"Well, it seems like everyone in our family is hung-up on frogs." Clint Crockett (Adam Roarke)
An amazing movie, if you get down to it: this nature-gone-mad eco-horror movie not only evidences a notable lack of directorial talent, thespian ability and narrative skill, but is also oddly boring and padded and without any truly convincing action — BUT: it is also amazingly riveting and fun and watchable. It is truly a tangible example of dichotomy at work, and deserves its reputation as one of the worst watchable movies ever made.
Trailer to
Frogs (1972):
Alone in the opening scenes, as we watch mustacheless nature photographer Pickett Smith (Katherine Ross's husband Sam Elliott of The Man Who Killed Hitler and then Bigfoot [2018 / trailer], Ghost Rider (2007 / trailer), Tombstone [1993 / trailer] and so much more) paddle through the swamps taking photographs nature and pollution, we already know that the production is going to be lacking: Italy-born cinematographer Mario Tosi* (11 May 1935 – 11 Nov 2021) has notable difficulty at keeping the shot in focus. Luckily his ability to focus does improve, even if his camerawork is pretty generic and not much better than that found in an assembly-line TV movie.
*Mario Tosi, who started his career lensing things like Sinderella and the Golden Bra (1964 / movie in 5 minutes) and How to Succeed with Girls (1964 / full movie) before working himself up to movies like Swamp Country (1966, with R.G. Armstrong) and the ridiculously bad Terror in the Jungle (1968 / music) and Frogs, eventually went on to do better jobs on better movies, like Buster and Billie (1974 / trailer) and Carrie (1976 / trailer). He was also a painter; an example of his work is directly below.
The script for Frogs comes from the hands of Robert Hutchison and Robert Blees (9 Jun 1918 – 31 Jan 2015), the latter of whom was an industry stalwart whose low-brow credits go back to Sweater Girl (1942 / full film) and who had highlights like Who Slew Auntie Roo? (1972 / trailer, co-scribed with Jimmy Sangster) and Robert Fuest's classic Dr Phibes Rises Again (1972 / trailer), but the uncomplicated script to Frogs is pretty underdeveloped, illogical and populated above all by stereotypes and ciphers.
Strangely enough, for a nature-takes-revenge movie titled Frogs, the story never actually sees the frogs do anything but hop about or watch or croak, leaving the various rather incompetently staged deaths to snakes, lizards and salamanders, gators, turtles and crabs, tarantulas and, unbelievably enough, apparently sentient Spanish moss. The scriptwriters, not to mention those who greenlighted the script, had to have been stoned to think that what they had written was in any way fit to be filmed.
Not that the plot is all that complicated: on the family mansion on the private island of the filthy rich Crockett family, where the various mostly less-than-likeable and definitely not environmentally conscious family members and hanger-ons have gathered for the annual birthday celebration of the clan's unpleasant patriarch Jason (Ray Milland [3 Jan 1907 – 10 Marc 1986] of The Swiss Conspiracy [1976]), nature suddenly starts doing away with one person after the other. Not exactly a plotline that requires a lot of creativity, but one that could offer a lot of possibilities — all of which are squandered by the slumming scriptwriters.
*Milland, an actor whose main concern was generally money and not quality, followed his star turn in Frogs with the even more reviled Thing with Two Heads (1972 / trailer). Oddly enough, one of his most WTF movies, the ridiculously entertaining Old Dark House thriller The House in Nightmare Park (1973 / trailer below), has become virtually forgotten by now.
Trailer —
The House in Nightmare Park (1973):
The lack of talent that the script seems to evidence, unbelievably enough, is truly outdone by the incompetence and directorial inability displayed by the movie's spectacularly untalented director, the busy TV auteur George McCowan* (27 Jun 1927 – 1 Nov 1995). He fails to bring any sense of urgency to this rather bloodless and not very violent GP movie, and any suspense that builds is intermittent — as in only when a character wanders away to be killed — and of the kind that draws laughter instead of clenched teeth.
McCowan and his scriptwriters pad the movie with innumerable shots of thousands of the titular creatures (though most look more like toads than frogs), which helps puff the movie to feature-film length but never manages to make the creatures threatening. Careless to the point of obviously not caring at all — for example: the first dead guy, Grover, is not only one of the Breathing Dead but also opens his eyes from one shot to the other — McCowan almost succeeds in getting a terrible performance from his entire cast, but both Sam Elliot and Judy "Black Barbie" Pace** foil him there.
*Aside from Frogs, McCowan directed around nine feature films during his career, none of which are as memorable as this disasterpiece. He killed the Magnificent Seven franchise with the flop that was The Magnificent Seven Ride! (1972 / trailer), made the shot-on-video and virtually unseen paranoia thriller To Kill the King (1974, with Susan Tyrrell), helped destroy Jan-Michael Vincent's career with Shadow of the Hawk (1976 / trailer), and subsequently crowned his lackluster career with the psychotronically terrible but fun Shape of Things to Come (1979 / trailer).
**The beautiful Judy Pace (of 13 Frightened Girls [1963 / trailer], the WTF Three in the Attic [1968 / trailer] & its sequel Up in the Cellar [1970 / trailer], Cotton Comes to Harlem [1970 / trailer], the overly familiar Cool Breeze [1972 / trailer], and more) plays Bella Garrington, the model girlfriend of one of Jason's grandsons. She and the Crockett family's Afro-American staff, Maybelle (blues singer Mae Mercer [12 Jun 1932 – 29 Oct 2008] of Pretty Baby [1978 / trailer], The Swinging Cheerleaders [1974 / trailer], and Dirty Harry [1971 / trailer]) and Charles (Lance Taylor Sr. [18 May 1915 – 6 Sept 1984] of Blacula [1972 / trailer]), leave midway for civilization, but while we never see exactly what happens to them, we later learn that they obviously didn't make it to safety.
Not from the film —
Mae Mercer with Sonny Boy Williamson live:
Ray Milland, on the other hand, hovers indeterminably amidst the thespian resolve of Pace and Elliot: if his turn as the almost militant, bullheaded and loveless patriarch is in any way convincing, it's because he obviously hates being in the movie and often seems drunk. Somehow, his seething inebriation lends credence to his refusal to let killer kritters and a few dead family members stand in the way of his annual July birthday celebration. His demise is long in waiting — for that matter, all deaths are long in waiting, as they are always preceded by an interminable and anything but suspenseful tease period — and is also, in all truth, the most anti-climactic.
"I'm as heartbroken as anybody over this tragedy, but I won't let anything interfere with today's schedule!" Jason Crockett (Ray Milland)
Of the kills, the one that would have impressed the most is probably the one found in the first cut of the movie and (partially) found in the original trailer: the addle-brained butterfly collector Aunt Iris (Holly Irving [16 Jul 1917 – 28 Dec 2002] of The Crowded Sky [1960, with Anne Francis), was originally killed by a big butterfly pulling her into quicksand, but cooler heads seem to have prevailed because by the time the movie hit the cinemas, her death was reshot using less-WTF leeches and a rattler. Still, as with the fates of most of the family members, you can't help but laugh as she dies. (One wonders why the filmmakers saw it as acceptable to have sentient Spanish moss working together with tarantulas to kill family member Michael Martindale [David Gilliam of Severance (2006 / trailer) and Gunpowder (1986 / trailer)] but found the idea of a giant butterfly unacceptable.)
Regardless of the how anyone dies in the movie, however, rest assured that the deaths are neither frightening nor even competently filmed. The demise of Jenny Crockett (Lynn "Miss Arizona 1957" Bordon [24 Mar 1937 – 3 Mar 2015] of Hellhole (1985, with Edy Williams), and Black Mama White Mama [1973]) stands out in particular as a good laugh, but rest assured that there is not a single shown death that doesn't instigate either mirth or groans.
Okay, Frogs is truly terrible and boring movie that should perhaps better be titled An Exercise in Incompetence. There is nothing about the movie that should make it enjoyable, that should make you want to bother to watch it. But it is one of those rare movies that manages somehow, well, if not to transcend its countless faults, then to at least present them in such a road-kill manner that the movie, as boring as it is, becomes mesmerizingly watchable. And the more people watching it at the same time, the better. Just don't forget the beer and smoke.
