Category Archives: The Daily Grindhouse

6 Trailers For A Doomed Society

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Hi there and welcome to yet another edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Film trailers!

1) Damnation Alley (1977)

This movie was actually on the Fox Movie Channel last night.  The trailer’s better.

2) The Tenement (1985)

As this trailer makes clear, this film is also known as Slaughter In The South Bronx.

3) Enter The Ninja (1981)

It’s Franco Nero!

4) Eat My Dust (1976)

It’s Ron Howard!

5) Beatrice Cenci (1969)

Before Lucio Fulci devoted himself to making zombie films, he made this one.  It tells the true story of Beatrice Cenci, an Italian noblewoman who, in 1599, conspired to murder her abusive father.  Fulci considered it to be his second best film.  I’ve never seen it but I hope to do so someday soon.

6) The Slams (1973)

Finally, let’s conclude this edition with Jim Brown in … The Slams!

6 Trailers For Mother’s Day

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Hi there!  If you’re a mom, Happy Mother’s Day.  And if you’re not, you better go do something nice for your mom or else run the risk of being given back to the gypsies that she got you from.  (Incidentally, there’s no shame in being a gypsy adoptee.  According to my sisters, I was left in the backyard by a wandering gypsy band and just look at me now…) 

Here’s the latest edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Film Trailers for you to watch and maybe (or maybe not) enjoy on this temperate Sunday….

1) Teenage Mother (1967)

I’ve featured this trailer before but I figured that since it’s Mother’s Day…

2) The Bloody Brood (1959)

Yes, this is the same Bloody Brood that I reviewed on this website a few days ago.

3) Operation Kid Brother (1967)

Come October, we’re going to be reviewing every single James Bond film ever made here at the Shattered Lens.  Until then, why not enjoy this trailer featuring Sean Connery’s kid brother Neil?

4) Lightning Bolt (1966)

Much like Operation Kid Brother, this appears to be another Italian attempt to make a Bond-style film.  Apparently, Neil Connery is not featured in this one.

5) Avenging Angel (1985)

Awwww…this movie was released the year I was born. :)

And finally, let’s close things out with a film that’s become such a classic and is so influential that film snobs tend to forget that it’s essentially a very well-made grindhouse film…

6) Psycho (1960)

A Canadian Quickie With Lisa Marie: The Bloody Brood (dir. by Julian Roffman)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

As part of my ongoing mission to see all of the film’s featured in Mill Creek’s 50 Chilling Classics box set, I watched a 65-minute Canadian film called The Bloody Brood last night.

First released in 1959 and filmed in moody, noir-ish black-and-white, The Bloody Brood tells the story of a low-level drug dealer and aspiring beatnik named Nico (Peter Falk).  One night, while hanging out at the local coffeehouse and listening to decadent jazz, Nico witnesses a man drop dead of a heart attack.  Intrigued by the man’s sudden death, Nico and his nervous friend, a tv director named Francis (Ron Hartmann), decide that they want to experience what it would be like to deliberately kill someone.  Before you can say “Leopold and Loeb,” Nico and Francis are feeding a random stranger a hamburger laced with ground glass.  That stranger, a hard-working telegram delivery man named Ricky (George Sperdakous), later dies of an intestinal hemorrhage.

Unknown to Nico and Francis, Ricky has an older brother named Cliff (Jack Betts) and Cliff doesn’t believe that his brother’s death was an accident.  With the covert help of Detective McLeod (Robert Christie), Cliff starts to investigate his brother’s death.  Cliff eventually meets Ellie (Barbara Lord), a disillusioned woman who has fallen in with Nico and his murderous crowd.

The Bloody Brood is an unexpected surprise, a genuinely entertaining B-movie that more than overcomes the confines of its low-budget and limited running time.  While Peter Falk is the obvious center of the picture and steals every scene that he’s in with his coldly charismatic style of evil, the entire film is well cast and well acted with Hartmann and Betts both bringing unexpected nuance to their roles.  However, the real star of the film is director Julian Roffman who gives the film a shadowy and threatening noir-look. 

