Also known as SuperBlack and In Your Face, this movie features Dr. Kinkade giving a special formula to his bodyguard, John Abar, to transform him into a black superhero. It was shot in the Baldwin Hills and Watts neighborhoods of Los Angeles without any permits. When the cops showed up, the actors playing the motorcycle gang surrounded them and the crew kept right on shooting.

Directed by white actor Frank Packard, who acted in a few films and was a gaffer on The Runaways, written by J. Walter Smith (who also plays Dr. Kinkade) and funded and conceived by James Smalley, a pimp from Louisiana who had the connections to film this movie in an actual house of the rising sun. He ran out of money before the film was completed and then sold the movie to the owner of a film processing lab to settle his unpaid bills. It played the Southern drive-in circuit and black theaters, then disappeared until it was re-released in 1990.

John Abar (Tobar Mayo) has come to the aid of the doctor and his family after they move to an all-white neighborhood and are treated exactly as you’d expect. He leads the Black Front of Unity (BFU), which sadly can’t save the life of Kinkade’s son. He’s been given superpowers in the hopes that he can combine Dr. King and Malcolm X, along with the invulnerability he needs to not get killed.

He also gets mental powers, the kind that allow him to teach prostitutes how to kung fu their masters — I wonder how Smalley felt about that — and turns a racist’s dinner to earthworms years before The Lost Boys.

To quote Black Horror Movies — and Abar — the powers may have been his all along: “You see, the potion released from my soul an ancient wisdom. My powers are of a divine origin. I’m only a tool, a mirror reflecting man onto himself. By controlling the mind, I can hasten the retributive forces lodged in his unconscious mind.”

He then lets a literal Biblical plague loose on those honkeys.

This movie may appear cheap, because it is. However, it also presents some really great ideas, featuring a hero who brings intelligence instead of violence and offers multiple perspectives on the 1970s black experience. It’s also bizarre, almost unexpectedly so. I found myself loving every minute of this and I think you will as well.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This movie is quite literally the Justice League — more like the Legion of Doom — of scumbag film superstars.

It was written and produced by Harry Alan Towers, who transitioned from syndicating radio and TV shows to being arrested, along with his girlfriend, Mariella Novotny — who was played by Britt Eklund in Scandal — for operating a vice ring. He jumped bail and ran to Europe while his lover revealed that Towers was a Soviet agent using his girls to get info for the Russians. And Novotny, a high-class call girl, had already been linked to both John and Robert Kennedy, as well as having experience working for MI5.

Once he settled down in Europe, Towers married actress Maria Rohm — she’s in this, as well as several other Jess Franco movies — and started writing and producing movies based on the novels of Agatha Christie, the Marquis de Sade and giallo father — one of many, but a father nonetheless — Edgar Wallace.

Plus, he worked extensively with the second member of our rogue’s gallery: Jesus “Jess” Franco.  This may have been the first film that Jess and Towers worked on, but they would go on to make The Girl from Rio, Venus in Furs, Justine, and Eugenie. The Story of Her Journey into Perversion, The Bloody Judge, Count Dracula, The Blood of Fu Manchu and The Castle of Fu Manchu.

Franco made at least 173 movies and took a gradual slide from horror, Eurospy and softcore films into grimier and grimier films. He’s an acquired taste that I’ve grown to enjoy, yet for every well-made movie like Bloody Moon, you’ll find one where you wonder if Franco had even seen a film before, much less made one.

The reason for that is often the funds that Franco had at his disposal. He’s the kind of filmmaker who would make ten bad movies instead of one good one, provided he had the chance to make a movie.

He reminds me a lot of the third member of our exploitation army of evil, and that would be the man that edited this movie — and from all accounts, directed the pornographic insert (pun intended) scenes — Bruno Mattei..

The French version of this movie features eight minutes of fully adult footage, shot with body doubles in similar settings, all to create the illusion that this movie is much more hardcore than it actually is.

To be perfectly frank, this movie is an aberrant work of absolute indecency, even without seeing gynecological footage of the old in and out.

New inmate Marie (Rohm, yes, the producer’s wife, yet she endures so much that you really get the idea that this is not an example of nepotism) has arrived at Castillo de la Muerte, an island prison where she’s given the number — she no longer has a name — 99.

She’s joined by Helga, now known as 97. She’s played by Elisa Montes, who had appeared in several peplum and westerns before this. And Natalie Mendoz — 98 — is played by Luciana Paluzzi, who was SPECTRE assassin Fiona Volpa in Thunderball, as well as showing up in everything from The Green Slime to A Black Veil for Lisa, The Man Who Came from Hate and The Klansman.

