2017 cult movie highlights

A lot of my cult movie watching highlights in 2017 seemed to be re-watches of old favourites.

Like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) which gets better with each viewing.

And much the same can be said for Forbidden Planet(1956).

Dracula’s Daughter (1936) also stands up remarkably well to repeat viewings.

As for movies I hadn’t seen before, Hammer’s sci-fi horror effort Quatermass II (1957) was particularly good.

While The Black Raven (1943) is a very fine Old Dark House-style movie.

If you want sexploitation with some actual emotional depth then Joe Sarno’s Daddy, Darling (1970) could be just what you’re after.

Felicity (1978) is an Australia Emmanuelle rip-off that is quite a bit better than the film it's ripping off.

And Career Bed (1969) has all the outrageousness you could desire in an American sexploitation flick.

Goodbye Emmanuelle (1977)

Goodbye Emmanuelle (later retitled Emmanuelle 3) was the third of the official Emmanuelle movies. It was also intended by Sylvia Kristel to be her last appearance in the role (although that proved to be not quite the case).

Goodbye Emmanuelle came out in 1977, two years after Emmanuelle 2, and it marks a significant departure for the series. The first thing that is noticeable is that the simulated sex scenes are much briefer, and much tamer, than those in the previous two films. They’re very tame indeed compared to those in the very steamy Emmanuelle 2.

Even more startling is a dramatic change in tone. Goodbye Emmanuelle tries to be a serious look at the actual consequences of the sexual revolution that the first two movies celebrated with such enthusiasm. Whether it succeeds or not is a matter of opinion but director François Leterrier certainly seemed to have his own ideas on the direction in which the series should go.

Emmanuelle (Sylvia Kristel) and her architect husband Jean (Umberto Orsini) are now living in the Seychelles. There’s not much to do there other than have sex but luckily that’s all that Emmanuelle and Jean are interested in doing.

They still have their open marriage and of course they’re blissfully happy because how could you not be happy if you’ve overcome all those silly antiquated notions like jealousy and possessiveness? Emmanuelle and Jean are a liberated couple and being liberated is the key to happiness. And yet there are signs that perhaps Emmanuelle is not quite as happy as she should be. She is starting to suspect that men treat her like she’s a whore. She’s even starting to suspect that they may have some justification for doing so. She’s finding that maybe jealousy isn’t so easy to leave behind. And she’s starting to wonder if a husband who enjoys watching his wife have sex with other men (and women) might not be much of a husband. He might not even be much of a man. Could it be that she has discovered that sexual freedom comes at a price? And that maybe the price is too high?

Some of Emmanuelle’s friends are also discovering that sexual freedom has its downside. One even suggests to our heroine that the problem with sexual liberation is that one day you get old.

This all comes to a head when she meets handsome sensitive film-maker Grégory (Jean-Pierre Bouvier). She’s attracted to him so naturally the first thing she does when they meet is to perform oral sex on him. Curiously enough this doesn’t seem to make him like her, or respect her. Emmanuelle is very confused by this.

In fact everything about Grégory confuses and disturbs Emmanuelle. He has quaint old-fashioned ideas about love and sex. He even believes it’s only possible to love one person at a time! He thinks jealousy is normal and natural. He thinks there is more to love than just having sex. He doesn’t believe in orgies or threesomes. This guy is seriously weird. The worst thing is, she can’t stop thinking about him. She wants him desperately. She doesn’t just want to have sex with him, she wants to be with him. You know, walking hand-in-hand along the beach and all that outdated romance stuff.

Emmanuelle is, for the first time in her life, falling in love. She’s also learning that other people actually have feelings (something of which she was entirely unaware).

Of course this means that Sylvia Kristel has to do a bit more serious acting than in the previous Emmanuelle films, and she does give a more complex performance that suggests that Emmanuelle might have some actual depth to her character.

