Tag Archives: 1968

CBS LATE MOVIE: Sol Madrid (1968)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Sol Madrid was on the CBS Late Movie on March 8 and November 9, 1972, September 26, 1973 and January 30, 1975.

Also known as The Heroin Gang and The Secret File of Sol Madrid, this is based on Fruit of the Poppy by Robert Wilder. Directed by Brian G. Hutton (Where Eagles Dare, Kelly’s Heroes) and written by David Karp, it stars Man from U.N.C.L.E.‘s David McCallum as the titular character.

Small-time crook Harry (Pat Hingle) is trying to escape with half a million dollars of stolen organized crime money, taking his girl, Stacey (Stella Stevens), to Madrid. Hitman Dano Villanova (Rip Torn, who replaced John Cassavetes, who was “sick” but really walked off the set; he would later say “Ricardo Montalban is to improvisational acting what Mount Rushmore is to animation.”) is hired to murder him, while drug dealer Emil Dietrich (Telly Savales) and a crooked cop named Jalisco (Ricardo Montalbán) are making a deal to move tons of heroin into the U.S. Sol Madrid must deal with all of them.

Anyway, this was supposed to be a Eurospy, but it doesn’t have the gadgets. It does have Stella Stevens.

You can watch this on YouTube.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Behind Locked Doors (1968)

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Also known as Any Body…Any Way, this movie was exactly what I wanted it to be: fucking weird.

When Terry Wilson (Joyce Danner) and Ann Henderson (Eve Reeves) go to the middle of nowhere for a barn party, Ann is nearly raped but saved by the middle-aged, British and oh-so-strange Mr. Bradley (Daniel Garth). They ditch the party and Ann’s man, but then run out of gas because otherwise we wouldn’t have a movie.

In the middle of nowhere, they walk up to a house — on the suggestion of a drifter (Ivan Agar, Laughing Crow from Shriek of the Mutilated) who is more than he seems — that just so happens to belong to Mr. Bradley and his sister Ida (Irene Lawrence). They have no phone and their car isn’t working either, so they stay for dinner and a bed for the evening. Ida needs the company. She’s been there for two years, ever since her mortician brother retired.

So why are there bars on the windows? Why did their door lock behind them? Why are the closest filled with women’s clothing of all sizes? Why would Terry pick this exact and terrifying time to finally get sapphic with her office buddy?

The Bradleys wake them up and let them know that they’re in control and must play their demented games with them or end up like all the embalmed bodies in the basement. Mr. Bradley just wants to discover the perfect way to make love, so if he has to tie up women and then kill them, that’s how his laboratory of libido operates.

I mean, this is a movie that starts with fifteen minutes of go go dancing in a barn — I played in a band that practiced in a barn and it’s hard to sing when all you can smell is shit, so I can’t even imagine go go dancing while smelling cow feces — and ends with that same barn and Ann going off with the guy who tried to rape her and Terry finding another young lady to enjoy a game of flats with. Yes, I used a 17th-century term — lesbian sex was thought to look like two playing cards rubbing together — in this article. I bring you quality euphemisms, my friend.

Did you not see Harry Novak’s signature hanging above this? Behind Locked Doors was directed and co-written by Charles Romine, who would go on to make Mysteries of the Gods. In contrast, producer and uncredited co-writer Stanley H. Brassloff made one of the most upsetting softcore movies, Toys Are Not for Children.

This movie looks way better than it should, with great lighting, bright colors, and a room full of gorgeous and dead women — or are they? — posed seductively, along with an off-the-rails room destroying catfight and an ending that blew my mind, as deceased denizens of the strange mansion come back for one last dance with brother and sister into the inferno. This is the kind of movie that makes you stay for all that barn dancing, and you wonder, “When does it get weird? Sam promised me it would get there,” and when it does, you’ll text me and say, “I can’t believe that this is a real movie.” Well, it is, pal. It sure is.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Angels from Hell (1968)

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Bruce Kessler had a wild life. A race car driver, the last person to speak to James Dean, a survivor of a racing crash that put him into a coma, a world-class skeet and trap shooter, and the director of tons of TV shows and movies (Cruise Into Terror, Deathmoon) and movies (Simon King of the Witches, Killers Three, The Gay Deceivers), he led what we call a life.

Mike (Tom Stern) comes back from ‘Nam and back to leading his gang, the Madcaps. Unlike many of these biker movies, the main cop — Bingham (Jack Starrett) — is actually sympathetic to the motorcyclists.

