ITALIAN STALLION (1970)

"I'll be velvet-mouthed on your shank of love."

This would be a totally forgettable soft-core porn flick if it wasn't the debut film of Sylvester Stallone. I've only seen this re-edited version so I can't say if the original film(titled THE PARTY AT KITTY AND STUD'S) makes any more sense than this. This here is just like they filmed a bunch of crappy loops and loosely strung them together to make something that plays for about an hour. You get to see Sly's limp Italian sausage throughout the movie and I don't blame him for that since nothing is really all that sexy that's on display. There's some lesbianism, a flasher, a little s & m action and it all ends with a big orgy which consists of ugly hippies wiggling around on each other and playing ring-around-the-rosie while awful music plays. I think the weirdest scene is when Stud(played by Stallone) punches a mirror and Kitty licks the blood off his hand all sexy like. Only worth watching if you're some kind of Stallone fanatic.  Anyone else will be instantly bored.

CHAINED HEAT (1983)

"Don't you walk away from me, you chalk-faced whore!"

This is probably one of the best of the whole women-in-prison genre of sleaze-fueled epics.  It's got so many great elements to it including the mandatory exploitation ones that include your basic boobs, blood and beasts.  It also has probably the best cast of any of these sleazy caged chick flicks.  You got Linda Blair playing the basic, boring, goody-goody role.  She's supposed to be the person who the audience empathizes with but I pretty much hate her and think she makes terrible decisions throughout the whole movie.  Also she has a crappy haircut which may have also made me not sympathize with her as much as I would have normally.  The real star to me is the great Sybil Danning as the leader of all the white convicts.  She's awesome as usual as the main bad-ass.  There is one scene where she wears mom jeans that I didn't care for but besides that she's fantastic!  Who else could stand up to Tamara "CLEOPATRA JONES" Dobson as the leader of the black gal gang?  I did notice on my latest viewing that her gang seems to consist of a grand total of about 4 people which seemed a little lopsided in whitey's favor here.  As far as beasts go there's Sybil's sidekick, the butt-ugly Spider, who appropriately enough gets killed while hanging out on a crapper. There's also Dean Wormer from ANIMAL HOUSE himself as our ultra-scummy porn-making warden here.  This guy has to have the most amazing office in the history of wardens.  I especially dug the stuffed jungle cat with light-up eyes and the luxurious Jacuzzi in his office/swinging bachelor-pad.   Henry Silva plays a drug-smuggling prison employee in a subdued role for a guy who you always see being quite intense in most of his other films.  He does get to smack Blair around a little which reminds you of some of his more typical tough-guy roles.  There's also a ton of other memorable characters with names like Boots, Grinder and Bubbles.  Mix all these characters into a cartoonishly stereotypical world of trash and debauchery and it's exploitation movie gold.  You get rape, a black chick sliced up with razor blades,  gratuitous showering, lots of cat-fights, lesbian make-outs, a new-wave chick, death on the toilet, an 80's strip-tease show and just about everything a lover of lowbrow cinema could want.  I was lucky enough to view an actual film print of this one last night and it made me appreciate it just that much more.  In addition to a slew of unrelated movies that were re-titled as sequels there was an "official" Part II to this that starred Bridgette Nielsen and came out ten years later but I'm pretty sure that has nothing to do with the original.

3 SHOTS OF A WINCHESTER FOR RINGO (1966)

This movie is known under a few different names; THREE GRAVES FOR A WINCHESTER, THREE BULLETS FOR RINGO etc., but whatever you want to call it, it's pretty awful. The plot is a messy convoluted one about a deed and a family battling over something or another. For me there were two memorable scenes in this whole thing. In one we see a young boy screaming as he's being pulled slowly towards a fire to get information out of someone and in the other a woman is hung up, with her arms spread all Jesus-like, high above a town while a shoot-out takes place. That's about it. Mickey Hargitay who is great in BLOODY PIT OF HORROR is just really bland here as is most everyone else. Both Hargitay and Gordon Mitchell were in HERCULES-type films before switching over to Italo-westerns like this.  I would say skip this one unless you dig lots of talky-talk and some really badly staged, illogical shoot-outs.

