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.

Directed and written by Harry Revier — who also made Lash of the Penitentes and would come back in the 50s and 60s to re-edit movie serial Buck Rodgers into Planet Outlaws and The Lost City into City of Lost Men — this original exploitation movie was the first produced by Kroger Babb, who would go on to make Mom and Dad.

Star Shirley Mills, who was also the youngest daughter in The Grapes of Wrath, is nude in this movie. That’s pretty amazing seeing as how it was made at the time of the Hays Code. It was an educational movie and made outside of Hollywood, but Mills is also 12 years old in this movie. You can imagine how controversial it was.

Miss Carol (Diana Durrell) has come back to the Ozarks to be a teacher and to end child marriage, which is the shame of the movie. Jake Bolby (Warner Richmond) wants to marry Mills’ character and is stopped by the law and then killed by Angelo the dwarf (Angelo Rossitto). Rossitto is in a ton of movies, all the way from the 20s to the 80s. He may be best known as the Master part of Master Blaster in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

Babb tried submitting this movie for a certificate of approval, only to be told it was “a sexually abhorrent abnormality which violates all moral principles.” He released it anyway and when it played Indianapolis, film critic Anna Horn said that she was horrified that a “cheap, crude, mislabeled morality play would be shown in a major Indiana family theater.” Babb met with Horn and instead of her writing a review, they stayed together for thirty-six years. She would write his next film, Mom and Dad.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Shot in two weeks for $50,000 outside Stamford, Connecticut by local producer/director Del Tenney, The Horror of Party Beach was advertised as “The First Horror-Monster Musical.” Tenney would also direct I Eat Your Skin, a movie that we all know as the much worse half of the famous double bill with the utterly astounding I Drink Your Blood.

The Del-Aires just want to play a party on the beach for the kids, but radioactive waste transforms a skeleton into a shambling monster. Hank Green just wants to get with Tina, but she’s drunk and wants to hook up with a biker. A fight ensues, but dudes are dudes and get along and end up shaking hands. So The Del-Aires play “The Zombie Stomp” and everyone has a swell time until that monster — remember him? — kills Tina and her bloody body washes up at the party.

Meanwhile, Dr. Gavin and the cops are on the case, but the doctor is more on Hank’s case, but he just knows that his assistant is the object of his older daughter’s affection. And then there’s some voodoo, because you know, why not. And then there’s a slumber party, because that’s what girls do when they’re in their early twenties. But never mind, the monster has found friends and they decide to wipe out all of these nubile young somnambulists.

Through some buffoonery, we learn that sodium can kill these monsters. There are also many, many more songs by The Del-Aires, who can’t seem to grasp the fact that monsters are rising up and mostly killing attractive women. Perhaps they could put their guitars down, pick up some table salt and get to work wiping out whatever the hell these creatures are?

This movie even got a photo comic book tie-in from Warren Publishing, the home of Famous Monsters, Eerie and Creepy. Wally Wood and Russ Jones worked on it and it’s a great collectors’ item.

Beyond all those groovy tunes by The Del-Aires, Edward Earle Marsh composed the soundtrack. You may know him better as Zebedy Colt, who started his career in Laurel and Hardy’s Babes In Toyland before releasing a series of gay cabaret songs before embarking on a career in pornography which would lead him to being in movies like Barbara Broadcast and directing films like The Devil Inside Her, which has nothing to do with the Joan Collins film of the same name.

You can watch this for free on Tubi or buy the Severin blu ray to get the best possible experience.

UPDATE: Thanks to Robert Constant, I am happy to tell you that this is also on Amazon Prime, free with your membership.

The poster for The Acid Eaters is, of course, a billion times better than the movie it’s selling, but how many films have a bunch of people climbing a fifty-foot tower of LSD cubes? One that I can think of.

Under the name B. Ron Elliott, this film’s director, Byron Mabe, made a nudie cutie with perhaps the best title ever, A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine. He also directed She Freak, The Lustful Turk, Nude Django, Mystic Mountain Massacre and Space Thing amongst others. In between making these berserk movies, he was an actor in Hollywood.

Writer Carl Monson would direct a few movies too, like A Scream in the Streets, Please Don’t Eat My Mother!, Will to Die (AKA Legacy of Blood), The Takers and the x-rated Tarz and Jane and Cheeta, which had Devil In Ms. Jones star Georgina Spelvin, Talia Cochrane (Wham! Bam! Thank You Spaceman!, Devil’s Ecstasy) and Patrick Wright (The Seven Minutes, Track of the Moon Beast) in it.

