Rene Bond week (August 11 – 17) Rene Bond could brighten up even the most dreary productions, and she was in plenty of them. In the early adult scene she was one of the better actors, particularly when it came to comedy, though she could squeeze into some leather and throw the whips around when the role called for it. Bond appeared in somewhere near 100 films, thanks to her affable professionalism she worked with many filmmakers multiple times and regularly performed with her boyfriend Ric Lutze. Her career received an enhancement when she became one of the first stars to get a boobjob. She retired from film in the late-70s just as the porno chic era was dying down, but before the video era. You can find her in a ton of SWV titles, so take yer pick!

Billie Joe Peabody (Rene Bond) is gorgeous, so perfect and beautiful — look, it’s Rene Bond — that her male relatives chase her all day long, hoping to get to touch her. Breaking up these shenanigans is when Grandma Peabody (Zena Foster, The Corpse Grinders) decides she wants the entire family to get together before she dies. That family would be Leroy (John Tull, the assistant director of C.B. Hustlers, Drive-In Massacre and The Witch Who Came from the Sea), Jenny (Pamella Princess), Jeff (Mark Buckalew in his only acting job; he was a gaffer, best boy or assistant director on productions like Butterfly, Just Before Dawn, Masters of the Universe and Sweatin’ to the Oldies 2), Jeeter (Steven Hodge) and Fester (Jack Richesin), as well as Prudence (Ellen Stephens), who left the country for the big city.

Prudence ends up having a great time — the moonshines helps — and drunkenly asks the family to come visit her for a party, if they’re ever in town. Well, they soon are. And she regrets it, as she thinks they’ll embarrass her. So all her friends dress like hillbillies and the Peabody family shows up looking normal. Fester tells her not to worry, as they’re still family. He also brought the goat that she won in a chicken chase at the party.

At the party, Billie Joe meets agent Walter Wimpy, who is George “Buck” Flower doing a Paul Lynde impression, except that he’s trying to get her naked and doesn’t care about her singing career. No matter what Flower did in his career — and he did so much — he got to do a simulated sex scene with Rene Bond which has to be like walking on the surface of the moon or being able to read minds for real. His character has a bad heart and dies and you know, I’m exhausted by life and nowhere close to as old as Flower looks here — he’s 17 years younger when this was made than I am now — but if you’re going to go into sweet oblivion, how else should you leave this reality?

Director and writer Bethel Buckalew lived to be 94 and made nine movies — Tobacco Roddy, Midnite Plowboy, Southern Comforts, Below the Belt, The Dirty Mind of Young Sally, Sassy Sue, Mag Wheels (a vansploitation movie I haven’t seen!) and My Boys Are Good Boys — with most of them being filmed for producer Harry Novak.

There are so many country softcore movies and you know, I’ve seen a lot of them. I could blame Cinemax After Dark but I know that only I am to blame.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Hollywood Babylon, the book by filmmaker Kenneth Anger, was banned shortly after it was first published in the U.S. in 1965. It wasn’t reprinted for ten years and when it came back, it was filled with photos of Jayne Mansfield’s car crash, Carole Landis and uncensored images of the Black Dahlia’s destroyed body.

I read it a hundred times in my teens and twenties, a book that taught me the Crowley quote “Every man and every woman is a star,” as well as so many urban legends that probably weren’t true, but who cares? Clara Bow never slept with the entire USC football team, including John Wayne. Mansfield wasn’t decapitated. It finally led to a sequel and a 1992 syndicated series hosted by Tony Curtis.

But before that, there was this, an unauthorized film.

Directed by Van Guylder (The Bang Bang Gang and a later sequel, Hollywood Babylon II, taken from the TV show) and written by L.K. Farbella, this plays just as loose with reality as its inspiration. Fatty Arbuckle was exonerated for the death of Virginia Rappe and paid for it with his career. Here, he gets away with assaulting her with a bottle of champagne. Rudolph Valentino inspired gay clubs and had a fondness for butch women. Erich von Stroheim got off watching women get whipped. And yes, Clara Bow wears out those Trojans. The football players. They all went in bareback.

Yes, Olive Thomas killed herself, but she died in a hospital instead of a hotel room. Wallace Reid was probably addicted to drugs before this movie claims that he was. Charlie Chaplin slept with Lita Grey when she was 15, but did he have other women give him fellatio while she watched, so that he could train her to never have actual sex with. him again? And why does no one look like the actors they’re supposed to be and while this mentions nearly everyone, it gets shy about William Randolph Hearst?

