In the book that inspired these Weird Wednesday posts, Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive, Lars Nilsen writes, “This was promoted as ‘the female James Bond.” There’s some truth to that. Both have two legs and carry a gun. But if I had to choose between a James Bond movie and Ginger, this would win nine throws out of 10. Unlike 007, Ginger is a hard-faced, bleached blonde biker chick from New Jersey who goes undercover to expose a marijuana and white slavery ring. This is about the most mean-spirited, merciless, joyfully cruel example of rough sexploitation you’re ever likely to luck into. It has a casually nihilistic “we’re all scum, but only some of us admit it” attitude that’s, well… refreshing. And it’s hilarious, particularly if you have an irredeemably sick sense of humor. In Ginger’s world, all men are scum who deserve to be killed and worse. And Ginger does much, much worse. With piano wire in one case.”

This stars Cheri Caffaro, who, no offense to Nilsen, was born in Pasadena. At a very young age, she won a Life magazine Brigitte Bardot look-alike contest, beating Portland Mason, James’s daughter. Her husband, Don Schain, may have eventually produced High School Musical for Disney, but he made three scuzzy Ginger movies with his soon-to-be wife: this film, The Abductors and Girls Are for Loving.

Ginger McAllister takes on a job of infiltrating a gang of criminals. This often means sleeping with men and women, which can often mean using piano wire on a dude’s tallywhacker and threatening to cut it off. This feels like porn without penetration, the kind of porn that was playing the Avon and the rougher theaters, as Ginger is tied up and assaulted several times, yet always comes out on top, even when bad guy Rex Halsey (Duane Tucker) rapes her. After all, the cut to her face assures us that she likes this.

If you’re expecting a 1971 grindhouse movie to have any morality… just wait for the scene where Ginger relates how three black guys assaulted her when she was young and how much she hates African-American men, using all the language you would hope she wouldn’t.

That said, this is Tracey Walter’s first movie, playing Ginger’s brother. One day, he would be Bob the Goon.

This is the kind of sex movie that makes no one want to have sex ever again. Bodies just fall onto one another, nudity seems like an attack on you and at no moment does anything feel arousing. Ah, the 007 of 42nd Street. I want to watch her fight Olga.

Tony Anthony played The Stranger in four films — Stranger in Town, The Stranger Returns, The Silent Stranger and this film — plus he’s also in the Zatoichi by way of Italy film Blindman (Ringo Starr is in it!) and wrote, produced and starred in Comin’ At Ya! and Treasure of the Four Crowns, movies that’d start a short 3D boom which ended with Anthony claiming that he made an estimated $1 million worth of lenses before Jaws 3D, the film that ended the trend.

This movie is just crazy — closer to a fantasy movie than a Western — and has no care at all about the fact that it doesn’t follow any rules at all. It’s directed by Ferdinando Baldi, who also made the Mark Gregory-starring Ten Zan: The Ultimate Mission.

The Stranger gets dragged into a ghost town by his horse, who promptly dies. That;s when a family of gypsies pays him to escort Princess Elizabeth Maria de Burgos (Diane Lorys, Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll) back to Spain. There, the Stranger does battle with Vikings, Moors, barbarians, ghosts, a bill and a hunchback. That’s when he lives up to the alternate title — The Stranger Gets Mean — and lets the guns and dynamite do his talking.

Raf Baldassarre is in this, who you may have seen in everything from Hercules In the Haunted World and Eyeball to plenty of Westerns like Dakota Joe, The Great Silence, Sartana Kills Them All, Arizona Went Wild … and Killed Them All! and even played Sabata in Dig Your Grave Friend … Sabata’s Coming. He’s also in both of Luigi Cozzi’s incredbly entertaining films based on Greek myth, Hercules and The Adventures of Hercules.

Morelia is played by Mirta Miller, who somehow unites so many film genres that I love — HBO After Dark semi-sleaze (Bolero), Mexican wrestling films (Santo vs. Dr. Death), giallo (Eyeball), shark movies (The Shark Hunter), sword and sorcery (Battle of the Amazons) and Spanish horror (Vengeance of the Zombies, Count Dracula’s Great Love and Dr. Jekyll vs. the Werewolf).

So yeah. An Italian Western with a four-barrelled shotgun carrying hero traveling through time who doesn’t respect the princess he’s trying to save. If this sounds like Army of Darkness at all to you, please remember that it came out 17 years before that movie.

