Yes, Ilsa died at the end of the first movie but when has that ever stopped a sequel?

Directed again by Don Edmonds, written by Langston Stafford and again featuring Dyanne Thorne as Ilsa, this film starts with three crates arriving for Ilsa to process. They three chastity belt-confined women. They are the sole heiress of a chain store king of the United States, an actress who is a Scandinavian love goddess and an Asian-European equestrian champion. Working for Sheikh El-Sharif (Jerry Delony), she is to prepare them for sale, which means forcing them to make love to her lesbian bodyguards and crush the body parts of spies who are working for the American commander (Max Thayer) who is spying on her.

This is a movie that has exploding diaphragms and belly button cameras, so it is much more Eurospy than the original. It is just as ridiculous. It also steals the theme from Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb.

It also has a formidable cast, including Russ Meyer supervixens Uschi Digard  and Haji, Tanya Boyd, Colleen Brennan, Marilyn Joi, Su Ling and the returning George Buck Flower. There’s also a plot where the commander and Ilsa save the prince and she still gets condemned to starvation. Don’t worry. She’ll be back.

This is a much slicker looking movie with cardboard sets but somehow, it has more of a spirit of fun, even if it has dialogue like “Let’s see how she dances with no feet.”

Don Edmonds and produced by David F. Friedman, Ilsa is one of the most notorious exploitation movies of all time. Gene Siskel said it was “the most degenerate picture I have seen to play downtown” and people were shocked by its depictions of castration, torture, human experiments and sexual degradation. Of course, it was a huge success.

Based on Ilse Koch, a woman who ran the Buchenwald concentration camp, where she supposedly killed some prisoners to get their tattooed skin. Even if time — and court cases — have proved that she was not as horrible as those claims, the legend stuck.

She did not, however, look anything like Dyanne Thorne. The actress went from the stage and comedy albums in New York City to singing in Las Vegas and acting in movies like Point of Terror. She was also a church ordained, non-denominational ministers of a church called the Science of Mind. Later in life — she also studied anthropology — Thorne and husband Howard Mauer offered weddings in Las Vegas. She would even dress like Ilsa if you wanted.

Ilsa runs a prison camp and also uses it for her sexual needs, which can’t be satisfied by any man. When any of them orgasm before her, they lose their manhood and are killed. The only man that survives her bedroom is Wolfe (Gregory Knoph), who looks like the perfect Aryan Ubermensch. He will be, however, her undoing.

Meanwhile, a visiting German general gives Ilsa the Iron Cross for her service as she proves that women are superior when it comes to dealing with pain. He also asks her to urinate on him, so…yeah. You may not be ready for this movie, to be perfectly honest.

The other reason this movie works is a great cast. There’s George Buck Flower as Dr. Binz, Ilsa’s assistant doctor. He was also an uncredited assistant director, casting director, set decorator and grip. It also has appearances by Uschi Digard, Colleen Brennan (AKA Sharon Kelly; she’s also in the first sequel) and Sandy Dempsey.

Ilsa comes after Lee Frost and Friedman’s Love Camp 7 became a success in Canada, which found André Link and John Dunning of Cinepix Film Properties wanting to make their own cash-in. There were some worries that this movie would backfire, so it starts with a square-up: “The film you are about to see is based on documented Holocaust facts. The atrocities shown were conducted as medical experiments in special concentration camps throughout Hitler’s Third Reich. Although the Nazis and Schutzstaffel’s crimes against humanity are historically accurate, the characters depicted are composites of notorious Nazi personalities; and the events portrayed, have been condensed into one locality for dramatic purposes. Because of its shocking subject matter, this film is restricted to adult audiences only. We dedicate this film with the hope that these heinous, absolutely HORRIFIC crimes will never happen again.”

It also has its share of fake names. Herman Traeger is Friedman, Jonah Royston is Saxton, Flower used C.D. Lafleuer and Richard Kennedy was Wolfgang Roehm. The editor had to have used a fake name, as Kurt Schnit means “short cut” in German.

Despite — spoiler warning — Ilsa being shot in the head and her crimes being covered up, she somehow survived and appears in three sequels that all also end with her being killed or near-death.

Most incredibly, this was shot on the set of Hogan’s Heroes, which had been cancelled and was due to be toen down. The filmmakers told them they would be destroying it, which got them the use of the entire pre-built world that appears so much more sinister than it did when Colonel Klink was running things.

Phil Tucker invented a rotary engine known as the CT Surge Turbine that he successfully patented and unsuccessfully tried to sell to the automobile industry as a more efficient alternative to the internal combustion engine. And years after directing movies like this and The Cape Canaveral Monsters, he did actually contribute to some movies as an editor, including Orca and King Kong.

