If you ever wanted a collision of two absolute titans of mid-century exploitation cinema, Blaze Starr Goes Nudist is your holy grail.

First, you have Blaze Starr (born Fannie Belle Fleming), the undisputed Queen of Burlesque. Blaze wasn’t just a dancer; she was a master marketer and an American icon who famously caught the eye of Louisiana Governor Earl Long (a romance later immortalized in the 1989 film Blaze starring Paul Newman). She was known for her explosive red hair, her couch routine and a gimmick in which her G-string would literally catch fire, thanks to clever stage pyrotechnics. Blaze’s famous smoking gimmick was achieved using a hidden battery pack and a small piece of flash paper. She actually brought a version of her stage show to the film, giving audiences a taste of the act that made her rich.

Behind the camera, you have the legendary Doris Wishman. A true anomaly, Doris was a female director ruling the male-dominated, sleazy world of 1960s sexploitation. Wishman’s style is instantly recognizable, as she often shot without sound and dubbed everything in later. Watch as her camera stares at ashtrays, feet, light fixtures or the back of a character’s head while they are speaking to avoid having to match lip-syncing! It creates a dreamlike, disorienting and utterly fascinating watch.

Let’s be honest: nobody was buying a ticket to Blaze Starr Goes Nudist for the gripping narrative. The plot is a clothesline — pun absolutely intended — designed to do two things: showcase Blaze’s charisma and fill the runtime with footage of people living the nudist lifestyle.

The film falls squarely into the nudist colony documentary subgenre that was wildly popular in the early ’60s. Legal loopholes at the time allowed for onscreen nudity as long as it was presented as a healthy, educational lifestyle choice. So, Wishman gives us plenty of wholesome, naked activities, like naked volleyball, naked badminton and naked lounging by the pool.

Nudist colony movies are as boring as it gets, but it’s a boredom I invite into my life. A calming, serene boredom, a time when it seemed like all we had to worry about was sitting naked in the grass, which seems like a horrible idea.

This was filmed at the  Sunny Palms Lodge in Homestead, Florida. The same location was used for Doris’ The Prince and the Nature Girl, Diary of a Nudist, Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls and Playgirls International, as well as E.S. Seeley Jr.’s Shagri-La, which stars Sammy Petrillo!

Blaze herself is incredibly charming here. She possesses a natural, easygoing screen presence that outshines the stiff, community-theater acting of the supporting cast. The story is simple. Blaze is tired of her agent, Tony —who is also her fiancé—running her all over the country doing her act, so she goes to a nudist colony to relax, using her real name—Belle Fleming—as an alias. She soon gets quite close to the director of the colony, Andy Simms, who is played by Ralph Young, the singing partner of Belgian-born Tony Sandler, performing as Sandler and Young. His songs “The Moon Is the Lamp of Love,” “Moon Doll” and “Hideout In the Sun” all appear in Wishman movies.

While the film has that distinct, low-budget Wishman grime around the edges, it’s surprisingly lighthearted, breezy and innocent compared to the darker, sleazier roughies Wishman would direct later in her career (like Bad Girls Go to Hell). It’s basically a 70-minute vacation video with a burlesque superstar.

Like most Wishman films, the audio was recorded entirely in post-production. However, Blaze Starr didn’t dub her own voice! Another actress was brought in to provide Blaze’s lines, giving her a slightly different vibe than her actual Maryland/West Virginia twang.

To keep the film from being seized by vice squads, Wishman had to adhere to the era’s strict censorship rules: plenty of bouncing and bare skin were allowed, but showing pubic hair was a one-way ticket to a courtroom. The cast spent a lot of time strategically standing behind bushes, holding volleyballs or framing shots from the waist up. You do get to see two dudes run, wangs swinging, however.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

May 3, 1962 should be a day to be celebrated. After all, that’s when this movie debuted as a double feature with Invasion of the Animal People, Jerry Warren’s remix of the Swedish movie Space Invasion of Lapland. But here, in this film, it’s all Jerry: directing, writing, producing and editing. What did people feel when they crawled into the light from a dark theater or drove away from a drive-in? Were they astounded? Did they feel like someone had smacked them in the head with a rock? I wish I could have been there and seen normal people confronted by the magic that is Jerry Warren.

While his peers like Roger Corman were busy filming scenes, Jerry was the king of the buy-and-fix-it-up special. Usually, that meant taking a moody Swedish thriller or a Mexican horror flick, hacking out the plot and dubbing in dialogue that didn’t match the lip movements. But with 1962’s Terror of the Bloodhunters, Jerry actually stepped behind the camera to give us a Southern California pretending to be South America classic.

Our story kicks off with a great escape. A group of prisoners decides that a French penal colony isn’t exactly a five-star resort and makes a break for the dense South American brush. Because no B-movie escape is complete without a hostage, they snag the commandant’s daughter, Marlene (Dorothy Haney). From there, it’s a grueling hike through the Amazon by way of Griffith Park, where they face bug bites, humidity and the realization that their wardrobe wasn’t picked for hiking.

