EDITOR’S NOTE: High Ballin’ was on the CBS Late Movie on May 15, 1981.
“Iron Duke” Boykin (Jerry Reed) is an independent trucker dealing with “King” Carroll (Chris Wiggins) and his gang, led by Harvey (David Ferry), who are trying to get every big rig driver to be part of his company. He’s joined by Rane (Peter Fonda) and Pickup (Helen Shaver) in an attempt to bring whiskey to a labor camp, thereby making enough money to be free of the monopoly.
But when Boykin is shot and Pickup is captured, Rane has to fight the gang with a posse — this movie is pretty much a Western with trucks instead of horses — and go one-on-one with Harvey.
Set in the U.S. but shot in Toronto, this also was released on video as Death Toll, which is a way more serious title.
Director Peter Carter also made Rituals and The Intruder Within, so he’s good in my eyes. It’s written by Paul F. Edwards, Richard Robinson (Kingdom of the Spiders) and Stephen Schneck (Welcome to Blood City). This has an amazing action scene with Rane launching cars off a truck onto the gang chasing Duke, as well as a tire iron fight outside a truck stop. Best of all, this was called Convoy II in some countries.Plus Clint Howard and Michael Ironside! How can you go wrong with all of these elements, as well as Jerry Reed singing the theme song, the same house at the beginning of Smokey and the Bandit in this opening and the stars of Smokey and Easy Rider teaming up?
EDITOR’S NOTE: Alexander: The Other Side of Dawn was on the CBS Late Movie on December 11, 1970 and June 30, 1980.
I said in the article on Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway that Alexander was a loser. Well, I should have seen his movie first, because it’s way better than the more famous first movie and he comes off way better.
This pulls a Halloween 2 and starts right where the first movie ended, as Alexander Duncan (Leigh McCloskey) is being operated on. He then has flashbacks of how he came from Oklahoma to Hollywood with dreams of being an actor. What else was he supposed to do? His father Eddie (Lonny Chapman) threw him out because he had so many kids to feed and Alexander was drawing more than doing chores. His mother (Diana Douglas, Michaels mom!) begs dad to reconsider, but his mind is made up.
He’s too young to get a real gig, so a hustler named Buddy (Asher Brauner) introduces him to sex work. He makes $50 off his first john. He then wakes up and we see the ending of the first movie, as Alexander convinces Dawn (Eve Plum) to go back home. While her story may be happy now, his isn’t. He loses his job and goes back to walking the streets, getting arrested on his first night.
Ray Church (Earl Holliman) overhears Alexander asking for his old probation officer, Donald Umber. But for some reason, he’s left town. And I totally lied about Dawn being happy, because she misses Alexander and stuff isn’t going well for her either. I bet she’d be unhappy to know that Buddy is taking his former friend on double dates where older women pay for their company. She also probably wouldn’t like that he becomes the plaything of football player Charles Selby (Alan Feinstein), using him for his cash.
Dawn gets recognized at home by someone who knows she was a sex worker. She runs away and goes back to Hollywood, where she luckily meets Alex just in time. He’s fresh off a drug bust and just wants to leave town. Together, they head out into a future that we hope is happy.
Director John Erman also made the Scarlett TV miniseries, as well as Roots: The Next Generations, Stella and When the Time Comes. This was written by Walter Dallenbach (Las Vegas Lady) and Dalene Young, who is credited with the characters and story.
Alexander is obviously gay and his father’s hatred of his art hints at this. One wonders how solid his relationship with Dawn really will be. However, I was moved by how this movie, despite being made in 1977, didn’t have the normal homosexual stereotypes. It doesn’t place any judgement on Alexander for potentially liking men, even if we’re told her loves Dawn. My opinion? They’re both in horrible lives and only have one another, at least for now.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Survivor was on the CBS Late Movie on April 7 and August 3, 1988.
A man known only as The Survivor (Christopher Mayer) returned from space ten years ago to find the Earth looking like the cover of Defcon-4. And yes, that is Vance Duke, the man who tried to ruin many a childhood when Bo and Luke had a contractual dispute.
He’s met less than a handful of people in ten years of wandering the nuclear cursed lands and even meets a woman (Sue Kiel) who claims to know of a city filled with people. She’s kidnapped before she can tell him more, which leads to him searching for her.
Who kidnapped her? Well, seeing as how this was made in 1987, this movie is contractually obligated to have Richard Moll as the bad guy, Kragg. Don’t be confused if you saw the 1998 film The Survivor, in which Moll plays Kyla.
