Friday, March 13, 2020

Babes of Yesteryear – Uschi Digard, Part VIII: 1975

Babes of Yesteryear: a wasted life's irregular and P.I. feature that takes a look at the filmographies of the underappreciated actresses cum sex bombs of low-culture cinema of the past. Some may still be alive, others not. Our choice of whom we look at is idiosyncratic and entirely our own — but the actors are/were babes, one and all.
As the photo (maybe) and blog-entry title above reveal, we're currently looking at the films of one of the ultimate cult babes ever, a woman who needs no introduction to any and all red-blooded American cis gender, tendentially hetero male whose hormonal memory goes further back than the start of the 80s: the great Uschi Digard.* 
* A.k.a. Astrid | Debbie Bowman | Brigette | Briget | Britt | Marie Brown | Clarissa | Uschi Dansk | Debbie | Ushi Devon | Julia Digaid | Uschi Digaid | Ushi Digant | Ursula Digard | Ushie Digard | Ushi Digard | Alicia Digart | Uschi Digart | Ushi Digart | Ushi Digert | Uschi Digger | Beatrice Dunn | Fiona | Francine Franklin | Gina | Glenda | Sheila Gramer | Ilsa | Jobi | Cynthia Jones | Karin | Astrid Lillimor | Astrid Lillimore | Lola | Marie Marceau | Marni | Sally Martin | Mindy | Olga | Ves Pray | Barbara Que | Ronnie Roundheels | Sherrie | H. Sohl | Heide Sohl | Heidi Sohler | U. Heidi Sohler | Sonja | Susie | Euji Swenson | Pat Tarqui | Joanie Ulrich | Ursula | Uschi | Ushi | Mishka Valkaro | Elke Vann | Elke Von | Jobi Winston | Ingred Young… and probably more.
As The Oak Drive-In puts it: "With her long hair, Amazonian build & beautiful natural looks (usually devoid of make-up), nobody seems to personify that 60s & early 70s sex appeal 'look' better than [Uschi Digard]. She had a presence that truly was bigger than life — a mind-bending combination of hippie Earth Mother looks and a sexual wildcat. […] She always seemed to have a smile on her face and almost seemed to be winking at the camera and saying 'Hey, it's all in fun.' Although she skirted around the edges at times, she never preformed hardcore…" 
Today, Uschi Digard is still alive, happily married (for over 50 years), and last we heard retired in Palm Springs, CA. To learn everything you ever wanted to know about her, we would suggest listening to the great interview she gave The Rialto Report in 2013. You can find her on that predatory thing known as Facebook.
Please note: we make no guarantee for the validity of the release dates given… or of the info supplied, for that matter.
Herewith we give a nudity warning: naked babes and beefcake are highly likely to be found in our Babes of Yesteryear entries. If such sights offend thee, well, either go to another blog or pluck thy eyes from thee...

Go here for
Uschi Digard, Part I: 1968-69
Uschi Digard, Part II: 1970, Part I
Uschi Digard, Part IV: 1971, Part I
Uschi Digard, Part V: 1971, Part II
Uschi Digard, Part VI: 1972
Uschi Digard, Part VII: 1973-74



Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S.
(1975, dir. Don Edmonds)
 

"The film you are about to see is based on documented fact. The atrocities shown were conducted as 'medical experiments' in special concentration camps throughout Hitler's Third Reich. Although these crimes against humanity are historically accurate, the characters depicted are composites of notorious Nazi personalities; and the events portrayed, have been condensed into one locality for dramatic purposes. Because of its shocking subject matter, this film is restricted to adult audiences only. We dedicate this film with the hope that these heinous crimes will never happen again."

 
Produced by "Herman Traeger", otherwise known as David F. Friedman. Rumor has it that this is the most-viewed movie at both Steve Bannon's and Sebastian Gorka's circle jerks.
When it comes to exploitation movies, the Ilsa movies are without doubt some of the most infamous. Don Edmonds (1 Sept 1937 – 30 May 2009), whose directorial debut was Wild Honey (1971, see Part V), which also featured Uschi, directed both this, the first Ilsa movie, and the first sequel, Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976). The first sequel, like the later two that followed in 1977 — Jean LaFleur's Ilsa, The Tigress of Siberia (trailer) and Jess Franco's Ilsa, the Wicked Warden a.k.a. Greta, The Mad Butcher (trailer) — ignores the fact that Ilsa actually dies at the end of Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S.
Trailer to
Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S.:
Undoubtedly Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S. got made due to the success of the earlier David F. Friedman Naziploitation WIP sexploiter, Lee Frost's Love Camp 7 (1969 / trailer). The script was supplied by "Jonah Royston", a.k.a. John C.W. Saxton (4 Dec 1930 – 15 May 1987), the scriptwriter behind such fun stuff as Happy Birthday to Me (1981 / trailer) & Class of 1984 (1982 / trailer), and was probably inspired by two infamous real-life female Nazi concentration camp wardens, Ilse "The Bitch of Buchenwald" Koch (22 Sept 1906 – 1 Sept 1967) and Irma "The Hyena of Auschwitz" Grese (7 Oct 1923 – 13 Dec 1945), the latter of whom was supposedly a sadistic nympho. Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S. was shot in nine days in Culver City, CA, on the sets of the recently cancelled TV series Hogan's Heroes (1965-71).
Uschi shows up, uncredited, as one of the tortured female prisoners (you can see her in the background of the photo below). If sexploitation veteran Dyanne Thorne wasn't a "name" prior to this movie, she sure was afterwards. The same year she made this movie, she married occasional co-star Howard Maurer. Currently, Dr. Dyanne Maurer (PhD, LLD, DD) and Dr. Howard Maurer (Dr. of Mus., DD), as ordained ministers, do weddings in Las Vegas.*
* Let us correct that: She was an ordained minister. Unbeknownst to us, between the time we wrote this blog entry and posted it, she died. On 28 Jan 2020, to be exact.
The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre, which lists the movie as "recommended" and calls it "the absolute, unsurpassed apex of exploitation sleaze", has the plot: "In a Nazi camp, men and women are experimented on in a wide variety of horrifying ways by Ilsa (Thorne), an Aryan dominatrix whose pet project involves proving that women can withstand more pain and torture than men, and also tends to punish men that don't perform to her satisfaction in bed until an American (Gregory Knoph) comes to tame the shrew with his sexual prowess. The real tragedy is that this story is based on real experiments and accounts of SS camps, only in this movie the girls are all sexy, and the nudity, S&M and gore are gratuitous and rampant."
The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review says, "The basic appeal of Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is a parade of tortures. These become quite extreme — burning brands and electrified dildos shoved up the vagina, maggots placed in open wounds, people being boiled alive and splattered in pressure chambers [Uschi]. What is utterly outrageous about Ilsa is how it exploits the Jewish Holocaust for its ends. A pre-credits note announces that it is offering up a true account of the Holocaust atrocities — a claim that is surely akin to a porn film declaring that it is making a realistic statement about rape. […] There is a vague connection to the real experiments conducted in the death camps by people like Dr Josef Mengele and the film certainly, as it states, does convey a grimness in depicting these. (If Ilsa had gone a little bit further the other way in a less exploitative direction it could almost have been a sobering portrait of sadism as Pier Paolo Pasolini's masterwork Salo or 120 Days of Sodom [1975 / trailer]). However, when it comes to the climax where the prisoners turn the tables on their torturers with equally sadistic regard, one can see that the producers of Ilsa are only interested in the pornographic presentation of acts of torture without regard for who is conducting them."
Indeed, House of Self-Indulgence, which insists that "Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS is all about postponing the ejection of seminal fluid", points out that "Utilizing the well-worn titillate-then-repulse method of exploitation filmmaking, director Don Edmonds seems to revel in causing your aroused feelings to quickly turn into ones of revulsion and disgust. Having us cheering on a man's genitals to plunge as far as they can vaginally go one minute, only to have us wincing uncontrollably a mere ten seconds later when those very genitals are unceremoniously removed without even as much as a half-hearted Auf Wiedersehen was a tad jarring."
In all truth, the movie a a whole is a bit more than "a tad jarring". Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS is the kind of movie that can cost one friendships, so if you watch it, choose your viewing partner with care.
The Klezmatics doing
Woody Guthrie's song Ilsa Koch:


