BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!
Barry Mahon used the name T.A. Dee to direct this, which is kind of a bummer, because I’d put this on the good side of the Mahon film column. It was written by Forest Russell (using the name Russell Fore), who only wrote one other movie, Unholy Matrimony.
A hypnotist realizes that there’s more money — and women — if he starts a sex cult. He takes the name Brother Eros and starts to preach that “Love is all that counts.”
I dig the idea that there are old rich women who bankroll this cult because they’re elite perverts. But if you’re coming to The Love Cult expecting debauchery, this movie is near PG-13 in content.
I really do love the tagline for it, though: “Here’s a major motion picture that tells the inside story of phony religious groups that used the DEVIL for a preacher!”
Rita Bennett is in this. Despite appearing in movies for directors like Joseph W. Sarno, Barry Mahon, William Rose, and the Ameros during the nudie cutie and roughie eras, then appearing in plenty of mainstream movies like Raging Bull and All That Jazz, she never got her drinking out of control and was buried in a potter’s field, her body unclaimed after her demise.
Uta Erickson, who was in the Findlay’s Her Flesh trilogy, is also in this, as is Sharon Kent from Beware the Black Widow, Some Like It Violent and Carny Girl.
BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!
Crazy World…Crazy People was directed by Renato Polselli, who co-wrote the film with Giuseppe Pellegrini, who wrote and did second unit work on several of Polselli’s early movies.
A group of young musicians work with Maurizio, an older vaudeville actor (Posani), to organize a show that only gets on the stage thanks to girlfriends and Elvezia Allori, the actor’s wife (France Polesello). One of those musicians is Claudio Natili, who twenty years later would score Fulci’s The Devil’s Honey.
Thea Fleming also appears and is even on some of the posters. She showed up in several Eurospy movies like SuperSeven Calling Cairo, From the Orient With Fury and Operation Counterspy. Franco Latini is in the cast as well and he was the voice for Stan Laurel, as well as several muppets and the Italian dub voice of Skeletor and Donald Duck.
The film itself is a fake mondo about the concert and the issues of it getting to the public. It has none of the other outright insanity that you can find in Polselli’s other movies.
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.
Sold as a double bill with William Grefé’s Death Curse of Tartu, this is Florida regional drive-in exploitation at its absolute best. I mean, sure there are plenty of movies where sea creatures rise to the beach to menace near-nude girls, but do any of them have Neil Sedaka* belting out “Do the Jellyfish?”
Shot on the very same Rainbow Springs that were once attacked by the Creature from the Black Lagoon, this starts off hot, with a hand reaching up from the depths of the ocean to murder an innocent young girl who just wants to listen to her radio.
A bunch of college kids — well, one of them is a doctor and his assistant, but come on, this is basically a slasher in the swamps — just want to drink orange drink and make fun of Egon, their host’s helper with the scary face. Why, it’s enough for a man to turn himself into a half-human, half-jellyfish maniac who knows how to use an axe when he isn’t sending an entire armada of Portuguese Man O’ War jellyfish to kill everyone.
And yeah, he does have a giant jellyfish in a tank and a head shaped like one. This is that kind of movie. That kind of awesome movie where the killer has obviously flippers on and a giant inflatable head.
*They may have advertised special singing star Neil Sedaka, but they never promised you he’d show up, did they?
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.
The Oumi Kingdom is in shambles after General Daijo Yuki (Bin Amatsu) and his ninja Orochimaru (Ryūtarō Ōtomo) kill Lord Ogata (Shinichiro Hayashi) and his wife. Soldiers loyal to Ogata have succeeded in helping his son Ikazuchi-Maru to escape but Orochimaru transforms into a serpent and tries to kill him. Luckily, a giant eagle flies in and saves Ikazuchi-Maru.