This movie may move a bit slow, as it is mostly told through narration and flashbacks. Kragg’s plan is to repopulate the Earth by taking every woman and fertilizing them, while encouraging suicides to keep the numbers low. He also wants to castrate The Survivor, which seems like a pretty rude way to deal with an enemy. At least let them keep their cock!
Director Michael Shackleton only directed this one film but did shoot two different Benji movies. It was written by Bima Stagg and Martin Wragge. Wragge produced another Stagg script for Black Trash and also wrote The Last Warrior, which sounds like an end of the world movie, but is not.
Shot in South Africa and distributed by Vestron, this is way more high falutin of post nuke movie than you’d expect from Vance Duke and Bull Shannon. Did you know Bull’s first name was Nostradamus? As slow as this plays, I can’t even imagine how long it seemed with commercials when it played the CBS Late Movie.
Byron Cherry, who played Coy Duke, never got to be in a post-apocalyptic movie. He did, however, show up in Blood Salvage.
Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!
In 1926, Randolph (Jeffrey Hurst) catches his wife (Ursula Austin) making love to his best friend (Terry Austin). He kills them, then himself, and remains trapped in the apartment, his spirit unable to move on.
Fifty years later, Abby (also Ursula Austin) moves into the apartment, a place where sex is always happening, mostly between her neighbors Patrick (Robert Kerman, who would go to Italy and make Cannibal Holocaust), his unnamed blonde lover (Nancy Dare) and Lola (Vanessa Del Rio), who is the one who told Abby to move here. There’s also Tess Albertino (Annie Sprinkle).
Abby can’t sleep and magically, sleeping pills show up. She takes them and we see the sky, the wind picks up and Randolph emerges from the wallpaper to make love to her, which we see as Abby being thrown around the bed with no one else there. The problem, well besides the lack of consent in this scene, is that every man who has sex with Abby gets killed from here on our. There’s even a radio thrown into a bathtub which I love to no end. Anny deals with this by wandering through a blizzard before coming home to discover that she has a wedding ring stuck on her hand.
The credits say that this was directed by Luigi Manicottale — when has an American taken on an Italian name, that’s the exact reverse of how this works — but that’s really Doris Wishman. The ghost effects of this movie, the strange snowy park walking scene, the murder after murder without stopping the nonstop lovemaking — this is one strange movie. I have no idea who would be turned on by it and I don’t think Doris cared at all.
Annie Sprinkle recently posted about this movie on Instagram, saying “I was just interviewed for a documentary film about cult filmmaker, Doris Wishman. Amazingly I was in two of her movies almost 50 years ago. Satan Was A Lady and Come With My Love. I had not had a single acting lesson. (Still haven’t. ) I didn’t like acting. I liked the sekx scenes. When I thought about it, Doris was the first woman director I worked with. She was in her 60s and when we shot the dirty bits she would leave the room! The films are partly on YouTube. I was 20 years young and had very bad hair! Most everyone else in the film is dead now. I’m still here! Dori’s would be amazed I’m now still making films and am a Guggenheim Fellow even. Doris is gone but not forgotten.”
The effect of the man emerging from the wallpaper scares me.
Written by Ken Friedman (who also wrote several other Kaplan film, such as Bad Girls; he also wrote Death By Invitation), this was an attempt by Dino De Laurentiis at making an American movie that starring Italian actor Terence Hill, who was already well-known to American audiences for They Call Me Trinity.
The result? According to Variety, Radio City Music Hall in New York sued 20th Century-Fox for $107,123 because the tickets sold so poorly.
”When a simple garage mechanic suddenly inherits a billion dollars, he gets more action, excitement, romance and riotous adventure than money can buy!” Yes, Terence Hill is Guido Falcone, an Italian mechanic who is the only relative that didn’t beg his rich American uncle for money. When he gets the entire estate, his uncle’s business manager John Cutler (Jackie Gleason) flies to Italy to try and con him. Despite his sweet nature, Guido is way smarter than he appears and wants to look over the estate; he has to be in San Francisco on a certain date to accept the offer. Cutler, wanting the money for himself, hires Rosie (Valerie Perrine) and her friend Bernie (Dick Miller) to distract Guido and keep him for signing his estate papers.
Lily Tomlin was supposed to be in the movie, but the studio didn’t want her. And Perrine, as urban legend tells us, introduced herself to the sweet natured Hill by telling her that she could light a cigarette with her vagina. They did not get along after that and had to play that they were falling in love.
