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

Shot in a historical castle in the small village of Crêvecoeur, Requiem for a Vampire finds director Jean Rollin’s fourth female vampire movie. The castle was nice — it was filled with expensive antiques — but Rollin was more interested in the dungeons that overlooked the entire region.

Marie-Pierre Castel, who starred in Rollin’s The Nude Vampire and Shiver of the Vampires along with her twin sister Catherine, stars and is joined by Mireille Dargent, whose agent was stealing her wages for the movie and Rollin figured that out and got her paid.

They play Marie (Castel) and Michelle (Dargent), who first appear as clowns on the run from unseen pursuers. Their driver is killed and they race into the woods where they are nearly buried alive in a cemetery and then an ancient castle filled with bats and a cozy bed to make love in. The castle is filled with skeletons and a male and female vampire. Of course, the male has designs on them, wanting them for his virginal eternal vampire brides, but Michelle ends up sleeping with another man which ruins those plans and almost destroys her relationship with her true love Marie.

He was learning however and got past censors by shooting a version where the girls stayed clothed, even when being whipped and while they engaged in a sapphic embrace. Most countries can handle horrific violence; the form of a nude woman is where the problems begin.

This is the only movie I’ve ever seen where a vampire bat goes down on a woman, so for that alone, Jean Rollin has my respect if not obsession.

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.

Before he made his first movie — Troika — in 1969, Frederic Hobbs was an artist who went from the traditional to a whole way of presenting art, creating parade sculptures that took art from the museum to the people. That’s when he figured it out — to get the people to see something as art, you should hide it in a film. He also created the films Roseland and Alabama’s Ghost before this one. And honestly, nothing can prepare you for this.

Imagine if David Lynch made a 1950’s nuclear warning monster film. But before you go see it, you get in a car crash and suffer a really bad concussion. Cool. Then, someone spikes your Icee with a dose of LSD that would cripple Owsley “Bear” Stanley. You now have a very, very small idea of just how crazy things are about to get.

There are two stories happening here: a scientist is trying to crack the code on a mysterious sheep-like creature while a conservative landowner fights being bought out by prospectors. All in Virginia City, Nevada, which was once the richest city in America after the silver and gold rush. The mines went dry, the people went away and the only people left are tourists staring at a dead husk.

I have to tell you, you’ve never quite seen a creature quite like the Godmonster. At once it appears to be the most real and yet fakest creature ever seen on the silver screen. It very well could be one of Lovecraft’s ancient ones for all I know, as it saunters and stumbles and falters across the frame, scaring children at birthday parties and blowing up gas stations.

There’s also a subplot with a fake dog funeral. Don’t ask me how any of this ties together, because all of it has blown my mind sky high, like a Jigsaw song from 1975.

Imagine a movie where the creature doesn’t do a single thing until more than one hour into the run time of a movie under ninety minutes, all while the nonprofessional actors can’t act and the professional ones chew scenery like they’re the godmonsters of the fringe festival.

I get real down sometimes when I think the world could be a better place than it is. The Godmonster of Indian Flats proves to me that somewhere out there, at some time, in some corner of the cosmos — let’s say a drive-in that smells like skunk weed and MD40 — some brave souls had no idea what the actual fuck they were getting into when it started playing. That fact makes me happy, imagining people driving away before the movie even ends, telling their friends and family that they suffered their way through a movie where a lamb emitted smoke and gave his life so that an entire town could die. There aren’t enough stars in the galaxy and every reality ever to properly review this movie. I’ll have to go back to college to invent some kind of formula so that my fragile mind can try and quantify it.

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.

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 where he battles Patch the demon) wants to cure his son from leukemia. So he does what doctors have always said would work — he puts him 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.

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 was had a bloody surgeon’s hands holding a scalpel with the words “Warning: this film contains scenes of extreme and explicit violence.”

You can watch this for free 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.

William Girdler was born on October 22, 1947 in Jefferson County, KY and this was his first of nine movies in six years, ending only when he died while scouting locations in the Philippines for his next film.

After he finished with the Air Force, Girlder formed Studio One with best friend and brother-in-law J. Patrick Kelly. Initially focused on TV commercials, Studio One eventually took on movies with this film. It later became Mid-America Pictures when Girdler’s films began making money.

According to the official William Girdler site, his “make ’em fast and cheap” directorial style was the result of a premonition that he’d die by the age of 30. Well, he made it to thirty, at least. Some say that Girdler was so obsessed with his own death that he said that he was in a race against time.

Filmed in Louisville in late 1971 for around $50,000, this is the story of concert pianist Lucina Martin (Carla Borelli) who has been abducted by Dr. Jason Specter (Charles Kissinger) and taken to his Pleasant Hill Hospital for treatment. It’s a sanitarium that she swears that she doesn’t belong in and who would want to be in a place where the doctor kills people to add to his Satanic majesty and immortality? And is Specter also the evil sorceress Martine? Because Kissinger is definitely playing both parts. He was also a horror host in Louisville known as the Fearmonger on WDRB.

It all leads up to a virgin sacrifice with our lovely piano player as the victim and Martine saying things like the fact that she “calls upon the gates of the dark realm to crash asunder” and invokes “blazing angles of the shining trapezoid.” What’s that? Oh, you know, the Order of the Trapezoid which later became the governing body of the Church of Satan.

More of that in a bit.

