The Reincarnation of Sex (1982), by Luiz Castellini

That is the actual title of this Brazilian horror/softcore film, though it also appeared under the title of Mortal Possession, which to me is a much more fitting and rational title. However, The Reincarnation of Sex lets you know up front what you're in for, though reincarnation only arguably occurs. There's a lot of sex. A lot of it is hilarious. Let's dive in.

Patricia is the daughter of a wealthy landowner named Antonio, and she and her father's employee Artur have fallen in love. This means they have a lot of complicated, painful-looking sex. Eventually this starts to disrupt Antonio's sleep and drive him mad. Not only is the sex loud and obnoxious, but someone from a lower class is screwing his daughter, and Antonio is certain Artur just wants Patricia for the family money. Thus, he slaughters Artur with an axe, barely disguising such from his wife and daughter. However, Artur's spirit is infuriated by this and he possesses Patricia to dig up his head, sever his head, and bury his head in a potted plant in the living room. From this vantage point he is free to commence his scheme of making a lot of people have sex in the house, until they all die, usually from sex exhaustion (sexhaustion?) or from the ever-increasing psychoses of their partners.

This movie is about as surreal as its title. (Seriously, how does sex as an act/concept reincarnate?) For most of the first "act," where we follow Patricia, Antonio, and Artur, things are fairly linear, if overdramatic and weirdly-edited at times. Once Patricia is dead, however, things become much more vignette-y. First we follow Celia and Fabio, a married couple who move in. Celia becomes a nymphomaniac, even desiring incest when Fabio suggests calling in her psychiatrist uncle for aid. This culminates in Celia lopping Fabio's head off during sex. Following this we get a much shorter segment following a lesbian named Ligia, whom Artur kills for having straight sex, I guess? (I mean better than the reverse.) There's a wrap-up segment involving Celia's real estate agent and uncle teaming up to investigate the ghosts but it's all over the place and goes nowhere. I'd say it feels like a dream, but at this point I'm old enough to know that no dream is ever as crazy as trash cinema.

The sex scenes are absolutely ridiculous. No one has sex like this, not unless they want to rip their vag, break their dick, dislocate their spine, or all three. Some of these actors must have contortionist training. I mean, it definitely helps that no actual penetration is happening, what with this being softcore-only and all, but still, you'd break your fucking bones doing this. The "lesbian" scenes seem to star straight people, as I've never seen two women less turned on and disinterested in kissing in my life. The only time they're even somewhat convincing is when Ligia is getting a vibrator blowjob--something which sounds completely ungratifying to me, but what do I know, I'm only a gay woman myself. I can't describe the things that pass for "lovemaking" in this flick but I hope there are other movies out there with sex scenes half as entertaining. Making it even better is the fact that director Castellini may have been inspired by none other than Jess fuckin' Franco for some of his work on this, as the patented Franco crotch-zoom is prominently used here. Also, isn't it something of a Franco touch to have a straightjacket-clad mental patient's panties visible?

The acting also gets pretty great. A lot of breathy hamminess, particularly from Antonio, and some wonderful dialogue, also from Antonio. "Has her monthly bleeding come at last?" is something I never expected to hear (or read, given the subtitles) in a movie. Trash keeps hitting me with lines like that. Just the other day I was rewatched Robot Monster and the line "You look like a pooped-out pinwheel!" reentered my sphere of cognizance. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried.

There's not much else I can say about this one. In case this review has not convinced you to check out this movie, I should say here that this movie which is at least half sex originally premiered on television.

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Fanny Hill (1964), by Russ Meyer

John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure has a history to it which I must confess I am somewhat ill-equipped to encapsulate. Suffice it to say that it is one of the earliest erotic novels in English, at least one of the earliest to achieve and sustain notice both during and after its own time. Telling the tale of young Fanny Hill, and her indoctrination into the world of prostitution, Memoirs set the stage for a tradition of Western pornography that saw various revivals after the commencement of the trend in the mid 18th Century, with perhaps the biggest revival in recent memory being the book's influence on the Sexual Revolution of the '60s and '70s. As a reflection of that reminiscence, none other than Russ Meyer himself set his usual crew of busty ladies to the task of adapting Cleland's two-century-old novel to film--it was likely not the first such adaptation of its kind, and it was certainly not the last. It is perhaps most appropriate that Meyer handled the production of Fanny Hill, as he would become one of the exploitation filmmakers with recognized mainstream cred. He ended making Beyond the Valley of the Dolls with Roger Ebert, after all. To make a comedy of manners based around a fetishized classed-up version of the 18th Century, adapting one of the most famous pieces of erotic literature ever written, could hardly have been in better hands than Meyer's.

Fanny Hill is a young, innocent orphan, and it is clear from the start that "innocent" may be the understatement of her native 18th Century. After basically being robbed by her only friend, she starts looking for a job in London, ending up in the hands of "kindly" Mrs. Brown, whose dead daughter Fanny ostensibly resembles. Brown takes her back to her, well, brothel, where the shenanigans begin. Fanny never assumes that sex is the object of her various interactions, whether it be with her leather-clad, cigarette-smoking lesbian "cousin" (which oh my god it is so hard watching these movies while being gay and single) or with several men who are brought over to enjoy her company. Eventually, she meets a young man nearly as innocent as herself, an ensign named Charles--when Charles endeavors to marry Fanny, Mrs. Brown arranges for him to be kidnapped by pirates. But love, or what passes for it in this tale, sometimes comes back in strange ways. And maybe love is what it'll take to get Fanny of the life she's found for herself.

Most of the charm and humor of the film--as well as a lot of the unintentional horror--comes from the veritable sea of double entendres that populate the runtime. This sort of comedy thrives on the idea of the 18th Century and the Victorian period which followed it being a time of great euphemism, often contrasting an archetypical bawdiness found in the scandal sheets and "low publications" of the time--which included Fanny Hill itself. Consequently, the world of this movie has a dynamic where it's somehow inappropriate to talk about sex directly even though literally everyone except for the title character is a pervert. Now, obviously, the premise that exploits this--that Fanny is unaware of everything because of her inability to navigate the social customs of her time--does definitely have a creepy edge to it. There are more than a few instances where the "joke" is basically that someone is about to take advantage of Fanny's lack of sexual knowledge to rape her. And I have to bring that up because, well--I have to. As the 21st Century continues to define itself, its style and trends will inevitably shift to progress beyond the ethical confines of the 20th Century. Consequently, I always dive into older sex comedies under the presumption that I as a woman will probably feel uncomfortable. After all, these movies were made for men. Comedies directed primarily at women--sexist in themselves for entirely different reasons--became their own thing at a certain point, but their own problems are beyond the limits of this review. What I mean to say is: rape, or at least threatened rape in some form or another, has been seen as funny in a lot of these older movies, especially when it's dolled up under surrounding contexts of eroticism. But I did not feel uncomfortable with Fanny Hill--though I know I can't speak for everyone. I think it's just because no one, not even the most provincial peasant girl of the most remote part of King George's England, could be as naive as Fanny. At some point you're going to figure out that someone wants to have sex with you for money, or at least that your roommates have sex for money.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for stories set in the 1700s, which capture that unique fantastic spirit of that century. After all, I was definitely pulled into the euphemism comedy, even if it is basically the film's only joke. We have rhyming market sellers, slops thrown on people in the streets, and seeming gallons of busty prostitutes dangling giggling out of windows. Not based on reality--not one as pleasant as presented, of course--but an aesthetic which I think is perfect for the sort of "bawdiness" that this movie sets out to achieve. It's the loyalty not only to the appearance of the London of Cleland's time and description, but it's also the loyalty to the tone of Cleland's work, so particularly rooted in the 18th Century, that helps this movie work so well for me.

Some of the humor is in taking the piss out of the formality of the 18th Century. Lines like "Don't tell the others you don't even belong to the Guild" are pretty great, and they help add onto the primary joke of Fanny's copious innocence. Other jokes occasionally prod in, some truly bizarre, like when Charles tells Mrs. Brown, "Topping kidneys, ma'am!" and she says, "My own...the recipe, that is." There's nothing else like that in the rest of the movie, so it made me laugh. A good comedy is like a good soup. You need to have onions to make the chicken taste good, but if you just cram a bunch of fucking onions in everywhere then...yeah. As for charm--part of wit, and thus essential to an 18th Century comedy of manners--that comes from the heart. Russ Meyer had heart, I feel. But then, this is only the second of his movies that I've seen, and I know nothing of the man in real life.

