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.

Fast Company (1979)

Fast Company is a lighthearted romantic action thriller drag-racing drive-in movie directed by David Cronenberg. This is definitely not the sort of thing one associates with Cronenberg.

This is a Canadian movie shot entirely in Canada.

Cronenberg was just finding his feet as a director at this time. This is a movie he did for a pay cheque but he is in fact a drag-racing fan.

Lonnie Johnson (William Smith) is a well-known popular drag racer. He drives the fastest dragsters, the “fuelers” which run on nitromethane and alcohol. Or he did, until his car exploded. Now he has to drive a “funny car” (front-engined dragsters with fibreglass body shells). Which means that his protégé Billy Booker (known as Billy the Kid) misses out. Lonnie feels bad about this. He likes Billy. But Lonnie had no choice. He races for the FastCo team and his boss Phil Adamson (John Saxon) insists.

We know Adamson is going to be the bad guy because he’s played by John Saxon. And Saxon is in full-on nasty slimy super-villain mode.

Lonnie’s chief rival is Gary "The Blacksmith" Black (Cedric Smith). Gary resents Lonnie’s success but while he’s hyper-competitive we should not jump to the conclusion that he’s going to be a bad guy.

Lonnie’ girlfriend is Sammy (Claudia Jennings). She’d like him to give up racing and she knows he won’t but she loves him anyway.

Billy the Kid is sleeping with Candy (Judy Foster), who is a kind of drag racing equivalent of a Formula 1 grid girl. Adamson is trying to force her to sleep with clients.

Adamson has plans to get rid of Lonnie because Lonnie won’t grovel to him but he has to have a plausible justification for firing him.

It all comes to a head with a big race for the Funny Car championship.

There’s some satire here about the corrupting effects of commercialism in sport but FastCo is not a giant corporation. Adamson has a private plane but it’s not a LearJet. It’s a little single-engined Cessna. FastCo and Adamson are just not big enough or important enough to be truly sinister, which makes the satire lighthearted and amusing. Despite his ruthlessness and unscrupulousness Adamson is ridiculous rather than truly scary.

There’s plenty of cool drag racing action. There are crashes and there are exploding dragsters. Lonnie is nicknamed Lucky Man because of his extraordinary knack for walking away unscathed from spectacular crashes. There’s some suspense. There’s an over-the-top villain. There’s a bit of humour. There’s a lighthearted feelgood vibe. There’s some romance. There are bare boobs. This is a total drive-in movie.

One thing I like about it is that it takes these people seriously. Drag racing is their life. The movie isn’t mocking them. Lonnie isn’t a ridiculous figure. Sammy isn’t made to seem ridiculous for loving him. Candy isn’t made to seem ridiculous for loving Billy. These people have a passion and they follow it. They are doing what they love. Sammy respects Lonnie for that.

With motor racing there’s always the sneaking suspicion that the attraction for the spectators is the possibility of witnessing a fiery crash. It’s a kind of primitive ritual - men courting violent death. It’s a dance of death. It’s interesting that although on the surface Fast Company doesn’t seem at all Cronenbergian 17 years later Cronenberg would deal with similar themes in a very Cronenbergian way in Crash. And while Fast Company doesn’t deal with the erotic aspect of this attraction overtly we do see some very hot babes who are obviously at least to some extent keen to have sex with men who may be marked for death.

John Saxon is delightfully fiendish. William Smith makes a good sympathetic hero. He’s not perfect but basically he’s a good guy. Claudia Jennings, a fine actress, is very good but isn’t given enough to do.

Fast Company is a fine above-average drive-in movie.

This movie looks great on Blu-Ray.

The Stepmother (1972)

The Stepmother is a 1972 erotic thriller released through Crown International so you’re expecting standard drive-in fodder. 

It was written and directed by Howard Avedis. More about him later.

Structurally this movie is as much a police procedural as an erotic thriller and it can also be regarded as an inverted mystery, in which the viewer knows the identity of the murderer right from the start and the interest of the story lies in the way in which the killer is brought to justice.

The movie opens with a woman having sex with a man somewhat against her will. This encounter is witnessed by a man whom we presume to be the woman’s jealous husband. The husband then kills the other man.

I’m not giving away any spoilers here. This all happens in the first few minutes.

This movie adds an interesting twist. There’s a second murder at roughly the same time and it would be obvious to even the greenest cop that the two murders are related. That’s the one thing in the case that is an absolute certainty. Inspector Darnezi (John Anderson) has no doubts on this score.

