Sunset Cove (1978)

Teen-sex comedy Sunset Cove has a serviceable premise, because it depicts horny adolescents from different cliques joining forces to protect a stretch of California coastline from avaricious developers. Yet learning that the film was directed by Al Adamson should give an indication of the many ways the picture squanders its potential. Although Sunset Cove is coherent by Adamson standards, inasmuch as the movie never gets lost in nonsensical subplots, everything is substandard. The acting is weak, the camerawork is rushed, the storytelling is sloppy, and the tone is all over the place. Many scenes aim for light comedy, as when kids jump into hang-gliders so they can buzz a splashy party thrown by the developers, but at one point Adamson stops the movie dead for an endless sex scene set inside a van, complete with repetitious shots of a buxom girl shoving her breasts into a dude’s face and rubbing her hand across the front of his shorts. For an interminable three minutes or so, Sunset Cove morphs from brainless comedy to sleazy softcore. Making bad movies worse was Adamson’s special gift. Notwithstanding a brief appearance by John Carradine as a retired judge, nobody familiar appears in the cast, and several of the one-dimensional characters have nicknames including “Bubbles,” “Chubby,” and “Moose.” As for the nominal protagonist, he’s ostensibly a straight-arrow nerd, as evidenced by his eyeglasses. His inexplicable transformation into a drunken streaker who propositions a girl after inadvertently seeing her naked is par for the course.

Sunset Cove: LAME

The Female Bunch (1971)

Based on its title and release year, you’d think The Female Bunch was a low-budget riff on Sam Peckinpah’s violent Western The Wild Bunch (1969). Instead, it’s a wobbly mixture of crime, feminism, revenge, and the group dynamics of a cult-like organization. Although the movie contains many interesting ideas and a handful of intense scenes, it also has the usual problems of movies directed by (or, in this case, co-directed by) Al Adamson. Scenes don’t cut together, sound work is sloppy, and transitions are pathetic. Notwithstanding a prologue, the movie begins with Sandy (Nesa Renet) experiencing man trouble in Vegas. Enter Sandy’s go-go dancer buddy Libby (Regina Carrol), who invites Sandy to join a group of women who live on a desert ranch. Leading the group is whip-cracking Grace (Jennifer Bishop), who has high expectations of loyalty: Sandy’s initiation test involves climbing into a coffin and letting Grace bury her alive. No men are allowed on Grace’s ranch except, for some reason, aging horse wrangler Monti (Lon Chaney Jr.). After establishing this fraught scenario, the movie loses focus during a shapeless second act featuring crime sprees, a druggy lesbian scene, and a debauched trip to Mexico. Toward the end of the picture, the plot snaps back into place and the movie’s level of violence increases dramatically. So while The Female Bunch has thrills, it also bombards the audience with lots of discombobulated nastiness. Although Bishop is suitably fierce, watching Chaney in his last film role is depressing, since he’s bloated and his voice is nearly gone, and this picture doesn’t mark a high point in costar Russ Tamblyn’s career, either.

The Female Bunch: LAME

Girls for Rent (1974)

          Fact One: Girls for Rent is also known as I Spit on Your Corpse. Fact Two: The flick’s leading actress is porn star Georgina Spelvin. Fact Three: Helming this picture is the one and only Al Adamson, whose extensive filmography overflows with grindhouse schlock. Given these strikes against the movie, it’s surprising to report that Girls for Rent is nearly watchable. The plot makes sense, more or less; there’s quite a bit of action, especially during the last 30 minutes or so; and Spelvin occasionally musters a formidable sort of seen-it-all toughness. By the normal standards of Al Adamson flicks, these are exceptional strengths. Having said all that, Girls for Rent is still a low-budget quickie starring a skin-flick performer, so viewers know what to expect here—lots of grimy sex scenes that drag on interminably, with Adamson’s camera lingering crudely on every grope and gyration. Moreover, it’s not as if removing, say, 10 minutes of dull smut would have elevated this picture to respectability. This thing’s trash.