BTW: At least one online source claims that for the NYC release of Frogs, the movie was paired with one of the most ridiculous Japanese Godzilla movies, the ecology-minded Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1971), a.k.a. Godzilla vs. Hedorah, a movie famous for its scene in which the Smog Monster, having tossed Godzilla in a deep pit, proceeds to cover Godzilla with sludgy shit. A Godzilla movie worth watching.
(Spoilers.) Not to be confused with The Survivalist (2015 / trailer), a somewhat older and even more low-budget, post-apocalyptic movie that is both a bit more demanding and memorable. But if this Survivalist is unarguably the lesser of the two movies — say, spam vs. hotdog — it works well enough for what it is: a relatively generic but mildly diverting 1.5 hours of genre entertainment, interspersed with moments of unintentional laughter, a few truly effective scenes, some truly botched opportunities, a mildly interesting but ultimately distracting narrative structure telling past and present, uneven acting, and a storyline that just never seems to work as well as it should.
In regard to the story as a whole, the movie never works as well as it does the first five minutes, which quickly tells how society falls apart when a world-wide epidemic of a 99%-fatal strain of COVID breaks out. The scenes are accompanied by the chattering of an unknown woman on the radio (an uncredited Lori Petty, of Tank Girl [1995] and Route 666 [2002]), a survivor somewhere that seems to fill her time on air, babbling less like a post-apocalyptic radio announcer than a CB-radio enthusiast (remember CB radios?) on a roll.
Trailer to
The Survivalist:
The world of The Survivalist is the world of today, but slightly worse-off. COVID has now mutated into a virus that simply kills everyone — no "long COVID" here — and civilization as we know it has fallen apartment.* But low, one man survives the illness, Aaron Ramsey (John Malkovich of Shadow of the Vampire [2000 / trailer], Jonah Hex [2010 / trailer], Mutant Chronicles [2008], Warm Bodies [2013 / trailer], and Bullet Head [2017]), and before you can say Charles Manson, he has a fanatically faithful group of followers convinced he is the new messiah sent to save mankind.
*"This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper." — T.S. Eliot
But for that, he needs his fertile incubator. And so he and his faithful are hot on the trail of a young lady, Sarah (Ruby Modine, of better films, like Central Park [2017 / trailer], Happy Death Day I [2017 / trailer] & Happy Death Day 2U [2019 / trailer] and Satanic Panic [2019 / trailer]), whom they believe to be immune, with the intention of using her as the Eve of a new, COVID-resistant breed of mankind seeded by Ramsey. (Hey, not the stupidest thing to believe — some people actually believe Trump will save America.) She and her brother, Guy (Tom Pecinka of The Kill Room [2023/ trailer]), go on the run, doggedly pursued by the messiah and his motley crew. As a duo, they don't make it far, leading Guy to basically walk into the path of the bullets of the faithful so as to enable Sarah to make it to the compound of "the survivalist", Ben Hodges (Jonathan Rhys Meyers of the forgotten classic of cheese that is Killer Tongue [1996 / trailer], Octane [2003 / trailer] and Disquiet [2023 / trailer]) — who, despite having only been an office pencil-pusher at the FBI, seems to have a rep. Needless to say, Aaron and company soon show up and, well, you pretty much probably know the story already, don't you?
Directed by B-film director John Keeyes (The Harrowing [2017 / trailer], Doom Room [2013 / trailer] and the short Mechanical Grave [2012 / trailer], amongst others), The Survivalist appears to be the first of four films written by scriptwriter Matthew Rogers,* who does not seem to be a man of any notable originality. The somewhat commonplace story Rogers wrote for The Survivalist is decidedly run-of-the-mill — we've seen it before, done better and done worse — but it also has, as already mentioned, some good unintentional guffaws and a decent scene of two. The biggest twist of the narrative, however, that the heroine, Sarah — SPOILER! — is basically a contemporary Typhoid Mary COVID Mary, is true headscratcher of a decision. In two seconds she goes from a young woman in desperate need of help to an incredibly selfish person: she consciously seeks out the help of the (healthy) survivalist Ben Hodges (Meyers), a man she doesn't even know, knowing in advance that her presence will infect him with a 99%-fatal virus. (Gee, she's really lucky that he's such a straight-up and understanding guy.)
*All of which — namely, this flick here, Code Name Banshee (2022 / trailer), The Collective (2023 / trailer) and The Clean Up Crew (2024 / trailer) — were directed by John Keeyes. As a genre filmmaker, he is a very active and productive director.
Malkovich, who doesn't seem to say no to anything nowadays, has some howler dialogue when he first shows up, and one would be hard to say that he really nails it initially. But for all the questionable dialogue he has to spout, he keeps his gravitas and, by the end of the movie, achieves a level of believability and effectiveness.
Meyers, in turn, usually remains believable as the kill-reluctant survivalist, but he truly makes some odd choices — like how he always chooses to duke it out with the individual fanatic instead of simply shooting them in the back. Seriously: they have said they are going to kill him, they have invaded his compound, they have shot him and they are actively trying to end his life, and yet he remains reluctant to the end to slay them, only doing so (with relative efficiency, after first always being beat to a pulp and despite bullet wounds) when it gets down to the brass tacks of being killed or killing.
The killings, like the film itself, may be violent, but they are hardly glorified or heroic or flashy. That the deaths are always so dirty and undignified is perhaps one of the strongest aspects of the movie, as they buck the contemporary trend of aesthetic flash and high-fashion action choreography so common to most kill-happy flicks of the day. Somewhere along the way, it is faintly dropped that Aaron and Ben may have a history somewhere, but the point is never followed up on; but, for that, The Survivalist spends a lot of time filling in Ben's back story. Time and again, and particularly whenever the action starts, Ben has a flashback, which cumulatively reveal his troubled relationship to his gambling-addicted father Heath (Julian Sands [4 Jan 1958 – 13 Jan 2023] of Romasanta[2004], The Painted Bird [2019 / trailer], and Death Rider in the House of Vampires [2021 / trailer]) and how Ben came to his ranch and became "the survivalist". The flashbacks may be great for filling in Ben's backstory, but they do kill the tension, sorely and continually undermining the suspense of a movie that already has problems establishing and maintaining any.
Neither truly bad nor all that good, The Survivalist ultimately falls smack-dab within the realm of the mildly entertaining but irrelevant. We blew 1.50€ at a cut-out store for our DVD of the middling movie, and while we don't exactly feel ripped off, we don't exactly feel like the movie was worth the money. On the other hand, if you can watch The Survivalist for free, you could do worse.
Over at the imdb, Woody Anders offers a dry biography: "Shelby Dale Berry was born [...] in Dallas, Texas. Berry married his childhood sweetheart Dorothy Louise Lewis (25 Jan 1947 – 20 Oct 2011) on January 25, 1947. Dale spent the central part of his life working with his father and uncle in the heavy construction machinery business. In the mid-1960s Berry wrote, directed, and/or produced a handful of low-budget regional exploitation films as well as acted in several movies. Moreover, Dale and his wife Dorothy were not only members of the DAC Country Club, but also were involved in charity organizations that raised funds for many children's charities. Berry died at age 83 on October 20, 2011 in Sunnyvale, Texas. He was survived by three children, five grandchildren, and five great grandchildren."
For more about the man, the myth, the filmmaker, may we suggest the website byNWR? Until you go there, however, enjoy Part III our typically meandering and all-over-the-place career review of the Texan (s)exploitation filmmaker Dale Berry...
Apparently, yet another lost film. Released (in beautiful Fresno, CA) on 1 April 1966. Dale Berry supplied the script: swiping the basic voyeur concept of Irvin Berwick's Strange Compulsion (1964, see Part II), Berry took it an exploitive step further by making the lead voyeur character a killer.