I’m not giving away any spoilers here either. All of this is just the initial setup.

That jealous husband is architect Frank Delgado (Alejandro Rey). The woman we saw at the start is his second wife Margo (Catherine Justice). Frank is successful and he and Margo are part of a little circle of rich people with slightly arty tendencies. There’s a hint of early 70s Southern California decadence. This was a world in which drugs and bed-hopping were popular pastimes in such circles. Frank doesn’t quite fit in. He’s Mexican and he’s a devout Catholic.

This little circle includes Frank’s business partner Dick Hill (Larry Linville) and Dick’s wife Sonya (Marlene Schmidt) as well as a maker of blue movies who goes by the name of Goof and Goof’s girlfriend.

There are some tensions. For one thing Frank isn’t entirely sure he can trust Margo not to sleep around.

Things get more complicated when Frank’s son Steve (Rudy Herrera Jr) arrives from Mexico. There’s definitely tension between Steve and Margo. Maybe not surprising given that Steve’s stepmother isn’t all that older than he is and she’s very hot and she’s a woman in touch with her sexual appetites.

There’s also another killing.

We know that events are moving towards a crisis and Avedis handles the sense of impending doom quite well. We don’t know what form the crisis will take. There are several distinct possibilities.

The plot is a bit loose. Avedis’s screenplay has a few clunky moments.

The biggest problem is that it’s all very tame. The ingredients were there for a steamy erotic thriller and in the 80s or early 90s that’s how it would have played out (and that’s certainly how an Italian director would have approached it). The Stepmother however never develops any real erotic heat and never really catches fire. It’s not quite sleazy enough.

Alejandro Rey is good as a man on the edge. His life is out of control. Catherine Justice is pretty good as Margo although the script doesn’t give her enough opportunities to smoulder.

Directed Howard Avedis was born Hikmet Labib Avedis in Iraq. He directed several movies in Iraq before relocating to the United States where he produced and directed a series of low-budget movies. He gets virtually no respect as a film-maker, being generally dismissed as a director of cheap drive-in trash. That’s rather unfair. I’ve now seen three of his movies and they’re rather interesting and slightly offbeat. Both The Teacher (1974) and The Fifth Floor are worth seeing.

The Stepmother is nowhere near as bad as its reputation would suggest. Not as good as the other Howard Avedis movies I’ve seen but it’s enjoyable in a 70s drive-in movie way. Recommended.

It’s included in several multi-movie DVD sets from Mill Creek. The transfer is very good.

Weekend with the Babysitter (1970)

Weekend with the Babysitter is a 1970 Crown International release and it’s not quite the movie that the title would suggest. They had had a success the previous year with The Babysitter (which is the better movie and is worth seeing) so in this case the choice of title may have been an attempt to make it look like a sequel. Both movies were written and directed by Don Anderson and both starred George E. Carey but the two movies are rather different.

Jim Carlton (George E. Carey) is a successful but slightly disillusioned film director. He has a much younger wife, Mona (Luanne Roberts), but the marriage is not a notable success.

Candy Wilson (Susan Romen) arrives to babysit their kid but the dates got mixed up. They don’t need her. Mona is going to her mother’s for the weekend and the kid is going with her.

Logically Jim should now drive Candy home but instead they decide to have a few drinks. Candy reads his latest script, a youth culture movie, and she tells him that it gets the youth culture of today totally wrong. Candy offers to give Jim a look at the real world of these crazy far-out kids today. She takes him to a coffee shop, he meets her friends, he gets stoned with them. Jim thinks this is all groovy.

Mona isn’t really staying with her mother. She’s gone to see her dealer. Mona is a junkie but she’s a rich middle-class junkie and she has no problems paying for her drugs. She’s pretty good at hiding her drug habit. Jim thinks she’s become a bit strange and distant but he has no idea that she’s on the needle.

Mona’s dealer forces her to allow him to borrow her husband’s cabin cruiser to make a drug pickup.

Meanwhile Jim is making the scene with Candy, in and out of the bedroom. Jim is falling for Candy in a big way. And she seems to dig him as well. They have a joyous weekend of sex and fun.

Candy’s friends turn out to be really nice kids. They’re into motorcycles but they’re not outlaw bikers on Harleys. They’re into motocross and they ride Japanese bikes. They’re just kids having fun. And they just love hanging with conservative middle-aged guys in suits.

