Porky’s was a big deal in the 80s, a time before easy access to pornography. Because while that movie is set in the 50s, it delivers on what it promises: female nudity and plenty of it.

And sure, in 1994 it seemed like it took ten minutes to download a photo online, but the hose of non-stop pulchritude that was able to be beamed directly into your home had already started to trickle.

And that’s when Lontano Investments purchased all the rights to Porky’s.

Seven years later, they still hadn’t made a movie.

That’s when they signed a deal with Mola Entertainment, who promised to make the movie for the price of 1.5% of the movie’s budget and option fees, as well as the opportunity to make a sequel as long as they made a movie within five years. Legal wrangled ensured and years went by with no movie, as the big stumbling block was that Lontano Investments demanded that the new Porky’s must have a $10 million dollar budget.

So eight years later, Mola decided to spend a million to make an ashcan — a film made just to satisfy the contract and retain their rights so that they could make the sequel and then make money there, which seems like a wild plan — by making Porky’s Pimpin’ Pee Wee.

And that’s when they brought on Brian Trenchard-Smith.

Yes, the same man who made Stunt Rock, Turkey Shoot and The Man from Hong Kong.

“I call it Young Republicans in Love. Think about it. These characters are all pretty vile. Sex-obsessed, narcissistic young people,” the director explained to Moviefone.

Yeah, that’s the same Brian Trenchard-Smith.

Hired four weeks before filming — which took place over 15 days on location in Canyon Country and at a studio in Simi Valley — the movie got made. But was it enough?

No one’s really sure.

Mola believed that they had fulfilled their obligations and retained rights to make another sequel. However, Lontano claimed that the film required that $10 million dollar budget.

In 2002, Howard Stern acquired the remake rights. 11 years later, the parties reached a confidential settlement and agreed to dismiss a claim and counterclaim with prejudice. The terms of the settlement remain confidential.

And we still don’t have a $10 million dollar budget version of Porky’s…even if we don’t need one.

Somehow, the movie we got is supposed to be a sequel to the original trilogy despite the fact that the last time we saw Pee Wee, Meat and Tommy was in 1954 and they haven’t aged a day in the last 55 years. Did they walk through a gap in the space-time continuum? Are they clones? Perhaps robots? The movie never tells us.

However, the movie — with one lone exception we’ll get into — this movie is the most sex-positive teen sex comedy I’ve seen in a long time as well as one of the filthiest. There’s not much outright copulation, but plenty of sex toys, filthy talk and even male genitals being shown in outline and grabbed, something that rarely happens in these films.

Also, the story revolves around Porky’s daughter breaking away from her father’s house of the rising sun and making her own modern brothel thanks to the three male characters, who need to make money after a party destroys a vase.

That’s right. A Risky Business by way of 80s sitcom plot for a movie that has deep throat incurred puking.

This is also a movie where no one is truly exploited and all of the sex work in bright and cheery and you know, more of that please. It truly does not judge anyone for their kinks or their needs or their ability to make money from their bodies until the end, when one of the “what happened to these characters” moments reveals that one got the clap — maybe this is the 50s — and points an arrow at who gave it to him, shaming a woman in the midst of so many characters that went through this guilt-free.

Anyways, this movie is much more interesting for the story of how it came to be than what it is. But I think you figured that out by now.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Also known as American Primitive, this movie stars Tate Donovan (the voice of Disney’s version of Hercules) as the titular Harry, who has just moved to Cape Cod with his teenage daughters Madeline and Daisy. Their goal is to keep all of the women away from their recently widowed father. But what happens next will surprise everyone.

One night, when Madeline and her friends head out to the discos of her new town, she sees her father dancing with Mr. Gibbs (Adam Pascal, SLC Punk!, the original cast of Rent), his new business partner.

This is in 1973, so when the entire town finds out, you can just expect how they react. And when the girl’s maternal grandparents arrive to take them away from their father, how a family is defined comes into question.

Directed and co-written by Gwen Wynne (with Mary Beth Fielder), this film may be from 2009, but it’s certainly a movie that holds up and is worth checking out.

Wild About Harry is available On Demand December 17 from Global Digital Releasing.

After this and Gutterballs, I guess that I can never accuse Ryan Nicholson of being subtle. I mean, beyond the back alley abortion that gives birth to this movies protagonist, there are numerous scatalogical scenes in this that even Joe D’Amato may have watched and said, “Potresti voler abbassare i toni, Ryan.”

