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.

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.

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.

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.

She Came on the Bus (1969)

She Came on the Bus is a fairly late entry in the sexploitation roughie sub-genre and it manages both surprisingly tame and still oddly depraved.

A gang of juvenile delinquents, four guys and a girl, embark of a rampage of rape, petty theft and more rape. In the course of their adventures they steal a bus which becomes a sort of mobile headquarters. They begin by breaking into a house and raping a young housewife, then turn their attentions to a door-to-door saleslady. When this gets boring they head off in the housewife’s car and then get the bright idea that hijacking a bus would provide lots of thrills.

They pick up a couple of young female passengers who end up getting the sort of bus ride they hadn’t expected. One of them decides she really likes being ravished by juvenile delinquents; the other doesn’t like it one little bit. After a while the bus ride gets boring so they go back to the housewife’s house, then that gets boring so they get back on the bus. The bus will be their life in future.

Not much of a plot, although with enough energy and style it could have been enough. Sadly the energy and style aren’t quite there.

Writer-director Curt Ledger clearly belongs to the school of film-making where you roll the cameras for a while and see what happens. That kind of cinema verité approach can be effective but here it (mostly) doesn’t work.

This is not just low-budget film-making, this is at the very bottom of the heap. There’s no synchronised sound, no dialogue, just a voiceover narration that tries to be portentous and disapproving and some bizarre sound library choices. Given the lack of dialogue, and the lack of anything but the most basic storyline it’s impossible to say anything about the acting.

I use the term juvenile delinquents quite deliberately. These kids do almost seem like the kinds of juvenile delinquents you’d see in movies in the 50s. The jarring note is that while their demeanour is tame in a very 1950s way their actions are pretty perverted. It’s like a movie caught in some kind of constantly reversing time warp.

What makes this movie particularly odd is the tameness, rather surprising for 1969. There’s no frontal nudity at all and just one brief shot of a naked behind. There are plenty of topless scenes but for 1969 the nudity quotient is incredibly low. The sex scenes are also remarkably coy. You get a sex scene in which the guy leaves his trousers on and the girl keeps her panties on. I guess he is a juvenile delinquent so maybe he wasn’t paying attention in biology class when the topic of sex was covered and so the idea that it might be a good for the panties to come off just didn’t occur to him. Although it’s also quite possible that these girls have their panties actually welded on. Mostly the sex scenes are not much more than heavy petting.

On the other hand while the visual content is extremely mild the ideas are genuinely depraved. These are nasty vicious people but they’re doing nasty vicious things in an oddly innocuous sort of way. For the most part the rape scenes have no impact whatsoever since absolutely nothing is actually happening beyond a bit of clumsy and rather diffident groping.

There’s no sexual frisson to any of this, and no effective shock value either. The consensual sex scenes involving the girl juvenile delinquent are equally coy. This girl also has the kinds of panties that can only be removed with industrial cutting equipment.

A major problem here of course is the lack of dialogue. We get no sense whatever of the personalities of any of the participants, not even the briefest sketch, so we feel no emotional involvement. We don’t feel the terror of the women involved. We also find it hard to believe that these women are in any real danger. There’s no sense of menace. The victims don’t seem real enough and the perpetrators don’t seem actually scary.

There is one exception. There is one scene on the bus that does actually manage to be quite raunchy and to pack a real punch. It actually seems weirdly out of place. It’s at least mildly  shocking in a way that the rest of the movie isn’t.

Naturally there’s a go-go dancing scene which must qualify as the most gratuitous and out-of-place such scene in movie history.

Something Weird released this one as part of a triple-header that also includes Sin Syndicate and Sin Magazine. The transfer for She Came on the Bus is quite OK if hardly dazzling. This is of course a movie that probably never looked dazzling to begin with!

This is definitely one of the lesser roughies. If you want a roughie with a real impact and some subtlety The Defilers is infinitely superior. If you want full-blooded depravity it’s hard to go past The Touch of Her Flesh. And if you want roughies that deliver deliciously weird entertainment then mid-period Doris Wishman (such as Bad Girls Go to Hell and Another Day, Another Man) can be recommended. If you want genuine style, Russ Meyer’s Mudhoney is the real deal.

She Came on the Bus has the right ingredients but fails to deliver.

Daddy, Darling (1970)

Daddy, Darling is a 1970 softcore flick about incest so you know this is going to be a sleazy exploitative little film. Except that it’s a Joe Sarno film, and it’s one of his more artistically ambitious efforts (and Sarno could be pretty artistically ambitious). And it isn’t really sleazy or exploitative at all. Sarno approaches his subject matter seriously and with sensitivity, as he often did, and on this occasion it works surprisingly well.

