Tag Archives: 1976

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Deep Jaws (1976)

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Uranus Studio is scammed Uncle Sam into financing Deep Jaws, a sexploitation mermaid movie that has nothing to do with Deep Throat or Jaws. How did they get the money? The government paid them to fake the moon landing. Yes, really. Also: This is softcore. This isn’t Gums, which is very similar but hardcore.

Directed by Perry Dell (The Dicktator) and written by Walt David (Evil Come Evil Go), Charles Teitel and Manuel Conde (the cinematographer of Terror at Orgy Castle), this has a good cast: Sandy Carey (who was in Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman, Drive In Massacre, The Beast and the Vixens and Time Walker), redhead dreamgirl Roxanne Brewer (Fantasm, Sexual Kung Fu In Hong Kong), Anne Gaybis (Snow White in Fairy Tales) and George “Buck” Flower.

It’s not great but hey — softcore was on the way out so at least it’s different.

You can watch this on CultPics.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Day Dream (1976)

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Hakujitsumu is based on a 1926 short story by Junichirō Tanizaki, which explores the nature of reality.

An artist and a young woman are in a dentist’s waiting room, and the man is too shy to even connect with her. In the same examining room, they’re both given an anesthetic as he imagines that she is being abused and tortured and even chased by a vampire. The uncut Dutch version even has a sexually explicit scene during which the woman is digitally attacked by the dentist.

A significant budget example of a pinky violence movie, this film even dared to show female pubic hair, a major cultural crime in Japan. Most instances — even in the most hardcore of films — are digitally fogged or have a mosaic over them.

Director and writer Tetsuji Takechi was nearly 70 when this was made. He’d already filmed Day Dream once before in 1964, after starting his career in kabuki theater and having his own TV show, The Tetsuji Takechi Hour, during which he reinterpreted Japanese stage classics. His next film, 1965’s Black Snow, saw him arrested on indecency charges and embroiled in a public battle over censorship between Japan’s intellectuals and the country’s government. Takechi won the lawsuit, which paved the way for the pinky films of the 1960s and 1970s.

Black Snow may be more controversial for its themes than its sex: its protagonist is a young Japanese man whose mother serves the U.S. military at Yokota Air Base as a prostitute. He’s impotent unless making love with a loaded gun in his hand, and before long, he’s killed a black soldier before being cut down by several Americans. The film is also fiercely nationalist with Americans — most pointedly the black man who is killed — shown to be nothing but sex-wild animals.

In the journal Eiga Geinjutsu, Takechi said, “The censors are getting tough about Black Snow. I admit there are many nude scenes in the film, but they are psychological nude scenes symbolizing the defencelessness of the Japanese people in the face of the American invasion. Prompted by the CIA and the U.S. Army, they say my film is immoral. This is, of course, an old story that has been going on for centuries. When they suppressed Kabuki plays during the Edo period, forbidding women to act, because of prostitution, and young actors, because of homosexuality, they said it was to preserve public morals. In fact, it was a matter of rank political suppression.”

The remake of Day Dream came a full decade after newspapers would not advertise his movies, and the director was only writing. That film is literally Japan’s first hardcore pornographic movie, and it was a big-budget movie played on big screens.

Yet while Westerners see his influence, in Japan, Takechi was an outsider in the mainstream and pinky world, so he’s forgotten. His right-wing politics clash with the protest ethos within other pinky films, so all in all, he’s lost in many ways.

Female star Kyoko Aizome, who plays Chieko, would gain notoriety from this film and become a star in the worlds of feature dancing (being arrested for indecency due to her on-stage behavior) and hard and soft AV (adult video) movies. According to an article on The Bloody Pit of Horror, she had her hymen surgically repaired so she could lose her virginity again on camera and also had her own King Kong vs. Godzilla moment when she starred in Traci Takes Tokyo opposite an underage Traci Lords.

As for the vampires, the dentist’s assistants (Saeda Kawaguchi and Yuri Yaio) have fangs, and the dentist himself is Kwaidan actor Kei Sato, a mainstream talent appearing in a movie that is anything but. Even after Chieko runs over the dentist and decapitates him, he comes back as a traditional film vampire.