They’re suffering under the oppressive sapphic rule of Thelma Diaz, a tough warden who is, shockingly, played by Oscar-winner Mercedes McCambridge, who won that award for All the King’s Men, was nominated for Giant and was also the voice of Pazuzu. She’s berserk in this movie, laying it all on the line, unafraid to go over the top and then keep her upward trajectory.

“From now on, you have no name, only a number. You have no future, only the past. No hope, only regrets. You have no friends, only me,” she barks at them before they even get into the prison.

Eventually, Diaz takes things too far, but even the new warden, Caroll (Maria Schell, who had an affair so memorable with Glenn Ford that she remembered it two decades later and gifted him with a dog named Bismarck who became his constant companion) can’t improve this hell on earth. So the women escape at the same time that several men break out from the similarly brutal rule of Governor Santos (Herbert Lom).

What happens when you have several damaged women on the run being followed by men who haven’t even seen a woman in decades? And what if that happens in a Jess Franco movie? Yeah, you can see where this is heading.

Rosalba Neri — Lady Frankenstein! — is also on hand to pretty much set the film on fire in every single frame that she shows up in.

Every Women in Prison movie that would follow in the slimy wake of this film would be based on the path it blazed, including Mattei’s own The Jail: Women’s Hell, which he waited nearly four decades to make and adhered mainly to what Franco had started. Well, he was also following the even more berserk template he’d established with Violence In a Women’s Prison and Women’s Prison Massacre. Man, if you want a WIP movie, call Bruno Mattei. Sadly, you can’t. He’s dead.

Or you could call Jess Franco, if he were alive. He made nine WIP movies in his career, including Isla the Wicked Warden, Justine, The Lovers of Devil’s Island, Barbed Wire Dolls, Women Behind Bars, Love Camp, Sadomania and this movie.

This is one of the Franco films where he’s not just making a movie, but a good one. The focus is soft, the feel is surreal and the interplay with the Bruno Nicolai score is fabulous.

Spike and Hoax (Stephen Geoffreys from Fright Night) are cousins who live under the overly watchful eye of Hoax’s super religious mother, Lucy (Sandy Dennis, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, God Told Me To). They couldn’t be more different. Hoax is a nerd afraid of everyone, while Spike is a motorcycle-riding bad boy with the girl of his cousin’s dreams, Suzie (Lezlie Deane, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare).

Both boys start using the novelty phone number 976-EVIL, which reads them creepy-themed fortunes for a few dollars. The real truth is quite sinister: Satan uses the line to find people to give them what they want in exchange for their souls. There’s a great scene here where a religious investigator goes to the home of 976-EVIL, After Dark, Inc. There is room after room of people, Santas, phone sex women, and so much more, but in one dusty, cobwebbed closet lies the machine that powers this foul enterprise.

By the end of this movie, the cousins’ power dynamic has shifted, and the literal gateway to Hell appears in front of them. The way there is littered with ’80s clichés and a tone that is never sure if it fully wants to be comedic or horrific.

Still, this movie is not without its charms. The Deftones wrote the songs “Diamond Eyes” and “976-EVIL” about the film and it was popular enough to bring Spike back for the direct-to-video sequel 976-EVIL II: The Astral Factor. And England met his wife, set decorator Nancy Booth, while directing this movie. She would sneak R+N into the backgrounds of scenes that he would discover each day while watching the dailies. And hey, how many movies have uber religious old women get devoured by cats?

PS – There’s an entire chapter about this film in the book Satanic Panic: Pop Culture Paranoia in the 1980s that is must reading.

I’ve been inspired by the book Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive and have decided that every Wednesday on the site will be films that played as part of the Alamo Draft House Weird Wednesday events.

William Castle loved a gimmick. Here, he promised that each of the thirteen girls would be from their own country, even if Judy Pace plays a Liberian. Our American heroine, Candace “Candy” Hull (Kathy Dunn), is fresh out of school and devoted to trying to win the heart of spy Wally Sanders (Murray Hamilton). She goes into espionage herself before getting in trouble.

The rest of the ladies, except Dunn, Lynne Sue Moon (who plays Mai Ling), and Gina Trikonis (who plays Natasha), won their roles in a contest and use their real names for their roles.

Candy and her friends are all the children of diplomats and used to be among the upper crust. But what happens when a spy is killed? Also, there are fifteen girls, not thirteen. But mostly, it’s Candy using the name Kitten and getting in too deep.

The other girls include Alexandra Basterdo (The Ghoul, The Blood Spattered Bride), Lynne Sue Moon (55 Days at Peking) and Gina Trikonis (West Side Story and later a costume designer).

This played double features with Gidget Goes to Rome, which may not be what you expect from a William Castle Movie.