The Monster Club (Great Britain, 1980)

This portmanteau film — that's golden-snot vocabulary for anthology film — is the final feature film directorial effort by Roy Ward Baker (Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde [1971] and The Legend of Seven Golden Vampires [1974]) and, contrary to what many people believe, is not an Amicus Productions. The vignettes are based on the tales of the British horror author R. Chetwynd-Hayes — as is the final Amicus anthology movie, From Beyond the Grave (1973 / trailer) — and John Carradine, the headlining star alongside Vincent Price, plays the author in, clearly, a fictionalized form.

An enjoyable if less than stellar effort, The Monster Club is a highly uneven ride that is at times entertaining and at times excruciating, almost never truly scary but often good for a laugh — as it was obviously intended to be — and enjoyable above all simply for the presence of the two headlining Old Masters, Carradine and Price, during the interlocking scenes. Neither seems to be trying to hard, but then they don't have too: they exude a relaxed and lightly wry presence achieved by years of experience and practice, and are a pleasure to watch and hear. They seem to be having fun, and it carries over to the viewer. 

Elsewhere, during the horror vignettes themselves, other favorite faces show up occasionally for the ride as well; Elke Sommers (Hotel der toten Gäste [1965] and Flashback – Mörderische Sommer [2000]), Donald Pleasance, Patrick Magee (Dementia 13 [1963 / trailer / full movie] and The Masque of the Red Death [1964]), and Stuart Whitman being the immediately recognizable ones for us here at A Wasted Life. This in turn also helps make the somewhat mundane and less than spectacular tales more palatable. Indeed, if the vignettes are examples of the horror that R. Chetwynd-Hayes wrote, the movie hardly inspires one to search out his work. Still, there are worse stories (and movies) out there... 

The wrap-around sequence concerns the elderly horror author Chetwynd-Hayes (John Carradine) who is out and about one night enjoying the sight of his books in a bookstore window when Eramus (Vincent Price), a starving vampire fan, takes a lite lunch from him and then invites Chetwynd-Hayes to the titular Monster Club as a form of repayment and possible inspiration. (The idea of such clubs was used again later, of course, in both the TV series Buffy (1997-2003) and its spinoff Angel (1999-2004), not to mention the monster of all monster-club movies, From Dusk to Dawn [1996 / trailer].) The place is hilarious, intentionally of course, as the whole movie does not really try hard to be serious at all, but one must say that the monster masks look less burlesque or humorous than simply badly made and dirt cheap. But the dilettantish execution of the masks reflects the general mood of the film, as The Monster Club, which doesn't really have a nasty bone in its body, is definitely aimed more at pre-teens with an odd sense of humor than anything else.

Eramus sits down to his glass of blood, Chetwynd-Hayes to his tomato juice (so as to look less conspicuous), and we are treated to a rather long lecture on the family tree of monster interbreeding, the concept that is common to all three stories, which feature characters of different mixed blood. The first tale, "The Shadmock", is perhaps the ickiest one of them all, if only because it is so sad that a beauty like Angela (Barbara Kellerman of Satan's Slave [1976 / trailer]) meets the fate that she does, while her slimebag boyfriend (Simon Ward of Deadly Strangers [1975 / full movie], Dominique [1979 / trailer], Holocaust 2000 [1977 / a trailer] and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed! [1969 / trailer]) only ends up insane. The "monster" of the segment, the "shadmock" Raven (James Laurenson of Assault [1971 / trailer]), looking much like a first cousin of the Addams Family, is more tragic than terrible, and in the longer run is perhaps in greater need of a good shrink than a girlfriend. (Some websites claim that Klaus KIinsky had been offered and turned down a role in The Monster Club; it is easy to imagine that this may have been the part.) 

The middle section, "The Vampires", introduced by an chuckle-inducing swipe at film producers, is perhaps the weakest if funniest of them all, and features both Donald Pleasance (Raw Meat [1972], Prince of Darkness [1987], The Mutations [1973]  and Django II  [1987]) as a vampire hunter, Eklund as a human vampire bride, and Richard Johnson (of Zombies II [1979 / trailer], The Haunting [1963 / trailer], Beyond the Door [1974 / trailer], The Comeback [1978 / trailer], The Great Alligator [1979 / German trailer], The Night Child [1975 / trailer] and much more) as the absentee vampire father; the first twist at the end is rather effective and funny, the second twist only gives the viewer the feeling that the filmmakers wanted their cake and to eat it, too. In other words, it is less funny than simply too much and actually damages an already too-humorous segment... Still, kids who like happy ending will like it. 

