Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Hollywood Babylon, the book by filmmaker Kenneth Anger, was banned shortly after it was first published in the U.S. in 1965. It wasn’t reprinted for ten years and when it came back, it was filled with photos of Jayne Mansfield’s car crash, Carole Landis and uncensored images of the Black Dahlia’s destroyed body.

I read it a hundred times in my teens and twenties, a book that taught me the Crowley quote “Every man and every woman is a star,” as well as so many urban legends that probably weren’t true, but who cares? Clara Bow never slept with the entire USC football team, including John Wayne. Mansfield wasn’t decapitated. It finally led to a sequel and a 1992 syndicated series hosted by Tony Curtis.

But before that, there was this, an unauthorized film.

Directed by Van Guylder (The Bang Bang Gang and a later sequel, Hollywood Babylon II, taken from the TV show) and written by L.K. Farbella, this plays just as loose with reality as its inspiration. Fatty Arbuckle was exonerated for the death of Virginia Rappe and paid for it with his career. Here, he gets away with assaulting her with a bottle of champagne. Rudolph Valentino inspired gay clubs and had a fondness for butch women. Erich von Stroheim got off watching women get whipped. And yes, Clara Bow wears out those Trojans. The football players. They all went in bareback.

Yes, Olive Thomas killed herself, but she died in a hospital instead of a hotel room. Wallace Reid was probably addicted to drugs before this movie claims that he was. Charlie Chaplin slept with Lita Grey when she was 15, but did he have other women give him fellatio while she watched, so that he could train her to never have actual sex with. him again? And why does no one look like the actors they’re supposed to be and while this mentions nearly everyone, it gets shy about William Randolph Hearst?

That said, Uschi Digard is in this and sometimes that’s enough to get past any issues with quality and the very judging narration. That’s Jane Ailyson from The Godson and A Clock Work Blue getting whipped. A party scene also has Suzanne Fields in it, Dale Ardor from Flesh Gordon.

That narration — listen to this prose: “This was Hollywood, once considered a suburb of sprawling Los Angeles – destined, perhaps doomed, to become it’s very heart. In 1916, however, it was just a junction of dirt roads and a scattering of orange groves. If there was sin, it was not to be seen. Scandalous sin that is, for what was going on at the studio on Sunset Boulevard was merely play-acting, a Babylonian orgy involving hundreds, nay thousands of actors and extras, portraying the doom Belshazzar. This passion play, D.W. Griffith’s most ambitious epic, was titled “Intolerance” and it set the tone for Tinseltown… something to live up to, something to live down. The shadow of Babylon had fallen over Hollywood. Scandal was waiting just out of camera range.”

There could be an amazing version of this book. Anger would probably be the right choice to have directed it. This ends up being that rare softcore movie that is boring despite having everything it needs to be so exciting.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

La Donna nel Mondo hustled its way into theaters months after the success of Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi’s Mondo Cane. Where the first film was unfocused and just shows, quite literaly, a dog’s life, the sequel lives up to its name: you are going to see women all of the world.

We start in Israel, where we see women start training for their military service, which is soon juxtaposed with the island of Roger Hopkins, who has 84 wives and 52 children.

That difference bwteen women is the highlight of much of the footage, showing women longing for statues and their mates, who instead parade about in full regalia in New Guinea ritual.

There’s a trip to Cannes — this happens in so many mondos that I’ve lost track by this point — as well as a camera club (that’s where Bettie Page got her start, allowing men to pay her to take photos of her as she posed; incel weirdos did not get their start via the internet, dear friends), dude ranches where divorcees get the marital bliss they were missing, prostitution, Japanese women diving for pearls and getting their eyes more Westernized, plastic surgery, forced tattoos, Thalidomide babies and women screaming at God in Lourdes. There’s all that and so much more, all concentrating on, yes, the women of the world, but mostly wanting to show you plenty of flesh along the way.

This movie is dedicated to Italian exploitation films Belinda Lee, who died in a car crash that also injured her boyfriend Jacopetti: “To Belinda Lee, who throughout this long journey accompanied and helped us with love” appears on screen with ten seconds of silence. Jacopetti would be buried next to her thirty years later, never falling out of love with her, despite a lifetime mired in the sheer muck and grime of the mondo.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

As far as I’m concerned, Marisa Mell can be in every giallo. She can be in every movie, actually.

