B.W.'s Top Twenty Sex Sirens of Cult Cinema : The Top Ten

                    10) Adrienne Barbeau

                              9) Gloria Guida
 
                 8) Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith

                        7) Rene Bond

                       6) Corinne Clery

                        5) Madeline Smith

                             4) Ewa Aulin

                             3) Annie Belle

                      2) Francoise Pascal

                   1) Christina Lindberg

"Candy" (1968) d/ Christian Marquand

Ewa Aulin is probably my favorite blonde of the late sixties/early seventies, exuding a child-like innocence with sensuality so pure, your heart'd probably stop if you tried to snort a line of it. Nowhere is this more evident than her 1968 star-studded counter-culture sexploitative romp, Candy, based on a satirical update on Voltaire's Candide in the form of Terry Southern's novel (but you knew that already). Unfortunately,  Ms. Aulin's acting ability never attained the same levels as her beauty, and this is also painfully obvious to anyone watching the movie, with the bubbly starlet often phonetically sounding out words like she's never heard them before. Propping her up throughout, like a theatrical crutch, are the likes of Richard Burton, John Huston, John Astin, James Coburn, Walter Matthau, and Brando himself. So she's no Bette Davis. She's fucking great to look at.


I'd give the Gobstopper to Slugworth for some of this Candy (Ewa Aulin).
Mr. Christian (Astin) has got his square hands full with his teenage daughter, Candy (Aulin), who's snuck off to see Mac Fisto(Richard Burton), the great poet/piss artist who tries to compromise her morals in the back of his glass-bottomed limo (praise heaped upon the upskirt Gods here), as driven by his faithful manservant, Zero (Sugar Ray Robinson), on a ride home from school, with her father walking in on the self-pickled performer raping a mannequin as his daughter sinks Emmanuel the Mexican gardener's (a completely rotten Ringo Starr in his acting debut) balls atop the pool table. While sending Candy off to live with her libidinous uncle (also John Astin), Mr. Christian is knocked unconscious on the airport runway by Emmanuel's vengeance-minded sisters (with no less than Florinda Balkan among their ranks!) just as they board a plane full of soldiers, as led by General Smight (Walter Matthau), and he naturally tries to play 'hide the bayonet' with Candy at 50,000 feet, before sky diving after his men. I'm starting to notice a pattern developing here...


Flint's knocking at yer backdoor, and he's comin' in.
Back on Terra firma, Candy's unresponsive father is operated on in New York by Dr. Krankheit (James Coburn), an unorthodox neurosurgeon who implants an electrical outlet into the back of his domepiece (later used to power a transistor radio at the raucous after party), triumphantly flipping a bloody bird at the medical theater before helping Candy with her...posture. Ahem. When the patient deliriously wanders out into the street, Candy gives chase, after which she's fucked inside a grand piano by a hunchbacked art thief (Charles Aznavour), groped by a pair of beat cops, and enlightened (insert another 'ahem' here, please) by a phony guru (Marlon Brando) who lives inside a customized eighteen-wheeler.She leaves him frozen solid and follows a mysterious hooded figure that turns out to be her father into a collapsing temple before strolling through a meadow in a plain white dress past all the colorful characters she has encountered along the way; her dress becoming more ornately decorated as she goes, finally returning to her otherworldly form and returning to the stars from whence she came.


"That doesn't feel like a 'Super 8' to me!!"
The striking Aulin turned up in such genre favorites as Giulio Questi's Death Laid An Egg the same year, and Aristide Massaccesi's Death Smiles on a Murderer as well as Jorge Grau's Legend of Blood Castle, both 1973, as well as an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus during it's premier season, interestingly enough. I think many negative critics of tonight's film have been unreasonably austere in their judgment. This one plays like a bump n' grind version of an early Jodorowsky journey, though you'll find more honest to goodness T n' A in Alejandro's work than you ever will here. The thrills, like most of the chuckles you'll encounter in Buck Henry's mirthfully satirical dialog, are cheap, harmless fun. A cult classic packed with groovy psychedelia and frenetic energy that entertains throughout that I'd deduce is easily worth three Wops on the scale.


Could you imagine Brando getting airborne like this in '78? Me, neither.