I present this movie in a somewhat bitter context, as I wrestle with issues of my own sexuality--specifically if/where I fall on the asexual spectrum--and my feelings on how the normative prioritization of sexual relationships in modern society marginalizes asexual and aromatic people. I've never felt comfortable with the '60s notion of "Free Love" since I was educated on how this was actually used frequently as an excuse for rape, but I now feel obligated to warn my fellow progressives that many of the old beliefs on sexuality are no longer keyed to liberal progress, at least as long as they do not shift to fully accommodate people who don't have that sort of attraction. In the '60s this movie probably felt pretty miraculous. The early '60s saw film cast off a great many of its shackles, at least in the underground market. Now, I have to wonder. Not because I'm a prude, because true prudes if they exist want people to feel shame for their sexuality, and what I want instead is for ace people to feel included. Just remember, I guess, that 100 minutes of waggling bosoms and double/triple/quadruple entendres can be fun, but to some of us it also just gets a little tacky. Because that's just not what we're into. And then when you can't get away from it, that's the problem.

But I really enjoyed Fanny Hill, even if it sits precariously now. It's well-written and the sets and costumes are marvelous. It was one of my favorite views of 2017, and I've already rewatched it three times this year. Whether it's harmless to you, or whether its non-harmlessness is a deterrent, is a ball in your court. Proceed with caution, unless you know that sexploitation can offer nothing new to you.

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She Killed in Ecstasy (1971), by Jess Franco

As a Jess Franco fan, I consider She Killed in Ecstasy to perhaps be the film which best summarizes his triumphs as a director--to date, I am unsure which film best represents his failings. It has everything that fits the unique feel that Franco brought to the table as a director, being a distinct vision of trashy weirdness that touches on the tropes and film mechanics which Franco returned to nearly obsessively. Furthermore, it also stars not only Franco himself, but his muse Soledad Miranda and the Awful Dr. Orlof in person, Howard Vernon.

Soledad Miranda plays a young woman (never named) who ends up marrying Dr. Johnson, an ambitious medical researcher who wants to create people with greater disease immunity via in-utero hormone stimulations. For this unethical action, the Medical Council orders him stripped of his license to practice and his experiments destroyed. This drives Johnson insane and he eventually kills himself with a straight razor. Mrs. Johnson sets out for revenge against the four scientists (whose ranks include both Howard Vernon and Jess Franco) whom she holds responsible for her husband's death. She seduces and kidnaps all of them, subjecting them to gruesome deaths, until at last she joins her husband in whatever afterlife awaits him.

Pretty straightforward. There is little pretense in what is transpiring here, but that is where Franco soars. This movie has a fairly high amount of subtext, which actually gets a chance to remain as subtext. The villains of this film--the doctors who destroy Johnson's life--are depicted as what we would identify today as arch-conservatives. They are opposed to hippies, drugs, prostitution, and, as it happens, tampering with human embryos. Now their problems with Johnson's experiments are not that they, y'know, could be perceived as being what the Nazis wanted, but that they kill fetuses. What's more, they say this is not only a medical crime, but also a blasphemy as well. Indeed there's definitely a religious framing to the doctors' motivations, as, while they're not specified to be Christian, they definitely have some sort of religious beliefs which motivate their medical practices. It's easy to read this movie through a feminist, pro-choice lens, a rejection of a social order which values the lives or "lives" of fetuses over those of suffering adults and children. Some of Howard Vernon's talks about the lives of hippies, and "social orders to which [one] must conform," seem to be a genuine meditation on Franco's behalf on the idea of changing social mores and the revealed hypocrisy of the so-called moral guardians in the tide of transformation that took place in the late '60s. In a somewhat predictable twist, Howard Vernon, the most outspoken of the group on matters of ethics, is revealed to be a masochist who hates kissing and other traditional expressions of sexuality--what would have passed as a shortcut "pervert" in the '70s. What's more, the overzealousness of Johnson's opponents mirrors the violence committed by abortion opponents in real life; after all, it doesn't seem very professional scientifically to wreck a rival's lab and assault said rival's wife. That comes from a place of emotion, not cold ethics.

I still don't know how I feel about the idea of in-utero hormone manipulation, however, which is what's at stake here even if it seems to stand in for abortion. Perhaps that's where my generation will be seen as dinosaurs--as science marches on it may indeed be possible to eradicate genetic diseases and birth defects in the womb, and that may be embraced by whoever comes next as a progressive ideal. I'm wary again because to me it recalls eugenics, and indeed I can easily see those with the means to do creating children who are a step beyond, who have unfair physical advantages that will allow them to be born doped athletes, as it were. I also worry about the drugs used being unsafe and causing more harm to the children than good in the long-term, because there's a habit in the United States of refusing to do or ignoring extant research when it comes to the drug industry. I think most significantly, however, I am concerned about our primitive notions of what constitutes a "defect" in regards to how this practice could be applied--that is to say if we can detect autism in the womb, or even homosexuality, there would certainly be parents who would want those traits eradicated, and there would be plenty of doctors willing to do so. In a broader sense this would also affect the rights to bodily independence for intersex individuals as well, who already face nonconsensual "normalizing" surgeries in infancy almost universally. Technology should not serve to narrow diversity and I believe that autistic, queer, and intersex identities and bodies are vital to our society.

But anyway. Now that I've guaranteed some angry messages sent my way, let's talk about how this is a Jess Franco movie. The Franco identity is irrevocably linked to the trash aesthetic. Soledad Miranda shows up with metal pasties that have a third pasty dangling as a pendant between them. Everyone sounds like they recorded their lines in a bathtub or swimming pool, even when the characters are in small rooms or outside. The zoom lens, as ever, is abused, with nary a single shot in the whole not featuring some sort of zoom. (I wonder what the script for this looked like.) Our leads live in a creepy artsy house that makes no sense. There are pretentious poetic divergences that mean absolutely nothing. And of course, there are plenty of characters twitching and sweating in beds as disembodied voices mock them. In this case, Dr. Johnson spends a rather sizable chunk of the movie hearing the Medical Council call him "Ein Tier" (an animal) over and over and over and over again. It's one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen, or rather heard. It's gotten to the point now where whenever I see a movie where someone accuses someone of being a murderer or some such, I always have to join in their shouting with, "Ein Tier! Ein Tier! Ein Tier! Ein Tier!"

Let's talk about Howard Vernon.

First of all, his voice. I am now sure that Vernon did his own dialogue for this one, because it sounds like him from interviews and other movies where he speaks naturally, like Zombie Lake and Ogroff. This indicates to me that Vernon spoke German just as well as he did English, French, and Spanish. I really wish there was a biography of Howard Vernon available because little details like this fascinate me.

Speaking of details...

Howard

Vernon's

dick.

There's no getting around this one. I don't know who to look to in this case: Howard Vernon, for being willing to show his 57-year-old dick and balls on camera, or Jess Franco, for being able to convince a 57-year-old actor with at least some dignity to his name (he was in a Godard film, after all) to do a sex/murder scene that ends with him showing off his goods. Then he was able to do it again two years later for Countess Perverse. In this movie it becomes doubly incredible--in that I literally could not find it credible that I was seeing this--because this also features Vernon's character being castrated. To have both a favorite actor's junk in a film unexpectedly in addition to a castration scene not only rocketed this movie up onto the A-List for me but also made me severely question myself and whether or not I'll have an audience after including these details.

In all seriousness, it may sound like I'm body-shaming Vernon, poking mean-spirited fun at the body of a man just because said man happens to be aged. In truth, this scene did legitimately deepen my respect for Vernon, and sent me a vivid picture of the connection between Vernon and Jess Franco. Franco wanted to send his cast into the flames and Howard Vernon would follow him to the end. He was an actor true, dedicated to his craft, never turning in a performance he didn't put his heart into it. In truth a lot of my amusement over this comes from the fact that I may have horrified some of you who are familiar with Vernon and who never wanted to imagine that he had a nude scene, much less a full-frontal one. But here is the honest truth: if someone was in a Jess Franco movie, you can guarantee there is another Jess Franco movie where we see their junk. I'm legitimately surprised we didn't see Franco's own balls in this too.

Anyway. Like I said, She Killed in Ecstasy provides what is probably the Jess Franco experience. As we've seen, that's both for the better and for the worse. But of all of Franco's movies I've seen, this one is one of the most lively, and thus, one of the most traditionally entertaining. If you are willing to brave a whole lot of genitalia, this one will not leave you disappointed. I watched in ecstasy.

