Is a biker movie not enough action for you? What if I told you that a biker gang named The Devil’s Advocates happen upon some warlocks and then one of them is bitten by a female werewolf and transforms under the full moon? How’s that sound?

I literally just told you the entire plot of this movie. Soon after the cult members cast a curse on the biker leader’s (Stephen Oliver, who was married to Lana Wood, sister of Natalie Wood and also the star of Motorpsycho and Angels from Hell) girlfriend that makes her turn into a werewolf, she turns him as well. Soon, the bikers are being killed one by one until they see their leader and his girl transform.

The bikers head back to the church for revenge, but suddenly stop when they see themselves in the cult lineup.

This movie has been sampled by Rob Zombie repeatedly, including the line “We all know how we’re going to die, baby. We’re gonna crash and burn.” It’s also better than anything he’s done since The Devil’s Rejects. Actually, it’s probably better than that, too.

Real bikers were used for all the stunts in this movie, so it has a real authenticity to it. And the weirdness of the cult’s rituals breaks into that so nicely, giving this movie a real air of pure strange. The cult leader, One, is played by Severn Darden, who played Governor Kolp in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes. He’s so great in this movie!

The soundtrack is also so good. It’s very blues country rock with a bit of doom. It’s perfect for the action on the screen. This movie gets a very high recommendation!

You can watch this on Tubi.

Jill Winters (Norma Eberhardt) runs away, become thieves and live “a sin-steeped story of the rise of the Beat Generation.” Directed by Paul Henreid (the Cardinal from Exorcist II: The Heretic) from a script by Allen Rivkin and Ib Melchior, they find themselves working with Rick (Mike Connors) and Artie (Troy Donahue) and go from slipping guys a mickey when they take them back to their motel rooms to knocking over a post office to get six figures worth of jewels.

Meanwhile, Jill’s sister Kim (Mary Murphy) gets sick of their drunken father and decides to find where her sister is, getting mixed up in all this crime. She’s just lucky that she meets a truck driver named Jerry (Sheridan Comerate) who treats her well and helps her forget that her dad’s drunken friend once tried to touch her.

These girls are supposed to be teens but are instead in their late 20s. Such is the juvenile delinquent film. It played with Girls On the Loose and you can often see pictures of Eberhardt being worn by Slash from Guns ‘n Roses.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Known as Dragon Zombies Return, this movie is the kind of movie I just let wash over me.

Polly Shang Kuan Ling-Feng plays East Sea Dragon, a woman who has spent a year in a cave to study her fighting style and now is searching for the other, well, zodiac fighters like Rooster, Rat, Ox, Snake, Horse, Ram, Monkey, Dog, Pig, Tiger and Rabbit. Everyone has a costume that ties into their sign and martial arts to match.

Their enemy? Tiger Shark, played by Lo Lieh, who has an army of crab men, a boat that launches rubber sharks and the Five Elements, Fire, Wood, Water, Air and Gold. You thought there were only four elements? You aren’t ready for this.

From http://tarstarkas.net/2012/11/the-zodiac-fighters/

This is the story of a professional mourner who finds a magic cave and unites all of the animal forms of combat to battle rubber sharks. I have no other way to explain it. It’s one of the oddest movies I’ve seen — and just think about that and all that I have watched — and it’s so blobby and grainy and a bad transfer and you know, I kind of want it that way.

Want me to convince you?

Morricone’s theme from Exorcist II is in this.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Filmed and released within four months of the late-1966 Sunset Strip curfew riots, this American-International Pictures film was directed by Arthur Dreifuss and written by Orville H. Hampton. It even has its own song, “Riot on Sunset Strip”, written by Tony Valentino and John Fleck of the Standells.

It has some of the same cast from another AIP movie, Hot Rods to Hell. In that film, Mimsy Farmer was the bad girl and Laurie Mock was the virgin. Here, they switch roles, as Farmer is Andrea Dollier, a young girl seduced by LSD and evil hippies. Aldo Ray plays Sgt. Walt Lorimer, a cop who has been trying to get along with the kids on Sunset but when he finds his daughter sexually assaulted, he goes wild on a bunch of flower children. If only she hadn’t taken that drink laced by Herbie (Schuyler Hayden), she wouldn’t have been attacked by five boys that same night.

