69 EsSINtial SWV Titles (September 15 – 21): Klon, who came up with this list, said “This isn’t the 69 BEST SWV movies, it isn’t my 69 FAVORITE SWV movies, my goal was to highlight 69 of the MOST SWV movies.” You can see the whole list here, including some of the ones I’ve already posted.

Using some of the same sets from Hercules and the Conquest of Atlantis, Mario Bava (Blood and Black Lace, Black Sunday) created a masterpiece with this film. Featuring Reg Park (who appeared in four Hercules films and was considered a mentor to Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Christopher Lee (The Satanic Rites of Dracula, The Wicker Man, everything good and right about horror movies), this would influence every sword and sandal movie that would follow, as well as films like Flash Gordon.

Despite the size of the budget and the cheapness of the sets, Bava crafts a totally unique world, filled with rich colors and billowing smoke. And with Lee as King Lico, there’s finally a villain that feels worthy of Hercules’ bold heroics.

As Hercules returns from many adventures, he discovers that the love of his life, Princess Deianira, has lost her memory. Unbeknownst to him, Lico is responsible. Working with the forces of the underworld, he wants her for himself (and Hercules out of the way). He sends Hercules, Theseus and Telemachus on a suicide mission to steal the Stone of Forgetfulness from a small island within a lake of fire. For love, Hercules will dare anything, diving headfirst into what normal men fear.

Indulge me in hyperbole for a moment, but Bava could be seen as very much the same. He made a bet with himself on this film, “attempting to shoot it with one segmented wall containing doors and windows and four movable columns.” Facing down a challenge and attempting to outdo the past Steve Reeves Hercules films while crafting a visual style all his own — Bava exceeds expectations here.

To me, the heart of the film is the differences between Hercules and Theseus. Hercules is driven by duty, devotion and love, while Theseus is addicted to new experiences, whether they be violent or sexual. When he is turned against Hercules, you know that our hero will forgive him, no matter what. His strength goes beyond physical — it extends to his heart.

There’s a scene in the film where the Queen of the Hesperides tells Hercules this advice: “Believe only what you do, not what you think you see.” That’s a perfect thought for this film. You may see fake rocks, silly costumes and a goofy plot. Or you can enjoy this film’s simple pleasures, wild colors and otherworldly feel.

There’s always a divide in how I see movies and how others do, which often leads me to not always want to share a film. Do you know what I mean? I honestly adore a film like Holy Mountain or The Beyond, but I know that by telling someone who isn’t willing to accept some of the faults, to simply see it as a dumb movie instead of a treasured story, I’m just going to get upset. This L.A. Weekly article sums it so well. Bava was operating on a small budget, with a small script, but delivered beyond measure. A story where one of the main characters must realize that in order to find true happiness for all, he must give up his own happiness? That’s deeper than the papier-mâché boulders and wooden performances here hint at.

Within the confines of what is expected, Bava is able to move us, to inspire us, to wow us, to take us to another, better world — one filled with smoke and lava and neon and beauty. We are limited now by the fact that every film must look perfect and clean and realistic. I’ll take one Hercules in the Haunted World over every movie that will play in moviehouses this year.

Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!

In around an hour, Frank (Doug Leith) and Marion (Dwan Marlow) get married, go to Vegas on their honeymoon, take in a Tex Ritter show, then head off to an island where a maniac with a club foot (Anton von Stralen) stalks her and waits until he leaves. Then, he unleashes his fury on the newlywed bride while her husband goes to get supplies.

Also known as Ecstasy On Lovers’ Island, it has Frank coming back only to get choked out and his wife having to stab the man whose feet we see for most of the movie — over and over — to survive. Maybe that strange man was just upset that Marion had an internal monologue saying things like “God really knew what he was doing when he made the sun!” and was hoping this was a nudie cutie and she wouldn’t disrobe.

The “Directed By Perri” is Peter Perry Jr. He also made Kiss Me Quick!, My Tale Is Hot, Mondo Mod, The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet and the seventh Taboo. He also edited Blood of Dracula’s Castle and Horror of the Blood Monsters. He has a Joe D’Amato level amount of other names, including Dick C. Crane, A.J. Gaylord, Arthur P. Stootsberry and Seymour Tuchus.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.

John Hayes was behind some truly wild movies, like Grave of the Vampire, Dream No Evil, Garden of the Dead, End of the World and Jailbait Babysitter. But here in 1961, he’s making a Hollywood done her wrong movie that stars Rue McClanahan as Sandy, an exotic dancer who thinks she’s tough enough to take on Tinseltown.

Also known as Walk the Angry Beach and The Unholy Choice, this also has a man named Tony (Tony Vorno) who wants to take Sandy away from all of this if he can just get one more score. As he tries and makes an honest woman out of her by being a thief. Also: This was originally made without the burlesque footage, which means that it was about twenty minutes long, as these scenes seem to go on for hours. Did you ever think you’d reach a point where women sexy dancing would get boring?

