The Alley Tramp (1968)

The Alley Tramp is a good girl gone bad 1968 sexploitation flick directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis. The credits list Armand Parys as the director (and give every member of the cast and crew a phony French name) in a desperate attempt to give the impression that this is a classy French production. But it’s neither classy nor French and H.G. Lewis was indeed the director.

Lewis was an important figure in exploitation cinema in the 60s but somehow I’ve always found his movies to be not quite as much fun as they sound like they’re going to be. The Alley Tramp is no exception. The threadbare plot isn’t a problem. Plenty of sexploitation film-makers could have taken such a flimsy idea and made a highly entertaining film out of it. Lewis’s approach just seems lifeless, as if he just wanted to get it over and done with.

The plot revolves around young Marie Barker (Julie Ames). Marie is sixteen, but she’s not exactly sweet sixteen. Her mother has always feared that one day she’d run wild and now she’s convinced that those fears have turned out to be well-founded. What sets Marie off is the sight of her parents having sex (which is apparently a very rare occurrence in the Barker household). As everyone knows this is a sight that can trigger nymphomania in teenage girls, and Marie is soon running amok sexually.

Her first target is her good-natured third cousin, Phil. Phil is a decent enough young man but he is utterly unable to resist Marie’s very determined advances.

Marie’s mother Lily (Amy Heath), already suffering from extreme sexual frustration, suspects that her husband is having an affair (which he is, with his secretary) and since her chances of ever getting any marital sex seem remote she decides to have an affair as well. She picks Herbie as a good prospect, or at least a good prospect for a woman who likes it rough (as Lily does).

Inevitably things get complicated, with Marie seducing Herbie. After having an abortion and then seducing the doctor in the hospital Marie is packed off to a mental institution. But all is not lost. Her parents are assured that nymphomania is a treatable medical condition.

The sex scenes are pretty much what you expect in a 60s sexploitation feature, the sex mostly taking place under the bedclothes with the men keeping their jockey shorts on at all times. There is however plenty of nudity, including frontal nudity, and including at least one remarkably explicit shot that Lewis presumably hoped (rightly as it turned out) that he could get away with. Or perhaps he was so uninterested he didn’t notice it himself.

Julia Ames and Amy Heath are both quite attractive (with Amy Heath looking rather young to be the mother of a sixteen-year-old) and they both spend plenty of time naked.

This film features some of the worst acting you will ever come across. That turns out to be its saving grace. Julia Ames is atrocious but she’s enormous fun especially when she goes completely over-the-top in the scene in which Marie finally snaps and lets her mother know exactly how things are going to be from now on. It’s a gloriously epic piece of overacting. Amy Heath is no slouch in the overacting department either. Between the two of them they turn what could have been a dull film into a deliciously entertaining exercise in bad but thoroughly enjoyable film-making.

There is also a brief go-go dancing scene. More go-go dancing would have helped but we have to be grateful for what we get.

Something Weird paired this one with another sexploitation film, Over 18…And Ready! (which I haven’t watched yet). The Alley Tramp looks terrific. There’s the usual array of Something Weird extras.

The Alley Tramp is I suppose a borderline roughie, although it lacks the edge to qualify as a fully-fledged member of that species.

It has to be admitted that this is far from being a classic of the genre but it is a must-see movie for true connoisseurs of excruciatingly bad acting. If you’re a H.G. Lewis completist you’ll also be interested.

The Frozen Dead (1966)

The Frozen Dead might be a schlocky sci-fi/horror B-movie with a close kinship to cheap and lurid 1950s mad scientist movies (and to both zombie and Nazisploitation movies) but it has enough odd interesting qualities to make it worth seeing. Although the majority of these kinds of movies tend to be American or European this is actually a 1966 British production.

Dr Norberg (Dana Andrews) appears to be a dedicated and kindly medical researcher living in a comfortable country house not too far from London. He’s German but the war has been over for more than twenty years and he’s popular and well-respected in the district. In reality though the war never did end for Dr Norberg. He’s actually a stalwart Nazi Party member and his medical research is far from innocuous. In the closing stages of the war he perfected a method of freezing people so that they could be revivified many years later. He froze twelve Nazi officers and they’re in his basement laboratory.

Actually to say that he perfected the method is a slight exaggeration. Defreezing people turned out to be more difficult than he anticipated and so far the ones he has defrozen have ended up with severe brain damage. He is however working hard to refine his techniques.