In Psychotherapists on Film, 1899-1999, John Fowlers & Paul Frizler put the plot succinctly: "A madman who goes to a psychiatrist for help ends up getting none and killing the shrink." The imdb, however, offers greater detail: "Haunted by the memory of his victims, voyeur Dane Harris confesses to Professor Foray, a psychic (sic) adviser, to having committed series of sex crimes: Dane watches an exotic dancer perform, follows her to her apartment and beats her to death. In a lovers' lane, he locks a couple in the trunk of their car, shoots them and sets fire to the gas tank. On several occasions he hides in women's bedrooms, watches them undress and fondles them as they sleep. After listening to Dane's confession, the professor telephones the police, in hopes of getting a reward for turning Dane in; but, Dane, who has overheard the call, murders him. Dane then rapes the professor's secretary and holds her hostage as the police close in. The secretary is shot as she breaks away and Dane is killed in the ensuing gun battle."
The title proved to be a bit too much for some newspapers. The Sadistic Lover became The Shameless Lover at the Daily News (NYC) when it was screened in 1967 at the Avon (a.k.a. the Avenue) with the similarly themed and probably lost Arch Hudson film, Love: My Way (1964),* which became The Way of Love. Plot of Hudson's film: "Steve (Jerry Harris) tells a psychiatrist his life story: As a little boy, he watches his mother, a prostitute, service her customers. She discovers him and beats him with a belt. Grown older, he derives sexual pleasure as a voyeur. He is arrested for voyeurism by the police. Released from jail, he persuades two prostitutes to let him watch them make love. One of the women, Capri, will take no money from him, but she joins with him in mutual flagellation. Steve becomes overwrought and, believing Capri to be his mother, kills her. He is captured and put under the care of a psychiatrist. [AFI Catalog]"
Has nothing to do with the film —
Love My Way from the Psychedelic Furs:
*According Xploitation Reviews, in their interesting piece on Hudson's first film, Tortured Females (1965 / full film), which like all his films was a Mitam Productions production, many Mitam films, but for a few like Tortured Females,
are lost films because Lou Mishkin (30 Jun 1941 – 25 Sept 2001), the
son of exploitation film producer and founder of Mitam Productions
William Mishkin (6 Dec 1908 – 13 Apr 1997), destroyed the originals to
retrieve the silver. ("You suck, Lou.")
Who knows who plays whom in The Sadistic Lover, the assumed first directorial project of the truly obscure regional director George Gunter, who apparently entered the film biz by producing (and doing the cinematography on) L.Q. Jones's The Devil's Bedroom in 1964. L.Q. Jones (19 Aug 1927 – 9 Jul 2022) was primarily active as an actor — in Route 666[2001], for example — but some people might remember him for his second, and last, feature directorial project, A Boy and His Dog (1975 / trailer). In the keeping of the incestuous nature of exploitation moviemakers, the film being shown during the open-air screening in A Boy and His Dog is nothing less than the last known movie produced by George E. Gunter's Gunter Productions, the currently misplaced A Fistful of Rawhide (1970), the only known directorial project of Wilton G. Beggs, the scriptwriter of Gunter's The Old Man's Bride (1967). Going by the available online descriptions, Gunter's few movies — The Old Man's Bride is his second feature-length movie, currently existent only as an incomplete "short film" — were threadbare projects that tended to up the sleaze; unluckily, most seem to be lost.
As the newspaper advertisement below, from Danville's The Register (18 July 1967), reveals, the "stark realism" of the movie made it at least as far as North Carolina, where it played at the South Drive-in alongside Lollipop (1964). Lollipop (1964) is the English-language name for the Brazilian exploitation flick Asfalto Selvagem.
Title track to
Lollipop:
A year later, in 1968 in Honolulu at the Victory Theatre, The Sadistic Lover got paired with the Spanish/American co-production The Fickle Finger of Fate, a.k.a. The Cups of San Sebastian (1967), an obscure Tab Hunter movie. Plot: "An American engineer (Tab Hunter) visiting Madrid on business who is prevented from returning to the U.S. after customs officers find one of two priceless and recently stolen candlesticks, the Fingers of Fate, inside his suitcase. Since the authorities won't let him leave until the other candlestick is found — and he's getting married in New York in four days — he returns to his hotel to figure out which of the five finalists in the International Miss Rainbow Contest accidentally exchanged her suitcase for his, while any halfway sentient viewer will know who stole the Fingers an hour before the obvious is revealed. [...] Pretty bad. [Letterbxd]"
The Fickle Finger of Fate —
the full film:
Of the names on the poster of The Sadistic Lover, only two are known to have made other movies: Ann Lane appears (as does Erica Gavin) in Fredric Hobbs's misunderstood art film Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973 / AGFA trailer) as well as Dale Berry's The Hot Bed (1965, see Part II), while Ralph G. Edwards is found in most George E. Gunter films, as well as two other equally lost movies, William Gaston's Myra's Bed (1967) — which we are not convinced isn't a pseudonymously directed George Gunter project — and L.Q. Jones's directorial debut (as "Justus McQueen"), The Devi's Bedroom (1964). Diane Durette, in her only known film appearance, may possibly have been a stripper who went by the name Texas Li'l Darlin' (taken from a musical); she was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on 1 Feb 1939 as Diane Redding: "Running away from home at age thirteen to join the circus, eventually becoming a trapeze flyer; her experiences as a stripper with a traveling carnival; her exotic dancing career as Texas Li'l Darlin'. [SMU Library]"
Hip, Hot and 21
(1966, dir. Dale Berry)
Premiered in Dallas, Planet Texas, on 24 Nov 1966. A.k.a. Hot, Hep and 21 and Hip, Hep and 21.
Directed by Dale Berry and written "Big Daddy Epstein III", most likely a very close relation to "Harry Epstein", the director of The Hot Bed (1965 see Part II) — in other words, we would wager that Big Daddy and Dale Berry are one and the same person. Berry also shows up in his move to play the part of Sgt. Hanley Actor.
Trailer to Hip, Hot and 21 at 30:02 of Something Weird Reel Wild Cinema – Southern Sleaze:
"From deep in the heart of Texas comes this [...] dose of Dale Berry Texploitation.... In Hip, Hot and 21, lone-star babe Diane (Diane Darcel) is sold by her parents (two hillbillies straight out of Dogpatch) into an arranged marriage for $50. When that doesn't pan out, Diane embarks on a seedy odyssey rife with dope dealers, junkies, hookers, mobsters... and girls who love girls. If all that sordid melodrama doesn't git yer goat, perhaps this will float your boat: Luscious, lugubrious Lorna Maitland* (of Russ Meyer's Lorna [1964 / opening scene] and Mudhoney [1965 / trailer, with Princess Livingston]) shows up to dance in a club, working her itsy bitsy teeny weeny striped bikini for all she's worth... [Mondo Confidential]"
Indeed, the photo of Lorna Maitland at the lower left of the poster(s) doesn't even come from Hip, Hot and 21, but from Meyer's far superior B&W exploitation classic Lorna (poster below).
"Texan nudie filmmaker Dale Barry was a certified madman with little regard for narrative cohesion. The film lulls the viewer with one poorly filmed backroom stag smoker sex sequence to another before introducing jarring narrative shifts. This is the least entertaining of Barry's four features, if mainly because the ninety-minute runtime is completely unjustifiable. There's still enough low rent sleaze, alienlike filmmaking, and tawdry country fried hicksploitation atmosphere to keep Something Weird devotees amused. [Teenage Frankenstein]"
Diane Darcel dances in
Hip, Hot and 21:
"Boy, does director Dale Berry cover all the deliciously trashy grindhouse cinema bases in a simply astounding kitchen sink manner: We've got a ridiculously tawdry and eventful narrative that piles one crazy incident upon another (poor Diane even gets sexually assaulted by the same lecherous motel clerk twice!), hot babes romping around in their undies or less, a groovy score that combines jazz and surf-rock with right-on happening results, an unflinchingly sordid tone, a satisfying smattering of bare female skin, a wild and exciting climactic foot chase and shootout with the police, and a colorful array of scummy characters who include a predatory lesbian, a pathetic strung-out junkie, and, best of all, a creepy woman-beating pervert named Ernie (Artie Brooks of The Party Girls [1969 / trailer below]). Buxom Lorna Maitland struts her sizzling stuff as a sexy stripper while the always dependable Bill Thurman (of The Black Cat [1966 / trailer] and 'Gator Bait [1973 / trailer]) contributes his usual sturdy performance as a tough detective. A scuzzy marvel. [Woodyanders at imdb]"
Trailer to
PartyGirls(1969):
Perhaps as to be expected by anything Hip, Hot and 21, it got around. As the advertisement above shows, it made it to the Studio Theatre in Philadelphia in February 1967, where it was part of a double feature with "the British schoolgirl-gone-bad import The Yellow Teddy Bears (1963), re-titled Gutter Girls for this release (it was titled The Thrill Seekers for its first US run) [Screen 13]."