But as great as the title is and as cool as biker movies can be—often hiring real gang members and having them do stunts—this just can’t decide whether the bikers should be heroic or scumbags, and it can’t have it both ways.

At least it has Arlene Martel in the cast. She was also Spock’s would-be wife, T’Pring, in the “Amok Time” episode. She also played a character named Adultress 58 in Battlestar Galactica, and if that’s not a great band name, I have no idea what is. She also shows up in Dracula’s Dog, Bunny Yeager’s Nude Camera and Chatterbox! And if you were a ’90s hipster, you should know Von Dutch did the opening titles and murals.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: All the Way Down (1968)

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Joe (Joe Weldon) is the man who gets the girls for a Sunset Strip go-go club. He also gets those girls for his own pleasure, as he starts the movie by taking Colette (Mary Bauer, who may have been in Lady Godiva Rides, The Divorcee and Street of a Thousand Pleasures but was also a production assistant on Sesame Street) back home for some clumsy sixties exploitation movie aardvarking.

There’s also Sandra and Billie, two ladies who do a BDSM routine that had to be volcanic back in 1968, but when voiced over today with “wow, look how out there these chicks” are VO and some amazing fuzz guitar, it’s kind of quaint. Then the ladies go home and get a vibrator that is so unsexual that in no way can you be turned on by. It looks like…man, I don’t even know. It looks like something you’d buy at Home Depot.

The girls decide to skip work the next day, which means that Joe has to bring in a new lady: Cindy (Pat Barrington), who tends the bar. If you didn’t guess by the fact that Pat Barrington is playing Cindy, well, in little time she’s the most popular dancer there is. Barrington is the queen of movies like this, as well as a life that Ashley West of The Rialto Report said was “a wild tale of sexploitation films, a serial killer, go-go dancing, sexual assault, Hollywood, nude modeling, Sam Fuller, Lenny Bruce, Robert Mitchum, and much more.” Barrinton was also the gold girl in Orgy of the Dead and shows up in The Satanist, Mantis In Lace and Sisters In Leather.

Anyways, the rest of the girls get upset and try to forcibly make her a daughter of Sappho, which leads to the police arriving and the end of the gravy train for Joe.

Director Zoltan G. Spencer also made seven other movies: The Hand of Pleasure, Danish & Blue, The Screentest Girls, Sisters In Leather, Tropic of Scorpio, The Satanist and Terror At Orgy Castle. He’s the voice of Joe in this and sounds world-weary. Joseph A. Ziemba from AGFA said that he was “a mysterious sex-horror sorcerer who created happy un-worlds that writhed with sexual chaos, shabby sets, and baffling tangents.” I want to thank him for being part of my favorite genre: the sex movie that doesn’t have any intention of turning you on.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: All the Sins of Sodom (1968)

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The title of this movie is awesome, but then I found out that it’s also called All The Evils Of Satan, and I don’t know if I could be more enthusiastic about a film.

New York City shutterbug Henning (Dan Machuen) is supposed to shoot some nudes for his agent Paula (Peggy Sarno), but is obsessed with shooting the evil that lives inside all women. To capture this, he takes images of Leslie (Maria Lease, who would go on to be a director of adult films, and Dolly Dearest and the script supervisor on Better Off Dead) as she hangs from the ceiling of his studio. After they make love, and while Henning usually never sees another of his conquests again, she feels different. She’s also mindblowingly gorgeous, which helps.

He also meets another model named Joyce (Marianne Prevost), for whom he feels sorry. She’s homeless and needs a hand up. He invites her to stay in his studio and assist him, but when he grows angry that he can’t capture with his camera what he sees with his eyes, he learns that she’s the perfect muse for his images of base morality. Paula even tells him she sent Joyce his way, claiming, “I sent her to you because she is what you’re looking for. If I ever I saw it, she’s the daughter of Satan.”

That means that things aren’t going to end well for anyone. Again, this is in stark black and white and while the lovemaking scenes are quite erotic, they’re mostly clothed. Then again, when they were made by Sarno, this burned the celluloid.

APRIL MOVIE THON 4: Candy (1968)

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April 1: Drop A Bomb- Please share your favorite critical and financial flop with us!

I’m obsessed not just by flops but by the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Hollywood wanted to figure out how to get the kids into theaters. Easy Rider was a hit, so they financed movies like The Last Movie, Head,  Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Skidoo, Zabriskie Point and so many more.

