Lindsay Finch (Mary Charlotte Wilcox, The Beast of the Yellow Night and Psychic Killer) loves to go to funerals, where she mourns and then kisses the dead men passionately after everyone else leaves. Throw in a theme song that sounds like it comes from James Bond, while we see flashbacks of her relationship with her dead father, visiting his grave and her pigtails, and I’m all in.

She has swinging hippie parties at her pad, and her friend Wade (Christopher Stone, the late husband of Dee Wallace, who appeared with her in Cujo and The Howling) tries to get with her. Just when it seems she’s giving in to his makeout moves, she screams at him to stop, and he calls her a bitch, because this is 1973. She dreams of her father in yellow-hued flashbacks and hugs a stuffed animal.

Later, she goes through the funeral notices to find the services for young men. We then meet Fred McSweeney, a mortician, as he picks up a male prostitute. That job is just a cover for his true love — a Satanic coven that meets at night, inside the mortuary, where they have orgies with dead bodies. McSweeney takes the young man to his workplace, where he pumps the manwhore full of embalming fluid while he’s still alive, all while Lindsay goes to another funeral where she tries to make out with Bobby. She’s surprised by Alex (Lyle Waggoner, TV’s The Carol Burnett Show and Wonder Woman, as well as the honor of being the first nude centerfold in Playgirl and the appointed mayor of Encino, California), the man’s brother.

Speaking of that embalming scene, it goes on and on and on, with the young man screaming, “I’m blind!” over and over. It’s nearly campy instead of frightening. To say this film has a tone issue is an understatement.

Lindsay sneaks out to Bobby’s funeral, where she starts to associate Alex with her father. He’s a wealthy gallery owner, and they begin a romance—one she refuses to consummate, even after they are eventually married. Every time she sees him, she gets yellow-hued flashbacks with a music box soundtrack of her playing with her father. But more about that in a little, OK?

McSweeney speaks to Lindsay after he catches her at a funeral, telling her about a group she should join. Yet she tries to remain normal, even going on a date with Wade that ends in failure. That’s when she decides to see what McSweeney’s group is all about.

She walks into an orgy with the dead, which freaks her out enough to go back home. Then she and Alex fall in love with no dialogue, just a montage. It’s a strange part of an incredibly strange film, with this happy-go-lucky relationship coming out of nowhere in a film otherwise about sex with dead people.

Lindsay keeps talking to the cult and ends up getting a dead body of her very own. But Wade follows her and is killed by McSweeney. She screams in horror. This scene wasn’t in the original script, nor was the Satanic group in the one that follows, but they were used to pad out the film and add more horror elements so it would play better at drive-ins.

Again — tone being all over the place — we’re treated to a nude cult disrobing Wade’s corpse and having their way with it before Lindsay awakes screaming. But the marriage isn’t working out well, with Alex following her all over town and their maid — complete with the most stereotypical Irish accent ever — telling him that his wife spends her days at her father’s grave, wearing pigtails and dressed like a little girl. You should see the look on Alex’s face when he catches her as she yells, “This is not your place, go away!”

Alex tries to get Lindsay to go on a holiday to visit his mother, but he discovers a registered letter from McSweeney to his wife for a meeting at 10 PM. He follows her to the mortuary, where he discovers his wife surrounded by nude devil worshippers as she makes love to a dead body. She looks frightened and then McSweeney murders Alex, which calms her.

McSweeney drugs her as she lies in her bed, then brings in her husband, now embalmed so he can last forever, finally a man whom she can be attracted to: the combination of her father — who we see in flashback being shot accidentally by her — and the man she fell in love with. The editing here — combined with dissonant instruments and a remix of the title theme — is crazy, like this film has suddenly become Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

We see intercut shots of Lindsay getting under the covers with her dead husband and her getting in the coffin with her father as everything goes sepia tone and the theme song returns.

Love Me Deadly isn’t for everyone. It’s one of those films that I hesitate to recommend to normal folks. But it is the kind of movie I text people about in the middle of the night.