The Yellow Teddy Bears —
the full film, while it lasts:
The plot to YTB: "A clique of girls in an English school wear a small yellow teddy bear on their uniform to signify that they have lost their virginity. Linda (Annette Whiteley), the girls' leader, fears she may be pregnant from her window cleaner boyfriend, Kinky (Iain Gregory [10 Feb 1942 – 8 Apr 2021]), an aspiring pop singer. Desperate, and unable to confide in her parents, she must wrestle with her conscience and decide what course of action to take. Meanwhile, a concerned teacher (Jacqueline Ellis) learns the significance of the yellow teddy bears, and in trying to help the girls in question, puts her own career in jeopardy." Iain Gregory obviously had some pop-singer aspirations at some point in his life, for a released a few singles, including a song inspired by the film...
Yellow Teddy Bear,
sung by Iain Gregory:
The same month as in Phili, Hip, Hot and 21 was in NYC at the Tivoli, which later became famous as one of the first purely gay hardcore theaters (legend has it that Jack "Hubba Hubba" Wrangler met his wife Margaret Whiting there). Who knows what the original title of ...that Kind of Love is, but we might conjecture that the film screened would have been either the English dub of the Czechoslovakian movie Taková láske (1959), a.k.a. That Kind of Love, or maybe the more thematically appropriate later release, That Kind of Girl (1963). Anyone out there know for sure?
Trailer to
That Kind of Girl:
And from NYC, two months later, in April 1967, "Hip, Ho and 21" — ho' obviously didn't mean ho' back in 1967 — found its way to La La Land, where it got paired with The Young Sinners — the latter film is probably not the 1931 movie The Young Sinners.
Unluckily, there are numerous movies a.k.a. The Young Sinner(s), so what the second film is open to conjecture: Was it the early Tom "Billy Jack" Laughlin flick The Young Sinner a.k.a. Like Father Like Son (1961 / scene)? The 1958 French flick Les tricheurs (trailer) a.k.a. Young Sinners? Or maybe the lowbrow directorial debut of Joel Rapp (22 May 1934 – 15 Sept 2021), Young Sinners a.k.a. High School Big Shot (1959 / full film). Or the once scandalous Norwegian import, with Liv Ulman's starring role, Ung flukt a.k.a. The Wayward Girl a.k.a. Young Sinners (1959 / Liv dancing)?
Also in 1967, but in Daytona Beach at the Capri, Hip, Hot and 21 got paired with Bob Felderman's probably lost Hawaiian Thigh (1965, poster below), about which little is known other than it stars former actress/model Maureen Gaffney of The Black Klansman (1966). Now named Maureen Gaffney Wolfson and living in California, she has become a successful painter...
Maureen Gaffney Wolfson Art Gallery
grand opening promo video:
Two years later, in October 1969, Hip, Hot and 21 was still in the grindhouses, if only in Middle America — at the Park in Youngstown, Ohio, at an address where no known theatre supposedly ever was. The second feature, Angelique in Black Leather (1968), was/is a hard-soft lesbian-tryst B&D flick allegedly made by the titular lesbian Angelique [Bouchet], who of course never made another movie.
The appearance of surprisingly slim Lorna Maitland plays big in all the advertising and there is not a review out there that doesn't draw attention to her shimmying and shaking appearance. Hers is a tragic tale, as Travalanchetells (drawing all its info from the Rialto Report): Born on 19 November 1943, Barbara Ann Popejoy in Glendale, CA, she was raised "in Norman, Oklahoma, Popejoy ran away from home at age 16 and lived for a few months in Reno [...]. In 1960 she moved on to L.A., singing with aspiring pop groups and dancing in nightclubs until she saw an ad placed by Meyer seeking a star for his new film. [...] It was Meyer who gave Lorna her screen name. She was pregnant at the time, and possessed of Brobdingnagian mammaries, Meyer's most important criterion in casting. Lorna was a hit for him. Unfortunately, their next film together Mudhoney (1965) was not, and they essentially parted ways [...]. By this time (and this hasn't been a very long time, has it?) she'd been hanging out with rock bands, and had already blown her mind out with acid and other drugs. [...] There are accounts of offers she received around this time, movie and TV deals, but in her drugged out state she was in no position to take advantage of them. She married and had some kids, but was plagued by periodic psychotic episodes. Then came divorce and the life of an itinerant drifter. The last her family had heard of her was circa 1990. There are police records of a woman that may be Lorna committing petty crimes in California as late as 2008." Lorna Maitland, or Barbara Ann Popejoy, disappeared into the netherworld of the American homeless...
The Cramps –
I Can Hardly Stand It:
The Carolyn Lima Story
(1966, dir. John Rowe)
Supposedly the movie premiered in Houston on 9 April 1966; also known as Burn Baby Burn, The Burning Man and Burn Your Baby. Dale Berry is listed as the associate producer of this Texan slab of grindhouse cheese, but considering the movie's narrative we wouldn't be surprised if he wrote it, too. (No credited writer is known.) And, oddly, "John Rowe" never made another movie again.
What is the strangest thing of all, however, is that although the true story of the original crime is sleazy and crazy enough, the plot of the movie bears almost no resemblance to the actual events. As mentioned in Motion Picture Exhibitor (Nov 1965-Feb 1966), "[Charles]Martinez [Berry's partner in filmic crime] estimated that only eight per cent of the real story of the Fred Tones murder case was retained in the film." Fred Tones (27 Apr 1916 – 6 Feb 1961) is the guy who got murdered and burned.
The Carolyn Lima Story is considered a lost movie, although way back in 2012 the fabulous blog Temple of Schlock (whence a lot of stuff in this entry comes from) claimed it "FOUND" — where and who has it, however, they failed to say. TOS also says that the real Carolyn Lima worked as a "technical advisor" for the movie, a fact we could not collaborate.... She did, apparently, show up at least once to help promote the movie.
The plot, as found at the AFI Catalog: "Actress Carolyn Lima (Dana Sherry), released from prison after serving a sentence for murder, meets Mark Kimmery, and the two plan to marry despite objections from his mother and his friends. Dressing in front of a mirror, Mark reconstructs Carolyn's past. As a young woman, Carolyn is seduced by the syndicate into a life of prostitution. There is a murder, and Carolyn is imprisoned. The syndicate, believing that they can pull Carolyn back into a life of crime, kidnap Carolyn and Mark to force her to cooperate in the payroll robbery of the large store where she works. The gangsters intend to murder Carolyn and Mark, but they themselves die at the hands of both the police and a gang of women who are former associates of Carolyn. Carolyn and Mark marry and plan to begin a new life."
Other than for Dana Sherry, who plays who is unknown, and virtually everyone who acted in the movie had never been seen on screen before or, like Dale Berry regular Josette (in her last known movie appearance), has never been seen onscreen again since.
