Pets introduced audiences to not only one of the B-movie world’s most beautiful debutants, but also its eventual queen in Candice Rialson (billed here as “Candy”). In an approximate five-year stretch before choosing early retirement, the buxom blonde made a string of low-budget hits, most notably in three Roger Corman productions: Summer School Teachers, Candy Stripe Nurses and the self-aware sublimity that is Hollywood Boulevard. While not as well-remembered or -reviewed, Pets got there first, showing what the gorgeous, all-American girl could do with ease to a grimy, sugar-stained screen: light it up.

As with The Centerfold Girls the following year, Raphael Nussbaum’s Pets eschews the route of plot for an episodic structure of three stories; other than sort of ending without an ending, the only element they share is Rialson, front-and-center throughout as Bonnie. Even the last scene gives up on closure, asking, “THE END …?” as if Bonnie’s misadventures were ready to play out in a weekly prime-time slot. (We should be so lucky.)

Having just fled her abusive brother (Mike Cartel, Runaway Nightmare), the presumably teenaged Bonnie meets Pat (Teri Guzman, Five Angry Women), an African-American woman who teaches her street-survival skills by making her an unwitting part of a kidnapping and robbery. Their target: a married man (Bret Parker, This Is a Hijack) all too willing to give them a ride, presumably in exchange for another.

Then Bonnie wanders from that bad situation into another, entering a live-in business-and-boudoir arrangement with Geraldine (Joan Blackman, Macon County Line), a lesbian painter whose jealousy flares brighter than the colors on her canvas. Finally, Bonnie accepts an invitation to hang out at the home of wealthy art patron Vincent Stackman (Ed Bishop, TV’s UFO), whose hidden basement doubles as a private zoo. This final segment lends Pets its title, as well as its meant-to-shock marketing depicting Guzman and Rialson chained at the neck — something that never occurs and primes the viewer for a bucket-brimming serving of vile, debasing pornography. This is not that movie …

… but it more than earns its R rating. Nussbaum (The Amorous Adventures of Don Quixote & Sancho Panza) clearly knew he was holding dynamite with Rialson carrying the picture, so the TNT is pushed into scenes of T&A often. This being her first speaking role, Rialson is not as comfortable and charismatic as she soon became, so she lets her pink blouse do much of the heavy lifting. Pets is just sleazy enough to placate drive-in crowds, yet smart enough to not let the sex and violence entirely drown out its message of — yep, believe it! — female empowerment and its questions of who’s possessing whom. —Rod Lott

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Ray Dennis Steckler, the backyard multihyphenate whose psychotronic efforts have dealt famously with two-bit superheroes (Rat Pfink a Boo Boo) and mixed-up zombies (The Incredibly Strange Creatures), turns his lens to the world of crime in the private-eye procedural Body Fever. Aside from writing, directing and producing, Steckler takes the starring role — no surprise there — as Charlie Smith, an always napping detective for hire.

He’s hired by beefy crime boss Big Mack (Bernard Fein, Robin and the 7 Hoods) to locate one Carrie Erskine (Carolyn Brandt, then Mrs. Steckler), a sexy cat burglar — check out that snakeskin suit and Catwoman mask! — for snatching $150,000 of pure, uncut heroin from his safe. (Unbeknownst to Big Mack, the drugs immediately were stolen from her as well.) Charlie puts his feet to the Hollywood pavement and frequents local sleazy hangouts to determine Ms. Erskine’s whereabouts. When he finally does find her — dancing in his room, no less — she makes him an offer he can’t refuse: She’ll give Charlie half of the cut if he helps her get the smack back. They fall in love.

Wishfully titled Super Cool on some prints, Body Fever is neither exciting nor even suspenseful; nonetheless, there’s something enjoyable about watching Steckler — who looks like a dopier Kevin Spacey in a Gilligan cap — traipse around town in a connect-the-dots gumshoe plot of his own doing. He’s no actor — no one in his films ever is — but he does have more directorial talent than he’s given credit for; of course, he is to blame for much of that reputation, given that he could be his own worst enemy (see: The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher).

At the very least, his movies look interesting, and here, he gives himself a few arty sex scenes to direct the fuck out of. Clearly, he enjoyed it — hey, I’d give myself four sex scenes, too — so it’s hard not to be slightly charmed by this B-level potboiler. —Rod Lott

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As many glamorous models do, Valerie (Andrea Allen, Old Dracula) exhibits terrible taste in men; her boyfriend, Terry (Alex Leppard, Crowley), is a two-bit thief whose idea of a date is taking Valerie with him to a remote mansion in the woods … and ordering her to stay in the car while he goes for a little B&E. Bored, she disobeys and joins him. Inside the house, the two have to hide in a closet upon realizing they’re not alone. From their vantage point, they watch in terror as a busty prostitute (Barbara Meale, Sex and the Other Woman) is brutally murdered by a man they cannot see, beyond the genre-appropriate black leather gloves covering his grabby, stabby hands.

A horrified Valerie hightails it outta there. The next day, Terry’s car shows up, but Terry himself does not. Nor does he later, and given the circumstances, it’s not exactly the kind of disappearance she can report to the police. In an attempt to locate him, friends accompany Valerie to the scene of the crime … if only she could find it. Why, it’s as if they’re looking for The House That Vanished.

