Director and writer Don Edmonds (of course, you know him from Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS) made this shot in a week and a day film that may have been distributed by New World but has nothing to do with their nurse films. Actually, Corman released it through Filmgroup.

This stars Donna Young (The Naughty Stewardesses), Marilyn Joi (Cleopatra Schwartz!) and Lauren Simon as the nurses, but unlike those Corman nurses films, these three girls have barely any social issues to solve and instead have to avoid Buck Flower as a horrifying sex offender, heal boxer John Daniels and handle Albert Cole’s mobster.

This movie will make you yearn for the subtlety of The Young Nurses. It’s violently not good, but I guess it had the kind of title and frequent nudity that it took to get on screens in 1974.

H. B. Halicki directed, wrote, starred in, produced and even did his own stuntwork to make this movie come to life, even hiring friends and family to keep the budget low. The cops, firemen and paramedics were real ones from Carson, California, as was its mayor, Sak Yamamoto. All of the vehicles they use were bought at an auction for $200 each and the fire trucks during the big chase at the end are Long Beach fire department trucks on their way to put out a real fire.

That final chase is forty minutes long and had no script. The whole movie had no script. Instead, Halicki showed editor Warner E. Leighton a piece of paper with a big circle, telling him that they went around a dust bowl twice and that was the script. Leighton had no idea what would be given to him each day.

H.B. Halicki Mercantile Co. & Junk Yard was the business that its creator ran and there were times that he would shut down the shooting so that he could fix some cars for money so that he could come back and wreck some for this movie.

Halicki is Maindrian Pace, an insurance investigator who runs a chop shop and is also the boss of a ring of car thieves. He has a code of honor, however, as everything he steals has to be insured so that the owners are compensated.

That code does not stop him from working for a South American drug lord who offers $200,000 to start and $2000,000 to finish taking 48 specific vehicles in five days. Each of the cars — given female names — have different degrees of difficulty to take, but Eleanor, a yellow 1973 Ford Mustang, is the toughest of all. Each time he attempts to find one, an issue keeps Maindrian from completing his order.  The final chase in which he tries to complete the order takes up six California cities and seemingly hundreds of vehicles, ending when he jumps the car thirty feet in the air for 128 feet. Usually cars have a gas-driven catapult or the help of CGI to make the stunt look good. Nope, That’s just H.B. in a car, compressing ten vertebrae and never walking the same way again. At one point, he hit a lamp post at more than 80 miles an hour and when he was finally awakened, the first thing he said was, “Did we get coverage?”

Sadly, his luck would not last. When making the sequel fifteen years later, a water tower fell incorrectly and the cable attached to it snapped. This chopped part of a light pole, which fell on Halicki, killing him. A shame and yet, how many times did he walk away from disaster?

For a movie that has 93 car crashes, of course Eleanor would be listed in the cast. That car deserves it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on November 5, 2021 and was written by Benjamin Merrell, who lives in Seattle, WA. You can check out his blog at cestnonunblog.com and follow him on Letterboxd.

Diana ‘TNT’ Jackson (Jeannie Bell), one bad mamma jamma, heads off to Hong Kong to, I guess, tell off her brother, Stag Jackson after he didn’t respond to the letter that she sent him to, um, tell him off. “He asked me to send him some money, instead I sent him a piece of my mind. I just want to know if he got it.” I guess some “Screw you” messages have to be delivered in person. But, unbeknownst to her, brother dearest was actually killed by drug dealers during the opening credits. Now TNT is out for revenge!

…Or something like that. TNT Jackson, the character and the movie, aren’t really overly concerned with things like a logical plot progression or proper character motivations. The movie suffers from a flimsy, paper thin plot about double-crossing drug dealers that feels like it was slapped together and invented solely to give TNT something to do until she discovers which one of the drug dealers killed her brother. It stresses style over substance, but thank God the movie at least has some style.

After leaving the airport TNT takes a cab to the bad part of town. You know it’s bad because the very first thing we see is a woman getting raped in the middle of the street. On the plus side, someone does immediately come to the woman’s rescue, however his ass is swiftly kicked by the rapist, who then leaves, presumably to try and finish what he started. TNT asks around for directions, which goes over about as well as you think it will, and thus she draws the attention of a gang of muggers. TNT isn’t screwing around though. She mops the floor with them pretty easily and even has a fun fight with a mugger who likes showing off his two ridiculously massive butterfly knives.

