"Sexplosion" (1990) d/ Denni Lugli

I first encountered tonight's review in a VHS bootleg catalog, of all places, back in the early nineties when my thirst for new cult/horror/exploitation was ravenous and increasingly difficult to slake, even with regular road trips in all directions to seek out and score new genre stimuli. Though I'm not gonna glorify the fly-by-night media brigands who offered the title, since we run a legit cabin cruiser of ill repute upon the seas of creativity here at the Wop, I will admit to ordering it through them back then, my curiosity precipitated by a brief typewritten sentence or two describing the ...ahem....plot of the eighteen minute long effort, directed by avant garde artist, Denni Lugli. Of course, when I finally got the tape, threw it in, and watched past the snow at the outset, I'd been given a copy of something else entirely, and not at all what I'd ordered months earlier. Oh yeah, did I mention that it took that long for my order to arrive, besides being wrong? That's what I get for fucking around with bootlegs, right? Fuck you. Then about fifteen years later...


Sembra legittimo e securo...provatelo!
After some brief grainy video titles and a Buttgereit-esque synth score, we meet a couple (Paul St. Pauli, Rrose Selavy) lounging out and watching television (...of the gonorrhea conspiracy variety, no less) while smoking cigarettes and drinking what looks like scotch. He momentarily ponders using a small vial of titular "Sexplosion" while she starts to get frisky... but no. They then decide to hook up the clunky, eighties-style Panasonic video camera and film themselves going horizontal. An affluence of titties, birthmarks, and hairy bush follows, married to a brief cunnilingus sequence and a longer fellatial bout, which leaves him sleeping unresponsive next to her, as she tries to awaken him for another more satisfying round of sesso, but to no avail.


"Il mio cazzo e' morbido come gelato!"
At this point, the unfulfilled minx sneaks off and fills a syringe with the aforementioned "Sexplosion", then fixes his sleeping ass up with it, before cuddling up to his naked form in anticipation of the hip-bucking hijinks to follow. Only, this stuff has suddenly transformed him into a slathering fuck fiend, complete with latex rubber facial appliances, bubblegum vending machine fake teeth, and a sizable phony cock that drips blood and semen alternately. He chases her into the bathroom, looking like a horny mountain variant Jerry Seinfeld while crucifying her tongue to the toilet lid with a pair of scissors, then taking her from behind with his new faux endowment, piped in grunts and screams abound. Then his dick falls off. Finally, we're treated to more video bars, tracking problems, titles, and synth.


"Ammirare l'artigianato di questo coperchio di toletta!"
The poor girl seen here appears under the pseudonym Rrose Selavy, which also happened to be the female alter ego of artist Marcel Duchamp, a sort of play on the French words for "Eros, that's life." How quaint. The guy appears as Paul St Pauli, not much of a nod to art, but twice as goofy sounding. According to Lugli's website which hasn't been updated in quite a while, he served as an assistant to Italian FX wizard Sergio Stivaletti on films like Demoni 2 (1986), Spettri (1986), and Opera (1987), though he's got no imdb credits on any of those movies. One look at his effects work here tells me he must've been more of an espresso gopher than a latex stirrer, if anything. Despite being little more than grainy Z-grade porn with some insultingly cheap and amateurish gore thrown in for whatever reason, it's just sleazy enough (and eighteen minutes is thankfully brief) to work as a rare trash oddity that you might pull a chuckle out of, under the optimum circumstances, with optimum in this instance meaning "well-drugged". The standard deuce.


"Posso chiamare di nuovo un po' di tempo?"

"Los Ritos Sexuales del Diablo" (1982) d/ José Ramón Larraz

Next, we'll look at Los Ritos Sexuales del Diablo, a 1982 offering to the dark lord and master from Spanish sleazemeister Jose Ramon Larraz, the director responsible for famous fiend fodder like Vampyres (1974) and Symptoms (1974),  and later, things like 1987's Rest in Pieces and Edge of the Axe (1988), under his favorite pseudonym, Joseph Braunstein. Like much of his body of work, tonight's review, also known as Black Candles, is packed to the gills with deviate sex and nudity, and though this is a relatively bloodless effort for him, save for one wince-worthy on screen demise that we'll touch upon later,  the sex is degenerate and vulgar enough to make your skin crawl at certain points, if that's the type of thing you groove on, and this is coming from a guy who's nothing to sneeze at,  himself, in the sackmaster sweepstakes. Let's get on with the review while I get the ol' ego under control (with a whip and chair) over here...


