Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

Somehow, this is one of the better shot movies I’ve seen in some time and I was shocked that it was an adult movie. It also has some generally creepy moments in it to the point that if this was a mainstream movie, it would definitely have a cult audience.

Constance Money, fresh from The Opening of Misty Beethoven, is Mary and the movie opens with her swimming, filmed with underwater cameras and creating some arty ways of exploring her. Soon, she and her husband Ned (John Leslie) are making love poolside and he finishes too soon, enraging her. It seems he has a habit of this, but you know, he’s married to Constance Money. Ned screams to Heaven for help, then when there’s no answer, to Hell. He’s soon met by the shadowy Arranger (a man only listed as Andre), who is almost always in shadowy and constantly doing tai chi moves. He gives Ned a special paste that can be put on his body or eaten and soon, he’s able to satisfy Mary. The problem is that he can’t stop being aroused, which leads to him passing on this Satanic ingredient to so many of his friends and everyone starts having the kind of sex that even makes the Devil jealous.

Soon, Eric (Jon Martin), Jane (Sharon Thorpe, Sodom and Gomorrah: The Last Seven Days), Bonnie (Sandy Pinney, Long Jeanne Silver), Kate (Angela Haze, Devil’s Playground), Briscoe (Tyler Reynolds), Ben (Kent Hall), Diane (Lucia Lenki), Helene (Kristine Heller, Confessions), Ned and Mary are all having an orgy, devouring a pink cake and smearing it all over a table, mixing it with the occult powder and basically doing coke with it and smearing it all over one another.

This is a strange one as it starts happy and full of free love, but there are quirky moments that suggest that this could become a horror movie at any time. By the last two minutes, that’s what it is, as the colors start to warp, people start to have little deaths and big deaths during a gigantic lovemaking session between the cast and the Arranger dances around all of them to the bongo beat of Hands Benedict. Then, as everyone lies dying or dead, he picks up Mary and tells her that he saved her, as he has plans for her as they disappear into the Hollywood hills.

Mary! Mary! was directed and written by Bernard Morris, which is a pseudonym. Another alter ego is cinematographer Hans Kristian, who is really Henning Schellerup, the cinematographer of Silent Night, Deadly Night; Kiss of the Tarantula and The Lincoln Conspiracy, as well as the director of In Search of Historic Jesus and Beyond Death’s Door.

Most incredibly, this has the kind of car chase that should be in a 70s action movie instead of pornography. As Hank, Bonnie and Kate speed to the party nude, they’re nearly arrested by the police, played by a blink and you miss her Rene Bond and Ken Scudder from Thundercrack! I couldn’t believe just how amazing this film gets in this scene and in the psychedelic ending, as each person dies and the screen looks like a black light poster. There’s even a scene where Mary and Ned eat steak while having sex, rubbing greasy cuts all over one another. It’s just weird and I mean that in the way that this movie becomes fascinating and even disturbing as they Ned showers her with red wine, making it seem like the two are devouring raw flesh.

This movie blew me away.

Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

We live in the magical kind of world where someone can make a sexy version of Little Shop of Horrors and I think that’s great. By someone, I mean director Carl Monson (The Acid Eaters, Legacy of Blood), writer Eric Norden (A Scream In the Streets) and produced Harry Novak.

Henry (Buck Kartalian, Julius from Planet of the Apes) is a lonely man who lives with his mother Clarice (Lyn Lundgren) who finds a plant that he turns into his friend. That plant has a voice like a sexy woman and likes to eat meat, starting with bug, then frogs, dogs, cats and people. It wants pretty ladies, like the centerfolds — Karen Christy (Miss December 1971) and Danielle De Vabre (Miss November 1971) — hanging up in Henry’s room.

Despite the title, his mother does get chowed down on, as does a cop (Monson), a next door neighbor (Rick Lutze) and that man’s wife, who decides to take Harry’s virginity before the now male and female plants eat her. Seeing as how she’s Rene Bond, this is quite a loss.

Harry decides he’s going to kill his plants — Eve and Adam — but once they have babies, he lets them live. I guess it’s back to being a peeping tom for him, as long as the plants don’t decide to make a meal of him.