Conveniently, one of our main characters, Elaine, (a “government agent” working undercover with the drug dealers as leader Sid’s girlfriend) happens to witness the fight and offers TNT a ride, which leads to one of my favorite dialogue interactions of the entire film. Elaine wants to know more about why TNT is in town but TNT, who has thus far only dealt with people who wanted to rape, mug or kill her since she got into town, is having none of it. “Look lady, or whoever you are…I accepted a ride to Joe’s Haven and that’s all you need to know about me.” To which, Elaine simply replies, “Bitch.”

Joe’s Haven is Stag Jackson’s last known address, a nightclub/strip club/dojo owned by Hong Kong local Joe, who TNT very unself-consciously asks, “Who’s ever heard of a Chinaman named Joe? … They call me TNT.” Joe is the one who tells her that Stag never got her “screw you” letter, and then later informs her that Stag was actually killed during the opening credits. Meanwhile, Elaine sends their enforcer Charlie to the club to check TNT out and figure out what her deal is. And since TNT is the only fly black chick with a killer afro on Hong Kong island (her afro is indeed spectacular), he immediately takes a liking to her. Little do either of them know at the time, but Charlie is actually the one who killed TNT’s brother. I’d like to say that was a spoiler, but again, this was the very first thing that happened in the movie.

We never end up finding out why TNT was angry at her brother or what was in the nasty letter she wrote him or even why exactly Charlie wanted to kill him, because the plot immediately shifts its focus to the double-crossing drug dealers. Someone in Sid’s gang is leaking info about their drug buys and stealing their heroin shipments, so everyone naturally assumes it has something to do with TNT, despite the fact that she literally just got there and has no idea who any of these people are. (Sid is played by Ken Metcalfe, who apparently also did some rewrites on the script. Was Ken responsible for making the writing better or worse? We may never know.) Weirder still, they all suspect her of being the rat, when in reality literally half the gang is working behind Sid’s back to betray him.

The other major gang figure we haven’t gotten to yet is Ming, the guy with the hookup with their supplier, whom you’re supposed to suspect is the one stealing the drugs, despite the fact that he may actually be the only loyal soldier in Sid’s gang. But we, the audience, don’t like him, because he doesn’t like how cozy Elaine and Charlie are getting with TNT. And of course to make us really hate him there has to be a scene where Ming and his henchmen corner TNT in her room and threaten her with torture and rape. TNT has to fight them off, topless naturally, clad only in her panties, so we the audience can enjoy some quality slow-motion jiggling, er, fight choreography.

There are actually quite a few fun fights in this movie, especially at the end when everyone starts Kung Fu Fighting like they’re in a Carl Douglas song. The fight choreography in general is pretty well put together, especially considering a lot of the fight scenes were shot over the shoulder, covering up for the fact that most of the Western actors clearly lack any sort of actual prior martial arts experience. Jeannie Bell in particular has a very expressive brand of chopsocky that does a stellar job of selling that TNT is a kung fu master badass, despite Jeannie obviously not having any clue as to what she’s doing.

TNT Jackson isn’t a great film, but fans of blacksploitation and chopsocky kung fu flicks can probably find enough nudity, blood, gore and most importantly fun here to keep them entertained for its blissfully short 74 minute runtime.

TNT Jackson was produced by American International Pictures and directed by Filipino Blacksploitation pioneer Cirio H. Santiago, who is probably best known for 1981’s Firecracker (seriously, check out Firecracker. It’s fantastic.) Written by Dick Miller (yeah, that Dick Miller), with martial arts instruction by J.Lo (unfortunately not that J.Lo).

The last in the New World Pictures nurses movies, Candy Stripe Nurses stars Candice Rialson as Sandy, a nurse determined to cure rock star Owen Boles (Kendrew Lascelles, a playwright and poet for the most part) of his impotence. The other girls include Diane (Robin Mattson, Hot Rod), who wants to be a doctor who ends up getting involved with speed-addicted basketball player Cliff (Rod Haase), and Marisa (Maria Rojo), who has a romance with potential criminal Carlos (Roger Cruz). Rojo was thirty one and playing a juvenile delinquent, which I find absolutely fits into the world of Corman.

