Satan in High Heels‘ titular devil isn’t really Satan; it’s just that, in 1962 (as in 2013), putting the C-word in a title was verboten.

And Stacey Kane (former pin-up girl Meg Myles) is certainly that. At the start, she’s a burlesque dancer for a two-bit carnival that can’t pay her what her 42-24-36 frame is worth. Salvation of sorts arrives in the form of her twitchy, supposedly sober, no-good ex-husband and his fistful of cash. She takes the latter and leaves the former waiting in her trailer, thinking she’s gone to gather her things so they can run off together. Whatta sap!

Instead, Stacey takes her smoky (and smoker’s) voice to a New York club where she can perform with her chords, not her cans. And this is all before the opening credits! Upon arrival at said club, she wows its manager, Pepe (Grayson Hall, Dr. Julia Hoffman of TV’s Dark Shadows), with her pipes. And with her pulchritude, she also wows the club’s owner (Mike Keene, Violent Midnight) … and the owner’s son (Robert Yuro, The Shakiest Gun in the West). Not a problem; she can screw (over) both.

If it wasn’t director Jerald Intrator’s intent to shoot Satan in Bounce-O-Vision, he sure lucked out. (But since he also helmed Striporama, I’m guessing it was planned.) He has no discernible style, letting Myles’ figure do much of the work. Her tired face suits her character well, showing lots of mileage. While she’s not a great actress, she belts well; her most memorable musical number is singing “The Female of the Species,” all while clad in a leather get-up — complete with riding crop — that would satisfy many a fetishist.

Speaking of, the moral of the story seems to be that guys will put up with an awful lot for access to a killer pair of breasts. This is true. —Rod Lott

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With his bald head and flaring nostrils, the world-renowned Dr. Henry J. Heimlich looks like Sid Caesar on a bender and sounds like Christopher Walken, eerie phrasing and all. Thus, it’s tough to take him as competent, especially when in the first scene, he straddles a woman lying on the floor, pushes on her chest and calls it “an act of love.”

I don’t care if he did create the life-saving Heimlich Maneuver; in Dr. Heimlich’s Home First-Aid Video, he is simultaneously scary and dubious. If a person’s choking, there’s Henry, talking about pressure on the diaphragm, and coming up from behind to wrap his slimy tentacles around some innocent young woman.

The other people in this made-for-VHS instructional video are even stranger. In the section on wood splinters, some wimp dumps his load of logs as if he’d just had a massive coronary. On animal bites, some simpleton prods the face of a German shepherd with a twig. A toddler is shown gnawing away on an electric cord.

The tape gets grislier as it goes on, with shots of severely blistered arms, as well as a prodigious flow of blood from a little girl’s knee; the latter proves quite touching, as her mother consoles her: “See the blood, dear? See how it flows?” Taking the proverbial cake, however, is the oaf who somehow manages to drop an open container of drain cleaner onto his face. Aaaiiieeeee!

Henry ends his First-Aid Video by telling the viewer not to pick his or her nose. —Rod Lott

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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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