Hollywood 90028 (1973)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr Peters’ Pets (1962)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Angelica: The Young Vixen (1970)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Orgy of the Dead (1965)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moonshine Love (1969)

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

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

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

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

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

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

We find out that they’re a close family.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I like the ending. It just seems right.

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

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

Goldilocks and the Three Bares (1963)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.