After the original movie was made, South Korean director Yu Hyun-mok remade it as Chunmong (Empty Dream) and was arrested because there was a rumored nude scene. There were also rumors that actress Park Su-jeong had been humiliated by appearing naked on the set. The truth was that she wore a body stocking. Supposedly, the Korean film, which was kept off screens until 2004, is a superior piece of surrealist art.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Date with a Kidnapper (1976)

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I recall attending a convention and seeing my first Severin booth, and thinking, “If I start buying these movies, I’m never going to stop.”

I can’t always predict the future all that well, but after my first purchase — Dr. Butcher M.D., in case you wondered — I keep buying something from this label almost every single month.

The films of Frederick R. Friedel set, which also includes Axe and Blood Brothers, are just one of many examples of why I love Severin. Not only have they taken a Video Nasty and a drive-in obscurity and made them look better than they ever have before, they’ve also found almost everyone that worked on these films, gotten their side of the story and explained what actually happened before, during and after they were filmed.

Jack Canon, who the credits erroneously refer to as the kidnapped co-ed, plays Eddie Matlock, who is really the kidnapper. He was also in Axe, Maximum Overdrive and Trucker’s Woman. As the film begins, he’s already taking Sandra Morely (Leslie Rivers) captive. Her father puts an enormous ransom out for her return, so other criminals are now after them both to try and get paid.

Also known as Date With a Kidnapper, this is 75 minutes of a movie where things just happen for no reason, with no set-up or explanation. Axe is a movie where nothing happens for long stretches of time, whereas this is the opposite: a movie where all kinds of things happen, and the Stockholm syndrome is in full effect — although the kidnapper isn’t truly the villain he seems to be at the beginning.

This film looks gorgeous, getting every cent of its budget on the screen, and was shot by Austin McKinney, who worked on all sorts of genre films, from shooting Boris Karloff’s four Mexican films (The Snake People, House of Evil, Isle of the Snake People and Alien Terror), Hot Summer in Barefoot County, Getting It On and Jaws 3-D to being part of the sound crew on Hellraiser III and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child to working on the special effects team on movies like Beastmaster 2, Escape from New York, Battle Beyond the Stars, Sorceress and The Terminator. He was even the uncredited editor for The Beast of Yucca Flats and the production manager for The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?

You can get this from Severin.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Chesty Anderson, USN (1976)

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Chesty Anderson is a WAVE (Woman Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) in the U.S. Navy and the lead character in a movie that promises that you will see bare breasts. That’s 1976, I guess, and Shari Eubank is the right actress for this. A former cheerleader and homecoming queen at Farmer City High School in Illinois, she was only in one other movie and what a movie: Russ Meyer’s Supervixens. After this movie, she quit acting and moved back home, where she became a drama teacher. And she’s a way better actress than most people would be in a sexploitation film, but man, Supervixen is your drama teacher? The world is fascinating.

While this movie is a snooze — how can a movie named Chesty Anderson, USN be boring? — It does have a fun cast. It left Scatman Crothers ill-prepared for dealing with Kubrick, as one can only assume every scene is done in one take; I’ll bet there were fewer takes in this entire film than in one scene of The Shining. Timothy Carey is devouring scenery and being a lunatic as a mobster, while Ilsa, Dyanne Thorne, is in this as a fellow WAVE. At the same time, Joyce Mandel (Wham Bam Thank You Space Man), Uschi Digard (so many mammary-based movies), Rosanne Katon (Bachelor Party), Marcie Barkin (Fade to Black), Connie Hoffman (Naughty Stewardesses), Dorrie Thomson (Policewoman) and even Betty Thomas show up. Fred Willard, too, as Chesty’s square boyfriend.

Chesty’s sister has been killed after taking photos of Senator Dexter (George Dexter) in drag, which gets organized crime involved. And a man-eating plant is part of the story.

Yet through all this — a movie with all of these people — it’s very PG. And look, I’m not demanding sin, but in a film with this cast, even the shower scenes could be watched on regular television. It promises you vice and gives you virtue. Well, not much, but you get the point.

