BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!
Barry Mahon must have been looking for any story he could shape into a narrative to get nude women into a story by 1963. He made so many movies like this, but this installment has some charm, as some of the guys will do anything to appear to be artists and get the attention of a girl willing to doff her duds.
Monica Davis (Rocket Attack U.S.A.), Jane Day (She Shoulda Stayed In Bed), Davee Decker (It’s All for Sale), Audrey Campbell (Olga herself!) and the Bennett sisters play the ladies in this, a movie that attempts to be a documentary while also making any opportunity to show off these girls.
I saw a modern picture of Chesty Morgan the other day. She looked like someone’s grandmother, a lady you’d see shopping at Walmart. I wonder about so many of the ladies in Mahon’s films who owned their beauty and appeared in these movies. Did their kids ever know? Their husbands? Were their lives better because of the experience?
September Drive-In Super Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on September 27 and 28, 2024. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included) for an additional $15 per person. You can buy tickets at the show but get there early and learn more here.
In his book How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Roger Corman went into detail on this film, an infamous one in his career: “It began as a challenge: to shoot most of a gothic film in two days using leftover sets from The Raven. It turned into the longest production of my career — an ordeal that required five directors and nine months to complete.”
While Corman is listed as the director, it was also worked on by Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Jakob, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill and even Jack Nicholson. It all started with a rained out tennis game, as Corman decided that since the sets were still there for two days and he had access to Boris Karloff. Nobody really knew what the movie would be about, other than to be in a castle, and that Karloff had two days to do his part. The icon of horror had no clue that some of that would be spent in a tank of cold water.
The funny thing is that American-International Pictures paid for the sets for The Raven, but Corman was making this film by himself. He never asked if he could do it. He just started shooting. Samuel Z. Arkoff knew something was happening when at the wrap party, all of the sets were still standing. Then again, he knew that Corman would be coming to him to distribute the movie.
Other directors came in instead of Corman, as this was a non-union job and he was a union director. The beach scenes were shot by Coppola, along with Hill and Gary Kurtz, much of which was unusable as Coppola didn’t tell the cameraman that he was shooting night shots and then he went way over. Eleven days of shooting, which was like two Corman films worth of shooting.
Dennis Jakob shot Hoover Dam for the water scenes — while also working on his thesis film, something Corman couldn’t get angry about, because he was doing the same thing so often — and Monte Hellman and Jack Hill finished the film. Well, then Corman thought nothing worked together and it was boring, so he went back and shot a bunch of new scenes to make the movie work together. In a lot of those reshoots, Jack Nicholson’s wife Sandra Knight is noticeably pregnant when she wasn’t in the early shoots.
Meanwhile, Corman had promised Karloff $15,000 if this movie made $150,000. It didn’t,. but he had another idea. If Karloff would appear in Targets, he would get the cash. Corman told Peter Bogdanovich that he would finance his film if he shot twenty minutes of new Karloff footage, added in twenty minutes of this movie and then shot forty minutes with a new cast. Bogdanovich used footage from this movie at the beginning of his film, as Karloff watches himself and proclaims the movie as terrible.
French soldier André Duvalier (Nicholson) has left his men after a battle gone wrong and is rescued by Helene (Knight), a woman who looks just like the dead wife of a Baron. Twenty years before, after finding his wife with another man, the Baron (Karloff) killed her and had his servant Stefan (Dick Miller) kill the man he found her with.
A witch named Katrina (Dorothy Neumann) has been sending the ghost of the Baron’s wife to torment him, asking him to kill himself and join her. That’s because she thinks that the Baron killed her son Eric when the truth — ready for the spoiler — is that Eric killed the Baron and has gone so insane that he thinks that he is the Baron and killed Eric. By the time she learns this, it’s too late to enter the castle and as she runs to save her son, she walks across consecrated ground and burns. Just like Shakespeare, everyone dies except our young lovers, except that Helene is a ghost as well and she turns into a corpse after kissing André.
