The Naked Zoo (1970)

William Grefé made some fun ultra low budget horror films but with The Naked Zoo he switched his attention to the counterculture.

It’s most notable for being one of Rita Hayworth’s last films and she’s by far the best thing in this movie.

Terry Shaw (Steve Oliver) aspires to be a great writer but earns his living as a gigolo. One of his clients is Helen Golden (Hayworth). She’s married to a very rich guy who is confined to a wheelchair which is why she turns to Terry to satisfy her physical needs.

Terry is a total creep and he spends his time hopping from one woman’s bed to another.

He hangs out with a bunch of hippies although they look more like beatniks from a decade earlier. 

Like so many movies from this era dealing with the counterculture it was clearly made by people who just thought beatniks and hippies were pretty much the same thing.

Terry and Helen are caught in the act by her husband and he has a gun and it all gets messy. Terry is worried that the cops will be after him but he doesn’t do anything about it.

The plot is almost non-existent and what there is is an incoherent mess.

Terry beds a few more women and lots of controlled substances get consumed. It’s all a big freak-out.

Eventually Grefé decides that maybe he needs to wrap up the plot but the way he does so is rather feeble.

The music sounds like it’s a decade out of date and reinforces the beatnik vibe.

There’s lot of acid-trip psychedelic stuff which is amusing enough.

There’s plenty of grooving and bed-hopping but it’s all rather tame.

There’s very little violence but the wheelchair guy with the gun going after the guilty couple is entertainingly goofy.

Hayworth is excellent. Steve Oliver is quite good, bearing in mind that he’s playing a thoroughly loathsome human being.

This is not a movie that is sympathetic to hippies. Mostly they’re portrayed as ridiculous but let’s face it it’s not easy to make hippies look anything but ridiculous. They also come across as slightly sinister.

There really aren’t any wholly admirable characters in this film. We feel that if bad stuff happens to them they have at least to some extent brought it on themselves.

The Naked Zoo doesn’t quite work. It’s just too much of a mess and it’s not a sufficiently entertaining mess. It’s recommended only if you really like hippies being awful movies.

The Naked Zoo is included on the four-disc Blu-Ray collection He Came from the Swamp: The William Grefé Collection. Two versions of the film are provided. There’s the director’s cut (which is the one I watched) and an alternative version, supposedly spicier.

Grefé’s earlier horror offerings The Death Curse of Tartu (1966) and Sting of Death (1965) are much more fun.

Hollywood 90028 (1973)

Hollywood 90028 was written, directed and produced by Christina Hornisher. She seems to have worked on it intermittently in 1969 and 1970 but it was not released until 1973.  It then more or less vanished into obscurity. 

This was Christina Hornisher’s only feature film and when you’ve watched Hollywood 90028 you understand why she never got to make another movie. It has huge huge problems.

Superficially it’s a serial killer thriller but it isn’t really a thriller. It isn’t really an exploitation movie. It tries very very hard to be an art movie, with decidedly mixed results.

Mark (Christopher Augustine) is an aspiring filmmaker who pays the bills by making adult films. He is confident that it’s just a matter of time until he is recognised as the next Kubrick.

In the opening scene we see him pick up a girl, they go to bed and he strangles her.

Then we’re into his struggles as an artist forced to degrade himself by making nudie movies. On an S&M-themed shoot he meets Michelle. He falls for her big time.

The relationship between Mark and Michelle seems to progress to a certain point and then go no further. Which is not surprising. She has a rich successful boyfriend who keeps her in luxury and while she likes Mark she is realistic enough to realise that dumping the rich boyfriend for a failed filmmaker loser like Mark would be foolish.

While he tries to work out his relationship with Michelle he still finds time to strangle another girl.

Eventually, with agonising slowness, we get to the climax and it’s truly memorable (and easily the best part of the movie) although Hornisher then undercuts it with some heavy-handed symbolism.

Christina Hornisher’s art film ambitions are very obvious. She makes sure that it doesn’t come across as an exploitation movie by making the murder scenes flat and uninteresting and making the sex scenes totally un-erotic.

