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!

Olga (Audrey Campbell) is the meanest and the best at her job, which is turning out women like Frenchie (Gigi Darlene), plying them with marijuana and if that doesn’t work, just beating them into submission, all so that they turn tricks for her and the syndicate. The syndicate! You will hear their names so many times.

A film made with all voiceovers, White Slaves of Chinatown was directed and written by Joseph P. Mawra, who directed Fireball Jungle and may or may not have directed Shanty Tramp and Savages from Hell. Probably not.

There’s opium everywhere and this feels like those black and white detective magazines you used to see on the newstand that seem way more perverted than any porn magazine, always with women being threatened on the cover and in every story.

Olga would return for four more movies: Olga’s House of Shame and Olga’s Girls with Campbell and Mme. Olga’s Massage Parlor with no Olga showing up and Olga’s Dance Hall Girls with Lucy Eldredge as Olga.

In 1964, this movie was probably as offensive as can be. Today, it’s still pretty scuzzy but you can’t help but find it adorable.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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.

Luigi Scattini’s directing career is all over the place, hitting all the various genres of the 60’s and 70’s. There’s comedy — War Italian Style, which unites silent film legend Buston Keaton with the Italian comedian duo of Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia (more on them in a bit). There’s mondo — Sweden Heaven and Hell, narrated by Edmund Purdom and featuring Piero Umiliani’s “Mah Nà Mah Nà, which would be used by Benny Hill and The Muppets. And more mondo — the magical Witchcraft ’70, as well as Questo Sporco Mondo Meraviglioso (This Dirty Wonderful World) and Sexy Magico. There’s Eurospy — the Richard Harrison-starring Ring Around the World. And plenty of sexual themed films like La Ragazza dalla Pelle di Luna (The Girl with the Moon Skin), La Ragazza Fuoristrada (The Off-Road Girl), The Body, La Notte dell’alta Marea (The Night of High Tide, which has Pam Grier) and Blue Nude. He’s also the father of Monica Scattini, the only actress I know who could be in both One from the Heart and Ruggero Deodato’s Concorde Affaire ’79.

Saying this is an uneven film is being generous to uneven films. The moronic antics of Franchi and Ingrassia, who play bellhops, play out around Mansfield lounging about and gradually getting undressed. Her husband at the time, Mickey Hargitay, also shows up.

Yes, a movie where Jayne is a doctor — of sexual relations — whose film of mating rituals around the world is an excuse to show mondo footage. These are the movies I fill my life with and bring to you.

Credit — or blame — goes to Massimo Pupillo, who would make Bloody Pit of Horror with Hargitay, and Amedeo Sollazzo, who worked with Franchi and Ingrassia throughout their long careers.

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.

Directed by Irwin Meyer (who wrote the Hollywood Babylon TV series) and written by Alexander Panas, this is quite literally about a terror-filled post-wedding between Lilli (Abbey Heller) and Emile Duvre (Robert Parsons). People start dying and the killer could be anyone from Emile to his servant Hajmir (Vincent Petti), his mistress Helene (Beverly Lane), or his brother Max (Panas). It could also be any of the maniacs that Emile hangs out with or perhaps the person who keeps calling and hanging up.

This movie was filmed in the home of Sepy Dubronyi, a Hungarian born sculptor who fled to Cuba and then to the U.S. He was famous for sculpting celebrities, like his former fling Anita Ekburg. He had plenty of famous women, including Linda Christian (the first Bond girl in the TV version of Casino Royale), Brigitte Bardot and Ava Gardner.

The tagline promises “A honeymoon of ecstasy turns into a nightmare… Shock upon shock brings a thrilling, chilling blood-curdling tale to the screen!” I have no idea what that script was, because this really has no plan, feeling like a Miami based void where characters appear and fade away at whim. It’s also known as Orgy of the Golden Nudes, The Golden Nymphs and Orgies, which are great titles, but again have nothing to do with the actual film.