That title is a bit of a ruse, as House does not reside in the realm of the supernatural, where so many of director José Ramón Larraz’s best-known works do, including Black Candles and Vampyres, to name only two. That’s not to say he’s out of his element, but with the Spanish filmmaker shooting British actors in British locations, one could make the case that screenwriter Derek Ford (Don’t Open Till Christmas) possesses a greater claim of authorship. In Larraz’s favor, The House That Vanished noticeably bears a dominant stamp of suspense, although hardly “in the great Hitchcock tradition” shouted by its ad campaign.

However, if you want to talk Hitchcock blondes, Allen is as functional as Tippi Hedren and as gorgeous as Kim Novak. Vanished (also released under the nonsensical and overly punctuated title of Scream — and Die!) gives her nearly every frame to fill, which she does with considerable allure and enough aplomb. Her Grace — er, grace — makes up for deficiencies elsewhere, such as a herring so red, it’s sunburned. —Rod Lott

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If David Berkowitz, the real-life Son of Sam, actually did receive his orders to kill from a dog, that would make more sense than Another Son of Sam, a bonkers exploitation thriller that trades on the murderer’s media-friendly moniker, but otherwise is unrelated. Not for nothing was this tabloid-tainted obscurity the one and only stab at directing, screenwriting, producing, editing and casting by Dave A. Adams, stuntman of William Grefé’s Whiskey Mountain.

After three minutes of ellipses-ridden titles commemorating the exploits and body counts of such all-star serial killers as Jack the Ripper, Charles Starkweather and Richard Speck, Another Son of Sam presents a live performance by the Tom Jones-esque singer Johnny Charro (as himself) at the Treehouse Lounge, which has as much bearing on the hour that follows as all the front-loaded discussion of waterskiing: zilch. Just get used to that; Adams has no idea how to set up a story, so the viewer will be unable to determine the main character. I thought I knew, but learned — after my second viewing, no less — that the policeman I assumed was the lead was actually two officers who not only look alike, but have similar-sounding names. To say that the “FLUSH OLD MEDICINES DOWN THE TOILET” sign spotted in early scenes is more prominent than any of its surrounding performers is hardly an exaggeration.

Therefore, there is no lead role — not even the titular madman, Harvey! Until the climax, such as it is, we glimpse him only as a set of feet or hands or eyes in extreme close-up, like the creature in Creepshow’s segment of “The Crate.” Strangling an orderly with a telephone cord and clocking a lady doc into a coma, Harvey escapes a mental institution, where a treatment of shock therapy literally jolts into a willy-nilly killing spree. His reign of terror occurs mostly in a girls’ college dorm — one well-populated, despite it being spring break. Once Harvey slays one of its residents (who stole $500 from the administration building, so she sorta deserves it, the film suggests), the police call in the local S.W.A.T. team, whose members perform on the level of S.H.I.T., making for an awkwardly inert action sequence of roughly 30 minutes. (At least the S.W.A.T. commander is entertaining in mispronouncing super-simple words in a super-Southern drawl: “window” –> “wind-uh.”)

Amateurs though the performers may be (and they are), their acting is hardly the flick’s defining deficiency. Another Son of Sam sports a color palette as brown as a UPS truck full of UPS uniforms; its straightforward timeline struggles to adhere to a reality as it leaps between cops and collegians; Adams employs slow-motion for no other discernible reason than to elongate the running time over the hour-and-a-nickel mark; his editing choices are so puzzling, they veer toward the experimental (emphasis on “mental”) — and that’s even discounting his head-scratching decision to end virtually every scene with a freeze frame! Why, it’s as if Adams caught the final shot of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and thought, “If it works once, why not dozens of times?” Ergo, freeze frames out the wazoo — enough to power a 1982 J. Geils Band single.

In summary, this is a killer no-budget, no-win endeavor lensed in that hotbed of auteurist cinema, North Carolina. Don’t you dare miss it! —Rod Lott

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Somewhere, under the 25 miles of canals that twist through the capital city of Holland, lurks a serial killer in a scuba suit — shades of The Snorkel! People of Amsterdam, you are Amsterdamned.

In this minor gem of Dutch genre cinema, writer and director Dick Maas, reunites with Huub Stapel, the satanic Santa of his 2010 Christmas horror film, Saint Nick. Here, Stapel is the good guy: Eric Visser, a single dad and Amsterdam’s top police detective. Visser’s work on the case begins when a boat full of tourists can’t help but make icky contact with the corpse of a hooker, left dangling from a bridge. That the glass-topped watercraft cannot come to an immediate stop, causing the body to be dragged ever so slowly over horrified passengers, like a mop held by a lethargic janitor, lets you know Maas isn’t above introducing a streak of wicked humor into a thriller that is played largely straight, despite that exploitable title.

Clad head to toe in black synthetic rubber, the killer projects sleek menace as he makes waves through the city on his stabby spree. Although the movie is a tad too long at an hour and 54 minutes, it more or less moves swiftly through the paces of a procedural, replete with red herrings and last-act twists. Midway through Amsterdamned, Maas impressively stages its best sequence: a high-speed boat chase through those narrow canals lined with innocent members of the public on each side. While not quite on the hair-raising level of The French Connection or Bullitt, the extended scene — something of a knockout — generates a sizable wake of fun that elevates the material surrounding it. —Rod Lott

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