As the trailer will tell you, Corruption is not a woman’s picture.
That’s debatable.
What is not is that Corruption is a ripoff of Eyes without a Face.
But hey — some of my favorite movies are total rip-offs.
Renowned plastic surgeon Sir John Rowan (Peter Cushing) starts the movie at a swinging 60s party with his beautiful fiancée Lynn (Sue Lloyd, Hysteria). Sir John isn’t dealing well with all this counterculture excess, so when a pervy photographer makes a pass at his girl, he attacks the man, sending a hot light into Lynn’s face. This party may seem like a parody when seen today, but this is a serious scene, with Cushing facing the Summer of Love and not dealing so well with all of it.
Rowan pledges to fix Lynn’s scarred face through a combination of laser technology and a pituitary gland transplant. Sound good? Well, it’s fueled by murder, giving the fluids of young women to his wife, to keep her face from scarring and it needs to be repeated again and again to stop the scars from coming back. Everything goes well — as well as repeatedly killing people and basically feeding their skin to your wife can go– until Sir John and Lynn try to seduce a new victim who ends up being part of a gang of robbers.
Those criminals break into the home of Sir John and they soon learn his secret. However, no one profits from this knowledge, as everyone ends up getting killed by a surgical laser. And then, get this — it’s all a dream!
Cushing would say, “It was gratuitously violent, fearfully sick. But it was a good script, which just goes to show how important the presentation is.” You have to love a movie where Van Helsing flips out at a party that Austin Powers would say is way too mod. And wow, it’s pretty gory for a late sixties British movie!
Director Robert Hartford-Davis would also make Incense for the Damned, Gonks Go Beat and The Fiend.
Also, just to remind you one more time, Corruption is not a woman’s picture.
Ted V. Mikels lived the kind of life that most teenage boys dream of. He lived in a house that looked like a castle, made exploitation movies and lived with gorgeous women who wanted to be filmmakers that he referred to as Castle Ladies.
When the Lotus Cat Food Company finds itself going out of business, its owners, Landau (Sanford Mitchell) and Maltby (J. Byron Foster), decide to start using dead bodies from a graveyard for the source of their cat food. The cats then have a taste for man and start killing. Only veterinarian Howard Glass (Sean Kenney) and nurse Angie Robinson (Monika Kelly) can stop the wild cats.
Not only was this written by Arch Hall Sr. — the father of Arch Hall Jr. — the script was touched up by Joe Cranston — the father of Bryan Cranston.
Tucson, Arizona. The insane killer Ray (Jason Williams, Flesh Gordon) and the whiny sad guy Alex (Bill Osco, The Being) get five kilos of cocaine, run into some police, kill those officers — the title is a spoiler — before they steal a frozen lemonade truck, shotgun blast another policeman, murder a gas station worker, ice another guy and kidnap his girl, Karen (Diane Keller, one and done). Then, they hide out in a motel in the hopes that everything blows over.
Alex gives Karen some coke, they ball, then they sell the drugs to Collins (Michael D. White) and his girlfriends Lena (Donna Stubbert) and Becky (Judy Ross) before things go straight to Hell.
Almost everyone other than Flesh Gordon and Bill Osco are one and done, even director Walter R. Cichy. The biggest star out of this movie would be Rick Baker, who went directly from this movie to Star Wars, changing it from a grimy 16mm drive-in film where you can see the crew in the back of the car at one stage.
This cost $50,000, money that was raised by Ted Dye, a Texas-based owner of X-rated theaters looking to make something mainstream. Another reason? Flesh Gordon had been confiscated in a police bust, so its producer, Cichy, needed money. He got Williams to make this. The director of that film, Howard Ziehm, wrote the story for Cop Killers with Osco and Cichy, who finished the screenplay.
According to the opening credits, “this story is true, but actual names and places are fictitious.” That’s because Pete Walker read a story in the tabloid News of the World and got inspired. And unlike movies of this era like Permissive and More, the degenerate lifestyle he envisioned wasn’t tragic.
Joe (Robin Askwith, the Confessions of… series) and Carol (Janet Lynn*, Twins of Evil) have left behind their small town for swinging London, where Joe struggles to find work and she quickly becomes a model.
Before you can open the newspaper to Page 3, Carol’s involved in the scummier side of entertainment — the photoshoot for a dirty magazine was shot in Mayfair photographer Philip O. Stearn’s studio and the stills were in the July 1970 issue — with dirty old men all wanting a piece of our heroine.
There’s some great casting here, with Stubby Kaye (the owner of Acme in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?), Harry Baird (The Four of the Apocalypse), Chris Sandford (who was also in Walker’s Die Screaming, Marianne), radio DJ Pete Murray, Carry On star Eric Barker, Pearl Hackney (who was in four Walker films, including Four Dimensions of Greta, Tiffany Jones and Schizo) and Martin Wyldeck (Walker really liked using the same actors, as he also was in several of his movies).
This never gets as dirty as the American title — The Dirtiest Girl I Ever Met — promises. It exists in a different time of sexuality, where Robin Askwith’s butt and innuendos are enough. But man, all those scenes of old men licking their lips in slow motion make me realize that Walker really was created to be a horror director.