And then comes the final tale, "The Ghouls", featuring Patrick Magee as one of the bad ghouls and Stuart Whitman (of Eaten Alive [1977 / trailer], Night of the Lepus [1972 / trailer], Ruby [1977 / trailer], Devil's Hand [1981 / trailer], Horror Safari  [1982 / trailer], Welcome to Arrow Beach [1974 / trailer] and Deadly Intruder      [1988 / trailer]) as the director in search of a shooting location. If one overlooks the one blaring flaw of the story — the ghouls can't stand the cross yet have for years taken dinner from a graveyard full of cross tombstones* — it is perhaps the most successful of the lot: blackly humorous and extremely fatalistic, it is horrendous even as it tries not to be overly serious. It comes the closest, in our opinion, to the tales found in the classic EC comic books, which were, as everyone knows, the biggest influence on the British (if not most) anthology horror film as of the 1960s and 70s.

Two other highpoints of the movie include Price's closing monologue, a convincing argument that humans are far more the true monster on the world than all other monsters combined, and a funny striptease (done by an unknown Suzanna Willis) to some group called Night that we have often seen as a GIF but had never previously known whence it came. It gets a good laugh from those who don't know it — and almost as good of one from those who do. It is also the only music interlude that doesn't make the viewer cringe...

Stevie (Vann) Lange  of Night sings — The Stripper Scene:

Speaking of the music interludes: they are biggest flaw of the movie, and The Monster Club would well have been better served had they been dumped in favor of a forth episode. But they are there, and they are not good, almost as bad as those found in Night Train to Terror (1985), but instead of only one crappy new wave group (as in the legendary Night Train), in The Monster Club there are four or maybe more — we've tried desperately to forget — and they are not all new wave, old wave or of any wave at all. The oldest wave is of course The Pretty Things, who show up for a song and thus only reveal how deep of a commercial rut they were already in when the movie came out. The best number is of course that of the token female singer Stevie Lange, but as killer as her voice is, like all the songs in the movie, it's not like you will find yourself really wanting to hear it again. 

But good or bad, the crappy music is made worse by the fact that Roy Ward Baker, while a serviceable and experienced director more than capable of making a professional if almost generically-styled movie, obviously hadn't the foggiest clue of how to film music videos despite obviously trying to do so whenever the bands are on stage. He fails completely: never once looking to Russ Meyer or Eisenstein (MTV wasn't around for another year) for a clearer concept of montage and quick edit, or even trying to combine the song to the image or edit, he instead opts to do nothing special or, for one blue-faced guy (a laughably serious and miserable B. A. Robertson singing a generic-sounding 80s new wave turd entitled Sucker For Your Love), going crazy with the zoom — and, by doing so, managing to show the world, if only due to comparison, that Jess Franco as actually a master of the zoom. Major ouch. The songs and technique are a far cry from, say, the equally dated but nevertheless successful appearance of Bauhaus in The Hunger (1983 / trailer) singing Bela Lugosi Is Dead.

Opening titles to The Hunger — Bela Lugosi Is Dead:

The Monster Club: fun enough but hardly earthshaking, its plus points outweigh its flaws, but on the whole it is not the best movie of the director or of any of the familiar faces found in it. Go in with low expectations, and you might enjoy it, but we for one can't help but wonder why it should enjoy some sort of cult popularity...

*Actually, there are really so many other small logical flaws in every narrative that one really has to decide to consciously ignore them or the entire movie will become somewhat of a drag.

B. A. Robertson singing Sucker For Your Love:

Short Film: The Gunfighter (USA, 2014)

What if the omnipresent voice of the cheap Western novel could suddenly to be heard by all those who are involved in the tale, and what if that voice was of a perfidious nature and knew everyone's sexual secrets? This concept is the basis of director Eric Kissack's little film here, the very professional-looking, nine-minute short film entitled The Gunfighter, written by Kevin Tenglin. 