The fact that this movie has some serious ambitions isn’t the problem. There’s no reason why you can’t make a serious movie about sex. The problem is that for the story to work, really work effectively, there needs to be a much more intense erotic charge in the developing relationship between Emmanuelle and Grégory. We need to be convinced that for Emmanuelle sex with someone she cares about really is a whole lot better than the empty meaningless sex she’s had before. The sex with Grégory needs to mean something, but that erotic charge just isn’t there and the emotional intensity isn’t really there either. It’s not that the sex scenes need to be more explicit - they just need to be more intense and more passionate.

As director François Leterrier knows how to use the exotic location and how to give the movie the lush look that was the Emmanuelle trademark. Unfortunately he shows no flair for the erotic, which is a bit of a problem when you’re making an erotic movie. He deserves credit for trying to explore the emotional ramifications of Emmanuelle’s lifestyle but overall the movie is just a bit on the dull side. When you have Sylvia Kristel as your star and she spends a good deal of her screen time naked and your movie is still dull you’ve definitely done something wrong.

The Region 4 DVD offers a pretty good transfer, with negligible extras.

Goodbye Emmanuelle is an interesting experiment that had real potential. As an erotic movie it is however decidedly limp. Possibly worth seeing if you’re a Sylvia Kristel completist but it’s difficult to recommend this one wholeheartedly.

Sting of Death (1965)

Sting of Death, released in 1965, was the first horror movie made by low-budget Florida film-maker William Grefé (although he’d made a couple of race car movies prior to that). It was shot on location in the Everglades and like his next film, Death Curse of Tartu, it makes great use of the setting.

Dr Richardson (Jack Nagle) is a marine biologist. He has his own laboratory and a pretty fancy house complete with pool. His chief assistant is the young Dr John Hoyt (Joe Morrison) but he also gets help from his daughter Karen (Valerie Hawkins) and the slightly scary Egon (John Vella). Egon has a fairly severe facial disfigurement which we surmise was the result of an encounter with some very unfriendly marine creature. Egon has a bit of an obsession with the Portuguese man-of-war so that may have the creature responsible. Egon is hyper-sensitive about his appearance.

Egon also clearly has a bit of a crush on Karen. Possibly more than just a crush.

Grefé certainly understood pacing. He opens the movie with a major scare, with a beautiful young woman attacked by an aquatic monster. Then he slows things down and for the next half-hour it seems like we’re watching a beach party movie. It’s all girls, dancing, pop music and lightheartedness but Grefé makes sure we don’t entirely forget that there’s some mysterious and terrifying danger out there. Then he kicks the horror into high gear with a couple of impressive (considering the small budget) terror set-pieces.

The beach party elements come from the fact that Dr Hoyt has thrown a party for Karen and her friends who are spending their spring vacation at Dr Richardson’s place. Dr Hoyt has invited a bunch of kids from a nearby college. Hence the dancing and the pop music (supplied by Neil Sedaka who was a pretty big pop star at the time). It’s also a chance to have lots of scantily-clad babes dancing. There’s virtually no nudity in this film (apart from a brief shower scene) but there’s no shortage of eye candy. And it’s amazing how often the camera seems to zero in on the posteriors of the young ladies.

The sudden switch to outright horror is handled effectively and then the tension gets ratcheted up. We get a classic horror movie scenario. There’s a terrifying monster out there. We have a bunch of people isolated in a house and they’re out of contact with the outside world because the radio has, mysteriously, been smashed. There are only two men, they are armed only with revolvers, and they have a houseful of frightened teenage girls to protect. Worst of all, they can only guess at the nature of the menace they’re facing.

In fact the alert viewer might already have his suspicions as to the nature of the threat. The average sea-monster is unlikely to have the foresight to put the radio out of action before striking. Actually I suspect that Grefé intends us to guess the nature of the mystery right from the start and it actually makes things scarier.

Some facts just have to be faced squarely. The acting is awful. Absolutely awful. It doesn’t really matter since this can hardly be described as a character-driven movie and the characters are in any case pretty much stereotypes - the slightly eccentric older scientist, the hunky and brave young scientist, the beautiful and virtuous daughter, etc.

