Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!
Sheldon Seymour is Herschell Gordon Lewis. Miss Nymphet’s Zap-In is Laugh-In. The difference is that this has nudity and the jokes aren’t as good. Then again, to younger people who never watched Laugh-In, this is going to seem strange. And really, it may only be important to hardcore fans of the Godfather of Gore.
The song “Miss Nymphet (Zap!)” by The Zaps, who are really Herschell’s son Robert, plays throughout the movie and you get jokes like this:
Go-Go Dancer #1: Do you know how to catch one of us topless dancers?
Go-Go Dancer #2: I’ll tell you. With a booby trap!
It’s also a lot like the cartoons that would be in a rip off of Playboy like Cavalier or Flirt.
Actresses in this include Dixie Donovan (Angelica: The Young Vixen), Luanne Roberts (Bonnie’s Kids), Phyllis Stengel (Take It Out In Trade), Julie Conners (Night of the Witches and the adult movie that nearly ruined Lash LaRue, Hard On the Trail), Bambi Allen (who plays Miss Nymphet; she was also in Lash of Lust), Mary Jane Shippen (Don’t Just Lay There) and Debbie Osborne (The Cult).
I’m going to watch all of Lewis’ movies, so sometimes you have to work your way through some rough ones. The rounder 1970s bodies helped.
Herschell Gordon Lewis week (July 14 – 20) HG seemed to truly love packing theaters. He’s most famous for introducing gore to horror movies, but he’d fill any need that the audience had. He made every genre of exploitation __ – even kids movies! Gore movies would’ve happened eventually, but Herschell seemed to take joy in crafting gross-out shocks for unsuspecting cineasts. INTERESTING FACT! HG Lewis was a huge fan of Kentucky Fried Chicken and had them cater all of his productions. Col. Harland Sanders himself appeared in Lewis’ Blast Off Girls!
Reverend Roscoe Boone (Jeffrey Allen, who was the Mayor in Two Thousand Maniacs!) isn’t really a man of the cloth, but don’t tell the people in his deep southern town, who he rules over as he sells moonshine and keeps the law — Agent Colt (Tim Holt) and Markel (Prentis Smithson) — at bay by getting them wasted under threat of death and then taking compromising pictures of them with underage girls.
I mean, you can see why they follow him. He gets everyone in town drunk, gives them work and then is given to fiery sermons like “Corinthians done sayeth: “It is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.” Now, all you boys with passion get in line there.” And then all the young boys get to make out with the hottest women in town.
This is the kind of place where tourists like Sandy (Dana Demonbreun) and Jane (Joy Smothermon) come to visit and get crucified and one of the girls who set up the feds decides to tell the law that she lied, which leads to her getting stoned. There’s also a head that gets blown off that’s so brutal that I was like, “Oh yeah. This is a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie.”
It’s also Larry Drake’s first movie.
If you’re into scummy Southern movies with lots of blood and aberrant sexuality — and who isn’t — this will satisfy your urges. Kind of like moonshine, this stuff won’t kill you but enough might make you blind.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Night of Dark Shadows was on the CBS Late Movie on June 13, 1977.
After the success of 1970’s House of Dark Shadows, MGM wanted a sequel. The show was off the air and Curtis thought that this would be the perfect time to bring back Barnabas Collins, but Johnathan Frid was fearful of being typecast.
To his credit, Curtis didn’t recast the role and worked on an all-new story, originally called Curse of Dark Shadows. They even hired spiritualist Hans Holzer — yes, the guy who wrote one of the Amityville books — to be on set and loosely followed the parallel world sequence of the show, focusing on the popular Quentin Collins.
With just 24 hours notice, MGM forced Curtis to cut over 35 minutes from the movie, which makes it pretty incoherent. The film that was to be was much darker and more intense.
While this movie did fine, it didn’t have the magic or box office of the last one. Which is a real shame, because I love it.
Quentin Collins (David Selby, also of the Dark Shadows TV show) has arrived at Collinwood with his wife Tracy (Kate Jackson) and is mesmerized by the portrait of Angelique (Lara Parker, also reprising her role from the show).
