The Curious Dr. Humpp (1969), by Emilio Vieyra and Jerald Intrator

So, uh, there's no way the director of this film didn't see The Awful Dr. Orlof. Or Atom Age Vampire. Or The Corpse Vanishes. Fuck, there's a lot of goddamn glandsploitation movies! But The Curious Dr. Humpp differs from them in a variety of key ways. Namely, it's one of the more bizarre variants on the glandsploitation genre, throwing a bit of The Brain That Wouldn't Die into the mix--but with an actual brain this time!

Dr. Humpp is a researcher who forces his hideously (and hilariously) disfigured monster-goon assistants to kidnap young people to have a lot of sex. Not to have sex with; it's complicated and I'll get into it. In an astonishingly overlong opening segment, we witness one of the blatant man-in-the-mask mutants kidnap a pair of lesbians, an alcoholic dude, a masturbating hypersexual lady, a hippie foursome, and a stripper. All of them except for Outlier Alcoholic Man are young and attractive and improbably keep their makeup on at times. We know how young and attractive and made-up they are because we watch each of them (except the alcoholic) engage in sexual behavior for prolonged periods of time. The stripper is so sexy she makes a saxophone player cum in his pants! Huh, it's starting to seem like a movie called The Curious Dr. Humpp is a softcore porn or something. It transpires, in the bare excuse for the plot, that Dr. Humpp is making his victims have sex after consuming a smoking, bubbling potion. This somehow produces another smoking, bubbling potion (eww), which Humpp ingests to stave off a mutation such as that which has consumed his assistants. But also, the bad doctor's research is being used to the benefit of a preserved brain in a jar who schemes to conquer the world!

That's a big "but also." The copy I watched was in Spanish with no subs, and so while I could make out enough to tell what was happening, I'm pretty sure the Jar Brain was added in last second. He really doesn't have a bearing on the plot (if they are a he). However, he is much more memorable than our cop protagonists. Considerable time is spent trying to make this one cop into the hero, and it doesn't work, because he's just there to make it feel like a krimi. Speaking of krimis, and, consequently, Edgar Wallace, that's what makes me feel like this could have come from Jesus Franco circa 1962. Cops are just crammed in here because they'd be crammed into an Edgar Wallace adaptation. True, they are cheap protagonists, but I can't help but feel like the creators of this film were going for something particular in terms of style and genre. Interestingly, there were scenes set inside Dr. Humpp's complex which made it feel like a prison movie. It never lingers long enough to count, and the prisoners never interact with each other in a meaningful way, but they could have changed genres and it would have been a natural flow.

Let's talk about Dr. Humpp himself. He looks like Adam West and has a hot wife who's really into masochism. Outside of sex-sauce experiments they also cut open the heads of their mutants and stick hot metal in them to make smoke come out of their eyes. The Humpps have a lot of these mutants! When the cop breaks into the facility he's confronted by a whole army of them. I wish I knew why Humpp was himself turning into a mutant, or what caused the mutant outbreak through the lab. Maybe Humpp worked at the '60s incarnation of the Umbrella Corporation. Or perhaps it was merely fate, for Humpp seems to go out of his way to make his potions foam and sizzle unnecessarily, and he also keeps a skull on his desk. He is clearly evil, or mad, at the very least. On top of this, he gets sex hallucinations when he drinks his splooge-serum, which may or may not be manifestations of his own psyche. That doesn't actually support the idea that he's evil and so evil things happen around him, I just wanted to bring it up because I love me some good ol' psychedelic sex hallucinations. In living black-and-white!

Dr. Humpp is a minor work in the annals of trash, but the title alone is indelible. I've known about this movie for as long as I've been watching exploitation junk, and I'm happy to have actually seen it now. Long stretches of it will put you to sleep (YES WE GET IT THE PEOPLE ONSCREEN ARE FUCKING) but it makes a surprisingly funny double feature with Awful Dr. Orlof. I mean, c'mon, there are Astro-Zombies who look more convincing than this movie's monsters! And seriously--how many movies are there where someone takes someone's glandular fluids and uses them to create a scientist potion?! I just keep finding more! It's really disturbing, especially since few of them have Howard Vernon in them. Much less his dick.

Anyway. Take a look at the poster for this if you aren't swayed into viewing. Yes, the monster does actually look like that. Worse, even. The poster omits the fact that the monster's eyes aren't exactly synced up--he doesn't gaze down on someone like that, and you'll know what I mean when you see it for yourself. Today's a Wednesday, so have a happy Humpp Day.

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The Stud (1978), by Quentin Masters

This movie was pitched to me as "British Saturday Night Fever." What?! Not only are the plots completely dissimilar, but before this movie, the idea of a British disco movie struck me as being about as likely as dubstep in Puritan times. Well, I can now finally have a double feature with Disco Godfather. You have no idea how glad that makes me.

The film opens with a surprisingly catchy disco song that I had stuck in my head for--well, actually, it's still in my head, and I think I first saw this movie, like, a year ago. The only lyrics consist of "Ooh--Stud! What's his name, what's his game?" It implies immediately that we're dealing with a man of mystery; one who we've already seen to be the recipient of dozens of signed photographs from beautiful women that allude to his tremendous sexual prowess. The man in question is Tony Blake, the manager of a club called "Hobo" which is owned by the wealthy Fontaine Khaled. Fontaine is married to a diplomat, Benjamin Khaled, who is unaware of Fontaine's many affairs. Her favorite is Tony, who we learn she "made," training him in management, class, and sex. She says of him, "You know, when we first met, he thought a 69 was a bottle of scotch!" Fontaine has sex with Tony in an elevator where she's hidden secret cameras. Not only does she enjoy watching the tapes for her own satisfaction, but she uses the tapes to advertise Tony to her friends. She's planning a big trip to Paris, where Tony is the intended centerpiece of a massive orgy. He isn't to know until the last minute, though, an unnecessarily rape-y twist that shows off that Fontaine is a libertine in the style of de Sade. She loves wealth for wealth's sake, even though that wealth has left her bored enough where she's bound to completely collapse if she doesn't have sex constantly. The Paris plot develops slowly and runs parallel to a thread which has Tony trying to open his own club, so he can be free of Fontaine forever.