          Glossing over the needlessly convoluted and time-consuming setup, the movie proper begins when hooker Donna (Susan McIver) doses a client with a knock-out drug. Donna believes her job is to immobilize the guy and take compromising pictures, but it turns out the drug was lethal. She’s been set up. Donna flees, so her criminal bosses send badass ladies Erica (Rosalind Miles) and Sandra (Spelvin) to find and kill Donna. In typical Adamson fashion, what should have been a simple chase movie morphs into something shapeless, thanks to semi-comical interludes with creepy supporting characters and the aforementioned overlong screwing scenes. Eventually, Girls for Rent gets down to business with chases and fights, to say nothing of a truly grim final sequence. In sum, next time you’re craving mindless sleaze with a dash of nihilism, here’s the thoroughly disreputable movie for you.

Girls for Rent: FUNKY

Jessi’s Girls (1975)

          Discovering a watchable Al Adamson movie is a joyous moment for the ’70s-cinema explorer, so even though Jessi’s Girls is contrived and exploitive, it improves upon most of Adamson’s directorial adventures simply because the plot makes sense and the production values are relatively professional. For surprisingly long stretches of screen time, this low-budget Western is compelling thanks to a simple vengeance-mission narrative and the novelty, given the context, of a distaff protagonist. Redheaded beauty Sondra Currie stars as Jessica Hartwell, a Mormon woman traveling with her husband through the American frontier. A gang of thugs led by odious Frank Brock (Ben Frank) attacks the Hartwells, raping Jessica and killing her husband. Left for dead with a gunshot wound, Jessica finds her way to an isolated homestead, where grizzled loner Rufe (Rod Cameron) provides shelter and teaches Jessica how to use guns. Meanwhile, the film introduces several outlaw women, all of whom get captured by a marshal. In the story’s dopiest coincidence, Jessica stumbles upon the marshal’s wagon, kills him, and frees the outlaw women. That’s how they become participants in her vengeance mission.

          This movie’s obvious negatives are plentiful. Characterizations are trite, the plot shamelessly cops elements from the Raquel Welch movie Hannie Caulder (1971), and Adamson goes overboard with topless shots. This is hardly the sleaziest drive-in picture of the ’70s, but it was unquestionably designed to satisfy low appetites. Having said all that, the movie’s positives include qualities that are rare in the Adamson oeuvre. The story moves along at a good clip with virtually no glaring logic problems. The central character is interesting and sympathetic, with a fairly consistent behavior pattern. Supporting characters enter and exit the story when they should, so the picture isn’t bogged down with or derailed by pointless discursions. And the style is appropriate, from the dusty locations to the guitar-and-harmonica soundtrack. So even though Jessi’s Girls is ultimately nothing but a boobs-and-bullets cheapie, it’s palatable. For an Adamson movie, that’s saying a lot. You may now begin the Rick Springfield jokes you’ve been desperate to make since you first read the movie’s title.

Jessi’s Girls: FUNKY

Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970)

Original movies directed by Al Adamson are bad enough, but his hodgepodge flicks, assembled from pieces of films for which Adamson bought the rights, are even worse. Sci-fi/horror embarrassment Horror of the Blood Monsters demonstrates why. To repurpose scenes from a black-and-white Filipino movie about cavemen fighting supernatural monsters, Adamson shot some new material and contrived an incoherent story about Earth sending a space vessel to a distant planet as a means of combating extraterrestrial vampires, or something like that. The picture opens with a lame vampire attack shot in a soundstage, then transitions to ground-control scenes featuring black curtains as backdrops, and eventually to spaceship sequences with the production values (and performance quality) of a high school musical. To mask the monochromatic nature of the Filipino footage, Adamson provides dialogue about mysterious radiation that changes the color spectrum, and the black-and-white stuff appears tinted green or red or whatever. The monsters in the recycled scenes are ridiculous, flying bat-winged little people, real lizards photographed in forced perspective, underwater crab creatures, and vampires whose fangs look like pieces of chalk. Adamson’s new scenes aren’t any better. John Carradine spews pointless exposition, a buxom blonde looks confused while, thanks to iffy dubbing, another actress’ voice emanates from her mouth, and so on. At one point, the technicians at ground control stop supervising the emergency space mission so they can make out and play with a color-spectrum gun, resulting in yet more tinted shots. Alternate titles for this crapfest include Creatures of the Prehistoric Planet, The Flesh Creatures, and Vampire Men of the Lost Planet.

