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.

Run Swinger Run! (1967)

Run Swinger Run! is a 1967 sexploitation feature written, produced and directed by Barry Mahon. 

This one falls into the roughie sub-genre but it’s rather sedate as roughies go.

It opens with a beautiful almost naked girl lazing by the pool. A gunman takes a shot at her. She flees.

Her name is Laura. She makes her escape and on the highway she gets a lift from a respectable-looking guy named Mike. Laura tells Mike the sad story that led her to being on the run. Most of the movie takes the form of an extended flashback.

It all started a few years earlier when her mother had to take in boarders. One of the boarders, a sleazy middle-aged guy, forces himself on her. This leads her to a shocking and very upsetting discovery. She really enjoys sex. Laura has discovered that she is a Bad Girl.

She leaves home and arrives in LA hoping that her friend Mary would take her in. Unfortunately Mary is part of a dope-pushing ring. Laura isn’t going to have anything to do with that. Once again she has to flee.

In a bar another middle-aged man, named Schneider, offers her a proposition. She could earn a thousand dollars a week. Laura isn’t a sweet young innocent. She figures the job means working as a prostitute. That doesn’t bother her too much.

She’d have been more worried if she’d known Schneider was a gangster and working for a really big-time gangster. She’d also have been more worried if she’d known what happened to her predecessor. Schneider’s girls are in practice slaves. They sign contracts for several years assuming that at the end of that time they will be free. That is a very optimistic assumption. And a very unrealistic assumption. Once they have worked for Schneider they know way too much abut his organisation.

This is a lot more than a prostitution racket. It’s much more dangerous than that. Gun-running is involved.

Laura starts to think that it’s about time to flee once again, but this time it won’t be so easy.

What’s unusual about this movie (by the standards of the roughie sub-genre) is that it has a pretty decent, and pretty coherent, plot. In fact it could have been the basis for a fine thriller. But this is a sexploitation movie so the plot is essentially a device to have young ladies in situations where they will take their clothes off.

The problem is that the execution is rather stodgy and clunky. The crude sets (in fact it’s most likely the movie was shot in someone’s house) don’t help. You can’t entirely blame Barry Mahon for this. Movies like this were made on minuscule budgets with incredibly tight shooting schedules. There was neither the time nor the money to attempt ambitious visual set-pieces.

Even labouring under such constraints some sexploitation directors could make lively fun movies. They did this by adding a certain amount of craziness. Mahon doesn’t do this. He was clearly content just to get the movie shot as quickly and as long as it contained the requisite exploitation elements it would make money. The aim was to make money, not art.

And the exploitation elements are certainly there. There are lots of very attractive young women who spend most of the movie almost naked. This was 1967 so there’s no frontal nudity. There is however an abundance of bare breasts.

Despite what some silly online reviewers will tell you this is a movie that is almost entirely lacking in sleaze and scuzziness. Extraordinarily this film has some online reviewers clutching their pearls. People these days seem to live incredibly sheltered lives.

The lack of sleaze and scuzziness is in fact the main problem here. Run Swinger Run! is just much too tame, and was ridiculously tame even in 1967. It's still moderately entertaining.

This movie was released on one of the old Something Weird double-header DVDs, paired with Sex Club International. Run Swinger Run! gets a decent enough transfer. The movie was shot in black-and-white and the 1.37:P1 aspect ratio is quite correct.

Sinthia: The Devil's Doll (1970)

Sinthia: The Devil's Doll is a 1970 sexploitation feature that promises sex and satanism but delivers something else entirely, something much weirder.

It was directed by Ray Dennis Steckler so you expect an incoherent mess. That’s what you get, but in its own way this movie works remarkably well. Its incoherence becomes a feature rather than a bug.

Cynthia (who becomes Sinthia in her nightmates) is a young woman aged around twenty who has been undergoing therapy. At the age of twelve she murdered both her parents. Due to her age she was not convicted but she did have to undergo therapy. Now her psychiatrist thinks she’s almost cured. There’s just one more step she has to take. It’s the step that will end her disturbing nightmares.

