Possibly inspired by the kidnapping of Barbara Jane Mackle, The Candy Snatchers gets its name because Eddy (Vince Martorano), Jessie (Tiffany Bolling) and Alan (Brad Davis) have kidnapped a young girl named Candy (Susan Sennett) from her Catholic school. They keep her buried alive — with a pipe for air — in a field somewhere in California. Only the autistic Sean Newton (Christopher Trueblood) knows that she’s there, but he’s a little kid who can barely communicate, trapped with parents — Dudley (Jerry Butts) and Audrey (Bonnie Boland) — who seemingly hate him.

Candy will inherit $2 million from her late father when she turns 21. But if she dies before that, her stepfather, Avery (Ben Piazza), gets half, and his wife, Katherine (Dolores Dorn), receives the other. So he doesn’t even tell her that Candy is gone.

Even when presented with a severed ear — the criminals go to a morgue and cut one off a dead body — Avery doesn’t care. He’s already sleeping with an employee, Lisa (Phyllis Major), and doesn’t care that Alan seduces his wife. He cares even less when they kill her.

These horrible people are all determined to destroy one another. I won’t ruin the end of this, only to say that you will have to create your own conclusion to the story.

Bolling hated this, saying to TCM Underground, “I was doing cocaine…and I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I was very angry about the way that my career had gone in the industry…the opportunities that I had and had not been given…. The hardest thing for me, as I look back on it, was I had done a television series, The New People, and so I had a lot of young people who really respected me and… revered me as something of a hero, and then I came out with this stupid Candy Snatchers movie… It was a horrendous experience.”

Director Guerdon Trueblood — that’s his son playing Sean — and co-star Vince Martorano had been best friends at George Washington University in Virginia. They made a bet about who would get into filmmaking first. Trueblood became an in-demand writer for TV series and movies of the week. When he got the job of directing this movie, he asked writer Bryan Gindoff to create the character of Eddy specifically for Martorano, who was working as a commercial fisherman at the time.

William Allen Castleman directed Johnny Firecloud and The Erotic Adventures of Zorro, as well as composed the music for The Swinging Cheerleaders, The Adult Version of Jekyll & Hide, the 1974 The Wrestler, The Big Bird Cage, Trader Hornee, The Ecstasies of Women, Thar She Blows!, Space Thing, Nude Django, The Lustful Turk, The Acid Eaters, Ski on the Wild Side, She Freak, The Defilers, The Devil’s Mistress, Starlet!, Trader Hornee, ‘Gator Bait and At the End of the Rainbow. He also produced 7 Into Snowy and Chorus Call, so he was busy.

Written by Alvin L. Fast, who also wrote Moonshine Girls, Tom, Eaten Alive, Black Shampoo, Satan’s Cheerleaders and Angels’ Brigade, Bummer is about a rock band called The Group who are, well, out getting groupies. Their bass player, Butts (Dennis Burkley), goes nutzoid and starts killing people. First, he throws two of the girls in a shower and slaps them while calling them pigs. But you know, he owns the touring van. The limit comes when he kills people, starting with a groupie and the lead singer Duke (Kipp Whitman) before the other band aids get their revenge.

One of those girls is Carol Speed from Abby! Other ladies include Connie Strickland (The Centerfold Girls), who plays Barbara, the girlfriend of drummer Gary (David Buchanan); Dolly, who is Diane Lee Hart from The Pom-Pom Girls and Morely, The Group’s manager, who is Leslie McRay (Cleopatra in Death Race 2000).

Shot by Gary Graver, which makes this way better than it should be. It also has one of the most misogynistic taglines ever: ““You don’t have to rape a groupie… You just have to ask!”

David F. Friedman, the other producer, and Bob Cresse show up as cops at the end. As Herman Traeger, Friedman produced Ilsa and he was behind much of the soft core — and some hardcore — exploitation that made up the best of the form. Cresse wrote and produced most of those and shows up in them, often as a love camp commandant or as Granny Good in House On Bare Mountain. Cresse had a reputation for being tough, often carrying guns and with two bodyguards on his payroll. His career ended when he was walking his dog and saw two men beating a woman on Hollywood Boulevard. He pulled out a gun and ordered the men to stop. One of them said he was a cop and shot Cresse before killing his dog. The hospital stay that followed — he had no health insurance — ruined him.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Directed and written by Edward J. Lakso and Herbert L. Strock, Brother On the Run has Billy (Kyle Johnson) and Frank (Gary Rist) on the run — one is black, the other is white — and they hide out after a job gone wrong with Billy’s sister Maud (Gwenn Mitchell), who lives next to Professor Grant (Terry Carter). The title comes from, of course, these brothers on the run despite the teacher trying to help them. He also has sex with two women before he gets to that help.

Lasko wrote The Power Within, Back to the Planet of the Apes, Mr. Tease and His Playthings and tons of TV, while Strock directed Monstroid, The Crawling Hand, The Devil’s Messenger, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, How to Make a Monster, Blood of Dracula and, yes, so much TV.

What they made here is about as good as you’d imagine, as two middle-aged white guys try their hands at blacksploitation.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Matt Cimber has pretty much lived a life—he was married to Jayne Mansfield, he created the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, and he directed movies like Butterfly, The Witch Who Came from the Sea and Hundra, amongst others. In 1973, he convinced six currently playing NFL stars to appear in a black version of the biker film. The results? Amazing.

The Black Six is made up of six All-Pro NFL stars:

• Gene Washington, San Francisco 49ers (who was also in Cimber’s Lady Cocoa and Airport ’75)
• Willie Lanier, Kansas City Chiefs (who is in the NFL Hall of Fame and was named to the NFL 75th Anniversary All-Time Team)
• Carl Eller, Minnesota Vikings (an NFL Hall of Famer who went on to found substance abuse clinics)
• Mercury Morris, Miami Dolphins (a Pittsburgh native who was drafted to West Texas State, the alma mater of tons of pro wrestlers, including Tully Blanchard, Stan Hansen, Ted DiBiase, Dusty Rhodes and both Funk brothers to name but a few)
• Lem Barney, Detroit Lions (an NFL Hall of Famer who sang backup on Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and played himself in Paper Lion)
• Joe Greene, Pittsburgh Steelers (one of my hometown heroes, Greene is probably one of the greatest — if not the greatest — Steelers ever. He  appeared in a famous Coke commercial, as well as Fighting Back: The Rocky Bleier Story and Smokey and the Bandit II and is also an NFL Hall of Famer)

Washington already had some acting experience, so he stars as Bubba Daniels, a Vietnam War vet who returns home to find that his brother has been killed by a white supremacist biker gang. Their leader, Thor, is played by Ben Davidson, an avid real-life biker who played for the Oakland Raiders. You can also see him in M*A*S*H*, Conan the Barbarian and as Porter the Bouncer in Behind the Green Door.

Bubba and his gang — the Black Six — decide to avenge that death, which leads to battles with racist townies, uncaring police and Thor’s gang. The final battle ends with Thor blowing up his own bike to kill them all or so it would seem. According to Mercury M, orris’ book Against the Grain, the players protested that ending — guess they didn’t realize that nearly every biker movie ends with the heroes getting killed — so that’s why the movie ends with the title card that says “Honky, look out…Hassle a brother, and the Black 6 will return!” 

It’s all pretty depressing stuff, to be honest. But you can say that for nearly all biker and blaxploitation cinema. It’s still amazing to be that at one point, the NFL didn’t have the control that it does today and that six of its biggest stars could go off and make a movie together.

You can watch this on Tubi.