There are then two plots going on, a romance plot and a crime thriller plot about drug smuggling. Both plots are rather on the thin side.

There are a couple of brief action scenes. There’s a moderate amount of nudity, with brief frontal nudity. There are very tame sex scenes.

The big problem is Jim. It’s hard to believe that a film director in 1970 could be quite so innocent and strait-laced. George E. Carey isn’t a terrible actor but he would have been more convincing playing a real estate agent or a banker.

There’s a slight credibility problem with the romance. It’s not inconceivable for a girl to fall for an older man, but it is hard to believe that Candy would fall for this particular older man. He’s just too boring.

There is however a reason that Jim is portrayed as very conservative and dull. This is not really a movie about a romance between a young woman and an older man. What the movie is really all about is the clash of cultures, the clash between the culture of Eisenhower-era America represented by Jim and the America of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll and peace and love.

What makes it slightly more interesting is that neither culture is demonised. Jim is not such a bad guy. The kids are not dangerous hippie psychos. Candy isn’t scheming or manipulative. They’re all doing their best. Except for the drug dealer and he’s the only unsympathetic character.

One thing that should be pointed out is that Candy is clearly a grown woman. She’s no schoolgirl. She’s probably around 20 so the movie is much less sleazy than you might expect.

This is more drugsploitation than sexploitation. It could be described as an attempt at hippiesploitation. It was made a year after the Manson murders so there was plenty of paranoia about hippies at that time. This movie was clearly hoping to cash in on that hippie paranoia although in fact it takes a remarkably sympathetic view of youth culture.

One of the amusing things about this movie is that early on we have Candy complaining that Jim’s movies are totally out of touch with actual youth culture but Weekend with the Babysitter isn’t exactly an authentic look at that culture either.

Weekend with the Babysitter probably wouldn’t be worth buying on its own but it’s mildly entertaining and if you’re going to buy the excellent 32-movie Drive-In Cult Classics DVD boxed set (and you definitely should buy it) you might as well give it a watch.

Weekend with the Babysitter gets a good anamorphic transfer. The set includes some great drive-in movies - Trip With the Teacher (1975), The Babysitter (1969), Cindy and Donna (1970), The Pom Pom Girls (1976), the wonderful Malibu High (1979), Van Nuys Blvd. (1979) and Pick-up (1975). All of which are very much worth watching. Even the lesser movies in this set like The Teacher (1974) and Hot Target (1985) are worth a spin.

Candy Stripe Nurses (1974)

Candy Stripe Nurses, released in 1974, was the last of the hugely popular nurse movies made by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures.

It was written and directed by Alan Holleb.

These movies followed a formula that Corman used in other series as well. The movie tells the stories of three nurses and the adventures and misadventures they have on the job and off. Most of the adventures seem to involve the young ladies losing their clothing. The stories of the three women are intercut throughout the film although there’s no connection between their stories.

Candy stripe nurses (or candy stripers) were volunteers who performed simple nursing duties under the supervision of nurses. Such volunteers still exist but I don’t think we’re allowed to call them candy stripers any more. They were called candy stripers because of the cute candy-striped uniforms they wore, which are probably also not allowed any more.

Firstly there’s Marisa (Maria Rojo). She keeps getting into trouble at school. She’s the world’s oldest juvenile delinquent (Miss Rojo was 31 when she made this movie). Her principal is tempted to call the police after her latest outrage but offers her a way out. The matter will be forgotten if she volunteers to work as a candy stripe nurse at the local hospital.

One of Marisa’s patients is a young guy named Carlos who was wounded during a gas station armed robbery. He’s now facing prison for his part in the robbery. He assures Marisa that he is innocent (and in fact he really is innocent). Marisa plays amateur detective to find evidence that will clear him. She is motivated by a love of justice, and by the fact that she thinks Carlos is really nice and really cute.

This is the segment that doesn’t really work because it’s too serious in tone and the plot idea isn’t that great.

Secondly there’s Diane (Robin Matson). She’s an intellectual and she hopes to be a doctor one day. She takes life pretty seriously. She likes men, but she likes serious intellectual men. Until she gets involved with a patient. He’s a jock (in fact a basketball player). He’s not her type at all. At least that’s what she thinks until they have wild sex in the gym. Now she realises she really likes totally non-intellectual jocks.

