Lindsay Finch (Mary Charlotte Wilcox, The Beast of the Yellow Night and Psychic Killer) loves to go to funerals, where she mourns and then kisses the dead men passionately after everyone else leaves. Throw in a theme song that sounds like it comes out of James Bond while we see flashbacks of her relationship with her dead father and visiting his grave and pigtails and I’m all in.

She has swinging hippie parties at her pad and her friend Wade (Christopher Stone, the late husband of Dee Wallace who appeared with her in Cujo and The Howling)  tries to get with her. Just when it seems she’s giving in to his makeout moves, she screams at him to stop and he calls her a bitch, because this is 1973. She dreams of her father in yellow hued flashbacks and hugs a stuffed animal.

Later, she goes through the funeral notices to find the services for young men. We then meet Fred McSweeney, a mortician, as he picks up a male prostitute. That job is just a cover for his true love — a Satanic coven that meets at night, inside the mortuary, where they have orgies with dead bodies. McSweeney takes the young man to his workplace where he pumps the manwhore full of embalming fluid while he’s still alive, all while Lindsay goes to another funeral where she tries to make out with Bobby. She’s surprised by Alex (Lyle Waggoner, TV’s The Carol Burnett Show and Wonder Woman, as well as the honor of being the first nude centerfold in Playgirl and the appointed mayor of Encino, California), the man’s brother.

Speaking of that embalming scene, it goes on and on and on, with the young man screaming, “I’m blind!” over and over. It’s nearly campy instead of frightening. To say this film has an issue with tone is an understatement.

Lindsay sneaks out to Bobby’s funeral, where she starts to associate Alex with her father. He’s a rich gallery owner and they begin a romance — one she refuses to consummate, even after they are eventually married. Every time she sees him, we get yellow hued flashbacks with a music box soundtrack of her playing with her father. But more about that in a little, OK?

McSweeney speaks to Lindsay after he catches her at a funeral, telling her that he has a group that she should join. Yet she tries to remain normal, even going on a date with  Wade that fails. That’s when she decides to see what McSweeney’s group is all about.

She walks into an orgy with the dead, which freaks her out enough to go back home. Then she and Alex fall in love with no dialogue, just a montage. It’s a strange part of an incredibly strange film, with this happy go lucky relationship coming out of nowhere in a film otherwise about sex with dead people.

Lindsay keeps talking to the cult and ends up getting a dead body of her very own. But Wade follows her and is killed by McSweeney. She screams in horror. This scene wasn’t n the original script, nor was the Satanic group in the one that follows, but were used to pad out the film and add more horror elements so that it would potentially play drive-ins better.

Again — tone being all over the place — we’re treated to a nude cult disrobing Wade’s corpse and having their way with it before Lindsay awakes screaming. But the marriage isn’t working out well, with Alex following her all over town and their maid — complete with the most stereotypical Irish accent ever — telling him that his wife spends her days at her father’s grave, wearing pigtails and dressed like a little girl. You should see the look on Alex’s face when he catches her as she yells, “This is not your place, go away!”

Alex tries to get Lindsay to go on a holiday to visit his mother, but he discovers a registered letter from McSweeney to his wife for a meeting at 10 PM. He follows her to the mortuary where he discovers his wife surrounded by nude devil worshippers as she makes love to a dead body. She looks frightened and then McSweeney murders Alex, which calms her.

McSweeney drugs her as she lies in her bed, then brings in her husband, now embalmed so he can last forever, finally a man who she can be attracted to: the combination of her father — who we see in flashback being shot accidentally by her — and the man she fell in love with. The editing here — combined with dissonant instruments and a remix of the title theme — is crazy, like this film has suddenly become Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

We see intercut shots of Lindsay getting under the covers with her dead husband and her getting in the coffin with her father as everything goes sepia tone and the theme song returns.

Love Me Deadly isn’t for everyone. It’s one of those films that I hesitate to recommend to normal folks. But it is the kind of movie I text people about in the middle of the night.

Code Red has released this film on DVD, but it’s still rather hard to find. It’s up on YouTube, where I found it. It’s…well, it’s something. If you enjoyed The Baby, well, then you’re on the right wavelength of this one.

You can watch this on Tubi.

How do you follow Plan 9 from Outer Space?

You bring back Tor Johnson as Lobo and Paul Marco as Kelton the cop from Bride of the Monster, you get Criswell to do another framing story and get the character of Captain Robbins to return as well, even if Johnny Carpenter takes over the role from Harvey B. Dunn, who does play a frightened driver in this.