This is a movie that jumbles dreams, fantasies, memories and hallucinations in a wild cocktail. We don’t know where reality leaves off and her dreams begin, because Sinthia herself does not know. We are in effect seeing everything from within the mind of a very disturbed young woman.

Characters seem to change places with each other, because that’s what happens in dreams. Situations merge into other situations, because that’s what happens in dreams. Some of the things we see are Sinthia’s memories, but they may not be reliable. She has gone over certain events in her mind so many times that she can no longer be certain exactly what happened.

Sinthia saw her father having sex with her mother (or possibly her stepmother). Sinthia went crazy with jealousy at the thought that her mother was going to steal Daddy away from her. It’s not unusual for a child to feel possessive towards a parent but there are very definite sexual overtones to her feelings for her daddy.

The problem is that Sinthia was at that age when a girl first starts to become aware of sex and love. Sinthia is clearly bewildered and frightened by her sexual feelings.

After leaving the psychiatrist’s office the 20-year-old Sinthia meets an artist, Lenny. He wants to paint her. She meets several women who seem to take an unusual interest in her.

Lenny takes her to a play. Sinthia takes the play much too seriously and interrupts the performance. This is a play within a film but it could be a play within a dream within a film.

Sinthia may be falling in love with Lenny.

We cannot be sure of the reality of anything that takes place outside the psychiatrist’s office. Some of it might be real. It’s possible that all of it takes place entirely within Sinthia’s mind.

A lot of movies have tried this sort of thing - mixing dream and reality in such a way that the viewer cannot be certain which is which. This movie does it fairly successfully. In fact more successfully than some much more expensive and much more prestigious films.

This movie really does have an incredibly authentic dream feel. Steckler achieves this without fancy special effects (this was an ultra low budget movie) - he uses camera angles, filters, simple superimpositions and rapid-fire editing. Today it would be achieved by spending millions on CGI and the results would almost certainly be less disturbing and less disorienting. You don’t need money, you need imagination and confidence.

It would be easy to take cheap shots at the acting. On the whole it’s very amateurish. That also becomes a feature rather than a bug. These people could be real people, or just characters in a dream, or real people transformed in Sinthia’s mind into dream characters. Sinthia herself could be a character in her own dream. More polished naturalistic performance would have weakened the spooky dream feel.

There’s no actual satanism, although Sinthia does have nightmares about being claimed by the Devil for her wickedness.

There’s a huge amount of nudity, but this is a story all about sex. All of Sinthia’s fears and guilts, and all of her dreams and fantasies, come back to sex. Surprisingly, given subject matter that would terrify a filmmaker of today, the movie doesn’t feel sleazy. It doesn’t even feel exploitative. It is honest and open about sexual feelings, and that in itself would have filmmakers of today running for cover.

This is a sexploitation movie with at least some serious purpose and with some arty pretensions.

What makes it worth seeing is that Steckler has no real idea of what he’s doing. As I said at the beginning it’s an incoherent mess but it fails in such interesting ways. Its faults (directorial ineptitude and terrible acting) end up making it feel like a genuine nightmare. Nightmares don’t make sense. They don’t mean anything. They’re just there. A more competent director would have taken this material and turned it into something intelligent and provocative. But that wouldn’t have worked. A nightmare is like a horror movie directed by an insane child. They couldn’t find an insane child to direct this movie but they found Ray Dennis Steckler which is the next best thing.

So many sexploitation movies survive in the form of a single release print often in very poor condition. That’s clearly the case here. Don’t expect a pristine transfer, just be grateful that such a fascinating oddity survived at all.

Something Weird paired this one with Satanis: The Devil’s Mass on a double-feature DVD that is now hard to find. It’s also available on Blu-Ray from Severin in a Ray Dennis Steckler boxed set.

Sinthia: The Devil's Doll is weird but it’s weird in a really interesting way and it’s highly recommended.

A Night in Hollywood (1953)

A Night in Hollywood is a 1953 burlesque movie.

This was an odd genre. These were actual burlesque shows, filmed in actual burlesque theatres but without an audience present (presumably because that would have caused major sound recording problems). They’re a chance to see what classical burlesque was really like. Burlesque was a mix of songs, comedy sketches and strip-tease routines.