The true case as explained at Amazon: "Leslie Douglas Ashley met Carolyn Lima at a lesbian bar in Houston. In February 1961, soon after moving in together, the pair, who had turned to prostitution, were charged with fatally shooting a customer named Fred A. Tones, leaving his burned body in a vacant lot. A legal battle and media circus ensued. Ashley was sentenced to death; Lima was imprisoned and eventually released. Ashley's verdict was overturned because the prosecutor improperly hid psychiatric records. Ashley was sent to a mental hospital, escaped and was captured six months later.* After serving five years in prison, he was released and underwent a sex-change operation, becoming Leslie Elaine Perez. In a stranger than fiction twist, she became politically active in Houston's chapter of ACT-UP." "The details of the crime suggest that the death was no accident. Ashley shot Tones six times with a pistol. Then, to remove all evidence, the body was covered in gasoline and burned. Ashley and Lima, however, argued that they killed Tones in self-defense. According to the two prostitutes, Tones became violent with Lima's genitals as she and Ashely were engaged in sodomy, and Ashley intervened by firing one single shot. Tones allegedly started swinging a bayonet, at which point Ashley fired the remaining five shots into his body. [William Branham Site]"
Lima and Perez await execution* (1963):
*Which, of course, never happened.
Prior to meeting the allegedly "slightly retarded17-year-old hooker" Carolyn Lima, Ashley supposedly tried his luck as a drag performer in NYC. After the two killed Tones, they took his car and went to NYC by way of New Orleans and the Mardi Gras; once in NYC, they got picked up on something minor and then got sent back to Texas. Lima, not so "slightly retarded" after all, turned evidence the second time they went to trial. After Ashley, sentenced to 15 years in an asylum, escaped and made her way onto the FBI's Most Wanted list; (s)he was found working as Bobo the Clown in a traveling carnival — even without what happened after the court case, one wonders why The Carolyn Lima Story jettisoned so much of the outrageous truth for what sounds like a rather uninteresting fictional narrative...
Lost or found, the movie is not currently available. For that, as Burn Baby Burn it did get its grindhouse playdates in its day, as the advertisements at Temple of Schlock attest. In North Carolina, it played at the South Drive-in alongside Young Dillenger (1965 / full film).
At the equally long-gone Capri Art in Deleware, as The Carolyn Lima Story it was incongruently paired with the "sloppy, predicable [British] comedy with practised performers getting a few easy laughs", A French Mistress (1960 / scene). That film starred the French nubile Agnés Laurent (28 Jan 1936 – 16 Feb 2010), below, who wrote crime novels after her mildly successful career as a young, pretty thing ended.
On Planet Texas, at the Prince in San Antonio, Burn Baby Burn got paired with Dale Berry's very own The Hot Bed (1965) — an inspired couplet of titles, to say the least. In an unknown theatre in Abilene, it was paired with the surprisingly well-received exploiter A Cold Wind in August (1961), the directorial debut of Alexander Singer (18 Apr 1928 – 28 Dec 2020).
While it lasts —
A Cold Wind in August:
Hot Thrills and Warm Chills
(1967, dir. Dale Berry)
Released January 1967, Dale Berry's last 100% original-material directorial project was written by "Herman Eldeweis" — gee, we wonder who that might be. Berry also appears onscreen to play Chief Masterson. We have our doubts about how much of the background music the probably pseudonymous "Dario de Mexico" actually supplied, but the photos found online of the supposed performer of the movie's Ma-Ma Mambo are actually all of the mambo master Perez Prado (11 Dec 1916 – 14 Sept 1989). Also, according to Shazam, the mambo song played in the movie is actually Prado's Mamma A Go Go.) So, mama, go figure...
Hot Thrills and Warm Chills —
Rita Alexander moves to Ma-Ma-Mambo:
DVD Talk has the "plot": "Thankfully, things are a lot less unctuous down in the fabulous French Quarter, and reformed robber Toni (Rita Alexander) wants her gal pals to drink in all the decadence. She has a few freaked-out glamour fits before letting in her former friends, and they proceed to dish the dirt about the men who make their life miserable. Kitten (Jeane Manson) tells a story about her wedding night, and the bridesmaid who bedded her dim as a dirt clod husband. She then informs the others about a 'gorgeous hunk' of insurance salesman that she planned on porking, only to have her naked roommate Chris (Bubbles Cash) steal him away. All Dody (Susan Branson) has to say is that she's married to a CPA named Lester P. Chester and the conversation immediately turns to crime. See, Toni has one more score for her girl gang, and if the others are willing, they plan on procuring the Mardi Gras crown of 'King Sex'. With the $500K the bauble is worth, they can all fly down to the Caribbean and live like slutty queens. There is only one thing keeping them from a successful haul, and it's not their combined single digit IQ. No, Toni is all touchy feely with a local law enforcement officer, and when the cops learn of the upcoming larceny, they set up the she mob. The robbery goes sour, Toni and Dody end up running through the New Orleans streets during the big parade, and Chris shows up to have sex with anyone whose willing."
"Hot Thrills and Warm Chills is the best movie John Waters never made. Rita Alexander, who plays blonde bouffant catwoman Toni, even sounds like Mary Vivian Pierce, and her hair and eye make-up would scarcely shame Divine. Swanning around her tiny living room, twirling a taffeta-fringed dress and waving her arms around madly, she's a burlesque queen from outer space whose diet pills have definitely kicked in. Alexander is, quite simply, one of the great exploitation divas of the sixties; as compelling a screen presence as Tura Satana. With her wild appearance and extravagant manners, she's a study in camp screen magnetism. As for her sisters in crime: if you've ever wanted to see more of Divine's shoplifting friends Chicklet and Concetta, from Waters' masterpiece Female Trouble (1974 / trailer), you need look no further; their spiritual forebears are right here. [byNWR]
Over at Flick Attack, on the other hand, Rodd Lott is less impressed: "Hot Thrills and Warm Chills is a no-frills affair of sexploitation malarkey [...]. Texas director Dale Berry fails to depict the crime, presumably distracted what with all the parade footage, mirror prancing, stage dancing, stripper acts, makeout sessions, bedroom romps and pendulous breasts of Mars Needs Women (1968 / trailer) abductee Bubbles Cash. As a character quips, 'Once a nymph, always a nymph.' It all takes place in New Orleans, 'where babes and booze can be had with the wink of an eye.' That's the only quick element in the black-and-white pic, all 67 minutes of which feel like 134. In sparkly britches with top to match, Rita Alexander ostensibly stars, but mostly just wiggles and wriggles like a worm suddenly cut in half. [...]" Bubbles Cash later took the filmmakers to court, but how that ended we know not...
WFAA Clip of Bubbles Cash in Court
In the intriguing interview of Rita Alexander at the always hard-to-navigate but entertaining website byNWR, when asked "So, Rita — Hot Chills and Warm Thrills (sic): what do you remember?", she responded: "I don't remember a damn thing. I can't even watch it. You know I've never actually watched that thing the whole way through? I was so embarrassed. It was embarrassing, if you really wanna know the truth. See, it was supposed to be a real picture. And then they put in sex scenes starring other women. That's not the way it was sold to me. It was sold to me as a legit movie. And then it opened down the street at the sex movie palace. In some ways I was lied to, because they wound up making a dirty movie — 'What the hell, man? What did you do that for? Why did you stick that stuff in there?'"
As far as we could find, the only other feature film Rita Alexander ever participated was Matt Cimber's Vegas-set Fake-Out (1982 / trailer).
Uses material from Hot Thrills and Warm Chills —
Bonobo's Between the Lines (2006):
byNWR also asked Bubbles Cash about the movie, but despite the available proof that she truly is in it — she even took Dale Berry to court for withholding promised payment for acting in it — she adamantly maintains she is not in either Hot Thrills and Warm Chills or Berry's earlier Hip, Hot and 21. (But then, going by the interview, she and her Outsider-artist daughter long left planet Earth for Jupiter or beyond.)
Since the movie came out, Susan Branson has fallen off the face of the Earth. As has Lorna Maitland, although her life can at least be followed until 1990 (see Rialto Report's What Happened to Lorna Maitland? Her Beauty, Tragedy and Mystery); she is less in Hot Thrills and Warm Chills than inserted into the movie, once again shaking her booty in the same bikini seen in the previous year's Hip, Hot and 21. In good ol' fashioned exploitation exaggeration, her part was given greater importance in the Avalon Fine Arts Theatre's advertisement for the odd pairing of Hot Thrills and Warm Chills with Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily? (1966 / trailer).
And as for the Glory Roads, who are credited on the poster, a group named Glory Roads did eventually release a 45 featuring the song below as the A-side and a cover of Nothing but a Heartache on the B-side. But who they were, where they came from and where they went is still obscured by passing time...
