"Naked Massacre" (1976) d/ Denis Heroux

Richard Speck, notorious for more than being name dropped as one of Divine's celebrity blow jobs in Female Trouble (1974), was also a U.S. merchant marine-turned-mass murderer when he slipped into a dormitory for nurses in Chicago on a July night in 1966, and spent the evening torturing, raping, and murdering eight young student nurses ("It just wasn't their night," he'd later chuckle) while on an alcohol and drug fueled bender, leading to a famous electric chair death sentence, eventually reduced to a twelve hundred year bed at Stateville Prison, where the unrepentant killer grew breasts, often boasted of his crimes, and spent his days blowing coke and fellow inmates until his black heart finally quit at age forty-nine. Tonight's review is just one of several cinematic dramatizations of this legendary scar-faced creep (Your humble narrator is a scar-faced goon, know the diff, Cliff), this one from French-Canadian director Denis Heroux, who'd give us the killer cat anthology, The Uncanny, the following year, chose the war-torn streets of Belfast at the height of it's political unrest as the backdrop for this rarely-seen exploitation dittie.


"No Brady has ever planted a car bomb, Marcia, and you can be darn sure that no Brady ever will. Pardon my language, Alice..."
We see an awful lot of Richard Sp...uhh, Cain Adamson (Matthieu Carriere), a Vietnam Vet drifting his way back home to the States, aimlessly wandering the streets of Belfast amid spray-painted I.R.A. slogans and patrols of British soldiers, where the psychological burden of an abusive upbringing, the horrors of war, an unfaithful wife, lack of funds, etc, etc, take an irreparable toll on the man's fragile grip on sanity, finally leading him to break into a nearby building rented out to some student nurses with intent to burgle, or so he'd lead the terrified young women to believe, just before he convinces them to tie themselves up in one of the bedrooms, from which he calmly leads them, one by one, to a fate of degradation, sexual assault, and violent death. Just like he promised he wasn't gonna do! Joke's on you, girls. You showed kindness and trust to a transient sociopathic Robert Reed lookalike with a "Born for Hell" tattoo and an inborn hatred for women. That's never a smart move in a movie like this...


Not to detract from the horrific murder or anything, but check out that woolly lap-mammoth.
As predicted, things rapidly go Andy Milligan for our heroines. One aspiring care-giver gets the wind choked out of her, and another gets stabbed, while a third takes the knife from Adamson and fatally shanks herself in front of his eyes, rather than submit to his imposed sexual fancy, which doesn't happen to exclude outing a pair of closeted lesbians in a forced horizontal pair-up that ends in...anybody? If  you quick-witted readers at home said "violent, humiliating death", give yourselves... one of those puffy re-released Ugly Stickers (not "Charlie" though, he's my fave, and you'll have to work a lot harder to snag him, I don't mind tellin' ya), I dunno. Believing he's exhausted himself of potential rape/murder victims, and having confessed his incestuous relationship with his sister along the way, along with various other little-known personal tidbits that I'm sure these chicks appreciated hearing about just before being brutally murdered, and famously forgetting "the one under the bed", our reverse-feminist opens his wrist in the end, only to be denied closure by the authorities.


"...but I haaaaate salmon without a couscous side."
Among the unlucky nurses are Carol Laure, who you'll recall from the wild Sweet Movie, and Ely Galleani, an Italian actress who's worked with everyone from Fulci to D'Amato.I scored the C & F Services bare bones disc for a couple of bucks used at an FYE a while back, and it seems like a pretty fair trade to my best assessment, as I don't foresee any sudden mad collector urges to upgrade to a hardbox or mediabook release ever happening. If you're looking for a cheap fix of grainy ( bordering on downright murky in spots) blood, tits (thankfully not Dickie's),  woofin' seventies-tastic bush, and enough uncomfortable-looking misogynist torture and rape to make Krug Stilo step away for a momentary reflective stoagie of penance, then this one might just whet your appetite, briefly. On the scale, Naked scores a deuce, as the closest portrayal I've personally seen to the actual crimes themselves. Worth a look.


"Pour some crimson in me, Jimson."

