One of the best film books of this decade is Julian Upton’s Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems, which opened my eyes to, well, some of British cinema’s curiosities, obscurities and forgotten gems. I finished the book with a to-watch list with more titles than life will allow me to get around to. One toward the top, however, was Corruption, a mad, mod variation on France’s wildly influential Eyes Without a Face.

From Black Gunn director Robert Hartford-Davis, Corruption casts Hammer horror icon Peter Cushing as “the famous surgeon” John Rogan, who has quite a lovely fiancée in Lynn (Sue Lloyd, Revenge of the Pink Panther), a model whose camera-beloved face is scarred hideously when a scuffle at a party knocks a photography lamp onto her right cheek. Ridden with guilt, Dr. Rogan experiments furiously until he’s able to restore Lynn’s va-va-voom visage via dead tissue. The procedure is unethical, yet utterly remarkable … until it no longer is and the scarring resurfaces.

The trick, of course, is that in order to make the procedure stick, he must acquire living human tissue. And for that, of course, he must resort to murder.

That’s where Corruption becomes really oddball, because seriously, where else can you see Star Wars’ Grand Moff Tarkin wrestling with a topless prostitute? Although the good doctor becomes quite adept at beheading babes, the film is not quite the festival of sleaze as advertised; in truth, it is not too far removed from Hammer’s level of gore: now near quaint.

With horns blaring and sweat dripping, there’s an urgency and immediacy to the scenes in which Dr. Rogan claims his victims, but for true Corruption, look to Lynn, who increasingly pushes her hubs to kill for the benefit of her beauty. By the second half, the gorgeous gal has gained an ugly heart. Similarly, Hartford-Davis’ film loses its luster in the last half hour, when it trades Georges Franju’s aforementioned Eyes for Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, but with a laser. —Rod Lott

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Jaws wasn’t even a year old when NBC debuted Shark Kill on May 20, 1976, making the telefilm likely the first contestant in the still-ongoing sharksploitation sweepstakes. And that’s about all William A. Graham’s (Beyond the Bermuda Triangle) cash-in has going for it.

At an oil rig under repair in the Pacific Ocean, young marine biologist Rick Dayner (Phillip Clark, 1982’s Alone in the Dark) spots (stock footage of) a Great White shark, but blue-collar boss Banducci (Midnight Run’s Richard Foronjy, the Luis Guzmán of his day) won’t have any of it, claiming the kid just “sees sardines,” and orders his men to keep working. Dayner is adamant: “Mister, I know what I saw!”

Eventually, they listen to him … but only after the (stock footage of the) shark eats one worker and amputates the leg of another. The latter fellow’s brother, Cabo Mendoza (Richard Yniguez, The Deadly Tower), joins Dayner on a $20,000 bounty hunt for the shark. When Dayner answers Mendoza’s question about the size of their target (about 15 feet), we know this is a BFD because the music score wakes up just long enough to punctuate Mendoza’s face pause with a “dun-dun-dunnnnn!”

Scheider and Dreyfuss, they ain’t. Hell, Lorraine Gary and Mario Van Peebles, they ain’t. I’m sure I would have loved it at age 5. —Rod Lott

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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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