Of course, we also get plenty of eyefuls of the action at Hobo. (That actually is the worst nightclub name I've heard, ever.) We have Tony's pedo friend who "waits for 'em to get off the schoolbuses"; we have Molly, a black woman who Fontaine (the white bitch) calls "an interesting creature"; then there's the seemingly endless "disco" song which mostly chants, "Let's go, disco, let's go disco." That last bit is probably the funniest thing in the whole movie--I mean, I laugh at music from all eras, and I especially like laughing at the music I like. But disco can get so goddamn goofy sometimes. I'm on the floor every single time I realize that the fucking song has been playing for like seven solid minutes.

Tony hates his situation. Sure, he gets laid more than any other man in London who's not David Bowie, but even his conquests from outside Fontaine's social circles fully know about his place on the ladder. Molly calls Tony a gigolo, and while he's frankly a sexist pig, Tony knows that it feels wrong to be used. When Ben Khaled comes down to Hobo to visit with his wife, Tony falls in love with--or makes himself fall in love with--Ben's daughter from a prior marriage, Alex. Alex is turned on by Tony, even and perhaps especially after she learns that he's fucking her stepmother. Her own boyfriend is so no-sex-before-marriage that her attempts to make out with her are met with confusion and disgust. So she and Tony sleep together and something of a relationship starts. But then Christmas comes. It's time to go to Paris.

And oh my God, I'm glad movies exist, because you'd never see this in real life. Fontaine's Parisian friend has a gigantic sex-mansion, complete with what is probably the world's hardest-to-maintain swimming pool. Have you seen Caligula, or at least, Brad Jones' review of it? I immediately thought of Tiberius' grotto during this scene, albeit less ridiculous. I mean, the place has a fucking sex-swing on it! Anyone who is into sex-swings or fucking in pools is in the right because there's nothing wrong with what you're into (as long as it's not animals or children). However, I'm going to speak from my own personal perspective and set of kinks, when I say: 1) sex-swings sound extremely painful and dangerous; 2) fucking in a pool sounds even more extremely painful and dangerous because YOU DON'T WANT TO GET CHLORINE INSIDE YOUR FUCKING GENITALS. Also, orgies in a pool? Get ready for some floaters. Brrrrr.

Inevitably, Mr. Khaled learns about his wife's dealings, because that's usually what happens when you create dozens of sex tapes featuring yourself and your extramarital lover and store them in your husband's house. Tony is on his way out, because surprise, being drugged with amphetamines and raped is incredibly disturbing to him. At least Fontaine burns with him--or does she? I guess we'll have to find out in The Bitch! Because yes, this did get a sequel.

Thank Disco God!

Not only does The Stud offer us a fascinating glimpse into the British side of disco, but it's a pretty progressive movie for a film full of homophobic slurs and ruthless misogyny. It depicts the rape of a man with the same sort of gruesome focus as many movies of the period where women are raped. In fact, that's one of the central themes: that men, too, are harmed by patriarchy, because they're expected in all senses to be fuck machines. And naturally, not every man wants to be a fuck machine--in the sense of having sex frequently and/or intensely, or in the sense of being a genuine machine, so slavishly dedicated to his base desires that he'll accept anything that comes his way. And it does so in a way that doesn't show all women as monsters; only the characters in-universe are sexist. Everyone in this movie is pretty much awful, or at best severely obnoxious. Nearly everybody is a pedophile, a rapist, a racist, or just cruel for no reason. The richer you get, the bitcher you get. And this is a movie about the super-rich.

The dialogue is very pointy and sometimes it gets ridiculous. People talk about how snappy and dire Valley of the Dolls is, but Valley of the Dolls just made me a bit sleepy if I can be frank. This movie has about as many barbs as a drag show, but the costumes aren't nearly beautiful enough--it is a good-looking film, even if it never does anything too bold with the visuals. As far as the barbs, though, you do need to have a high threshold of tolerance, for both acid and camp. It's like if the Adam West Batman villains could say fuck.

Overall, The Stud has much to offer and its 3.6 on IMDB perplexes me. The movie made a good deal of money when it came out, and contemporary reviews were positive, it seems. I mean, it does deal with some dark topics, particularly that of male rape. Why would a film about male rape get such low reviews? Surely that's not a reflection of any aspect of our society? Hmmmmmmmm...

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Disturbia (2007), by D.J. Caruso

2007 logic: if you are an utterly disrespectful creep, you will get the girl. I had fun ripping into this one.

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Macumba Sexual (1983), by Jess Franco

Our Pride Twentygayteen reviews come to a close with Macumba Sexual, Jess Franco's even trippier remake of his early Vampyros Lesbos.