A wire hanger abortion kills Hanger’s mom, but he’s raised in the back alleys and then taken to meet his biological father, who cheerfully gets him his first prostitute. Also, at some point, Hanger eats a Jehovah’s Witness, gets assaulted in his colostomy hole and then has to get revenge for everything that has ever happened to him.

But man, getting there is like walking through the meanest dark night, a knee-deep dive into a sewer filled with the vilest miasma you’ve ever seen, much less tasted. And if you ever wanted to see Lloyd Kaufman play a trans prostitute, this movie is here for you.

Sadly, creator Ryan Nicholson died of brain cancer at the early age of 47. He left behind a wife and son and that thought really keeps me from going any further into this movie.

The moral of this movie is this is exactly the kind of stuff that I tend to have on the TV when Becca walks in the room and she gets incredibly angry at me and refuses to talk to me for the rest of the day. Thanks, filmmakers!

You know, the films of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani kind of frustrate me. I want to love The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears and Let the Corpses Tan, but they felt like they were at times more concerned with their own style, particularly the former. But man, I must have been in the right mood because Amer worked just fine.

We follow the life of Ana, whose life-long search for carnal pleasures is also haunted by the specter of death itself, symbolized as a black lace hand that holds her screams inside her body. There are three different stories and three different versions of our heroine as she grows from a frightened child into, well, a frightened woman played by three actresses: Cassandra Foret, Charlotte Guibeaud and Marie Bos.

The Variety review of this claimed that this film has “virtually no plot to speak of, and repeated use of shock zooms, jump cuts, monochrome filters and hissing sounds.” So, basically a giallo, right?

The soundtrack shines, as all manner of 70s Italian murder ballads play, including songs from The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (Bruno Nicolai), What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (Stelvio Cipriani), Black Belly of the Tarantula (Morricone), Killer Cop (Cipriani), The Great Kidnapping (Cipriani) and Adriano Celentano’s “Furore,” which played over the opening titles of Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much, which totally fits into this film.

Sadly, we won’t ever live in the glory days from 1970 to 1975, when films like this were playing. But we can dream, can’t we?

Written, produced and directed by Charles Band — I mean, it has small puppet-like killers and how can we even keep track of the demonic toys, devil dolls, worry dolls and skull heads at this point; also why was this not called Skull Headz and part of Full Moon’s urban films? — this movie starts by having Naomi Arkoff gettingis tortured on a rack for having a cell phone. Obviously, the Arkoff family is non-traditional and they also live in a castle in Italy, which would be the other Charles Band leitmotif.

Those little tiny Skull Heads protect the Arkoff family. Originally, the Romans buried the dead in catacombs and built the home that they live in to guard against grave robbers. And the little guys were created by witchcraft to keep people from messing with the dead.

Can you guess that the Hollywood producers who come to film the castle really want to steal what’s inside the tomb? Also, you may not realize it, but you’re going to watch a family drama that goes on for nearly an hour before the occult comes in, which is…well, it’s exactly the kind of movie I expect from this studio.

Beyond finding this movie under another title — Devious — this also shows up in a cut-down remix within Full Moon’s The Haunted Dollhouse. It may actually be better in this short format because it cuts out all the real people and gets us to what we really want: Skull Heads.

You can watch this on Tubi.

You know, I purposely didn’t watch this movie because it was rated PG-13.

I’m a moron.

Co-written (with his brother Ivan) and directed by Sam Raimi, this is the kind of delirious rollercoaster kind of movie that I love.

Loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) wants a promotion but has to show that she can make tough decisions. When an elderly woman asks for the third extension on her mortgage, Christine says no. The woman begs her on her hands and knees for mercy and Christine calls security on her.

Later, as Christine walks to her car, the woman attacks her and places a curse on one of her buttons. That night, her nose begins to bleed after a fortune teller says that a dark force is after her in the form of the demon Lamia. In three days, Christine will be dragged to hell unless the old woman forgives her. However, that seems impossible, because she’s dead.

Maybe a sacrifice will help. At least that’s what the fortune teller explains to our heroine, who goes home and kills her cat. Well, the only thing that does is make me hate our lead. Then there’s the attempt to place the demon into a goat and that goes about as well as you can expect Finally, they learn that she can pass the curse off to someone else, even someone dead, so she digs up the old women and shoves the button into the woman’s dead body.