This felt like a can’t miss: the novel Candy by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg using the name Maxwell Kenton. They got paid $500 by Olympia Press, the same people who printed the first edition of Lolita. They wrote it chapter by chapter, trading things back and forth. They were amazed that it became a big deal, as Hoffenberg said, “Do you remember what kind of shit people were saying? One guy wrote a review about how Candy was a satire on Candide. So, right away, I went back and reread Voltaire to see if he was right. That’s what happens to you. It’s as if you vomit in the gutter and everybody starts saying it’s the greatest new art form, so you go back to see it, and, by God, you have to agree.”

Candy Christian is a Midwestern girl who just wants to make people happy. Of course, being an eighteen-year-old and gorgeous blonde, most of them want to have sex with her, then own her. She wants to make love to the gardener, but that leads to her father nearly dying from a concussion and adventures that will take her around the world.

Originally, Frank Perry—who directed The Swimmer—was going to make this, and Hayley Mills would play Candy. Her father wouldn’t let her play the role, so Christian Macquand got the rights. He’d just helped Marlon Brando buy his island—Brando’s son was named for him—and that got the great actor on board, as well as other big-time box office names.

In Patrick McGilligan’s Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s, Southern said that the director “disappointed me by casting a Swedish for the lead role, which was uniquely American and midwestern. He thought this would make Candy’s appeal more universal. That’s when I withdrew from the film.”

That Swedish girl is Ewa Aulin, who is naturally attractive and had already been in the Tinto Brass giallo Col cuore in gola and Giulio Questi’s Death Laid an Egg. Aulin would only be in one other movie that U.S. audiences may see, Start the Revolution Without Me, before appearing in her husband John Shadow’s Microscopic Liquid Subway to Oblivion and Italian films including The Double, When Love Is Lust, Legend of Blood Castle, Death Smiles on a Murderer and Una vita lunga un giorno. By 23, she had tired of acting, divorced Shadow, and met real-estate developer Cesare Paladino. She had two daughters and became a schoolteacher.

Buck Henry took over the script, and the movie got made.

The film starts with Candy daydreaming in her father’s (John Astin) class; she soon falls for the charms of the poet MacPhisto (Richard Burton), who is too drunk to make love to her. The gardener, Emmanuelle (Ringo Starr), attacks her, and she gives in; when his family finds out — he was about to be a priest — they are attacked by his sisters Lolita (Florinda Bolkan in her first movie), Conchitya (Marilù Tolo!) and Marquita (Nicoletta Machiavelli!). Her father gets a brain injury and she goes off with his brother (also Astin) and his wife Livia (Elsa Martinelli), but not before she’s nearly impregnanted by Brigadier General Smight (Walter Matthau) and lusted after by the man who saves her father’s life, Dr. Abraham Krankheit (James Coburn), and filmed by Jonathan J. John (Enrico Maria Salerno). Oh yeah- the doctor’s nurse is Rolling Stones muse Anita Pallenberg.

She meets many men — a hunchback (Charles Aznavour), a guru (Brando, who its said tried to have sex with her for real on camera) and another guru who enlightens her before its revealed that it’s her father and yes, they have just had sex — and by the end, wanders through a field of hippies and flies into space.

Southern said, “The film version of Candy is proof positive of everything rotten you ever heard about major studio production. They are absolutely compelled to botch everything original to the extent that it is no longer even vaguely recognizable.”

Brando said that this was the worst movie he ever made. But man, this excerpt from Marlon: A Portrait Of The Rebel As An Artist by Bob Thomas is just insane: “Brando, of course, wanted his portion of the script rewritten. The screenwriter was Buck Henry, a gifted young comedy stylist who had written The Graduate for the screen. Brandovisitedt Henry at the Plaza Athenee Hotel in Paris accompanied by the French moneyman for Candy, Peter Zoref, a conspiratorial-looking man who wore dark glasses indoors and out. The two visitors found Henry suffering from food poisoning. Henry tried to defer the conference, but Brando insisted on continuing, even while the writer went to the bathroom. While Henry retched, Brando shouted comments about how the comedy elements of his sequence could be heightened. There was a brief silence from within, and Brando opened the bathroom door to find Henry nearly unconscious, hunched over the toilet. Brando lifted the slender writer into his arms, carried him into the bedroom, and laid him out on the bed. Brando sat beside him and continued reading from the script and making suggestions to increase the hilarity. Zoref remained stolid behind his dark glasses, occasionally puffing on a cigar. A knock came on the door, and a waiter entered to remove the dinner tray. He stopped and surveyed the scene with open mouth: an (alleged) American gangster sitting in a chair like a stuffed figure, a thin corpse stretched out on the bed, a famous movie star sitting on the bed and guffawing over pages he was reading. The waiter slowly turned and walked out the door, closing it quietly behind him.”

