JUNESPLOITATION: Girl With the Red Lips (1986)

Posted on by

June 10: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Jess Franco!

I am down to 187 of 206 Jess Franco movies, using this list on Letterboxd. What’s left?

  • Claire
  • Las Tribulaciones de un Buda Bizco
  • Las Chuponas
  • Lola 2000
  • The Tree from Spain
  • Las playas vacias
  • Oro espanol
  • Estampas guipuzcoanas número 2: Pío Baroja
  • El destierro del Cid
  • A Man, Eight Girls
  • El misterio del castillo rojo
  • El huésped de la niebla
  • Voces de muerte
  • Sida, la peste del siglo XX
  • In Pursuit of Barbara
  • El abuelo, la condesa y Escarlata la traviesa
  • Montes de Venus
  • Lascivia

Several of these movies may have never been made. Many could be lost.

That said, Jess Franco sure liked making the same movie over and over again with some variations.

La chica de los labios rojos is in the same world as Kiss Me Monster, Red Lips, Two Undercover Angels, Red Lips, Two Spies In Flowered Panties and Red Silk. There’s either one or two spy girls in these movies, as well as diamond theft. Jess was big on diamonds being stolen. I love him for this.

Terry Morgan (Lina Romay, who else?) is our heroine, Al Pereira (Antonio Mayans) shows up, Jess has a cameo as Professor Karame and yes, there is a Jess Franco cinematic universe. Somehow, only 29 people have seen this on Letterboxd and 56 on IMDB. Can you imagine this? Is it because I had to go to DVD Lady to get this? That’s where my mania is, paying people $12 for low-quality files of Jess and Bruno Mattei movies so I can cross them off my list.

rllr on Mubi said: “Another “Red Lips” sequel, but this time the characters explain the film through non-stop dialogue. Boring exposition from start to finish. Like some other ’80s films from Franco, I can’t really see ANYTHING remotely interesting to ANYONE, but probably some freak “had a good time with it”.”

Yes, I am triggered.

I watch these movies, however, I can get them and at whatever quality they exist in. You can’t get these in pristine 4K — give Severin time — and so you just have to be happy with things you can barely see, but then Lina Romay’s eyes and smile call out to you through the multi-dub haze and tell you it’s all going to be OK. Sure, your 401K is ruined, you’ll work hard until the day you die and not many people will miss what you’ve left behind — thousands of diatribes about movies under a hundred people even care about — but damn it, she and Jess Franco found one another and built a love story around how much he enjoyed zooming his camera into her lady parts and he won a lifetime achievement ward in Spain, which thrills me every time I think about it. Oh you magical ghost of Lina, captured like amber, smiling back at me, saying that for now, it will all be alright. For now, I will watch you hop into beds with strange men and steal diamonds and leave behind notes in lipstick on their mirrors.

TRIBECA FESTIVAL 2025: Lemonade Blessing (2025)

Posted on by

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Official synopsis: Freshly tossed into a private Catholic high school by his devout mother, John (Jake Ryan) falls head over heels for a devious classmate ready to push his faith (and morals) to the brink with a series of increasingly uncomfortable actions, all in the name of love. 

You don’t have to have attended Catholic high school to fully appreciate writer/director Chris Merola’s terrific debut feature dramedy Lemonade Blessing. Its awkward, cringe-inducing, heartbreaking, and triumphant themes and scenes are relatable to everyone who has been a teenager or is currently going through those difficult years. 

Jake Ryan is marvelous as John, a freshman at a Catholic high school who lives under the strict rules of his strongly religious mother, Mary (Jeanine Serralles). The poor fella can’t even have a few moments of self-gratification in the tub without his mom hanging outside the door, haranguing him. 

Socially awkward John befriends some male classmates whose ideas of how relationships with girls should be handled come from watching porn videos. He soon falls for Lilith (Skye Alissa Friedman) — you’ll notice a pattern in certain character names — a girl with issues of her own, and whose strong personality John is no match for. She gives him increasingly unnerving tasks to perform to continue dating her, which leads the boy to question his faith, his behavior, and his place in the world.