John Karlen and Nancy Barrett show up as Alex and Claire Jenkins, two horror novelists who have moved into one of the guest houses. They’re about to learn just how crazy Collinwood can get, what with the housekeeper Carlotta (Grayson Hall, who played several Dark Shadows characters, but foremost amongst them Dr. Julia Hoffman) revealing that nearly everyone here is reincarnated from the past of the house, with herself as Sarah Castle and Quentin as Charles Collins, who once was the love of, yes, Angelique, who was hung as a witch. Seeing as how Charles was having an affair with her — the wife of his brother, no less — he was buried alive next to her corpse.
Hijinks, as they say, ensue. Hijinks like murder, possession, women hung in the trees and a girl holding a doll.
You also get Dark Shadows regulars Jim Storm as Gerard Stiles, Diana Millay (whose role as the phoenix-like Laura Collins was the first supernatural character on the show), Christopher Pennock as Gabriel Collins, Thayer David (who again, played many characters on the show) and Clarice Blackburn, who missed the last Dark Shadows film.
I spent years hunting this down on DVD and it was worth the effort. Perhaps the best viewing I’ve enjoyed of this film was in a rainy and foggy drive-in, late into the night. Does life get any better than that?
EDITOR’S NOTE: Escape from the Planet of the Apes was on the CBS Late Movie on September 6, 1977.
“Apes exist, Sequel required.”
With those words, sent in a telegram from producer Arthur P. Jacobs to writer Paul Dehn, a sequel was set in motion to Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
But hey — didn’t everyone die in a nuclear bomb blast at the end of that movie?
They sure did.
Doesn’t matter.
Dehn decided that Cornelius and Zira — along with an inventor ape named Milo — would go back in time with Taylor’s ship. He also consulted Pierre Boulle, writer of the original Planet of the Apes novel, to add more satire to the story. Originally titled Secret of the Planet of the Apes, the results are rather genius, as only three ape actors allowed for a smaller budget while selling director Don Taylor (Damien: The Omen II andThe Final Countdown) on the idea of making the film more humorous.
Cornelius (Roddy McDowall), Zira (Kim Hunter) and Dr. Milo (Sal Mineo!) have escaped the ruin of future Earth and landed back in 1973, where they are taken to the Los Angeles Zoo, where Dr. Stephanie Branton (Natalie Trundy, the wife of producer Jacobs and the only actor to portray every single race in the Apes universe) and Dr. Lewis Dixon (Bradford Dillman!) are set to examine them.
In private, the apes elect to not to let the humans know that they can speak. They also can’t tell them that, you know, they once dissected humans and that everyone else died in the Ape War. But man, those humans act so condescending to Zira and she flips out and shows them just how smart she is. And then she starts talking. And then, well, a mishap allows a zoo gorilla to kill Dr. Milo. Luckily — and in spite of this — Lewis ends up friends with the chimpanzees.
Meanwhile, a Presidential Commission has been formed to investigate the return of Taylor’s spaceship and determine what these apes are all about. Cornelius and Zira become celebrities over night and everyone loves them.
That’s not sitting well with President’s Science Advisor Dr. Otto Hasslein (Eric Braeden, Titanic, Colossus: The Forbin Project), who discovers that Zira is with child and therefore fears for the future of humanity. He gets her drunk — dude, she’s pregnant! — and she reveals all, which means that now it’s time for the government to really interrogate them. After some truth syrum, Zira reveals that yes, she has dissected humans before and yes, she knew Taylor before he died.
Hasslein takes his findings to the President (William Windom), who must agree with the council that Zira’s pregnancy is to be aborted — guess he’s not a Right to Lifer — and that they must both be sterilized. After his child is called a little monkey by an orderly, Cornelius goes wild and accidentally kills the man before they escape.
Branton and Dixon help the apes to escape, where they hid out in the circus run by Senor Armando (Ricardo Montalban!), where an ape named Heloise has just given birth. Zira also gives birth to a son, whom she names Milo in honor of their deceased friend.