Pastries
(1975 dir. "Adele Robbins")

"Adele Robbins", a.k.a. "David Fleetwood" and Joe Robertson. We took a look at Joseph F. Robertson (17 April 1925 – 8 July 2001) in Part IV: 1971, when we took a look at his sexsploiter A Touch of Sweden, which is actually this movie as well: someone (probably Robertson) took the original soft-core movie and re-edited it with added hardcore inserts and thus A Touch of Sweden became Pastries.
Back in Part IV, we said the following about Robertson: "A former marine — and military mate of Ed Wood — he entered the film biz via D-grade horror, as the producer and/or writer and/or actor and/or director of fondly remembered sub-standard fun, namely Herbert L. Strock's The Crawling Hand (1963 / trailer), Robert Hutton's The Slime People (1963 / trailer) and Gerd Oswald's (less fun) Agent for H.A.R.M. (1966 / trailer). By the seventies, he'd moved into exploitation and even has the dubious honor of having directed a cross-dressed Ed Wood in Love Feast (1969) and Mrs Stone's Thing (1970 / theme music). Once he went hardcore, he pretty much stayed there until the end, though he returned to no budget horror briefly for two horror comedies, Stephen Sayadian's Dr. Caligari (1989 / trailer) and Auntie Lee's Meat Pies (1992 / scene)."
Over at Something Weird, Prince Pervo writes: "Take the sexploitation comedy A Touch of Sweden, add hardcore inserts to it, and the end result is a really crazy pastiche called Pastries, whose trailer promises 'Over Fifty Visual Orgasms!' Start counting... Big movie star Sherry (Uschi Digard) flies home to Sweden on vacation and tells a young, pigtailed farmgirl-type all about life and love in America: 'A good lover is a good lover, no matter where he comes from,' says Sherry as the inserts kick in right away. Baring her hooters at every opportunity, Sherry also decides 'to do something for humanity', so she takes a job as a nurse's aide in a local hospital and starts balling patients right and left. (She also has a fling with Count Dracula [Ray Sebastian] whom she meets at a marina.) Four other nurses […] also perform similar services for humanity. So zealous are these sexploitation R.N.'s that they consistently deliver out-patient care to the nearby Gland Hotel where they all conveniently live. […] This pervert's favorite scenes include Mindy Brandt (a.k.a. Rene Bond) gluing Virginia's (Sandy Dempsey) vagina shut with a procto-syringe so that she can pretend she's a virgin for sheik […], and Selma (Sandi Carey) helping doctors remove a Coke bottle stuck in the rump of gay-barber (John Keith). […] Though A Touch of Sweden is perfectly fine on its own, few films from this era offer so many legendary sexploitation and porno stars all in the same package as Pastries."
Pastries can be found online at your favorite porn site (like here, at XVideos), but directly below are the first 12 minutes of the badly dubbed A Touch of Sweden. 
12 minutes of
A Touch of Sweden:


Inside Amy
(1975, dir. Ronald Víctor García)

