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A slasher that plays it classy, this is the sixth film adaptation of John Willard’s 1922 play. It was directed by Radley Metzger, who stepped away from adult briefly — he also made Maraschino Cherry the same year under his Henry Paris name and would return for the uncredited The Tale of Tiffany Lust the following year — to direct a mainstream film.

On the twentieth anniversary of the death of Cyrus West (Wilfrid Hyde-White, My Fair Lady), his cousins are summoned to his mansion to watch his will and testament. They are stuntman Charlie Wilder (Peter McEnery, Footprints On the Moon), hunter Susan Sillsby (Pussy Galore herself, Honor Blackman), her lover Cicily Young (Olivia Hussey, Black Christmas), surgeon Henry Blythe (Daniel Massey, The Vault of Horror), fashion designer Annabelle West (Carol Lynley, The Poseidon Adventure) and songwriter Paul Jones (Michael Callan, Double Exposure). Joining them are the executor of the will, Allison Crosby (Wendy Hiller, Toys In the Attic) and the maid, Mrs. Pleasant (Beatrix Lehmann, Psyche ’59).

To get the entire estate, Annabelle must remain in the abandoned mansion with all of her cousins for one night and remain sane. Dr. Hendricks (Edward Fox, The Day of the Jackal) will judge her, yet the first thing he does is inform everyone that a trenchcoat-clad patient has escaped from the mental hospital, one who believes that he is a cat and loves to murder with claw-like weaponry.

What follows is a haunted house/slasher/giallo cocktail that is quite a potent mix. Shot in the same house as The Omen, it looks and feels great. Metzger’s only non-adult movie, it came about because of his long-time business relationship with producer Richard Gordon, who had once hired him to direct the English language versions of the films he was importing from Europe.

In an interview with Psychotronic Video, Metzger said, “It was a fun picture, but the litigation involved was horrendous. The distributor chose not to honor the contract. We sued, and it is very difficult to be the aggressor in a lawsuit. After all those years of defending myself in censorship cases in which we never lost one, there I was trying to create a case on the other side. It took a very long time. We won the suit because it was an obvious breach. The picture was finally released in 1981, but the timing was off. The haunted house aspect helped when it came to ancillary rights. Outside of theatres, Cat has done tremendous business. It was the leader in all those syndication packages. It has never stopped playing. We actually have been living off that picture for eight or nine years.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Today’s movie is brought to you by AC Nicholas, who has graciously become a Big B&S’er, a monthly supporter of the site and got to pick an entire week of movies. Would you like to have me write about the movies of your choice? It’s simple!

1. Go to our Ko-Fi site and donate. There’s no set amount and I won’t tell you what to do. In fact, if you just keep reading for free, we can still be friends.
2. Join as a monthly member for just $1. That makes you a Little B&S’er.
3. As a Medium B&S’er at just $3 a month, if you pick a movie or a director, I’ll write about them for you. In fact, I’ll do one for each month you subscribe and even dedicate the post to you.
4. For $5 a month, you basically get some major power. As a Big B&S’er, I’ll write an entire week on any subject you’d like. How awesome would that be? In fact, I’ll do it for every month you’re a member. Do you think any of your other movie sites will do that for you?

Maraschino Cherry (Gloria Leonard), the owner of a high-class escort service in New York City, spends this movie teaching her younger sister Penny Cherry (Jenny Baxter) what it takes to succeed in the business.

Leonard had a pretty interesting life. She grew up in the Mosholu Parkway neighborhood in the Bronx along with Robert Klein, Penny and Gary Marshall, and Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. Before her adult career, she was a bond trader and a PR person for Elektra Records. When she got her first work, her agent didn’t tell her it was for hardcore.

She was later the publisher of High Society, a job that she took seriously, according to adult historian Ashley West: “Gloria really would visit wholesalers herself, had relationships with all the distributors, would hire and fire staff, would supervise layouts, would recommend and decide upon the content, so really became a hands-on editor, at least in the first five or six years of her stint at High Society.” She also invented two things that became huge profit makers: publishing celebrity nudes, which led to the magazine Celebrity Skin, and using 976 numbers for phone sex.

