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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In retrospect, it seems amazing that writer/director Michael Tolkin was able to get The Rapture made. In the history of mainstream American filmmaking, it’s hard to come up with another example of a film that persuasively argues that even if the God worshipped by millions of evangelical Christians does exist, he/she/it is far too cruel and capricious to actually deserve their devotion.

In other words, this is definitely not Left Behind.

Mimi Rogers plays a bored telephone operator who has grown weary of her empty life of sexual promiscuity. Following a series of conversations and epiphanies, she becomes “born again” and convinces her lover (David Duchovny, with mullet) to join in her conversion. For a time, they are happy, but then he is killed by a disgruntled employee and she finds her faith tested by a series of signs from God that eventually convince her to murder her daughter.

Unable to kill herself, she is saved from imprisonment by the titular event, only to face the near-impossible choice of loving the deity who caused her so much pain or spending the rest of eternity in desolate isolation.

Tolkin largely gets away with the heavy-handedness of his thesis, thanks to dollops of near-exploitation levels of sex and violence, combined with very deliberate, almost dreamlike pacing. But the film ultimately succeeds thanks to Rogers’ amazing, career-defining performance, which allows us to understand the decisions her character makes from beginning to end, concluding with the most devastating act of cinematic defiance I’ve ever seen. —Allan Mott

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It’s hard to believe there was a time when the name Pia Zadora was on everyone’s quivering lips. For one moment in history, she was lauded as our nation’s highest female ideal, a growth-stunted pixie with a mischievous, Lolita-esque twinkle in her eye. She was the Megan Fox of her time — a time when our country was less judgmental about its objects of sexual fantasies. Today, she’s nothing more than another cultural oddity, a punch-line name best left for Trivial Pursuit questions and cameos in John Waters flicks, but she got her masterpiece in the Depression-era, depression-inducing melodrama Butterfly.

Zadora is the bee-stung-lipped Kady, a seductively wanton tween who surprises her estranged pop, Jess (Stacy Keach), one afternoon and proceeds to turn his life upside down as she offers him her own downside up. Yes, she teaches this gruff loner to love again — not in the life-affirming, “I want to be a better father!” kind of way, but more in the “I want to massage my daughter’s nubile breasts while I bathe her!” kind of way. To Kady and Jess, incest is the best way to pass time as they mine for ill-gotten silver. I personally would’ve just stuck to singing old slave spirituals, but then again, Zadora isn’t my nympho daughter.

Orson Welles shows up as a drunken judge and bloats all over the screen, delivering a wonderfully unintelligible performance that is so bitter and careless and drunk on Paul Masson, I doubt he knew the cameras were rolling. But maybe that’s just Matt Cimber’s charmingly free-flowing directorial style which, coincidentally, made him the Razzies’ pick for worst director that year. (That’s okay, Matt, the Razzies have been the stupidest award show since … well, ever. Consider the source.)

Watching Butterfly, you’re filled with wistful visions of Zadora’s unrealized promise. I say it’s about time for this little spitfire’s comeback, if only for a feature-length realization of her post-apocalyptic video for “When the Rain Begins to Fall.” I’m sure Jermaine Jackson would be down for it. And probably Cimber, too. —Louis Fowler

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