*Susan George was initially considered for this movie.
Directed and co-written — with T. Gertler — by Joseph Adler, who also made Sex and the College Girl and Scream Baby Scream, Convention Girls is a movie that I can’t find. The Alamo Drafthouse refers to it as a “Florida-shot indie obscurity — a super rare 35mm print of a movie never released on DVD or video!”
They went on to describe this movie as a “Nashville-inspired multi-character drama set in a Miami Beach hotel during a weekend-long toy manufacturers convention. The smart screenplay by Trudy Gertler uses the handful of prostitutes working the convention as a structural device to tie together the various subplots and character arcs. Originally titled Conventions, this offbeat regional indie pic — more slice-of-life than sexploitation — was acquired by producer/distributor M.A. Ripps, the huckster responsible for the notorious ’60s shocker Poor White Trash, who retitled it Convention Girls and gave it a full-blown exploitation makeover. After playing the drive-in circuit for half a dozen years, the film pretty much vanished, rarely (if ever) showing on TV and never receiving a home video release.”
This seems like a sex movie, but from all accounts, it’s actually the story of a toymaker trying to keep from being a sellout. There’s also a sex worker falling into a depression and self-directed death in a bathtub, affairs, horrible male-to-female behavior and the dirty side of the toy industry.
Actors include Nancy Lawson (God’s Bloody Acre), Anne Seward in her debut, Roberta White, Carol Linden, Robert Gallo, Naomi Fink (also in Adler’s Sammy Somebody), Clarence Thomas (not that one) and William Kerwin. I think legally, you couldn’t make a low budget movie in Florida without him.
We first encountered The Child at a Halloween party thrown at the palatial Mexican War Streets home of Mr. Groovy Doom himself, Bill Van Ryn. While some folks drank in the kitchen or enjoyed the mix of Goblin and My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult blasting in the sitting room, I was entranced by a film that was playing on the TV. The sound wasn’t turned up, the images all felt like transmissions from beyond, and nothing really added up in the movie. “What the hell is this?” I asked. “Oh, The Child!” exclaimed Bill, hurriedly running in to try and explain why he was growing more and more obsessed with multiple rewatches of the film.
Sometime in the 1930s — which you’d only know from the old 1930s as this film feels like an anachronism lost in no particular time — Alicianne has been hired to be the caretaker for Rosalie Nordon, the titular child, who has just lost her mother. Along with her father and brother Len, she lives in a house on the edge of the woods.
Even the trip to the house is strange, with Alicianne’s car breaking down after she drives it into a ditch. A journey through the woods brings her to Mrs. Whitfield, who warns her about the Nordon family. She probably should have listened, as everyone in this family — hell, everyone in this movie — is touched, as they say.
When Alicianne first meets Rosalie, the jack-in-the-box suddenly moves by itself. It’s a very subtle scene that hints that things might not be right here. After all, people have seen Rosalie wandering the cemetery late at night, a place where she brings kittens so that her friends there will do anything she asks. And even dinner is strange, as her father relates a story of Boy Scouts eating a soup stirred with oleander that caused them all to die. Father and daughter have a good laugh at that while Len just seems embarrassed by his family.
Then there are the drawings — Rosalie has been sketching everyone who was at her mother’s funeral, marking them for death. And if she does have psychic abilities, is she using them to reanimate the dead or control them? Or do they just do whatever she wants? The Child wasn’t made to give you those answers. It just screams in your face and demands that you keep watching despite your ever-growing confusion.
Mrs. Whitfield’s dog is taken first, then that old busy body pays the price, with her face getting off as the zombies mutilate her. That gardener has some of mommy’s jewelry, so he has to pay, too. And Alicianne, who was supposedly here just for Rosalie, has started to spend too much time with Len. She’s next on the list.
There are some really haunting scenes as we get closer to Halloween, like a scarecrow come to life and a jack-o-lantern that keeps relighting itself and following our heroine around the room.
Finally, Mr. Nordon starts to discipline his daughter, which leads to Rosalie unleashing all of her powers. She decimates her father, crashes Alicianne’s car and sends zombies to chase her governess and brother all the way to an old mill. Len tries to fight them while Alicianna just screams and screams, but he can’t stop them from dragging him under the building and tearing his face to bloody pieces. As the attack of the zombies stops, Rosalie walks through the door just as our heroine hits her with an axe. She walks outside into the dawn’s light and everything is still. The threat is over.
Written by Ralph Lucas as Kill and Go Hide, The Child isn’t a great movie, but it’s an interesting one. If you ask me, that’s way more important. Some people will get tied up in things like narrative cohesion, good acting and a soundtrack that makes sense. None of those people should watch The Child with you, as they’ll just ruin what can be an awesome experience. This is the kind of magic that takes over, kind of like one of those dreams you have and try to write down the moment you wake up, but it gets lost in the ether of reality. For most of the film, the zombies are barely glimpsed, just seen in the shadows, so they really could just be tramps that live in the cemetery. Or something much worse.
