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!

We live in the magical kind of world where someone can make a sexy version of Little Shop of Horrors and I think that’s great. By someone, I mean director Carl Monson (The Acid Eaters, Legacy of Blood), writer Eric Norden (A Scream In the Streets) and produced Harry Novak.

Henry (Buck Kartalian, Julius from Planet of the Apes) is a lonely man who lives with his mother Clarice (Lyn Lundgren) who finds a plant that he turns into his friend. That plant has a voice like a sexy woman and likes to eat meat, starting with bug, then frogs, dogs, cats and people. It wants pretty ladies, like the centerfolds — Karen Christy (Miss December 1971) and Danielle De Vabre (Miss November 1971) — hanging up in Henry’s room.

Despite the title, his mother does get chowed down on, as does a cop (Monson), a next door neighbor (Rick Lutze) and that man’s wife, who decides to take Harry’s virginity before the now male and female plants eat her. Seeing as how she’s Rene Bond, this is quite a loss.

Harry decides he’s going to kill his plants — Eve and Adam — but once they have babies, he lets them live. I guess it’s back to being a peeping tom for him, as long as the plants don’t decide to make a meal of him.

You have to laugh at a movie that has Rene Bond worry that her husband is going to leave her because she’s flat chested. If she is, this must be Earth-Russ, the planet where every woman has mammaries that are half their body weight. Also known as The Hungry Pets and Sexpot Swingers.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

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!

I know Bernard Girard more for the movies he didn’t finish — he was replaced with Lee H. Katzin on What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? by producer Robert Aldrich and started the movie We’re All Crazy Now with The Runaways that was completed by director Alan Sacks and released as Du-beat-e-o — but he did actually direct some efforts, including The Rebel Set, This Woman Is Dangerous, The Happiness Cage, The Mad Room, Gone With the West and Dead Heat On a Merry-Go-Round. He also directed and wrote this movie and man, why are people not clamoring for this to get a blu ray release?

John Blake (Robert Culp) is dissatisfied with the rat race and dealing with the pressures of his family’s architecture business. So he takes his wife Joanna (Samantha Eggar) and moves into his great grandfather’s home The Grove in the countryside and you know what happens when city folk go back to their roots in 1970s movies.

Distributed by Cinerama Releasing Corporation — who also released Asylum, Walking Tall, The Vault of Horror, The Mack, And Now the Screaming Starts!, Terror In the Wax Museum, The Harrad Experiment, Your Three Minutes Are Up, Dr. Death: Seeker of Souls, The Pyx, Arnold and Marco all in 1973 — and produced by Penthouse — which will make sense in a little — this starts strange when everyone back home refers to John’s grandfather as The Colonel and many of them want nothing to do with him. Even the man he hires to renovate the house — Clarence “Big” Miller (blues singer Big Miller, who was the title character in Big Meat Eater) — seems to think that The Colonel doesn’t want John there. His wife doesn’t want to be there either, but there are times that it seems that she loves him and others like she might as well be a ghost.

This was shelved by MGM because it made so little sense. It was based on a novel by Andrew Lytle and that book was a definite ghost story. This can’t make up its mind. That voice saying “Go away” also feels the same way. Just when everything feels dreary, John walks out of his house and finds a white horse that brings him to town and soon has him participating in an orgy set to a live performance of Billy Joe Royal singing “Mountain Woman.” Soon, he’s making love to Luanna Baxter (Sheila Sullivan, AKA Sheila Culp, the wife of our lead actor at the time) and running through the woods completely naked. Yes, Robert Culp, star of I Spy, dashing full dong through a meadow and making love in a waterfall.

Yet when he gets home, his wife claims that he had rough sex with her that night and couldn’t stop touching himself. Was it him? Or was it The Colonel? Or could it be all of those things, as this movie seems to have multiple timeline all within one movie. It all ends with Eggar slashing Culp with a straight razor and him throwing her out the same window that he tossed their TV out of at the beginning of the movie.

I’m not saying this is a good movie, but I am saying that it’s a film with an orgy scene that feels like it could be in The Wicker Man except that everyone eats spaghetti — to be fair, I was once a guest at an OTO lodge party where everyone was eating bowl after bowl of guacamole with no chips, just spoons — before doing a line dance and then having sex and hey, there’s Rene Bond to remind you that Penthouse bought this three years after MGM threw it away. It’s like Antichrist without the cock violence, Dark August but horny, the 70s hippy aesthetic fighting with a movie that wants to be to be something more than it is but possibly made by a director who has no idea how to bring the movie inside his head onto the celluloid. He claimed that it was about “a modern man’s attempt to get away from his contemporary hang-ups by returning to his ancestral home.”