This has suddenly become critical. He has just been informed that the Party actually has 1,500 frozen Nazis in storage and now they want them all revived so that the Third Reich can be reborn.

To add to his troubles his much-loved niece Jean (Anna Palk) has arrived back home from a school in America earlier than expected. She knows nothing of his past or his work and he really doesn’t want her finding a basement full of deep-frozen Nazis.

On the other hand an opportunity has come his way. He has finally been able to obtain a completely fresh human head which he has been able to sever from the body and keep alive. This may give him the keys to understanding how to revive his frozen comrades successfully without damaging their brains.

This might sound like an incredibly trashy film. It is a trashy film but it’s a cut above most films of its type. There are some genuinely effective and atmospheric images. The head without a body is very well done and quite creepy.

What really sets it apart is the performance of Dana Andrews. Andrews was a fine actor who by the 60s found himself relegated to low-budget shockers but he hadn’t forgotten how to act. He plays his role pretty straight and makes Dr Norberg a mad scientist who despite being a Nazi does have some good qualities. He’s a Nazi with ethics! And his German accent is subtle and convincing.

Anna Palk is quite good as the niece. Alan Tilvern plays Norberg’s assistant Karl Essen and he also manages to deliver a fairly non-hammy performance. Philip Gilbert is the weak link as young American scientist Ted Roberts who agrees to help Norberg with his experiments. Look out for Edward Fox in a small role as a brain-damaged Nazi zombie.

Nazi fever really took off in the 1960s and fuelled a whole series of mostly Z-grade sci-fi horror flocks as well as even more lurid fare. Nazis became an obsession in television action adventure series as well. Nazis were simply everywhere in the world of 60s pop culture.

What makes this movie interesting is that it has all the outrageousness that the plot outline would lead you to expect combined with a certain British quality of understatement. It’s as if writer-director Herbert J. Leder (who was actually an American) was trying to make a quality sci-fi horror movie in the tradition of Hammer’s celebrated Quatermass films. With a limited budget and ludicrously over-the-top subject matter it’s not surprising that he falls short of his objective but at least he gave it the old college try.

On the whole this is a silly but reasonably well-made fun movie. It’s low-budget but the production values are certainly not rock-bottom. And it does have that surprisingly complex performance by Dana Andrews to give it a touch of unexpected class.

The Warner Archive disc offers a very good anamorphic transfer. The colours look great.

The Frozen Dead is pretty entertaining. Zombies, a memorable mad scientist, a head without a body and snap-frozen Nazis - what’s not to love? Recommended.

And if you love Dana Andrews in this movie he's also good as a mad scientist in the excellent Crack in the World.

Platinum Pussycat (1968)

Platinum Pussycat (also released as The Losers) is a 1968 sexploitation movie that creates its own little sub-genre. We could call it sexploitation noir, or maybe noirsploitation. It’s a strange little movie but it’s fascinating and it’s entertaining.

Some guy called Hollister gets stabbed to death. His girl Dena (Sandy Roberts) didn’t do it but she is the prime suspect, mainly because she didn’t play things too smart after the murder. She picked up the knife, left her prints all over it, then ran before the cops arrived. So it’s not surprising that the police figure she’s the murderess.

In desperation she turns to her ex-boyfriend Mike Baron (Jeff Baker). Mike’s an ex-cop and he’s one tough hombre. The only trouble is that he knows Dena pretty well and he doesn’t trust her one little bit. He is however persuaded to help her hide out for a while, at the apartment of a lady artist friend of his. This works out very badly indeed for the lady artist, and pretty badly for Dena as well when a couple of hoods show up. They rape Dena and kidnap her and then they torture her.

This makes Mike pretty mad and when Mike gets mad people get hurt. They get hurt real bad.

At this point the plot, pretty shaky to begin with, starts to gain quite a bit in complications and lose quite a bit in coherence. It seems that Hollister was mixed up with a Soviet spy master and the whole thing revolves around some stolen documents and the money that was to be exchanged for said documents. Everybody involved was trying to double-cross everybody else and now there are lots of people prepared to commit all manner of mayhem to get their hands on the documents, or the money, or both.

So basically this is a spy thriller. And while it might be a bit incoherent it’s really no more incoherent than a lot of the mainstream spy movies of the mid to late 60s. It was an incoherent kind of decade.

You might now be asking what happened to the sexploitation angle? Well you needn’t worry about that. The spy thriller plot is interspersed with lots of sex and lots of nudity. The sex scenes don’t always make much sense. I have no idea where the two lesbians came from but this is a sexploitation movie and so it had to have lesbians, and it does. And they get down to some hot girl-on-girl action as well as a threesome with a particularly nasty gangster.

