The best thing that I can say about this movie is that nearly every person in it is a horrible person. There are cops that don’t do their jobs well, expectant mothers that smoke and other parents that couldn’t care less if their kids have come home yet. Even the lovely people in this movie only exist to be snuffed out. This is the blackest of comedies and also the most nihilistic of films.

Jim and Slim, a couple of workers at the Ravensback chemical plant, decide to finish work early and head to the bar, neglecting the pressure gauge warnings and allowing a cloud of yellow toxic smoke to escape.

That yellow cloud finds its way to a school bus full of innocent children who are so well behaved that they even sing a song to compliment their bus driver. Suddenly, the bus passes through the yellow cloud, and the kids get turned into zombie-like monsters with black fingernails.

The townspeople only think the kids have disappeared, so they shut the town down and try to keep out any outsiders until things clear up. Boy, this town…there’s Billy the local sheriff, who is in over his head. There’s Harry, his deputy, who only seems to want to get it on with Suzie (and who can blame him, what else is there to do in a small town?). And then there’s Molly, who runs the general store and is also the police dispatcher, because that makes sense. She’s played by Shannon Bolin, a singer who was once known as The Lady with the Dark Blue Voice in the 1940s.

Even though this was made in 1980, it’s both woke and exploitative enough to give zombie Tommy two mommies. One of them, Dr. Joyce, is among the first to be burned alive by one of The Children. Not the last — as the kids all come home, they burn their parents and most of the town alive.

I guess John is our hero, and his wife, Cathy, is pregnant (and pats her stomach and says, “Sorry…” before smoking a cigarette), so he’s obviously worried about her. That’s when this movie shifts into one that totally lives up to today’s theme. Kids get killed left and right with impunity. Roasted in closets, zombified hands chopped off, shotgunned…it’s pretty much open season on children. And when The Children die, it sounds like a cat in heat.

After all that, John falls asleep and wakes up to deliver his wife’s baby. We get a peaceful scene of the many, many dead bodies with the children all lying there looking peaceful and not dismembered. That’s when John noticed that his newborn child had black fingernails.

Director Max Kalmanowicz only has one other credit, the weirdo sex comedy Dreams Come True, where “a young couple masters the supernatural art of astral projection which allows them to travel through dreams, explore their fantasies and make a whole lot of love.” Hopefully, nobody cuts off a ten-year-old’s hand in that movie.

Shout out to The Bloody Pit of Horror for the alternate posters.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Chesty Anderson is a WAVE (Woman Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) in the U.S. Navy and the lead character in a movie that promises that you will see bare breasts. That’s 1976, I guess, and Shari Eubank is the right actress for this. A former cheerleader and homecoming queen at Farmer City High School in Illinois, she was only in one other movie and what a movie: Russ Meyer’s Supervixens. After this movie, she quit acting and moved back home, where she became a drama teacher. And she’s a way better actress than most people would be in a sexploitation film, but man, Supervixen is your drama teacher? The world is fascinating.

While this movie is a snooze — how can a movie named Chesty Anderson, USN be boring? — It does have a fun cast. It left Scatman Crothers ill-prepared for dealing with Kubrick, as one can only assume every scene is done in one take; I’ll bet there were fewer takes in this entire film than in one scene of The Shining. Timothy Carey is devouring scenery and being a lunatic as a mobster, while Ilsa, Dyanne Thorne, is in this as a fellow WAVE. At the same time, Joyce Mandel (Wham Bam Thank You Space Man), Uschi Digard (so many mammary-based movies), Rosanne Katon (Bachelor Party), Marcie Barkin (Fade to Black), Connie Hoffman (Naughty Stewardesses), Dorrie Thomson (Policewoman) and even Betty Thomas show up. Fred Willard, too, as Chesty’s square boyfriend.

Chesty’s sister has been killed after taking photos of Senator Dexter (George Dexter) in drag, which gets organized crime involved. And a man-eating plant is part of the story.

Yet through all this — a movie with all of these people — it’s very PG. And look, I’m not demanding sin, but in a film with this cast, even the shower scenes could be watched on regular television. It promises you vice and gives you virtue. Well, not much, but you get the point.

Director Ed Forsyth also made Superchick, Caged Men, The Ramrodder and more, while writer Paul Pumpian mostly worked in animation after this, and this is the only film for his co-writer H.F. Green.

