Bimbo Movie Bash

Bimbo Movie Bash

United States - 1996

Director - various

Cult Video, 1996, VHS

Run Time -1 hour, 30 minutes

Not really a movie in its own right, just a compilation of clips from various low budget T&A flicks of the Corman/Olen Ray school. Unfortunately, or not depending on your point of view, this copy was trashed and unwatchable.

Wild Gals of the Naked West

Wild Gals of the Naked West

United States - 1962

Director - Russ Meyer

RM Film International, VHS

Run Time -1 hour, 5 minutes

Perhaps I should make it perfectly clear and come clean just in case it hasn’t become obvious by now. No matter what I may say elsewhere, the fact is that I'm a heterosexual American male, so I can't help but like westerns. Most of the people that I know who are into horror and science-fiction films aren’t really big on the westerns. I’m not really sure why this is, and the reasons probably vary from person to person, but I’m guessing that it’s primarily due to the costumes. Well my friends, I have some good news to report. That problem has been solved (actually, quite some time ago.) Thanks to the unique and wonderful stylings of dedicated and intrepid writer/director/producer Russ Meyer, costumes are not a problem at all in Wild Gals of the Naked West.

Oh, I’d be lying to you if I said this was some kind of western with aliens or zombies, because it isn’t. It’s still a western, and there are still the usual boots, chaps and neckerchiefs. But you probably won’t even notice them, or at worst, you'll notice but won’t care. That’s because you’ll be taken in by the sheer volume of cutting edge filmmaking techniques displayed by this auteur director. First and foremost is the dramatic set design of Wild Gals. It's a sparse minimalistic look reminiscent of the finest groundbreaking German films of the silent era. I hesitate to say avant-garde (that’s French anyway), but it’s very different and experimental, sort of like meta-set-design if you know what I mean

Second is Wild Gals' pacing, a cacophony of repeated obnoxious Benny-Hillesque audio-blasts synched with a staccato of quick repetitive close-ups. It’s a collage effect very much ahead of its time, in fact it presages the fast-paced, short-attention-span editing style of films popular some 50 years later with today’s youth. It seems very nearly designed to induce a Pavlovian response to images rather than contributing in any way to the narrative. Don’t get me wrong, there is a story to Wild Gals, it just, how shall we say…. doesn't require much of an attention span at all.

Finally, and this is probably the most important innovation in the western genre since John Ford met John Wayne; the lack of costumes altogether. True, as I mentioned above there are still costumes, but here comes the kicker; not on everyone (or every body.) It is precisely the dearth of costumes, or more accurately their sparing use that makes Wild Gals such a watchable western. When half of the cast is barely wearing anything at all, the relative level of attention that the costumes get pretty much averages out if you ask me

All told Wild Gals of the Naked West is a deceptively simple film with an incredibly clever nucleus. Budgetarily it may not be a shining star, but what it does have it isn’t afraid to hang out in the open. Actually its willingness to bare itself in all sorts of ways is what makes this film such a special piece of cinema history. So I guess I'm not sorry that I like westerns. Ever since my first mindboggling exposure to Wild Gals so many years ago, I have held for them a very dear place in my bosoms.

Striptease Murder Case

Striptease Murder Case

United States - 1950

Director - Hugh Prince
 

Nature's Sweethearts

Nature's Sweethearts

United States - 1963

Director - Larry Wolk

What exploitation enthusiast can forget those laughably innocent days of the nudist camp film?!

House on Bare Mountain

House on Bare Mountain

United States - 1962

Director - Lee Frost (R.L. Frost)

Something Weird, VHS, 1993
Run Time -1 hour and a full 2 extra minutes of hilarious bouncing and bootlegging.

Granny Good runs an exclusive finishing school for girls high in the mountains of somewhere. At Granny Good's School for Good Girls, many of the lessons are conducted in the open air. As one would hope, physical education takes place without material confinements, but even the more intellectual pursuits are taught free of binding restrictions.

With the increasing emphasis on privately subsidized education these days however, Granny is finding it incredibly difficult to meet the school's financial needs. To make up for the shortfall she's begun distilling moonshine in the basement. Or rather, she's impressed a werewolf to do the distilling while she assists in the girl's unrestrained education. Unfortunately one of her new students, while not too concerned about physically covering up, is metaphorically speaking an undercover cop. Right in the middle of one of those wonderful go-go parties that lend such energetic authenticity to low budget films of the 60's, the Feds bust Granny's still and the school is shut down, bringing our titilating tale of woe to a tumultuous termination.

