Dr. Craig Cooper (Peter Carpenter) is overseeing the care of the dying Ridgeley Waterman (Eric Allison), who is tended to by his daughter Victoria (Maria De Aragon) and round the clock nurse Miss Turner (Leslie Simms).

Victoria has repeatedly tried to seduce the doctor, who has problems of his own. He used to perform abortions when that was illegal and he’s being blackmailed. He finally gives in to her and looks the other way when she poisons her father. Her sister Gail (Vickie Peterson) comes to contest the will, only to learn that she gets everything. She also has a would-be lover — maybe, it’s never outright said but come on — named Kate (Jacqueline Dalya), but once Gail hooks up with the doctor, she leaves. And this all puts Victoria from being bedridden over the will to absolutely a murderer when her sister reveals that she’s taken her doctor from her.

Then she paints in blood.

Shot in a home once owned by Bela Lugosi by Robert Vincent O’Neill, Gary Kent said of this, “Robert was a prop man to begin with. I had no idea he was a director. The next thing I knew he was doing it, and he called me in as a production manager. It was fun. He took it seriously, so you never got the feeling he was just in it for the bucks. I thought it just took him forever to get a shot. He was always fussing over it. It was murder. His movies were long and arduous, but nonetheless I had some affection for Robert.”

According to Leslie Simms, a year after production had commenced, she was called back to complete re-shoots for an alternate cut of the film intended for television broadcast. In order for the film to be shown on TV, the nudity and violence had to be cut. That left a lot of time. They added a subplot that has her nurse working with the blackmailer. Instead of the murders, we see Miss Turner report the killings to the blackmailer.

This movie also has Regan Wilson in the cast. She was Playboy‘s Playmate of the Month for October 1967. Those photos were taken to the moon inside the schedule of Apollo 12’s mission commander, Pete Conrad. Her co-star, Vicki Peters, was also the April 1972 Playmate of the Month.

You can also read Eric Wrazen and Bill Van Ryn‘s feelings on this movie.

Director and writer Erick Santamaria only made one movie (or did he? Letterboxd also lists three Spanish-language movies, La masacre de Ponce, La Tormenta and Los hijos del vicio) and this is it. He wrote the script along with his star, William Kerwin, and Kerwin’s brother Harry. Of course, by this point people may have known the actor from being in Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs! But now, he wasn’t the hero. Now, he was the villain named Bill, an artist who loses his mind when his models move.

The Kerwins left the environs of Florida behind to come to Canada for this and oddly, this is the only acting role for Neil Sedaka. Why the singer of “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen” would choose a scummy drive-in movie to be in is a mystery. Yet here he is as Bob, who is dating Betty (Linda Christopher) and ends up being seduced by her sister Arlene (Christopher’s real-life sister Jean) after a concert by JB & The Playboys. Maybe it was because Neil got up on stage and sang “Waterbug” with them.

One may also wonder why the movie has shifted from a murderous amateur artist killing women — with a speargun! — and suddenly has become a soap opera. I have learned that when it comes to movies of this ill repute to not ask these types of queries.

After this sisterly affair, Bob and Betty go back to their college and Arlene ends up hiring Bill. She wants him, after all, despite the fact that he instantly looks like a killer from a Canuxploitation horror movie set in Quebec because that’s exactly who he is. She keeps trying to get in his slacks and he keeps blowing her off. Finally, he consents to sketch her. She keeps moving and he tries to playfully strangle her. After she fights him off, he apologizes and explains why he’s how he is: he once helplessly watched as three girls drowned. Now, he has nightmares about watching them all over again as a fourth woman shoots a man with a bow and arrow. His psychologist told him to paint what was in that dream but he’s never been able to get it right because these women keep moving around. She’s dumb enough to allow him to stay in the house and even worse, to skinny dip around him. He loses it all over again, strangles her and leaves her in the very convenient walk-in cooler that her house has. Now, he can sketch and paint her dead body and achieve his need to paint that dream.