In many ways, The Bloody Brood represents everything I love about the low-budget, often sordid B-movies of the 50s and 60s.  Working with limited resources and a small cast, director Julian Roffman managed to create a genuinely memorable movie.  Films like The Bloody Brood continue to serve as proof that you don’t need millions of dollars to make a good film.  You just need a strong creative vision and the imagination to make that vision a reality.

A Grindhouse Quickie with Lisa Marie: The Demon (dir. by Percival Rubens)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last summer, I decided to watch and review all 50 of the films to be found in Mill Creek’s Chilling Classics box set.  Mill Creek, of course, is a company that’s best known for releasing box sets that seem to primarily feature low-budget films that, for whatever reason, have now found themselves in the public domain.  If you’re a fan of old school B-movies in general, then you probably know just how fun it can be to read the back of a Mill Creek boxset and discover what obscure films are waiting inside.  The thing that I especially love about Mill Creek is the fact that — in the best grindhouse tradition — they describe every film that they distribute (whether it’s George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead or something like Las Vegas Bloodbath) as being a “classic.”

So, anyway, I started to watch and review the films in the Chilling Classics box set but, as 2011 drew to a close, things got rather hectic and busy here at the TSL Bunker.  In between covering the Oscar season and keeping the world supplied with weekly trailer posts, I had to set aside my plans to review the entire boxset for another day. 

Well, I’m happy to say that day is here!  Last night, I dug out the old Chilling Classics box set and I watched a South African slasher film from 1981, The Demon.

The Demon actually tells two separate but connected stories.  In the first story, a teenage girl is kidnapped from her bedroom by a masked killer.  Her distraught family calls in a tormented psychic who quickly proves himself to so superfluous and useless that you’d forget all about him except he’s played by the late Cameron Mitchell. 

If you’re a fan of old school grindhouse and exploitation films then you’ve undoubtedly seen a handful of films featuring Mr. Mitchell.  A former “legitimate” actor who, early on in his career, appeared in things like Death of a Salesman, Mitchell eventually became better known for appearing in low-budget exploitation films.  Mitchell could always be counted on to shamelessly overemote and, regardless of the film he was appearing in, he was always a lot of fun to watch.  If nothing else, Mitchell always seemed to be rather amused by the films he found himself in.  It’s a shame that Cameron Mitchell died before Quentin Tarantino could engineer a comeback for him. 

In The Demon, Cameron Mitchell spends most of his limited screen time standing on a rocky cliff while staring down at the ocean below and having psychic visions that don’t really seem to have much to do with anything else happening in the film.  Actually, visions is the wrong word.  As Mitchell says, “Sometimes…I get these feelings.  Vibes, as the kids would say.”

And the kids are in a lot of trouble because our nameless killer has moved on to the city where he spends his time hanging around outside of a place called Boobs Disco and stalking two teachers named Mary (Jennifer Holmes) and Jo (Zoli Markey).  This is the film’s second storyline and it mostly consists of Mary spotting the killer out of the corner of her eye and Jo pursuing a relationship with the most boring man on the planet.

Like quite a few films that seem to pop up in various Mill Creek box sets, The Demon is technically a pretty bad film but, once you accept that fact, it’s also an occasionally entertaining mess that delivers a handful of effectively creepy moment.

The scenes featuring Cameron Mitchell are entertaining for exactly the reason that you think they are.  These scenes are such obvious filler and were so obviously added as an excuse to get a “name” actor to join the cast that it’s impossible not to admire the nerve of the filmmakers.  They weren’t going to let a silly thing like narrative cohesion get in the way of producing a 90 minute film.  Playing the world’s worst psychic, Cameron Mitchell delivers his lines with such a truly unfocused intensity that I actually spent the first half of the movie convinced that he was the murderer.  The final fate of Mitchell’s character is truly shocking (if just because it kind of comes out of nowhere) and Mitchell plays his final scene as if he’s starring in a dinner theater production of some lost Shakespearean play.

