Barbara Peeters, who would go on to direct Summer School Teachers, Starhops and Humanoids from the Deep, came up with the idea for this movie while working as a script supervisor on Angels Die Hard. Once actress Rita Murray told her she was looking to produce, Peeters pitched and wrote this film in days. This would make Peeters the first female biker film director.

The six foot tall Dixie Peabody had been in Angels Die Hard in a small part and wouldn’t make many movies past this starring role (she’s also in Night Call Nurses and was a production assistant on Peeters’ Summer School Teachers). She plays Dag, who isn’t just a girl riding the back of the bike, but instead someone who rides for revenge on her own cycle.

As the film begins, we see her brother Dennis (Dixie’s real-life-brother Dan) get shot in the fact with a shotgun blast by a stranger (Stephen Whittaker), an event we see replayed in Dag’s head throughout the film. She grabs Jonsie (Terry Mace), Bernie (Clyde Ventura) and a gun of her own and they all head out north to kill that man, a fact lamented by her mother who realizes there’s no way she can stop her daughter. Maybe no one can.

Yet this isn’t the expected revenge film. The trio meet a witch in the desert who reveals to Dag that the revenge isn’t going to take away her grief and pain. An encounter with a hippie art teacher (Dan Haggerty) that turns into a red lit lovemaking scene which causes Dag to run rather than face up to the emotions she’s running from shows that our heroine maybe has some demons of her own. This is confirmed by the drug trip flashback she has and the ending, which drops some gasoline on the fire of this film and confirms the real reason why Dag’s brother’s death destroyed her.

Top it all off with some great songs by East-West Pipeline — their “Let It Be” isn’t The Beatles’ song but it’s super hot — and this film stands out from the rest of the biker pack. I wonder why Dixie Peabody didn’t do more, because she had the charisma to be somebody big and by that, I mean she’d be the villain torturing Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith or Claudia Jennings in some dank prison somewhere in the jungle, which I see as making it big.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on November 12, 2018.

Imagine a Hammer movie where instead of implied nudity and strange sexuality, everything is laid, well, bare. It’s not hardcore, but compared to where horror was pre-1971, Lady Frankenstein is a somewhat audacious concept: the man is no longer in charge and it turns out that the heroine (or villain, there’s no real hero in this movie though) is even more warped and insatiable than those that have come before. If you listen to Rob Zombie, you may know the sample from the trailer for this film: “Who is this irresistible creature who has an insatiable love for the dead?”

Three graverobbers deliver a body to Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten!) and his assistant Dr. Marshall (Paul Muller, Barbed Wire Dolls) to bring back to life. The twist is that Tania Frankenstein (Rosalba Neri, Lucifera: Demon Lover, Amuck!) has completed her studies in medicine and is eager to help her father with his secret work.

The next day, the Frankensteins and Marshall watch a criminal be hung and run into Captain Harris (Mickey Hargitay, the former husband of Jayne Mansfield and father of actress Mariska Hargitay, who was played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1980 made-for-TV movie The Jayne Mansfield Story), who already suspects them of graverobbing.

That night, Frankenstein brings the man back to life — a scarred, weird headed, giant-eyed beast — who pretty much instantly hugs the Baron to death. Tania and Marshall report the murder as a burglar, but Harris calls their facts into question.

If you thought that killers going after people as they have sex was something that was invented in 1980’s slashers, the creature in Lady Frankenstein is here to show you the error of your ways as he comes upon (no, not like that, get your mind out of the gutter) numerous frolicking couples and eviscerates them.

Meanwhile, Tania makes Marshall confess that he’s always loved her, but his old body can’t satisfy her. This is a polite way to say that the dude has erectile dysfunction and if Viagra had existed in the 1800s, there would be no need for the movie to continue the way that it does. Tania does find the mildly mentally challenged servant Thomas (Marino Masé, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times) attractive, so she has sex with him while Marshall watches. Thus cuckolded, he snuffs the young man out with a pillow.