The Gunfighter just won the award for Best Short Film at the 2014 Los Angeles Film Festival and is currently making the rounds at other festivals, where it is rightly enjoying a good reception and should surely bring in a few more honors.Some guy named S. James Wegg reviewed the short for the 20th Annual Palm Springs International ShortFest earlier this month, and, under the heading "The danger of thoughts being heard aloud", he gave the film five stars and wrote: "The old expression 'if you could read my mind' takes on a new and hilarious meaning in Kissack's satire of life in the Old West. Starting with the arrival of a stranger packing iron (Shawn Parsons [of The Sacrament (2013 / trailer)]) is ideally cast as the gradually conflicted gunfighter) in a dusty saloon, the narrator (superb texture and tone from Nick Offerman [of  Sin City (2005 / trailer) and Cursed (2005 / trailer)]) quickly slips his usual noose of dryly revealing back-story and begins revealing damning secrets about everyone from the town whore (Eileen O’Connell [of Get Dead (2014 / trailer) and Heterosexuals (2010 / trailer)]) to all of her Johns and even a 'Jane' or two who dare not speak her name. Of course the notion of a 'ballet of death' artfully has its payoff, leaving everyone seeing red and the audience praying that no all-seeing narrator will lay bare their foibles, transgressions and predilections for all to see. But relax, in these days of social media mania, how could that ever happen?"
Enjoy A Wasted Life's "Short Film of the Month" for July 2014: The Gunfighter.

R.I.P.: Harry H. Novak, Part V: 1968

12 January  1928 — 26 March  2014

"When I was a kid, my Daddy told me, 'There's a buyer for everything.' And I lived to find out that he was right."

Harry H. Novak

Harry H. Novak, alongside David F Friedman (24 December 1923 — 14 February 2011) one of the great (s)exploitation kings of the last half of the 20th century, died 26 March 2014 at the age of 86.

A detailed career review of all the projects Harry H. Novak foisted upon the American public would be Sisyphean task at best and hardly possible, as no full and unequivocal list exists. What follows is a review of the films that we found that, for the most part, probably had Novak's involved somewhere along the way — and some that may not have. It is definitely not a complete list, and definitely not infallible, it is merely culled from sources reliable and unreliable that we found online. We also in no way suggest that the given release dates are the correct ones, they are merely the first ones we found.

If you know any we missed, feel free to send the title...

Go here for Part II (1956–64)

Go here for Part III (1965–1966)

Go here for Part IV (1967)

Boneless

(1968, dir. Seiichi Fukuda)

Aka Mutilation, original title: Honenuki. Another Japanese pink film picked up by Harry Novak for stateside release. EigaWijia says: "Given the title Mutilation in some English texts, the film was released in the US by Harry Novak under the title Boneless. Under that title it has been released in the US on DVD-R by Something Weird video, who describe it as 'a lurid offering from the formative years of the Japanese eroduction'.

Over at imdb, c.auger@gmx.de explains the plot: "When the two lovers Yukio (Kaoru Miya) and Minoru (Mari Nagisa) meet again after four years of separation, they find that their old feelings are not dead. The problem is that Yukio is now married. But things get really complicated when they are spied upon by a blackmailer who then forces Yukio to have sex with Mister Jacob, a foreign businessman. Ironically, it was Yukio's unknowing husband, who ordered the blackmailer to find a woman for his important business partner Jacob. When Jacob leaves the country the blackmailer decides to use Yukio for other jobs and make her his partner."

Japanese poster above from Las Mejores Peliculas delMundo. 

For Single Swingers Only

(1968, dir. Don Davis)

Included by benefit of doubt, this Don Davis (aka Donald A. Davis) movie should not to be confused with Columbia Pictures' For Singles Only, released the same year (poster below). For Single Swingers Only was later released on VHS by Something Weird as a Harry Novak double feature with Gordon Heller's Free Love Confidential (1967).

RottenTomatoes reduces the plot to "the party really gets started when single girls Gracie (Heidi Anderson) and Gloria (Sharon Sanford) move into a swingers-only apartment complex", but Amazon offers more detail: "Gracie and Gloria move into an apartment complex reserved For Single Swingers Only where the bed-hoppin' neighbors include studs-in-residence Arty and Dave, 'everybody's playmate' Connie, and Ruth, the lesbian landlady who's also 'a peek freak.' But not everyone was made to swing and Gracie starts to crack, especially after finding Arty & Dave making it with a teen runaway in the living room and Gloria & Ruth doing it in the bedroom: 'Everything has an insane dirty feeling about it!' So insane that poor Gracie starts to imagine all the swingers turning into refugees from a horror film. Sexploitation as you like it from the vaults of Harry Novak. Remember: 'Only Groovy Chicks Need Apply'!"

