, he falls for the widderwoman of the title, a woman who has married and buried five. She’s rich, attractive and has a hot daughter, Willie Mae (Jeramie Rain), who steals watermelons for a living. Don’t tell Vince Majestyk.

Unlike the original, this one was based on two plays by Chet McIntyre: Poor Rudolph and Feather and the Bell. You have to wonder—were there really stage plays dedicated to the Preacherman back then, or did they just shoehorn him into these plots? 

While the original got a second wind thanks to Troma’s 1983 theatrical re-release, Widderwoman got stuck with a PG rating and seemed to vanish outside the Southern drive-in circuit. It is, without a doubt, the most North Carolinian movie you’ll find, a regional curio packed with hillbilly caricatures and humor that only a drive-in crowd could love. And by that, I mean me.

Viola plays Amos Huxley with a level of demented conviction so true that you’d swear this guy was a real snake-oil salesman, not a Brooklyn-born playwright. He even goes so far as to decline an onscreen credit, billing the role asAmos Huxley…as himself.Despite this being a vanity production, he’s actually pretty generous with screen time. Jeramie Rain is a standout as the no-nonsense Willie Mae—a role that fits right in alongside her turn as Sadie in Last House on the Left. Interestingly, she used the pseudonymSue Davishere, which is a bit of a mystery since she used her real name in films she reportedly loathed.

And then there’s the mystery of Rebecca Payson (who plays Armanda). Some think that she’s actually Deborah Loomis, who was in Blood Bath and Hercules in New York. The scandal sheets tried to track Loomis down when Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, hoping for dirt, but she was untraceable. If the New York Post couldn’t find her, what chance do I have? 

Viola would go on to write one more movie, The Night They Robbed Big Bertha’s

You can watch this on YouTube.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The Pink Garter Gang (1971)

Directed by one-and-done director Jimmy Murphy, who co-wrote it with The Killers screenwriter Ray Chavez Vegas, The iInk Garter Gang is, as the poster tells us, all about Billy Boy and his five girl gang and they’re wired for action! They rob for kicks, fortune and thrills!

Some of the ads also say, “These hot pants chicks mean trouble!” and “SEE the 140 M.P.H. getaway… wildest chase ever filmed!”

It’s got ten watches on Letterboxd and I had to pay $12 for a copy from DVD Lady, so allow me to take you through it.

You’ve got Mick Mehas (The Girls from Thunder Strip, Hell’s Chosen Few, The Cycle Savages), Saxon Chase, Bruce Kimball (Drive-In Massacre, Fangs), Deborah Darnell (one of Count Yorga‘s vampire women), Tanye Morgan (Targets) and Ann Martell heading up the cast, but the real “wait, is that…?” moment comes when you see Paul Gleason on the screen. Yeah, the same guy who played Vernon, the nightmare principal in The Breakfast Club, is in here. So is Keith Carradine as a surfer.

We do at least start with a girl in a mini-dress with a pink garter. Don’t get used to her. She isn’t around long. But there is a guy with a gang of five women, just as the sales copy promised us. And we do get a biker gang, which includes Roach, Bongos (who doesn’t play them), their leader Splinter (who isn’t a mutant rat) and Kimball, who brags of never taking a bath.

This is less biker movie and more people hanging out in wood-paneled dives and going to the beach. And the pink garter does show up, around twenty minutes in, while a song that sounds like a ripoff of “The Candy Man Can” plays over and over.

This gang wears black track suits, kind of like they’re a thrash band in the 1980s more than bikers. This also has one of the best narrative shifts I’ve ever seen, where a dying cop says, “I have a daughter. I mean, I had a daughter,” as we cut to a bunch of hippies smoking thai sticks while bikers gather around a concert for the band Rain Forest that probably is going to be more Altamont than Woodstock. The cop’s daughter is getting double teamed by Splinter and his gang, as they laugh about it by way of ADR. “They were the ones that picked her up and turned her on,” says the stoic lawman. “I couldn’t prove it, but I know it was them.”

Once we see the cops start chasing that silver Corvette of our heroes and police start crashing and dying, it’s only a matter of time before this all ends like so many early 70s films. Biker films, especially. Easy Rider set the bar. As Adam in Werewolves On Wheels said, “We all know how we’re gonna die, baby… we’re gonna crash and burn!”

But no! At the end, after some gunfights and chases, Billy Boy just leaves and an angry matronly lady just walks off as his boat sails off to the sound of that “Candy Man” bootleg. One of the girls waves goodbye just in time to fake me out again.

Spoiler: Billy Boy’s boat — well, it’s an insert stock shot probably from another movie — blows up real good.