If the scenes featuring Mitchell are mostly entertaining for being so bad, the scenes in which the nameless killer stalks Mary and Jo are actually pretty well done and the final confrontation between the final girl and the killer is handled surprisingly well (though I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the fact that the film contrives to have the final girl fight for her life while topless).  The killer’s lack of personality makes him all the more intimidating and both Jennifer Holmes and Zoli Markey are likable and believable in the roles of Mary and Jo.  If nothing else, The Demon proves that even a really poorly produced horror film can be partially redeemed (if not saved) by a likable cast of potential victims.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, The Demon — like many forgotten exploitation flicks — serves as a valuable time capsule of the society that produced it.  To offer up just one example:

6 Trailers for Cinco De Mayo

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Hola and happy Cinco De Mayo!  I’m not sure if Cinco De Mayo is as big a deal up north as it is down here in the Southwest but today is going to be one of the few Saturdays that I don’t go to the movies.  Instead, I will be observing this day with friends, family (I am a fourth Spanish), and cerveza.  But first, here’s the latest edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Trailers…

(Be warned: Some of these trailers are a tad bit more explicit than some of the other trailers that I’ve featured as a part of this series.  Watch with caution.)

1) Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971)

This is one of the first of the great Spanish horror films. 

2) Return of the Evil Dead (1973)

The Blind Dead returned in this gory and violent sequel.  One of my prize possessions is my Blind Dead box set, which was released (in the shape of a coffin, no less) by Blue Underground.

3) Vampyros Lesbos (1971)

This is the German trailer for Vampyros Lesbos, directed by the infamous Jess Franco.  Just try to guess what this film is about…

4) Oasis of the Living Dead (1981)

In a career that has spanned over 500 films, Jess Franco has dealt with not only lesbian vampires but zombies as well…

5) Night of the Bloody Apes (1969)

From Rene Cardona comes this surprisingly bloody films about what happens when an ape’s heart is transplanted into a normal human being.  Fortunately, there’s a wrestler around to save the day…

6) The Werewolf Vs. The Vampire Woman (1970)

Finally, let’s end things with a Paul Naschy film, shall we?

6 Trailers For A Sunday

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Hi!  I apologize for being a day late with this week’s edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Film trailers.  In the future, I may just start regularly posting these on Sunday morning as opposed to Saturday.  But that’s something that can be decided in the future.  For the present, the trailers are the only thing that matters…

1) Witchboard (1986)

This trailer is short but effective.  The guy with the beard scares me every time.

2) Jennifer (1978)

Guess which earlier movie inspired this one?

3) Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965)

When you’ve got a named like Dr. Terror, you might as well get a house of horrors.

4) The Hand (1981)

Continuing on a theme that was introduced in the previous trailer, this film is apparently about a disembodied hand creating mayhem.  It was directed by Oliver Stone who later gave the world Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps.

5) Death Smiles At Murder (1973)

This film is from the infamous Joe D’Amato and apparently, it features a cameo from Klaus Kinski.  That’s how you know it’s good.  Plus, I love the title.

6) Evil Toons (1990)

Wow, this looks terrible, doesn’t it?  Still, I have to include it because it’s just such a purely grindhouse trailer, featuring everything from a gimmick to a somewhat reputable actor who obviously was having trouble paying his rent back in 1990.

Film Review: Something Weird (dir. by Herschell Gordon Lewis)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Now that I’ve finished reviewing the Friday the 13th series, I can finally take the time to make a few comments about a film that I’ve been meaning to review for a while here on the Shattered Lens: Herschell Gordon Lewis’s 1967 film Something Weird.

How to describe Something Weird?  Well, I could tell you that it was one of the first films to realize that ESP, witchcraft, and LSD made for a potent combination.  I could also point out that everyone’s favorite company — Something Weird Video — took their name from this film.  However, I think the best (and maybe only) way to tell you about this film is to simply tell you what happens.