Scenes from Columbia Pictures' For Singles Only: 

Sounds like a plot to us, but DVD Drive-in disagrees: "Unlike Don Davis' other films, For Single Swingers Only has a threadbare plot on which to hang non-stop nude and sex scenes. This is the epitome of the weekend wonder, obviously shot for pennies in a local motel posing as an apartment complex. You get two long shower scenes, lots of extended scenes of people unpacking, walking around their apartments, or sitting around naked, somehow ballooning the running time of this thing to 68 minutes. It fits well on this double feature, considering we follow two more young women having sexual shenanigans in the free love 1960s, but unfortunately has little to recommend about it."

As far as we can tell, no one in front of the camera ever made another movie — or at least not under the same name. For Single Swingers Only can be found for free on any number of NSFW websites, like this one here.

Four Kinds of Love

(1968, writ. & dir. William Rotsler)
 

"Yes, there are Four Kinds of Love . . . four kinds of sex. There is an infinite number of combinations. If you can avoid Hate and Money-sex, find enough Like-sex and search for Love-sex, you just might get through life alive." 

The Press Book at One-Sheet Index.

Years before Ellen S. Berscheid came up with her specifications of the four kinds of love (Romantic/Passionate Love, Companionate Love, Compassionate Love, and Attachment Love), Rotsler reduced love to sex and proposed and presented his own definitions of the four kinds of love in this movie here, aptly entitled Four Kinds of Love, which the American Film Institute's Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States (Volume 1, Part 2) explains as: "An investigation into human sexual behavior reveals four different modes of erotic involvement: sex between lovers, called 'love-sex'; 'money-sex' including all relationships motivated by the desire for material gain; casual or 'like-sex'; and 'hate-sex', which includes rape."

We took a superficial look at this "drama" in our R.I.P. career review of Paul Hunt: "According to imdb, Paul Hunt appears uncredited as 'Paul' in this sex film directed by Renaissance Man William Rotsler. At imdb, john22900 says: 'There's not much to this movie. The women in this movie are much better to look at than the men. For the most part the women have nice bodies and pretty faces. Two of the men that are almost instantly recognizable are Jay Edwards and William Rotsler aka Shannon Carse. The best looking brunette is probably Carol Turner who is very hot but there is a blonde with a nice set of large breasts too. This film is in black and white and most of the film is spent on nudity and sex. No plot to speak of. The film is better when it concentrates on the naked women, not the men who thankfully keep most of their clothes on during this movie'."

The press book at One-Sheet Index explains the fine points of the four segments: "The Love-sex portion of Four Kinds of Love features Kathleen Williams and Don Alman in what, in effect, is an erotic poem. [...] Money-sex is the world's oldest commodity. A lot of marriages are built on Money-sex. Money-sex isn't just prostitution (as shown in the film by Jay Edwards purchase and use of Carol Turner) or street corner assignation or the money on the dresser. It's the girl who allows you certain freedoms because if she doesn't, you won't take her to dinner or the movies and she won't be popular. It's the wife who married for the large house, the safe husband, the sure job, the bank account and the duplicate credit cards. [...] Hate-sex comes in many guises jealousy, frustration, fear. [...] Sheri Jackson is annoyed at Hugh Hamilton's eager pawing and decides to build him up to a big let-down . . . only she falls victim to her own trap and is raped. [...] Like-sex is most of the sex in the world. Ordinarily people must at least like each other to participate. Like-sex is the sex part of most marriages, and all casual affairs. [...] And no one likes sex better than Clint Randall, James Brand and Paul Hunter who pursue and are pursued by an eager band of lovelies — Karen Richards, Brigette Grennell, Linda Stiles, Sheri Jackson, Vicky Saunders and Christine Thomas."

Among the other women of the film is brunette Kathy Williams, above, who showed up that same year in a secondary role in Don Henderson's great morality tale, The Babysitter (trailer).

Theme Song to The Babysitter:

Behind Locked Doors

(1968, writ. & dir. Charles Romine)

Not to be confused — as many people do — with Distribpix's B&W roughie Two Girls for a Madman, also from 1968, directed by Stanley H. Brassloff, whom some online sources credit as co-scriptwriter to Behind Locked Doors.