Horror of the Blood Monsters: SQUARE

Mean Mother (1971)

As if his original productions weren’t bad enough, schlockmeister Al Adamson periodically repurposed old footage—from his own past films and from productions for which he acquired the rights—to swindle unsuspecting grindhouse audiences. Bogusly marketed as a brand-new blaxploitation picture, Mean Mother began its existence as Run for Your Life (1971), a Spanish-made adventure flick about a Vietnam deserter who becomes mired in various criminal enterprises. Adamson bought the movie, then shot about 30 minutes of new scenes featuring Dobie Gray, a singer who scored a pop hit the previous year with “Drift Away,” as a second deserter. (Squandering any tie-in opportunities, the singer is billed here as “Clifton Brown.”) Adamson spliced material from the two productions together and created a disjointed hybrid film. Mean Mother starts and ends with the new material, which has a quasi-blaxploitation feel if only because Gray and Marilyn Joi, the leading lady in his sequences, are both African-American. Every so often, Adamson cuts to the Spanish material, which has a totally different vibe. The new scenes are fast-paced and sleazy, whereas the European scenes are leisurely and slick. Tracking the storyline is pointless, though the overall gist has something to do with the deserters trying to raise enough money to leave Rome, where they landed after fleeing Southeast Asia, and relocate to Canada. There’s also some nonsense about drug deals and kidnappings, but, really, everything in the plot is an excuse to trigger fight scenes and sex scenes. Adamson satisfies low appetites with nudity and violence, but the deeply uninteresting Mean Mother disappoints in every other regard. As for Gray, the fact that he only notched one more screen credit—14 years after Mean Mother—correctly indicates that acting was not among his gifts.

Mean Mother: LAME

The Naughty Stewardesses (1974) & Blazing Stewardesses (1975)

          Exploitation-flick hack Al Adamson brings the Mile High Club crashing to the ground with these awful movies about horny flight attendants. Styled after Roger Corman’s sexy-nurse movies of the early ’70s, The Naughty Stewardesses is a melodrama concerning several friends who score in the air and on the ground. The heroine is Debbie (Connie Hoffman), a nice girl from a small town who’s shocked by her big-city friends’ sexual antics. In a party scene, she recoils when a pal is presented with a man covered in frosting and candles like he’s a birthday cake, then proceeds to, ahem, blow out the candles in full view of party guests. Yet Debbie’s no prude, because when she falls for a photographer named Cal (Richard Smedley), she poses nude during a portrait session. “I feel so free,” she coos. “Perhaps by taking off my clothes, I took off my mask, too.” Oy.
          Things get complicated when Debbie accepts an invitation from an older man, Brewster (Robert Livingston), to visit his pad in Palm Springs. He’s a randy old goat, and he eventually sleeps with most of the stewardesses in the story, even getting one compliant gal to test out an elaborate sex gadget called a “Persian Penguin.” The movie jumps erratically between incompatible storylines and tonalities all the way to a pointlessly violent climax. Yet parts of The Naughty Stewardesses are strangely compelling simply because scenes go on forever. That said,  the picture’s magnetism is strictly of the traffic-accident variety. Still, Hoffman is quite lovely, even though she can’t act, so Adamson might have been able to make something luridly enjoyable from this material if he’d cut this picture down from 102 sluggish minutes to, say, 80 zippy ones.