This was initially released by Atlas Films in 1975, then rereleased by Flora Releasing and Coast Films. Thanks to Temple of Schlock for that, as well as the knowledge that this aired on TV as Anderson’s Angels. How much did they cut? It was also rereleased by 21st Century.

Stephanie Fondue, who stars in this as Jeannie, had an even more incredible real name. Enid Finnbogason. She was in Hollywood from Winnipeg, got hit up at lunch to try out for this movie and got it. She’d never been a cheerleader. She was twenty. Also: A nude model, so disrobing during the audition was no big whoop.

In the film, Amarosa High School is a high-stakes place where lives depend on football games. Along with Jeannie, Bonnie (Jovita Bush), Debbie (Brandy Woods) and head cheerleader Claudia (Denise Dillaway, who eventually did the makeup for 2000s reality specials Exposed! Pro Wrestling’s Greatest Secrets and Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets, as well as the VHS release of Party Games for Adults Only, the girls try to help the men win. Except that Claudia is catty and is trying to get Jeannie deflowered by the end of the season. It’s a backward teen sex comedy bet.

But hey, everyone goes to see I Drink Your Blood at one point. So there’s that.

Director and co-writer Paul Glicker also directed Running Scared (starring Ken Wahl) and adult films Parlor Games and Hot Circuit. Other writers included Richard Lerner, Tad Richards, and Ace Baandige, a pseudonym for someone who claimed to have been a Presidential scriptwriter named David. David Gergen seems too clean for this, David Shipley is too young and David Frum was 11 when this came out. I am looking at Presidential writers and comparing them to someone who made a sex film.

Speaking of sex films, Suzie is played by Sandy Evans, but that’s Clair Dia, who was in Lucifer’s Women and 3 A.M. — the only porn with an Orson Welles-edited scene — and directed Screwples and The Health Spa. Patty, played by Kim Stanton, who is also known as Kimberly Hyde, appeared in The Young Nurses and Candy Stripe Nurses. There were a lot of nurse movies. There are even sequels to this one: The Swinging Cheerleaders, Revenge of the Cheerleaders and Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend.

The coach is Patrick Weight, who was in so many 70s and 80s scumbag movies. Track of the Moon Beast, the handsy truck driver in Gradation Day, Mr. Peterbilt in Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, a gardener in Young Lady Chatterley, the stepfather in Wicked Wicked…his career was something.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Sometimes I wonder how far a movie can go down the toilet. Good news — Chained Heat left me with little room to ponder. It’s written and directed by Paul Nicholas, who brought us another slice of insanity, Julie Darling.

This is yet another descent into madness for poor Linda Blair, who has endured some of cinema’s worst tortures. Here, she’s naive teenager Carol Henderson, sentenced to serve 18 months in the slammer for accidentally killing a man. As the new fish, can she survive?

This is one horrifying prison. Warden Backman (John Vernon) has a hot tub where he films pornography with the inmates. Captain Taylor (Stella Stevens) is a madame who uses the inmates to make money when she’s not making whoopee with Lester (Henry Silva). Meanwhile, Lester is making time with the prison’s leader of the white girls, Ericka (Sybil Danning!), who is battling the leader of the black girls, Dutchess (Tamara Dobson, Cleopatra Jones) and strangely TV’s Jason of Star Command) for dominance.

Edy Williams, the former wife of Russ Meyer, shows up, as does Nita Talbot (Marya from Hogan’s Heroes) and Louisa Moritz from The Last American Virgin and New Year’s Evil.

Because this was made in the 1980s, the ladies want to riot in the hopes of getting a better warden. Instead, perhaps they should seek the means of power for themselves. Then again, you can’t expect a 1983 women in prison movie to be woke. You have two men in prison, and you need to know what and when it was made for.

In my perfect world, Sybil and Linda would have teamed up for Thelma and Louise and spent most of the movie’s running time killing men with chainsaws. This is probably why I don’t get to make the movies, only write about them.

Also known as Cruisin’ High, this stars two actors from another 1976 teens in trouble movie, Derrel Maury and Steve Bond, who were in Massacre at Central High AKA Sexy Jeans. As for the titular Eddie “Cat” Murkil, actor David Kyle is now a missionary and religious speaker after being an actor and male prostitute.

