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!

There are two movies with the name Devil Woman. This one and 1973’s She yao jing AKA Bruka Queen of Evil, which is the sequel, at least spiritually I guess. The 1970 Devil Woman was directed by Jose Flores Sibal. It begins with the birth of a young girl who has snakes for hair. Her father throws she and her mother into the rainy night and we catch up with them years later when she has grown into the teen Manda. She keeps her head covered at all times and the children often bully her. One day, they try to pull the wrap off and many of them end up dying by snake bite. The townspeople set her mother’s house on fire and again, she runs off into the night.

When she grows to adulthood, Manda (Divina Valencia) has become a snake goddess who takes over a gang, which brings her into conflict with a martial artist named Su Wen when she kidnaps his girlfriend. This movie, as you probably expect, has tons of human on snake violence and has a very similar story to its sequel. Also, there’s no transaction, which means you’re working your way through it Tower of Babel style.

Can you believe that you live in a reality that has not just one but two Filipino snake-haired woman movies?

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. 

Man, Roberta Findlay made some incredibly scummy movies. This is just another example of her talents, 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.

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.

Gerard Damiano is probably best known for making Deep Throat, the movie that created porno chic, even if the trend of adult films being accepted was happening for some time. It just so happened that his film had a great title and came along at the right time. Before he made it, he made this, a mondo movie that explains how the world is changing and accepting more sexually oriented entertainment.

While the film mainly concentrates on the titillation of meeting sex workers and female adult performers, it does have Damiano interviewing Mary Philips of N.O.W., gay magazine publisher and activist Arthur Irving, and Jack Nichols and Lige Clark from Gay Magazine. That’s pretty much as far as it goes for showing homosexual material. It does, however, spend more time with Screw publishers Al Goldstein and Jim Buckley, as well as Patrick and Tally Wright having hardcore sex for several seconds along with several female models masturbating.

Somehow, this movie uses Marmalade’s “Reflections of My Life,” which went gold in 1971. I have no idea how they got the rights, which is me saying that Damiano just used it.

Adult stars that appear in this include Tallie Cochrane (Can I Do It ‘Till I Need Glasses?, Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman), Rita Vance (The Kiss of Her Flesh), Kim Pope (The Amazing Transplant), Suzzan Landau (Keyholes Are for Peeping), Alex Mann (I Drink Your Blood), Linda Southern (The Headless Eyes), Patrick Wright (the truck driver at the beginning of Graduation Day), Linda Lovelace, who would soon become a big star in Damiano’s next film.

There’s also an appearance by Damiano’s son, in case you’re wondering if this is still exploitation, and early plaster caster Nancy (who is also in Pornography In New York), who is absolutely stunning as she appears as a normal sexual being in a world of idealized bodies.

So much has, pardon the silly pun, changed since Changes was made. Times Square is now all cleaned up and you can find incest porn in the privacy of your home online. Yet the right still pushes to censor whatever they determine as pornography, as that’s a major part of Plan 2025. Who determines what is art and what is porn? Surely the sex shows in this are filth, but they’re also made for consenting adults. Could the films I love that aren’t pornography be considered porn under these rules? Will owning Jess Franco movies be a crime, the video nasties all over again? This movie makes me consider how far we’ve come but how often we slide back, as even young people today are frighteningly puritanical.

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.

Ray Dennis Steckler directed this — oh, I mean Sven Christian — and co-wrote it with Herb Robins, the director of The Worm Eaters and The Brainsucker. The two had worked together on The Thrill Killers and The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters. He also plays Lucifer.

Steckler was having a hard time casting the lead, but when Ted Roter, who plays Sinthia’s father, had car trouble, he was picked up by a Sunday school teacher who got the part.

There’s not really any other movie like this.

Look at this description: “Cynthia Kyle enters puberty with a vengeance, murdering her parents as they make love: she’s wanted her father to love only her. Eight years later, she’s free and wants to marry, but nightmares plague her so she seeks psychiatric help. The doctor asks her to describe a dream: it’s long and elaborate with dreams within dreams of Lucifer, Hell, and her parents in various guises. To shed her guilt, the shrink recommends that she commit suicide in her next dream. In it, she falls in love with an artist who reminds her of her father, responds to a woman who finds her attractive, and celebrates her first school-yard kiss. The dream takes her back to her parents’ bedside. Is any cure possible?”