A textbook Nudie-Cutie from the auteur who brought you such classics of good taste as Black Gestapo and The Thing With Two Heads, House on Bare Mountain is pure dumb entertainment from the days when pornography was still kitschy. It's a concentrated nugget of exploitation history, a lowbrow vaudeville/burlesque comedy chock full of gyrating pelvises, big boobs, amazing hairdos and men in rubber masks. But you know, to tell the truth, if I have to participate in base objectification, I'll feel a lot better about it if it's goofy.

When Women Played Ding Dong

When Men Carried Clubs and Women Played Ding Dong

Italy - 1974

Director - Bruno Corbucci

That is a terrible poster, but then again, it's not the visuals that are really doing the selling.

The most notable aspect of this film which I haven't seen is that the makeup was done by Gianetto Di Rossi, master of zombie-gore.

Zero Woman

Zero Woman

Japan - 1995

Director - Daisuke Goto

Tokyo Shock, 1998, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 30 minutes

21 years after the original, Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs, a "sequel" was born, and it was bad. The trailer for this film can be seen at IMDB, here is a trailer for Red Handcuffs from user Asianwack. Listen to the music by Daisuke Okamoto, brilliant.

Waves of Lust

Waves of Lust

Una ondata di piacere (original title)

Italy - 1975

Director - Ruggero Deodato

Come Play With Me

Come Play With Me

United Kingdom - 1977

Director - George Harrison Marks

This film gets pretty low ratings online which is unfortunate considering the "entertainingly funny and blushingly saucy" poster artwork attributed to Tom William Chantrell, a British artist whose work you can see more of at Britposters.com. Without buying the film there seems to be no way to verify its low quality except for the usual blanket statements about British cinema.

You can see this poster on the wall in a scene in Jack Hazan and David Mingay's Clash socio-bio-pic Rude Boy.

The Beast In Space

Beast In Space

Italy- 1980

Director - Alfonso Brescia

Severin Films, 2008, DVD

Run Time - 1 hour, 32 minutes

I couldn't help but watch Alfonso Brescia's Beast In Space after having my mind totally exploded by his Trilogy of Pain. I wish I could go back and watch them again for the first time and feel violated all over again. That is why these days I watch whatever other Brescia trash I come across. I no longer feel surprised, but I want to recreate that feeling of shock and awe. The last one I found entirely by accident, realizing that Amazons vs. Supermen was a Brescia film only because the music had been recycled, and because it was such a unique flavor of terrible. I bought it because it was co-produced by the Shaw Bros. Studio and I was hoping for some bizarre kung-fu. What I got was a godawful emotional hangover.

I kindof found this one in the same way except that I spotted Brescia's pseudonym, "Al Bradley" in the opening credits. Beast In Space is a more "modern" spin on the French arthouse bestiality porno La Bete (The Beast, 1975). In Brescia's "space" version the Beast is a guy with goat legs (pants with hair glued on), ostensibly a satyr with a giant cock and a preference for human astronaut women. The rest of the plot is a barely connected mess of recycled garbage from the Trilogy, which to be perfectly honest was pretty much just recycling itself already.

This has the exact same feel as the Trilogy, foggy ethereal, and very low budget with an underlying foundation of swinger innuendo. The difference of course is that in this case, they follow through on the innuendo. There is an X rated version of Beast In Space, but I watched the soft version. Plain old grinding is fine with me, I have a hard time with the clinical body-double penetration shots typical of this era and genre, they're gross. (Like Thriller: A Cruel Picture) But it leaves me wondering if there are dirty versions of the Trilogy. Sleaze certainly fits the atmosphere set in those earlier films (and copied in this film), and it seems likely that the feel of the film, regardless of the plot/context should give us an indication of the film-makers true passion. Either Brescia's spaceships look like cheap nightclubs, or cheap nightclubs look like Brescia's spaceships. For all intents and purposes, they're the same thing.


Witness if you dare my intoxicated, stream of consciousness Brescia deflowering with the Trilogy of Pain. You've been warned:
Cosmos: War of the Planets
Star Odessey
War of the Robots

The DVD cover of the hardcore version.