THE WITCHMAKER (1969)

I have to admit that this movie isn't really very good.  It's full of lots of talking about witchcraft and devil-worshiping and the action is pretty stretched out through the running time.  But that being said this was a movie that I used to catch on New York's channel 9 Chiller Theater, or maybe it was the 4 o'clock movie, every once in a while back when I was a kid and I remember it scaring me.  So just for the sentimental value alone I rate this one higher than it realistically should be.  Being shot in the swamps of Louisiana I feel the movie does do a good job of creating a good spooky atmosphere throughout the whole film.   It also features a performance by a large fellow in a furry vest who's a warlock or "a berserk" as they refer to him and this guy used to give me nightmares so I guess if you were a monster obsessed kid in the 70's he crept around in your head for a while at night when you were trying to sleep.  Of course the movie also features Alvy Moore who was a familiar character on GREEN ACRES which kinda kills the scary tension that mighta been built up.  There's also a lack of nudity from all the hot-looking witches and their victims and that's a damn shame and seems very strange since there's almost a naked lady right there on the poster.  My DVD of this film is titled THE LEGEND OF WITCH HOLLOW and for some reason that sounds really silly to me.  Probably cuz it reminds me of that stupid SLEEPY HOLLOW story.  I can't really recommend this one unless you have a fond child-hood attachment or maybe you have a fetish for girls hung upside down before being sacrificed to Satan. AKA THE NAKED WITCH

THIS MAN CAN'T DIE (1968)

Guy Madison was a big cowboy actor back in the 1940's and also made a few of those Italian swords'n'sandals flicks before heading into starring in this spaghetti-western.  The fact that he was an old time American western star really stands out when you compare him to someone like Clint Eastwood who was so good at portraying the flip-side of what those characters represented.  He's also not a particularly compelling character in this movie.  The plot is about as basic as westerns get: a guy's family is murdered: his sister is raped and then our man Guy shows up for revenge time.  Notably the only nudity you get is not in the love scene but whenever a female is violently attacked.  Way to titillate sleazy viewers Italy.  The most realistic thing in this whole film, and the only thing that really separates this from more common U.S.-filmed westerns at this time, is the way many of the evil gang is offed by our hero who takes many of them out by atypically shooting them in the back and sneaking around in the shadows.  Besides this though there's really not much to make this stand out from a million better Italian shoot-em-up movies.

Silly theme song, "Life is too marvelous for you...":

DR. TARR'S TORTURE DUNGEON (1973)

This movie has a great title that unfortunately is never lived up to by the actual film.  It sounds like we're in for something along the lines of BLOODSUCKING FREAKS but what you get is a lot more of a subdued tale of inmates running an asylum.  It's barely even a horror film despite being marketed that way.  The movie was made in Mexico by director Juan Lopez Moctezuma who also was a producer on EL TOPO.  This movie has sort of a similar feel to that epic but in a very watered down way.  Sort of a surrealism-light situation.  You get a pretty mild rape scene thrown in, a little nudity, people acting crazy(including an amusing chicken-man) and endless scenes of talking which make this mostly a big snooze-fest.  This has also been released under the title of THE MANSION OF MADNESS which is apparently uncut but I've never seen that version and can't say if it's any gorier or more exciting than this cut American release.

THE CREEPING TERROR (1964)

Movies that are labeled "the worst movie of all time" generally aren't as bad as all the hype would lead you to believe.  This movie is really bad but there are way duller and more inert movies that are completely forgettable.  This one is at least memorable for it's ridiculous monster which consists of a couple of guys under what appears to be a very shitty-looking carpet or maybe some old raggedy-ass quilt of some sort.  It has a sort-of insect-looking head and I think they were going for a monster caterpillar sort of thing.  The story is about a UFO that crashes which contains two identical stupid-looking monsters.  It's almost all told in a dull monotonous voice-over narration which is always a bad sign with these old creature feature flicks. In fact though there might be some exceptions to this rule I think there is a direct correlation between how shitty a movie from the 50's/60's is with how much time is spent using voice-over narration in it.  The worst example of this being THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS in my opinion. The high-point of this whole film here though is catching some up-skirt shots of various women as they are gulped down by our slow-moving monster that they could have easily ran away from.  Supposedly a real monster was built for this and stolen before shooting started so they threw this abomination together in a few minutes.  I'm sure it couldn't have looked any worse than this thing.  Check this out only if you're into bottom of the barrel junk cinema.
AKA THE CRAWLING TERROR

SCARED TO DEATH (1947)

This is more of an old-time murder mystery than a horror flick. It's also pretty dull and even comedic in parts and the mystery parts don't really make much sense in the end. The only thing that makes this worth watching at all is Bela Lugosi and his sidekick, the great midget actor Angelo Rossitto(who was in everything from FREAKS to MAD MAX 3). Basically any scenes without either of these two is really ponderous stuff. Unfortunately our little midget hero splits about halfway through the movie and is never mentioned again. It's also weird to see a cheap-o B-movie from the 40's that's in color(and I'm pretty sure this is Lugosi's only color film). There's also a weird-o in a blue mask who peeps through the window every once in a while and a totally nonsensical ending. Luckily this one is on a lot of cheap-ass horror compilations DVD's otherwise it's probably not worth the effort of seeking it out.