All the female cast members get naked at some stage. Mostly the sex and nudity is what you expect from early to mid 60s sexploitation - no frontal nudity and while the sex scenes try to be steamy the guys keep their underpants on. This suddenly changes midway through and we get a ten-minute interlude with fairly explicit (by the standards of 1968) sex and some frontal nudity. This little interlude was shot in colour while the rest of the movie is in black-and-white. It is of course quite possible that this sequence was shot separately some time after the rest of the movie.

There’s a very obvious film noir influence here and I suspect it was particularly influenced by John Boorman’s Point Blank which came out in 1967. Lee Marvin’s performance in that film might well have inspired Jeff Baker’s performance in this film. In fact this movie has a pretty strong claim to be considered as an authentic neo-noir. Not a great neo-noir, but considering the ultra low budget it’s better than you might expect. There’s even an actual action set-piece as the finale.

Sandy Roberts can’t really act but she’s cute and she knows how to look seductive. She has the femme fatale role and she carries it off reasonably well.

The really interesting performance comes from Jeff Baker. I’m not claiming he was any great shakes as an actor but he sure as hell was hardboiled. Mike Baron is your basic hardboiled movie private eye on steroids. This guy could eat Mike Hammer for breakfast.

The impression of incoherence is perhaps mainly due to the soundtrack, with its odd mix of random noise, pop songs and voiceover narration that manages to make the details of the plot much more difficult to untangle. In fact it’s probably easier to follow the plot if you ignore the voiceover narration altogether.

Retro Seduction Cinema have released this movie as part of a double feature, paired with The Sexploiters. It’s a two-disc set and there are oodles of extras. They’ve done a fairly reasonable job with the transfer. The source material clearly had some problems. There’s some severe print damage in places but mostly the image quality is quite good. Sound quality is OK but with a few dropouts.

Platinum Pussycat might not make a whole lot of sense but it’s certainly action-packed, by which I mean it’s packed with actual action as well as sex. As a sexploitation movie it clearly belongs in the roughie category but it tries hard to be a film noir and at times it succeeds. It’s oddly hypnotic and fascinating. Most of all it’s fun. Highly recommended.

The Atomic Brain (1963)

The Atomic Brain (the original theatrical release title was Monstrosity) is classic Z-grade sci-fi horror schlock.

This is a mad scientist movie and it has all the right ingredients. Of course having the right ingredients doesn’t guarantee a good movie.

The mad scientist in question is Dr Otto Frank (Frank Gerstle) and he is on the verge of perfecting the technique of brain transplantation. He’s transplanted animal brains into humans and now he’s ready to take the next step - human brain transplants.

His experiments are financed by a rich old lady named Mrs March (Marjorie Eaton). She wants to be young again and she wants Dr Frank to transplant her brain into the body of a beautiful young woman. Of course not many young women are likely to volunteer to donate their bodies and for the operation to succeed the body has to be fresh. Mrs March and her boyfriend (gigolo might be a more accurate description) Victor (Frank Fowler) come up with the idea of obtaining a young female companion from a domestic employment agency. They get three applicants, all from overseas (obviously they don’t want nosy families sniffing about if the girls happen to vanish).

The three girls are Bea (Judy Bamber), Nina (Erika Peters) and Anita (Lisa Lang). Bea is English (and Judy Bamber’s attempt at an English accent has to be heard to be believed), Nina is German (luckily Erika Peters is German so she sounds convincing enough) and Anita is Mexican (with another not wholly convincing accent). Mrs Match quickly decides that Bea is the prettiest and so it’s Bea’s body she wants, although for complicated reasons that decision changes later.

There are a couple of Dr Frank’s earlier experiments wandering about and they’re pretty much zombies, plus the telephone wires have been cut and the girls are locked in they don’t take too long to figure out that something bad is going on here. They figure that leaving might be an excellent idea but that’s easier said than done.

You might be wondering where the atomic element comes in. Atomic energy is what Dr Frank uses to re-activate his transplanted brains.

The Atomic Brain is one of those movies that pops up on worst movies of all time lists. It is pretty bad but it’s certainly not bad in the way Ed Wood’s movies are bad. There’s a certain basic level of film-making competence at work here. There’s even the occasional shot that is moderately well composed. And it has a coherent plot. I’m not suggesting it’s a good plot but it is coherent. It’s very silly, but since when has silliness been a problem in science fiction or horror movies?