This is the kind of movie that today gets one-star hate reviews by hip kids on Letterboxd who can’t be bothered to write much more than a sentence. It didn’t fare that well when it was released, either. But man, it’s a mess, a glorious mess, but one that has Coburn being incredible, famous people acting like morons and Aulin being some kind of android angel who has floated into this movie and bewitched everyone. She married Shadow while making this, a rock star who would one day write the 3D Matt Cimber martial arts movie Tiger Man.

So yeah, it’s a mess, but I love it for that. This is from a time when people were not afraid to fail and would throw money at projects that made no sense. Hollywood emerged from years of musicals and Westerns to try and become cinema, only to fall into blockbusters. But this emerged, a movie shot in France and Italy that looks luscious and yet is dumb throughout, a perfect blend of overindulgence and underwatched.

You can watch this on Tubi.

SEVERIN BOX SET RELEASE: Fear In the Philippines: The Complete Blood Island Films

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From 1959 to 1971, Filipino filmmakers Eddie Romero and Gerry de León —along with Hemisphere Pictures marketing consultant Samuel M. Sherman—booked flights for drive-in audiences to Blood Island. This dark den of zombies, medical experiments, wanton women and terror would last four movies that fans of exploitation films have obsessed over ever since.

I’ve loved these movies ever since I first discovered them when Severin’s first re-releases came out a few years ago. I was so lucky to see many of them at the drive-in.

Now, Severin is re-releasing all of them – scanned uncut in 4K with improved color and audio plus over 8 combined hours of special features – in a new box set that you can get directly from the Severin Films Webstore.

Terror Is a Man (1959): Call it Blood Creature, Creature from Blood Island, The Gory Creatures, Island of Terror, Gore Creature, or its most well-known title, Terror Is a Man, but what you should really call it is the first of the Blood Island films. These movies, produced by Eddie Romero and Kane W. Lynn, include Brides of Blood, The Mad Doctor of Blood Island and Beast of Blood.  You can also consider The Blood Drinkers a Blood Island movie.

This movie was in theaters for nearly ten years—until 1969, when distributor Sam Sherman re-released it as Blood Creature with a warning bell that alerted the audience to impending gore.

William Fitzgerald (Richard Derr, who was almost The Shadow in a TV pilot that was turned into a movie called The Invisible Avenger) is the lone survivor of a ship that has crashed on Blood Island. Also, there are Dr. Girard (Francis Lederer, whose Simi Hills home is considered a landmark residence), his frustrated wife Frances (Greta Thyssen, who was in three of the Three Stooges shorts and Cottonpickin’ Chickenpickers) and his assistant Walter Perrera.

Much like The Island of Dr. Moreau, Girard is making half-man, half-animals like the panther he’s been experimenting on that tends to attack villagers. Of course, the doctor’s wife falls in love with the protagonist, and the beast gets loose and kills all sorts of people, including his creator. But hey — that mummy-like cat-eyed fiend seems to survive at the end, as a small island boy sends him away on a rowboat.

Gorgeous natives. Strong men. Crazy doctors. Werecats in bandages. Blood Island. Indeed, this one has it all.

The Severin release includes extras such as interviews with Samuel M. Sherman, co-director Eddie Romero, Pete Tombs (co-author of Of Immoral Tales), and critic Mark Holcomb, a trailer, and a poster and still gallery.

Brides of Blood (1968): This movie, which was originally known as Island of Living Horror, was rereleased with Count Dracula’s Great Love. The former was retitled Cemetery Girls and the latter was renamed Grave Desires.

Much like all of these Filipino horror films, it’s completely bonkers.

The tropics are the place for three Americans to find, well, complete insanity.

Dr. Paul Henderson, a nuclear scientist investigating nuclear bomb tests, is played by Kent Taylor. He was once a major star, playing the title role in fifty-eight Boston Blackie movies. His name is also half the inspiration for Superman’s alter ego (the other star is Clark Gable).