Beyond the music of The Standells, The Enemies and The Chocolate Watchband, we also get a long sequence of Farmer tripping out. Perhaps in my cinematic universe, her character Andrea goes on to become Estelle from More, which was made just two years later and is much franker about drug use. Maybe if her parents stayed together, maybe if her mother Margie (Hortense Petra) wasn’t a drunk, maybe if her dad wasn’t so driven to clean up the streets all of this would have never have happened.

I realize I love Mimsy Farmer on film because she’s always in trouble. Or causing it, freaking out about slashing her father, a man who always wanted a boy and got her instead or dealing with a conspiracy that wants to eat her or sunspots and autopsies. Her movie life is a nightmare and she’s a dream, what can I say?

This movie is ridiculous, made by out of touch people for kids probably far away from Los Angeles who want a piece of the action. Therefore, I love every minute.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Howard W. “Kroger” Babb called himself America’s Fearless Young Showman and lived by the belief, “You gotta tell ’em to sell ’em.” The name Kroger either came from working at the grocery store as a kid or the fact that his dad loved B.H. Kroger coffee. He worked numerous other jobs all through his teens, even showing up in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not for refereeing a record number of games. After working as a reporter, he did publicity for the Chakeres-Warners movie theaters and found out he had a gift for working people into the movies.

In the early 1940s, Babb joined Cox and Underwood. This distributor bought movies too controversial to advertise and took them on the road, four-walling theaters. Babb went on the road to sell Dust to Dust, which was High School Girl with a childbirth scene added. He made Cox and Underwood so much money that they retired. He decided to make his own company, Hygienic Productions.

After Babb somehow was invited to a meeting that discussed how many young girls were getting pregnant by soldiers from Sheppard Air Force Base, he worked with his future wife Mildred Horn to write a screenplay. He got twenty investors and Willian “One Shot” Beaudine to direct the movie.

Costing $62,000 to film and make 300 prints, it went on the road, often with Babb presenting the movie. He had a devotion to profit: expenses were estimated at 5% for selling and distribution overhead was 7%, resulting in some of the highest returns in movies. He believed that it made $63,000 for every $1,000 the twenty investors put in, while  the Los Angeles Times estimated in 1977 that it made $40 million to $100 million in profit.

He also had renowned educator Elliot Forbes show up, along with a shapely nurse, to talk during the movie and sell books about hygiene. There wasn’t really an Elliot Forbes but there were at least a hundred of the man with that name constantly going around the country for decades showing the film. Depending on the morality of each city, Mom and Dad could be shown as a cautionary film, a controversial one, an educational opportunity or the chance for men to see a woman’s private parts. The fact that a baby was coming out of them was just the price perverts paid to see a vagina bare on the big screen.

The book that was sold, Man and Boy and Woman and Girl, cost 8 cents to make. He sold it for a dollar, making around $40 million. The IRS came after him throughout his life and he was always sure to never give the same figures. He also claimed he lost a hundred pounds on the Astounding Swedish Ice Cream Diet, so Babb was the best of what I love about old movies: a carny flim-flam snake oil salesman who was always looking to make money and was always selling.

Sure, he got sued 428 over the movie, but wasn’t it all worth it?

Mom and Dad is about Joan Blake (June Carlson), a good young girl who sleeps with pilot Jack Griffin (Bob Lowell) after he sweet talks her into the backseat of his car. She’s soon pregnant and her parents, Sarah (Lois Austin) and Dan (George Eldredge) can barely pay attention to her. Her brother (Jimmy Clark) finally gets her to talk to Carl Blackburn (Hardie Albright), a teacher kicked out for teaching sex education, and explaining what is happening to her.

Depending on the print that was in your theater, you also saw a variety of sex hygiene movies, including one that showed childbirth, whether normal or caesarean, as well as one that graphically shows what syphilis does to the human body. Also, your ending would either have Joan have the baby, lose it when it was stillborn or have it adopted. If you saw the film in a black theater, Olympic athlete Jesse Owens would be there.

Exploitation films would not be what they were without Kroger Babb.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The bachelorette party has become dangerous in the horror films of the 2020s. It seems that every time ladies get together, people die. I was excited about watching this because it was directed by Dave Parker, who made The Dead Hate the Living!

