"Skins" (1994) d/ Wings Hauser

Here's a rarely-seen exploitative oddity from the mid-nineties that was written, directed by, and stars one of my favorite bad guys of the eighties, 'Ramrod' himself, the one and only Wings Hauser. Of course, he also croons a tune, "Walking on the Right Side of the Devil", for the production, but it pales in comparison to his unforgettable "Neon Slime". Also singing (sort of) her way through a co-starring role is Linda Blair, of "The Exorcist"(1973) fame and "Exorcist II: The Heretic"(1977) infamy. She gets 'em out, here, too, and it's always a good time, whenever she does do just that, in my estimation.


"Fruit cocktail?? Thanks boys, but I'm watching my figure...", laughs Bentz (Cole Hauser).
A gay kid named Marjoe (!) gets fagbashed by a gang of skinheads and left to die, naked and spray painted in an alley. His mother, Maggie (Linda Blair) pollutes the air in honky tonk dive bars with something vaguely resembling singing, while his father, Joe (Wings Hauser), an alcoholic ex-cop, spends his nights knackered in Mexico, while the skins brazenly terrorize Hollywood Boulevard, kicking over trash cans, slamdancing to the house band (the singer says "Oi!" a whole lot) at their elaborately decorated clubhouse (Nazi stencils, swasti-curtains abound, and even a dramatic hulking floor-stika) and spray painting the obligatory swastikas over Walk of Fame stars, those bald-headed bastards. When Maggie travels down to Mexico to enlist her drunken sot of a husband, he calls his own son a fag(!!) before finally agreeing to dry out and get involved.


"I'll climb outta this jumpsuit if you're bringing something like this to the table..."
When Joe's first attempt at drunken payback goes miserably wrong at the clubhouse (the leader, Bentz, played by his real life son, Cole, beats him bloody then pisses on him...jeez, that must have been a fun shoot), he makes a teary-eyed vow to his wife and recovering son to turn things around, by cutting off the hooch, and repeatedly stumbling up a steep hill while dressed like Richard Simmons, being cheered on by his flamboyant son at the top, in one of several montage sequences. Meanwhile, the skins are raping the female half of an interracial couple, and later getting off the hook when the girl is too intimidated to finger the responsible eggheads. Maggie, impressed by Joe's sweaty efforts and improved relationship with Marjoe, gives her husband a piece of montage-pussy, as a reward. At the climax, Joe turns the usual Hollywood Boulevard rabble into a lynch mob, jogging down the middle of the street with bats and weapons to the clubhouse, where they take it to the bellicose bootboys, in a pro-wrasslin' style free-for-all. The reunited family walks off, arm-in-arm, while Bentz, who ducked out on the beating, and his rottweiler move on towards a whiter, brighter future...Skins 2? Never happened.


"Can I marinate both of these in neon slime?", ponders Joe (Wings Hauser).
Besides Wings and Cole, the film also features Wings' partner/wife, Cali Lili Hauser as the skinheads' punky plaything, and his daughter, Bright Hauser, as a "Young White Angel", sieg heiling in a swazzy armband, and reciting "America, the Beautiful". It's nice to see families working together like this. Interestingly, Cole would again portray a skinhead gang leader just a year later in John Singleton's lifeless imbroglio/ethno-wank, Higher Learning (1995). As far as skinhead-related movies go, this one's not as engaging as 16 Years of Alcohol (2003) or Romper Stomper (1992), but it isn't quite as mephitic as cine-turds like Pariah (1998) or Greydon Clark's legendarily laughable Skinheads (1989). Still, it's closer to the latter two than the former, with unintentional laughs galore and Linda Blair's bountiful bobblers. There's a region 2 dvd out there, should your curiosity win out. Two wops.


The one at the front, giving it the mouth, but at the end of the night, we'll all shout...

"Calvaire" (2004) d/ Fabrice Du Welz

Thanks to Belgian filmmaker Fabrice Du Welz, you can pretty much cross the High Fens natural reserve in Liege off your bucket list of places to visit. When I think about tonight's review ...also known as The Ordeal (2004), and rightfully so, as Du Welz has concocted a bizarre mix of beautiful cinematography and gripping psychological terror, the madness of  love, and dreary, ominous isolation that makes for a pretty wild ride, while tapping into earlier films like Psycho (1960), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Deliverance (1972), and Misery (1990). If those titles don't paint a vivid enough picture of what kind of lunacy you're in for here, it's outta my hands, folks. I've done all I can...


