Before Tom DeSimone became the guy who gave us the sleaze-pop masterpiece Hell Night, the iconic Reform School Girls and the Linda Blair-led Savage Streets, he made what the poster called “The First Real Adult Film in 3D!”

Let’s be honest: this is softcore. It’s the kind of movie you could maybe sit through with your dad, but you’d be sweating bullets if your mom walked into the room. 

We kick things off in the prison shower—because, of course, we do. We’ve got Gertie (the legendary Annik Borel, better known as the Werewolf Woman) trying to get intimate with Cindy (the queen of 70s adult cinema, Uschi Digard). But they get cockblocked by the warden, Dr. Reinhardt, who decides to let a group of inmates into the general population for two days as part of a rehab program.

Does this work out? Of course not. The outside world is just as messed up as the slammer. But you didn’t come here for the plot, did you? You came for the 3D experience. And the sleaze. So you want body painting? You got Candy Samples getting turned into a living canvas. You want a cast that reads like an exploitation “Who’s Who“? Feast your eyes on Jacqueline Giroux  Trick or Treats and Drive-In Massacre), Tracy Handfuss (A Clockwork Blue, Psyched by the 4D Witch), Maria Arnold (Fantasm), Liz Wolfe (Fantasm Comes Again), Linda York (A Scream in the Streets), Marsha Jordan (Teen-Age Jail Bait) and Neola Graef (Cries of Ecstasy, Blows of Death).

Critics might argue that The Stewardesses beat it to the 3D adult punch by three years, but who cares about semantics? They could also say that this is less a movie and more a series of softcore lovemaking scenes strung together by the thinnest thread of plot imaginable.

Who listens to them?

Lee Marvin—the man who makes granite look like playdough—goes to Kansas to turn a meatpacking plant into a graveyard in Michael Ritchie’s Prime Cut.

Marvin plays Nick Devlin, a Chicago mob enforcer sent to Kansas City to collect a $500,000 debt from Mary Ann (Gene Hackman). Mary Ann isn’t just running a wholesale meatpacking plant; he’s running a human trafficking operation. He buys desperate young women, keeps them sedated on drugs and sells them off to the highest bidder. This grim setup creates a dark, unsettling atmosphere that contrasts sharply with the sunny, Americana backdrop of the Kansas county fair, where much of the film takes place.

It’s a dangerous job. After all, one of Devlin’s predecessors gets turned into a hot dog by Weenie (Gregory Walcott). But Nick is the ultimate cool professional in a world that’s gone completely sideways. And Hackman? He’s playing Mary Ann with a mix of reptilian charm and total instability that reminds you why he’s one of the best to ever do it. Keep an eye out for Angel Tompkins as Mary Ann’s wife and a young Sissy Spacek in her screen debut as Poppy. She’s the soul of the film in a sea of absolute scumbags.

The story might be a mess, but there’s a wheat thresher used as a murder weapon and some of the best actors in an action movie. So yeah, it goes nowhere. But it’s a cool ride. 

Piranha, Piranha isn’t the Joe Dante creature-feature you’re likely thinking of, but rather a sweaty, low-budget Venezuelan adventure. Wildlife photographers Art (Tom Simcox) and his sister Terry (Ahna Capri, Enter the Dragon) head into the Amazon, presumably to capture some stunning shots of nature. They hire Jim Pendrake (Peter Brown), an American guide who presumably knows his way around the bush. However, the travel itinerary goes to hell once they cross paths with Caribe (William Smith), a local hunter who has decided that humans are just as fun to track and kill as the local wildlife.

It’s essentially The Most Dangerous Game set against the backdrop of the rainforest, where the characters have to worry about both the guy with the rifle and the titular flesh-eating fish waiting in the murk.

The film is a curiosity, directed by William Gibson (no, not that techomancer; this is the director’s only movie) and written by Richard Finder (also his only work on IMDb). While these names aren’t exactly household staples in the pantheon of cinema greats, they delivered a flick that serves as a perfect time capsule of 70s grindhouse adventure. The production is a scrappy international affair, filmed on location in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Colombia, giving it an authentic, rough-around-the-edges grit that you just can’t replicate on a soundstage.

You’ve got William Smith, a legendary tough guy of B-movie cinema, chewing the scenery as the villain. He makes every movie better. Pairing him with Peter Brown is a treat for fans of the 1960s show Laredo, where the two played Texas Rangers.

