Not every movie dares open with a quote from 18th-century moralist Samuel Johnson. (Then again, I don’t watch the History channel.) Michael Matteo Rossi’s Misogynist does, with this: “Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore, they choose the weakest or the most ignorant.” The next 77 minutes set out to prove the theory. And frickin’ how!

Heartbroken Harrison (Jonathan Bennett, Mean Girls) is crying over a Dear John letter when who should walk on by but smooth-talking mystery man Trevor (Jon Briddell, Midnight Movie), who dismisses the missive as “typical bullshit a woman would say.” With the flip of a business card, he advises Harrison, “All you need is conditioning.”

Three years and one title card later, Harrison is under Trevor’s employ, rounding up soul-crushed dude-bros to whom Trev can espouse his brand of female-hating “conditioning.” (Harrison must be terrible at his job, because the audience can be counted on one hand.) A sample of Trevor’s vindictive venom: “All woman are exactly the same. Every woman … wants to get fucked. All woman want to be hurt. They love that sting. All women want to be controlled. And I’m here to teach you how to control.”

Although this two-bit Frank T. Mackey (Tom Cruise’s character in Magnolia) is the most chauvinistic of the bunch, the film is less his story than about the effects of his teachings — specifically, how years of ingesting hate speech takes a toll on Harrison as he enters into holy matrimony. (Marital advice from the boss: “Fuck her before she fucks you.”) That his fiancée, April (Danielle Lozeau, Werewolf Rising), would choose a life with Harrison given his résumé when she is devout to a virginity-intact degree is but one boulder of incredulity along Rossi’s road. Their honeymoon scene, just post-consummation, is set up as Misogynist’s emotional climax, yet feels like warmed-up leftovers from a high school playwrights’ competition. Unfortunately, most of the movie does.

Operating on a higher plane than his castmates, Briddell unequivocally commits to portraying the hateful, unpleasant, despicable Trevor (“Chow down on my cock. I didn’t unzip it to feel a breeze”). Yet the movie overflows with hateful, unpleasant, despicable characters; not even April is patchable for viewer sympathy.

In fact, until the out-of-place “where are they now?” coda, I was unable to tell whether writer/director/producer Rossi was decrying or enabling the very behavior his actors depict without filters. In more skilled hands, the intent would be clear; when it is not, the ending — indeed, the film’s purpose — simply does not deliver the message it believes it has. Misogynist isn’t so bad to stir up ill will — just indifference. —Rod Lott

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Following close on the stiletto heels of 2013’s Blood of 1000 Virgins, GrindhouseFlix’s first original feature, the jackbooted Nazithon: Decadence and Destruction emerges as the second. It, too, is a trailer collection brimming with no-frills fun and it, too, is directed by company head Charles Band, if hitting the “REC” button for host segments can be called direction. While Virgins wallowed in sexploitation, Nazithon naturally casts its eye on that most odious of psychotronic-film movements: Nazisploitation!

While we’re on the subject of odious, Nazithon is hosted in monotone by Michelle “Bombshell” McGee, a pseudo-celebrity known for her gnarly face tattoos, but only because she’s known for breaking up Sandra Bullock’s marriage. Having previously played an SS soldier in Band’s Puppet Master X: Axis Rising, Ian Roberts stands silently behind the heavily inked McGee, who appears all too comfortable in Nazi garb as she introduces each themed grouping of vintage previews. Many of the coming attractions sport interchangeable titles: SS Experiment Love Camp, SS Camp 5: Women’s Hell, Love Camp 7. The latter, per its trailer’s narrator, is “where women were used like cattle!”

Popular in the 1970s, such flicks prove tough sits, partly because of their subject matter, partly because they seem to incite audience pleasure in the torture of females, and partly because they’re just so damned boring. However, their hyperbolic ads show so much — including enough showering to dry one’s epidermis to Sahara levels — you’re left with no need to suffer through the actual experience. The exception may be the Ilsa saga (all four chapters of which are represented here), partly because they’re aware of their cheesy center, partly because of the eye-popping Dyanne Thorne and — with my 37-22-35-track mind, it merits repeating — partly because of the eye-popping Dyanne Thorne.

Showcasing more variety, Nazithon’s back half is better, starting with a section on neo-Nazis, which basically allows for the cross-pollination of the genre into the likes of blaxploitation (The Black Gestapo) and biker films (The Tormentors). The program’s pinnacle arrives at the home stretch, devoted to the goose-steps-meet-goose-bumps realm of supernatural Nazis, as exemplified by Ken Wiederhorn’s Shock Waves, Jean Rollin’s Zombie Lake and Jess Franco’s Oasis of the Zombies. —Rod Lott

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Sick of being sexually harassed by the boss, cat-food factory worker Karen Walker (Claudia Jennings, Gator Bait) impulsively quits and parlays her hot temper and hot bod into a career as a professional roller-derby skater. Despite never having played the sport before, she proves a natural. Despite proving a natural, she provokes jealousy as she zooms right past her fellow orange-jerseyed Avengers, literally and figuratively.