"Dominique, nique, nique, s'en allait tout simplement...c'mon, ev'rybuddy!"
After cabaret singer Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas) speeds away in his personalized van from his last successful gig belting out mundane love songs (in a personalized cape, mind you) to horny Belgian grannies (and smitten nurses who Polaroid him their boobs) in a backwater convalescent home, he breaks down during a sleet storm in the dark and desolate wilderness of Liege, bumping into a disheveled-looking chap named Boris (Jean-Luc Couchard) who's been searching for his dog, Bella, in the elements, and who points him towards the empty local inn, where an quirky little fellow named Paul Bartel (Ha! ...as played by Jackie Berroyer) sets him up with a bed and breakfast, on the odd promise that he does not go near the village. While out on a nature walk, he does just that, spying a horrific gaggle of crummy-looking mutant locals as they take turns making love to a pig in a nearby barn. Bartel promises that his van will be repaired by morning, and the men trade a joke for a song after dinner, amid melancholy vibes over Bartel's wife, Gloria, who apparently broke camp ages ago.


"Check your pay envelope, I put Polaroids of my boobs in there.", notes Mademoiselle Vicky (Brigitte Lahaie). 
The next morning, things have gone from disadvantageous to deplorable. Marc's van looks to have been broken into and rummaged through, the only phone has been disconnected, Bartel is nowhere to be found, and the small closet in his room is now filled with women's dresses. He then notices an angry Bartel outside smashing the fuck out of his vehicle with a sledgehammer, and runs down to try and reason with him, only to get brained with the detached battery. Bartel sets the van on fire and drags the unconscious lounge singer off. When he finally comes to, he's wearing a dress, tied to a chair, and getting his injured, bleeding head shaved by the innkeeper, who seems to have convinced himself that the man is his wife, returned to him. When Marc tries to escape, Boris returns him to Bartel's tractor (which is spotted by some of the locals on a trapping run), and later crucifies him (!) to some support beams in the barn. From here, the situation only turns more distressing by the sickening minute.


"If you don't pay attention to my footwork, you'll never be able to do the 'Tor Johnson' ...You've got it all wrong. Sway left, then right, then left, then right, then..."
Du Welz followed this effort up with Vinyan (2008), Alleluia (2014), and Colt 45 (2014), all of which are on my "to watch" list, for sure. Phillipe Nahon you'll probably remember from things like Haute Tension (2003), and Gaspar Noe's Irreversible (2002), as well as Seul contre tous/ I Stand Alone (1998). Brigitte Lahaie, as most of you should well know by now, was one of France's premier pornographic exports in the late seventies. I found this one as deliriously demented and rotten as any grindhouse flick from the seventies, though beautifully framed with a decidedly arthouse lens, lending a surreal feel to the unpleasant proceedings which might be a cultural curveball to mainstream genre fans. On the scale, Calvaire shuffles about to the tune of three Wops, a must-taste for discerning Euro-horror palates out there.


"Okay, well, since you put it that way...", shrugs Shotgun-face (Laurent Lucas).

"Teenage Hitchhikers" (1975) d/ Gerri Sedley

Once upon a time, before the advent of interstate serial killers, teenage girls often took to the roadside, flashed some cleavage, and flipped up a thumb to get where they were going. Of course, the unwritten hitchhiking commandment was something like, "Gas, grass, or ass. Nobody rides for free.", so every excursion was a potential adventure waiting to jump off. In tonight's review, we document the madcap hijinks of a pair of hippie chicks, Sandra Peabody/Cassel, who you'll remember as the sweet young thing who gets her chest stiletto-autographed like a high school desk by Krug Stilo, in Wes Craven's seminal shocker, Last House on the Left (1972), and Chris Jordan, who broke into movies four years earlier in a production called Piss Orgy (1971), as they set out to do just that.


"Just look at that halitose halibut...and there's a fish in there, too."
We follow the misadventures of a perky pair of  hippie ride-thumbers named Bird (Sandra Peabody) and Mouse (Chris Jordan, as Kathie Christopher) as they hitchhike their way towards liberation, sexual freedom, and total independence, finding fleshy fun and tumbling into titillating trouble along the way. They get picked up by a camperful of  zooted dirt merchants, and when it looks like they have designs on jackrolling the girls, they sing a rancid hippie folk song instead, and proposition them to a life of groupiedom. The girls splash around in a stream, and Bird catches a trout with her panties. At a roadside diner, they get topless and embarrassingly go-go dance off beat in their drawers for food, which they don't even get, and rightfully so, they're horrible dancers.