Things get better for him, as she puts his brain in the young man’s body, making him superhumanly strong for some reason. While all that’s going on, the creature keeps on terrorizing people until they remember that they’re supposed to pick up pitchforks and torches and take him out.

The monster makes its way back to the castle, where it attacks Marshall, who rips off its arm, allowing Tania to stab it before he smashes its head open. As the castle burns down around them, Marshall and Tania make love as Harris and Thomas’ sister Julia (Renate Kasché, Devil in the Flesh) watches. The flames consume them as Marshall begins to choke out Tania.

Lady Frankenstein has a great lead who can do anything a man can do, if a man wants to bring the dead back to life and have sex with their reanimated corpses. That’s progress, I think.

Further progress is that every time I watch this movie, I love it more and more. I’m so excited that it’s part of Severin‘s Danza Macabra box set along with The Monster of the Opera, The Seventh Grave and Scream of the Demon Lover.

At some point in the late 60s, female vampires started to rival their traditional male ancestors. Sure, Dracula’s Daughter and Brides of Dracula were unleashed in 1936 and 1960, but they were tied to a man. The world of female vampires first rose in Carmilla-influenced movies like Blood and Roses and Daughters of Darkness, as well as Eurohorror like the films of Jean Rollin (Rape of the Vampire, The Shiver of the Vampires, Requiem for a Vampire), Jess Franco (Vampyros Lesbos, Female Vampire) and Jose Larraz (Vampyres), not to mention the ever-growing female desire within the world of Hammer (Twins of Evil, Lust for a Vampire, The Vampire Lovers, Countess Dracula), Crypt of the Vampire and strange regional and world cinema like Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Lemora and The Blood Spattered Bride.

Carmilla was first filmed all the way back in 1932 as Vampyr and that story — beyond inspiring so many of the films in the last paragraph — informs The Velvet Vampire. Never think that Carmilla was inspired by Bram Stoker’s better known novel; it predates Dracula by 26 years.

Director Stephanie Rothman was seeking a movie to make after The Student Nurses and the first thought was The Student Teachers, which she wrote with her husband Charles Swartz. Then producer Larry Woolner wanted to make a movie a lot like Daughters of Darkness and Rothman and Swartz wrote this modern day tale of a female vampire.

The vampire at the center of this movie, Diane Le Fanu, is played by Celeste Yarnall, who was in Henry Alan Towers and Jess Franco’s Eve and Beast of Blood; before retiring from acting to be successful in real estate, writing books on holistic pet care, teaching nutrition and breeding of Tonkinese cats, she had Elvis sing “A Little Less Conversation” to her in Live a Little, Love A Little and acted opposite David Soul in the Star Trek episode “The Apple.” Before this film, she turned down rules that had nudity. But when she got divorced and had a young daughter, she decided to do this movie to pay her mortgage.

She told Alex Ander On Film, “I had just had my daughter on July 4th 1970 and was still breastfeeding when I did the movie, so I brought my daughter with me and everyone was very accommodating, just a joy to work with. It was my first experience having a female director and it was remarkable especially concerning the sexual scenes. Stephanie was very sensitive. She closed the set during the more explicit shots, and there was often just Michael and I and the cameraman. We had a skeletal crew that made sure everything was in place. And then of course, the robes came off…”

Her role is named after author Sheridan Le Fanu, the author of Carmilla — Carl Stoker (Gene Shane), the author fanged character in this movie, gets his name from the Dracula author — and she lives in the desert, luring people into her embrace while never leaving behind the preserved corpse of her husband.

She’s invited Lee Ritter (Michael Blodgett, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) and his wife Susan (Sherry Miles, The Pack) into the desert, where she rides around in her dune buggy and eventually seduces them both. But Lee’s just a means to an end; Susan is who she really needs. But is she a vampire? Sure, she sucks the venom — and blood — of Susan, but she mainly just eats bloody pieces of chicken livers, has a reflection and walks by day. Yet place a crucifix in her way…

There are moments — like the dream sequence where the young couple makes love in the midst of the sand dunes as Diane emerges through a window to attack them — that feels like the sunbaked California remix of Jean Rollin’s artistic blooddrinkers. It’s also the exact opposite of the kind of film that you’d think it was, an exploitative lesbian sex and blood movie. It has all those things. It just feels classier than it should.