Hasslein is more animal than the apes, tracking them to a shipyard. The couple do not want to be taken alive, which suits him just fine. He fires numerous shots into Zira and her baby to the horror of all watching. Cornelius kills him in retaliation before being shot by a sniper. The couple crawl toward each other, touching one another one more time before dying.
Meanwhile, at Armando’s circus, we learn that Zira switched children with Heloise and Milo has survived. As the ringmaster walks away, we hear his first words as he cries for his mother.
Somehow, each Apes film tops the previous one for total downer endings.
It could have been worse — Cornelius and Zira were originally going to be ripped apart by a pack of Doberman Pinschers!
James Bacon shows up here — the only actor to be in all five of the Apes films. He also would go on to write numerous books about Hollywood, including the Jackie Gleason biography How Sweet It Is: The Jackie Gleason Story. This is the only movie in the series where he plays a human being.
Detroit TV announcer — he was mostly on WXYZ-TV — Bill Bonds plays a TV newsman. John Randolph plays a councilman, a role he’d also play in the next film, and he’s in another monkey movie, the 1976 remake of King Kong. M. Emmet Walsh also makes an appearance. And Albert Salmi, who is in Superstition, is here as well.
Sal Mineo found the makeup process very uncomfortable and tiring. Kim Hunter would later say that she and Roddy McDowall had to hug Mineo a lot to console him. He had hoped that this movie would restart his career, as it did McDowall’s, but due to how much he hated the make-up, he was killed off earlier than originally planned. Escape from the Planet of the Apes would be Mineo’s final theatrical film before he was murdered on February 12, 1976 at the age of 37.
Bleeding Skull’s Top 50 (July 7 – 13) The middle-brow champions of low-brow horror, Bleeding Skull has picked out some of their favorites from the SWV catalog. They neglected to put I Drink Your Blood or EEGAH!on the list, but I think I can forgive them since they included Ship of Monsters.
Zodiac Killer is just as much an attempt to catch the never arrested real-life Zodiac Killer as it was to cash in as an exploitation movie.
On its opening night on April 7, 1971 at the RKO Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco, audience members were asked to write their answers to the question “I think the Zodiac kills because …” and drop their entries into a large box. They were told that they could win a Kawasaki motorcycle, but they were also having their handwriting being tested by experts against the actual handwriting of the killer. Members of the cast were waiting to grab and interrogate anyone whose penmanship was suspect.
I don’t see David Fincher doing that.
In the first half of this movie, Grover (Bob Jones) bemoans his life. He’s a drunk and balding tow truck driver who can’t even see his daughter whenever he wants to. He takes her hostage and decides to tell the cops that he’s the Zodiac. She runs away and he gets the due process of being shot a whole bunch of times, his body falling into a swimming pool.
The truth, as shown in the second half, is that the Zodiac is Grover’s friend Jerry (Hal Reed). He’s a Satanist who hates humanity when he isn’t delivering their mail. He blames his crimes on the fact that his father is mentally ill, then his closing voiceover warns the audience that he will never been caught and that there are others just like him.
Along with Another Son of Sam, Zodiac Rapist and even Dirty Harry, the Zodiac was all over 70s cinema. This film’s director Tom Hanson — according to Mental Floss— “had found his niche as the owner of several Pizza Man franchises and a handful of Kentucky Fried Chicken locations.” He spent $13,000 of his money making this movie, which was less about making a good film and more about luring the Zodiac to the theater. He believes that he met the Zodiac at the urinal, when a man next to him said, “You know, real blood doesn’t come out like that.” As for his research, at least Hanson met with reporter Paul Avery, who also gave this quote that started some prints of this movie: “The motion picture you are about to see was conceived in June 1970. Its goal is not to win commercial awards but to create an “awareness of a present danger”, Zodiac is based on known facts. If some of the scenes, dialogue, and letters seem strange and unreal, remember – they happened. My life was threatened on October 28, 1970 by Zodiac. His victims have received no warnings. They were unsuspecting people like you.”