The film starts out brilliantly with ten minutes of vaguely connected and disjointed images.  We start out with a close-up of a pair of legs that apparently belong to someone being chased down a city street.

Cut To: 

Two guys practicing karate.  One of them we will never see again.  The other one is a doughy-faced guy named Alex Jordan (William Brooker).  The one we will never see again explains to Alex that he’s not actually that talented when it comes to the martial arts.  Alex looks annoyed.

Cut to:

Alex is fooling around with a blonde that we’ll never see again and who will never be mentioned again for the rest of the film.  “You’re electrifying,” she tells him.

Cut to:

Some random guy is electrocuted by a downed power line.  Cronin ”Mitch” Mitchell (Tony McCabe) runs over to help him and gets hit in the face by the same power line.  He falls to the ground while a group of random people wander over.  “Has anybody called an ambulance yet?” someone calmly asks.

Suddenly, there’s a man in a suit kneeling down by the two bodies and apparently, he’s some sort of medicine man because, while looking at the first man, he says, “I’ll have to call the coroner on this man.”  

However, Mitch is still alive so he’s put into the back of a station wagon and driven to the local hospital.  As we watch Mitch being pulled out of the back of the car, the camera pans up to the cloudy sky and suddenly, a narrator comes out of nowhere and starts rambling about “the sixth sense, ESP!”  The narrator is also nice enough to let us know that Alex — the guy from the Karate lesson — is apparently a government scientist who is in charge of figuring out how to use ESP against America’s enemies.

This all happens in the first 10 minutes of the film and, unfortunately, the remaining 70 minutes of the film struggles to live up to the surrealistic brilliance of this little montage.

Anyway, Mitch is alive but now he’s got both a scar on his face and the ability to see the future.  As one of his doctor’s puts it, “He’s a different man since the accident … cynical.  Maybe even morbid!”  Once he’s released from the hospital, Mitch takes to wearing a black bandana over the lower half of his face and becomes a professional psychic.

 

He finds a little success but, as we’ve been told, he’s now “cynical…maybe ever morbid!”  However, things change for Mitch when he’s approached by a grotesquely ugly woman with a blue face and a cackling laugh.  She explains that she’s a witch and she’s willing to restore his face but only if he takes her as his lover.  Mitch reluctantly does this and his scars suddenly vanish.

Soon, Mitch is a celebrity, appearing on television.  Everywhere he goes, the witch is on his arm.  The rest of the world sees her as a beautiful woman named Ellen Parker (Elizabeth Lee) but whenever Mitch looks at her, he sees her in her true blue-faced form. 

Meanwhile, there’s a serial killer preying on the woman of Jefferson, Wisconsin and the chief of police (played by Lawrence Wood, the man who gave the infamous “fire sale” monologue in Lewis’s Scum of the Earth) invites Mitch and Ellen to come help with the investigation.  The government meanwhile sends Alex (remember him?) to the town to investigate Mitch and perhaps recruit Mitch into the service of his country.

Alex is, at first, skeptical of Mitch but then he sees Mitch exorcising a disgruntled spirit from a local church and he starts to think that Mitch might have some psychic abilities after all.  Mitch might just need a little help and Alex is there to provide it.

Meeting with Mitch in the police chief’s office (and with the entire police force looking on), Alex produces two white pills from his pocket and says, “I have a drug here — LSD.  Ever hear of it?”  Alex proceeds to echo many real-life MK-Ultra conspiracy theories as he explains that LSD will increase Mitch’s psychic abilities to the extent that he’ll be able to catch the killer.   Mitch replies, “I’ve never taken the drug before but I’ll be glad to, doctor.”