As this is a Warren movie, you should expect a generous helping of stock footage, including snakes, lizards and birds that clearly aren’t in the same zip code as the actors. And yes, there are actually cannibals.

If you’ve seen Warren’s other work, like The Wild World of Batwoman, you know one of his defining stylistic tools: The Long Pause. He loves a static shot where characters stare into the middle distance, perhaps contemplating their life choices or waiting for the craft services truck.

However, Terror of the Bloodhunters is often cited by the cult-cinema faithful as one of his better efforts. Why? Because it actually sticks to a coherent narrative. Starring Robert Clarke, a guy who survived both The Hideous Sun Demon and The Astounding She-Monster, the film has a professional anchor that keeps it from drifting entirely into the abyss of boredom. Clarke brings a level of sincerity to the role of Steve Mallory that the script probably didn’t deserve.

Plus, because it’s barely an hour, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. It gets you in, shows you some tribal spears and stock crocodiles, and gets you out. It’s not exactly Fitzcarraldo, but if you have a soft spot for grainy black-and-white foliage and guys in khakis shouting at the treeline, this is for you.

You can watch it on Cultpix.

Forget your Mannequin whimsy. Arne Mattsson’s The Doll is a dive into the deep, dark end of the loneliness pool, where the water is freezing, and the only thing keeping you afloat is a hollow piece of storefront fiberglass.

Per Oscarsson, a man who could look haunted while eating a sandwich, plays a night watchman who decides he’s had enough of the human race. He liberates a mannequin from the department store and sets up house. It’s not a heist movie; it’s a slow-motion collapse of the psyche. He doesn’t just talk to the doll. Instead, he lives for her.

While the premise sounds like it could’ve been a sleazy proto-slasher or a bizarre Twilight Zone riff, Mattsson treats it like high-art tragedy. This isn’t some magic-doll-comes-to-life romp. It’s a claustrophobic character study that asks: Is an imagined love better than no love at all?

In our world of AI chatbots and watching porn on our phones, not to mention Anton LaVey’s continual mentions of mannequin and android-based love dolls replacing humans, this film is quite prescient. 

If you like your cinema moody, Swedish and psychologically taxing, this is your bag, baby. It’s a film that understands that the scariest things aren’t under the bed. They’re the things we invent to keep from being alone.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Invasion of the Star Creatures was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 22, 1965 at 11:20 p.m.

Directed by character actor Bruno VeSota and written by Jonathan Haze, this has Privates Philbrick (Robert Ball) and Penn (Frank Ray Perilli) assigned to Fort Nicholson, which has a cave under the Earth — is this another Shaver Mystery film? — where they meet Kalar aliens Dr. Puna (Joanne Arnold, Playboy Playmate of the Month for May 1954) and Professor Tanga (Dolores Reed, sadly her third — after Hit and Run and Party Girl — role before she died of a drug overdose). Along with their vegetable men, they want to take over our planet, but because men are sexist pigs, they have learned how to stop them with a kiss. I kid!

Shot in Bronson Canyon, where all monsters and aliens find their homes, this was originally going to team up Haze (the star of The Little Shop of Horrors) with Dick Miller. It played double features with The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, which is a two-movie deal I love.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Brainiac was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 15, 1966, at 1:00 a.m.; Saturday, May 3, 1969, at 1:00 a.m.; Saturday, June 19, at 1:00 a.m.; and Saturday, March 4, 1972, at 1:00 a.m.

Known as El Baron del Terror in Mexico, this was directed by Chano Urueta, who helped Blue Demon get on the silver screen and was written by Federico Curiel, who would make The Champions of Justice, several Santo movies and Neutron.

All the way back in 1661, Baron Vitelius was burned at the stake during the Inquisition and claimed that the next time a particular comet passed by the Earth, all of the children of those who did him wrong would pay. I mean, you would think a bunch of religious folks would treat a necromantic sorcerer better, but such is life in ancient Mexico.

Three hundred years later, Baron Vitelius rides back in on that comet and is now able to change at will into a monster able to suck out the brains of his victims via a giant forked tongue, which is incredibly easy to do thanks to his ability to hypnotize his victims.

How bonkers is this movie? No less than Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart paid tribute to it in their song “Debra Kadabra,” saying “Turn it to Channel 13 / And make me watch the rubber tongue / When it comes out! From the puffed and flabulent Mexican rubber-goods mask / Next time they show the Binaca / Make me buy The Flosser / Make me grow Brainiac Fingers / But with more hair!”

In America, we’d be satisfied with an evil alien. In Mexico, it was added that he was a wizard who brought people back from the dead before he was burned alive and ascended to a heavenly body for three hundred years. ¡Viva las películas de terror!