They may have missed the killer despite their plans, as co-writer Ray Cantrell was hiding inside a freezer to watch audience members. He nearly passed out and as he was being rescued, someone left a card that said, “I am the Zodiac, I was here.” No one was able to see who left that message.
There was a documentary called The Zodiac Killer Trap that discussed how Hanson spent years keeping up on the man who he met in the bathroom, who was still alive as of 2019.
As for the movie, it’s as good as $13,000 and amateur filmmaking will allow. It does have Doodles Weaver in an absolute freakout of a performance, ranting and snarling dialogue like “I like ’em plump and juicy and dumb!” A member of Spike Jones’s City Slickers band, a writer for Mad Magazine, the uncle of Sigourney Weaver and a frequent cameo and guest star actor, his full name was Winstead Sheffield Glenndenning Dixon Weaver. You’ll wonder how life led him to be in this movie.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Billy Jack was on the CBS Late Movie on November 14, 1980 and November 20, 1981.
You may have thought that Billy Jack was dead after The Born Losers, shot in the back while trying to do the right thing. The truth is, he was just getting started. An anti-authority film, this movie struggled to be made, with American International Pictures pulling out while it was being made. Then, 20th Century Fox stepped in but refused to distribute the film. Auteur Tom Laughlin would not release the sound for the film, making it unreleasable until he could own the film himself, getting Warner Brothers to distribute it. He was unhappy with how Warner Brothers sold the film, so he sued them and finally released the movie himself.
At the heart of the film, the movie presents a conundrum: the only way to achieve peace is to repeatedly beat the stuffing out of people.
Also, the Navajo Green Beret Vietnam War veteran and hapkido master known as Billy Jack is played by director (as T.C. Frank), producer (as Mary Rose Solti) and co-writer (as Frank Christina) Tom Laughlin, who is totally white. That said, the role of Billy Jack is anything but the way that Native Americans had been portrayed up until the early 70s.
Laughlin was also a muckraker, really in the best of ways. He’d written the film nearly two decades before after seeing the way Native Americans were treated in Winner, South Dakota, the home of his wife Delores Taylor. What took so long to get it to screen? Well, beyond building his acting career, Laughlin also quit acting in 1959 to start a Montessori preschool in Santa Monica, California.
After the school went out of business, he went back into acting and after the Billy Jack series, he was set to change the world with Billy Jack Enterprises, which had plans for a new Montessori school, a record label, an investigative magazine, books, a distribution company and more message-laden movies, including films for children. Yet the last movie, Billy Jack Goes to Washington, didn’t connect with audiences. Or, as Laughlin charged, it was the fault of Warner Brothers illegally selling the television rights to his films. Or even Senator Vance Hartke, who he said told him that, “You’ll never get this released. This house you have, everything will be destroyed.” in front of Lucille Ball, angered that the film correctly pointed out how senators were owned by lobbyists.
There was going to be a fifth film, The Return of Billy Jack, that ended in the 2000s when Laughoun got hurt and the money ran out. He claimed for years that it would get made with the title changing to Billy Jack’s Crusade to End the War in Iraq and Restore America to Its Moral Purpose, Billy Jack’s Moral Revolution and Billy Jack for President, with the plan to have Billy Jack and President George W. Bush debate each other.
Man, I wish that was made.
That said, the original Billy Jack is an incredibly strange movie, a film made of a singular vision.
Billy Jack is the defender of the Freedom School, a school full of happy children taught my Laughlin’s real-life wife Delores, who are assaulted from all sides by the horrible folks of the redneck town where, for some reason, they have decided to make their home. A movie this strange demands a run-on sentence like that to describe it.
This is the kind of movie where the hero must face off with a snake and purposefully be bitten with venom so that he can become brothers with the snake, as well as have a theme song “One Tin Soldier (The Legend of Billy Jack),” which was recorded by Jinx Dawson and her band Coven, whose album Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls is as metal as it gets, even featuring a black mass as its second side.