This is…well, it’s something. If you enjoyed The Baby, well, then you’re on the right wavelength for this one.

You can watch this on Tubi.

As you know, I do love alternate titles. This was known in the U.S. as When the Screaming Stops and even better, The Swinging Monster, both titles that make no sense, what with this being set in an indeterminate time and the only swinging coming from how many gorgeous women are in it. That said, the first other title got a gimmick from distributor Independent Artists, who added Shock Notice, turning the screen red with flashing lights before each murder.

This was more than just a creative flourish. It was a desperate marketing ploy by Independent Artists to compete. Similar to William Castle’s Percepto”or the Bell System”in other films, the red-tinted screen served as a psychological trigger. It essentially told the audience, “Put down your popcorn and look up, something expensive and messy is about to happen.” It turned a standard creature feature into a sensory assault, bridging the gap between a gothic fairy tale and a proto-slasher.

Directed and written by Amando de Ossorio, this is about a German boarding school for girls — parents, don’t send your babies to German boarding schools — where the young ladies are getting murdered in such bloody and horrifying ways during every full moon. This leads the teacher, Elke Ackerman (Silvia Tortosa, Horror Express), to hire a hunter named Sigurd (Tony Kendall, The Whip and the Body) to protect her pupils. Ossorio juxtaposes the sterile, buttoned-up environment of the boarding school with the wet, neon-lit grime of Loreley’s grotto. It’s a visual representation of the 1970s struggle between traditional morality and the burgeoning sexual revolution.

Each night, Sigurd patrols the school grounds — noticing the many gorgeous students under his protection, naturally — before he meets Sigurd a cloaked woman (Helga Liné) that he keeps missing despite chasing her. He also meets Professor Von Lander (Ángel Menéndez), who has made a dagger that can transform the creature — the Loreley — back to her human form. And as you can imagine, he’s already fallen for her, despite his job and the fact that she’s killed numerous people.

Sigurd is also in love with Elke — maybe he’s The Swinging Monster — and Loreley has already gone after her while restraining him in the undersea cave where she lives with an army of feral women. It’s an entire world removed from our own, like another time and place, which our somewhat modern man destroys with bombs before leaving behind the monstrous world and embracing a love of reason. I’m not so sure I’d make the same choice.

I’ve read a lot of reviews that make fun of this movie, that say it has bad effects, that it’s kind of stupid. Those people are small-minded, sad folks who can’t embrace the world of Eurohorror, where every man looks like a superhero, and every young girl’s bodice is practically either ripped open or covered in blood. A world where gorgeous women lie in wait inside lagoon caves, ready to transform and destroy.

Critics who pan this for bad acting or an illogical plot are missing the point. This isn’t a movie you watch for a tight script; it’s a movie you experience for the Technicolor blood, the insane creature design and the sheer audacity of a plot that treats a lizard-woman heart-thief as a legitimate romantic rival.

Directed by Robert Altman and based on Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel, with a script by Leigh Brackett (who co-wrote the screenplay for Chandler’s The Big Sleep), who said that United Artists demanded that “either you take Elliott Gould or you don’t make the film. Elliott Gould was not exactly my idea of Philip Marlowe, but anyway, there we were.” — The Long Goodbye was revised to move the story to the 70s.

As for Gould, he hadn’t worked in two years, ever since battling with Kim Darby and director Anthony Harvey on A Glimpse of Tiger. He had to take a psychological examination before United Artists would sign him to the lead role.

Marlowe (Gould) is asked by his friend Terry Lennox (baseball player and author of Ball Four, Jim Bouton) to take him to the border at Tijuana. When he gets home, the cops bring him in and question him about Lennox killing his wife, Sylvia. After three days in jail — and refusing to help the police — Marlowe learns that Lennox is said to have committed suicide. He refuses to believe that story.