I’m trying not to make this a thousand words about how gorgeous Claudia Jennings was. Born Mary Eileen “Miomi” Chesterton in Milwaukee — eventually moving to Evanston, Illinois, where her father was the advertising director for Skilsaw — she was a receptionist at Playboy before appearing in a centerfold (November 1969) and becoming the Playmate of the Year for 1970, in less than thirty years. She was an incandescent star, appearing in movies like Unholy Rollers, The Single Girls, Sisters of Death, Moonshine County Express and Deathsport, to name a few. IMDB may tell us that she took her stage name from the character that Angelique Pettyjohn played in The Touch of Her Flesh — debatable, but I wish this was true — and that Aaron Spelling wanted her to replace Kate Jackson on his show Charlie’s Angels but her four Playboy nude appearances scared network executives off, but the truth is, she was here for a brief time and nearly fifty years after her death, I’m still staring at her in any movie she’s in and sighing.

In the July 20oo issue of Femme Fatales, Ari Bass wrote in the article “Claudia Jennings: The Drive-In Diva,” that she had taken to wearing a gold-plated bracelet that said bitch on it. “That’s what I always play in the movies,” Jennings explained. “Though it’s the opposite of what I am really, I’m cast as a spitfire. Bad girl types. I suppose because being submissive is completely alien to me. There aren’t many good female roles in films nowadays, so I figure I’ll come into my own when I’m about 30. At this point, I can’t play kids or hippies, and I sure as hell can’t play the wronged wife because you wouldn’t believe a man cheats on me.”

Ferd Sebastian said the film was written for Jennings, with whom he and his wife Beverly had worked on The Single Girls. “She wanted to do a film with not a lot of dialogue, so ‘Gator Bait was it,” said Sebastian. “I really like to work with the Cajun people. We all piled into our motorhome and left LA… We were headed for the swamps, Myself, Bev, Claudia, our two boys, a dog and a pregnant cat. It was by far the most fun shoot I have ever been on.”

It’s a simple movie. Desiree Thibodeau (Jennings) lives in the swamps, a barefoot girl at one with nature, yet who looks like, well, Claudia Jennings. Ben Bracken (Ben Sebastian) and Deputy Billy Boy (Clyde Ventura) catch her trapping gators and decide that instead of arresting her, they’ll just assault her. That doesn’t work, and as they chase her, Billy Boy accidentally kills Ben. He tells Sheriff Joe Bob Thomas (Bill Thurman) that Desiree did it. So the cops do what they do worst and head into the swamps to arrest her, along with Ben’s father, T.J. (Sam Gilman), and his son Leroy (Douglas Dirkson), a man who was already castrated by Desiree. They even attack her family—Big T (Tracy Sebastian) and Julie (Janit Baldwin)—before she destroys them.

There’s a twist at the end — T.J. might be closer to Desiree than we believed — but really this is all about men being morons and getting turned against one another by a sheer force of femininity. 

The time Claudia Jennings spent in our reality was short. But she lived a life, and we can only wish that she were still here to know just how well-remembered she is.

The Garbage Pail Kids were created by Art Spiegelman and released by Topps in 1985. Yes, the same cartoonist who made Maus. He and Mark Newgarden worked together as the editors and art directors of the project, with Len Brown — the same person who Wally Wood named T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agent Dynamo after and one of the creators of Wacky Packages and Mars Attacks — as the manager and art by John Poundart for the first series, then Jay Lynch, Tom Bunk, James Warhola — the nephew of Andy Warhol — and more.

These cards were a huge success and sold worldwide (they’re called Mr. Creepy in Japan, Totally Broken Kids in Germany, The Filthies in France, Snotlings in Italy and The Garbage Gang elsewhere). They were quite controversial and banned in many schools. And then Original Appalachian Artworks — the same Xavier Roberts who stole the look of Martha Nelson Thomas’ soft-sculpture dolls that came with a birth certificate — sued, and they had to change the logo. But by 1988, the kids were gone. Yet they came back in 2003 and never went away. You can even get blockchain-backed high-end versions of them now.

Look, I’m someone who doesn’t believe in “so bad it’s good” and has found the light in the darkness of so many so-called bad films. This one challenged my will to live, but there are times during it when the overwhelming badness of the film approaches surrealist art, and I laughed so hard that my head began to throb and I was sure this was the stroke that would wipe out my lifelong hard-earned knowledge of Mattei, D’Amato and lesser scumbag directors.

Dodger (Mackenzie Astin) works in the junk store of magician Captain Manzini (Anthony Newley) and is also the target of a gang of toughs led by Juice (Ron MacLachlan) while loving that bad dude’s girl, Tangerine (Katie Barberi), from afar.

To break up all that preteen angst, a garbage can falls from the sky containing green ooze and the Garbage Pail Kids: the always snotty Messy Tessie; the Hawaiian shirt-wearing flatulent Windy Winston; the throw up on command Valerie Vomit (played by Debbie Lee Carrington, memorable as the small-statured Martian rebel in Total Recall); the whining baby Foul Phil; the acne-scarred superhero Nat Nerd and the toe eating reptilian hybrid nightmare called Ali Gator.  None of these characters are in any way endearing, cute, or ugly. They’re borderline upsetting, and the more I think about it, the more I love this movie for being so dead and vacant.