He’s married to the gorgeous but always ready-to-cuckold Carla, Beverly Powers. Beverly was once the highest-paid exotic dancer in the world before becoming an actress and starring with Elvis in Speedway, Kissin’ Cousins and Viva Las Vegas. She also pretty much played herself in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. After all that acting, she became a minister with The Living Ministry in Maui, Hawaii.

Then there’s Jim Farrell, a young Peace Corps member played by John Ashley. Ashley was an AIP star who appeared in Dragstrip Girl and sang his song “Let Yourself Go Go Go” in Zero Hour! He was also a regular in their beach movies, appearing at Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo, and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.

After living in Oklahoma for a while, Ashley produced these movies with Hemisphere Pictures, living in the Philippines for part of the year and helping to create these little bits of madness.

Our protagonists soon learn that Blood Island is cursed. It’s now a place that has been irradiated by nuclear fallout from those bomb tests, with vines that attack people and butterflies that bite. There’s also a beast in the jungle that tears women apart to get off because, hey, why not?

Carla learns that the beast is one of the villagers, Esteban, but it comes at the price of her own life. She’s an early “sex and people who want sex must be destroyed” casualty decades before this type of destruction de rigeur.

Between carnivorous trees eating Carla’s remains and the movie ending in a vast orgy, this is probably unlike any other film you’ve seen before. You can say that about every single film from this studio.

The press book for the movie suggested that all female theatergoers would get the chance to become Brides of Blood and receive a free engagement ring. There was even the idea of giving away fake marriage certificates, but legal concerns prevented that.

Extras on the Severin release include commentary from  Samuel M. Sherman; interviews with co-director Eddie Romero, Sherman and Beverly Powers; the alternate Brides of Blood Island title sequence and a Jungle Fury title card; a teaser; a trailer and a poster and still gallery.

Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1969): We’re back ten years after we first got to Blood Island. Eddie Romero and Gerardo de Leon have returned in the directing chair, and this time, they’ve brought even more blood, beasts and boobs than they did in their last effort, Brides of Blood.

This film was syndicated to TV as Tomb of the Living Dead and is also known as The Mad Doctor of Crimson Island because, in some states, like Rhode Island, the word “blood” wasn’t allowed in movie advertising.

After Brides of Blood, John Ashley discovered that the film was so well-received that distributors asked him to make more. He moved to the Philippines and got to work.

The film starts with an initiation, as at some theaters, you are given a packet of green liquid and asked to recite the oath of green blood so that you can watch the unnatural green-blooded ones without fear of contamination. Years later, Sam Sherman said that he came up with this idea, and he got incredibly sick when he drank one of the packets. The film’s other gimmick is rapidly zoomed in and out, like Fulci on speed, whenever a monster appears. That was to cover the harmful special effects, but it made plenty of theatergoers sick. Man — destructive green liquid and frequent pans and zooms. It’s as if they wanted kids to puke!

A woman runs naked through a jungle before a green-skinned monster kills her. Yes, that’s how you start a movie!

Then we meet our heroes, like pathologist Dr. Bill Foster (Ashley), Sheila Willard (Angelique Pettyjohn, who was famously in the Star Trek episode “The Gamesters of Triskelion” and early 80s hardcore films like Titillation, Stalag 69 and Body Talk) and Carlos Lopez (Ronaldo Valdez, who would become the first Filipino Kentucky Fried Chicken Colonel).

The ship’s captain, who got them there, tells them how the island is cursed and how its people bleed green blood. Everything falls apart — Sheila’s dad, who she hoped to take home, is now a drunk. And Carlos’ mother refuses to leave, even after the mysterious death of her husband.

It turns out that Dr. Lorca has been experimenting on the natives, who just want to be healthy. Instead, they’re becoming green beasts that murder everything they can. Look out, everyone! I hope you’ve drunk your green blood before this all began!

Angelique Pettyjohn claimed that the love scene with John Ashley was not simulated. Seeing how Severin finally found the uncut film, and I haven’t seen any penetration, I think she’s full of it. But who am I to doubt her?

To make this even better, the American trailer of this is narrated by Brother Theodore!

Extras on the Severin release include commentary by Nathaniel Thompson and Howard S. Berger and a second commentary with Samuel M. Sherman; interviews with Pete Tombs, Mark Holcomb and Eddie Romero; a trailer and a poster and still gallery.

Beast of Blood (1970): All good things must end. This is the final of the Blood Island films and the last movie that Eddie Romero would make for Hemisphere Pictures.