Yet we’re all going to remember him for this movie and to be honest, whenever life gets me down, I remember that at some point, people got together and decided to make a movie about the end of the world and threw a monkey suit with a TV set for a head in it and I think about the startling ridiculousness of that and you know, it’s all better.

That monster is known as Ro-Man Extension XJ-2. He’s played by George Barrows, who made his own gorilla suit to get roles in movies. He’s already used his Calcinator death ray to kill everyone on Earth except for the eight people we meet in this movie.

I mean, that’s pretty through. There were 2.6 billion people alive in 1953, so to wipe out that many people, much less be able to find the eight you missed is pretty good work, if I can commend the outright annihilation of a planet.

Sure, this movie outright rips off the ending of Invaders from Mars and recycles footage from One Million B.C., Lost Continent, Rocketship X-M and Captive Women, but it’s in 3D, shot all over Bronson Canyon and was made in four days for $16,000. That is also worth celebrating.

It also has a score by Elmer Bernstein, who was currently being held back from major movies because of his liberal views. He also did a score for Cat Women of the Moon that year, but soon would be one of the biggest names in movie music.

Look, this is a movie that has a Billion Bubble Machine with an antenna being used for Ro-Man to communicate with the Great Guidance, the supreme leader of his face, who finally gets fed up and blasts not only that gorilla robot but the child hero before he causes dinosaurs to come back and then uses psychotronic vibrations to smash Earth out of the universe. If you can’t find something to love there, you are beyond hope.

You can watch the Mystery Science Theater and original version of this movie on Tubi.

Directed, written and produced by Herbert J. Leder, this is all about Nazi scientist Dr. Norberg (Dana Andrews), who has taken over an English estate and is unfreezing soldiers that have been iced up for twenty years. What he gets are zombies like his brother (Edward Fox) and Elsa (Kathleen Breck), the best friend of his niece Jean (Anna Palk), who is now a living head. His commanding officers General Lubeck (Karel Stepanek) and Captain Tirptiz (Basil Henson) have been told he’s doing a great job but all he can freeze is the body and not the brain. He brings in American scientist Ted Roberts (Philip Gilbert) to help him, a man who is not aware that there are 1,500 frozen soldiers all over the world.

How did that smart man come in, see a wall of arms and a decapitated female head that is still alive and think, “Everything seems totally fine.”

Although The Frozen Dead was shot and released in UK theaters and on U.S. TV in color, the U.S. theatrical release prints of it were released in black-and-white in order to save money. It played double features with another Leder movie, It! 

This is not the first movie I have seen where a disembodied female head just wants to die.

Made at the Lake Como Family Nudist Resort in Lutz, Florida, this is all about J. Randolph Latimore (R. G. Armstrong), his daughter-in-law Susan (Jamie O’Hara) and his granddaughter (Karen Sue Trent) coming to terms with the death of his son and her falling in love with Johnny Patterson (Mickey Knox) as well as the elder man coming to grips with the growing need for people to be nude in public.

While this film seems silly today, it was part of a court case, Excelsior Pictures vs. New York Board of Regents. The New York State Court of Appeals ruled that onscreen nudity was not obscene and this movie is why others can depict nakedness on screen. Everyone in this is a nudist by the end. In movies like this, if you had a nude woman appear at a nudist camp, it was legal. Anywhere else she was naked, it wasn’t. That’s why there were so many of these films.

Director and co-writer Max Nosseck always seemed to make exploitation in the U.S. like Dillinger — starring Lawrence Tierney and written by William Castle and Philip Yordan — as well as Girls Under 21. Then again, he also made The Return of Rin Tin Tin.

Nudist camp movies may seem goofy and perhaps even boring today. When this debuted in Tampa, a 20 year old woman wasn’t allowed in to see it, as she was too young. She was in the movie, so she was old enough to be nude at a camp.

You can watch this on the Internet Archive.

Written and directed by Curtis Harrington — one of the leaders of New Queer Cinema and also the director of Queen of Blood, What’s the Matter with Helen?, Who Slew Auntie Roo?, Ruby and so many more — this film was always one I wanted to see as it features Marjorie Cameron in a small role.

Harrington had also shot a documentary about her — The Wormwood Star — and I’ll forgive you if you have no idea who she is. Cameron was many things — an artist, poet, actress, and probably most essentially, an occultist. A follower of Crowley’s Thelema, she was married to rocket pioneer and nexus point of all things 20th century occult, Jack Parsons. In fact, Parsons believed that he had conjured Cameron to be the Whore of Babylon/Thelemite goddess Babalon as part of his Babalon Working rite, which he conducted alongside L. Rod Hubbard. No, really. It may have also opened our world to the aliens that have obsessed us since Kenneth Arnold reported a UFO in 1947.