A.k.a. Swinger's Massacre and Super Swinging Playmates. Directed by the man who brought you The Toy Box (1971, see Part IV). Ronald Víctor García is now an artist. This "grim, serious and epic hard-R-rated film filled with sex and murder" with "X actresses like Uschi, Rene Bond and Marsha Jordan in bit roles" is available from Alpha Blue. The full film can also be found online at any given virus-laden porn site…
Fred Adelman at Critical Condition offers a full synopsis to this "weird little sexploitation thriller from the swinging 70s": "Charlie Tishman (Eastman Price*) is a successful lawyer who is getting tired of only making love to his wife Amy (Jan Mitchell), so when a client suggests he and his wife go to a swingers club, the idea intrigues him. […] Amy is not too keen on the idea […], but Charlie keeps working on her […] until she eventually relents and agrees to go. Once at the swingers club, Amy at first acts like a cold fish until they meet Rod (Paul Oberon) and Marge (Mickie Nader), a swinging couple who invite Charlie and Amy over to their house for one of their frequent partner-swapping parties […]. Amy is still reluctant when they show up at the party, but a couple of stiff vodkas and Amy joins the other women, Marge, Donna (Ann Perry), Diane (Rene Bond) and Irene (Marsha Jordan) as they change into lingerie and pick partners. A funny thing happens, as Amy gets turned-on making it with all the men, including Rod, Jerry (Philip Luther of Alligator [1980]), Bill (Ron Darby) and Jim (Gary Kent of Dracula vs. Frankenstein [1970]), but Charlie is unable to 'get it up' and make love to any of the women. As Amy screws all the men, Charlie gets drunk, becomes disillusioned with the swinging lifestyle […]. Charlie begins to go slowly insane with jealousy and when Bill calls him the following week to invite him over for a poker game and mentions that Amy's 'the best fuck we ever had', Charlie snaps. He stakes out the poker game and follows Jim home. He knocks out Jim, puts him in his car, runs a hose from the tailpipe to the car's window and watches as Jim chokes to death from carbon monoxide poisoning (while Jim pleads, 'I didn't mean it Charlie!'). He next kills Rod in the same manner (The police at first think both their deaths was a gay suicide pact!). Charlie then grabs a sniper rifle and kills Bill as he gets in his car. When Charlie and Amy go to Jerry and Donna's house for drinks, Amy and Donna have lesbian sex (after a three-way with Jerry), while Charlie gets drunk and homicidal. Charlie drugs all their drinks and then strangles Jerry and hangs Donna. As the police close in and Amy is made aware of her husband's murderous habits, Charlie goes totally bonkers and tries to kill Amy…"
* "Eastman Price" is actually Mikel "Slugger" Angel (31 Oct 1926 – 21 Apr 2001), actor, scriptwriter and director. He wrote diverse Matt Cimber movies, and other fun stuff like Demon Keeper (1994 / trailer), Evil Spirits (1990 / trailer), Grotesque (1988 / German trailer), Psychic Killer (1975 / trailer) and The Love Butcher (1975 / clip).
Inside Amy seems to be a love it or hate movie. At Horror News, Todd Martin (like Fred Adelman at Critical Condition) mostly liked it, saying: "Inside Amy is an awesome little flick full of bad acting, bad 70s fashion, nudity, and violence. […] One of the things that I like about the film is the fact that Amy is totally opposed to the idea of swinging initially and wants nothing to do with it. She is completely devoted to Charlie and doesn't care that he has sexual hang-ups. The only reason she even agrees to sleep with other people is because he keeps badgering her to do so and she wants to make him happy. Of course the opposite occurs and she actually ends up enjoying swinging while Charlie hates it, which makes this one fall into the old 'be careful what you wish for' category for him. […] The only down side that I can think of is the fact that there is pretty much no gore and the death scenes leave a lot to be desired. […] For a movie that is also known as Swingers Massacre there is a serious lack of massacring going on here and I would have really liked to have seen Charlie take some of his victims out in some more creative and bloody ways." 
Trailer to
Swingers Massacre:
Trash Film Guru — which asks the valid question "What kind of a movie features Uschi Digard, Rene Bond, and Marsha Jordan and doesn't have any of them […] git nekkid?" — is less impressed by the movie, which it calls "a mid-70s exploitation flick with an inherently anti-sex, pro-traditional-values message, in this case on the 'evils' of wipe-swapping, disguised as a titillating softcore skin parade". In his view, Inside Amy is one of the "most repugnant pieces of business you're ever likely to see" because of "the tone director Garcia takes": "From the moment Charlie can't get his prick to pop up (for Marsha Jordan, no less), it's pretty clear that Ron G. wants the audience to both empathize with, and frankly to assume, the limp-dicked lawyer's point of view! In […] a lazily oozing little number called Who Knows What Goes On Inside Amy?, the lyrics for which tell her (and, by extension, us) that it's Amy herself who's headed down the road to ruin, that she'd better get home and start being a housewife again, that the nasty, filthy fantasies inside her head are going to tear her loving marriage apart — as if all this shit were her fault! Hell, once Charlie starts killing, he's just doing what any normal, red-blooded American guy who's wife has had a fair number of strangers' pricks in her would do, right? […] That's exactly the editorial viewpoint that Garcia assumes with the rest of this flick. […] Who the hell wrote this script — Rick Santorum? So what we've got here goes well beyond the simple anti-sex, puritanical messaging inherent in so many exploitation flicks that market themselves as being transgressive, footloose, and fancy-free. This crosses the line from being anti-pleasure into being straight-up, and muscularly, anti-women, in a way that even the most transparent slasher flick that kills all the girls who like sex while having the virgin save the day and be the sole survivor never could. You'd certainly never get away with anything this stridently patriarchal, not to mention openly afraid of female sexuality, today* — which is probably for the best, I suppose." 
* Maybe not as a movie, but as a Republican, most likely, and as a President, definitely. Which is definitely not for the best.


Kitty Can't Help It
(1975, dir. Peter Locke) 
Since Wes Craven was an editor on this movie, we looked at it briefly at R.I.P.: Wesley Earl "Wes" Craven, Part I (1970-1977), where we wrote:

