Man, Roberta Findlay made some incredibly scummy movies. This is just another example of his style, a movie in which Janie (Mary Jane Carpenter, Sex Family Robinson, How to Succeed with Sex, Double Initiation) tells her daddy — who yes, she’s sleeping with — about all the people that she’s killed. After each murder, she makes love to herself as shes covered with blood.

This movie is fuzzy and scuzzy and the audio is all over the place and the music is way too loud and everything looks like a mess and yet, it’s exactly right. Roberta directed most of this, although some credit Jack Bravman (Zombie Nightmare, Night of the Dribbler and the producer of the Findlay’s Snuff).

Everyone has on outfits that Robert Crumb would be crazy for and Roberta does the borderline maniac narration for the nudie cutie gone slasher footage that we watch, where sound rarely matches up with voices. This is a dirty movie with no sex, a film that promises titilation and only delivers strangeness.

I would compare this movie to something else, but there really isn’t anything else like it. Man, Roberta Findlay inspires me more and more with each of her films I see, because she was out there in the 60’s and 70’s making mindbending pieces of trashy art even if she had to use a man’s name to make it happen.

The other night, I had a tooth infection and the only way I could sleep was to lie my face on a heating pad until it felt like it was scalding my flesh and I fell asleep finally, fitfully, and when I awoke I was totally covered in sweat and afraid from the dreams that I had. That’s exactly what watching this movie is like, so beware.

Donald Cammell was raised in a home “filled with magicians, metaphysicians, spiritualists and demons” and spent his childhood bouncing on the knee of “the wickedest man in the world” Aleister Crowley. Originally a painter, he became a screenwriter before meeting the Rolling Stones through Anita Pallenberg.

Performance was supposed to be a light-hearted swinging ’60s romp, but it ended up being what John Simon of New York Magazine called “the most vile film ever made.” It’s the story of two men*, Chas (James Fox), a brutal street thug, and Turner (Mick Jagger), a rock star who has gone into hiding.

Chas was a member of an East London gang, a man of violence who is prized for his ability to get money for his employer Harry Flowers. However, his complicated past with another gangster and that man’s murder has ostracized him from the gang and put him on the run and into the orbit of Turner and his two women, Pherber (Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michèle Breton).

By the end of the film, fuelled by drugs, cross-cutting techniques, a disjointed narrative and no small amount of magic, the two men have switched identities, with Chas displaying Turner’s face and Turner, well, not having a face any longer.

Warner Brothers thought that with Jagger in the movie they getting a Rolling Stones movie that young people could go see. Instead, they got a movie filled with drugs, sex, violence and ideas about cross-dressing and sex transforming identity that would still be dangerous half a century later.

The behind the scenes events — the house in Lowndes Square used in the film was investigated for drugs, Keith Richards was outside in a car fuming because Jagger and Anita were really having sex, Fox stopped acting for fifteen years to become an evangelical Christian — are just as interesting as the film, but the movie itself is astounding.

It was almost unreleased, as a Warner exec would complain, “Even the bathwater was dirty” and the wife of one of them would throw up at the premiere. Ken Hyman, the leader of Warner Brothers, decided that “no amount of editing, re-looping or re-scheduling would cover up the fact that the picture ultimately made no sense.” The film was shelved for two years until Hyman left and even then, the movie was re-edited and the Cockney accents were redubbed.

Time has been kind to Performance, a movie that points out the juxtaposition between the violent lives of East End with the rock and roll world of London. “A Memo to Turner” predates music videos. Bands from Coil to Big Audio Dynamite and Happy Mondays all referenced or sampled the movie while it’s been an influence on so many directors.

As for Cammell, he struggled against the mainstream after this movie — and with Marlon Brando, who kept asking him to write films and then deciding not to make them — before making Demon Seed, a film that deals with transformative sexuality, just like Performance. He’d make White of the Eye and Wild Side before killing himself with a shotgun. Kevin Macdonald (co-director of the story of his life, Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance), said “He didn’t kill himself because of years of failure. He killed himself because he had always wanted to kill himself.”

I held back watching this for years, because I wanted to make sure that I was ready for it. I needed to be prepared for this film, to not use it as wallpaper or background noise. It deserved more than that. And I’m glad I waited. It was worth it.