The setup is classic grindhouse comfort food: an expedition gone wrong, deep in the South American jungle. You’ve got the requisite crew of researchers, some high-stakes tension, and, of course, the ever-present threat of being reduced to a skeleton in mere seconds by a swarm of hyper-aggressive, aquatic pests. What makes Piranha, Piranha truly special in that specific, battered-print-from-a-drive-in kind of way is the commitment to the danger of the jungle.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Oh René Cardona. Here you are remaking the lucha libre movie you did back in 1962, Las Luchadoras Contra el Medico Asesino, or The Wrestling Women vs. the Killer Doctor or Doctor of Doom, as it was called in the U.S.

While this was made in 1969 as La Horripilante Bestia Humana, or The Horrible Man-Beast, this one didn’t play in the U.S. until 1972. With alternate titles like Horror y Sexo and Gomar – The Human Gorilla, this is a fine blend of ladies wrestling with apes and, well, human heart surgery footage.

Rene is also known for his films Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy, the incredibly baffling Santa Claus and Survive!, a movie all about plane crashes and cannibalism.

Female masked wrestler, Lucy, dresses like the devil and wrestles at the arena — dare we say Arena Mexico? — every Friday, where she often knocks out other girls who dress like cat girls. She wants to retire for a life of leisure — and less stress — with her cop boyfriend.

However, Dr. Krellman (Jose Elias Moreno, who was Santa Claus in the aforementioned film in which he battled Patch the demon) wants to cure his son of leukemia. So he does what doctors have always said would work—puts a gorilla heart inside his boy. As we all know from health class, this turns his son into a deformed and murderous man-ape with the craziness of the organ donor to boot.

The inclusion of actual, grainy footage of a human heart transplant was a common shocker tactic in Latin American and European exploitation of the time. It provides a stomach-churning realism that clashes wildly with the rubbery, sweaty Gorilla-Man makeup.

You won’t be bored, what with the nudity, real open heart surgery and rampant murders. A monkey man that rips off dudes’ faces and the clothes of girls? Si, muchacho.

This made the Section 1 video nasties list, probably because its VHS cover art had a bloody surgeon’s hands holding a scalpel with the words “Warning: this film contains scenes of extreme and explicit violence.”

Night of the Bloody Apes is a bizarre cocktail of genres that shouldn’t work, yet remains endlessly watchable. It manages to be a sports movie, a medical thriller, a monster flick and a procedural all at once.

You can watch this for free on Tubi.

You know those movies that feel like a cold, damp fog rolling off the English Channel? The ones where everyone wears thick knit sweaters and looks like they haven’t seen a sunbeam since the late sixties? That’s Neither the Sea Nor the Sand. It’s a romance from beyond the grave flick that treats romance with the bleak, grey reality of a rotting corpse that just won’t quit you.

Anna Robinson (Susan Hampshire) is having a rough go of it. She’s ditched her husband and fled to the island of Jersey to get her head straight. While wandering the dunes, she meets Hugh Debernon (Michael Jayston). They fall into that kind of intense, us-against-the-world love that usually ends in a double suicide or a very awkward Thanksgiving. Speaking of awkward, Hugh’s brother George is a religious zealot who thinks Anna is basically the Whore of Babylon in a trench coat.

The lovers head to Scotland for some “Is this just an affair?” soul-searching. Hugh promises it’s the real deal, but then—boom—he drops dead on a beach while playing tag. The local doc checks the pulse, signs the papers and calls it a day. Anna, understandably, loses her mind with grief.

But then Hugh just… gets up and walks back into the house that night.

Anna is thrilled and thinks the doctor was a quack. The audience, however, sees Hugh’s thousand-yard stare and realizes he’s basically a flesh-puppet for Anna’s sheer willpower. The trip back to Jersey marks the end of the honeymoon. Hugh has stopped talking entirely. He just sits there, staring at Anna with eyes that say, “I’m currently decomposing.“

George isn’t buying the miracle story. He’s convinced Anna is a witch who conjured an evil spirit to pilot his brother’s meat-suit. To prove it, he literally burns Hugh’s hand to see if he flinches. (Spoiler: He doesn’t. Hugh starts “talking” to Anna in her head. He pretends to go along with George’s plan for an exorcism, but during the car ride to see the priest, Hugh uses his zombie-psychic powers to run George’s car off a cliff. There’s even some Bewitched sound effects!

The cops show up to tell Hugh his brother is dead, leading to a truly bizarre scene where Anna hands over Hugh’s own death certificate from Scotland while he sits in the corner acting like a very aggressive mannequin. Eventually, the reality of the situation—and the smell?—becomes too much. Anna realizes that if she wants to be with her man, she’s gotta go where he’s going. The film ends with the two of them walking hand in hand into the freezing ocean, while their friend Collie watches from the shore, probably wondering whether he should have called a mental health professional three weeks ago.

