EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on July 30, 2019.

As you may have learned by now, I absolutely love movies that are based on true stories that aren’t really true. This is yet another, directed by Michael Miller, who also brought us National Lampoon’s Class Reunion, a slasher spoof written by John Hughes, the martial arts/slasher Chuck Norris-starring Silent Rage and the TV movies A Crime of Innocence, Danielle Steele’s Daddy and Roses Are for the Rich, a movie that would fit right into our redneck week, as Lisa Hartman plays an Appalachian widow who vows to destroy Bruce Dern, the man who got her husband killed.

Dinah Hunter (Yvette Mimieux, The Time Machine, Snowbeast) is an ad exec in LA who has just about had it. She quits her job after arguing with a client and leaves for NYC after catching her man having some aggressive cuddling in the swimming pool with another woman.

As she drives across our great nation, Dinah picks up Bobby Ray (Robert Carradine, Revenge of the Nerds) and his pregnant girlfriend Lola (Nancy Lee Noble, Honey Pot from She-Devils on Wheels). They end up robbing her for everything she’s got, so she walks to a bar and asks to use the phone. This being a 1970’s drive-in movie, the bartender (character actor Britt Leach, who was in the Jerry Lewis comeback movie Hardly Working that I endured as a child, as well as The Last Starfighter and Silent Night, Deadly Night) ends up assaulting her and then calls the cops when she defends herself. This isn’t the big city — the police believe the local, not her.

Dinah ends up in Jackson County jail — go figure, with a title like that — right next to Blake (Tommy Lee Jones), who awaiting extradition to Texas on a murder charge. Seeing as how Dinah has no ID, she has to wait until someone gets back to her from New York or Los Angeles. Deputy Hobie can’t even deal with her being in a cell for one night before he too attacks her, but she ends up killing him with a wooden stool and Blake helps her escape by stealing the keys. Sheriff Dempsey (Severn Darden, an original member of Second City and Kulp in the Planet of the Apes films) chases after them before running into a drunk driver in an accident that kills both of them.

Blake and Dinah go on the road, chased by the cops after being charged for Hobie’s death. She wants to turn herself in as she still believes in the law, even after everything. He lets her know that every small town cop is corrupt and that no one will believe that she acted in self-defense.

The police finally catch them during a parade in Fallsburg, gunning down Blake in the street, with him bleeding out all over the American flag. We’re left watching our heroine in the back of a cop car, going back to jail for what presumably is more hell on earth. And that’s it — were you expecting a happy ending from a 1970’s Roger Corman deep fried crime movie?

Jackson County Jail was written by Donald E. Stewart, who would go on to win an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for the movie Missing. He also wrote the films Deathsport, The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger and the TV movie Death of a Centerfold – The Dorothy Stratten Story.

Roger Corman would remake this movie in 1997 as Macon County Jail with Ally Sheedy and David Carradine as the leads and Charles Napier as the sheriff.

You can watch this for free on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on May 24, 2020.

I was telling someone who doesn’t watch movies like I do — well, that could be just about anyone — that this film has a cast packed with stars. That’s when I realized that Hollywood Boulevard has a cast that is all famous to me and probably me alone. I don’t care. These are my people. Join me as I celebrate them.

Candice Rialson, the inspiration for Bridget Fonda’s character in Jackie Brown, stars as Candy Wednesday, new in town and ready to be a big star. She gets an agent named Walter Paisley (Dick Miller, with the same name as his character in A Bucket of Blood) who can’t get her any work until she gets mixed up in a bank robbery.

Those of you who read the site know that I watched this movie specifically because Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov are in it. What kept me around was the fact that this movie is basically making fun of every Corman movie of this era, with the three girls formula and a script pretty much taken from the Bela Lugosi movie The Death Kiss.

Seeing as how this was directed by Allan Arkush and Joe Dante, there are a ton of inside jokes. Bartel’s director character, Eric Von Leppe, is the name of Boris Karloff’s character from The Terror. John Kramer’s character, Duke Mantee, is named for Bogart’s character in The Petrified Forest. Tara Strohmeier’s Jill McBain is named for Claudia Cardinale’s character in Once Upon a Time in the West. You also have a movie named Machete Maidens, as well as almost every Corman director showing up in cameos, plus Forrest J. Ackerman and Robby the Robot popping up.

