Kelly (Crystal Owens, Riders in the Storm) is not just a struggling actress, but a struggling wife. Her photographer husband, Sam (the bland David Christensen, Shandra: The Jungle Girl), doesn’t even have sex with her anymore, because he’s always tooling around in his darkroom for hours, seeing what develops.

While rehearsing for a play, Kelly gets good news from her stereotypical agent — you know the type: wears Hawaiian shirts, speaks in a brash New Yawk accent, loudly smacks pastrami — about a movie role. As Kelly tells Sam about the gig, their discussion doubles as a meta description for Turn of the Blade:

Sam: “So what kind of movie is this exactly?”
Kelly: “Your usual low-budget erotic thriller.”
Sam: “And what part do you play?”
Kelly (after a dramatic pause): “The victim.” 

The next scene isn’t as winking. If anything, it may be stalling:

Sam: “I’m sorry.”
Kelly: “What for?”
Sam: “I’m just sorry.” 

He should be! What with burying his blue-balled self in the breasts of a helicopter pilot named Wendy (Julie Horvath). In true erotic-thriller fashion, she: a) gets too attached, and b) is crazy. We know the latter is true before her behavior grows erratic, because c’mon, what normal person sits in bed with a cockatoo perched on her shoulder?

Meanwhile, Kelly starts to receive threatening phone calls.

Turns out, Turn of the Blade isn’t your usual low-budget erotic thriller after all, despite the sloppy, “sexy” sax score, which sounds like David Sanborn downed two whole Slippery Nipples before entering the studio. First, rather than choosing a pair of words at random, its title is a helicopter pun. Carrying the whirlybird theme further, the title rotates — and between fonts at that!

Second, where’s the nudity? I’ll answer that: The scenes exist — you just have to know where to look. And you’ll want to. A remarkably beautiful woman, Owens is perfect to lead this type of thing. Applying the icing to her own cake, she’s a decent actress.

On the other hand, in the villainous Other Woman role, Horvath is talking cardboard. It’s not a shock to learn this remains her sole acting credit. Her best moments aren’t even while serving as one corner of the love triangle, but in black-and-white flashbacks to her wedding day. That’s when her brand-new hub (Robert Owen) kills the mood of their limo ride en route to their Vegas honeymoon by having the driver pull over to help a stranded lady in short shorts (Daniella Rich, Diary of a Sex Addict). He not only puts the attractive stranger in the limo’s private area for the newlyweds, but offers her champagne! In her white bridal dress, Wendy stews red.

It’s hard to hate a picture that begins with the line, “You slept with him, didn’t you? You homewrecking little slut!” But let’s not kid ourselves: Turn of the Blade is a third-rate Fatal Attraction with a final-minute reveal not designed to make you bust out laughing, yet does.

One assumes director and co-writer Bryan Michael Stoller (Dragon Fury II) didn’t intend for Sam to bump another car while parking his Jeep, or for viewers to notice that Wendy’s husband’s gravestone bears two huge typos. After this initial feature about chasing tail, Stoller pivoted to Christian movies about an animal known for chasing its tail: First Dog, The Amazing Wizard of Paws and Santa Stole Our Dog! (exclamation 100% not ours). —Rod Lott

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Not to be confused with 1976’s The Muthers, a women-in-prison film from exploitation legend Cirio H. Santiago, 1968’s The Muthers is a sexploitation film from exploitation semi-legend Don A. Davis. Presented “in ‘throbbing’ color,” it’s about married women in the L.A. suburbs having sex with men who aren’t their husbands and, this being softcore, never remove their britches. 

Many of the daytime romps occur at the Pink Swan bar, where Bartender Larry (Steve Vincent, Space Thing) graciously allows the use of his office — even for two pairs at once. Elsewhere, among many other couplings, Virginia Gordon (Hot Spur) goes at it with some guy in her poolside lounge chair while her teen daughter (Victoria Bond, The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet), watching in secret, rubs her bikini bottoms against a tree.

Davis once again employs his curvaceous crutch, Flick Attack favorite Marsha Jordan (The Divorcee). Just when you think The Muthers will end without Jordan showing skin, Davis introduces the movie’s only semblance of story: whether her daughter (Love Camp 7 penetrator Kathy Williams) can find Mom before some bald creepo can get his mitts, mouth and mallet all over Marsha and her mams? 

Don’t you worry — the young lady fails.

Also featuring the sexy, sassy Linda O’Bryant from Davis’ spy-oriented Golden Box, The Muthers boasts a big, brassy, helluva melodic earworm in its opening credits. I just don’t know that it needed repeating for an hour. It’s as if the movie has a one-track mind. —Rod Lott

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Why spice things up in the bedroom when you can do it in The Black Room?

“HILLTOP MANSION HAS UNIQUE & EXOTIC ROOM” is all the nightly cockblocked husband Larry (Jimmy Stathis, X-Ray) needs to read in the classifieds to color his horny self intrigued. Upon a tour of the Hollywood Hills home, he slaps down $200 a month to secure the place as a secret fuck-pad, even though the ad failed to state “SHITLOAD OF CANDELABRAS.”

