When I was a kid in the 1970’s, I was sitting in a B. Dalton’s reading — parents routinely dropped kids off places to read without any fear of kidnapping back then — and discovered a copy of Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex on a shelf. I had no idea what it was at the time, but the drawings (by Chris Foss, who would go on to work on Alien, Flash Gordon and Jodorowsky’s Dune) were upsetting to me. Hairy soft focused seventies post-hippies getting it on didn’t jibe well with my single digit mind.

I forgot what that feeling was like. And then I watched Tintorera…Tiger Shark.

This movie is based on the novel of the same name by oceanographer Ramón Bravo, an undersea explorer who studied the 19-foot-long species of shark known as “tintorera” and also discovered the sleeping sharks of Isla Mujeres. You may know him better for his role as the underwater zombie in Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2.

Here’s the thing — this is a shark movie, but it’s also pretty much a softcore adult movie about the three-way relationship between the heroes. As such, this is the only shark movie I’ve watched all week with full frontal male nudity, which is something of an accomplishment.

Hugo Stiglitz from Nightmare City plays Steven, born in the US but a Mexican businessman here in Cancun for vacation. He falls for Patricia (Fiona Lewis, Dr. Phibes Rises Again) but breaks up with her when he can’t decide whether or not he’s in love with her. Ah, the 1970’s.

Jealousy ensues when she starts hooking up with Miguel (Andrés García, a real-life former diving instructor who is also in Bermuda: Cave of the Sharks), the swimming instructor at the resort. After those two dance the devil’s dance and Steven gets all misty-eyed, she goes skinny dipping and ends up being eaten by a tiger shark that seems to have breathing problems, judging by the soundtrack.

The two fight over what happened to Patricia, but neither ever learn that she was devoured by a shark. That night, the two hook up with Kelly and Cynthia Madison, two American college students looking for fun, and swim to Steven’s yacht as the heavy breathing shark follows them. They swap beds all night long before heading back to the resort and the shark decides to leave them alone. Kelly is played by Jennifer Ashley, who was also in Phantom of the Paradise, Chained Heat and Guyana: Cult of the Damned, while Cynthia is Laura Lyons, which is her real name and not a stage name inspired by the Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles. She was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for February 1976 and actually led a strike amongst the club bunnies that led to better wages and rights for them. Other than an appearance on TV’s Love, American Style, this is the only other acting role in her career.

Steven and Miguel decide to partner up both in a shark hunting business and in being womanizers. They start shooting all manner of sharks, but Miguel warns Steven that if they ever meet a tiger shark that they must immediately get out of the water.

The guys meet Gabriella (Susan George, Die Screaming, Marianne) and take her shark hunting. She hates it, but falls for both men. They decide to form a triad relationship where they can’t be with any other woman or fall in love with her. Remember those The Joy of Sex drawings I mentioned earlier? Get ready to watch the play out as the three make love, make omelets and sightsee the Mayan ruins.

Sadly, the next time they go shark hunting, the tiger shark reappears — surprise! — and bites Miguel in half. Gabriella is so upset that she leaves, never to return. Steven vows revenge on the shark and beats up every shark he can find, upsetting even the most hardened fishermen. Surely, they tell him, he has killed the tiger shark by now.

Nope. It’s still out there, killing fishermen and lying in wait for Steven. At a beach party with Kelly, Cynthia and two new American girls (one of them is Priscilla Barnes from TV’s Three’s Company and The Devil’s Rejects), everyone skinny dips. As Steven and Cynthia make out nude in the water, the tiger shark comes back and tears the woman literally out of his embrace. Everyone is injured by the shark’s attack and Steven makes a promise to kill the shark himself.

You may be wondering: how will Steven go about killing this shark? If you guessed “he’s going to blow it up” then congratulations. You’ve been watching just as many shark movies as I have. Are explosives the shark’s natural predator?

Anyhow — Steven uses a devilfish to lure the shark close and then he hears its breathing, because that’s how sharks work. He succeeds in turning that shark into a million pieces, but loses his arm in the process. He wakes up in a hospital bed, minus an arm but filled with happy memories of the sexy times he shared with Miguel and Gabriella.

Keep in mind when you seek out this film that there are two versions. One is 85 minutes long and is more of a shark film. Then there’s the 126 minutes long cut that’s chock full of swinging Mexican resort sex. Also, a warning for those of you sensitive to these matters: many of the scenes of fish being caught and killed underwater are unsimulated. That should be no surprise to anyone who has seen a René Cardona Jr. directed film, as he threw live birds through windows in Beaks: The Movie and a cat over a wall in Night of a Thousand Cats. He’s also responsible for the borderline insane film Bermuda Triangle, as well as the scum-ridden cash-in Guyana: Crime of the Century.