"Pins and needles, needles and pins, have yourself a heart attack while you're hitting the skins (you bastard.)!"
After seeing a poor balding bastard's ticker conk out during a mid-day romp with a sexy young finger licking witch, due to a mysterious pair of hands wielding a sizable pin and voodoo doll over some titular black candles elsewhere, we're introduced to the dead fuck's sensuous sister, Carol (Vanessa Hidalgo), who's smoking body and attention to detail of the garter belts and silk stockings variety bring me great pleasure, and who's husband Robert (Mauro Rivera) looks like the result of gene splicing experiments involving Greg Brady and 70's porn dick Jamie Gillis, as they arrive at her brother's cottage in a secluded corner of England as guests of her mysterious sister-in-law Fiona (Helga Line), who happens to dig black candles and framed prints with sinister subject matter, and also,  peep tomming their constant fuck sessions through a concealed hole in the wall behind a painting, and also, Satan. The other locals all seem to think ol' Scratch is swell, too, as evidenced during a black rite in a barn involving the aforementioned finger licker and a goat. Scratch that one off of my bucket list of things to see. Oh, and before I forget, Carol and her late brother were ankles behind the ears kinda close, to add to the "Did I just see what I just saw?" vibe going on at this pad.


"Just give me another minute in here, I'm pinching off another Phish album!"
It doesn't take long for middle-aged Fiona to sock it to Robert, who's only too happy to spread it around in the family, and he's soon participating in her coven's black magic orgies, where you'll see a tubby out-of-favor Satanist receive punishment in the form of a sword up the ol' wah-zoo. One of the hired help/Satanists/goat wranglers heists a gaudy necklace out of Carol's effects and she's soon the subject of the circle's sex magicks herself, as conducted by a creepy guy with a cocaine pinky claw and a priest suit. The new Satanic Robert fancies some fartbox action from his unwilling wife, who pairs up with several of the witches for lesbian loving in the name of Lucifer, who, though he never shows up here, has to be impressed with the effort. In the end, we see the couple arriving at Fiona's under the exact same circumstances. All merely a dream...or was it? Only Larraz (and Lenzi, perhaps) knows for sure.


"I'm gonna stay over here tonight, baby, if it's all the same to you, your busy wallpaper has spoiled my boner."
You'll remember Helga Line from her genre work in titles like Horror Express (1972), My Dear Killer (1972), and Exorcism's Daughter (1971) opposite Paul Naschy. Hidalgo appeared with Lilli Carati in Italian comedy,  C'e' un fantasma nel mio letto (1981). Though the effective, throbbing soundtrack is credited to Cam,  I swear I can hear elements of Marcello Giombini's work in Gariazzo's L'ossessa (1974) throughout the damned thing. I swear I can. This one's heavy on filth and flesh, and though I wasn't always entertained by Larraz's disturbing images, the outrageous dialog and lovely actresses assets on display kept me engaged right up until the end credits. If you're as twisted as I am, you'll enjoy it, too, though I wouldn't advise those sensitive or easily offended readers/viewers to seek out a copy, because you probably wont enjoy it in the least. Two wops. Approach with caution.


"Oh Billy, when it comes to Satanic hay rolls, you're simply the G.O.A.T.!"

"Dværgen aka/ The Sinful Dwarf" (1973) d/ Vidal Raski

Achondroplasiaphobics, proceed at your own risk. Tonight's review stands as the most notoriously insolubrious dwarfsploitation flick of the seventies, a decade that prides itself on quality filth to begin with. From the cheap sets to the actors, most of which never appeared in a film again, and rightfully so, spitting out  basic dialog like bitter paste while unable to generate any sizzle in the embarrassing grainy hardcore segments, the whole lurid affair is bound to leave any self-respecting viewer feeling pretty itchy. In other words, a fucking legendary Danish howler that's sure to satisfy the most jaded cult cinephile on movie night, guaranteed.


