BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Emilio Vieyra also made The Curious Dr. Humpp but he may have created something even stranger here.

There’s a maniac loose, wearing a mask and wig, prowling the beaches of Argentina where he uses his haunting organ and rock and roll records to lure gorgeous women to his house where he uses them up, injects them with smack and dumps them back on the beach, dead to the world, before he drives away in his silver sports car.

The coroner, Dr. Bermudez (Alberto Candeau), says that the girls are all just drug addicts. And he should know, because his wife and her last lover had an affair with all manner of substances that ended with a car smashed and her dead. Maybe he’s drug obsessed. Maybe he’s the killer.

A handsome cop named Ernest Lauria (Mauricio De Ferraris) is in town to help solve this case, which gets even more deranged when women start to disappear and come back as complete zombies. Like every assassin with a copy of Catcher in the Rye, they all have the same record, jazz music by Silvio Valverde (Ricardo Bauleo), who also taught every one of the three dead girls to play piano.

This played double features as Feast of Flesh with Night of the Bloody Apes and man, if I saw that at the drive-in I would have just started crying from joy. This movie has acid that turns women into zombie acid fiends who have sex with a man in a weird mask, as well as a hero that berates his love interest — Baby! — for nearly getting assaulted.

https://www.zomboscloset.com/zombos_closet_of_horror_b/2013/04/night-of-the-bloody-apes-double-bill-pressbook.html

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.

Claire Brennan plays Jade Cochran, a diner waitress who hates freaks and sadly for her, she’s pretty much in a remake of Tod Browning’s Freaks but, you know, 35 years later and somehow with a lower budget. Within minutes — and just one ferris wheel ride — she’s the wife of circus owner Steve St. John (Bill McKinney) and moments after that, rough trade Blackie Fleming (Lee Raymond) is treating her how she likes being treated behind her new old man’s back and then, even sooner than that, Steve’s dead at the hands and switchblade of Blackie and Jade owns it all.

Again, if you saw Freaks, you know how this all ends, the comeuppance of it all, right? The effects are rudimentary but effective and I mean, you can’t call a movie She Freak and not have a she freak.

Directed by Byron Mabe (The Acid Eaters, Space Thing, Nude Django) with inserts from Donn Davison. Donn was the manager of Florida’s Dragon Art Theatre and one of the guys who would work four-walled theaters and talk marks into buying gimmicks. He also narrated the trailer for The Crawling Thing and Creature Of Evil.

This was written by Michael B. Druxman (who also wrote the Cannon movie Keaton’s Cop) and producer David F. Friedman, who produced this and also plays the carnival barker. He learned how to make movies in the army and when he was discharged, he sold army-surplus searchlights. His first customer? Kroger Babb, perhaps the most carny of all carnies. And this, Friedman entered the world of film, working with Herschell Gordon Lewis, making more money in softcore and retiring when hardcore took over.

Filmed during the Kern County Fair and the Ventura County Fair, She Freak takes advantage of the rides and attractions of West Coast Shows, which was such a major company that they could do five carnivals in different locations at the same time. Most of their crew are in this.

Even though Jade and Shorty (Felix Silla) are at odds in this movie, the truth is there’s a thin line between love and hate. This movie started a nine year affair between the two that was kept a secret, even when Brennan gave birth to Silla’s son.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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.

Four years later, Coffin Joe has returned from the end of At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul and has recovered from shock, blindness and being accused of a series of murders. Now it’s time to get back to finding his perfect woman and continue his blood.

Together with a hunchbacked assistant named Brono, he kidnaps six gorgeous women and puts them all through a horrific series of tasks to determine who will bear his child. Only Marcia doesn’t scream in the face of the madness Coffin Joe puts them through, so only she can be the one. Yet even though he takes her to his bed — and kills the other five with snakes — she refuses him. He releases her, claiming he knows that she will never tell anyone what she has seen.

That’s when he meets the Colonel’s daughter, Laura, who actually returns his affection. The military man and his son try to break off their union, but Coffin Joe acts as only as he can to such an offense: he has Bruno kill Laura’s brother and blames the colonel’s henchman Truncador.

