Gratuitous Nudity – Page 9

October Horrorshow: Hell of the Living Dead

What an absolute pile of trash. I loved every minute of this film. Well, almost every minute of it. I loved the exploding heads and zombies munching on guts. I loved how director Bruno Mattei slipped in some nudity and pretended it wasn’t gratuitous. I loved how wild and unrealistic were the main characters. And I loved how no one in the movie seemed to absorb, for more than a second at a time, that zombies have to be shot in the head to stop them.

What I didn’t love was Mattei’s liberal use of footage from the 1974 documentary Nuova Guinea, l’isola dei cannibali (New Guinea: Island of Cannibals). Specifically, the footage of tribal mortuary feasts, wherein natives eat parts of their dead and rotting relatives, was hard to stomach. But, I cannot deny that this did much to make Hell of the Living Dead a memorable shitty movie watch. (As an aside, Island of Cannibals has, as of this writing, one of the weirdest IMDb pages one will come across. It’s an Italian documentary, with a Japanese writer and a Japanese director, and the only people listed in the cast are Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, in what I can only assume is archival footage. There isn’t even a description of what the film is about, nor have any of IMDb’s unpaid army of users posted a review. Even more strange, the only footage of this film I could find on the internet, outside of Mattei’s usage, is a short intro and title screen.) Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Hell of the Living Dead”

October Horrorshow: Nightbeast

Blood, gore, low production values, a little gratuitous nudity, and charm out the wazoo. That’s Nightbeast, the 1982 sci-fi/horror flick from b-movie filmmaker Don Dohler. It’s a simple film with a simple idea: an alien passing by Earth runs into a stray asteroid and crashes in rural Maryland. It’s an angry beast, and it wastes no time slaughtering the locals with its laser gun.

Trying to stop the massacre are the cops and the good citizens of Perry Hall, led by Sheriff Cinder (Tom Griffith). That’s all the plot one really needs to know. There’s very little setup to this flick, and very little character development. That’s a good thing, as Dohler didn’t round up the best talent for his opus. Besides Griffith, there’s Karin Kardian as Deputy Lisa Kent, Jamie Zemarel as local Jamie Lambert, and Don Leifert as local tough guy and murderer Drago (it’s a subplot). None of these performers, or the others listed in the credits, had much work outside of Don Dohler films, and none of them seemed like professionals. But, their lack of acting chops only adds to the appeal. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Nightbeast”

October Horrorshow: Terror (1978)

Sometimes when watching a film, a viewer can tell that the whole project barely held together. We viewers tend to hold that film is an artistic struggle carried out by a single individual. The director has a vision and a story they want to share. This is called the auteur theory of film, and is the main reason we heap praise on directors, at the expense of everyone else involved in a production. Less acknowledged is the reality that film is a business. As anyone who ever worked in an office can tell you, folks are just hanging on by their fingernails, hoping against hope that no one notices how much of the job is just faking it until it gets done. Here is director Norman J. Warren on his 1978 film, Terror:

[A] search for a story [in Terror] is in vain…There is no real storyline and very little, if any, logic. We had the money for a low-budget film, but no script and no idea of what film we wanted to make…we made a list of all the scenes we’d like to see in a horror film. We handed the list to writer David McGillivray, who incorporated the ideas into a ‘sort of story.’

That’s an excellent description of this film. There is a plot, involving an ancient curse set upon the Garrick family by a witch, but the plot is just a means to get from one death scene to another. It’s those scenes, fleshed out and very atmospheric, where this film truly lives. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Terror (1978)”

October Horrorshow: The Devil’s Nightmare

At first glance, The Devil’s Nightmare looks like a shoo-in addition to the Shitty Movie Sundays Watchability Index. After a full viewing, however, I can say that it’s not. And since Missile Test is a dictatorship, my opinions have the force of law.

The main reason why one would think this is shitty is that the movie doesn’t look all that good. It doesn’t appear to have ever gotten a restoration before release to Blu-Ray, and, as of this writing, it wasn’t available on streaming. The print I saw was from a horror compilation DVD set, formatted for CRT televisions. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: The Devil’s Nightmare”

October Horrorshow: Blood Sabbath, or, My Soul for Some Strange

Blood Sabbath movie poster What a bucket of sleaze. Blood Sabbath, the 1972 exploitation horror flick from screenwriter William A. Bairn and director Brianne Murphy, is exactly the kind of movie that gets the pious all worked up. Gratuitous nudity only begins to describe the amount of flesh in this movie. This is one of those drive-in classics packed full, from start to finish, with butts, boobs, and bush. Add in witchcraft, and one would be hard-pressed to find an R-rated film more capable of moral corruption. It’s spectacular.

