Filmed in a year when Spanish cult director Jess Franco made 12 (!) films, Cries of Pleasure tends to get lost in the pubic bushes, until now never released outside of his native country and, honestly, with good reason.

While Franco does have his strong points — usually in his far more outré sexual outings — when you’re making a dozen low-budget features, most of them can’t be winners. Pleasure floats somewhere in the crusty bottom; even though it’s another dip into de Sade’s bloody pool, it’s not strange enough to be all that interesting.

That being said, if you’re looking for plenty of simulated sex, included exaggerated acts of oral and very exaggerated squeals of arousal, this might elicit your own cries of pleasure as Franco favorite Lina Romay (Night of Open Sex) goes on a clitoral rampage with sensually mustachioed dynamo Robert Foster and his bevy of whip-smart beauties in a gorgeous villa overlooking someplace in Europe.

With loads of extended tongue-kissing and recoiled morality, there’s also a mentally handicapped Spanish guitar player who muses over what he sees as cinematic bookends; it’s easy, because as this unshaven team of deviants goes at it, he’s usually forced to sit there and strum his instrument — and I do mean his guitar, sadly.

For Franco completists and chronic masturbators — and those of you who tend to combine the two — Cries of Pleasure is a pleasurable outing that doesn’t really say anything, but shows a whole lot and, when it comes to most of Franco’s considerable output, I guess that’ll do, pig-boy. —Louis Fowler

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What a ship captain thinks is cotton below deck is actually nitroglycerin — Dangerous Cargo, if you will. This Greek-language picture of peril takes place almost entirely on the potentially doomed boat, but is far more interested in explosions of another sort. And with Body Double femme fatale Deborah Shelton aboard, who can blame it?

Resplendent in Crystal Gayle hair and a rainbow-sherbet dress when she first appears, the gorgeous Shelton plays the wife of the captain (Nikos Verlekis, Land of the Minotaur) on his maiden voyage. She used to be a thing with the ship’s first mate, which gets a little confusing since both men look the same: as the Greek James Brolin. The only one you need worry about, however, is the lead pirate (Minotaur alum Kostas Karagiorgis) of the group that smuggles the nitro on before departure (in a container labeled “DANGEROUS NITRO” in — no joke — peel-’n’-stick letters) for eventual ship takeover and subsequent destruction of oil wells.

The graying, bloated pirate has eyes — and hands and crotch — for Shelton, all of which he employs in multiple rape/sex scenes that uncomfortably teeter toward the near-gynecological, hairy ass cracks and all. An entirely different Kostas, last name Karagiannis, is the director of this clumsy, double-drachma enterprise, proficient only in zooming in to his fellow Kostas’ constant groping and squeezing and suckling of the most unfortunate American leading lady.

Dangerous Cargo may be a shaggy-dog precursor to the Cinemax-ready erotic thrillers that kept Shannons Tweed and Whirry busy for most of the 1990s, but imagine if the Andrew Stevens/Marc Singer role were filled by, say, Dennis Farina. (No offense, Dennis, and R.I.P.) —Rod Lott

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Have you ever wanted to voyeuristically watch as a woman gleefully masturbates a horse? If the answer is “yes,” then pull your pants down, take out your questionable member and liberally grease up for Emanuelle in America.

Notorious sexpot Emanuelle (the always alluring Laura Gemser) is back in New York, photographing nude models and calmly sexualizing murderers. With a hot tip from the sleazy periodical she dubiously works for, Emanuelle goes undercover on a sex farm, trying to raise some hard love. Thankfully, it comes (and cums) fairly easy for her.

From there, she’s traveling to all the pornographic hot spots in America to track down and graphically expose the sexual secrets of the rich and filthy. As a matter of fact, at one point, a Robin Leach-a-like licks creamy frosting off the body of a sexy model at an orgy. It’s a champagne wet dream that you wish you could wake from.

In the hundred-minute runtime, Emanuelle manages to bed most of the staff of every hotel she stays in, has a rather lascivious pool party with some girls on the payroll and, if the bestiality wasn’t enough for you — and it really should be — then how about some reasonably disturbing (but, I’m told, quite fake) snuff footage?