Everything would be fine except that he keeps going nuts and doing crazy things. The doctors thought he was on drugs but the drug tests were negative. Diane is sure she can find a way to save him. This segment works because Robin Matson is a cute, sexy, likeable oddball.

Thirdly there’s Sandy (Candice Rialson). She’s doing really well in her studies because she’s discovered the secret of academic success. You get young doctors to do your homework for you by having sex with them. She ends up working in the hospital’s sex clinic. One of the patients being treated in the sex clinic is rock star Owen Boles (Kendrew Lascelles). He has dried up creatively because he can no longer satisfy his cute female groupies in the bedroom, and his bedroom prowess was the secret to his creative drive.

Sandy has no doubts that she can reawaken the stricken pop star’s interest in sex. This segment is the most amusing.

The acting is adequate given that the roles aren’t exactly over-demanding. Robin Matson and Candice Rialson are charming and sexy and they take their clothes off. Candice Rialson was at this stage the queen of the drive-in movies.

The Corman formula is followed rigidly. A combination of melodrama and sexy humour, very tightly paced, with lots of bare breasts and bottoms. It was a carefully calculated formula - Corman knew just how much nudity and violence he could get away with in the markets at which he was aiming. These nurse movies are very tame, but just titillating enough for those markets.

Corman knew it was a winning formula. Writer-director Alan Holleb gives Corman what he wanted and the result was never going to win any Oscars but it’s fun slightly naughty good-natured entertainment.

Candy Stripe Nurses is recommended as long as your expectations are not set too high.

Shout! Factory has released four Roger Corman nurse movies in a DVD boxed set and if you like his formula you’ll enjoy this set. The transfer is anamorphic and quite acceptable.

I’ve also reviewed another earlier Corman nurse picture, The Young Nurses (1973).

The Sister in Law (1974)

The Sister in Law is a 1974 Crown International release which falls vaguely into the erotic thriller category.

It starts off as a sexual-romantic melodrama but with hints in the background that there’s a thriller plot here that will eventually kick in.

Robert (John Savage) is a young man who has been away for a couple of years, finding himself or finding America or finding something or other. Now he’s returned to his parents’ home.
He finds that his sister-in-law Joanna (Anne Saxon) has moved in with his parents. Joanna is getting a divorce from Robert’s big brother Edward, because Edward has moved in with his girlfriend Deborah.

There’s an obvious and immediate attraction between Robert and Joanna. We get the feeling that Joanna doesn’t like to be without a man for too long. It’s obvious that within a very short time these two are going to be sharing a bed. That might not be too much of a problem except for one thing. Edward decides to return to his parents’ home as well, and he brings his new girlfriend with him.

Things become more than a little tense.

Edward doesn’t want Joanna any more but his pride is a bit wounded by her obvious sexual hunger for his kid brother. Edward is very tightly wrapped and there’s an edge of violence and nastiness in his makeup. He gets a bit aggressive towards Robert.

While this is happening Joanna has noticed the way Robert and Deborah are looking at each other. Joanna doesn’t like what she sees. She doesn’t like it one little bit. Her pride took a bit of a knock when Edward dumped her for Deborah. She is most definitely not going to let Deborah steal Robert from her as well. If she has to fight to keep Robert then she’ll fight, and Joanna is not the kind of gal you want as an enemy. She’s feisty and a bit crazy.

Predictably Joanna and Deborah come to blows (in a reasonably good swimming-pool catfight scene).

Robert has Joanna if he wants her but now he wants Deborah as well. He’s a crazy mixed-up kid.

Edward has other things to worry about. He’s involved in business dealings with some pretty shady characters. In fact they appear to be out-and-out gangsters. Edward thinks he’s a tough guy but these guys play in the major leagues and as tough guys go Edward is very much a Little Leaguer. He’s out of his depth and he’s too stubborn and arrogant and conceited to admit it.

Gradually the thriller elements start to dominate and the other characters are drawn into Edward’s ill-advised criminal enterprises.

The romantic-sexual melodrama and thriller elements make an uneasy combination. As a thriller it’s at best OK but nothing at all special. As a melodrama about sexual deceit and game-playing it’s much more interesting and it might have been better for the movie to have concentrated on that element.

There is a lack of sympathetic characters. Edward is a jerk and he’s dumb. Robert is a whiny self-pitying brat. Deborah doesn’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain. That leaves Joanna as the only sympathetic character. At least she’s not dumb or whiny. She has more complex motivations than the other characters. We’d like to know more about what makes her tick so it’s disappointing when the focus shifts away from her. The emotional entanglements are not satisfactorily resolved. They’re just quietly forgotten. That’s a pity because they were potentially really interesting. Not just a romantic triangle but a romantic quadrangle with multiple levels of betrayal and deceit and jealousy.