Originally called Revenge of the Dead, this sat on the shelf for years after its premiere. Wood had intended to make changes but couldn’t afford the post-production work. The film laboratory opted to keep the negative footage and for years, people thought that this wasn’t a real movie or a lost one. Film archivist Wade Williams managed to locate the film with the help of Wood’s widow Kathy.

It’s also a lot like The Unearthly. The writer of that movie is supposedly the director’s wife, but I’ve also heard it was Ed Wood. The plot is the same — there’s an isolated setting, a supernatural carny and undercover cops. Tor Johnson also plays Lobo in both movies, which were both shot in 1957. It also has a lot of stuff taken from the movie Sucker Money.

Criswell starts us off by pronouncing “How many of you know the horror, the terror I will now reveal to you?” Oh Criswell. We’re ready. Maybe not for you to talk about juvenile delinquents and drunk driving, but whatever you want to discuss.

Then we watch as a couple fight when the man gets too aggressive. They are soon killed by a Black Ghost. That’s when Kelton comes on board to investigate, saying “Monsters! Space people! Mad doctors! They didn’t teach me about such things in the police academy! And yet that’s all I’ve been assigned to since I became on active duty! Why do I always get picked for these screwy details all the time? I resign.”

Are we in the Ed Wood Cinematic Universe? Yes.

There’s also a White Ghost who is really an actress named Sheila (Valda Hansen), a Dr. Acula (played by “The Meanest Man In the Movies” Kenne Duncan; as for the name Dr. Acula, does anyone still fall for that?), a seance at a table filled with skeletons, the Black Ghost (Jeannie Stevens) being revealed as a real undead creature and Criswell bidding us farewell from inside a coffin, telling us we’ll all be dead someday. Thanks Criswell.

Sometimes, Jeannie Stevens wasn’t there for her scenes. So when you see that, you’re seeing Ed Wood as her. I wonder if he wore his angora sweater under the costume.

You can watch this on YouTube.

This is the first appearance in a Russ Meyer movie of Charles Napier. He plays Harry Thompson, a California border sheriff and marijuana smuggler who also somehow — spoiler warning — comes back from the dead to die again in Supervixens.

But as for this movie, it starts with a narration that blames marijuana for so many evils in society. Harry has ignored all that as he Harry works his sheriff job in between illegal activity. He lives at the site of a close silver mine with his English nurse girlfriend Cherry (Linda Ashton). As for Raquel (Larissa Ely), she’s a writer who has an interest in sexually pleasuring men. The two women learn of one another but Harry doesn’t want them to make love for some reason. When we first see Raquel, she’s in bed with Harry’s partner Enrique (Bert Santos). The two men work for Mr. Franklin (Frank Bolger), the town’s main politician, to move drugs. One of their other associates, the Apache (John Milo) is screwing everyone over. Franklin asks for him to be killed, but he gets away and steals Harry’s Jeep.

Now, Enrique knows too much and he must be killed. But the Apache gets to him — and Mr. Franklin — first. Raquel finds his body and is so upset, she must be hospitalized. Good news. Her nurse is Cherry and they finally get together to make love, all while Harry and the Apache do the exact opposite and kill one another.

But ah — it was all a story that Raquel was writing. This strange ending may be because a lot of the film’s footage was accidentally ruined by the color lab. Roger Ebert said, “The result is that audiences don’t even realize anything is missing; a close analysis might reveal some cavernous gaps in the plot, and it is a little hard to figure out exactly how (or if) all the characters know each other, but Meyer’s subjective scenes are so inventive and his editing so confident that he simply sweeps the audience right along with him. Cherry, Harry and Raquel! is possibly the only narrative film ever made without a narrative.” Uschi Digard, the lover of the Apache, was also added Linda Ashton quit and you have to admit that she adds a lot to the film. Meyer claims the other actress quit over her pomeranians ruining the carpets of the motel they were staying in and the owner getting upset.

He also said, “The picture is the most successful film I have on cable television-or hotel-vision-because you never have to come in at the beginning. It doesn’t matter. It could be a loop.”

It also has one of the first instances of mainstream full frontal male nudity, which made it a controversial movie all the way back in 1969.

“Two Much For One Man…Russ Meyer’s Busty Buxotic Beauties … Titilating … Torrid … Untopable … Too Much For One Man!”

After going from nudies to roughies, Russ Meyer made this mondo film that explores San Francisco as well as the women who dance there in one of the first cities that permitted them to dance topless. As they show themselves to the camera, there’s a non-stop barrage of a narrator speaking, the girls being interviewed and distorted guitars.

