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.

The feature debut of Norman J. Warren, Her Private Hell came about producer Bachoo Sen approached Richard Schulman, owner of London’s Paris Pullman Cinema, with the idea to make their own films. This is how the production company Piccadilly Pictures started.

Schuman was the owner of London’s Paris Pullman Cinema and was showing Warren’s short film Fragment, so they made an offer for him to film two movies for them. The director would later tell Rock Shock Pop!, “I had no idea what the film would be, but to be honest, I would have said yes to anything. I was 25 and desperate to direct a feature film.

The story was written by Glynn Christian, a New Zealand immigrant who based his screenplay on his own experiences as a foreigner living in the swinging London of the 60s.

Marisa (Lucia Modugno, LSD Flesh of the Devil, Danger: Diabolik) has come to London to be a model and the first magazine she works for decides to keep her in a fancy high rise apartment along with their top photographer, Bernie (Terry Skelton). They explain its for her protection and not to be the sole owner of her image, which she soon realizes as the magazine begins to control her every move.

While Marisa sleeps with Bernie, she also falls for Matt (Daniel Ollier, who beat Udo Keir for the role), a young photographer whose avant-garde nudes end up in Margaret — one of the magazine’s owners — possession and get sold to a foreign magazine. The film then becomes all about who Marisa will leave with — Bernie, Matt or alone. And perhaps Margaret and Bernie aren’t strangers to one another, as it turns out.

At once a naive girl done wrong film mixed with a movie about the literal swinging 60s morals, Her Private Hell isn’t the Norman J. Warren you may know and love. This is closer to French New Wave than anything else he’d make.

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.

Directed by Vicente Aranda (The Blood Spattered Bride), who wrote the story with Antonio Rabinad, based on the short story Bailando para Parker by Gonzalo Suárez, Exquisite Cadaver starts with a girl committing suicide by laying down headfirst on train tracks.

We meet a man (Carlos Estrada) who is the publisher of pulp horror — giallo — and someone who has become quite successful as a result. He gets a severed human hand in the mail, which he buries in a park. Another package is sent, this time with a torn dress and a photo of a woman. He also gets a telegram, which his wife (Teresa Gimpera, Hannah Queen of the Vampires) reads and it ends with the promise of sending a forearm. He lies and says its for work, but as she follows him, she notices that he is also being stalked by a woman in a black veil.

The woman is Parker (Capucine, The Pink Panther), who lures the man to her house where she gives him LSD. He staggers through her villa, following the sound of her voice, which leads him to a woman’s body inside a refrigerator. He passes out and wakes up at home, his wife having been called by Parker to get her husband.

The man reveals to his wife that he had an affair with a woman named Esther (Judy Matheson, The House That Vanished; is it too soon to talk about ’72?) who told him “I’d die so that my love for you will last. So that indifference will not kill it” before she laid down on the train tracks, as we saw as the movie began. Except that a detective that the man’s wife hired saved Esther.

As she tried to get her life together, Esther fell for a doctor before meeting Parker, who she soon began an affair with. Parker was in love with her, trying to save her, but Esther never stopped loving the man, finally killing herself. Parker then made this plan to get revenge for her lost love, even cutting. her corpse to pieces, sending each one until finally, the head arrives. The man looks for his wife but she is gone, leaving for Paris and a new relationship with Parker, who has seduced her.

After filming ended, Aranda gave Matheson the silver hand pendant that her character wore in the film. She still has it to this day and even established a trademark of wearing it in her subsequent films.

As for the director, he had an accident on the set which led to him directing much of this movie from a stretcher.

Thanks to Theater of Guts, I know that this was released in the U.S. by Gadabout-Gaddis Productions, who released The Man from Nowhere, Find a Place to Die, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, One On Top of the Other and Marta. According to the site, it played drive-in screens as late as 1983 as a double feature with Twilight Zone: The Movie.

The title Exquisite Corpse comes from the game created by Surrealism founder André Breton that has a collection of words or images collectively assembled by several creators who have no idea what has come before other than a line, which is added to until a complete art piece emerges. The name comes from the phrase that was part of the first work created by the game, “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.”

The Spanish title, Las Crueles (The Cruel Ones), is meant to sound like Les Diaboliques. It was not the title preferred by Aranda.

This was partially shot in the same house as Patrick Still Lives and Burial Ground. Thanks Erica from Unsung Horrors!

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.

“See…Vala, the voluptuous cave babe! See…Mota, the mighty war-lard! See…Dino, the plastic-eating dinosaur!”

Directed by Ed De Priest — who was making adult films as Jules Martine all the way up to 1998 — and written by Akdon Telmig — which is one letter away from being Vodka Gimlet, which Ed Wood drank a lot of and yes, he wrote this one — One Million AC/DC is a movie where people are menaced by someone in an ape suit and a rubber dinosaur when they aren’t having making softcore love.

Stuntman Gary Kent is the leader of these cave people, it’s shot in Bronson Park and Gary Graver was running the camera. All of these facts may be more interesting than the movie. But man, who else other than Graver could work with Orson Welles and Wood, who wrote the phrase “Tyrannosaurus style” for this. Then again, the line “Nothing has changed, right down through the ages. Man has to kill. Man has to eat. Man has to have his woman.” is pretty solid.

You know who is listed as the historical consultants? Bob Cresse and Lee Frost. I laughed for about five minutes reading that.

This also has a lot of crossover with the casts of two movies from 1968, The Kiss Off and The Kill (which was directed and written by Graver).

If you can get past all of this, well, dark and unsexy sex, you will come to the realization that this is the same dinosaur toy that was in David L. Hewitt’s The Mighty Gorga.

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.

Directed by Irwin Meyer (who wrote the Hollywood Babylon TV series) and written by Alexander Panas, this is quite literally about a terror-filled post-wedding between Lilli (Abbey Heller) and Emile Duvre (Robert Parsons). People start dying and the killer could be anyone from Emile to his servant Hajmir (Vincent Petti), his mistress Helene (Beverly Lane), or his brother Max (Panas). It could also be any of the maniacs that Emile hangs out with or perhaps the person who keeps calling and hanging up.

This movie was filmed in the home of Sepy Dubronyi, a Hungarian born sculptor who fled to Cuba and then to the U.S. He was famous for sculpting celebrities, like his former fling Anita Ekburg. He had plenty of famous women, including Linda Christian (the first Bond girl in the TV version of Casino Royale), Brigitte Bardot and Ava Gardner.

The tagline promises “A honeymoon of ecstasy turns into a nightmare… Shock upon shock brings a thrilling, chilling blood-curdling tale to the screen!” I have no idea what that script was, because this really has no plan, feeling like a Miami based void where characters appear and fade away at whim. It’s also known as Orgy of the Golden Nudes, The Golden Nymphs and Orgies, which are great titles, but again have nothing to do with the actual film.

Lilli says at one point, “Even in my dreams, I hadn’t dreamt of it as wonderful as this. For me, it was a stairway to heaven, and Emile’s eyes were filled with stars.” That’s before she’s almost killed by a sculpture while trying to swim and having to hear her new husband exclaim, “The circle leads from life to death. The power of life is the power of death. And I have that power, to take life from death and immortalize it forever. That’s why I had to kill, to give life to my statues.”

This is the kind of movie that lunatics will enjoy. Like, well, me.

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.

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.