          Blazing Stewardesses is even worse. Although the sequel features some of the same actors playing some of the same characters, the movie is largely unrelated to its predecessor. Conceived as an homage/spoof of old Western movies, the picture takes part of its title from Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1974), and the sexy-stewardess stuff shares screen time with nonsense about a frontier madam, a noble rancher, and villains on horseback. Making Blazing Stewardesses even more disjointed is the presence of past-their-prime comedy duo the Ritz Brothers, who contribute lots of embarrassing facial expressions and stale patter. At one point, costar Yvonne De Carlo, playing the madam, stops the movie dead to warble a corny song. Blazing Stewardesses is such an overstuffed mess that the stewardesses don’t spend much time blazing, so this wannabe sex comedy has a dangerously low sex quotient. Hoffman underwhelms once more, though her beauty remains arresting, but costar Regina Carrol, playing Debbie’s busty friend, gives a performance so awful, thanks to childish vocal delivery and lobotomized facial expressions, that her scenes are unwatchable. As for the overall movie, Blazing Stewardesses is so dumb that an unfunny joke about the Ritz Brothers eating a giant sandwich gets repeated as the closing gag.

Naughty Stewardesses: LAME

Blazing Stewardesses: SQUARE

Black Heat (1976)

Even given the low expectations I have whenever encountering an Al Adamson film, Black Heat was a serious letdown, inasmuch as I feel asleep the first three times I tried to watch the thing. And while that remark could probably suffice as a review, I’ll soldier through a few lines in the same way I eventually soldiered through the movie. As the title suggests, Black Heat is a cop movie in the blaxploitation mode. Las Vegas detective “Kicks” Carter (Timothy Brown) works two cases at once, helping women escape indentured servitude as hookers while also tracking gunrunners who are trying to smuggle weapons to revolutionaries in Central America. Neither of these cases results in much onscreen excitement, and they don’t mesh together well, so Black Heat has a herky-jerky narrative rhythm that’s as annoying as the picture’s leaden pacing. One boring thing happens after another, with little in the way of transitions in between, so only the presence of Brown in most scenes gives the impression that all the pieces belong to the same puzzle. Making matters worse are Adamson’s characteristic descents into sleaze, such as a long gang-rape scene and a leering girl-on-girl vignette. As for the leading man, Brown is spectacularly uninteresting to watch, seeing as how he was something of a renaissance man offscreen; the former NFL player dabbled in singing and dancing as well as acting. About the only kind thing I can say about Black Heat—sometimes known as The Murder Gang—is that it’s photographed better than the usual Adamson fare, with many nighttime scenes benefitting from proper backlighting. But when the most compelling thing about a shot is the use of secondary illumination to separate figures from dark backgrounds—well, that pretty much says it all.

Black Heat: LAME

Brain of Blood (1971)

Further proof that Al Adamson’s movies are akin to the slime that pools on the floors of movie theaters as beverages and butter congeal with body fluids, Brain of Blood has some moments of unintentional humor simply because it’s so spectacularly stupid, but slogging through 90-ish minutes of schlock is too high a price to pay for an occasional chuckle. Title notwithstanding, the plot is best described as brainless. In the fictional country of Khaleed, a ruler named Amir recruits an American surgeon to transplant Amir’s brain from his own dying body into a healthy new one. Inexplicably, the doctor doesn’t bother to line up a fresh body before Amir dies, so he’s forced to deposit the brain into the skull of a hulking murderer. Meanwhile, conspirators try to prevent Amir’s resurrection, Amir’s bimbo girlfriend schemes with the doctor, and the murderer stalks women. Full disclosure: It’s highly probable the preceding description contains inaccuracies, since Brain of Blood is so discombobulated and uninteresting that tracking the story is challenging. Anyway, here are some of the ironic delights that Brain of Blood has to offer. Amir’s body is stored in head-to-toe tinfoil. The disembodied brain looks like (and probably is) a clump of hamburger. The murderer’s post-surgery facial look resembles a cottage-cheese-textured skullcap. Amir’s lover is played by a woman who looks like a retired Las Vegas stripper, thanks to her helmet of bleach-blonde hair and leathery skin. There’s a dwarf assistant who periodically sports a jaunty golf cap. The doctor chases after the murderer while carrying a gadget that resembles a Dustbuster. And so on. Although Brain of Blood has a couple of extreme moments, notably many closeups of scalpels cutting flesh, it’s not anywhere near violent enough to thrill fans of gore. If you’re a fan of bores, then, well, you’re in luck.