Torben Bille had a great face for exploitation movies.
Lila Lash (Clara Keller) is a brutal, alcoholic, vitriolic, scarred, has-been of the stage (and she's the nice one!), who runs a boarding house in what looks to be Copenhagen, despite whatever they try to tell you here, with the help of her perverted, crippled, dwarf son, Olaf (Torben Bille), who enjoys luring sweet young things into their attic with toy wind up poodles, braining them with his walking stick, then imprisoning them in an especially filthy corner cell and shooting heroin (as regularly supplied inside various stuffed animals by a smack dealer named...Santa Claus) into random body parts (usually an ass cheek) until they're dependent on junk, eventually forcing them to turn free attic tricks for their next opiate fix. Olaf also enjoys peeking in on a pair of  destitute newlyweds named Peter and Mary (Tony Eades, Anne Sparrow), who share tins of sardines in their dingy apartment and fuck sloppily all night long when Peter isn't out failing to score a writing job and while Lila and her faithful drinking buddy pound Beefeater and cackle awful show tunes with the sinister little bastard accompanying on piano, like a musical Muttley to her Dick Dastardly.


Mary (Anne Sparrow) does her best to spruce up the dismal surroundings.
When Peter scores a job with Santa, keeping him away from his filthy hole-in-the-wall and wife for long periods of time, it's inevitable that Olaf clobbers the nosy oft-nude blonde while she's sneaking around in the toy-cluttered attic, discovering the naked, filthy, and dope-sick hookers, and becoming one herself, getting a  hokey-looking yet effectively sleazy pussy-christening from Olaf's trusty walking stick. Meanwhile, the misogyny is laid on thickly, as spaced out n' chained up objects of love go from being forcibly raped to a state of orgiastic bliss in the time frame of one shaky uncomfortable close up. Safe to say that Gloria Steinem didn't write this screenplay... Before too long, Peter finally figures it out and goes to the authorities who bust Santa Claus ( is nothing sacred to you law-upholding bastards?) and converge angry mob style upon the white slave ring. Lila eats a shiv, and then there's the small dummy-chuck off of the rooftop you were waiting for all along.


Number of scarfaced, over-the-hill cabaret singers who get 'em out here: One too many.
This one was mostly panned by the Danes at the theaters before getting picked up for distribution under the 'Sinful Dwarf' title by exploitation king, Harry Novak (who else?). The bantam Torben Bille also allegedly hosted some Danish children's shows(!), maintained a career in adult movies(!!), and was even rumored to have married to co-star Anne Sparrow (!!!) at some point before vacating the earthly plane at age 47 in 1993. That's the way to do it, Stallion. Severin delivered the perverted goods in the form of a Special Edition dvd in 2009. Don't let the commonplace two Wop score scare you away from this one, it has to be seen to be believed, for sure.


Olaf makes the girlies say "Ohhh..." while he laffs.

"Macchie solari" (1975) d/Armando Crispino

Tonight's movie, whose title translates to "Sun Spots" ( misleadingly released as Autopsy here in the States two years later), stands as an odd entry in the gialli sweepstakes, missing the trademark black gloved killer so prevalent in other films of the genre, but what it lacks in convention it more than makes up for with heaping dollops of sleazy sex, hallucinatory nightmare sequences, and the usual stellar evocative soundtrack from Ennio Morricone, not to mention one of the more delirious premises you're ever gonna find in movies like this. Director Crispino handles the frantic workload with lurid zeal, as though he himself had been affected by the magnetic activity on the star's surface, with an able cast that's headed by usual genre suspects, Mimsy Farmer and Ray Lovelock.


"Let go of my hand already, hippie, my nipples are getting fenceburn."
After opening with a disturbing montage of a sudden rash of suicides attributed to the titular solar phenomena, we head to the Roman morgue, where Simona ( Farmer) hallucinates the reanimation of a chunky female stabbing victim while other corpses come to life and copulate amid the limp come-on's of her assistant Ivo (Ernesto Colli), before her boyfriend Edgar (Lovelock) surprises her on a slab. Later, the body of a leggy redhead (Gaby Wagner) turns up on one of the young pathologist's gurneys just a day after meeting her, the victim of an apparent gun-inflicted suicide on the beach, with Ivo lustily squeezing her dead boobs like a package of ass paper on a supermarket shelf, and just as Simona is laboriously working on her thesis paper on real and staged suicides, what luck. While dining out with her playboy father, Lello (Carlo Cattaneo), she has a sun-induced migraine that tunes her into a clue about the deceased ginger, leading her back to the morgue, where she meets Father Lenox (Barry Primus), the dead girl's brother and a race car driver-turned-priest(!), who believes his sister's death was no suicide...