Now, Bill gets his plans really going. He places an ad for someone to care for his sister and Pat (Mary Lou Collier) applies and instantly is added to the meat locker. So is lounge singer Nikki (Andrée Champagne, who sings the song “Montage” and went on to be the casting director of Quest for Fire), who is also posed for Bill’s etchings. Finally, a friend of Arlene’s comes to check on her and ends up becoming the final woman in the painting, but then the power goes out and Bill’s plans melt, so to speak. It all comes together quite well.

Unreleased in the U.S. until 1970 — as  Decoy For Terror — Playgirl Killer promises nudity and mayhem and delivers jazzy music and saturated semi-violence. But who cares? You already paid for your ticket and you just get the chance to let it all play out. I’m a sucker for movies where artists go wild and destroy people in the pursuit of their aesthetic pursuits.

Bonus points: A theremin-heavy soundtrack.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Ben Saul (Scott Marlowe) is a reform school graduate who is starts classes at a public high school and wins over the students by buying beer for them and getting them into weed. He’s actually working for the syndicate and things start getting out of hand when a kid tries to hold up a gas station and gets killed. Of course, Ben starts getting high on his own supply and of course, he dies because that’s the moral of this movie.

This was produced by Elmer Rhoden Jr of the Kansas City-based Commonwealth Theaters, a prominent chain of motion picture theaters that needed low-budget teen exploitation films. The first movie he made, The Delinquents, was directed by Robert Altman. This would be the second film he made, which was directed by William Witney and written by Richard C. Sarafian.

It was picked up by American International Pictures and ended up being one of their bigger juvenile delinquent movies. It was so realistic that Richard Bakalyan and Dickie Jones were arrested by Kansas City police for vagrancy in between filming.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Xanadu was more than a flop. As part of a double bill with Can’t Stop the Music, it was the inspiration for the Golden Raspberry Awards, which recognize the worst films of the year. Yes, somehow a disco rollerskating remake of Down to Earth — itself the sequel to Here Comes Mr. Jordan — ended up being a critically reviled mess. Go figure.

The film was originally going to be a relatively low-budget roller disco picture. But as more prominent performers joined the production, it grew larger and larger in scope. Yet rollerskating improbably remained a recurring theme. Also, the strange mix of Jeff Lynne’s Electric Light Orchestra and Olivia Newton-John — along with Cliff Richard and The Tubes — made for an eclectic soundtrack that became a hit independent of the moribund status of the film that inspired it.

But hey — what do you want from a movie that quotes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” a poem written after a night of opium indulgence?

A large mural of the Nine Muses of Olympus comes to life, with women emerging from it and flying away. In the original script, Sonny Malone (Michael Beck from The Warriors, Megaforce and TV movie giallo lost gem Blackout) painted that mural, which makes sense. In the movie, it’s just the start of things as we follow one of those muses to Earth and meet Sonny as he’s about to give up on his dream of being an artist.

Sonny’s latest job is painting an album cover for a band called The Nine Sisters, which has a beautiful woman in front of an art deco auditorium, who just happens to look like the roller skater who kissed him and ran away. Sonny’s obsessed with her and learns that her name is Kira and well, she’s Olivia Newton-John and also one of the legendary Muses.

Later, Sonny befriends Daniel “Danny” McGuire (Gene Kelly!) who was once a big band leader but is now a construction mogul. Turns out he had a Muse once who looked just like Kira, who gets the two men to build a gigantic nightclub. For some reason, both of these guys got mad when they learned that the woman they love is some Olympian ideal.

Of course, Kira has gone against the Prime Directive and fallen in love, so shes called back to Xanadu, but Sonny can get there by roller skating as hard as he can through the mural. After debating her father Zeus, he and his wife Mnemosyne agree to allow Kira to return to Earth for a moment or maybe forever — you know, that whole time is different between the afterlife and here kind of conundrum.