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A Night to Dismember (1983), by Doris Wishman

I have called Carlos Tobalina "The Man," but Doris Wishman puts even him to shame. She was a director like no other, a pioneer not merely for being a woman in the mid 20th Century who ended up with the sort of career usually only obtainable and usually only wanted by men, but for being also something of an underground artist. She threw flourish and flair into 42nd Street sleaze with a style suggesting even she herself was unsure of what she was accomplishing with such. This attention to color and romance and drama was always contrasted with a hilarious feeling of slack laziness and rushed cheapness. And of course, Wishman was always as viciously exploitative as her male counterparts, if not moreso. While Wishman usually made sexploitation flicks intended to show off big boobs (or sometimes, to mix things up a bit, absurdly big boobs), A Night to Dismember was her attempt to cash in on the slasher movie craze rising from the hot freshness of Friday the 13th and, from a little earlier, Halloween. The result was doubtlessly bizarre to begin with, but then something very unusual happened. Someone tried to destroy the movie's print, and nearly succeeded--and this did not deter Wishman. She slowly reconstructed the film from what remained, using dubs and "clever" editing to hide the holes. Or, so she claimed: there's really only one bit of solid evidence that I know of to substantiate this. But just remember, even if this didn't happen, every frame of this movie definitely feels like it did. Remember that well!

The Kent family has lived in the small town of Woodmire Lake for 70 years. However, one October night in 1986 (I'll get to that, don't worry), the Kents were all killed in some manner. (The movie says all its death happen in one night, and that's bullshit, but again, I'll get to it.) Phineas Kent and his two beautiful daughters were slaughtered, and Broderick Kent killed himself after slaying his wife for insurance money. That left Adam Kent, his wife, and their three children, Billy, Mary, and Vicky. Vicky for all intents and purposes is our protagonist--five years prior, she was sent to a mental hospital for killing two boys. However, she's since reformed and recover, and she spends the movie with everyone around her, including and especially her family, fully expecting her to crumble back into homicidal insanity. Billy and Mary in particular want to keep all their parents' affections for themselves (despite looking old enough to have at least one grad degree), and as such forge an increasingly ludicrous string of stunts to frame Vicky and/or drive her nuts, including dressing up like a waterbound zombie and later some kind of green-skinned old man. Of course, there are also some killings going on which make it look mighty probable Billy and Mary won't need to frame their sister for murder. Detective Tim O'Malley is on the case, but will he figure things out before it's too late?

Most if not all of the plot of this movie is told via voiceover. This is because all the stuff that would normally forward the plot was destroyed in a fire...again, ostensibly. The possibility remains that all of the madness that dances across A Night to Dismember's 68 minutes was made on purpose, but even Wishman was too embarrassed to move forward without proper apologia in place. Listening to this voiceover shows a shakiness that has rarely been paralleled in other movies I've seen. Even if there wasn't a warbling delivery to it I'd still be agog at editing that leaves us with the line, "The Kents lived in Woodmire Lake for 70 years. Then, all of the Kents were dead." "Manic" is the word I wrote down to describe it, and I can't think of anything better. There are so many cuts in this film there's a special Death named after them. The tone, speed, and diction of a character's line will change at random, and there's beloved celebration of the old Coleman Francis trick of keeping everyone's mouth out of frame. Once we reach the axe murders all hell breaks loose, and the swiftness and repetition of the cuts nears artfulness. The "bong" sound that sometimes announces the appearance of Chesty Morgan's tits in Deadly Weapons makes a shocking reappearance, to the point of insanity. And there are "chase" scenes made of the same two or three shots looped endlessly.

As I said in my review for Frozen Scream, I'm positive that Thomas McGowan, who plays Kevin McGuire in that film, also plays Tim O'Malley, who is mysteriously uncredited both on IMDB and in A Night to Dismember's end credits themselves. O'Malley supplies the bizarre opening voiceover which summarizes the deaths of both Phineas and Broderick Kent's families in four minutes, as though this film was a sequel to movies about those murders. Then, he dates Vicky's killing of the neighborhood boys to "August of 1981," but also "five years ago." Remember this movie was released in 1983. Either the actor flubbed his line, the editing made him flub his line, or Wishman meant for this movie to be set in the future. Similarly, it's worth commenting on the fact that O'Malley insists the events of this all take place in one day, which I assume is meant to explain why Adam Kent never learns about the massacre of his family. But I'm sure we go through at least one day/night cycle. All of this just contributes to the sheer strangeness that this movie is ridden with.

Now, regarding the chance that there was another version of this movie: I believe it, and I think the trailer proves it. The trailer is a trip in itself, and it fortunately features a spooky narrator who tells us the story of the movie he's advertising. Except in this version, Mary Kent has no siblings, and is apparently assaulted in some form by a disfigured stranger--this encounter leaves her with psychic powers (!), which she uses to slaughter her family. Then, years later, Vicky Manuel moves into the former Kent home, where she begins having psychic visions of the murders. If you've been reading this review in any capacity you can tell that that is a totally different movie. Add in the fact that this trailer features a ton of footage completely unseen in the finished cut and I think the tales are true. This would explain one shot I've noticed in the final movie where one of Vicky's relatives is running towards a car saying, through dub, "Hurry up, dear, it's going to rain!" The shot is slowed down to make it seem less frantic but it's clearly a shot of people running in panic; the person speaking is looking over her shoulder and screaming. They just dubbed right over and hoped no one would notice. I would love to see the original version of this film (I do have to wonder why Wishman didn't make use of the "lost" footage present in the absolutely-extant trailer), but I'm also infinitely pleased with what we ended up with.

A Night to Dismember is one of my favorite movies of all time and I will say no more of it, due to my deathless hopes that more people will see and find fondness for it. I don't want to compare films to Troll 2, The Room, or, God forbid, Birdemic, but if you need a new great bad movie, this is it. It is nothing short of a miracle in filmmaking, which we can all learn from. Here's to Doris.

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Orgy of the Dead (1965), by Stephen C. Apostolof and Ed Wood

Does it really need saying that it wouldn't be a proper Spookyween without Ed Wood? No one quite handled the horror genre in the way Ed did. Though he presented his scary stuff in a fashion implying he was being cynical and ironic, Wood actually threw himself into his work and believed himself to be the scribe of hair-raising nightmares--or at least, the custodian of hair-rising nightmares past. His obsession with Bela Lugosi and the Universal Horror movies led him to create films which ended up perpetuating the exaggerated campiness that folks today think all old horror films, Universal included, happened to contain. Once more this is that strange idea of horror as fun--horror as a Halloween children's game. There's virtually nothing actually scary about Orgy of the Dead--in fact it's probably not really about being scary--but it's still a fun watch if you've got both an adult mind and a remnant ribbon of that old Halloween children's spirit.

Orgy of the Dead doesn't burden itself with needy troubles like plot, but since you asked, there are a few incidents here and there. Bob and Shirley are a couple driving through an unfamiliar area. Bob is a famous writer, who is apparently out on the road in search of inspiration. "Most of my books are based off of fact or legend," he says. "That's why they sell in the top spots!" Anyway, Bob's a dumbass, so he ends up driving too fast and goes off the road, ending up in an old cemetery. It is this cemetery which is ruled by "the Emperor," played by Criswell. The Emperor orders numerous dead folk to rise from the grave and dance for him, erotically, if possible. This includes "the woman who died by fire" and "she who loved gold." Then, without warning, a woman in cat footy-pajamas comes out, with holes cut in the pajamas for her tits and booty. We follow a parade of ethnic stereotype dancers, who are commented on by a werewolf and American-accented mummy. This long string of ostensibly erotic dances continues until at long last it comes time for the two intruders to be sacrificed. But then day comes, turning the Emperor and his minions to skeletons, leaving our heroes believing it was naught but a dream.

So yes, this movie is largely about well-proportioned ladies jiggling. Ed Wood presents us this sea of T&A using the only platform he knows--remember, the dude couldn't make a movie about trans rights without putting Bela Lugosi in the vicinity of smoky test tubes and creepy shadows. So of course this movie is "actually" about the secrets of the world of the dead, and their bizarre ceremonies under the full moon when they walk the Earth. Obviously. The thing is, I think old Eddie forgot that he was hired to write sexploitation first and horror second. For while Wood was a master of sleaze, he was primarily a master of dialogue that no one but he found intimidating. That's why we keep cutting from the naked woman on screen to a mummy who says bullshit like: "Back in my days of ancient Egypt, snakes were the stuff of nightmares!" Uh, in contrast to today's harmless snakes, which no one is afraid of?