It has to be said that most of the young people in this movie are pretty unpleasant. They’re shallow and they’re thoughtlessly cruel. The one exception is Karen. She’s the nice girl. Not quite as pretty as some of the other girls but pretty enough and she has a sense of responsibility and an awareness of, and a dislike for, cruelty. The irony is that her caring ends up being more cruel than outright cruelty.

Grefé also includes some decent underwater sequences which is fairly ambitious for a zero-budget movie. The monster effects are mostly good although the head is a bit of a worry.

The formula established in this movie worked well so Grefé pretty much stuck to it for Death Curse of Tartu as well.

There are some definite hints of Beauty and the Beast here.

Something Weird paired this one with Grefé’s 1966 Death Curse of Tartu (also an entertaining flick) and of course they included plenty of extras including audio commentaries for both movies, the commentaries being done by Grefé himself. He’s a very amusing guy and these are well worth the listen. Somehow Something Weird managed to locate the original negative of Sting of Death and the transfer is superb. The colours are vivid and the image quality is absolutely top-notch.

Sting of Death is lots of low-budget horror fun. This is a great double-feature release. Highly recommended.

Olga's Dance Hall Girls (1969)

Olga's Dance Hall Girls was the fifth and last of the infamous Olga films, although it’s claim to be an actual Olga film can be debated.

The Olga series began in 1964. They were not quite roughies although with many obvious similarities to that sleazy little sub-genre. The Olga films upped the ante on the sado-masochism front with wall-to-wall torture scenes. Had it been possible to take these movies seriously they would have been very strong stuff indeed. In fact it was not possible to take them the least bit seriously. Their camp quotient was off the scale. That is their charm (if you happen to be an Olga fan). Their outrageousness is so excessive as to be almost cartoon-like. Director Joseph Mawra made the formula work rather well but what really made the Olga movies so appealing was Olga herself. Or more particularly it was the delirious performances of Audrey Campbell as the cruel ruthless mercenary Olga, glorying in her wickedness like a Victorian melodrama villain.

Four Olga movies appeared before Audrey Campbell departed. In 1969 the decision was made to do a fifth movie. The absence of Audrey Campbell is enough on its own to cast doubt on this movie’s claim to be an Olga film, but in fact it turned out to be an entirely different type of sexploitation movie, veering towards erotic horror. It’s impossible to imagine the real Olga bothering with Satanism. There’s just not enough money in it.

In Olga's Dance Hall Girls we find Olga running a dance hall which is a cover for a prostitution racket. The house’s specialty is beautiful young bored housewives. The assumption is that there will be enough allure in the idea of having sex with respectable wholesome housewives to turn a tidy profit.

Olga’s right-hand man Nick (Larry Hunter) is very pleased with his latest recruit. Carol Ross is a housewife and she’s stunning and he’s convinced she has the potential to be thoroughly corrupt and debauched. His judgment on that score is very sound. The problems for Olga’s organisation with come from Carol’s friend Jill, an attractive enough housewife but one who curiously enough seems to have no desire to embrace perversity and crime.

Then comes the surprise revelation that Olga is a servant of Satan, and of course she’s planning to sacrifice a virgin. Given that the young lady in question has worked in Olga’s dance hall for quite some time the audience could be forgiven for having some doubts about her virginity.

Olga's Dance Hall Girls shows serious signs of not knowing what it wants to be. For most of its running time it seems like it’s going to turn out to be a typical roughie. The witchcraft stuff is tacked on at the end and while I for one have no objection to sexy witches indulging in rituals that are almost certainly going to requite a minimal amount of clothing it just doesn’t seem to gel with the rest of the movie.

The other problem is that the major part of the film that is trying to be a roughie suffers from being too tame to be a real roughie. Some attractive young ladies get naked and there are some simulated sex scenes that are moderately hot by 60s exploitation movie standards (by 1969 American women had apparently discovered that if you’re going to have sex it’s an advantage to take your panties off although the men still cling to the tradition of keeping their trousers on). There’s very little real perversity and no real sense of menace or impending violence. There is also no torture whatsoever, and torture scenes were what Olga movies were all about.