Trailer to Two Girls for a Madman:

Aka Any Body... Any Way, Le amanti proibite del Dr. Sex, and Sto gymno kormi sou, Behind Closed Doors appears to be Charles Romine's only known film; more than one source indicates that it was released in the 70s with hardcore inserts under the title Then Came Ecstasy, while other sources say the movie originally came from South Africa (we assume the country, not the region) and was bought and distributed by Novak. The tidbit about South Africa, which is hardly likely if Stanley H. Brassloff truly did script the film, is strongly negated by DVD Drive-in, which states "Contrary to popular belief, Behind Locked Doors was not made in South Africa. Director Charles Romine hailed from the Cape, but the film was shot in upstate New York, which would explain the appearance of Shriek of the Mutilated's (trailer) Ivan Hagar as the creepy handyman (as in that film, he spends much of the time shirtless and in awe of his own hairy muscular body) and familiar library music from Findlay and Wishman flicks."

At DB Cult, Phil Hardy offers the following originally not 100% correct but now corrected synopsis: "After their car is drained of petrol, two young girls (Eve Reeves and Joyce Danner) stay the night at the mysterious hilltop mansion of a Mr. Bradley (Daniel Garth) and his sister Myra. They soon discover they are prisoners, and are to be used as subjects in Bradley's scientific experiments to find a perfect love mate. A mixture of old-dark-house horrors and sexual goings-on, the film is effectively suspenseful and climaxes in a Corman-esque conflagration further enlivened by the appearance of the re-animated corpses of Bradley's previous victims."

Trailer to Behind Locked Doors:

 The Muthers

(1968, dir. Donald A. Davis)
 

Novak distributes yet another movie directed by the Ed Wood wanna-be Donald A. Davis, this time written by "Jason Hunter", who wrote a total of four Davis films — including Marsha: The Erotic Housewife (1970 / trailer) — and then disappeared.

The Muthers is not to be confused — although it always is — with the Blaxploitation movie from 1976, also titled The Muthers (see above): the cast in the 1968 Davis movie here is lily white and privileged.

 

Marsha Jordan, seen above in full glory, the lead wanton woman of The Muthers (and Marsha: The Erotic Housewife, for that matter) was a highly active actress in the sleaze cinema of the 60s and 70s, only quitting with the rise of raw wiener and tuna and detailed salami sandwiches. Her most famous film is probably Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) in which, unlike The Muthers and Marsha: The Erotic Housewife, she does not play the lead.

Trailer to Count Yorga, Vampire (1970):

TCM has the plot: "A group of thrill-seeking, Southern California suburban women ignore the effects of their extramarital sexual activities on their children until Susie (Kathy Williams), teenage daughter of one of the women (Marsha Jordan), mortally wounds her boyfriend when she finds him in bed with her mother."

The other "suburban lounge lizardess" of note in The Muthers is Virginia Gordon, seen above, Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Month for January 1959. "Gordon's most significant film, in terms of cinema history, is 1962's Tonight for Sure, as it marks the directorial debut of Francis Ford Coppola." But her most shocking film is surely Lee Frost's 1968 disturbingly sleazy The Animal.

Full Movie — The Animal (1968):

Kitten in a Cage

(1968, dir. Richard MacLeod)

No Kitten with a Whip (1964) here, just a Kitten in the Cage. Novak did the theatrical distribution of this movie; ten years later director Richard MacLeod did the porn movie The Ganja Express (with Jamie Gillis & Annie Sprinkle [a still NSFW edit of the movie]) and then disappeared. Going by the trailer below, Kitten in a Cage was post-synced with all the finesse of an Italian slasher.

Trailer to Kitten in a Cage:

Over at Fandango, Mark Deming of Rovi offers the plot: "A woman is caught in the middle of a plot by thieves to steal a fortune she doesn't really know about in this oddball sexploitation opus filled with strange plot twists, non sequitur dialogue, characters who appear only to be dropped moments later, and clumsy post-production audio recording. Regular guy Ted (John Durnham) is driving down the highway when he's flagged down by Julie (Miriam Eliot), a panicky woman wearing only a raincoat who has just escaped from a mental institution with cops on her trail. According to Julie, she was locked up against her will for reasons she doesn't understand, and needs to get back to the city. Ted is puzzled but offers to help, and eventually Julie makes contact with her boss, Brian, who owns several nightspots in town. Brian offers to let Julie stay with him, and when Ted informs Julie that her apartment has been ransacked, she takes Brian up on his offer. However, after a man in a ski mask attempts to attack Julie with a syringe, Brian arranges for Julie to stay with Kelly (June Roberts), an exotic dancer who works at one of his clubs. As it happens, Kelly would like Julie to be more than just a houseguest, but that's the least of Julie's troubles; a gang of criminals have discovered a fortune in jewels has been stashed in one of Brian's bars where Julie once worked, and they need her help to find them, even if she's unaware of their presence."