The film follows Vietnam War vet David (Anthony Geary). He’s having a rough time with what he experienced in the war, and has gone on a walkabout that takes him, I think, into Mexico. The film isn’t clear on that. While there, he is accosted in the night by three naked partiers and chased through the woods. He trips and falls, hitting his head on a rock and falling unconscious. When he awakens, he finds himself being cared for by a buxom young lady named Yyala (Susan Damante). She’s a water spirit, or something similar, and the two fall in love with each other. But, David can’t get past first base because, according to Yyala, she has no soul, and it’s forbidden for her to be with someone who still has theirs. So, David makes it his mission to rid himself of his soul so he can get laid. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Blood Sabbath, or, My Soul for Some Strange”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Empire of Ash III, aka Last of the Warriors

What a gloriously stupid movie. It has it all. Barely sensible plot, bad dialogue, bad acting, cheap filmstock, gratuitous nudity, and all the other accoutrements that make shitty cinema great. Every time the flick threatens to drag, directors Michael Mazo and Lloyd A. Simandi throw in a gunfight and some explosions, and all is well with the world once again. Empire of Ash III is no rare gem, but we shitty movie fans love it when filmmakers just throw shit at the wall to see what sticks. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Empire of Ash III, aka Last of the Warriors”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Chain Gang Women

We have been hornswoggled. We have been bamboozled. Hoodwinked. Swindled. Tricked, and defrauded. A movie with a title such as Chain Gang Women has obligations to be met. There needs to be women. On a chain gang. And there should be, at minimum, two nude shower scenes. A film with a title like this owes its audience genuine exploitative sleaze. This flick is that, to be sure, but to an inadequate extent. Nor does that change the fact that viewers are the victims of shameless misdirection in the pursuit of drive-in dollars. I shall explain. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Chain Gang Women”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Policewomen, or, Misogyny: The Movie

Sondra Currie stars as Lacy Bond, and the last name is no coincidence. As much as Policewomen, the 1974 flick from writers Lee Frost and Wes Bishop, and also directed by Frost, is an exploitation buddy cop crime women in prison gangster martial arts LA story, it’s also a James Bond ripoff. And, unlike all the Bond films, the camera keeps rolling during the naughty bits in this shitty gem.

Policewomen opens with a jailbreak. Despite the ass-kicking efforts of Lacy Bond, two inmates, Pam and Janette (Jeannie Bell and Laurie Rose) stage a spectacular escape. They get naked while they’re doing it, too, staking this flick’s gratuitous nudity claims early (this film actually has much less skin than I expected). For her above and beyond efforts, Lacy is recruited to do some plainclothes work. The squad she joins is investigating a gang led by Maude (Elizabeth Stuart, in her only appearance), an aged, foul-mouthed, dried up, wrinkly old prune of a godfather. Before we get to Maude and her gang, though, I need to write about Lacy Bond’s new colleagues. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Policewomen, or, Misogyny: The Movie”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Point of Terror

Point of Terror is the final film in a career cut short. Actor/producer Peter Carpenter only has four credits on his IMDb page, and this is the last. There are conflicting stories in the tubes, but what they all agree on is that Carpenter is dead. It happened at any time between 1971, not too long after this film was released, and the early 1980s. Either way, Carpenter was poised to have a fantastic career in shitty movies, akin to that of Andrew Stevens, but it wasn’t to be. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Point of Terror”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Hands of Steel, aka Vendetta dal futuro

The importance of the Italian contribution to Shitty Movie Sundays cannot be overstated. Many of the most outrageous and joyfully incompetent films featured in the Watchability Index hail from that land of ancient art and culture. I’m sure that way back in the day, before the miracle that is recorded media, there were countless shitty penny operas and circuses for the masses to enjoy. For all we know Verdi had a secret passion for sleaze. My point is, shitty Italian cinema didn’t just come from nowhere. The DNA had to be there already. For every master filmmaker such as Federico Fellini, there has been an Enzo G. Castellari. For every Lina Wertmuller, a Bruno Mattei. And for every Bernardo Bertolucci, there has been a Sergio Martino. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Hands of Steel, aka Vendetta dal futuro”