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Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976), by Don Edmonds

1975 saw the release of what could easily be called the archetypical Nazisploitation film, Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. That film featured Dyanne Thorne as Ilsa, a Nazi commandant who tortures prisoners at a concentration camp, while also seeking a man who can give her an orgasm. Those who fail in this task--i.e. all of the male prisoners at the camp--are castrated. As you may well expect, She-Wolf is a miserably gruesome watch, with much of the torture that's shown looking pretty authentic, thanks to the filmmakers only showing what they could technically accomplish, and implying the rest. When making the follow-up, which brought Ilsa to 1970s Saudi Arabia, the filmmakers toned down much of the disturbing content in an effort to seek an audience that wasn't comprised entirely of weirdos and perverts. But they still had to appeal to, y'know, weirdos and perverts, because it was still a film about a big-breasted, often-nude Teutonic blonde torturing people in ways that were occasionally erotic. While many consider this mixture of interests to be a failure, I'm of the opinion that the producers of Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks managed to create an atmosphere of camp which both the original film and this film's followup, Ilsa, Tigress of Siberia, were sorely lacking. This is, generally speaking, a feel-good exploitation movie, where it's just one bit of nonsense happening after another. It grows on you after a while.

Ilsa is now the lieutenant of a powerful Middle Eastern crime lord, El Sharif. El Sharif deals both in human trafficking and in drugs, and he and Ilsa's activities have caused them to be investigated by an international commission led by Commander Adam Scott and a pudgy, wimpy German dude named Dr. Kaiser. The pair have a spy planted in El Sharif's palace but she is captured and tortured before they arrive. Despite knowing that the two are spies, Ilsa falls for Commander Scott when he turns out to be a regular sex machine. Eventually her relationship with him causes El Sharif to sentence her to molestation at the hands of a leprous beggar whom she had flogged at the start of the movie. This causes her to help out a group of rebels seeking to oust El Sharif and replace him with the legitimate ruler of this region, his nephew Prince Ali. In the end Ilsa is betrayed by Ali and thrown in his dungeons to await a hideous fate.

I had to piece together aspects of this plot over multiple viewings, because as far as director Edmonds is concerned, story is as secondary and incidental as a hillbilly's napkins at an all-you-can-eat barbecue buffet. No, we're here to see sleaze, and they are quite insistent on pouring on that sleaze whenever they can. Gore, dismemberment, torture, cannibalism, pedophilia, and rape are all key themes, though unlike She-Wolf none of it is brought "too far." For all that means. For example, they may talk about letting rats feast on someone's vaginal tissues, but they don't show it. We still get a girl whose breasts are crushed in a vice (which is actually a lot funnier than it sounds) and of course there are the women whose vaginas are outfitted with proximity mines. These mines are tested, by the way, by "the love machine"--a piston-driven mechanical arm that ends with an immaculate pewter dildo. (Might not want to use that too much, pewter can be real nasty on the skin I've heard.) Legit gross-out points to the scene where a girl's legs are eaten by ants--and then there's the guy who buys one of the girls, but says over a pair of pliers, "I don't like the scrape of teeth..."

Dr. Kaiser's arc in this movie is, um. Interesting. On the drive to El Sharif's palace he says, "I hope they do not give me...a sheep's eye. I have been all over the Arab world and it is a common gift to give to foreign guests. But they are disgusting, and I do not know if I could eat another one." Then of course El Sharif feeds him "the eye of [his] most beautiful sheep"--Kaiser's spy. Later, El Sharif sends an underage male prostitute to Kaiser's room, and despite initial resistance, there is every indication that he ended up taking him up on his offer! It's equal parts horrifying and comical, because despite its implications, it's so blatantly glanced over that it feels like a background gag! I have no idea what to make of this. I think it's best I move on. It is noteworthy that the same actor played a Nazi General in She-Wolf of the SS who commanded Ilsa to give him a golden shower. So he's always been a class act.

I don't really even know if I can call this film racist, because while it seems to assert that Arabs are vicious and have a propensity for human trafficking, it's not really something that's specifically dwelled on besides the provision of the setting. There are local people fighting El Sharif for presumably noble purposes, and it's not like the white Europeans are much better, with Dr. Kaiser being a pedophile, Commander Scott leaving Ilsa to die after sleeping with her, and Ilsa being, well...Ilsa. The sleaze is universal, and frankly, after watching movies like The Sheik and The Barbarian, this movie is pretty fair in its treatment of Arab folk. Though that's not saying much.

If you want uncut sleaze as only the '70s can deliver it, this is the film to watch. It's the one Ilsa movie I've bothered to go back to, and despite the change in tone, it is the most watchable of all of them in terms of content and lack of boredom. There's always something happening--whether you like it or not.

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Sex Madness (1938), by Dwain Esper

We've probably all heard of Reefer Madness at this point. As a matter of fact a lot of you reading this site can probably cite a specific Favorite Moment from Reefer Madness, even if you've only seen it once. Reefer Madness stands relatively untouched as the exploitation movie of the 1930s, if anything because it's one of the few which is still watchable. The Cocaine Fiends, Marihuana, and all the others just don't hold up, because they lack that unique spark that made Reefer Madness fucking crazy. But, while it's still not close to Reefer Madness, Sex Madness is pretty special, if nothing else because it makes for a great riff with friends.

Sex Madness is a relatively plotless depiction of what will happen if you don't listen to your parents (or maybe listen to them too much) and spend your youth going to orgies. Okay, orgies were still off-limits in the '30s, even in exploitation films that posed as education fodder. That doesn't stop our main characters from stopping by a "guest room" party though! We follow the twin narratives of Millicent Hamilton, ambitious young typist and beauty queen, and Tom Lorenz, son of city reformer Paul Lorenz, who is on a quest to eradicate "social diseases" like syphilis. ("Social diseases"? Really? Not only does that have an edge of shaming to it, but "social" is perhaps the most unintentionally hilarious synonym for "sexual" I've heard in a while. It changes so many contexts!) Tom picks up his syphilis at said guest-room party, while Millicent, in her hunger to become a beauty queen champ, is infected via date-rape by her would-be manager. Tom struggles with whether or not to tell his dad and risk ruining his career, while Millicent seeks a cure so she can get married. Because I guess doctors in the 1930s had the authority to stop marriages if someone had syphilis. Or something. Anyway, Tom eventually learns that his dad is on his side, while Millicent is seemingly cured only to infect her husband and baby, killing the latter. I think they still swing for a happy ending, though. Yay?