*It’s directed by two men as well, Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, who would go on to make Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Witches.

As drug use gets out of control at a small college, one of the professors (Alex Rebar, The Incredible Melting Man himself and the writer of Demented and To All a Goodnight, as well as a contributing writer to Beyond the Door.

This starts off just right — a crazy theme, trippy visuals and Ewa Aulin (Candy, Death Laid an Egg) getting her groove on — before Dr. John, worried that the college’s reputation is being tarnished by all the drug use, particularly when one of his fellow professors takes one of those Dragnet acid trips and thinks he can fly.

The scheming professor decides to work with one of the nerdier kids to take a heroin addict named Billy (Carlo De Mejo, The House by the Cemetery, The Other Hell) and appoints himself the troubled youth’s personal savior. But then his wife — there’s Ewa Aulin — decides to try some of the horse for herself and things get out of hand.

Billy decides that this would the perfect time to test the masculinity of his captor and try to cuck him, which seems to be a bad idea when white knighting teacher takes you against your will. I mean, this is a movie with the line, “Elizabeth, have you ever seen your husband’s penis? John, have you ever seen your own penis?”

With a title like this one and Aulin appearing, along with De Mejo, it’s easy to think that this is a giallo. To be honest, even this movie has no idea what it is.

To be fair, this movie is a total mess, but a fascinating one. It was directed by a man named John Shadow, who some thought was Joe D’Amato — if only! — but it turns out that he was married to Aulin for four years and had a son together named Shawn. He used his own money to produce this movie and it ended up playing nowhere in the world.

Seriously, Shadow is a conspiracy figure. According to IMDB, in spite of numerous newspaper and magazine articles, photos, discographies, interviews with Aulin, the existence of their Swiss-born son, people think that Shadow was really Italian producer Roberto Loyola (I mean, on IMDB, he’s listed as using the name John Shadow to write Pieces and to direct Tales of Canterbury, a movie that D’Amato was also thought to have made). I mean, Shadow even wrote the songs for this movie and people still think he’s Loyola.

These are the strange mysteries that this somewhat lost movie has swirling around it. As they say, the story of the movie is better than the movie itself. To add to the occult nature of this one, the copy I found is a beat up Greek VHS* that was uploaded to YouTube and is well-nigh unwatchable. And yet, I watched it just the same.

*According to Oblivion DVD, there are only two copies of this movie left in existence.

This film starts with a title card that says, “America’s Fearless Showman Kroger Babb.”

No matter what happens after that, I love this movie.

Bernie Hamilton, who was Capt. Harold Dobey on Starsky and Hutch, as well as appearing in Scream Blacula Scream, The Swimmer and Luis Buñuel’s The Young One, is Mike, a black theology student dealing with addiction.

Writer, actor and producer Jac Zacha had aspirations here, but the film falters. Supposedly, there was a cut opening where he explained how this was the true story of his life. Maybe he wanted to take that out after, you know, there’s that scene when a woman goes off a cliff. Beyond being as convincing as a falling in a Fulci movie, this movie would implicate him in a death.

One of the actors in here, Eric Weston, would go on to write and direct Evilspeak.

You can watch this on the amazing ByNWR site.

José Mojica Marins directed movies for six years before making At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, the first appearance of Brazil’s national boogeyman, Zé do Caixão, or Coffin Joe.

Joe is a man with no morals but a devotion to Nietzschian philosophies and absolute hatred for religion with the goal of achieving immortality through the birth of a perfect son. And while he does not believe in the supernatural, he often finds himself walking through visions of the otherworld.

Coffin Joe came to Marins — the man who would often be referred to as the character interchangeably — in a very magic way. “In a dream saw a figure dragging me to a cemetery. Soon he left me in front of a headstone, there were two dates of my birth and my death. People at home were very frightened, called a priest because they thought I was possessed. I woke up screaming, and at that time decided to do a movie unlike anything I had done. He was born at that moment the character would become a legend: Coffin Joe. The character began to take shape in my mind and in my life. The cemetery gave me the name, completed the costume of Joe the cover of voodoo and black hat, which was the symbol of a classic brand of cigarettes. He would be a mortician.”

