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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For nearly an hour of its hour, The Beautiful, the Bloody, and the Bare consists of a naked woman being drawn or photographed for artistic purposes. How does the narrator make that interesting? Beats me, because he doesn’t. Director and writer Sande N. Johnsen (Teenage Gang Debs) doesn’t seem to know, either, although he tries by inserting props like guitars, beach balls, African ritual masks — you know, the usual. At least the constant jazz music’s hep!

The narrator of this New Yawk story, Leo (Tom Signorelli of Michael Mann’s Thief), is an artist who convinces his buddy Pete (Jack Lowe, Johnsen’s The Twisted Sex) to put his heavy-haired arms to good use as a nudie shutterbug. Although visually the type of guy who says, “Now look here, lady” three times a day with incontestable derision, Pete agrees.

All goes fine for a while — a long, long while to the viewer — as Pete takes pictures of so many undressed dames with such varied shapes and slopes of breasts, you could CLEP out of freshmen geometry. Then Pete’s aversion to the color red rears its fangs. From a model’s fiery hair to another’s freshly coated fingernails, each appearance of the crimson makes him go wonky, resulting in one of cinema’s greatest worst reaction shots as Pete’s struck speechless for a full 10 seconds! By the time yet another model cuts her finger, Pete acts like he’s just been told he has a dead mother, tummy cancer and a disappearing penis.

So Johnsen can justify the Bloody portion of the title, Pete starts murdering the gals. It’s similar to Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Color Me Blood Red, but a year earlier and really, really boring. Exception: the end’s rooftop chase and Pete’s final freakout, in which he slathers himself up like the Peanut Butter Baby. The production is so cheap, city streets and walls play home to painted and markered credits, far outlasting this nudie cutie’s run. —Rod Lott

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Come spy with me, beckon Marsha Jordan and Ann Perry to curious viewers of The Golden Box, a secret-agent sexploitation caper from Her Odd Tastes director Don Davis. As a fan of Jordan, the Jayne Mansfield of ’60s softcore cinema, I was double-O ready for it.

In L.A., shortly after getting serviced while sitting on an all-gold toilet, the sideburnt musician Kirby (Forman Shane, College Girls Confidential) is shot dead by a mob enforcer. The murderer absconds with Kirby’s sheet music — actually an encoded record of the organization’s illegal wire transactions. In paragraphs of exposition he stays alive just long enough to blurt to the ladies before gurgling some ketchup, Kirby admits to skimming off the top of mob money.

With that, Diane and Donna (Jordan and Perry, respectively) embark on a mission to find Kirby’s killer, the silk-kerchiefed Slade (Jim Gentry, Hollywood Babylon). This endeavor takes them from Washington, D.C., to, um, Grand Rapids, Michigan, testing mattress-spring durability along the way. Scenes shot in the latter constitute Box’s most entertaining stretch (not involving the law of gravity), as our plump-chested pair tails Slade. At one point, to avoid being made, they duck into “one of those sexy adult movie theaters” showing none other than Jordan and Davis’ other 1970 collab, Marsha the Erotic Housewife! Amusingly taking the in-joke further, the box office gets a refund request.

Although its occasional change out of bedrooms and into the streets makes The Golden Box novel, it still isn’t remotely as fun as it sounds, not even with spinning interstitials à la TV’s Batman and the liberal spritz of a literal seltzer water bottle. Alas, this film marked Jordan and Davis’ fifth and final T&A team-up. Perhaps Jordan didn’t like sharing the spotlight with Perry (The Bellboy and the Playgirls)? Everything about Jordan is big — her hairdo, her personality, her line readings, her … well — so it’s not like she leaves much room onscreen for anyone or anything else. Her visual appeal aside, Box’s greatest asset is the score from Davis’ regular composers, Chet and Jim Moore; it’s as bouncy as its stars. —Rod Lott

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