Kira and the Muses perform at the new nightclub — also called Xanadu — before flying back to the real Xanadu. Yet a waitress who looks just like Kira stays behind, giving no easy answers.

Xanadu is the second movie of this week of musicals that features Adolfo Quinones, also known as the breakdancer Shabba Doo. You may remember him as Ozone in the two Breakin’ movies. And one of the Muses is Sandahl Bergman, who would soon be amazing in movies like Conan the Barbarian and She. This is also strangely the second movie this week that John “Fee” Waybill and Vince Welnick of The Tubes showed up in.

Somehow, director Robert Greenwald emerged to create the celebrated TV movie The Burning Bed before starting a new career in the next century creative left wing documentaries like Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.

Amazingly, this became a well-received musical years after it failed as a movie. Me, I remember Marvel Super Special #17, the comic book adaption and wondering why anyone would want to read it.

Xanadu is a movie that could only emerge in 1980. That said, it has some great songs like “Magic” and “Suddenly,” but somehow this is a musical that proves that you can make a bad movie from great songs. It’s all too much — too much skating, too much gloss, too much schmaltz. Yet there’s something to love under all that glitter.

Ella (Patricia Allison) is the punk daughter of the sheriff who just so happens to be the fastest gun in her island town. When her father (Bashir Salahuddin) is killed just after being warned that the people who killed his wife and son are back in town, she hopes that someone will get her justice. No one does and it feels like her father’s murder is being forgotten. Well, this may be set in the present, but it’s definitely a Western and it has a heroine who equals any man with a gun.

The state police, led by Sam Mayo (Adam Lustick) aren’t getting anything done. The new cop Hobbes (Arjun Gupta) is clueless and the mayor Calvin Whitney (Tate Donovan) may be behind it all. All Ella has is her weapon and her friend Townes (Myles Evans).

Directed by Max Isaacson and written by Tony Borden, this was filmed in Hawaii, where Paradise is located. It’s gritty at times yet covered in bright colors; Tia Carrere shows up as the boss of the bad guys, complete with an eye patch. I read one review that said that it can’t figure out what kind of movie it is. I disagree; it’s one that has so many influences yet emerges as a unique and exciting action film all its own.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Henry Darrow McComas (the writer of Wolfman’s Got Nards), this is the story of Sadie (Rachel Colwell) and Ed (Dillon Casey), a young couple who are barely getting along as they live the van life and travel across the U.S. Their travels take them to a camp run by the title character (Brooke Johnson) who is very much Mrs. Vorhees without the need for a son to rise from the lake two movies later. Then again, this ends with the hint of a sequel and gets supernatural.

I never wanted to go camping before this and certainly don’t want to now. The camp host has a series of rules — her life was ruined by those horrible kids that didn’t follow them, also it must be this place, this horrible place — and there’s one kill, in which a man climbs up out of one of those camp toilets covered in human excrement and looking like some kind of demon that would have made this an ironic film if it came out in 1980.

That said, I would never leave my dog at a killer camp and drive away. Obviously, Ed is a complete moron but he seems to get it together before the end. I really enjoyed this because it definitely leans into what you’re expecting before becoming what you’re not expecting. That’s a big swing and seeing that this is a Tubi Original, an even bigger one. Bring on The Camp Host 2.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Ted V. Mikels lived the kind of life that most teenage boys dream of. He lived in a house that looked like a castle, made exploitation movies and lived with gorgeous women who wanted to be filmmakers that he referred to as Castle Ladies.

When the Lotus Cat Food Company finds itself going out of business, its owners Landau (Sanford Mitchell) and Maltby (J. Byron Foster), who decide to start using dead bodies from a graveyard for the source of their cat food. The cats then have a taste for man and start killing. Only veterinarian Howard Glass (Sean Kenney) and nurse Angie Robinson (Monika Kelly) can stop the wild cats.

Not only was this written by Arch Hall Sr. — the father of Arch Hall Jr. — the script was touched up by Joe Cranston — the father of Bryan Cranston.