Marlowe is hired by Eileen Wade (Nina van Pallandt, who dated Hughes diary forger Clifford Irving and sings “Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?” in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) to find her missing husband Roger (Sterling Hayden, who was drunk and stoned for most of the movie; he’s still great), which takes the detective — who never stops smoking — into the health and fitness world of well-off Californians. And of course, the Wade and the Lennox couples knew one another, as Eileen confesses that Roger was sleeping with Sylvia, and might have killed her, right after Roger walks into the sea and drowns. Oh yeah — there’s also the matter of mob boss Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell), who has some money owed to him by Terry.

All paths lead back to Mexico, where Marlowe soon realizes that he’s been played for a fool. However, he plans on having the last laugh. Altman referred to his character as Rip Van Marlowe, seeing him as a man trapped in the 50s and “trying to invoke the morals of a previous era.”

The cast also includes David Arkin, Pancho Córdova, Amityville 2 and Mommie Dearest star Rutanya Alda, Jack Riley, David Carradine, Morris the Cat and a non-speaking role for an impossibly young Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Critics savaged this on initial release, with Jay Cocks from Time saying, “It is a curious spectacle to see Altman mocking a level of achievement to which, at his best, he could only aspire.” Chris Champlin of the Los Angeles Times summed up what so many thought of Gould as Chandler’s hard-boiled detective hero by writing, “He is not Chandler’s Marlowe, or mine, and I can’t find him interesting, sympathetic or amusing, and I can’t be sure who will.”

As for the actor, he has said that, as long as he is physically able, he hopes to reprise the role. He has a screenplay entitled It’s Always Now based on the Chandler story “The Curtain.” The Chandler estate sold him the rights for $1.

With an always-moving camera and the pastel cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond, this movie still looks wonderful and has stood the test of its time, a time when it was not as well considered.

The 1970s were a gold mine for hagsploitation and Southern Gothic grittiness, but The Killing Kind occupies a strange, lonely corner of that subgenre. It’s not just a thriller; it’s a suffocating character study directed by Curtis Harrington, a master of the macabre and the misunderstood (see: Night Tide and What’s the Matter with Helen?).

Harrington was a pioneer of New American Cinema who transitioned into the studio system without losing his avant-garde sensibilities. In this film, he creates a palette that feels as damp and stagnant as a basement. He doesn’t rely on jump scares; he relies on the inherent wrongness of the domestic space. The boarding house is less a sanctuary and more a terrarium where resentment festered until it became lethal.

Terry (John Savage, The Deer Hunter) was forced to participate in a gang assault and served two years in prison, losing his sanity. His mother, Thelma (Ann Sothern, so many roles, but also the titular voice of My Mother the Car), runs a boarding house for old women who all gossip about the strange nature of their relationship; if you didn’t know the truth, you would think they were a married couple, not a son and his mother.

Thelma wishes that the victim of the assault, Tina (Sue Bernard, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), were dead. So Terry runs her off the road. He hears how his attorney Rhea Benson (Ruth Roman, whose slate of movies in the early 70s was absolutely wild between this, The Baby and Impulse) didn’t protect him enough, so he kills her too. He even kills new tenant Lori (Cindy Williams, who was commuting between the set of this film and The Conversation), and they move the body out in full view of their suspicious neighbor, Lori (Luana Anders, Night Tide).

Speaking of that librarian next door, the same character appears in 1980s The Attic, which was also written by Tony Crechales and George Edwards.

The true monster of the film isn’t necessarily Terry’s fractured psyche, but the umbilical cord that was never cut. The film dances on the edge of the Oedipal complex, making the audience deeply uncomfortable with every shared meal and whispered confidence between mother and son. It suggests that while society broke Terry, his mother is the one who shaped the shards into a weapon.

Also, to those who worry about cat murder, yes — a cat does die in this. It was a real cat in that scene, but it was sedated by a vet. The one in the dumpster is an actual euthanized cat, but it was not killed for this production.

Sadly, this movie had poor distribution and was lost for a few years. How exciting is it that we live in a world where films get found and we can find them ourselves so easily?

You can watch this on Tubi.

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.