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.

Jennie (Beverly Lunsford) is married to a man old enough to be if not her father, surely her older uncle, named Albert Peckingpaw (Jack Lester). But when Mario Dingle (Jim Reader) starts working on their farm, she suddenly decides to perhaps lying under a wrinkled elderly gent isn’t the life she wants. He catches them, drugs them and throws them in a hole while going off to dig their graves. The only person that can save them is sex worker Lulu Belle (Virginia Wood), who is heading out to meet Albert for a reason yet to be found out.

Originally titled Albert Peckingpaw’s Revenge and Tender Grass, this once-melodrama was recut by Robert Carl Cohen, who added in Lulu Belle, added the strip tease scene, threw in the silent movie title cards and made it sleazy, basically. It was nearly a different movie than what original director and writer James Landis (The Sadist) had in mind.

Making this work harder are the soundtrack by Davie Allan and the Arrows and cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond. What other hicksploitation sex scandal film has that?

“RIVER BOTTOM YOUNG STUFF! she’s hitched to an old-man-husband, and he’s got a young stiff for a hired man–it’s what you call a triangle!”

You can watch this on Tubi.

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. 

“Whatever she put in that tea hit me like a concrete lullaby.”

Man, the poetry that exists inside this film is kind of like finding a diamond in a shit-strewn toilet and I mean that as a compliment.

Richard David (Michael Findlay, still working through his issues and maybe some new ones as he directs, writes and stars in another, well, epic) has already killed his wife (that’s his real life wife Roberta, whose voice sticks around) and is barely on the run before he picks up hitchhikers Maggie (Uta Erickson) and Jackie (Linda Boyce). While Jackie engages in the kind of behavior that can cause a driver to crash his car, Maggie finds the bloodied body of Mrs. David in the backseat. They take him to their home, which is protected by Bruno (John Amero) and contains another lesbian, Belle (Janet Banzet), and their child of sorts, Baby (Kim Lewid) who is always naked in her crib. They plan on using Richard as their sperm bank to create new children and keep him in line through torture and constant sex with their maid Anna (Donna Stone), who he refers to as Boobarella.

Finally, she warns Richard to run, but it’s too late. The ladies burn him and beat him until he loses what’s left of his mind, strangling and slashing his way to a freedom that he doesn’t find, as Anna uses her massive mammaries to asphyxiate him into oblivion. This would be a climax in any other roughie, but we’ve already had a scene where two of the ladies breast feed Baby while whipping her bloody, then force her to puke up all of the milk. That’s commitment to the bit.

Sadly, Michael Findlay was killed by a helicopter on the roof of the Pan Am Building, literally cut to pieces in some reports, lacerated in others. He left behind quite a history of some of the most truly transgressive movies ever made. Much of the credit should go to his partner Roberta, whose cinematography elevates these from trash to trash with noir aspirations.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

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. 

For two movies, Richard Jennings (director and co-writer Michael Findlay, who did the story with his wife Roberta) has attacked women to get back at his now dead wife. Now, however, he is the one being hunted by Steve’s — the dead boyfriend of his dead wife — sister Maria (Uta Erickson, Electric Lover) and her boyfriend Don (Earl Hindman, appearing as Leo Heinz).

All the while, Richard is killing off women like Cleo (Donna Stone), who he beats with a tire iron on a snow-covered beach before torturing her with crab claws before electrocuting her through her earrings, followed by picking up a hitchhiker (Rita Vance) who he burns with a blowtorch and then wraps in blankets and sets on fire. Can that be topped? Well, he also douches another woman with acid and his sperm has become so filthy that it poisons an unlucky woman who swallows his fecund seed.

Maria, Don and her sister and lover Doris (Alice Grant who is also Suzzan Landau, Keyholes Are for Peeping) all conspire to get Richard into their trap, which involves her tying his member to a string connected to the trigger of a gun that will shoot him in his sex if he gets erect while watching her have sex with her boyfriend.

Yes, all of this happens and more. There’s a beach battle where Richard screams “I’ll slice you in two like a piece of cheese!” and Maria inserting beads into Don’s back door, which is even more astounding when you realize that he’s Wilson from Home Improvement. No wonder he never showed his face to that narc, Tim Allen! And I totally forgot that the sisters canoodle while Doris’ girlfriend Moana (Janet Banzet AKA Marie Brent and Pat Barrett; The Amazing Transplant) is recovering from the flu. The morals of this movie, I tell you, of which there are none.

There’s a theory that Findlay was abused by priests while he was a child and a lot of his movies are him working out his issues. “I do a service to all mankind with every Jezebel I kill,” he snarls at one point. Richard has gone from kind of, sort of the hero of the first film in this tragedy, a slasher villain in the second and now a complete lunatic with an eyepatch he may not even need, another crime of playing a doctor to women who don’t need his fingers all over and inside them, and a German accident that goes away as often as the patch he keeps taking off.

