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.

Bleeding Skull’s Top 50 (July 7 – 13) The middle-brow champions of low-brow horror, Bleeding Skull has picked out some of their favorites from the SWV catalog. They neglected to put I Drink Your Blood or EEGAH! on the list, but I think I can forgive them since they included Ship of Monsters. 

Directed, written and produced by William Edwards, this movie starts with this line: “I saw a panorama of beautiful hills. However, as beautiful as it may seem, death lurked behind those beautiful hills and beautiful women. I don’t know which came first.”

Count Alucard (Vince Kelly) has brought a reporter named Mike (Billy Whitton) to his cave and turned him into Irving Jackalman, a werewolf henchman who brings him women to both feed on and make love to. The jackal or werewolf mask is from another movie that Edwards wrote, The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals, which has five minutes of John Carradine in it.

The problem is that Mike’s girlfriend Ann (Ann Hollis, who was also in The Ravager) is so attractive that the vampire must have her even after a whole movie of him tying up women, making out with them and then drinking their hemoglobin.

Producer Whit Boyd also was behind 60s sleaze like Spiked Heels and Black Nylons, Hot Blooded Woman, The Sex Shuffle, Scarlet Negligee, The Office Party, Party Girls and Eat, Drink and Make Merrie. In April 1970, sheriff’s deputies in Pensacola, FL seized prints of this movie and I Am Curious (Yellow) from the Ritz Theatre and charged the manager with two counts of unlawful showing of an obscene film and maintaining a public nuisance.

Where this gets even better is that the original sound shot with the movie was so bad and didn’t match the footage that the entire thing was dubbed in the studio. As well as additional footage shot in Dallas, using local talent, there are only two voices in this movie and both sound like old vaudeville comedians talking over some jazz instead of any dialogue for most of the film.

It makes this roughie feel almost cute, I almost said, then I looked up and a werewolf was strangling a naked women, who was covered with blood, and still raw dogging — I guess, right? — her.

One of the few actresses in this to do anything else is Sue Allen. She plays Carol in this and is also in the X-rated 1970 movie Cindy and Donna. She would go on to sing in several cartoons, including Yogi’s First Christmas.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Joe Sarno week (June 16 – 22) Joe Sarno was called the Bergman of 42nd St, but don’t let that stop you from watching his movies! He was able to shape dramatic stories that were entertaining and of-the-moment while working with tight budgets and inexperienced performers but he never lost sight of why people were buying the tickets – HOT SEX!

Also known as Kvinnolek, this Joe Sarno-directed and written movie is about Lisa Holmberg (Gunbritt Öhrström), who is the latest Sarno leading lady to be gorgeous and at the same time emotionally unsatisfied, no matter how well the rest of her high fashion life may be.

She heads to the country to rest and meets Ingrid (Gunilla Iwansson), a young girl who she convinces that she could escape her normal life and become a model. Of course, she also has her own designs on her young charge. Can Sapphic May and December — more like February and June — romance blossom?

This was brought to the U.S. by Cannon, which seemingly carried everything Sarno was making.

I love that when this played Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Press drama editor Thomas Blakely said “Yes” draws no from one critic: Swedish import is cheap, shoddy, ragged sex romp. They sent the drama editor to a Joe Sarno movie!

Meanwhile, I Am Curious (Yellow) was playing in New Kensington at the Dattola Theater.

Joe Sarno week (June 16 – 22) Joe Sarno was called the Bergman of 42nd St, but don’t let that stop you from watching his movies! He was able to shape dramatic stories that were entertaining and of-the-moment while working with tight budgets and inexperienced performers but he never lost sight of why people were buying the tickets – HOT SEX!

After her mother dies, Inga (former ballet dancer Marie Liljedahl, who really hit the trifecta of late sixties sleaze being in this Joe Sarno movie and its sequel The Seduction of Inga, Massimo Dallamano’s Dorian Gray and Jess Franco’s Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion; she retired from acting by the time she was 21) goes to live with her aunt Greta (Monica Strömmerstedt), who only wants to set her up with a rich older man named Einar (Thomas Ungewitter) and make money off of her. Yet once Inga meets Karl (Casten Lassen) — her aunt’s younger lover — she runs from this rich world of decadence.

In November of 1969, the police busted into the Dakota Theater in Grand Forks, ND and arrested the manager and the projectionist, charging them with running an obscene film. They were found not guilty, which was a major step toward legally showing pornography.

That said — this is quite tame by today’s standards. And it’s filled with so much story and emotional content, it’s hard to compare it to what pornography has become.

There’s a gorgeous scene in the beginning of this as Inga, nude but for a diaphanous nightgown, takes a series of wind-up toys and lets them race across the floor in front of her. Inga continues to return to these toys as her sexuality is awakened and her innocence left behind.

The film is just as much about Greta, a gorgeous yet aging woman clinging to her youth by dating increasingly younger men which comes with it a price: these young men need money to stay around, not love or sex.

Sometimes, the feeling of sin is better than the sin itself.

Joe Sarno week (June 16 – 22) Joe Sarno was called the Bergman of 42nd St, but don’t let that stop you from watching his movies! He was able to shape dramatic stories that were entertaining and of-the-moment while working with tight budgets and inexperienced performers but he never lost sight of why people were buying the tickets – HOT SEX!

Cannon was making money on Joe Sarno’s films, getting them into theaters as Sarno divided his time making movies in the United States and in Sweden, Germany and Denmark. His early films are stark black and white affairs and life is never easy for anyone within them. Also, the phrase Deep Inside is the greatest adult title ever and would eventually be used along with the names of actresses, such as Sarno’s uncredited X-rated Inside Jennifer Welles and Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle.

Millicent Redmond (Peggy Steffans, the Findlay Flesh trilogy) is a woman who is frigid in bed and therefore gets her pleasure manipulating others, like seeing what kind of trouble she can get Lina (Mary Park) into; plays around with the relationship between her old lesbian roommates Neva (Tia Walter) and Jean (Sheila Britt, The Swap and How They Make It); heats up older lesbian who loves younger women Mavis (Bella Donna, not the Belladonna whose retirement still makes one wistful) and gets Pam (Lara Danielli) involved with the absolute wrong man.

Sarno’s movies have an existential sadness that I absolutely love. I can only imagine what raincoaters felt about these movies, already worried about being in public watching filth, worried about the cops coming in and then the movie they went up against so much just depresses them beyond comprehension. They are sexy without sex, a fascinating idea that feels like the ruined orgasms that so many unfortunate of today’s cyber perverts are so obsessed by.

Joe Sarno week (June 16 – 22) Joe Sarno was called the Bergman of 42nd St, but don’t let that stop you from watching his movies! He was able to shape dramatic stories that were entertaining and of-the-moment while working with tight budgets and inexperienced performers but he never lost sight of why people were buying the tickets – HOT SEX!

The title of this movie is awesome and 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 as well as Dolly Dearestand being 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) who he feels sorry for. 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 that 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.