Merola superbly balances the dramatic elements of John’s existential and philosophical journey with comical sequences — both of which are calculated to make viewers squirm and wince, from awkward makeout scenes filmed close up to blasphemies galore. 

Ryan and Friedman are outstanding as the teen couple navigating their first attempts at romance, and Serralles also shines as John’s struggling mother. The supporting players all give top-notch performances, as well.

Along with all of Lemonade Blessing’s awkwardness and discomfiture, the film boasts a big heart. It’s a truly remarkable coming of age story for today, but one that is highly relatable no matter a viewer’s age.

Lemonade Blessing screens as part of the 2025 Tribeca Festival, which runs June 4–15 in New York City. For more information, visit https://www.tribecafilm.com

Dead, White & Blue (2025)

Posted on by

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. In addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, voice-over artist, and sometime actor and stand-up comedian, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and has made multiple appearances on Making Tarantino: The Podcast. He also contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine, the B & S About Movies Podcast, and the Horror and Sons website. His most recent essay, “Of Punks and Stains and Student Films: A Tribute to Night Flight, the 80s Late-Night Cult Sensation,” appeared in Drive-In Asylum #26.

One of my favorite obscure film genres is “films with comedy redubbing,” where filmmakers take existing footage and add a new, comedic soundtrack. Most folks-in-the-know would probably consider What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), as the first of its kind, a film where Woody Allen took a Japanese spy film and redubbed it to hilarious effect. But Jay Ward, the creator of Rocky and Bullwinkle, was there before Allen with his syndicated TV show Fractured Flickers (1963). Ward and his voice-actor cohorts, like Paul Frees, Bill Scott, and June Foray, used footage from silent films and turned Lon Chaney, Sr.’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame into Dinky Dunstan, Boy Cheerleader and Rin Tin Tin into Foam, King of the Mad Dogs. The beloved Ward was a genius, and his show was way ahead of its time. It could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the best skits from SNL today. 

Over the years, there have been a few more of these Frankenstein-like creations: J-Men Forever (1979), created by The Firesign Theater, which used old Republic film serials and was a staple of the classic USA Network show Night Flight; Revenge of the Sun Demon, a/k/a What’s Up, Hideous Sun Demon (1983), a riff on The Hideous Sun Demon (1958), with a young Jay Leno voicing the title character; Mad Movies with the L.A. Connection (1985), a syndicated TV series created from public-domain features; and Kung Pow! Enter the Fist (2002), where comedian Steve Oedekerk, redubbed all the characters and injected himself into a Jimmy Wang Yu movie.* Los Angeles film archivist Mike Davis and his company Stag Films have done Sex Galaxy (2008), with footage from Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), and President Wolfman (2012), based on The Werewolf of Washington (1973). I recently saw Dead, White & Blue (2025), Davis’s latest film, at the wonderful Babylon Fest at the Babylon Kino in Columbia, South Carolina.

To create the “green movie,” so named because it uses recycled footage, Davis poured over more than 300 public domains films—mostly training and educational films from the U.S. government, military, and law enforcement—to create a zany tale about the KKK’s using a shrink ray (like in The Fantastic Voyage (1966)) in an attempt to retrieve an incriminating bullet from the body of a dead black man who was killed by a racist cop. And that’s just for starters, as the main plot takes various turns and digressions before ending with a hilariously over-the-top “Go Murica” image from some forgotten training film.