Director Ed Forsyth also made Superchick, Caged Men, The Ramrodder and more, while writer Paul Pumpian mostly worked in animation after this, and this is the only film for his co-writer H.F. Green.

This was initially released by Atlas Films in 1975, then rereleased by Flora Releasing and Coast Films. Thanks to Temple of Schlock for that, as well as the knowledge that this aired on TV as Anderson’s Angels. How much did they cut? It was also rereleased by 21st Century.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Cat Murkil and the Silks (1976)

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Also known as Cruisin’ High, this stars two actors from another 1976 teens in trouble movie, Derrel Maury and Steve Bond, who were in Massacre at Central High AKA Sexy Jeans. As for the titular Eddie “Cat” Murkil, actor David Kyle is now a missionary and religious speaker after being an actor and male prostitute.

Eddie and the Silks are white kids playing around at being a gang, which means stealing cars, robbing businesses, fighting with other gangs and because this is a 70s drive-in movie, sleeping around. Eddie’s brother Joey (Bond) has already been through all of this and tries to warn his sibling to go straight. He kills Punch, the leader of the gang, takes over and pretty much gets them all killed when he rumbles with a Latino gang. He’s also trying to make time with his brother’s wife, except she’s already cheating on his brother, so he ties up her new man and shoots her in the lady parts. This is a scene at odds with some of the hijinks here, just like the shower stabbing scene earlier.

Either you look like a kid or a twenty-year-old teenager in this.

But hey, vans are cruising, which is what I watch movies for.

In case you recognize Eddie, well, he’s Judith Myers’ boyfriend.

This was re-released as its alternate title in 1979, Cruisin’ High, with a different ad campaign, then again under that name on VHS in 1985 with a totally different look, trying to be tougher than it is. That’s funny because it cut all of the gun violence and the shower stabbing.

In Germany, it was released as CATS – Die Klasse von 1976, in Spain as Eddie el gato and had two incredible working titles: L.A. Gangs Rising and Street Kids of America.

Also, as I always note this, Doodles Weaver is in this!

You can watch this on Tubi.

CBS LATE MOVIE: The Keeper (1976)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Keeper was on the CBS Late Movie on December 19, 1985.

Christopher Lee is The Keeper, the crippled administrator of a secluded and exclusive mental hospital known as Underwood Asylum. It’s where the richest and most well-known families in British Columbia send their mentally disturbed relatives for care. Yet these families are killed off en masse, with their insane relatives suddenly becoming relatively well-off. Dick Driver (Tell Schreiber) is the detective — Triple D, as it were — who is out to find out what’s happening.

In a 1976 interview shared on Reeling Back, Lee had praise for this low-budget movie shot in Vancouver, saying, “I’ve never come across a story quite like this one. The character is extremely well-written. It has so many different sides to it that I said to my wife when I read it, “Here, this is good.” I gave it to her to read, and she said, “Yes, it’s perfect.” I said, “I’m going to do this. I’d like to do this very much.” The story itself appealed to me as a story. One of the major reasons, if not the major reason, I accept a role is because of what the story is and what the story is about.”

Three years later, he was asked of the film in this article: “It was a little movie. Drake directed it on a $135,000 budget, 60 percent of which came from the federal government’s Canadian Film Development Corporation. After Lee had returned to London, “I received a letter from British Equity, passing along a letter from Canadian Equity, advising me not to do the picture. ‘They were concerned because it was a completely non-union project.” The film, one that had appealed to Lee, “because it was an original idea, totally original,” has never been released. “An actor never goes into a picture with the knowledge that it’s going to be a disaster,” he said. “I always hope for the best, and work to do my best for the producers””

The Keeper sat unwatched for nearly a decade before being sold to TV, and in 1985, nine years after its release, it aired on the CBS Late Movie. It was released on VHS.