The Glory Roads —
Rock Me in the Cradle:
Jeane Manson, on the other hand, managed to make herself a real career in the entertainment business. In 1973, she was a lead in The Young Nurses (trailer, with Dick Miller) and had a large role in the gory exploiter Terror Circus* (1973 / trailer), and the year later became Playboy's Playmate of the Month for August (centerfold below) and starred in Dirty O'Neil (1974 / trailer). Moving to France, she acted in more movies and took up a singing career, having a hit with the song Avant de nous dire adieu. In 1979, she sang at the Eurovison Song Contest for Luxembourg, coming in 13th with her song J'ai déjà vu ça dans tes yeux. (Back then, the singers still sang in the language of the country they represented.) She was later seen stateside, naked but not dead, in the "heavy on violence, nudity, vulgar language and sexual situation" Charles Bronson thriller 10 to Midnight (1983 / trailer), but for the most part she has remained in Europe — smart woman – where she releases regular albums and appears on TV shows and series.
*A.k.a. The Barn of the Naked Dead. Starring the exploitation-film master actor Andrew "Horse" Prine (14 Feb 1936 – 31 Oct 2022), he is reported to have said: "This is the only movie I ever regretted making."
Jeane Manson sings
J'ai déjà vu ça dans tes yeux:
Mondo Sexo
(1967, dir. "Dale Berrystein")
Berry's final and probably lost movie, directed by "Dale Berrystein", produced by "Fanny Frankenstein" and based on an original story by "Charles Martinstein". A detailed search of the web only produces quick references to the movie but little info, and much of what one finds is wrong — for example, Mondo Sexo is neither a short film nor is it from France. According to byNWR, however, "Mondo Sexo is probably much of a piece too, being made up of out-takes from The Hot Bed, Passion in the Sun and Hot-Blooded Woman edited into a new story about a female vigilante squad hunting a rapist." The poster above, obviously enough, comes from emovieposter, where they basically write more about the plot than any other website (admittedly, though crazy, the plot they give doesn't sound very Berry-like): "Mondo Sexo, the 1967 Dale Berry [...] sexploitation crime thriller. [...] A really despicable movie about a rapist whose victims so enjoy the experience that they want it to be repeated, but the rapist refuses and keeps raping new women, and finally, his victims gather together and have sex with him until he dies. Starring Frenchy La Rue, Claudine Manson, Knockers O'Hare, Sylvia Bardette, Conrad Marcus, Jimmy Green and 'the Tia-Juana Girls'. [...]" To that, in his book Sexuality in World Cinema, James L. Limbacher adds the following: "Fanny Frankenstein wrote this one about a man convicted of rape who gets out of prison and haunts a nightclub where he rapes the customers."
One thing that definitely intrigues us here at a wasted life is what is written on the backside of the poster available at emovieposter, namely: "Private Sexy Tary and Keyhole Cuties". The film Private Sexy Taryobviously existed once upon a time, as is proven by the triple-feature poster for Beauty and the Cave (1961, see Part I) and advertisements like the one below we found somewhere at Screen 13, where it was screened at Philadelphia's Studio Theatre as part of a triple feature with two Barry Mahon movies, The Love Cult (1966 / trailer) and The Girl with the Magic Box (1965).
Is there link between Dale Berry and what appears to be a truly obscure and probably lost sexploitation movie titled Private Sexy Tary? Not that we'll lose sleep over it, but enquiring minds want to know.
BTW: Berry's Mondo Sexo (1967) should definitely not be confused with the hardcore "documentary" on the "sexual practices in the pre-Deep Throat era" from Alien Films usually titled Porno Mondo (1971) but also found online as Mondo Sexo — even if the title card in the film itself still remains Porno Mondo. (Unlike Berry's film, that one is easy to find online.) Porno Mondo, a Southern Californian production, is the only film ever credited to the unknown director "Frederico Schwartz". A 60-odd-minute fuck film, it includes the familiar faces (and more) of Rene Bond (clothed and credited as "Sila Lean"), her husband Rick Lutze (8 Apr 1944 – 22 Sept 2011), the legendary Kathy Hilton, Con Covert (1935 – 1990) and other forgotten names. "Knowing the entire film is fictitious, the film, and especially the interviews, comes across as amusing. One would assume though at the time it came out Federico Schwartz most likely expected audiences would not recognize the cast and might think it to be real. Had I seen this under the belief that it was a real documentary I doubt I would have found it as amusing as I did. [Adult DVD]"
Nor, for that matter, should Berry's Mondo Sexo be confused with Sergio Martino's 1969 mondo documentary Mille peccati... nessuna virtù / Wages of Sin, which also enjoyed a re-release as Mondo Sex.
Recognize the music to Sergio Martino's
Mille peccati... nessuna virtù?
Dale Berry's Mondo Sexo did see the light of day, in any event: there are real newspaper advertisements for it (we found them at Screen 13)...
Above, at Minneapolis's Avalon Fine Arts, Mondo Sexo — "... a film of violence made from the juice of life!" — even got paired with a film it supposedly uses outtakes from, Hip, Hot and 21.
And in Florida, at the Capri Art, it got paired with Burlesque Queens, a mystery a.k.a. title. Two possibilities come to mind, 1953's now lost partially 3-D I Was a Burlesque Queen and 1955's Teasarama (trailer below), but face it, it could be any movie in the world.
Trailer to
Teasarama:
BTW: In their comment to the Avalon Fine Arts theatre advert further above, Screen 13 says "Another Berry production in Hip, Hot, and 21 was teamed up with the very sordid Mondo Sexo which was the source of the fan favorite Follow That Skirt."Not correct, for Mondo Sexo, like the movies it took its outtakes, was surely in B&W, whereas Richard W. Bomont's sleazy short, Follow that Skirt a.k.a. Mondo Weirdo, is in full lurid color. Follow that Skirt is also "a master class in bad taste that would make John Waters proud. A creepozoid voyeur wearing Ray-Bans (Dale West) follows women home and murders them with a butcher knife. A monotone narrator tells us why: 'He's a man who hates women because he wants to be one himself.' With its free jazz soundtrack, collage-like structure, and deranged sexual politics, Follow That Skirt [...] is a 27-minute mash-up of the 'true crime' style of The Zodiac Killer (1971 / full film), the pop-art violence of Blood Feast (1963 / full film), and the queer-tinged camp of Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things (1971 / AGFA trailer). Something for everyone! [Letterbxd]"
The full short —
Follow That Skirt:
Attack of the Eye Creatures
(1967, dir. Larry Buchanan)
How cheap can you be? The VHS release of the movie lifts the artwork from the nine years older The Crawling Eye (1958 / trailer), poster below, the movie released in the US cut together from the 6-episode, half-hour-long British TV show, The Trollenberg Terror (1956-57). Notice: on some copies, the title of the film reads The Attack of the The Eye Creatures...
"Another carload of those blasted smoochers on my property! I'll get the law after 'em."
Old Man Bailey (Ethan Allen)
Over at the endlessly entertaining but hard-to-navigate nyNWR, in an article cum interview with Berry's daughter Susan Second, Susan mentions, "I remember Dad being involved with Beauty and the Cave. And The Eye Creatures (1967), which was filmed in Dallas in the White Rock Lake area, where we lived then. John Ashley (25 Dec 1934 – 3 Oct 1997) was in town and I was there for part of it." She doesn't say in what way her father was involved, but for the sake of completionism, let's take a look at Buchanan's cinematic fart, The Attack of the Eye Creatures, one of a series of remakes of old AIP movies he made for television broadcast. Here, he remakes the far-far-far better but also not very good Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957 / trailer below).