Well, needless to say, the LSD produces the typical cinematic red-tinged, desert-themed trip but it still ends with Mitch figuring out who the killer is. It also allows Mitch to understand that the killer is sane “98% of the time.”  However, there’s a problem because now that killer is out to kill Mitch and Alex has fallen in love with Ellen, the blue-faced witch…

To be honest, Something Weird is not one of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s best films.  Even by typical Lewis standards, the plot doesn’t make much sense and the acting is incredibly bad.  Whereas other Lewis films (like Blood Feast) featured performances that were deliberately over the top, the cast of Something Weird comes across as if they were as confused while making Something Weird as the audience would later be while watching it.  (However, it should be noted that Elizabeth Lee at least seems to be having fun in the role of the constantly cackling witch.) 

However, I still love Something Weird because, unlike so many other movies, it actually lives up to its name.  This is a movie that promises to be weird and that’s exactly what it is.  There’s just so much to love in this film.  Check out the way that Mitch’s “facial scars” never look the same from scene-to-scene.  (At one point, the scars cover his entire face but, in the next scene, they can be easily hidden by a bandana.)  Watch in amazement as the same set is used and re-used for almost every scene in the movie, with just the furniture occasionally being rearranged depending on whether the scene is supposed to take place in an office or a hotel room. 

Ultimately, my love for this film comes down to the little details.    I love how the ambulance at the start of the film is just an old school station wagon (complete with wood paneling) with a siren on top of it.  Even better is how the police captain’s office is decorated with a faded pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln that literally appear to have been ripped out of an old history textbook.

In the greatest tradition of the grindhouse, there is no other movie like Something Weird and, for that reason alone, it’s worth watching.

All Of My Love And 6 More Trailers

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Hi there and welcome to another edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Film Trailers!  Today, we bring you 6 trailers featuring endangered streetwalkers, lost teenagers, and killer monkeys.

1) Monkey Shines (1988)

Our first trailer comes to us from director George A. Romero.  The monkey from this trailer also made an appearance in Toy Story 3.

2) Survival Run (1979)

As a film, Survival Run looks pretty bad but I think this trailer actually provides a public service.  Seriously, stay out of the desert.  Between the radiation mutants and the drug smugglers, there’s nothing good to be found out there.

3) Streets (1990)

I can imagine the tag line for a rerelease of this film — “Before Christina Applegate was keeping it Up All Night, she was keeping it up on the Streets!”  I have to give credit for this discovery to the newest addition to TSL, the Trash Film Guru.  Check out his review here.

4) Street Asylum (1990)

Continuing the theme of the streets, here’s another film about urban crime.  This one stars Wings Hauser and G. Gordon Liddy.

5) Fatal Skies (1990)

Things aren’t much safer in the skies.  This film, oddly enough, apparently star Timothy Leary.

6) The Freeway Maniac (1988)

Obviously, he’s been spending too much time on Central Expressway during rush hour.  (Yes, that’s a Dallas-centric comment.)

6 Trailers To Keep Things Cheerful

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

After spending two weeks researching the career of Jason Voorhees, I am in the mood for some movies that feature absolutely no one getting brutally murdered. That’s why this edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Trailers is dedicated to some of the most light-weight comedies ever made. 

(Yes, I realize that these films aren’t exactly grindhouse films but they’re close enough.)

1) Making the Grade (1984)

This trailer almost feels like a parody, doesn’t it?  In fact, it very well could be.  Has anyone ever actually seen this Making the Grade movie?

2) White Water Summer (1987)

This is a weird movie that, for some reason, tends to pop up on TV every few months or so.  Kevin Bacon is a nature guide who appears to be sociopath and Sean Astin is the kid that he bullies nonstop.  Eventually, Bacon breaks his leg and Astin saves his life or something like that.  The whole movie just has a really weird feel to it.

3) Private Lessons (1981)

These next three trailers form a trilogy of sorts.  We start off with Private Lessons, which — let’s be honest — is a pretty creepy trailer.

4) Private School (1983)

The 2nd part of the private trilogy was directed by Noel Black who also directed one of the best films of the 60s, Pretty Poison.

