44: Alien 2: On Earth (1980, Ciro Ippolito [as "Sam Cromwell"])

Owned version: The 2011 DVD released by Midnight Legacy as their fledgling - and ultimately only - entry into the market. They had big plans, and the subsequent collapse of the label is quite the lesson in hubris and marketing. (Lesson 1: Maybe don't start your label with a bottom-tier obscurity even genre heads aren't crazy about.)

Acquired: April 29th, 2012, from a vendor stationed outside the theater as I was headed into Exhumed Films's eX-Fest, a yearly 12-hour marathon of exploitation films. This was the first and only time I've been able to attend, so it's nice to have this disc as a souvenier.

Seen before?: Once from this disc, on March 4th, 2017 - was at the time researching knockoffs of Alien and Aliens in preparation for an article I never got around to writing.

The title offers a ripoff. The subtitle promises the mythical sequel the franchise proper promised multiple times but never quite got around to making. The film itself... is all of the above and more. Alien 2: On Earth follows a group of young Italians (one of whom has telepathic powers) as they go spelunking in San Diego following a strange incident involving a returning spacecraft and some missing astronauts. Once they leave topside roughly half an hour in, they're on earth but might as well not be for all the available natural light, and this isn't lost on Ippolito. His main directorial trick is to have the intrepid climbers shine their helmets directly into the camera, which is obvious but remarkably effective and surprising in its versatility - he gets looming shadows and lens flares (there's a great one where he frames it so the lens flare stretches directly across the protagonist's eyes as she's trying to telepathically locate a missing member of the party), but he also pushes further, exploiting the enveloping darkness to send them into deep space without leaving the terra firma. Seriously, check these shot of the party about to descend, which looks for all the world like an extreme close-up of a constellation:

Or this subsequent one during the descent:

There's a conscious artistry here that belies the film's status as a low-budget ripoff - this is a film made by people who genuinely wanted to make the best film they could with the materials they had. In the world of Italian genre knockoffs, a world where people like Bruno Mattei and Andrea Bianchi can thrive, that's a refreshing thing to find.

It isn't just tricks of the light, either. The cutting is often functional but can be bluntly effective when the time calls for it, like a cut from an exploding alien rock to the flash of a Polaroid camera, or a quick shock-cut away from a little girl on a beach whose face has been turned into hamburger. (How she's crying with no face-holes left is a mystery, but the shot is kicked away fast enough that we're not left much space to think about that.) And while the cramped setting doesn't allow for much in the way of virtuoso camerawork, there's still the occasional stylistic flourish that catches attention, like the slow tracking shot starting from a rope at a man's feet that goes down the length of a prone woman's body, ending at her head, at which point her face promptly explodes and ejects something slimy.

As the creature emerges, it has one of the lady's eyeballs balanced on its head - a goofy, gross touch that puts this entirely in line with others of its ilk. Past the unique setting and the effective use of it, Ippolito's main stock in trade is enthusiastic, lumpy splatter; while the majority of the shock scenes are confined to the back half of the film, once they arrive, they're pleasingly gnarly. Heads explode, dangling bodies are emptied out, things burst from various fleshy hiding places, people are munched... it's a good time in that peculiar tempura-paint way at which Italian gore films are so skilled. The contrast between the beasts here and the one in its inspiration is interesting - where Giger's monster is sleek perfection, the low-rent cousins we get here are all blood and sinews, moist rubber mounds of tentacles and unidentifiable chunky flesh. If anything, they somewhat resemble a gluey mass of crimson, wavering stalactites, and whether that's a knowing tip of the cap to the setting, a nod towards their origins within mysterious glowing space rocks, both, or neither, it works in its way.

Alien 2 also reveals itself as a product comfortably nestled in a very specific genre/country movement when we get to the end. The missing-astronaut drama, after running as background noise for most of the first act and vanishing completely when they go into the caves, finally dovetails itself into the main story. Ippolito sets the stage tonally within the first thirty minutes - there's a concentration in finding the unsettling in the mundane, in the still darkness of a garage or the too-noisy clatter of a busy bowling alley - and that pays off once the survivors of the underworld fracas finally re-emerge into the light. For all its idiocy and dorkiness (Great Moments in Dialogue: "Where'd I find it? I found it where people find things!"), this carries with it a horror of oblivion and the inevitability of same, something it shares with Zombie and Nightmare City and Inferno and other such fully-limbic contemporaneous works. Once certain wheels have been set in motion, you can only ignore it for so long before it comes for you too.