This was lost for years until Something Weird found it. I can’t even imagine what raincoaters in 1968 thought when attacked by this movie. For every moment of gorgeous women cavorting, you have Richard yelling, “My poisoned semen should take care of you well enough. So long, sucker!” A roughie made by lunatics, for lunatics and yet one that looks way better than it should.

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

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. 

Who destroyed Richard Jennings’ (Michael Findlay) life? Was it his wife Claudia (Angelique Pettyjohn)? Or Steve (Ron Scardera), the lover she cheated on her husband with? Does it even matter to Richard any more? After all, he’s returned from the dead, like a demented 42nd Street grindhouse Jason Vorhees, How do you get over being stabbed in the heart? Well, maybe when your heart has been broken, you just go on.

After watching credits quite literally written on a bathroom wall and hear Roberta Findlay’s voice on the radio, recounting everything from the first movie, but never explaining how Richard came to own an art theater that presents live sex on stage and screens movies like Squash Crazy that is, to borrow a phrase from Pieces, exactly what you think it is.

He’s also become a degenerate Dr. Phibes, inventing all manner of weapons to kill his those on his perceived enemies list, like a dildo that kills and poisoned g strings. Richard also doesn’t need the eyepatch, in the same way that Dr. Doom really doesn’t need his mask, if we follow the ideas of Kirby over Lee . It appears and reappears at will, whether that’s a statement or just Findlay not caring about continuity when he has so much female flesh to show and a machete fight in a moving truck that ends with a castration to entertain you.

As if this is a proto-MCU movie, this even teases more over the end credits: “Will This End the Bloody Career of Richard Jennings? Has His Lust for the Blood of Naked Girls Been Satisfied?? Don’t Fail to See The Kiss of Her Flesh Coming Soon to This Theatre.”

As “The Right Kind” by The Jaybirds keeps playing on the soundtrack, this only gets more depraved. I know that fans of this movie like me romanticize the terrifying real life nature of what New York City was at this time, but who cares? It gave birth to this movie, in which a nude woman holds a cat over her sex and Richard hits her with this pillow talk: “Yes, this little pussy is really a primordial, carnivorous beast waiting to tear apart anything it can touch.”

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

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.

The feature debut of Norman J. Warren, Her Private Hell came about producer Bachoo Sen approached Richard Schulman, owner of London’s Paris Pullman Cinema, with the idea to make their own films. This is how the production company Piccadilly Pictures started.

Schuman was the owner of London’s Paris Pullman Cinema and was showing Warren’s short film Fragment, so they made an offer for him to film two movies for them. The director would later tell Rock Shock Pop!, “I had no idea what the film would be, but to be honest, I would have said yes to anything. I was 25 and desperate to direct a feature film.

The story was written by Glynn Christian, a New Zealand immigrant who based his screenplay on his own experiences as a foreigner living in the swinging London of the 60s.

Marisa (Lucia Modugno, LSD Flesh of the Devil, Danger: Diabolik) has come to London to be a model and the first magazine she works for decides to keep her in a fancy high rise apartment along with their top photographer, Bernie (Terry Skelton). They explain its for her protection and not to be the sole owner of her image, which she soon realizes as the magazine begins to control her every move.

While Marisa sleeps with Bernie, she also falls for Matt (Daniel Ollier, who beat Udo Keir for the role), a young photographer whose avant-garde nudes end up in Margaret — one of the magazine’s owners — possession and get sold to a foreign magazine. The film then becomes all about who Marisa will leave with — Bernie, Matt or alone. And perhaps Margaret and Bernie aren’t strangers to one another, as it turns out.

At once a naive girl done wrong film mixed with a movie about the literal swinging 60s morals, Her Private Hell isn’t the Norman J. Warren you may know and love. This is closer to French New Wave than anything else he’d make.

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 by Glauco Del Mar and written by Antonio Velazquez, this South America import with some scenes shot in New York City sexploitation movie starts with Sofia (Carmin O’Neal) and Dr. Anderson (Roberto Maurano) burying Mr. Montel (Guillermo De Córdova) after he has a cataleptic fit. Seconds after his funeral, he bursts out of his coffin and starts exploring the world of sex because, well, who knows. But it works — it has a demented theremin soundtrack and feels like Doris Wishman in the best of ways. After he experiences so many sexual hijinks, including lesbians and drag queens, which is like going from zero virginity to turbo in moments. He also drags a blonde from an alley into her apartment and takes her while an old woman watches, saying “Oh, if only I were ten years younger.”

Also known as Unsatisfied Love, this is a movie that begins with a virgin crying in his coffin, has the same music Andy Milligan used to use, long shots of squirrels, a grave escape that feels completely taken from Night of the Living Dead yet made the same year, bad dubbing, unsynched sound, enough shots of feet that Wishman and Quentin Tarantino would be pleased and a movie that feels like “What if Carnival of Souls was about losing your virginity?”

