June 21: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is AIP! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Also released as Twinky and London Affair, Lola has the kind of story that only a movie made in 1970 could have.

Scott Wardman (Charles Bronson) falls in love — or something — with Sybil Londonderry (Susan George), who also goes by Twinky and Lola. The problem is that he’s 38 and she’s 16. He seemingly knows the age of consent and any guy that can instantly tell you that is a creep.

Then Scott gets busted for being married to a child and forced to leave England. He says, “I make one uncool move with a nutty 16-year-old kid, and suddenly my whole world is turned upside down.” Now this pornographic author has to go back to the United States.

If you think this couldn’t happen, well…

Norman Thaddeus Vane wrote this and its based on his own married to 16 year-old model Sarah Caldwell, who he married when he was also 38. In an interview with the astounding Hidden Films, the writer — and later director — would claim, “There was a reason I wound up marrying Sarah Caldwell (who was 16 at the time and later cast in Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter which Vane scripted; Vane later based the script for Lola on this scandalous marriage). I was a good-looking kid on King’s Road in Chelsea, I had a sports car, I had money, I had a beautiful flat.”

Vane also pretty much explains the plot of this film in that interview: “I met her at a party. She was stunningly beautiful. I had a small flat on King’s Road in Chelsea, and she used to come over secretly on the way back from school, and we used to fuck. And she told her parents that she was seeing me — I was probably about 38 or something—and they were angry. Her father was head of the East India Trading Company. The only way we could see each other was if we got married, and in Scotland, you could get married at 16. So we eloped there. I had been sleeping with a Scottish girl from Glasgow. You had to spend three days in residence in Scotland before you got married, so I asked her if we could use her family’s address and she said yes. Sarah called her parents and said “I’m very sorry to tell you this, but I got married today!” The newspapers wrote columns about her, it was like a front page story, for months afterwards. They called me “The Cad of the Year.””

This entire interview is wild and I urge you to read it, as he claims that director Richard Donner immediately slept with Susan George, that the movie was financed by an Italian baron and Bronson superfan who later committed suicide over Britt Ekland, that Bronson’s wife Jill Ireland wanted to play the teenage girl and that Bronson couldn’t be controlled by Donner and he ruined the movie.

Lola is fascinating because why would Scott and Lola ever get together — well, sex — or stay together? There’s nothing that suggests that they have a single thing in common other than her schoolgirl crush on him and well, yeah, she’s Susan George in 1970, I get that. Yet Bronson comes off as, well, Charles Bronson, a man who speaks little and is quick to violence. Maybe that’s how I see him as I’ve watched so many of his action movies, but when you see the posters and VHS covers for this, you’ll see that I wasn’t the only one who saw Bronson just as a force of violent nature.

Lola ends up getting an apartment for the couple while Scott is in jail over a misunderstanding, then she doesn’t realize that he has a job as a writer and needs to be left alone while he’s working. As a jerk of a writer myself, I get it. She also acts like a kid because she is one. Finally, after running away and coming back, she goes back to England for good.

This is not the last movie that Vane would make that references his life. The Black Room is about how he cheated on his wife in his own black room with Penthouse centerfolds that he met while working at that publication. It remains to be discovered if any of those women were vampires. Vane also made the absolutely baffling Club Life, a movie that I want everyone to watch.

I wonder if Susan George met with her agent and said, “Can I do something not so scuzzy for my next movie, like sleep with a guy twice my age?” And the agent said, “Susan baby, have I got a movie for you. It’s classy. It’s called Straw Dogs.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

June 20: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Blacksploitation! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Born Walter Gordon, Jamaa Fanaka was one of the leading directors of the L.A. Rebellion film movement, a new generation of young African and African-American filmmakers who studied at the UCLA Film School in the late-1960s to the late-1980s. They created a new form of black cinema that was an alternative to Hollywood. Fanaka was, however, “very much fascinated by Hollywood and averse to the contentious ideological and artistic discussions that were fundamental to the formation of the school.”

Independently produced, written, directed and edited by Fanaka as an undergraduate project at UCLA that took seventeen months of weekends, all of his savings and some of his parent’s as well, Fanaka’s advisors at the school told him to not even try a feature film as his class project. He ended up creating one that won a national theatrical distribution deal with Crown International Pictures. The director would complete his thesis film, Emma Mae, and Penitentiary while still in college.

Sure, it was re-released on video as Soul Vengeance but this movie isn’t the typical blacksploitation movie, despite beginning with its hero Charles (Marlo Monte) being arrested by corrupt white police and nearly castrated. When he’s released, all Charles wants to do is forget the past. He wants to move past the life of crime he once led. He can’t even have Twyla (Jackie Ziegler), the girl he loves, who is now the woman of his former best friend, N.D. (Jake Carter).

Sounds like a typical blacksploitation movie and I promised you that it wasn’t.

