"He gave his life rather than bend to the yoke of tyranny!" Prolific B-movie director R.G. Springsteen took a break from horse operas for this 1949 anti-Communist propaganda film issued at the dawn of McCarthyism. A disillusioned American soldier (Robert Rockwell) is lured into joining the U.S. Communist Party only to learn that abandoning his new comrades is not an option. German-born Hanna Axmann-Rezzori is love interest Nina, while Chattanooga's Betty Lou Gerson, who the following year would narrate Walt Disney's Cinderella, is "Yvonne, a power-hungry, psychopathic, love-starved woman of destruction." Also with Barbra Fuller (The Roommates) and Leo Cleary from State Penitentiary as fearless Father Leary.
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This is Andy Milligan's 1967 The Naked Witch under a reissue title intended to deemphasize the horror angle. It starred LaMama Troupe member Beth Porter (Futz) as the witch/temptress, and also featured Milligan regulars Maggie Rogers (Seeds of Sin) and Torture Dungeon's Hal Borske along with Robert Burgos (The Degenerates) and Lee The Promiscuous Sex Forbes. It's currently unavailable under either title.
"America's Fearless Showman" Kroger Babb reissued The Lawton Story, a 1949 film from B-movie director Harold Daniels (Bayou) about an annual Easter pageant in Lawton, Oklahoma, with a new title and nude scenes...just kidding! Instead, Babb hired fabled quickie director William "One Shot" Beaudine (Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter) to shoot a maudlin wraparound written by Babb's wife Mildred Horn (Mom and Dad) profiling precocious child actor Ginger Prince. Daniels' original cut featured Lawton townspeople, such as Millard Coody and Darlene Bridges, as themselves and as biblical characters in the pageant, while Beaudine's add-on offered character actors Forrest Taylor from Sam Fuller's Park Row and Ferris Taylor (Henry Aldrich Haunts A House) as bickering brothers in need of divine inspiration. Cinematographer Henry Sharp had previously filmed Duck Soup for the Marx Brothers.
Petite Mari Blanchard split her career between television work and B-movie roles, including this 1957 sci-fi thriller from expatriate German director Kurt Neumann (The Fly). Blanchard's character is a dying woman given an experimental drug with unexpectedly dire results. With "Maverick" star Jack Kelly and Albert Dr. Cyclops Dekker as fruit fly fluid formulators. The cast also features "Blossom Rock" aka Marie Blake ("Grandmama" from The Addams Family), character actor George Baxter (The Flying Saucer), and suave Paul Cavanagh (Francis In The Haunted House). Cinematographer Karl Struss also filmed classics for DeMille, Murnau, Mamoulian, and others as well as 1953's Mesa of Lost Women.
Svelte Susan Stewart (Like It Is) is Lila, a wigged-out go go dancer for whom a dose of LSD releases murderous rage in director William Rotsler's 1968 acid-fueled fantasy that shuttles from strip club to tawdry warehouse bedroom. Initially sold as a sexer, Lila delivered disappointing returns so distributor Harry Novak hacked out club footage and sold what was left as horror film Mantis In Lace. Also with Pat Barrington (Orgy of the Dead), Steve Vincent from Pandora and the Magic Box, and Russ Meyer regular Stuart Lancaster (Mudhoney). Cinematography was by László Kovács, who filmed Easy Rider for Dennis Hopper the following year. Lila's vegetable-heavy hallucinations were devised by experimental filmmaker gone nudie nabob Ed Blow the Man Down DePriest, and Baltimore's Vic Lance (Booby Trap) composed the memorable theme song.
This 1977 porn flick, also known as Closet Casanova, starred Tovia Borodyn, aka Ted Roter, as Paul, whose midlife crisis finds him caught between two lovers a generation apart. It was directed by Peter Balakoff, aka Ted Roter, and featured Gena Lee (Stephanie's Lust Story) and Diane Miller from Roter's horror porn The Psychiatrist as the other two in Paul's trio. Also with bodacious Bill Margold (Fantasm) and Robert Genital Hospital Bullock. Roter purportedly considered himself the John Cassavetes of porn, which translates here as an artistic license for discontinuity.
Harry Novak's Boxoffice International distributed writer/director Paul Hunt's 1969 tale of a motorboat racer (The Mighty Gorga's Gary Graver, usually behind the camera) who runs afoul of gangsters. With Barbara Mills from The Harem Bunch, joltin' Jane Tsentas (Evil Come, Evil Go), and Monica Gayle ("Patch" from Switchblade Sisters). Cinematography by Ron Twin Peaks Garcia. Hunt, who also co-produced, also founded west coast "underground movie" distributor Canyon Films.
Argentine filmmaker Emilio Vieyra, best known for The Curious Dr. Humpp (1969), also directed this 1963 tale of vengeance that centers around a seedy Buenos Aires nightclub. Known at home as Testigo para un crimen, it was released in the U.S. in 1966 with a pervy new title along with added scenes featuring nudity and kink such as the "dance of the velvet whip" with a fishing net so memorably featured in the campaign. Blonde Libertad Leblanc (The Pink Pussy: Where Sin Lives) is Blondie, a singer at the aforementioned club that's also home to an illegal gambling operation and murder. Also with popular Argentine television star José María Langlais (Masterworks of Terror), Julio deGrazia (the Superagentes adventure comedies), and drag queen Michelle from the 1961 Argentine proto-mondo America By Night.
Nicholas Ray's rip-roaring role reversal western from 1954 starred Joan Trog Crawford as Vienna, a saucy saloon owner who falls under scrutiny for hanging out with a character named "The Dancin' Kid" (western star Scott Brady) and the titular gunslinger Johnny Logan (troubled HUAC patsy Sterling Hayden). The climactic shootout is between Vienna and her repressed rival, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge from Touch of Evil). Also with John Vampire Hookers Carradine; future television stars Ward Bond and Ernest Borgnine (Wagon Train and McHale's Navy, respectively); and Ben Cooper (The Fastest Guitar Alive).
In 1960 New York-based producer/distributor William Mishkin dubbed a racy nine-year-old Italian opera potboiler entitled Core 'ngrato ("The Ungrateful Heart"), named after an often-covered Neopolitan song, and crowned it with a more grindhouse friendly title and an opera-free campaign. It was a late-career work from director Guido Brignone (the 1925 Maciste in Hell) and starred Carla Del Poggio (Variety Lights), American actor Frank Latimore from René Clément's Purple Noon, Tina Lattanzi (The Leopard), and Giovanna Galletti from Last Tango In Paris. The director co-wrote with Mario Monicelli (Big Deal On Madonna Street) and the one-named Steno (Dr. Jeckyll Likes Them Hot). Cameraman Silvano Ippoliti would later find frequent work with Tinto Caligula Brass.
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