As Dr. Bill Foster (John Ashley), Sheila Willard, her father and Carlos Lopez escape from Blood Island, this movie’s Beast gets on board and goes buck wild, killing everyone he can and blowing up the ship. He survives and heads back to the jungle while Dr. Foster spends months recovering. Everyone he knew or loved is now dead.

Of course, he’s going back to Blood Island.

Dr. Lorca (Eddie Garcia), who apparently died at the end of the last movie, is still alive but horribly scarred. He controls the beast, which can live without its head and even talk and control its own body from afar.

This is less of a narrative movie for me and more a collection of magical images, as bodies squirt blood and beasts have swampy faces and make strange noises while their heads rot inside beakers and lab equipment.

To promote this one, which played a double bill with Curse of the Vampires, the producers printed counterfeit 10 bills that folded in half, with the other side revealing a poster for the film. Those fake sawbucks were scattered all around the neighborhoods where this movie played.

Extras on the Severin release include commentary by Samuel M. Sherman, interviews with Celeste Yarnall and Eddie Garcia; a Super 8 digest version; a trailer; a radio spot and a poster and a still gallery.

Spy Shadow (1967-1968)

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As part of the show Super President, which had two adventures per episode, one part of the show was where we learned of Spy Shadow, an agent of Interspy named Richard Vance (Ted Cassidy) who learned — somewhere in the mysterious Far East, just like Lamont Cranston, here said to be in Tibet with mystics who taught him the power of concentration — how to command his shadow to become another person. He’d need that power as he fought S.P.I.D.E.R. (Society for Plunder, International Disorder, Espionage and Racketeering) in Eurospy-style adventures.

Created by DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, formed by David H. DePatie and Friz Freleng, this is a footnote in TV superheroics, but may have been a bigger character had it not been placed with Super President, a show that people still seem to hate sixty years after it first aired.

I wonder if the makers of this show had been reading Doom Patrol, as Spy Shadow’s powers are a lot like Negative Man from that team. At least Spy Shadow doesn’t have to be wrapped up in bandages like Larry Trainor.

You can watch all of the episodes of this show on YouTube.

SEVERIN BLU RAY RELEASE: Russ Meyer’s Vixen (1968)

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Give Russ Meyer $70,000 and he will give you everything.

Take it from Roger Ebert: “Meyer’s ability to keep his movies light and farcical took the edge off the sex for people seeing their first skin-flick. By the time he made Vixen, Meyer had developed a directing style so open, direct and good-humored that it dominated his material. He was willing to use dialogue so ridiculous… situations so obviously tongue-in-cheek, characters so incredibly stereotyped and larger than life, that even his most torrid scenes usually managed to get outside themselves. Vixen was not only a good skin-flick, but a merciless satire on the whole genre.”

It was also the first movie to get an X-rating for its sex scenes, which I’d consider a compliment because, after all, it’s softcore.

Vixen Palmer (Erica Gavin, who danced at The Losers, the same topless bar where Meyer women Haji and Tura Satana also once bewitched men; she’s also in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Caged Heat, Erika’s Hot Summer — a Gary Graver film which was once another movie and then edited around her after this movie became a box office success — and Godmonster of Indian Flats) lives with her husband Tom (Garth Pillsbury, who also shows up in If You Don’t Stop It… You’ll Go Blind!!!, Can I Do It ‘Till I Need Glasses?, Malibu High and The Loch Ness Horror) up in the woods of British Columbia, running a tourist resort.

She’s quite literally always on the make — the tagline “Is she woman…or animal?” is more than lived up to — as she seduces a Mountie (Peter Carpenter) the moment her husband flies out to pick up the next couple staying with them for a fishing vacation. Days — maybe hours — after they arrive, she sleeps with the husband, Dave (Robert Aiken, speaking of Gary Graver, Aiken wrote his movie Moon In Scorpio) and then his wife, Janet (Vincene Wallace, what does it say about me that I instantly knew she was in the Harry Novak produced The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet?) just as quickly. Hell, give her time and she’ll even sleep with her brother Judd (Jon Evans), despite his protest “We decided to stop doing this when we were 12.”

The only man or woman she won’t touch seems to be Niles (Harrison Page, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), an African American Vietnam War deserter who is friends with Judd. He’s in Canada hiding from the draft, as he sees the war as a racist endeavor. Mr. O’Bannion (Michael Donovan O’Donnell) wants to pay to fly him to back to America, but he soon tries to hijack the plane and force everyone to Cuba. Luckily, Tom and Niles stop this and get away from the authorities, too, which means that Vixen has to get over her racist feelings toward Niles.