This could have been a very good movie looking at the shifting and confusing sexual mores of the 70s.

As it stands it’s a movie that doesn’t quite make it. Its biggest asset is Anne Saxon’s enigmatic but fascinating performance as Joanna. There’s plenty of topless nudity and a few reasonably steamy sex scenes that are made interesting by the fact that the motives of the participants are so tangled and murky. The Sister in Law is tentatively recommended but it does lose its way.

This movie is included in the excellent 32-movie Drive-In Cult Classics DVD boxed set. The Sister in Law gets a good anamorphic transfer. The set includes some great drive-in movies - Trip With the Teacher (1975), The Babysitter (1969), Cindy and Donna (1970), The Pom Pom Girls (1976), the excellent Malibu High (1979), Van Nuys Blvd. (1979) and Pick-up (1975). All of which are very much worth watching. Even the lesser movies in this set like The Teacher (1974) and Hot Target (1985) are worth a spin.

The Teacher (1974)

The Teacher is another Crown International release included in the wonderful Mill Creek Drive-In Classics 32-movie pack. This one dates from 1974.

Diane Marshal (Angel Tompkins) is a high school teacher. She’s pushing thirty, she’s married but separated and she has normal female urges which can be a bit of a temptation when your pupils are cute horny teenage boys. Diana looks to go out in her cabin cruiser and sunbathe topless. Two of her pupils, Sean Roberts (Jay North) and his best buddy Lou Gordon (Rudy Herrera Jr) have discovered that they can get a very good view of Diane’s sunbathing routine from an old warehouse. Being teenage boys they naturally take advantage of the opportunity. It’s pretty harmless stuff.

Lou’s older brother Ralph (Anthony James) also watches Diane from the warehouse. Ralph might be a harmless crazy Vietnam vet or he might be a dangerous crazy Vietnam vet. He seems to be seriously obsessed by Diane. He’s pretty much stalking her.

These three peepers get into an argument and Lou falls to his death.

Ralph was already a bit crazy but now he’s really crazy. He blames Sean for Lou’s death. Maybe he blames Diane as well. Ralph drives a hearse and in that old warehouse he has a coffin in which he keeps his treasures - his binoculars, his gun, his scuba gear and other stuff.

Diane is intent on playing Mrs Robinson to young Sean. Sean is naïve and he’s a virgin but Diane soon takes care of his virginity. Romance as well as lust blossoms for Diane and Sean.

And now Ralph is stalking them. His intentions aren’t clear and it’s likely that he’s so crazy he doesn’t know himself what he intends to do.

Diane and Sean are too wrapped up in bedroom fun to appreciate just how dangerous Ralph has become. Even when they’re canoodling on her boat and Ralph’s face suddenly appears at the cabin window (he’s snorkelled out to the boat) they don’t realise that they may be dealing with a potential killer.

This is a move that isn’t quite sure what its focus is going to be. Is it going to be a serious coming-of-age movie or a twisted erotic/psychological thriller? It tries to be both. Surprisingly enough, it succeeds to a certain degree.

Jay North was famous as the child star of Dennis the Menace. This was his attempt to break into grown-up roles. After this movie he more or less abandoned that attempt. He’s not good here but he’s not terrible. Sean is supposed to be goofy and gormless - he’s a hormone-crazed teenage boy.

Anthony James does some serious scenery-chewing as Ralph and he manages to get across the point that Ralph’s craziness is growing steadily worse. He does overdo things a bit and Ralph does come across as a cartoonish monster at times. But he’s fun.

The movie’s biggest asset is Angel Tompkins. She gives a subtle finely judged performance. The danger was that Diane would come across as a bit of a predator but Tompkins convinces us that Diane isn’t really a manipulative schemer. She’s lonely and she genuinely likes Sean. She’s the one who does the seducing but she’s well aware that Sean wants to be seduced, and it’s not as if he’s under-age. Tompkins also convinces us that Diane is not entirely sure of her own emotions. She was intending the affair to be a lighthearted adventure for herself and for Sean but she finds herself getting seriously emotionally involved.

There’s a bit of nudity and a bit of simulated sex but it’s pretty restrained. The violence isn’t graphic either.

