BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Barry Mahon is magic. And madness, too.

After volunteering for the Canadian Royal Air Force before America entered World War II, then getting shot down, imprisoned and escaping Stalag Luft III before getting captured again, then being saved by Patton’s 3rd Army and then becoming Errol Flynn’s personal pilot and manager, Mahon’s life was already crazy. Then he started making movies like Rocket Attack U.S.A., Cuban Rebel Girls and Fanny Hill Meets Dr. Erotico. 

That’s all before Barry set up shop at Florida’s Pirates World theme park — on the north side of Sheridan Street in Dania east of US-1 south of Ft. Lauderdale — and started throwing concerts when he wasn’t making some of the most ludicrous movies — and I mean that as a compliment — ever made, like The Wonderful Land of Oz and perhaps his finest movie, Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny.

I’ve been hunting for this film, where a pirate’s ghost convinces the staff of the park to put on a free concert, for literally years and years. I found it. And it pleases me to no end. In fact, it is my happening and it freaks me out.

BONUS WILDCARD WEEK (September 22 – 28) Go order something from the SWV website and watch it!

Edward L. Montoro, the man who was the heart and soul of the main era of Film Ventures International, only directed one other movie — Platinum Pussycat — and wrote two others — again, Platinum Pussycat and Day of the Animals — other than this movie.

Heaven (Marie Marceau, which is hilarious, because who else would mistake Uschi Digard with that body and accent?), Sin (Jennie Lynn, who played four roles on My Three Sons before this) and Karen (Phyllis Stengel, who was in tons of early adult, like Ed Wood’s Take It Out In Trade) are out to become movie stars, even leaving behind Heaven’s cop man Bernie (Scott Cameron).

This leads him to Mr. Salacity (Miles White), a Hollywood producer who gets them on the casting couch. It’s pretty much what you expect, except for the fact that the men never show anything while the women show it all. There’s also a scene where Uschi gets a cold and to heal herself, she has one of her friends cover her breasts with Vicks VapoRub. I love Vicks so much, so this scene meant a lot to me, particularly when you realize that it takes two gigantic tubs of the stuff to even get close to covering the pride of Saltsjö-Duvnäs, Sweden’s 48 F bosom.

I mean, you kind of have to see that, you know?

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.

Making his way to England instead of Staten Island, Andy Milligan created a vampire movie in which Rev. Alexander Algernon Ford (Gavin Reed) has an entire family of vampires — a wife who doesn’t speak, three green-skinned vampire women and a hunchback named Spool — living in Carfax Abbey.

Inbreeding is destroying this vampiric brood, so he calls out to America for more family members to add to the DNA and increase their chances of survival.

To get this on film, Milligan handmade costumes and smeared vaseline all over the lens. As always, he also had everyone scream at the top of their lungs.

Spool is abused throughout the movie, even when he’s trying to do the right thing and save the victims.

A lot of people seem to hate this movie and you know, maybe I have Stockholm Syndrome because I watched so many Andy Milligan movies all in the same week, but I am not seeing the same movie that they have. I kind of fall into a drone dream when I watch these, letting them wash over me and take away the world that I don’t want to be in. I feel sad for others who can’t use these movies in the same way.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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.

“I’m trisexual — I’ll try anything for pleasure!”

Any movie that has this line, no matter what happens in it, has something good in it.

Norman (Gerald Jaccuzo) is The Duke Of Norwich. When his half-brother is killed, he gets closer to the throne, which makes him filled with a need for power. He sets his other half-brother Albert (Hal Borske) up with a commoner named Heather MacGregor (Susan Cassidy) with plans to take control of their child and therefore, the throne. But there’s also the dead half-brother’s pregnant wife Lady Jane (Patricia Dillon), a hunchback named Ivan (Richard Mason) — who even gets into a threesome — and a woman with one eye.

I can’t even imagine what people unaware of Andy Milligan think when they saw this. It could still be happening now thanks to streaming, as someone sees the poster art and the title and thinks. “I’ll try this” before they’re confronted by Staten Island being a foreign country and costumes that look like they came from a Christmas play. Will any of them make it to the end? Or will they just be upset by what they have seen?

You can watch this on Tubi.

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.