Tintorera…Tiger Shark is one of the stranger films I’ve watched, not only in my shark obsessed week of trying to watch every single pre-Sharknado film of this genre, but really in all the films I’ve watched. I have no idea who it is truly for, yet appreciate its willingness to indulge in spectacle and scum, whether that be people hooking up or being eaten in front of your very eyes.

If you read comic books in the summer of 1977, there’s no way you didn’t know about Orca. Despite everything that nature — and SeaWorld — could teach us, it was time to meet a predator even more deadly to man than the great white shark. To quote Neko Case: “You know they call them killer whales.”

Orca raises the Jaws rip-off stakes: if the name Orca can be Quint’s boat, here, it can be an entire movie. Dino De Laurentiis called writer Luciano Vincenzoni (he also wrote The Good, The Bad and the Ugly) in the middle of the night and told to find a fish tougher and more terrible than the great white to make a movie that could go up against Spielberg’s. Vincenzoni’s brother told him all about the killer whales and the rest is scumtastic movie history.

Directed by Michael Anderson (Logan’s Run, Doc Savage), Orca is the kind of movie that critics have assaulted for years. I’m here to tell you that every single one of them is wrong. It’s a completely ridiculous film, a shameless reboot of both Jaws and Moby Dick, but by no means is it not entertaining as hell. And it has an incredible Ennio Morricone score, something that so many fish films could only wish they aspired to.

Captain Nolan (Richard Harris, who nearly died doing his own stunts and also would grow enraged if anyone dared compare this movie to any other film) catches fish and marine animals so that he can pay off his boat. His crew is looking for a great white, which comes after crewmember Ken (Robert Carradine, Lewis from Revenge of the Nerds). An orca saves Ken and Nolan decides to repay its kindness by capturing it. After he harpoons the whale, he learns that he’s killed its mate, which miscarries and drops a fetus onto the deck of the ship that the callous captain hoses off into the ocean while our titular hero/villain/sea mammal screams in anguish. This is when you wonder: how did this movie get a PG rating?

Novak (Keenan Wynn, The Dark, Piranha), another crew member, cuts the female loose and its mate drags her dead body to shore. The villagers all rise up against the crew, who demand that Nolan kill the orca, who has gone wild and is ruining local fishing. When Nolan refuses to put the fish out of its misery, it retaliates by sinking all of the fishing boats and breaking all of the town’s fuel lines, because of course killer whales can hold grudges.

That’s what brings Dr. Rachel Bedford (Charlotte Rampling), a whale expert, into the movie. She believes that orcas are like humans, a fact that Nolan can understand. He sees himself as one of the whales, as his wife and unborn child were killed by a drunk driver. He promises not to fight the whale, but it kills Novak, attacks Nolan’s house and then bites off the leg of his injured worker, Annie (Bo Derek in her film debut).

Nolan and his crew, including Paul (Peter Hooten, who was also in Derek’s first actual filmed movie, Fantasies, as well as the 1970’s Dr. Strange TV movie and Just a Damned Soldier with Mark Gregory), all take off after the orca, along with Native American Jacob Umilak (Will Sampson, the magical Native American in films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Poltergeist II). That’s when the orca goes buckfutter and wipes out nearly everyone by either grabbing them, biting them, crushing them and tossing icebergs at the boat.

The orca throws Nolan all the lace like a ragdoll, killing him, but leaving Bedford alive. We watch as Nolan sinks into the water in a crucified pose and the killer whale decides to swim under the ice. Now, there’s some conjecture here: is the killer whale trapped or has it decided that with its revenge complete, all it can do is die when faced with the path or revenge that it has wrought? I can see the poetry of this thought, but then I realize that I’ve just watched a film filled with no subtlety whatsoever, so perhaps the orca swam on, discovered a new mate and remains ready to wipe out all of humanity at a moment’s notice.

Orca is everything I love about movies: it’s big and dumb and bloody. It’s the kind of movie a fine actor like Richard Harris chews the scenery with just as much viciousness as a killer whale devours one of Bo Derek’s shapely gams. It also takes shark films to the next level. Every single one of the humans in this movie are amongst the dumbest people ever, doomed by the fact that they even known Captain Nolan. The moment he hoses orca’s son into the icy waters, he’s sealed his fate. This is one of the few films where you root for the beast and savor its revenge.

You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll be amazed at Bo’s bloody stump. I want more people to love this movie even a fourth as much as I do.

Somehow, Ovidio Assonitis (Beyond the Door, Madhouse, The Visitor) must have had pictures of people in Hollywood in very compromising positions. How else could he have gotten Hollywood royalty like Henry Fonda, Shelley Winters and John Huston to appear in a movie about a giant killer octopus?