"A.k.a. California Drive-In Girls, Drive In and The Carhops; the last known directorial effort of Peter Locke. Wes Craven was the editor of this grindhouse comedy, a relatively generic if entertaining jiggler — among the bongos seen, those of the great Uschi Digard, the 'Lady in Hotel Room' [and, on the original poster, as 'the girl with the 48's'].
"Movies About Girls has long, detailed review of the movie, which we've emasculated to the following: 'Here's what important to know about The Carhops. It's not about carhops. The carhopping is over with two minutes into the film. So then, what is it about? Hard to say. Rape, mostly. [...] Carhops has an excellent poster and an excellent title, which not only got it made, but is apparently still convincing saps like yours cruelly to watch it. [...] Porn and gore, apparently, is something Locke can do with panache. R-rated sex comedies, on the other hand, are just not his forte. Bland, creepy, and depressingly unfunny, with less nudity than you'd like and more threats of rape than you could possibly need, Carhops is useful only to Uschi completists and groupie enthusiasts keen on seeing Pam Des Barres strum an acoustic guitar. I didn't exactly feel cheated, but I'm pretty numb at this point. You'd probably be pretty disappointed.'"
The car chase from
The Carhops:
Today, we would like to point out what Temple of Shock says: "The Carhops is credited with a 1975 release date on the IMDb, which is incorrect. NMD Film Distributing put out the version known as The Carhops in 1977. As for the 1975 release date, that applies to Kitty Can't Help It, the original cut of the movie without the carhop footage that was added for the '77 release. Given an R rating by the MPAA in 1974, Kitty Can't Help It was released by Mammoth Films in 1975. (The ad above [the "car chase"] is from a May '75 run in De Moines, IA.)"
Every 70s Movie has the plot: "[...] This abysmal sex comedy involves a group of young women trying to get their friend laid properly. The protagonist, Kitty (Kitty Carl), can't find a man who satisfies her, so she shares her problem with buddies who include hookers and swingers, as well as carhops. All of them tell their boyfriends and/or husbands to sleep with Kitty, but none gets the job done. It's not as if Kitty has compunctions about screwing her friends' significant others. Instead, 'comedic' circumstances intrude just when things get hot. In one scene, Kitty and a dude try humping in the desert, but Kitty freaks out when a large iguana appears nearby. Seeking to look macho, the dude not only picks up the iguana but also tries to kiss the lizard, which bites the dude's tongue. And so on. Kitty Can't Help It comprises one underwhelming scene after another, and most of the acting is shoddy. One exception is the versatile Jack DeLeon, whose psychopathic character torments Kitty whenever the filmmakers decide, unwisely, to include something serious […]. Yet the only genuinely famous person in the cast is Pamela Des Barres, who plays one of Kitty's generous friends. Previously known as 'Miss Pamela', Des Barres is a notorious rock-music groupie who penned the definitive memoir on servicing popular musicians, I'm with the Band (1987)."
Paul Ross, one of the two credited scriptwriters, went on to help script the "documentary" Journey into the Beyond (1975 / trailer below) and the horror movie Beyond Evil (1980 / trailer).
Trailer to
Journey into the Beyond:


Female Chauvinists
(1975, dir. Jourdan Alexander)
A.k.a., down under, as Pussy Brigade. In Germany, as the Farm der Superhexen, or "Farm of the Super Witches." In his The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988, Jason S. Martinko writes "P/D: Jay Jackson. Cast: Candy Samples (non sex), Roxanne Brewer (non sex), Uschi Digard (non sex), Eve Orlon (as Sunny Boyd), Linda York, Deborah McGuire, Rick Dillon. A girl is sent by a photographer to go undercover into a training camp run by man-hating lesbian feminists. She also brings along her lover, who fakes being a deaf mute. He ends up getting gang raped by the militant feminists. The screenplay was written by Jack Holtzman. Cinematography was done by Fred Goodich and film editing was done by Jay Jackson."
Martinko didn't know that "Jay Jackson" is a pseudonym for the once-prolific, Israeli-born porn film maker, Jourdan Alexander, whom we took a quick look at in R.I.P.: Harry H. Novak, Part XIII: 1978-79, where we looked at his porn flick Heavenly Desire (1979 / song & scene), which Novak had the copyright to, and wrote that Jourdan Alexander was "Born Yaacov Yaacovy on January 27, 1945, in Tel Aviv, Israel (and died September 24, 2008, in California), Jourdan Alexander — a.k.a. Jack Wolfe, Jacov Jaacovi, Jordan Alexander, Jaacov Jaacovi — seems to have entered porn in 1971 with the lost Western spoof A Fistful of 44s (1971); what he was doing between his last known direct-to-video movies, From China with Love (1994) and Backdoor Smugglers (1994), and 2008, when he died, is unknown to us." 
Trailer to
Female Chauvinists:
Female Chauvinists has a cast that includes some pneumatic actresses that would make Russ Meyer proud: aside from Uschi and Candy Samples (12 Apr 1940 – 30 Sept 2019), the impressive Roxanne Brewer (1 Mar 1941 – 1 Oct 1987) and Deborah McGuire (below, with Uschi, from the film) are found in this time capsule.
Over at Cinema Headcheese, in their blog entry Interracial Sex Havoc Part #4: 1976 they say, "This [...] is a sexist satire of the feminist movement. It is also very boring and not funny at all. For starters, the feminists won't let a transsexual join their demonstrations. But the film really kicks off when a girl with enormous tits (Brewer) has sex with a guy (Rick Dillon) while a photographer is taking pictures of them, soon he will convince her to join the movement. 'They are just women; they need a man to straighten them up.' On with the show, women are using bottles as sex toys and one of them says that she became a lesbian because her father raped her when she was young. Anyway, there's loads of interracial sex in this one, mainly between a black girl (McGuire) and several white performers. GOD IS A FEMALE."
It should perhaps be pointed out that the hardcore sex was subsequently added, so not everyone shown having sex is actually having the sex. Indeed, WIP Films complains that the movie "would be a soft-core classic for fans of women with huge breasts, but is ruined by (lots of) badly edited-in additional hard X inserts and scenes".
At Something Weird, Prince Pervo offers a somewhat more blow-by-blow description of the movie: "'Do unto the male chauvinist pigs as they have done unto you!' shrieks Ms. Fulla Bull (Nora Holliday), the gnome-like leader of a militant group of Female Chauvinists […], and while protesting in Hollywood, she attracts the attention of Cecil, a creepy photographer, who gets an idea. 'I want to expose them for the dirty bunch of lesbians they really are,' he tells Boopsie (the breast-heavy Brewer, who probably woud've been a burlesque superstar if she'd been born a bit earlier). Boopsie promptly enrolls in Ms. Bull's training camp which also includes such new recruits as Glory (Debbie McGuire, one of the few black stars of sexploitation), Chi Chi (Eva Orlon, billed here as 'Sunny Boyd'), […] and the dramatically contoured Uschi Digard as Pussy, a die-hard dyke in love with her galpal Lucy (Helen O'Connell). ('Lucy likes Pussy,' get it?) Sure enough, there's plenty of lesbian action in the camp — almost all of which involves Uschi ('It may be a dog-eat-dog world out there, but it's a pussy-eat-pussy world down here!') — but there are also classes on the vagina and male supremacy as well as group masturbation with Dr. Pepper bottles. By pretending to be deaf and dumb, Boopsie's boyfriend Vince also infiltrates the compound and is hired as a handyman and clandestine stud until Ms. Bull learns of him ('We have found a serpent in our Garden of Eden!'). Though a 'castration ceremony' is scheduled, the gals instead decide to spare and 'study him' by keeping Vince in a stable where he's forced to service each girl at a time.... We're also treated to Uschi and Roxanne doing a steamy girl-girl scene; a surreal dream scene in which Uschi and a bunch of the gals rob a 'sperm bank' in the middle of the woods; and, shockingly, Ms. Bull even getting into the action by stripping off her clothes and diving on Vince — a moment in celluloid history that will absolutely scar everyone who views it. And then there's hardcore most of it spliced in from other films. […] On the other hand, the original version wasn't entirely softcore in the first place and crossed the line with some of the masturbation scenes (note Debbie and the bottle) as well as some oral sex which is somewhat obscured by the camera but definitely not faked. In fact, part of the perverse pleasure here is trying to determine if the active genitalia do or do not really belong to the people on screen. Ah, the joys of studying film...."