This film had quite a life. It played triple features with The Embalmer and The Undertaker and His Pals, double features in the UK with Horror Hospital and played drive-ins from 1980 to 1985 as The Flesh Grinders. It also was part of the legendary 5 Deranged Features lineup, playing as Night of the Howling Beast along with Dracula vs. Frankenstein under the title They’re Coming to Get You, The Wizard of Gore as House of Torture, Creature from Black Lake and Shriek of the Mutilated. House of Schlock has a great article about this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Made just before Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Motorpsycho has bikers Brahmin (Steve Oliver), Slick (Thomas Scott) and Rufus (F. Rufus Owens) assaulting women and killing their husbands. Their next victim is Gail Maddox (Holle K. Winters), the wife of veterinarian Cory Maddox (Alex Rocco). As he gets her to the hospital, the gang have already tracked their next victim, Ruby Bonner (Haji, who seriously seems to be some kind of goddess from another planet*), the way too young wife of Harry Bonner (Coleman Francis), who she hates with all her being. They’re both shot and left for dead, but Cory saves her and says he can take her as far as the next town. He wants to kill everyone who dared touch his wife.

There’s an incredible scene where a snake bites Cory and he demands that Ruby suck the poison out. It gets wild, let me tell you. “Suck it!” he keeps yelling. Man, Russ Meyer is anything but subtle.

I imagine that this story is taking place in the same desert as Pussycat! and we’re just lucky that the male bikers never met Varla, Rosie and Billie.

Haji’s real name was Barbarella Catton. Beyond the two Meyer movies mentioned already, she’s also in his movies Good Morning and… Goodbye!, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Supervixens. She started exotic dancing at the age of 14 and she wrote most of her dialogue in his movies. I’m overjoyed by the fact that she’s also in Demonoid, one of my favorite movies, as well as Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman, Bigfoot,  and Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, using the name Haji Cat. She continued performing in burlesque shows until a year before her death in 2013.

* I have evidence. She told Chris Poggiali, “I’ve always claimed that I’m just a visitor from another place, here to restore energy to my body. My mother was from another galaxy. She brought me here, and we settled in Quebec, but I’ve been here many times before that.”

Director and writer Greydon Clark had $50,000 and the idea to take Shampoo and make a black version, subverting blacksploitation by having its hero — Jonathan (John Daniels) — be a business owner instead of the expected criminal. The director of photography had a car accident and still said he would show up. He didn’t and the film’s gaffer, Dean Cundey, took over.

Mr. Jonathan’s is the most successful hair salon for women on the Sunset Strip and that’s because, well, every old and rich white woman in town is coming to get dicked down by Mr. Jonathan. There’s no other polite way to say it. Backed up by hairdressers Artie (Skip E. Lowe, the inspiration for Jiminy Glick) and Richard (Gary Allen), he lives the kind of life that Machete would later imitate.

He soon falls in love with his receptionist, Brenda (Tanya Boyd), who breaks his heart when she disappears. That’s because she’s been kidnapped by her ex, a white mobster, and Jonathan loses his mind after they tear up his shop and even sexually abuse his hairdressers. So he does what any of us would. He gets a chainsaw and kills everyone.

This is the kind of movie where a white woman looks at a nude black man and says, “Oh my God! Mr. Jonathan, it IS bigger and better!” Perhaps you will not be surprised by just how bad the depiction of its gay characters is. This was made in 1976 and that’s in my lifetime. Also: nearly everyone used stage names as it was non-union, so William Bonner is billed as Jack Meoff. That’s kind of the name you’d expect from a porn, but this feels like an adult movie for the first section — there’s a scene in which two young women in a pool seduce Mr. Johnathan before their mother mounts him and makes them watch — and then it becomes a romance before someone is sodomized with a curling iron and revenge comes with a pool cue, an axe and finally, that chainsaw in a gory climax no one saw coming.

You can watch this on Tubi.