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.

Crypt of Dark Secrets (1976)

Crypt of Dark Secrets is a zero-budget horror/hicksploitation/swampsploitation/sexploitation flick made in Louisiana. Nobody seems to have a good word to say for this movie but I’m willing to mount at least a partial defence of this one.

There’s an island in a remote stretch of the bayou and there’s a house there. No-one has been able to live in the house because it’s reputed to be haunted.

The middle-aged local sheriff explains to his younger partner that the haunting may be connected to the mysterious legend of Damballah. Damballah is a kind of witch or voodoo goddess who lives in the swamp and has lived there for centuries. It’s a very obscure legend but the cop is inclined to give it some credence. He’s seen plenty of weird things in that swamp.

That remote haunted house in the swamp now has a new tenant, Ted Watkins. Ted is a retired Army Ranger and Vietnam vet and after Vietnam nothing scares him. He has a stack of money which he keeps in the bread tin in his kitchen. He’s confident that only a complete idiot would dare to rob such a renowned tough guy.

As it happens there are two idiots who are indeed going to try to rob him. These guys are as dumb as rocks. The wife of one of them has at least enough sense to figure out that it would be advisable to leave no witnesses. They’ll have to kill Ted Watkins.

Killing Ted proves to be surprisingly easy, but now the thieves’ problems really begin.

Ted is dead but he doesn’t stay dead long. He is found by a strange girl he has often seen wandering in the swamp. There’s nobody living within ten miles of his cabin so there can’t be any such girl but he’s seen her and he knows she exists.

The girl is of course Damballah!

Damballah (played by Maureen Ridley) has all kinds of witchy powers. She can transform herself into a snake. Bringing dead Vietnam vets back to life is child’s play for her.

Damballah is fond of Ted. She thinks he could be the Chosen One, the man destined for her. She’s naturally pretty annoyed that someone killed him, even temporarily. Voodoo witch queens tend to look for revenge when that happens.

The problem with these kinds of off-the-wall cult movies is that people insist on judging them by the standards of regular movies. You can’t do that. By any objective standards, by any of the criteria that apply to mainstream movies, this is a terrible movie. I’ve never liked the idea of describing a movie as so bad it’s good. I think that misses the point. It’s more correct to say that cult movies are either good or bad according to different rules from mainstream movies.

The things that are bad about this movie aren’t really relevant. The acting is atrocious but you don’t watch a movie like this hoping to see an Oscar-worthy acting performance. The actors in a cult movie don’t have to be good in a conventional way, they have to deliver the goods in other ways. Take Maureen Ridley as Damballah in this movie. She’s stiff and she delivers her lines in an incredibly stilted way. But she’s supposed to be some weirdass supernatural voodoo queen. They don’t speak the way regular girls do. They speak in a weird portentous way. Maureen Ridley captures the right touch of weirdness. She looks exotic, she has a great body and she knows how to give off spooky sexy vibes. Her performance is bad by ordinary standards but perfect for this movie.

The interior scenes are dull and static but once the camera gets out into the bayou everything changes. The location shooting is excellent. And director Jack Weis does manage to achieve some genuine touches of foreboding.

The special effects are ultra-cheap. Damballah can transform herself into a snake. In 1976 even a big-budget major-studio movie probably could not have pulled off that kind of transformation scene. So all Weis does is to show us the snake, then there’s a cloud of mist, and then Damballah is standing there. It’s the oldest cheapest trick in the book for dealing with such scenes but if it’s done right it works and it doesn’t cost money.

The movie’s biggest selling point is undoubtedly Damballah’s naked dancing scenes and they work. They’re strange and sexy and you can’t accuse Weis of indulging in gratuitous nudity. No self-respecting supernatural voodoo queen would even think of dancing in the woods with her clothes on.

The basic premise is quite solid. There’s the supernatural spooky stuff, there’s the crime angle and there’s hidden pirate treasure. The right ingredients for a silly sexy horror flick.