Supervixens
(1975, writ & dir. Russ Meer)

We took a quick looked this classic Meyer's film way back in 2011 in our R.I.P. Career Review of Charles Napier, where we scribbled:
"Perhaps Meyer's last truly entertaining and successful films, starring the memorable Shari Eubank [above] in the dual roles of SuperAngel and SuperVixen, Charlie Pitts as the put-upon Clint Ramsey and Napier as the psychopathic cop Harry Sledge. This was the first film we at a wasted life ever saw with Napier, and we never forgot his face. Other faces (and breasts) of note are supplied by the Haji, Colleen Brennan (as Sharon Kelly) and Uschi Digard. Plot: Clint Ramsey has to leave his job at Martin Bormann's gas station and go on the run after psycho cop Harry Sledge murders his wife. Throughout his travels Clint gets raped and harassed by hot wanton women before meeting his dream woman. But then Harry shows up, intent on killing Clint and his new squeeze.... Thank God for Polish dynamite."
 
The image above is an Italo poster from when the film was released. Were a poster like that made today, it would surely be labelled a "Photoshop Fail".
When Haji passed on in 2013, we took a deeper look at the movie in her R.I.P. Career Review: "Digital Retribution says: 'Supervixens is an extremely unusual film. What may at first come across as soft core porn, actually has a pretty good story, and is a hilarious, sexy and is a vicious satire of the times in which it was made. Meyer took the similar themes of his earlier film Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965 / trailer) and took everything to a more excessive level. The women are bustier, and regularly topless, the violence more horrific and shocking, the chases faster, the set pieces more rural and the obscure, well, more obscure. With many deliberately scandalous moments in this film, Supervixens is in a genre all of its own…'
We here at a wasted life find it a fabulous film, though not all who took part seemed to have enjoyed making it. When asked about the movie in an interview at Rock! Shock! Pop!, the Golden Age porn star Colleen Brennan, who plays SuperCherry in the movie and whose last known credit (as far as we can tell) is Colleen Brennan: Porn's 1st Grandma (2007), tritely said: 'I sincerely believe that Russ Meyer likes breasts but not their complex life-support systems. I didn't like him the first day I met him or the last. [...] And I'm not saying that Meyer was any fonder of me, but I would never have signed up for another one of his misogynistic tit-floggers.'
Haji appears as SuperHaji in this multi-violent cartoon of a soft-core sexploitation film that literally gives meaning to the word cleavage. Among all the cartoon babes that populate this film, SuperHaji does stand out a bit as the overly sparkly hippy waitress that could but refuses (out of spite) to confirm the hero's alibi. While her unique appearance fits the overall lack of reality of the movie, as she explains in her interview in Shock Cinema, her look was due to a misunderstanding: "Russ said, 'We're gonna be shooting in a nightclub.' At that point, a lot of young people were wearing stones on their faces. Gluing stones everywhere. It took me hours to glue those stones all over me, and when I showed up, it was this little cheap roadhouse! It's like putting an emerald on a fake gold necklace! I said to Russ, 'Why didn't you tell me it was going to be this kind of place? Look at me!' But we went with the scene anyway. It was pretty, but I was just a little out of place. [laughs] There I was, serving beer with stones all over me!"
The lead female of the movie, the intensely beautiful Shari Eubank, plays two roles and left the film business after her next movie, the less-memorable Chesty Anderson, USN (1976 / excerpt), to return to Illinois to teach; she currently works* at Blue Ridge High, and her great smile seems to be very much intact. Over at Bright Lights Russ Meyer once claimed the film, the first that he wrote alone ('together with the actors'), is his version of an Horatio Alger tale: 'They were always about a young man who was totally good, and he would always set out to gain his fortune and he would always come up against terrible people. They did everything they could to do him in, but he fought fair, you know, and he always survived and succeeded in the end.'
* By now, actually, she could well be retired. One stays ageless only on film.
And, finally: the plot — as explained by All Movie: "[...] Clint (Charles Pitts) is working at a gas station (run by none other than Martin Bormann (Henry Rowland), who was working as a bartender in Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) when his wife (Eubank) is brutally murdered by Harry Sledge (Charles Napier), a cop with a deeply sadistic streak. Clint tries to bring Harry to justice while Harry attempts to frame Clint for the crime. In the meantime, Clint is constantly pursued by a variety of women with improbable names, voracious sexual appetites and bodies that make Pamela Anderson look like Kate Moss. [...] Supervixens features a villainous performance by Charles Napier, another from Meyer stalwart Stuart Lancaster and several typically cantilevered beauties, including Haji, Shari Eubank and Uschi Digard." Not to mention Christy Hartburg as SuperLorna, the poster girl, in her only film role ever,* and the Afro American babe Deborah McGuire as SuperEula..."
* Since then, it has come to be revealed that "Christy Hartburg", possibly born Christine Siggelakis, did indeed take part in a few later movie and TV projects, but under the name "Christina Cummings". She had blink-and-you-miss-it appearances in National Lampoon's Movie Madness (1982 / trailer) and Wacko (1982 / trailer).  
Trailer to
Supervixens:


The Black Gestapo
(1975, dir Lee Frost)
 
A.k.a. Ghetto Warriors and Black Enforcers. It was perhaps to be expected that when the legendary sleaze-sploitation director Lee Frost (14 Aug 1935 – 25 May 2007), together with his regular collaborator Wes Bishop (12 Sept 1932 – 25 June 1993), would finally decide to jump on the Blaxploitation bandwagon, they would try something as insane as melding it with Nazi-sploitation. The Black Gestapo was not exactly a big hit when it came out, in part (we assume) because it was so obviously subconsciously anti-black, but the years has given the movie a certain level of cult popularity, to the point that a website like Last Movie Review on the Left — a honky website as lily-white as this one, we assume — now raves "Action, beautiful naked women, big bad black guys, and a cool funky soundtrack. Blaxploitation at its finest." 

