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.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Also known as The Bullet Machine, Clegg Private Eye and Harry and the Hookers, Clegg was directed by one of my favorite British scum directors, Lindsay Shonteff, the same man who brought us Devil Doll, The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World, License to Kill, The Fast Kill, The Million Eyes of Sumuru, Night, After Night, After Night, Permissive, Big Zapper, No. 1 of the Secret Service, Licensed to Love and Kill and so many more. He even made two SOV movies, Lipstick and Blood and The Killing Edge. Born in Canada, he went to the UK to make movies and did what he loved until the day that he died, closing out his life on the last day of production of his final film, Angels, Devils, and Men.

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.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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.