How many Pollacks does it take to make Fantom Kiler? I don’t have the answer. Regardless, Fantom Kiler — yes, that’s right, only one L — has to be the single most fucked-up movie I’ve ever seen.

In a bus station, two bumbling janitors — one of whom looks like Super Mario, so we’ll call the other one Luigi, for the sake of balance — push their mops and imagine what all the women there look like naked. Among them is a skinny brunette, who then slips in front of them and rejects Mario’s painful advances. So he imagines the woman walking through a spooky forest at night, gradually losing her pieces of clothing to tree branches and barbed wire before she is stark naked, whereupon she meets Fantom Kiler. With his trenchcoat and bandaged face, he looks exactly like Darkman, except you can’t see his eyes. He slashes her body all over and rapes her with a knife.

Back in reality, Mario (who resembles SNL’s Seth Meyers with a fake mustache) is in his office (since when do janitors have offices?) when the new cleaning woman arrives. She comes to work in the acceptable maid attire — namely, a short tube top that barely covers her breasts and cut-off shorts. Much to Mario’s delight, she starts scrubbing things up in suggestive positions, often exposing her breasts. Then she offers to demonstrate why she is the reigning Miss Butt Beautiful and does something with a wooden spoon that I just can’t bring myself to put into words; let’s just say “spoontang” and leave it at that. Then Mario dreams she meets the Fantom Kiler. She dies, while buck naked.

This cycle repeats, with Fantom Kiler ready to “kile” any naked woman he meets. He picks up one blonde in a car, which then conveniently stalls. While checking the oil, the Fantom Killer needs a rag, so the hussy offers her pantyhose. Oops, she isn’t wearing any, so she takes off her shirt, too. Her shorts mysteriously disappear, only to reappear underneath the car, thus not only allowing the viewer to see what her gynecologist sees in horrifying close-up, but also allowing Fantom Kiler the prime opportunity to ram a metal spike all up in her pooper with a mallet.

This goes on and on, later with Ms. Spoontang reappearing to get intimate with Fantom Kiler’s mop handle. Then Mario, too wrapped up in his imagination, chokes on a peanut and dies. And so does the Fantom Kiler. Meanwhile, Luigi has been investigating this string of murders, even though they were all in the mind of Mario, who again, met his untimely demise by choking on a peanut.

I know you think I just made all this up, but I swear to you I did not. —Rod Lott

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If anything, Private School serves as fair warning that just because a director makes a critically acclaimed cult movie (that very few people have actually seen) early in their career doesn’t mean that’s what the world will remember them for.

In 1968, Noel Black made Pretty Poison, a darkly comic thriller about a mentally ill man (Anthony Perkins) whose life is taken over and ruined by a very pretty teenage sociopath (Tuesday Weld). Fifteen years and several flops and made-for-TV movies later, he found himself at the mercy of producer R. Ben Efraim (the man who gave us Private Lessons and Private Resort) with Private School. I suspect he took the job assuming such a seemingly inconsequential project would remain as obscure as his other films. What he could not have imagined was that Private School would take on a life of its own in the then-new world of home video, where it easily became his best-known work.

The question, then, is why such a truly terrible teen comedy that only ever works as a desperate parody of itself succeeded when Black’s other films didn’t? The answer is simple: Betsy Russell riding topless on a horse. If you’re a heterosexual male between the ages of 30 to 40, you probably “watched” this scene at least a dozen times before you moved out of your parents’ house. And if you didn’t, you likely live a life of constant turmoil and regret.

Much like Black. —Allan Mott

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Is marijuana an aphrodisiac? While I know some women who would easily fellate you for a dime-sack of high-quality, hydroponic sticky-icky with no hesitation, I have a feeling that has more to do with low self-esteem and the lack of a positive male role model than it does any type of magically seductive ingredient laced within those tenderly pungent pot buds.

Sadly, I personally have never been privy to such THC-leazy doings — although it hasn’t been for a lack of trying — nor have I ever been to a swanky cocktail party wherein a joint is casually passed around and eventual inhalation of the demon weed leads to a spontaneously nude encounter group session wherein pock-faced, fully-bushed cuties are told to stare at your bathing-suit area and gently caress your mons pubis, as I am repeatedly promised in this 1971 sexploitation relic.