Trailer to
The Black Gestapo:
Pre-cert has the plot description as found on some old VHS: "They are the Ghetto Warriors. The People's Army has declared war on the streets. It could have happened in any major city in the United States. Ex-Vietnam veteran General Ahmed (Rod Perry of The Black Godfather [1974 / trailer]) fought for years for a grant from the city to operate a peoples [sic] army, a black organization dedicated to dealing with the problems of the Black Ghetto. His small army of 100 operated weekly food programmes for the poor and several detoxification units for alcoholics and drug addicts. All in opposition to the White Syndicate pumping drugs into the people faster than the peoples [sic] army could stem the flow. It was Colonel Kojah (Charles Robinson of Beowulf [1999] and Set It Off [1996]), Ahmed's Chief of Staff, who suggested they form a security force. Ahmed is cautious knowing that Kojah is capable of extreme violence and does not wish to start a blood bath between Whites and Blacks. However, when pretty Marsha Moore (Angela Brent), a nurse in one of the detoxification clinics and one time lover of General Ahmed is savagely beaten and raped by two of the syndicates [sic] men, Ahmed gives in to Colonel Kojah's demands for a security force and the target is vengeance, power and The Black Gestapo…"
Both Lee Frost and Wes Bishop play white bad guys in this movie, while Uschi Digard plays the white ho' of Kojah.
Trash City points out the obvious: "As the Blaxploitation fad ran its course, entries got more off-the-wall. This may be the looniest of them all, not least for its Nazi footage, set to a funky 'wacka-chikka' soundtrack. […]"
Over at All Movie, Donald Guarisco pretty much agrees, saying "Even by Blaxploitation standards, this is one mean and seedy little affair. The Black Gestapo lives up the offensive potential of its title by cramming every bit of nastiness it can muster into its short running time; veteran exploitation scribes Lee Frost and Wes Bishop pack their tale with an endless stream of shoot-outs, bare flesh, fisticuffs and every drop of bad attitude that can be wrung from the subject of race relations. As a result, The Black Gestapo is socially irresponsible but never less than watchable. […] All in all, The Black Gestapo is likely to alienate most viewers on the strength of its extraordinarily tacky premise alone but curiosity-seekers will find it lives up to its perverse promise." 

Music to
The Black Gestapo:
While the Department of Afro-American Research Arts & Culture (DAARAC) doesn't have any contentions with the movie, Bad Azz MoFo takes a look at some of the movie's subtexts and does, thus spleening: "There are so many bad Blaxploitation movies (and by bad, I don't mean good), that it's hard to say which are the ones you should avoid the most. If, however, you find yourself in a situation where you have an opportunity to see The Black Gestapo, I'd really recommend watching something like bestiality videos instead. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that if you never watch a Blaxploitation film in your life, this is the one to not see. This ineptly executed little ditty tells the story of the People's Army, a Black Panther-like organization that protects the neighborhood, but is led astray by corruption and white poontang. […] Things begin to get out of hand as the security force start shakin' down the community, takin' up criminal activities, and makin' it with the white ho's that lounge around the pool at the People's Army stronghold, while Kojah and his homies eat fried chicken. Seriously. […] The Black Gestapo can best be described as B-movie honky propaganda. The very concept of black empowerment and militancy is raped and distorted by this low-rent piece rancid garbage. And I do mean low rent. On a technical basis alone this movie is a loser. If movies were toilet paper, this would be the equivalent to wiping your ass with plywood. Apparently writer Wes Bishop and director Lee Frost were trying to draw some comparison to the black power movement, Nazi Germany, and maybe even Idi Amin's regime that was then in power in Uganda."
Over at the imdb, in turn, some guy named horrorbargainbin sees it less extreme, saying instead that "The first half of the film is the better with the evil white crime syndicate going to war with The People's Army. All too soon though, The People's Army is exploiting its own people in the exact same manner the driven-out whites did. No, we can no longer root for the Black Gestapo since they are shown doing or saying the exact same horrible things the whites had previously done in at least three scenes. The point, very much the same as that of the novel Animal Farm, is really driven home so that even the least sharp viewer could grasp it. Those who overthrow the oppressor are doomed to become oppressors themselves."


If You Don't Stop It... You'll Go Blind!!!
(1975, dir. Keefe Brasselle & I. Robert Levy)