Katja Holmquist (Helli Louise) is a 19-year-old girl whose father Eric (Ole Wisborg) has brought her up on his own since her mother’s death. Katja and her father are very close, which is natural enough. The trouble is that Katja is a teenager, her hormones are raging and she’s a virgin. She’s becoming a bit too attached to her dad. It’s perhaps unfortunate that her father has chosen this moment to remarry. He is going to marry Svea (Gio Petré), a woman for whom Katja has already conceived a certain dislike. It’s not especially unusual for a girl in this situation to be somewhat jealous now that she’s no longer going to be the sole focus of her father’s affections, and it’s not unusual for the girl to feel a little bit emotionally confused. Unfortunately Katja takes things a bit further. Her feelings for Eric have started to become sexual. In the normal course of events she’d probably grow out of this phase without any damage being done but now that there’s another woman staking a sexual claim on her father Katja’s feelings have taken on a new urgency. She’s determined to stake her own claim first and she starts making frankly sexual advances to him and he (perhaps naturally) either fails to get the message or deliberately chooses not to admit what is happening.

As things get more and more tense Katja develops a friendship with a female artist. The artist is your basic predatory lesbian (and where would sexploitation films be without predatory lesbians) but Katja is kind of naïve about such matters and has no idea of her friend’s tastes. Katja’s naïvete is of course part of her problem.

Sarno’s approach was always more successful when he had a decent cast and that is something that doesn’t happen very often when you’re making low-budget sex films. In this case he was pretty lucky.

Daddy, Darling was made during Sarno’s Swedish period. Making films in Sweden generally allowed him to find reasonably good acting talent not afraid to appear in movies about sex. Ole Wisborg as Eric and Gio Petré as Svea are certainly quite competent.

Helli Louise as Katja is another matter. She’s more than competent, she’s very very good. She clearly decided to approach the role as a real acting job and she proves she has the acting chops to do so. It’s a nicely nuanced performance. Katja is dangerous, but she’s dangerous because she’s confused, not because she’s evil or calculating. She’s not crazy and she’s not a scheming little minx.  She’s a teenager. She has the emotional and sexual desires of a woman but she has no clear idea what to do with those desires. She’s not malicious. She can be conniving, but she is conniving the way a child is conniving.

Helli Louise is very pretty and very sexy but she’s not an obvious sex kitten type, and that’s important because Katja is not a sex kitten.

All three main characters are really fairly ordinary people doing their best but sometimes not handling things as well as they should.

Sarno is being very ambitious in this film. He was often ambitious. The results didn’t always live up to the intentions. As a writer he could come up with decent story ideas but he had no great ear for dialogue. As a director he lacked the visual brilliance of a Radley Metzger. What Sarno had was a genuine fascination with the emotional dimensions of sex and his best films did have some emotional depth. And while he may not have had great stylistic flair he knew how to shoot a sex scene that combined eroticism with emotion.

Of course Sarno’s ideas on how to shoot sex scenes weren’t always quite what you expect in a softcore sex film. There’s a fine example in Daddy, Darling. Katja is staying for a few days at a female friend’s house. They have to share a bed. That becomes a slight problem when Katja’s friend decides she wants to share the bed with her boyfriend as well, and she and the boyfriend start having sex. This is an obvious opportunity for a hot sex scene with a hint of kinkiness. So what does Sarno show us? Almost nothing, as far as sex is concerned, just dim blurred shapes in the background. Instead the camera focuses entirely on Katja’s eyes as she lies in bed beside the love-making couple. It focuses on Katja’s eyes for the entire sex scene. The sex in the background is of no interest to Sarno. He is interested in Katja’s reaction. It’s a very effective scene but it’s going to be very disappointing for anyone hoping to see some hot sex. It’s a pretty bold approach to take in a softcore skinflick. We do however get some insight into Katja’s problems. When it comes to sex she’s really all at sea. She’s not afraid of sex but she’s rather bewildered by it.

In another very Sarno sex scene all we see is Katja’s panties around her ankles, and we see her face. That’s all. Perhaps not the sort of scene to please the distributors but artistically it’s devastatingly effective.

This is a movie that certainly deals with incestuous feelings but there’s no actual incest. There’s only one sex scene between Katja and her father and it’s a dream sequence. The subject is handled sensitively and with sympathy for the characters concerned and Sarno’s approach works.

