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

Get it at Amazon.

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

Get it at Amazon.

You never realize just how sleazy most Rod Stewart tunes are until they’re used as the backdrop for the seduction of a teenage boy; I know this not from personal experience, mind you, but from the fact that the filmic wet dream Private Lessons uses at least three different Rod songs for this erotic purpose.

The summer’s here and all Albuquerque rich-kid Philly (Eric Brown) and his requisite chubby bud want is to see a girl naked. That perverted wish comes true — and a whole lot more than that — when sexy maid Ms. Mallow (Sylvia Kristel) moves into his mansion, sexually teasing and sensually taunting him until, in the middle of surprisingly graphic intercourse, she dies of apparent heart failure.

By the way: In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Philly is only about 15 years old when all this is going on.

Panicked, he enlists his chauffeur, Dr. Johnny Fever Lester (Howard Hesseman), to help him get rid of that fine body; little does Philly know, however, that it is all part of an extortion plan that, sadly, takes the movie’s view off of the adolescent sexual experimentation and, instead, on a lame crime subplot that wraps up neatly with a minorly madcap chase scene.

Private Lessons has, embarrassingly, been a longtime favorite film of mine since secretly viewing cable airings of it, repeatedly, as a kid in the early ’80s. Star Eric Brown was pretty much the luckiest kid on TV at the time — besides this film, he also got it on with statuesque Sybil Danning in They’re Playing with Fire, as well as being cast as Buzz on the first season of Mama’s Family. What a resume!

Not to be outdone, French delight Kristel — high on both her marriage to Ian McShane and mounds of cocaine, possibly at the same time — is a tempestuous delight, even if for half the nude scenes she’s using a body double, for reasons I don’t understand and, honestly, don’t care to explore unless “Tonight’s the Night” is blaring in the background. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Based on the adult comic book Butterscotch by Italian writer/artist Milo Manara, The Erotic Misadventures of the Invisible Man is exactly the Skinemax entry you think it is, but with opening credits appearing in the dreaded Comic Sans typeface.

Having just been dumped by aspiring actress Rachal (Elina Madison, Creepshow 3), aspiring actor Norman (Scott Coppola, not part of Francis Ford’s filmmaking dynasty) nurses a broken heart as he waits tables. At one such gig, his luck changes when he attracts the attention of aspiring actress Kelly (Gabriella Hall, The Exotic Time Machine), but also is rendered invisible after a jug of what looks like buffalo sauce spills on him. Although no one can see Norman, everyone can smell him; several characters detect the scent of butterscotch — sniff out the connection?

To illustrate Norman’s outta-sight shenanigans, writer/director Rolfe Kanefsky (showing none of the promise of his debut film, There’s Nothing Out There) cheaply makes a lot of objects move on their own — telephone, champagne flute, hotel bell, vacuum hose, anal beads — and tears off the occasional outfit from his movie’s interchangeable female bodies. (Exclaims an Italian woman witnessing an instance of the latter, “She’s being uh-raped-uh by a ghost-uh!”)

Much elongated softcore sex ensues, including between Kelly and an invisible Norman, challenging Hall to act petting, tugging and humping something that isn’t there. Master Thespian would be proud.

Misadventures exerts no effort beyond the simulated thrusts and gyrations of its performers. Kanefsky’s cornball dialogue seems to draw inspiration from childrens’ joke books (“Can’t wait to see the look on Kelly’s face when she doesn’t see me!”), and situations that I’m sure had them in stitches on set start flat and fall from there, such as a man in a full duck costume walking into a bar and asking for grapes.

In interest of transparency, I almost laughed once, when a partygoer (Michelle Bauer, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama) hears Kelly’s last name and inquires, “Parkinson? Like the disease?” Yes. —Ed Donovan

Get it at Amazon.

A public service announcement: “Alucard” is “Dracula” spelled backward, which you likely already knew, and not because the opening credits of Dracula (the Dirty Old Man) tell you. But that they do is indicative of how low the bar of wit is set.

Played by this-and-only-this actor Vince Kelley, Alucard awakes (hardly elderly, but whatever) and, under the auspices of re-opening a mine, lures a businessman named Mike (Billy Whitton, Mission: Africa) to his cave and turns him into a werewolf right out of a K. Gordon Murray-presented Mexi-matinee. Now christened anew as Irving Jackalman, Mike runs errands for his vampire boss — or errand, singular: Abduct young women and bring them to Alcuard’s lair to be tied up, stripped down and bitten on the boob. At 69 (!) minutes, the sexploitation quickie basically depicts this scenario half a dozen times — lather, rinse, repeat — with none of the ladies having breasts large enough for the count’s liking.

Somehow, I have managed to avoid mentioning the movie’s craziest aspect until now. It is not that Dirty Old Man is almost entirely dubbed, but that Alucard is, for no detectable reason, now a painfully unfunny Catskills comedian (redundant, I know) in the nerve-grating vein of Jackie Mason. Even if your ears have been professionally vacuumed by an ENT seconds before showtime, you’ll still wonder if perhaps there is something you missed.

There is not. Unless you fail to notice the C-section scar on a brunette victim Jackalman dry-humps because you are too distracted watching the poor woman struggling to contain her laughter at the absurdity of it all — and that’s before his postcoital Green Stamps joke! I would not be surprised if the dialogue were crafted Johnny-on-the-spot in the recording studio, because ultimately, what is said is irrelevant compared to what is shown. This is the stuff of a men’s pulp magazine come to life, and writer/director William Edwards delivers on that: sooo stupid, yet sooo fun. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.