That’s because while Charles was in prison, he was experimented on, like Luke Cage in Marvel Comics, but instead of getting skin knives and that bullets can’t touch, he gets a murderous and prehensile penis. Seriously, it’s feet, not just inches long. It’s the kind of penis that frightens the white male establishment way more than the typical African American member, because when he’s not using it to seduce the white wives of the cop who tried to slice off his prick, Officer Harry Freeman (Ben Bigelow), as well as the prosecutor and judge who set him up. He’s also strangling those men with it, which has to be the worst way for a straight white racist man to die.

Despite trying to find some form of comfort with Carmen (Reatha Grey), prison has destroyed Charles. And what he’s done to Freeman’s wife (Tiffany Peters) has ruined that cop, as if he needed any help, telling his wife that she’s contaminated. That’s because even before he gained his monstrous member, Charles was cucking the law. And that’s why Freeman tried to take a knife to our hero while he was in handcuffs. I have no idea why he’s stayed married, as one evening he wakes her up by choking her back into oblivion and she looks him in the eye and snarls, “You think you’re a man? You didn’t even have the guts to destroy the object of your humiliation. Me!”

Also, maybe I didn’t mention it, but his new penis — who would do this experiment, what was it for and why would they be authorized? — can hypnotize white women.

I love that this movie exists, that it has sloppy moments where we just watch people dancing in the streets in footage that had to be just the camera running and capturing what these small Los Angeles neighborhoods used to be like. As wild as this movie gets, it only hints at just how far Fanaka would push reality with the Penitentiary series.

You can watch this on YouTube.

June 19: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 80s Horror! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

I’ve made a real 180 on Lamberto Bava. Maybe it’s because the first of his movies that I watched was Devilfish. I should have really started with Macabre, A Blade In the Dark or any of his TV movies and then I’d feel a lot different. And years ago, I unfairly compared him with his father instead of allowing him to be judged on his own merit.

I am sorry, John Old Jr.

The Prince of Terror has never been released in the U.S. on VHS, DVD or blu ray. That’s a shame.

It pulls the Body Double fake out as soon as it starts, as you get the jump scare of a woman — Magda (Marina Viro) — escaping an RV only to see her boyfriend drown in a swamp and become an inflated zombie and begin stalking her through a swamp.

This isn’t happening.

Instead, it’s the set of director Vincent Omen’s (Tomas Arana, The Church) latest movie. He hates the script from his longtime writer Paul Hilary (David Brandon, who was the director in Stage Fright so dumb that he let his cast stay in the theater where a killing machine was hiding), so he gets him fired before heading out to play golf. While he’s hitting the front 9, he’s interviewed by a reporter (Virginia Bryant, The Barbarians) who asks him about the rumors that he’s much older than 37 and his public perception as the “Prince of Darkness.”

He holds up one of his golf balls, which has 666 on it. Obviously, he’s into this personna.

After he finishes playing, he goes home to his wife Betty (Carole Andre, Yor Hunter from the Future), daughter Susan (Joyce Pitti) and dog Demon. Yes, he is definitely into this demonic side. That evening, he and his lovely spouse are supposed to join his producer (Pascal Druant) and Magda for dinner. And then, golf balls explode into their home, sinister phone calls start and end only when the phone lines are severed and their cute little dog is killed — by having his fur removed and then he’s just thrown in the garbage — because this is an Italian movie. Then, a bald killer with a huge knife (Ulisse Miniverni) appears.

By the end of the movie, Omen gets shot, his wife gets her leg ensnared in a bear trap and his daughter gets buried alive in the basement. Plus, the toilet flushes blood and the security guard is replaced with a robot. It’s an all over the place plan from Paul the writer and actor Eddie Felson– the bald monster — who both want to get back at Vincent.

Special effects maestro Sergio Stivaletti got a workout here, as when Vincent gets his revenge, he starts attacking people with golf balls, including one that blows up a man’s wrist and another that goes Fulci and blows up an eyeball. There’s also a good Simon Boswell score.

I wonder how much of this story was writer Dardano Sacchetti getting his scripting revenge on former friend and co-creator Lucio Fulci. That scene where he’s accused of stealing ideas and it becomes obvious that Omen has no ideas of his own, as well as a bloody script emerging from a toilet, seem to lead one to feel that way. It’s fun in a TV movie way — I love this era of Italian TV movie horror — but it certainly doesn’t aspire to the heights that Fulci reached.

This is part of a series of movies that aired on Italian TV as Alta tensione. The other episodes are L’uomo che non voleva morire, in which a man is near death in a hospital and trying to recall how he got there; Il gioko, a story of a teacher thinking her students murdered the instructor she has replaced and the giallo Testimone oculare. All were directed by Lamberto Bava.

I hope that American boutique labels follow the lead of Cauldron Films and release movies like this and the House of series that they just put out instead of just releasing the same movies in new formats. There is so much out there!

You can watch this on YouTube.