Director Alan Holieb said, “I found out they had taken a poll at a local high school. They sent someone out with a list of 30 or so titles and Candy Stripe Nurses got the most votes. They wanted a little social consciousness, a little romance, a little comedy and a little sex. Another requirement was they wanted a sex clinic. I don’t know why!”

He would go on to direct Wizards of the Lost Kingdom without a credit and School Spirit.

Originally shot at the Burbank Community Hospital, the cast and crew were kicked out when the real script was discovered — they had given the administration one that had none of the sex scenes — and Rialson was found hiding naked before shooting one of her scenes.

This is the last and definitely least of the nurse films, as it abandons the social commentary and just goes straight for the sex, with a very odd to 2023 moral center, as guys just push women into sex to the point that it feels like an assault.

1930s Up the River may be the first women in prison movie — feel free to correct me — but between this movie and Jess Franco’s 99 Women, all the things you need to know about WIP that would follow have been set in stone. In fact, Roger Corman thought the genre had already peaked and little did he know how many more movies were to come.

That’s why director and writer Jonathan Demme financed this himself, first calling it Renegade Girls and finding inspiration from the prison movies of the past like White Heat and Caged when it came time to retitle it.

Jacqueline Wilson (Erica Gavin, Vixen!) has been busted for drugs — she’s innocent — and sent to Connorville, where she’s in the care of McQueen (Barbara Steele, forever the queen of evil), a wheelchair-bound repressed warden who seems to live to torture her prisoners. And while Jacqueline first hates Maggie (Juanita Brown, Foxy Brown), they end up busting out with fellow inmate Crazy Alice (Crystin Sinclaire, Ruby, Eaten Alive), robbing a bank and getting so brave that they bust back into the jail to rescue all of their former cell mates, who include Deborah Clearbranch (before she was Desiree Cousteau), Ella Reed, Irene Stokes, Amy Barrett, Cynthia Songe and two of the most important of all 70s female exploitation icons, Roberta Collins and Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith.

This movie stands out from every other WIP ever made because it doesn’t stay in our reality, instead letting us see into the dreams and hopes of the women behind bars, even Steele, who can escape her chair and be part of “The Blue Angel” inside the prison showers. Of course, before we have too much sympathy for her, she’s also sent so many of the women to be experimented upon and get electrical shocks from Dr. Randolph (Warren Miller).

Obviously, Demme would go above and beyond this film with Stop Making Sense, Silence of the Lambs and Something Wild. But it’s in genre films like this where he started and proved that he could make something special even on the smallest of budgets.

Barbara Peeters directed and wrote one of the better of the Corman “occupation” films with this movie, which was produced by Julie Corman. It’s a simple story: three girls leave Iowa for a California summer and we watch the way their lives are changed.

Like Sally (Pat Anderson, Bonnie’s Kids, Fly Me). She came out here to teach photography and misses her fiancee back home, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t date a whole bunch of men like a former rock star who now works in a grocery store because of his food fetish and another teacher who takes her to the Pussycat Theater and then shoots nudes of her. Sally also hooks up with a movie star named John John Lacey who is Michael Greer from Messiah of Evil.

Or Denise (Rhonda Leigh Hopkins). She gets involved in the life of one of her students when he steals a car. Well, she sleeps with him too, so maybe she’s not the best teacher.

The star, however, is Conklin (Candice Rialson, Moonshine County Express). She decides to coach a girl’s football team despite the men’s coach (Dick Miller) standing in her way.

There’s always a trade-off in the Corman occupation films. The best of them — like this one — present a world where women can compete and defeat entrenched male power structures. However, they all are filled with mostly female nudity. That said, in this film, Rialson’s character chooses the man she loves, a geeky teacher many would pass by, and she’s in complete ownership of her body.

Director Billy Hazelrod (Joe Warfield) wants to make a biker movie in a small town where all of the interactions are real. He wants people to live and breathe their roles, but seeing as how the town already distrusts not just bikers but these Hollywood types, he’s basically setting up a horrible tragedy. Or maybe that’s what he intended all along. Why else would he set a sexual assault scene in a church, surrounded by real worshippers? And why is anyone surprised when they stop kneeling and start attacking the bikers — who they think are real — as the cameras keep rolling?

Sue Bernard (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) is the lead actress who starts taking her role too seriously. Andrea Cagan (The Hot Box) is the local girl who gets seduced by the dream factory that has taken over her small town. And John Holmes plays a cop!