Speaking of saving money, AIP used to send its composers to more inexpensive European studios. In spite of this movies small budget, Ronald Stein was able to record both this movie’s soundtrack and the score for Dementia 13 all in one session while using the 90-piece Munich Symphony Orchestra. Speaking of that movie, The Terror played double features with it.
So yes, this isn’t a perfect movie, but at least Nicholson has good memories of it, saying “I had a great time. Paid the rent. They don’t make movies like The Terror anymore.”
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.
I’m proud to say that Herschell Gordon Lewis was born in the same town as me, Pittsburgh, PA. He was lured from a career as an educator into being a radio station manager and then, well, advertising got him. I can relate. I’ve spent the better part of 25 years doing the same. But then Lewis got smart. He learned how to make money.
He began making movies with David F. Friedman, starting with Living Venus. Their nudie cuties would be innocent today, but showed way more skin than mainstream films. These weren’t high art. They were made to turn a profit and they sure did, from movies like Boin-n-g! and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre to the world’s first — and probably only — nudist camp musical, Goldilocks and the Three Bares.
Once nudie movies got boring, Lewis needed another tactic. He found it. Oh wow, did he find it. Gore. Blood everywhere, guts all over the screen and no limits to the depravity that he’d fester on drive-in screens nationwide. It all started with Blood Feast.
This is a pretty simple film: Faud Ramses wants to make sacrifices to the Egyptian goddess Ishtar to resurrect her, so he kills beautiful young socialites when he’s not catering their coming out parties. He’s also wiping out anyone who requests a copy of his book, Ancient Weird Religious Rites.
Shot in Miami, Florida — where life is cheap! — in just four days for just $24,000, Blood Feast used all local ingredients for the gore, except for a sheep’s tongue that came from Tampa Bay. Friedman was a genius at publicity, helping the film succeed, giving out vomit bags at screenings and even applying to get an injunction against his own movie in Sarasota so that it couldn’t be shown.
Lewis and Friedman didn’t stray too far from their sexy roots, bringing in June 1963 Playmate of the Month Connie Mason to star in the film. She would come back for Lewis’ even more astounding Two Thousand Maniacs!
As for Lewis, he left filmmaking in the 1970’s, served some jail time for fraud and then began copywriting his way to even greater success, a second — maybe even third or fourth career — later in life. He wrote and published over twenty books, including The Businessman’s Guide to Advertising and Sales Promotion, Direct Mail Copy That Sells! and The Advertising Age Handbook of Advertising. His books were all over the place at my first agency job and I was shocked to discover that the author of these books — one of the godfathers of direct mail and eblasts — was also the American godfather of gore. Sometimes. life makes sense.
In 2016, Arrow Video released a huge box set of his films and the man whose work was often in grimy drive-ins and Something Weird video cassettes finally began to be appreciated as an auteur. Funny, as he was the man who said, “I see filmmaking as a business and pity anyone who regards it as an art form.”
You know those movies that they warn you about and tell you that they’ll warp your mind and make you a maniac, how you’ll never be the same again? This is that movie. You should probably watch it right now.
Can’t make it this weekend? Blood Feast is available on Tubi or on Shudder with and without commentary from Joe Bob Briggs.
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!
Mondo Cane 2 (1963): New Guinea, Germany, Singapore, Portugal, Australia, America and beyond, no country is safe when Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi have their cameras rolling. Paolo Cavara, who helped make Mondo Cane, had moved on to make other films, including Black Belly of the Tarantulaand Plot of Fear.
This time around, their journey takes us through vivisections, lynchings, tranvestitites, sex clubs, alligator hunts and a trip to a mortician’s school. Everything in this consists of cutting room footage of the first film, including a scene where a monk sets himself ablaze that was totally faked with the help of special effects wizard Carlo Rambaldi.
As the mondo had grown beyond their film, this time Jacopetti and Prosperi go abti-establishment, even laughing about how the dog scenes in the original movie kept them off screens in England. They’re incredulous and probably desensitized over all that they have seen.