This movie is a miracle, because so much went wrong. The actor playing the monstrous Montag the Magnificent walked off the set following a confrontation with Fred Sandy and crew member Ray Sager had to take over the role. And as for the effects, they were basically two dead sheep soaked in PineSol. I can’t even imagine how much everything stunk, like the smell of an adult bookstore before they started making couples friendly places. Handling all those sheep organs was director Herschell Gordon Lewis’ son Robert.

Yes, it’s amazing that a movie with such primitive effects and non-trained actors works so well, but that’s just the weirdness that are the films of Lewis, movies that seem to exist inside vacuums of non-action punctuated by blasts of nausea-imbuing viscera.

Every night, Montag takes the stage and has long-winded speeches about the nature of reality before murdering a woman in front of an audience, then showing that it was all a trick. Then, the same woman dies the same way later that night. Reporters Sherry Carson (Judy Cler) and Greg (Phil Laurenson), along with her boyfriend Jack (Wayne Ratay), know that Montag is behind all of this. They just need to prove it.

The end of this movie breaks from what we expect and goes full psychotic. As they sit on the couch, Jack peels off his own face and reveals Montag before shoving his hands into the stomach of Sherry, who laughs in his face and disputes the illusions and the very nature of Montag’s reality, sending the entire movie back to the very beginning of this movie, creating a loop of reality as Sherry turns to her man and says, “You know what I think? I think he’s a phony.”

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.

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!”

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.

“Let all the spirits hear. I am the first born Son of Satan. He commands my thoughts. I speak his words. The Book of the Dead! Sons and daughters of Satan. Put aside your worldly things and come to me. Let it be known, sons and daughters, that Satan was an acid head. Drink from his cup; pledge yourselves. And together, we’ll all freak out.”

Has a movie ever started better? I don’t think so. I Drink Your Blood will take you prisoner, stab in the stomach with a fork and write on the walls with your blood!

In fact, I watched that opening at last year’s April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama in the middle of the night, surrounded by fog and inebriated on a variety of vices. It was a transcendent moment.

Horace Bones leads a cult that worships Satan and drops acid. A young girl, Sylvia, watches from the woods but is caught, then raped by the cult members before she escapes. She’s found the next morning by Mildred, a baker, and Sylvia’s brother Pete. They get her back to her father, Doc Banner, the town’s veterinarian. And oh the town — it’s been abandoned due to dam project. The hippies break down and decide to stick around.

The only food in town? Meat pies from Mildred’s bakery, which Horace and family take as they set up their home in a house scheduled for demolition. And when Doc comes for revenge, the gang smashes his glasses and force him to take LSD.

So how do you get revenge? Well, if you’re Pete, you kill a rabies infected dog and inject the blood into meat pies, which infects the gang and makes them go crazy. They begin to attack one another as Molly runs away, finding the mill workers, who she ends up having sex with all night long until she bites one of the men.

Horace goes full-on insane, even more insane than the beginning of the film, attacking two of the construction workers. Only Andy from the group is not infected and he finds Sylvia and Pete. Meanwhile, the infection spreads to the rest of the town.

Banner gets impaled. Horace is stabbed by Rollo, the African-American member of the family. Mildred is barricaded inside her bakery and Andy is beheaded before they get in. The Japanese member of the family sets herself on fire. Everyone other than Mildred, her boyfriend Oaks (who comes to save them), Sylvia and Pete dies horribly.

Director David Durston worked with producer and CEO of Cinemation Industries Jerry Gross to write and direct this film. He said that “wanted to make the most graphic horror film ever produced, but he didn’t want any vampires, man-made monsters, werewolves, mad doctors, or little people.” The director couldn’t come up with an idea until he read an article about a village in Iran where a pack of rabid wolves infected several villagers, making them insane and homicidal. Dunston found a doctor who had been to the village and that had filmed the evidence. He was further inspired by the Manson family trials.

This is the first film to be given an X rating for violence instead of sex. And while originally entitled Phobia, the name change to I Drink Your Blood and pairing with  1964’s Zombies, also retitled as I Eat Your Skin, proved a potent blend for audiences. The two movies are almost always thought of together.

This film is unafraid to be the exploitation junk that normal people avoid. It’s grimy, filthy and ultimately entertaining as hell. It takes everyone’s worst fears of the hippies and shows you in graphic detail what happens when those fears come true.

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?