The idea of this movie is way more interesting than the film itself. If I write and tell you that an accidental killing in this film becomes part of the movie that is being made within the movie and it’s about art and life intersecting, it comes off that this film is able to turn that storyline into something meaningful. It gets close through it’s very fly on the wall way of being shot. Yet it’s so talky that it feels like it will take a long time to get there. If made by a better filmmaker, it may have.

Speaking of those filmmakers, this was directed and co-written (with Earl Jay) by Gerald Sindell, who also made H.O.T.S., a movie that was on cable seemingly non-stop in the middle of the masturbatory night in my teenage years.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This has been on the site before — it’s a Joe D’Amato movie, so just expect that — and the last time was on December 12, 2021.

The assistant director of Johnny Got His Gun, as well as the director of Big Bad Mama, Lone Wolf McQuaid and Eye for an Eye, Steve Carver directed this exploitation roughie, where slave girls become gladiators and rise against their masters. But hey — it has Pam Grier in it! And you know why it’s probably so sleazy? I blame the director of cinematography — Joe D’Amato!

Actually, in Italy, they said that this movie was made by Michael Wotruba. You know who that is? That’s right, the same man who is Joe D’Amato, Aristide Massaccesi. In the book Erotismo, orrore e pornografia secondo Joe D’Amato, the man of many names said that Italian producer Franco Gaudenzi didn’t trust Carver, who was sent by Roger Corman, so he sent D’Amato to help as needed. Carver did the talking, D’Amato did the action and we have a movie.

Speaking of Corman, he offered this movie to Martin Scorsese after Boxcar Bertha. Let that rest in your brain for a bit. Instead of making Mean Streets, Scorsese would have been working with Raf Donato. Or David Hills. Or maybe Boy Tan Bien.

In the time after Spartacus, in the ancient Roman town of Brundusium, a group of slave girls is sold to Timarchus (Daniele Vargas, Eyeball), a promoter who puts together the fights in the Colosseum. After the girls engage in a fight, she gets a big idea: make them fight to the death.

That’s when Mamawi (Pam Grier) and Bodicia (Margaret Markov) — who had just teamed up in Black Mama, White Mama — decide to team up again and get out alive. Rosalba Neri (Lady Frankenstein herself!, as well as Lucifera: Demon Lover and Amuck!) is in this too!

Markov met her husband, producer Mark Damon, while making this movie, but couldn’t date until production was over, as director Steve Carver had made a rule regarding cast and crew intermingling.

Your enjoyment of this will depend on how much you enjoy watching women battle as gladiators. I wrote that a while ago and come on, everybody loves that. They didn’ call this movie Naked Warriors for nothing.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on April 20, 2022.

The highest grossing film in Japan in 1973 and 1974, Submersion of Japan or Japan Sinks! was also a big deal in the U.S. Roger Corman bought the rights as part of New World Pictures and made a remix where he cut out lots of footage, added new sequences directed by Andrew Meyer (Night of the Cobra Woman) and added Lorne Greene as an ambassador at the United Nations as well as appearances by Rhonda Leigh Hopkins (Summer School Teachers), John Fujioka (Shinyuki from American Ninja), Marvin Miller (who was a narrator in several movies), Susan Sennett (Candy from The Candy Snatchers), Ralph James (Sixpack Annie), Phil Roth, Cliff Pellow and Joe Dante.

Now called Tidal Wave, it came out in May of 1975, while New World also released an uncut subtitled version called Submersion of Japan in America.

If you remember when we discussed Nosutoradamusu no daiyogen, Japan was in disaster mania, predicting the end of the world at every turn. This movie was inspired by Nippon chinbotsu by Sakyô Komatsu, the same author of Virus: The End, Bye Bye Jupiter, Disappearance of the Capital and Time of the Apes. Of all his work, Komatsu’s sinking story was so popular that it became a TV series in 1974 and was remade in 2006 as Doomsday: The Sinking of Japan, then remade again as the 2020 TV mini-series Japan Sinks 2020, which was so big that it played theaters and spun off another series, Japan Sinks: People of Hope.

There was even a 2006 parody, Nihon igai zenbu chinbotsu, which means The World Sinks Except Japan.