Brain of Blood: SQUARE

Cinderella 2000 (1977)

          Usually, the closest thing to enjoyment that one can derive from watching a movie directed by Al Adamson is laughing at something unintentionally funny—a cheap-looking prop, a nonsensical plot twist, a terrible performance, whatever. Whereas the incompetence of some bad filmmakers is charming because they keep trying to achieve something that’s beyond their ability, Adamson’s brand of cinematic awfulness is mostly just tiresome. In that context, it’s almost heartening to discuss Adamson’s bizarre softcore sci-fi musical Cinderella 2000, because while it is unquestionably as schlocky as anything else bearing his name, at least Cinderella 2000 was designed to induce laughter. So even though very few people will actually laugh with the picture, seeing as how it’s stupid and tacky from beginning to end, at least viewers can laugh at the picture with a clear conscience. Any reaction is better than no reaction, right?

          Shot on a meager budget, Cinderella 2000 takes place in the year 2047, where The Controller (Erwin Fuller), a riff on Orwell’s Big Brother, has outlawed sex outside of government-sanctioned encounters. Naturally, this means the citizenry is horny, so folks break the rules whenever possible. Only vaguely related to this premise is a retelling of the Cinderella story. Wholesome-looking blonde Cindy (Catherine Erhardt) lives with The Widow (Renee Harmon), this film’s avatar for the wicked stepmother in the classic Cinderella story. The Widow’s daughters, black Bella (Bhurni Cowans) and white Stella (Adina Ross), won’t share their male lovers with put-upon Cindy, so she’s even hornier than everyone else. Yet because she’s the heroine, she’s more lonely than lustful, the notion being that she’s a potential savior who can reintroduce the concept of romantic love. Or something like that.

          Anyway, Cindy mopes in the forest one day until a spaceship (!) delivers her Fairy Godfather (Jay B. Larson), a singing-and-dancing queen who croons a number called “We All Need Love.” This is where Cinderella 2000 crosses the line from dopey to deranged. As the Fairy Godfather prances around the forest, he summons forest animals to demonstrate copulation. They appear in the form of two extras wearing leotards and creepy-looking bunny heads, and as the song drags along, these two hump while the soundtrack punctuates each thrust with a bouncy sound effect. Later in the number—which goes on forever—more forest creatures emerge, including a pair of extremely disturbing man-sized flowers.

          The musical style of Cinderella 2000 is all over the place, with some numbers sounding like show tunes and others sounding like R&B bump-and-grinds; the country ditty performed by a robot that’s upset about not being able to screw a computer is particularly cringe-inducing. Complementing the peculiar music is a generally cheap visual aesthetic, with characters wearing silly-looking sparkly costumes and garish makeup. Naturally, the acting is terrible, although the ladies who spend most of their screen time completely or partially naked have attractive figures. As for the film’s smut content, viewers should know better than to expect real erotica from Adamson, who had a special gift for draining the vitality from anything he captured on camera. Ladies writhe atop interchangeable studs, but the resulting imagery is about as hot as some National Geographic stag reel of actual stags.

          Nonetheless, Cinderella 2000 stands out among Adamson’s filmography because even though it’s low-budget crap, it’s ambitious low-budget crap. The movie fails at every single thing it tries, but at least Adamson left his comfort zone.

