Depending on where you found this tape in the 70s, it went by a dozen different names. In Spain, it was the poetic Una gota de sangre para morir amando (A Drop of Blood to Die Loving); in France, the nonsensical Le bal du vaudou (The Voodoo Ball); and in the UK, it was slapped with the grindhouse titles Clockwork Terror or Murder In a Blue World.

It’s director and co-screenwriter Eloy de la Iglesia’s take on a future world that at times may feel very 1973 but also feels way more 2022 than we may want to admit.

To understand this movie, you have to understand De la Iglesia. A member of the Spanish Communist Party and an openly gay man living under the iron-fisted censorship of dictator Francisco Franco, his films weren’t just entertainment. They were Molotov cocktails. He specialized in Quinqui cinema, focusing on delinquency, social protest and the grit of the marginalized. Murder In a Blue World is another of his assaults on the status quo.

Sue Lyon (yes, Kubrick’s original Lolita) stars as Anna Vernia, a dedicated nurse by day who spends her nights acting as the “adistic homosexual killer the police are panicking over. In a stroke of brilliant irony, Anna collects pop art and even owns a copy of the novel Lolita. When she isn’t working, she lures gorgeous young men back to her apartment, sleeps with them and then—inspired by the rhythm of their post-coital heartbeats—slices them open with a scalpel.

She’s dating Dr. Victor Sender (Victor Sorel), a man convinced he can cure the rampant crime in their futuristic city through aggressive electroshock therapy. It’s a classic battle of ideologies: Victor wants to lobotomize the violence out of society, while Anna is the violence society created.

De la Iglesia doesn’t just tip his hat to Stanley Kubrick; he steals the hat and wears it. Early in the film, a family settles in to watch A Clockwork Orange on TV before being brutally attacked by a motorcycle gang.

Enter David (Chris Mitchum), a gang member with a conscience who gets beaten and expelled by his peers. After witnessing Anna disposing of a corpse, David decides to play a dangerous game of blackmail. He doesn’t want to turn her in; he wants her money to buy a motorcycle. It’s a strange, psychosexual cat-and-mouse game between a survivor of the streets and a high-society predator.

When David’s old gang leaves him for dead, he ends up in Victor’s hospital, slated for the doctor’s redemption treatment. Anna, having developed a twisted affection for the boy, realizes she can’t let the state take his soul. In a haunting finale, she reads Edgar Allan Poe to him, choosing to end his life on her own terms while Victor’s patients lose their minds in the background. It’s a bleak, beautiful bath in some dystopian dread.

I love how this movie somehow combines the ancient future of the 70s with the trapping of giallo. This is a strange and wonderful film that I plan on going back to several times.

Once abandoned to the wilds of public domain DVD sets, Messiah of Evil was for a time the gold amongst the dross, a film of incredible power. Hidden amongst old television shows, near-unwatchable transfers of Spanish horror and video store-era throwaways, it held a haunting power. Did I see that? Is this movie real? Can I explain it to anyone who hasn’t seen it?

Today, Messiah of Evil isn’t just a legendary once-lost film returned to power. It’s a work of art that feels like it came from beyond the wall of sleep, the place where the Ancient Ones slumber until time untold to come back and reclaim their rightful and most horrible power.

You can watch Messiah of Evil on several levels. On the most basic, it’s a film about Arietty (the never before or since more lovely Marianna Hill) attempting to find her lost artist father in the cursed town of Point Dume, California.

It’s also a zombie movie of sorts, made in the wake of Night of the Living Dead yet uninfluenced by it, where an entire town slowly becomes something like the living dead. As they bleed from the eyes and lose all sensation, they begin to crave meat from any source, be it an entire grocery store’s meat department, mice or human flesh. Once they give in to their transformation, they light fires on the shore, as their ritual of The Waiting anticipates the Dark Stranger’s return to glory, leading them toward taking over the rest of reality.

