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.

Under the working titles Jayne Mansfield Reports, Mansfield Reports Europe and Mansfield By Night, this mondo was shot from 1964 to 1967 as Mansfield toured Europe. It has to be a mondo, because the movie really is all over the place, with the star meeting Italian roadside prostitutes, running from the paparazzi and attending the Cannes Film Festival, where she pretty much runs toward the paparazzi.

Complicating matters was that Mansfield died in a car accident in June 1967.

That didn’t stop producer Dick Randall, whose career took him from the Catskills as a joke writer for Milton Berle to producing all manner of movies that I obsess over, such as Pieces, Mario Bava’s Four Times That Night, The French Sex Murders, The Girl In Room 2A, For Your Height Only, Slaughter High and the only movie he directed, the absolutely ludicrous and completely awesome Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks.

Randall did what you’d expect. He hired Carolyn De Fonseca, the actress who often dubbed Mansfield in European movies like Primitive Love and Dog Eat Dog. So yeah. That’s not even Jayne talking in a movie that’s supposedly all about her deepest and darkest thoughts.

De Fonseca’s voice is all over the movies covered on this site. She’s a tourist in Eyeball. That’s her doing Barbara Steele’s voice in Terror-Creatures from the Grave. Marisa Mell in Secret Agent Super Dragon. She’s Florinda Balkan’s English voice in Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling. And she makes vocal appearances in The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, The Case of the Bloody Iris, Torso, The Eerie Midnight Horror Show, Strip Nude for Your Killer, Emanuelle in America, Inferno and so many more. Her voice comes out of Sybil Danning’s mouth in The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, Daria Nicolodi in Deep Red and Phenomena, Barbara Magnolfi in Suspiria, Tisa Farrow in Antropophagus, Dagmar Lassander in The House by the Cemetery, Laura Gemser in Ator the Fighting Eagle, Sabrina Siani in Throne of Fire and Corinne Clery in Fulci’s The Devil’s Honey.

That’s why I write about movies. I would have never known otherwise that one person was the sound that I heard in so many movies that I count amongst my favorites, much less a mondo all about Jayne Mansfield.

With breathy narration, Mansfield visits nudist colonies, strip clubs, a gay bar and a massage parlor because this was the mid-60’s and people were losing their minds over the sexual revolution. She also judges a transvestite beauty pageant, meets the topless girl band The Ladybirds and does the Twist to a song by Rocky Roberts & The Airedales.

You also get shots of Mansfield in Playboy — the equivalent of someone filming a magazine — as well as nude scenes from her in Promises! Promises! and moments with her husband Mickey Hargitay in the movies Primitive Love and The Loves of Hercules.

With Mansfield dying before the movie could be complete, you just knew that news footage of her car accident scene would show up in this. There’s also a tour of her home, the Pink Palace, by Hargitay. He was a plumber and carpenter before becoming a star, so he made her the heart-shaped swimming pool at the center of the all-pink landmark.

In the 1980 TV movie, The Jayne Mansfield Story, Arnold Schwarzenegger played Hargitay, who pretty much demystified and popularized bodybuilding for young athletes. He and Mansfield’s daughter Mariska can be seen pretty much 24 hours a day now on the Law and Order TV shows.

One of the directors of this movie, Joel Holt, is also the narrator in Olga’s House of Shame and Olga’s Girls. Yes, that’s the kind of movie you’re about to revel in. Enjoy it. Wade in it. Experience it.

This was released on blu ray release from Severin along with Wild, Weird, Wonderful Italians.

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!

I’ve seen so many World’s Most Dangerous Games. Bloodlust, The 10th Victim, The Woman Hunt, Maneater, Long Lasting Days, Prey for the Hunter, No Man’s Island, Night Creature, Relentless Justice, Fleshburn, Pray for the Wildcats, American Hunt, Scream of the Wolf, The Beast Must Die, Death Race 2000, The Man With the Golden Gun, The Perverse Countess, Seven Women for Satan, Turkey Shoot, Tag the Assassination Game, The Prize of Peril, The Final Executioner, Gymkata, Endgame, Fair Game, Rituals, Lethal Woman, Mirage, Hunter’s Blood, Blood Games, 31, Hunt Club, Hunting Games, Army of One, Warriors of the Year 2072, Game of Survival, Violence In a Women’s Prison, Avenging Force, Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, The Running Man, Deadly Game, Hard Target, Surviving the Game, Slashers, The Woman Hunter, Tender Flesh (Jess Franco on the list twice), Battle Royale, Mean Guns, The Jail: The Women’s Hell (Bruno Mattei on the list twice), Naked Fear, The Purge movies, Ready or Not, The Hunt, even Without Warning and the Predator films are in the same genre.

Herbert S. Altman directed one other movie, the Lenny Bruce film Dirtymouth, and co-director Robert Worms was the director of Terror On Tape. Together with writer Bill Boyd — one and done — they made what may be the strangest take on Richard Connell’s story. They go by the name Eve. This is the first time an adaptation would have a female hunter.

Actor Charles Freeman (Dick Lord), druggie Buddy (Frank Geraci) and former pro wrestler Rocco (Jake LaMotta, the raging bull!) have all been acquitted of murder — Charles killed a lover’s husband, Buddy gave a girlfriend an overdose and Rocco wouldn’t stop beating on another fighter — at some time in their lives but are now on the skids. They’re gathered by Virginia Marcus (Eileen Lord, a one and done as well and that’s a shame because she’s beyond bonkers in this), a wealthy woman who offers them $100,000 each if they can survive for one day with her hunting them throughout New York City.

None of them make it. Charles gets the acting role he’s always wanted, but it’s a set-up to be shot with an arrow. Rocco gets treated like a bull as Virginia dresses like a matador and uses the traditional bullfight weapons to murder him. Buddy gets away, but just for a few hours and soon dies, killed looking for a fix.

Those are the original 55 minutes of this movie. The other 15 minutes that were added later are nude women, added so that this could play in art theaters. Virginia is unhinged, becoming a hunter after her brother threw her dog off the roof — “I was glad when it died!” she barks at her psychoanalyst — and she ends up screaming in a straightjacket, back to being a little girl by the end.

This movie is about as wonderful as it gets.

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.