I’m not sure what Hornisher was trying to say because she keeps undercutting herself. Is she saying that making naughty movies has made Mark crazy, or that Hollywood has made him crazy? Maybe, but in that case why go to so much trouble to let us know that Mark has been messed up since childhood? Is she saying that adult films exploit women? Maybe, but the other girl in the main adult movie scene is laughing and joking while the camera is rolling. She’s having fun. And there is not the slightest indication that Michelle is    affected in any way by doing that scene. Immediately afterwards she’s her usual bright and breezy self. There’s nothing remotely messed up about Michelle. She has a rich sugar daddy who treats her extremely well. She likes her luxury home. She’s a winner. These girls do not seem exploited.

Is Hornisher saying that capitalism is the problem? But that doesn’t work, since we know that Mark’s problems go back to his childhood. And Michelle lives in luxury. Capitalism hasn’t done her any harm.

This movie mostly comes across as a student film that needed a lot more work. And a lot more focus. The script (which Hornisher wrote under a pseudonym) just isn’t properly thought out.

It’s difficult to imagine what her target audience was. The exploitation elements would have alienated the art house audience. It’s way too tame for the grindhouse market. And it’s way too slow and plodding for drive-in audiences. It was in fact released on the drive-in circuit and it’s not surprising that it sank without trace.

The wonderful 1969-70 location shooting in L.A. is the best thing about this movie. It’s a nice time capsule.

Despite the effective shock ending Hollywood 90028 just doesn’t come off. It isn’t even an interesting failure or a fascinating oddity. I honestly cannot recommend this one.

Grindhouse Releasing went crazy with this one, releasing it as a three-disc (!) Blu-Ray set with two cuts of the movie, two audio commentaries, Hornisher’s early experimental shorts and assorted documentaries and interviews plus the soundtrack on CD.

Mr Peters’ Pets (1962)

Mr Peters’ Pets is a 1962 nudie-cutie and perhaps an explanation of this genre would be in order.

It started with a 1954 court case involving the nudist camp movie Garden of Eden. In Excelsior Pictures vs. New York Board of Regents the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that nudity was not obscene, as such. That made movies (such as nudist camp movies) depicting nudity legal. Sort of. You still had to tread carefully and go to extravagant lengths to avoid even the slightest hint of sex.

It soon became apparent that nudist camp movies were a dead end. One can only take so much nude volleyball. It was Russ Meyer who came up with the solution in 1959 when, with The Immoral Mr Teas, he invented the nudie-cutie. He realised that there were three key ingredients. Firstly, there had to be a plot gimmick to justify lots of non-sexualised female nudity. It didn’t matter if the plot device was silly. In fact that was a plus. But it had to be silly in a cute endearing way. Meyer came up with the idea of a guy who goes to the dentist and his optic nerve gets damaged. As a result he now has X-Ray Vision, but he can only see through women’s clothes.

Secondly, there have to be lots of gags. They can be mildly risqué but must not be crude. The tone has to suggest lightweight innocent fun. Meyer could come up with the right gags.

Thirdly, the girls had to be beautiful, and they had to be beautifully shot. In 1959 (and up until around 1967) you could only get way with T&A so the idea was to have plenty of it.

The Immoral Mr Teas has all those ingredient combined to perfection. Most subsequent nudie-cuties fell down to some degree in at least one of these areas.

Mr Peters’ Pets has a suitably silly cute plot device. A pet shop owner, Mr Peters, gets hold of a formula that allows him to take on the appearance of an animal for a short period. He can then provide cute animals as adorable companions for pretty girls, and the girls won’t be shy about undressing in front of kittens or puppies, not knowing that they’re undressing in front of the lecherous pet shop proprietor. As I say, it’s silly, but it has a certain charm and it works.

This movie falls down a bit in the second area. The gags are rather feeble, and since the film was shot without synchronised sound we get a never-ending voiceover narration which just isn’t funny enough.

In the third vital area Mr Peter’s Pets scores very highly. These girls are stunners. And there’s an immense quantity of T&A on display.

And it has another major asset. The movie is a series of vignettes as Mr Peters assumes different animal identities. The first vignette is straightforward, just a pretty blonde taking a bath while being watched Mr Peters in the guise of a kitten. But the later vignettes have a bizarre surreal quantity. A girl enjoys a day at the beach but she has with her a beach umbrella, a fishing rod and a fish bowl. She seems to be fishing for a goldfish to put in her fish bowl. And then she wants to play with the fish bowl.

The segment with the three babes having an artistic day out takes on a slightly manic quality as well.