Seduction Cinema released this film as part of their Retro Seduction Cinema line. The transfer has major strengths and major weaknesses, presumably reflecting the source material. There is a lot of print damage. On the other hand the image is reasonably crisp and the colours look pretty good. And there are a few extras including an interview with Joe and Peggy Sarno.

Of course much depends on what you are actually wanting out of this movie. As softcore porn it’s perhaps not a great success. There’s a fair bit of nudity and sex but it’s all very tasteful, possibly too tasteful for some. As an emotional/sexual melodrama it is however fairly successful. And Helli Louise’s performance is superb. This is a very Joe Sarno movie even by Joe Sarno standards and it’s one of his best efforts. Highly recommended.

The Curse of Her Flesh (1968)

The Curse of Her Flesh, released in 1968, was the second instalment in Michael Findlay’s notorious Flesh trilogy, perhaps the most deliriously perverse of all 1960s sexploitation movies. This is bizarre entertainment, although entertainment may not be the right word to use to describe these cinematic sleazefests.

The roughie sub-genre emerged as audiences began to tire of the rather innocent shenanigans of the nudie-cutie genre. If nude volleyball was beginning to pall why not add lashings of violence and add a kinky edge to the sex? Actually the nudie-cuties didn’t have any sex, just nudity, but by the mid-60s it was starting to be possible to depict sex as long as care was taken to ensure that very little was actually seen. Violence on the other hand was much easier to get away with.

There were roughies, and then there were the films of husband-and-wife team Michael and Roberta Findlay. The Findlays didn’t just push the edge of the envelope. They ripped up the envelope, set it on fire and then stomped on it. Their films were exercises in bad taste, misanthropy, weirdness, kinkiness and excess. Michael directed and often starred in the films while Roberts handled the cinematography. They co-produced and co-wrote the productions. Roberta occasionally acted as well. Roberta was one of the fairly small number of women involved in actually making sexploitation movies rather than just appearing in them. 

Considering the nature of their films it’s unusual enough for a woman to be involved in the production side. It’s even more surprising for a married woman to be doing so. You have to wonder what their marriage was like!

Watching such movies you’d have to suspect that Michael had a few issues. In fact you’d have to suspect that he had lots of issues. Whether this was true or not I have no idea. For all I know maybe he was actually a nice regular guy in real life.

This one takes up where The Touch of Her Flesh left off. Arms dealer Richard Jennings, having bumped off his unfaithful stripper wife, along with sundry other hookers and strippers, is back and his mental state hasn’t improved any. He wants more revenge. And he intends to get it, in the most extreme manner possible. It’s not really necessary to tell you much more about the plot. This flick is a series of strange and depraved sequences and plot coherence was not a major priority.

Apart from the revenge theme there’s also something connected with an inheritance but I’m still not quite clear what that was all about.

Richard as usual is venting his anger on strippers and in this case he’s particularly targeting a girl who does a kinky lesbian stage act. He deals with her indirectly but in a suitably gruesome and nasty manner.

There’s also another girl who is the girlfriend of his main target, the man who stole his wife. She has somehow managed to convince the guy that she’s a virgin. In fact she has plans to restore her lost virginity and that offers Richard an opportunity to make his vengeance very devious indeed.

There’s a definite arty edge to this film, or rather there’s a definite attempt at artiness. Trying to be arty is something that is generally best avoided and to be honest Radley Metzger was the only film-maker capable of convincingly combining erotica and art (which he did most successfully in his superb The Lickerish Quartet). The Findlays don’t really get away with it here. They give the impression of trying too hard and the result is a movie that is slow-moving and muddled rather than artistic. It’s also debatable just how successfully anyone could have combined this much sleaze with art.

The acting is mostly typical of the genre, in other words the performers were chosen for their willingness to engage in cinematic kinkiness rather than for their acting chops. It does have to be said though that Michael Findlay makes a fairly convincing psychotic killer.

There’s a stupendous amount of depravity in this movie although it’s too bizarre and unhinged to be genuinely disturbing.

Something Weird released all three of the Findlay Flesh films on one DVD. They’re not very long films so this involves no real compromises as far as the quality of the transfers is concerned. The Curse of Her Flesh gets a fullframe transfer (which is correct since it was shot in the 1.37:1 aspect ratio) and looks very good. There are no extras, hardly surprising with three movies on one disc.

The Curse of Her Flesh is not for the faint-hearted. This is one strange and grubby little movie. It has a certain morbid fascination but on the whole it lacks the fun that makes so many 60s sexploitation movies so enjoyable. And if you want depravity Dave Friedman’s The Defilers does it better and more intelligently. I think this one is strictly for fans of the Findlays.