Video Vacuum was not impresses with Kitten: "Man, this is one muddled and under-plotted skinflick [...]. The biggest problem with Kitten in a Cage is that the audience never really knows what the fuck is going on throughout the entire movie. Sometimes this is a good thing, like if Christopher Nolan or David Lynch is directing the flick, because at the end there's some sort of payoff. Since this flick was directed by the no-name never-was Robert MacLeod, none of this remotely works. At one point Julie says, 'There are so many loose ends'. That pretty much sums everything up. [...] The plot is paper thin (although that's really an insult to paper) and the painful running time is padded with decidedly unsexy footage of horse-faced strippers. Combine that with the molasses pacing, terrible acting, non-existent production values, and horribly looped dialogue and sound effects; and you've got yourself one truly shitty flick. I did like the lesbian massage scene though."
Kitten in a Cage was the last film for glamour model and second-string sleaze starlet June Roberts; credited here as "June Morgan", she plays Kelly. Roberts probably began her "film career"  (if one can call it that) the Brazilian "melodramas" (if one can call them that) Otto Lara Rezende ou... Bonitinha, Mas Ordinária aka Pretty But Wicked (1963 / full Brazilian version) and Acosada aka The Pink Pussy: Where Violence Lives (1964), went on to work for such fine filmmakers as the Findleys, Joseph P. Mawra, Barry Mahon, Joseph Sarno, C. Davis Smith, Sande N. Johnsen and Doris Wishman before, well, disappearing into obscurity. As the website Mr Skin says, "June Roberts is one of the original pioneers of perversion on the big screen, and for that we owe her an eternal debt of gratitude [....]".

Trailer to The Pink Pussy — Where Violence Lives (1964):

  

The Devil in Velvet

(1968, dir. Larry Crane)

Novak distributed this movie not based on the classic John Dickson Carr novel of the same name.
The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures (Volume 1, Part 1), which calls the movie a comedy, explains the plot: "The Marquis de Sade is brought to trial before Chancellor Marboeuf (Edmund Nightwood) on charges of poisoning three prostitutes after a bawdy-house orgy. As the witnesses file past, the Marquis' strange and imaginative sexual practices are revealed, along with his outrageous sense of humor. After the orgy in question, each girl was presented with a box of candies, which the plaintiffs claim were poisoned. The testimony reveals that the candies actually contained a laxative. It becomes evident that the Marquis' gross sensualism is devoid of malice, and the Chancellor becomes convinced that the charges against him are an insult to the nobility of France. Before sentence is passed, however, the Marquis is permitted to speak. The contempt he expresses for the entire court enrages the judge, who sentences him to life imprisonment in the Bastille. Having spent 13 years in confinement, the Marquis makes imprudent remarks about the prison governor, and he is transferred to the Asylum for the Insane at Charenton 11 days before the Revolution would have freed him. Regretfully, he contemplates his former life."

Among the babes in the film: Christine Cybelle (seen above from Fly Now Pay Later [1969]), also found in Cool It, Baby (1967), which we took a look at in Part IV of this RIP career review. Scriptwriter "Walter M. Berger" wrote five films for Larry Crane and then dropped off the face of the earth. The last script he supplied was for Crane's 1969 B&D opus, All Women Are Bad.

Trailer to All Women Are Bad (1969):

Mantis in Lace

(1968, dir. William Rotsler)
  

Aka Lila. Written by Sanford White — not the long-murdered architect Stanford White — whose meager (known) film career includes the film script to Free Love Confidential (1967) and, supposedly, a directorial turn with The Art of Gentle Persuasion (1970), the theme song of which, Sexy World — if we are to believe The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures (Volume 1, Part 1) — is sung by "Tushi Grabasso".

Eccentric Cinema, which doesn't like the movie, says "This is a truly bizarre movie that was originally released in two different forms: one a psychedelic serial killer film with sex, the other a psychedelic sex film with a serial killer. Take your pick; either way it's a very strange trip. Both versions have one thing in common, though: lots of tits and little sense."

Over at Mondo Digital, Harry Novak himself explains which is which: "That [film] was a horror mystery, a thriller, with a little T&A in it, and it had psychedelic lighting which was quite the thing at the time. For the drive-ins and the conventional theaters, Mantis in Lace was the horror title, and Lila was the sex exploitation version. There was very little difference, maybe ten minutes at the most. It did exceptionally well for the period."