As for Culp, he told The Bucks County Courier, “This is the kind of picture you wait for your whole life.” He also said, “The story is that I decided to do it because I couldn’t understand it. “It’s true, I didn’t understand it. But that was because there were 3 pages of the climax missing!”

The amazing caligula.org site has a great article on this film, which explains how Caligula wasn’t really Penthouse’s first movie.

“There is no telling what condition the movie was in when Penthouse Pictures acquired it. It may or may not have still been the authentic version. It may well have been tampered with by Stone et al or some emissary thereof. But it is unquestionable that Penthouse commissioned a firm to film something new, and it was actually quite beautiful to look at: a psychedelic multiple exposure of a topless dancer, as well as a dancer in a skeleton outfit, all accompanied by an acoustic guitar. That footage was intercut into a domestic scene, as though it were a flashback of some sort. But by the time the movie finishes, we realize that it was not a flashback after all; it was merely meddling by Penthouse. Penthouse further enhanced the film with a country singer surrounded by three nude women.”

Billy Joe Royal’s performance was force-fitted into the scene of the hoedown, but the footage simply did not match, and the intercutting is rather jarring. I wish I could see how the scene originally played. Penthouse then hired an editor to simplify the movie, cutting it down to 74 minutes. In this short version, characters and relationships were never developed or explored, leaving so many loose ends that it’s no wonder people had trouble following the narrative. I would guess that the original was far more ambiguous and a bit challenging, and that the haunted-house story was a suggestion, planted into disordered minds, that flowered under duress. It was surely not only the Robert Culp character who was affected, but the Eggar character too, as well as many others.”

Penthouse replaced the credits with some crazy paintings, then this played theaters and drive-ins on double features with Asylum and The Vault of Horror. Penthouse Pictures Inc. went out of business after this and was replaced by Penthouse Productions, Ltd., which put out Good to See You Again, Alice Cooper and Watched, which were four-walled. They also invested in Chinatown, Day of the Locust and The Longest Yard.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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!

Directed and written by James Chiara in his only filmed work, Heads or Tails is Harry (Matt Hewitt, Hollywood Babylon) as a virginal office worker whose life is pretty much the worst. His boss Mr. Bennett (John Barnum, The Cremators) treats him like garbage and even his secretary Marsha (Rene Bond) is rude to him. When client Yolanda Wainwright (Uschi Digard) tells him how dumb he is, he’s at rock bottom.

That night, he meets a magician (Harvey Whippsnake) who gives him a pill that he claims will fix his life. Back home, he takes it and four women — Do-It (Becky Sharpe appearing as Becky Pearlman; she was in Angie Baby), Right-Guard (Starlyn Simone, using her Michelle Simone stage name, she’s also in A Climax of Blue Power as Linda Harris), Delicious (Sandy Carey, Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman) and Show-Me (Kathy Hilton, Poor Cecily) — show up and make sweet love to him before disappearing. He finally gets lucky and ends up making love to all of them at the same time.

That’s the softcore version.

A couple of years later, this was re-released as Honey Buns and has a totally inserted scene in which a businessman (John Seeman, who had 116 adult roles and had to be exhausted) has a meeting of sorts with Joan Devlon (Night Caller) and Monique Cardin (who was in a movie called Baby Rosemary). There are other inserts that make it seem like Bond is having sex — not that she didn’t on film — but it’s not her.

That magician looks like Temu Dr. Demento.

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!

Directed by Eric Jeffrey Haims (A Clock Work Blue, The Jekyll and Hyde Portfolio) and Shelley Haims, who co-wrote it with Tom Reamy, The Mislayed Genie (or The Miss Laid Genii) has David Bates (Franklin Anthony) — get it, Master Bates — finding out that when he rubs his penis, a genie (Tobar Mayo, who was also Abar) comes out and grants his wishes. At one point, gangsters tie up our hero and one of his friends has to, well, get the genie to emerge from his wang.

“See David’s magic…lamp??? If you rub it LONG enough… If you rub it HARD enough… You’ll COME out smiling…” is the tagline, but let’s be honest, I watched this because Rene Bond plays Miss Gooch, the school’s sexual education teacher. This is a magical world where young boys are taught all the basics of lovemaking by perhaps one of the most perfect beings to ever break hearts.

This has appearances by Ana Ali (A Scream In the Streets), Margot Devletian (Evil Come, Evil Go), Diana Hardy (The Goddaughter) and Tricia Opal (Sex In the Comics). I am amused that just a year into porno chic that movies like this went all the way into fantasy and couldn’t decide if they wanted to be softcore or full adult, as this has numerous erections. There’s a fun idea here but the movie can barely care to explore it.

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!