Trailer to
Invasion of the Saucer Men:
The original narrative for The Eye Creatures comes, uncredited, from a short story titled The Cosmic Frame by Paul W. Fairman (22 Aug 1909 – Oct 1977), originally published in Amazing Stories (May 1955). That story also served as the (credited) source for the far, far, far better but also not very good Invasion of the Saucer Men, one of prodigious genre filmmaker Edward L. Cahn's science fiction films. Neither Paul Fairman nor Invasion of the Saucer Men scriptwriters Robert J. Gurney Jr. (11 Dec 1924 – 26 Jan 2011) and Al Martin (1 Jan 1897 – 10 Oct 1971) receive credit in Buchanan's film.* Fairman, a busy short story and genre author, under the pseudonym P.W. Fair, authored the Man from S.T.U.D. series (1968-1971), which includes such catchy titles as...
*Robert J. Gurney Jr. & Al Martin's credit is deserved due to the fact that they wrote the script to the first version, and the changes in the new version are legendarily few. Gurney's short cinema-related CV includes some directorial credits, including the bad-film fave Terror from the Year 5000 (1958 / trailer) and the don't-trust-strangers scare flick Edge of Fury (1958 / full film). Martin's career was a bit more substantial: he began as writer of silent film title cards before moving into screenplays, Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957) being one of his last projects. Other projects of note include The Rogues' Tavern (1936 / full film); the first of Bela Lugosi's Monogram Nine, Invisible Ghost (1941 / full film), and the oddly forgettable Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942 / trailer).
"One interesting experiment to try is to watch both [The Eye Creatures] and Saucer Men in fairly close proximity; it's a chance to see two different versions of the same script. Saucer Men isn't a great movie in and of itself, but it does give you an appreciation of how simple competence and decent editing can make a world of difference. [Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings]"
In The Eye Creatures, the following happens: "Project Visitor should be used to search for UAPs, but the horny soldiers use it to watch teenagers like Stan Kenyon (John Ashley, a 33-year-old 'teenager' in this movie) and his girlfriend Susan Rogers (Cynthia Hull of High Yellow [1965 / full movie] and The Young Runaways [1968 / trailer]) make out. When she tells him that she thinks someone is watching them, he tells her that everyone in every car is watching each other. [...] As they pull out of lover's lane, they hit and kill an alien with their car. The alien body ends up getting used in a get rich plan and the government looks for it. It turns out that the aliens plan on attacking the town but the teens soon learn that bright light destroys them, so everyone stops dry humping and shines their headlights on the eye creatures, destroying them. [B&S about Movies]"
"I expected to be frightened on my wedding night, but nothing like this!"
Susan (Cynthia Hull)
Rivets on the Poster has "to confess a certain weakness for one of the new subplots of the film, as we see the inept – and frankly comic – response of the mighty U.S. military establishment to the arrival of the flying saucer. Which in this case is a former press-agent turned Lieutenant,* his superior, and a handful of Air Force guys with guns. And then there are the two guys monitoring the secret cameras,** who miss the saucer landing because they were too busy spying on the couples in Lovers' Lane with the infrared cameras that are part of their massive surveillance system!"
*Warren Hammack (14 Feb 1934 – 13 Feb 2023) of The Copper Scroll of Mary Magdalene (2004), not with Erica Gavin.
**Corporal Culver (Jonathan Ledford [18 Oct 1921 – 31 May 1984] of Edgar G. Ulmer's The Amazing Transparent Man [1960 / trailer]) and his underling (Tony Huston, possibly the co-scripter of The Hellcats [1968 / trailer] and Five the Hard Way a.k.a. The Side Hackers [1969 / opening]).
"Susan's got a lot of the right things to put in the right places, and she's all mine."
Stan (John Ashley)
"Yet, while Invasion of the Saucer Men was a genuinely clever sci-fi satire, Attack of the Eye Creatures is done in by Buchanan's inability to keep his story moving at a steady pace and it doesn't help that the iconic Saucer Men have been replaced by men who appear to be wearing trash bags. Attack of the Eye Creatures is an unfortunate remake and one that should be viewed only after you've watched Invasion of the Saucer Men and maybe every other public domain sci-fi film that's currently on YouTube. [Through a Shattered Lense]"
Trailer to
Attack of the Eye Creatures:
Mudhoney
(1965, dir. Russ Meyer)
&
Tropic of Scorpio
(1968, writ. & dir. Zoltan G. Spencer)
"In 1967 Berry quit filmmaking, and never returned to the director's chair. Two of his films (Hot Thrills and Warm Chills [1967] and Hip, Hot and 21 [1966]) had been produced under the banner of Trans Continental Artists Corporation, a Houston-based company run by Charles M. Martinez,* Berry's director of photography. The two men kept the Trans Continental Artists banner and in September 1968 they moved from film production to film exhibition, opening a new cinema, Studio III, in Corpus Christi, southern Texas. [...] Studio III began trading on 1 September with Russ Meyer's Mudhoney [...]. Judging by a gap in the newspaper listings between January 1969 and July 1970, it seems the cinema was actually forced to close for eighteen months. When it returned it was still showing adult material, including a smattering of Berry's own films, but business remained turbulent. [byNWR]"
*Obviously enough, films are not the only thing that get lost. Fathers do, too — including Berry's partner in crime, Charles M. Martinez. Over at the Temple of Schlock, in the comments section of their 5 Jun 2012 entry The Endangered List: Burn Baby Burn, a grammatically challenged person wrote in: "I been looking for my father which is the producer of this film Charles Martinez I been n looking for him for 35 plus years if you all can be any help pls call me 2134796562". Check your attic (and maybe your birth certificate).
In the end, the only real connection Berry has with Mudhoney and Tropic of Scorpio is that he screened them both at his adult theatre... but, hell! Let's look at both films anyway...
We already looked at Mudhoney before, for example in the first entry (on Princess Livingston) of our multi-part Babe of Yesteryear look at the babes of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970 / trailer), where we more or less wrote:
A.k.a. Rope of Flesh and Mudhoney... Leaves a Taste of Evil! It may be Meyer's preceding roughie, Lorna (1964), and his later film, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965 / trailer, see R.I.P. Haji and R.I.P. Tura Santana), that get all the attention, but here at a wasted life we have always found this sweaty and violent slab of period-set, melodramatic hixploitation to be the best of Meyer's three roughie classics.
Princess Livingston is [...] Maggie Marie, the white-trash mother of the local cathouse housing pneumatic good-time gal Clara Belle (Lorna Maitland) and her equally pneumatic deaf and dumb sister Eula (Rena Horten [11 Feb 1941 – 11 Nov 2009] of Out of Sight [1966 / trailer], Russ Meyer's Fanny Hill [1964 / trailer] and Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace [1962]). That's Rena below... and on many of the posters.
The film was a financial failure, and Meyer later said it was a mistake that he only made because he was in love with Rena Horton; Robert Ebert, on the other hand, saw Mudhoney as Meyer's "most interesting, most ambitious, most complex" neglected masterpiece. We agree with Ebert 100% and are happy that Meyer fell in love with Rena Horton's breasts. Had he not, this film might never have been made.
Mudhoney is based on an obscure novel titled Streets Paved with Gold by Raymond Friday Locke (1934 – 8 June 2002), who co-wrote the screenplay with William E. Sprague, the latter of whom went on to script Meyer's non-classic Motorpsycho (1965, see R.I.P. Haji).
The plot, as supplied by Fred Beldin at All Movie: "California McKinney (John Furlong [14 Apr 1933 – 23 Jun 2008] of Vampires [1998]) is hitchhiking to the state he was named for after serving a five-year sentence for manslaughter. He runs out of money in Spooner, MO, and finds work at a farm run by Lute Wade (Stuart Lancaster [30 Nov 1920 – 22 Dec 2000]) and his niece, Hannah Brenshaw (Antoinette Christiani). All Calif wants is to do is work quietly until he can save enough money to keep on moving, but Hannah's drunken husband, Sidney (Hal Hopper [11 Nov 1912 – 2 Nov 1970]), takes it upon himself to verbally and physically abuse him, as he does his own wife and anyone else who crosses his path. Sidney spends most of his time drinking corn liquor at the local whorehouse and bragging about his plans to sell the farm after the sickly Uncle Lute dies. However, the goodhearted Calif and the long-suffering Hannah are falling in love, and Lute arranges his will so that Sidney can't lay claim to the estate after his death. The desperate Sidney plots with the local preacher (Franklin Bolger) to exploit the small town's gossipy nature with lies about Hannah's virtue, though his conniving is undone when he commits an insane, jealous crime and finds himself the target of a bloodthirsty vigilante group."*
*Keep your eyes open when the individual faces flit by and you'll see the unmistakable visage of the director, Russ Meyer.