The Unholy Rollers is an odd-duck mix of the sports drama and producer Roger Corman’s hick-underdog comedies. Scripted by Corman regular Howard R. Cohen (Saturday the 14th), it asks us to believe that Karen could not only become a citywide star, but make “lots of money,” which she drops on new furniture, family and friends, and a car with a zebra-print hardtop. Yet we kind of believe it because director Vernon Zimmerman (Fade to Black) trusts viewers will topple head over heels for Jennings. She possesses such an all-American beauty and confidence, it’s difficult not to, even while taking note of the third-rate arena.

As depicted in this flick, roller derby is pro wrestling on wheels, complete with costumed heroes and villains, all of whom clutch cans of Coors as if water had yet to be invented. The skating sequences bring a real snap to the two-bit proceedings, and it is here that first-time editor Martin Scorsese demonstrates a touch of the genius to come.

Don’t mistake The Unholy Rollers for genius. Narratively, it’s a mess, braking for joke-tellling sessions that remind one of the opening spreads of Mad magazine’s movie parodies. The story threads abruptly culminate in a strange, downbeat ending of self-destruction that, like any of Karen’s brutish teammates, comes from nowhere to knock you out. It’s an easy watch, however, and it becomes clear that the film has more on its mind than exploitative elements; it checks through those as quick as it can in order to settle into a parable about the price of fame. —Rod Lott

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Thanks to director Luigi Scattini (Witchcraft ’70), it’s mondo movie time, sex kitten-style, as Jayne Mansfield (The Girl Can’t Help It) shimmies into Italy and serves up a projector’s worth of animal sacrifices and nude natives in her Capri Hilton hotel room. Fresh from conducting a study on man’s base emotion of lust around the world, “Dr. Jayne” has loads of documentary footage she can’t wait to unspool for her anthropology-professor audience of one (Carlo Kechler, The Ghost).

Among the footage captured by Jayne during her travels to the likes of China, Indonesia and the Philippines:
• a pig being slaughtered, screaming included;
• cockfighting roosters, complete with leg knives;
• an African beauty performing a topless hoochie-choochie dance, which “tends to excite the poor drummer, who is obliged to go on pounding his bongos”;
• a cheating wife being pelted with eggs; and
• another woman tested for adultery by a “supernatural python.” No worries, ladies — it only sinks its fangs into the whorish ones.

As Jayne and the professor review the footage, two superhorny bellhops (Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia, the very poor man’s Martin & Lewis) peek through the vent and keyhole and go through their crazy pratfall antics. Because she obliviously encourages it by appearing before them in various states of undress, from a baby-blue bath towel to tight black undies, they fantasize about Jayne as a belly dancer and a Hawaiian hula girl (while one of the guys dons — shudder — a leopard-print Speedo). Back in real life, to prove her point that men are essentially animals, she strips for the guys while the prof secretly watches from the closet. The more annoying of the two hotel ‘hops runs around like a orangutan by the time Ms. Mansfield has unhooked her bra, but like I can really talk. I do, however, claim to be more refined than the professor, since he transforms into a snarling werewolf.

With Primitive Love, the harmless sex comedy finally had merged with the noxious mondo genre. By the time of the picture, Mansfield’s career downshifted into his final, tragic phase, but the girl still looked fabulously hot, cellulite and all. More of the sex bomb would help quicken the pace of this goofy mash-up of a movie, not to mention my heart. One pretty much has to love her in order to even tolerate this. —Rod Lott

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Reefer Madness isn’t the only drug-hysteria film out there, you know. One year later, there was Assassin of Youth, another misguided anti-“marihuana” lecture disguised as entertainment that today, because of its misinformation and over-the-top histrionics, is entertainment.

As an opening newspaper headline screams, “AGED WOMAN KILLED,” leaving young, virginal, good girl Joan (Luana Walters, The Corpse Vanishes) in line to inherit her grandmother’s fortune. But what happens when she gets mixed up with the wrong crowd?

A reporter working undercover as a soda jerk is about to find out along with her. After the kids enjoy their malted milks, you see, they go out for a smokefest, which causes them to tell bad jokes, do swami dances and attack each other with butcher knives (whereas, in reality, pot simply causes people to eat snack foods, smell like damp basements and be under the severe delusion that The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a good movie). —Rod Lott

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