The songs were usually terrible. The comedy was invariably atrocious. This was the so-called ”baggy pants” style of comedy and it’s an ordeal to sit through. There was only ever one reason for seeing a burlesque show (or a burlesque movie) - the strippers. Fortunately the strip-tease artistes were often excellent.

How much the girls could reveal varied from city to city and varied over time. In some cases the moment the girl took her dress off the police would move in and arrest everybody, in order to protect America from the mortal danger posed by half-clad women. In other cases the girl could strip down to a G-string and pasties. In rare cases they might get away with losing the pasties. They generally took off as much as they could get away with.

Since the girls were not naked they had to rely on provocative dancing to generate the necessary erotic heat. The things some of these girls could do with their hips and their posteriors can only inspire awe. These women played the female body like a musical instrument.

By 1953 when this film was shot burlesque was almost dead. Strip-tease would survive but old-time burlesque finally succumbed to the twin challenges of legal persecution and the rise of new forms of erotic entertainment. That makes watching the burlesque movies (mostly filmed between the very late 1940s and the early 50s) a rather poignant experience.

Nothing seems to be known about where this particular movie was shot. The fact that it’s partly in black-and-white and partly in colour suggests it was filmed on two separate occasions, possibly in different burlesque theatres.

It’s notable mainly for featuring two of the legendary burlesque queens, Misty Ayres and Tempest Storm. There are half-a-dozen strip-tease routines. Tempest Storm’s routine is by far the most daring.

My advice is to fast-forward through the songs and the comedy.

These movies do have enormous historical interest. This is a fascinating uniquely American art form now totally extinct.

Modern attempts to revive burlesque can never work because classical strip-tease relies on the tease. It relies on the fact that at a particular historical moment seeing pretty girls in very very skimpy costumes was a genuine erotic thrill. I have no moral problems with strip shows in which the girls take everything off but if the strippers end up fully nude it’s not burlesque. It’s no longer a tease. It has become something different. Not necessarily better or worse, but different.

A Night in Hollywood is perhaps worth seeing for Tempest Storm but there are better burlesque movies.

This movie is included in Something Weird’s six-movie DVD set Strip Strip Hooray. I’d recommend some of the other movies in this set such as Everybody’s Girl (1950), Midnight Frolics (1949), B Girl Rhapsody (1952) and French Follies (1951) much more highly than this one. Image quality is acceptable.

Sinderella and the Golden Bra (1964)

Sinderella and the Golden Bra is a 1964 nudie-cutie and it also belongs to a rather small sub-genre, the nudie musical.

It has what seems like a perfect setup for a nudie-cutie. It’s the Cinderella story, but when our heroine flees the masked ball she doesn’t leave behind her glass slipper but her bra. A golden bra. So in order to find the mysterious girl whom the price hopes to marry the kingdom has to be searched for a maiden possessing the physical attributes that will perfectly fill out that golden bra. It’s exactly the sort of naughty but goofy concept you want for a movie such as this. Honestly, with that setup you can’t go wrong. But surprisingly this movie does go wrong, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment.

The prince is a dreamy lad and his father feels that his son needs to be married off as soon as possible. A masked ball to which every young lady in the kingdom will be invited seems like the answer. Somewhere in this land there has to be a girl capable of arousing the prince’s interest.

The problem is that he already knows which girl he wants to marry - the one he keeps dreaming about.

The king is really much more interested in his knitting than in his son’s romantic problems. The idea of a king devoting himself to knitting is mildly amusing at first but it wears thin real fast.

Derella (Suzanne Sybele) is of course the step-sister of two awful girls, Flossy and Fanny. Both they and their mother treat Derella with contempt. Derella is beautiful but no-one has noticed.

Instead of a fairy godmother she has a fairy godfather who does the magic stuff with pumpkins to get Derella to the ball. He’s well-meaning but he’s a drunk and he’s been a failure as a fairy godfather.

Derella flees from the ball at the stroke of midnight, minus her bra. The rest of the movie follows the basic fairy tale story.