Trained by Dojin Hiki (Nobuo Kaneko), Ikazuchi-Maru grows to become a ninja who specializes in toad magic. One evening, Hiki is attacked by Orochimaru and it’s revealed that the old man once taught the evil ninja and was also the eagle that saved our hero, who arrives too late — along with Tsunade (Tomoko Ogawa) — to save him. Now out for revenge, he goes after the ninja while Tsunade follows, given a spider pin by the spider woman who saved her.
Ikazuchi-Maru renames himself Jiraiya and becomes friends with Saki (Yumi Suzumura) and her little brother Shirota (Takao Iwamura), saving them from Daijo Yuki’s men. But oh, the twists and turns, as it turns out that while she loves our hero, Tsunade is also the daughter of Orochimaru! And there’s still a battle between the ninjas in their toad and serpent forms to follow.
Man, I absolutely loved this movie. It combines the martial arts movie with kaiju and has so many strange things about it. People hopefully loved it too, but I bet so many people who watched the American-International TV versions just thought it was dumb. Not me!
AIP also redubbed the monsters, so the Orochi-Maru Dragon sounds like Godzilla and Gaira from War of the Gargantuas, the Ikazuchi-Maru/Jiraiya Toad roars like Rodan, the giant eagle is Mothra and Sunate’s giant spider now sounds like a metallic monster and also has the voice of Kiyla from Ultraman. They also removed the opening and closing songs and replaced them with basic instrumentals. The toad also was used on the Toei series Kamen no ninja Aka-Kage.
You could almost see a lot of Star Wars in this movie. An evil magic fighter orphans a young boy who is destined to have great power who is saved by an old man and raised in the ways of the very same magic. He becomes friends with the daughter of that enemy — Leia is, after all, Darth Vader’s daughter — and he finally becomes strong enough in magic that he can fight back and the evil magic fighter becomes briefly good before his heroic sacrifice. Sure, we can all get behind that Joseph Campbell Hero’s Journey, but sometimes, things get a little ripped off.
Speaking of that Hero’s Journey, this is based on a Japanese folktale, The Tale of the Gallant Jiraiya, and was directed by Tetsuya Yamanouchi (Akakage, The Ninja Hunt) and written by Masaru Igami (Prince of Space, the main writer of Kamen Rider, Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot) and Mokuami Kawatake.
The title in Japan was Great Mystic Dragon Battle, which is super metal, and it has even better ones over the entire world, like Grand Duel in Magic, Ninja Apocalypse and Monsters of the Apocalypse. If you’ve ever seen the Taiwanese movie Young FlyingHero, that feels like a remake of this movie.
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.
When a general’s son is taken hostage as ransom to free a bandit leader, the general’s daughter Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-pei, who Western audiences may recognize as Jade Fox from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) goes to rescue her brother and battle the bandit gang. She’s protected by a drunk named Fan Da-Pei (Yueh Hua), who is really Drunken Cat, a secret martial arts master, who saves her from a poison dart.
The bandits have worked their way into a monastery led by an evil abbot named Liao Kung (Yeung Chi-hing), who once helped Fan Da-Pei to be accepted into the school that taught them both their martial arts skills. As a result, the hero doesn’t want to battle him. He also believes that there’s no way their battle won’t end in death.
Director King Hu also made A Touch of Zen, which is an essential Hong Kong film. There’s an urban legend that Jackie Chan is rumored to play one of the child singers at the beginning of the film, but Pei-Pei Cheng has stated that he is not in the movie.
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.
Two spy groups, M.A.F.I.A. and S.I.N. — they never tell what those mean — are at war. On the side of good, or M.A.F.I.A., we have Agent Silk Suit (Sal Rogge). The evil, or S.I.N., is led by Dr. Sexus (Bob Oran) and his henchmen Poontang Plenty (Joyana Frederics, The Brick Dollhouse), Bigjob (Rick Wright) and several women wearing the finest lingerie of 1966. Everyone seems like they get along well enough and are all after and his assistant Karen (Lisa Ryan), who uses their invisibility formula to disappear and show up naked. And before long, the good guys and bad guys are on the same side and trying to find that invisibility pill.