Anyways…

Cynthia, or Sinthia, is played by Shula Roan, AKA Bunny Allister. The only other movie she’s in is The Curious Female. That night, when she goes to sleep, she dreams that she’s in an orgy where everyone starts yelling “Sinthia loves her father!” like she’s Jamie Lloyd trying to get through lunch at Haddonfield High School. That’s because she’s in a special underworld, the hell of people who killed their parents.

She meets Carol (Brett Zeller, The Doll Squad) on a lonely road and follows her home to a mansion in the middle of nowhere that is filled with art painted by Lennie (Ted Royer, using the name Boris Balachoff). She gets a tarot card reading, has a sapphic encounter with Carol and then marries Lennie, who she thinks is her father. Then, she wakes up at her therapist’s office and he tells her to kill herself in the next dream — remember that chestnut? — and Carol and Lennie refuse to allow that to happen.

Somehow, this is not the goofball Steckler but some kind of Kenneth Anger on the cheap and I mean that in the best way I can possibly mean it. It has a heroine that wanted her father so much that she stabbed her parents and burned their house down and now is somehow cured. Except that, well, her new fiancee looks just like her dad once we get to see him.

How do you get out of Hell? You learn to love yourself. One handed.

If you can make it through the wild camera angles and Sinthia yelling, “Daddy!” every few moments, there is something here. Something Weird released it with Satanis: The Devil’s Mass and that’s beyond wonderful. Steckler shows some knowledge of cinematography here and the colors are psychedelic. This is the kind of movie that I love but I also know that when I recommend it to people, they don’t ask me to tell them what I’m watching any longer.

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)!

Leonard Kirtman mostly directed adult, churning out titles like The Seduction of Cindy, Up Desiree Lane and Confessions of a Candy Striper, often using the name Leon Gucci. This is one of the few movies he made without penetration yet it has all the feel of a New York City-made porn from 1970.

Shot in Coney Island — I would not be surprised if there were no permits and no one had any idea they were even filming — this movie revolves around the people who are killed after winning a teddy bear at the booth of Tom (Earle Edgerton) and his hunchback-heaving assistant Gimpy (John Harris, the stage name for Burt Young!).

There’s a district attorney called Dan (Martin Barolsky) who gets called down to investigate, but he’s so dumb that he brings his fiancee Laura (Judith Resnick) along to the carnival and man, defund the slasher police.

No set dialogue. Scuzzy looking footage. Gore from the Herschell Gordon Lewis school of pause on the guts. A great moment where a tunnel of love ends with a screaming survivor and a headless blood spraying victim. So much repetition. Sound effects out of nowhere. Folk music. Cool jazz. A drunken sailor. Bad relationships. Death is everywhere.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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!  

I’ve seen some strange movies, but Doris Wishman’s films often feel like they belong to my favorite genre: movies made by beings not from our reality, beamed to us in the hopes that we won’t notice that there isn’t a single moment of normal human behavior in what they have created.

Arthur Barlen (João Fernandes) starts the movie by visiting his ex-girlfriend Mary (Sandy Eden) to propose to her. As she happily celebrates, he catches a vision of her earrings, loses his mind and chokes the life out of her in a way that only appears in roughies. The police are chasing him for the murder, while his mother Ann (Linda Southern, The Headless Eyes, A Night to Dismember) asks her police detective brother-in-law Bill (Larry Hunter) to find her son.

Let me see if I can explain why this happens, if I can do the narrative of this movie justice. Dr. Cyril Meade (Bernard Marcel) treated Arthur because the young man was upset about being a virgin. Dr. Cyril also had an assistant, Felix (Sam Stewart). He loved Felix to the point that he glows when he talks about him. He also introduced Arthur to Felix, who tried to set him up on a double date and ended up having sex with both women (Linda Boyce, The Curse of Her Flesh, and Uta Erickson, The Ultimate Degenerate) at the same time while Arthur helplessly watched. Yet Arthur also loved Felix and once he realized that his friend was dying, he was surprised that Felix wanted to live on, giving Arthur his gigantic penis to replace his micro cock. However, once the surgery — which trust me, if it was a real surgery it would happen every day — is complete, the sight of golden earrings makes Arthur insane with lust and anger.