THE THING THAT COULDN'T DIE (1958)

OK so there's this decapitated head of a Satanist in a box and he hypnotizes a retarded fellow to kill for him. Then the big guy is shot dead by the police so he gets a chick to carry him around. This movie drags along at a snails pace and really doesn't have much of a pay-off. Our monster(who's now just a goopy-faced guy with a reverberating voice) finally gets reunited with his body and then is quickly killed by a crucifix necklace that's placed on him. Only a couple of guys get killed in the whole movie(including our Satanist who gets his head chopped-off but that sorta doesn't count since he comes back).  There's also a lovely lady with super-natural-type abilities who doesn't do much but get freaked out about everything.  The monster attack music from CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON shows up as well as other typical 50's sci-fi themes.  There's a ton of way more entertaining 50's monster classics that you should watch before this one.

APACHE BLOOD (1975)

I acquired this movie as part of a spaghetti-western box set I picked up a while back.  Why it's in this set I have no idea.  For one thing it's an American western and for another thing it's probably one of the worst westerns I've ever seen!  The whole movie is about this small group of cavalrymen who fight a small band of Indians.  That's it! They go back and forth killing each other one at a time until there's only two people left and then they fight it out.  I suppose there is a way of making this non-plotted mess slightly interesting but these filmmakers had no clue how to do that.  There's barely any dialogue and our Indian hero is named Shee Clit Soak.  Now I'll grant you that I'm just an ignorant white man but is Clit really an Indian name?  And Shee Clit Soak?  That's not even a good porn star name!!  Also that was supposed to be the original title of this film.  I can't imagine why they woulda changed that one.  I would definitely say avoid this one unless you need a good nap since besides the gunshots this is a pretty quiet film.

Spoiler alert!  Thanks to YouTube you can save your time and jump right to the nonsensical ending:

HARD TICKET TO HAWAII (1987)

                                               "One man's dream is another man's lunch"

Tons of topless beauties standing around in model poses and as an afterthought there's a story about diamond smuggling gangsters or something like that. As a bonus you also get a large puppety-looking killer snake on the loose, a transvestite spy character, sumo wrestlers and some awkward kung fu thrown in. Also gratuitous use of a grenade launcher and unnecessary violence towards a blow-up sex doll.  The boat from director Andy Sidaris' MALIBU EXPRESS shows up and this is supposed to be a sequel to that flick although you get no appearance from Sybil Danning's tits which is disappointing and only a fleeting reference to the events in the first movie.  There's also a horrific theme song which you get to hear in full as the director shows off the plane he rented in a long music video sequence.  Sidaris' movies although really stupid and filled with equally dumb characters who make bad jokes are all filmed really well with that slick direct to cable TV look and I can see why this guys movies became staples of late-night sleaze programming for a few years as they're really fun disposable garbage entertainment filled with former Playboy playmates.  Also the snake scenes are more enjoyable than anything in that shitty cgi-filled ANACONDA movie.  I especially enjoyed the old snake in the toilet gag.

ANITA: THE SHOCKING ACCOUNT OF A YOUNG NYMPHOMANIAC (1973)

This early 70's soft-core Swedish sexploitation flick is probably only of interest to fans of the sexy Christina Lindberg star of the great rape/revenge flick THEY CALL HER ONE EYE.  This pic came out a year before that eye-gouging epic and features Lindberg as a 17-year old schoolgirl who's also a nymphomaniac.  Just about every few minutes you get the lovely Christina naked either having really depressing sex with various dorks or giving out blow-jobs to filthy old men or doing a nice striptease in front of her family.  How can she be cured of this deviant behavior?  Apparently having an orgasm is her key to happiness and a fulfilling love life.  Not exactly the deepest or most psychiatric-ally accurate portrayal of human sexuality ever put on screen but still a pretty fun little dirty movie for the most part despite the sort of doomed downer vibe our naughty heroine gives off.  It's weird that many of the films of Sweden(even silly sex films) have that unintentionally gloomy feeling to them.  It must be something about living in such a chilly environment or maybe it was just a 70's thing. Check it out for the supreme boob display! AKA ANITA: SWEDISH NYMPHET

MALIBU EXPRESS (1985)

