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.

La venganza del sexo (Revenge of Sex) was released by Forbes-Unistar in the U.S. with the amazing title of The Curious Dr. Humpp.

Dr. Humpp (Dr. Zoide in the original, played by Aldo Barbero and wearing a wild outfit) plans on giving mankind eternal life using the power of the human libido. He has kidnapped several people*, including Rachel (Gloria Prat) and her boyfriend, a few hippies, a couple of lesbians and a woman with photos of naked men, and plans on forcing them to make love as much and as often as possible.

He also has a monster to kidnap these young sexual folks.

George (Ricardo Bauleo) is a reporter who follows Dr. Humpp after watching him buy boner pills at a pharmacy. Why does a sex doctor need to buy these things? He follows him to his secret lab and gets captured. He and Rachel make a plan and while George is getting it on with the nurse (Susana Beltrán), he learns that she wants to escape and be part of their plan. The monster has also become obsessed with a stripper that he captured.

Directed by Emilio Vieyra (who wrote this) and Jerald Intrator, this is a movie filled with dialogue like, “I must position this positive electrode against the nerves of the libido. If this experiment succeeds, I’ll not only be able to restrain lust, but also turn humans into veritable screwing machines!,” “Sex dominates the world! And now, I dominate sex!” and “It was I who first discovered how to make a man impotent by hiding his hat. I was the first one to explain the connection between excessive masturbation and entering politics.”

Fog. A monster that plays guitar. A strange and haunting soundtrack that’s as much jazz as early electronic music and I have no way of making it fit into a single category. A movie that tries to look like an Italian horror movie but also has nudity in nearly every scene. And the main power lurking in the shadows? A brain kept alive in fluid. And yes, one of my favorites, ether kidnapping.

The love that I have for this movie cannot be calculated by the logic of alphabets and the weights and measures of the human race.

*All of these scenes are inserts added when the movie made its way to the U.S. You can see Kim Pope (Intimate Teenager) and Kim Lewid (A Thousand Pleasures).

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.

Sir Donovan (Gualtiero Isnenghi) has learned that a tribe in Kenyan has a white woman, Tarzana (Femi Benussi, Bloody Pit of Horror, So Sweet, So Dead), who he believes is his granddaughter Elizabeth. Somehow, she has survived the airplane crash that her parents died in over the African jungle. The rich elderly man and his niece Doris (Franca Polesello) hire Glen Shipper (Ken Clark, Gunman Called Nebraska) to find her. However, they’ve been joined by her cousin Groder (Franco Ressel) who plans on killing Elizabeth to remain the only heir.

The crew also has a native woman, Kamala (Beryl Cunningham, The Weekend Murders) who sends the men into lust pains with her dancing. All while Tarznna watches Glen and gets jealous of the way Doris is all over him. That said, Femi Benussi is perhaps one of the most gorgeous women of all time, even if somehow she found eye shadow in the jungle. She also has a chimp who is dubbed and tells her that she doesn’t need to put her clothes on.

Tarzana was directed by Guido Malatesta, who mainly made peplum like Maciste Contro i Cacciatori di Teste. A year before this, he made a very similar movie, Samoa, Queen of the Jungle. That one has Edwige Fenech in it as the jungle girl. I’m certain right now you’ve stopped reading this and gone off to find it. If you’re still here, this was co-written with Gianfranco Clerici, who would come back to the jungle years later and write Cannibal Holocaust.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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. 

Michael (Michael Findlay, who co-directed and co-wrote this with his wife Roberta) wakes up in ancient Greece. Why? Who cares. The important thing is that the first woman that he runs into (Maria Lease, fated to one day direct Dolly Dearest), well, he beats into oblivion because he’s Michael Findlay.

Set to the poetry of Pierre Louys, we see Linda Boyce, Maria Lorello, Rosine Martinque, Denise Lemaine and Uta Erickson, the lesbians of this past time, playing in the woods. It tends to go on and on, but this feels like an attempt to be arthouse instead of grindhouse, except that Roberta shoots the women like Jess Franco in a Spanish ballroom in the mid 2000’s, her camera invading right into gynecology instead of the kind of fare that critics would pontificate upon.

