Somewhere in the Caribbean, psychotic pot farmer and arms dealer Charlie Davis (Bruce Bennett, The Alligator People) is The Fiend of Dope Island, who physically abuses the native slaves he calls his employees. (Comparisons to Michael Fassbender’s Oscar-nominated role in 12 Years a Slave are not out of line.) Meanwhile, right-hand man David (Robert Bray, My Gun Is Quick) tries to right his boss’ wrongs. Besides being the only white guy on the payroll, David stands out for wearing a yacht captain’s hat as if he’s the top half missing from an “& Tennille” marquee.

One day at the isle’s bamboo-walled cantina (and the movie’s primary set), in sashays Glory La Verne (Queen of Outer Space’s Tania Velia, billed here as “the Yugoslavian bombshell”), a shapely firecracker Charlie has hired to perform hoochie-coochie dances for his viewing pleasure to the point of literal exhaustion for her — a weakened state making it all the easier for him to attempt rape.

Although directorial duties fell to oater specialist Nate Watt (Hopalong Cassidy Returns, et al.), the script was co-written by Bennett, who sure gave himself a meaty part as the antagonist. Seeing him bark orders — each punctuated with the crack of his trusty whip — is one thing, but Bennett is at his ham-hock best during the dance numbers, maniacally laughing and feverishly bongoing his way into an orgiastic frenzy as Glory shakes her groove thang. Dope Island may be nothing more than a melodrama, but his Reefer Madness-styled overdelivery infuses the picture with a nutty flavor, kicking it over into the stuff of many a men’s adventure magazine cover. —Rod Lott

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Two years before producer Albert Zugsmith had Sex Kittens Go to College, he went undercover in High School Confidential! (Exclamation his.)

A juvenile-delinquent exposé of sorts, the film centers on snot-nosed transfer student/perennial senior Tony (Russ Tamblyn, Satan’s Sadists), who arrives at Santa Bellow High with a wad of cash and a roll of weed. As the faculty members get schooled on the ravages of marijuana addiction, Tony tries to claw his way to the top of the town pushers’ org chart, as well as into the pants of not-so-good girl Joan (Diane Jergens, Island of Lost Women), the main squeeze of BMOC J.I. (John Drew Barrymore, Death on the Fourposter). Ironically, the woman who really wants to bed Tony is his soused ’n’ sexy aunt (Mamie Van Doren, 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt), whose home apparently came prebuilt with its own wah-wah-wah soundtrack.

Helmed by Jack Arnold (The Incredible Shrinking Man), High School Confidential! is one of those teen pics in which all the students are played by actors at least a decade removed from the classroom. It’s also quite the time capsule, with an overuse of “crummy” (second only to the narration of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye) and slang weighing down every line of dialogue, e.g., “That’s the way the bongo bingles.”

In other words, I loved it! Both the Fast Times of its day and Reefer Madness if made by skilled craftsmen, the film is a now-alien world of crew cuts, Beat poets and race-ready jalopies. Tamblyn is delightfully smug; Van Doren is off-the-charts sexy; and the ace cast also includes Teenage Werewolf Michael Landon, Plan 9’s Lyle Talbot, The Little Shop of Horrors shopkeeper Mel Welles, Charlie Chaplin sidekick Jackie Coogan and Jerry Lee Lewis as himself, singing and playing the piano in the back of a moving pickup truck and probably hoping for a Junior High School Confidential! This one’s tops, chum. —Rod Lott

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At the curtain call of her latest play, acclaimed, yet over-the-hill stage actress Adriana Roman (played by former Madame X, the legendary Lana Turner) announces her retirement. As the prologue for The Big Cube, the scene could stand in for the uneasy career transition Turner and her Tinseltown peers experienced when New Hollywood pushed boundaries and buttons, and in doing so, shoved Old Hollywood’s melodramas and musicals out of the way. The elderly white men who ran the studios sought to capitalize on the youthquake they never understood, resulting in supposedly “with-it” pictures that succeeded only in demonstrating how sorely out of touch said studios were.

At least their failures put some choice cuts of camp on our plates, The Big Cube included.