That may be why Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader said, “Given the genre (horror) and the budget (extremely low), it may seem perverse to say that Stephanie Rothman’s 1971 film is among the best women’s films ever made, but so it is.”

When she appeared at a screening of this film at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women in 2008, she told Ben Sher, “The freedom that existed was the freedom to take what were the genre expectations and do unexpected things with them. Do things that would make them seem relevant to a wider audience than the usual fans of exploitation films. So we included political opinions and we tried to make the stories have more psychological depth. We tried, given the restrictions of the genre, to address some ideas that were ignored by Hollywood and by most other films made at that time. As long as we met the sub-distributors expectations, they didn’t mind if we exceeded them in other ways. In fact, they were happy if we did things that were controversial, because that would give them publicity in the papers. That’s not why we did them, but that was certainly why they accepted these things. As long as the theater wasn’t burned down, it was all right if we exceeded the conventional expectations for this kind of film.”

The Velvet Vampire played with Scream of the Demon Lover, which is exactly the kind of sex and horror you expect, not that that’s a bad thing. Rothman never really got the respect she deserved by Hollywood when she was working within it. Indeed, in that earlier referenced interview she claims that MGM brought her in for an interview to discuss this movie when they were making The Hunger with Tony Scott and wanted it to feel like her movie. She replied to them, “Well, if you want a film like The Velvet Vampire, why don’t you get Stephanie Rothman to make it?”

I’ve seen this movie described as stylish trash. While that sounds like the kind of movie I love, I continue to rail against the idea of so bad it’s good and guilty pleasures. This film is gorgeous, steamy and looks and plays way better than it should given its budget and origins. We should celebrate it as a success, not place it into a ghetto of film so that we can feel better about having to celebrate a movie with more humble or commercial origins.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally posted on July 27, 2018.

Jonathan Demme (Married to the Mob, Silence of the Lambs) impressed Roger Corman with his writing ability and was asked if he wanted to try a motorcycle movie. His idea? Rashomon on motorcycles. He turned to his friend Joe Viola, a commercial director, and created this film.

Roger Corman got the idea for this movie — a sequel of sorts to The Student Nurses — after being sent a letter of complaint about that movie from the Private Duty Nurses Association. It’s written and directed by George Armitage, who wrote Gas-s-s-s, Hot Rod, Vigilante Force and Darktown Strutters. He’d go on to direct and write Grosse Point Blank.

It’s a really similar story to the first Corman nurses film as, you knew it, a group of nurses deal with the issues of the day. There’s Spring (Katherine Cannon, later Donna’s mom on Beverly Hills 90210) who falls for Vietnam vet and bike rider Domino (Dennis Redfield). Lynn (Pegi Boucher) has a water pollution storyline. And Lola (Joyce Williams) has to take a backseat to her black doctor boyfriend who is trying to change the status quo, but just for black men. Women will have to wait or so he states.

The social issues here feel tacked on, the women feel less interesting than the men they’re with — they often take a backseat to them and it feels wrong — and it just seems like we miss the deft touch that Stephanie Rothman brought to the first of New World’s female job movies. That said, the music is by a band called Sky and I kind of liked it; I’m amazed that Doug Fieger in that band was also in The Knack.

Armitage would go on to write the next film in this series, Night Call Nurses, which is a perfect exploitation title that suggests something illicit without ever saying it.

According to Stephanie Rothman, Roger Corman started this film by having James Gordon White write it, but he didn’t like the results. She, her husband Charles S. Swartz and Frances Doel plotted the idea and had Don Spencer write the actual script. Corman wanted her to direct it, but she turned it down. Enter Jack Hill and enter the Philippines, where John Ashley and his partners put up a chunk of the money, leading to this movie getting its unique look.