Now, as to what went wrong. Firstly, the songs are rather lacklustre. Secondly, the jokes are rather feeble. The biggest problem however is that by 1964 nudie-cutie standards it’s ridiculously tame. We get a few very brief glimpses of bare breasts. Given that the musical and comedy elements are not up to scratch the movie could still have been saved had it been made genuinely titillating. But it isn’t. And we spend the whole movie expecting that we will see Derella’s presumably impressive bust but all we get is a brief flash. Given that Suzanne Sybele isn’t much of a singer or actress you have to wonder why she was cast if she wasn’t willing to show a bit more skin.

Of course it’s probable that the print that Something Weird found is the only surviving print and it is possible that it was cut at some stage. But it gives the impression that it really was simply a very tame film.

The print is certainly in very poor condition. There’s a lot of print damage.

Sinderella and the Golden Bra is good-natured and inoffensive but doesn’t quite make it. It is mildly interesting if you’re into nudie fairy tales.

Something Weird paired this film on DVD with H.G. Lewis’s Goldilocks and the Three Bares which I am yet to watch. There are of course also the assorted short subjects you expect from Something Weird.

Some online reviews will tell you that this is one of only two known nudie musicals. That is utter nonsense. There have been quite a few, several of which are in fact extremely good.

The First Nudie Musical (1976) is inspired sexy craziness and I highly recommend it. And the 1977 Cinderella (AKA The Other Cinderella) is an example of how to do a nudie musical fairy tale properly. It’s very sexy and very crazy and the songs are a riot.

Satanis: The Devil's Mass (1970)

Satanis: The Devil's Mass is a 1970 documentary on Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan, formed by LaVey in the late 60s.

LaVey is a fascinating figure who really belongs more to the history of American pop culture than to the history of occultism. He claimed to have been a former circus lion tamer and to have had an affair with Marilyn Monroe, both claims being dubious. LaVey was a musician and released several albums.

LaVey was reasonably well read in esoteric literature but seems to have been more heavily influenced by weird fiction writers such as H.P. Lovecraft.

Overall LaVey comes across in the interviews in this film as a born showman and a rather genial charming man. He had charisma but it was the charisma of a show business impresario rather than of a cult leader.

His actual teachings come down to not a great deal more than life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (as found in that notorious satanic text the United States Declaration of Independence).

At the time the film was made the Church of Satan’s headquarters was still the famous Black House in San Francisco.

There was at this time a media obsession (in the U.S. but especially in Britain) with witchcraft in suburbia. Journalists, being journalists, neither understood nor cared that satanism and witchcraft were not necessarily the same thing. The most scandalous thing about both satanists and witches was of course that they apparently had sex. And that the women took their clothes off.

LaVey may well have been both a showman and quite sincere in his religious beliefs. That’s the case with many cult leaders.

LaVey’s concept of satanism has little to do with evil. In fact he disapproved of many white magicians on ethical grounds. He intensely disliked the idea of sacrificing animals and this was never done in his Church of Satan. He saw Satan as an oppositional figure, a figure representing freedom as opposed to the rigid moral riles of Christianity, rather than a figure of evil. He was particularly keen on the idea of sexual freedom. His ideas were not wildly different from those held by many counter-culture figures of that period.

There are interviews with many of his closest aides and with his wife of the time and his daughter. His followers actually seem saner than most hippies of that era, and there is at least some coherence to their beliefs.

Of course Satanis: The Devil's Mass’s main selling point was the Black Mass, and the nudity (of which there’s quite a bit). It’s all rather theatrical but there’s common enough in plenty of religious sects.

The interviews with LaVey’s neighbours are amusing. One old guy reveals the true evils to which satanism leads - satanists don’t mow their lawns regularly. Another neighbour describes him as a very nice man. On the whole he appears to have been regarded as entirely harmless. Which of course he was.

This one was released on a Something Weird double-header DVD some years ago, paired with Ray Dennis Steckler’s Sinthia: The Devil's Doll. It has to be said that the transfer of Satanis: The Devil's Mass is pretty rough. One assumes that the surviving print was in poor shape. It was clearly shot on a very low budget so it probably never looked particularly great.

Satanis: The Devil's Mass is a fascinating look at both a religious and pop cultural phenomenon of a particular time period. For those reasons it’s well worth seeing. Recommended.