Something Weird found a pretty decent print of this movie. They paired it with The Naked Witch (a movie which is a failure but an interesting failure) and added lots of extras. Most are strip-tease shorts. The Afro-Cuban Genii strip in particular is pretty terrific. That’s one energetic girl. I guess she takes her vitamins every morning. There’s also a zonked-out psychedelic bad acid trip short which is wall-to-wall female frontal nudity but it’s certainly trippy.

Crypt of Dark Secrets isn’t a lost classic but if you’re in the right mood it’s kinda fun. It helps if you have a taste for swampsploitation movies. Just make sure to have plenty of beer and popcorn. Recommended.

Swamp Girl (1971)

Swamp Girl is a very low-budget hicksploitation movie released as part of a Something Weird swamp double-header (paired with Swamp Country). It’s definitely hicksploitation but despite being made in 1971 it’s not, as you might expect, a sex and sleaze fest. There’s no nudity at all and the violence is very low-key.

It was shot (in colour) on location in the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia.

The swamp girl is Janeen (Simone Griffeth) and she lives in the Okefenokee Swamp with her pa. Janeen’s pa is a black man. Janeen is very pretty, very blonde and very white. It’s apparently never occurred to her to wonder if maybe he’s not her real pa.

The swamp girl is a kind of local legend. Nobody is sure if she really exists. Lots of people claim to have seen her but maybe they’d just had too much moonshine whiskey.

Now she’s been spotted again, near a spot where where a dying man was found. The man died of snakebite but the locals are inclined to think that the mysterious swamp girl had something to do with it.

Swamp Ranger Jimmy Walker (he’s a kind of singing swamp ranger) sets off to find out what’s going on in the swamp.

He finds the swamp girl. In fact she saves his life. He tells her that there could be trouble coming for her and her pa. They might not be left alone any longer. Janeen reports all this back to her pa. Her pa then breaks the news to her that he’s not her pa and that she should call him Nat instead and now she learns the truth about her origins. Which begins a series of flashbacks.

Nat had been living in the swamp, working for Old Doc. Old Doc was an abortionist but his main income was from selling little girls into white slavery. He’d been intending to sell Janeen. She would have fetched big money. Nat, who was basically a good-hearted guy, couldn’t bear to think of such a fate being in store for little Janeen so he rescued her and raised her as his own child.

Back to the present day, and trouble is definitely coming for the swamp girl. Firstly in the form of Carol, who has just busted out of a women’s prison farm, killing a guard in the process. Carol and her boyfriend are heading to the Florida state line and they decide that the best way to get there is through the swamp, on foot. Which is of course a seriously bad idea. Their only chance is to persuade the swamp girl to lead them out. If Janeen represents purity and innocence then Carol represents evil and depravity. She’s a stone-cold killer.

The other complication is that Carol’s dad Gifford Martin (who’s a bad ’un) has hired three rednecks to find Carol and they’re heading off into the swamp as well.

There’s quite a body count in this movie, but most of them fall victim to venomous snakes or gators. Yep, one of the characters gets eaten by gators.

There’s also a reasonably good cat fight between Janeen and Carol which will appeal to mud-wrestling fans (although I hasten to add that both girls are fully clothed).

Director Donald A. Davis had started his career as a production assistant on Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. Not exactly an illustrious start. He went on to direct a number of sexploitation features. He was technically a bit more competent than Ed Wood, but only a bit.

Simone Griffeth is quite good as Janeen but the rest of the acting ranges from adequate to pretty terrible.

The transfer on this one isn’t sensational. It’s a bit dark and a bit murky. Apart from the second feature Swamp Country the extras include a 25-minute short film, Swamp Virgin, which is actually which is actually a very heavily edited version of a 1947 feature called Untamed Fury.

Swamp Girl is somewhat in the style of the hicksploitation movies of an earlier era such as Louisiana Hussey. Of course if you want hicksploitation done really well you can’t go past Russ Meyer’s deliciously steamy Lorna and Mudhoney.