Olga is played by Lucy Eldredge. She has an interestingly exotic look, not beautiful but striking in a slightly disturbing way. She convinces us that Olga is a predatory lesbian (an essential part of the character in the earlier films) and has no morals to speak of but she’s no Audrey Campbell. Her biggest problem is that most of her scenes require her to sit in one spot whilst engaging in rambling dialogues that go on for much too long. She just doesn’t get enough opportunities to demonstrate Olga-style wickedness. She could just be a very ruthless businesswoman.

Larry Hunter manages to make Nick seem sleazy and a bit dangerous which is all he’s required to do. Most of the actresses are of the standard you expect from sexploitation movies which doesn’t really matter since all they really have to do is take their clothes off when necessary.

The shining exception is the remarkable Linda Boyce who plays Carol Ross. She’s a very competent actress and she is able to make her character reasonably interesting. She has the ability (which she demonstrated in quite a few sexploitation features) to project a real sense of smouldering and dangerous sexuality. She also looks good nude and she’s nude a good deal of the time so all in all she has everything you’d want in a sexploitation actress and she effortlessly steals the picture.

The presence of the lovely Uta Erickson is also welcome and she gets to engage in a fairly good cat fight scene in her underwear. It’s one of the movie’s better moments.

This movie is included in Something Weird’s three-movie Olga set. The transfer is by no means pristine but it’s acceptable. Since the disc includes two other better Olga movies it’s definitely a recommended purchase. It’s not a movie that would be particularly worth buying on its own but assuming you’re going to buy the disc anyway (and I can’t imagine any right-thinking person not wanting to do so) then there’s no compelling reason not to give Olga's Dance Hall Girls a spin. It’s not a real Olga movie and it’s not terribly good but it’s not entirely lacking in entertainment value and Linda Boyce is always worth watching.

Mermaids of Tiburon (1962)

There are not all that many mermaid movies. This is perhaps not surprising since if you’re going to make a movie about mermaids you really need to be able to include underwater photography, preferably plenty of and preferably of high quality. In writer-director-producer-cinematographer John Lamb Mermaids of Tiburon had someone who could certainly provide that. Lamb would go on to do underwater photography for a number of TV series including Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. As far as the underwater photography is concerned Mermaids of Tiburon is just about the ultimate mermaid movie.

It’s also rather an oddity. It’s a fantasy adventure, a thriller and (depending on the version you see) an erotic film. The thriller plot is fairly weak but at least it provides a small amount of action and suspense. As a fantasy adventure it has a genuine quirky charm.

Which brings us to the erotic element and that’s quite a complicated story. This movie exists in at least three, and possibly four, different versions. The original US theatrical version would have no trouble getting a G rating today. There was in all probability an international version with some nudity. A couple of years later Lamb did some reshoots, adding quite a bit of nudity, and retitled the film The Aqua Sex. Then, twenty-five years after its original release, Lamb drastically recut the movie and the result was the final version which was given the title Mermaids of Tiburon, The Nude version. This version has lots and lots of nudity. It’s only partial nudity. The girls are topless, although they aren’t wearing a great deal on the bottom half either. Which version you prefer is a matter of taste. The Nude Version goes a bit overboard in terms of the quantity of female flesh on display but it’s still tasteful nudity and the girls are certainly very attractive.

The plot can be disposed of very quickly. Marine biologist Dr Samuel Jamison (George Rowe) heads off to the remote island of Tiburon off the coast of Mexico to investigate reports of a hitherto unknown sea mammal seen in the area. There’s also the lure of pearls, very large pearls of very high quality, so the expedition offers the promise of both scientific interest and money. If you’re a marine biologist life doesn’t get much better than that.