That said, Uschi Digard is in this and sometimes that’s enough to get past any issues with quality and the very judging narration. That’s Jane Ailyson from The Godson and A Clock Work Blue getting whipped. A party scene also has Suzanne Fields in it, Dale Ardor from Flesh Gordon.

That narration — listen to this prose: “This was Hollywood, once considered a suburb of sprawling Los Angeles – destined, perhaps doomed, to become it’s very heart. In 1916, however, it was just a junction of dirt roads and a scattering of orange groves. If there was sin, it was not to be seen. Scandalous sin that is, for what was going on at the studio on Sunset Boulevard was merely play-acting, a Babylonian orgy involving hundreds, nay thousands of actors and extras, portraying the doom Belshazzar. This passion play, D.W. Griffith’s most ambitious epic, was titled “Intolerance” and it set the tone for Tinseltown… something to live up to, something to live down. The shadow of Babylon had fallen over Hollywood. Scandal was waiting just out of camera range.”

There could be an amazing version of this book. Anger would probably be the right choice to have directed it. This ends up being that rare softcore movie that is boring despite having everything it needs to be so exciting.

Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Hans Weimar (Tristan Rogers, Robert Scorpio from General Hospital) is a journalist in London writing about au pair girls who starts to investigate Greta (Leena Skoog), a teenage girl who has gone missing. Everyone he meets knows a different version of her, which the movie shows with 3D sequences that the poster promises will put a girl in your lap.

England’s first 3D movie and it’s a Pete Walker sex film. How amazing is culture? Interestingly, the alternate version Three Dimensions of Greta is Four Dimensions of Greta with most of the naughty bits removed, so the fourth dimension is nudity.

Robin Askwith (Confessions of a Pop Performer) is a soccer player, Greta is trapped by gangster Carl Roberts (Alan Curtis), Richard O’Brien shows up years before The Rocky Horror Picture Show and this is totally Akira Kurosawa in that it goes Rashomon and asks us to attempt to determine who Greta really is.

I prefer Pete Walker movies that mix sex and violence. Then again, I do love 3D, even if it’s just a gimmick.  Then again, if the gimmick gets you into the theater — or makes you buy the blu ray — then it’s a good one. I kind of wish that everyone had more, well, dimension to them, which sounds like the kind of thing that someone who watches porn for the plot would say.

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!

This was a parody of everything that had come before in the gory and sleazy Herschell Gordon Lewis and if anything, goes even further than all that had been done in the past.

Reporter Nancy Weston (Amy Farrell) has offered detective Abraham Gentry (Frank Kress) $50,000 if he can solve the murder of Suzie Cream Puff (Jackie Kroeger), as long as she gets the exclusive. Following him on his investigation, other food-themed dancers like Candy Cane and Pickles get killed with evidence that points to a man named Grout (Ray Sager), a Vietnam vet that misses smashing the heads of dead people during war and finds vegetables a poor substitute. Or maybe its the feminists who are protesting all the male gaze in the go go club. Oh yeah — Henny Youngman also shows up as Mr. Marzdone Mobilie, a man who owns plenty of jack shacks and strip clubs.

Gentry keeps Weston drunk most of the time or gets her onstage to dance in an amateur contest but he’s just really trying to lure the killer into his clutches. He’s a horrible person and in fact, nearly everyone in this movie is completely despicable, some kind of alternate world where everyone is absolute scum. I say this with beaming happiness.

The only movie that Lewis ever sent to the MPAA — it got an X, so no surprises there — this is the kind of movie where a woman’s breasts are cut over with scissors to drink chocolate milk out of them, but it can still have themes of PTSD from Vietnam in 1972, years before any other filmmakers were articulating this issue.

But at heart (and guts and brains), this is a movie where a woman’s butt is beaten with a tenderizing hammer and then seasoned with salt and pepper. Or a bubble gum chewing dancer dying as her bubble is filled with blood? Then somehow there’s a level-headed appearance by the feminist group in the movie that pretty much has them saying everything that Lewis probably knew he was guilty of. Literally exploitation and education at once, but lost on everyone who just loved a director who often had characters just play with entrails for long stretches while he zoomed in. And then he invented direct mail.

You can watch this on Tubi.