I quite enjoyed Swamp Girl but I have a high tolerance for bad low-budget movies. There’s some great location shooting and it’s kind of fun if you’re in the mood. Worth a look if hicksploitation is your thing.

Swamp Country (1966)

Swamp Country, a very low-budget 1966 effort filmed in the swampland of Florida, is a hicksploitation movie but it belongs to that fascinating sub-genre that could perhaps be called swampsploitation. Most were set, and shot, in the Okefenokee Swamp and a better setting for an exploitation movie would be hard to find.

Swamp Country has a couple of plotlines going on, one involving an aspiring country singer and a local gal and the other involving a woman from the city who is sent to a one-horse town on the edge of the swamp for some purpose that I must confess remained something of a mystery to me except that the guys sending her appeared to be mobsters. Before she leaves she is warned to stay off the sauce but of course as soon as she books into a motel she heads straight for a bar and gets thoroughly plastered. She gets back to her motel room and promptly gets strangled.

The poor schmuck in the room next door, a big guy called Dave Wetzel, gets arrested for the murder. There’s not a shred of evidence against him but that doesn’t bother the local sheriff. Wetzel, figuring he hasn’t got a hope of getting justice, escapes. And heads straight for the swamp where of course he has no chance of survival. There isn’t a character in this movie who isn’t as dumb as a rock.

Despite the fact that they have zero evidence against him the sheriff and the townsfolk decide to hunt Dave down and they clearly are not too worried about taking him alive. He’s from the city after all, so he’s probably guilty of something. They have guns and dogs and they’re going to get some sport.

But now we get a surprise twist. It wasn’t so dumb for Dave Wetzel to head for the swamp after all. He just happens to be an expert in jungle survival techniques. Hunting him through the swamp turns out to be more dangerous for the hunters than the hunted. Mostly it’s dangerous because the guys in the posse are incredibly dumb. Dave doesn’t have to kill them. They just get themselves into trouble. It’s as if they’ve lived next door to the swamp all their lives but have no idea of the perils that lurk there. For example they apparently have no idea that there are bears in the swamp.

The hunt through the swamp could have provided some real excitement but suddenly the movie loses interest in it and starts to focus on the romantic triangle between Nora Cox (who lives with her kid sister and alcoholic mother), Sheriff Jim Tanner and would-be country music star Baker Knight. The Sheriff is old enough to be Nora’s dad, or at least that’s what we’re told (actually actress Carolyn Gilbert is much too old to play the role).

This is not just a swampsploitation movie, it’s a musical swampsploitation movie. We get quite a few songs, all of which you’ll want to forget as quickly as possible. Baker Knight plays himself. He really was an aspiring country music star and he really did make the big time. I didn’t like his songs, but your mileage may vary.

The romance sub-plot slows down the action and there’s another sub-plot as well, which has Baker kidnapped by gangsters. There’s an attempt to tie the swamp hunt and romance sub-plots together at the end. The tying together of sub-plots doesn’t work too well but that’s part of the movie’s charm. It has an engaging amateurishness to it. This is regional exploitation cinema which was a big thing at one time. Low-budget movies like this were made purely for regional drive-in markets (where they did good business) and mostly never played markets like New York and LA.

Which means that when judging a movie like this you have to keep in mind the audience at which it was aimed. They loved seeing city folks hunted through swamps, they loved sentimental country music and they loved corny romance.

Bad acting is usually a plus in movies such as this but it has to be the right sort of bad acting. In this case the performances are a bit too wooden. Surprisingly some of these people (like Lyle Waggoner who plays a deputy) went on to have actual careers.

David DaLie (who plays Dave Wetzel) wrote the screenplay. This movie seems to be producer-director Robert Patrick’s sole feature film directing credit. Which is not surprising since it’s a pretty amateurish effort.