Except that Dr Jamison is about to discover that Tiburon offers a third attraction that makes science and profit seem rather unimportant. He discovers that the island is home to a colony of mermaids. Very pretty mermaids they are too. Dr Jamison knows all the legends about mermaids, how they lure men to their doom, but he’s willing to take that chance. Sometimes you have to take risks when you’re a scientist.

While Dr Jamison is busily pursuing the aquatic lovelies the unscrupulous hoodlum Milo Sangster (Timothy Carey) is after those pearls and he’s prepared to take extreme measures to get them.

The acting is mostly pretty awful although Timothy Carey’s scenery-chewing is a great deal of fun. Dr Jamison provides the voiceover narration. Whether the narration is supposed to dead serious or somewhat tongue-in-cheek is hard to say but it turns out to be rather amusing in a deadpan way.

Diane Webber plays the mermaid with whom the hero is obsessed in the original version while Gaby Martone is the main focus in the Nude Version with Miss Webber’s screen time unfortunately seriously curtailed. Neither has to do much besides looking lovely and both manage that with no great difficulty.

One real oddity of the Nude Version is that some of the mermaids have tails and some don’t. No reason is given for this and one is left to assume that when Lamb did the 1964 reshoots he decided to ditch the tails because the girls without tails could wear skimpy fur bikini bottom things which show off their semi-naked behinds rather nicely.

The underwater sequences take up a very large part of the film’s running time and they’re superbly done, and not just by the standards of 1962. The fact that in the Nude Version these sequences feature beautiful near-naked women might well be seen by some people as being a definite bonus.

The two versions of Mermaids of Tiburon are not quite entirely different films, but the differences are significant. Apart from the added nudity the Nude Version has been extensively recut. The two versions end up being the same story turned into two different kinds of film. The original version is a charming and rather innocent romantic fantasy with just a hint of eroticism (you can’t make mermaids entirely unerotic) and it is in no sense an exploitation movie. The Nude Version still retains much of the charm but it is much more overtly and frankly an erotic fantasy movie, and it’s definitely an exploitation movie. Since John Lamb was responsible for both versions it raises interesting questions about his intentions. It would appear that his intentions in 1987 were not at all the same as his intentions in 1962.

While the Nude Version includes an enormous amount of nudity it must still have seemed very tame indeed by 1980s standards. There’s absolutely no sex at all and not a glimpse of pubic hair, and only the briefest glimpse of a bare bottom. Even compared to the average early 1960s nudie-cutie this movie is fairly tame. On the other hand I guess one could argue that topless young ladies swimming underwater with their breasts (and these are rather well-developed young ladies) freed from the constraints of gravity might be seen as having a certain erotic charge!

The original version is probably the better film overall, with mermaids who look like mermaids rather than just semi-naked aquatic girls. It’s also much more focused, with the hero’s attention centred on just one of the mermaids. There’s a real romantic angle involved. It works as a fantasy movie. The Nude Version isn’t terrible by any means. As long as you accept that it’s about the nude girls then it has to be said that it works in the same way that the better nudie-cuties work.

Kit Parker Films and VCI Entertainment have released this movie as their Psychotronica Volume 3 disc, paired with the Mexican-Cuban oddity Yambao. The DVD includes both the Nude Version and the original non-nude theatrical version of Mermaids of Tiburon which is rather nice since they are so different in tone. There’s also a boxed set that includes all three Psychotronica Volumes, a total of six films. They make up a varied but extremely interesting collection and the boxed set is definitely the way to go.

The Nude Version of Mermaids of Tiburon is letterboxed and the transfer is quite acceptable if not dazzling. The original non-nude theatrical version is fullframe but the image quality is slightly superior compared to the Nude Version.

Bowanga Bowanga (1953)

Bowanga Bowanga: White Sirens of Africa (also released as Wild Women) is an ultra low budget 1953 jungle adventure movie which is quite enjoyable if you’re in the mood.