The supporting cast includes R.G. Armstrong as a Southern sheriff, Chill Wills as a military leader, Slim Pickens as a rancher, William Redfield as a lawyer for the company, Sam Laws and Johnny Ray McGhee as a father and son with differing views on life and even Leo Rossi as a kidnapper. As I say, it’s the kind of cast I personally would call all-star, even if no one else would agree.
Hill would also appear in another box office bomb the same year, March or Die, which also had Gene Hackman and Catherine Deneuve in the cast.
I have no idea why Hollywood would hire Hill and have him play in a movie that’s nothing like what he did best. At least he was able to work with Bud Spencer again and make plenty of late 70s and 80s buddy movies, as well as Super Fuzz as a solo movie three years later.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Carny was on the CBS Late Movie on May 19, 1986 and June 16 and August 5, 1987.
Robert Kaylor made the documentaries Derby and Max-Out before this film, which he wrote with his wife Phoebe, Thomas Baum (The Sender) and Robbie Robertson. Yes, from The Band. He also plays Patch, the fixer for the Great American Carnival. This makes more sense than you would think, as when he was 14 and 15, Robertson worked summer jobs in the traveling carny circuit, which also inspired The Band’s song “Life is a Carnival.”
Patch’s best friend is Frankie (Gary Busey), who is also The Mighty Bozo, a clown who sits in a dunk tank and tries to get people mad enough to play his game. Then, in the middle of their perfect small life, Donna (Jodie Foster) meets and falls for Frankie and joins the carny.
She soon learns the ways of the carnival, even if Patch doesn’t want her in their world. She finally fits in when her work on the midway thanks to the training of Gerta (Meg Foster). But you know how young love goes, because soon enough, she ends up in bed with Patch, which adds drama to the carnival.
Luckily, everyone comes together after the local mob attacks the carnival and leaves their oldest member On-Your-Mark (Elisha Cook Jr.) dead and nearly kills Frankie, too. Patch, Frankie, Donna and Heavy St. John (Kenneth McMillan) get their revenge by pulling another scam on the criminals, then the carny leaves town again, but this time with Donna as her own woman, belonging to no one.
This movie also has small roles for some of my favorite actors, like Fred Ward, Tim Thomerson and Craig Wasson (as Foster’s townie boyfriend). As for Foster, she was 16 when she made this movie and had love scenes with Busey, who was 35, and Robertson, who was 36. There’s also a scene where she tries to seduce a lesbian mark that is nearly volcanic.
Everyone is uniformly great in this film and Robertson was a natural at acting. Sadly, it came out on the same weekend as The Shining and The Empire Strikes Back, so you can just figure how well it did at the box office. This movie also feels more like a hang out than a plot and that’s another reason why I liked it so much. You get the vibe of what it’s like to be part of the carnival. The freedom, as well as the issues, the way each city is different and how the relationships work. It’s really something.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Getting Physical was on the CBS Late Movie on October 22, 1986.
Kendall Gibley (Alexandra Paul) is trying to be an actress, but has a day job she dates, worries that she’s chubby and has self-esteem problems. And then one day, she finds herself at a gym and bonds with Nadine and Craig Cawley (Sandahl Bergman and John Aprea), the owners. While she’s starting a relationship with a cop named Mickey (David Naughton), Kendall gets super into being fit and even starts training for a contest. Her new size upsets Mickey, who ends up punching another cop, and they break up, just in time for Nadine to worry that her husband is paying too much attention to Kendall.
Also: Kendall’s dad Hugh (Robert Webber) thinks she’s fat and her mother Myra (Janet Carroll) thinks she needs to have casual sex. And her boss Byron Waldo (Earl Boen) gets mad when she eats celery at work.
By the end, everything works out well and despite being new to working out, Kendall is a finalist in a contest hosting by Arnold’s best friend Franco Columbu. You’ll also get to see Candy Csencsits (who sadly died at 33 from breast cancer), Vicki Kibler-Silengo, Lisa Lyon (who is also in The Hustler of Muscle Beach), Rachel McLish (Aces: Iron Eagle III), Yana Nirvana (who was Drusilla in the 1977 adult version of Cinderella) and Spice Williams-Crosby (Vixis the Klingon from Star Trek V), Connie Downing (Moving Violations) and Denise Gordy (Reform School Girls). Anne Ramsey (Mama Fratelli!) also shows up.