This movie has all the requisite '30s exploitation tropes: poorly-integrated footage sampled from other films. Evil [minorities] (in this case lesbians). Exaggerated, lip-licking leering. Irrelevant, often nonsensical newspaper headlines ("Sex criminal jailed after baby murder" doesn't really describe any of the events of his film, even when a baby does die). Creaky stage-play cinematography. Horrible, horrible, horrible acting. Moral alarmism. Glorification of what it's ostensibly attacking. Etc., etc. Sex Madness, though, goes beyond in many ways, starting with the fact that it's a sexploitation movie about syphilis. It's the ultimate in combining lurid sexuality with shaming people for the accidental consequences of their actions. It shames people for being sexually assaulted. Every frame of this is subtitled "Ewwwww" in invisible ink. For every moment we're supposed to be aroused by the turn of a shapely gam or stock footage of dancing girls, there are characters pontificating about the horrors of one of the most gruesome diseases a human being can contract. They also feature footage of someone afflicted with the disease which may be fake, but the extra scratches on the film print suggest that perhaps this is real medical footage. I mean, it's far from ending your movie with dog surgery like Life Returns, or with live birth reels like a lot of the roadshow exploitation flicks did, but man, they really made sure you knew the word "exploitation" back then. Sometimes these 1930s films will do stuff that would shock the directors of the fucking 1970s. Someday someone is going to unearth a 1930s-era snuff film, or at least an equivalent of Faces of Death. Not only it is pretty sick to exploit people who already face heavy stigma to begin with (this movie is an entire novel on STD stigma), but to blend it in with content that's meant to turn the audience on is rather a cheap blow. More like a string of cheap blows, if we're being fair.

But there's the mundane stuff, too, which makes this stand out to me. I have to anatomize one scene in particular, because it was such a bizarre thing to witness. Was I warned of this scene in a review? Or have I seen this movie before and simply bleached it from my memory? Because there is a scene in this movie where Millicent fudges her line due to a window accidentally slamming in the background, and it came in like I was expecting it. Reshooting probably didn't even come up in discussion when this scene was filmed. The actors probably just whipped out their cigarettes (or joints) when they yelled cut and wondered if there was booze enough in the world to make them forget this mess. Seriously, this is one of the most dramatic and obvious flubs I've seen in a while. I have to wonder how fucking likely this even was. If I left my windows wide open it could be months before they slam closed by themselves. Either they were filming on a shithole location (probable) or the set was fucking haunted (equally probable).

I've been obsessed with the word synecdoche lately and I've been passing it on to my friends: and this scene, friends, is synecdoche. The statement and sum of the whole movie is held in that slamming window, that flubbed take.

Anyway, I don't want to say you should watch an entire movie just to see a window slam, but man, did I get a kick out of that. Also: all of the leering in this movie. If you make it a double feature with Reefer Madness make this the opening feature, not the follow-up. And if you value your souls, please turn your brains off before viewing.

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Black Devil Doll from Hell (1984), by Chester Novell Turner

Black Devil Doll from Hell opens with this proclamation: "We all have our personal horror stories to tell. May yours never be as devastating as Miss Helen Black's." I'm glad that director Chester Novell Turner decided to include this expression of sentiment. Because now, I dread the day where I find an antique shop that sells a ventriloquist doll which will not only molest me, but call me a bitch over and over again, until I am driven mad. Verily, there is no worse fate on this Earth, save for perhaps enduring an existence without Black Devil Doll from Hell.

Helen Black is an ultra-Christian in a world of sin. Her friends call her up to brag about their gangbangs, and she runs into thieves selling stolen goods out of their car trunks on her walk back from church. She's sanctimonious and has a rather large stick up her ass, but many of her peers are just as bad. It's pretty great that her friends think they can talk about sex with her when she's told them time and time again about her beliefs on such things. Anyway, Helen eventually ends up at an antique shop where she is fascinated by a ventriloquist puppet. The store owner tells her it once belonged to an East Indian sorcerer, and it always finds its way back to the shop--she's sold it four times but it's returned one way or another every time. Helen decides to try her luck, bringing the doll home with her. Soon the doll comes to life and introduces her to the world of rape, consensual sex, and being called "bitch" every five seconds, all at the same time. These scenes are virtually indescribable because it's a woman being fucked by a puppet. When she wakes up she finds the puppet missing, and tries to replace him with flesh-and-blood men. This isn't the same, though, and she eventually remembers that the puppet always returns to the store. But you only get one try at puppet dick, because when she re-purchases the doll and tries to make it fuck her, its eyes light up and she dies from what appears to be brain hemorrhage. Fin.

This movie is upsetting on basically every level. Not only is about puppet-rape and its transformation into puppet-lust, presented as an apparent consequence for religious devotion, but aesthetically and directorially it is also a sensory mess. Scenes end too late, music comes in too earlier. The stylishly awful Casio just sort of barges in with no cares about appropriateness or dialogue mixing. For example, when the antique store owner is giving Helen the doll's backstory, a high-pitched squeal immediately breaks in and starts muting the dialogue through pure aural force. Characters will start talking but a lack of union between the cuts and cues fill their lines with unnatural pauses. And, if you want to see the "ultimate VHS movie" that's still visible through its sea of fuzz, look no further. This is SOV as fuck, and it's a miracle.