A couple of big game hunters on safari in Africa, Count Michelangelo Sparafucile (Don Orlando) and Kirby (Mort Thompson), come across the exhausted Trent (Lewis Wilson). Trent is an explorer and he has a strange tale to tell. Many years earlier, as a small boy, he had a terrifying encounter with the dreaded Ulama, the White Sirens of Africa. Just a few days earlier, tramping through the African jungle, he encountered them again. He is determined to lead an expedition to solve once and for all the question of the origin and nature of the Ulama.

And what are the Ulama? They are a tribe of savage white women who live in the jungle and they are feared by one and all. These amazons appear to have no menfolk.

Our three intrepid adventurers manage to get themselves captured by the Ulama almost immediately. The Count is much too scrawny to be of interest to the Ulama. The Ulama queen is however very interested in Trent. He is a strong man and she has a use for such a man. Judging by their reactions the other Ulama girls can also think of some interesting uses for a strong man. There is a great deal of excitement in the Ulama camp.

Our captive explorers do not know what strange and terrible fate awaits them. They might end up in the cooking pot, sacrificed to heathen gods or perhaps (most frightening of all) they might even be called upon to satisfy the lusts of these fearsome amazons.

Trent soon has reason to believe that it’s the queen’s lusts that he’s going to be called upon to satisfy. We discover that the Ulama do not live entirely without men but at the moment the queen is without a man. Her last husband was speared (by the queen herself) attempting to escape. Being the husband of the queen might turn out to be a slightly dangerous and not overly attractive occupation, even if the queen happens to be young and pretty.

The Ulama women are easily roused to anger and jealousy which offers the opportunity to include a couple of fairly energetic cat fights. The Ulama women seem to enjoy fighting rather a lot, and as we will learn later they like fighting against men as well.

There is some dissent within the Ulama camp. They don’t seem to be enough strong men to go around and the girls who are likely to miss out are not very happy about it. They might even prove to be allies of Trent and his companions against the queen. But first our explorers will have to survive single combat against the most formidable of the Ulama warriors.

There’s also an all-too-brief guy-in-a-gorilla-suit scene but apparently all this gorilla is interested in doing is strolling through the jungle hand-in-hand with an Ulama maiden.

This was 1953 so the Ulama are fairly modestly attired, their outfits being variations on the fur bikini theme. While these jungle women live a primitive lifestyle, hunting with spears, they do seem to have mastered the art of hairstyling (and may even have invented the permanent wave).

This film makes very extensive use of stock footage, which you’d expect in a low-budget offering in this genre. Other parts of the film were shot on location in the steamy jungles of Darkest California. This is a movie which probably cost almost nothing to make. It certainly looks like a film on which no money at all was spent.

Veteran writer-director Norman Dawn had worked extensively in the adventure genre. It’s probably unfair to offer a judgment on his talents based on a zero-budget feature such as this.

Queen Bonga Bonga is played by Dana Wilson, who went on to marry legendary producer Albert R. Broccoli. She does the fierce, proud and lustful amazon queen thing well enough. Let’s be honest, this is not a movie that was ever going to give any of the performers the chance to enhance their acting reputations. At best it was a much-needed pay cheque.

This movie is part of a jungle movie triple-header released by Something Weird, along with Wild Women of Wongo and Virgin Sacrifice  (and unusually for a Something Weird triple feature there are quite a few extras as well). Bowanga Bowanga is in reasonable shape although the print used was far from pristine. The movie was shot in black-and-white and is presented in its correct 1.33:1 aspect ratio.

Bowanga Bowanga is pretty bad but it’s entertainingly bad if jungle movies and lusty amazon warriors are your thing. Recommended, and the DVD really is exceptional value for money.

Dr. Sex (1964)

Dr. Sex is a nudie-cutie from the flamboyant and eccentric low-budget producer-director Ted V. Mikels (responsible for such amazing kitsch classics as Doll Squad).

By 1964 the nudie-cutie genre was starting to run out of steam. The problem was that while you could get away with quite a lot of nudity you could only do so by avoiding overtly sexual situations. The more you were able to keep things non-sexual the more nudity you could pack into your movie. The nudist camp movie had initially been the easiest way to do this but by 1964 movie audiences had seen as much nude volleyball as they ever wanted to see.

