EDITOR’S NOTE: Bimini Code was on the CBS Late Movie on May 8, June 4 and November 20, 1986. 

Stacey (Vickie Benson, Cheerleader Camp) and Cheryl (Kristal Richardson) own a scuba shop, but also decide to help save a missing boy along with their friends Rick and Fuji. They end up being kidnapped themselves and taken to the undersea base of Madame X, AKA Countess Magda von Cress (Rosanna Simanaitis), a totally mean, totally eyepatched super villainess who of course is my favorite person in this movie. She even has a small dog!

Madame X is after the Power Stone — “The secret of the ancient Mayans! The secret of nuclear fusion!” — but she didn’t count on two women who can swim underwater and ride motorcycles. Not even a tarantula can stop them. And then in the last half of this movie, it becomes Raiders of the Lost Ark!

The bad guys in this work for the Scorpio Peanut Company. Let that set in.

This movie taught me that people can speak underwater, that if you’re a bad guy you can dress however you want no matter how hot the jungle is, that a film can have tons of action and locations and still drag, that women in bikinis are our last line of defense and that you should always screen your henchmen.

Director Barry Clark and writer Gabrielle Rivera have made a movie that feels like if Andy Sidaris didn’t care at all about showing naked women. It has the feel of his movies, but none of the sheer wildness of them and no one remembers that you’re supposed to have several hot tub scenes.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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!  

Liliana Wilczkowska was born in Poland and was orphaned by the Nazis. She grew up in Israel, moving to the U.S. in 1957 to marry Josef Wilczkowski ten days after they met. Her husband and one of his meat market employees died in a robbery in 1965 and by the 70s, she was using her 73-32-36 body as an exotic dancer, going by the name of  Zsa Zsa “Chesty” Gabborr, dancing mainly to pay for her two young daughters.

She made it to the “Combat Zone” of Boston red light clubs and took on the name Chesty Moore. Dancing to Tom Jones’ “Delilah,” she would often allow men to touch her breasts to prove they were real. You have to understand that her body defies imagination.

Wearing bras specially made by Texas company Command Performance, she would often appear with two little people, each carrying a breast. She married — and quickly divorced — National League umpire Dick Stello, and then she appeared in two of Doris Wishman’s films. I’ll get to one of them in a moment. She’s also the only person I can think of that is in a Wishman movie and a Fellini film, as she was cut from Casanova.

Morgan kept dancing four months a year — she made $8,000 a week — and doing real estate in the off season until 1991, when she was 54 years old. Tired of the constant legal battles, she became a landlady just as she became famous all over again when John Waters featured a scene from Deadly Weapons in his movie Serial Mom.

In this film, she plays Crystal, an ad exec whose lover Larry (Richard Towers) has just been killed. To get revenge, she drugs and smothers man after man with, well, her mams. There’s Tony (Harry Reems), Captain Hook and by the end, even her own father in her way. Chesty also seems always just on the verge of falling asleep.

Do you need any more reasons to watch this? Well, the soundtrack, made up of library cuts from KPM Music’s KPM 1055 Dramatic Background, is incredible. That song “Hippy?” That’s the trailer music for Torso. You’ll fall in love with the theme, “Hard Selling Woman” by Mike Lease with The Studio G’s Beat Group. And despite how grimy this may all feel at times, you may fall for this film, too. There’s nothing else like it and somehow, the sequel is even weirder.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Horsemen was on the CBS Late Movie on October 26, 1973; September 20, 1974 and June 11, 1976.

Uraz (Omar Sharif) is the son of Tursen (Jack Palance), a stable master and retired buzkashi player, a sport in which horse-mounted players attempt to place a goat or calf carcass in a goal. He has lost his honor when he breaks his leg in a game that his father has bet all of the family’s money on, which means he has to learn how to ride and play again, despite most of his leg.

Based on Joseph Kessel’s Les cavaliers, this was scripted by Dalton Trumbo and directed by John Frankenheimer, who loved the movie even if it wasn’t a financial success.

There’s a lot of animal violence in this, so be warned. I mean, it’s a game played with a dead animal, after all. The same game is played in Rambo III, in case you wondered. Like that movie, the Afghanistan of this film is long gone.

It’s a big Hollywood film about a sport and a place that I can imagine very few people were interested in, which makes me interested in it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Blood Beast Terror was on the CBS Late Movie on March 8, 1974.

When you mention 1960’s British horror films, most people are going to think of Hammer. Or Amicus. But there’s also Tigon, the very small studio who could, and by could, I mean make some astoundingly strange movies.

Witchfinder General, The Curse of the Crimson Altar, The Blood on Satan’s Claw…these are the movies that make me think that England in 1967 was an insane place to be.

Vernon Sewell directed this thriller about young and good looking men having their throats torn open and drained by a killer so frightening that whomever it is has driven the last eyewitness mad, claiming that a horrible winged creature with huge eyes is the killer.

Detective Inspector Quennell (Peter Cushing) responds by thinking that a giant eagle — no, not the Pittsburgh-based grocery store — has to be the murderer.

If this development has you happy, then good news. This is the kind of stiff upper lip British low budget fun you’re looking for. Yes, I struggled to include this in either the werewolf or vampire weeks we’re planning because it features a weremoth who lives on human blood. A weremoth! What will they think of next!?!

Cushing considered this the worst of his many films. Scanning his vast resume should tell you just how low this must be, but he was acting in as many films as he could to pay for the care of his wife Helene, who was suffering from emphysema. She would die four years later and by all accounts, he never recovered.

This played on double bills with the 1962 Italian film Slaughter of the Vampires.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde was on the CBS Late Movie on February 8, 1974.

Hammer had already made two adaptions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — The Ugly Duckling and The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll. But what if they combined that story with the historical Jack the Ripper and Burke and Hare cases? And what if Jekyll turned into a female Hyde? Now we have a movie!

Dr. Henry Jekyll (Ralph Bates, Lust for a Vampire) has been trying to cure all known illnesses but his friend Professor Robertson (Gerald Sim, Dr. Phibes Rises Again) laughs that by the time his experiments are discovered and used, he’ll be long dead and unable to enjoy his achievements.

Jekyll then abandons his altruistic aims and starts looking for the elixir of life, which he feels uses female hormones that he takes from the bodies of women supplied by William Burke and William Hare, real life murderers that killed people and sold them to doctors for anatomy lessons. Never mind that those murders happened sixty years before the timeline of this film.

Meanwhile, Susan Spencer lives above him and they’re attracted to one another. However, he’s too absorbed by his work to do anything about it. Soon, he’s created a serum that not only changes his character, but transforms him into a gorgeous and amoral woman (Martine Beswick, who is in the first two Bond movies, plays the Queen of Evil in Seizure and was Xaviera Hollander in The Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood) that he calls Mrs. Edwina Hyde. Susan instantly hates her, but her brother Howard (Lewis Fiander, Who Can Kill a Child?) falls for her.

Dr. Jekyll soon learns that his serum requires more female hormones than Burke and Hare can acquire for him. And when they’re finally caught, he’s forced to commit the crimes that the rest of London believes were those of Jack the Ripper. Jekyll hates what he has become, but Hyde loves it, even killing the Professor when he dares question her.

The male and female sides of his/her/its body all go to war with one another with Susan as the prize. Seriously, this is a movie that demands to be remade today.

Sadly, Caroline Munro was nearly Mrs. Hyde, but dropped out when she realized that the film required nudity. That said, Martine Beswick is pretty great in this. She was initially asked to do full frontal nudity and wouldn’t talk to director Roy Ward Baker (Asylum, The Vault of Horror) for a week.