This is a world where women suck toes with champagne on them before killing people. 1966 spying was way different, I guess. This was directed by C. Davis Smith, Doris Wishman’s cinematographer, and is like a radio play about Fu Manchu played over softcore action that never really gets all that sexy, except for the aside where a naked woman (June Robert, The Beast Who Killed Women) poses while drinking all that pasteurized liquid.
Knowing that Wishman actually had a cinematographer may short out your central nervous system. This also has some roughie action with a steam torture that doesn’t get all that upsetting. You know how old wrestling magazines used to tell you about the secret world of apartment wrestling? This is like that, shot in New York City places where rent was cheap.
Smith also directed the sex scenes in Wishman’s Satan Was a Lady and Come With Me My Love. Beyond this movie, he also directed File X for Sex: The Story of the Perverted, Graffiti and All My Men under his name and In Flight Service and To Turn a Trick as Charles Andrew. He also edited the video for Run-DMC’s “KIng of Rock.”
I love The Rialto Report, which interviewed Smith, who said of this movie, “People loved spy films at that time. … James Bond movies, I Spy, Get Smart. I figured a sex version would be a good money-maker. And it did ok. I stole all the ideas. The title came from TV series, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and I stole the name of our heroine from the Bond movie, Goldfinger. Except our heroine wasn’t called Pussy Galore but Poontang Plenty! Special Agent 0069, of course.”
He added, “The budget for S.I.N. was $5,000 and I got that from these two stunt men – Sam Stewart and Bob Oran. In fact we shot most of it at Bob’s apartment, which he used as a basic film studio. Sam and Bob were part of the same repertory company that existed making sex films in the 1960s. Sam had an acting part in S.I.N. too. He married one of the regular actresses, Sheila Britt, and they’ve been married ever since.”
Joyana Frederics is like an East Coast Tura Satana, doing karate movies and appearing vaguely Asian. Other than the two adult films she acted in, she appeared in two episodes of Adam-12 and an episode of Ironside.
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)!
Directed, shot by and edited by Jon Hall, who also plays Dr. Otto Lindsay, The Beach Girls and the Monster is the kind of strange movie that I love so much. The surf footage was shot by Dale Davis — who also is in this as Tom — and he also made the surf documentaries Walk on the Wet Side, Strictly Hot and The Golden Breed. Even better, it has sculptures, the monster’s head,and the Kingsley the Lion, which were all created by Walker Edmiston — who plays Mark — who had a kid’s show in Los Angeles and went on to be the voice of Ernie the Keebler Elf, several characters on Lidsville, Sigmund from Sigmund and the Sea Monster, the Zuni Fetish Doll in Trilogy of Terror and Magneto on the 1980s Spider-Man, as well as playing Professor Crandall on The Dukes of Hazzard.
Can it get even better than that?
Let me introduce you to the The Watusi Dancing Girls” rom Hollywood’s Whisky a Go Go club on Sunset Boulevard. And how about that soundtrack with appearances by The Hustlers and the theme song “Dance Baby Dance” by Frank Sinatra Jr. and Joan Janis.
Bunny (Gloria Neil, Sarah in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) is found dead after being attacked by a seawood covered lizard creature. No, not Slithis. Or Zaat. Or one of the Humanoids from the Deep. This, according to Dr. Lindsay, is a fantigua fish that has grown large enough to exist out of the ocean. Did it grow lungs? What kind of scientist is he? And why does he call the kids loafers and little tramps?
Maybe he’s mad that his son Richard Lindsay (Arnold Lessing) is a beach bum, that his best friend Mark (Edmiston) has moved in and sculpts, and that his wife Vicky (Sue Casey, Evilspeak) drinks and flirts all the time, seeming like the kind of woman that John Ashley would certainly sleep with and cuck him were this Blood Island and not Santa Monica. Richard was there when Bunny died, so all he cares about now is his girlfriend Jane (Elaine DuPont) and living life for fun instead of doing research with his old man.