After a suicide attempt and being institutionalized, Cameron gathered a group of magic practitioners around herself that she called The Children, whose sex magic rituals were to create a moonchild. She was now pregnant with what she referred to as the Wormwood Star, but that ended in miscarriage. Many of The Children soon left, as her proclamations of the future had grown increasingly apocalyptic.

Cameron’s orbit — much like her husband’s — unites both the worlds of art and the occult, straddling appearing in the films of Kenneth Anger, working with UFO expert and contactee George Van Tassel and appearing in Wallace Berman’s art journal Semina.

Why did I tell you all this? Because it fascinates me that she’s in Night Tide.

Johnny Drake (Dennis Hopper!) is a young sailor on shore leave who meets Mora (Linda Lawson, who is also in William Castle’s Let’s Kill Uncle), a woman who makes her living appearing in a sideshow. They fall in love before he learns that her past boyfriends have drowned under mysterious circumstances. That may — or may not — be because Mora is a siren, a legendary creature who exists to lure men to their deaths. Adding to her suspicions is the mystery woman (Cameron) who calls to her and demands that she follow her destiny.

One evening, under a full moon, she invites him deep sea swimming, but cuts his hose, forcing him to surface so that she isn’t tempted to kill him. She then swims into the depths of the ocean, fulfilling the call of the mystery woman. And when he returns to the boardwalk, her dead body is still in the mermaid sideshow, now there for visitors to gawk at her dead eyes.

Despite a police confession as to who the killer is, the strange woman in black and her call to the sea is never explained.

Anton LaVey discussed this film in Blanche Barton’s The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey. “There’s a whole genre of films that are just little evocative low-budget gems that I certainly wouldn’t call schlock but that are also being revived as a consequence of more attention in those directions. Director Curtis Hanington’s first movie, Night Tide filmed around the Santa Monica Pier and Venice. California in the late ’50’s, is a psychologically intricate story about a young sailor (Dennis Hopper) who falls in love with a mermaid It’s just wonderful to see these precious works of art being finally given the attention they merit.” This also appears on the Church of Satan film list.

According to Spencer Kansa’s Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron, Anger introduced Cameron and LaVey, who was delighted to meet the actress, having been a fan of the film.

You can download this movie from the Internet Archive or buy the Kino Lober blu ray.

The Day the Earth Froze is a Russian-Finish film that goes by Sampo. It was bought by American-International Pictures, cut by 24 minutes, the crew was renamed (Aleksandr Ptushko is Gregg Sebelious,  Eve Kivi is Nina Anderson and Andris Oshin has the name Jon Powers) and it was a double feature with Conquered City. There’s also the idea that this was shot in Vistascope, whatever that could be.

It’s all about how Lemminkäinen tries to win the heart of Annikki and battles the evil witch Louhi, who wants to make a magic machine called a Sampo that can make salt, grain and gold. When our hero fails to get it for her, she steals the sun and the world freezes, just as you’d expect from the name of the movie.

Directed by the same man who made The Magic Voyage of Sinbad and The Sword and the Dragon, each scene was shot four times: once in Russian, once in Finnish and then in both standard and anamorphic widescreen

If you have only seen the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, well, you can get the original film in a restored version from Deaf Crocodile. You can also watch this on Tubi.

At once an exploration of the Beats and one of the last original film noir movies, The Beat Generation is about the police looking for Stan Hess (Ray Danton), a serial rapist known as the Aspirin Kid because he goes to married women’s homes, acts like he has a headache and then attacks them while their husband isn’t home. He meets a cop named Culloran (Steve Cochran) who doesn’t realize he has the man everyone is looking for in his car. The cop and his partner Baron (Jackie Coogan) think that the real rapist is beatnik Art Jester (James Mitchum). How wrong he is, learning that when Hess assaults his wife and makes her pregnant, nearly ending his marriage while Jester falls for a gangster’s wife, Georgia Altera (Mamie Van Doren).

Directed by Charles F. Haas, who also made the Van Doren movie Girls Town, The Beat Generation has plenty of beatnik moments, like Maila Nurmi — Vampira — has a white rat walking all over her ghostly skin while freestyling a poem. Louis Armstrong is also on hand and recorded the theme song.

Irish McCalla was going to be the lead, but was told there was a rape scene and she’d have to do more for the European version, but the assault would be in good taste. She decided to take a smaller part.

This was written by Richard Matheson, who based it on a true story, saying it was “about a guy who would meet salesmen and talk to them on the road, learn all about their houses, where they were during the day, what they did; then he would go and attack the wives while the salesmen were still on the road. I wrote it as a police procedure film.”

There’s also a wrestling beatnik. That’s Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, who used to slap people in boxing matches. Despite all the silliness, this is a much darker movie than you’d think.