Of course, it’s a horror movie, so it’s not over. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I loved the ending. Actually, I liked the whole movie, even if the effects dated a little sooner than the filmmakers planned. Any movie that takes inspiration from Night of the Demon is going to be just fine with me.

I characterize George Romero’s post-Creepshow output the same way that I do Lucio Fulci’s post Manhattan Baby output, except that, you know, I actually like some of what Fulci did. His films feel like a man struggling for relevance, falling back on outdated tropes and the same old, same old one more time.

But man, as rough as Fulci’s life got, he never started a middling anthology film off with absolutely dreadful dialogue like “Now I lay me down to rest, but there’s a goblin upon my chest. He’s grey and ugly and very gory and he wants to tell me a deadtime story.”

For shame.

The first film has three stories:

• Valley of the Shadow, in which a woman takes people into the jungle on a cursed trip to find her missing husband)
• Wet, the story of digging up a mermaid
• Housecall, which has a doctor visit a boy who claims to be a vampire.

At least Tom Savini directed the last story and tried. The rest of this, put together by Michael Fischa (My Mom’s A Werewolf) and Jeff Monhahan, who appeared in Romero’s films Two Evil Eyes and Bruiser, made me question just how bad movies can be and I just spent a week watching every Bruno Mattei film I could get my hands on.

The second film finds Fischa and Monahan returning to direct a segment each, with Matt Walsh directing another.

Sadly, it’s no better:

• The Gorge is about three friends whose hiking trip ends in an avalanche and cannibalism.
• On Sabbath Hill is the closest the film gets to something unique with a tale of a professor’s dead girlfriend coming back to haunt him.
• Dust has a doctor discovering that Mars dust can cute cancer and the security guard who steals his breakthrough.

I really hope that Romero at least got some money for these films, because I see no reason that he should be involved in these pictures. I struggled to get through these. Don’t make the same error that I did.

Tubi has Deadtime Stories: Volume 1 and Deadtime Stories: Volume 2 streaming for free, just in case you don’t believe me.

Renaldo Kuhler was a scientific illustrator who invented an imaginary country to survive his childhood and kept his country alive throughout his entire life. He drew every single person in this country, knew their songs and is able to tell you the history and geography of this country, which of course does not exist.

The methodically detailed maps of the imaginary country and tales of the politics and upheavals of this small country are as rich in the mind of Kuhler as if they are real life. Brett Ingram is an amazing filmmaker, as he was able to somehow turn this into a movie that makes sense.

I’ve been recommending this movie to everyone, because it completely blows my mind that this country lived and breathed. I wonder if, like Gardner Fox’s theory, that this place is real and that Kuhler was a receiver of all this data.

This movie has my highest recommendation. Track it down if you can.

Monami is a transfer student with a secret and a burning need for Mizushima. As Japanese women share chocolate to show their love, a piece of the candy with her blood in it has brought him into her world of vampires, while his jilted girlfriend Keiko pays the price by accidentally dying, then coming back as an undead creature still in love with him.

That description is a poor — and oh so quick way — to explain to you the insanity that this movie has within it. Starting with a knife battle between zombies and our heroes and expanding to include a Kabuki mad scientist who works alongside the school nurse — who has eyeballs embedded in her breasts — who creates the Frankenstein Girl; Japanese girl cultures like Lolitas and Ganguro; a wrist-cutting competition; and finally the Tokyo Tower being used to create a near-indestructible creature seeking revenge.

Yoshihiro Nishimura, who directed Tokyo Gore Police, and Naoyuki Tomomatsu, who made the Lust of the Dead series, combined efforts to make this film, based on a manga (where the title characters never met).

Also — on the subject of Ganguro, it was a “fashion trend among young Japanese women that started in the mid-1990s, distinguished by a dark tan and contrasting make-up liberally applied by fashionistas.” The first tour I went to Japan, I was shocked to see so many young girls basically wearing blackface. Then again, it is also influenced by kabuki and noh dress, as well as the yamanba mountain witch. It’s a really strange look and while this movie takes things way further than they are in reality in so many ways, the look of the girls in this is actually pretty close to the trends that it’s parodying.

You can watch this on YouTube.