Awakening of the Beast begins in black and white, as a series of vignettes of the ways that drug users debase themselves are shown in lurid, sweaty detail. A TV panel debates the idea that sexual perversion is caused by the use of illegal drugs, with more stories that illustrate this point. The TV show needs an expert on depravity, so they ask Marins to appear on the show.

Afterward, the doctor who conducted the experiment doses four volunteers and asks for them to stare at a poster of The Strange World of Coffin Joe. Supposedly Marins didn’t know much about using drugs, but he intended this movie to speak against the fact that the uses of drugs are treated worse than the suppliers and that the Brazilian film industry saw him as no better than a long-nailed drug dealer.

The acid trip that follows is highlighted by Coffin Joe, ranting against anyone and everyone. Of course, this film was banned by the very establishment it rails against. So basically, Coffin Joe is a self-fulfilling prophecy; the maniac attacking belief structures created by an artist who only believes in the power of film.

“My world is strange, but it’s worthy to all those who want to accept it, and never corrupt as some want to portray it. Because it’s made up, my friend, of strange people, though none are stranger than you!”

David Greene was behind a lot of my favorite TV movies, like Roots; Rich Man, Poor Man; Madame Sin and the remake of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? He also made I Start Counting and The Shuttered Room.

Arthur and Gerrie Mason (Eli Wallach and Julie Harris) realize that their marriage isn’t perfect and struggle to fix it as their daughter Maxie fights drug addiction. Arthur catches her in bed with a biker, high on cocaine, and immediately believes that his rock star son Artie (Stephen McHattie) who gave her the drugs, but it turns out that its the nerd next door.

Roger Ebert said that The People Next Door was “the best movie so far about parents, kids and drugs, and probably the best we’re likely to get (considering Hollywood’s recent tendency to exploit the drug culture for “youth movies”).”

This has a decent cast, with Hal Holbrook, Cloris Leachman and Rue McClanahan all showing up, along with Rutanya Alda as a nurse.

It didn’t make me want to stop doing drugs, but your viewing may change your habits.

Man, Ray Lovelock can’t catch a break. Of the films I’ve seen him in, he never makes it to the final frame. Then again, he also gets nearly every girl that gets put in front of him, so while his final luck isn’t always great, he does fine along the way.

Queens of Evil AKA La Regine is a 70s occult-infused end of the hippy movement sun-drenched nightmare of a film that will find its way into my blu ray player multiple times this year. Lovelock is David, a motorcyclist who searching for answers until he meets a man in a Rolls Royce who has a flat. That old man pays back David’s selfless act by stabbing one of our protagonist’s tires. A chase ensues and the rich driver crashes his car and dies. David, fearing the inevitable legal issues, runs right into a dark forest.

He awakes to three gorgeous women named Liv (Haydée Politoff, Interrabang), Samantha (Silvia Monti, A Lizard In a Woman’s Skin) and Bibiana (Evelyn Stewart, The Whip and the Body) all watching him. They live in a huge house in the woods that is filled with impossible angles and gigantic full wall photos of their faces. They’re also given to serving huge meals and conducting rituals in the night.

This is the kind of movie where three women tell a guy that they have a ritual to attend in the middle of a lake to meet with the fish, then pulling hundreds of them and he’s like, “Nope. Nothing strange at all.”

Of course, he sleeps with every single of them before things descend into madness, filled with dream sequences, dragons painted onto nude flesh, a sinister party and finally a feminist-driven decimation, followed by time lapse flowers sprouting from a shallow grave. In a word — incredible.

Director Tonino Cervi somehow made a film in which three strange women seduced and are seduced by one man not sleaze at all, but instead strangely innocent and totally infused with the fantastic. He also produced one of the weirdest — imagine what that entails — Italian horror films, Il Nido del Ragno (The Spider Labyrinth).

The new Mondo Macabro release of this film is, as is par for the course for this company, wonderful. Beyond the brand new 4k transfer, there’s an archival interview with Lovelock (who also sang two songs in this), audio commentary by Kat Ellinger and Samm Deighan, alternative scenes and the option to watch this dubbed in English or in the original Italian with subtitles.

You can get it from Mondo Macabro (their site is currently being worked on, so head to Diabolik DVD).