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

The Hooked Generation (1968): The films that William Grefé made in Florida feel sweaty and messy and filled with menace, just like the Sunshine State itself, the kind of place that could give you both the Happiest Place on Earth and bands like Deicide and, well, Creed.

This time around, Grefé is telling us the story of a group of three drug pushers who are no longer content to kidnap people and assault women. No, they’re in for the big score, killing their Cuban drug suppliers, an act that puts them on a one-way ticket to the kind of horrible end that can only be found in a regional drive-in movie.

Daisy (Jeremy Slate, The Born Losers, True Grit), Acid (John Davis Chandle, who is also in Grefé’s Mako: The Jaws of Death and Whiskey Mountain, as well as playing the lead bad guy in Adventures In Babysitting) and Dum Dum (Willie Pastrano, who Grefé hired for The Wild Rebels and The Naked Zoo) are absolute scumbags that spend the majority of this movie doing horrible things and talking as much as they can to pad things out.

Look for William Kerwin — who you may know from Herschell Gordon Lewis movies — shows up as an FBI agent.

The Psychedelic Priest (1971): Also known as Electric Shades of Grey and Jesus Freak, The Psychedelic Priest wasn’t really directed by Stewart “Terry” Merrill, but instead William Gréfe, who was paid for this movie in trading stamps, which he described in Brian Albright’s Regional Horror Films, 1958-1990: A State-by-State Guide with Interviews as “Instead of cash, if you owned a TV store and I owned a garage, and you needed your transmission fixed, you’d give me trading stamps. When I needed a TV, I could go get a TV from you.”

Gréfe got paid $100,000 in trading stamps to make this movie that was never released until thirty years later because everyone felt it would be a bomb. As for Gréfe, he was now the president of Ivan Tors Films, making family movies, so he realized that “I didn’t want some wild hippie drug movie with my name as writer and director.”

The cast and the crew were non-actors, mostly real hippies, and the story is rambling at best, as Father John realizes that he can no longer preach to the young people, so he goes on some sort of quest to learn how to fit into a world that doesn’t need religion any longer. He almost leaves the cloth for a woman named Sunny, but by the end of the movie, he’s come back to his commitment to the church.

This was shot on the fly, with scenes mainly being improvised, as well as a soundtrack that is really solid. It’s a great experiment and whether or not it works for you is, well, up to you. I dug what it was trying to do, even if it’s not always successful.

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

After Castle of Blood‘s disappointing box office, Antonio Margheriti felt he could remake the film in color and have it be more successful.

Edgar Allan Poe (Klaus Kinski) is our narrator and Kinski shows up for the beginning and the ending of the movie. He’s interviewed by Alan Foster (Anthony Franciosa), who challenges him as to the truth of his stories. This leads to a bed with Lord Blackwood (Enrico Osterman) about spending a night in his castle, a place where he soon meets Elisabeth (Michèle Mercier, Black Sabbath) and quickly falls into love — and bed — with her before she announces that she’s no longer alive.

There’s also Julia (Karin Field), William Perkins (Silvano Tranquilli) and Elisabeth’s husband,Dr. Carmus (Peter Carsten). The ghosts need his blood to come back to life, but Elisabeth helps him to escape, only for him to impale himself on the gate, dying just as Poe gets there.

I adore that the tagline of this is “Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s Night of the Living Dead.” He did write a poem “Spirits of the Dead” and the 1932 movie The Living Dead was based on Poe’s “The Black Cat” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club. But no, he has nothing to do with Romero’s movie.

I really like the soundtrack by Riz Ortolani but this can’t compare to the black and white — and yes, Barbara Steele appearance — in the original. That said, Kinski is awesome in every second he’s on screen, looking like a complete madman.

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

Qualcosa Striscia nel Buio may mean Something Crawls in the Dark, but the inexact translation of the original title is what this played in the U.S. as.

A series of travelers are headed out into a foreboding evening — it was a cold, dark night — when they realize that a washed-out bridge means that they’re all finding shelter in the same house that was once the home of a lady occultist. The cars contain all manner of individuals with their own reasons for being out in the storm, like the two detectives transporting a restrained Farley Grainger, a fighting husband and wife, and a surgeon and his assistant.

Of course, one of these folks will decide to conduct a seance and that’s the point where everything falls to pieces. The result of this occult ritual is that everyone becomes possessed and starts acting like Ecstasy-loving maniacs. And with the phone lines not working, the bridge out and a storm outside — and now inside an emotional weather outburst happening — the movie transitions from giallo to outright gothic horror.

There’s also a butler named Joe who just happens to keep a pantsless woman who he occasionally makes love to, as well as a POV camera view that keeps happening, making this film stand out from the giallo pack somewhat as the ghost takes over each person, making them give in to their desires and even stopping clocks dead.