This is an important nudie-cutie ingredient I neglected to mention earlier - a crazy oddball vibe which Mr Peters’ Pets certainly has.

The Something Weird/Kino Cult Blu-Ray provides a pretty solid transfer for Mr Peters’ Pets, plus an audio commentary and two other nudie-cuties.

Peter Perry Jr directed some of the very best of the nudie-cuties. Kiss Me Quick! (1964) is an engaging mixture of monster movie, science fiction and nudie-cutie and it features go-go dancing. The Joys of Jezebel (1970) is a nudie movie set in Hell with some wild 60s visuals. My Tale Is Hot (1964) is another nudie-cutie with devilish overtones. He also directed The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1966) for David F. Friedman and that one stars the amazing Stacey Walker. She’s more than enough reason to see that film.

But perhaps the most interesting of the movies directed by Peter Perry Jr is Revenge of the Virgins (1959), a crazy nudie western with a screenplay be Ed Wood Jr.

Peter Perry Jr really does have claims to being the grandmaster of the nudie-cutie genre. I found Mr Peters’ Pets to be oddly endearing. If, like me, you have a soft spot for this much-disparaged genre then Mr Peters’ Pets is recommended.

Common Law Wife (1961)

Common Law Wife actually started out as a movie called Swamp Rose, directed by Larry Buchanan and shot in colour. It was then turned into a black-and-white movie called Common Law Wife with a huge amount of additional footage shot by a different director, Eric Sayers.

It all becomes quite confusing. It appears that Buchanan’s original film no longer exists. If indeed he ever completed it.

To make things really confusing the central character, Baby Doll, is played by two different actresses!

Both versions originated in Texas, with the swamp footage being shot near the Louisiana border.

Surprisingly, in its own way, it all works as a lurid thoroughly enjoyable hicksploitation potboiler. It’s not a sexploitation movie. There’s no nudity. It does however qualify as swampsploitation with a bit of southern gothic thrown in. The plot is complicated but delightfully lurid.

Shugfoot Rainey (George Edgley) is the richest man in town. His money comes from oil. He lives with his wife Linda (Annabelle Weenick) except that they’re not actually married. Or so Shug Rainey assumed.

Shug is tired of Linda. Her looks are fading and she’s rather needy. Shug has wired for his niece Jonelle (played by Lacey Kelly in Buchanan’s footage and an unknown actress in Sayers’ footage) to come to see him. He intends Jonelle to be Linda’s replacement. Jonelle is a stripper in New Orleans. Everyone calls her Baby Doll. She’s a whole lot younger and cuter than Linda. Jonelle is very pretty, albeit in a cheap sort of way. Shug doesn’t mind if she looks cheap. He likes his women that way.

The problem is that Linda has seen a lawyer who has told her that as far as the law in this state is concerned she is Shug Rainey’s common law wife. He can’t just boot her out the door. He could try to buy her off but Linda isn’t having any of that. Linda likes living in Shug’s mansion. She is emotionally dependent and she also has her pride. She’s not going to be replaced by a brazen hussy like Baby Doll.

The local sheriff, Sheriff Jody, gets mixed up in the drama. He’s Shug Rainey’s nephew. He’s married to Jonelle’s very respectable very prim sister but he’s lusted after Jonelle for years. They had an affair in their teenage years. The two sisters most definitely do not get along. Pretty soon the erotic embers are blazing back into life for Jonelle and Jody.

And then there’s Bull the moonshiner. He’s after Jonelle as well.

There are therefore lots of emotional betrayals and sexual triangles going on. And there’s money at stake as well. Shug has money. Bull has money. You figure this could easily end in murder. What’s cool is that there is no way to be sure which of these sleazy people is likely to be the victim, and which is likely to be the killer.

And of course it does end in murder.

The plot is wild and crazy but surprisingly, given the film’s bizarre production history, it does hang together in its own overcooked way. And Baby Doll is a memorable bad girl.

This is not a sexploitation movie. There is no nudity. It is an exploitation movie but of a slightly earlier more tame variety. It relies on overheated passions rather than bare skin.

The DVD transfer isn’t great but it’s acceptable. I believe there’s now been a Blu-Ray release. The Something Weird DVD also includes two other hicksploitation films, Jennie: Wife/Child and Moonshine Love (which is great fun).