Yet now comes the dark night for the man who has no soul, as he goes to Hell after learning that one of his six brides was pregnant when he killed her. Dooming her child, he wanders the technicolor nightmare that is the abyss and comes upon Satan himself, who is also Coffin Joe. Our world’s version renounces his ways in light of this revelation.

Coffin Joe resists all the killers the colonel and his men send after him and finally impregnates Laura, just as Marcia kills herself by drinking arsenic. Yet before she dies, she tells the townsfolk of Coffin Joe’s crimes and they form a lynch mob just as he must decide who will survive, his bride or the baby, as the pregnancy has complications. Together they agree that the child must live, but fate is cruel and both Laura and Joe’s scion die. Destroyed by this, he is no match for the lynch mob that arrives, shooting him in the cemetery where he drowns in the same pond where he drowned so many of his victims.

At the point of death, a priest offers to hear Joe’s confession. He accepts God as his Savior and drowns as the skeletons of his victims claim him.

Brazilian censors forced filmmaker — and the human avatar of Coffin Joe — Jose Mojica Marins to recut and redub the end of this movie. That’s why the strange ending of salvation is in here. It enraged Jose Mojica Marins and put a curse on his career, or so he felt, to the point that he could never finish his planned trilogy of three Coffin Joe movies. It took until 2005 and filmmakers who grew up as his fans before Embodiment of Evil closed out the story and showed how Coffin Joe survived.

In The Wizard of Oz, a better world is in color instead of black and white. In This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, Hell itself is the only place to get the full color gel Mario Bava treatment and that says something about the nihilistic worldview of its creator and his creation. I grew up in a small town too, Coffin Joe, but I wasn’t brave enough to grow out my fingernail to absurd lengths, go on and on about my superiority and make out with a woman while throwing snakes at others. I can only watch you and see how it could have been.

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.

I’m a very simple man. I love a good hygiene movie. A square up reel? Pure excitement. If a movie starts with a scientist or a learned man of medicine explaining that this is a true story and that we need to be open to what we see, well, I’m on the edge of my seat.

Albert Rose (Leslie Marlowe) is the American ideal: handsome looks, comes from old money, can play sports and a smash with the ladies. Yet one day, he’s lured to a hotel and blackmailed by the proof that he deserted his platoon during a firefight over in Korea and he’s also slept with a prostitute. To get away with these crimes, he paid someone else to take the blame. Now, Dominita (Dorian Wayne) demands that he pay her twenty grand and be his slave for one year.

Also: He has to become a woman.

Ruth (Wendy Roberts), who trains him to be a maid and gives him four estrogen pills a day, insists that this is all a game. He becomes Rose Albert and Diminita claims that he wanted this punishment and was always a woman inside. When Ruth falls in love with him, it’s because she’s a lesbian and wants him to be a woman.

This sets up a really interesting situation, of a man who may or may not want to be a woman, yet has fallen for a woman who only loves him when he has subverted his sex. Yet it’s all forgotten when Albert realizes that Dominita and he have met before, as she’s really Dominique Festro, a soldier who also deserted in Korea that he shot in the leg.

We’re back at the end in the square up reel, as after this exploitation movie, the psychologist asks us to be tolerant of cross dressing and transvestites. That’s pretty open minded today, never mind in 1967.

Perhaps even more amazing is that this is the first movie by Bob Clark, years before he’d make the alpha and omega of holiday movies, Black Christmas and A Christmas Story.

Based on a story by Harris Anders, Clark wrote the script with Jeff Gillen, who would act in his movies Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, Deathdream and, one day years later, as Santa in A Christmas Story.

Leslie Marlowe was one of the first American drag queens to perform in clubs and Dorian Wayne was known as the Queen of the Florida Queens. His real name was Rick Colantino and he performed at clubs throughout Florida before becoming a dresser for Broadway shows.

This is probably — definitely — offensive to people on both side of the LGBTQ+ spectrum, but it’s fascinating to see Bob Clark as John Waters.

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.