One of only two directorial credits by minor actor Keefe Brasselle (7 Feb 1923 – 7 July 1981, of Not Wanted [1949 / trailer] and Black Gunn [1972 / trailer]); his other co-directorial credit is for The Fighting Wildcats (1957), produced by Richard Gordon (see R.I.P. Richard Gordon). Brasselle's co-director for this movie here is I. Robert Levy, who went on to direct the follow-up film, Can I Do It Till I Need Glasses (1977 / trailer) alone.
This is one of a plethora of puerile sketch comedy flicks to hit the screen throughout the seventies and early eighties, all of which were illegitimate offspring of Laugh-In. This one here is a bit like H.G. Lewis's Miss Nymphet's Zap In (1970 / trailer) in that all the jokes are basically just sex jokes, but despite how cheap If You Don't Stop… might look, it looks like a million dollars in comparison to Lewis's no-budget production.
Like its sequel, this movie was written by I. Robert Levy, Mike Price and Mike Callie; the last of the trio went on to write and self-publish a whole series of "bad taste joke books (available at Amazon, for example) with titles such as The Hilarious Guide to Great Bad Taste Dirty Jokes, The Hilarious Guide to Great Bad Taste Mexican Jokes and/or Trump vs Hillary: The Ultimate Bad Taste Political Joke Book. One and all, perfect Christmas gifts for your Trump-voting family member.*
* Let's look at the sales description to Vice President Pence's favorite book of the series, The Hilarious Guide to Great Bad Taste Gay and Lesbian Jokes Vol 6: "A superb and funny collection of over 220 premium Classic Dirty, Bad Taste, Offensive, insulting, and Perverted GAY & LESBIAN JOKES & ONE LINERS that FAGS, LESBOS, HOMOS, PECKER PUFFERS,CRACK SNACKERS, GASH GOBBLERS, FUDGE PACKERS, DYKES, RUG MUNCHERS, WEENIE WASHERS, ASS BANDITS & 'BRUCIES' Really Hate…. And Rightfully So! Written, Edited and 'Massaged' for the needy 'Bad Taste Deprived' by Acclaimed Comedy & Joke Writer and Prodcer, MIKE CALLIE [...]"
Uschi Digard — a.k.a. "Uschi Bazzoom" — appears often throughout the movie, usually nude.
Retrospace hits the nail on the head by saying, "If You Don't Stop It, You'll Go Blind (1975) is just a collection of off-color jokes put to film. Consider it a film adaptation of a dirty joke book.... which is not necessarily a bad thing. Lightweight, fun, ribald humor is a dead art. I think we're so inundated these days with much more graphic stuff, that cheeky humor just seems... well, a bit lame. […] As to this movie, I really can't give it a proper review except to say that if you like vintage cocktail lounge comedy, you'll appreciate this film. There's no plot, just joke after joke." 
Hah Hah Hah!
There is a framing story, of course, as Movie Guy notes, "They're the kind of jokes that teenage boys whisper to each other in the junior high/middle school locker room after gym class. […] The premise that holds these sketches together is an awards show that recognizes various achievements in all things sexual...... Best Lay of the Year, Best Solo Performance of the Year, Most Persistant Pansy, Best Set of Jugs, etc. The awards show, hosted by Pat McCormick (as himself), plays like an Academy Awards ceremony, it even has a great finale, a Busby Berkeley-like number featuring actor Keefe Brassell (A Place in the Sun [1951 / trailer]) singing Don't Fuck Around With Love. It's one of this flick's many highlights. The viewer gets a series of jokes about homosexuality, impotence, bestiality, adultery, profane old ladies, masturbation, female anatomy and leering sex perverts and degenerates. Some of the gags work and some don't. […] The filmmakers pretty much leave no stone unturned, they reference almost every sexual matter and the movie rightfully deserves it's R-rating. It's one of those dirty movies that no parent in their right mind would allow their teens to watch, even though the level of humor appears to be aimed at 14-year-old boys, so they wait until the parents are asleep before sneaking downstairs to watch it at 2:15 am on cable TV. They keep the sound turned down very low and cover their mouths while they snicker at the corny gags and gawk at the abundance of naked ladies. […]"
We here at a wasted life searched long and hard to find Keefe Brasselle's song Don't Fuck Around With Love somewhere online, but were unsuccessful. For that, however, we found the song below. A real doo-wop song from 1953 recorded by a long forgotten (if ever known) group named The Blenders as an "alternative take" to their official Jay Dee Records release, Don't Play Around with Love.
The Blenders sing
Don't Fuck Around With Love:


The Killer Elite
(1975, dir. Sam Peckinpah)

Uschi Digard, glorified extra: uncredited, she's a party guest in the background of some scene somewhere in this movie. This Peckinpah sock-em chop-em movie (!!!) is based on a novel by "Robert Rostand" originally entitled Monkey in the Middle (but which now shares the name of the film), and if we are to believe Wikipedia (03.29.18), James Caan, the movie's lead, rates the movie "zero on a scale of ten" and only took the part on the recommendation of his advisors; at Revolvy, on the other hand, they say he rates it five out ten.

Trivia unrelated to this film: One of James Caan's earliest film appearances, uncredited, is as a "Soldier with radio" somewhere in Irma La Deuce (1963 / trailer), in which not Uschi but another big-breasted icon had a relatively visible part: Tura Satana (10 July 1938 – 4 Frb 2011) played Suzette Wong. 
Trailer to
The Killer Elite:
At Ozus' World Movie Reviews, Dennis Schwartz, who thinks that "the convoluted plot is enhanced greatly by Peckinpah's gritty direction, though it could and should have been more exciting", offers the following plot description: "Tough guy ladies man Mike Locken (James Caan of Way of the Gun [2000]]) is a mercenary CIA-like security agent employed by the shadowy organization Com Teg, run by the mysterious Laurence Weyburn (Gig Young of The Shuttered Room [1967 / trailer]) and under him is the ambitious field boss Cap Collis (Arthur Hill). The company receives payments from the CIA to do jobs it is not sanctioned to do. Mike's partner and best friend George Hansen (Robert Duvall) turns out to be a double-crosser who leaves him for a cripple, after he was richly bought off to go over to the other side. […] Bent on revenge, Mike works hard to rehab so he can walk again with the aid of a cane and he also diligently works-out in martial arts. Mike's lured out of retirement by the unreliable Collis when there's a failed attempt at the San Francisco airport by Japanese ninjas to assassinate Yuen Chung (Mako), an anti-Communist Chinese political leader. Mike is further told that the backup hit-men team at the airport were Hansen and an associate named Hamilton. Mike recruits for $500 a day a team of trigger-happy sharpshooter Jerome Miller (Bo Hopkins of Crack in the Floor [2001] and Uncle Sam [1996]) and loyal wheel-man Mac (Burt Young of Blood Beach [1980 / trailer] and Carnival of Blood [1970 / trailer]), and the trio in a straightforward action-packed manner aim to take down the baddies while protecting their idealistic political client."
 