In Warped and Faded, Lars Nilsen said, “Without a doubt, the rarest biker movie we ever played. There were dozens of these things making a constant circuit through the U.S. Late in the cycle, the occasional token new film like The Pink Garter Gang was popped into a “Cycle Carnival” triple or quadriple feature alongside classics like Devil’s Angels and Hell’s Angels On Wheels. People never seemed to get tired of watching scuzzy scooter trash behaving inappropriately, and from all indications, this is a chip off the oold engine block. Expect blasting fuzz guitars, endless scenes of bikers riding through square towns, hair-pulling cat fights, a lot of beer drinking, smooching and — in all likelihood — a biker named Mouse, Speed or Acid.”

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Poor Pretty Eddie (1975)

I rarely watch a movie that gets on the very verge of upsetting me. Poor Pretty Eddie is that rare film that pushed me pretty far and made me feel somewhat upset while watching, which ended up making me keep going and enjoy the end results. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s amazing that this movie even exists.

Most of the makers of this film were employed in the adult film industry, with Poor Pretty Eddie representing their chance to go straight. Backing came from Michael Thevis, the notorious Atlanta-based “King of Pornography,” who owned a record company named GRC, a chain of sex shops and a company that manufactured peep show booths. In fact, the rock band Flood recorded the soundtrack for the martial arts movie Blood of the Dragon in his Sound Pit Studio on Atlanta’s Simpson Street, which also saw country singer Moe Bandy, dance sensation Loleatta Holloway and country songwriter and the author of the three million record selling “Chevy Van” Sammy Johns — as well as R&B acts like Ripple, the Rhodes Kids, King Hannibal and Sam Dees — all record there. He also published a series of pornographic novels that were written by Ed Wood under the name Donna D. Dildo.

Producing a legit movie allowed Thevis to launder money that he had made through shadier dealings, which brought the FBI in. Shortly after the film was released, he was jailed on a variety of charges and then escaped prison in 1978, ending up on the FBI’s most-wanted list. He had already put a contract out on the life of the man who had given the police all the info they needed to put him away. While on the lam, he tracked down that man — Roger Dean Underhill — and killed him and another associate. He bragged about it in prison, and fellow prisoners ratted him out.

In 1980, Michael Thevis, the so-called “Scarface of Porn,” who once owned nearly half of the industry and made $100 million a year ($311 million today when adjusted for inflation), was sentenced to spend 28 years to life in the Oak Park Heights Correctional Facility, an underground penitentiary outside of Minneapolis and eventually the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta. His palatial home was eventually sold to Whitney Houston. In 2013, he died of heart and respiratory failure. This Daily Beast article on his life is required reading.

Poor Pretty Eddie was written by B. W. Sandefur, who is mostly known for his TV writing and producing. In fact, he was behind one of the oddest series of the early 1980’s, NBC’s Cliffhangers, which featured three different stories that all began in the middle. Stop Susan WilliamsThe Secret Empire and The Curse of Dracula were all eventually released theatrically in Europe — with extra material added.

Loosely based on Jean Genet’s play The Balcony and directed by David Worth (Kickboxer) and Richard Robinson (whose films include Is There Sex After Marriage and Adultery for Fun & Profit ), this film is shocking even today.

The Turner Classic Movies article on the film hits it right on the head. They describe Eddie as such: “A sleazy exploitation thriller with artistic pretensions, the film manages to be offensive, crude and inept in equal measure while still succeeding as a compulsive viewing experience for connoisseurs of fringe cinema who think they’ve seen everything.”

We start at the University of Georgia, where Liz Wetherly (Leslie Uggams, who older readers will know from Roots and younger ones will know from the Deadpool movies) is performing the national anthem. There’s a cut to her car driving down a country road, and we hear her say, “Look, I have two weeks before my next concert. Now I’m going to get in my car and drive until I find a nice, quiet hole to crawl into.”

Be careful what you wish for.

After his car breaks down, Liz rents a cabin for the night — so she thinks — while the gigantic handyman Keno (Ted Cassidy, who was Lurch on The Addams Family, as well as the second actor to play Bigfoot on The Six-Million Dollar Man after Andre the Giant. He was also the narrator for The Incredible Hulk and provided the voices for Godzilla, Frankenstein Jr., The Thing, Moltar, Metallus, Black Manta and Brainiac for various Hanna-Barbera cartoons.)