Directed and written by Canadian singer-songwriter, film director, and screenwriter T.Y. Drake (who would go on to write Terror Train), this film features the detective sending his assistant, Mae B. Jones (Sally Drake) is undercover at the sanitarium, where Lee is putting his patients through their worst fears because, well, he loves to watch that. Then, Dick commits himself to learning more. If you could explain to me what The Keeper’s plan is and how he’s supposed to make it all happen, I’d be so happy.

You can find this movie, but it’s as close to a lost one as there is these days. However, it’s by no means a discovery. It’s…something. I mean, I had fun with it, but as this site should prove to you, I have a distinct lack of taste.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave (1976)

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Originally a South Korean movie called Amelika bangmungaeg (also called Visitor of America), this was released in the U.S. by Aquarius Releasing with new dubbing, an incredibly insane poster of Bruce Lee emerging from a grave to defend a half nude woman and battle a flying bat baby as well as a new beginning filmed in the U.S. where lighting strikes the grave of Bruce Lee, who soon emerges, ready to fight. In an amazing display of absolute lunacy, that’s it. No more Bruce Lee.

No, instead, we follow Wong Han (Jun Chong, a judo master who used the name Bruce K. L. Lea; he’s the founder of the World United Martial Arts Organization (WUMAO); has trained Lorenzo Lamas, Sam J. Jones, Phillip and Simon Rhee, and Heather Graham; he also shows up in L.A. Street Fighters, Silent Assassins and Street Soldiers) as he makes his way to America to try and learn who killed his brother Han Ji-Hyeok.

Also, it appears that Wong’s brother died by jumping off his apartment building and is being incinerated in the furnace of the same building, which ends with Wong scooping up all the burned bones and placing them around his neck, along with a photo of the deceased and wandering the streets looking for answers. He’s then attacked by a man in black, whom he defeats and kills, which leads to his arrest.

Wong is bailed out by a wealthy man named Scott Lee and asked to find a woman named Susan (Deborah Dutch, Deep Jaws, 976-EVIL II), who ends up being a waitress. Lee’s decision to hire him is a mystery, given that he’s shown no ability to find the killers of his brother, so there’s no precedent for his detective skills. Anyways, he decides to help Susan and teaches her martial arts so quickly that she can fight nearly as well as he in mere days. She soon informs our hero that she learned from her job in Lee’s Turkish bathhouse that five men were involved in the death of his brother: the black man Wong has already battled, as well as a white man, a Japanese fighter, a Mexican and a cowboy. Given that there are about 4 million people in Los Angeles, finding them will be challenging. Then again, he didn’t see the killers yet and did find Susan, so he’s batting .500, which would get you in the hall of fame.

Then, our hero goes to a Christmas parade. Why? So the people there can look directly at the camera, and the filmmakers could shoot this without permits. Our hero is a peculiar individual who refuses to sleep in Susan’s house due to moral reasons. Consequently, she purchases an RV for him to sleep in outside her house.

Anyway, the cowboy is the last one standing, having killed the other killers before Wong, which means our hero and he will have to battle one-on-one. He fights like a pro wrestler, which I can appreciate, and then we learn that maybe Wong’s brother is still alive, as nearly everyone else dies. Yes, our hero can’t even protect the woman who helps him, choosing to do a fancy flying kick instead of just disarming the bad guy.

Directed by Lee Doo-yong and written by Hong Ji-Un, this movie is really something else. It’s not goo,d and yet I loved every moment. I kept thinking about the trailer and the poster and how they had to have led people to say, “Bruce Lee versus the black angel of death? How can I not watch this?”

You can watch this on Tubi.

Sizzlin’ Summer of Side-Splitters 2025: Revenge of the Cheerleaders (1976)

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July 7-13 Teen Movie Hell Week: From the book description on the Bazillion Points website: All-seeing author Mike “McBeardo” McPadden (Heavy Metal Movies) passes righteous judgment over the entire (teen movie) genre, one boobs-and-boner opus at a time. In more than 350 reviews and sidebars, Teen Movie Hell lays the crucible of coming-of-age comedies bare, from party-hearty farces such as The Pom-Pom Girls, Up the Creek, and Fraternity Vacation to the extreme insanity exploding all over King Frat, Screwballs, The Party Animal, and Surf II: The End of the Trilogy.