Eddie and the Silks are white kids playing around at being a gang, which means stealing cars, robbing businesses, fighting with other gangs and because this is a 70s drive-in movie, sleeping around. Eddie’s brother Joey (Bond) has already been through all of this and tries to warn his sibling to go straight. He kills Punch, the leader of the gang, takes over and pretty much gets them all killed when he rumbles with a Latino gang. He’s also trying to make time with his brother’s wife, except she’s already cheating on his brother, so he ties up her new man and shoots her in the lady parts. This is a scene at odds with some of the hijinks here, just like the shower stabbing scene earlier.

Either you look like a kid or a twenty-year-old teenager in this.

But hey, vans are cruising, which is what I watch movies for.

In case you recognize Eddie, well, he’s Judith Myers’ boyfriend.

This was re-released as its alternate title in 1979, Cruisin’ High, with a different ad campaign, then again under that name on VHS in 1985 with a totally different look, trying to be tougher than it is. That’s funny because it cut all of the gun violence and the shower stabbing.

In Germany, it was released as CATS – Die Klasse von 1976, in Spain as Eddie el gato and had two incredible working titles: L.A. Gangs Rising and Street Kids of America.

Also, as I always note this, Doodles Weaver is in this!

You can watch this on Tubi.

Based on Catherine and Co. by Edouard de Segonzac, this is about Catherine (Jane Birkin) — are you shocked? — who becomes a sex worker and starts her own business. She also sells stock and repurchases her business.

Directed by Michel Boisrond, this was written by Catherine Breillat, whose first novel at 17, l’Homme facile (A Man for the Asking), was banned for French readers under 18. She would go on to make Romance and Anatomy of Hell, both of which feature adult actor Rocco Siffredi. She also acted in Last Tango in Paris.

She isn’t without controversy, as actress Caroline Ducey accused her of allowing actors to go too far with her sexually during Romance (not Siffredi). She has also been outspoken about actress Asia Argento, who had starred in her film The Last Mistress. She didn’t believe that Weinstein was guilty and referred to Argento as being involved in “semi-prostitution.” Argento responded by calling Breillat “the most sadistic and downright evil director she’d ever worked with.”

Man, Christopher Lee may rival Donald Pleasence for not being able to say no — I say this with full knowledge that the former turned down Halloween while the latter said yes to that series more than he should have — and here he played Sax Rohmer’s “yellow peril” character of Fu Manchu, who is joined by his just as sadistic daughter Lin Tang. She’s played by Tsai Chin, who was a Bond girl twice in You Only Live Twice and Casino Royale, topped the music charts with “The Ding Dong Song,” and played Auntie Lindo in The Joy Luck Club.

Rosalba Neri is also in this, and you know, as bad as this movie might be, Rosalba Neri is in it. You should be so lucky as to get to spend 92 minutes with her.

This is the fifth and final time that Sir Lee played Fu Manchu, if you can believe that. Also starring in this movie is a substantial amount of pilfered footage, including the entire opening effects sequence from A Night to Remember and the dam bursting sequence taken from Campbell’s Kingdom.

There’s lots of fog, which I appreciate, and a plot about freezing the oceans, which I am also totally down with. Man, is Fu Manchu the good guy?

Al Adamson should never have made a children’s film. This is the man who made Psycho a Go-Go, featuring two different softcore movies with flying hostesses (The Naughty Stewardesses and Blazing Stewardesses), the staggering Dracula vs. Frankenstein, and a Filipino horror movie that was dubbed, tinted in neon hues, and released as Horror of the Blood Monsters. And, oh, by the way, his film Satan’s Sadists was shot at Spahn Ranch, and he was not shy about using that fact to promote the movie. And how can we forget his rip-off of Eddie Romero’s Blood Island films, the impressive Brain of Blood?

But yeah. So then he decided to make a movie for the kids, it failed, he went into real estate and then ended up murdered by a contractor and buried in the cement under a new hot tub.

So are you ready for Carnival Magic? No. I really don’t think you are.