Directed by Steven Hilliard Stern (Rolling Vengeance, The Park Is Mine, Murder In Space, Mazes and Monsters) and written by Marcy Gross, Laurian Leggett and Ann Weston, this movie is filled with slow jams and 80s soft love ballads, including several songs by Billy Davis Jr. and Marilyn McCoo, as well as songs by Thelma Houston. There’s a new song in almost scene at one point with lots of sweet sounding choruses.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Alphabet Murders was on the CBS Late Movie on April 5 and August 10, 1972.
Directed by Frank Tashlin (The Girl Can’t Help It, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?) and written by David Pursall and Jack Seddon, this film didn’t win the favor of Agatha Christie — who objected to bedroom scenes — and ended up switch Zero Mostel for Tony Randall as Hercule Poirot. Pursall and Seddon, were upset that Tashlin and Robert Morley, who played Hastings, rewrote the script and Randall ad-libbed so much.
It also has two actors who played Poirot. Maurice Denham, who is Inspector Japp, would appear as the famous detective in a 1985 BBC Radio 4 adaptation of The Mystery of the Blue Train. Austin Trevor, who is Judson, played Poirot in three movies: Alibi, Black Coffee and Lord Edgware Dies.
Hastings believes that Poirot is in danger and he’s right. A mysterious woman Amanda Beatrice Cross (Anita Ekberg) makes an attempt and draws him into a murder plot that follows the alphabet — this was based on the book The ABC Murders, but since there was a theater chain in England with that name, it was changed to not offend them — with a clown named Albert Aachen and a bowler named Betty Barnard are the first victims. Poirot thinks that Sir Carmichael Clarke could be the next victim, which makes sense.
This movie establishes the Agatha Christie cinematic universe, as Miss Jane Marple (Margaret Rutherford) and Mr. Stringer (Stringer Davis) show up from their own film series. While that’s awesome, it’s strange to see Poirot be a moron like Inspector Clouseau.
Christie and her fans didn’t like this film, which didn’t play England until a year after its release, showing up as a double feature with Tashlin’s The Glass Bottom Boat.
Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!
Doris Wishman produced and directed at least thirty films over four decades, mostly in the usually male-dominated genres of sexploitation and pornography. Her film career began as a hobby after the death of her husband in 1958 and her feature debut was 1960’s Hideout in the Sun.
She’d already had experience in the film industry, as she worked for her cousin Max Rosenberg as a film booker for his art and exploitation films. The 1957 New York appeals court that allowed nudism to be shown in movie theaters inspired her to make that first film, which she followed in 1961 with Nude on the Moon, a film that was banned in New York because nudist colonies were legally permissible but nudism on the moon was not. She also worked with the legendary burlesque dancer Blaze Starr but as the nudie cutie genre started losing money, she moved into sexploitation.
That’s when some of her most famous — well, amongst lovers of ridiculous cinema like me — films got made, like Bad Girls Go to Hell and the Chesty Morgan vehicles Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73, films in which Morgan kills people with her monstrous 73-inch breasts.
Wishman also produced 1972’s Keyholes Are for Peeping, which starred comedian Sammy Petrillo, a Brooklyn nightclub performer who eventually made Pittsburgh his hometown in the 1990’s. He’s probably better known for his teaming up with singer Duke Mitchell (yes, the guy who made Massacre Mafia Style and Gone with the Pope) as the poor man’s Martin and Lewis. They teamed up for Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, which also somehow rips off Abbott and Costello monster films at the same time.
As the industry moved from softcore to hardcore, Wishman directed two Annie Sprinkle features, Satan Was a Lady and Come With Me, My Love. She wasn’t really excited about the shift and denied working on these films. As the 70’s were coming to a close, she released a film she’d been working on since 1971, Let Me Die a Woman, a groundbreaking semidocumentary on transgender issues filtered through the lens of exploitation.
That brings us to today’s movie, A Night to Dismember, which she started filming in 1978 to cash in on the slasher craze begun by Halloween. Wishman was ready to direct and produce the film from a screenplay by Judith J. Kushner. Most of the shoot took place in 1979 in New York at Wishman’s home.
From there, things get weird. Wishman claimed that multiple reels were destroyed in the photo processing lab, resulting in her having to reshoot several scenes and use stock footage to make a releasable final film. After four years (!) of post-production, the film would remain unreleased until MPI Media Group put it out in 1989.
There’s also an entirely different version of this film that was released in August 2018 on YouTube by the film’s cinematographer, C. Davis Smith. This version features actress Diana Cummings in the lead role and an entirely different plot, as adult film actress Samantha Fox replaced Cummings after the destruction of Wishman’s film.
According to Smith, Fox paid Wishman $2,000 to get the starring role of Vicki Kent. He said he doesn’t know for sure, but he believes that Wishman faked the story that the original print was destroyed in a fire and reshot the film with Fox. You can read more about that story here.