I enjoyed Common Law Wife quite a bit. Highly recommended.

Common Law Wife is fairly close in feel to another swampsploitation potboiler, the rather entertaining Louisiana Hussy (1959). It also has a bit in common with Russ Meyer’s southern gothic hicksploitation classics Lorna (1964) and Mudhoney (1964) although it has to be said that Meyer’s two films are way way better.

Angelica: The Young Vixen (1970)

Angelica: The Young Vixen is a low-budget sexploitation movie made by an outfit called Vega International. This company had a brief and confusing history and of the half dozen or so movies they planned to make some were completed and some weren’t. One of the partners in the company was Oliver Drake, a prolific director of B-westerns who helmed several of Vega’s films including The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals. He’s credited as director of Angelica: The Young Vixen but it was in fact directed by another guy who had taken the name OIiver Drake.

Vega were active from around 1968 to maybe 1971 and Angelica: The Young Vixen seems to have had its original release in 1970. It was considered a lost film until very recently when Severin got hold of a very battered but complete release print. They have included it as an extra on their Blu-Ray release of The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals.

Angelica: The Young Vixen falls vaguely within the hicksploitation sub-genre (a sub-genre I dearly love).

Ned Hurley (William Johnson) is the overseer on the farm belonging to Judge Blaine (Lou d’Jena). Cute blonde nymphet Angelica (Dixie Donovan) is one the field hands. She’s shacked up with a gypsy named Nick (Vincent Ricco) but she’s been playing around with Ned as well and that’s already led to the two men trading punches.

We then get a sex scene, a threesome, which was a later insert and has no connection whatsoever with the rest of the movie but presumably a distributor thought the movie needed to be spiced up. It adds a bizarre touch because we have no idea at all who these people are.

Then, in a slightly surreal scene, Nick drags the two illicit lovers, sleeping bag and all, to a tree where he tries to string them up. The final result is that Ned is charged with murder. It was really an accident and the dropping of the charges is just a formality but the judge has to figure out what to do with Angelica. She’s a material witness. And she’s 17.

The judge’s daughter Marlou (Josie Kirk) suggests that Angelica can come stay with them.

Marlou has an ulterior motive. She likes girls. She likes girls in That Way. Especially cute blonde sexpots. Angelica isn’t into girls in That Way but she figures it would be wise to play along.

Angelica is still sleeping with Ned. And she’s started sleeping with Judge Blaine. And with a lawyer attached to the judge’s court. Angelica is a very friendly girl. Very affectionate.

There’s a perfect setup here for some overheated melodrama and that’s what we get and it’s done reasonably well and it’s quite entertaining. The script is perfectly adequate.

The acting on the whole is pretty basic but Dixie Donovan (who made a stack of sexploitation movies in her very brief film career) is a lot of fun as Angelica. Maybe not a conventionally good actress but she knows how to do the seductive dangerous sex kitten thing to a tee and she clearly had no inhibitions about taking her clothes off. And she’s very easy on the eyes.

There is nudity, including frontal nudity, in copious quantities and numerous sex scenes but there is still plenty of time for the outrageously overcooked plot to keep simmering along.

The print has some very major print damage which was obviously why Severin decided to throw it in as a freebie. It was a good decision. This is a thoroughly enjoyable slice of classic American sexploitation. I liked Angelica: The Young Vixen but then I do like this sort of thing quite a bit.

And they’ve included an audio commentary for it! Which makes this a fine double-header Blu-Ray release.

Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979)

Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens was Russ Meyer’s final feature film. It’s his most outrageous movie and that’s really saying something.

The script was credited by Meyer and Roger Ebert but according to Meyer it was mostly Ebert’s work. Ebert was involved in the writing of several of Meyer’s later films.

For me Peak Meyer is from 1964 to 1968, with Lorna, Mudhoney, Vixen and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! being his greatest movies. His final trio of movies, Supervixens, Up! and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens push his vision beyond the limits of sanity and good taste.

Any Meyer movie is going to have insane amounts of inspired visual insanity and energy and this movie has plenty of both.

Meyer has some interesting things to say on the commentary track. This was his final film, not because his movies were no longer popular, but because it was no longer possible to get distribution. Multiplexes would not show his movies.