This movie was the result of a bet between producer Jon Davison and Roger Corman. Davison believed that he could make the cheapest New World Pictures movie ever, so he was given $60,000 and ten days.

Consider it a greatest hits collection, with scenes taken directly from Battle Beyond the Sun, The Terror, The Big Bird Cage, Night of the Cobra Woman, The Hot Box, Night Call Nurses, Unholy Rollers, Savage!, Caged Heat, Big Bad Mama, Death Race 2000 and Crazy Mama all here.

Let me sum this up: Candice Rialson looks better in the Frankenstein costume than David Carradine.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on August 3, 2019.

I discovered this movie thanks to Joe Bob Briggs’ How Rednecks Saved Hollywood presentation. The clips he showed were absolutely astounding and there was no way that the actual movie could live up to his speech about the film, right? Nope. This is one sordid piece of scummy moviemaking that does all that and more.

Director Gus Trikonis started his career as a dancer in West Side Story, playing Indio, a member of the Sharks. His directing work for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures led to Corman claiming he was one of the best young directors that he had worked with. His films run the gamut of hicksploitation, from The Side Hackers to The Swinging Barmaids, Supercock, The Evil, Moonshine County Express and the movie based on the Johnny Paycheck sung and David Allen Coe written song Take This Job and Shove It. He was also married to Goldie Hawn for awhile.

Monica Gayle (The Stewardesses, Switchblade Sisters) stars as Jamie, the Nashville Girl of the title (the film also played under the titles New Girl In Town and Country Music Daughter in an attempt to convince people it had something to do with the Loretta Lynn bio Coal Miner’s Daughter). She’ll do anything to make it in Nashville after leaving town when she’s assaulted by a boyfriend and abused by her father. It doesn’t get any better in music city, trust me.

Somehow this movie goes from jailbait in trouble to massage parlor receptionist to women in prison to young girl getting pawed by every man in town in very short order, ending with her under the thrall and ownership of big time country star Jeb (Glenn Corbett of TV’s Route 66) and enduring the attentions of Kelly (Roger Davis, TV’s Dark Shadows, as well as Ruby and Killer Bees).

Judith Roberts shows up as Jeb’s long-suffering wife. She’d go on to star in things like Orange Is the New Black, but we know her best as Mary Shaw in Dead Silence.

Singer Johnny Rodriguez and songwriters Rory Bourke, Gene Dobbins, and John Wills all show up here and contribute music. None of this makes Nashville look like a great city to live in or be a rising female artist. There are more #metoo moments in five minutes of this movie than in pretty much everything Hollywood will release this year. It gets to the point that you honestly worry about Monica Gayle’s personal mental health. She might change her name to Melody Mason and get a whole new life story, but she can never escape the past that got her here.

Somehow, there’s a novel version of this movie that has even more sex in it. It’s written by Gary Friedrich, who co-created Ghost Rider. So there’s that.

You can watch this on Tubi or go all out and grab the Scorpion Releasing blu ray from Ronin Flix.

Erwin C. Dietrich is listed as the director and writer of this, but it’s also Jess Franco pitching in to direct. There’s a story behind that.

According to Kyle Faulkner on Letterboxd, at the end of 1975, Franco got the job of making a more pornographic ripoff of Mandingo, which would seem to be right up his alley. As the cast and crew were at a party, Jess and Line Romay ran from the event that they were throwing, effectively dashing on the bill for two weeks before resurfacing in Italy. This is when Lina and her husband Ramon Ardid finally got divorced and Franco had to face up to years of running from his debts. That’s why he made so many films for Dietrich, as he was locked up as his house director to pay back people and probably stay out of trouble.

Pia (Pilar Coll), Margit (Kali Hansa) and Maite (Esther Moser) are three girls who dance in a cabaret — hey, have you ever seen that in a Jess Franco movie? — and live together in a one bed apartment, which is convenient for a menage a trois banana eating session. Then, Mustafa (Eric Falk) and two photographers (Kurt Meinicke and Marlies Haas) kidnap one of them, creating the need for a rescue operation, which means that all three girls try to hump Mustafa until he dies.