Then of course there is the script. Helen puts nylons on the Black Devil Doll from Hell, saying, "These will make you just a shade darker...you'll look more real." She follows this up with, "These are the only eyes to ever see me NEKKID...until we're married." So, is she gonna marry the doll then? When the doll pops out to knock Helen unconscious, not only is he played by a child, but the soundtrack appears to consist of velociraptor noises taken from a nine-year time-portal opening up to a showing of Jurassic Park. It just gets better and better.

The rape scene is simultaneously disturbing and laughable. We get lines like "Now that you have smelled the foulness of my breath, you can know the sweetness of my tongue" and "Heeeeeere's Johnny!" The foul breath in question is represented by filling the dummy's mouth with dry ice. The actors also go all-out on making sex sounds, so it does sound like porn if you look away. But when you look back, it's a two-and-a-half foot tall puppet fucking a human woman. There is no preparation for this.

Somehow, the whole affair does manage to be a little boring at times, due to a large amount of padding, but this simple tale contains enough vomitous horror for everyone and anyone who can dare its cruel mysteries. Just be ready to get shocked to your soul.

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Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars (1992), by John Carr

It is finished. What began in 1980 with The Nightmare Never Ends and led into Gretta in 1984 and Night Train to Terror the year after comes to a stunning finale twelve years after it commenced with Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars. Originally set for production in 1982 under the title Scream Your Head Off, Marilyn was only partially made, and it took ten years for the scrapped footage to be turned around into a full movie. I suspect that the movie we would've gotten with Scream Your Head Off would have been more similar to "The Case of Harry Billings" from Night Train to Terror, but sometime in the decade between its start and finish director John Carr and writer Philip Yordan developed an obsession with actress Marilyn Monroe, and decided to work that angle into the affair. The success of the result means that this whole quartet is amazing all the way through: Marilyn doesn't drop the prestigious ball passed to it by its predecessors.

Harry Billings accidentally kills his wife in a drunken accident on the first day of their marriage, and shortly afterwards, tries to commit suicide. For this, the hospital that retrieves him follows what is clearly real-life procedure and sends him to a mental hospital for indefinite, nonconsensual treatment with no notification to his surviving family. The hospital is run by Dr. Brewer and Dr. Fargo, and they use the hospital to harvest women to sell to Middle Eastern oil sheikhs using hypnotically-controlled patients. Considerably odder than just kidnapping the women for body parts, no? While being used for this purpose Harry also encounters a patient who claims to be Marilyn Monroe, who speaks of a powerful conspiracy to imprison her in this place. Due to the meds they give her she frequently reverts to the mental age of 12, desiring a handsome prince to come save her. Curious to bring up her age, given that Marilyn hasn't, y'know, aged in the last thirty years since her ostensible death. Eventually Dr. Fargo lobotomizes Brewer, but this will bring about her downfall when she seeks to have Harry, the hospital, and all the money to herself.

Not too far a deviation from Night Train, I'd say, but the introduction of the Marilyn plot, and the screentime it consumes, cannot be understated. This is significant for one big reason: this movie is edited drunkenly, trying desperately to stitch on the newer Marilyn bits to the older Scream Your Head Off bits. Making the whole mess hopeless is that the older parts of the movie were shot on film, while the newer Marilyn chunks are very obviously shot on video. This makes the whole affair seem less like A Night to Dismember and more like Run Coyote Run, the pseudo-remake/sequel to Lady Street Fighter. It's a patchwork monster but I always love when one of those makes itself at home in my house.

The film bits feature the same sort of artistic scripting and direction that made Gretta seems so self-contradictory. There's a scene where Dr. Brewer gives someone the "Roman thumb" and it actually feels like something from a real movie. Then the video comes along and it's stiff, hurried, and over-focused on making cheesecake out of Marilyn Monroe. There is no sense of quality in the script. This fits John Carr's filmmaking very well, though; even the good bits that are continuous with one another are still largely suspended in seas of Just Not Getting It. Carr knows how good movies look, but he doesn't know how they work. As ever, this quality works entirely to our benefit.

The mental hospital is still unbelievable medieval, though that might be partially to blame on Fargo and Brewer's crooked natures. However, I don't understand why an ordinary hospital chooses to send someone to a psychiatric facility against their will, rather than, y'know, offering them treatment at the actual hospital and discharging them with recommendations for a therapist. Harry hasn't even regained consciousness when they choose, via shitty dub work, to send him off to Brewer's "care." This must be a weird alternate universe in several ways besides that unusual detail, though, since one of Harry's victims is only mildly put off by a "cab driver" who drives an unmarked cab, is oddly insistent on driving her, waives the fare, and also buys her coffee which he does not allow her to refuse. Sometimes movies just do this. I don't why. They just keep doing it.

I'm running out of things to say, but I'm going to spoil something before I wrap it all up. In the end, the twist seems to be that Harry's friend is actually Marilyn Monroe. That's why I made a note how she hasn't aged since 1962; it's not because she's someone who believes she's Marilyn Monroe, it's because she actually is her. That means the conspiracy against her was real and is probably still out there with no one really investigating it. That's a big slug in the jaw from a movie which already has the audacity to not print a colon in its title. But the movie does have a happy ending, a non-ableist one at that, with the various patients all getting what they want without judgment.