39: Alice Goodbody (1974, Tom Scheuer)

Owned version: The Blu-ray released in 2017 by Code Red, packaged with Those Mad Mad Movie Makers (the sanitized retitle of the film better known as The Last Porno Flick).

Acquired: Late in 2017 or early in 2018 from Diabolik DVD.

Seen before?: No.

After the deep diving of the last couple pieces, it feels a bit refreshing to splash around in a puddle. Alice Goodbody is a silly Hollywood sex comedy about a sweet, naive woman sleeping her way up the ladder of fame in exchange for an ever-mounting big break in an epic about Julius Caesar. It has nothing grand to offer aside from the breathtaking body of Sharon Kelly. It is instead content to tell the same joke with slight variations - Alice finds out who she has to sleep with next while going down on "2nd assistant production manager" Myron Mittleman (that last name, I know I know), tries to accommodate the weird sexual proclivities of whomever she's been given with a modicum of success, finds her role subsequently increased and then suffers an on-set accident that puts her out of commission and demands a delay on set. This goes through five cycles, after which Scheuer hits the blackout on a hoary eye-roller of a punchline.

Much to my surprise, I found it kind of charming.

A lot of that has to do with the wide-eyed gee-shucks charm of the voluptuous Ms. Kelly, who has the difficult task of playing this material light and cheeky without letting the innate misogyny sour it or making Alice seem like too much of a dupe. She is blessedly more than up to the task, making Alice into a sunny and optimistic sort who's up for whatever because, hey, you gotta pay your dues and who wouldn't want to be in the movies? Or maybe I'm just responding to the fact that Scheuer skirts the edge of dizzy-dame stereotypes by turning Alice into a hardcore, omnivorous cinephile - if she's spacey, it's not that she's stupid but that she's lost in her head thinking about the film she just saw or looking forward to the one she's going to see later. Seriously - her first line of dialogue sees her waxing rhapsodic about Borzage's 7th Heaven, her fateful date with Mittleman sees her exclaiming, "This is exactly how June Preisser was discovered!" and one injury is met with, "I bet nothing like this ever happened to Maria Montez!" I'm just saying, I relate to being at your job and thinking about whatever you stayed up into the wee hours of the morning to watch, how could I not, I'm weak like that.

Ms. Kelly, with her open face and big easy smile, also serves as a beacon towards the script's feathery cheer. The light touch is critical in that it manages to differentiate it from the reams of contemporaneous comedies that come off as flat sitcoms, all sledgehammer jokes and dead-air timing (e.g. the film with which it shares a disc). It feints towards setting up a dichotomy between the wonder of the movies felt by Alice and the cynical sausage-grinding that actually produces those movies, but it never gets too insistent on that cynicism - it's too busy being goofy. There's a point-of-view shot from inside Alice's vagina. The director is a dime-store spoof on Erich Von Stroheim about whom is said at one point, "He thinks De Mille mighta made it if he didn't think so small!" The legendary George "Buck" Flower figures in a food-slathered sex scene that either doubles down on Tom Jones or prefigures Hot Shots!, I can't quite decide. Flower also has a bit where he spies on a neighbor of his having sex with a man in a gorilla costume. The accidents on set, as they get more elaborate and Scheuer starts to have fun with the fact that we know a crack-up is inevitable, start to seem like a lost Final Destination entry. An elephant psychiatrist boasts of having shown a frigid female elephant pornographic films. ("Of people?" "No, of elephants!") Hell, scratch that - all you need to know is that there is an elephant psychiatrist in this film. I can't defend Alice Goodbody on any real merit. I can't say it holds up over feature length. I can't even expect I'll ever watch it again. But it was a nice surprise to actually enjoy a '70s smutcom, to a degree, and that's more value than I had expected.

30: Agony of Love (1966, William Rotsler)

Owned version: The 2004 DVD released by Something Weird as a double feature with another Rotsler feature The Girl with the Hungry Eyes.

Acquired: Probably in December of 2010 from eBay after Something Weird announced that all their Harry Novak-produced titles were going out of print.

Seen before?: Once from this disc - June 8th, 2011.

"Don't you see that the money and the way you get it is not a very satisfactory substitute for love? I think what you want, Barbara, is normal love. Isn't that everything you really need?"