Adriana trades the theater for playing the part of well-to-do wife of über-wealthy Charles Winthrop (Dan O’Herlihy, Halloween III: Season of the Witch). The news doesn’t sit well with his daughter, Lisa (Swedish actress Karin Mossberg, The Uninhibited), whose accent is explained away by Daddy having shipped her to a Swiss school following her mother’s death. Lisa leads a life of Riley, partying with airheaded pal Bibi (Pamela Rodgers, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine), who suggests things like, “Hey, large idea! Let’s call half a dozen guys and have an orgy!” and ditches her dresses when she gets sky-high.

At one groovy soirée, Lisa catches the eye of slimy med student Johnny Allen (George Chakiris, West Side Story), who manufacturers LSD in the university lab for his social circle. And when Johnny learns Lisa’s loaded, well, she catches his other eye, too. Just as Lisa warms to her new stepmother, her father dies. Per the sizable Winthrop will, Lisa is set to inherit a trust of $1 million unless she gets married and if Adriana consents to the union. Which she does not. Being human sleaze, Johnny hatches a scheme: Dose Adriana with enough LSD to drive her crazy — and perhaps even to her death.

Here is where the title of The Big Cube comes into play, priming viewers for its craziest sequences as Chilean filmmaker Tito Davison, helming his first and last Hollywood film, attempts to portray LSD trips, both from an insider’s and outsider’s POV. Johnny mansplains acid to Lisa with the you-don’t-say words of “You see sounds. You hear colors,” and Davison tries his damnedest to put that way-out feeling onscreen. I’ve never touched the stuff, but something tells me it’s more like the kaleidoscope of primitive special effects and less like the shot of Chakiris chunking a rock at your car windshield.

Anyway, the kids’ attempts to gaslight the ol’ bag give Turner the green flag to emote histrionically, as if she broke the glass marked “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, JOAN CRAWFORD.” And that comparison is apropos because The Big Cube nearly qualifies as “hagsploitation” — if only it weren’t quite so colorful, dressed in puffy shirts and weighted down with horoscope medallions. It’s like the soap bubbles of Valley of the Dolls as filtered through the clutched pearls of Reefer Madness, but not as fun as either. —Rod Lott

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The cinema of Ghana and Nigeria — referred to colloquially and collectively as Nollywood — is best known for its low-budget goofy actioners and laughable melodramas, but there is very much a frightening side to their filmmaking: the ominous atmosphere and existential dread of their many demon-possession films. Forget The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, whatever … Ghana and Nigerian filmmakers have them beaten and beaten brutally.

Maybe it’s because they still fear Satan in a way that Westerners (lamentably) don’t anymore, but regardless, their horror epics featuring demonic witch doctors, torso-shaking, eye-rolling vessels and sweaty preachers calling on Jesus to get rid of that vile creature tend to leave audiences praying for their own soul by the time the credits roll.

But then you’ve got to deal with a sequel … or two … or three …

It’s a trend that I’m surprised took American filmmakers so long to latch onto, but auteur Jules David Bartkowski, armed with a camera, a white suit and about 100 bucks or so traveled to this foreign land, gathering the biggest names in (regional) African cinema — Wanlov the Kubolor, Funsho Ogundipe and Lady Nancy Jay, to name a few — and actually made a pretty good first attempt at introductory cinematic diplomacy.

Bartkowski is Benjamin, a mathematician working on African drum rhythms and their supposed equations. When sitting in a bar one afternoon, he’s talked into starring as a white ghost in a film called Pastor Paul. During the filming, however, he goes into a strange trance and when the eccentric director yells cut, Ben can’t remember anything. People tell him he’s possessed, so he travels to a nearby town to hook up with the area witch doctor, and then it gets truly bizarre — but in a financially responsible way, making it even more scary.

While many fish-out-of-water films use a certain sense of xenophobia to get their paranoid feelings of danger and despondency across, this film mostly avoids that; surprisingly, mostly everyone in Pastor Paul, from the little kids following the characters around to the long stretch of Christian preaching, is just doing their thing and Benjamin is caught in the middle of it, walking along, letting them tell their stories, letting the audience experience what he does.