Somehow, she ends up stuck for days thanks to the machinations of Eddie (Michael Christian, TV’s Peyton Place), a lothario who has already ensnared motel owner Bertha (Shelley Winters, who was in so many movies where she ran a house of ill repute, at least in my imagination, as well as the killer mother of an alien child in a role that doesn’t add up in another astonishingly bonkers Atlanta-based movie, The Visitor). Strangely enough, in the filmed version of the aforementioned Genet play, Winter played nearly the same role. Yet here, she plays it as a once gorgeous showgirl stuck remembering the past through the haze of alcohol, trying in vain to hold on to her man. Of note, Winters was paid in cash for her role and nearly died when her private plane almost crashed upon landing in Atlanta.

Not only does Eddie want Liz for carnal reasons, but he also thinks she can help him in his career as a country singer. He spends much of the film dressed in Elvis jumpsuits and warbling his way through ballads. And oh yeah — he eventually assaults our heroine and then subjects her to further torture, like forcing her to please a traveling salesman and eating Keno’s dog.

Liz finally gets the courage to turn in Eddie, which leads to Sheriff Orville (Slim Pickens!)  asking her, “Did he bite ya on the tittie?” and making her submit to a public trial in a crowded VFW/bar as locals gasp that a black woman is in their midst. Drunken proprietor Floyd (Dub Taylor, a cowboy star and former Clemson Tide football player, who is in all manner of redneck films like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot…tick…tick…tick…, Evel KnievelGatorCreature from Black LakeThe Great Smokey Roadblock and Moonshine County Express) then conducts a trial in front of an assembled crowd of drunken locals, many of whom appear disturbingly disturbed, that ends with Liz stripped nude and crying.

The film’s montage sequences are some of the most disturbing I’ve sat through, including Eddie assaulting Liz to the sounds of a country love song intercut with two dogs humping, as well as a scene where she takes photos of him near a waterfall, imagining her camera is a shotgun and that he is covered in blood and gore.

It all climaxes with a wedding where Eddie and Liz are to be wed, which ends in a slow-motion Sam Peckinpah-style gun battle as Keno blasts his way in for revenge over his dog, and everyone gets caught in the crossfire. The film ends with Liz, her life ruined and not enhanced by this escape from her busy life, raising a shotgun to murder Bertha.

Also known as Black Vengeance, The Victim, Heartbreak Motel and Redneck County Rape, the film played drive-ins and grindhouses for nearly a decade. The Heartbreak Motel version features plenty of differences, as Eddie narrates the movie and action scenes have been cut out and replaced with lengthy soliloquies that don’t appear in any other version of the film. Instead of ending with the gun battle, Heartbreak Motel closes with Eddie leaving Georgia for Nashville and a recording contract. There are fewer scenes of Eddie attacking Liz, but, strangely enough, there is one where Eddie and Bertha make, umm, third input love to the haunting strains of a bluegrass ballad.

To say that critics — especially in Atlanta — disliked this film is an understatement.

The 1970s were packed with films that you are kind of, sort of horror movies, yet feature no supernatural elements. They just made you feel like you needed to take an entire day’s worth of showers to clean off the scum after watching them. This is one hell of an addition to those movies. It’s not for everyone, but for those who want to see how low exploitation can go, it’s ready to attack your sensibilities.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Polk County Pot Plane (1977)

In August of 1975, a bizarre chapter in Polk County, Georgia history was written.

A large cargo plane loaded with marijuana crash-landed, and no one could figure out how to remove it. More than four decades later, the incident remains one of the strangest and most memorable events in the county’s history.

What followed that summer night involved a hijacked cargo aircraft, an international drug-smuggling operation and a chain of events that thrust quiet Polk County into the center of a story that seemed more suited to a Hollywood crime thriller than rural Georgia. Yet for the residents who witnessed it, the Pot Plane incident was very real.

The New York Times reported on it, saying “In normal times, Seals W. Swafford, the sheriff of Rolk County up in the North Georgia hills just across the Alabama state line, spends most of his time worrying about how to oversee 313 square miles of territory with just two deputies to serve papers and keep cars moving on the two highways into and out of town.

“Our main problem in Polk County is traffic,” says the 46‐year‐old sheriff, a taciturn but amiable man. “A grave problem. Then we get this airplane. . .”

“This airplane” is a red, white and blue, 93‐foot, four-engine DC‐4 cargo plane that rests incongruously at the end of a rutted, stump‐lined field on the top of a nearby mountain in the middle of nowhere.

The plane landed on the night of Aug. 3 with a cargo of marijuana, and now no one knows quite how to get it out. Meanwhile, it has become something of a tourist attraction.”