Lilli says at one point, “Even in my dreams, I hadn’t dreamt of it as wonderful as this. For me, it was a stairway to heaven, and Emile’s eyes were filled with stars.” That’s before she’s almost killed by a sculpture while trying to swim and having to hear her new husband exclaim, “The circle leads from life to death. The power of life is the power of death. And I have that power, to take life from death and immortalize it forever. That’s why I had to kill, to give life to my statues.”

This is the kind of movie that lunatics will enjoy. Like, well, me.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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!

After the success of his gore epics, Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs!, Herschell Gordon Lewis made this, the first of several country fried films. But just because this is supposed to be a sexy comedy romp doesn’t mean that Lewis won’t hit us with plenty of strangeness and lots of the red stuff.

Charles Glore, working here as Chuck Scott, is a country western star who heads back to the hills of the Carolines where within days, he’s in the middle of a feud between the government and the moonshiners. Glore also was the musical director for Two Thousand Maniacs! and wrote this movie.

The title card says “directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, who ought to know better, but don’t.” Lewis just can’t help himself, as in the midst of the country fun, a psycho named Asa Potter is refused sex from the singer’s girlfriend and then kills her. Keep in mind that he’s also the town’s sheriff and also assaults multiple women in the film, including one mentally challenged girl that eventually fells him with an axe, which is how it works in the universe of Lewis.

This leads to the sheriff shooting people off a watertower, Charles Starkweather-style. Keep in mind this movie was made only six years after that shocking event.

Lewis also wrote and sings the main theme, “White Lightning.” As much as he would live up to the quote “I see filmmaking as a business and pity anyone who regards it as an art form,” you can tell when the man is having a good time. Moonshine Mountain isn’t a good film, but it sure is interesting in parts and it’s pretty short. More films should aspire to both points.

There was also a novelization of the film, which blows my mind. It’s a collector’s item today. I miss the time when every movie had a book that would go with it. Somehow, having this movie written into a novel legitimizes it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Bleeding Skull’s Top 50 (July 7 – 13) The middle-brow champions of low-brow horror, Bleeding Skull has picked out some of their favorites from the SWV catalog. They neglected to put I Drink Your Blood or EEGAH! on the list, but I think I can forgive them since they included Ship of Monsters. 

Made in Huntington, West Virginia, Teen-Age Stranger was directed by Ben Parker (Thunder Mountain, Invisible Avenger) and written by Clark Davis, who also wrote the songs “Yipe Stripes” and “Willows Wept” that are in this.

Huntington may be the second largest city in the state and the home of 1950s TV icon Dagmar, game show host Peter Marshall and Brad Dourif, but it does not seem large enough to have a giallo-style killer wandering the streets, tying women up with their stockings and leaving lipstick X marks all over their young dead bodies.

Jimmy Walton (Bill Bloom) is a dirtbike racing rebel new in town. Everyone thinks he could be the strangler, even if his brother Mikey (John Humphries) and his secret love Betty (Jo Canterbury) know it can’t be him or any of his gang, the Fastbacks even if the killer is wearing one of their jackets.

This is the kind of movie where a hamburger restaurant can have a band called the Huntington Astronauts just jump up and start playing and yet there’s a sexually motivated killing machine bringing death to this Leave It to Beaver black and white world.

The real hero is Mikey, who might be the biggest goofball in the history of movies. Between his brother taking the blame for things he’s done, being so annoying that his brother kicks him in the face and being unable to ride a bicycle without an accident, he cries in nearly every scene. If this really were a giallo, he would have to be the killer.

John Humphries later revealed that he thought that Jo Canterbury was a professional actress. She was really an airline hostess. When she got wilder with her performance, he thought she was a pro, so he did the same thing.

This played theaters and drive-ins as late as 1985 due to its great title. It became better known after Mystery Science Theater 3000 played it on their show. It does a lot in 61 minutes. Those West Virginia kids are unshakeable. Betty nearly gets killed by the villain — who is not a teenager, but Janitor Choker is a worse title and a spoiler, sorry — and then has a cop shoot a bullet right at her that hits the killer and he dies inches from her, she goes right back to the malt shop. Montani Semper Liberi!

You can watch this on Tubi with or without riffing.