Strip For Action

Strip For Action

A.K.A. - Hot Ticket

United States – 1996

Director – Lev L. Spiro

New Horizons Home Video, 1999, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 17 minutes

There are many amusements on offer when occasionally watching one of these stripper oddities from the Corman studio. One of the most awkward, particularly in mixed company is contemplating and discussing the extent of plastic surgery that the principals have undergone to achieve their current shape. In fact I think if you watched enough of these you could probably watch them transform over the course of their careers.
But hey, we are talking about the stripper microgenre invented by actress Katt Shea with Stripped to Kill (1987). It was to be the first of a slew of successful films revolving around the trials and tribulations of strippers. The very nature of the work demands that you repeatedly perform stripteases, in both the scenes taking place in the stripclub, as well as the scenes in which you do it with your late-90’s mushroom haircut boyfriend. Instead of an actress willing to strip, the job requires a stripper willing to act, which is exactly the standard set by Shea.

The name alone, Strip for Action, holds tremendous menace. The combination and context of the words possess an imminent but still ethereal threat. But backed up by that killer tagline, it really drives it home for me. The insinuation of stripping doesn’t convey anything explicitly filthy, but the addition of action suggests that that action, whatever it is can only take place when naked. The nature of the action itself remains in question, and this is where the threat lies, shrouded in mystery.

The Strip For Action box art is phenomenal. For over a year as this movie sat on my shelf waiting to be screened. Browsing the unwatched tapes I would occasionally pull it out and contemplate it. Each time I would stare at the cover for a while thinking to myself, “She looks uncomfortable, do I really want to watch this?” Let’s be honest, I was intimidated, hung up on the possibility of impending emotional darkness if I followed through. So for all that time the box art looked awkward, but I was too cowed to pay much heed.

But when I woke this morning, I realized that the decision had already been made, Strip For Action was the movie I was going to watch tonight. So when the time came, the idea of this film was no longer threatening, and perhaps that’s why I was able to see the box art with uncluttered eyes. It was then that I realized the fact that the gun is obviously and poorly Photoshopped into her hand after the fact. Not only that, as I was inspecting that digital handiwork, I realized that her bra was also an ad hoc addition. I wish I could tell you that this suggests some deep metaphor for the meaning of the film itself, some kind of prophecy. But it is as straightforward and honest as a picture worth an hour and 15 minutes can get. No, what Strip For Action boils down to is a soap-opera spiked with lap-dances and cursing. The box, with all its bluster and false modesty, is an explicit reflection of the film contained within, a sort of a Bizarro-world version of the emperor’s new clothes.

You girls stay in the car while we exchange hair styling tips.

To Sleep With A Vampire

To Sleep With A Vampire
United States – 1992
Director – Adam Frieman
New Concorde Home Video, 2002, VHS
Run Time – 1 hour, 21 min.

As you now know, there are few things I find more despicable than a vampire. I am however a shallow bastard and this film stars Charlie Spradling (Ski School,Wild At Heart.) It was also executive produced by Roger Corman. According to Beverly Gray in her book Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Life there was a period when cheap skin flicks were being filmed at Corman studios during the night on the same sets as other films. For these reasons I had to see for myself, so it was worth the 2 dollar price tag.

Jacob (Scott Valentine) is the perfect example of douchey vampire, he seems to think that exaggerated frowning counts as emoting his inner sorrow. His tragedy is that he looks so much like a low-rent John Cusack that no one takes him seriously. He hates his hunger for blood so he starves himself as long as he can until he has no other choice. On top of this he longs to experience the world of the day. Talk about a snobby tragedy, pick the one thing you can’t have and covet it. Isn’t that a version of the Oedipus complex?

So to solve this problem Jacob wanders around in the slums, looking for people more pitiful than himself, people that no one will miss since no one matters but him. So logically, he seeks his next victim in a woman of the night, someone whose pain he can sense. Nina (Spradling) a stripper at a club, that despite its location in the ghetto is fully crewed and patronized exclusively by white people. Jacob’s attraction to Nina goes beyond her physical attributes though, he’s into that suffering that he sensed. More specifically, her tequila swilling, pill popping, suicidal, homeless unfit-mother suffering. This is the purest undiluted essence of modern tragedy.