Sorry, Aphrodisiac!: The Sexual Secret of Marijuana, but while you dubiously proclaim that cannabis is an ancient sexual enticer that will lead even the most frigid broad to drop trou and let you plow, in my experience, it’s typically just two or three dudes chafing it up on a Goodwill couch, barely watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force and, almost ritualistically, going to sleep, alone, with a belly full of Salsa Verde Doritos, depressed they can’t even maintain the most pathetic of erections for some tearful self-stimulation before passing out to side one of Jefferson Starship’s Red Octopus.

Your visual dissertation just doesn’t hold (bong) water, Aphrodisiac! It does, however, hold other, thicker fluids. While I’m sure in their heart-of-hearts, the filmmakers thought they were presenting a strong case for the use of marijuana as a sexual aid, all that hard work and scientific research is pretty much lost entirely the first moment onscreen penetration occurs between two of the saddest, most unphotogenic, low-rent porn actors the Bowery-based modeling agency could rustle up.

And, you know, I kinda liked that, actually. The idea of a director trotting out to the nearest homeless shelter, paying a belligerent morphine addict $10 to mime the most reptilian of sexual encounters with an equally uninterested, possibly dead hooker, using every diseased thrust as an opportunity to feel something other than the lifetime of mind-numbing regret and stomach-growling hunger … well, that’s some sexy shit. It makes me feel like a shadowy Italian businessman who just paid $5,000 to sit in a hotel room with other equally shadowy businessman — mostly Japanese — to watch a Bolivian snuff flick. I’m sure we can all relate. —Louis Fowler

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I knew I was going to dig Superchick once the opening credits read, “Norman Bartold as old policeman.” But, yeah, the sight of Joyce Jillson strutting down an airplane terminal in black hot pants and fuck-me boots, all to a swingin’ soundtrack, sure didn’t hurt. (In fact, it felt good.) Neither did the sight of Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, accompanied by a toilet flush, suggesting that high art, this ain’t, so take it or leave it. I’ll take it!

Peyton Place refugee and eventual kook astrologer Jillson essays the role of Tara B. True, a stewardess — yes, back when they were called “stewardesses,” not “flight attendants,” because they said things like, “Coffee, tea or me?” — who’s quite a liberated gal, juggling three lovers in three cities. She’s faithful to all, not counting the lucky dudes she spontaneously inducts into the mile-high club.

One of those is a Marine she nails in the lavatory just to serve her country; the soldier stands at attention. Tara’s the kind of woman who coos threats like, “Last one in bed … gets no head.” She’s a fun girl. And she should be, because Superchick is essentially plotless, no matter how hard it tries to venture into mob territory.

In the loose framework of the film, Tara visits a porn set (where luscious Uschi Digard is fully on display); tokes up at a pot party; kung-fus a biker gang intent on a gang bang; screws a composer inside a piano, twice; chains John Carradine to a wall; loses her bikini bottom in the ocean, leading to some saltwater lovin’; and, finally, foils some hijackers, whereupon her blouse pops open for the TV cameras. You’re cleared for takeoff! —Rod Lott

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Black Cobra Woman isn’t so much a film as it is 95 minutes of Black Emanuelle startlet Laura Gemser disrobing and hopping into bed with random people, regardless of gender, race, color or creed. It’s not for nothing this is also known as Emanuelle Goes Japanese.

Gemser works in Hong Kong as a dancer at a club, and her act involves gyrating suggestively with a live snake. This so entrances filthy rich businessman Jack Palance that he meets her the next day and asks her to move in with him, despite just being told that he gives her the heebie-jeebies. But he wants her company because, he says, “It’s lonely. And I like your scent.” (Hey, in a film like this, who doesn’t?) She relents until her jealous Asian boyfriend slaps and then dry-humps her (while wearing all of his three-piece suit). Then she’s gladly Jack’s new roomie. As the tagline goes, “How much snake can one woman take?”

Don’t expect wacky, Three’s Company-style shenanigans, because the rest is pretty much full-frontal Gemser, as she sleeps with women, showers with them, gets massaged alongside them with phallic instruments and even “helps” one put on her bathing suit and is practically hypnotized by the sight of the girl’s trim-needy beaver. To make up for the lack of story (and perhaps slightly justify the title), a couple of naked chicks are fatally bitten by snakes.

Given that it has some awkward edits — oh, and that it’s directed by porn’s Joe D’Amato — I’m convinced a harder, pervier version exists out there. It’s fairly pointless, but so blatantly prurient that its shortcomings don’t sink it entirely. —Rod Lott

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