You watch Ed Wood-penned movies for the writing. Because Lord did that man suck at dialogue. Somehow, however, he is still better at it than Harry Stephen Keeler, and, depending on the day, George Lucas. I've provided a few snippets here and there, but honestly, every single fucking line is pure fucking gold. Somehow, even the most relevant speeches collapse into untamed non sequitur. We critics sometimes complain about having too little material--and sometimes, there are those moments where we're forced to complain about having too much material. I swear to God, Wood's writing is like its own dialect of English or something. Someday we'll find an island of pudgy white guys dressed in angora sweaters, and that's all they'll speak in. Let's try to tackle the line, "She was a zombie in life...so too must she walk as a zombie in death!" What?! A zombie in life?! I mean, technically, voodoo zombies are drugged, hypnotized living people, but still, even those kinds of zombies have been referred to commonly as "the living dead" since the '30s. As far as I'm concerned, most folks in 1965 would have thought you had to die to become a zombie. No, I suspect this is some of Wood's patented social soapboxing. Wood is criticizing this lady's social behavior--she was a social zombie. At least, that's how I read it, and having now read a couple books of Wood's prose on top of seeing most of his movies, I feel I have solid insight. But it's Ed Wood. There is no fucking canon.

Criswell makes this movie lovely. Seeing him in color is a trip and a half. I don't know if he looked  this out of it in Plan 9 from Outer Space, but he's trying pretty hard to hide his age at this point. He has what I call Trump Bags--gross little white rings around his eyes where his obvious fake tan halts its orangeness. His performance varies. Sometimes he's having the time of his life, others he's clearly baffled by the syntax of what he's been asked to say, and a lot of the time he just wishes he was doing bullshit mentalism on TV again. I wonder how much the nudity he was actually present for. I can see someone with a career like his trying to stay away from that. He's joined by a woman who is not Vampira, but is made up to look like her. (No, she isn't Elvira, either.) She does a very good job, a better job than Vampira probably could have done. It is a misplaced acting extravaganza.

So much of Orgy of the Dead is dedicated to tedious and occasionally offensive stripteases that it may drive the ordinary viewer mad. I can't even argue that it's the best Ed Wood movie, as I am much more impressed with Glen or Glenda. But it is an amusing and baffling entry into the Wood corpus, and even if horror wasn't the point of emphasis, it's suitably "spooky" enough for us to celebrate with it this month.

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Deadly Weapons (1973), by Doris Wishman

It's time.

Crystal is a woman with enormous boobs. Picture the biggest boobs you've ever seen on a person, and then approximately double them in size, and you're looking at the kind of boobs Crystal has. She looks to be in some degree of pain most times of the day, which is totally understandable if you've ever had big boobs or worn big boob prosthetics before. Yet she has problems even bigger than her boobs. Her boyfriend, Larry, is a mobster, and he's decided to go out on one last big score before settling down with her--he steals a notebook vital to his boss, in order to blackmail him for 100 grand. But he's not quick enough and gets gunned down. Fortunately, Crystal overhears that one of the killers is a one-eyed man named Captain Hook, who is going to stay in a hotel in Vegas. She tracks him there, and her one-woman war against the mob begins.

And she kills her victims suffocating them to death in her boobs.

I've mentioned Doris Wishman here and there on the site before, and at only one other time does she shine brighter than she does here in Deadly Weapons. We'll get to that other movie in this year's Spookyween, but for now let's talk about her. Wishman is one of the most idiosyncratic sexploitation directors of all time. It is somehow entirely her to see an actress like Chesty Morgan (nee Liliana Wilczkowska, who plays Crystal, as you may expect) and immediately think, "Hm, yes, those puppies could be used for murder. But I also have to arouse my audience to make money. Well, c'est la vie--I'll just combine the two." For good measure she brought in Harry Reems, perhaps to trick people into thinking this was a hardcore feature. And then, she set about directing it.

I'm sure there's a better verb to fit Wishman's style of film creation than "directing." Wishman's true power the ability to hollow out other human beings and make them instruments of her id. Somehow, she managed to translate her batshit ideas into modes that were comprehensible, but no less batshit. It's almost like everything is directed wrong. There's brightness, prettiness, but everything is cheap. It's par for the course, archetypically so, as far as mid-century sexploitation goes: horrible, cheesy voiceovers, abrupt interruptions from familiar stock music cues, bored-looking actors, comic-relief "boing" sounds in the presence of tits, and missed-by-a-mile fake violence. Doris takes these already-unconventional cinematic occurrences, and then does them as aliens would do them.

Consider one of the recurring oddities of the movie: when Chesty/Crystal unveils her mammoth mammaries to go in for the kill, the music will cut to instead play a stock horror lightning strike, as if Chesty's tits are the new Universal monsters. They may as well be. Isn't there a scene in Gulliver's Travels where Gulliver accidentally sneaks a peek at some Brobdingnagian junk, and it's so humbling he becomes impotent? Well, even the toughest among us will break down in horror before the monolithic (or duolithic) sight of Chesty's chesticles. I mean this all with the fondest respect. When Crystal isn't looking contentedly bored, she really does look like her bra strap is cutting into her back.

Then, there is the repetitive dialogue. Crystal's tipoff that a man named Captain Hook killed her beau wouldn't be possible unless Harry Reems was there to say, "You're a pretty good shot for a man with one eye, Captain Hook" three separate times. (This is also contingent on the fact that Captain Hook's real name turns out to be Captain Hook, but whatever.) When Crystal is hunting Captain Hook, she calls the service desk of the hotel to see if he's checked in yet. When they say he isn't, she waits five seconds, tells herself, "Maybe they just didn't check carefully," and calls again...with the same result. It's a completely pointless sequence that doesn't even waste enough time to be considered padding. I don't know what this was supposed to accomplish. It doesn't make Crystal seem like a more insistent investigator, it makes her seem ineffectual and impatient.

And I'll never get over how bad the violence looks in a lot of these movies. When the mob boss goes to "crush" Harry Reems' hand with his shoe, he's not even touching him! Add that to the fact that Reems is a porn actor, so his whimpers of pain sound weirdly sexual. That's actually a pretty common feature of these sexploitation flicks, I should point out: pain and pleasure are usually the same as far as vocals are concerned. Especially if it's got the Doris Wishman stamp of approval on it.

Deadly Weapons is not for everyone, and upon rewatching it for this review, it's slower than I remember. However, if you have patience, and the capacity to absorb lengthy shots of titanic boobs, then you will be well-rewarded in strangeness. And you know what? This movie had a fucking spiritual successor. Double Agent 73 has Chesty Morgan running around with a camera hidden in her boobs, taking pictures in the name of heroic espionage. Yepppp...

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Infrasexum (1969), by Carlos Tobalina

Carlos Tobalina was a sage. He was The Man. He was the big kahuna, the primus unus, the Alpha and the Omega. I didn't think that I could ever get enough of Flesh and Bullets, and then, when all hope was lost, I found that for once I lived in a kind world. Fifteen years or so before Flesh and Bullets, the Neil Breen of the 20th Century turned out Infrasexum, his first movie, an ostensible look into the horrors of male impotence. And yet the resultant film was more, much more. You are not ready.

Peter Allison is a man with a unique problem despite his unique situation in life. He's a very successful businessman, and he has a stunningly attractive wife, and yet for some reason, he can't, uh, prime the old motor as it were. He can't loose his juice--can't sharpen his pencil. He has trouble making his dick hard is what I'm saying. So he decides to cut himself off from his business and family and go on a road trip in search of self-discovery. He ends making a small fortune in Vegas, then returns to Los Angeles, where he meets Carlos (played by Carlos Tobalina), who "turns [him] on to marijuana, LSD, and the hippie world." But still Peter can't find relief from his limpness, even as Carlos introduces him to the world of lesbian threeways. He becomes a painter, but his world is briefly shredded when two crooks learn of his wealth and kidnap one of his hippie girlfriends to try to rob him. When he refuses to comply, one of them tries to rape the girl, and when she resists, he stabs her and starts removing her intestines. Peter is able to escape the two and kills them in self-defense. Then, he goes to a park where he watches ducks have sex. After yet another failed attempt to bang a girl, Peter attempts to bang Carlos Tobalina. This doesn't work either--he's not into men, though not for a want of trying. At the end of it all, as in Psyched by the 4D Witch and other sexploitation movies, a psychiatrist shows up and magics it all better, suggesting that Peter have sex with someone who resembles the best sex partner he ever had. He also suggests he rejects the negative standards placed on him by his father, which we didn't know he had until this point. When this happens, Peter is finally free. The end.