As A.P. Stootsberry, Peter Perry Jr. made The Notorious Cleopatra, The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet and The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill. He used his real name to make this and Honeymoon of Terror.

This movie explores the Sunset Strip in 1966, which is everything from bars like the Pandora’s Box, Gazzarri’s, the Whisky A Go-Go and the Fifth Estate to learning about karate, surfing, pot, protests and go-karts.

This movie stars “The Youth of the World,” which seems to be every kid alive in 1966, but trust me, it’s a select crew here.

It’s all narrated by Humble Harve Miller, who was a huge star at Los Angeles’ KHJ-AM, the same station that “The Real Deal” Don Steele was at. However, in 1971, Harve had a major tiff with his wife that ended with him shooting and killing her. He was able to get his charges lowered to second-degree murder, claiming that in a fight over the gun, she was accidentally shot.

He spent three years in jail, teaching other inmates how to succeed in radio and recording books for the blind. When he got out, he went right back on the air. At the height of his career, one in four people in LA was listening to him and he has a 21.4 share, a number no one will ever get ever again.

The cinematographers of this movie, Lazlo Kovans and Vilmos Szigmond, would go on to make some pretty influential films like Easy Rider and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Findlay Week (August 18 – 24) Husband and wife Michael and Roberta Findlay made mean-spirited films. They collaborated on films like Take Me Naked, The Ultimate Degenerate, and the notorious Flesh Trilogy, plus they actually looked like criminals – walking mug shots! You expect to see them glowering on the cover of one of those tabloids next to a headline like “KIDNAPPER COUPLE COLLECTED VICTIMS FINGERS.” Instead they were pornographers which did make them like criminals in their day. A lot of the filmmakers of their era would claim they only made this kind of movie because there was money in it, but Michael and Roberta were sincere adherents. Even when audience tastes changed and the couple were divorced they continued to make their own films that mixed in elements of kink and cruelty. 

Richard Jennings (director Michael Findlay) is a weapons book author — yes, really — who catches his exotic dancer wife Claudia (Angelique Pettyjohn) in bed with another man (Ron Skideri). Unable to handle it, he runs into the street and gets hit by a car so hard that his eyeball pops out. This traumatic incident convinces him that all woman of loose morals must die by his hand.

And so begins The Flesh Trilogy.

After watching the credits projected on a nude female body and the incident that destroys Richard’s life, we watch as he alternately views near-pneumatic New York City women, from exotic dancers to street walkers, and then kills them with poisoned thorns, a dart gun or a crossbow. It’s rough and raw and later installments would become more technically proficient while nevertheless being even more sadistic and just plain scummy. I do not say these words in a bad way.

Meanwhile, Richard is barking out dialogue like “Once a man’s locked within the hot vice of love that is their thighs, he can never escape.” and grabbing his wife’s chest before trying to kill her, sputtering “Let me see them again and feel them again before they die!” Sure, he starts as a victim and he’s castrated in a way by being trapped in a wheelchair for much of the film, sadly wheeling down 42nd Street, chugging bourbon as he exclaims stuff like “I will slash open the very core of your perversion! Your blood will be testimony of your depravity!” And then he attempts to escape the very sexual vortex of the female being, which sounds very high falutin but keep in mind that as gorgeously grungry as so much of this black and white film looks, there are also people who definitely masturbated in theaters to this.

The credits claim that this was directed by Julian Marsh,which is the name of the character in 42nd Street who is directing the show. Suzanne Marre is final girl Janet, Vivian Del Rio and Sally Farb are two of the dancers and Peggy Steffans (AKA Cleo Nova) appears. That final girl thought is appropriate, as this is as much a slasher as it is a roughie. Actually, it’s such a slasher that Richard dies at the end of it and comes back for the sequel.

Speaking of those James Bond-ish projected credits, that’s Roberta Findlay lying there. And from what I heard, this is where Claudia Jennings got her stage name, transforming from Mary Eileen Chesterton from suburban Illinois into the type of “soft pink trap” that would terrify Richard.

You can get all three of these movies in one set from Vinegar Syndrome.