In case you can’t guess, there’s no such thing as the monster. Yes, the doctor is dressing up, all to make his son more serious by killing everyone that he is friends with as well as getting rid of his second wife.
Also known as Monster from the Surf and Surf Terror, this movie is totally The Horror of Party Beach but I don’t care. It’s like a sitcom or Scooby-Doo episode except that all sorts of people die and it ends with a misunderstood father, who is dressed as an undersea monster, driving his car off a cliff and blowing up real good.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Last of the Secret Agents? was on the CBS Late Movie on July 8, 1975.
Marty Allen and Steve Rossi — who used the catchphrase “Hello Dere!” — were a comedy from 1957 until 1968 that appeared on over 700 television shows including 44 appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show.
This film is their spy spoof, featuring Nancy Sinatra acting and singing “The Last of the Secret Agents,” which is also in the Billy Murray movie The Man Who Knew Too Little.
Paramount Pictures knew all about comedy teams. In the 1940s, they made big money off of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in the 1950s. There was the hope that Allen and Rossi could do the same here, but it didn’t happen. That said, they did make Allen and Rossi Meet Dracula and Frankenstein.
In this movie, they play tourists who are recruited by the Good Guys Institute to battle Zoltan Schubach and THEM, who are stealing art treasures.
It was directed by Norman Abbott, who worked a lot with Jack Benny and was a director for the Get Smart! TV show, amongst many other programs.
Lou Jacobi shows up (he’s Murray, the man who gets lost inside his TV in Amazon Women on the Moon), as does Thordis Brandt (The Witchmaker), Harvey Korman and the one-time wife of Russ Meyer, Edy Williams.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Dracula: Prince of Darkness was on the CBS Late Movie on March 12, 1973 and July 12, 1974.
Made six years after The Brides of Dracula — which has Baron Meinster (David Peel) as the antagonist instead of Dracula — and is the third of nine Hammer Dracula movies, this was shot at the same time as Rasputin, the Mad Monk and played double features with The Plague of the Zombies. If you went, you got plastic vampire fangs and zombie eyeglasses.
It begins by reminding us how 1958’s Dracula ended with Doctor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) finally ending the reign of Count Dracula (Christopher Lee) with sunlight. Ten years later, Father Sandor (Andrew Keir) has already tired of burying bodies as if they were vampires. After all, Dracula is gone.
That said, he still tells four English tourists — Diana (Suzan Farmer), Charles (Francis Matthews), Helen (Barbara Shelley) and Alan (Charles Tingwell) — not to visit Karlsbad. But no, the Kent family are dumb and go anyway, even as their carriage driver refuses to take them any closer. They decide to go look at a castle where the servant, Klove (Philip Latham), tells them that his master Count Dracula always wanted to give a place for visitors to stay. He says that and soon kills Alan, mixing his blood with Dracula’s ashes to bring the king of the vampires back, then luring Helen into his crypt where he can feast on her. Charles and Diana barely make it out alive and are saved by Father Sandor.
Dracula has followers everywhere, even amongst the church, but as always, the protagonists survive. Dracula dies in an interesting way here, drowning under ice, which I was not aware was a way to kill him. This scene almost really did kill stuntman Eddie Powell, who became trapped underwater.
Lee wasn’t too pleased with this film, saying, “I didn’t speak in that picture. The reason was very simple. I read the script and saw the dialogue! I said to Hammer, “If you think I’m going to say any of these lines, you’re very much mistaken.”” Writer Jimmy Sangster denied this, claiming,”…vampires don’t chat. So I didn’t write him any dialogue. Christopher Lee has claimed that he refused to speak the lines he was given…So you can take your pick as to why Christopher Lee didn’t have any dialogue in the picture. Or you can take my word for it. I didn’t write any.”
Regardless of this, he, Sangster and director Terence Fisher would keep on making Hammer movies.
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