You don’t really watch Billy Jack. It washes over you. The words I use to describe it aren’t enough. It’s absolutely ridiculous in the finest of ways and I really want you to experience it.
Uschi Digard week (June 23 – 29) Digard is best known for her work with Russ Meyer but she became an SWV fan favorite for two gargantuan reasons, her charm and her prolific career. The Swiss actress fled to America in 1968 and began a long career filling the silver screen from corner to corner with her overflowing positive energy. Show the lady some respect and watch one of her movies.
A section 3 video nasty and a production of Harry Novak, this movie should come complete with soap so that you can clean yourself up after the way you feel post-watch. But hey, before we luxuriate in filth, let’s talk about Harry and Boxoffice International Pictures.
Just take a cursory scan through some of the films that Boxoffice brought to the eyes of maniacs like you and me: Kiss Me Quick! in which an alien comes to our planet in search of feminine breeding stock*, the spectacularly named mondo Suburban Pagans, the drinking suburban housewives and their pot-smoking daughters in The Muthers, Jean Rollin’s The Nude Vampire, the Gary Graver-directed Erika’s Hot Summer, redneck trash (a good thing) like Country Cuzzins and Sweet Georgia, the brutal and wonderful Toys Are Not for Children, The Sinful Dwarf, Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks, Lisa, Rattlers, The Child and so many more. When I first started buying trailer collections, the Something Weird Extra Weird Sampler was where I first saw Harry’s signature swirl onto my screen and then blow my mind with the aberrant junk that he was fostering on the movie buying public.
The actual story of this movie isn’t really a story as much as it’s an opportunity to get single women one handing it and couplings two handing it. So yeah, Ralph has taken Donna to see his crazy uncle again, but first she has to see her man in the boat before putting on a scene before the somehow dead and yet able to speak from beyond the grave uncle. And then this movie makes me wonder, who is this for? Who wants to see fellatio interrupted by stabbing or Uschi Digard have sex with — not in — a bed** or a necrophilia scene that ends with a pitchfork murder? Someone, I guess. As Harry Novak himself once said, “When I was a kid, my Daddy told me, “There’s a buyer for everything.” And I lived to find out that he was right.”
But if you make it through all that freaky 70s not so sexy sex, well, you learn the truth. The fact that Donna is really the uncle who is really an alien who sells human brains as drugs on the planet Arkon and the gifts promised from the toy box are really death as we watch a whole bunch of hippies get trapped inside a death house.
Director and writer Ronald Víctor García started out as an electro-mechanical packaging designer for the Apollo Command Module, the Saturn Stage II Helium Purge System and the Polaris Atomic Submarine Launching Systems before making movies like this. And somehow, some way, he became the director of photography for Twin Peaks and One from the Heart. In fact, he’s still out there today, working as a cinematographer on The Good Fight.
I wouldn’t say that this movie was good, but I will say that I was pretty messed up in a good way by it. It has a great movie somewhere in there and I wished that they had found it.
*Harry had a thing for sexy aliens, producing one of my favorite named movies of all time, 1975’s Wham! Bam! Thank You, Spaceman!
**To be fair, I am a red-blooded male and I am willing to watch Uschi Digard do pretty much whatever she wants to do.
Uschi Digard week (June 23 – 29) Digard is best known for her work with Russ Meyer but she became an SWV fan favorite for two gargantuan reasons, her charm and her prolific career. The Swiss actress fled to America in 1968 and began a long career filling the silver screen from corner to corner with her overflowing positive energy. Show the lady some respect and watch one of her movies.
Long thought to either be a lost film or only having a single print still in existence that was in German with no subtitles, this movie supposedly lives as a 35mm print in the library of Quentin Tarantino.
Directed and written by Albert Zugsmith (Movie Star, American Style or; LSD, I Hate You; The Chinese Room and one of the worst movies ever made, Dondi) — who used the name Kentucky Jones so that the real Manson Family wouldn’t creepy crawl his house — this was also known as Together Girls, House of Bondage and the best possible exploitation title possible, The Manson Massacre.