Sex in a coffin. Sex with a guy with a fez on his head. Posters for the Bond movies From Russia With Love, Diamonds Are Forever and The Man with the Golden Gun on a wall. A movie about work-based slavery when that’s what Franco was kind of going through himself. Another cut called Wilde Lust that’s the same movies with dongs. Yes, this kind of has it all, if it all means mid 70s smut.

On paper, this is about a crime boss named Mr. Winter (Roger Darton) who leaves Hong Kong during a gang war and sets up a new shop in Paris where he gets busy doing what he does best: kidnapping women and getting them to become sex workers who make him money.

The strange part is figuring out how much of this movie was directed by Jess Franco and how much was by Marius Lesoeur and other Eurocine directors. There’s a scene in a cabaret with a Jess cameo which is definitely all him but the shootout that opens this movie is way too much action for him, as he often struggled with showing action movie basics in his work.

At least Alice Arno (Kiss Me Killer) is on hand as Winter’s henchwoman.

My hunt for info on this movie at. least led me to a site that — for some reason — has Jess Franco’s horoscope birth chart. What can we learn from this?

According to Robert Monell, “Franco was called in to direct some of the stage shows while footage from other Eurocine films (Paul Naschy’s Crimson) and new scenes directed by Eurocine founder Marius Lesoeur told the tale.” He used the name A.M.F. Frank, which is also a name that Lesoeur used on other movies.

Directed by Alain Cavalier, Fill ‘Er Up with Super is the story of Klouk (Bernard Crombey), a young auto salesman who has to cancel a vacation with his wife so that he can personally deliver a Chevrolet station wagon to a rich owner on the Riviera. He decides to make it a more fun trip by inviting his friend Philippe (Xavier Saint-Macary) and picking up a two other men on the road by the names of Charles (Etienne Chico) and Daniel (Patrick Bouchitey).

All four of these actors were friends and along with Cavalier, they wrote this film and filmed it on the road, away from the studio, with the freedom to make it be about anything they wanted. The guys really aren’t going anywhere in life or on this journey, but it’s times exactly those kinds of voyages teach you who you are and where you may end up. It’s an exploration of what makes these men, well, men, as they ride inside a giant symbol of masculine American virtue, a gas guzzling car that has to seem out of place as they drive through the small towns on their way from the north to the south of France, from Lille to the Cote d’Azut.

The Radiance Films blu ray release of this movie has a 2K restoration of the film from the original negative. three short films with the cast directed by Cavalier; an interview with Bernard Crombey; an appreciation of Fill ‘Er Up with Super by Cahiers du Cinema deputy editor Charlotte Garson; newly translated English subtitles; a reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters and a limited Edition booklet featuring new writing on the film. You can get it from MVD.

Countess Edna Luise Von Stein (Pamela Stanford, Lorna the Exorcist, Cannibal Terror) once had a stud in bed that was surprised by her sister Millicent (Karine Gambier, but you can also call her Simone Samson like they did in Caged Women and Secrets of a French Maid). That man ended up assaulting Millicent while Edna watched and now, Edna keeps her all tied and drugged up with the help of Dr. Barrios (Jack Taylor) all in the hopes that if she can get the lawyers to say that Millicent is legally insane, then she’ll get everything.

Milly has one hope. Her sister has brought many men to her room — and watched — but only Joe (Kurt Meinicke) ever gave her pleasure. He’s in love with her, but can he rescue her? Is there anything left? And will Edna let her go, seeing as how her pleasure is dependent on seeing her sister remain unfulfilled?

This also has the much better title Satanic Sisters even if there are no occult things happening. Just weird sex, the kind of stuff that Erwin C. Dietrich wrote and there’s no Lina around but there’s Jess, shooting things through curtains and that’s about all we can hope for at this stage.

Around the World In 80 Beds is a collaboration between Erwin C. Dietrich (who took all the credit; he also made Secrets of a French Maid, Six Swedish Girls in a Boarding School, She Devils of the SS and you can get a feel for what he specialized in by those titles; Franco made 17 movies for him) and Jess Franco (no credit, but hey, I’m not doing a month of just any director’s films, much less for the second year in a room), this is not Mondo Erotico except in Germany, so don’t get it confused with the 1973 Filippo Walter Ratti-directed Mondo Erotico; nor the Joe D’Amato-directed, Amanda Lear-starring Crazy Nights which is also called Mondo Erotico and certainly not the Osvaldo Civirani-directed Tentazioni proibite, which also played in Germany as Mondo Erotico.