Mondo Freudo (1966): Mondo Freudo is all about “a world of sex and the strange & unusual laws that govern it,” as told by two absolute maniacs: the producer/director/distributor team of Lee Frost and Bob Cresse, with Cresse himself ranting as we try and make it through another swing through the world of mondo.
Hollywood strippers, Tijuana hookers, London lesbians, Asian sex shows, Times Square Satanists and topless Watusi clubs. Hidden cameras have recorded everything from teenagers making out to a Mexican slave market, a Black Mass near Times Square, while we also see people get painted, beaten and wrestle in mud.
Cresse would go on to make Love Camp 7 and plenty of other upsetting — or awesome — movies before his life fell apart one day while he walked his dog. Coming across two men beating a woman in broad daylight on Hollywood Boulevard, Cresse pulled his gun and ordered the men to stop. Turns out they were cops and shot him in the stomach and then killed his dog. He’d spend seven months in the hospital with no health insurance, losing most of his fortune.
Frost would make The Black Gestapoand put sex inserts into a foreign mondo all about the occult, creating the near-classic Witchcraft ’70. He was smart enough to not fight any police.
Ecco (1963): Offsetting the globetrotting shock of this film — watch a woman bite off a reindeer’s scrotum with her bare teeth! — is the voice of George Sanders, perhaps way too sophisticated a man for such an endeavor. That said, money is money, and it’s time for Gianni Proia to take us all around This Shocking World (the other title for this mondo).
Beyond the expected lesbians and strippers — show me a mondo that doesn’t have those and it’s amazing that I am seeing them as commonplace at this point — you also get a trip to the original Grand Guignol and get to watch a man repeatedly impale himself.
The US version — re-edited with a new commentary by absolute maniac Bob Cresse and with an Italian title that means “look here” — adds scenes from World by Night No. 2, another Proia mondo, with bodybuilding showgirls, Roller Derby and some vacation footage. Consider it like watching snaps from holiday, except the vacation goers have no compunction showing you absolute filth.
Mondo Balordo (1964): Albert T. Viola — yes, the same man who wrote, directed, produced and starred in Preacherman— completed the American version of this film, known as A Fool’s World in Italy. There, it was directed by Roberto Bianchi Montero, who also made the mondos Africa Sexy, Orient By Night, Sexy Nudo, Sexy nel Mondo, Universo Proibito and Superspettacoli nel Mondo. He would go on to make So Sweet, So Dead.
Imagine a world “throbbing and pulsing with love, from the jungle orgies of primitive tribes to sin-filled evenings of the London sophisticate.” Now imagine those very same words coming out of the mouth of Boris Karloff.
Here are just some of the folks you will meet and sights you will see: a dwarf singer, bodybuilders, bedouin pimps, Japanese models for rent, Indian exorcists, people who can’t stop smoking, Jehovah’s Witnesses, lottery players, a clone of Valentino, high end rich dogs, a Borneo version of Romeo and Juliet, cults, nightclubs, Luna Park, London after hours and so much more.
Mondo Bizarro (1966): “To the worm in the cheese, the cheese is the universe. To the maggot in the cadaver, the cadaver is infinity. And to you, what is your world? How do you know what is beyond the Beyond? Most of us don’t even know what is behind the Beyond.”
Mondo Bizarro blew my mind and it hadn’t even started yet.
Much like all of the Lee Frost and Bob Cresse mondos, this is a mix of both documentary and faked footage. Sure, that one way glass in a changing room is fake, but hey, Frederick’s of Hollywood is real, even if it shows up in so many mondo films that I lose track of which one is which.
This one also has a man sticking nails in his skin and eating glass, the hippies of Los Angeles, Germans watching a Nazi play. Cresse must have been, umm, Cresse-ing his jeans, seeing as how he played a German officer in Love Camp 7 with such aufregung.