So says a psychiatrist to Barbara (Pat Barrington), a lonesome and disaffected housewife ignored by her business-minded husband and thus summing up the key tension of the film for those too slow or horny to get it. As a way to deal with her spiraling feelings of emptiness, Barbara fills her ample free time by adopting the alias Brandy and doing some light prostitution. Agony of Love has a certain number of plot beats in common with an acknowledged masterpiece of world cinema and indeed often feels like the grimy off-brand version of it, to the point where an alternate title could have easily been Hell de Jour (though it preceded the Bunuel by a year). It even dips into a couple of dream sequences, though Rotsler is hardly working in the puckish, mysterious register of Bunuel - the descent into the fantastic here is as blunt as the psychiatrist's diagnosis, baroque on-the-nose nightmares of sex and money and hostility in which dollar bills are threaded together into chains and horror-movie strings shriek their panic out over the Dutch-angled visuals. (The voiceover repeating the word "Barbara" and then switching it up to "money" is a fun touch.)

This, clearly, is not a subtle film. But then, sexploitation isn't a subtle genre, especially the grimly moralistic roughie (of which this is a fairly mild iteration). Taken in relation to its brethren, Agony of Love is a pretty good time. Rotsler, making his directorial debut, keeps things moving briskly - the sex scenes come at regular intervals but don't run so long as to become tiresome - and he manages to make his ragged inexperience into an asset at certain points, like a ragged pair of zooms at the end into the faces of Barbara and her husband respectively. I also like the depiction of the husband - instead of a typical lout, nebbish or philanderer, he's portrayed as a regular (if awkward and uncomfortable) guy who really loves his wife so thinks he needs to work as hard as he can to get her everything she needs and furthermore would never dream of so much as looking at another woman. It lends an unexpected bit of genuine tragedy to the expected downbeat ending, which is tough to pull off in this oft-callous genre.

Plus, there's the scene with the man billed as "The Eater," which is one of the most delightfully wackadoo things I've seen in one of these films. And Pat Barrington? She has excellent breasts. I'm only human.

24: The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961, Herschell Gordon Lewis [as "Lewis H. Gordon"])

Owned version: A DVD-R manufactured by Something Weird Video.

Acquired: February 22nd, 2008 from Something Weird.

Seen before?: Twice - once on December 31st, 2008 and once on March 4th, 2010. (The latter viewing resulted in this review, which sums it up pretty well.)

The joy of formula, pt. 2...

Since I don't have much to improve upon or change the previous review linked up there, I'd like to touch on something I find interesting about sex, voyeurism and the nudie-cutie as expressed in this specific iteration. Nudie-cuties, for the unfamiliar, are films in which elaborate excuses are devised for lucky men to play Peeping Tom to a host of unclothed beauties. This is effected via means supernatural (Like Wow!, in which a hobo finds magic X-ray glasses), professional (The "Imp"probable Mr. Wee Gee, featuring the famed photographer applying his trade to something other than headline-chasing) or fantastic (International Smorgasbroad, in which a cook dreams of past meals and the ladies that came with them), but the end result remains naked boobs. It's all variations on a theme, a dozen ways to say the same thing - a series of Playboy joke books scribbled out onto celluloid.

They are among the stupidest films ever made.

The important part, though, is that The Man exists. He's the gatekeeper, the carnival barker shilling carnal promises. This one man has something special about him, something that allows him to frolic in a wondrous world of pleasantly bare female flesh, and for the low low price of one movie ticket you can spend an hour in this paradise of pulchritude. As such, there's generally a leering quality to the films, one leavened by the good-natured fluffy idiocy endemic to the genre but there nonetheless; given that these films often play as feature-length Tex Avery wolf whistles, this is hardly surprising. This is then what's odd about The Adventures of Lucky Pierre - Lewis's chosen tour guide displays a spectacular indifference to the naked ladies around him.

The film is divided into five segments, each of which finds a way to deny the inherent voyeurism. The first segment has Pierre sketching nude models, and the fourth has him photographing nude models who keep disappearing when the shutter snaps; in both, he's too focused on the artistic endeavor to leer. (In the latter, indeed, he's far more excited by the camera than by the subject.) The second segment has him fixing a plumbing problem in a man's house, unaware of the man's wife showering five feet away from him. In the third segment, he stumbles over a pair of nude sunbathers while birdwatching. In each of these, his obliviousness can be excused to his concentration on his job. But it's the last segment that pushes this into fascinating territory. The final bit in Pierre has our chapeau-clad hero attending a drive-in movie theater showing nudie shorts. At last, we have an acknowledgement of desire - Pierre, finally, is One Of Us. But alas! Pierre is so fixated on the films he's there to see that he ignores the fact that the ticket taker and the concession girl are both nude right in front of him. And then a bus parks in front of him for the duration of the film, causing him to miss that too. It's as if Lewis and producer David Friedman decided to punish poor Pierre for not shedding his blinders.