Meyer started this without a leading lady, which some would think is a bad idea. He told Ebert in Film Comment, “Bravely I went up to the location for Vixen without a leading lady and left a couple of my henchmen to try to find somebody. It’s always difficult. But Erica had a curious quality about her. She didn’t have the greatest body, you know. She didn’t have the up-thrust breasts like the others.”

Side note: Of course Russ Meyer would think that such a gorgeous woman was lacking in the breast department. Then again, I’ve said for years that I never notice breasts and nearly every long term relationship I’ve had has been with women who were blessed with curves like a Russ actress, so maybe I have watched too many of his movies. I also don’t see that as a bad thing. I agree with Gavin as to why Meyer’s movies just work: “His films came from a different direction than porno. Basically he was not looking through a camera; he was looking through a peephole. I think that’s why his films were so good. He was a true voyeur.”

In the book that would be my early quite to psychotronic films, Incredibly Strange Films, Meyer was able to see that Gavin was one of the main reasons why this was a success. He thought that the scene between her and Judd was one of the best he ever shot, saying that it “…was the best of them all. She really displayed an animal quality that I’ve never been able to achieve before – the way she grunted and hung in there and did her lines. It was a really remarkable job… I’ve done a lot of jokey screwing but there’s something about Erica and her brother that was just remarkable… it really represents the way I like to screw.”

It had to terrify people upon watching this just how much Vixen is a non-stop engine of passion. I always laugh when people say that they want a woman like her yet they’d probably be mentally unable — not to mention physically challenged — to keep her. By the end, the title “The end?” suggests that she’ll never be able to stop seducing. And who would want her to?

Well…maybe some folks in Ohio.

Thanks to Charles Keating, who was busted in the savings and loan scandal of the late 1980s, this movie is still banned in Cincinnati. The financial expert obtained an injunction preventing it being shown on the grounds that it was obscene and the cops seized the print the first day itw as shown. It didn’t get to play in Ohio and cost Meyer $250,000 to defend the movie.

Keating said Meyer had done more to undermine morals in the nation than anyone else.

Meyer responded, “I was glad to do it.”

After watching this movie on VHS for years, the Severin blu ray is a revelation. The colors, muted in the past, are now a memory, replaced by a lush rainbow of joy. Things are sharper, no long fuzzy, looking as they would in my dreams. I don’t know how to say thank you enough to everyone who worked on this.

Extras including an archival audio commentary by director/co-writer/producer/cinematographer/co-Editor Russ Meyer; the Censor Prologue from the 1981 theatrical re-release); an audio commentary by Gavin; archival interviews with Gavin And Harrison Page; David Del Valle’s The Sinister Image with guests Russ Meyer and Yvette Vickers; Entertainment… Or Obscenity? – Marc Edward Heuck on the film’s historic Cincinnati censorship battles and a trailer.

You can get this from Severin.

Super President (1967-1968)

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When this show aired, it upset so many people. The National Association of Broadcasters said: “An all-time low in bad taste, with the President of the United States in a Superman role. NBC was responsible for this direct ideological approach to totalitarianism. We fear that there may be other broadcasters who are irresponsible enough to keep it in circulation.”

The idea of a super-powered American President seems dumb, but four years after the death of Kennedy and as America seemed to be on the verge of falling apart, maybe it seemed like a great plot for a cartoon. At least the DePatie–Freleng studio, who also made The Pink Panther cartoons, were commissioned to make Warner Brothers specials and also animated the lightsabers for Star Wars, thought so.

The President of the United States, former astronaut James Norcross, is voiced by Paul Frees, whose voice has been in almost everything you’ve ever watched. Other voice talent included Ted Cassidy, June Foray and Don Messick, whose voices would be in the few things that Frees didn’t work on.

Super President got his powers from a cosmic storm, just like the Fantastic Four, giving him increased strength and the ability to change his molecular composition like Metamorpho, plus he has a cave and special vehicle called the Omnicar like Batman and his Batcave and Batmobile.

Perhaps this cartoon, while forgotten today, inspired Calvin Ellis, the Kryptonian President of the United States on Earth-23 who is also the Superman of that reality (and just happens to look like Barack Obama).

You can watch all of the episodes of this show on YouTube.