Directed by Fred Burnley and written by Rosemary Davies, based on a book by Gordon Honeycombe, this is the kind of romance movie for people who like the fog and the grave. You know who you are.

You can get it from Vinegar Syndrome.

Call it Il paese del sesso selvaggio (The Country of Savage Sex). Or refer to it as Deep River Savages and Sacrifice! Or just say it by the name most of the U.S. saw it as, Man from Deep River. Whatever title you see it as, you can claim to have seen the first movie in Italy’s cannibal cycle, which, like all filones, takes another, the mondo, and goes even further.

British photographer John Bradley (Ivan Rassimov, who was Serbian) has been photographing the Thai wildlife. A boxing match is more interesting to him than the woman he’s with and soon, he’s so drunk that he’s stabbing a man in a bar fight. Then, it’s time to go into the heart of darkness and go down the river. He wakes up, and his guide is dead, and he’s been taken, as the natives believe him to be a merman thanks to his wetsuit. 

After some torture, the chief Luhanà agrees to release John to Maraya (Burmese/British cannibal movie queen Me Me Lai), who has shown an interest in him. Her governess, Taima, speaks English and decides to help him escape. That night, a helicopter comes close, and John tries and fails to get away, killing Maraya’s fiancé, Karen. This, for some reason, makes him seem like he could be a member of the tribe, so they start to torture him all over again to see if he belongs. In case you’re wondering, yes, this would like you to think it’s A Man Called Horse.

By the end of the film, he’s had a child with Maraya, but she doesn’t make it. When the helicopter comes to rescue him again, he hides and goes deeper into the jungle, having left the world of civilization behind.

This film was a huge success in New York City’s grindhouses, but it ran into problems when it tried to cross the pond. Even though the BBFC took one look at the celluloid in ’75 and slammed the door on a theatrical release, the flick pulled a fast one, sneaking into UK homes under the title Deep River Savages. But you can’t keep a good exploitation film down for long without the moral crusaders noticing. By 1983, when the DPP was busy clutching their pearls and drafting the infamous Video Nasties list, Lenzi’s opus was right there in the crosshairs. Once the Video Recordings Act of 1984 became the law of the land, the UK government dropped the hammer. Deep River Savages wasn’t just trimmed. It was banned in its entirety until 2003, when three minutes were cut. In 2016, another release saw three more minutes chopped with the same disdain that animals are sliced to bits in this. In the U.S., this got an R rating.

Director Umberto Lenzi really hit almost every filone Italy had to offer, from peplum (Samson and the Slave Queen) and Eurospy (008: Operation Exterminate, SuperSeven Calling Cairo) to comic book movies (Kriminal, Tarzan In the Golden Grotto), giallo (Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, Eyeball, Spasmo), pliziotteschi (The Tough Ones), Conan rip-offs (Ironmaster), horror (Ghosthouse, Nightmare Beach) and even VHS era cash-ins (Primal Rage, Hitcher In the Dark). He also made two more cannibal films, Eaten Alive! (which takes scenes from this film) and Cannibal Ferox, which was released in the U.S. as Make Them Die Slowly. 

In case you’re wondering about that scene where Me Me Lai gets raw-dogged on the ashes of her dead fiancé, it’s based on truth and isn’t just the kind of transgressive imagery we expect in Italian movies. It’s based on a traditional African ritual known as widow cleansing. In the internal logic of the culture, a woman becomes dirty when her husband dies. She’s essentially a walking biohazard of bad luck and grief, supposedly possessed by the lingering spirit of the deceased. To stop this curse from spreading like a supernatural virus through the rest of the village, the widow has to be scrubbed clean and the only way to wash away the shadows of the dead is through a three-day marathon of unprotected sex with a purifier, who is usually the dead guy’s brother.

A warning: For many fans of cult and exploitation cinema, scenes of real animal death are often the ones that make the movie difficult to revisit. Here is the breakdown of the animals killed on screen in this film:

• A Crocodile: This is one of the film’s more protracted and famous scenes. The animal is dragged from the water, bound and then cut open and gutted while still alive.
• A Python/Large Snake: The snake is decapitated during a sequence intended to show the dangers of the jungle.
• A Monkey: In a scene that reflects the survival tropes of the genre, a monkey is killed and its brain is eaten by the characters.
• A Mongoose vs. Cobra: True to the mondo style that influenced Lenzi, there is a sequence featuring a fight between a mongoose and a cobra that ends with the snake’s death.

While Man from Deep River is often praised for its lush cinematography and for being more of a fish-out-of-water adventure than the later, more mean-spirited cannibal films like Cannibal Holocaust (intended as a Lenzi-directed sequel, but he turned it down twice), the inclusion of these non-simulated animal deaths remains its most controversial element.