Somehow, the cinematography is great.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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)!

Back in Drive-In Asylum #8, I wrote about “John Carradine vs. Mil Mascaras” and this movie is the film where it happens.

Carradine had sold everything he owned to start a traveling Shakespeare actor’s company and when it folded, he was penniless, which led to the kind of roles that we love him in. In fact, the actor would get to go wild in these parts unlike any straight films he’d made. He’d make several movies in Mexico such as Diabolical Pact, Enigma de Muerte, Autopsy of a Ghost and La Señora Muerte, but this time, he’s a vampire!

A Transylvania Airlines plane has crashed in Mexico. bringing Aura to the country — all of the male vampires are dead — and into competition for leadership of the vampire women with Dracula’s widow Countess Véria. They’re also biting luchadors and using them as henchmen, which puts Mil on their trail.

Meanwhile, the women have Count Branos (Carradine). Once he was such a powerful vampire that he was the man who taught Dracula. Yet now, after a vampire hunter put a stake through his brain instead of his heart, he’s become a moronic and sad man, crying in a cage and dreaming of the days when he ruled the world of the undead.

Yet its a ruse, as Véria sacrifices her own life to make him powerful again and man, Carradine goes absolutely wild in the role as an unbound master vampire. Sure, it’s all the way at the end of the movie, but man, it’s great.

Also: a car runs Mil off the road and it’s driven by bats. By bats!

Even better, this movie starts off as all Carradine movies should, with him speaking directly to the camera. All movies should start this way.

Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: J.H. Rood made the documentary Don’t, which you can find on the Internet Archive. He became interested in making films in high school, and in 1991 founded Ghoul Inc. Productions. His first films, shot between 1991 and 1994, were mostly horror, and were shot on his dad’s camcorder and edited by hooking two VCRs together. In 2013, he and  best pal and film collaborator Alex Lopez started making movies seriously and have created The Abode of Mad Tales, Honky Thunder and The Bitter End. His influences include Roger Corman, Larry Buchanan, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Ted V. Mikels, S.F. Brownrigg, Frank Henenlotter, Ed Wood and Dario Argento.

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)!

Also known as Santo Attacks the Witches, this film finds the Mexican superhero wrestler El Santo trying to save a woman named Ofelia, who keeps having visions of Satan and his witch followers using her as a human sacrifice. Santo saves her by literally making the shadow of the cross with his body, stopping not only the witches but sending Satan away and waking up Ofelia. She’s had this dream ever since she’s been forced to live in the home of her dead parents in order to get their fortune in the will. Luckily, her boyfriend Arturo knows that Santo exists and sets out to contact him.

It turns out that the family secretary died fifteen years ago and has been a witch named Mayra* since then. She commands an army of witches who go out of their way to “infernally seduce” our hero who sends them on their way back to Hell. Santo uses all manner of weaponry to make that happen, from flaming torches to giant crosses.

Satan wants Ofelia and Santo out of the way, but our hero is just too much for those who trod the left hand path. By the end, the man in the silver mask has set dozens of occult dabblers ablaze, leaving the young lovers in an embrace as he jumps in his sportscar and drives away, presumably to wrestle a match or perhaps battle female werewolves.

There are better Santo movies, but honestly, a Santo movie is like a taco. They’re all good. Some are better than others. But even a bad taco is better than anything else.

*She’s played by Lorena Velázquez, who was also Thorina the Queen of the Vampires in Santo contra Las Mujeres Vampiros and Gloria Venus in the Wrestling Women series.

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!

Dr. Percy Corly (Robert Wood) teaches sex education and he’s still a virgin. If that makes sense, this movie might. He and Dr. Hamilcar West(Jim Vance) build a machine that creates women — well, it makes a rabbit instead of a Playboy Bunny and a gay man, which they soon erase — and they both become addicted to it.

There is no nudity in a sex movie. Herschell Gordon Lewis has flim flammed you, making you think you’re going to see a man create his dream women and have orgies. No, he just kisses them. Well, he is a virgin. And that’s not a computer, it’s a Lady Schick Consolette Portable Hair Dryer Model 307.

The point of this movie was to get marks into a theater and not really to entertain anyone. This movie, however, entertained me because it’s just so strange. Lewis told Bleeding Skull how it was made in one sentence: “I had a partner named David Chudnow. His peculiar wife, Rosamond, wrote that script. What the heck.”

Seriously, I can only imagine how angry people were watching this when it came out because there are still people who get mad about it today and they weren’t going to an art theater to see some nudity. Instead, they watched a movie that is baffling on nearly every level, one that challenges you to keep watching it.

You can watch this on Tubi.