I can't possibly hope to conjure words for my feelings about the journey these four movies have taken me through. So I'll simply end here with the knowledge that these were not the only movies John Carr and Philip Yordan worked on. Those that survive are in my scopes. The party lives on. And if you want to join the party, you should check out Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars. Just don't take the complimentary coffee.

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The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds (1965), by Bert Williams

2010 was probably when I first starting keeping the prototype form of the list that would become the A-List. I could no longer count my favorite trash movies on two hands, much less ten hands, so in order to make sure I didn't forget something in the long course of time, I started writing shit down. There was a secondary list to this, of course, which is the list we all make, the list of movies we want to see when we have a chance. Beneath this second list, though, was yet another list, which not everyone keeps. This was the list of Lost Films for whose return I would wait eternity. This included movies so rare that they might as well be lost.

In eight years, I've found some of those movies: Death Brings Roses is the one that comes to mind the quickest. I'm still looking for The Weird Ones, Sasqua, Amanita Pestilens, and many others. But out of all of them, I never expected The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds to be found. It was lost; as in, all-copies-incinerated lost, London After Midnight lost, not-a-single-frame-remains lost. And yet fate, or something greater, finds a way, and a complete copy of Bert Williams' 1965 exploitation epic was found in an abandoned movie theater just last year and streamed on MUBI. Response has been limited--after all, most people reading this review will have never heard of the film before, and it's just an exploitation movie. But I'm baffled by the few reviews that do exist that say that the film is "nothing special" or "forgettable." On the contrary: I believe that Nest deserves to be enshrined among one of the inner circles of the Trash Pantheon, demonstrating attributes that make it akin to films like Sledgehammer and Manos: The Hands of Fate.

A Liquor Control Department agent named Johnson--no first name--is dispatched to take out a nest of crummy bootleggers, led by the rather unpleasant-looking "Doc." His father was killed by bootleggers, but through sheer dopiness Johnson will prevail. He only regrets having to leave behind Pat, his notably-younger, notably-hotter wife who apparently can't have sex for reasons that are never explained. Eventually Johnson's cover among the bootleggers is blown and he's forced to go on the run into the swamps. Here, he witnesses a strange naked blonde girl who dances around in the swamps wearing a plastic see-through mask very much like the one the killer wears in Sledgehammer. She tries to kill him in a VERY jarring sequence, but he escapes and is taken it by Harold, the groundskeeper of the remote Cuckoo Bird Inn, who honestly does look like Torgo's cousin. The Cuckoo Bird Inn is run by the tyrannical Mrs. Pratt, who, like most people in this movie, CAN ONLY COMMUNICATE WITH YELLING. She also abuses her daughter Lisa in a style much in the same way as Carrie's mom, but Johnson is stuck there until he's done recovering. Oh, but did I mention that Lisa almost perfectly resembles the nude girl who tried to murder Johnson earlier?

The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds makes a lot of wrongheaded decision that lead to it being a very strange watch. I want to start with the fact that our main protagonist is an idiot--but a debonair idiot. Like, his entire character is that he's some kind of ill-mannered bumpkin, but at the same time, he's played up as if this is really charming somehow. He tells Mrs. Pratt, "You're a real attractive woman..." (she isn't) "...just like my sister!" (?!?). Then there's the fact that Pat, his wife, who vanishes without a solitary trace by the film's second half, isn't interested in sex with him, but she takes the blame for this without explanation. There's also a recurring gag of sorts where Johnson keeps crushing Harold's thumb, and it's never really clear if he's deliberately trying to provoke him or if he's just an imbecile.

Johnson also sweats a lot, but so does everyone else. Seriously, there may be more sweat in this than in the Ms. Blandish remake. It is a dour, sour-slick movie, Apocalypse Now-like at times, with lots of high, grungy shadows and claustrophobic grimy indoors. That's before we get to some of the film's more gruesome surprises. The grindhouse has arrived, hallowed be it's name--if this movie came later it would be an appropriate bridge between Manos and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but for now it instead forms a sort of link between Manos and Spider Baby; or, the Maddest Story Ever Told. It's still pretty tame by modern standards, but all these films are cousins to each other--distant echoes probably of the shitty, unnecessarily-praised 1932 Old Dark House (which incidentally starred William "Boris Karloff" Pratt), yet still more powerful in the end than that drab, stupid film could ever be. The initial scenes with Lisa in her plastic mask are legitimately scary, and caught me completely off guard the first time I saw them. They feature plenty of boosted shrieks and sped up footage, which hints at the garbled talent director Williams frequently but inconsistently portrays.

The film starts huffing and puffing when it reaches its final revelations, which include such wonders as Harold's gory secret, the reason why Mrs. Pratt abuses Lisa, and the nature of the "Chapel" the ultra-religious Mrs. Pratt keeps on the Inn property. In all my viewings I've zoned out a lot while watching it. However, the film's multiple climaxes are totally bananas, and frankly, middle chunks aside, so is most of the rest of the film. It's not only scripted off-kilter, making it a strange story no matter how it could end up directed, but it's directed bizarrely as well, with lots of uncomfortable angles and an insistence on having characters face away from each other as they talk. Part art drama, part exploitation gore flick, Nest of the Cuckoo Birds actually is an unsung micro-classic, though it achieves such status entirely in trash terms. Its blend of humorous lapses of judgment and legitimately heart-rending horror sequences makes it something every trash film fan should track down immediately.