The festival audience got a kick out of Dead, White & Blue, as did I, even though it didn’t play in its optimal setting as a midnight movie. (And I’m pretty sure that for many of us in attendance, the ingested substances hadn’t even kicked in.) I can’t imagine how much work it took to find the footage, put it together into a cohesive narrative, and then retcon a funny dub track. (One thing in Davis’s favor was that his “lead actor” was in multiple films.) I suspect that you could make a dozen indie films in the time it took to create this small wonder. Many jokes, both broad and obscure, hit the mark. (I was the only one who laughed at this sly exchange between two characters: “What’s happening now?” “I liked the original better!”) My only quibble with Davis’s stellar editing and joke writing is that, at 87 minutes, the movie is about 15 minutes too long. Some judicious editing of the sluggish sections would put this film in a league with J-Men Forever, the platinum standard for this tiny genre.

Dead, White & Blue is currently on the festival circuit. Check it out. I’m going to seek out the two earlier films by Mike Davis. He’s an amazingly talented guy.

*I’m excluding films like Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) with Steve Martin and Allen’s Zelig (1983), where actors interact with old footage without a completely new dub track.

TUBI ORIGINAL: The Killing Cove (2025)

Posted on by

I was starting to get worried. There hadn’t been a new Chris Stokes movie on Tubi for a long time and I wondered, has the well gone dry? I am happy to tell you that The Killing Cove is here and it’s his best one to date. It has the Tubi Movie Recommendations & Reviews Facebook group all over the place- angry, confused, fired up, loving it- and such a mess of emotions.

Sisters Sarah (Precious Way) and Kristen Donald (Madison Epps) have just moved to town with their college professor father, Charles (Tremayne Norris). The first night there, a college party gets out of hand, one of them gets roofied by a jock named Jeffrey  (Bishop Freeman) and now, they want to find out how to get justice. Or revenge. But soon, clouds of smoke start to appear on campus, sending their friends to their deaths, like something out of a krimi movie. Or a giallo! Yes, this is more Black Giallo from Stokes! I’m loving it!

Who could it be with all these red herrings? Friendly guy, lab-loving Wayne (Aaron Bryce Sheats)? Charles trying to get revenge on the girls for their outing him and his date raping ways? Or is it much, much deeper?

This is my 25th Chris Stokes movie, and man, his Tubi work keeps getting better. It’s as if someone who only saw I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream made giallo and krimi without knowing that those essences are inside the DNA of those films, the beating hearts that flow the blood through those filones. They don’t need to know where they come from; they only need to know that they are. Films that have moments where women ingest green gas that makes them bang their heads into walls until they’re dead, allowing a masked villain to get away with no trace. It’s no different than an Edgar Wallace novel, even if it has no idea who that is. The magic of film and of Tubi is that it can unite cultures that would never speak to one another to make something that entertains us.

You can watch this on Tubi.

JUNESPLOITATION: The Girl from Starship Venus (1975)

Posted on by

June 9: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Free Space!

Hey Derek Ford, thanks for making this movie, which is also called The Sexplorer. Man, it’s as scummy as I would expect from you.

Monika Ringwald AKA Marilyn Rickard was in Satan’s Slave and British men’s magazines like Witchcraft and Health and Efficiency. Here she’s a girl from Venus who has come to our planet to explore, which leads her to a gym with naked people, an adult movie theater, a wedding and a balloon room, all guided by the voiceover of her leader.

Mark Jones would one day be an Imperial Officer, but he plays Lecher here. Prudence Drage would be the handmaiden in the Bible fantasy in A Clockwork Orange, but she was also in two of the Adventures of… movies, Virgin Witch and Eskimo Nell. Tanya Ferova played a stripper in this and Terror. Juliet Groves was also in Naughty Girls and Keep It Up, Jack, which also had Veronica Peters, who posed for plenty of men’s magazines in addition to being in this.

When this came to America, pun not intended, it had inserts.

Murder, She Wrote S1 E18: Murder Takes the Bus (1985)

Posted on by

Jessica and a slew of passengers are forced to take refuge from a storm at a remote diner when one of the passengers is found stabbed in his seat on a bus to Boston.