"Sweet Movie"(1974)d/Dušan Makavejev

During my adolescent years, I first got wind of this strange and controversial Yugoslavian rarity through one of the VHS bootleggers I used to deal with, and my curiosity was further sparked by later mentions from trusted genre writers in various publications I regularly flipped through.It wasn't until last night, though, when I finally got the opportunity to screen this one for myself, thanks to the folks at Criterion and Doc's all-encompassing current NetFlix queue.If you're not into all the footage of exhumation of the 22,000 estimated mass graves containing Polish nationals executed by Russian troops on the order of Joseph Stalin contained within, there's always plenty of simulated and unsimulated coprophilia, emetophilia, genital fondling, teat-suckling, and implied paedophilia for you to wrap your glassies around, and if there's one thing that enhances a movie experience, it's seeing John "Animal House" Vernon pissing on-camera out of his erect dick, painted gold for effect.Yeah, not really.Anna Prucnal, the blonde actress who's center of the second narrative, which Makavejev was forced to write when lead actress Carol Laure up and quit after having to fondle a guy's bare uncircumsized junk on-screen (the last straw for her, after enduring several unsavory acts her character performs in the script), was banned from re-entering her native Poland for years after authorities deemed the movie both pornographic and anti-communist in nature.C'mon fellas, those are two of my own finest qualities.Though I was mostly unimpressed with the movie, there are some brilliant sequences with rich visual style contained herein that I'd be upset about never getting to experience if I hadn't watched in the first place.So effective, they are, that I'd revisit them separately in the future.Forwards towards, me hearties.

"Why you gotta flash me yer beaver, lady?Can't you see I'm on the shoe?"
First, we're introduced to Miss Canada(Carol Laure), as she wins a Most Virginal contest, as determined by a gynecologist on stage(Miss Yugoslavia is a burly broad who body slams him into the examination chair), winning a lucrative marriage to an eccentric milk tycoon named Mr. Kapital(John Vernon) who introduces her to the joys of matrimony on their wedding night by whipping out his gold-painted hard on and taking a whiz on her while his creepy old mother and a band of hippes garbed like religious leaders serenade the couple from outside.Embarrassed by Dean Wormser's weiner, she relates a desire to split to Kapital's mom who nearly drowns her before leaving her to the black musclehead(Roy Callender) who serves as family bodyguard.He jumps rope naked and stuffs her into a suitcase(!), which ends up on the Eiffel Tower, where a film starring a Latin lothario named El Macho(Sami Frey) is being filmed.She soon falls prey to his animal magnetism and they have sex right there on the landmark, but a group of touring nuns interrupt their coitus and scare them into a state of penis captivus(he gets stuck inside her!!).After being freed from the ahem, liplock, by French painter/writer Roland Topor, she finds herself in a therapy commune of artists led by Otto Muehl, where she breastfeeds from a lactating hippie, and after a particularly gross meal sans utensils, one of the other members experiences a rebirth of sorts, crying like a baby, pissing and shitting while the others pamper him.Finally, we see her writhing naked in a pool of liquid chocolate for a film crew.Clearly, this is not an ad for Godiva chocolates...or is it.

Choleric over her character's on-camera uncut cock-coddling, Carole was compelled to quit.
The second intercut narrative deals with a failed communist revolutionary named Anna Planeta(Anna Prucnal), who captains a massive, gaudy boat full of candy (with an enormous papier-mache Karl Marx head on the prow, mind you) down a river, where she spots a sailor named Potemkin(Pierre Clémenti) pissing in broad daylight on the shore and opts to give him a lift.After they reminisce and joyously sing old commie songs together, she warns him not to fall in love with her, else she'll be forced to kill him.Potemkin ignores her warnings and pleas to leave the ship, and ends up putting the blocks to her in a hanging nest full of sugar, after which she bites his granule-covered skin, drawing blood, and shanks him in the labonza repeatedly, twirling the blade and mixing the sweet substance with his red red kroovy.She warned you, pal.Her next passengers are a group of adolescent boys who she seduces with candy, stripping off her garments and teasing them with her nakedness.In the end, she's apprehended and hauled off by the authorities as police officers lay plastic sacks containing the childrens' lifeless bodies on the shore in front of a crowd of terrified onlookers.Later, when the crowd has dispersed, we see the children rising from the plastic like butterflies from their cocoons, reborn.

Potemkin(Pierre Clémenti)'s pelvis is promptly perforated while plunged in a cistern of sugar.
Say what you will about Sweet Movie, but you could never accuse it of being boring.A little excessive, like locking yourself in the hall closet with a box of candy bars, but those aforementioned sequences make it a worthwhile viewing, both visually stunning and thought provoking(I got a kick out of the vintage stock footage of baby gymnastics.Baby gymnastics, really?), truly a tightrope balance of exploitative elements and museum quality art.Definitely not for everyone, especially not those individuals whose minds are on lockdown from the bizarre, perverse, and the absurd.Laure's choco-nudity is liable to leave you Yugo-slobberin' for more, while Prucnal's scene with the boys will most likely disturb you deeply.Or leave you itchy, one or the other.Both women have gone on to successful singing careers, with Laure continuing to act in French television and films all along.On the scale, it earns two Wops, mainly because I can't see myself ever compelled to watch it again for any reason.After seeing it once, I can't imagine many of you will either.

If they made this outta chocolate, I'd be in a hyperosmolar nonketotic coma by now.