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Night Train to Terror (1985), by John Carr, Philip Marsak, Tom McGowan, Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, and Gregg G. Tallas

With this review, I have now reviewed this movie three times over--and we're not done yet. When I was talking about Gretta and The Nightmare Never Ends, I may have alluded to the fact that the third piece of this anthology was never finished or released. Well, I was wrong. When I made that statement I knew that third movie as Scream Your Head Off, with a 1981 production date. A meager amount of research on my part would have unearthed that Scream Your Head Off was released eleven years after it began production, under the rather odd title of Marilyn: Alive and Behind Bars. But that movie is for another day; we're here to talk about Night Train to Terror, the primary reason why any of the three movies it was slashed out from are remembered.

God, Satan, and a mysterious third party who may be Death, are aboard a train. Also aboard is a REALLY shitty '80s pop band, whose lives are on the line: the train is due to crash at midnight, and God and Satan are here to debate the nature of humanity in order to determine whether the band will go to Heaven or Hell when they die. In order to convince God that humanity isn't worth saving, Satan tells God three stories, each of which supposedly prove humanity's evil. In "The Case of Harry Billings" (aka Scream Your Head Off), the titular Harry Billings kills his wife with drunk driving and ends up in a weird mental institution which chains up naked women for the purposes of rape (I think?) and organ harvesting. The main doctor there turns Harry into his drugged/hypnotic agent to abduct women for this purpose. The head nurse is also banging Harry and plans to have him help her lobotomize the head doctor so she can take over the hospital. It's pretty fucking weird.

Next is "The Case of Gretta Connors," aka Gretta. Things are kept pretty much the same, but they try to make Gretta seem more like a victim and George seem more evil; the primary focus is on the Death Wish Club. The main oddity of this segment is that they never explain why Gretta becomes Charlie White--she just suddenly looks like a guy for some reason. While they prominently feature the beetle scene, they also add on new footage of the beetle (rendered with claymation) escaping the room and killing a random makeout couple in a scene that totally doesn't have different video quality. By kill them, I mean it stings them, and this makes their faces explode.

Finally, we have "The Case of Claire Hansen," cleaved from the meat of The Nightmare Never Ends. I saw very few differences here and it actually told the story much more efficiently than the original film did. However, there are some scenes which appear to be of the same type of tacked-on claymation gore as that which appeared in the Gretta segment. I suspect similar sequences were added to the Scream Your Head Off bits, but we'll find out when I finally get around to Marilyn: Alive and Behind Bars.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to watch Night Train to Terror without context, aside from the obvious fact that it would be a headrush of unparalleled vertigo. Even with context, Night Train is a heady brew of Doris Wishman-esque cuts, unexplained plot threads, and hidden surprises. Every segment is discombobulated, with traces of subplots floating here and there and yet meaning nothing. This includes the new footage shot for the film. They try to make the pop band on the train into actual characters, despite the fact that all they do is sing the same songs over and over and over again; there's a mention of, "Oh, man, it's too bad our van broke down and we had to take this train!"--as if we could possibly care. How does that even make sense? Trains have to go to very specific places, and even if one was going to where I was headed I'd still worry about leaving my van behind to jump one! To me, that's like saying, "Shit, my motorcycle is out of gas. Might as well charter a cruise ship home then." It's ditching one line of vehicle for another. But I'm getting off-track: again, we're supposed to believe that there's an actual story to this frame story besides the God-Satan thing, and one line is supposed to cover the whole depth of that story. That's a perfect synecdoche for the entire movie. That line is patchwork and so is the rest of the film.

Perhaps I'll have more of a chance in the future to delve into this genre of patchwork remakes, which has existed since forever. For now, both Night Train to Terror and The White Gorilla are fine additions to my A-List, and I'll be returning to their uniquely Burroughsian madness time and time again. In regards to Night Train specifically, I will be returning to it in a stranger sense, when at last the time comes to review the third movie from its twisted catalogue.

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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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The Primal Essence: The Mudman's Top Ten New Views of 2017

2017 saw a lot of growth for the A-List! I found a comfortable schedule wherein I could squeeze in three reviews a week, and I intend to hang onto that schedule for as long as I can. I opened a Patreon, which has been an exciting experience so far. I posted a bad movie sci-fi novella. I was able to find nine weird books to talk about--not as many as I'd hoped, but that's what next year is for. It was a marvelous time and I can't tell you how glad I was to have this site to go back to whenever the real world came down too hard on me. The fact that so many of you kept showing up week after week made it all the better. I may curate its entries, but it's really you guys who build my A-List...you're all on my A-List of People. You are the finest souls I know.

The movies on this list are the cream of the crop. They tore my heart from my chest and shook up my soul. I hope you track them down if you haven't already because they will reshape your life for the better. Well, actually, it's for the worse. But in a good way. Capiche?

FROM BEST TO BESTEST:

#10 - I AM HERE...NOW, by Neil Breen

It is only out of a stubborn respect for the later entries of this list that Mr. Breen ended up at the number ten spot...otherwise this one would be much higher. I Am Here...Now was the best possible introduction to Breen I could(n't)'ve hoped for. I've seen some pretty bizarre Ancient Alien stories over the years, but this one takes the cake--Breen is a sign that Weird Film is far from dead, even as the Intentional Bad Movies try to take their cut from the legacy spawned by the people whom Breen now succeeds. May self-awareness never touch you, Neil, ol' buddy. I'm so glad I have the rest of your filmography to discover.

#9 - THE PHANTOM COWBOY, by Robert J. Horner / SMOKING GUNS, by Alan James

A dirty stinkin' tie! I knew I had to have one B-Western on here and no matter how much boiling down I did I couldn't pick one of these over the other. Smoking Guns is definitely the "better" movie, but the sheer shittiness of The Phantom Cowboy makes it feel truly alien. I'm starting to doubt I'll find Westerns weirder than these two, but if these are the best there are I'm in good company. I've definitely raised a lot of eyebrows in my time talking about the movies I watch with the people I know in Real Life. They've never been raised higher than when I tried to describe these two.