This particular Bird (Sandra Peabody) is fogging up my spotting scope.
Before the end credits roll, these two take turns balling a bald-headed travelling salesman, interrupt a crazed, escaped rapist as he's about to force his way onto a chick in a backwoods meadow (sheesh, there was a whole lotta raping going on in movies back then) by stripping down themselves and critiquing his form(!) before okie-doking his ass and tying him to a tree. A wealthy lesbian also succeeds in sapphically seducing the hitch-sisters before the whole zany affair comes to a head at a far out hippie orgy, with thrusting bodies strewn about the pad like mad, Dad. In the end, we see them hitching a ride once again, but when a male driver stops to give them a lift, they run to their convertible, and speed off, giving him a playful bird. Oh, those teenage hitchhikers.


Though the groovy hippie orgy is semi-simulated, bouncy nipples like these will surely leave you stimulated. 
This would be the last film appearance for the sweetly sexy Sandra Peabody/Cassel, who walked away from the industry to produce children's television and teach drama, after having scored seedy credits in things like Love-In 1972 (1971), Voices of Desire (1972), and Filthiest Show in Town (1973). Getting tortured/raped/murdered by David Hess turned out to be her high water mark, cinematically speaking. Chris Jordan, who was once married to porn star Eric Edwards (who scores an uncredited cameo in the hippie orgy scene, by the way) also co-starred with Peabody in 1973's Massage Parlor Hookers, and banged out (ahem) soft and hardcore work up until the mid-seventies in movies like NY sexploitation king Joe Sarno's Confessions of a Young American Housewife (1974) and Misty (1976), before passing away in 1990. Claire Wilbur, you'll recall seeing in Radley Metzger's Score (1974). On the scale Hitchhikers thumbs it's way towards a pair of Wops, worth a look if you dig this sort of thing.


"We've got our own transportation now, so, like, down with you, maaaaaan!"

"Autumn Born" (1979) d/ Lloyd Simandl

A rarely seen, late seventies S & M-fueled endurance test from our pals up north that stars the lusciously voluptuous body of beautiful murdered Playboy Playmate of the Year, Dorothy Stratten. I'm forced to objectify the late actress here, as the bobbery concerning her untapped, unrealized acting skill everyone's always on about when she comes up in conversation, which is definitely not on display in this, her starring debut, of sorts {a full year before the spectacle that wasn't Galaxina (1980)}, seems like, well... bobbery. What remains has the feel of a Swedish Erotica loop minus the wah-wah guitar, Seka's red scarf, or the woolly penetration close ups. What fun is that, you ask? Not much at all, sez I. Not much at all.


Try on those satin rollerskate shorts next. All of Pomeroy's is belongings to you, baby.
Tara Dawson (Dorothy Stratten)'s compulsion to purchase polyester discoey looking outfits en masse not only serves as a lengthy opening montage for the high maintenance teenager to show off her adult curves while trying the dresses on, as the camera records them for perverted posterity (her pubic mound features prominently here), but also as a springboard for her unsavory, controlling uncle, Grant (Nate Macintosh) to vent repetitiously about, filling the frame with enough wood to keep Grizzly Adams' fireplace lit all winter long. Of course, it's not just the nineteen hundred dollar clothes bill that has her unc on the schiz, it's also the fact that she's about to turn eighteen and inherit her father's assets, all of which he's currently in control of. What's a guy to do, besides hire an icy dominatrix to torture his niece into signing everything over to him, obviously.


Never realized that you Canucks liked your camels filtered.
With Monica (Jocelyn Fournier) on board to adjust Tara's obnoxious sense of entitlement, and also horsewhip Tara's supple buttocks into submission, the spoiled teen is soon taught the value of clumsily-acted out discipline, and also not to paint her toenails in detestable rustic shades(seriously...). At one point, her captors introduce a wind up mouse to her, then sing the Three Blind Mice rhyme where the farmer's wife chops off the rodents' tails from the next room, forcing the distraught, hysterical girl to try to hide her new prized possession from tail surgery, in the walls. But that's not all. There's also flat dialog shouted at walls, humiliating assisted baths in tiny washtubs, sparkless sapphic hints that fizzle out at the Eskimo level, spirit-shattering rape and degradation. Something for nobody, really.