As a kid, speaking of Rue, The Golden Girls felt so old. Well, here I am and her character Blanche was a year older than me. It’s weird because I only see the older version of her when I see this movie, as I didn’t age into her, as with so many actresses who were teenage crushes and are now moms and grandmothers in movies. That said, I always worried that I wouldn’t find age appropriate women attractive when I was younger and now, white hair can turn my head. That’s personal growth.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.

Predating Night of the Living Dead by seven years, Santo was already battling zombies before it was cool, then played out.

That’s because the police can’t deal with the shambling walking dead, so they turn to the man in the silver mask to drop elbows on them.

There’s one harrowing scene where the zombies set an orphanage on fire, then decide to beat up every child inside. Luckily, Santo jumps through a window — wearing a cape no less — and starts hitting chops on them. He battles nearly all of them, who can’t be stopped by bullets, even when two cops get felled by just a punch. One of the zombies seems to favor stomps and he does so to, as they say, stomp a mudhole in our hero. Don’t worry — he gets a big babyface comeback.

Look for luchas Black Shadow, Gory Guerrero (father of Eddy and inventor of so many wrestling moves) and El Gladiator.

This was Santo’s first starring role — at the age of 41 no less — and he makes the most of it. He’s pretty much Batman in the best of ways, except he refuses to wear a shirt and has, as mentioned before, a glamorous cape. I can’t even quantify how much I love this movie. The funny thing is, somehow Santo’s films would grow even stranger, encompassing spy films, whatever was hot in horror at the time and femme fatales who just had to possess our masked hero. He made over fifty of these films and I wish he’d made five hundred more.

You can watch this on YouTube:

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Before Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman made this movie, adult films were black and white smokers played in the back rooms of men’s clubs and social clubs. They were hired by film distributor Alfred N. Sack to make a “color 35mm film of cute girls carousing around with beach balls, or whatever.” Sack made most of his money working with his brother distributing black cinema at a time that it barely existed. He paid the two $7,000.

Comedian Billy Falbo plays Lucky Pierre, who mainly walks into situations where he sees women naked. Unlike many of the nudist films — in which people may have been nude but were engaged in volleyball or other games — this was the first of the nudie cuties, a film where pretty girls got naked in a comedy. In his book A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King, Friedman estimated that there were six hundred ripoffs over the next decade.

You can see a pre-gore film William Kerwin as a man hiring a plumber and Lewis regular Lawrence J. Aberwood’s voice as the announcer as well as pretty ladies including Kay Montie, Pat O’Farrell, Linda Cotton, Dorothy Holbrook, Toni Carroll (her last role; she also appeared on some television and was the first wife of producer David L. Wolper), Gail Jordan and Ginger Hale, who would appear in two other movies for the team,  Goldilocks and the Three Bares and Boin-n-g, as well as Peter Perry Jr.’s The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill.

Filmed in Cutie Color and Skinamascope, this feels like Benny Hill but somehow slow, as if naked women can be boring. In 1961, this was obviously volcanic in its intensity, but today it is a reminder of the wars of the sexual revolution. However, so much of adult moves on from here, so we should look at it as a monument.

Golden Oldies Week (July 27 – August 3) Something Weird Video have released such a wide range of movies over the last 30 years that trying to categorize them can be tricky. They started out as a gray market mail order distributor (aka a bootlegger) not unlike the Cape Copy Center or Sinister Cinema and eventually moved into the niche se ploit titles that would set them apart. The movies on this list are the kind of cult genre titles that were the bread and butter of many of the bootleg companies of the 90s and most were not exclusive to SWV. If you look in the catalogs or on the website these would be under categories like “Nightmare Theatre’s Late Night Chill-O-Rama Horror Show,” “Jaws of the Jungle,” “Sci-fi Late Night Creature Feature Show,” or “Spies, Thighs & Private Eyes.” Many of these are currently available as downloads from the SWV site (until the end of 2024)!

“There was a ring of blind men
Sent by the reverend to kill
Wealthy old pigs feasting on swill
Inside the mouth of madness
The killer creeps into view
A shadow cast in torment
Coming for you

Dead Eyes of London, they’re watching you
Dead Eyes of London, follow you home
Dead Eyes of London, they’re watching you

You’re never coming back, you’re never coming back”

Directed by Alfred Vohrer and written by Egon Eis and Wolfgang Lukschy, this is — like all krimi — based on the novel by Edgar Wallace, who is also the father of King Kong and giallo. It’s the first of a series of 14 movies filmed by Vohrer and was originally adapted in 1939 as The Dark Eyes of London AKA The Human Monster. It was remade in 1968 by Vohrer as The Gorilla Gang.