According to an article in the Austin Chronicle, even the way that film was discovered is unsettling. Alamo Drafthouse programmer Zack Carlson said, “I didn’t know about the movie until I already owned it. It was an entire movie on one giant reel, and written on the side of it, in Sharpie, it said Carnival Fucking Magic. It completely decimated everyone. We couldn’t understand what the movie was, because although it’s made under the guise of a children’s film, it features domestic abuse, vivisection, and, even more uncomfortably, it just has this pervasive air of stale, alcoholic uncles. It’s the most quietly inappropriate kids’ movie ever made. You can tell it was made by people who have never spent any time around children.”

At face value, the movie is all about Markov the Magnificent (Don Stewart, who appeared on the soap opera Guiding Light for sixteen years), a magician and mind reader whose career has hit a skid. However, when he teams up with a talking chimp — after a while, no one is really all that amazed that monkeys can speak — named Alexander the Great, their dirt-poor Stoney Martin Carnival finally has a chance to succeed. Then again, Kirk the alcoholic lion tamer (Joe Cirillo, who played cops in everything from Maniac Cop 2 to Splash, Ghostbusters and Death Wish 3) and the doctor who wants to examine Alexander’s brain may screw it all up.

Of course, Al’s wife, Regina Carrol, shows up. But what you don’t expect is that the monkey loves women’s bras and stealing cars. You might wonder what a child would want to see this or how they’d react being dropped off at the theater in 1981 by their parents and having to confront this film. I’m in my forties and barely survived it with my insanity intact (to be fair, I’ve gone back more than a few times to try and watch it again).

See, there’s a war brewing between Markov and Kirk. Our hero doesn’t like telling many people, but he was raised by Buddhist monks who taught him hypnosis, levitation, and how to communicate with animals. The main problem is that the more he talks to Kirk’s animals, the less they take our villain as their master.

Speaking of talking, that’s pretty much all this movie does. Everyone talks, about losing their wives, potentially losing their daughters, leaving behind their old lives and worries about their future. I’m not really sure what children want to see, the inner workings and turmoil of a ratty circus. After all, we’ve all come to realize just how sinister the big top is, and this movie will do nothing to dissuade you from that notion.

I really have no idea who this film is really for. But yet, that’s part of the charm. Every year, numerous movies are made for kids that quickly fade away. Somehow, this oddity persists, even though the print for it remained hidden for decades. Beyond all rational reasoning, Carnival Magic is available to watch on Netflix — albeit with riffing from Mystery Science Theater 3000 — and ready to mess with anyone’s brain that stumbles across it.

You can get this from Severin.

The sequel to If You Don’t Stop It… You’ll Go Blind!!! This makes me remember when HBO used to show burlesque, which was weird after porno chic, as it was all these old comedians telling the same jokes and girls barely getting naked, yet at the same time, you could go see full penetration adult movies. However, this film is filled with dirty jokes, one after another, with some minor nudity. It was re-released three years after its initial release because Robin Williams was featured in it before he became a star. That said, he wasn’t in the 1977 version. They went and found the cut footage and put it back out, leading to a lawsuit.

Speaking of stars, L.A. billboard icon Angelyne, Ron Jeremy, Tallie Cochrane (AKA Viola Reeves, Kay Geddes, Grace Turlie, Talia Wright, Silver Fox and Chick Jones) and Uschi Digard all show up.

Director I. Robert Levy transitioned from editing 1970s TV to making these two movies, writing them with Mike Callie and Mike Price. There’s nothing like this today; it’s just a total piece of junk with a great title, a better poster, and an audience that was looking for something, anything, in the days before cable adult films.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed and produced by Matt Cimber and written by Mikel Angel under the pseudonym of George Theakos, The Candy Tangerine Man presents the dual lives of businessperson Ron Lewis (John Daniels). By day, he’s a successful executive, a loving husband and a devoted father. By night, he’s the Black Baron, riding down the Sunset Strip in his yellow and red Rolls Royce to collect the money from his sex workers.

He was a GOOD FATHER by day…and a MEAN MUTHA at night!

Unlike every real pimp in the world, he treats his women right. Sure, some of them try to steal money from him and he has to deal with them, as well as organized crime, but he’s selling sex for the betterment of his family. See? He’s an alright guy. Sometimes, you just need to keep the girls in line as well as protect them from some guy going all The New York Ripper on them.

While this is derivative of every other blacksploitation movie, it does get to the hand down the garbage disposal gore scene two years before Rolling Thunder.

Git Back JACK–Give him no JIVE…He is the BAAAD’EST Cat in ’75!