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.

The only film by Frank Spokeman and the lone film by writers Robert Selmers and Herb Wheeler, Teenage Fantasies is the American cover version of Germany’s Schoolgirl Report and the one advantage that we have over German filth films is that our side has Rene Bond, which is a lot like having all the nuclear warheads.

Filmed at the Eugene Hotel in Eugene, Oregon, this starts with a square up scroll, in which the filmmakers want you to know that thanks to the pill and porn chic, the teenagers of 1972 finally have fantasies. And now, we’re going to get to see them re-enacted.

Most of the scenes — a teenage threeway, a girl interested in aggressive sex, the tradesman’s entrance — are your basic sex stories. Where this shines is when Suzanne Fields (Flesh Gordon) does a JOI scene a half century before internet porn and whenever Bond is on the screen, taking man after man as she introduces each segment. She’s got on fake eyelashes, blue eyeshade and looks like what I can only assume angels appear like, minus how the Book of Ezekiel described them as wheels with eyeballs all over them and four faces.

The only other performers who are not one and done are Carmen Olivera (A Clockwork Blue).

This was filmed by Andy Romanoff, who started as a production manager as Herschell Gordon Lewis’ films before shooting A Taste of Blood and Something Weird. He went on to work as a still photographer on Switchblade Sisters and The Swinging Cheerleaders, the Louma crane op on 1941, Can’t Stop the Music, One from the Heart, Wolfen, Friday the 13th Part 3, The Entity, Something Wicked This Way Comes, To Live and Die In L.A., Stop Making Sense, the Warrant video for “Cherry Pie” and Sweatin’ to the Oldies 3.

Teenage Fantasies also had its own psychiatric consultant, Dr. Roland W. Thaxter. I have no idea what he did on set.

But anyways, Rene Bond forever.

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!

Not enough people talk about Pete Walker, whose movies are mind destroyers and who is all over the map when it comes to output, making giallo-esque in England films like Die Screaming, Marianne; House of Whipcord and The Comeback.

One of his obsessions was to make a movie where actors die in a themed way by those older than them. This is the first time he explored that and it’s all about a mystery producer who has gathered a cast of unemployed actors to be in a mysterious play, rehearsing them in an abandoned theatre beside the sea.

Meanwhile, a black gloved killer is murdering everyone, a killing spree that started thirty years ago when he trapped his wife and her lover behind a wall. Now, everyone is going to deal with his pain as he works it out by you know, killing everyone in the play.

This movie lives up to the flesh part of its title, as no matter how cold that theater looks, nearly every female star feels the urge to doff her bra and show the world their ample gifts. Pete Walker may not have invented the male gaze, but damn if I can’t think of someone who was in its grip more.

Parts of this movie were even shot in 3D, which makes me happier than you’ll ever know.

Here’s a drink for this movie.

The Blood Show

• 2 oz. tequila
• 2 oz. blood orange juice (or 1.5 oz. orange juice and .5 oz. grenadine)
• 2 oz. pomegranate juice

1. Shake it all up with ice in a cocktail shaker.
2. Pour in a glass and savor.

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.