BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!
Both of the titles of this movie reference others: Kiss Me Quick! is a takeoff of Kiss Me, Stupid and the original title, Dr. Breedlove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love, is obviously taken from Kubrick.
Sterilox is an alien who has come from the Buttless galaxy. He’s played by Frank A. Coe, using the name Fattie Beltbuckle. He ends up in the lab of Dr. Breedlove (Max Gardens), seeking a perfect woman to become the housewife for their planet. Yes, not for breeding. Who are we to not respect the command of the Grand Glom? Yet, one wonders, why is the alien Stan Laurel? And why. is Dr. Breedlover more Bela Lugosi than Peter Sellers?
“Dance! Dance, my little sex bombs!” yells the mad scientist as women gyrate all around the alien and then Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula and a mummy show up. This is like Famous Monsters if it had a few pages from Leg Show in it, what with all of the stockings being slowly removed.
Director Peter Perry Jr. has the kind of resume that I get obsessed over (and so did Something Weird). Revenge of the Virgins, Honeymoon of Terror, Mr. Peter’s Pets, Knockers Up, My Tale Is Hot, The Wondrful World of Girls, The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill, Mondo Mod, The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet, The Notorious Cleopatra, The Joys of Jezebel, Cycle Vixens, A Woman’s Dream and many years later, an uncredited job on Taboo VII, long after the fun days of porno chic had become dead and buried.
This was the first movie produced by Harry Novak. He was hands on, as he and Perry did a talent search at strip clubs, looking for women who could act and who would also take their clothes off. This was the start of him getting a roster of actresses looking for work who had been bumping and grinding under wigs and assumed names. Novak’s Boxoffice International Pictures would go on to make more than fifty movies after this.
This is also the first movie in the U.S. for cinematographer László Kovács, who had been in the U.S. for two years and not been hired. He couldn’t speak English and wasn’t in the union. Novak met him and hired him for several of his films — this is the best looking nudie cutie that you will ever see — before he became an in-demand cinematographer in Hollywood.
Coe also played the Frankenstein Monster and did sound, while Max Gardens was the other producer. Also known as Manny Goodtimes, he played Lucifer in My Tale Is Hot and was a men’s club owner.
The ladies in this include Boobra (Natasha, also in The Kill and One Million AC/DC), Kissme (Jackie De Witt, No Tears for the Damned), Barebra (Bibi), Hotty Totty (Claudia Banks), Gertie Tassle (Althea Currier, Sinderella and the Golden Bra), Gigi String (Donna, The Forbidden), Lotta Cash (Lucky) and Gina Cathchafanni (Pat Hall).
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.
It takes a certain kind of genius — or maniac — to make a gore drenched version of Brigadoon. I was explaining this movie to someone and said that the main reason why I like it so much is the completely joyful way in which the townsfolk of Pleasant Valley go about their murderous rampage. This is the time of their lives — well, post-death lives — and it’s worth hollering and singing and shouting about.
Shot over two weeks in the small Florida town of St. Cloud — not yet a cog in the omnipotent wheel of the Disney vacation empire yet — and featuring the gleeful participation of nearly every citizen in that sleepy community, this movie established the danger of the South to North audiences, a theme that would reach its creative apex in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Yankee tourists, made up of the Millers, the Wells and unmarried folks Tom White and Terry Adams (Lewis’ muse, if he ever had one and only because he never sliced off one of her limbs or cut out her tongue, Connie Mason) have followed the detours to Pleasant Valley where they’re the guests of honor for the centennial celebration.
Yes, a hundred years ago, the Union troops marched through the town and killed every man, woman and child. What a thing to celebrate!
The town’s mayor, Joseph Buckman (Taalkeus Blank, who used the name Jeffery Allen, could do such a Southern accent that Lewis would also use him in Moonshine Mountain, This Stuff’ll Kill Ya! and Year of the Yahoo!), and the townspeople show everyone great hospitality at first, but before you can say Mason-Dixon Line they’re slicing off their guests body parts, drawing and quartering them, getting rolled down the hill in a nail-filled barrel, having rocks dropped on them and all other manner of grisly crowd pleasing hijinks.
After kidnapping little Billy, Terry and Tom make it out of town and come back with the police, only to discover that the town never existed. When they leave, the townspeople return and wonder what the world will be like when they come back in 2065 before disappearing into the fog.
This was Lewis’ favorites of his films and he even published a tie-in paperback version of the story.
Yes, that’s Herschell Gordon Lewis singing the theme song, too. You have to admire his dedication to filmmaking. This was produced by David F. Friedman, who met up with Kroger Babb before a career that has everything from nudie cuties and roughies to gore and Naziploitation, which he produced under the name Herman Traeger.
More movies should be like Two Thousand Maniacs!, but so few have the gumption to even try.
Here’s a drink.
Pleasant Valley Dew
4 oz. Mountain Dew
2 oz. moonshine
,5 oz. triple sec
2 oz. pineapple juice
2 oz. orange juice
2 oz. pomegranate juice
Pour it all in a shaker with ice and shake it like it’s a Yankee in a barrel.
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.
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.
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 magicalWitchcraft ’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.
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.
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.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Comedy of Terrors was on the CBS Late Movie on September 1, 1972 and April 30, 1973.
American-International Pictures follow up to The Raven, this movie reunites Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff. Adding to the trio is Basil Rathbone, giving this film an astounding cast. They’re all working from a script by Richard Matheson and direction by Jacques Tourneur, who for my money made some of the greatest horror movies ever like Night of the Demon, The Leopard Manand Cat People.
Price is Waldo Trumbull, a funeral home owner, a business that he stole from his partner Amos Hinchley (Karloff) after marrying his daughter Amaryllis (Joyce Jameson). They only have one coffin, which saves them money, as Felix Gillie (Lorre) dumps the bodies when he isn’t setting up the death of wealthy clients.
Rathbone plays John F. Black, Esq., the landlord that tries to evict Trumbull but keeps dying and coming back to life, giving soliloquies and dying again. The cat, who keeps waking him up due to allergies, is played by Orangey the cat, who also menaced The Incredible Shrinking Man.
While a fun movie, this one could have really used Corman’s touch. That said I’m a big fan of Tourneur. It wasn’t a big success, but it’s still worth a watch. You might even spot the hearse coach that now is part of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.
Yoshie Nomoto (Miyuki Kuwano) is a young and naive woman from the countryside who has come to the big city and fallen for Eiji Kitami (Mikijiro Hira), a young gangster who pushes her into a life of ill repute. But when we first meet her, she’s already been living this life for some time and despite Hiroshi Fujii (Keisuke Sonoi) thinking he can save her from it, it seems like she’s trapped forever.
Directed by Noburo Nakamura, The Shape of Night is a gorgeous film, one that is filled with the most lush colors and a filmmaking style that makes the heart sing. Speaking of the heart, this proves that love can’t stop an unhappy ending, but such is how it works sometimes in the movies.
Yoshie loves Eiji, no matter how harsh the life he has led her into. There’s a harrowing scene where his bosses take advantage of her and he must watch. It’s not an easy scene to sit through, which is something one can say for the drama of this entire film.
This limited edition of 3,000 Radiance Films release comes with a isual essay on the artistic upheavals at Shochiku studios during the 1960s by Tom Mes, a trailer, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow, a limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Chuck Stephens and it’s all presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.