Empty a bottle of limoncello at the morgue, and this is what happens.
Lenox pummels the superintendent's face in the stairwell with his holy mitts, using the same reckless abandon in investigating his sister's death that forced him to prematurely retire from the racing circuit. As Simona gets closer to the truth at the criminal museum, a booby trap nearly erases her from the equation. Edgar walks away from his accident at the speedway, and shows  Simona a vintage pornography slide show that ends in tears and a non-bj (the worst kind, I tell you). Lello does a high window flopper that leaves him mute and paralyzed while his daughter, who never bought a blouse with buttons, parries an attempted morgue-rape by Ivo with a fork. Finally, she goes in for some nudie prod games with Edgar, only realizing mid-coitus that she's in love with Father Lenox. Lello flatlines in the middle of answering a question about his attempted suicide, and in the end, surprise... it's Edgar, who's the right homicidal bastard, scheming with Lenox's sister to rob Simona's father of his fortune. After narrowly escaping a staged double suicide, the priest and doctor rush to the square for a high scaffolding intervention that naturally goes badly. Cue: stock footage of solar flares and Morricone.


...because"Wet Mimsy" doesn't need a witty punchline, at all, really.
Crispino's other directorial efforts include his first attempt at giallo, 1972's L'etrusco uccide ancora aka/ The Dead Are Alive, John il bastardo aka/ John the Bastard (1967), a western, and 1968's Commandos, a war movie starring Lee Van Cleef. The Chicago-born Farmer was no stranger to gialli, herself, appearing in no less than Argento's 4 mosche di velluto grigio aka/ Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) and 1974's Il profumo della signora in nero aka/ The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974). Lovelock, always a favorite, regularly worked with directors like Fulci, Deodato, Grau, Di Leo, and Gariazzo throughout the sixties and seventies. On the scale, Autopsy garners a solid three wops, and comes recommended for anybody with a taste for the lurid side of genre film from the boot. Check it out!


...looks like another case of "Irish Sunglasses".

"Blue Movie" (1978) d/ Alberto Cavallone

If you needed a shower after watching the enjoyably slimy Giallo a Venezia, you might think about trying to dry ice blast yourself clean after getting through tonight's review, a schizophrenic, misogynistic, fetishistic mess from the man who brought you 1980's Blow Job, that openly revels in it's 'Blue' title, before turning a revolting shade of brown. Italian Playboy Playmates Dirce Funari and Leda Simonetti lend the only recognizable faces to Alberto Cavallone's cast in this exercise in endurance that's full of unenjoyable imagery and begs the eternal question, "Where does the role play end and rape begin?" In this particular case, somewhere just after the opening credits finish rolling...


"What's with-ah alla the fahking-ah cans??!!", ponders Daniela ( Daniella Dugas).
We kick off here with a young woman (Dugas) being raped in the woods by an unknown assailant with a stocking pulled over his face. She manages to escape, flagging down a passing car, as driven by Claudio (Claude Maran), a photographer who hates stupid, expressionless women nearly as much as he likes empty cans, and, to a lesser degree, keeping fresh turds in cigarette packs in his fridge. There's also quite a few baby dolls in tiny jars strewn about the place, as well. While keeping a nightmare-plagued Daniela under lock and key, Claudio alternates between photographing and verbally abusing one of his ultra-submissive models (Funari), running a hot light over her nude body. Random footage of war atrocities accompanies his sadism-flavored photo shoots, while Daniela snoops around his flat, prying open a locked door to reveal a slide projector chock full o' can based photographic art. For her crimes, she's forced to crawl around like a dog a bit, after some disciplinary bitch slaps, of course.