After having our protagonist covered with sewage and abused by the gang, only to be saved by the Kids, it still has Dodger in love with Tangerine, who wants to be a fashion designer and puts the GPK into service as pretty much slaves. The kids steal a Pepsi truck — I can’t imagine Pepsi would have loved how they’re presented in this — and then go to a Three Stooges festival, which makes them so insane that they drink beer with bikers, and Ali Gator gets to eat some toes. Despite being babies and children, the GPK get drunk on beer, which is encouraged by the film, and sing songs so inane that I again started to laugh the kind of frenzied guffaws that only happen when I endure severe physical pain.

Despite the kids being put into the State Home for the Ugly, a place where Gandhi and Santa Claus are executed because this is a movie for children, they escape, ruin a fashion show and refuse to go away, not even following the rules of Mr. Mxyzptlk.

If it seems like Dodger and Tangerine seem on again, off again and ill-matched, well — Astin and Barberi dated and broke up mid-movie. That wasn’t Austin’s only issue. He got the movie without telling his father, John Astin, who tried to get his son out of this film.

Rod Amateau directed and co-wrote this, and his career was, well, something. He started his career doing stunts in movies like Rebel Without a Cause and Mighty Joe Young (he was also a stunt driver for Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker and Thunder Run after this directing career took off) and then wrote and directed episodes of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, produced and directed 78 episodes of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, produced and directed The New Phil Silvers Show, directed nearly every episode of My Mother the Car and also made The Statue, one of the few movies Roger Ebert ever walked out on, as well as High School U.S.A., the movie that convinced Joel Robinson to leave Hollywood; Son of Hitler, a Peter Cushing movie that never played outside of Germany; and he also wrote Sunset, one of the many Blake Edwards films — and mistakes — that a nascent Bruce Willis would make.

I can’t even imagine the horror movie that John Carl Buechler — who did the effects for this as well as TerrorVision, Dolls, Hard Rock Zombies, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and many, many more, as well as directing Cellar Dweller, Watchers 4 and Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood — had planned.

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie grossed just $661,512 during its opening weekend and eventually $1.6 million on a $1 million budget, but was still seen as a major disappointment. Astin told Mental Floss, “The heroes of the entire experience are the seven little people actors in costumes every day in triple-digit heat in the San Fernando Valley. They couldn’t see or hear. There was only so much time they could have the heads on before they ran out of oxygen.”

Effects artist William Butler went even further: “I think it was a stupid idea of a stupid screenplay, with stupid designs, that made for a cacophony of stupidity.”

Also known as The Horror Star and Body Snatchers, this is the tale of Conrad Razkoff (Ferdy Mayne), a horror film star who fakes his death or maybe not, but definitely exists beyond life and death as he wipes out a drama class.

Before that, Ragzoff is in a dentures commercial, and the director argues with him over his acting, so Ragzoff shoves him off a balcony. Then, he visits the drama school and faints from excitement, revived by one of the students, Meg (Jennifer Starrett).

That night, he decides to die and tells his director, Wolfgang (Leon Askin), what he wants for his funeral. As he expires — or fakes it — Wolfgang says, “The world is rid of you, and I am rid of you. Good night, sweet prince of ham!” The great actor rises and kills the disbeliever with a pillow.

Meg, Saint (Luca Bercovici, the director of Ghoulies), Bobo (Scott Thomson, Copeland from the Police Academy series), Eve (Carlene Olson), Donna (Donna McDaniel, Angel), Oscar (Alan Stock) and Stu (Jeffrey Combs, cast for his hair color, really) go to the cemetery after dark to see Ragzoff’s tomb. A film begins, cursing them, before they steal the body and head off to an old mansion in time for the coffin to explode and all sorts of murder, including tongue ripping, black magic and crypt gas.

By the end, the police show up to find Meg surrounded by her dead friends and Conrad rising from his grave to kill a fake psychic and joins his wife, at which point we see the video inside the tomb with the actor saying how much he enjoys being in Hell.

I’m obsessed with the films of Norman Thaddeus Vane, like The Black Room and Midnight. Plus, the scenes of Conrad being a horror star are really Christopher Lee in Uncle Was a Vampire. It’s strange and wonderful. That’s what I want in all my movies.

The Troma “Tromatic Special Edition” Blu-ray includes extras such as the DVD Intro featuring Lloyd Kaufman and Debbie Rechon, an archival audio interview with director Norman Thaddeus Vane, historical commentary with David Del Valle and David DeCoteau, audio commentary from The Hysteria Continues, the original trailer, artwork gallery, an interview with DP Joel King, Troma behind-the-scenes and music videos. You can get it from MVD.