Producer Harry Novak acquired this film and made his money on it, even if director Robert Voskanian and producer Robert Dadashia saw no profit. It’s a story we’ve seen hundreds of times — an interesting movie taken, used and abused by conmen who have no interest in art.
Carol (Rebecca Brooke) is in the middle of a steady swinging relationship between her husband Eddie (David Hausman), next door neighbor and best friend Anne (Chris Jordan) and her partner Pete (Eric Edwards). But when her widowed mother, Jennifer Robison (Jennifer Welles), comes to live with her, she worries that they will have to hide their open lifestyle. Yet soon enough, mom is making it with a grocery boy, engaging in forbidden love with her daughter and maybe even running away with her son-in-law.
Joe Sarno’s movies are filthy but they’re also classy, which is something that usually never makes sense and never really works. He always pulls off this balancing act and does the same here, as the wood-paneled suburban 70s household turns into a pit of sin, a place that unlocks passions once put away.
There’s an uncredited Peter Gallagher in this.
Some maniac posted this with all the sex cut out on YouTube. What’s the opposite of an insert?
Based on Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, written by Thomas De Quincey — the same person who inspired Suspiria — and has Vincent Price as Gilbert De Quincey. He’s an adventurer hired to stop the sale of Chinese brides to overseas men.
That makes this sound too ordinary, a film that feels like you’re on drugs, that has Yvonne Moray as a small courtesan, a fishing net filmed backward filled with captured women, bad girl Ruby Low (Linda Ho), a two-fisted action hero role for Vincent Price, floating skulls, rotting bodies and a narration by Price that makes this feel even more odd.
You can also find this as Souls for Sale and Evils of Chinatown. Director Albert Zugsmith also made College Confidential, Sex Kittens Go to College, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, Fanny Hill, Psychedelic Sexualis and the horrific nightmare that is Dondi. He also produced The Incredible Shrinking Man and High School Confidential. What many may not know is that he was also a lawyer. In 1947, he represented a friend from the war, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, in their lawsuit against National Comics for stealing their creation, Superman. They settled out of court for $100,000, and National kept the character. Most of the money went to pay Zugsmith’s fees.
Siegel wanted Bob Kane to come on board and sue over Batman. In the years that followed, both Siegel and Shuster believed that Kane and Zugsmith had made a deal without telling them. They got nothing, Kane got his part ownership and profit deal on Batman, and Zugsmith got his pay. They lost their jobs, never getting to create new adventures for the Man from Krypton.
Writing for this movie has some class. Seton I. Miller won the Oscar for the script for Here Comes Mr. Jordan. He also wrote Scarface and A Knife for the Ladies.
Flower Child Coffin (Pam Grier) is Coffy, who saves lives as an emergency room nurse but also takes them as she gets revenge for her sister Lubelle, murdering the people who got her hooked on heroin. Once her friend Officer Carter (William Elliot) gets crippled by those very same people, she decides to up her need to kill everyone in her way.
She thinks her boyfriend, Howard Brunswick (Booker Bradshaw), is on her side, working to make the community better. But he’s just as bad as her targets, King George (Robert DoQui) and Arturo Vitroni (Alan Arbus). He even tells them that she’s just another whore, sending her to death at the hands of Omar (Sid Haig) before she pulls a weapon out of her hair and stabs him in the throat over and over again.
All that’s left is to, well, kill everyone. Yet Howard almost wins her back. He tells her how they’re going to change the community. And then a white woman asks him to come back to bed. What else can she do but blow his manhood off with a shotgun?
Jack Hill directed and wrote this, and everything he touched — Switchblade Sisters, Spider Baby — became the kind of movies that transcended their drive-in and exploitation beginnings. Coffy isn’t the kind of woman who needs to be rescued; she’s a force of sheer violence, unstoppable even when things look at their worst. By the end, she walks the beachfront alone; you half expect her to walk into the ocean like Godzilla.
Ex-policeman and private detective Harry Clegg (Gilbert Wynne) is hired by Lord Cruickshank (Norman Claridge) after the rich man gets a threat on his life. Clegg may be the hero, but his inner dialogue includes lines like “I’m a private eye. Also a cold-blooded killer, a liar and a thief. My big problem is, I’ve been a loser since the day I was born.”
A sex worker named Suzy the Slag (Gilly Grant, School for Sex) is killing off old rich men with beartraps, guns and her sexual charms. Maybe she’s just mad that the filmmaker chose such a poor and misogynistic name for her. Sometimes she strangles men, lets them get their breath, then drowns them in her bathtub. A former adult actress, Suzy, serves as the killer for Wildman (Gary Hope), who has waited twenty years for his revenge on these rich guys.
Wildman also has five lollipop girls — Susan Killington, Laura Beaumont (who went on to write for Thomas the Train), Hannah Leek, Susan Babbage and Felicity Leach — who may be in their 20s but are dressed like teenagers or younger, all sucking on lollipops more than once in this film.
This isn’t great, but it has a gross charm to it. That’s a compliment.
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