The women who appear include Bouncy, who is Babette “44-24-38 World’s Most Sensational Exotic Entertainer” Bardot, who also appeared in Meyer’s Common Law Cabin; Pat Barrington, who was in Mantis In Lace and dated jazz musician and serial killer Melvin Rees; Lucious (Sin Lenee); Buxotic (Darlene Gray); Yummy (Diane Young); Delicious (Darla Paris); Xciting (Donna X) and footage from Europe in the Raw of Veronique Gabriel, Greta Thorwald, Denice Duval, Abundavita, Heide Richter, Gigi La Touche and Yvette Le Grand. There’s also screentest footage from Lorna of Lorna Maitland.

Pat Barrington says in this “All you’re doing is a dance – it has no meaning whatsoever” and she’s right. This is an hour and fifty-five minutes of women dancing nude in front of radios. What must a girl possess to measure up as a topless dancer? She must have a body well above the average in physical beauty – unblemished by an uneven suntan!” This is as pure a journey into what Euss Meyer wanted to see — well, he called it “crud” and made it just to make money — if he were the paying customer. I kind of enjoyed Abundavita, who has antenna of some sort. Also, Yvette LeGrand dances at the Crazy Horse and that reminds me that as dumb as Motley Crue was, they wrote “Girl, Girls, Girls” and that ensured they’d get free lap dances at every bar they mentioned (those would be the now closed Dollhouse in Ft. Lauderdale, Tattletails in Atlanta, the Seventh Veil on the Sunset Strip, Crazy Horse in Paris, the Body Shop in Hollywood, the closed Tropicana in Los Angeles and the closed Marble Arch in Vancouver).

This movie has no redeeming value unless you like to watch naked women dance next to trains. Maybe I do, you know?

After The Seven Minutes and Blacksnake were failures at the box office, Russ Meyer went back to what worked best. Sex comedies.

He said, “I’m back to big bosoms, square jaws, lotsa action and the most sensational sex you ever saw. I’m back to what I do best – erotic, comedic sex, sex, sex – and I’ll never stray again.”

He wrote this himself and claimed it was based on Horatio Alger’s tales. “They were always about a young man who was totally good, and he would always set out to gain his fortune and he would always come up against terrible people. They did everything they could to do him in, but he fought fair, you know, and he always survived and succeeded in the end. So, that’s just one facet of the thing.”

Supervixens would be the biggest commercial success Meyer had since Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, making $8.2 million on a $100,000 budget.

Clint Ramsey (Charles Pitts) works at a gas station for Martin Bormann (Henry Rowland) — Hitler’s personal secretary who ran to America and runs his small shop in the desert — and is married to SuperAngel (Shari Eubank). All she does all day is call and harass him at work when she isn’t demanding that he come back home and make love to her. When a customer — SuperLorna (Christy Hartburg) — flirts with him, she flips out and tries to kill him with an axe. He goes to a bar where Super Haji (Haji) comes on to him as a a cop named Harry Sledge (Charles Napier, playing the same character from Harry, Cherry and Raquel) tries to sleep with his wife but can’t perform, so he murders her in the bathtub. He burns down their house and sets up Clint, who runs from the law.

The rest of the movie is a series of his adventures, from being molested and mugged by Cal (John LaZar) and Super Cherry (Colleen Brennan), taken care of by a farmer whose wife SuperSoul (Uschi Digard) assaults him, sleeping with the deaf daughter of a motel owner named SuperEula (Deborah McGuire) and finally, discovering his true love, Super Angel (also Eubank). Of course, Harry shows up and wants to destroy their happiness, even if Clint only sees him as a friend. They’re both nearly blown up before the dynamite claims the villain like Wile E. Coyote.

Meyer said that the where Harry beats, stabs, stomps and drops a radio in the tub to kill Super Vixen was the most trouble he’d had with censors, other than Kitten Natividad’s full nudity in Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. He also had to deal with watching this movie in the theater with Eubank and her father, who hated that his daughter was working with Russ Meyer. After the film ended, Eubank’s father sad he actually liked the film.

The one thing that’s interesting about this movie is that it’s unafraid to show glimpses of penis unlike so many other sex films. It’s also absolutely ridiculous and so over the top that I have no idea who can take it seriously, other than people still being upset about the murder scene. At least Super Vixen comes back as a ghost and is able to be in charge of her own sexuality, as all ends happily because of love.