It took a suitably demented eye to frame and photograph Infrasexum. This relatively straightforward tale zigs and zags in ways I wasn't prepared for. When it suddenly turns into a hostage/murder movie, for example, completely H.G. Lewis-esque gore, I am never ready. And, like Ogroff, this movie is always full of stuff which I never noticed on previous viewings. For example, it wasn't until the viewing which spawned this review that I figured out that Carlos was played by the director. That makes the stunningly tender scene where male-on-male sex almost happens even better than it was before. I also didn't notice that Peter visits the bisexual couple at Apartment 420; that the hippie fest he and Carlos go to features a stoned girl with a third eye painted on her forehead; or that said hippie festival also features a guy carrying around an adorable baby fox. These are all miraculous sights to see, glimpses back into another time.

This whole movie, in a sense, is a meditation on the hippie movement. In all likelihood, Carlos was just trying to make money off the hippies, just as many exploitation films at the time were, but that doesn't mean this film lacks time-capsule value. I'm pretty cynical about the hippies these days but little 18-year-old Mudman would have loved this. I can still feel a bit of the groove--while I no longer consider that white guys with embarrassing hair-clips bobbing their heads drunkenly with absolutely no understanding of where they are to be a symbol of freedom, it is still fascinating to watch people who have a seeming dearth of judgment for their peers acting like children and doing nothing productive in particular. In a sense I wish we still had that lack of judgment; but I also don't think that doing cartwheels through parks for hours is a particularly great use of time and energy when you're 25 years old, either. What I appreciate is that, for the most part, people are very nice in this film, and the movie tries to make a point that we--as in humanity--are not as bad as we seem. Peter is free with his money, Carlos is free with his drugs, the girls are free with their sex. And most of the judgment Peter faces for his impotence comes from himself, not from his partners. It would have been too easy to make yet another impotence-themed sexploitation movie where the person spends most of the movie being screamed at, but generally, Peter gets off pretty easy, his pain being more realistically internal than would be shown in a lot of similar films.

And I do really appreciate how the hippie free-spiritisms appear in the style of the film. Bloated with voiceovers, the movie really does play out like Peter's traveling journal, which makes it one of them road trip flicks I love so much. The light classical music sampled throughout the film gives it an artsy sentimental feel that makes me get all fuzzy inside. This really does help build the story of a man who is struggling to find freedom from a prison he's built for himself. It makes it seem tenderly psychological. I love it.

Of course, there is also the lovely trash.

Bad edits, cuts in the soundtrack, and incomprehensible dialogue all wrack the movie, pushing it straight into the Technicolor world of one of Doris Wishman's '70s movies (which I'll get to soon enough!). Peter dresses like a gay bullfighter for a startling percentage of the runtime. And, as Jess Franco will tell you, nothing says classy like a slow zoom towards the vagina of a corpse. Rest assured, we are absolutely still dealing with the director of Flesh and Bullets here. But this is him at his rawest. Gone is the drama of murdering another man's wife; instead, we are gazing into the id of a director/actor on his own personal trip into hedonism. It's almost like a documentary. Yet, still confined to the magically unrealistic world of fiction.

In case you can't tell, I really, really like this movie. Boobs and butts galore, plus a little blood, and a strange journey into a strange mind. Don't miss it.

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The Fast Set (1957), by Pierre Foucaud

The war between progress and tradition is the conflict of our age--if we survive our current period of history, people will look back at today as the center of an era defined by a profound and violent difference between left- and right-wing politics. I suspect that by the time this is all over--if it ever ends--we will be left with a world less fundamentally grounded on the old 18th Century idea of liberalism vs. conservatism than what we're used to. At the very least, the definitions of those institutions will be dramatically shifted, or at least, shifted to different sets of issues. And, while this could be construed as wishful thinking, I suspect that conservatism, at least in the United States, is ultimately on its last legs; the recent indications of intensifying conservatism in the form of the increasing activity of white supremacist movements and the like are symbols of conservative inability to reconcile the general right-wing identity with the way the country is going, even in this post-Obama world of ours, which will lead to a burnout followed by a generally progressive (i.e. not necessarily leftist) attitude amongst the populace-at-large. That's my interpretation, at least.

But let's not talk about the present state of ideological conflict (seriously; keep it out of the comments). Today we're talking about the 1950s. Pierre Foucaud's The Fast Set is a lot of things, including a romance and a striptease documentary; but it's also about the difference between the old ways and the new, the libertine and the reserved. Only the French could produce a sexploitation movie that so convincingly touches on real issues.

Sophie is the daughter of a wealthy Lyons family, who disapprove of her boyfriend Jack and her desire to follow him and her dreams of being an artist to Paris. Thanks to her cool mom, Sophie is able to join Jack in Paris, but the fast life she discovers is nothing she's prepared for. Sure, Sophie is used to rebellion back in Lyons, but she wasn't prepared for the world of stripteases, nude modeling, and prototypical free love. She has to dodge the attentions of her jealous rival Rita, and in her quest to win Jack over entirely, she becomes a bohemian. Eventually, the stage calls to her. Out in the parlor, the audience awaits their striptease...

First of all, it needs to be said that this movie is, for nearly all modern audiences, going to seem extremely mild. I don't know how much of that is deliberate, but let's just say those of us who have seen Human Centipede 2 are going to find Sophie's dad's offense at her leaving dinner without being properly excused a little silly. In the beginning, I do believe that Sophie's actions are meant to be seen as rebellious (they also include the abominable crime of eating sweets instead of dinner), but they are not quite on par with taking off your clothes all sexy-like for a crowd of strangers. She is meant to start out naive so she can make her lovely quest towards true libertinism. I do always enjoy stories like this, of young people finding their inner freedoms, even as I get older and more cynical. Movies like this, as milquetoasty as they can be, help me feel less crusty around the edges.

The conservatism, on the other hand, does feel real. Even today we have to contend with old ladies who think that wearing shorts is slutty; and I think all of us have heard at least one middle-aged dude who is refuted on a point for just this once, whose immediate response is to bluster, "I GUESS I'M JUST ALWAYS WRONG THEN." The times, they are a-not changing. I would have laughed if Sophie's dad had a t-shirt that said, "J'ai accheté cet fusil à pompe parce qu'un jour un garçon va sortir avec ma fille"--and not because those shirts are ever anything but fucking sexist and dumb. At least this movie is...generally not racist? Some of the striptease acts are likely to offend people (there's one involving a hashish-smoking sheikh called "Impressions of the Orient"), but it's still usually pretty mild.

The stripteases themselves are presented, as I alluded before, in a pseudo-documentary fashion. This movie illustrates superbly the transition between old-world burlesque and the exotic dancing of today. Initially, we see that these acts are tamer than what we're accustomed, with one of them never even showing the nipples of the woman in question. Then, several of the acts we see actually follow vague storylines. By the time that we see our strippers are a pair of male Laurel & Hardy impressionists, whose deliberately unerotic striptease is received humorously by the audience, we know that we're looking at an animal which is today extinct in the wild. If you put two ugly guys out on stage at a strip club and had them start taking their clothes off, they'd be lynched. Now, I don't say that to disparage the modern exotic dancing industry--just perhaps their audience. It's just interesting to see such an "artsy" take on what we unjustly view today as a lowdown sort of thing, and more interesting to think about how our society may have gotten that way. Have we become more liberal with our sexuality, in our treatment of women, or less? Has the art gone away on its own, or did we push it out? And what can we do for the stripping and exotic dancing which does still hold the artistic spirit?

The movie does get some details of realism wrong. For example, no one is ever turned on during a nude modeling. Not the models, not the artists. I haven't even participated in a nude modeling art session (you can tell because I don't know what they're properly called), and I know that they're uncomfortable as fuck. Not because of the nudity, but because art is pain, and also, studios are cold. When one of the artists remarked on the attractiveness of his nude model I was completely taken out of the movie. ZERO STARS.

To return to the themes in a serious sense for a moment: this movie is about the Big City turning a privileged girl into a rebel, but it's also about a country girl taming a city man. Tradition gets a little victory at the end, which may have been a scene tacked on for the sake of censors and pearl-clutchers. It's interesting to see the movie try to be fair, in a way which is pretty harmless at that. The whole movie is pretty harmless, again due to the oft-stated mildness.