Dr. Mabuse has a new base under a theater, a place that is putting on a play about the French Revolution but really, it’s just a place for dancer Liane Martin (Karin Dor, You Only Live Twice, Assignment Terror) to take a steamy bath. Something for daddy, as they say.

Anyhow, Mabuse wants an invisibility machine and he’ll kill for it. Or at least his new henchmen will, who include Walter Bluhm as a murder clown. Only FBI agent Joe Como (Lex Barker) — Perry’s brother? — can save the day. There’s also a mutated scientist, if you have a Letterboxd list of those.

Released in the U.S. as The Invisible Horror, this was directed by Harald Reinl, who also made Chariots of the Gods, Mysteries of the Gods, The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism and The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle.

The Eureka box set Mabuse Lives! has this movie, along with an introduction by genre film expert and Video Watchdog founder Tim Lucas, a new 1080p presentation from a 2K restoration of the original film elements undertaken by CCC, a commentary track by film historian and author David Kalat, and an alternate ending. You can get it from MVD.

We often think that ninjas only started to exist in the 80s. Yet, in the early 60s, there was a craze in Japan because of the Shinobi no Mono books and these three movies. Written by Tomoyoshi Murayama, these stories were serialized in the Sunday edition of the newspaper Akahata from November of 1960 to May of 1962, with the name meaning “ninja.”

The novels are set during Japan’s Sengoku period and star Goemon Ishikawa, a famous outlaw hero who used his ninja skills to battle the samurai. While the real man and his son were boiled alive in public after their failed assassination attempt on the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the fictional version has become a Robin Hood-like character, a man with near-superhuman ninja powers at times.

Goemon had already been the subject of several pre-WWII Japanese films- Ishikawa Goemon Ichidaiki and Ishikawa Goemon no Hoji. Still, in the early 60s, when a thief protecting villagers against the rich and powerful would be a theme that resonated with the Japanese, he became a pop culture sensation.

Band of Assassins (1962): Raizo Ichikawa plays Goemon as a young man here, a member of a ninja clan who must constantly worry about being found and destroyed by the samurai. He’s been selected to kill Nobunaga Oda (Tomisaburo Wakayama), which makes the other ninjas jealous. So now, Goemon is nearly a man without a country as he must deal with assassination attempts, double crosses and his mission.

Directed by Satsuo Yamamoto, this turned into the kind of movie that grabbed the attention of Japanese kids. It was intended to be one and done, but by the end, even though only Goemon survives and can escape this world of treachery and violence to have a family, he had to return. Ninjas, a real thing that had disappeared from the world- or is that what they want you to believe? — only to take over pop culture twice in the 20th century.

Revenge (1963): Nobunaga Oda has killed all of the ninjas of the Iga clan, yet he doesn’t know that Goemon has survived. Our hero just wants to build a family and disappear- ninjas are good at part of that- but he’s soon pulled back into combat when his infant son is killed.

Instead of running straight into the bad guys, as most action heroes would, Goemon uses psychological trickery and his ability to hide just about anywhere to drive his enemies crazy. Unlike the first film, where his honor is constantly on the line and he must watch everyone, his goals in this film are much more straightforward: kill the people who ruined his life.

Even though Goemon is boiled alive at the end of this- but not before shouting out the bad guys as way worse thieves than him- there’s still one more movie. How can that happen?

Resurrection (1963): Thanks to Hattori Hanzo (Saburô Date)- yes, the same man who made swords in Kill Bill– Goemon has survived, as he was switched out with another ninja at the last minute. I didn’t see it happen, but that’s just how talented a master ninja can be.

This idea was enough to get director Satsuo Yahamoto to quit the series, which brought in Kazuo Mori to make this for Daiei. It’s revisionist history- perhaps this is where Tarantino got the idea to save Sharon Tate- but in the service of pop culture and film commerce.

Now, he must get the revenge he’s craved for two movies now and take out Toyotomi Hideyoshi (Eijiro Tono). This is more personal and has less swordplay, but I’m sure audiences were ready for more, seeing as how all three of these movies were made over two years.

The Radiance Blu-ray box set of the Shinobi trilogy has digital transfers of each film presented on two discs, made available on Blu-ray for the first time outside Japan. Extras include an interview about director Satsuo Yamamoto with Shozo Ichiyama, artistic director of the Tokyo International Film Festival, a visual essay on the ninja in Japanese cinema by film scholar Mance Thompson, an interview with film critic Toshiaki Sato on star Raizo Ichikawa, trailers, six postcards of promotional material from the films, reversible sleeves featuring artwork based on original promotional materials and a limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Jonathan Clements on the Shinobi no mono series and Diane Wei Lewis on writer Tomoyoshi Murayama. This limited edition of 3000 copies is presented in a rigid box with full-height Scanavo cases and removable OBI strip, leaving packaging free of certificates and markings. You can get this from MVD.