Mantis in Lace Theme Song:

Here at A Wasted Life, we took a superficial look at the movie Lila during our R.I.P. career review of surfing sleazemonger Paul Hunt: "Better known in (its edited form) as Mantis in Lace. According to imdb, Paul appears uncredited as a member of the audience — a slim connection at best for including the film here, but it is Rotsler's masterpiece and does have a great title song. Plot, per imdb: 'A topless dancer attracts, seduces, then murders the men she sleeps with. She does it with a twist, however; she kills them with garden tools.' As Girls, Guns and Ghouls puts it: 'If you're looking for a nice, humble sleaze-film that relishes its vintage strip-club environs, go no further than Mantis in Lace. It doesn't drench the screen with gore or even that much sex, but there's something quite effective about the whole demented little endeavor.'"

The on-line magazine called Funhouse offers further info: "The story is very basic: go-go dancer (Susan Stewert as Lila) picks up goon, brings goon home, takes acid, and stabs goon while having simultaneous sex and bad trip (she never has a good trip, but keeps dropping the dope). [...] Good scenes are of the Sunset Strip were we see The Youngbloods, Things To Come, and Procol Harum on the Whiskey A Go-Go marquee, Gazzari's, and a sign advertising an 'LSD Review'. Also all of Lila's strange trips. In one she cuts into a sandwich, which changes to a knife cutting through a bloody arm. Referring to this scene Rotsler notes, 'The lab lost a vital 400-foot roll and Peter Perry (of Kiss Me Quick [1964]) did a magnificent job of editing without anything to edit. [...] A man in the Washington, DC area who had a number of theatres — he wanted more blood. So we rented the same stage and used my grandfather's meat-axe, and every time she ['Lila'] chopped down two fat guys threw paper cups full of blood on her.' [...] While the bodies continue to disappear the bumbling cops begin to investigate. This allows us to follow them into various topless bars and sunset strip type psychedelic go go clubs, which gives us the opportunity to watch a number of other topless dancers. Among those featured is Pat Barrington [...].

NSFW (Yes, They Are Plastic) —

Pat Barrington's Belly Dance from All The Way Down (1968):

"That's about it, but the general shallowness of the development of the plot is more than made up for by the crazy combination of topless go go dancing, acid tripping, and bloody murder. The movie is still however more of a nudie flick than a gore flick, with an ample showing of female breasts, and the displayed violence being actually minimal. With the budget he had to work with, Rotsler turned out a film a step above others of its type in quality."

Trailer to Mantis in Lace:

Naked Pursuit

(1968, dir. Toshio Okuwaki)
 
Trailer:

Original title: Kôfun!!. Director Okuwaki was once married to Tamaki Katori, the now-retired actress who, with roughly 600 film credits to her name and extremely active in the early days of Pink, once was known as the Pink Princess of Japan. According to Jasper Sharp's book Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema, the original Japanese version of this film here is now lost, while Novak's is still around.

BFI, concise as always, explains the film thus: "A young girl planning suicide is raped by a student (Masayoshi Nogami [2 March 1940 — 22 December 2010]). The sensual pleasure she experiences for the first time restores her will to live." In other words, another film that propagates that misogynist fantasy that women enjoy being raped. (Remeber: "No" means "Yes" — Not!)

The rapist — or rather, the actor playing the rapist, Masayoshi Nogami — enjoyed a long career; zombie fans might want to check out a 2001 film in which he appears, Stacy.

Trailer to Stacy:

Suburban Pagans

(1968, writ. & dir. "Shannon Carse")
 
"Oh, and don't wear too much underwear":

"Shannon Carse", of course, was one of William Rotsler's favorite pseudonyms. Released in Germany as Wilde Nächte im Pornoclub — "Wild Nights in the Porno Club".