The mad scientist laboratory is not too bad for a very low-budget film. There are no attempts at elaborate special effects, and that was probably a very wise decision.

The main problem here is that it’s all rather stodgy. It just doesn’t quite have that spark that makes for great low-budget schlock.

It does have its moments though. The scene in which Mrs March has Nina modelling clothes is pretty creepy when you consider that Mrs March is more interested in checking out Nina’s body (which is soon to be hers) than the clothes.

These sorts of movies tend to have very predictable endings (you know that the mad scientist is not going to get away with his evil plans) but this one does throw in a couple of decent little twists.

Something Weird released this one on a triple-feature disc along with a real obscurity called Love After Death (which I have yet to watch)  and The Incredible Petrified World (a bad sci-fi movie that is unfortunately very dull indeed). The Atomic Brain gets a pretty good transfer.

If you’re in the mood for enjoyable sci-fi silliness then you could do worse than watch The Atomic Brain, although it has to be said that there are better movies (including low-budget movies) dealing with much the same themes. Recommended, as long as you don’t get your hopes up too high.

Love Is a Four-Letter Word (1966)

Love Is a Four-Letter Word (AKA The Love Girls) is a 1966 sexploitation movie believed to have been a lost film until the discovery of a print a few years back. It was written and produced by Bob Cresse and directed by Lee Frost, both key figures in the west coast sexploitation business.

Jerry is a pleasant if rather quiet young man. Life should be pretty good for him. He’s attending university. He has a beautiful girlfriend named Sheila. It’s Sheila that is the problem. While she’s happy to parade around in front of him wearing nothing but a towel she reacts with shock and horror if he tries to lay a finger on her.

Jerry has the feeling that everyone is having lots of sex. Everyone except him. His frustrations are increased by the fact that when he looks out the window he has a clear view into a neighbouring building and every window of that neighbouring building reveals the same thing - beautiful young ladies getting dressed or getting undressed or taking showers or just cavorting about in their birthday suits.

Jerry is starting to get seriously obsessed and seriously worried, especially when his psychology lecturer is droning on about sex offenders. It naturally occurs to Jerry that he might be a sex offender himself.

For Jerry the problem is not just his voyeurism. It’s the dreams. He’s starting to have trouble distinguishing between the dreams and reality. Naturally the dreams are always about attractive young ladies and naturally they’re always naked, or in the process of getting naked.

Frost handles this confusion between reality and fantasy rather well, with a couple of quite surreal scenes. The scene in the brothel is particularly disturbing. The movie was shot with synchronised sound but suddenly in this scene there’s no synchronised sound but we hear the two girls’ voices. But are they really saying the things we hear, or does Jerry just think they’re saying those things?

Equally disturbing is the scene in which Jerry is watching a nudie short in one of those old-fashioned coin-operated peep shows. The girl in the movie stares straight at the camera, and clearly Jerry has the feeling she really is looking at him. This idea crops up again when Jerry is watching a girl stripping at a party and he imagines that they’re at home in the kitchen and she’s doing the strip-tease just for him.

At times we are not quite sure if what we’re seeing is real or if it’s just happening in Jerry’s fevered mind. This kind of approach is fairly ambitious (and rather arty) for a sexploitation move but Frost is confident enough and competent enough to pull it off.

There are lots of lovely women in this movie and none of them spend more than a few brief moments fully clothed. As a sexploitation movie it therefore works very well but the great thing about this genre is that if you felt like making more than just a sex film there was nothing to stop you. You could add some arty touches or even attempt a bit of psychological insight. Most of the people seeing the movie at the time weren’t going to notice but if it gave you some satisfaction to feel like you were making a real movie you went ahead and did it. The results could be surprisingly interesting which is one of the reason the genre has gained a cult following. You just never know when a sexploitation movie is going to deliver a bit more than just naked flesh.

Love Is a Four-Letter Word does offer a little more, it does have those intriguingly surreal touches and with Lee Frost at the helm it’s executed with a certain panache.

I should also mention that there’s some fantastic surf music on the soundtrack.

Love Is a Four-Letter Word was released (under the title The Love Girls) on DVD a few years back by Cinema Epoch. There’s a very brief moment halfway through when there’s severe print damage but taken overall this is an excellent transfer. There’s not much in the way of extras but the brief essay by Bill Gibron does offer a few worthwhile snippets of information.

This movie turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. Highly recommended.

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.

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.