Then, the payoff: As Pierre goes to wander off, he tosses away the dice that have been the film's motif and have, at the end of every segment, landed on ones. The dice this time roll seven. Nude women emerge from the background and Pierre, having finally broken the curse of snake-eyes, opens his eyes, sees them and rejoices. This admonishment to wake up, get off your duff and engage with the world around you is likely unintentional, just an unexpected double entendre bouncing off Lewis's burlesque-broad punchline. But there it is anyway. Call it How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tits.

14: The Abnormal Female (1969, George Rodgers)

Owned release: The 2006 DVD put out by Something Weird & Image Entertainment. This is the second of three featured films on the disc, sandwiched in between One Shocking Moment and Maidens of Fetish Street.

Acquired: July 1st, 2017 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

Yup, that's this site's first NSFW image. Showed up a bit quicker than I expected, I'll be honest.

This, though, is also a remarkable indication of the film to come - it can't even get through the opening credits without pushing out some naked flesh. Literally the first image in the film is that of an FFM threesome, and an unceasing parade of sexual imagery continues under the whole of the opening credits. All are images that will reappear later in the film - the image above, for instance, is extracted from the film's second segment, regarding a housewife who is compelled towards extramarital affairs - but sans context it still serves as a statement of purpose: You came for some sex, you're gonna get some fuckin' sex, mister.

This being 1969, the mainstream breakthrough of hardcore porn is just around the corner, and The Abnormal Female plays like a film with a foot in both camps - the single-mindedness of a hardcore film joined to the cynical, judgmental morality endemic to a lot of sexploitation of this era (though, to be fair, that attitude was hardly limited to the grindhouse circuit). Mostly, this feels intensely frustrated at not having been made and released three years later, and that anger comes out in the treatment of the women in the film. It's framed as a series of case histories by a psychologist who specializes in this sort of thing, and as the title implies, it's very concerned with a "right" way to be a female in opposition to all we see here. These profiles concern, in order, a sadist, a serial adulteress, a nymphomaniac, a married couple of swingers and a lesbian; as their sordid histories are being depicted, the narrator in the guise of the psychologist breaks down their neuroses with no small amount of tongue-clucking. This is especially strong in the second segment, wherein the adulteress's outside activities are explicitly contrasted with her married sex life - the latter is "decent" (read: dull), the sort of thing where the husband likes to do it in one way and that's all that's being brought to the party, while the former is taboo enough that the woman demands to be demeaned by her lovers in the filthiest terms imaginable.

Yet, sex needs filth, right? Because of that, there's another part of me that wonders if this is a bit of a jape, an ironic laugh up the sleeve at the notion of sexual mores by aspiring pornographers. I sense a bit of hand-tipping at times: in the ludicrous outsized origins and appetites of the nymphomaniac, who spied on her parents both in the act and during solo work, the latter of which led to her own taste for self-pleasure, and once had fifteen guys in one afternoon and by the way, she's also fifteen years old; in the sadist finding a way to torture her slave with citrus fruit; in the married couple being horny enough to fuck every day and eventually get into threesomes but still wholesome enough to call it "intercourse." The Abnormal Female is the kind of grungy black-and-white chunk of sleaze that tut-tuts about the sleaze while making sure to slather it on you in great greasy dollops, and part of the amusement is the friction between word and deed, between the ostensible morality being espoused and the actual one being depicted. Are the filmmakers looking down their nose or thumbing it? Do the quotes on the title card belong around the whole thing or just the second word?

