Not based on the same-named Prince song in which the Prince of Funk meets her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine, Darling Nikki is a transparent allegory of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, dripping in Day-Glo.

As played by co-writer/co-producer Nicole D’Angelo, Nikki works on a sexy cooking show called Edible Desires. She’s kind of like its Vanna White, if Pat Sajak were allowed to put things in her mouth. She’s also a loving girlfriend to the brilliant Ethan (Donnie Darko’s James Duval, here for name value), who’s very busy working on “something with binary sound waves.” And she’s also a prostitute, whose madame (Elana Krausz, 2017’s Ghost House) talks to a dog statue in her backyard.

“I knew you’d be quite popular,” the madame says as Nikki tucks a dirty wad of foreign bills into her cleavage. “Your parents would be so proud. If only they could see you now.” Indeed! Cue the montage of Nikki with various johns and fellow ladies, engaging in group sex, drinking champagne, having tickle fights, dancing in lingerie, being denied slices of Hickory Farms salami and, most unfortunately for the viewer, eating creamed corn in extreme close-up.

After being violently raped and left foaming at the mouth by a “mean man” some people call Maurice (Steve Polites, 2017’s Dementia 13), Nikki stumbles into an alternate reality. She gets there from the bathtub, thanks to what looks like a basket of Spree, adorned with the note “EAT ME.” Each time she takes one, it sparkles, sending her consciousness down the rabbit hole and to a near-death drowning once she comes to. (The movie’s “DRINK ME” equivalent is a mystery green liquid: Absinthe? Listerine? Hi-C Ecto Cooler?)

In the dreamworld, Nikki is dressed as a scorching-hot vixen version of Disney’s animated Alice. There, she encounters a giggling cat man who licks milk and himself, watches guys in drag and uses the flying guillotine. Back in the real world, events are hardly more lucid: While a celebratory Ethan has cracked the riddle of whatever he’s been doing with those pesky binary sound waves, Nikki’s having a flashback-cum-breakdown over being forced to eat cat food.

As with the other works of enigmatic director Gregory Hatanaka (Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance), Darling Nikki marks an unofficial-family affair, using his regular players and co-conspirators; chief among them is the ambitious D’Angelo, increasingly a behind-the-scenes player in Hatanaka’s unnaturally prolific Cinema Epoch productions. She’s written herself a showcase for her striking beauty and an imaginative mind, but the story … well, that’s another story. So many ideas are presented to their own detriment, with none given enough attention to bear fruit — perhaps impossible in an abbreviated showtime of 62 minutes.

Put in simplest terms, it doesn’t make any sense. Viewers are given only a sliver of a chance to get their bearings before things go — in Nikki’s own words — “batshit mental-ward crazy.” As with Hatanaka/D’Angelo’s Heartbeat (one of seven collaborations in 2020 alone), overstuffing leads to delirium, as things that aren’t supposed to be funny are, and things that are supposed to be funny aren’t. That may have you wish to borrow another sentence or two from Nikki’s lips — namely, “Oh, enough of this nonsense. … How do I get out here?” — but please, resist that urge. Though baffling and quarter-baked it may be, an earnestness shines through akin to charm. Or something with binary sound waves. —Rod Lott

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One has to admire the guts and gusto of the gang behind Ingagi — or would admire if director William Campbell’s very idea and execution weren’t so, well, racist. It’s a historical curio nonetheless.

A color-tinted stew of ethnography and chicanery, the film purports to be a documentary of a 1926 African expedition by one Sir Hubert Winstead. In actuality, Ingagi not only was faked, but much of its safari footage stolen from another movie, which explains why those scenes are of much lesser resolution.

As the opening crawl of exposition informs audiences, Winstead has heard wild stories of a remote village in Africa whose tribesmen adhere to a most unusual yearly ritual: sacrificing a woman to a sex-mad gorilla, simply because they believe the gods demand it. The gods must be crazy! So Winstead and his fellow British explorers head to Africa to take some time to do the things they never had.

Upon arrival, they watch a beggar perform cigarette tricks and play three-card monte with eggs — all a mere prelude to the zoo-as-menu shenanigans on which the bulk of Ingagi is built, from warthogs to wildebeest. Animals encountered and/or hunted include crocodiles, zebras, elephants, leopards, deer, giraffes, ostriches, vultures, rhinos, armadillos, hyenas and fairly tame impala. Many, if not most, of these creatures are killed, with retrieval of the bodies left to Winstead’s native “boys.” Maybe it’s my chronic back pain, but dragging a dead hippo looks like quite the chore.

We also witness a python denied a lunch of lemur, as well as Winstead’s crew setting traps for little monkeys; when one is caught, narrator Louis Nizor chuckles with a tinge of cruelty, “What a duffer!” (Nizor, who fulfilled similar duties a year later for Campbell’s follow-up, Nu-Ma-Pu – Cannibalism, is highly opinionated throughout, remarking on “grotesque baboons” and outright declaring, “Rhinos are stupid beasts.”) For good measure, they “discover” a new animal they dub the “tortadillo,” which is a tortoise affixed with phony wings and tail, looking not unlike a Pokémon precursor.