5) Private Resort (1985)

And then we come to this…Private Resort.  Much like White Water Summer, Private Resort used to always show up on Sunday afternoon TV and I’ve never really understood why.  That said, I watched it a few times because I’ll watch Johnny Depp in anything.

6) Fraternity Vacation (1985)

And finally, let’s wrap things up with Fraternity Vacation, starring future Oscar winner Tim Robbins.

Grindhouse Classics : “She Freak”

Posted on by trashfilmguru

Okay, so it’s not Herschell Gordon Lewis — but 1967′s She Freak is pretty close, at least in terms of style and tone (if not gore content — the only blood on display here is in a very brief screwdriver-through-the-hand moment that frankly isn’t even nauseating) , and why shouldn’t it be? After all, it’s the “brain”child of HGL’s old producing partner, the legendary David F. Friedman, and definitely has a Lewis-like bizarre-on-a-budget sensibility. Oh, and it’s also available on DVD from Something Weird Video (nice full-frame transfer, acceptable mono sound, extras include a feature-length Friedman commentary, a gallery of exploitation art, some SWV trailers, a couple of tangentially-related shorts, etc.), the label that handles more or less all of our guy Herschell’s stuff, so — yeah, there are some similarities, to be sure.

Unfortunately, it’s even closer to Tod Browning’s seminal exploitation classic Freaks — not that there’s anything wrong with Freaks, mind you, and if you’re gonna rip something off  I suppose you might as well rip off one of the all-time greats, but anyway, read on and my use of the term “unfortunately” will, hopefully, make sense. In point of fact,  to call She Freak a rip-off is probably being a little too harsh, since even though it pretty much tells the exact same story as Freaks, it does so from the point of view of the gold-digging damsel rather than her victim. So maybe it’s more a case of an inverse carbon-copy. Which still means it’s nothing too earth-shatteringly original, but I digress.

Our story here revolves around one Jade Cochran (Claire Brennen, who bears a rather uncanny resemblance to latter-day Russ Meyer starlet Pandora Peaks minus the surgical — uhhhmmm — “enhancements”), a simple country girl who commits the cardinal exploitation movie sin of wanting something better out of life (of all the nerve!), and isn’t afraid to step on a few toes on her climb to what passes for “the top” in her admittedly limited worldview. At the outset of our little shot-around-Bakersfield-for-$65,000 morality play, Jade’s slinging hash as a waitress at the greasiest of greasy-spoon diners, but when an advance man for a traveling carnival comes though one day, she has the temerity to ask him if there’s any work for a gal with no experience,no skills, no education, but a pretty nice pair of legs in his merry troupe. He tells her to stop by and see the owner of the show after they get the tents set up, she tells her lecherous married creep of a boss to go to shove it (granted, after he fires her first and tells her she’s headed straight to hell — he’s a real charmer, this guy) and the next day she shows up at the box office and quickly finds herself employed — as a waitress (again) at the carnival snack truck. Step one on the road to world domination achieved, I guess.

It’s not long,  though, before our gal Jade really does start her hardscrabble climb up the carnival ladder. First she gets in good with a gal named “Moon” Mullins (Lynn Courtney), the closest thing to a stripper the show employs. “Moon” makes Jade the kindly offer of letting her shack up with her in her motel room while she’s in town, and before you know it Jade’s pestering her for the names of any single men with potential attached to the show. Jade’s already taken a liking to a fella named Blackie Fleming (Lee Raymond), who runs the Ferris wheel, but “Moon” lets her know there’s no future in getting mixed up with lowly ride operators and suggests that Jade should set her sights on Steve St. John (Bill McKinney), the well-to-do widower who owns the freak show — why, he’s even got a house in Tampa!