Esther Moser is the host of this film and just in the year 1977 she’d appear in Franco’s Ilsa, the Wicked Warden; Die Sklavinnen; Blue Rita and Die teuflischen Schwestern. Instead of eighty beds, as promised, the viewer instead is given several stories in an anthology-style film, starting with a black mass in Greenwich Village — yes, five people can be a black mass, one figures, one for each point of the pentagram — and then jet sets us if not all over the world then at least to different small sets to show what the naughty are doing in San Francisco (where an eighty-year-old Elisabeth Bathory claims she stays young by bathing in male-made fluids), Copenhagen (for incest live on stage and you thought this was a  new thing the weird kids that search Pornhub are into), Hamburg (where a dominatrix known as the Bride of Satan does her dastardly work), Agoa (where the elders of a tribe take a new bride before her husband; yes, remember that all mondo movies must have a jungle scene that defines racism); Amsterdam (where a sex class experiments with toys, including a man being penetrated, so this is ahead of time at least sexually) and Istanbul (for yet another live sex show).

Who knew all this sex could be so boring?

I guess sometimes, Franco needed money, but this is a rough one to get through. At least there’s one funny moment when a love doll looks bored by sex, if an inanimate toy can be turned off. You may also notice Eric Falk (Stiletto from one of Dietrich’s wilder movies Mad Foxes) plus several of the girls who show up in Franco’s movies from his time with Dietrich, like Esther Studer, Pilar Coll, Lorli Bucher and Yvonne Eduser .

But seriously, unless you’re someone whose ADD demands that you see every Jess Franco film and have a Letterboxd list and a whole month on your site devoted to him, you may not need to see this.

The themes of childhood memories and wanting the world of fairy tales over real life empowers Lips of Blood and it was disconcerting to see so many of those scenes remixed and placed into and around clinical pornography in this movie, which was forced upon creator Jean Rollin, who used the name Michel Gand to make this.

Instead of an image of the past reminding Frédéric of a lost past, here he reads through a book and explains how vampirism is just another perversion. I realize that Rollin had to make this to make back the money that Lips of Blood lost at theaters, but it had to be just pain upon pain for him to prostitute his memories and his beloved vampires for just a simple suck and fuck.

Where in the last movie Claudine was taking photos of a nude model, here she’s filming a couple that has nothing to do with the first film as they make boring love. That same Asian woman ends the film going down on our hero and maybe he should watch out for her fangs.

I guess you could see that this fits within the first movie but I really feel sad about all of this. And it’s not for some puritanical reason. If someone like D’Amato or Franco did the same — hell Franco did the same — I would understand and realize that those guys moved past the question of art and commerce and decided mostly on the latter. I feel empathy that Rollin had to answer that as well.

I guess we all have our Lisa and the Devil, huh?

Jean Rollin is Michel Gentil, this film’s director and writer (he also appears for a few moments) and this was one of the many periods in his life where he found himself making adult films and not for the love of it like Jess Franco or the understanding that he was a capitalist like Joe D’Amato but because he wanted to survive when the films he really loved making just didn’t make him enough money.

Martine (Tania Busselier, who was also in Franco’s Ilsa the Wicked Warden and Countess Perverse) is a  writer of erotic novels who can’t find peace, quiet or inspiration until she stays at a hotel and the guests give her more than enough to write down.

Those guests include Eva Khris, Eva Kwang (who is in several of Rollin’s adult films and shows up uncredited in Madame Claude), Martine Grimaud (the doomed photographer from Lips of Blood) and the Castel twins, Catherine and Marie-Pierre. Yes, this is an adult film with them, yet their participation isn’t as full as others.

Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, who wrote the narration for this, would play Orloff in Franco’s Female Vampire and also shows up in Killing Car, The Demoniacs, The Living Dead Girl and The Grapes of Death.

It’s not really all that erotic or well-made, but it is another Rollin film to watch and explore. If anything, it seems like when women have their clothes on, he’s more interested and therefore, their scenes actually live up to being arousing. But once it gets down to the basic push and pull, he checks out and starts thinking of beaches, always beaches, and his beloved vampires and asks if they’re done yet.