Or maybe it’s about something else. Is it about the final days of the class struggle that started in the 60s? The zombies nearly all wear suits while their targets, like collector of legends Thom (Michael Greer, who would go on to provide the voice for Bette Davis after she quit the film Wicked Stepmother) and his two lovers, Toni (Joy Bang, who worked with talents like Roger Vadim, Norman Mailer and Woody Allen before Messiah) and Laura (The Price is Right model Anitra Ford), are free love visions of style and sophistication. Yet the Dark Stranger cuts through class, even turning cop upon cop near the climax.

Parts of the film were never fully realized, but that doesn’t matter. Some critics complain that major plot points and the lead characters’ motivations are never fully explained. Even the most normal people in this film act like the strangest characters in others. At no point does it feel like we’re watching a movie set in our reality.

I don’t want that.

This is what I want. A transmission from another place where our surrealism is their everyday.

Messiah of Evil was created in an environment that will never exist again — the New Hollywood that starts with traditional studios panicking as their blockbusters and musicals would stall at the box office, while films like Easy Rider succeeded. Suddenly, deeply personal films would be made within the studio or even exploitation systems. Indeed, the previously mentioned Night of the Living Dead is packed with politics and social commentary, things only hinted at in past horror and science fiction films. This trend would die with Jaws and Star Wars. Yet at this point, as this film’s commentary track by Kim Newman and Stephen Thrower reminds us, even the creators of the blockbusters that changed entertainment forever, all the way back then, all wanted to be artists. And in a moment of true irony, the creators of this film — the husband-and-wife team of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz — would go on to direct Howard the Duck and write American Graffiti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for Goerge Lucas.

This is a movie where the heroine finds herself in the throes of undead transformation, throwing up mouthfuls of insects while the shade of her father begs her to not tell the world what she knows before he attacks her. After murdering everyone else in their path, the dead things of Point Dume don’t kill her. No, they resign her to an even more horrible fate: she must spread the legend further so that once the Dark Stranger arrives, more of reality is receptive to his grasp. She ends the film in a mental institution, knowing that one day soon, the end of everything we hold dear will arrive.

I love that this movie once appeared in DVD bundles easily available in K-Marts and WalMarts, places where normal people would find this asynchronous transmission from another place and time and wonder what the hell they were watching. Much like the infection of Point Dume or Arietty spreading the infection into other towns, it found the right people. It always discovers the best way to transmit its message to those most willing to spread its legend. It survives, no matter what, despite not being finished, despite age, despite being lost for so long.

How wonderful it is to have what was once occult brought into the light and yet it loses nothing of its infernal power. In fact, it retains its power now, all the furtive watches and evangelists that loved this movie and spread that message.

BONUS: Listen to the commentary track that I did with Bill Van Ryn from Drive-In Asylum here:

If Juan López Moctezuma had only ever gifted the world Alucarda, his seat in the pantheon of cult cinema would already be upholstered in velvet and stained with theatrical blood. But Moctezuma wasn’t just a director; he was a surrealist provocateur who served as the head of programming for Televisa and worked as the producer/right-hand man to Alejandro Jodorowsky on El Topo and Fando y Lis.

The film follows a journalist who treks to a remote, mist-shrouded institution to profile the revolutionary “System of Soothing” pioneered by the esteemed Dr. Maillard (Claudio Brook, Alucarda, The Devil’s Rain!). The pitch? Treat the mentally ill by allowing them to indulge their delusions rather than chaining them to walls. However, the progressive atmosphere quickly curdles into something far more sinister. The reporter discovers a chaotic, ritualistic society where the doctor’s daughter, Eugenie, tells the reporter that he hasn’t met the real doctor, just one of the inmates who is quite literally running the asylum and randomly quoting Aleister Crowley. Even better — Susana Kamini, Justine from Alucarda, shows up as a cult priestess!

Imagine if Hammer or Amicus made a movie in Mexico, with all of the dialogue in English, and fed massive amounts of drugs to everyone involved. That’s pretty much how I imagine that this film was made. It’s also an Edgar Allan Poe story (The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether), but really, it’s also a costume drama with more powdered wigs than a British courthouse.

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.