An immediate sequel to the same year’s Two Undercover Angels, Jess Franco’s Kiss Me Monster again stars Janine Reynaud (The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail) and Rosanna Yanni (Hunchback of the Morgue) as the Paul Newman-lusting Diana and Regina, the striptease-cum-detective duo known as The Red Lips. As is the case with its spy-spoofing predecessor, prepare for the monster-free Monster to make zero fucking sense.

Also prepare to be perfectly okay with that.

While in some glamorous Spanish city to perform their act, which involves playing the saxophone while clad in costumes right out of Bob Fosse’s cocaine dreams, Diana and Regina run into murder, spray-can narcotics, cool jazz, leisurely swims and bad guys clad in cloaks that, in the dark, could be mistaken for KKK uniforms. But please don’t ask me to relay the plot, because story points are, unlike most Franco starlets, impenetrable.

An occasional spurt of exposition fills in more blanks than are gained by actually watching that action take place, e.g., “I was taken prisoner by a group of queer virgins and was put in a cage. One of them worked me over with a whip. Then they let me out again, then they gave me a funny kind of whistle or something as a farewell present.”

You’ll just have to take the ladies’ word for it. Since both are beautiful (although at some angles, Reynaud channels Peg Bundy), Franco assumes (rightly) that the average male viewer will accept said word at face value. Because what lovely faces! What exotic locales! What colorful compositions! What outlandish scenarios! What the hell just happened!?! —Rod Lott

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For the fourth movie in the Beach Party series (and the third sequel in 1964 alone!), AIP shook things up beyond the cast’s hips by adding a new director (Don Weis, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini), a sci-fi element and many, many sets of PJs. While Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello indeed return, they’re playing different characters, but it hardly matters.

Seen only from behind until the final shot, Avalon plays a Martian who sends Go Go (Tommy Kirk, Village of the Giants), a teenager of the angry red planet, to Earth on an exploratory mission before a planned full-scale invasion. Go Go attracts the amorous attention of Connie (Funicello), who hasn’t been too happy with her current, lunkheaded beau (Jody McCrea, Bikini Beach), who’s hosting quite the shindig for the whole gang at the mansion of his dress shop-owning aunt, Wendy (Elsa Lanchester, The Bride of Frankenstein).

Coincidentally, all this occurs on the same weekend that Aunt Wendy’s hidden riches are targeted for theft by con man J. Sinister Hulk (Jesse White, Las Vegas Lady) whose balding pate and chomped cigar clearly mark him as a jokey dig at AIP co-founder Samuel Z. Arkoff. To assist him in his nefarious scheme, Hulk enlists a super-sexy Swede (Bobbi Shaw, Sergeant Dead Head) and a Native American named Chief Rotting Eagle (legendary silent comedian Buster Keaton, here reduced to lines like “Cowabunga. Make chop-chop”).

Pool Party would have made a more fitting title, as these 20-something teens dive, front-flip and cannonball into Wendy’s pool with reckless abandon — and often — throughout. But the word “pajama” carries the connotation of nookie, which no one onscreen was having, although drive-in audiences where Pajama Party was projected likely were. That’s not to say Weis and friends don’t try to wink at the deed as unsubtly as the MPAA permitted. Personifying the sex act in a start-to-finish running gag is not Funicello, for Uncle Walt never would have allowed it, but future AIP Co-Founder James Nicholson Wife No. 2, Susan Hart (Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine). The shapely brunette gets male castmates’ (and viewers’) motors running with a highly suggestive hustle of the hips that causes Dr Pepper to pop their caps, marshmallows to combust and candles to melt — the latter fate ultimately shared by the end credits!

Even with all these hinted-at erections and orgasms, Pajama Party remains good, clean fun. I imagine more adults may have had their panties wadded by a visual joke that sees two teens literally walking on water. Keep an eye out for that fun-in-the-sun sacrilege, as well as future stars Teri Garr and Toni Basil as backup dancers. —Rod Lott

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Harvey Huntington Honeywagon III is on a mission: to prove that Frankie (Frankie Avalon), Dee Dee (Annette Funicello) and the rest of their group of sun-kissed, surf-lovin’ teenagers spending their days and nights on Bikini Beach harbor “an abnormal preoccupation with sex,” so much so that the rare jolts of activity in their brains are “only of a carnal nature.”

Yeah, and?

Honeywagon (a trim Keenan Wynn, A Woman for All Men) has an ulterior motive: to clear the way for a retirement village. That’s hardly a plot, but there is no plot — just a lot of “stuff” that happens, which is not a bad thing when a film radiates so much joy, not to mention counts a man in a chimpanzee suit among its supporting cast.

Oh, did I not mention the chimp? There’s also a chimp. Known as Clyde (Janos Prohaska, Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You), Honeywagon’s pet hangs ten on the waves and chauffeurs the boss around in a Rolls Royce. See it to believe it.

There’s a rival for Dee Dee’s affection, in the form of British Invasion rocker Potato Bug (also Avalon, unrecognizable and demonstrating surprising comedic deftness), a mop-topped star whose vocab is riddled with only-in-the-UK phrases like “sticky wicket.” There’s a constantly mugging Don Rickles as dragster mechanic Big Drag. There’s a musical number by a 14-year-old Stevie Wonder. There’s a cameo by Boris Karloff, making a friendly in-joke at fellow horror royalty member Vincent Price. There’s the return of buffoonish biker Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck, The Gong Show Movie) and his gang, including a teenage werewolf and a billiards hustler named South Dakota Slim (Timothy Carey, The World’s Greatest Sinner).