The climatic warehouse scenes are executed quite well (and it is a great setting).

Iraq-born writer-director Howard Avedis (credited here as Hikmet Avedis) loses control just a little. The movie is too long and has a few pacing issues. The dialogue doesn’t exactly sparkle. He does manage to give the movie some creepy moments and he redeems himself with the excellent ending.

This is a very very 70s movie. And I mean that in a good way. It has that 70s loopiness and weirdness. There are no rules, man. We’re just making a movie. Just let it happen.

The anamorphic transfer is quite acceptable.

The Teacher might not obey the rules of classical Hollywood movie-making but it has plenty of entertainment value. Highly recommended.

The Phantom Empire (1988)

If you’re aiming to make not just a good movie but a great one then what are the ingredients you’re going to need? First of all you obviously need cave-dwelling mutant cannibals. You’ll also need amazon warrior women. Of course you’ll need a cute robot. And dinosaurs, naturally. The good news is that Fred Olen Ray’s 1988 opus The Phantom Empire includes every one of these ingredients. Plus it has Sybil Danning as an evil alien queen dressed in bondage gear. And yet you won’t find this movie on any critics’ list of the greatest movies of all time.

The movie opens with Denae Chambers (Susan Stokey) hiring partners Cort Eastman (Ross Hagen) and Eddy Colchilde (Dawn Wildsmith) for an expedition. Twenty years earlier Denae’s father perished on a similar expedition. The objective is to find a lost civilisation hidden deep within a system of underground caverns. There’s also the strong likelihood of finding a fabulous lost treasure.

The cavern is not to be found deep in the Amazon rainforest or the foothills of the Himalayas or the sandy wastes of the Sahara Desert. No, it’s just a couple of miles from LA. Five minutes drive away. Which is certainly convenient.

There is likely to be danger involved. A few days earlier a picnicker was decapitated by a mutant cannibal monster that emerged from the cave.

Denae will be going along on the expedition as well and Cort has recruited a couple of scientists - Professor Strock (Robert Quarry) and graduate student Andrew Paris (Jeffrey Combs).

It doesn’t take long for the expedition to encounter the first of the mutant cannibals. They don’t seem too friendly. In fact they try to cook Denae for dinner.

The expedition also acquires another member - a friendly but frightened half-naked amazon warrior girl. They name her Cave Bunny. Cave Bunny takes a bit of a shine to young Andrew which doesn’t please Denae - she’d also taken a shine to him.

There’s lot of running about in the vast system of caverns, which was a challenge to Fred Olen Ray and his crew since all they had to film in was a single cave about twenty feet long. But thanks to movie magic you will believe this is a gigantic cave system.

The amazon warrior women (apart from Cave Bunny) are not too friendly. The robot isn’t friendly either. The mutant cannibals are decidedly hostile. And their trouble really starts when the alien queen puts in an appearance. She considers them to be inferior specimens of an inferior species.

There are gun battles in the cave, expedition members get captured and there are plenty of narrow escapes.

The acting is pretty bad by ordinary standards but the performances are right for this type of movie. Dawn Wildsmith is great as the cynical wise-cracking tough dame Eddy. Sybil Danning is, well she’s Sybil Danning and she makes an awesome-looking alien queen.

The movie was shot in six days and cost $120,000 to make. So don’t expect spectacular special effects. The alien queen’s spaceship and her futuristic hovercar look very cheap, but cheap in an endearingly fun way.

Don’t expect the plot to make much sense either.

Given the meagre budget Ray knew he had to take advantage of any opportunities to add production values and visual interest. He discovered that he could rent Robby the Robot very cheaply. There’s no reason for a robot to be in the movie, but he’s a cool robot. Ray was also able to get the hovercar cheap - it had apparently been used in the Logan’s Run TV series. And then the distributor wanted extra footage shot, and Ray found out he could get some cool dinosaur footage from Planet of the Dinosaurs.

As a result The Phantom Empire is filled with things that have no logical place in the story and no logical connection with each other, but that adds to the movie’s goofy charm.

The Phantom Empire might be an incoherent mess, but it’s an incoherent mess that is huge amounts of fun. It’s such a good-natured romp of a movie.

The RetroMedia Blu-Ray looks great and includes a very enjoyable audio commentary by Fred Olen Ray and cinematographer Gary Graver plus a documentary on the film and a few other extras.

The Phantom Empire is cheap low-budget fun and it’s highly recommended.