After The Cheerleaders and The Swinging Cheerleaders, where else was there to go?

This feels like porn without the penetration and by that, I mean it feels like amateur porn and somehow, David Hasselhoff is in it as a character named Boner. There’s a moment where the cafeteria spaghetti is dosed with LSD and the entire school freaks out, ending up in the gym showers as class is cancelled and the orgy begins. There’s also a moment where one of the cheerleaders gives one of the boys a rim job while he works in an ice cream stand, which feels way ahead of its time, seeing as how it was made in 1976.

Yes, there’s a story where the adults want to combine Aloha and Lincoln High to sell the school land and make money. Everyone dances whenever they feel it. Sex solves everything.

Speaking of sex, Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith is in this and was actually pregnant while it was being made. This is even worked into the plot, as much as the dinosaur theme park is. She’s holding her real son, Justin Sterling, at the end. His father, John, composed the music for this film.

Directed by Richard Lerner, who was involved in all of the cheerleaders series one way or another, this was written by Ted Greenwald, Nathaniel Dorsky and Ace Baandige, which, as I’ve said before, has to be their real name.

Beyond Rainbeaux, there’s also Penthouse July 1976 Pet Helen Lang, who was also in Tarz and Jane and Cheetah and Hot Nasties, which stars Susan Kiger, the first Playboy Playmate to do porn before she became a Playmate in January 1977; Jerri Woods (Toby from Switchblade Sisters); Patrice Rohmer (Harrad Summer) and Susie Elene.

You can watch this on Tubi.

CBS LATE MOVIE: The Missing Are Deadly (1975)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Missing Are Deadly was on the CBS Late Movie on May 21, 1976.

Directed by Don McDougall (the TV movies that made up Farewell to the Planet of the Apes, Forgotten City of the Planet of the Apes, Spider-Man: The Dragon’s Challenge and two Kolchak episodes, “The Youth Killer” and “Legacy of Terror”) and written by TV veterans Michael Michaelian and Katharyn Powers, The Missing Are Deadly starts with Dr. Margolin (Ed Nelson) inviting his mentally disturbed son Jeff (Gary Morgan) to his lab, where he takes one of Dr. Durov’s (Leonard Nimoy) infected mice. Yes, the man who once was and would be Spock has been experimenting on infecting vermin with Mombasa Fever despite being told to stop doing exactly that. Now, Jeff has taken the disease into the wild, where the CDC has been hampered by a horrible President — oh wait, that’s real life — where the CDC and the scientists must stop the spread or multitudes will die.

David (George O’Hanlon Jr.) is Jeff’s brother and primary caregiver. He’s upset that dad is sending his brother to live at a new school instead of caring for him at home. Then again, Jeff thinks that he’s a robot named Gordot. Also: Jeff infects everyone around him, including Jeff’s girlfriend Michelle (Kathleen Quinlan) and troops from The Crazies have to be sent out to stop this plague.

Spock figures it out, Dr. Margolin lets Jeff stay home despite him almost killing most of the United States and this is ninety minutes of TV movie. José Ferrer shows up and Marla Gibbs is a nurse! As Jackée would say, “MAAAAARY!”

You can watch this on YouTube.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Black Heat (1976)

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Tim Brown played football and acted, but because of the success of Jim Brown, who did the same things, he had to change his name to Timothy Brown. He stars in this as “Kicks” Carter, a Vegas cop fighting Ziggy’s (Russ Tamblyn) gang. He has to get revenge for his partner’s death and handle TV reporter Stephanie Adams (Tanya Boyd). Also, fight gun runners and save women from a house of ill repute. That’s a lot of work.

Directed by Al Adamson and written by John D’Amato, Sheldon Lee and Budd Donnelly, this is also known as The Murder Gang and Girl’s Hotel.

Regina Carroll shows up—well, she was Adamson’s wife—and so do Jana Bellan (Mary Lou from Sixpack Annie) and Adamson stock player Geoffrey Land. It seems like Tamblyn is having a lot of fun being an absolute lunatic, and he makes this worth watching.