Russ Meyer, who directed this and co-wrote it with James Griffith, who also plays the Man of God who speaks at the open and close of this, said that Lorna is “a brutal examination of the important realities of power, prophecy, freedom and justice in our society against a background of violence and lust, where simplicity is only a facade.” It’s also the first serious movie he’d make after filming war footage — some claims the sight of the flag being raised on Iwo Jima was shot by Meyer — and nudie cuties like The Immoral Mr. Teas and Wild Gals of the Naked West. Not that this movie is any less sexual, as it was charged with obscenity in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Florida.

“Without artistic surrender, without compromise, without question or apology, an important motion picture was produced: LORNA—a woman too much for one man.”

That’s right. Lorna (Lorna Maitland) is unsatisfied with her husband Jim (James Rucker), no matter how hard he works at the salt mine and slaves over the books at night to become an accountant. He’s boring, after all. And when she’s assaulted by a convict (Mark Bradley) — while she swims nude in a river — she discovers her lust is still intact, despite her marriage. She invites him back to her place and tragedy mars the ending so much that we see the form of the Grim Reaper staring down on the final moments of this film.

Maria Andre was about to play Lorna but something was wrong. Meyer figured it out. Her breasts were too small for him. He paid her anyways — she was already in his movie Heavenly Bodies! — and found the 42D-22-36 Barbara Ann Popejoy thanks to his wife Eve. He changed her name to Lorna Maitland and she’d be in his next two films after this, Mondo Topless (actually, he used some of her audition for this and it wasn’t new footage) and Mudhoney. She was pregnant during the filming and gave her child up for adoption afterward.  Her life after being in movies wasn’t all that happy, as related by The Rialto Report.

Written in four days and shot in ten, Lorna is short and to the point. It’s also pretty great. Unfortunately, other than Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, so many of Meyer’s movies are going unremembered and unseen by younger viewers, as the DVDs are so high in price and there aren’t blu rays or ways to see them streaming. I’d love if this changed. His work demands to be examined.

Mike Wilson (Russ Tamblyn) goes undercover as Tony Baker to get inside a high school narcotics operation. His cover is that he lives with Gwen Dulaine (Mamie Van Doren) who acts as his aunt but really wants to seduce him. He keeps his cover, which means he’s some kind of robot, because living with Mamie Van Doren who wants to sleep with you at every opportunity seems like the kind of life some men dream of their entire existence, you know?

Mike also has some romantic moments with a student — Joan Staples (Diane Jergens) — and a teacher — Arlene Williams (Jan Sterling) — but he’s more interested in getting the guy pushing all the marijuana in school who is known as Mr. A (Jackie Coogan).

The thing about this movie is that the cops are all squares and all of the really cool people are on drugs. So yes, the makers of this movie — director Jack Arnold and producer Albert Zugsmith, the man who director Dondi — erred on the side of making an entertaining movie, even if Zugsmith wanted nudity. Indeed, the European version of this movie has Jan Sterling topless when Tamblyn calls her on the telephone and a girl in the throes of heroin withdrawal showing her breasts.

If you listened to any White Zombie, you’ll recognize the beat poetry read by the character played by Phillipa Fallon, who was also in Zugsmiths’s The Girl In the Kremlin and The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, which goes like this:

“My old man was a bread stasher all his life. He never got fat. He wound up with a used car, a 17-inch screen and arthritis. Tomorrow is a drag, man, tomorrow is a king-sized bust. // They cried, “Put down pot. Don’t think a lot.” For what? Time how much and what to do with it. Sleep, man, and you might wake up diggin’ the whole human race, givin’ itself three days to get out. Tomorrow is a drag, pops, the future is a flake. // I had a canary who couldn’t sing. I had a cat that let me share my pad with her. I bought a dog that killed the cat that ate the canary. What is truth? // I had an uncle with an ivy-league car. He had life with a belt in the back. He had a button-down brain. Wind up a belt in the mouth and a button-down lip. // He coughed blood on this earth. Now there’s a race for space. We can cough blood on the moon soon. Tomorrow is dragsville, cats. Tomorrow is a king-sized drag. // Hula fast shorts, swing with a gassy chick, turn on to a thousand joys, smile on what happened, then check what’s gonna happen, you’ll miss what’s happening. Turn your eyes inside and dig the vacuum. Tomorrow, drag.”

That sample appears on La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1, as does the Columbus speech at the start of the movie and the lines “Do you want to start a rumble?” and “Drop it, buster!”

Not only does this movie have Jerry Lee Lewis do the theme song, he shows up to sing it.

I love this movie. I love it so much I nearly missed Michael Landon showing up in it, but I was concentrating on all the kids just openly smoking joints and, well, thinking about Mamie Van Doren.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Zontar, the Thing from Venus is one of the many remakes of Roger Corman movies — this one is It Conquered the World — directed by Larry Buchanan.

This starts at a dinner party. That’s where NASA scientist Dr. Keith Ritchie (Anthony Huston) reveals to Dr. Curt Taylor (John Agar) that he’s been secretly meeting with an alien from Venus named Zontar who is coming to solve all of Earth’s issues. A dinner party would not seem to be the time to do this.