This movie could have just as easily been titled SYBIL DANNING'S BOOBS because this movie showcases her gargantuan tits in and out of dozens of different outfits and she looks amazing in every one. Probably the best I've ever seen her look in anything.   There's also a bunch of other chest-balloons on display thanks to a few Playboy Playmates who also appear.  This movie was directed by 80's breast aficionado Andy Sidaris. His films were the mainstay of USA's UP ALL NIGHT program back when cable was worth watching except of course, back then they always cut the explicitness right out of the films so it's nice to finally get to see these big booby epics the way god intended them to be seen thanks to the Sidaris box set that came out a while back.  This tale is about a private investigator so it all basically plays out like an episode of MAGNUM PI but with the addition of plenty of bare ass. This guy even has the standard PI mustache and gets laid constantly. Also his main squeeze is Ms. Danning, that lucky bastard! There's also a family of hillbillies that show up for comic relief, really bad kung-fu and a little blood when people start getting knocked of by a mysterious killer. One scene has a semi-rape thing going on and the girl ends up enjoying it in the end. This was the only part of the flick that seemed like it was straight out of the 70's. While this is nowhere near the awesome insanity of a typical Russ Meyers' boob-a-thon it's still a mildly amusing time-waster even if it does drag on longer than necessary and wraps everything up in a way too complex explanation for such a silly movie. The whole thing is about a sliver above being a porn flick with its simplistic plot being just an excuse for as much gratuitousness as you can cram into 100 minutes or so.   Probably only of interest to horny tit-obsessed guys or ladies who might have some lesbian leanings.

INSIDE (2007)

Part of the French new wave of extreme horror flicks, along with stuff like MARTYRS and HIGH TENSION,  this film is really just a showcase of extremely violent and gory set-pieces but it's also very enjoyable for what it is.  Unlike many gore for gore's sake-type films this one is set up well enough that you actually care about the main character who happens to be a pregnant woman.  Her natural vulnerability in that state is used well to garner sympathy from the audience and pull us, as the viewers, into the ordeal on display.  You can tell this isn't a modern American film because of the levels that the violence delves into.  It's just not the type of film that you will find playing at a multiplex in the U.S. anytime soon.  Comparing this to MARTYRS, as I have heard some people do, is kind of a joke, I mean this movie really doesn't have any deep or significant meaning at all and doesn't leave you with much to think about after it's over.  Sort of like an action movie with brutality thrown in.  Regardless of the fact that the plot is extremely simplistic I find all the gore-hound elements too hard to resist and would recommend this to anyone with a strong stomach although I imagine if you're pregnant or have ever had kids this would probably be a good one to skip.  

STRIPTEASER (1995)

"I don't know about anyone else but I've certainly got a hard-on!"

I could have sworn that I'd seen this movie before but it was the sorta similar STRIP FOR ACTION(which also starred Maria Ford and Nikki Fritz) and that tells you what kind of a generic tale you're in for.  What you get here is a fairly simplistic movie about a weird Lou Reed/Howard Stern-looking guy who holds a strip-club hostage for some reason.  I think it was something to do with him being a nutso-wackjob. Eventually everything leads to a big shootout ending and it's all pretty pointless.  Of course it's all really just an excuse to see some good-looking stripper action and a bunch of bouncy boobs.  While STRIP FOR ACTION was disappointing in the nakedness department this one delivers quite a bit of bare ass and lovely bouncy boob as pretty much all the ladies in the cast get fully nude for your viewing pleasure.  There's also one absurdly fake-looking set of rock-solid chest-balloons which show how far we've come in the bolt-on breast business since the mid-90's.  Leatherface from TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III shows up as a bartender.  Worth a watch if you like bottom of the barrel 90's made-for-video junk with boobs and people getting shot.  Also the whole movie is only a little over an hour long which is a big plus and you get some pretty memorable one-liners, like the one above, from our psycho gunman.

MOONRUNNERS (1975)

I was never really a huge fan of THE DUKES OF HAZARD but plenty of people in the 80's were and it was a pretty unavoidable phenomenon at the time.  This movie is basically the blueprint for the TV show and they're both based on a real-life moonshine runner named Jerry Rushing.  You even get two of the same character names from TV and narration and music by Waylon Jennings.  The difference is in this there's a little sex, a main character dies, our heroes are moonshine runners and the Boss Hogg character actually runs a whorehouse.    These are all big pluses in my book and I'd choose watching this movie again over that silly TV show any day.  I was lucky enough to catch this a few days ago at a theater that was serving genuine moonshine which I'm sure heightened the experience a bit.  I also have to add that the movie could have been trimmed a bit as it seems to go on a little long towards the end.  There were a few spots where it could have been wrapped up sooner but dragged on.  Besides this minor flaw I'd say check this out for some decent 70's moonshine-filled hicksploitation car-crashing goodness if that's your thing.  This movie was originally promoted as a sort-of sequel to 1958's THUNDER ROAD but it's not really.  It just also stars James Mitchum who was in the earlier film and it's also about moonshine running.