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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No sooner has this delightfully creepy children’s video began than a giant bear with a pleasant voice starts shaking his massive behind while singing a self-penned ditty about the benefits of “going potty.” One of the lyrics is “You’ll feel like a millionaire / When you pull up your underwear.” What correlation exists between financial independence and the ability to hike one’s briefs successfully to waist level is lost on me, but that’s really beside the point.

With Bear in the Big Blue House: Potty Time with Bear, what I should be most concerned about is that there is an obese bear who, although a total stranger, really wants to teach our children about proper anal usage, and his eagerness to do so just strikes me as — how to put this? — wrong and illegal in most of the 48 contiguous states.

As he plays checkers with a mouse who I think was named Tutter, Bear asks his little friend if he needs to use the bathroom. Tutter says no. Bear asks again. Tutter again declines. Undaunted (or perhaps blessed with the power of mind control), Bear asks yet again, practically willing a full intestinal tract on his rodent pal, so Tutter rushes off to the toilet to take a dump. We join Tutter on the pot as he tells Bear he won’t be much longer: “I just have to wipe!”

I never thought I’d see the day when a Jim Henson program would feature a puppet in mid-defecation, and not only that, but one that would use the word “wipe” as a verb, in a context that involved wadded-up two-ply and the risk of fecal contamination. But that day indeed came, and it was Dec. 8 — a date that will live in infamy.

Bear excuses himself upstairs, where another of his noticeably younger chums is engaged in voiding bodily waste. Bear joins this tot in the bathroom and they carry on a conversation while the little one has his pants ’round his ankles. And I really couldn’t watch any further. —Rod Lott

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The defining moment of KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park comes when drummer Peter Criss (aka Cat Man) first speaks aloud and the familiar Saturday-morning cartoon voice of male Wonder Twin Zan (Michael Bell) comes out of his mouth. It’s then that you realize this made-for-TV film:
1) was produced by Hanna-Barbara,
2) stars a bunch of people who really had no desire to be involved, and
3) is far more wonderful than we probably deserve.

Starring the world’s greatest terrible rock band of all time, the original members of KISS play themselves — with the fictional license that along with being unapologetic cash whores, they also each possess super powers, which they’ll need in order to stop the titular villain (a slumming Anthony Zerbe) who is turning amusement park customers into robotic slaves. The band is alerted to his evil doings by a pretty young fan named Melissa, (Deborah Ryan) who — in the film’s most fantastic and unrealistic contrivance — Gene Simmons doesn’t try to fuck.

Normally talented genre director Gordon Hessler (The Golden Voyage of Sinbad) couldn’t overcome the nonexistent budget and, as a result, the telefilm has an almost Ed Wood-ian level of unintentionally amusing shoddiness (i.e. Ace Frehley’s stunt double is clearly an overweight black man). Definitely not for the serious-minded, KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park is one of those nostalgia pieces whose glaring imperfections actually makes it far more lovable than a well-made film. —Allan Mott

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I have seen a lot of crazy shit in my life, but nothing prepared me for the utter insanity of Penitentiary director Jamaa Fanaka’s debut feature. Welcome Home Brother Charles (also known as Soul Vengeance) opens with a bizarre R&B/industrial theme while the camera scrolls over an African penis statue. Cut to local drug dealer Charlie (Marlo Monte) getting busted by a cop who just caught his wife with a black man, so instead of just booking Charlie, the cop tries to castrate him.

Charlie is sent to prison for three years where he has a frightening nightmare (told through black-and-white stills). After he’s released, the film becomes a “make the ghetto a better place” film, where Charlie does good in the neighborhood, getting a girlfriend out of prostitution and talking to his young brother about the dangers of gangs. But then, Charlie goes psycho and starts killing the honkies who put him in prison … with his magic penis.

I don’t know how and I don’t know why, but all of a sudden, Charlie’s member has the power to make white women go into a hypnotic trance and do his bidding. Once he has his enemy cornered, he simply takes off his pants and his dick grows bigger and bigger until it wraps itself around the judge’s neck, strangling him.

So, in other words, Welcome Home Brother Charles is one of the greatest films of all time. —Louis Fowler

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