1979 was a time of flux as far as exploitation movies were concerned. Hardcore had destroyed the softcore grindhouse market. The mainstream market was off-limits. Home video had not yet emerged. Within a few years the direct-to-video market would have been perfect for Meyer’s purposes but by that time he had lost interest.

The setting for this movie is a small town called Smalltown. Lamar Shedd (Ken Kerr) and his wife Lavonia (Kitten Natividad) are having marital problems. Lavonia is disgusted by Lamar’s obsession with anal sex. She looks for gratification elsewhere, in the arms of garbage collector Mr Peterbuilt. As does Lamar looks elsewhere as well. Lavinia also moonlights as stripper Lola Langusta.

Lamar and Lavonia seek help from a marriage counsellor, but he turns out to want to do to Lamar what Lamar wants to do with Lavonia.

Perhaps spiritual guidance can help. Local radio evangelist Eufaula Roop (Anne Marie) is sure she can teach Lamar to pleasure a woman the way Lavonia wants to be pleasured.

Insofar as there’s any semblance of a plot is that in their own mad ways Lamar and Lavonia are trying to save their marriage. But mostly the plot is just a succession of wild crazy vignettes.

The acting is what you expect in a Meyer film - exaggerated to the point of parody and then pushed even further.

The movie’s biggest asset is Kitten Natividad. Apart from her amazing body, her breathtaking lack of inhibition and her manic energy she’s also genuinely funny.

The key to appreciating Meyer’s films, especially his 70s films, is to see them as sexed-up ultra-violent riffs on the classic Looney Tunes cartoons. His films have the same self-awareness, the same tendency to self-consciously draw attention to their own artificiality and filmic-ness, the same wild absurdity, the same manic energy, they treat violence in the same way (exaggerating it to such absurd lengths that it becomes hilarious rather than disturbing), the same wild surreal touches and the same anarchic qualities.

Meyer takes this stylistic approach and adds the machine-gun editing style he first perfected in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! And by this time he was utilising an onscreen narrator (in this case Stuart Lancaster) to provide a running commentary, adding even more to the artificiality. Offhand I can’t think of another American filmmakers whose embrace of deliberate artificiality was so total and so radical.

This is softcore but Meyer is pushing the limits of softcore quite a bit here. The nudity is very explicit and the sex scenes get quite graphic.

No matter where you fall on the ideological spectrum you will be able to find something here to shock and offend you. But if you do get offended just remember that Meyer has set you up for it - he is yanking your chain. He is baiting you. If you take the bait then that’s on you.

Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens is a bizarre roller-coaster ride of sex and silliness. They don’t make movies like this any more. Highly recommended.

Severin’s Blu-Ray release is an enormous improvement on the old out-of-print DVD release.

Jennie: Wife/Child (1968)

Jennie: Wife/Child, released in 1968, is a prime slice of hicksploitation. Robert Carl Cohen and James Landis are the credited directors with Landis writing the screenplay.

Things are pretty tense down on the Peckingpaw farm. Albert Peckingpaw (Jack Lester) is a sour bad-tempered old man and he’s convinced that his cute 20-year-old wife Jennie (Beverly Lunsford) is not to be trusted where men are concerned. He’s probably right. In fact he’s definitely right.

Of course it would help if he showed Jennie a bit of affection and allowed her to have a social life and have some fun. That might have satisfied her.

Now she’s got her eye on the Peckingpaws’ hunky young farmhand Mario Dingle (Jim Reader). Mario is terrified. He wants nothing to do with her. He knows that she’s trouble.

But Jennie wants some lovin’ and she’s determined to get some.

Mario is as dumb as a rock but it’s not his brain that interests Jennie.

Jennie is not just starved of carnal pleasures. She’s starved of affection. She’s also sick of not having pretty things. She’s become more reckless in her flirting with Mario.

And she becomes enraged when she discovers that Mario visits a whore regularly.

It’s more and more difficult for Jennie and Mario to keep their hands off each other, with Jennie being the one pushing the issue more energetically.

They think they’re being discreet but they’re not discreet enough. And maybe Albert is a bit sharper than they’d thought.

You know where things are certainly going to go from here but that’s not quite how it plays out. James Landis’s script is a bit cleverer than you might expect.

There are some quite neat slightly unexpected plot twists, and the characters behave in the unpredictable irrational ways that real people behave, rather than like characters in a cheap exploitation movie.