Australia After Dark (1976)

Australia After Dark is a 1976 ozploitation/sexploitation feature which belongs to the weird and wonderful mondo film genre.

The mondo film, which began in Italy in 1962 with Mondo Cane, was very much an artifact of the 1960s. A mondo film is a pseudo-documentary focusing on brief looks at weird and sensational things, with some genuine footage and some faked footage. It’s a genre that hasn’t aged well. The mondo sex film is a curious sub-genre of a curious genre and Australia After Dark is such a film.

Being a mondo film means that there’s no plot at all. And since each segment only runs a couple of minutes there’s absolutely zero narrative anywhere. The connections between the segments are tenuous at best but mostly non-existent. There are no thematic connections. But that’s how mondo films are. Insofar as they have an appeal it lies in the fact that you have absolutely no idea what to expect next.

It was the nudity that was going to sell the movie (and in fact did sell it) and there’s an immense amount of frontal nudity. On the other hand a mondo film is supposed to cover a huge range of sensational or weird subjects so the sexy segments are interspersed with odd sensational stuff.

Director John D. Lamond always had an eye on international markets so there’s lots of Australiana (especially stuff dealing with the Outback) which would have bored Australian viewers to tears but would have seemed exotic to overseas audiences.

And you know that the boring segments will be over in a minute or two and we’ll be back to nude women. Lamond really did understand what sells.

The challenge of course is to find dozens of different ways to get attractive young women out of their clothes. Lamond is up to the challenge. Girls trying on bikinis. Nude bathing on the Barrier Reef. Clothing fetishism. Food fetishism. Nude scuba diving. A gentleman’s club that offer lovely handmaidens for stressed businessmen. Painters using nude women as their canvases.

No movie such as this would be complete without a witchcraft in the modern world segment. Here we get two - white magic and black magic. Fortunately both kinds of magic require beautiful young ladies to get naked. If you can’t attract an audience with nude witches you’re just not cut out to be a filmmaker.

There are also UFO cultists and they’re always fun. These ones are so crazy it takes one’s breath away. There are hippies. And there’s an insane entertainer who is insane in ways you never imagined were possible. You might be wondering if the Chariots of the Gods craze gets a mention. It does. Yes, ancient astronauts.

People today believe just as many crazy things as people in the 70s (people in every generation believe different crazy things) but the crazy things people believed in then were totally different, and more fun.

This movie’s appeal at the time was obviously the copious quantities of nudity. Today it’s a fascinating time capsule. It’s so very very 1970s. Guys with long hair. Women with hair, well you know where women had hair back then. 70s fashions. 70s cultural attitudes guaranteed to make twenty-somethings of today burst into tears. 1970s Sydney street scenes. Sydney’s notorious red-light district, King’s Cross, in all its seedy sleazy 70s glory. Surfer’s Paradise in the 70s. And that attitude to sex - that it was naughty but lots of fun.

No mondo film was ever meant to be taken seriously and this one is no exception. There’s some obviously genuine footage and plenty of obviously staged footage.

Lamond went on to make the best of all Emmanuelle clones, Felicity, in 1978.

I’d love to be able to report that there’s a fully restored special edition Blu-Ray but sadly that hasn’t happened. Your best bet is the old Umbrella Entertainment DVD double feature which also includes Lamond’s 1978 follow-up, The ABC of Love and Sex Australian Style (this DVD is still available). The transfer is letterboxed and not fantastic but this is the kind of movie that is more fun to watch if the print looks a bit scuzzy.

That time capsule element is certainly the reason to see this film. It’s just like being back in the 70s! If that appeals to you you’ll enjoy Australia After Dark.

The idea of a mondo film focused on sex was not exactly original back in 1976. British filmmakers Arnold L. Miller and Stanley A. Long made several in the 60s, beginning with West End Jungle (1961) and continuing with London in the Raw (1965), Primitive London (1965). Their sexy mondo films are actually quite entertaining.

The Dirty Dolls (1973)

The Dirty Dolls is a very obscure 1976 softcore sexploitation crime thriller film which has been released by the American Genre Film Archive (paired with Things To Come) in their Smut Without Smut series on Blu-Ray.