There were other ways to show large amounts of naked female flesh in a non-sexual way but they required some imagination. Dr. Sex is one of the more successful attempts.

Three sexual therapists recount their more interesting recent cases. We see the patients’ stories while the therapists narrate. This obviously offers ample opportunities for showing attractive naked ladies but since they’re sex therapists it might seem to be a bit tricky to keep the nudity non-sexual. In fact Mikels manages this very cleverly.

The nudie-cutie was essentially a good-humoured light-hearted genre and so the cases recounted are odd but in a very harmless way and the emphasis is on humour (humour being considered to be a very desirable ingredient in a nudie-cutie). There’s even some reasonably effective satire at the expense of both psychiatry and art.

The first case involves a peeping tom and a dog and the idea is silly but it is amusing.

The second case involves a window dresser and his shop-window mannequins. To this window dresser the mannequins are real. Very real indeed. More real to him than any real girls he knows. Which of course offers the movie the opportunity to switch between the mannequins and real girls, and since this chap likes to help the mannequins undress every night after the store closes (mannequins not being able to undress themselves) there’s the opportunity for some more nakedness.

This story can almost be regarded as a homage to one of the most famous of all Twilight Zone episodes.

Then in the next segment we get a young female exhibitionist who satisfies her urges to disrobe in public by working as an artists’ model. Her encounter with modernist art quickly convinces her to find another way to satisfy her cravings. She goes on to find fulfilment as a strip-tease artiste (and her routine suggests that the actress in question was obviously a professional stripper).

After this we’re back in paranormal territory with a haunted house story. This patient’s house is haunted by lovely nude women with a passion for doing the housework. Now you might think that being haunted by beautiful unclad girls whose only desire is to wait on you hand and foot is actually not such a terrible situation. The problem is that he wants to make contact with them but he can’t touch them. Which, as I’m sure you will admit, takes some of the fun out of being surrounded by beautiful nude women.

It has to be said that Mikels found some remarkably luscious young ladies prepared to spend most of the screen time without their clothes on.

Unfortunately the source material was in very poor shape with a great deal of print damage. It’s still watchable.

Something Weird paired Dr Sex with Wanda, the Sadistic Hypnotist for a double-header DVD release. The DVD includes a swag of extras. Most notable among these are five short films and these are truly bizarre examples of the sexploitation short subject.

The Casting Director is quite amusing and features a rather lovely lady. The Handyman is really strange. The idea is straightforward - a janitor discovers naked girls in all the rooms on the 19th floor of a hotel. The treatment of the subject and the visuals are however fascinatingly weird and surreal. Things get even stranger with Duelling Divas. Who knew that girls in bra and panties and stockings was an actual fetish? But on the evidence of this film that’s the case. It has to be admitted that it has a certain fascination. Naked Devil Doll features an undraped young lady who does look like a naked devil doll. Jane on a Train is very brief - a man travelling on a train tries out his skills at hypnotism to persuade a young female passenger to shed her clothes.

There’s a jokiness to both Dr. Sex and to these shorts that you don’t really get these days. The idea of combining nudity and comedy has rather gone out of fashion. Considering what some of the sex comedies of the 70s were like it’s perhaps understandable but the very concept of sex comedies became discredited but it’s still a bit sad that the element of fun has largely gone.

Dr. Sex isn’t exactly art. It’s a nudie-cutie and as such it’s an excuse to show as much naked feminine pulchritude as possible. This objective is however accomplished with a certain style and cleverness, there are amusing moments, there are a couple of stories that achieve a low-key weirdness, the girls are extremely pretty and while there’s no frontal nudity (which you weren’t going to get away with in 1964) there are enough bare breasts and bare bottoms to satisfy any reasonable person. In other words Dr. Sex has to be considered to be a rather successful nudie-cutie. If you have a soft spot for this oddly good-natured genre then this one can be highly recommended.