Elsa Gidow, who wrote the first book of openly lesbian poetry published in North America, has a poem by the same title:

I shall not harm you at all nor ask you
        for anything,
You need have no fear;
I am only very tired and would like to
        rest awhile
With my head here
And play with the long strands of your
        loosed hair,
Or touch your skin,
Feel your cool breath on my eyes,
        watch it stir
Those rising hills where your breasts begin;
And listen to your voice whispering
        tender words
Until, perhaps, I fall asleep;
Or feel you kiss my forehead to comfort me
        a little
If I should weep.
That is all, just to lie so beside you
Till dawn’s lamp is lit.
You need not fear me. I have given
        too much of love
Ever to ask for it.

As for Mnasidika, she’s one of the characters in Pierre Louÿs’ The Songs of Bilitis, Translated from the Greek. Pretty cultured stuff for a movie made after the Supreme Court permitted genitals in movies and the Findlays went for it. This movie is, at times, just genitals. It was new at the time, I guess, and you didn’t need a baby coming out of it like Mom and Dad so that raincoaters could watch.

That said, the Findlays love ruined orgasms before that became a thing on Pornhub, so this ends with the women hunting down Michael and castrating him. That’s wild, because if you dwell on it, he had his wife filming a scene where his cock got cut off. As always, a maniac.

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.

Directed by Vicente Aranda (The Blood Spattered Bride), who wrote the story with Antonio Rabinad, based on the short story Bailando para Parker by Gonzalo Suárez, Exquisite Cadaver starts with a girl committing suicide by laying down headfirst on train tracks.

We meet a man (Carlos Estrada) who is the publisher of pulp horror — giallo — and someone who has become quite successful as a result. He gets a severed human hand in the mail, which he buries in a park. Another package is sent, this time with a torn dress and a photo of a woman. He also gets a telegram, which his wife (Teresa Gimpera, Hannah Queen of the Vampires) reads and it ends with the promise of sending a forearm. He lies and says its for work, but as she follows him, she notices that he is also being stalked by a woman in a black veil.

The woman is Parker (Capucine, The Pink Panther), who lures the man to her house where she gives him LSD. He staggers through her villa, following the sound of her voice, which leads him to a woman’s body inside a refrigerator. He passes out and wakes up at home, his wife having been called by Parker to get her husband.

The man reveals to his wife that he had an affair with a woman named Esther (Judy Matheson, The House That Vanished; is it too soon to talk about ’72?) who told him “I’d die so that my love for you will last. So that indifference will not kill it” before she laid down on the train tracks, as we saw as the movie began. Except that a detective that the man’s wife hired saved Esther.

As she tried to get her life together, Esther fell for a doctor before meeting Parker, who she soon began an affair with. Parker was in love with her, trying to save her, but Esther never stopped loving the man, finally killing herself. Parker then made this plan to get revenge for her lost love, even cutting. her corpse to pieces, sending each one until finally, the head arrives. The man looks for his wife but she is gone, leaving for Paris and a new relationship with Parker, who has seduced her.

After filming ended, Aranda gave Matheson the silver hand pendant that her character wore in the film. She still has it to this day and even established a trademark of wearing it in her subsequent films.

As for the director, he had an accident on the set which led to him directing much of this movie from a stretcher.

Thanks to Theater of Guts, I know that this was released in the U.S. by Gadabout-Gaddis Productions, who released The Man from Nowhere, Find a Place to Die, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, One On Top of the Other and Marta. According to the site, it played drive-in screens as late as 1983 as a double feature with Twilight Zone: The Movie.

The title Exquisite Corpse comes from the game created by Surrealism founder André Breton that has a collection of words or images collectively assembled by several creators who have no idea what has come before other than a line, which is added to until a complete art piece emerges. The name comes from the phrase that was part of the first work created by the game, “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.”

The Spanish title, Las Crueles (The Cruel Ones), is meant to sound like Les Diaboliques. It was not the title preferred by Aranda.