You'd need one of Andre the Giant's mitts to blot out that bush.
He takes in Leda (Simonetti), a pixie-haired waif left homeless-by-volcano(you'd think people'd have insurance for that kinda thing), that he later peep-toms on, as she swaps fluids with a lanky, effeminate African (Joseph Dickson, as "Il Negro"), who'd been searching for Daniela, snarkily slagging himself off to Claudio as a homosexual, before dicking down his new secretary on the sneak. Meanwhile, Claudio has also locked up a compliant Sylvia like a starving animal, allowing her to occasionally sloppily lap coffee cake(? the print I watched was thankfully far from crisp...) crumbs off of his chest while she jerks him off. Next up, he's got one of his models pinching off her daily deuce in what looks like a paint roller tray, or it could be a litter box. Does it matter, at this point? In any case, this movie gets a good deal shittier from here on out, both literally and figuratively. Rather than spelling it all out graphically and hilariously for you here, I'm gonna leave the finale for you to discover on your own, should you be inclined to hunt down such obscure art-sleaze cinema, as I had done before you. Woe is me for my curiosity, but woe of woes is you who now oughta know better.


"Ohhh, take me, Willis! Now, while Arnold's still on the dialysis machine..."
The two reasons I sought out this title in the first place: Funari would also appear in Starcrash and Midnight Blue the following year, before her notoriously lascivious turns in D'Amato's Le notti erotiche dei morte viventi aka/Sexy Nights of the Living Dead(1980) and Porno Holocaust (1981). Simonetti appeared in Bruno Mattei's La vera storia della monaca di Monza aka/The True Story of the Nun of Monza(1980) and Detenute violente aka/Hell Penitentiary with Ajita Wilson in 1984.  I think Doc, a fellow of a milder tolerance for the disgusting, who naturally vacated the room for good when the paint tray came out, may have best put the exclamation on our observations tonight, when he said, afterwards: "I'd rather watch the guy with the eggs." One Wop. For hardcore genre freaks only.


Not the worst thing that gets eaten in this movie. Trust me.

"Giallo a Venezia" (1979) d/ Mario Landi

So now we've finally come to Mario Landi's infamously sleazy Giallo a Venezia, rougher than a pair of stucco underwear and seedier than the couch cushions in a V.I.P. lounge. Impressive, when you think about it, that a movie set in as lush, picturesque surroundings as Venice could have you reaching for a bar of soap as quickly as this one does. The suspense and mystery elements typically found in gialli are nowhere to be found here, instead, Landi chooses to emphasize the misogyny and sadism of the sub-genre, and even then, it all seems pretty phoned in, in the end, thanks to lifeless performances from the cast, sequences that suffer from poor lighting, lengthy, pointless extreme close-ups, or the film's overall dull look, due to the dogshit film stock utilized within. Still, despite being little more than a cheap porno with some amateur gore thrown in, you might be embarrassed at how much you're entertained by it, under the proper substances, errr...circumstances.


" 'Ay Babalugats, scommetto che posso mangiare cinquante uova..."
We open with a man being stabbed repeatedly in the goodies, and a woman floundering in the drink, with both corpses turning up on dry land, and thus, perplexing the fuck out of one Inspector De Paul (Blynn), a frazzle-headed wise ass with an affinity for hard-boiled eggs (seriously...there's maybe two or three scenes in all where he's not sloppily chain-eating them, or at least peeling one and throwing the bits of shell on the floor like an ignorant scumbag, but I digress...) for much of the duration. His lazy investigation reveals that Flavia (Leonora Fani) and Fabio (Gianni Dei) were a romantic couple at growing odds with his increasingly deviant and perverse sex kinks and cocaine abuse, as flashbacks show what begins as harmless exhibitionism (he fucks her in front of an effeminate-looking peeper), soon degenerates into humiliation, rape, prostitution, and finally, murder. After blowing some nose candy and thumbing through antique pornography while an unsatisfied Flavia scolds her beav elsewhere (for, I dunno, twenty boring minutes solid?), Fabio forces his girl into a sweaty, public threeway in a movie theater with a perverted Joe Spinell lookalike, who whacks his meat on camera.