And there’s lots of dancing, including a defensive move that can be described only as a “go-go ass attack.” See it to believe it.

Romp number three in AIP’s squeaky-clean Beach Party series, Bikini Beach doesn’t dare kick over the sandcastle that made the previous pair so stinkin’ successful. Again guided by director William Asher, who keeps control of the wall-to-wall zaniness like twisting a stick around spinning cotton candy, Bikini Beach culminates in a mad, mad, mad, mad go-kart chase — one that proves the exception to my rule that nothing good can come of sped-up film.

You get all this and Funicello’s belly button, exposed at last. See it to believe it. —Rod Lott

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Now that the costly process of shooting on film — not to mention developing it — is a thing of the past, technology allows anyone to make movies. But just because you can doesn’t automatically mean you should, and some of today’s DIY efforts not-so-secretly make me wish operating a DV camera required a license. Nowhere does the amateur-hour approach ring louder than in the realm of the slasher movie.

What is it about the venerable but nonvenerated horror subgenre that inspires so many would-be Wes Cravens to cry “Action”? (And why do their screenplays drop a “fuck” — or its endless variants thereof — on seemingly every page?) In hopes of finding the next Make-Out with Violence or Puppet Monster Massacre, I’ve sat through many microbudgeted horrors, none more horrible — and that’s really saying something — than Camp Massacre, originally titled as Fat Chance.

Once it gets past the prologue of former porn star Bree Olson (The Human Centipede III) getting stabbed — with a knife, pervert — in the shower for no discernible reason other than killing two birds (nudity, name value) with one stone, the film by 2013’s The Hospital co-directors Jim O’Rear and Daniel Emery Taylor (who also serves as screenwriter) gets down to business. Unfortunately, that business is fat-shaming in the name of alleged comedy, as 10 rather large men — ranging from merely obese to morbidly so — compete in a 30-day boot camp for the fictitious reality show By the Pound, with a $1 million booty at stake. As the show goes on, the competition becomes tougher — and yet easier, because of the serial killer offing the contestants.

O’Rear and Taylor consistently go for the gross-out, so hardcore fans of Troma pick-ups might find it funny. I can appreciate a good fart joke and other scatological set pieces when they’re well-executed, but the bottom line with Camp Massacre is that it’s an ugly mess — visually, conceptually, metaphorically — and too witless to offend. Ironically, the film could have mitigated its awfulness simply by slimming down. In an utterly baffling creative decision, Camp Massacre runs a bloated, Cimino-esque 129 minutes long! One By the Pounder pledges, “We’ll fix it in post.” They didn’t. —Rod Lott

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Read the original review in Exploitation Retrospect: The Journal of Junk Culture & Fringe Media #53

Matt Helm adventure No. 3, The Ambushers, finds the ever-sassy, always-sauced spy (Rat Pack crooner Dean Martin) ordered by Intelligence Counter Espionage (ICE) to retrieve the federal government’s super-secret, experimental flying saucer, which has been hijacked. One José Ortega (Albert Salmi, Caddyshack), a millionaire beer magnate, and his precious, all-powerful, matter-moving laser beam are to blame. Luckily for the film, Ortega and the U.S. UFO are located in Acapulco, so what’s a secret agent to do? An assignment’s an assignment, and Matt unconvincingly goes undercover as a fashion photographer.

Accompanying Matt are his alcohol-soaked bloodstream and fellow ICE agent Sheila Sommers. As played by Janice Rule (The Swimmer), Sheila is homelier than the Helm series’ average above-average female foil; compared to forbearing curve-bearers Stella Stevens in The Silencers or Ann-Margret in Murderers’ Row, the stick-like Rule looks like a PTA mom — okay, so a PTA mom who hasn’t given up on joie de vivre, but still, Rule’s casting as eye candy is eyebrow-raising curious. The Ambushers is, after all, a movie whose opening credits serve as a proto-MTV video for Hugo Montenegro’s catchy, teeny-bopper tune about how hot and sexy those hot and sexy girls are in their hot and sexy bikinis. Plus, every woman wants to bed Matt, and he, every woman.

The Ambushers’ cavalier attitude toward coupling makes a subplot of Sheila’s extra-icky and bothersome: When Ortega zapped the saucer out of the sky and onto his turf, Sheila was its pilot … and he raped her into a shadow of her former self. Still shell-shocked from the trauma, she harbors personal reasons to end Ortega’s reign.

Folks, The Ambushers is a comedy. At no point does director Henry Levin (The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm) allow anything to alter the sunshine-and-lollipops mood of the picture (and, by extension, the four-pic series as a whole). But brush all those thoughts aside so we get back to the brass tacks of our businessman/rapist: He has plans to auction the spacecraft to the highest bidder, currently “an Oriental gentleman whose name I cannot pronounce.” Oh, boy. Given those Breakfast at Tiffany’s times, I’m half-surprised Levin and screenwriter Herbert Baker (The Girl Can’t Help It) didn’t Go There and name the $100 million bidder Commander Chow Mein or something.

Sexism, racism, other -isms: all par for the course (coarse?) of that era of pop culture. Through the eyes and ears of today, these elements smart … and yet do not completely ruin the fun, of which the movie offers plenty, right down to a roller-coaster of a climactic chase. The Ambushers is a flick of literal bullet bras, killer maracas, melting belt buckles, insta-tents, giant beer bottles, beer-barrel bowling, magic bartending, deadly fezzes, funny cigarettes (not the kind laced with THC, mind you), sultry Senta Berger (The Quiller Memorandum) and constant jokes at the expense of women having bumps and folds that men do not — hee-haw! —Rod Lott

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