Wealthy men who have just bought insurance policies are dying and Scotland Yard is on the case. A large, bald and monstrous killer is on the loose. He’s Blind Jack, played by former pro wrestler Ady Berber. Chief inspector Larry Holt (Joachim Fuchsberger) suspects a blind church as being part of these killings, so he hires braille expert Nora Ward (Karin Baal, who was also in the very krimi What Have You Done to Solange?) to help, which puts her in danger. By the end of the movie, she’s menaced with a blowtorch and nearly drowned, but at least the top cop wants to marry her when it’s all over.

This ad is from Zombo’s Closet, an amazing site.

Foggy streets, seedy nightclubs, a young Klaus Kinski being odd and so much mood. While made in 1961, this didn’t make it to the U.S. until 1965, playing a double feature with The Ghost.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!  

Before we start, I have to explain.

As I look for movies that feature matriarchal societies, it seems like so many of them end up being straight-up male gaze fuelled fantasies. Or so you’d think, because while this movie was made by Anthony Brooks and O.O. Miller, only one of those names belongs to a man.

Brooks may have been Raymond Phelan (the writer, director, editor and one of the main actors of Too Young, Too Immoral), but Miller is really Doris Wishman, who Joe Bob Briggs referred to as “The greatest female exploitation film director in history.” From a series of nudist colony movies to movies with incredible names like Bad Girls Go to Hell, Satan Was a Lady and Let Me Die a Woman, as well as A Night to Dismember and two Eurospy films (Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73) starring all 73-inches of the woman with the largest bust on record, Chesty Morgan.

The truth is, this movie does introduce us to a female-run society on the moon, which for some reason is the occult-created Coral Castle near Miami, but they’re all topless. Yet like many of the nudist films of the early 60’s, this comes off as quite innocent. And unlike so many of them, this movie isn’t boring.

Dr. Jeff Huntley (Lester Brown in his one and only role) has inherited millions in his uncle’s will and is finally going to the moon with his mentor, Professor Nichols (William Mayer, who shows up as in several of these movies, like Blaze Starr Goes Nudist, which was not much of a life change).

Nichols sees Huntley like a son and worries about how dangerous the moon will be. He’s old, so he’s ready to die. But he wants Huntley to live and find a wife. After all, their secretary Cathy (Marietta) is in love with him and he doesn’t see it or doesn’t care. All he wants to do is go to the moon.

They get there, wearing brightly colored spacesuits with plenty of spaces for the lack of environment on the lunar surface to kill them. But instead, you know, they end up at Coral Castle and meet an entire planet of clothing-free ladies who are led by a Moon Queen (also Marietta) who uses her psychic powers — or maybe Dr. Jeff has never seen breasts before in person — to make our young moon-obsessed friend get obsessed over her mountain peaks.

Perhaps this explains why Jack Parsons blew himself up after falling so hard for Marjorie Cameron. I mean, you become besotten with one literal Whore of Babylon and you lose your security clearance but still get a peak on the dark side of the Moon named after you.

But I digress.

For two guys who planned a trip to the moon for years, they didn’t bring enough oxygen and also leave their camera behind, so no one will believe them that the lunar surface looks more like the aforementioned Blaze Starr’s 2 O’Clock Club.

It all works out, because that’s when the hood doctor discovers that his secretary — who he’s been ignoring forever, who sits and types the same letter all night long hoping that he will notice her — looks just like the Moon Queen. They embrace, the camera dollys back to give them some privacy and then the Professor walks in on them and just looks on approvingly. He just stands there and watches and smiles to the camera.

Keep an eye out for Shelby Livingston, who just three short years later would be chopped to pieces –just a few towns away in Kissimmee, Florida — in Two Thousand Maniacs! Lacey Kelly, who was in Bunny Yeager’s Nude Camera and Common Law Wife, is also on the Moon.

There’s also a moment where the two space-loving men discuss Dr. Jeff going to a movie, as they drive past the Variety Theater, which is showing Wishman’s Hideout in the Sun. Did Dr. Jeff recognize Pat Reilly when he also saw her up there in space?

This movie also has its own theme song, which is pretty cool when you think about it. “I’m Mooning Over You (My Little Moon Doll),” which was warbled by Ralph Young over orchestration that had been arranged by — but not credited to —  Doc Severinsen.

While not the most feminist leaning film ever, we can still point to the fact that the Moon Queen does rule her planet and you know, if you can breathe the lack of air on the lunar surface — to be fair, at the end the scientists have no idea where they’ve really come back from — you can forget puritanical mumbo jumbo and just walk around unencumbered.

After all, it worked for Blaze Starr, who was smart enough to get 4% of the profits for the 1984 movies about her life, Blaze.