On the trash side, we get such wonders as the tiniest car ever (seriously, EVER) and an extremely casual delivery of the line, "She could kill herself!" There's also an awesome jazz soundtrack which will probably get stuck in your head. If you like seeing interesting '50s politics, and you also like seeing people take their clothes off comedically, you need to speed up--so you can catch up with The Fast Set.

...also this movie probably features the last-ever use of the word "Set" in that context, at least until The Rebel Set came along in 1959. And speaking of The Rebel Set, we'll get into mid-century MST3K fodder again in just a little bit.

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Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977), by George Barry

Hey, I reviewed Troll 2 and Manos. It can't hurt to take a look at Death Bed too.

A couple is hiking through the woods to get to an old abandoned house. There's a bed in there that they want to fuck on. Well, that the dude wants to fuck on--this is an awkward sort of relationship. Judging from douchedude's letterman jacket they might be meant to be high school students. There's a man who's been trapped behind a painting in the bedroom for sixty years, who is unable to speak to the other characters but narrates the film. He watches as the bed first eats their food--extruding a foamy yellow stomach acid to do so--and then the lovers themselves. The rest of the film follows the misadventures of the various people who stumble across and are eaten by the Death Bed. Slowly, the narrator reveals the Bed's story: long ago, a demon fell in love with a human woman and created a bed to seduce her in. However, because he was a demon she died during their encounter, and in his grief for her he cried tears of blood, which animated the bed with a ceaseless hunger. Eventually, the narrator is able to speak to a girl who is the reincarnation of the bed's "mother," and with some good ol' ceremonial magic the bed is put to rest.

If a movie with the title Death Bed: The Bed That Eats was made today, you can bet it would be some sort of zany Troma-esque comedy. And while Death Bed is certainly a comedy, it's not really "zany." Or disgusting. Or stupid. That being said, it's not particularly smart, either. It just has style. I've tagged it as "artsy" but in terms of theme and universal questions and whatnot, it's not particularly strong. But it adopts a strange dignity unto itself. Close-up shots show blood droplets snuffing out candle-flames. Statues cry sanguinary tears. Old-timey sepia stock footage plays. And, there is a lady who sleeps in the bed reading a magazine called Oral Lesbians.

Yeah, this movie is pretty goofy. One of the prolonged flashbacks in the history of the Death Bed--surely the most essential of all of them--tells the tale of "Dr." Graham and his wife, who turned the mansion of the Death Bed's residence into a sexual healing clinic; i.e. an orgy club. The narrator speaks of the Death Bed's "one true feast" of six orgy practitioners, including the good doctor and his wife, one sunlit afternoon. I seem to remember this subplot taking up around ten minutes of the movie. It feels like that in any case. They could've done a whole movie with just that in my mind, but I need to be careful what I wish for.

Probably my favorite detail about this movie's weird sideways humor is the fact that the narrator, based on his appearance, on the style of his art, and on the fact that he died of tuberculosis before being trapped behind his painting, is 19th Century artist Aubrey Beardsley. I can think of no reason as to why they would choose Beardsley of all people to fulfill this role aside from that George Barry was a fan of his (and not without reason). The fact that they don't even say his name in the credits makes this a fun inside joke to catch. They even get to joke around with some of his famous quotes, paraphrasing them somewhat: "You have one aim--the grotesque. You are nothing if not grotesque. Except hungry." It's something for snobs and gorehounds alike.

And indeed, this is a pretty gory movie--a lighter H.G. Lewis, I would say. This gore is accompanied wonderfully by a plethora of bad acting. The two go so well together. I would say this is a Kids Goofing Off sort of deal but the people involved are in their 40s, so it's Director's Friends Goofing Off instead. Performances range from sincere to intoxicated. Try to strain out some of the dialogue and guffaw endlessly at the inanity of some of the deliveries. To say nothing of the material itself.

If there was any sort of theme to the movie, it would be one of awkwardness. The couple at the beginning is awkward. The group who shows up at the house at the beginning are all awkward coworkers. A man has his hands eaten down to the bones by the bed, and his response is one of feeling awkward. The demon who was the bed's "father" fucked the love of his life to death Edward Cullen-style, which is awkward. I don't know what the director was trying to say with this, if anything. Perhaps just that life is awkward, even when you are being digested by demonically-possessed furniture. Truer words, never spoken.

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The Love Captive (1969), by Larry Crane

I meant to do this back before I did All Women Are Bad. After all, this was my first Larry Crane movie, and All Women, my second. I mean, All Women Were Bad caught me so off-guard that I couldn't resist. And after that, I always found myself thinking that I had already done this one, just because it's so essential to me that certainly I wouldn't go on without it. But then I smartened up a bit and reminded myself that I have this thing called a search bar and I can, as it were, see what reviews I've already done. And sure enough, I haven't done The Love Captive yet. Let's just get started...we've waited long enough.

Always trust a movie that features "Night on Bald Mountain." Always double-trust a movie that opens with "Night on Bald Mountain." So does The Love Captive commence, before referring itself to our protagonist, a nameless woman who wanders around Greenwich Village. The narrator talks over her wanderings, giving us information on the weird and wild world of Greenwich entertainment, both high- and lowbrow. This narrator condemns movies like Andy Warhol's Flesh and nervously suggests the lady may be a hooker. But that doesn't stop him from creeping on her as she undresses in a hotel room. Eventually our protagonist finds herself in Manzini's Museum of the Macabre, and then the movie really gets going. A fast-paced exploration into Inquisition torture devices, Houdini memorabilia, and vampire coffins ensues, and we jump from brief glimpses of lunatic-painted portraits to extensive fire-eating shows. It's all very overwhelming and wonderful, and if you have a trace of carnival spirit in you, the ridiculous showmanship and spectacle of the whole affair will give you warm fuzzies. Then, our lead is locked inside the Museum after dark, with the intent of making off with a Houdini straitjacket, but she has a surprise in store for her. At night the Museum's werewolves come out! After experiencing a night of terror, she comes back up to her hotel room and has sex with a dude. Then, lesbianism happens. And then, another lady seduces the Museum owner to take it over from him. A dude's junk flaps around in front of the camera, and we conclude.

The Love Captive functions better less as a "movie" and more like a box full of film clips of varying degrees of watchability. Like a lot of B&W sexploitation, you'll want to mosey around the general unappealing softcore fucking, skipping instead to the bizarre travelogue-style footage, and the riveting sideshow touring. The movie is less a "slice-of-life" film and more like a scrapbook laced in with odd tangential Tall Tales. Things that didn't really happen on the vacation, but would have improved it. It may actually also be a slice-of-life film, but for Greenwich Village circa 1969. Y'know, the place and time white hipsters love fetishizing? Well, I guess I can kind of get it. It's hard to resist attractions like Manzini's Museum, or a gift shop that sells a shirt that reads "GODDAMN YOU, CHARLIE BROWN."

Everything about this is so sloppy and weird that it probably is a vacation home-video edited into a sexploitation feature. The hucksters and fucksters of the '60s were desperate enough to do that--it would make them money, after all. Everything is rushed and clipped together. Plotlines vanish and are replaced with alternative circumstances. Various people all dub each other with bad impressions of each others' voices. The music is the same '60s sexploitation library cues every Something Weird fan has heard before and again. It's a marvelous headtrip that I do think only the '60s could produce. Nothing makes sense, and yet everything comes together. I watched Zardoz for the first time recently and this movie is still weirder than fucking Zardoz.

The movie shares this mutant home-video commonality not with A Clockwork Blue...more like the coy, quasi-dignified chuckles of The Hand of Pleasure. The narrator is hilarious. I love voiceovers from movies from this time. They were usually put in to help cut costs, and they really show how slack and alien the scripts for these movies were. This is the history of economics in slow motion--porn grunge seen first hand. This movie, both for its content and its context, is an anthropological dream.

Now I'm starting to get too far up my own ass--I do that when I'm happy. This movie has relieved of me, once again, the weary tensions of our plane. It is my Land of Cockaigne, my Arcadia, my Blue-Rock Candy Mountains. In more serious terms, however, it's yet another record of a crazed brain. It is another gate into the sort of madness that is sometimes necessary to crack open the ice that sheathes creativity. It is another marker by which we understand that the world we take for granted is not always what it seems, and how that's a marvelous and lovely thing. Too often are we Captives of our Hate. We should be Captives of Love instead.

And this movie is so captivating. In good ways and bad. So check it out when you can.

