While The Blair Witch Project was by no means the horror masterwork as it was touted, it still had potential to be a good film. Obviously, director John Bacchus (Batbabe: The Dark Nightie) saw this potential, too, and decided to run with it, adding the essential elements needed in any great movie: gigantic, silicone-enhanced breasts and an on-the-loose ape.

Following the same basic plot of Blair Witch, The Erotic Witch Project follows three horse-faced hotties — Darian Caine, Katie Keane and Victoria Vega — as they venture to a remote wooded area to debunk the myth of the “Erotic Witch” for their sexuality class. They head off, even with news that an ape has escaped into the woods. The three bicker argue and lose their map. Pretty much the same so far, right?

Soon, the girls start hearing the orgasmic howl of the witch, which causes them to perform many, many sexual acts, both solo and with each other — one even using a twig! These scenes are never really “hot,” mostly because of all the stretch marks and pimples on the actresses’ asses. Also, they seem really forced and fake. Unlike so many others, these girls just don’t seem to really enjoy being exploited in a film that is just above porno.

They wake up in the morning and find dildos and an inflatable woman strewn all about the campsite. Then, the ape finds their camera and watches them get it on. I think he masturbates, too, but it is implied and not shown. Not that I really wanted to see it anyway.

Blair’s nonexistent chills, production values and dialogue are mimicked perfectly, but this is the better movie, which is really not saying much. —Louis Fowler

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Legend has it — at least within the realm of Surrender Cinema/Full Moon’s ultra-cheap skin flicks — that deep in the wild exists a strange yet voluptuous creature named Shandra: The Jungle Girl, who kills men by pleasuring them to death. Naturally, some scheming, slimy millionaire-type with the devious name of Travis Fox (David Christensen, The Mangler 2) wants to capture her and sell her to the highest bidder.

Fox recruits a couple of scientists (or rather, softcore porn actors decked in white lab coats) and the token tubby Hispanic, Diego (John Lopez, Mutant Species), to accompany him into the jungle, played here by a largely barren field in Southern California, complete with man-made rock walls. (Likewise, in the movie’s opening jungle montage, one shot is of a parrot who’s clearly at a zoo, what with the concrete sidewalk and barbed wire visible in the background.)

The team finds and snares the mute Shandra (Lisa Throw, aka Neena Quiroz, I Like to Play Games Too), but only after they speak this three-line exchange twice: “Hear that?” “Sounds like a dream girl, doc. She’s close.”

Shandra feeds on her prey by sneaking up for a kiss on the lips before moving on to more carnal activities. The men falling victim to her wiles fully cooperate, whereas I wouldn’t be able to get past the vaginal-hygiene issue. Call me old-fashioned. (Speaking of victims, the first guy to go says shortly beforehand, “No sign of the creature described to us by the Amazonians. In fact, other than a gaggle of squirrel monkeys above my campsite, there’s been no contact with any life at all.”)

After examining “the jungle bitch,” the scientists determine she has the ability to implant footage from previous Full Moon films into the minds of whoever she touches. That’s really quite a gift … to pad out the running time, of course, because director Cybil Richards (Femalien) had to have something beyond grammar-be-damned dialogue (“Doctor, you have did the test to determine Shandra’s actual age?”) and unsexy simulated sex. And, hey, who knew feral women were afforded the benefits of underwire support? —Rod Lott

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In his second film, cult-crap director Ted V. Mikels (The Corpse Grinders) directs Dr. Sex, a nudie-cutie comedy that dares to combine exhibitionism with psychiatry. At last!

In preparation for a textbook project on which they’re about to embark, three shrinks — Dr. Sex, Dr. Schmutz and Dr. Lovejoy — swap tales of their oversexed, horndog patients. And speaking of dog, one is actually a poodle that gets its doggy kicks by watching its female owner undress and soap up in the tub. To each his own.