Naturally, it — ahem — comes with a catch: raging gonorrhea. The owners/siblings Jason and Bridget (Necromancy’s Stephen Knight and The Amityville Curse’s Cassandra Gava) sneak peeks and snap blackmail-worthy photos via two-way mirror. Then, unbeknownst to Larry, they murder his conquests and bury the bodies in the yard — yes, even the lady Larry balls while they’re covered in glow paint.

Jason puts it best, young man: “This isn’t the YMCA.”

As writer and co-director, Norman Thaddeus Vane (1983’s Frightmare) can’t help but bring a little horror to this tale of property and perversion. But accidental or not, he more helps establish the template for a phenomenon of the following decade: the straight-to-cable/video erotic thriller. Like the best of those, The Black Room has its cake and lays it, too, with Larry not only living his repressed fantasies, but also blessed with a fabulous — and fabulously beautiful — wife at home in Robin (Clara Perryman, who somehow never scored a movie before or after this).

Perryman’s performance is of a higher caliber than Vane could’ve hoped for. Because she gets more than one dimension to play — and does all of them well — he really lucked out with that hire. When Robin discovers Larry’s infidelity, her devotion to her husband collapses … until she decides the best way to save the marriage is to give the room a ride herself. She picks up a young stud in Christopher McDonald (in the same year he greased up Grease 2) and his mighty white-boy ’fro.

McDonald’s not the only cast member to graduate a long career; soon-to-be scream queen Linnea Quigley (Sorority Babes at the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama) appears as Robin and Larry’s babysitter in a late-film turn that makes her one of the least reliable babysitters in cinema history. Laurie Strode, she ain’t. At least her poor decision skills pave the way for an ominous ending not tied up in a pretty bow. —Rod Lott

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Originally known as Honey Britches, Donn Davidson’s Shantytown Honeymoon is best known under the name Troma slapped on it in the VHS heyday: Demented Death Farm Massacre. Even with Troma’s appended John Carradine prologue, the retitling is misleading for what more or less plays as a feature-length version of a dirty joke.

After a high-profile jewel heist, four criminals — whose erudite leader, Philip (Jim Peck, Pet Sematary II), resembles early SNL fixture Michael O’Donoghue — need to lay low. One downed plane and stolen Jeep later, they stand at the stoop of the rural ramshackle home of age-disparate spouses Reba Sue and Horlan, respectively played by porn actress Ashley Brooks and horror host George Ellis. She’s a real cutie patootie in her sexual prime, whereas he looks like he placed fourth in a Sid Haig lookalike contest he didn’t even enter. 

Philip’s got his hands full trying to keep the hands of a fellow felon (Mike Coolick, Can’t Stop the Music) off Reba Sue’s full bosom, plus the hands of horny ol’ Horlan off their own lovely ladies (one-timers Pepper Thurston and Trudy Moore). This being a sexploitation confection, Philip fails marvelously. This also being a hicksploitation effort, the opening and closing credits are chalked on a wooden fence.

Davison (Blood Beast of Monster Mountain) gives this cheapo Honeymoon doses of crude gore à la H.G. Lewis: a bear trap to a leg, a pitchfork to a neck, a corn liquor jug to a forehead, and so on. Its best effects are the chest objects, but you’d be surprised how Shantytown is more about teasing the T&A than showing ’em — hardly an issue when the redneck romp’s lackluster acting, bathroom-wall scripting and scene-to-scene discrepant pacing amount to a good time, despite your better judgment.

Granted, the movie is about half as much fun as it is stupid. But, folks, this one’s mighty stupid. —Rod Lott

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Hot Thrills and Warm Chills is a no-frills affair of sexploitation malarkey, as three dames plot a jewelry heist during a Mardi Gras masquerade ball. (You know the one: where, at the stroke of midnight, someone is crowned “King Sex.”)

Texas director Dale Berry (Hip, Hot and 21) fails to depict the crime, presumably distracted what with all the parade footage, mirror prancing, stage dancing, stripper acts, makeout sessions, bedroom romps and pendulous breasts of Mars Needs Women abductee Bubbles Cash. As a character quips, “Once a nymph, always a nymph.”

It all takes place in New Orleans, “where babes and booze can be had with the wink of an eye.” That’s the only quick element in the black-and-white pic, all 67 minutes of which feel like 134. In sparkly britches with top to match, Rita Alexander (Fake-Out) ostensibly stars, but mostly just wiggles and wriggles like a worm suddenly cut in half.

Speaking of worms, the rug-cutting music by Dario De Mexico burrows in your ear in a big, bouncy way the movie itself cannot; not for nothing does it appear on — and arguably takes over — Something Weird Video’s Greatest Hits compilation album.

De Mexico’s language-challenged lyrics make more sense than Hot Thrills and Warm Chills‘ overdubbed dialogue. “Haven’t I see you somewhere before?” asks a woman to a guy who responds, “Maybe. I’ve been seen before.” Not seen: Russ Meyer regular Lorna Maitland, who gets top billing, despite being MIA. —Rod Lott

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