Jade takes her gal-pal up on her advice and soon begins courting her prey  over coffee and donuts every morning at the snack truck. Cut to a montage of rather listless-looking dates than play out sans dialogue and show our supposed lovebirds going out to dinner, riding around town in his car, and walking around the carnival a whole hell of a lot (when you add in all the extraneous footage of carnival set-up and tear-down activities also included in this flick — hey, Friedman had an “in” with a carny operator and wanted to get his money’s worth — you begin to see why even at a slim 83 minutes plenty of people refer to it as being “padded”) and presto!, before you know it,Ms. Cochran is now Mrs. St. John.

There are, however, a couple of pesky problems she can’t seem to run away from. One is the freaks themselves. We never actually see any of them (until the very end, and I’m sorry to report there’s not a real “freak” in the bunch — they’re all extras in makeup and cheap prosthetics), apart from a garden-variety midget named — amazingly enough — Shorty (Felix Silla),  who seems to have a penchant for following his boss’s new lady-love around, but she makes it clear that she can’t stand the sight of them and that they creep her the hell out. Steve indulges in some painfully wooden dialogue about how they’re his friends, they’re people just like you and me, he’s not exploiting them he’s giving them a chance, etc., but it’s no use. She just doesn’t care for their kind.

Her second (and larger) problem, though, his Blackie. He gives it to Jade rough-and-ready and that’s just how she likes it. In fact, she can’t seem to keep away from the guy. One night the always-underfoot Shorty spies her sneaking out of Blackie’s trailer, and when he tells his best-friend/boss about it, all he gets is a slap in the fact for his trouble. Yes, it appears as though Steve’s truly got rose-tinted glasses on when it comes to looking at his new bride, but when he gets “home” to their motel room (we never do get to see that palatial Tampa estate) and finds Blackie on his way out the door and Jade with a big smile on her face, he knows he’s been had. A fight ensues, Steve gets stabbed, Jade stands above him without lifting a finger to help and then turns her back on him as he dies, Blackie flees into the night,  is caught by the cops, confesses, and goes to jail —and now the freak show is Jade’s property, free and clear.

For the next five minutes or so we see Jade in her new incarnation as super-bitch of the midway — she drives her big Cadillac around recklessly, tells “Moon” to take a hike, spends a lot of time counting her money — and fires poor old Shorty. Which proves, of course, to be her undoing, as Shorty and his fellow losers in the genetic lottery surround her as she’s getting into her car one night, brandishing knives and torches one and all, close ranks around her terrified and convulsing body, and move in for — well, not the kill. To be honest, I have no idea exactly what they do to her, but she ends up like this —

And needless to say, for a gal that got to where she is on her looks, that’s gotta be a career-killer. To complete the homage (how’s that for being polite about it?) to Browning’s earlier film, the whole story is presented between two framing sequences featuring a carnival barker who tells his audience of gasping onlookers (and us) at the beginning that there are two kinds of freaks, those created by God and those made by man , and then we return to hear the end of his spiel before the big “reveal” finale showing us Jade as she is today (or as she was in 1967, at any rate). All in all it’s not a half-bad little time-waster as far as completely derivative and frankly unnecessary “uncredited remakes” go, and Brennen, who was actually a pretty good actress in her day (sadly, she passed away at a fairly early age from cancer in 1977) turns in a deliciously slow-burn-sinister starring turn as Jade that she clearly relishes every second of, but if you’ve seen Freaks then you’ve seen this done a)before, b)better, and c) with real circus “freak” performers.

Still, since the entire exploitation movie business was literally born as a traveling roadshow racket molded on the carny model, it’s nice to see drive-in fare that openly pays tribute to its roots like this one does. And I really shouldn’t do this, but — since exploitation’s the name of the game here, I think it only fitting that I end this whole thing by repeating a particularly salacious rumor that’s been circulating around the internet for some time now : apparently it was revealed shortly after Brennen’s death that she had secretly been seeing Felix “Shorty” Silla on the side for nine years and even bore his child! I have no idea if this is true or just another tinseltown tall tale, but it seems strangely natural that a movie like this would give birth to such a, well — freakish legend, and just think : if She Freak itself were half as interesting as this bit of gossip, it would definitely be remembered as an all-time classic!