Season 1, Episode 18: Murder Takes the Bus (March 17, 1985)

Tonight on Murder, She Wrote…

JB is giving a speech to the Maine Sheriffs’ Association and Amos picks her up, only for his car to die. So why not take the bus?

Who’s in it, outside of Angela Lansbury, and were they in any exploitation movies?

Jane Pascal is played by one of my biggest movie crushes, Linda Blair. Do I have to tell you what movies she was in? I mean, I did a list of Ten Linda Blair films. OK, The Exorcist, The Exorcist II: The Heretic, Born Innocent, Sarah T. – Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic, Airport 1975, Chained Heat, Savage Streets and so many more.

Sheriff Amos Tupper is, as always, Tom Bosely. Will this episode be the time he changes the title of the show to Amos, She Blew?

Ben Gibbons is Michael Constantine, Gus from My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Santa from Prancer and has roles in Thinner, Pray for Death and even a turn as The Sorcerer in Electra Woman and Dyna Girl.

Steve Pascal is Terence Knox, who was in Children of the Corn II, From a Whisper to a Scream and the TV show Tour of Duty.

Professor Kent Radford is Larry Linville, of course, Major Frank Burns from M*A*S*H*.

Miriam Radford is Rue McClanahan, uniting two of the biggest old lady franchises of the 80s, as The Golden Girls and Jessica, kinda, sorta cross over.

Joe Downing is Albert Salmi, whose true love was the stage, not movies or TV. Yet he would be on Daniel Boone and play Alonzo P. Tucker on Lost in Space. He was also in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Viva Knievel!, Caddyshack, Superstition, Empire of the Ants and more. Sadly, he died in a murder-suicide with his second wife, Roberta, who had a restraining order against him.

Don Stroud plays Carey Drayson. Stroud was the son of vaudeville star Clarance Stroud and singer Ann McCormack. After a Hawaiian beach childhood — his mother owned and operated the popular Embers steakhouse/nightclub where she performed — he was picked by Troy Donahue to be his double on Hawaiian Eye. He moved to Los Angeles, where he managed the Whiskey-A-Go-Go before Sidney Poitier got him into acting. He’s in a bunch of the Roller Blade films — he’s Kabuki Devil in Legend of the Roller Blade Seven — as well as showing up in movies like Sweet Sixteen, The Amityville Horror, The Choirboys and Von Richthofen and Brown.

Ralph Leary is played by Mills Watson, who was in Cujo and Up In Smoke.

Cyrus Leffingwell is David Wayne, Dr. Amos Weatherby from House Calls. He was also in the movie version of It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman! In a Golden Girls moment of trivia, he was Blanche’s father, Big Daddy Hollingsworth, on the show.

John Davis Chandler (Bleak from Adventures In Babysitting) is Gilbert Stoner.

Charles Bazaldua has the role of man. Just a man.

What happens?

If you’re on a bus with Jessica Fletcher and can hear the Psycho music, you are going to die. Everyone on this bus — which Jessica and Amos got on after their car broke down — has no clue. But it’s raining so hard that they decide to stop at the Kozy Korner Kitchen, one of those diners in the middle of nowhere that are open all night and only on TV shows.

One of the men on the bus is a recently released convict who has already battled with Steve Pascal, so is anyone surprised when that criminal ends up dead back on the bus? The crook had been in jail for 15 years. One of his partners died during a robbery and the other has never been seen after the shootout.

Jessica tries to clear her head and goes to play a video game. In a past episode, it was established that Jessica loves arcades.

Amos is on the case. When Jessica tells him that the woman killed by the convict has the same last name as the bus driver, he tells her that he already figured it out. Amos really wants to get going and win a TV set at the police event, but they’re stuck here. Maybe if he solves a case on his own, Jessica will finally give up her Cabot Cove.

Amos is right. The bus driver did stab the guy. But he was already dead.

So who is the killer?

The phone is out, but the CB is working. And yet, someone has a CB radio here, and that too gets destroyed. It gets shot. So everyone is cut off, by the rain, by the lack of phone, by the CB being blown up and now, a killer is loose.