Zontar ends up being a three-eyed, bat-winged, skeletal black creature and I don’t want to be one of those people that judges people by their outside appearances, but I don’t think Zontar has any intention of making the world a better place.

Not even when Zontar starts possessing people with lobster injecto-pods does Ritchie think this friend is a horrific alien monster. No, it takes his wife Martha (Patricia De Laney) dying before he does something about it. Scientists are really smart and also so dumb.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

At the Explorers’ Club in London — yes, it’s all rich white dudes — Dr. Moran (George Coulouris) tells everyone that he’s going to the Amazon to get “a miracle-working JuJu that can bring the dead back to life.” While there, he watches Marpessa Dawn, a year removed from being in Black Orpheus — get eaten by a tree. Then he gets jungle fever and it takes five years for him to recover.

Dr. Moran has brought the tree and the drummer who controls it, Tanga (Jimmy Vaughan), to keep on working on bringing life to death, which starts with feeding Susan Curtis to the tree. I’m amused that Sara Leighton, who played the role, became a famous lady of British society known for her portrait painting.

Meanwhile, Sally Norton (Vera Day) is working at a sideshow dancing the hula-hula, because Hawaii was all mondo to British people in the late 50s. A local favorite named Jack Venner (Peter Wayn) ends up getting her fired and then hired by Moran, who must love Tanya Donelly because he can’t stop feeding that tree. And he starts falling for Sally, even strangling the woman who has loved him nearly forever, Margaret Santor (Joyce Gregg), all so she can start working in his lab.

The end of this movie gets all nihilist, as the drummer refuses to teach the secret of how to keep the brain alive after death and Moran realizes he loved Margaret and tries to bring her back to life, only to have her as a brainless zombie. Tanga tries to feed Sally to the tree, Moran sets it on fire and then gets killed by the drummer’s knife before Tanga kneels before the tree and lets it set him on fire.

What!?!

Director Charles Saunders and writer Brandon Fleming stopped making movies after 1963. That’s a shame because this movie is just…something.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Made by the same people who brought you Wheels of Tragedy and Mechanized Death, Signal 30 refers to the radio code used by the Ohio State Highway Patrol for a fatal traffic accident.

Today, there’s no way they would just show the dead bodies of people torn apart by car accidents and tell you how they got there. Everything would be blurred or they would just do reenactments. But no, here are real people in as close to a snuff movie as can exist, all authorized by the authorities.

Made in Mansfield, Ohio — which is between Cleveland and Columbus — this starts with these words: “This is not a Hollywood production as can readily be seen. The quality is below their standards. However, most of these scenes were taken under adverse conditions, nothing has been staged. These are actual scenes taken immediately after the accidents occurred. Also unlike Hollywood our actors are paid nothing. Most of the actors in these movies are bad actors and received top billing only on a tombstone. They paid a terrific price to be in these movies, they paid with their lives.”

There’s a moment where a young trucker is twisted and destroyed and then another is a black cinder as he is pulled from the barely recognizable detritus of what was once an big rig. It makes you realize that the highways are unsafe and may give you anxiety over even getting behind the wheel, because you are made of blood and muscles that won’t stand up to the destructive power of physics.

There’s also a barbecue restaurant in Cohoes, NY that has this name. You know, I always say the more horrifying the cartoon art of a barbecue spot, the better the food. There was once a place called Two Pigs that had two of the Three Little Pigs eating the third. I can only imagine that a restaurant named after vehicular death has to taste so good.

This movie is respected. Faces of Death is not. This is real. That one is fake. Draw your own conclusions.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty, this film remixes newsreels, military training films and other footage made during the Cold War to ease peoples’ minds about the inevitability of nuclear destruction and survivability. I’m so glad to report we no longer — oh, Putin said he’s going to fire nuclear missiles at us, never mind — look, if you grew up in the 80s, you faced nuclear terror and movies like The Day After and Threads every day.

“Viewed from a safe distance, the atomic bomb is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man.” Those words are horrifying but this movie is hilarious. Released as Reagan was leading the largest military increases since the Korean War, this is a movie that shows nuclear clouds “harmlessly” blowing over innocent people and soldiers testing themselves to see how much radiation that had been exposed to. Mutually assured destruction was the aim in 1982;  the U.S. had so many nukes that they could inflict end of the world damage on the Soviet Union even after absorbing everything they had, even if no one would survive. And who would want to? Again, have you seen Threads?

Directed by Jayne Loader and Kevin and Pierce Rafferty, this film has no narration, just music from the era and seemingly bombards you with continually more insane and ridiculous notions. Surely, you can just duck and cover when a bomb goes off. All set to an amazing soundtrack, which hammers home just how pointless this nuclear war idea all was and is.

This movie also inspired Michael Moore, who said, “This is the movie that told me that a documentary about a deadly serious subject could be very funny. Then I asked the people who made it to teach me how to do it. They did. That movie became my first – Roger & Me.”