Kelsey (Diana Gardner), Rochelle (Isabella Egizi), Blake (Nathaniel Ansbach) and Jenny (Anastasiya Bogach) are in Italy to celebrate Rochelle’s wedding to Richard (Davide Nurra). One of their friends, Brianna (Giulia Nunnari), has already been killed by a vampire but they don’t know that. No, they’re here to party, even if Kelsey and Rochelle aren’t really all that good of friends these days — which seems like a bit taken from Bridesmaids, but taken even darker because Rochelle stole Kelsey’s man, who is Richard. We also find out later that she may like Kelsey even more than Richard, however.

Everyone goes out and ends up a club owned by Victor (Fabián Castro). He asks to be invited back to where the party is happening and brings his vampire clan to start killing everyone, as well as try and win over Kelsey, who of course looks like his long dead love.

Written by Michael Lucid and Mary O’Neil (who is in Malum), this has some fine gore, gay representation — even Blake gets a love interest in vampire killer Dario (Riccardo Angelini) and some great production values. Is it the best vampire movie you’ve ever seen? Of course not. Is it a great movie for a rainy afternoon or late night with some drinks and pizza? Totally.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Maddie (Alexa Barajas) is driving when she gets distracted and hits someone. Instead of staying to check on them, she runs. Her mother is a politician and decides to hide her, more for her career than for Maddie’s safety. Her friend Hertig (Pavel Kríz) has created a state-of-the-art AI-powered house that has a system called ROMI (Jocelyn Chugg) that was created by Barkley (Juan Riedinger).

While hiding out, Maddie smokes weed, drinks and pops pills, showing no remorse at all for nearly killing someone. She does, however, learn that Hertig once had another woman living in the house named Irina (Jamie Shelnitz). That’s when the movie throws you a curve while otherwise it had been setting itself up to be an AI versus human beings film. It now is about a lost soul trapped in the house as well as a woman-hating serial killer coming after Maddie.

Director Robert Cuffley and writer Susie Moloney made a short of this film in 2019. There are some interesting shots in this as well as a really cool red color palette for some scenes, but there isn’t much that will surprise you. Cuffley also made Bright Hill Road, which has a similar story of a female protagonist confronting her past through the supernatural.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The third sequel to Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, this film finds Ilsa — didn’t she die a few times along the way? — changing sides from the Third Reich to the USSR as she runs Siberian Gulag 14, where she mentally and physically decimates men.

When Stalin dies, Ilsa burns the camp to the ground leaving no one alive except for Andrei Chikurin, who escapes and vows to get revenge. Twenty years later, he learns that Isla now runs a brothel in Canada when the Russian hockey team plays several games there.

According to the amazing Canuxploitation, Ilsa is actually a Canadian creation. When Lee Frost and David F. Friedman made big money with Love Camp 7 in Canada, Cinepix’s Andr Link and John Dunning wrote the script for Ilsa and got Friedman on board as a producer. Despite being the man who hired Dyanne Thorne for the role, issues with Cinepix and producer Don Carmody would have Friedman disown the movie.

Amazingly, this was produced by Ivan Reitman (using the name Julian Parnell).

This movie has a Siberian tiger named Sasha that Ilsa feeds men to, as well as many icy and watery graves and a scene where men arm wrestle over a running chainsaw. And each night, the men wrestle one another while a nude Ilsa challenges them to be the only two to come to her room where she’s definitely ahead of the adult film curve and very into DP (and I thought that was popularized by Ginger Lynn). She also has a mad scientist named Leve who has figured out ways to use photos and music to get into people’s brains.

Andrei Chikurin (Michel Morin) is the one man that she can’t break. He’s the one who killed her tiger and escaped the gulag and now, as the manager of the Russian hockey team, he somehow finds the one Montreal bordello called Aphrodite that Ilsa is the boss of. As he sits in the waiting room, her men take him and she tries to break him again — and make love to him, of course — before he’s freed by the Russian mafia and all manner of near Eurospy wildness goes down.

Director Jean LaFleur also made The Mystery of the Million Dollar Hockey Puck which has a lot of footage that was taken for this movie. It’s in no way as insane as the other Ilsa films — I mean, they have to contend with Jess Franco’s insane Ilsa, The Wicked Warden — but there’s lots of silly fun to be had. There’s also the ending, where Ilsa is left in the midst of nowhere, left with just her money to burn to stay alive.