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Crypt of Dark Secrets (1976), by Jack Weis

This is another one which sometimes seems to have a life of its own. Whenever I watch Crypt of Dark Secrets, I always feel like it's the right time; whenever I try to watch this movie when the day doesn't make time for it, it feels flat and empty. But when it's my time to watch it--when the movie lets me watch it--then suddenly every frame seems to gain its own weird inner light. I feel like this sensation goes well in hand with this movie's occult themes, which somehow always scratch my Magic Itch. There's a certain way that I like seeing magic done in movies, and this movie has got it. however that happens to be. Keep in mind that this movie does not contain a crypt.

There are legends of old Haunted Island out in the bayous near New Orleans--with a name like Haunted Island, that's basically a guarantee, ain't it? It's the supposed home of a woman named Damballa, an "Aztec" girl whose alternate form is a rainbow snake that is the bridge between life and death. Vietnam veteran Ted Watkins lives out in a small house on Haunted Island with an extensive fortune, and when he is visited by two cops who are curious about the legends of Damballa, they accidentally spread word of his money to a trio of crooks named Earl, Max, and Louise. The three are surprisingly eager to murder Ted and take his money, so they drown him and take all they can carry. But Ted isn't dead, at least not the way we know it--a beautiful naked woman appears and restores his spirit, explaining that she is Damballa, and that their souls must fuse together to fulfill their respective destinies. Ted is pretty cool with this idea (Ted's cool with basically everything), but he needs to avenge his death before he can move on. But temptation alone will bring fate to its conclusion: for there's a voodoo witch in the swamp who is willing to give the murderous trio the treasure of Jean LaFitte. They should have figured that there are no promises when voodoo dolls are involved.

Returning to the beginning of this review for a bit--almost more than any other movie, save for perhaps The Witches' Mountain, is this film like a dream. Everyone in it acts as if they aren't real, or like they're stoned. Every time I show this movie to someone (because sometimes this film wants me to bring it an audience), they say of Ted, "Is he high?" When I watch this alone, my question is, "Is everyone high?" People are in a strange headspace in this one. It goes beyond Ted's dull, blank stare, and his denim short-shorts. It's not just bad acting. But it's not anything deliberate, either. It's almost like they just aren't aware of what they're doing, like it doesn't matter. I wish I could put my finger on it but I can't.

Because this film takes it easy, generally speaking, it's a relaxing watch. And it manages to have a plot without the conflict being overly stressful. I'm someone who can get stressed out by movies. Even movies that I like can raise my cortisol levels if they contain too much conflict. On my thin-skinned days, this movie can pass over me with no trouble. Like, Ted dies, but he's revived immediately after--he needs to take revenge, but the voodoo cult does it for him, because they want him to succeed--and in the end he and Damballa are united to love each forever in the spirit world. Sure, there's the small detail that they hardly know each other, but there's a dreamy romance to Damballa, and not merely because she's hot. I watched this movie on the same day I did my Divine Emanuelle review and Maureen Ridley, who plays Damballa, is an eerie doppelganger for Laura Gemser. She reappears in Jack Weis' Death Brings Roses, one of the few known films that Weis directed. He also made Quadroon, which I watched for the first time before rewatching this. I don't know if I'll ever review it, but let me say for now that it's as essential as this one...

And Crypt of Dark Secrets is essential. It has a scene where a stack of dollar bills start bleeding ketchup. I was worried that the shortness of this review would detract from my implicit recommendation, but then I remembered that that was one of the details I wanted to mention. There are more, but Dark Secrets are best learned firsthand. Find the time for this film to find you.

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The Telephone Book (1971), by Nelson Lyon

Black and white sexploitation is a revelation. Like most statements this isn't universally true, though I always believe in the significance of anything, no matter how small. Hence this site. We haven't had a chance to talk about a lot of black and white sexploitation outside of the odd thing like All Women Are Bad, but for better or worse the genre has left a powerful impact on my life, even if it is a genre that most people have never heard of, much less experienced. Someday soon we'll have to talk about the wonders of Doris Wishman, or Larry Crane's The Love Captive, or, if I can handle it, Charles Morgan's Stick It In Your Ear. Despite the gruesome titles, to say nothing of the name of the genre itself, these movies are all pseudo-comedic explorations of sexuality through methods both crass and artistic. Oftentimes, the art arises accidentally, a consequence of a modern viewer responding to decades of pastiching this style in "highbrow" circles (or at least high-budgeted ones). But sometimes there is an intention to the craft, an actual attempt at low-budget artistry. I don't know how well intentional art films fit in with my broad and idiosyncratic definition of "trash," but let's just say that no matter how well-known or "significant" The Telephone Book is, it's become one of my new favorites ever. It's one of those movies packed with so much raw insanity that it's truly hard to believe it actually exists. Like Gretta, or Bloody Wednesday, or Evil Dead, this is a movie which hits every single button of what I like in a movie, while still containing flaws which keep it grounded in a realistic humanity. While nonetheless bursting out beyond anything anyone could properly prepare for.

Fittingly, this is a film about a woman who receives transcendent fulfillment from an admittedly flawed and perverse source. Alice is a sexually frustrated young stoner who lives in her small, barren apartment which is wallpapered with porn. One day, she receives a disgusting but largely implied dirty call from a man with black gloves calling from a payphone. This brings her more sexual release than she's ever felt before, so she's delighted when the man calls again, now represented by subtitles. He tells her his name is John Smith, and encourages her to track him down. It shouldn't be an impossible task--after all, he's in the telephone book.

Thus begins Alice's adventures in...well, a potential Wonderland metaphor would be superficial at best. First she meets a man who claims to be the caller, a stag film actor named Har Poon, and he's in the middle of making one of his movies when she comes across him. Then, she runs into a horny analyst who is astonishingly none other than Harcourt Fenton Mudd. Mustache and all. In exchange for money to make more phone calls, she tells him the story of how she helps a well-endowed middle-aged deal with his week-long priapism. Eventually Alice and Mr. Smith meet. And he turns out to be a homophobic, dog-kicking, homewrecking pedophile who wears a pig mask. No matter...he and Alice aren't meant to have sex in the conventional way. They agree to make one last call. And this leads to the film's final ten minutes.

The movie suddenly snaps to color.

And I will say no more.

Every single moment of this movie is unfettered surrealism. But it's calculated surrealism; little is done on accident. The movie has a habit of interrupting itself--especially when it comes to romance. It will be playing music that builds up the attraction Alice develops towards her mysterious caller when we are interrupted with vignettes of former dirty callers confessing their increasing strange and disturbing habits, like the man who used to call nuns while running his hand through a bowl of split pea soup. And the sex in this movie is always made unappealing in some way, despite the fact that Alice's actress, Sarah Kennedy, is one of the most attractive actresses I've been gay for in a while. It's like the movie never wants to be sincere with its romance or sexuality, presenting a contrasting cynicism to its apparent optimism. It does not take long for the film to get dark after Mr. Smith reveals himself, but Alice doesn't seem aware of it. I don't know what to take from the fact that his obvious anger issues, selfishness, and fucking pedophilia are not turn-offs for her. Like I said, the movie is flawed, but so is life. This movie is laboriously unlike life, but like religion it is made by humans and there are bound to be cracks. Or perhaps this is just Dada--the opening to the 1934 Mystery Ranch played out as a whole movie.

Despite its ventures into the tasteless, the movie is successfully funny throughout most of its runtime. The scenes with Rogel C. Carmel are especially great, because he is a great actor even off Star Trek. That is to say that I like to see Star Trek actors scream "fuck"--the only thing I love as much is seeing Star Trek actors face down giant killer rabbits. Because so much of the comedy arises from the surrealism, the movie invited some comparisons to other nonsensical comedies of a sexual nature, like A Clockwork Blue or Down and Dirty Duck. All three of these movies were probably made by stoners, but whereas A Clockwork Blue is weekend silliness, and Down and Dirty Duck is obsessed with being as offensive as possible at all costs, The Telephone Book has direction and drive. You feel like it's actually going somewhere, and rarely do its tangents subsume the themes of the film. Nothing is self-indulgent. It's stoned as fuck, but fortunately there's actually a brain in that THC-stormed skull.

The Telephone Book is a movie that reminds me why I got in this business to begin with. I feel like I've said that or some variant on it a lot recently, but that's just because I've had a string of good luck. This is some exceptionally pure and marvelous '70s B&W sleaze that was put together by people who actually cared. This is definitely a movie which more people should know about, and I really don't think anyone's life is complete without it. If you like art, if you like trash, if you like bad movies and good movies alike, there's something in it for you. Just mind the boobiez.