In this one, originally called La encadenada, she plays the live-in psychologist of millionaire widower Alexander’s (Richard Conte, wow what a get!)  slightly — well, perhaps completely — insane silent son. Within a few moments of plot time, she’s marrying the father, disposing of him and then moving on to his son. But then, of course, her evil ex (Anthony Steffen, who somehow played Django more than Franco Nero) shows up to ruin everything.

There are some wild ideas here — Alexander owns the Holy Grail, the real cup and it’s treated with all of the excitement that another Alexander gets when he shows off his magic window — but the film suffers from a lack of style. It needs the sex, the sizzle, the score, the everything that makes a giallo a giallo.

But man, the ending is slam bang great and Mell is awesome in this, an actress in search of a movie. And it’s got a really great supporting cast. Manuel Mur Oti never really directed that I’ve seen before, but his style here seems very point and shoot. That could be the result of the horrible print that is out there. But hey, let’s be honest: you could do worse than to watch Marissa Mell ruin men for 87 minutes.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Gerard Damiano is probably best known for making Deep Throat, the movie that created porno chic, even if the trend of adult films being accepted was happening for some time. It just so happened that his film had a great title and came along at the right time. Before he made it, he made this, a mondo movie that explains how the world is changing and accepting more sexually oriented entertainment.

While the film mainly concentrates on the titillation of meeting sex workers and female adult performers, it does have Damiano interviewing Mary Philips of N.O.W., gay magazine publisher and activist Arthur Irving, and Jack Nichols and Lige Clark from Gay Magazine. That’s pretty much as far as it goes for showing homosexual material. It does, however, spend more time with Screw publishers Al Goldstein and Jim Buckley, as well as Patrick and Tally Wright having hardcore sex for several seconds along with several female models masturbating.

Somehow, this movie uses Marmalade’s “Reflections of My Life,” which went gold in 1971. I have no idea how they got the rights, which is me saying that Damiano just used it.

Adult stars that appear in this include Tallie Cochrane (Can I Do It ‘Till I Need Glasses?, Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman), Rita Vance (The Kiss of Her Flesh), Kim Pope (The Amazing Transplant), Suzzan Landau (Keyholes Are for Peeping), Alex Mann (I Drink Your Blood), Linda Southern (The Headless Eyes), Patrick Wright (the truck driver at the beginning of Graduation Day), Linda Lovelace, who would soon become a big star in Damiano’s next film.

There’s also an appearance by Damiano’s son, in case you’re wondering if this is still exploitation, and early plaster caster Nancy (who is also in Pornography In New York), who is absolutely stunning as she appears as a normal sexual being in a world of idealized bodies.

So much has, pardon the silly pun, changed since Changes was made. Times Square is now all cleaned up and you can find incest porn in the privacy of your home online. Yet the right still pushes to censor whatever they determine as pornography, as that’s a major part of Plan 2025. Who determines what is art and what is porn? Surely the sex shows in this are filth, but they’re also made for consenting adults. Could the films I love that aren’t pornography be considered porn under these rules? Will owning Jess Franco movies be a crime, the video nasties all over again? This movie makes me consider how far we’ve come but how often we slide back, as even young people today are frighteningly puritanical.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Hans Weimar (Tristan Rogers, Robert Scorpio from General Hospital) is a journalist in London writing about au pair girls who starts to investigate Greta (Leena Skoog), a teenage girl who has gone missing. Everyone he meets knows a different version of her, which the movie shows with 3D sequences that the poster promises will put a girl in your lap.

England’s first 3D movie and it’s a Pete Walker sex film. How amazing is culture? Interestingly, the alternate version Three Dimensions of Greta is Four Dimensions of Greta with most of the naughty bits removed, so the fourth dimension is nudity.

Robin Askwith (Confessions of a Pop Performer) is a soccer player, Greta is trapped by gangster Carl Roberts (Alan Curtis), Richard O’Brien shows up years before The Rocky Horror Picture Show and this is totally Akira Kurosawa in that it goes Rashomon and asks us to attempt to determine who Greta really is.

I prefer Pete Walker movies that mix sex and violence. Then again, I do love 3D, even if it’s just a gimmick.  Then again, if the gimmick gets you into the theater — or makes you buy the blu ray — then it’s a good one. I kind of wish that everyone had more, well, dimension to them, which sounds like the kind of thing that someone who watches porn for the plot would say.