Trip With the Teacher (1975)

Trip With the Teacher is a Crown International release in 1975 so you know it will be low-budget, somewhat trashy and probably quite entertaining.

Miss Tenny (Brenda Fogarty) is a schoolteacher who’s taking four teenaged girls on a camping trip in the desert. They’ll be looking at stuff like archaeological sites. The girls are much more interested in boys and it doesn’t seem likely they’ll find many of them in the desert. They’re in a school bus, driven by the good-natured Marvin (Jack Driscoll).

The bus is being followed by three guys on motorcycles. Jay (Robert Gribben) is a nice enough guy. He turns out to be the closest thing this movie has to a hero. He only met the other two guys a short while back. Pete (Robert Porter) seems a bit wild and maybe a tiny bit unstable. It’s Pete’s brother Al (Zalman King) who is the worrying one. We very quickly find out that Al is crazy and mean and evil, and totally unpredictable. An old guy as a gas station spills petrol on Al’s bike. So Al kills him. Al is that kind of guy.

The bus breaks down and the three guys on the bikes stop. Whether they’ve stopped to help is another matter.

Marvin can’t fix the bus. Of course that should be no problem. When the three bikers reach the next town they can phone for someone to come out to help Marvin with the bus. Al says they’re prepared to make the call, on one condition. He wants one of the girls to ride off into the desert with him.

The girl in question thinks it’s a great idea. As soon as the girls spotted the bikers they went totally man-crazy. But Miss Tenny is not about to let any of the girls in her charge ride off into the desert with some strange guy on a motorcycle, especially a guy as disturbing as Al. If Miss Tenny knew that Al had just committed a brutal murder she’d be even more worried.

Things start to get nasty. Al commits another murder. He doesn’t want any witnesses left around, and Miss Tenny and her schoolgirls were all witnesses. They all end up in an isolated shack. Miss Tenny and her girls are prisoners. We’re not sure exactly what Al’s intentions are because he’s so crazy and unpredictable but it’s certainly possible that he intends to kill all the women. It’s highly likely he intends to do other things to them first.

By now we’ve figured out that Pete pretty much does what his brother tells him to do. He probably wouldn’t be actively evil on his own but under Al’s influence he’s dangerous.

A night of horror follows for the women.

There seems to be no escape. Offering any kind of resistance just makes Al crazier and meaner.

It’s a pretty nasty movie that today still packs quite a punch. There’s no gore and not a great deal of nudity. The violence is mostly not graphic but it’s very intense and at times quite shocking.

Earl Barton was a dancer who appeared in a few movies in the 50s. This was his only feature film as a writer-director and that’s a pity. He knew how to build suspense and he knew to create an atmosphere of paranoia and terror. He also understood pacing. The movie starts slow but the pace gradually picks up and leads to an exciting and tense finish. Why didn’t this guy get to make more movies?

The big drawcard here for cult movie fans has to be the presence of Zalman King. He was a bad actor, but he was a truly great bad actor. He is always fun to watch and he’s in top form here, playing Al as a guy who could explode into violence and madness at any moment. King goes outrageously over-the-top and makes this movie seriously menacing.

Robert Porter as Pete is overshadowed by Zalman King but he gives a fine creepy performance.

Brenda Fogarty is very solid as Miss Tenny, giving the character just a bit of depth. The actresses playing the girls are all pretty good as well.

This movie is included in Mill Creek's Drive-In Cult Classics 32 Movie Collection, a DVD set which includes interesting oddities such as Pick-Up (1975) as well as drive-in titillation like The Babysitter (1969). Lots of fun sleaze in this set. I believe that Trip With the Teacher has been released on Blu-Ray by Vinegar Syndrome.

Trip With the Teacher is very much a drive-in exploitation movie but despite the low budget it’s very well-crafted and genuinely harrowing. It’s one of those movies that turns out to be a whole lot better than you’re expecting it to be. Highly recommended.

Delinquent Schoolgirls (1975)

Delinquent Schoolgirls (AKA The Sizzlers AKA Carnal Madness) is a delirious slice of drive-in movie madness.

Three sex offenders escape from a hospital for the criminally insane. One is a gay theatrical type. Then there’s Big Dick Peters (Bob Minor), a flasher and rapist. The leader of the trio is Carl (Michael Pataki), another show business type. He’s a failed impressionist. He apparently just likes scaring people.