This was no cheap picture. Director Shirô Moritani has been second unit on Yojimbo while writer Shinobu Hashimoto was behind Rashomon, Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress and Throne of Blood amongst many other movies, as well as the director of Lake of Illusions, Minami no kaze to nami and I Want to Be a Shellfish.

Two hundred million years ago, what we know as the Earth was a single continent that split up over the years. At one point, Japan was part of the continent of Asia. But now? If you read the title, spoiler, Japan is going to sink. The first people to find out are geophysicist Dr. Tadokoro (Keiju Kobayashi, whose roles in comedies defined what post-war Japan saw as the ideal salaryman) and Onodera Toshio (Hiroshi Fujioka, the original Kamen Rider) take their submarine Wadatsumi-1 to the Ogasawara Islands. How bad is it? Well, the land mass that makes up the islands of Japan itself are about to collapse into a trench.

While Onodera is falling for Abe Reiko (Ayumi Ishida), volcanos start to erupt and earthquakes break out with more frequency. A rich businessman named Mr. Watari (Shōgo Shimada) pays for a series of expeditions to discover if Japan can be saved. But just like our climate, it’s already too late. Unlike our crisis, Japan has three choices: form a new country, seek a home in other countries or accept the end of the country and die.

They only have ten months to decide and as many countries offer to help, I’m reminded that as much as I love Japan, it’s an incredibly racist country. Even in a fictional story, South Korea, China and Taiwan refuse to help them. By the end, as the country sinks into the sea, more than half the population remains to go down with the ship. And our hero and heroine? They’re separated a world away from one another.

You know who is in this? Turkish born actor Andrew Hughes, a businessman based in Tokyo as an import-export businessman who shows up in so many Japanese films from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s, usually in minor roles but even playing Hitler in The Crazy Adventure. The Japanese prime minister is played by Nobuo Nakamura, who was in Kurosawa’s films, but the really interesting actor is the man playing the driver of the Japanese leader. He’s played by Haruo Nakajima, who played Godzilla from 1954’s original film to 1972’s Godzilla vs. Gigan. After this role, he went to work in Toho’s bowling alley. I wish I was making that up.

This movie has some amazing alternate titles, such as Panic Over Tokyo (West Germany and I’m shocked that Frankenstein was not involved, as his name was on every Toho Godzilla movie released there), The Fall of Japan (Belgium), Death in the Rising Sun (Portugal knows how to name a movie), The Sun Does Not Rise Over the Island (Czechoslovakia), Planet Earth Year Zero (Italy), S.O.S. The Earth Is Sinking (Sweden) and The End of the World (Turkey).

Roger Ebert nominated this movie for The 50 Worst Films of All Time–and How They Got That Way by Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss. He said, “The movie never ends, but if you wait long enough it gets to a point where it’s over.”

As for the Japanese version of the film — which lends its special effects to the aforementioned Toho Nostradamus movie — I really liked that unlike so many disaster films, the actual socioeconomic problems that the world would face get explained and shown. There’s no shortage of waves crushing everything in their way, but at least we learn something.

You can watch the original Japanese version of this movie at the Internet Archive.

Pygar (Robert Woods) recounts the story of his journey to Antigua — and The Lustful Amazons of the title — to Karzan (Wal Davis; if you’re watching the French version, he’s Maciste). He also tells the young adventurer that there’s a fortune in gold for the taking, but it’s all a ruse, as Pygar and the Amazon Queen (Alice Arno) are working together in the hopes that Karzan can be put out to stud. Once they get back to Antigua, Maciste is taken by the women and Pygar and Yuka (Lina Romay) go into business for themselves and take the gold.

Also known as Amazon Temple, Maciste contre la reine des Amazones, Yuka, Mädchen, die sich lieben lassen and Karzan contro le donne dal seno nudo, this is not Les Gloutonnes, a very similar film that uses much of the same footage and also places Howard Vernon into the narrative as Cagliostro.

Pygar is forced to have sex with Kali Hansa — oh the humanity! — while Alice Arno spanks him — the horror! — while Maciste sleeps with thirty plus Amazons, some of which do not survive his lovemaking abilities. Also: a werewolf shows up. Also also: the actress playing Marcia, Chantal Broque, is Alice Arno’s younger sister.

You can wonder why Franco was making a Tarzan ripoff — or peplum movie depending on the version you see — at this late date, but really, it was all about the naked Amazons.