Cinderella 2000: FREAKY

Death Dimension (1978)

It’s time to put your brain on lockdown once more, because that singular purveyor of low-budget cinematic stupidity, Al Adamson, is at it again. Death Dimension, the title of which has no discernible significance, is a sci-fi/espionage/martial-arts thriller starring the unfortunate Jim Kelly, a skilled athlete whose ascension to stardom following Black Belt Jones (1974) was impeded by his inability to act. Death Dimension—which is also known in some quarters as Black Eliminator, Freeze Bomb, The Kill Factor, among other titles—tells the loopy story of a scientist who hides designs for a weather weapon in a microchip, then surgically implants the microchip into the forehead of his pretty assistant. Once the scientist is killed, the assistant becomes a target. Assigned to protect her or recover the research or whatever—because, really, who cares?—is LAPD detective Ash (Kelly). Portraying Ash’s boss is George Lazenby, who starred as James Bond in one movie, and the 007 connection continues with the movie’s villain, “The Pig,” who is played by ex-Bond villain Harold “Odd Job” Sakata. Sort of. Keen ears will notice that Sakata’s dialogue was dubbed by character actor James Hong. And so it goes. Death Dimension jumps from one pointless scene to the next, stopping at regular intervals for Kelly to effortlessly defeat hordes of opponents; this is one of those dimwitted action movies in which the hero becomes a target for every bad guy in the world the instant he accepts his dangerous assignment. For added spice, Death Dimension contains lots of misogynistic material, including a bizarre scene during which “The Pig” uses a snapping turtle as an interrogation tool by holding its snout close to a woman’s breast. “One bite, and he’ll make you flat-chested!” If you watch Death Dimension after having perused these remarks, you have only yourself to blame.

Death Dimension: LAME

Hell’s Bloody Devils (1970)

Even by the bottom-feeding standards of director Al Adamson’s usual fare, Hell’s Bloody Devils is unwatchable garbage. Apparently a slapped-together compendium of footage from two (or more) incomplete features, the movie is part biker flick, part espionage caper, part romance, and part brain-melting sludge. Watching this picture is like staring at a TV that changes its own channels, because scenes stop abruptly, characters drift in and out the picture, and the vibe toggles between clean-cut ’60s (some of the footage was shelved for years) and sleazy ’70s. At its weirdest, the movie stops dead when two characters visit a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise for lunch and Colonel Sanders himself enters frame to ask the characters how they’re enjoying their meal. Familiar actors John Carradine and Broderick Crawford make fleeting appearances in Hell’s Bloody Devils—or, to put a finer point on it, in The Fakers, the espionage picture that Adamson commenced in the ’60s and repurposed for about half the footage of Hell’s Bloody Devils. Whatever. Hell’s Bloody Devils cuts from pointless vignettes of bikers festooned with Nazi regalia to a truly bewildering storyline about an Israeli secret agent teamed with a U.S. operative to do—something. Eventually, the spy stuff leads to a chase scene through a theme park, which comprises drab shots of people running through crowds to the accompaniment of overbearing music. Presumably, diehard schlock archivists have catalogued the components of this disastrous film’s ironic appeal, but for mere mortals, this is about as wretched as grade-Z cinema gets.

Hell’s Bloody Devils: SQUARE

Dynamite Brothers (1974)

During the first few minutes of the blaxploitation/martial-arts mash-up Dynamite Brothers, it almost seems as if perpetually incompetent filmmaker Al Adamson might surpass his usual low standards by actually manufacturing passable B-movie trash. Following three minutes of enjoyably kitschy illustrated opening credits, the first scene is a straightforward showdown between high-kicking warrior Larry Chin (Alan Tang) and several adversaries. Then, alas, Adamson commences storytelling, and things go south fast. Without belaboring the various dimwitted plot elements, the gist is that Larry travels from Hong Kong to America in order to find his long-lost brother, only to end up handcuffed to Stud Brown (Timothy Brown), a tough-talking African-American arrested on bogus charges. The duo shares a brief, Defiant Ones-style escapade, then break their chains to join forces and fight drug dealers. The action sprawls across San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the plot grows more and more unfathomable as it expands to include a love interest for Stud as well as a corrupt cop played by Hollywood veteran Aldo Ray. Folded into the muck are fight scenes, exploitive female nudity, and a cringe-inducing scene during which Stud seduces a mute girl named Sarah by improvising a song featuring their names. Through it all, Adamson’s filmmaking is so sloppy that it’s often hard to follow screen action within continuous scenes, much less from one scene to the next. Even with fistfights, kung fu, sex, and the reliable character actor James Hong at his disposal, Adamson can’t sustain coherence for more than a few minutes at a time, if that.