You have to laugh at a movie that has Rene Bond worry that her husband is going to leave her because she’s flat chested. If she is, this must be Earth-Russ, the planet where every woman has mammaries that are half their body weight. Also known as The Hungry Pets and Sexpot Swingers.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

The adult films of the 70s and the occult cross over pretty often, inspiring movies like The Devil In Miss Jones, High Priestess of Sexual Witchcraft, Sex Ritual of the Occult and so many more. In director Dominic Bolla and writer Jon Cutaia’s Angel Above — The Devil Blow, a teen named Randy Maldemar (Linda York, using the name Brittany Laine; she’s also in A Scream In the Streets and Panorama Blue) conjures up Satan (Lamar Gilbert) with the Necronomicon — the Simon one? — and black candles on her bedroom table. She proclaims that the devil isn’t attractive enough, so she spurns him, which leads to him infiltrating her holiest of holes and speaking through it, as this becomes The Exorcist but, you know, with more penetration even though the inspiration also has crucifix diddling.

Her mother Turgid (Starlyn Simone, Video Vixens!) attempts to help her by talking to her about sex, but when your daughter has a pre-Chatterbox possessed vagina that can’t be satisfied, the problem needs more than just the talk. Even modern medicine and psychiatry — Dr. I.M. Moribund (Chesley Noone) and Dr. Max Wanker (Nimrod Sappho), come on down — aren’t enough. She nearly eats Wanker’s tongue and launches another man down the stairs. Meanwhile, her mother is too busy sleeping with handyman George (Robert Bedford) and politician Lucius Watergag (John Keith), using the same trick of bending over and looking for the booze they’ve asked for. I was half expecting her to pull out a bottle of J&B at this point.

The only people who might be able to help her are Bible salesmen Peter (John Barnum) and Dennis Harp (Robbie Roberson), who arrive just in time. Sure, Registered Nurse Prudence Enfusoria is being assaulted by the handyman downstairs, but somehow Dennis falls in love with the devil-owned Randy and his strong, confident and romantic lovemaking is enough to push the Devil out of her and…into the nether regions of se Prudence. And she’s played by Rene Bond, so of course if I were a demon who could infiltrate the anatomy of women, that’s exactly where I would enter the devil, so to speak.

Beyond just Chatterbox, this predates another talking ladyparts movie, Le sexe qui parle. I have no idea who wanted this in the 70s, but someone did.

Bolla only made this movie, while Cutaia would go on to make the adult film Judgement Day in which Saint Peter stands before Heaven and reviews the final sex acts of numerous dead people. It has an actress named Morning Star in it, which is another name for Lucifer, in case you want to get hellish.

It’s kind of incredible that this movie exists, another version of the possession movies that I love so much, except, you know, with adult moments. I laughed out loud quite a few times during this and it actually has some cool effects, using slow motion and its small budget to be way more effective than it should be.

The amazing Barefoot and Independent YouTube page has posted a PG cut of this, which is about a quarter of the film’s length. But hey — you could watch it at work. Maybe.

Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

I know Bernard Girard more for the movies he didn’t finish — he was replaced with Lee H. Katzin on What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? by producer Robert Aldrich and started the movie We’re All Crazy Now with The Runaways that was completed by director Alan Sacks and released as Du-beat-e-o — but he did actually direct some efforts, including The Rebel Set, This Woman Is Dangerous, The Happiness Cage, The Mad Room, Gone With the West and Dead Heat On a Merry-Go-Round. He also directed and wrote this movie and man, why are people not clamoring for this to get a blu ray release?

John Blake (Robert Culp) is dissatisfied with the rat race and dealing with the pressures of his family’s architecture business. So he takes his wife Joanna (Samantha Eggar) and moves into his great grandfather’s home The Grove in the countryside and you know what happens when city folk go back to their roots in 1970s movies.