#8 - DRUMS O' VOODOO, by Arthur Hoerl

'Cause the drums make me happy...drums make me happy...my feelings on the so-called "race pictures" have shifted somewhat since I wrote this review due to some things I've learned about them (i.e. creative control was not in the hands of the actual black performers as much as I thought), but there's no taking away the talent from Drums O' Voodoo's cast. Aunt Hagar is still one of my favorite movie characters of all time, and to my dying day I won't forget the time she fucking sassed off Jesus. At this point, I feel I've seen every voodoo movies there is, but there's something deeply special about this one. I'm (ideally) getting a new copy soon, which may be from a different print...I may have to write something up if it turns out the lost footage is in this version.

#7 - JUNGLE TRAP, by James Bryan

I don't like getting hyped for movies because it's so easy for those sorts of hopes to get dashed. But not when James Bryan and Renee Harmon are at the helm. My heart nearly exploded when I learned this was a thing and it was a tough sweat waiting for it to come out. But it was worth it. Farewell to a pair of great careers...you guys made my life, one last time. Oh, how I wish you still had one left in you.

#6 - SWEET TRASH, by John Hayes

Now we're slipping into the New Weird. For me, that is. I spent so much of my life thinking I'd seen all the greats, but then this year came along and I started to see some trippy fucking shit. Sweet Trash is apparently not overly beloved even among trashsters, which is saddening. This movie dips into territory both grim and hilarious, often without warning, in the best of ways. As far as boggy-surreal nightmares go, this one just barely beat out Disconnected and Euridice BA 2037, which would make a great triple feature with this.

#5 - NIGHTMARE ALLEY, by Edmund Goulding

Gotta have at least one legitimately good movie on here. I guess this Ty Power guy is hot stuff, huh? Well, even if I had known that at the time, I would've been swept off my feet by this movie. A clammy, greasy, disconcerting expose of circus life, this one fits in perfectly with some of my other favorites from this year like The Unknown and The Amazing Mr. X, but this one is the best of all of them. I've been watching a lot of Hollywood dramas from the '40s now in the wake of sitting down for this three times in a row. I hope they won't make me sick.

#4 - BLOODY WEDNESDAY, by Mark G. Gilhuis

When I was writing the list I kept putting this on here for some reason. I'd take it off, asking myself, "Wha...really?" Then I would rewatch it and remember everything. For a while I would just quote that goddamn teddy bear, voice and everything, and sometimes people would hear me and worry about my health. Simultaneously the most depressing and hilarious movie about mental illness I've seen, Bloody Wednesday is so unsure of what the heck it's supposed to be that it becomes a psychedelic trance. I've found for myself a new classic of the slasher (?) genre, which isn't an easy feat these days.

#3 - INFRASEXUM, by Carlos Tobalina

Yes, I like this one more than Flesh and Bullets, because I'm a sucker. It's almost unbelievable to me that this was Tobalina's debut. This is a ballsy film to make under any circumstances, and yet porn is a weird thing, and thus he built a whole career out of this. I wasn't expecting to get a Pseudo-Philosophical Voiceover-Journal Inner-Quest Movie that also had a disembowelment scene, but at this point, I should know better. Art and trash go well together and this is a great example of how they pulled that off in the late '60s.

#2 - GRETTA, by John Carr

No explanation. It's not even based off the book--it just exists. It's like 35 movies got stuck in a blender and the director drank the result, and the camera implanted in his brain recorded everything he saw afterward. Or, alternatively, it was originally an 8-hour mega-epic like von Stroheim's Greed and they cut out too many reels. Why should we care about this occasionally-creepy romance when there are killer beetles...and vice versa? Better yet, it has a "sequel." If you count movies that recut other movies to make them even more confusing as "sequels," that is.

#1 - THE TELEPHONE BOOK, by Nelson Lyon

The best. The Holy Grail. This is why I got into reviewing movies. I laughed, I screamed. I could go on forever but The Telephone Book is really good, okay? Every new scene brought fresh surprises that I could never have expected--which is really what cinematic media is meant to be about. For a movie about sex, it felt like sex...it kept building, and building, and building, and then there was that ending and there was such joy. A vulgar, mind-boggling cartoon brought to life, I'll never see anything like it again; but then, I was lucky enough to see it in the first place. 

AND THE BOOK OF THE YEAR IS... *DRUMROLL PLEASE*
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THE UNHOLY THREE, by Tod Robbins

Man, I sure read a lot of bullshit this year. How could the Book of the Year be anything but this when the competition was Space Jason and voodoo sharks? The Unholy Three is a weirdly kinetic pulp pseudo-masterpiece, whose presence on this list means I can live with myself for not including The Unknown. Lon Chaney is a powerful figure even when he's not directly involved; and besides all that Tod Robbins is an accomplished enough writer to keep me hooked. Next year I'm gonna grab a copy of Robbins' "Spurs" to take a look back at the origin of Freaks, and this book will get a mention, as I've said, when I get to touching on Todd Browning's The Devil-Doll. Robbins also wrote a book called Mysterious Mr. Martin, which looks like a delight. More to follow!

So that's 2017! See you next year! I loved all the time we spend together and I can't wait to start again soon. In the meantime, you can check out the $1 tier on my Patreon to hear some of my Movie Thoughts. Otherwise...keeping dreaming, true believers!