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.

Tor Johnson is one of those actors who was a special effect without any help. Just by showing up on screen, he’s thrilling. In this one, he’s Joseph Jaworsky, a Russian scientist who runs from the Iron Curtain and finds his way to Yucca Flats, where radiation turns him into a mute beast. All he wanted to do was give the Americans the secrets to the Russian moon landing!

American actor, writer, producer and director Coleman Francis made this, casting his sons and himself in the movie. His oeuvre, as it were, is made up of films like The Skydivers and Red Zone Cuba. People don’t just smoke in his movies. The smoking becomes central to the entire film. Kevin Murphy of Mystery Science Theater 3000 said that the themes of his movies are “death, hatefulness, death, pain, and death.”

The police, for no real reason or trial, shoot the irradiated Tor Johnson over and over, but he lives just enough to hug a jackalope* before he dies. The police officers in Francis’ films, which often end his stories by brutally blowing away the bad guys, may be the most realistic ones in the history of movies.

Everything in this movie is dubbed. Nobody speaks on camera. Even guns are fired off-camera and then b-roll of guns being shot is cut in. The editing is such that some characters appear to have been shot to death and then arise and come back in later scenes. There’s also a murder scene in the beginning with a naked woman in the shower being choked. That scene is only in this because Francis likes shooting nude scenes.

What’s funny is that this movie predates The Incredible Hulk and seems very much like the same origin story. Maybe that’s a coincidence. As for Tor Johnson, he would only make one more movie, appearing without credit in Head. Here’s a quote about the making of the movie that I love: *The jackalope wandered on set and Tor Johnson improvised caressing it. Man, life is awesome, isn’t it?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Nicholas Merriweather, who wrote this, is Arch Hall Sr. He wanted to make his son, Arch Hall Jr., into a star. Before that, he was a legitimate cowboy and even had a Native American name: Waa-toe-gala Oak-Shilla, which means Wild Boy. In fact, when he died, he was buried in a full Sioux ceremony led by Lakota Sioux spiritual leader Frank Fools Crow. Before that, he was a pilot and stuntman who finally started his own studio, Fairway Productions, making movies like Eegah, The Corpse Grinders and The Sadist.

Arch Hall Jr. was a pilot after his short Hollywood life. He also used the name Nicolas Merriweather as a writer.

Wild Guitar was directed by Ray Dennis Steckler, who also made The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies and who rivals Joe D’Amato for alternate names, such as Sven Christian, Michel J. Rogers, Henri-Pierre Duval, Pierre Duvall, Sven Hellstrom, Ricardo Malatoté, Harry Nixon, Michael J. Rogers, Wolfgang Schmidt, Cindy Lou Steckler, R.D. Steckler, Ray Steckler, Cindy Lou Sutters and, of course, Cash Flagg. He also plays one of the bad guys, Steak.

The world of Wild Guitar seems on the surface like our own but no, it is not. It is a world that Bud Eagle (Hall Jr.) is seen as the next big star and is manipulated by big Hollywood boss Mike McCauley (William Watters, but that’s Hall Sr. being the heel to his boy) on the surface, but you’re seeing a universe that has been created by lunatics who think that their creation is normal when no, it is not. It is a mirror world that we stare into and worry that we will never properly leave. And yet we love this movie for that, as it is never boring. Bud misses his brother, who he writes letters to, and loves Vickie (Nancy Czar), a former figure skater that he’s met like once. I want this world to be the one I live in, a place where the giant headed Arch Hall Jr. can be the hottest star in the galaxy.

This does feel like part of a cinematic universe, as posters and props from Eegah are everywhere and the song “Vickie” was also in that movie. There are also posters for The Choppers and Wild Ones On Wheels.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) wants a Pulitzer so bad that he’s willing to go into a mental hospital to learn who killed someone. He’s talked Dr. Fong (Philip Ahn) into working with him to appear insane and his cover is that he’s incestually obsessed with his sister, who will be played by his exotic dancer girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers). She doesn’t want to be part of this, realizing how dangerous it is. He doesn’t care — he wants fame.

Once inside, Johnny is overwhelmed by the patients he meets. Literally, as an entire wing of female nymphomaniacs assault him. He gets closer to the truth through three patients: Stuart (James Best!), a man who was taken by the Koreans and indoctrinated into Communism before being reformed, then outed as a traitor by his own government. He now believes that he is Southern General J.E.B. Stewart. The second is Trent (Hari Rhodes), a black man who was so abused in college that he believes that he is a member of the Klu Klux Klan. The last is Boden (Gene Evans), a nuclear scientist who helped invent the atomic bomb who has reverted the mentality of a child so that he no longer has to create weapons.

While Johnny learns who the killer is, it takes his sanity, which is destroyed after shock therapy. He thinks that Cathy is his sister and sure, he writes the story, but he’s now trapped in the same place he worked so hard to get into.

Directed and written by Samuel Fuller, this was shot in ten days with no exteriors. Fuller was upset that the movie was sold as an exploitation movie. It played double features with The Naked Kiss. As I always say, the only difference between the arthouse and the grindhouse is where the movie is playing.

You can watch this on YouTube.