Smut Without Smut may be the silliest idea in the history of home video. The idea was to take X-Rated movies and chop out all the naughty bits. Perhaps their next project will be Thrillers Without Thrills, or Comedies Without Comedy.

At least they had the decency and just enough intelligence to include the uncut versions on the Blu-Ray as well. I watched the uncut version so that’s the version I’m reviewing.

Johnny leads a gang of desperate armed robbers. There’s Johnny, and five hot babes including his sister Dee Dee.

And one of the babes, Sherry, is played by sexploitation legend Sharon Kelly! Sharon Kelly started out as a go-go dancer, made a major splash in softcore and later moved into hardcore.

They’re not the world’s smartest or most efficient criminals. They kill someone in a bar heist. Then they move on to something much more ambitious, stealing uncut diamonds from a diamond exchange. They find themselves having to take two hostages and then they don’t know what to do with them. And maybe they can’t unload those diamonds. Johnny is out of his depth. He’s small-time and definitely not cut out for the big time.

The bar heist is fun. The girls are masquerading as missionaries collecting money for their church. Only they collect the money at gunpoint. They’ve found that this stimulates people to give more generously.

The problem they face in the diamond heist is that the diamonds are in an attache case chained to the wrist of a security guy. They have to take him along with them. And they run into a witness in the lift. They have to take her along as well.

There are already tensions in the gang. Johnny is sleeping with all of his girls. Except for Dee Dee, although he and Dee Dee are very close. Dee Dee is worried that things are getting out of hand.

The female hostage is rich and stuck-up and treats Johnny with contempt. Two of the girls decide to have some fun with her. They’ll subject her to some sapphic loving, and since they’ve handcuffed her she doesn’t have any choice in the matter. She is naturally outraged but the girls are persuasive and Sherry is impressed. For a beginner this lady can give a girl a surprising amount of pleasure.

Sherry also persuades the captive security guy to pleasure her. He’s tied up but the parts of him that are of interest to Sherry are easily accessible. Sherry has a very nice time, and she thinks he has such nice eyes.

The relationship between Johnny and his sister will also develop in an interesting way. This is the real heart of the movie and it works better in the uncut version because it needs to have a real impact. It needs to be a gut punch. I’ve watched the butchered version and it doesn’t quite have the impact and the shock value required. It works better in the uncut version because you get a sense of erotic desperation and lust out of control. The uncut version adds a slightly more disturbing touch as well, with the suggestion that Johnny’s suspicions about Dee Dee’s feelings might not be entirely wrong.

Chopping out all the sex scenes in this movie really is an insane thing to do. The butchered version runs for a mere 49 minutes. This is a sex movie. That’s what it’s all about. Yes, there’s a rudimentary crime plot but it’s lust that drives the plot and it’s the sleaziness and depravity and out-of-control unhealthy sexual desperation that provides all of the character motivations. The sex scenes are softcore but very raunchy and steamy and sweaty. Take out the sex and you have a ridiculously short second-rate ultra-cheap boring crime movie. With the sex it’s a wild crazy roller-coaster ride of sex and crime. It’s dirty and sleazy because it needs to be dirty and sleazy.

And this is a Sharon Kelly movie. She is quite a good actress and she’s cute and charming and amusing but people watch a Sharon Kelly movie to see her take her clothes off and get down to some bedroom action. That’s because once she’s naked she’s even cuter and more charming and more amusing and she sends the eroticism levels through the ceiling.

The sex is strictly softcore.

This movie is not in great condition. There’s a lot of print damage. That’s a feature rather than a bug. It makes the movie feel grimy and dirty, which is as it should be.

Don’t bother with the hacked-to-pieces cleaned-up let’s-not-offend-anybody version. In its uncut form The Dirty Dolls is a delightfully nasty, violent and scuzzy exploitation movie and it’s highly recommended.

Things To Come (1976)

Things To Come is a very obscure 1976 softcore sex science fiction film which has been released by the American Genre Film Archive (paired with The Dirty Dolls) in their Smut Without Smut series on Blu-Ray.