“Exorcism…the Occult…A Horror-Filled Night In A House Of Terror!” Writer and director Mario Colucci only directed one other movie, Revenge for Revenge, that he also wrote, directed and acted in. There are some interesting actors other than Granger here, such as Italian Neorealist actress Lucia Bosè (she’s also in Arcana), Giacomo Rossi Stuart (Kill, Baby, Kill; The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave), Angelo Francesco Lavagnino (who is in Fulci’s Beatrice Cenci as well as Orson Welles’ Othello and Chimes at Midnight) and Loredana Nusciak (Maria, the lover of Django) appearing as the photo of the lady of the house, who we are to believe is the ghost.

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

Directed by Ray Dennis Steckler — who said he had nothing to do with it — this adult film is on AGFA’s Smut Without Smut: Satanic Horror Nite. You can get it from Vinegar Syndrome. It also has Hotter than Hell, Satan’s Lust, Sacrilege, Satanic Sexual Awareness and The Devil Inside Her.

Cassandra the witch and schoolteacher (Jane Tsentas, Evil Come, Evil Go as well as two adult Jekyll and Hyde movies, The Jekyll and Hyde Portfolio and The Adult Version of Jekyll and Hide) seduces Jay (Gerald Broulard) by being able to talk about magic with him. Later, she get his girlfriend Maria (Ruthann Lott) to visit, drink possession tea and get tied to a table just in time for the devil (Charles Smith) to appear. Cassandra says, “My sacrilege is complete” as the couple runs from the horror they have just endured.

This feels like a softcore movie that had inserts put in for the hardcore. That said, Tsentas is gorgeous and you have to love when a witch shows up wearing a cape. I mean, I know that I do.

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.

Also known as Sex and Vampires, Strange Things Happen at Night, Terror of the Vampires, Thrill of the Vampire and Vampire Thrills, this is the third time that Jean Rollin would bring a vampire movie to the screen. Look, if you’re obsessed, you’re obsessed.

Isle (Sandra Julien, Je Suis Frigide… Pourquoi?) and Antoine (Jean-Marie Durand) have just arrived in town for their honeymoon, only to learn that the cousins they plan on staying with have died. But hey — they’re house is open, right? And it’s totally not weird that the two servants (Marie-Pierre Castel and Kuelan Herce) just tell them to stay. Nor is it otherworldly that Isolde (Dominique) emerges from a clock and soon, she’s unable to go out into the sun.

Every woman is naked, bras have spikes in them, castles are filled with fog, Rollin shows a love of the lighting and colors of Bava and the band Acanthu is just rocking so hard that no one can yell loud enough over them to tell them, “Hey this is a dreamy sapphic vampire movie, maybe stop rocking so hard” and they’re just headbanging and smoke is everywhere and just go with it, man.

Also: Not the last lesbian vampire movie Rollin had in him.

Dragon Art Theatre Week (September 8 – 14) Pssst. Hey…buddy… you wanna see some naked movies with your mom in em? This stuff here is premium split tail in action, my friend, straight from the vaults at Something Weird Video. It’s all the HARD X stuff on the SWV site that I could find on Letterboxd and let me tell you, when I say HARD X I mean it! These movies show it all baby, whatever sort of freaky shit you’re into, these movies have got it. Nipple clamps, ice cubes on the balls, lesbos, homos, cumshots, whips, leather, you name it! Plus we got air conditioning and the cleanest bathrooms on the deuce. Just step inside … and if you need some luudes or a lid talk to my man Shifty over at the popcorn counter. Tell him Klon sent you.

Bob Chinn and John Holmes made a bunch of these Johnny Wadd detective movies, like The Blonde in Black Lace, Tropic of Passion, The Danish Connection, Liquid Lips, Tell Them Johnny Wadd Is Here, Tapestry of Passion, The Jade Pussycat, Blonde Fire, China Cat and The Return of Johnny Wadd. This is the second in the franchise, after 1971’s Johnny Wadd.

Sheila (Heather Starr) starts the movie engaging in a solo bedroom rodeo before a mysterious Asian man (Chinn) slices her throat. Johnny Wadd shows up, as Sheila was a lost flame, and her man Alex (Alex Elliot) claims that she was killed. Wadd finds a lotus, which is a clue, and heads off to meet with one of her friends — after we get a flashback of Wadd and Sheila — who claims to be a lesbian but is soon attempting the labor of administering an oral review to Holmes.

Another lady, Suzie (Andy Bellamy), reveals that she’s Alex’s lover and that he’s a heroin dealer and that’s what led the Asian man to kill Sheila. This leads to a kung fu battle that really is more like a slap fight, but hey, you get awesome footage of Los Angeles in 1971 and it’s less than an hour.

Only John Holmes in the 70s would have a moment where he drops his pants and the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly plays.

This cost $750, actors were paid in sex and Holmes made $75. Also, some weirdo posted this goof on IMDB: “When the assassin cuts Sheila’s throat, the knife doesn’t make contact with her skin.”

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!

First off, this movie has the amazing gift of a totally stolen soundtrack that includes parts of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; at least three Beatles songs (“I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” “Good Day Sunshine” and “Yellow Submarine”) and the song that inspired Little Peggy March’s “I Will Follow Him,” Franck Pourcel’s “Chariot.”