The bigger question, though, is: Does that really matter? Because, if I am to judge every film by its intent, then I must loop back to the beginning of the review and get back to the main intent of this film. Which is fuckin'. Lots of fuckin'. And, in that regard... this is actually pretty enjoyable. It's fairly well-shot for a film of this era, with lots of rich shadowy blacks adding just the right dose of moody grime to the copious rumpy-pumpy, and director George Rodgers has enough skin in the game (excuse the pun) to suss out the occasional startling composition, e.g. the low-angle closeup on Vicky the sadist as she whips her slave, turning her growling visage into a mass of flying hair and swirling leather. The women are more attractive than average, with the actress playing Janet the young married being legitimately supercute, and the guys are... well, the guys are mustachioed skeeves, mostly, but Vicky's slave and Janet's husband Fred aren't so bad, and two non-skeevy guys in a film of this type and time is two more than most. It has its problems - alarmingly, nobody in this movie seems to have ever kissed another human being before, and they stop just short of straight-up licking each other's mouths - but as far as this ignominious genre goes, I've seen a lot worse. The sex is decent, the women are decent, and it's not weighed down with extraneous nonsense. It does its thing in an hour's time and gets the hell out. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am.

12: The Abductors (1972, Don Schain)

Owned release: The 2003 DVD put out by Monterey Video as included in the 2004 box set with the other two films in the Ginger series.

Acquired: June 13th, 2012 from Amazon - same order as Strip Strip Hooray, oddly enough.

Seen before?: Nope.

Seems appropriate that a film about a female detective whose main asset is her easy sexuality should turn into an object lesson on the perils of going too fast. Don Schain's The Abductors followed hot on the heels of his Ginger, the 1971 film that introduced Cheri Caffaro's sultry and savage superdick. Turned around quick enough that it also bears a 1971 copyright date, the chief problem with The Abductors is that the speed of production didn't leave any room for innovation - at every point, the reigning ethos seems like, "What if we just made Ginger again?" The biggest difference between the two, best as I can tell, is that this film drops the uncomfortable racism that's the most eyebrow-raising aspect of Ginger and replaces it with a second helping of uncomfortable sexual violence. Erasing ethnic slurs and doubling-down on rape - that's progress in these parts, I guess.

While I'd like to stop there and move on to the next film - this film, for all its discomfort, is intensely boring in the way that only a determined Xerox of a previous success can be - I suppose I should at least try and muck around with the sexual politics on display here. Ginger is strong and confident in her sexuality and takes pride in her desires - the opening scene sees her and her boss at the detective agency bantering, with Ginger making knowing cracks about her long history, e.g. "I'm lying flat on my stomach for a change," whereas the cheerleaders who are kidnapped at the film's outset are explicitly marked as virginal and thus easy marks for predatory males. So far, so standard. But the introduction of another detective, a younger woman who is also sexually confident and a judo champion to boot, complicate things a bit. Carter, the younger woman, is being used as bait to draw out the abductors, yet once her cover is blown, her strength fails her; while it briefly looks like she's going to use her judo expertise to fight her way out, that gets stymied pretty fast and earns her nothing more than some punches in the stomach and some rough tit-squeezing (there's a lot of rough tit-squeezing in this). Ginger, meanwhile, is also ensnared within the trap of the abductors, but she wiles her way out by seducing a gullible guard. It's not enough to be strong in the world of the Ginger films - to get the upper hand, you have to be able to weaponize your sexuality.

With that in mind, the surfeit of rape makes structural sense (though it doesn't make it any less gross) - in this universe, seemingly all depicted sex is also an act of violence. When one of the lead abductors attempts to break down an unwilling abductee by forcing his fingers into her vagina, that's an act of violence; when Ginger gets information out of a guy by handcuffing him to a tree, threatening him with a knife and fondling his junk, that's an act of violence; when the brainwashed cheerleaders cheerfully go to bed with the rich industrialists who've purchased them, that's an act of violence. Even the one seemingly innocent scene of mutual sexual enjoyment, in which Ginger and an Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer-looking advertising executive (with whom she's been flirting in order to set into motion her scheme to infiltrate the abductors) make love on a white shag carpet, turns out to be an act of violence - the advertising man was of course secretly a part of the abduction ring the whole time. And there's no counterbalance scene that's simply Ginger getting some as she professes a love for - the closest she gets to that is her friendly back-and-forth with her boss. Sex is power and power is sex, and never shall the twain be separated. Between the rape, the handcuffing, the sex-slave-creating brainwashing, the multiple scenes where Ginger starts to jerk a dude off only to chuckle and blue-ball him by walking offscreen, the cheerleader with the whip and the general skeeviness (where Ginger appeared to have been filmed in a series of hotel rooms, this appears to have been filmed in a series of basements), I feel like I know maybe a bit too much about Schain and Caffaro's sex life.