The acting is quite effective. Jack Lester as Albert is not as cartoonish as one expects. He’s menacing but there’s some nuance here.

Beverly Lunsford as Jennie is as cute as a button but her performance is also not too bad. She doesn’t make Jennie too sympathetic but nor does she make her too unsympathetic.

It’s worth pointing out that Jennie is no in fact a child. She’s twenty. She’s a grown woman, although emotionally she is perhaps a tad immature. She’s been married to Albert Peckingpaw for four months so she never was a child bride.

By 1968 sexploitation movies were becoming considerably more risqué but this movie is very tame with just some brief mild nudity. It’s not really sexploitation. There’s not much violence. It’s more of a hicksploitation movie aimed at the drive-in circuit.

Although it’s a sound film it uses intertitles, presumably to enhance the melodrama flavour. There are also songs interspersed throughout the action which give an odd but interesting feel.

Most online reviewers start from the assumption that movies such as this are junk that can only be appreciated as “so-bad-it’s-good” or camp which says a lot about the inability of most online reviewers to comprehend anything offbeat or truly unconventional. Jennie: Wife/Child does have an offbeat vibe but it’s clearly intentional rather than the result of incompetence. It’s an overcooked melodrama but with a darker rural noir edge.

It’s also a very competently made movie with some nice cinematic sequences. The cinematography is by the great Vilmos Zsigmond which is another reason not to dismiss this film as junk.

One should always try to approach movies with an open mind. This movie is a case in point. This is actually an extremely good extremely interesting movie with an ending that is not at all what you’re going to be expecting. Highly recommended.

Something Weird paired this film with the swampsploitation potboiler Common Law Wife (1961) and the two movies do have a similar feel. They’re fairly close in feel to the swampsploitation classic Louisiana Hussy (1959) and they have some affinity with Russ Meyer’s southern gothic hicksploitation masterpieces Lorna (1964) and Mudhoney (1964).

The Something Weird DVD actually includes three movies - Common Law Wife, Jennie: Wife/Child and Moonshine Love (1969). All three are worth seeing, making this one of Something Weird’s best-ever DVD releases. Common Law Wife and Jennie: Wife/Child have since been released on Blu-Ray by Film Masters.

Orgy of the Dead (1965)

Orgy of the Dead, released in 1965, is promoted as an Ed Wood Jr movie. He did not direct it but he did write the screenplay, based on his own novel.

While he has a huge cult following it has to be admitted that Wood’s reputation as a staggeringly incompetent director is richly deserved. The movies he directed are not just shambolic but all too often boring. On the other hand he really did write some very cool very entertaining screenplays. The Violent Years (1956) is a totally crazed juvenile delinquent movie which has to be seen to be believed. So the fact that Orgy of the Dead was written by Wood but directed by someone else makes it quite enticing.

And this movie plays to Wood’s strengths as a screenwriter - his talent for excruciatingly awful dialogue, his total inability to construct an even moderately coherent plot and his tendency to waft off into delirious lunacy.

This movie was in fact directed by Stephen C. Apostolof using the pseudonym A. C. Stephen.

The movie opens with young couple Bob and Shirley heading down the highway in search of a cemetery. Bob writes horror stories and cemeteries provide him with inspiration. They crash their car and do indeed end up in a graveyard, but a very lively one.

Bob and Shirley find themselves prisoners of the Emperor of the Night, his beautiful but sinister consort (the Black Ghoul) and his army of ghouls.The ghouls are beautiful girls who have earned eternal damnation for greed or lust or other assorted sins. What fiendish tortures await Bob and Shirley? In fact all that happens to them is that they have to watch almost-naked pretty girls dancing. The Black Ghoul threatens them with dire fates which never eventuate.

Technically the film is quite polished considering the minuscule budget. The camera remains in focus, the lighting is handled competently and it looks like it was made by someone who understood at least the basics of filmmaking.

The Emperor of the Night is played by Criswell, a fascinating character in his on right. He was a popular TV personality (even a semi-regular on the Johnny Carson Show) famous for his predictions which were of course simply outrageous jokes. He knows this movie is intended to be jokey and goofy and he has a lot of fun.