"[A] raw, unflinching drama taking mob mentality, religion, law, and more to task, says Silver Screening Room, "More than exploitation, it explores the effect change and crisis can have on individuals and groups. The Depression turns a small town into a pressure cooker of violence, everyone waiting for that moment when they can let loose and sacrifice someone, anyone, to the great god Fury. That's mob mentality, but Mudhoney also explores the desperation of families, the injustice done to workers, and the deep holes many buried themselves in when the work dried up. And still has time for sex jokes!"
And for boobs, too. Mudhoney is a movie well worth searching out and watching. It deserves a better fate than simply being known as the source of a cult rock band's name.
Tropic of Scorpio (1968), as far as we can tell, is the tertiary directorial credit of the Zoltan G. Spencer, a.k.a. Spence Crilly, but born as George Spencer Crilly Jr. (31 Mar 1924 – 28 Jan 1976), a man whose short career in exploitation, like that of Dale Berry, definitely deserves to be looked at in depth one day.
"Zoltan G. Spencer was a mysterious sex-horror sorcerer who created happy un-worlds that writhed with sexual chaos, shabby sets, and baffling tangents. From meta-enriched exposes of Hollywood's dark side (The Screentest Girls [1969])* to bizarro explorations in Halloween smut (Terror at Orgy Castle [1971]), Spencer's legacy is a synthetic wonderland of manic perversion. [Alamo Drafthouse]" Both the just mentioned soft-core films can be easily found and viewed for free on a multitude of hardcore streaming sites — seek and ye shall find.
Tropic of Cancer was co-produced by Paul Hunt, and seeing that its official release date is 18 Dec 1968, it was probably a first-run release when playing at Berry & Martinez's Studio III. Since then, it has pretty much disappeared, so much so that absolutely no one has ever bothered writing about it — who knows, perhaps it is as lost as Berry's former partner Charles M. Martinez. In any event, we doubt the movie to be an adaption of Robert Bledsoe's surely sleazy book of the same name published (1962) by low-rent sleazesters, Kozy Books.
Emovieposter pretty much knows the most: "Tropic of Scorpio, the 1968 [...] sexploitation comedy movie ('It's so easy to set fire to a woman where the hot wind blows!'; the movie was produced by Paul Hunt and had cinematography by Ed De Priest [...]), starring Dianne Curtis ('as Doris the Sun Virgin'), Cathy Price ('as Jane the Insatiable'), Arnie Cohen, Harvey Shane, and Yuki Tani. [...]" Oddly enough, they fail to mention the biggest star name of the movie: the great Marsha Jordon! (That's her above and below.) For more on about the cinematographer, may we suggest you read The Elusive Ed DePriest...
Yuki Tani was at the tail end of her non-career when she made this film; she made one last uncredited film appearance somewhere in The Love God? (1969, see Gina Dair) and then disappeared. Harvey Shain (a.k.a. Forman Shane) participated in a whole slew of cheap and low-brow movies on up past the naughts, beginning with Day of the Nightmare (1965 / full movie). After that movie, he pretty much only did "erotic movies" until the fun anti-classic, Planet of the Dinosaurs (1977 / trailer). The pneumatic Diane Curtis had a viable career as a nude model before disappearing; her only other known film currently remains the bad-film fan fave, The Acid Eaters (1967 / clip). The only member of the cast to truly go on and have a career was the character actor Victor Izay (23 Dec 1923 – 20 Jan 2014), who alternated between TV jobs and movies like The Astro Zombies (1968 / trailer, with Tura Satana) and Blood Song (1982 / full movie).
Zadar! Cow from Hell
(1989, dir. Robert Hughes)
Shall we call this one a "Big Maybe"? If you get down to it, "Dale Berry" really isn't all that exceptional of a name. An thus, although more than one website out there — but not the imdb— has this movie on their given Dale Berry filmography, we personally have our HUGE doubts that the Dale Berry who plays an "Angry Cow" in this (never forgotten because it was never known) independent production from Planet Iowa is the same Dale Berry that once lived on Planet Texas. But who are we to argue with Letterbxd, Gold Poster, Plex, ...? The movie premiered at the Sundance Festival, where the catalog description explains the films as follows: "[...] Zadar! Cow from Hell profiles a motley collection of sleazy movie characters trying to create a movie that doesn't exist about a giant cow that, well, doesn't exist either. Caught in the puzzled center of all this nonsense is a community of skeptical Iowa townspeople, whose volunteer spirit and good-natured hospitality gradually turn to open hostility as they realize they're as competent to make a film as these Hollywood types. Besides, the movie's so-called special-effects whiz has stuck unmovable cow horns on all of them for the mutant zombie-cow sequence. [...]" So, is Dale Berry in it? Well, why don't you watch the movie and let us know...
Zadar! Cow from Hell —
the full movie:
Prior to making Zadar! Cow from Hell, director Robert Hughes — needless to say, not the studley Robert Hughes who wrote The Shock of the New — also did a few truly terrible and eminently watchable low budget regional horror movies, namely: Hunter's Blood (1986) and Memorial Valley Massacre (1988 / trailer)...
Trailer to
Hunter's Blood:
Less interesting, along with porn director
legend Anthony
Spinelli (21 Feb 1927 – 29 May 2000), Robert Hughes split the directorial
chores on the D2V release Playboy: Bedtime Stories (1987). The five
"sexy" segments — "The Virgin's Cup", "The Farmer's
Daughter", "The Ring and The Garter", "Tricks of the Trade"
and "The Invisible Lover" — were originally made in the early
eighties for the Playboy channel, so who knows who directed what — and good
luck trying to find a copy of the dead media carrier on which the collection was released.
Playboy Bedtime Stories
interstitials:
What we don't look at and why (1966-1976)
Beyond his initial activity with Studio III, to what extent Dale Berry remained involved in the film industry is at best open to conjecture. While byNWR (the only online source that has truly taken a close look at Berry, his life, and his output) states that "Berry's earlier film company, Trans-American Pictures Corporation, stayed active in film distribution into the mid-1970s, handling such delights as Tim Kincaid's The Female Response (1973 / trailer) and Miss Nude America (1976 / article with trailer)", they actually overlook a small detail that is important and makes Dale Berry's involvement in any future "Trans-American" picture questionable.
For one, Berry's company was named Trans-American Pictures Corporation, while the firm that distributed Miss Nude America was Trans-American Pictures Incorporated. Confusingly, James P. Blake, the director and producer of Miss Nude America, founded a Trans-American Pictures Inc. in NYC in 1980, four years after his directorial debut, Miss Nude America (with Harry Reems), was first released. (Blake subsequently formed American Independent Productions in Los Angeles, a company familiar for a whole slew of B-movies.)
Secondly, the company that distributed The Female Response was Trans-American Films, a subsidy of API that usually released their foreign or too-sleazy product, not Trans-American Pictures. Thus, as far as a wasted life is concerned, Dale Berry probably/possibly had nothing to do with the distribution of either Tim Kincaid's The Female Response or James P. Blake's Miss Nude America... or, for that matter, any number of other impressive movies distributed by Trans-American Films, including (but not limited to) The Hallucination Generation (1966 / trailer), Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust(1980), Jess Franco's Succubus(1968, with Janine Reynaud), Tom Simone's Prison Girls (1972, with the Great Uschi & Candy Samples), Cronenberg's classic Shivers (1975 / trailer), Tinto Brass's Salon Kitty (1976), Derek Ford's The Swappers (1970 / trailer) and I Am a Groupie (1970 / trailer) — both produced by Stanley A Long— and countless mondos like Africa segreta (1969 / trailer), Sadismo (1967 / trailer), Spree (1967 / trailer), Witchcraft '70 (1969 / trailer), Africa Ama (1971 / full movie in Italian) and...
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