Produced by Screw Magazine founders Jim Buckley and Al Goldstein and what was to be the first of several movies from the New York City magazine, this was directed and written by Peter Locke, who produced The Brave Little Toaster, The Hills Have Eyes, Freeway, the cartoon Spiral Zone and lots of adult films, which he also directed. 

This is shot on 35mm, has a theme song — “Porno Queen” by Liz Torres, who was married to Locke at the time and would one day be Miss Patty on Gilmore Girls and this is a a far cry from the town square of Stars Hollow, yet the fact that she sang that and apepars in a non-sex role speaks to the “anything goes” hustle of New York’s theater and film scene at the time — and Wes Craven was the assistant director and editor. 

It’s a simple story. Felicity Split (Melissa Hall, a one-and-done actress who is actually more conventionally attractive than many 70s porn queens) is great in bed and turns that into a career. First, it’s her boyfriend Elliot (Harry Reems without facial hair!) — well, she also urinates on a human bidet (Peter Bramley, the first art director of National Lampoon with Bill Skurski), proving that early 70s adult is way filthier than 2026 smut — and then gets hooked up with an agent named Peter Pull (Marc Stevens) and getting into a $4 million dollar adult movie about the Bible, three years before the Mitchell Borthers made Sodom and Gomorrah: The Last Seven Days and six years before Caligula.

Other actors include Cindy West (who was also known as Susan Sands, Terri Scott, Joy Otis, Cindy Travcrs, Helen Highwater, Linda Terry, Laura Bentley, Teri Reardon, Laura Lake, Terry Ruggiera and here appearing as Tammy Twat; she’s also in Alfred Sole’s adult movie, Deep Sleep), Jamie Gillis (billed as Buster Hymen and acting just like you’d hope Jamie would), Roger Caine (who was in Martin as Al Levitsky), Gus Thomas (who went on to be a District Attorney for Cortland County, New York, and an adjunct professor for 17 years at Syracuse University Law School), Tanya Tickler (she’s given the thankless job of orally servicing Goldstein), Mike Sullivan (he also did props on this movie and would go on to do effects for Mortal Kombat, Star Trek V and Little Shop of Horrors, as well as play Dippy in Madman), David Buckley (who directed Saturday Night at the Baths) and Jim Buckley (AKA Jim Clark, director of Debbie Does Dallas).

What’s wild is the talent working on this. Music by Ronald Frangipane (The Holy Mountain, The Greek Tycoon, All the Kind Strangers, Joe Zito’s Abduction and Summer of Laura, as well as the keyboard player for Midnight Cowboy and Barbarella). Cinematography by Steve Bower (Joe, Who Killed Mary Whats’ername?, The Groove Tube, Cry Uncle). Bill Meredith (Madman, Communion, The Nesting, Scalpel, The Premonition, Ganja & Hess) on sound. On camera crew, Martin Andrews, who ran the camera on New Jack City and Mo’ Better Blues. Dan Newman (assistant director on movies like Teenage Hitchhikers, Stripes, This Is Spinal Tap, The Beastmaster, Hot Moves) was an electrician. Liz Argo as the script supervisor (she also worked on Case of the Full Moon Murders and The Children). And Harry Narunksy built the miniatures. He’d go on to make the models for Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity. 

It’s alright; it certainly wasn’t going to ride the wave of porn chic, but then again, is Deep Throat a good movie?

It Happened In Hollywood is perhaps best known for a live read on WMCA 570 AM in New York by “Long John” Nebel. Nebel was ahead of Coast to Coast AM by decades, taking calls from people who wanted to learn more about UFOs and the weird things that go bump in the night. During this moment, Nebel was trying to read an ad for this movie and, well, things got out of hand.

Directed and written by Walerian Borowczyk, Immoral Tales is four stories that each have a different tale of lovemaking, starting with “The Tide,” the story of André (Fabrice Luchini) getting head from his 16-year-old cousin (Lise Danvers) in concert with the waves of the ocean. This is taken from a story by surrealist writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues.

It’s followed by “Thérése the Philosopher,” an adaptation of the 1748 novel of the same name that was written by either Jean-Baptiste de Boyer or Marquis d’Argens. Thérése (Charlotte Alexandra) becomes locked out of her room, freeing her to mix her love of Christ with need for sex. There’s an incredibly sacrilegious moment filmed in actual church, which had the director exclaim “Thérèse was played by an English actress. She was only seventeen years old, I remember, and very shy. We had to film her nude scenes in complete seclusion, only my assistant and I were allowed to be there, and he was only twelve! We got permission to film in a real church, a very beautiful and quite famous one, an historical monument. There were no difficulties with the priest; I was very surprised. The man was very tolerant indeed, in spite of all this pipe organ business ! The film was even shown in the church cinema of the village, if you can imagine that!”