Something Weird have paired this one with Swamp Girl in a swamp double-header release. The transfer for Swamp Country isn’t that great. There’s quite a bit of print damage. But then we should be grateful that movies such as this have survived at all.

Swamp Country is a bit of an incoherent mess but devotees of low-budget regional movies will find it has a certain odd charm.

It was shot in colour and in the ‘scope aspect ratio which was unusual for such a low-budget movie at this time.

Some reviews of other swampsploitation and swamp-themed movies that you might be interested in -
The Death Curse of Tartu (1966), 'Gator Bait (1974), Louisiana Hussey (1959), Roger Corman’s Swamp Women (1955), The Swamp of the Ravens (1974).

Russ Meyer’s Lorna (1964) revisited

Russ Meyer’s career falls into a number of well-defined phases, with each apparent change of approach actually bringing him ever closer to his mature style. Meyer had invented the nudie-cutie with The Immoral Mr Teas in 1959 but he soon grew bored, and he also felt that audiences would grow bored. So he abandoned colour for black-and-white and plunged into his redneck gothic/southern gothic phase with Lorna in 1964. Lorna has affinities with the roughies that were becoming increasingly dominant in American sexploitation movies but it would be a mistake to class it as a straightforward roughie. Like all of Meyer’s films, it belongs to a particular and distinctive sub-genre of Meyer’s own invention.

Lorna (played by the gorgeous and awesomely well-endowed Lorna Maitland) is married to Jim. Jim is a real nice guy and Lorna was madly in love with him when they got married but he’s just not very exciting in the bedroom. Not exciting enough to give Lorna the sexual pleasure she craves. Poor Jim doesn’t know anything about what turns women on and he doesn’t even know there’s a problem. He innocently assumes that since he enjoys the sex Lorna must enjoy it as well.

Meyer’s films certainly linked sex and violence and most included at lest one rape scene. That might lead one to think that Meyer was some kind of misogynist, but that’s a conclusion that could only be reached by someone who hasn’t actually watched (or at least understood) his movies. Meyer was always interested in and sympathetic to the female point of view. If only Jim had understood a bit more about women, if only he had understood that Lorna’s perfectly natural needs were not being satisfied, if only just once he had asked her what was wrong, all the subsequent disasters could have been avoided.

Because there are going to be subsequent disasters. 

Jim works at the salt mine with Luther and Jonah. Luther is foul-mouthed and dirty-minded and obsessed with sex. He likes to give the impression that he can get as many women as he wants but it’s perfectly obvious that that is true only in his daydreams. At the opening of the film, he tries it on with a girl named Ruthie. Ruthie is very drunk, but she’s not drunk enough to want to sleep with Luther. Luther reacts with rage and beats her up. This is the first appearance in film of a standard Meyer trope - sexually inadequate men who turn to violence against women. Taken on the whole the men in Meyer’s movies are not a very admirable bunch.

Luther is obsessed with Lorna. In his daydreams Lorna would prefer to be with him than be with Jim. In reality Lorna is hardly even aware of Luther’s existence. 

Then an escaped convict enters the picture. He rapes Lorna and she finally experiences the sexual bliss she craves. Lorna thinks she’s found happiness at last. When she takes him home with her it’s reasonable to assume that events are moving towards a climax that is likely to be unpleasant for all concerned.

This movie marked a major departure for Meyer. His nudie-cuties were essentially plotless collections of humour and/or sexy vignettes. Lorna has a very definite plot. It’s a simple plot, but it’s the execution that is interesting. Lorna is structured like a morality play but the fire-and-brimstone preacher who delivers stinging denunciations of immorality at various points is a sure sign that we’re not supposed to take the morality play aspect at face value. The film is more an attack on moralism than on immorality, although in true exploitation movie style it tries to have it both ways. The preacher introduces another Meyer touch - a character playing the rôle of the Greek chorus, commenting on the events of the film.