This is the story of Pamela Goodnight (Judy Angel), who is looking for her best friend Carla. She calls her college sweetheart Wayne (James Mathers) and they spend a good chunk of the film baking the potato instead of looking for their friend, who has already been sacrificed to the dark one by Manheim Jarkhoff (George “Buck” Flower!) and his coven, which includes Boris, who has already been burned at the stake once, and Edith the witch. I mean, all Wayne has to say to set her mind at ease is, “You just let me be your daddy.”

As they descend into the Hollywood Hills, they learn that Jarkhoff runs Satanic Pictures, an adult studio devoted to making sinful cinema. He tells them that Carla was a speed freak on her way to an early grave before she burned up in a car that she never knew how to drive. In the midst of their investigation, Edith falls for Wayne and sneaks into his house as a black cat, then into his bed.

Before it’s all over, the cult has taken Pamela, Edith has fallen in love with Wayne and therefore must age into a skeleton and Satan himself shows up, wearing only the finest of Ben Cooper masks.

Edith looks like Susan Atkins when she was dancing in Anton Lavey’s Nude Witches Revue before she met Manson, in a time when the Church of Satan and a bunch of girls all living at Spahn Ranch seemed idyllic and we hadn’t yet learned of the Satanic Panic.

Also: The opening title cares are amazing.

“Night of the Warlock was filmed in its entirety in the hills above Hollywood, California by Satanic Films, Inc. whose involvement in the bizarre and the occult have gained the company a certain “notoriety” among the witchcraft groups and “covens” throughout the nation.

In the last sixteen months, the officers of Satanic Films, Inc. have received over 140 overt threats of violence and destruction if they continued to reveal the results of their research into the subject of witchcraft through the media of film.

Night of the Warlock is probably the most comprehensive and revealing film on the entire subject of the occult practices as they are pursed today by the disciples of the entity referred to as the “King of the Darkness.”

It is singular to note that since the release of Night of the Warlock, all six of the principals of Satanic Films, Inc. have met with violent death by fire — The Distributors”

This is also the only movie you’ll ever seen where George “Buck” Flower is naked except for a cape as he sneaks into the bedroom of a 70s porno blonde and gives her the stinkfinger while an instrumental of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” plays.

1971 was a wild year and I can only imagine the audiences that saw this. It’s not really all that arousing, which is my favorite kind of adult film, one that is more out to just be oddball or upsetting. Although Edith’s Michael Aquino eyebrows are doing something to me…

You can get this movie as part of AGFA’s Smut Without Smut: Satanic Horror Night from Vinegar Syndrome. It also has Hotter than Hell, Sacrilege, Satanic Sexual Awareness and The Devil Inside Her.

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!

Director Zoltan G. Spencer also made The Satanist and Terror at Orgy Castle. This time, he’s telling the story of the Hand of Pleasure, a secret organization of robotic women under the command of Dr. Dreadful (Spencer). He looks like the kind of thing if you saw it outside your home, you’re be terrified, wearing one of those old plastic see-through masks of an old man. Then again, he does say “Please excuse the mask… my face is the greatest horror of them all!” He wants to have his women sleep with spies and learn their secrets while a Sherlock Holmes-looking man — also old — tries to figure out what is happening.

Joe (William Howard, Brides of Lucifer)is one of those spies and his spying consists of watching strip club dancers and sleeping with Jill (Terri Johnson, Blood Sabbath). They end up at the doctor’s wax museum, where he claims “If my sex-transference machine can turn a woman into a man-hating robot, just think what it will do to a man!”

There’s unsynced sound, softcore performances that are so fun that everyone is smiling even when they’re whipping and choking the life out of each other, crazed narration, music that feels like it came from another dimension that we can only dream of listening to more of, stock footage, female and male full frontal, a hero that ends up making love to several women at once at the end even stacking them up as they pass out, a brainwave scanner that seems like something Cobra’s Dr. Venom would make yet only have a metal strainer to use and evil robot women who kill with their pleasurable mouths.

This movie is as wild as you’d hope and also filled with glorious padding, from nude bathing scenes that may still be playing and horse races. I’d go watch it right now if it was in a theater.

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!

The 70s and its obsession with Bigfoot is something I’ve written about several times. But little did I know The Geek existed, a movie that has no known director that was shot in Oregon and has Lynn Holmes (The Undergraduate), Nora Wieternik (Flesh Gordon) and Rene Bond’s husband Ric Lutze in it. No one is sure who the other actors are, either. They play three couples who are looking for Sasquatch in the woods or as this movie refers to it, The Geek.

Of course, as you expected, all the couples have sex. Perhaps you didn’t think one would say that his sister allowed him to fondle her breasts, but look, this is 1971 sleaze and there aren’t any rules like good taste. We haven’t even gotten to the monster, who looks like Andre the Giant on The Six Million Dollar Man if he got stuck in the costume and kept pissing himself inside it.

This movie is 50 minutes long and finds time to have two crypto sexual assaults in it, which had to be what some people were looking for. I learned that Bigfoot has a small pink member and that he prefers it doggy style. Squatchy style?

This is the kind of adult film that is just so squalid and sweaty and disgusting and you know I had to watch it. There are some things in this life you need to live through, like Bigfoot pornography.