Whew! That’s a lot of history to cover, but this is a film that has plenty of it. Let’s get into what it’s really all about!
The Kent family suffers from an ancestral curse that has caused nearly all of them to be murdered, often by one another. Bonnie was first, hacked to pieces by her sister Susan, who was upset that her father favored her sister. After the murder, she slipped on the blood and was killed by the very same axe.
Broderick Kent’s wife Lola is next, murdered in the bathtub. While Kent tries to proclain his innocence, he eventually hangs himself.
That’s when we get to Vicki Kent (Samantha Fox), who has just ben released from an insane asylum after killing two boys. Her brother and sister, Billy and Mary, want her to be committed again.
Despite wanting to rekindle her relationship with her ex-boyfriend, she struggles to make it in the real world, constantly hallucinating. Then again, with Frankie getting decapitated and his head burned in a fireplace, that relationship seems doomed.
Vicki tries to visit some relatives who turn her away before they’re all killed by hatchet and by car. Even a trip to the lake is fraught with horror, as a zombie chases her around, only to be revealed to be her brother Billy who has been trying to frighten her back into the sanitarium.
This is the kind of movie that rewards your lack of attention with shifts in characters, hairstyles and clothing all within the same scene. It doesn’t help that there is next to no voiced dialogue and only a narrorator’s voice to carry us through every scene and change in tone. We go from Vicki performing a sexy dance and trying to seduce a detective to Vicki’s sister Mary actually being the one behind all the killings.
The detective makes his way to the house where he finds a confused Vicki holding a hatchet. Despite hitting him several times with it, he manages to strangle her to death. That’s when we get the voice over from the detective, telling us that Mary was the real guilty party, but she’s escaped after killing a cab driver. And that’s the movie, I guess.
To put it bluntly, A Night to Dismember is a mess. It’s got songs that stop and start, horrible acting, bad gore and footage that appears to be the quality of a 1970’s super 8 home movie. It’s the kind of movie that if I watched it with a roomful of normal folks, they’d scoff and laugh. And that’s why I woke up at 4 AM so that I could enjoy it all by myself, away from the insults of people not ready to cheerful enjoy a movie that combines the insane and the inane. There’s also plenty of 1970’s fashion and an unhinged voiceover to love, which continues over the credits, making me adore this piece of film even more.
Back to Wishman. Before her death in 2002, she was finally honored for her groundbreaking work, with John Waters featured a clips from her films in Serial Mom, appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, appearances at the New York and Chicago Underground Film Festivals and a showing of her films at Los Angeles’s Nuart Theatre entitled “Doris Wishman: Queen of Sexploitation.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Mongo’s Back In Town was on the CBS Late Movie on January 31 and October 10, 1973 and April 20, 1978.
Lieutenant Pete Tolstad, the character played by Telly Savalas in this made for TV movie, feels like the early version of Kojak before that show would air in 1973. Tolstad grew up in the same neighborhood that is now his beat. He’s never had a real Christmas. He just does his job.
Directed by Marvin J. Chomsky (Tank, Evel Knievel, Roots) and written by Herman Miller and based on the book by E. Richard Johnson. Johnson was a convicted armed robber and murderer who wrote all eleven of his books from his cell at Stillwater State Prison in Minnesota. He started writing to pass the time in prison and his novel Silver Street won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for 1968 and the follow-up, which this movie is based on, was considered an even better book. Despite his success, he got into drugs while in prison. He escaped and went back into crime before being recaptured and stayed in jail until 1991.
Everyone is interested in the reasons why Mongo Nash (Joe Don Baker) is back in town and why he’s spending time with a young girl named Vikki (Sally Field) who has just come to town from West Virginia. Is he in town to do a hit for his brother Mike (Charles Cioffi)? Or does he just want left alone?
This has a great cast. Martin Sheen plays Tolstad’s partner Mike and Anne Francis is a gangster’s moll who Savalas has a flirty scene with. Baker is great and somehow makes a killer into someone that you feel some level of empathy for and the way he treats Vikki. Ah yes. He is a killer. On the way to the brutal ending, we have people get acid thrown in their faces and everyone is fair game for murder including kids.
Originally airing on CBS on December 10, 1971, this is also known as Steel Wreath, which is a strange title and probably one that makes more sense once Johnson and his books were forgotten. Perhaps they didn’t want people to think this was a Blazing Saddles sequel, which there was one that is forgotten and was a TV series.
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