The Parrallax Review was not all that impressed by the movie, saying: "Mid-'70s Peckinpah! Ah, but therein lies the rub. That may have been Peckinpah's most fruitful period, but by 1975, it was also the beginning of the end of his career. There's a distinct feeling throughout this movie that you're muddling through a hangover. Many scenes feel disconnected, and so does much of the acting by Caan, who tries for charmingly unpolished but often gives us smarmy, mumbled lines, as if he were coked out. Caan is said to have introduced Peckinpah to cocaine during the shoot, and the rambling incoherency on screen — including the dialogue and direction — certainly seems in line with that."
Surrender to the Void sees the film as flawed, but also thinks that "The Killer Elite is a remarkable film from Sam Peckinpah that features excellent performances from James Caan, Robert Duvall, and Burt Young. While it may be considered one of Peckinpah's weaker films, it is still a fascinating suspense-thriller that does play into Peckinpah's fascination with man and changing times as well this growing sense of cynicism where honor and loyalty are becoming non-existent. In the end, The Killer Elite is a marvelous film from Sam Peckinpah."
Despite what some think, this movie was not remade in 2011. That Killer Elite, featuring two men we here at a wasted life would love to see in full frontal nude — Jason Stratham and Dominic Purcell — is based on the novel The Feather Men by Ranulph Fiennes and has no Uschi in it, anywhere. 
Trailer to
Killer Elite:


A Climax of Blue Power
(1975, dir. "F.C. Perl")

Director "F.C. Perl" is otherwise known as Lee Frost, a (dead) filmmaker who needs no introduction to sleaze fans. He also used the "Franklin G. Pearl" moniker a few years earlier for Poor Cecily (1973, see Part VII). A Climax of Blue Power was obviously made as a skin-heavy "roughie", but by the time it hit the grindhouses it had been reedited with a lot of XXX inserts. Going by stills that exist, Uschi may have had a larger and nuder part in the original (and lost) soft-core version, but in the hardcore edit that survives, she shows up for all of a few minutes and keeps her clothes on.
As a triple-X movie, Frost's movie is found in Jason S. Martinko's The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988, where Martinko supplies a rare, full synopsis: "A sex deviant (I. William Quinn) dressed in a police uniform drives around Los Angeles in a phony police sedan, looking for prostitutes to harass and humiliate. He 'arrests' a harlot (Starlyn Simone, credited as 'Betty Childs') and drives her to a secluded area. He offers to let her go if she'll fellate him, but then he rapes and beats her after she agrees. While peeping on another woman (Angela Carnon, as 'Linda Harris') through the window of her beach house, the deviant sees her accidentally shoot and murder her husband. He intends to make her pay for her crime, but runs off. He visits a massage parlor where Uschi Digard and Bob Creese make quick cameos, and gets a 'massage' from two professionals. Instead of paying the $80.00 he owes, he pulls out his fake badge threatens to arrest the owner and girls for prostitution, and quickly leaves. At home, he lounges on his bed masturbating to 8mm loops of Rene Bond. Haunted by visions of the murderess from the beach house, he knows he must make her pay! He drives there and threatens the woman with a gun, before giving her a bath while dressed as a woman, with a blonde wig and make-up on. After the awkward bath, he carries her to the bedroom for a long sex scene. Angela Carnon had a body double stand-in for her sex scene, which adds to the strangeness. In the end, Angela shoots the deviant in the back, but he staggers to his car for one last chase scene with the cops. The deviant eventually pulls to the side of the road and the cops find him dead in his car."
Opening title to
A Climax of Blue Power:
Over at Amazon.com, Dr. Nono gives this "porn-with-plot potboiler" five out of five stars and says, "For those who like plot with their porn, Climax of Blue Power delivers energetic doses of each. Made in the 1970s when sex films used crudely-wrought plotlines to accent their carnal appeal (and to provide a defense against the obscenity laws of the time), Climax has a story that would have been effective without graphic depictions of sex but its provocative themes are well-served by them. […] The sexual sadism of the 1970s 'roughie' porn genre is usually too absurd to be disturbing, and that's pretty much the case here. Nevertheless, there's plenty of oddball debauchery to distinguish Climax of Blue Power as one of the most interesting roughies of the era. Throw in a great, atmospherically funky soundtrack, dream sequences, a plot twist revealing why the murder was deemed a suicide and a finale car chase that winds through the arid scenery of Southern California, and you got some blue-powerful bang for your buck! And the sex? Yeah, you get that too."
And when it comes to the sex, DVD Drive-in is of the opinion that "Lee Frost most probably shot this as one of his softcore two-day wonders. [...] Frost shot a series of ultra-low budget sex films in the early 1970s, and the look and feel of A Climax of Blue Power seems to gel with these quickies. However, it only saw theatrical distribution in 1974, when softcore had gone the way of the dinosaurs (and after Frost had some kind of credibility as a director, hence the pseudonym 'F.C. Perl' on this baby). It's doubtful Frost shot the hardcore footage for the release version (paging Chris Poggiali!), but it's actually pretty well-integrated. The viewer could actually buy that a given cock could belong to a given actor, and that an active mouth could belong to an active sex performer (the only exception to this is Angela Carnon's body double, who looks nothing like her)."
Girls Guns and Ghouls could do without the bodywork: "A Climax of Blue Power is not really that much fun to watch. I would have appreciated it a lot more if the ugly hardcore bits weren't so clumsily spliced in. The sex actors don't look anything like their softcore counterparts, most of the time. The film would have definitely stood up as a softcore feature on its own. Still, I guess films such as these weren't made for the Merchant Ivory crowd. Jason Carns tries pretty hard as Eddie, and in some scenes pulls off the psychopath he's meant to be. Lee Frost […] has created quite the sick little drama with this dark, generally unknown little beast, and you can occasionally feel some discomfort being inside Eddie's head, even in the non-explicit scenes when he's just alone and ranting against the world. It does seem that some attempt was made at art, of a sort. Of course, any storylines, drama and character development quickly vanished from sex cinema as the years went by, so maybe films as unique as these need to be viewed and appreciated on some levels." 
A scene from
A Climax in Blue:
Repulsive Cinema is capable of the last, it seems, as they rave: "A Climax of Blue Power is down and dirty triple X roughie from legendary exploitation director Lee Frost […]. The film is really well-made, stylish and moves along at a great pace, keeping you on the edge of your seat throughout the movie. Jason Carns gives a nice performance in the role of Eddie, and it's unnerving to see him slowly going more and more depraved as the movie progresses. And Linda, the killer, played by the gorgeous Starlyn Simone, does a good job as the killer turned victim. […] Disturbing and tense, A Climax of Blue Power plays out like a tight thriller. One of the very best roughie triple X films of the 70s. Highly recommended!"

More, more, more Uschi is found here.

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