If you want to appreciate this movie you have to understand what it isn’t. It isn’t a low-budget horror B-movie. That’s not what it’s trying to do so there’s no point in complaining that as a horror movie it just does’t work. It’s best not to compare it to movies Ed Wood directed in the 50s, like Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space. Those movies were trying to be very low-budget horror or sci-fi movies.

There’s no point in getting impatient about all the nude dancing and wondering when the horror content is going to kick in. It isn’t going to kick in. Nude dancing girls is what Orgy of the Dead is all about.

Orgy of the Dead is a very typical mid-60s American sexploitation movie of the nudie-cutie type - a lighthearted feel, quite a bit of goofiness and plenty of female flesh. This being 1965 there is no frontal nudity but there’s an abundance of bare breasts.

And Orgy of the Dead belongs to a sexploitation sub-sub-genre that enjoyed a certain vogue in the 60s - nudie-cuties with some tongue-in-cheek horror movie trappings. It belongs with movies like The Joys of Jezebel (1970) and Harry Novak’s Kiss Me Quick! (1964) and House on Bare Mountain (1962).

You have to judge Orgy of the Dead as a nudie-cutie. And as nudie-cuties go it’s not great but it’s OK. It doesn’t have the charm of Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr Teas (1959) or Doris Wishman’s Nude on the Moon (1961) or Hideout in the Sun (1960). It doesn’t have the madcap inventiveness of The Girl from S.I.N. (1966) or the cheerful goofiness of Henry’s Night In (1969).

But it does have lots of bare-breasted dancing lovelies.

Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-Ray release looks fabulous and includes quite a few extras.

Moonshine Love (1969)

The Sod Sisters is a very obscure American hicksploitation movie also released as Head for the Hills and later reissued as Moonshine Love. It was directed by Lester Williams.

It’s included as an extra on one of the old Something Weird DVD releases.

I really can tell you very little about this movie. I can’t even tell you where it was shot.

It begins with three of the most incompetent criminals who ever drew breath bungling a daring daylight robbery. It should have been easy - an old guy carrying a bag filled with banknotes. One of the trio, Tom (Tim E. Lane), decides to double-cross the others. He makes his getaway by jumping onto the back of a pickup truck but he manages to lose the loot. The loot is found by somebody, which will become important later.

He ends up lying unconscious by the side of a remote country road after falling from the pickup truck.

He’s found by Zeb (Hank Harrigan) and his two girls, Jeannie (Genie Palmer) and Lily (Breege McCoy).

We find out that they’re a close family.

Zeb is a moonshiner. He’s a cheerful likeable rogue.

Tom has amnesia after his fall from the truck. He’s wandering through the woods when he sees Jeannie and Lily frolicking naked in the river. It turns out that they’re nice girls and they take Tom home with them. Jeb doesn’t mind. Tom could be useful to have around. Jeb is easy-going but he’s a bit on the lazy side. If Tom is willing to work for his keep he’s welcome to stay.

Living in a cabin in the woods with only her daddy and her sister a girl can get a mite lonesome. And a healthy young girl like Jeannie has certain urges. Normal female urges. It’s at times like this that a girl is thankful for her carrot. A carrot can be a great comfort for a girl. I don’t know what it was like for the carrot but Jeannie is now feeling much more content and much more satisfied.

Pretty soon Tom and Jeannie are getting along really well and Jeannie doesn’t need her carrot any more. A man can do that job much more enjoyably.

Of course Tom’s erstwhile partners-in-crime will show up eventually and then things will get interesting.

This is the only credit for director Lester Williams and screenwriter Stan Potosky. In fact it’s the only screen credit for just about everybody involved. This is one of those regional exploitation movies made by people who were not much more than amateurs who had managed to get together a few thousand dollars (or sometimes, a few hundred dollars) and decided to make a movie. It’s very rough around the edges and the acting is terrible.

On the other hand the plot is actually quite decent. The pacing is good. There are a couple of amusing moments (such as the scene with the nosy revenue man) and they’re clearly intentionally amusing and reasonably clever. And there’s a slightly tongue-in-cheek feel which also appears to be intentional. The script is quite a bit better than the amateur hour effort that the movie’s micro-budget might lead one to expect.

There’s a bit of low-level violence. There’s a lot of nudity, including frontal nudity. There’s quite a bit of fairly graphic simulated sex. And that female masturbation scene with the carrot is surprisingly explicit. It helps that the two girls really are pretty and really do look nice without their clothes on.