As far as sideboob goes, this marvel produces more tears than 'Send in the Clowns' .
Speaking of missed opportunities, I could easily see Dorothy Stratten in a vintage Svetlana or de Renzy porno, among the busty ranks of Desiree Cousteau, Seka, or Anna Ventura, instantly becoming a favorite of porn proponents everywhere(as if she wasn't already, to a lesser degree). After bearing witness to this, one can see where Bob Fosse drew his inspiration from in creating Dorothy/Mariel's flubbed blood pellet scene in his Stratten biopic, Star 80. The acting rots like the teeth of a diabetic moonshiner after his third two liter of generic Mountain Dew of the night, while the direction is flatter than his fourth, after being left open on the counter overnight. If you're so bewitched by Dorothy's physical assets that you're going to sit down to this one, any got-damned way, despite my best efforts to steer you in the other direction, I suggest you mute the sound, and keep a ready thumb on the fast-forward button. O solo Wop-o.


Can't make jokes here either. Her ass was definitely not one.

" 'Gator Bait" (1974) d/ Ferd and Beverly Sebastian

Few redheads ever reached the volcanic heights of cinematic sensuality the way the late Claudia Jennings did in her brief but memorable run in drive-in fare of the early seventies, just four years removed from achieving  Playboy's Playmate of the Year at the outset of the decade here. For those unfamiliar with the tragic starlet, tonight's focus is as an adequate place to begin as any, a standard low budget chunk of swampy seventies sexploitation that's nearly as short on acting ( Not since Vic Morrow in Castellari's Great White has a main character gone in and out of accent as much as Jennings does here.) as it is long on boat chases ...and nipple slips during said boat chases.


Wardrobe malfunctions happen to the best of 'em, even coon-ass bitches like Desiree (Claudia Jennings).
Desiree (Jennings) is interrupted while poaching snakes and 'gators by the sheriff's oversexed son Billy Boy (Clyde Ventura) and his buddy Ben Bracken (Ben Sebastian), and is graciously offered a sex or jail option from the relentless young poonhounds after a lengthy boat chase, to which she chooses option c: chucking a bag of poisonous snakes into their boat, causing the young lawman to not only shoot his father's boat full of bullet holes, but his partner-in-crime's face piece also gets a good aerating in the melee. Naturally, he blames the sunk boat and dead buddy on the wild scarlet-haired bayou minx, who once castrated one of the other Bracken boys when he came on too strong(!). The two lawmen boat over to lay the bad news on Pa Bracken, who's been bullwhipping six shades of shit out of one of his other sons for trying to fuck his own sister moments earlier(!!).


"Rape?!!? Aw hell, I was just gonna ask ya to accompany me to the soda jerk to share a malted milk!"
An angry swampbilly posse motors out to the farthest reaches of the swamps where Desiree's shack lays, and her mute younger brother and sister are quickly set upon by the vengeful hicks and it only gets worse from there, when a sexually frustrated Castrati Bracken gives the girl a twenty gauge blast up the panty purse. 'Dere gon' be some re-vange fo dis, ah guaaar-on-tee.
The murderous rednecks vainly attempt to torch the Thibodeaux shack, but Desiree returns in time to discover her sister's lifeless body, leading the cajun swamp-ginger to exact bloody vengeance on all parties involved. If that wasn't bad enough, her plan of attack revolves around boat chases. Lots of boat chases. Seriously. Even Andrea Bocelli could see how this is all gonna wrap up, ten minutes into the movie.


"You're wrong, Lowell, Berluti was left at the snapping turtle..."
Despite her erratic performance, Claudia still possesses enough beauty and screen presence to keep the viewer watching right up until the final reel, and though she doesn't appear fully nude here, there are the aforementioned bevvy of nipple slips to help the actress further stand out against the backdrop of horny hayseeds. On the other hand,  Janit Baldwin you may recall from Ruby (1976) or Humongous (1982). In fact, most of the supporting cast and crew are either named Baldwin or Sebastian. Wait a second, did I just watch a documentary? Either way, there's just enough CJ going on in this one to keep me from crawling into the back seat with my drive-in demigoddess and steaming up the windows, late eighties style. Deuce.


How'd you like to make an Indio girl, Claudia? Sorry. Lenzi moment there.