Leonard was a board member of the Adult Video Association and its successor the Free Speech Coalition, and an outspoken advocate for the adult film industry and free speech rights. She also started Club 90, the first support group for women in adult. Sadly, she died from a stroke in her Hawaii home in 2014.

Directed by Radley Metzger under his Henry Paris name, this movie somehow looks classier than most mainstream movies made today. This has a cast filled with golden age stars like Lesllie Bovee, Constance Money, C.J. Laing, Anette Haven, Wade Nichols, Eric Edwards and Michael Gaunt as a man who can only perform while on the porcelain throne. Before he was well-known, Spalding Gray did adult and yes, he’s in this.

So much of this seems to be re-edited from The Opening of Misty Beethoven — Constance Money sued and won for her scenes being reused — but the quality is there. I mean, today most filth is shot on digital cameras. This is an actual movie with an actual plot shot on film. It may seem alien today but it once happened all the time.

It’s amazing to think that just ten years before, Metzger’s films like Camille 2000 were shocking.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Till Death was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January, 1981 at 1 a.m. It also aired on December 25, 1982 at 1 a.m.

Directed by Walter Stocker — the only movie he directed, he was usually an actor — and written by his son Gregory Dana, Till Death starts with Paul Ryan (Keith Atkinson) dreaming that he’s picked up a woman on a foggy road, then is trapped in a crypt — with his name on it — with her dead body. He wakes just in time to get married to Anne (Belinda Balaski!) and after some making out in the fog, there’s a car crash and she dies on the way to the honeymoon.

Yes, this one is dark.

Once healed, Paul goes to Eden Glen Cemetery and the Eternity mausoleum where his wife is buried. The shock is too much and he passes out, waking inside her tomb. And as you can imagine, he’s not alone.

Filmed in 1972 and having a 1974 copyright, this was not released until 1978 but as other reviewers have pointed out, it didn’t really show up until some UHF horror hosts played it in the early 80s. Like Chiller Theater in Pittsburgh, which even chose it for a Christmas night airing.

This is a love story with horror slightly getting involved. It’s nearly elevated horror — well, if early 70s can be — but knows to stay in the mood and deliver an actual ending. It predates The Iron Rose, but I doubt Jean Rollin ever saw this. So many lovers can get locked in the cemetery, don’t you know.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Malibu Beach was on USA Up All Night so many times: June 7 and November 11, 1989; April 6 and 7 and October 6, 1990 and April 12 and August 24, 1991.

Malibu Beach is not Malibu Bikini Shop, Malibu Hot Summer, Malibu Summer and it most certainly is not Malibu High, one of the most deceptively mean-spirited movies of all time.

That dog with a bikini in his mouth on the poster? He’s in this movie. He’s the pet of Dugan Hicks (Steve Oliver, who worked as a “cab driver, roughneck, bounty hunter, and fitness instructor to the stars”), the kind of sort of bad guy of this movie. Yes, the same Dugan Hicks from The Van. I just freaked out — do we have a Crown International cinematic universe?

Well, our lead character and lifeguard Dina (Kim Lankford, Street Corner Justice, The Octagon) lives in the same house that Laurie did in The Pom Pom Girls. I do believe that this shared reality exists.

Crown International movies are great because they say, “We have girls, a beach, some hunky guys, some music…what are we missing? A plot? What if they just all hang out for 90 minutes and occasionally have sex instead?”

This is the kind of movie that has a shark attack — it was a beach and 1978, you know? — and no one gets killed. It barely gets in the way of the breasts and beer and disco and weed. It also has Susan Player (Invasion of the Bee Girls, The Pom Pom Girls) and Tara Strohmeier (The Student Nurses, Truck Turner, Candy Stripe Nurses) in its cast and that’s a good thing.

Director Robert J. Rosenthal also wrote — you guessed it — The Pom Pom Girls and The Van and only directed one other movie, Zapped! He was joined on the writing of this movie by Celia Susan Cotelo, his co-writer on those two aforementioned Crown International movies.

As I prepare these articles, I often read through what other people think. I just read review that referred to this movie as a waste of time and how sad for people who don’t just want to watch a mindless hour and a half of dogs stealing bikini tops while young love blooms on the beach with no responsibility or worries of tomorrow.