Who did it?

Amos was right. The bus driver did kill the convict. He just tried to make everyone think they were in a giallo.

Who made it?

Another episode directed by Walter Grauman. It was written by Michael Scheff (who wrote Airport ’77) and his wife, Mary Ann Kasica.

Does Jessica get some?

Don’t you think she should show Amos some Happy Days because he finally got it right?

Does Jessica dress up or act drunk?

No, but she does wear a fashionable Burberry trench.

Was it any good?

I mean, this has a fantastic cast. I’ll say yes.

Any trivia?

Salmi is the only Murder, She Wrote suspect who ever really killed someone.

Is there a TV Guide ad?

Yes! Finally!

Give me a reasonable quote:

Jessica Fletcher: Oh, did you reach them?

Sheriff Amos Tupper: Yeah, said we’d be there about 8:00. Probably miss the hors d’oeuvres.

Jessica Fletcher: Well, no serious loss, I’m sure.

Sheriff Amos Tupper: Ms. Fletcher, the Main Sheriffs’ Association lays out the finest spread east of the Alleghenies.

What’s next?

While in the hospital with a fractured leg, Jessica investigates the murder of a doctor.

JUNESPLOITATION: The Doberman Gang (1972)

Posted on by

June 8: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Heists!

Dillinger, Bonnie, Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and Ma Barker are the Doberman Gang, six Dobermans who join the gang of Eddie Newton (Byron Mabe), Sammy (Simmy Bow), June (Julie Parrish) and former Air Force dog trainer Barney Greer (Hal Reed). Oh yes — there’s also a bulldog named J. Edgar.

Eddie and June have been a couple, but she soon sees that he could throw her away at any time. She starts getting close to Barney, who soon learns that this is a criminal plan to train these dogs. He’s told that he’ll be killed if he tries to get away, so he works with them in the hopes that he can save the dogs and June. But he soon has second thoughts when he learns that the dogs will be killed.

Good boys. J. Edgar gets them to run off with the money. The bad news is that one of the dogs was hit by a car, and I could have done without that part. Except that in the sequel, The Daring Dobermans, that dog is fine. Whew.

There are also two more movies in the series, The Amazing Dobermans and Alex and the Doberman Gang.

I didn’t have to worry so much, as this was the first movie to have the “No Animals Were Harmed” onscreen credit from the American Humane Association.

This was directed by Byron Ross Chudnow and written by Louis Garfinkle, who also wrote I Bury the Living, Face of Fire, The Hellbenders, Little Cigars and The Deer Hunter—yeah, I know, wow—and Frank Ray Perilli, who wrote Mansion of the Doomed, the Michael Pataki adult Cinderella, End of the World, Dracula’s Dog, the adult Fairy Tales, Laserblast, The Best of Sex and Violence and co-wrote Alligator with John Sayles.

Dimension Pictures played this as a double feature with The Twilight People. I love that!

Image from Mike’s Take On the Movies.

JUNESPLOITATION: Thrilling Bloody Sword (1981)

Posted on by

June 7: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Kung Fu!

Directed and co-written — is unleashed a better word? — by Hsin-Yi Chang (Snake In the Eagle’s Shadow 2, Kung-Fu Commandos), Thrilling Bloody Sword is a movie that can only be described by a run-on sentence of a paragraph: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves meets Russian adventure film plus Hong Kong wuxia with effects and colors that are a blend of Shaw Brothers horror, Mario Bava wizardry and cardboard magic, all infused with moments that would seem low tech even in the days of Georges Méliès while ideas and music are openly stolen in the ways of Bruno Mattei and Godfrey Ho, plus fighting bears, paper mâché demons, more borrowing from Flash Gordon than Star Wars, swords that shoot other swords, a BDSM costume for its heroic Prince that would have Chang Cheh wondering, “Is that too femme?” and a comet impregnanting a queen.