While Meyer was a quintessentially American film-maker Lorna owes quite a lot to the European art films of the period (especially Italian neorealism). But this is a European art film made in an entirely American way with an entirely American flavour.

Meyer had not yet evolved his full-blown signature style with the machine-gun editing but Lorna is still very much a Meyer film. It’s superbly shot. Meyer was a bit of a technical perfectionist. The idea that in a low-budget movie it doesn’t matter if the occasional shot is out of focus would have appalled Russ Meyer. He liked his movies to look great, and they invariably do look great. He worked quickly but his compositions are well thought out. I don’t think Meyer would have been capable of filming a poorly composed shot.

For the title rôle Meyer cast an actress named Maria Andre but he was not happy with the choice and at the last minute his wife Eve suggested a girl named Barbara Popejoy. Meyer renamed her Lorna Maitland and she’s one of the main reasons for the movie’s success. Apart from her extraordinary breasts (this is a Russ Meyer film so the subject of breasts cannot be avoided) she is perfect in every way, portraying Lorna as a mix of naïvete and seething sexual desire. 

For reasons connected wth the disposition of his estate Meyer’s films have not yet received the treatment they deserve on home video. Much lesser films have had special editions with audio commentaries and various extras and even Blu-Ray releases. For Meyer’s films we still have to rely on fairly basic DVD releases. The Region 2 release pairs Lorna with the equally interesting follow-up movie, Mudhoney, the second of Meyer’s redneck gothic films. Lorna gets a pretty good transfer.

Lorna is a nasty squalid little movie and it revels in its nastiness and squalor. It’s also stylish and absurdly entertaining. It made truckloads of money (Meyer celebrated by buying himself a brand-new Porsche). It’s one of the landmark sexploitation movies of the 60s and it’s highly recommended.

Louisiana Hussy (1959)

Louisiana Hussy is a 1959 exploitation movie set in the bayou country. In other words it’s a hicksploitation movie.

Pierre (Robert Richards) and Jacques (Peter Coe) Guillot are brothers but the problem is that they both love Lili (Betty Lynn). Lili has chosen Pierre and they’re getting married and Jacques is very very unhappy. Then Callie, an old gris-gris woman, tells Jacques that she’s found a sick child in the swamp. Only this is no child. Minette Lanier (for that is her name), is a very attractive and very well-developed young woman. Very well-developed indeed.

Minette is very reluctant to reveal anything about herself or where she comes from. Her clothes are expensive so it is assumed that she must be rich but she claims to have no home.

It is decided that Minette will stay with Pierre and Lili for a while.

The first thing Minette does is to seduce Pierre. But that doesn’t seem to interest her as a long-term proposition. The houses in this backwater village are tiny and the presence of Pierre’s wife in the house as well is going to cramp her style. So then she seduces Jacques.

Pierre and Jacques (and in fact all the inhabitants of this village known as The Pit) are decent honest people but they know nothing of the dangers of women like Minette. Seducing the brothers is child’s play to her. The way she wiggles that bottom of hers poor Jacques doesn't stand a chance.

Of course things are going to get rather tense between Pierre and Jacques, especially as Minette has convinced Jacques that Pierre tried to seduce her.

The big question is what on earth a woman like Minette Lanier is doing in such a backwater. She is obviously not the type. Not the type at all. Pierre, having decided that whatever else Minette might be she’s a bad woman (and a woman no man including himself could resist), decides to find out her secret before she can lead Jacques to his doom.

Director Lee Sholem worked mostly in television but made a few features as well. He was renowned for never ever going over schedule making him an ideal choice for low-budget material like this.

The acting isn’t great but the performances are mostly fun. Nan Peterson’s performance  as Minette is particularly enjoyable. She oozes sex. She is certainly a convincing hussey.