Smut Without Smut may be the most senseless idea in the history of home video. The idea was to take X-Rated movies and chop out all the X-Rated bits. I know, it’s a bit like taking comedy movies and chopping out all the jokes. I did get the impression from the commentary track by the AGFA team that there was a bit of an ideological agenda behind the Smut Without Smut project.

They did at least show some faint glimmerings of intelligence by including the uncut versions on the Blu-Ray as well.

I watched the uncut version so that’s the version I’m reviewing. Having also sat through the irritating audio commentary to the non-naughty version I can say that I’ve seen both versions.

OK, back to the movie. This is a story that takes place in a dystopian future. It’s a soft totalitarianism in which the population is controlled by television. So it’s basically the world we have now but with TV rather than the internet as the method of social control. The TV shows endless sex and violence because that calms people down.

One thing that is interesting is that the movie doesn’t get ideological. It doesn’t have an actual ideological axe to grind. The subject is social control by means of technology. What the ideological purpose behind the social control might be is never specified because it’s irrelevant.

Julie (Barbara Fisk) is the heroine and she’s dissatisfied by her marriage. Her husband just watches TV all day.

Julie is involved with a terrorist group who plan to blow up the government’s super-computer.

Julie wins the lottery. The prize is a week in the Pleasure Dome, where every fantasy can be lived out. The idea is obviously lifted from Westworld.

Julie doesn’t have much fun. The leisure activities are much too violent for her. These include killer-cross - moto-cross but with motorcycle riders hunting down female victims. Once it’s explained to her that the victims are just robots it doesn’t bother her so much. And when she later kills a security guard she feels no qualms about it at all. He was just a robot. A machine.

Of course the Pleasure Dome turns out to be not quite what it appears to be.

There are obvious borrowings from various other science fiction movies and TV series (such as Death Race 2000 and Nigel Kneale’s superb TV play Year of the Sex Olympics).

The plot might not be dazzlingly original but it’s perfectly serviceable and while the ending might not come as a huge surprise it’s effective enough.

OK, back to the smut. The X-Rated material is very mild simulated sex plus a lot of nudity. Yes, there is a lot of frontal nudity. If you’re terrified of the female body maybe you should play safe and just stick to children’s cartoons. There does seem to be some doubt about the original intentions of the filmmakers, as to whether some of the softcore material was added later, and whether the filmmakers approved or disapproved of this.

I think the movie makes much less sense without the softcore stuff. The sex stuff makes it clearer that this is a society in which sex and violence are used as social pacifiers. The scene with Julie and her husband watching TV has a lot more impact when we see the sex stuff on the TV. It makes the couple’s reactions a lot more interesting. There’s a very early scene which apparently had the AGFA team heading for the fainting couches. In fact it works really well. The sudden twist in which the poor innocent victim reveals that she’s just an actress and she’s treated the whole thing as a joke helps to make the point of the movie and adds an interesting multiple voyeurism - we’re watching a couple who are watching something but what they’re watching is not what it seems to be. And the viewer is immediately drawn into the voyeurism.

Very little is known about this movie. No-one knows anything about the producer-director, Derek Ford, or the writer, Michael Greenwood. It seems to have been financed by some guys with a background in hardcore. It’s impossible to say whether Ford knew the extra sex stuff was going to be added. When you watch the non-naughty Smut Without Smut version what you have is at best a cheap knock-off of a number of well-known sci-fi movies. I imagine that it was obvious that it was unreleasable. It’s not terrible but it’s just not interesting enough to have worked as a serious art film at the time, and it’s too tame to have succeeded as an exploitation movie. The decision to add the extra sex footage was quite sensible. It turned it into an intriguing exploration of social control through vicarious artificial pleasures. Rather than just being a cheapo Westworld it becomes an interesting riff on Huxley’s Brave New World.

And regarded in that light it’s not too bad. The ideas might not be original but they’re good ideas, and they might not be explored in profound depth but they are explored. I enjoyed it more than I expected to and it’s worth a recommend rating.

What’s interesting is that for decades this was thought be be a lost movie, until AGFA discovered they had had a complete print (in fairly good condition) sitting in their archive.