Infamously, Ingagi’s climax depicts Winstead’s cameramen catching footage of that fabled gorilla nabbing a topless native woman for some interspecies hanky-panky. The big ape is played by none other than Charles Gemora, who donned such a suit in more than 50 movies, including The Gorilla and Island of Lost Souls. After more than an hour of buildup, the sequence is deflating to expectations — fitting for what amounts to a no-taste National Geographic special and forebearer of the mondo mockumentary. —Rod Lott

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Multiple reasons may exist for a carnival sideshow’s use of garish paintings and a curtain to curtail peeks from the ticketless, but I’m only interested in the most obvious: Because you don’t get what you pay for.

Legendary B-movie director Fred Olen Ray (Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers) knows this; in fact, he literally wrote the book on it. Amplified by the barker’s ballyhoo, the sideshow posters outside the tent promised one thing and delivered another on the other side of the admission booth: something always lesser, often phony. For example, what was depicted as a giant spider with a human woman’s head actually would be — zut alors! — an illusion achieved by the lady sticking her head through a prop atop of a web of rope, with everything below her neck concealed.

Which brings us to Ray’s carnival-set Spidora. Its key art and tagline — hell, its very title — prime the viewer for a fanciful, “eight-legged love story” of this so-called spider woman. This is not that.

As much of a con as the shows it emulates, this is about Princess Marina, the Lobster Girl (the Amy Adams-esque Megan Sheehan), she of the claws for hands. Now, she does don a mask to moonlight as Spidora, which we get in one all-too-brief scene. But the rest? The rest is Marina and the smitten, Shakespeare-quoting suitor (Bobby Quinn Rice from Ray’s Super Shark) who’s a regular to the Museum of the Weird, Strange and the Unexpected. (Try fitting that on a ticket.)

Ray’s affection for the state-fair “freak show” is evident and reverent, given the sheer amount of coverage allotted to Marina’s act, the introductions of the top-hatted host (Jerry Lacey, TV’s Dark Shadows), the coat hanger swallower (Grindsploitation’s Krystal Pohaku) and the fire dancer (Crystal Marie) who twirls nary a tassel, but lighted wicks dangling from her pasties.

Less-exotic-sounding subject switcheroo notwithstanding, more to interested parties’ detriment is Spidora’s running time, misleadingly labeled at “Approx 90 Minutes.” That number is accurate if you include — and the Retromedia Entertainment DVD does — 1952’s notorious Chained for Life among the bonus features. Separated from that vehicle for conjoined sisters Daisy and Violet Hilton, Spidora runs a pat 15 minutes, which is not enough time to achieve anything but a start. Ray may not have had the funding to expand the short into a full film, but he definitely had the story, however unexplored. —Rod Lott

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The retro tribute Le Choc du Futur ends with an onscreen note of thanks to the unheralded women who were pioneers of electronic music in the 1970s, with a list of names that should be immediately written on a piece of paper and taken to your nearest record store to search.

Translated The Shock of the Future, the French film details a day in the life of Ana (Alejandro’s granddaughter Alma Jodorowsky) and her obsession with 70s-era equipment — especially a then-state-of-the-art beat machine — in the attempt to make a commercial jingle. She never gets around to it, instead making a killer disco tune instead.

As she does this, Choc details the constant barriers women faced in that burgeoning age of electronic music, most notably the way every guy, though he seems to take her seriously, wants a sexual favor in return. And while I’m sure not much has changed on that front, the way Ana perseveres is actually quite inspiring.

Directed by French composer Marc Collin and written with Elina Gakou Gomba, Le Choc du Futur portrays Ana as an anachronistic music geek with definite opinions that wouldn’t seem out of place at a Saturday-afternoon record store argument, especially when she’s decrying how, staring in the face of an electronic frontier, rock and roll is dead.

At the time, no matter how short-lived that time was, she might have been right, too. —Louis Fowler

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Everyone’s favorite husky Mexican wrestler with a mask, a cape and the ability to put wolfmen in headlocks like no other — El Santo, in case I didn’t narrow it down enough for you — is celebrated with this bone-crunchin’ compilation of his greatest triumphs, both in and out of the ring.

Honest talk: I started to find the in-ring footage tedious, as there’s only so much wrestling my brain can take before shuttering operations.

The out-of-ring stuff, however, gives this Something Weird Video assemblage its delirious kick: Santo fights fanged babes; Santo tackles zombies; Santo packs a wallop to a slow-moving, human-eating blob — all in scenes from such south-of-the-border exploits as Santo vs. the Vampire Women, Santo vs. the TV Killer and Santo vs. the Diabolical Hatchet.

As you may infer from the second half of Viva Santo and His Pals’ title, friends occasionally show up. One such pal, Blue Demon, joins in the creature-hunting, back-cracking fun of Santo and Blue Demon vs. the Monsters.

If the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences ever see it fit to award Santo a Lifetime Achievement Oscar (and they won’t), the clips have already been selected, and they’re all here in this two-hour collection. —Rod Lott

Get it at dvdrparty.