Is it too much for a man to ask to get him some Xmas lovin’? This here Happy Holiday Hearth is like having a fireplace on your TV, know what I’m sayin’? That’s the whole plot: There’s a fire and it burns.

And since fires are s’posed to be, like, all romantic and shit, I done put it in the player, hoping I’d get me a little sumthin’ sumthin’ with my girl. But she just laughed at it. And even though the Happy Holiday Hearth peoples done made it so one can manipulate the audio to be cracklin’ logs, Christmas music or cracklin’ logs and Christmas music, she didn’t want no bonin’! Bah, humbug. —Rod Lott

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Townies is a sleazy flick about a group of strange characters in a town called Schlarb, Ohio. (Imagine a black-and-white Hal Hartley film cast with recently discharged mental patients.) Scharb is a nice enough little town, but is suddenly being overrun by weirdos, freaks and goons. In true B-movie tradition, it is these freaks and goons that are the heroes of the piece. It’s the “normals” that you have to watch out for.

Director Wayne Alan Harold (Killer Nerd) introduces his ensemble, then moves briskly into the story, which includes necrophilia, martial arts, kidnapping and squirrel-eating. Townies definitely evokes early, rough-around-the-edges John Waters works, but retains its own sensibility.

While the movie is filled with bizarre characters and disgusting situations, Harold somehow manages to inject quite a bit of actual drama and emotion into the film. Clocking in at a mere 71 minutes, it moves at a brisk pace and never has a chance to get boring.

Townies was shot on a budget of $300, and serves as a great example of overcoming all kinds of limitations, especially budgetary. It has a completely stripped-down, grainy look. But the characters are interesting, the locations look like they’ve been carefully chosen, the movie is very well directed and it’s actually funny! Most of the time, I can’t even watch low-budget DV movies. I’m never “caught up” in them, like a viewer should be. I didn’t have that problem with Townies at all. It’s gross, humorous and even a little touching at times. —Ed Donovan

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Certainly it’s no accident that Sam Fuller set the powerhouse opening of The Naked Kiss on the Fourth of July, because it’s full of fireworks. Prostitute Kelly (Constance Towers) swings punches toward the camera, and that’s even before her pimp rips off her wig to reveal a bald scalp beneath. The visual manliness suits the whoop-ass she delivers. Once he’s knocked out cold, she takes the $75 she’s owed, reassembles herself and leaves.

Two years later, Kelly steps off the bus into the idyllic town of Grantville, and right into bed with an eager customer, asshole Capt. Griff (Anthony Eisley, The Wasp Woman). Immediately, she swears to go straight. Instead of enlisting at the whorehouse across the river, she lands a job she loves, working with handicapped children at an orthopedics hospital. She also falls in love with the town playboy philanthropist Grant (Michael Dante, Willard), who’s Griff’s best bud; equally smitten, Grant proposes marriage.

Can life be happily ever after for Kelly? Are you kidding? This is Sam Fuller we’re talking about here, and The Naked Kiss is not only his follow-up to the previous year’s Shock Corridor, but thematically, its first cousin. They share an overall strange vibe, as if a regular noir film got slipped a mickey, and a shocking-for-their-time subplot of deviant sexuality.

Only several jarring edits make Kiss the technically inferior work, but Towers being put front and center elevates this into the superior territory for me. Giving one hell of a performance that should have earned her an Oscar nomination, she supplies just the right amount of honor and histrionics. Kelly is not a “hooker with a heart of gold” character, either, but one who leaves Grantville with far more baggage than she brought. —Rod Lott

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Here’s what you get in 42nd Street Forever, Synapse Films’ first in a series of trailer compilations: flesh, blood, women, terror, an undertaker, his pals, nude nuns, killer ‘shrooms, crippled masters, centerfold girls, chicks with dicks, werewolves on wheels, pink angels, creampuffs, a post-apocalyptic decapitation and much, much more. As the clip for Starcrash warns, “You are about to be HURLED …”

In the mondo movie Secret Africa, a narrator intones almost gleefully, “A baby girl is scarred … for beauty!” Uniquely, a double feature of The Blood Spattered Bride and I Dismember Mama is presented as a faux news report, complete with mention of the “Up Chuck Cup” gimmick. Confessions of a Summer Camp Counselor is one of those colorful sex comedies from the UK that the book Keeping the British End Up: Four Decades of Saucy Cinema rendered with such infectious nostalgia. Wicked, Wicked pits Tiffany Bolling against a slasher in a hotel employee uniform, in a little somethin’ called “anamorphic Duovision”: “Twice the action! Twice the excitement!”

This debut volume is heavy on the lost art of ’70s porn trailers, which make adult films like The 3Dimensions of Greta look (almost) downright respectable. Another 3-D one is Hard Candy, starring The Lollipop Girls and John Holmes, who tells (warns?) viewers that they “can now sit under the shadow of my long schlong.” Panorama Blue touts being “shot in 70mm super widescreen/Panoramascope” while a couple makes out on a moving roller coaster, stripping until they’re fully nude. Don’t forget The Italian Stallion, starring a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone as Stud; all they can show here is Sly romping in the snow and playing on a jungle gym. (That’s not a euphemism.)

More names can be found in Corruption, with Peter Cushing as a ladykiller (the illegal kind); Ginger, starring Cheri Caffaro as the titular “goddamn dick-teasing bitch”; Super Fuzz with Terence Hill as the super cop who sees red; and Destroy All Monsters with Godzilla and the whole damn gang. Destroy all your plans for the next two hours and eight minutes when you slide this disc into your player. —Rod Lott

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With multiple directors tackling different stories set within one iconic world city, Tokyo! is just like New York, I Love You or Paris, je t’aime but watchable and winning. Well, for a hair more than half the time, at least, which beats the other passport-anthology films handily.

Up first is the best, Michel Gondry’s “Interior Design,” in which an aspiring filmmaker (Ryo Case) and his supportive but ignored girlfriend (Ayako Fujitani of the ’90s Gamera revival films) crash in the tiny Tokyo apartment of her pal (Ayumi Ito, Gantz II: Perfect Answer) while in town for his screening. When their transitionary lives prove too much for her to handle, the would-be director’s neglected partner undergoes an out-of-left-field change to feel useful, but I won’t spoil what. I will, however, hereby forgive Monsieur Gondry for The Green Hornet, based upon the infectious charm and creativity of this captivating short.

Why is it that most triptych flicks seem to place the weakest segment in the middle? Such is the case with “Merde.” From Leos Carax (Pola X), it concerns the titular creature (Denis Lavant) who has all of Tokyo in a tizzy. He’s a milky-eyed, manhole-dwelling mutant who steals crutches from the handicapped and throws cigarette butts at babies. The initial scenes, clearly taking a page or two from Godzilla, are funny. Then, with a court scene that feels like actual jury duty, it grows interminable. I wanted to commit seppuku.

Finally, there’s the partly successful “Shaking Tokyo” by Joon-ho Bong (The Host). The tale centers on a hermit (Teruyuki Kagawa, Sukiyaki Western Django) who hasn’t left his home in 10 years. His life is all about ordering pizza, reading magazines and falling asleep while defecating. He hates contact with people and sunlight. The idea is intriguing, both in the movie and real life; on many a frenzied day, I could go for a solitary agenda of pizza and pooping. Who’s with me? —Rod Lott

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