But it’s clear that Jacob is interested only in what he can get from her which to him apparently is a lot. This guy is the epitome of snarky stuck up asshole. He acts like a victim and then threatens everybody around him when he doesn’t get his way. Like a schoolyard bully he’ll do whatever it takes to get what he wants whether its friendly passivity or violence. Jacob is just like the jerks I knew in highschool who had really hot girlfriends. One minute he’s giving her the puppy-dog and flowers act and the next he’s dragging her somewhere by the back of the neck. Just like those girls Nina gets the picture pretty quick and plays along to avoid the throttlings. She tries to lift his spirits with tales of her own mortal sufferings and a fake sunbath under the spotlights at the beach. For this he strips his all-black stirrup-pants vampire outfit to reveal a cornea rupturing leopard speedo.


When tooth-grinding Nosfericidal restraint in the face of his sleazy undergarments still isn’t enough to shut his whining up, Nina gives Jacob a private package-deal performance at the strip club. But he can’t drop the victim act and just doesn’t give a shit about anyone else. She’ll “never understand the emptiness of living forever,” so he throws yet another hissy fit to draw attention off of her sturdy rack and back onto himself.

In the end, Jacob gets what he needed from the first baby-frown moment, a helping hand into the great oblivion. Nina tires him out in horizontal fashion, and sends him into the great beyond, all purple sparkles and writhing; melodramatic and weepy spoiled bitch to the bitter end.

Night of the Hunted

Night of the Hunted
La Nuit des Traquees
France – 1979
Director – Jean Rollin
Salvation Films, 1999, DVD
The Zombie Collection 3 DVD set

My experience with Jean Rollin is pretty limited, consisting as far as I knew simply of Zombie Lake which is absolutely one of the awesomest barely watchable crappy nazi-zombie-boob movies ever. Knowing now that Rollin is French it doesn’t surprise me that I hadn’t seen more of his films, I hate French exploitation cinema, it’s terrible. Boring and terrible.

Night of the Hunted is perhaps not quite so terrible, but it is pretty boring. The entire story revolves around one girl, Elysabeth (French porn actress Bridgette Lahaie) who is found late one night wandering the roads in her nightgown. Unable to remember what she is doing, or who she is, the French guy who finds her is kind enough to take her back to his place and get her out of her clothes for a graphic softcore romp on the white shag carpet.

Thus begins what I can only describe as a confusing series of violent rapes couched in existential artsy French garbage. Elysabeth herself is picked up from the kindly roadside rapists apartment by a mysterious official sounding couple who take her back to a strange compound/apartment complex where other confused, forgetful and above all mindlessly passive women reside (at least one more of whom is also a porn star).

Also like the women, several men are suffering (according to the doctor) from some sort of “disorder” with symptoms of amnesia, causing them to act irrational and lose their balance. The women wander around in a catatonic state of passivity, ostensibly in a state of socially unlimbered primitive sexual volatility while the men creep about with (also catatonic) knowing predatory malice. The supposed purpose of their captivity is to study the symptoms of this “illness” which is more or less (I would say more) an opportunity for the doctors to watch all these supposedly fragile and unspoiled women get raped, and subsequent post/concurrent coital violence to unfold. They go so far as to call them incurable once they are sufficiently "soiled" and they are then euthanized and cremated for fucks sake. Basically an opportunity for repeated male dominant sexual violence glossed over with excuses (radiation sickness, amnesia) proffered by the bespectacled and pretentious doctor, (who looks more like a city-park old-lady flasher than a medical professional.)

The implication it would seem is that without social constraint it is biologically normal for women to be passive victims, sortof blithely subservient to male sexual violence and competitive domination (and in the case of the doctor, intellectual domination). The sad thing is that the whole film ends up being just that, and attempts to disguise the moral affront in an idiotic French surrealist-minimalist (and totally bullshit and boring)“artistic” framework.


The problem is that for the most part the women involved are quite attractive and often naked, but the social violence scrapes what semblance of redeeming fun off the bones of exploitation (in the “film” sense of the term) and leaves it a twitching unappealing mass of peeled meat that looks pretty, but leaves a foul taste and makes you feel a little guilty for watching it to the bitter end.