Directed by Stephen Gibson (using the name Stan Gelson; he also made Black Lolita and used the name Norm de Plumé when he made Disco Dolls In Hot Skin and Hackin’ Jack vs. the Chainsaw Chick 3D) and written by a crew that included Harvey Meadowmuffin (another Gibson name), Pierre LaFarce (yet another Gibson name) and Tommy Rott (Arnold Herr, who shot Teaser, Hard Candy and several other movies with Gibson) and based on a joke by Ramsey Throckmorton (also, you guessed it, Gibson), The Playmates In Deep Vision 3-D is the first Eastman Kodak color 3D movie. Shot in the Deep Vision 3D process, there is a cut for drive-ins and another for adult theaters, but it never gets all that explicit.

There are also several other movies made with Deep Vision 3D, all directed by Gibson: Blonde Emmanuelle, Hard Candy and Wildcat Women.

Dr. Jane Kinsey (Becky Sharpe, If You Don’t Stop It… You’ll Go Blind!!!) is doing research on swinging when she meets TV show host Joe Strovack (John Paul Jones, Angie Baby) and everything up until that point was a documentary and now, it switches to a love story. And then it starts having Laugh-In quick bits.

One of those cut scenes has Rene Bond as a waitress and she looks right into your soul and says, “It’s all real.” Except that she had breast implant surgery before this movie was made. But who cares? It’s Rene Bond!

Also showing up, we have Con Covert, who was in everything from A Scream In the Streets to Repo Man. He was also the intruder in Fantasm and shows up multiple times in Hollywood Babylon. Plus, there’s Dalana Bissonnette (AKA Kathy Foster, Sally Jack and Claire Krumpet), Sandy Dempsey (one of the many prisoners of Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS), Suzanne Fields (Dale Ardor from Flesh Gordon), Kathy Hilton (The Toy Box), William Margold, Linda Marie (the succubus from Terror at Orgy Castle), Titus Moede (Boo Boo from Rat Pfink a Boo Boo), Gretchen Rudolph (Run Swinger Run!), Starlyn Simone (also known as Michelle Simone, Simone, Linda Harris — she used that name for A Climax of Blue Power — and Starline Comb, Nora Wieternik (Queen Amora from Flesh Gordon) and Wendy Winders (the woman going down on Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood Babylon).

This movie promised “The Revolutionary New 3-D Process That Will Put “The Playmates” Right in Your Lap!” The 3D process can’t be that good. The humor isn’t all that funny. But hey, it’s something different. And if you can’t watch a movie and wait for Rene Bond to show up, you really need some help.

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!

Frankie Lee (Rene Bond) and her boyfriend Johnnie Ellis (Ric Lutz) have a tough relationship. She’s becoming a big star as a singer and can’t be around whenever he wants her. He has a job she doesn’t understand as a computer programmer and when she comes to work, she’s so attractive that even his CPU hits on her. Come on, she’s Rene Bond. Of course a mainframe is going to fall in love.

The secret is that Johnnie is also sleeping with Alice (Cyndee Summers), Frankie’s best friend. They have a meet-up in her marital bed just in time for her husband Ray (John Barnum) to get home and put him in the hospital, where Frankie visits and give him an old fashioned as both of his arms are broken.

On another secret date, Johnnie tells Alice that he only keeps Frankie around for the money so that he can patent his computer invention. And despite him figuring out how to get both of them in bed at the same time, this story can only end in tragedy.

Rene Bond is amazing in this, singing, bring dramatic and doing comedy all in an hour of screen time. This is a softcore film, a rarity for almost everyone in the cast as well as director and writer Alan Colberg. It even has racing footage and feels like it was an attempt to make a real movie and not just a smoker.

I wish the whole movie was about that computer trying to have sex with Rene Bond.

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!

This was the first movie that Nicholas Meyer ever wrote. Yes, the same guy who wrote The Day After, Time After Time and the two good Star Trek films (two and four, if you’re playing at home) started right here. One day when he left to visit his parents, the script was altered and young Mr. Meyer wanted to take his name off of the project, but was convinced by his manager that he needed a credit.

Neil Agar (William Smith, Grave of the Vampire) is a special agent for the State Department sent to investigate the numerous deaths at government-sponsored Brandt Research.

It turns out that the scientists there are more obsessed with sex than their research to the point that some of them are literally getting balled to death. By the way, I’m on a quest to get the word balling and ball used in the vernacular again. Please help me.

The truth is the women of the research lab have all become Bee Girls through self-induced mutation. Now they have eyes that allow them to see like insects and the instincts of using and destroying men, several of whom totally welcome the end.

The main reason to watch this is Anitra Ford as Dr. Susan Harris. You may remember her from The Big Bird Cage and being a model on The Price Is Right. She’s in one of my favorite movies, 1972’s Messiah of Evil. If you haven’t seen that, you should probably just stop reading this right now and get on that.