By the standards of the time this film was probably considered to be rather racy but in 1959 the exploitation movie business was about to be revolutionised by the release of Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr Teas, the first of the genre that became known as nudie-cuties. The nudie-cuties would make movies like Louisiana Hussey seem very tame indeed. It’s fascinating to compare Louisiana Hussey with Meyer’s Lorna, released just three years later. The subject matter and settings of the two films are fairly similar. Lorna has a fair bit of nudity and a great deal of fairly explicit violence. It’s a whole different cinematic world. Of course being a Russ Meyer movie Lorna also has a lot more style and energy.

But Louisiana Hussey has its own charms and it manages to generate a considerable amount of sexual heat. Minette is like an alley cat on heat, but she’s also a ruthless schemer. She uses her sexual power (which she has in abundance) without any scruples at all. She has no difficulty convincing us that she can wrap any man around her finger. Minette is a whole lot of woman.

There is a brief nude swimming scene in Louisiana Hussey but it’s nudity 1959-style - trying to convince the audience they’re seeing something while making sure that mostly they don’t.

The Louisiana bayou setting is one of the film’s big pluses wth some pretty nice location shooting. And in movies the bayous seem to be an ideal setting for sex and sin and madness.

One interesting feature is that the movie doesn’t adopt a mocking tone towards the people of The Pit. They may be a bit out of their depth dealing with a woman like Minette but they’re not stupid and they’re not inbred.

I don’t get to say this very often but the Alpha Video DVD offers a very good transfer indeed. The black-and-white image quality is nice and sharp, contrast is excellent and it looks pleasingly bright without being the slightest bit washed-out. This is definitely one of the company’s better efforts.

And, amazingly, this is an Alpha Video DVD with extras. Yes, extras. There’s a very brief snippet of an interview with Samuel Z. Arkoff plus 15 minutes of nudie shorts (judging by the girls’ hairstyles they date from the 40s to the 60s).

This movie is pure trash but it’s good thoroughly enjoyable trash. If you love bad girl movies (and I’m assuming that everybody does) then Minette is a pretty memorable bad girl and Louisiana Hussey can be highly recommended. And given that it’s a fun movie and the transfer is good and the disc contains some actual extras Alpha Video’s DVD can be unhesitatingly recommended.

Mudhoney (1964)

If you’re only familiar with Russ Meyer from movies like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls or Supervixens then his 1965 movie Mudhoney is going to come as quite a surprise. It has the sudden eruptions of violence that also feature in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! but it’s much darker, and much grimmer. Yes, it has huge-breasted women, and some nudity, and some of the characteristic and rather black and bizarre Russ Meyer humour, but mostly it’s an unrelentingly serious and very disturbing movie. Set in a small town during the Depression, it tells the story of an ex-convict called Calif who takes a job as a farm hand. His employer is a woman named Hannah, who lives on the farm with her kindly father and her violent alcoholic husband. The husband spends most of his time at the local whorehouse. He’s just waiting for dear old dad to die so he can sell the farm from under his wife and take off with the money. When Calif falls in love with Hannah a train of violence and madness is set in motion, partially fuelled by an hysterical and almost certainly insane preacher who has decided that both Hannah and Calif are adulterous spawn of Satan.

This is one of the most savage and uncompromisingly negative portrayals of American small town life in movie history. It has the lot – small-minded townsfolk, a bigoted preacher, mindless violence, drunkenness, lynchings, rape, mob violence and more inbred rednecks than you’ve ever seen in one movie. As usual in a Russ Meyer movie, the most sympathetic characters are the women – there’s Clara Belle, a good-natured and fun-loving whore; her mute sister Eula, also a whore; and Hannah herself, a typical strong and very sexual Meter woman. Apart from Calif, the men are mostly violent or ineffectual or both. Or, in the case of the preacher, crazed as well. To me the movie seems like a classic example of American gothic at its best. Meyer’s satire is rarely subtle, but it’s undeniably effective. Hal Hopper is superb as the drunken husband. It’s a savage little movie that still packs a punch, and I highly recommend it.