The duo also used a high-powered lens to capture what they describe as a Lebanese white-slavery auction. Never mind that it’s obviously Bronson Canyon, the setting for everything from Night of the Blood Beast to Equinox, Octaman and, most famously, the entrance to the Batcave in the 1960’s TV show.
Make no bones about it. This is junk. But it’s entertaining junk.
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.
La Donna nel Mondo hustled its way into theaters months after the success of Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi’s Mondo Cane. Where the first film was unfocused and just shows, quite literaly, a dog’s life, the sequel lives up to its name: you are going to see women all of the world.
We start in Israel, where we see women start training for their military service, which is soon juxtaposed with the island of Roger Hopkins, who has 84 wives and 52 children.
That difference bwteen women is the highlight of much of the footage, showing women longing for statues and their mates, who instead parade about in full regalia in New Guinea ritual.
There’s a trip to Cannes — this happens in so many mondos that I’ve lost track by this point — as well as a camera club (that’s where Bettie Page got her start, allowing men to pay her to take photos of her as she posed; incel weirdos did not get their start via the internet, dear friends), dude ranches where divorcees get the marital bliss they were missing, prostitution, Japanese women diving for pearls and getting their eyes more Westernized, plastic surgery, forced tattoos, Thalidomide babies and women screaming at God in Lourdes. There’s all that and so much more, all concentrating on, yes, the women of the world, but mostly wanting to show you plenty of flesh along the way.
This movie is dedicated to Italian exploitation films Belinda Lee, who died in a car crash that also injured her boyfriend Jacopetti: “To Belinda Lee, who throughout this long journey accompanied and helped us with love” appears on screen with ten seconds of silence. Jacopetti would be buried next to her thirty years later, never falling out of love with her, despite a lifetime mired in the sheer muck and grime of the mondo.
Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!
In the opening credits, Herschell Gordon Lewis is referred to as Lewis H. Gordon and David Freeman is listed as Davis Freeman. They’re also who William R. Johnson and William Kerwin based their roles on in this, two normal guys who decide to start shooting naked women on film. To make it even more meta, they’re inspired by a Lewis and Freeman double feature of Daughter of the Sun and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre.
Some of those models include Linda Cotton (who was in The Adventures of Lucky Pierre), Louise Downe (who would go on to write several films, including Blood Feast, The Gruesome Twosome, She-Devils On Wheelsand Linda and Abilene, as well as acting in Diary of a Nudist as Bunny Downe, Scum of the Earthas Vicki Miles and uncredited in The Beast That Killed Women; she also was the second unit director for The Wizard of Gore, A Taste of Blood, How to Make a Doll and more), Christina Castel (also in Scum of the Earth), Joanne Stuart (Hollywood’s World of Flesh), Marge London (The Bare Hunt), Marlene Gage and Ginger Hale (The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill).
It’s goofy, but you know, in 1963, this was how guys got to see women nude.
Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!
Before treating the world to the delights of Blood Feast, the team of Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman would introduce us all to the world’s first nudist musical. Before Something Weird Video found this movie, it had been lost for 36 years. In the book Taste of Blood: The Films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, author Christopher Wayne Curry said that he hoped the film would be found one day, to which Lewis replied, “Oh my, I hope not.”
Nightclub singer Eddie Livingston is after press agent Alison Edwards until he learns the dark secret that she’s a nudist. However, his friend, the comic (I use that term incredibly loosely) Tommy Sweetwood sees the joy of the nudist life and plays Cupid to the couple, getting Eddie and Alison to enjoy all manner of activities in their birthday suits, like riding on a boat, swimming ,water skiing and even riding a horse. Soon, they’re in love and all is aces, baby.
This film sadly displays little of the fun that Lewis would later employ in his films. It’s almost like you’re waiting for Faud Ramses to show up and start eating tongues.
That said, I kind of love that former light heavyweight champion Joey Maxim is presented as such a big deal in the film. Watch as he reads his lines off the cuff of his shirt! That said, Maxim had a pretty great boxing career, including defeating British boxer Freddie Mills in a match for the aforementioned title. That match was the last of Mills career, as Maxim hit him so hard that three of Mills’ teeth became embedded in one of his gloves.