Victoria Vetri plays the heroine, Julie Zorn. Using the name Angela Dorian, she was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for September 1967 and 1968’s Playmate of the Year. When Apollo 12 went to the moon, a photo of her and Playmates Leslie Bianchini, Reagan Wilson and Cynthia Myers was there, inserted into the activity astronaut cuff checklists.

She also appears in Rosemary’s Baby and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. In 2010, nearly a quarter-century into her marriage to Bruce Rathgeb, Vetri was charged with attempted murder after allegedly shooting her husband at close range after an argument. She received nine years in prison on a charge that was finally reduced to attempted voluntary manslaughter. Her husband claimed that she had been saying, “No more Charlie, no more Charlie,” as she’d been convinced that Charles Manson wanted her dead ever since her friend Sharon Tate was killed. In fact, the gun that she used was given to her by Roman Polanski, who her husband claimed that she often slept with along with Tate. Vetri is in a halfway house now and working on making her way back to society.

This movie is also known as Graveyard Tramps, which has nothing to do with what it’s really about. You should watch it anyway.

There are several Bee Girls — called Bee Ladies in the credits — and they include Colleen Brennan (who also used the name Sharon Kelly and is in Russ Meyer’s Supervixens and Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS), Kathy Hilton (If You Don’t Stop It… You’ll Go Blind!!!), Sharon Madigan (Truck Turner) and, perhaps most importantly, Rene Bond, appearing in one of the nineteen movies she made in 1973 and one of the few mainstream efforts. Actually the only one.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Here’s a drink recipe.

Invasion of the Bee’s Knees

• 2 oz. gin
• .75 oz. lemon juice
• .75 oz. honey syrup
• 1 oz. egg white
• Dash of honey

1. Place all ingredients in a shaker, then shake vigorously.
2. Pour into a glass and enjoy.

Golden Oldies Week (July 27 – August 3) Something Weird Video have released such a wide range of movies over the last 30 years that trying to categorize them can be tricky. They started out as a gray market mail order distributor (aka a bootlegger) not unlike the Cape Copy Center or Sinister Cinema and eventually moved into the niche se ploit titles that would set them apart. The movies on this list are the kind of cult genre titles that were the bread and butter of many of the bootleg companies of the 90s and most were not exclusive to SWV. If you look in the catalogs or on the website these would be under categories like “Nightmare Theatre’s Late Night Chill-O-Rama Horror Show,” “Jaws of the Jungle,” “Sci-fi Late Night Creature Feature Show,” or “Spies, Thighs & Private Eyes.” Many of these are currently available as downloads from the SWV site (until the end of 2024)!

The problem with being Count Dracula is that your family line will eventually have to deal with in-breeding, which means that your lone male heir is a one-eyed, furry-faced boy Oh yeah — and your daughters may appear to be highly cultured musicians by day, but by night, they seduce any man — or woman — in their path, even priests. Actually, if Leon Klimovsky’s La Saga de los Draculas taught me anything, it’s that I don’t want to be Count Dracula.

If you’ve encountered any Spanish vampire films, you know that for every moment of sheer surrealist glee or breast baring blood blasting scene, you have to deal with long stretches where not much happens. Then again, we kind of specialize in movies where not much happens until the insane end of the film around here.

Berta is the long-lost relative of the Dracula clan who has returned home to the family castle, where all hopes of a male heir are pinned upon her. By the end of the film, she’s full-on bonkers, dispatching her cheating husband who has already consorted with all of her nubile relatives, then wipes them all out while they sleep in their coffins with an axe. Of course, that’s never worked on vampires before, but this film also features blood drinkers walking around in broad daylight.

By the end, she’s delivered her own baby and lied to the Count, who doesn’t struggle when she attacks him. That said, her blood gets all over the baby, who eagerly laps it up, ensuring that the Dracula bloodline will go on.

The print that played at the Drive-In Super Monster Rama was afflicted with a nasty case of vinegar syndrome, meaning that it would run for ten minutes and then fall apart, with credits that weren’t even worth running. That didn’t matter at all — by 2:30 AM I had ingested several strong ciders, some moonshine, some blazing hot slices of Buffalo chicken pizza and perhaps some other things that we can’t legally discuss. As the windows of our car fogged up and my wife slept by my side, I was pulled into the family dalliances of the Draculas.

It has everything you want from a European 1970’s vampire film: Helga Line leading an attractive cast of female blood suckers, some fine gore and even some cinematography that approaches art, mixed with — you guessed it — long stretches where people just talk and listen to some Bach. It’s certainly unlike any vampire film I’ve seen before. That — and the environment in which I watched it for the first time — added to my enjoyment.