The third tale is probably the most famous, as it concerns Elizabeth Báthory (Paloma Picasso) bathing herself in the blood of the young virgins of her kingdom. Picasso is really bathing in 30 gallons of pig blood in this part of the movie. Borowczyk was inspired by surrealist poet Valentine Penrose and the way she related the legend of Bathory.

Finally, Pope Alexander VI’s daughter  Lucrezia Borgia (Florence Bellamy) indulges her passions with her male relatives. There was a fifth story, which ended up being the film La Bête. When Arrow released this on blu ray, they added that film into this one as the third chapter.

Despite being a movie all about sex, this is a gorgeous act of cinema, filled with lush imagery and gorgeous camerawork. There was a time when non-hardcore movies could be made as art and this is a prime example, a film that was second place in the French box office behind another example of softcore, Emmanuelle.

Also known as Scream… and Die!, Please! Don’t Go in the Bedroom and Psycho Sex Fiend, this José Ramón Larraz movie has some amazing taglines like “Are You Planning an Affair? We Can Give You 7 Good Reasons Not to Have Your Next Affair at The House That Vanished, And They’re All DEAD!! 1. George 2. Marsha 3. Ted 4. Linda 5. Ronnie 6. Alice 7. Larry” and “Is it too soon to talk about ’72…that time Paul and Valerie fell in love at first sight and began searching for a place to have an affair — and they kept searching until they found…The House That Vanished.” I mean, they did tell us that it was “In the Great HITCHCOCK Tradition!”

Picked up by American-International Pictures in the U.S., trimmed by 15 minutes and given a really similar campaign – actually, it’s the exact same — as The Last House On the Left, this finds Larraz playing with his favorite toys: fashionable women in danger, pervy photographers, houses in the London countryside, sexual menace and murder. He kept going back to this well for a bit before throwing Satanism into the stew and, if anything, increasing the sheer levels of filth in his movies. And we were all the better for it.

Valerie Jennings (Andrea Allan) is one of those gorgeous women continually threatened by nearly every frame of this movie, starting when she and her photographer boyfriend Terry (Alex Leppard) travel to a shuttered hovel of a home deep in the London woods, a place that’s empty save for a room filled with women’s passports. As they hide in a closet when a new couple arrives, they don’t get to enjoy watching them make love; instead, the male dispatches the female with a switchblade. She runs, and Terry does too, but she never finds him, narrowly escaping to the safety of the big city.

She finds Terry’s car and a modeling portfolio with one image of a girl missing. She asks her friends Mike (Lawrence Keane) and Stella (Annabella Wood) what to do next, but they tell her that she and Terry have committed a crime and need not tell the police. Meanwhile, Mike introduces her to Paul (Karl Lanchbury, a Larraz villain in numerous entries), a mask maker who invites her to dinner with his aunt Susanna (Maggie Walker). If you’ve seen enough Larraz movies by now, you know that the aunt and nephew are soon to engage in the act of darkness.

Life starts falling apart, as Terry’s car keeps disappearing and reappearing; Valerie’s roommate Lorna (Judy Matheson) — who also sleeps nude with her pet monkey — is assaulted and killed, an old man with pigeons moves in downstairs and when she heads out of town to meet with Paul again, she realizes that his house is the same abandoned house she’s been in before thanks to the strange taxidermy inside. Seriously, if you go on a date and someone has a lot of taxidermy, please run.

There, she finds the bodies of those missing, and Paul’s aunt appears and demands that he kill Valerie. He responds by stabbing her as our heroine runs outside screaming, directly into the police, while Paul just sits in the void.

Writer Derek Ford also wrote The Legend of Spider Forest, Secret Rites, Corruption (which is not a women’s picture) and Don’t Open Till Christmas, as well as directing I Am a Groupie, Blood Tracks, The Urge to Kill and The Girl from Starship Venus.

Larraz comes from Spain to England to make movies that seem like they’re from Italy that have their origins in Germany and England. If that doesn’t make you look at his movies, then I have no hope for you.

I have to speak with pride for my Italian filmmaking countrymen: they do not give a fuck.

Any other movie these days that would put a child in danger would not do what director Enzo G. Castellari and writers Tito Carpi, Gianfranco Clerici, Vincenzo Mannino and Leonardo Martín do in this movie.

When the question is asked, “Does this go too far?” I assume Castellari laughed and drank another shot of J&B, delirious in the director’s chair.

Castellari claims he saw Bullitt and wanted to make this, but he probably was thinking of The French Connection. I mean, Fernando Rey is in it, just to assure us that, yes, this Italian movie will be stealing a lot from that movie.