I like the ending. It just seems right.

The print was clearly in less than pristine condition which is why Something Weird threw it it in as an extra bonus on their Common Law Wife/Jennie, Wife-Child double header DVD. The transfer really is perfectly acceptable.

If you can get past the very stilted acting Moonshine Love is a lot more entertaining than it has any right to be. I certainly wasn’t bored. This is good sexploitation/hicksploitation fun. I’m a sucker for hicksploitation and I like movies about moonshiners and this movie does have quite a bit of charm. I’m going to go out on a limb and give it a highly recommended rating.

Goldilocks and the Three Bares (1963)

Goldilocks and the Three Bares is a 1963 nudie-cutie directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis and produced by Thomas J. Dowd and the legendary David F. Friedman.

Now I’m not saying that Herschell Gordon Lewis was the worst film director in history. Well actually, now that I think about it, he really was the worst film director in history. In his work there’s a dullness, a lack of inspiration, a lack of imagination, a lack of understanding of pacing and of how to structure a feature film that is in its own way quite awe-inspiring.

There was a secret to making a good nudie-cutie. Russ Meyer discovered it in The Immoral Mr Teas back in 1959. A Supreme Court ruling had decreed that nudity per se was not obscene. But you had to make the nudity non-sexual. That led to a deluge of nudist camp movies. But there is only so much nude volleyball that any human being can endure.

The secret was to find a silly, goofy, amusing and clever excuse for presenting lots of naked women. In Meyer’s film a man has his optic never damaged during a dental procedure and as a side-effect he can now see straight through women’s clothing. In Doris Wishman’s Nude on the Moon the first manned mission to the Moon discovers that the Moon is inhabited - by naked women. Both these gimmicks make the nudity seem fun and playful and you don’t need to resort to nude volleyball.

The other secret was to add gags. Russ Meyer’s sense of humour might not have been sophisticated but he did have a sense of humour. The Immoral Mr Teas is genuinely amusing.

Which brings us to Goldilocks and the Three Bares which is just a standard nudist camp movie. Producer Tom Dowd did however have one gimmick up his sleeve - he was going to make this a nudie musical. An interesting idea but unfortunately the five or so songs that were written for the film are atrocious. And they’re sung by Rex Marlow who had been working as a pool cleaner. As a singer he’s a great pool cleaner.

And Dowd found the world’s worst comic, Tommy Sweetwood, to provide the comic elements.

The plot, such as it is, is that nightclub singer Eddie Livingston (Rex Marlow) is sweet on publicist Alison Edwards (Louise Downe). She keeps disappearing on weekends, which puzzles him. Tommy Sweetwood follows her and discovers the shocking truth - she is a nudist! She goes to a nudist camp on weekends. Eddie is devastated. He thought she was a nice girl.

Eventually Alison and her friend Cynthia persuade Eddie and Tommy to accompany them to the nudist camp. Eddie discovers that nudists are just like ordinary people, so it’s OK for him to be in love with Alison. After lots of nude boating and horse riding everything is fine between Alison and Eddie.

The problem is that it takes the movie takes so long to get to the nudie parts and in the meantime we have to endure interminable nightclub scenes with Tommy telling terrible jokes and Eddie singing awful songs.

On the plus side when we do get to the camp there is an immense quantity of nudity with lots of very pretty unclad girls. Lewis obviously waned to push the nudity as far as he could. Frontal nudity was not allowed in 1963 but there are lots of shots that go very very close indeed to revealing all of these girls’ charms and there are glimpses of frontal nudity which were probably accidental.

The Something Weird DVD also includes another nudie musical, Sinderella and the Golden Bra (1964) plus loads of extras.

The real highlight on the disc is the audio commentary for Goldilocks and the Three Bares. It features the great man, himself, David F. Friedman. As always he manages to be hugely informative and incredibly entertaining. It provides wonderful insights into the way these movies were made and marketed. The commentary is way more fun than the movie.

Goldilocks and the Three Bares isn’t really worth seeing on its own but with the commentary it becomes an absolute must.

Interestingly enough there have been a couple of truly excellent nudie musicals. The First Nudie Musical (1976) and Cinderella (AKA The Other Cinderella, 1977) are delightful movies which I highly recommend.