Yeah … you can probably pull your pants up now.

The always reliable Joe D’Amato directs (and erects) with the controversial flair that has made him and this film an outré fave amongst the horniest of film geeks for over 40 years, but it’s the stunning Gemser, an Indonesian model who outlasted and out-lusted Sylvia Kristel and her double-“m”s, that makes these smut films watchable long after the viewer has gone limp in hand-wiping disgust. —Louis Fowler

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French pervert Just Jaeckin must’ve gotten a museful erection while watching Raiders of the Lost Ark, because his adaptation of the cult comic strip “Sweet Gwendoline” — emphasis on the word “strip” — is full of all the swashbuckling action you love and, even more so, all the unbuckled belts you probably lust after.

Starring video vixen (and future domestic abuser) Tawny Kitaen as the titular Gwendoline, when we meet her, she’s being smuggled in a wooden crate to an absolutely offensive Asian setting, filled with flapping chickens, vegetable-slicing old women and raging Chinese thieves hellbent on rape and stealing, definitely in that order.

Along with her puckish pal Beth (Zabou), they make an uneasy alliance with sleazy adventurer Willard (Brent Huff), the ultimate man’s man who usually jokes about punching women in the face. He agrees to take these nubile teens (?) to the land of Yik-Yak to find a butterfly Gwendoline’s father was apparently searching for when he vanished.

Once they find the elusive flying bug, they’re thrown into a sadomasochistic world of pinched nipples and metal thongs, sexual traps and slave girls used to pull chariots. Even though I kind of lost track of what’s going on at this point, needless to say this is the part of the film where it’s probably okay to touch yourself.

Truncated to 88 minutes and retitled The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of Yik-Yak for American audiences — I guess distributors didn’t think Yankee audiences would “get” the not-so-subtle acts of erotic bondage continually onscreen — Gwendoline is a stupidly sexy take on a smutty comic strip, a movie that I’m guessing most of us grew up voyeuristically viewing on late-night cable. —Louis Fowler

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Something’s afoot — and abreast — in room 229 of the Happy Holiday Hotel, and a cowardly bellboy wants to see for his peeping-Tom self in The Bellboy and the Playgirls. The nudie-cutie film would have no shelf life, if not for being directed in part by Francis Ford Coppola, in one of two such pics the eventual Oscar hat-tricker helmed early in his career.

Also from 1962, Tonight for Sure was the other. Both starred Don Kenney in his only acting credits, here playing the titular bellboy — and, by today’s standards, also an incel, since he admits not knowing how to act around the girls for whom he madly lusts. He’s taking a correspondence course titled How to Be a Hotel Detective and Be Liked by Women, which we know because he flat-out tells the audience; one could say he breaks the fourth wall, but it looks like the production couldn’t afford more than two. His dual studies come in handy when he grows suspicious and aroused over 229’s group of beautiful ladies, whom he wrongly assumes are prostitutes and/or porn stars, because that’s comedy. Right?

Either scantily clad or nude, the women are led by the bountiful June Wilkinson (Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie), who — surprise of all surprises, given her Playboy popularity at the time — is the only one not to appear naked. The bellboy dons a number of disguises, drag included, in order to penetrate the room so he can take the ladies’ measurements and see them in the altogether, resulting in burlesque-ready exchanges like this:

“Get out of here!”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“You’re standing on my foot!”

All of the scenes with Wilkinson’s crew appear in eye-popping color, with the final 10 minutes (with perhaps cinema’s only cold-cream fight) in eye-popping-er 3-D. Most of the rest of the film actually comes from another: 1958’s Sin Began with Eve, a German black-and-white snore about a stage director (Willy Fritsch, Adventure in Rio) schooling his über-prudish actress (You Only Live Twice Bond girl Karin Dor) on the history of sex, with fanciful flashbacks to the likes of ancient Greece and gay Paree, all rendered on cardboard sets. In a poor attempt to tie this repurposed footage to his own, Coppola shot monochrome transitions of the bellboy as a side-gig stagehand.

Surprisingly progressive in some ways and astoundingly conservative in others, The Bellboy and the Playgirls is consistently terrible, and yet less embarrassing than Coppola’s Jack. —Rod Lott

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