But who cares? This is the story of a tough cop, Vice-Commissioner Belli (Franco Nero), battling perhaps even tougher bad guys, the kinds of drug dealers that’ll blow up their own men just to take out a few lawmen. These new criminals are so disgusting that even the the old-school organized crime bosses like Cafiero (Fernando Rey) try to take them out, only to learn that some of their most loyal men have decided to work for the other side.

Even after all the work it takes to convince Commissioner Aldo Scavino (James Whitmore) that he has a case, Belli must watch as the old man is killed. Soon, the new mob beats his lover Mirella (Delia Boccardo) into submission and then well…runs his daughter over with a car.

Any other movie would hold back from this and do it off-screen.

Welcome to Italy.

In Erica Schultz’s The Sweetest Taboo: An Unapologetic Guide to Child Kills In Film, she refers to this scene as one of the best ever made: “…High Crime’s car death is definitely top tier.” It’s shocking, so wild that I had to rewind it to ensure I had just seen what I thought I had. So when Belli goes wild, killing off everyone in his path — and looking suave doing it, I’m secure enough in my manhood to say Franco Nero is smoldering — we understand. I mean, we just watched his kid fly over the roof of a car and get run over.

When I was researching this movie, I saw that someone on Letterboxd referred to its soundtrack as dull and plodding. I want to go total Inspector Belli on that person, throwing the kind of slaps that an Italian action hero is known for. I was humming along the entire film and it’s been trapped in my head ever since. I don’t know how anyone could watch this and not fall in love with this movie.

I’m trying not to make this a thousand words about how gorgeous Claudia Jennings was. Born Mary Eileen “Miomi” Chesterton in Milwaukee — eventually moving to Evanston, Illinois, where her father was the advertising director for Skilsaw — she was a receptionist at Playboy before appearing in a centerfold (November 1969) and becoming the Playmate of the Year for 1970, in less than thirty years. She was an incandescent star, appearing in movies like Unholy Rollers, The Single Girls, Sisters of Death, Moonshine County Express and Deathsport, to name a few. IMDB may tell us that she took her stage name from the character that Angelique Pettyjohn played in The Touch of Her Flesh — debatable, but I wish this was true — and that Aaron Spelling wanted her to replace Kate Jackson on his show Charlie’s Angels but her four Playboy nude appearances scared network executives off, but the truth is, she was here for a brief time and nearly fifty years after her death, I’m still staring at her in any movie she’s in and sighing.

In the July 20oo issue of Femme Fatales, Ari Bass wrote in the article “Claudia Jennings: The Drive-In Diva,” that she had taken to wearing a gold-plated bracelet that said bitch on it. “That’s what I always play in the movies,” Jennings explained. “Though it’s the opposite of what I am really, I’m cast as a spitfire. Bad girl types. I suppose because being submissive is completely alien to me. There aren’t many good female roles in films nowadays, so I figure I’ll come into my own when I’m about 30. At this point, I can’t play kids or hippies, and I sure as hell can’t play the wronged wife because you wouldn’t believe a man cheats on me.”

Ferd Sebastian said the film was written for Jennings, with whom he and his wife Beverly had worked on The Single Girls. “She wanted to do a film with not a lot of dialogue, so ‘Gator Bait was it,” said Sebastian. “I really like to work with the Cajun people. We all piled into our motorhome and left LA… We were headed for the swamps, Myself, Bev, Claudia, our two boys, a dog and a pregnant cat. It was by far the most fun shoot I have ever been on.”

It’s a simple movie. Desiree Thibodeau (Jennings) lives in the swamps, a barefoot girl at one with nature, yet who looks like, well, Claudia Jennings. Ben Bracken (Ben Sebastian) and Deputy Billy Boy (Clyde Ventura) catch her trapping gators and decide that instead of arresting her, they’ll just assault her. That doesn’t work, and as they chase her, Billy Boy accidentally kills Ben. He tells Sheriff Joe Bob Thomas (Bill Thurman) that Desiree did it. So the cops do what they do worst and head into the swamps to arrest her, along with Ben’s father, T.J. (Sam Gilman), and his son Leroy (Douglas Dirkson), a man who was already castrated by Desiree. They even attack her family—Big T (Tracy Sebastian) and Julie (Janit Baldwin)—before she destroys them.

There’s a twist at the end — T.J. might be closer to Desiree than we believed — but really this is all about men being morons and getting turned against one another by a sheer force of femininity. 

The time Claudia Jennings spent in our reality was short. But she lived a life, and we can only wish that she were still here to know just how well-remembered she is.