The first stop after breaking out is a farmhouse. Earl’s wife Ellie is very sexually frustrated so she’s delighted when Big Dick rapes her. This is a very politically incorrect movie. Earl doesn’t really mind. He’s quite happy that someone else is satisfying Ellie’s sexual urges.

Their next stop will be a girls’ school, but it’s a kind of reform school. These are all bad girls. We know they’re bad girls because they talk about sex a lot and wear very short skirts. They read dirty books and giggle. This being a girls’ school there is of course some lesbian activity among the girls, but nowhere near as much as you might expect in a 70s movie of this type.

Before the lunatics get there an incident takes place which gives us a hint of the flavour of this bizarre movie. One of the girls is hopelessly in love with a middle-aged biology teacher. He asks her to help carry some books home. It might have ended there had she not bent over and given him a fantasising glimpse of her panties. So he drugs her, hypnotises her and removes her clothing, not realising that she would have enthusiastically consented.

The movie is a succession of incidents in which the lunatics become involved. These incidents range in tone from disturbing to weird to goofy slapstick to just plain incomprehensible.

Some of the episodes just go nowhere. A girl from the school, after undergoing a harrowing experience at the hands of the escaped lunatics, flags down a passing van. In the van are two very sleazy hippie types who seem much more interested in her naked breasts than in helping her. We feel that something bad or disturbing is going to happen here. And what actually happens? We have no idea. It’s as if the director simply forgot about that subplot.

Some episodes achieve true inspired weirdness. The creepy middle-aged biology teacher drugs and hypnotises a girl who has a crush on him. He strips her down to her bra and panties. He has her completely under his power. Now you can well imagine what is going to happen next, but that’s not what happens at all. Presumably he is unable to, er, consummate his lust for the girl. So he gets his pet snake to do it for him. At the moment that this scenario is interrupted by the arrival of the loonies the snake is heading for the girl’s, well I’m sure you can guess what part of her anatomy it’s heading for.

Other episodes leave you wondering whether the director was indulging in some mind-altering substances and just had no idea what he was doing, and just lost interest in some scenes or came up with the kinds of silly ideas that one does come up with under the influence of mind-altering drugs. There’s a scene in which the lunatics tie up one of the female teachers. It seems like it’s a setup for a kinky bondage scene. And what do the lunatics do to her? Nothing. They just forget all about her.

At one point the lunatics are holding ten schoolgirls hostage in the gym. They then force the girls to engage in a degrading and humiliating experience. The girls are forced to perform a chorus line number from a Busby Berkeley musical.

At another point they have two girls at their mercy. You just know what dangerous escaped sex offenders will do in such a situation. Instead of which the girls are forced to do some mud-wrestling. With each other.

This is a movie that veers between being a thriller, a teen sex comedy and a slapstick comedy. It’s problem as a thriller is that the three escaped asylum inmates are obviously not very dangerous. They’re pretty non-violent. We never really think the schoolgirls are in much danger. In fact when two of the lunatics had ten of the girls lined up in the gym I felt a bit sorry for the lunatics. The girls had been doing their karate class. It seemed pretty obvious that ten girls with martial arts training would have no trouble dealing with two unarmed guys. And this is a reform school. These are tough aggressive girls. I figured that as soon as the girls got seriously annoyed they would beat the two guys to a pulp. Which is what happened.

This is really a drive-in movie rather than a sexploitation movie. The sex scenes are very very tame and there’s only a modest amount of nudity. There are however lots and lots of panty shots and lots of bouncing boobies (these naughty delinquent girls express their rebelliousness by refusing to wear bras).

Sexploitation fans will recognise Sharon Kelly, star of such sexploitation classics as The Dirty Mind of Young Sally and Teenage Bride (a movie which features not a single teenager nor a single bride).

This movie is included in the six-movie Psychotronica boxed set from Kit Parker Films and VCI Entertainment. It’s a varied and interesting set, with the best film being John Lamb’s Mermaids of Tiburon, a strange dream-like slightly arty underwater erotic fantasy about, you guessed it, mermaids. Lamb was one of the great underwater cinematographers. Mondo Keyhole is a very politically incorrect sexploitation flick from John Lamb and cult movie legend Jack Hill.

As a comedy Delinquent Schoolgirls is a total wash-out. The humour is infantile and obvious and excruciating. As a sex film it’s pretty tame, although there are quite a few naked breasts. As a bizarre cinematic oddity it has a certain appeal.