Dynamite Brothers: LAME

Nurse Sherri (1978)

The most interesting thing about this horror flick from schlockmeister Al Adamson—in fact, probably the only interesting thing—is the absurd number of alternate titles the picture has carried while worming its way through various distribution channels. We’re talking Beyond the Living, Hands of Death, Horror Hospital, Killer’s Curse, Terror Hospital, and the expanded moniker The Possession of Nurse Sherri. More creativity has gone into rebranding this clunker than went into making the movie itself. A dull compendium of clichés related to cults, demonic possession, mind control, sexy nurses, and other ’70s-cinema tropes—there’s even a dash of blaxploitation—Nurse Sherri concerns an RN who becomes possessed by the spirit of an evil cult leader. He uses her as an instrument of revenge, killing enemies as well as innocent bystanders. Yet huge swaths of Nurse Sherri are not horrific, because the storyline tracks the adventures of three attractive nurses. One has a sexual affair with a patient. One helps an athlete overcome the shock of becoming blind. As for Sherri, she makes time with a handsome doctor whenever she’s not offing people. (Despite the prominence of sex in the storyline, the onscreen content is quite chaste, meaning that Nurse Sherri doesn’t even make the grade as an exploitation flick.) By the standards of producer/director Adamson’s other movies, Nurse Sherri is fairly cogent and linear, although the acting and production values are as terrible as always. By any other standards, Nurse Sherri is laughably bad. The FX used to depict an ethereal figure menacing Sherri look as if they cost about $1.98. The dialogue scenes are clunky. (Sample line: “I’ll introduce you to the bliss that lies beyond the borders of hell!”) And the music, which sounds as if it was copped from prints of 1940s horror pictures, works overtime to inject Adamson’s lifeless footage with energy. 

Nurse Sherri: LAME

Angels’ Wild Women (1972)

With all due respect to Ed Wood (if “respect” is the right word), a strong argument could be made that Al Adamson is actually the worst director of all time. Working in the exploitation realm from the mid-’60s to the early ’80s, he made consistently awful pictures that ripped off current box-office trends and were distinguished by incoherent plotting, shoddy production values, and terrible acting. Take, for instance, Adamson’s execrable biker flick Angels’ Wild Women, which comprises little more than 85 minutes of boobs, bikers, and brawls, with a little bit of sensationalistic Charles Manson imagery thrown in for no discernible reason. The movie starts with a violent rape, continues with a vignette of Nazis slaughtering victims (the “Nazis” are actors participating in a movie shoot), and later features such overused B-movie tropes as a bad drug experience, a messianic cult leader, and a murderous crime spree. Said spree is committed by curvaceous ladies who quit dating bikers in order to form their own outlaw outfit, but then get distracted from their activities every time some young stud crosses their path. How tacky is Angels’ Wild Women? Adamson shot the scenes involving the cult leader at Spahn’s Movie Ranch, the real-life hideout of the Manson Family. No threshold of bad taste was too forbidden for Adamson to cross, and yet there’s nothing truly rebellious or wild about his filmmaking. Throughout Angels’ Wild Women, he simply gathers counterculture signifiers without any sense of how to contextualize or energize them. Worse, Adamson can’t even make all the lurid garbage that he throws onscreen exciting. As it grinds through an undercooked “plot,” Angels’ Wild Women slips almost immediately into nothigness, with interminable dialogue scenes and laughably “artistic” love scenes pointlessly consuming screen time.