Distributed by Cinerama Releasing Corporation — who also released Asylum, Walking Tall, The Vault of Horror, The Mack, And Now the Screaming Starts!, Terror In the Wax Museum, The Harrad Experiment, Your Three Minutes Are Up, Dr. Death: Seeker of Souls, The Pyx, Arnold and Marco all in 1973 — and produced by Penthouse — which will make sense in a little — this starts strange when everyone back home refers to John’s grandfather as The Colonel and many of them want nothing to do with him. Even the man he hires to renovate the house — Clarence “Big” Miller (blues singer Big Miller, who was the title character in Big Meat Eater) — seems to think that The Colonel doesn’t want John there. His wife doesn’t want to be there either, but there are times that it seems that she loves him and others like she might as well be a ghost.

This was shelved by MGM because it made so little sense. It was based on a novel by Andrew Lytle and that book was a definite ghost story. This can’t make up its mind. That voice saying “Go away” also feels the same way. Just when everything feels dreary, John walks out of his house and finds a white horse that brings him to town and soon has him participating in an orgy set to a live performance of Billy Joe Royal singing “Mountain Woman.” Soon, he’s making love to Luanna Baxter (Sheila Sullivan, AKA Sheila Culp, the wife of our lead actor at the time) and running through the woods completely naked. Yes, Robert Culp, star of I Spy, dashing full dong through a meadow and making love in a waterfall.

Yet when he gets home, his wife claims that he had rough sex with her that night and couldn’t stop touching himself. Was it him? Or was it The Colonel? Or could it be all of those things, as this movie seems to have multiple timeline all within one movie. It all ends with Eggar slashing Culp with a straight razor and him throwing her out the same window that he tossed their TV out of at the beginning of the movie.

I’m not saying this is a good movie, but I am saying that it’s a film with an orgy scene that feels like it could be in The Wicker Man except that everyone eats spaghetti — to be fair, I was once a guest at an OTO lodge party where everyone was eating bowl after bowl of guacamole with no chips, just spoons — before doing a line dance and then having sex and hey, there’s Rene Bond to remind you that Penthouse bought this three years after MGM threw it away. It’s like Antichrist without the cock violence, Dark August but horny, the 70s hippy aesthetic fighting with a movie that wants to be to be something more than it is but possibly made by a director who has no idea how to bring the movie inside his head onto the celluloid. He claimed that it was about “a modern man’s attempt to get away from his contemporary hang-ups by returning to his ancestral home.”

As for Culp, he told The Bucks County Courier, “This is the kind of picture you wait for your whole life.” He also said, “The story is that I decided to do it because I couldn’t understand it. “It’s true, I didn’t understand it. But that was because there were 3 pages of the climax missing!”

The amazing caligula.org site has a great article on this film, which explains how Caligula wasn’t really Penthouse’s first movie.

“There is no telling what condition the movie was in when Penthouse Pictures acquired it. It may or may not have still been the authentic version. It may well have been tampered with by Stone et al or some emissary thereof. But it is unquestionable that Penthouse commissioned a firm to film something new, and it was actually quite beautiful to look at: a psychedelic multiple exposure of a topless dancer, as well as a dancer in a skeleton outfit, all accompanied by an acoustic guitar. That footage was intercut into a domestic scene, as though it were a flashback of some sort. But by the time the movie finishes, we realize that it was not a flashback after all; it was merely meddling by Penthouse. Penthouse further enhanced the film with a country singer surrounded by three nude women.”

Billy Joe Royal’s performance was force-fitted into the scene of the hoedown, but the footage simply did not match, and the intercutting is rather jarring. I wish I could see how the scene originally played. Penthouse then hired an editor to simplify the movie, cutting it down to 74 minutes. In this short version, characters and relationships were never developed or explored, leaving so many loose ends that it’s no wonder people had trouble following the narrative. I would guess that the original was far more ambiguous and a bit challenging, and that the haunted-house story was a suggestion, planted into disordered minds, that flowered under duress. It was surely not only the Robert Culp character who was affected, but the Eggar character too, as well as many others.”

Penthouse replaced the credits with some crazy paintings, then this played theaters and drive-ins on double features with Asylum and The Vault of Horror. Penthouse Pictures Inc. went out of business after this and was replaced by Penthouse Productions, Ltd., which put out Good to See You Again, Alice Cooper and Watched, which were four-walled. They also invested in Chinatown, Day of the Locust and The Longest Yard.

You can watch this on YouTube.