Career Bed (1969)

Career Bed is a movie about a mother and daughter. It has some claims to being the ultimate Mother From Hell movie. This is a sleazy little 1969 sexploitation flick written and directed by Joel M. Reed.

Mrs Potter and her daughter Susan have over from their small rural town to New York to further Susan’s acting career. Susan doesn’t actually want to be an actress. She wants to marry Bob, a nice young farmer from back home. Mrs Potter is however determined that Susan is going to be a star where she likes it or not. In fact Mrs Potter is prepared to take drastic steps to make sure Susan doesn’t marry Bob. There’s an easy way to do that. All she has to do is to seduce Bob herself. This proves to be even easier than she’d expected. Once Susan gets home and finds Mother and Bob naked in bed together she not surprisingly loses all interest in the idea of marrying her down home farmer boy.

Launching Susan’s career is now the priority. Mrs Potter knows that in Hollywood talent doesn’t count. Susan’s body is the currency that will finance her glittering career, but that currency is not going to be dispersed casually. Susan’s most crucial asset is her virginity. Mrs Potter knows that this is an asset that ought to be worth an important contract. No-one is going to get their hands on Susan’s body without cutting a deal with her other. Of course in the meantime it might be necessary to offer some kind of downpayment. Mrs Potter’s body (and it’s a pretty impressive body) will be the downpayment.

The fact that Susan’s agent Miss Reynolds is already enjoying Susan’s body is no problem. The agent is a lesbian, so Susan’s precious cherry is still safe.

Idealistic playwright Jack Landive (John Cardoza) wants to save Susan from her mother but Mrs Potter knows every trick of emotional manipulation in the book. In fact she’s added some new chapters of her own to that book. She knows how to keep Susan under control.

There’s a very unsavoury photographer with his own plans for Susan. He hopes to sell her virginity to big-time producer Ross Miller, and he hopes to enjoy a few romps in the hay with the aspiring starlet himself. The photographer, who likes to be known as the King, is the type of guy who thrives in Tinsel Town - he’ll do anything at all, absolutely anything, if there’s something in it for him.

There’s a rather pleasing symmetry to the plot (yes there is a plot) and the ending is rather neat and rather satisfying.

There’s quite a bit of T&A but no frontal nudity and the sex scenes manage to be sleazy without showing very much. The emphasis is on moral depravity and this movie has that quality in abundance.

Of course there has to be a lesbian sex scene. The one in this film is unusual in that it’s important in plot terms, and it’s effectively perverse, as Susan is seduced by her predatory lesbian agent. This is Hollywood after all, where the women are just as ambitious and ruthless as the men, and often a good deal more vicious.

There’s some rather juicy hard-boiled dialogue, absolutely dripping with venom, which the stars deliver with enthusiasm (Holly Hunter in particular has fun with some deliciously nasty lines).

Jennifer Welles went on to be one of the more well-known actresses in hardcore films in the mid-70s. She also starred in some of Joe Sarno’s best-known 70s productions including the excellent Abigail Lesley Is Back In Town. She was 35 when she made this film, a trifle old one might think to be playing a teenage ingenue, but she gets away with it. She looks terrific and she gets to do some real acting (and does it quite well).

Honey Hunter plays Mrs Potter. This seems to be her only film credit, which is nothing short of a tragedy. This is a performance of extraordinary malice and calculation.

Future hardcore porn icon Georgina Spelvin is impressively amoral as the lesbian Miss Reynolds.

When it comes to cinematic quality American sexploitation movies of the 60s range from crude and embarrassingly amateurish efforts to surprisingly professional and sophisticated productions. Career Bed is one of the very well made examples. Reed’s directing is lively and imaginative. He’s extremely fond of hand held shots and uses them effectively.

The soundtrack is pretty good too, in a very late 60s way.

Career Bed was released on DVD by Something Weird as part of double-header but that disc is now not so easy to find. Fortunately there’s a Dutch DVD release from ClickDVD in their American Grindhouse series which offers a good transfer (it’s in English with removable Dutch subtitles). The extras include some wonderful trailers, all with the Something Weird watermark on them which suggests that this Dutch DVD might well be the Something Weird release split onto two DVDs sold separately.

This is one gloriously cynical little movie. Since it deals with Hollywood the cynicism is undoubtedly justified. There have been plenty of film exposes of the sleazy underside of Tinsel Town and there have been a couple of other good examples within the sexploitation genre (such as Hollywood Babylon). Career Bed might well be the nastiest of the lot, as well as being one of the finest examples of the evil bitch mother film. Highly recommended.