If that isn’t strange enough, keep in mind that every environment has just a touch of strangeness happen. When we first see Mary, she’s naked and playing a zither, a stringed instrument that looks kind of like a miniature harp. Some of the apartments have paintings that look cursed, another has a moose head, yet another has a gigantic saddle, which causes Bill to ask the owner of the place, “Do you ride horses?” and she nonchalantly says, “It came with the apartment.” An entire wall of riding equipment, like how Ponderosa used to have that crap up on the wall, and she didn’t take it down or redecorate?

Speaking of Bill, he’s just as creepy as his nephew, often eyeing women as they cross and uncross their thighs while telling him of the horrifying assault they have endured at the hands and transplanted wang of his brother’s son.

You know, Wishman also made Let Me Die A Woman and you’d expect this movie to have a gory trouser snake transplant moment, but no. It’s like a lone moment of self-restraint in a movie that starts with black and white images of its protagonist attacking women and has a scene where he attacks a lesbian, causing her to throw up all over the place.

Speaking of that young lady with the saddle on her wall, that’s Ms. Evans. She’s played by Kim Pope, who appeared in many of the Golden Age of adult films like The Passions of Carol, White Slavery In New York and Deep Sleep, which was the first movie of Alfred Sole. Janet Banzet plays another victim, one who comes on to Arthur in the stairwell before he notices those earrings. Always those earrings. She was also in The Party at Kitty and Stud’s, the movie that started the urban legend of Stallone being in a hardcore movie. Suzzan Landau (Keyholes Are for Peeping) also shows up.

Is this kind of a giallo? Is it a remake of The Hands of Orlac that could only be named The Cock of Orlac? Why is there happy jazz playing over the sexual assaults? How bad can the dubbing get? Why is every home in this movie festooned with bric a brac? Why are there ransom shots of shoes and carpet? Why does a child choir sing along when one of the victims turns Arthur’s attack into lovemaking? How did raincoaters feel when they thought they were getting something to jack off to and were confronted by this blast of dada?

Stranger still, star João Fernandes started his career shooting second unit and acting in adult films — he was given the name Harry Flex by director Gerard Damiano during as he used an Arriflex camera — before being the cinematographer or director of photography of Legacy of Satan, Darktown Strutters, The Kirlian Witness, Human Experiments, The Prowler, The Nesting, Children of the Corn, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Hollywood Vice Squad and Red Scorpion, In the 1990s, he shot eight episodes and directed three episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger. That may be because after working on Joe Zito’s Norris movies Missing In Action and Invasion U.S.A., he also shot Chuck’s movies Braddock: Missing in Action III, Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection, The Hitman, Sidekicks, Hellbound, Top Dog and Forest Warrior.

I have seen so many weird movies. This has moved way to the top of the list of the oddest.

This 1970 documentary about Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan that was directed and produced by Ray Laurent, whose only other credits involve editing some films, including one of the Lemon Grove Kids films that Ray Dennis Steckler directed. Within this movie, there’s plenty of ritual footage, as well as interviews with LaVey, his family, church members and then his somewhat annoying neighbors and some priests and Mormon missionaries.

It’s really interesting to see how the people living next to LaVey saw things, less concerned about the people coming in and out than the upkeep and shingles of the Black House. This is a rare opportunity to see actual rituals of the early Church and hear from its members.

Also, the Church is very ahead of the cultural mores of the time — and even today — commenting on how they don’t tolerate homosexuality in the Church of Satan. Instead, they go further: “To tolerate is to infer they are different or less than, we just accept them as normal people because that’s exactly what they are.” Keep in mind this was made in 1970.

“Well, I had a man come to me the other day and he said that it was just terrible, when he joined the Satanic Church, he was masturbating just about every day, and now he’s masturbating two, and sometimes three, times a day, and he’s very happy, much happier than he’s ever been before.” – Anton Lavey

Director Ray Laurent also edited  The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters and Body Fever and was the editorial consultant on Sappho Darling.

This had an X rating, probably for the nudity in the Black Mass scene.