This Bill Hailey and the Comets song on the soundtrack is absolutely deranged, by the way:

“Last night I was dreamin’

Dreamed about the H-Bomb

Well the bomb-a went off and I was caught

I was the only man on the ground

There was-a 13 women and only one man in town”

You can watch this on Tubi.

A Bucket of Blood aspires to art as much as it does junk. Written by Charles B. Griffith, whose name you can associate with films as disparate as Smokey Bites the Dust, Barbarella and Death Race 2000, it’s a tale of trying to figure out how to create art when all you can do is repeat words and images. Maybe that’s what art really is.

Roger Corman himself directed this one, shot in five days for $50,000. But hey — AIP wanted a horror film and had sets left over from Diary of a High School Bride. The same set would also be used for The Little Shop of Horrors.

We start by hearing the beat poetry of Maxwell H. Brock (Julian Burton, The Masque of the Red Death) at The Yellow Door cafe. People only know when to clap when they’re told, as the people he decries as sheep really live up to it. But it’s art, baby.

Busboy Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) yearns to be part of this hip crowd and wants to win the heart of Carla (Barboura Morris, The Trip), a friendly hostess at the club. As he fails to make her a sculpture, his landlady’s cat Frankie (Myrtle Vail plays the snooping older woman; she’s actually Griffith’s grandmother) gets stuck in the wall. He tries to cut it out of the wall, but ends up killing the cat. So he does what any of us would: he covers it in clay, sticks a knife in it and calls it art.

The next morning, Walter’s boss Leonard (Antony Carbone, Creature from the Haunted Sea) makes fun of the morbid art, but Carla loves it. So up it goes, on display, where the beatniks all fall in love with it. One of those crazy cats named Naolia gives him some heroin to remember her by, but Walter has no idea what it is.

As he’s followed home by undercover cop and total fink Lou Raby (Bert Convy!), he’s told he’s going to be arrested for possession. He panics and hits Lou with a frying pan, giving him another piece of art called “Murdered Man” for everyone to fall in love with. But the secret’s soon to get out, as Leonard sees fur sticking out of his “Dead Cat” piece.

Walter is now the king of the artistic set, except for Alice (Judy Bamber, Dragstrip Girl), a model who is pretty much disliked by everyone. Walter asks her to be in his model and she agrees, only to be strangled and turned into his next art object. The results so impress Brock that he throws a party for Walter, who drunkenly beheads someone directly after and shows the results to his boss.

This has to end like all wax-related films. Walter finally feels enough self-worth to propose to Carla, who rejects him and soon learns that the sculptures are really human bodies covered in wax. Everyone chases him home, where he makes his last piece of art from himself — the “Hanged Man.”

Dick Miller said of the film — in the book Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers — “The story was good; the acting was good; the humor in it was good; the timing was right; everything about it was right. But they didn’t have any money for production values … and it suffered.”

Miller would go on to play a character named Walter Paisley in the films Hollywood Boulevard, The Howling, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Chopping Mall, Night of the Creeps, Shake, Rattle and Rock!, Rebel Highway, The Adventures of Biffle and Shoosterror and Schmo Boat.

The movie was remade in 1995 as part of the Roger Corman Presents series on Showtime. While never available on DVD, it was released as The Death Artist on VHS. It adds perhaps the one thing missing from the original: Paul Bartel. He and Mink Stole play a rich couple looking for new artists. Walter is played by Anthony Michael Hall, Carla by Justine Bateman, Shadoe Stevens is Maxwell and Sam Lloyd is Leonard. Taking place in a cappuccino bar, it also features Will Ferrell and David Cross in some of their first roles.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Part of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ so-called Blood Trilogy with Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs!, this one concerns Adam Sorg, an artist who is seeking the perfect color red for his latest masterpiece. While conventional science would tell you that blood would turn brown when it dries, in this movie, it remains the same garish tone that an Italian giallo would feature.

Color Me Blood Red and A Bucket of Blood are essentially the same basic film, except that where Roger Corman keeps much of the violence off-screen, you’re here for a Lewis film to see blood and organs splash all over the screen. You’re not here for subtlety.

Gordon Oas-Heim is positively unhinged here as the lead. It’s kind of amazing that years later, he’d play Manford the butler on The New Monkees. He also shows up in Lewis’ Moonshine Mountain as the sheriff (he used the stage name Adam Sorg here!) and also is in Andy Warhol’s Bad.

This would be the last film from the duo of Lewis and David F. Friedman. There were plans to make a fourth in the series — Suburban Roulette* — but Friedman thought they’d done all they could when it came to gore. He’d move on to make roughies and nudie cuties like A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine; 7 Into Snowy and The Acid Eaters, as well as Love Camp 7 and Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS using the name Herman Traeger.

You can watch this on Tubi or get the Arrow Video blu ray from Diabolik DVD. That has audio commentary by Lewis and Friedman, as well as Something Weird as a second bonus film. If you don’t have the gigantic Lewis box set, this is a great purchase.

*Lewis would end up making a movie with this title in 1968.

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.