"La morte ha sorriso all'assassino" (1973) d/ Aristide Massaccesi

Let's kick it off properly with what is arguably Italian sleazemeister Joe D'Amato's best genre work, in a Poe-inspired gothic 1973  giallo that stars Euro staple-creep Klaus Kinski and Swede-born confectionery item, Ewa "Candy" Aulin. Insert: lip smack here. In fact, those only familiar with the director's later, more crass efforts might be pleasantly surprised at the attention he dedicates to the film's dreamy look, a juxtaposition of horrible images against beautiful ones that I'm unsure he was ever able to purvey to an audience as effectively as he does here. As far as I know (a range that encompasses "just about everything" to "next to nothing" on any given day), it stands as the only other film in his two hundred (besides 1977's Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals), in which he uses his real name on a directorial credit, from a period when he clearly cared more about the artistic aspects of his movies than the financial success, as was visibly the case later in his career. Some might even go so far as to call it his "masterpiece"... Don't get the wrong idea, folks, this is still a D'Amato movie, and there's plenty of gory splatter and  nudity abound here, and you might have difficulty tracking the incoherent plot line even with the help of microchip implants, but such is the cinema, no?


More style and profile here than a Ric Flair wrasslin' promo. Woooo!
At the turn of the twentieth century, after a handsome doctor (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) impregnates the female half of an incestuous pair of siblings, resulting in the death of mother and child, her jilted, hunchbacked brother Franz (Luciano Rossi) sets out to restore her life. Three years later, on the doorstep of the estate of Walter Von Ravensbruck (Sergio Doria), son of the aforementioned doctor, a gruesome carriage accident finds beautiful passenger, Greta (Aulin) injured and the carriage driver skewered through the heart on the vehicle shaft.Walter calls in Dr. Sturges (Kinski) first to examine the driver's corpse for the authorities, then to diagnose the young, unresponsive woman. Sturges unflinchingly sinks a needle clear into her wide-open eye(!), then recognizes an inscription on the amulet around her neck as just the Incan formula for resurrection he's been looking for, for years! He scurries down to his sub-basement lab and laboriously fiddles with beakers and test tubes, before getting C.T.F.O.ed by mysterious hands just as his latest concoction brings a male corpse back to life. Thorough as a shadowy killer usually is, he re-snuffs Sturges' mute assistant and the reanimated corpse, for good measure. Upstairs, both Von Ravensbruck and his wife are mesmerized by their lovely new guest and play nudie prod games together while a maid that's haunted by visions of Franz gets her facepiece blown the eff off by the shadowy killer, who proves he's not against using a gun once in a while.


"Hold ztill. I'm goink to inzert zis pin into your eyeball..."
Walter's wife Eva (Angela Bo) walls up Greta in the musty cellar, after failing to drown her while giving her a bath, but ultimately fails in stopping the inevitable spectral haunting/ violent death in store for both she and her husband. The Von Ravensbruck's trusty manservant, Semian, reveals himself to be Greta's murderous accomplice, but she inexplicably rewards his loyalty by sending him off to join the choir invisible. After her objet du vengeance, Walter's father, is trapped in his daughter-in-law's crypt as her eyes ominously snap open, we flashback to Greta's resurrection at Franz's hands three years earlier, his success garnering him a nasty end from an ornery black feline that has issues with eyes. The grisly aftermath is discovered by a police inspector, who rehashes the strange details of the case to his elderly, invalid wife, who's been turned away from him in her wheelchair the whole time. When she turns to face him, he realizes that she is in reality, Greta, a harbinger of his own horrible fate, perhaps? Roll credits.


"...and the big dance is tonight! I'm ruined!!!"
What manner of insanity is this? A D'Amato movie that's not hardcore porn, and it merits a Wop, doubled, on the mostly infallible and oft-imitated ratings scale?? Believe it or not, despite his under-use of Kinski here, the convoluted story line, and some signature jerky handheld P.O.V. shots that he'd revisit again and again, in things like Porno Holocaust(1979) and Antropophagus(1980),  this just might be my favorite of all of the director's genre work, with mostly solid performances from the cast, palatable cinematography, and an aptly phantasmagorical score from Berto Pisano. D'Amato would follow this one up with several over the next few years under the name Michael Wotruba, including 1974's Eroi all'inferno, a war movie that also starred Rossi and Kinski. The adorable Aulin would next appear in Jorge Grau's Ceremonia Sangrienta (1973).


"Ho bisogno di aiuto! I've got a sheep's eye glued to my face!"