Another patient is a quite type who believes the mannequins he dresses for work are real, and thus, serves them coffee. The funniest patient — comparatively speaking, of course, as Dr. Sex is funny to no one, save perhaps your grandfather who jacked off to it in its day — is the fat guy who has naked ghosts cleaning his home, prompting some priceless facial expressions from the poor slob.

At the end, the docs throw one wild shindig — so wild that Schmutz turns into a poodle! Wait, huh? Exactly. Dr. Sex is impossible not to fast-forward through. The most interesting thing about it is that it’s co-written by Wayne Rogers of TV’s M*A*S*H, making him the Roger Ebert to Mikels’ Russ Meyer. —Rod Lott

Following her Playboy heyday, billionaire wedding and many, many Drake’s Cakes, Anna Nicole Smith showed us just how far starlets can fall and how pathetic they can really be (yet still be alive), in a softcore quasi-documentary that’s one of the least sexy things the year 1998 had to offer, along with the Nairobi Embassy bombing and the last ski trip of Sonny Bono. If there’s anyone who could make sex a turn-off at the time, it was Smith, in what could be called the Schafer’s Honey-Glazed Ham era of her career.

Interspersed with demonstrations of Anna’s uninspired fantasies are semi-interviews with Anna herself, in which she says things so stupid, you wonder why she had to read them off cue cards. (Example: “My favorite place to masturbate? Definitely the tub. I get the shivers just thinking about it.”) Serving as a framing device, Anna poses for a calendar that never hit the market.

Clearly, Anna Nicole Smith Exposed: Her Fantasies Revealed does not feature the early-’90s Anna that made her a household name; here, her face is all puffy and her once-celebrated breasts look bruised from excessive beatings. (“With a body like this, who wouldn’t want to masturbate?” she asks, and I assume rhetorically. “What a great way to start the day.”)

Nevertheless, several guys were (paid to be) eager to join her for some simulated sex, including Darren, a houseboy who gets his RDA of calcium from a morning romp with his bloated employer (“Darren, wonderful Darren. I pay him a lot to do nothing but please me. … Oh, and he also has a pretty good butt.”) Also falling prey to her scripted wiles is Jason, a shirtless pastry chef who moves like an animatronic robot on the fritz. (“I see Jason pounding out some dough on that hard, cold marble counter with his bare hands. … I just get sooo excited.”)

Coming to an end, Exposed presents some of Anna’s nude scenes from her starring roles in the action films To the Limit and Skyscraper. In theory, this would save you from having to rent them, but they’re even funnier than this misbegotten project. —Rod Lott

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Indonesian beauty Laura Gemser (Black Cobra Woman) stars as the oft-naked Emanuelle, Queen of the Desert. Except she doesn’t really play Emmanuelle as she has many a time, but rather a generic hussy going by the exotic name of Sheila. I understand the title switcheroo, as Sheila, Queen of the Desert sounds about as marketable as, say, Marcy, Ace Groundskeeper.

As the film’s story begins, Emanuelle Sheila is washing her breasts at a river when she’s approached by a scruffy guerilla soldier named Victor, who asks, “Have you ever screwed a guy you just met?”

She says, “Yes,” so he promptly jumps atop her. But she says if he wants “free pussy,” he has to work for it, so off she runs into the mountains. Victor angrily gives chase, eventually threatening to kill her with his knife if she doesn’t put out. Being crafty, she distracts him with her body so that Victor loses his footing and accidentally stabs himself in the gut as he rolls down the mountain to his death.

And that, ladies and gentleman, is how you get to be Queen of the Desert.

Soon, his buddies discover his blue-balled body and go looking for his murderer, although they’re already lost and don’t realize that the woman who’s just offered to be their guide is also responsible for his doom. Before long, she’s using her feminine wiles to get them to turn on one another.

What begins as sleazy fun then becomes a sleazy depressant, with rape, murder and gratuitous fruit-eating. The only thing more ludicrous than its claim that it was based on a novel is that … well, no, that covers it, really. —Rod Lott

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