In regard to this faux documentary full of ugly men who luckily remain for the most part fully clothed, the on-line magazine Funhouse says, "The operative word with this kinky is CHEAP. It is one of the emptiest in story and shoddiest in production value of any films of this sort that I have yet experienced. We start with a TV reporter (James Brad), with the seemingly obligatory fake mustache, interviewing Lt. Art Grennell (Steve Vincent) about the latest case he's wrapped, an evil group of San Fernando Valley swingers. [...] We are never really informed about just why it is illegal for a group of consenting married adults to get together and trade spouses, but the Lt. does give us a bit of his moralizing as to the cause. [...] When he states that, 'Man being then kind of animal he is, there are undoubtedly other clubs like this functioning at this moment', we cut to the action. After a sweep of the city, we see a group picking each other's house keys from a wastebasket to determine the current pairings. The featured actresses are Cara Peters, Kathleen Williams, Christine Thomas, and Carole Sanders. The rest of the plot is mostly taken up with the featured couples going through a variety of the swinger motions. [...] This film does show more female nudity, and does so for more extended periods of time, than many others. It also at least partially depicts activities such as group sex and lesbianism. [...] This film qualifies as a three-sleazer mostly by the fact that it's so shoddy. The direction is horrible, there's no continuity, the overdubbing is atrocious, and the dialog and story line are comical. Along with the relatively greater explicitness of the sexual situations, this ultra cheapness knocks it up a sleaze level. [...]."

 

Another Suburban Pagans Clip:

Acapulco Uncensored

(1968, dir. Donald A. Davis [uncredited])

Aka Mucho Macho Acapulco, Acapulco Expose, Acapulco Sex. Personally, we here at A Wasted Life have our doubts that Harry H. Novak had anything to do with this movie, as there is only one source, an on-line magazine called Funhouse, that claims he distributed it.

My Duck Is Dead explains the basic concept of this faux documentary: "Hidden cameras reveal the seamier side of one of the world's wildest cities. For the first time, see Acapulco uncovered, where young women perform all sorts of incredibly perverse acts in the secret houses of pleasure."

At imdb, good ol' lor from New York City actually saw the movie and wrote about it: "[...] Acapulco Uncensored offers little to the soft porn fan. It was clearly filler when released in the '60s and has even less interest today. A phony sailor (familiar actor Victor Izay [23 December 1923—20 January 2014]) is on-screen narrator, introducing mainly staged sex scenes using familiar porn talent. Usual hidden-camera premise to watch real people is bogus, though some unattractive non-pros are included in the cast. Condescending narration tries to contrast Mexican slums with high-society folk getting down to do the nasty (softcore style). A wife-swapping session by a pool features full frontal nudity, but looks like a sequence lifted from some feature film. Local prostitution is presented unglamorously and in boring fashion. At one point two hookers demonstrate lesbian sex — unarousing and patently phony. Kathy Williams displays her torpedo-shaped breasts as an American tourist named Marsha, seduced by a water ski boat owner Ramon (Vic Lance). This acted out scene is supposedly 'reality'. A nightlife segment features a busty young novice in a brothel but we don't even get to see her topless. Film concludes with an idiotic sequence on the narrator's boat with buxom redhead Linda O'Bryant camping it up as a dominating lesbian whore, who gives both our hero and his deckhand Mario a hard time. [...] It's the worst feature credited to usually reliable Don Davis I've sat through so far, by far. 

Victor Izay also appeared in Ted V. Mikels' Blood Orgy of the She-Devils (1972):

The Love Clinic

(1968, dir. Ferd Sebastian)

A popular title for vintage sleaze publications, none of which were the basis of this movie, which is an early film from the sleaze producing duo of husband Ferd Sebastian (director) and wife Beverly Sebastian (producer) — with regular collaborator (pseudonym?) Ann Cawthorne (scriptwriter) — whom we took a cursory look at in our R.I.P. career review of cult actor Richard Lynch when we took a look at the Sebastian & Sebastian flick Delta Fox (1979). As Emovieposter, whence we took the image below, states: "Ferd Sebastian, [...] directed several exploitation movies and then, after suffering from health issues, became a born-again Christian!"

Yet again, we here at A Wasted Life have our doubts about to what extent Harry H. Novak had anything to do with this movie, but not only does the on-line magazine Funhouse believes Novak had his fingers in the pie, but TCM also lists Boxoffice International as the movie's distributor, so we'll include it here.

In the book The Celluloid Couch, Leslie Y. Rabkin explains the plot: "This naughty-naughty of the late sixties involves a 'love clinic' presided over by a sexologist computer, COM 9001. A mix of voyeurism, masturbation, impotence, and swinging, it ends with the Luddite-inspired destruction of the machine, and a lustful 'marriage rape', which makes everything better." As the poster claims, the movie introduces two new actors, Marion Cline as the wife Kate Morgan and Jim Carlton as husband Sam, but the introduction seems to have gone nowhere for neither ever made another movie

Trailer to Ferd & Beverly Sebastian's masterpiece, 

Gator Bait (1974): 

Go here for Part VI (1969).