Collier (Judy Brown, The Manhandlers) is the new girl in prison, there for murdering her old man. That’s Pam Grier singing as we meet the girls on the block: tough lesbian Grear (yeah, Grier), her dominated girl Harrad (Brooke Mills, The Student Teachers), blonde badass Alcott (Roberta Collins, who dominated the screen in Caged Heat, Death Race 2000, Wonder Women and Unholy Rollers), Ferina (Gina Stuart) and her cat, and political dissident Bodine (Pat Woodell, a long way from Petticoat Junction). They’re all under the watchful and brutal eye of Miss Dietrich (Christiane Schmitdmer, The Giant Spider Invasion) and head girl in charge Lucian (Kathryn Loder, an out of control lunatic in this; she was the daughter of a theologian and nearly died of undiagnosed diabetes during the filming of the movie; she’s also in Foxy Brown). 

Nearly everything the women in prison genre is known for comes from this movie and the Caged Heat. This also throws in Sid Haig — more movies could use him — and Roberta Collins assaulting a man, snarling “You’ll either get it up or I’ll cut it off!” in a scene that had to titillate as much as it terrified men more than fifty years ago. She also has a movie stealing mud fight with Grier and then you also have Woodell double firing submachine guns and realism be damned, it looks incredible.

When this was cast, Grier was working as the receptionist at the American-International Pictures front desk. Can you imagine coming in for a meeting and Pam Grier is just sitting there? Two years later and she’d be perhaps the biggest non-major studio actress of the 70s. While many of the actresses in this film had to be convinced to do nude scenes, she asked for them. She’d later tell Rolling Stone, “I call it the Brown Nipple Revolution. We weren’t the epitome of sexual attraction for the male audience, in movies, magazines, anything. We were told our brown nipples weren’t attractive. I was trying to break that line of what was acceptable in society.”

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is incendiary, 51 years after it was made, so I have no idea what it was like when it played theaters in 1971. Melvin Van Peebles started making it as part of his three-picture deal with Columbia Pictures, but at the end of the day, no studio would finance this.

Van Peebles did it all himself, directing, raising the money, writing, scoring, starring, doing his own stunts and even had unsimulated sex that led to this movie being “rated X by an all-white jury” and if that’s not a tagline, tell me a better one.

Not only did he do the stunts, he jumped off a bridge nine times to get the perfect shot. And he got gonorrhea shooting all the sex scenes, then got workers’ comp from the Directors Guild for getting hurt while working, using the money to finish this movie.

He came up with the idea by driving his car into the Mojave desert and driving off the highay and then sitting and staring at the sun, which gave him a revelation. He was going to make a movie “about a brother getting the Man’s foot out of his ass.”

Sweetback grew up in a brothel, learned how to have sex when he was just a kid (that’s Mario Van Peebles, Melvin’s son, between a sex workers thighs in the opening) and has taken his lovemaking skills and big cock to the professional arena, performing every night in the live sex show in the house where he grew up.

His boss Beetle agrees to a deal from two cops. Sweetback looks like a killer they’re looking for and to keep the white public happy, they’re going to arrest him and then release him a day or so later. But then they handcuff him to Mu-Mu, a Black Panther, and when the cops beat the man into oblivion in the middle of nowhere, Sweetback turns his handcuffs into weapons, imposing his will on the Man.

On the run, no one will help our hero. A woman just wants sex for taking off his chains. His boss doesn’t want any trouble. A preacher just wants to keep things as they’ve always been. His episodic journey to freedom leads to drinking water in the desert, using his sex as his greatest weapon and hiding amongst others as dogs are turned on him and black men are attacked by the fuzz at every turn.

It’s mind numbing with quick cuts that seem of today and not older than I am. It was required viewing for members of the Black Panther Party. It was a movie that some black writers thought was as false as blacksploitation. But Spike Lee would one day say, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song gave us all the answers we needed. This was an example of how to make a film a real movie, distribute it yourself, and most important, get paid. Without Sweetback who knows if there could have been a She’s Gotta Have It, Hollywood Shuffle or House Party?”