Invar (Makee K. Blaisdell, who had played many Native Americans on TV) is our Manson. He spends much of the film sleeping in a coffin and having flashbacks, like how he used to have sex with his mom, who is played by Uschi Digard. He also killed his dad with a chair.
This is the kind of movie whose legends are better than the reality, like the one that Lee Frost directed it or that it was made by the Mansons. That said, cinematographer Robert Maxwell also worked on the adult movie The Ramrodder that was shot at Spahn Ranch and had Bobby Beausoleil and Catherine Share in the cast. So maybe sometimes, the lie is based in real life.
The cast includes Debbie Osborne (The Toy Box), April 1972 Playboy Playmate of the Month Vicki Peters (Blood Mania), Lindis Guinness (Grave of the Vampire) and James Whitworth, Jupiter from The Hills Have Eyes.
I wish that I could tell you that this was an amazing piece of adult film but no. It certainly isn’t. It does, however, have a scene where a baby is tossed into a dumpster.
Originally a play by Ira Levin — A Kiss Before Dying, Rosemary’s Baby, Deathtrap, The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil and Sliver to name a few — this is only the second dramatic role for star Bing Crosby, who took over the part that Burl Ives played on Broadway, Dr. Leonard Cook.
He’s the center of Greenfield, Vermont, responsible for the fact that there is hardly any crime and so much happiness. The man who is like a father to, Jimmy Tennyson( Jimmy Converse), comes back home and wants to be a doctor as well, but Cook is against it. This is his town.
Cook’s assistant Dora Ludlow (Abby Lewis) tells Tennyson to keep working on the older man, who has heart problems, as he needs an assistant. The young doctor also glows close to a former love, Janey Rausch (Blythe Danner). He soon figures out that all of the deaths in town are Dr. Cook pruning his garden of those who aren’t morally right for his small bit of heaven.
Originally airing on January 19, 1971 on ABC, this was directed by Ted Post, who we all know made The Baby and Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Writer Art Wallace worked on the Planet of the Apes TV series, as well as She Waits and being one of the creators of Dark Shadows. This is a really effective — and quick — movie. You’ll see the twist coming, but the end is so moving and Crosby is so good in this role, you’ll be along for every step of the ride.
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Lieutenant Pete Tolstad, the character played by Telly Savalas in this made for TV movie, feels like the early version of Kojak before that show would air in 1973. Tolstad grew up in the same neighborhood that is now his beat. He’s never had a real Christmas. He just does his job.
Directed by Marvin J. Chomsky (Tank, Evel Knievel, Roots) and written by Herman Miller and based on the book by E. Richard Johnson. Johnson was a convicted armed robber and murderer who wrote all eleven of his books from his cell at Stillwater State Prison in Minnesota. He started writing to pass the time in prison and his novel Silver Street won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for 1968 and the follow-up, which this movie is based on, was considered an even better book. Despite his success, he got into drugs while in prison. He escaped and went back into crime before being recaptured and stayed in jail until 1991.
Everyone is interested in the reasons why Mongo Nash (Joe Don Baker) is back in town and why he’s spending time with a young girl named Vikki (Sally Field) who has just come to town from West Virginia. Is he in town to do a hit for his brother Mike (Charles Cioffi)? Or does he just want left alone?
This has a great cast. Martin Sheen plays Tolstad’s partner Mike and Anne Francis is a gangster’s moll who Savalas has a flirty scene with. Baker is great and somehow makes a killer into someone that you feel some level of empathy for and the way he treats Vikki. Ah yes. He is a killer. On the way to the brutal ending, we have people get acid thrown in their faces and everyone is fair game for murder including kids.
Originally airing on CBS on December 10, 1971, this is also known as Steel Wreath, which is a strange title and probably one that makes more sense once Johnson and his books were forgotten. Perhaps they didn’t want people to think this was a Blazing Saddles sequel, which there was one that is forgotten and was a TV series.
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