Former Army pilot Robert G. Eby was arrested, along with four co-defendants, as the pilot for the Douglas C-54 Skymaster in a field that had been cut into a dense wooded area. This strip’s lights? A string of 100-watt lightbulbs. The operation was part of a much larger drug-smuggling network that had transported thousands of pounds of marijuana and hashish from Colombia into the United States using surplus military aircraft. Although police seized part of the shipment and linked the plane to a massive trafficking operation, prosecutors were unable to prove Eby was the pilot.

The case ultimately fell to pieces due to insufficient admissible evidence. Not even any sticks and stones? Well, whatever, as the abandoned plane remained stranded on the mountain and became a local curiosity after authorities struggled to figure out how to remove it.

According to Secret Handshake Cinema, that’s where James West Jr. comes in. He was an ex-Marine who became a maverick politician, passing a law that allowed women to conceal carry guns in their purses and flying into work every day via helicopter.

He bought the plane, the mountain and access to all of the men who pulled off this crime — all to make this movie.

If you’ve ever sat around wondering what would happen if two guys who looked like they’d been auditioning for a Lynyrd Skynyrd roadie position since 1973 were handed a script about the Dixie Mafia and a plane affectionately dubbed Big Bird, then stop what you’re doing. You’ve found your movie.

The film introduces us to Oosh (Don Watson) and Doosh (Bobby Watson). These guys aren’t actors; they are forces of nature. With full beards, wild hair and thick Southern drawls that make Boomhauer from King of the Hill sound like he’s practicing for a Shakespearean monologue, the Watson brothers are the beating heart of this flick. They don’t have careers in this movie; they just exist. They smoke, they drink, they drive too fast, and they work for the local drug kingpins.

Oosh and Doosh, who help pilot Big Bird, a DC-4 cargo plane, onto a makeshift mountaintop airstrip in rural Georgia. After unloading a shipment of marijuana into an RV, they are immediately pursued by local law enforcement in a chaotic series of crashes involving police cars, a bulldozer and their own battered vehicle. The pair is eventually arrested and jailed after the shipment is lost and their escape attempt fails.

Rather than eliminate them for botching the operation, a group of local crime bosses decides to break Oosh and Doosh out of jail and send them on another smuggling run. The duo is dramatically rescued from a prison rooftop by helicopter and soon finds themselves involved in more over-the-top adventures, including a massive tractor-trailer chase that destroys police cruisers and culminates in a semi-truck smashing through a house. After accumulating a large debt to their criminal employers, Oosh and Doosh rob an armored car in an attempt to make things right, leading to a shootout, more casualties and yet another high-speed pursuit.

That climactic scene where our heroes break out of jail via a helicopter, dangling for their dear lives hundreds of feet above a small Georgia town? That’s not a green screen. That’s not a stunt double. That is Don and Bobby Watson holding on for dear life.

The film’s climax recreates the real-life landing of the famous pot plane on Treat Mountain. As a local radio announcer reports that the aircraft will be auctioned off, Big Jim himself pilots Big Bird back into the spotlight, taking off from the mountaintop runway and soaring into the sky. The movie ends by celebrating the legendary airplane and the local folklore surrounding its exploits, using a string of car crashes, stunts and chases to transform a true Georgia drug-smuggling incident into a good-ol’-boy action-adventure.

Beyond acting in the movie, Big Jim also directed and produced it.  The script came from Jim Clarke. This was the only film from both, but they had support from cameraman Allen Facemire (who shot hicksploitation classics like Cockfighter and Moonrunners before being the DP for Under the Rainbow), editor Angelo Ross (whose work on Smoky and the Bandit had to come in handy here; he also edited Who Killed Teddy Bear?The Cross and the SwitchbladeMr. No LegsKing Frat and the paintball slasher Masterblaster), producer Robert W. McClure (Hot Summer In Barefoot CountyTrucker’s Woman), cameraman William D. Barber (who also shot camera on Empire of the AntsCat PeopleFace/OffRsh Hour and so many more movies) and cameraman Jerry Crowder (DP on UFO: Target Earth and J.C.),

Re-released by Paragon Video as In Hot Pursuit, this movie is a fixture on Mill Creek sets.

PS: This post on House of Schlock is where some of the images came from and is packed with info, including the fact that this movie was shown on television as part of the late-night Movie Greats series and a rumor that High Times publisher Tom Forcade was involved with this movie. This is soon disproved in the comments, as an anonymous poster writes, “He never owned the rights to distribute the movie or to put it on tape. The movie appeared on VHS shortly after James I. West, Jr., handed over a copy to Tom’s people during negotiations.”

You can watch this on YouTube.