How strange that what was taboo and sexy in 1963 is quaint and nearly boring today. But hey — a nudie-cutie musical! That’s something, right?
Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!
The first roughie and the work of Herschell Gordon Lewis and producer David F. Friedman, Scum of the Earth! tells the story of Kim Sherwood (Vickie Miles, AKA Allison Louise Downe, who was also in several other Lewis movies like She-Devils on Wheels), a college girl She-Devilshe wrong way and ends up trying to pay her tuition with glamour photos. But you know how the road to hell goes. It ends up going deeper and deeper, with Kim getting blackmailed into doing more and more explicit photos and dealing with sexualized violence, which is pretty insane for 1963.
Shot in six days and filmed in the same Miami locations that Blood Feast stained, it was made in black and white so that it would look filthy, like some kind of smoker film that would start turning on some old cigar smoking men before turning on them and shocking them with its willingness to make its sex violent. There’s also the matter of Sandy, another older girl, and her willingness to put the young Kim through all this so that she herself can escape.
Lewis — and Friedman — were the kings of talking you into the theater. They blessed this movie with some of the best taglines ever, like “Hell is their only address and they offer you a cheap substitute for fulfillment … in exchange for your soul!” and “Depraved. Demented. Loathsome. Nameless. Shameless. These are the Scum of the Earth!”
Lewis also knew how to write some dialogue, with stuff like “All you kids make me sick! You act like little Miss Muffet and down inside you’re dirty, do you hear me? Dirty! You’re greedy and self-centered and think you can get away with anything. You’re no better than the girl who sells herself to a man, you’re worse because you’re a hypocrite. And now little Miss Muffet is in trouble and she’s all outraged virtue. Well you listen and you listen well, you’re damaged merchandise and this is a fire sale.”
This was beyond hot stuff in the early 60s. Now you can stream it into your home. Times have changed.
Joe Sarno week (June 16 – 22) Joe Sarno was called the Bergman of 42nd St, but don’t let that stop you from watching his movies! He was able to shape dramatic stories that were entertaining and of-the-moment while working with tight budgets and inexperienced performers but he never lost sight of why people were buying the tickets – HOT SEX!
Bobbi (June Colbourne) is the kind of person who could only appear in a roughie directed by Joe Sarno. She’s a combination exotic dancer and fortune teller who uses a Haitian voodoo amulet to remain young and oh yeah, she can control almost any man, like her lover and bongo player Dave (Derek Murcott).
Her daughter Julia (Dian Lloyd) doesn’t want to live in the world her mother dominates. She’s also a dancer and doubles as a possessed woman during her mother’s psychic flim flam shows, raking in money from the marks and rubes.
After a night getting sodas, she gives her body to Ben Furman (Charles Clements). But soon, Dave decides to steal the amulet, putting everyone’s lives in a tailspin. Didn’t Dave already know that every one of Bobbi’s lovers has died horribly?
There’s no nudity or sex in this, but it feels just plain scuzzy and that’s the kind of filth that I wallow in. The promise of a carnal inferno and the delivery of entropy, so to speak. Then again, you get a lot of dance scenes that were volcanic in 1963 and could play on prime time TV today.
Like how Andy Milligan really only wants family members to lose their minds and scream at one another while the horror elements are just window dressing, so many Joe Sarno movies are about sadness and how people fail to connect. At the end, Bobbi remarks just how old and tired she is, despite all the magic. We don’t see her as younger — there’s no money for special effects — and have to become part of her illusion, hypnotized ourselves with the black and white starkness.
Sarno took over when original director Anthony Farrar left. Sure, it drags despite being 66 minutes, but then you remember that this is a sexless sex movie that has become a voodoo noir and you figure, well, it’s good enough.
One review on Letterboxd said, “The people are not very attractive nor appealing.” Maybe you’ve never seen pre-1970s adult films before. For shame.
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.
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