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.

If you thought that Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS was the limit, this movie makes it feel as if Jess Franco tool that movie as a personal challenge to somehow create something innumerable times sleazier.

Considered the third movie in the series — even if it wasn’t filmed as a sequel — and also known as Greta, the Mad Butcher, Ilsa: Absolute Power and Wanda, the Wicked Warden, this stars the women who is Ilsa, Dyanne Thorne, as Greta. She’s running a psychiatric hospital for young women, which gives her plenty of opportunities to indulge her more, shall we say, psychosexual side.

Probably shot at the same time — who knows, maybe even the same place — as Barbed Wire Dolls, the heroine of this story is Abbie Phillips, whose sister died inside the walls of Greta’s hospital, and now must infiltrate the hospital and find out why.

The amazing thing about this movie is that as wild as Ilsa has been in the past, she’s now entering the ninth circle of voyeur hell where director Jess Franco and his muse, Lina Romay, reside. Lina plays a prisoner named Juana who keeps the other female prisoners in line as well as lined up for prostitution and pornography. Also, in one scene that might break your mind, she follows a prison toilet BM by forcing Abbie to be human toilet paper. Yes, this happens and yes, this movie played American theaters and I have no idea how.

Snuff movies, acupuncture gone wrong, scarred women being used by cruel men, Lina Romay no doubt looking as perfect as she ever will or ever did and being the meanest woman in the world in a manner so brutal that she can only devour — literally — the previous champion in an ending that is either going to flip your stomach, raise your fist in triumph or both and Franco pretty much running through the motions he did in so many other women in prison movies, except Franco through the motions is still way more magical and insane and upsetting and sleazy and can you endure this than anyone perhaps ever.

José Ramón Larraz went to school for philosophy, became a comic book writer and then made some wild movies, like Whirlpool, which Roger Ebert negatively reviewed — I mean, I love it — by saying that it was a genuinely sickening film. It has to do with various varieties of sex, yes, but its main appeal seems to be its violence… The violence is not, however, the cathartic sort to be found in The Wild Bunch or the comic strip spaghetti Westerns. It’s a particularly grisly sort of violence, photographed for its own sake and deliberately relishing in its ugliness. It made me awfully uneasy.” He also directed the Spanish Western Watch Out Gringo! Sabata Will Return, The House That Vanished (which had so many titles, including Scream…And Die! and Please! Don’t Go in the Bedroom, as well as a campaign that made it look like Last House on the Left), Symptoms, Stigma, Black Candles (AKA Sex Rites of the Devil) and three American co-productions before the end of his career, the underrated Edge of the Axe, Rest in Pieces and Deadly Manor.

The film starts with its leads, Fran (Marianne Morris) and Miriam (Anulka Dziubinska, billed here as Anulka; a former Page 3 girl who was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for May 1973, she was once married to Soupy Sales’ son Tony, who was in Tin Machine with David Bowie, Reeves Gabriels and his brother Hunt Sales) in bed together, which was probably quite shocking in 1974, but perhaps even more shocking is when they’re machine gunned before the credits.

They’re brought back as vampires that roam the British countryside and take in wayward male motorists, draining them of more than blood before disposing of these conquests. They have a different form of vampirism than you may have seen before, making grisly arm wounds that they continually feed from, closer to cannibals than bloodsuckers.

Morris and Anulka make quite the pair; the film is in love with everything they do. Beyond the gorgeous leads, the scenery is just as inviting, as this was not around Oakley Court, which Hammer used for The Man in Black, The Lady Craved Excitement, The Brides of Dracula, The Reptile and The Plague of the Zombies. William Castle shot The Old Dark House there and you’ll also see it in films like Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny, and Girly; And Now the Screaming Starts! and perhaps most famously, it was the home of Dr. Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. While it had no heat or running water when that movie was filmed, it’s now a luxury hotel.

This played double features with The Devil’s Rain! in England, which is my kind of night.

You can watch this on Tubi.