This being the early 70s, the ending is ambiguous, the rubber bugs and snakes countless and a Satan that looks like someone wearing a costume from a party store. You know, it might sound like I’m laughing at this movie, but I’m not. Asylum of Satan pleases me to an incredible degree, a movie made by someone who knew he was born to make movies and yet trying all he could to learn right there on the screen.

Girlder told the Louisville Times, “Other people learned how to make movies in film schools. I learned by doing it. Nobody saw Billy Friedkin’s or Steven Spielberg’s mistakes, but all my mistakes were right up there on the screen for everybody to see.”

The film was made with the assistance of local investors but the movie didn’t make enough to return their investment. Shortly before his too soon death, Girdler signed over the rights to this movie and Three On a Meathook to those original investors so that they could make back their money.

The Girdler site also has an amazing interview with Don Wrege, who clapped the clapboard for this movie. I loved every word, especially when he explains how the Church of Satan got involved being technical consultants.

“A bunch of high school girls (some daughters of investors) were dressed in virginal white, given candles and positioned in a circle around Borelli who was roped to the alter. A guy in a rubber suit. (Girdler said the suit/mask was from Rosemary’s Baby but wasn’t shown in the film, thus it was affordable and available and, of course, cool.)

There was a lot of motion involved. I think the guy in the rubber suit was on an apple box with wheels. The Asmans were on the largest crane we used the whole time, if I remember correctly. Multiple takes were done, all the time Kissinger (I think) was reciting the invocations that had been written by the satanic guy who was standing in the wings watching all of this take place. The incantation, if that’s the right word, was repeated any number of times with as much sincerity as Charlie Kissinger could muster, as multiple takes were filmed.

During one take, and at some very convenient point in the “prayer,” like “…if you’re present, show yourself…” or something like that, one of the white-draped high school daughters of an investor passed out and hit the floor. Everyone was horrified. The two people from the Black Church without hesitation ran to the girl’s limp body and began saying all sorts of weird shit, speaking in some unidentifiable tongue. The girl’s mother, who was there, TOTALLY freaked out, running to her daughter’s side screaming “You leave her alone…get away!” to the two Satanists.

The daughter came to in a few moments, and was excused for the day. Everything was really tense for a couple of hours after that. I think some folks started to wonder what the hell we were messing with. I made a mental note to try to keep track of that girl who fainted, but I haven’t had the nerve. I really don’t want to know.”

Well, that advisor was Michael Aquino, the actual writer of a lot of the rituals in the Satanic Bible and he told the Girdler site that he didn’t remember anyone passing out. Aquino later broke away from the Church of Satan and formed the Temple of Set.

After receiving his PhD in political science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Aquino worked as an adjunct professor at Golden Gate University until 1986. The whole time, he was serving as an Active Guard Reserve officer of the United States Army stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco.

As the 80s went on, Aquino became intrigued by the connections between Nazis and the occult. At one point, he performed a solitary rite at Walhalla beneath the Wewelsburg castle which was an infamous ceremonial space used by the Schutzstaffel’s Ahnenerbe group.

He then formed the Order of the Trapezoid, which was a chivalric order influenced by a mix of Satanism, Pagan heathery and even the application of runes within magic. Aquino was often challenged in the Satanic Panic of many crimes, as well as in conspiracy circles for numerous acts of evil as he started his career in PsyOps. He even welcomed LaVey’s daughter Zeena and her husband Nikolas Schreck into the group before the inevitable break.

But I digress, as I always say.

Girdler would do so much more — again, in such a short time — but the basics of his career are here. The 70s were prime time for Satanic movies and he took advantage of it just as he would of all manner of subjects that he thought would make box office.

He was even kind of William Castle in a way here, as the press book mentions ordering “Sign of Satan Soul Protectors” to protect theatergoers from the “Evil Stare of the Devil.” That’s also Girdler’s Porsche in this and his sister Lynne Kelly in the pool with the snakes, because Sherry Steiner refused.

Here’s a drink for this movie.

Snake in the Swimming Pool

• 2 oz. Southern Comfort
• 4 oz. cranberry juice
• 1 oz. lime juice

1. Build over ice, starting with the SoCo, then followed by the cranberry and lemon.

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.

Shot with new permits or budget on the very real streets of New York City, Fleshpot on 42nd Street starts with two sex workers, Dusty Cole (Laura Cannon) and Cherry Lane (Neil Flanagan in drag), trying to make it in the world. But it all gets to be too much for Dusty, who quits the nightlife and tries to move on to the straight life with Bob (Harry Reems!). But as you know — or you should — this is an Andy Milligan movie. Things have a way of not working out.

Once Dusty and Bob hook up, this movie moves from a realistic world where two sex workers rob everyone they can to stay alive while being truly honest with one another about it to another where a man comes in and seemingly saves the day but not caring about his lover’s past.

Maybe that brief respite from a tough world of fighting to stay alive every day is echoed by how Milligan felt, back from London and still making movies for nothing that hardly anyone would see on the rough streets of NYC. But even 42nd Street was about to change, going from simply dangerous in places to absolutely harrowing in the wake of crack by the end of the decade. And even in 1972, the movies playing there went from just plain old exploitation to full penetration.

If you hear some people discuss the films of Milligan, they’re either dismissive or outright mean. I don’t know what they’re looking for, but unlike his horror work, this feels authentic and true. It’s got a downer ending that 1972 Hollywood would have embraced, even if there’s no way they ever could have.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.