Salvation films, at least on this 3 film set has resorted to a sort of bizarre introductory montage of extreme-costume-goth vampire softcore which makes almost no sense considering the content of the films (at least in this set) that they have released. This is a "zombie" movie set, decidedly the least "goth" undead, and Night of the Hunted could hardly be categorized as containing zombies. Whatever,

The Liner Notes of The Night of the Hunted with an essay on Rollin by Mark Morris, and an image of the ridiculous vampire (wielding a Colt! how, um, gothic?) of the intro.

The Salvation films DVD box-set cover.

Some alternate covers for the film, the right one appears to be Dutch or Danish (?) and bears little similarity to anything in the film.

Slammer Girls

Slammer Girls

United States - 1987

Director – Chuck Vincent

Lightning Video, 1988, VHS

Women In Prison films are a lot of things besides just women in prison. They can be anything from truly uncomfortable social commentary like Born Innocent, to hard core cut-n-paste porn like 99 Women or cheap fart-joke comedy like Slammer Girls. While this film might fall short of the actual fart bullseye, it hit quite a few branches on the way down.


The first tinny strains of music on the soundtrack bring back memories of many an uber shitty barbarian movie. Not surprising considering director Vincent helmed one of the shittiest, Warrior Queen, made the same year as Slammer Girls, and starring exploitation clydsedale Sybil Danning (Chained Heat and Jungle Warriors and Rick Hill, (Deathstalker himself in the first and fourth of that epic series). Vincent’s use of a regular stable of actors doesn’t stop at barbarians though.

A good-ol boy politician Jerry Calwell extols the virtues of electrocuting prison inmates, a position which apparently wins him the governors seat and the ire of an anonymous gloved hand which shoots him in the family jewels during his victory party. In an act that would make OJ and Cinderella proud, the cops run around trying to fit the assassins dropped glove to someone’s, anyone’s hand, winding up with innocent and dumb as a bag of wet sand Melody Campbell. Newspaper man Harry Weiner (that should give you a pretty good idea of where the humor is headed) decides to go undercover in the prison and expose Governor Callwell’s shady double business as manufacturer of JC Electric Chairs.

Melody is sent to prison where she meets a plethora of very crudely executed character types just groaning like overfilled sacks of offal with expletive-inducing puns ready to burst the shoddy seams. Thankfully - this is a women-in-prison film after all - their little tunics are strained too, and the ladies take it in stride to frequently relieve such pressure with surprisingly proactive nonchalance. Perhaps Chuck Vincent’s penchant for hiring former porn stars has something to do with this carefree attitude. In any case it does make the film more bare-able.
One such boob assault is committed by Tank (Tantala Ray of something called Tantala’s Fat Rack) and Mosquito against a whimpering nude Melody. Also on the inside is Mrs.Crabapples, the harsh prison matron who enjoys punishing the prisoners (though she falls short of lesbianism), some of whom don’t like it and some who do.
“Don’t I get any lashes? Not even just a few?”
Melody being the former, (much to the exasperated delight of her cellmates) finds herself time and again the scapegoat of the other women’s shenanigans and punished ruthlessly by Crabapples and her beefcake guards who double as barbarian strippers when the girls throw a welcome-back-from-solitary party for Melody. The crude, bludgeoning humor is ruthless and clearly must be meant to weaken your defenses for the final deluge of double entendre to come cascading from the ruptured sack.

Calwell’s mistress Candy Treat (Tally Brittany of, ahem, Warrior Queen) wants to be the prison warden because she was once in a Women In Prison film but didn’t get any good lines, and she wants to punish Melody for blasting Callwell’s dingaling. That seems like a plot thread that might take some actual acting from Brittany, so instead she takes most of her clothes off and gyrates with lots of “boi-oi-oi-oing” noises in a failed attempt to raise Callwell’s new transplanted penis for the solitary gay punchline of the film.

Finally, during a musical number resoundingly barked by the prisoners during Melody’s wedding (to Weiner) Calwell and Crabapples are revealed to be her parents, which doesn’t make much sense, but doesn’t have to at this point. Slammer Girls has absolutely no qualms about wallowing in stone dumb humor, dragging its knuckles intentionally through a base combination of slapstick and titty-flick that would make Benny Hill proud. The seemingly unassailable standards of WIP films make a lot of them seem almost forgettable except for occasional extremes of sex, violence or “exotic” locales (see Caged Fury). Even if it is remarkably simple (or not so for Chuck Vincent), Slammer Girls manages to stand out because the film, and those involved send-up those standards with glee.