This was partially shot in the same house as Patrick Still Lives and Burial Ground. Thanks Erica from Unsung Horrors!

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.

“See…Vala, the voluptuous cave babe! See…Mota, the mighty war-lard! See…Dino, the plastic-eating dinosaur!”

Directed by Ed De Priest — who was making adult films as Jules Martine all the way up to 1998 — and written by Akdon Telmig — which is one letter away from being Vodka Gimlet, which Ed Wood drank a lot of and yes, he wrote this one — One Million AC/DC is a movie where people are menaced by someone in an ape suit and a rubber dinosaur when they aren’t having making softcore love.

Stuntman Gary Kent is the leader of these cave people, it’s shot in Bronson Park and Gary Graver was running the camera. All of these facts may be more interesting than the movie. But man, who else other than Graver could work with Orson Welles and Wood, who wrote the phrase “Tyrannosaurus style” for this. Then again, the line “Nothing has changed, right down through the ages. Man has to kill. Man has to eat. Man has to have his woman.” is pretty solid.

You know who is listed as the historical consultants? Bob Cresse and Lee Frost. I laughed for about five minutes reading that.

This also has a lot of crossover with the casts of two movies from 1968, The Kiss Off and The Kill (which was directed and written by Graver).

If you can get past all of this, well, dark and unsexy sex, you will come to the realization that this is the same dinosaur toy that was in David L. Hewitt’s The Mighty Gorga.

Uschi Digard week (June 23 – 29) Digard is best known for her work with Russ Meyer but she became an SWV fan favorite for two gargantuan reasons, her charm and her prolific career. The Swiss actress fled to America in 1968 and began a long career filling the silver screen from corner to corner with her overflowing positive energy. Show the lady some respect and watch one of her movies.

This is the first appearance in a Russ Meyer movie of Charles Napier. He plays Harry Thompson, a California border sheriff and marijuana smuggler who also somehow — spoiler warning — comes back from the dead to die again in Supervixens.

But as for this movie, it starts with a narration that blames marijuana for so many evils in society. Harry has ignored all that as he Harry works his sheriff job in between illegal activity. He lives at the site of a close silver mine with his English nurse girlfriend Cherry (Linda Ashton). As for Raquel (Larissa Ely), she’s a writer who has an interest in sexually pleasuring men. The two women learn of one another but Harry doesn’t want them to make love for some reason. When we first see Raquel, she’s in bed with Harry’s partner Enrique (Bert Santos). The two men work for Mr. Franklin (Frank Bolger), the town’s main politician, to move drugs. One of their other associates, the Apache (John Milo) is screwing everyone over. Franklin asks for him to be killed, but he gets away and steals Harry’s Jeep.

Now, Enrique knows too much and he must be killed. But the Apache gets to him — and Mr. Franklin — first. Raquel finds his body and is so upset, she must be hospitalized. Good news. Her nurse is Cherry and they finally get together to make love, all while Harry and the Apache do the exact opposite and kill one another.

But ah — it was all a story that Raquel was writing. This strange ending may be because a lot of the film’s footage was accidentally ruined by the color lab. Roger Ebert said, “The result is that audiences don’t even realize anything is missing; a close analysis might reveal some cavernous gaps in the plot, and it is a little hard to figure out exactly how (or if) all the characters know each other, but Meyer’s subjective scenes are so inventive and his editing so confident that he simply sweeps the audience right along with him. Cherry, Harry and Raquel! is possibly the only narrative film ever made without a narrative.” Uschi Digard, the lover of the Apache, was also added Linda Ashton quit and you have to admit that she adds a lot to the film. Meyer claims the other actress quit over her pomeranians ruining the carpets of the motel they were staying in and the owner getting upset.

He also said, “The picture is the most successful film I have on cable television-or hotel-vision-because you never have to come in at the beginning. It doesn’t matter. It could be a loop.”

It also has one of the first instances of mainstream full frontal male nudity, which made it a controversial movie all the way back in 1969.