Angels Wild Women: SQUARE

Black Samurai (1977)

Poor Jim Kelly couldn’t seem to catch a break after initially gaining attention with his costarring role in the Bruce Lee smash Enter the Dragon (1973). A handsome and tall martial artist who also happened to be African-American, Kelly seemed poised to become a major action star, but several things held him back: 1) The blaxploitation genre was already on the wane at the moment he started making blaxploitation movies; 2) Martial-arts flicks were still a long way from breaking out of the grindhouse ghetto; 3) Kelly appeared in consistently weak films; and 4) Kelly lacked charisma equal to his impressive physique. Still, the actor managed to notch a few starring roles before the gravy train ran off the rails. Among the least of his efforts is the junky Black Samurai, which was directed by exploitation-flick hack Al Adamson. Boring, empty-headed, and repetitive, the movie tells a mundane story in the least interesting way imaginable. Even the fight scenes are underwhelming, since they’re so choreographed and safety-conscious that they lack menace. How schlocky is Black Samurai? Well, for one thing, the movie does not include samurais. For another thing, it comes complete with that staple of crappy Saturday-afternoon adventure flicks—a secret organization with a cartoonish acronym for a name. (Kelly’s character works for D.R.A.G.O.N., the Defense Reserve Agency Guardian of Nations.) The insipid plot features Kelly’s character traversing the globe to rescue is girlfriend from a criminal organization that’s led by a voodoo priest (who is white and calls himself a warlock). For no good reason, the movie includes a low-octane catfight, an endless mariachi-band musical number, an interpretive-dance voodoo ritual, a silly jet-pack ride (shades of 007), and other random scenes. Through it all, Kelly looks impressive even though his line delivers are lifeless and his martial-arts scenes are shabby. Since Black Samurai is neither entertaining nor ridiculous enough to inspire much unintentional laugher, it’s nearly a complete waste of time.

Black Samurai: LAME

Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971)

          Truly one of the worst movies ever made, the no-budget horror flick Dracula vs. Frankenstein is such an excruciating, incoherent mess that it’s not even fun to watch through the prism of traffic-accident perversity. The story involves Dracula (Zandor Vorkov) recruiting a mad scientist (J. Carrol Naish) to revive the Frankenstein monster (John Bloom) for some nefarious purpose, but just like when the same scheme unfolded in the Universal monster-mash pictures of the 1940s, Dracula ends up dueling with the monster. Since Dracula and Frankenstein are among most enduring figures in popular culture, it’s amazing that director Al Adamson managed to drain the vitality out of two classic monsters at once, but nothing of narrative interest occurs during the picture’s 90 minutes of supernatural mayhem.
          As Dracula, the cringe-inducing Vorkov comes across as a pasty girly-man reading lines off cue cards while his voice gets run through a distortion machine; the Frankenstein’s monster makeup gives the impression that a crumpled grocery bag was dropped onto Bloom’s head; and poor Lon Chaney Jr., a long way from his glory days in the aforementioned Universal horror pictures, looks bloated and depressed as he lumbers through a nothing role as an axe-wielding henchman. Also, for some inexplicable reason, Adamson regularly cuts from the monstrous goings-on in Dracula’s laboratory to innocuous scenes of forgettable supporting characters, as if he can’t even be bothered to deliver an entire movie’s worth of what his title promises.
          Finally, just to make matters so much worse, the picture’s production values are pathetic, to the point that the climactic duel is so under-lit it’s difficult to see what’s happening onscreen. But then again, Dracula vs. Frankenstein is such an interminable slog that not being able to see part of the movie is probably a blessing. Trivia buffs take note: Beloved monster-magazine publisher Forrest J. Ackerman plays a bit part and served as “technical consultant,” whatever that means, while Kenneth Strickfaden, who created props for The Bride of Frankenstein (1931), provided his vintage gadgets plus a few crude special effects.

Dracula vs. Frankenstein: SQUARE