Let Jim Kelly up from that leg scissors, sister, you're gonna kill the brother.
Through the late girl's friends, like Marzia (Mariangela Giordano), who's dealing with an obsessive stalker herself, De Paul learns that Flavia had also been cat o'nine tailed, forced into seducing the delivery boy, and ultimately, to turn a daylight trick while Fabio watched from a distance, only to be gang raped by a pair of men, in the process, while her boyfriend does fuck all. Elsewhere, Marzia gets laid, which causes her stalker to burn the man alive in a jealous rage, and saw off the woman's leg with a hacksaw... all while she remains conscious, mind you (she passes out from the agony, but he sportingly slaps her awake). De Paul arrests the perp, who confesses, yet denies murdering Fabio and Flavia, but the inspector discovers through yet another source how both bodies came to end up on land, since that particular detail seems to be the only one he's at all concerned with (t'was murder-suicide after all, as the audience will figure out about five minutes in), wrapping up both the case, and the movie.


Post-groceries handy? Now that's what I call gratitude.
Landi worked mostly in television during his long career in the industry, though he did offer audiences the deliriously inept Patrick vive ancora (1980), which also starred Dei in the lead. Fani also appeared in Enzo Castellari's Sensivita aka/ The House by the Edge of the Lake(1979).  Giordano, you'll probably remember as the incestual mother who gets her nipple chewed off by a zombified Peter Bark in  Bianchi's Lei notte del terrore (1981), though she also turned up in Landi's aforementioned Patrick sequel, La bimba di Satana(1982), Malabimba (1979), and Michele Soavi's La Setta (1991), among others. On the scale, Giallo rates an unimpressive single Wop and not goose eggs, as I've seen quite enough of those for the evening...


Who is that, amputating a girl's leg with a hacksaw, behind those Foster Grants!

"A Day of Violence" (2010) d/ Darren Ward

If crime drama was nourishment you could grub on, then British newcomer Darren Ward would be the equivalent of a back street cuisinier splashing the viewer's palate with bloody good eats, indeed. His second full-length feature plays like a low budget variant of his country's popular recent gangster epics like Snatch, Sexy Beast, or Gangster No. 1, but with a generous pinch of tribute to the Italian poliziotteschi of the seventies and eighties and a dash ( this should read "lid fell off of container, entire contents dumped haphazardly into mixture", really) of Big S und Big V*, for that downhome genre gusto. Though some of the dialog circumvents the power of the film's splattery reveal in the end, Violence is a pretty engaging piece of urban thuggery with a solid performance from Nick Rendell in the lead, and a welcome appearance by the legendary Johnny Morghen himself as a bong-reefing deadbeat crud.


The ol' "Bbbbllllblllllbllbbbbllll plus tax" does 'em in every time.
We meet Mitchell (Rendell) as his body bag is unzipped in the morgue, his hulking, lifeless body with a middle piece missing; his voice providing the narrative for the circuitous tale of how he got there in the first place, which starts just twenty-four hours earlier...after some lengthy spirited fuckage with his bird, he pays a visit to the dilapidated porn-papered digs of Hopper (Giovanni Lombardo-Radice), a vulgar derelict who owes him some money, but discovers significantly more cash stashed away in the beanbag chair than he's been leaning hard on his mark for. Having already pinned the pleading transient to the counter top with a steak knife (!), the burly bonebreaker decides to blag the extra bucks, slashing the neckpiece of the stoner and making the dash. Ironically, he seeks employment from the very crime lord he's only just robbed, a cold cunt named Boswell (Victor D. Thorn) who bases his criminal organization out of a print shop(!!).


They went easy on you compared to the old days, Johnny.
Unbeknownst to Mitchell, Hopper captured his slayer's sticky fingers on a cell phone vid, which ends up in the hands of one of Boswell's cartoony bald thugs, who all seem to have dainty nicknames for some unknown, yet convivial reason. Having just escaped some eye-watering-ly remorseless torture at the mitts of the boss' skin-pated brutes, he returns to his lover's, ready to deliver the blood money over for motivations that I'll leave un-discussed here, so that you readers might be able to better appreciate the claret-splashed climax for yourselves.


"At least he din't suffah."(Tony Soprano voice)
A stylized, nihilistic vision that's brimming with exploitative sex and violence for the gorehounds in the audience, and surely a sign of many more good things to come from this young director, who I'll be keeping my eye out for, as should you. On the scale, Violence earns a sterling score of tre wops. Recommended.


Faster than you can say Bob's your uncle and Fanny's your aunt, it's the new Pasta Slingshot...only from Montco.

*Sesso e violenza, naturalmente.