You know how when people talk up a movie and it never lives up to everything they’re telling you? This is not that movie.

Yaur-gi (Fong Fong-Fong) is the girl born from that comet, a princess to the King and Queen, who dies giving birth to a Cronenberg-esque lump with a beating heart. The King wants nothing to do with that “little ball of flesh” and sends her, like Moses, down the river where the seven dwarves find her. Prince Yur-juhn (Lau Seung-Him) falls in love with her and has to prove himself to the King, the same one who sent his daughter in a boat to her doom. That same dumb leader also has hired two magicians, Gi-err (Elsa Yeung Wai-San) and Shiah-ker (Chang Yi), to get all the demons out of his country. The problem is that they are collecting those demonic guys and getting ready to take over, as they also pray to a Satanic figure by the name of Spirit Ah-Ua.

Don’t worry, our heroes have a fairy who used to be a rabbit and a super magic user with a butt for a head to help them out. And the dwarves used to be generals who were shrunk down but could still fight. And fart. But mostly fight.

Yaur-gi is saved by the Prince, and she falls in love with him, but he’s off fighting a nine-headed dragon. When Yaur-gi comes to meet him after he defeats the monster, he’s turned into a bear and runs into the woods. So they put him in a barrel filled with healing chemicals, and he gets that really wild armor that looks like either something a bad guy feuding with Jushin “Thunder” Liger would wear or something out of an Italian peplum.

There are also literally hundreds of fights and a Magic Monster who lives in a coffin box like those Robobeast toys that Panosh Place put out for Voltron. What follows after this is a multiple sword battle with crystal, laser and shooting swords, people flying around on wires and music stolen from various movies, including Battlestar Galactica.

If that doesn’t make you love this, the production company was named Lusty Electric Industries.

Remember when Jademan Comics — man, the references in this one, sorry — and they were so strange and fascinating? This is even beyond that, a movie that cannot seemingly quit being weird, and it’s barely 80 minutes. Most films would not even go so far as to have a woman give birth to a thing after a comet hits her in the belly, but that’s where this starts. The highest and dankest movie drugs of all time. 999,999 stars out of 5.

Get this from Gold Ninja Video. Seriously, I will post a low-quality video link online, but you need to buy this.

Tales from the Crypt S7 E8: Report from the Grave (1996)

Posted on by

Elliot (James Frain) has discovered how to read the memories of the dead and to test this theory, he and his girlfriend Arianne (Siobhan Flynn) break into the crypt of a serial killer by the name of Valdemar Tymrak (Roger Ashton-Griffiths), who sold his soul to the devil. Not the best memories to use.

“Greetings, hack-riculture fans. I’ll be with you in a moment. I’ve just got to finish with the Artie-chokes. Come on, Artie, die already! Now, a little water and some fear-tilizer, and before you know it, I’ll be horror-vesting my own little field of screams. You didn’t know your pal the Crypt Keeper had a green thumb, did you? Well, I do. And the rest of me is pretty damn moldy, too! Which brings to mind tonight’s tale. It’s about a scientist who’s a bit of a scare-cropper himself. I call this one “Report From the Grave.””

Directed and written by William Malone (Feardotcom, House On Haunted Hill), this has Elliot become convinced that Arianne is stealing his work, so he kills her with Tymrak’s memories. But then he learns that she was on his side all along and now her spirit is being kept prisoner on the other side of death itself. And that’s how things end, with him unable to save her without bringing back the maniac. He kills himself and Arianne spends the rest of eternity tortured by Valdemar.

In the remake of House On Haunted Hill, Valdemar Tymrak is one of the guests who were invited to the house.

This episode is based on “Report from the Grave” from Vault of Horror #15. A new undertaker must go through an initiation to join the Vault-Keeper’s Club by digging up a recently departed member. It was written by Al Feldstein and WWilliamGaines and drawn by Jack Kamen.