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Blue Summer (1973), by Chuck Vincent

I don't know why this movie the impact on me that it did--which is kind of my way of saying I don't know why this movie left any impact on me at all. It's kind of like The Witches' Mountain, another movie I love which, frankly, has so little going for it that it's remarkable that it even still finds release. Really, there's little to separate Blue Summer from other softcore porn exercises of the early '70s, and I can think of little that makes it stand out against other "teen road trip" movies I've seen, to say nothing of the fact that it's not even that distinct from other non-teen road trip movies I've seen. But the High Concept premise sold me quick: "Two teens load up a car with beer and go on the road in search of sexual adventures." I think what made Blue Summer hook into my heart is it's cheap attempts to milk my nostalgia for the road trips of my youth. Sure, I never went on these trips in search of beer or sex--I went looking for ghosts, because I had this weird Gravity Falls-style youth--but the thrill of being young on the open road is something that fades away over time. Maybe it never goes away, but it's never quite the same again. So this crude little porno managed to stir up some strange emotions in me, managing to overcome another fault I had with The Witches' Mountain: I hated it the first few times I saw it.

Gene and Tracy have just finished high school, and soon, horror of horrors, it'll be off to college for the both of 'em. Thus they decide to spend the summer making the trip out to Gene's uncle's cottage, with plenty of stops along the way. The primary mission, of course, is girls, as many as they can bed. Once this premise is established and we've gotten our first few twangs of '70s guitar out of the way, our string of ostensibly erotic vignettes can begin. First our boys run into two girl hitchhikers of around the same age who turn out to be quite permissive. Of course, this is because they expect the boys to be permissive with their valuables. It's implied these two have been running this thumb 'em, bang 'em, and rob 'em for some time. Next, they run into a Manson-esque hippie leader and his two free-loving girlfriends, and that doesn't end well either. At last, they end up in some crap shanty town, where they're offered drunken sex with the village bicycle, Regina. Eventually, however, some thugs show up and butt ahead of the two on the train to Reginasville, and when they decide to fight for their rights to sex it looks like they're going to get their asses kicked. But back near the start of the movie, they ran into the world's most apathetic biker, whom they helped out when his bike wouldn't start. Ever since he's been stalking them with unclear intentions. Turns out he's just been looking to repay the favor, as he fights off the toughs so the boys can get away. When they reach the cottage, Tracy is reunited with an older woman whom he shared an attraction with earlier in the movie, and the two have sex, before realizing they probably shouldn't see each other again when Tracy meets a man older than him who turns out to be the woman's son. Finally, they pack it in, reflecting fondly on the new memories, but also lamenting what comes next.

Because Blue Summer is a porn first and foremost, it spends most of its runtime showing people rolling around and utterly failing at making out. This stuff is easy to fastforward through, unless you want to hear some purebred '70s guitar indulgence, including the occasional not-Beatles. The musical interludes are on par with An American Hippie in Israel for sheer ridiculousness. They highlight the fact that everything about this movie is pure '70s...it's just conspicuously free of drugs, even in the presence of hippies. I think I appreciated it initially by merit of its being a time-capsule film. It is a living memory of something that is, like the road trips of our youth, forever inaccessible. Hell, most of the buildings, forests, and mountains shown in this thing have probably been bulldozed by this point. One needs reminders that the world is always changing, and coming head-to-head with the past is one way of going about that.

There's some actual...heart...in this movie? Like, again, T&A, and tongue-on-tongue, those are the goals, but I get the impression Chuck Vincent, director of such films as Sex Crimes 2084 and Sexpot, actually had something of a personal stake in this film's story. Weird, innit? Any of us who graduated from high school knew it was a bigger step than anything we'd previously known, and that feeling is adequately communicated here. Growing up is scary. It does mean the end of a lot of freedoms that you may go on missing for the rest of your life. But it's also liberating. You get to have your own pets, you can feel the weight of your accomplishments, you can eat whatever garbage you fucking want. And you find that, after a time, you can even still find days to just sit around watching and writing about awesome movies. I can't help but wonder if there is a deliberate irony in that final sadness Tracy and Gene leave us on. One life's ending, but another is just beginning. I mean, if anything, I guess I don't get why they think there's not going to be booze, sex, and road trips in college.

And I think that theme--the fear of growing up--comes back in what is probably the most memorable thread in the film, the affair between Tracy and the older woman. I don't remember if the movie really explains why she ends up going for him; specifically, I don't know if she's meant to be predatory or not. But perhaps this woman fears the future as much as Tracy does, and therefore looks to younger men to help her feel youthful again. There's enough ambiguity that it gives the film depth it didn't have up until everything spills out about her twenty-something son.

I really don't think I can encourage you to watch Blue Summer. It's a relatively tedious run-of-the-mill skin flick, but with a few patches here and there that break up the ennui in ways that I at least found interesting. Let me know if it sticks in your head as well.

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Flesh and Bullets (1985), by Carlos Tobalina

This is the weirdest drama I've seen since Satan's Touch. It's definitely a drama, because while people get shot and the story (for the most part) is about murder, it's not a thriller. It is merely an extremely unconventional romance, filmed in an extremely unconventional way for the reason that this was the director's first feature in a while that wasn't hardcore porn. Watching Flesh and Bullets, you really won't believe that Carlos Tobalina made any movies prior to this one, as it's as naive and clumsy as today's direct-to-video piss buckets like Birdemic and A Talking Cat. The movie's awkward shallowness clashes with its desire to do a million crazy things at once, creating a weirdly engaging experience that's over before you know it.

When the movie opens, we see a man named Jeff trick two homeless guys into helping him a rob a bank. He does this so he can make alimony payments to his ostensibly bitchy wife, Dolores. While celebrating his success in a Vegas bar, he meets Roy, who also has an ostensibly bitchy wife named Gail to whom he owes an extravagant amount of money. Roy jokes around that he wishes his wife was dead, and this gives the two men an idea: what if they killed each others' wives? It would be the perfect crime, as there would be no apparent motive. Yep, it's Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, except they're both guys at once. At first, they're fine with killing the women, until they have sex with them, and when they meet their opposite's kids. Jeff has always wanted a boy, which Roy has--and Roy always wanted a girl, like Jeff's kid. But both men know that they are liabilities to one another, and both believe they can't get out of the deal without killing the other. This tension is largely forgotten as other matters arise, like snakebites and abusive exes. And awkwardness.

All of the awkwardness.

How awkward is this movie? Well, near the beginning, we see Jeff have sex with a prostitute. This is not the awkward bit, surprisingly, because after they're done, she says to him, "Wow, I really like you! Maybe next time, I will let you make love to me for free!" Jeff's reply: "I'll know it when I see it...or rather...when I feel it." Cut then to what appears to be a barely off-camera hardcore sequence! I can put it into words, people, but only the image itself may speak.

The acting takes this early scene's outlandish discomfort and carries it throughout the whole film. It's not quite to the levels of I Am Here...Now, but it does come close to the Breen Zone at times. However, it is sometimes jarringly broken by the random appearance of professionals, like the thirty second spot with Cesar Romero. No one except these errant professionals can do anything convincingly, which makes scenes like Roy's recounting of his gang-rape at the hands of gay pro wrestlers (!) cross a number of unexpected boundaries. Every chance Tobalina gets to have things obey a sense of continuity, he ignores.

The movie runs in a linear fashion, sure, but for the most part, it doesn't feel that way. There are some weird plot holes that almost don't seem like plot holes, by merit of the dream-like nature of the shitty acting. I feel like the way the two men describe their wives completely contradicts what we see of the women, and how the women describe their husbands contradicts what we've already seen of the men. I remember Jeff saying Dolores was frigid, for example, but when we meet her, she loves sex. There are also fakeout death scenes for Jeff and Roy which confused me enough to rewind a few times. Actually, now that I think about it, I had to rewind a lot of this movie. It runs about 90 minutes but it took up my whole afternoon...

I really don't know what to say about this. Every scene and shot is strange to experience. Maybe I'm just weird, but there's something fundamentally wrong about this movie, in an entirely captivating way. Perhaps this is a telling look into the head of a porn director. More likely it is just a look into the head of Carlos Tobalina. If there are other romance movies like this out there, I wanna know about them. Drop me a line. And while you're at it, drop this movie a line, and be hypnotized. The best "Flesh" movie of them all!

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