Sure, he’s shaking and convulsing around them, stricken by evil creepy crawlies, to bring it all back to the main story, but it’s the moments in between that are infinitely more interesting, to explore the souls of the friends (and enemies) he’s just made, sitting around talking and enjoying bowl after bowl of fufu with his grimy fingers.

But even more interesting is instead of bringing American techniques to Ghana and Nigeria, the filmmakers used theirs, the Africans, as a way to tell a compelling enough story, filled with plenty of strange tangents and obscure jokes to keep both Hollywood and Nollywood viewers both intrigued and waiting for parts two, three and four, which we’re promised is coming, to great terror and foreboding.  —Louis Fowler

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In Molly and the Ghost, which sounds like the greatest ’80s NBC sitcom premise that never was, 30-something Molly (one-and-done Lee Darling) finds her happy life as a successful California Realtor and loving wife turned tail-over-teakettle by the unexpected arrival of her “barely 17” sister, Susan (Ena Henderson, 1989’s Fatal Exposure), at her doorstep. Claiming an epic row with Dad, Susan needs a place to crash; Molly happily offers the guest bedroom since it’s just for a night …

… until it’s not. And until Susan pockets her older sister’s cash and jewelry, then attempts to do the same to Molly’s husband, Jeff (Ron Moriarty, Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2), once she finally meets him. From our vantage point, Susan first plots to get her paws on him when — fresh from emerging topless from an afternoon Jacuzzi soak — she walks in on him in his tighty-whities, ready to rub up against his spouse’s loins on the living room couch. The teen girl’s motivation would click with viewers if Jeff were some ripped, abs-aplenty hunk, but ummm … he’s not. No offense to the photo clerks of ShopRite, but Jeff looks like a photo clerk of ShopRite, whereas his wife, even with her 1991 hair, looks like Anne-Marie Martin of TV’s Sledge Hammer! To be clear, that’s not a bad thing. (But that Darling never acted again is; she has some talent!)

One night, while Molly’s out showing a house to prospective buyers, Susan’s in showing her goods to prospective semen depositor Jeff. Despite her best efforts in black lingerie, he’s just not into it, but to Molly, it looks like a compromising position all the same when she walks in on it. The next morning, Molly gives her immature li’l sis a good talking-to; Susan retaliates as all siblings in this situation would: by hiring a hitman. She finds the freelance assassin in the back pages of a shoplifted copy of War magazine. (Actually, the camera closes in on classifieds advertising military collectibles, but writer/director Don Jones either hoped no one would notice or assumed, not without merit, that his 16mm film’s intended audience could not read.)

The ponytailed hitman, John (Daniel Martine, 1989’s Cage), accepts the phoned-in assignment for $5,000, the downpayment for which Susan acquires by borrowing it from Molly (!) under the pretense of needing it “for computer school.” Beyond the dough, all John requires to get started is the mark’s name and photo. Susan eagerly complies — too eagerly, as it turns out — by tearing a photo of the sisters in two … and sending him the wrong half! Effectively ensuring her own demise, she realizes her mistake much too late.

Ergo, the Ghost portion of the title comes into play.

It is here that Jones (Schoolgirls in Chains) takes his thriller on a turn: a hard left into the supernatural, because, yeah, why the fuck not? Stuck-up even in death, the wraith Susan is given a second shot at sister sabotage when a matronly spirit (Carole Wells, The House of Seven Corpses) allows her to haunt Molly and Jeff rather than rest eternally. “You are so young to be so spiteful,” the boss-lady spirit tells her pupil. “You have much to learn and I fear it will be a painful process for all involved.” In other words, Heaven Can Wait for hussies.

Because skinflint filmmakers like Jones can’t foot the bill for fancy hauntings, much of Susan’s from-the-grave shenanigans amount to her laughing in mirrors. Now, there is a scene that depicts worms crawling from holes in her cheeks, but this animation is so chintzy, it really just looks like her face is pooping. At any rate, our wedded heroes don’t know what to do about this imposition. Then Jeff recalls the VHS copy of Ghostbusters, and just as suddenly, Molly and the Ghost becomes a comedy as well — and a body-switching one, at that! — before settling down as a drama. Maybe it’s best not to ask. Just watch! For all its shortcomings and corner-cutting, it’s never boring. —Rod Lott

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