Pat Harrington, who was in plenty of Harry Novak movies and Mantis In Lace, is in this, billed as Camille Grant and dancing to bongo drums. So are former pro wrestler Buck Kartalian, who you may know as The Khan from Gymkata, and Sharon Carr, who was in the aforementioned A Smell of Honey is on hand.

There’s a drone soundtrack, David F. Friedman serving as the cinematographer and the devil poking people in the butt while they’re all trying to kiss in the nude. Look, I’ve never done LSD, but I would hope that it is not as boring as this movie and totally as sensational as the poster for this one.

Olga (Audrey Campbell) is the meanest and the best at her job, which is turning out women like Frenchie (Gigi Darlene), plying them with marijuana and if that doesn’t work, just beating them into submission, all so that they turn tricks for her and the syndicate. The syndicate! You will hear their names so many times.

A film made with all voiceovers, White Slaves of Chinatown was directed and written by Joseph P. Mawra, who directed Fireball Jungle and may or may not have directed Shanty Tramp and Savages from Hell. Probably not.

There’s opium everywhere and this feels like those black and white detective magazines you used to see on the newstand that seem way more perverted than any porn magazine, always with women being threatened on the cover and in every story.

Olga would return for four more movies: Olga’s House of Shame and Olga’s Girls with Campbell and Mme. Olga’s Massage Parlor with no Olga showing up and Olga’s Dance Hall Girls with Lucy Eldredge as Olga.

In 1964, this movie was probably as offensive as can be. Today, it’s still pretty scuzzy but you can’t help but find it adorable.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Curt Siodmak wrote The Wolf Man and for that, we should always thank him. He also directed and wrote this film, which was shot in Eastmancolor on location on the Amazon River. There was 10,000 feet of color film left over that Siodmark couldn’t export. so the same cast and crew made Love Slaves of the Amazons.

Rock Dean (John Bromfield, whose wife Larri Thomas plays the nightclub dancer) wonders why the workers on his plantation have left. Dr. Andrea Romar (Beverly Garland) wants to find the drug that witch doctors use to shrink heads. That’s how they got on the Amazon. Their guide, Tupanico (Tom Payne) is really trying to lead his people back to the old ways and using the monster Curucu — or at least the legend — to drive them from the plantations.

At least there’s a scene where a piranha eats an arm. and wow, the ending, the gift of a shrunken head is always something.

You can get this from Vinegar Syndrome.

Man, Alan Ormsby has done so much. In addition to working with Bob Clark on Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and Death Dream, he wrote My Bodyguard and the remake of Cat People. Plus, he was the original director of Popcorn and the man behind Kenner’s Hugo: Man of a Thousand Faces action figure. 

He’s the man behind Deranged, along with Jeff Gillen, who played Jeff in Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and who you can see every Christmas Eve as Santa Claus in A Christmas Story. 

Deranged is filmed as if it were a true story, with reporter Tom Simms (Leslie Carlson, Black Christmas) appearing within the events and narrating them. The whole thing was based on Ed Gein, the infamous real life Butcher of Plainfield, Wisconsin that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho are both based on.

It was produced by producer Tom Karr, a concert promoter for bands like Led Zeppelin and Three Dog Night who had been fascinated with Ed Gein and dreamed of making a film about his story.

Ezra Cobb (Roberts Blossom, Old Man Marley in Home Alone, how’s that for a scary tie-in role?) is our Ed Gein stand-in, running a midwest farm with his mother Amanda (Cosette Lee, who played Raxl, Daughter of the Priestess of the Serpent on Strange Paradise, a Canadian occult soap opera created in the wake of Dark Shadows). Since he was a boy, she’s taught him to hate women.

Once she dies, it takes a year for him to come out of his shell. When he finally snaps to it, he does what any loving and grieving son would do: he digs his mom up and puts her body together with fish skin and wax.

Ezra gets involved with an eccentric older woman who claims she’s psychic named Maureen Shelby (Marian Waldman, Mrs. MacHenry from Black Christmas, and if you don’t know who that is, please stop reading and start watching). They have a fumbling sexual encounter that ends with Ezra killing her and we’re off to the races.

Ezra’s next target is Mary Ransum (Mickie Moore, who is also in The Vindicator and is one of the Believers in, yes, The Believers), a waitress who he lures home, knocks out and dresses in just her underwear for dinner. Their nice meal is ruined by her trying to run, so he smashes her head with a femur bone. And then he takes out young Sally, which leads the police to his home, where they find him in the kitchen, enjoying a bowl of blood after skinning her.

Deranged is not an easy watch, as its subtitle, Confessions of a Necrophile, will tell you. It’s also the second movie — after Deathdream — that Tom Savini ever worked his special effects magic on.

You can get the blu ray of this film from Kino Lorber.