Want to know how far Assonitis went to rip off Jaws? The trailer to this movie is narrated by Percy Rodrigues, who also voiced over the trailers to every single Jaws film.

You know how it goes: Solana Beach is a tourist town that’s facing off with a giant octopus that likes to eat people the whole way down to the bone. That’s because Mr. Whitehead’s (Fonda) Trojan company has built an illegal underwater tunnel that’s using radio signals that are too loud, driving the octopus insane.

Luckily, marine expert Will Gleason (Bo Hopkins, Midnight Express) and newspaper reporter Ned Turner (Huston) are on the job, tracking down the beast and setting a pair of killer whales named Summer and Winter loose on it. By the way — for this scene, that’s a real octopus — a dead one from a fish market — getting torn up. Oh you wacky Italians and your disregard for life!

Also: there’s a long sequence where Hopkins talks to his killer whales about how people treated him as a killer and how he loves them so much more than any human being he has ever met before he asks them to understand why they have to kill the octopus. It’s totally ADR and beyond ridiculous and made me love this movie 200,000 times more than I thought were possible.

Along the way, you’ll meet the gorgeous Delia Boccardo, Italian comedian Franco Diogene and the always welcome Claude Atkins as, you guessed it, a sheriff.

Moving things quickly — no matter how plodding the film gets — is a great soundtrack by Stelvio Cipriani, who is something of a Jaws ripoff music maestro, considering he also scored The Bermuda Triangle, Encounters in the Deep, Night of the Sharks, The Great Alligator and Piranha II: The Spawning.

The best thing about this movie is that it doesn’t care at all about having a plot of a central character that you can follow. Major characters just disappear. Shelley Winters doesn’t even have to be in this movie. And Assonitis seems like he’d rather be making a drama or art film than one with a giant rubber octopus, which makes this even more awesome than it should be.

Want to see it for yourself? Shout! Factory has you covered.

The Hammer Sisters are the kind of tough Southern girls that deal with their daddy’s murder by taking over his moonshine business, grabbing some weapons and being way tougher than any of the men they battle. Is that enough to get you to watch this movie?

What if I told you that it was directed by the same man who brought us The Evil, The Side Hackers and the movie based on the song Take This Job and Shove It?

Not yet? How does John Saxon playing a Southern stock car racer and moonshine runner sound? Not yet?

How about Susan Howard, former Dallas actress turned 700 Club host and NRA supporter?

William Conrad? Jeff Corey? Len “Uncle Leo” Lasser? Maurine “Marcia Brady” McCormick? Still not sold?

I get it. John Saxon was enough for me. But then I thought, I bet this movie has Claudia Jennings in it. And I was right. And that’s all it took.

What was it about American pop culture that took hicksploitation from the drive-in to the mainstream? I remember it myself — everyone had a CB radio, we all turned in to The Dukes of Hazzard and watched Smokey and the Bandit on HBO. Heck, I even had a silver NASCAR jacket that made me look like a 5-year-old pit crew member.

From the very first moment that John Saxon appears on screen and does his best version of a Southern accent, I was thoroughly entertained by this silly trifle of a film. It’s a Roger Corman 1970’s drive-in movie, so you’re going to get plenty of cars getting smashed up, scummy bad guys and “100 proof women” like Candice Rialson (Chatterbox, Pets).

You can grab this on blu ray from Code Red or watch it on Amazon Prime.

Wes Craven’s second full-length film — if we don’t include the porn film The Fireworks Woman that he directed as Abe Snake — is a trip through the Nevada desert that he wrote, produced and directed. You can see it as straight-forward narrative or you can choose to see it as a parable on how man will always be inhuman to other men.

The Carter family really gets it in this one. After being targeted by a family of cannibal savages in the Nevada desert, the family’s leader BIg Bob is crucified to a tree, the daughter Brenda is raped, numerous members are shot and stabbed and also killed, one of the family dogs is killed and even the baby is threatened with being a meal.

But they retaliate with just as much inhumanity as they battle back against the desert clan of Papa Jupiter, Pluto (Michael Berryman!) and Jupiter. Even the second family dog joins in and takes out his rage on the mutant clan.

The idea of an irradiated gang in the desert is intriguing and was inspired by the Sawney Bean clan in 1600’s Scotland, which claimed the lives of nearly 1,000 people.

Additionally, Craven was inspired by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and ended up making a film that — in my opinion — lives in its shadow. Interestingly enough, the films share product design from Robert Burns, as well as some of the exact same animal parts that decorate the homes of each film’s cannibal lairs. 

There’s a sequel, a remake and a sequel to that as well. In the late 1980’s, Craven even debated a third movie that was to be set in space, while his 1995 film produced for HBO, Mind Ripper, was originally intended as the third film in the series.

You can watch this on Shudder with commentary from Joe Bob Briggs.