Action

The Treasure of Jamaica Reef (1974)

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Underwater photography is the true star of The Treasure of Jamaica Reef, a pleasingly tame action-adventure about San Diego professionals who quit their day jobs to go hunting for rumored sunken gold in the Caribbean. The guys are played by The Oscar’s Stephen Boyd, future MGM exec David Ladd and a Wolfman Jack-bearded Chuck Woolery, right before achieving fame on the tube as the host of a new game show called Wheel of Fortune. Rounding out the quartet is a feisty blonde named Zappy (Cheryl Ladd, then Stoppelmoor and three years from joining Charlie’s Angels).

First-time director Virginia L. Stone (Run If You Can) takes an A-to-Z, near-documentary approach on getting our heroes to the ocean — for example, showing them negotiating to buy an old truck shaped like a wine barrel. Along the way they meet surfer-dude teen Darby (Darby Hinton, Malibu Express), who aids them in a chase in which Zappy hangs onto the luggage rack of a thief’s speeding car, and teddy-bear boat captain Rosey Grier (Skyjacked), who does not.

By the time the team is piloting small-prop planes and surveying the ocean floor from the comfort of a glass-bottomed raft, it hit me: The Treasure of Jamaica Reef plays as if based on the Fisher-Price Adventure People toy line, perhaps from a 9-year-old’s thunked-up outline. It’s certainly that sexless, with Mrs. Ladd in not only an overly modest bikini, but the same bikini day to day to day. As her character’s name hints, Zappy is presented as more kid sister than sex object, with Stone’s camera more interested in what lies beneath sea level. Unlike most B movies, Reef’s underwater footage is neither muddy, stock nor faked, so at the very least, viewers can appreciate local flavor galore.

When Jaws busted blocks the next year, the producers presumably kicked themselves for not having sharks in their film. Wrangling Boyd back, they shot bookends that graft a new plot of a cursed treasure map, and added some gore, some sex and, most importantly, some sharks. The resulting waterlogged mess was rechristened Evil in the Deep. No word if, per the poster, anyone’s nerves were ripped to shreds, but the 2.0 ending is an absolute hoot. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Porky’s II: The Next Day (1983)

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In 1971, Indigenous people cheered as the half-Native superhero Billy Jack womped whitey across the face with his bare foot. But, sadly, it was over a decade until we were given another group of cinematic heroes, this time in the form of the horny teens of Porky’s II: The Next Day.

That’s right: Porky’s II: The Next Day.

Whereas the original is a veritable cum-storm of sex jokes, sex pranks and sex gags, writer and director Bob Clark decided that, the next day, these turned-on teens should get educated on the non-erect real world by introducing religious hypocrisy, political lies and racial discrimination to their lustful lives. And, like morning wood, it actually works.

After a long night of destruction and demolition to Porky’s swamp-water roadhouse, the lovable louts return to Angel Beach High School to — what else? — join the drama club’s production of various Shakespearian works. This garners the attention of a fire-and-brimstone preacher who considers the Bard a sinful sonuvabitch.

Soon enough, the Ku Klux Klan gets their pointy hats involved when they find out that, in a recreation of Romeo and Juliet’s famed balcony scene, the movement’s Montague will be played by John Henry (Joseph Runningfox), a full-blooded Seminole. One night, these white supremacists beat him bad, as well as fire up a cross to add insult to injury.

While they’re dealing with the religious zealots — oh, yeah, and a scheming politico who attempts to make it with a 16-year-old girl — the lascivious lot manage to capture the Klan and, with the help of the entire Seminole tribe, strip the xenophobes and shave their heads before parading them nude in front of the preacher’s anti-Shakespeare rally in front of the school.

What’s so remarkable about all this is how respectful the Seminole people are depicted onscreen in a lesser-known sequel to a notorious sex comedy, more realistically than possibly any social-justice film of the era. While the strip-and-shave scenario is, of course, thought up by the young masturbators, the way the Indigenous community stands behind Henry is remarkable, as well as the fact Clark cast real Natives for the numerous background roles.

But if you’re a racist and like dated wanking material, don’t worry; this sex-filled sequel is still packed with pervy pranks like a hot-to-trot graveyard girl, a snake directed straight toward Ms. Balbricker’s vagina and a randy sexpot who inexplicably vomits from her bouncy boobs in a fancy nightclub. —Louis Fowler

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Thriller

The Death of Ocean View Park (1979)

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Whenever the golden age of disaster movies is discussed, 1977’s Rollercoaster often gets mentioned, which is weird, because it’s not a disaster movie. Perhaps people are confusing it with The Death of Ocean View Park? Although both were shot at Virginia’s real-life Ocean View Amusement Park, only the film sharing that name counts, beginning with a hurricane and ending with explosions aplenty.

Made for ABC prime time, The Death of Ocean View Park casts Mike Connors (Too Scared to Scream) as Sam Jackson (!), second-gen manager and one-time owner of the titular theme park now belonging to money-hungry developer Tom Flood. Played by Meteor man Martin Landau in full Murray Hamilton mode, Flood’s not about to let a little tropical hurricane and all its after-effects put the kibosh on Ocean View’s big Fourth of July event — for God’s sake, he’s already booked the Bee Gees!

But Jackson’s just Got a Feeling, which telepic director extraordinaire E.W. Swackhamer (Terror at London Bridge) accentuates more than once with a pan or cut to a “GAS LINE” sign posted at ground level of The Rocket. That’s the park’s coaster: 50 years old, wooden, rickety, shaky AF and, come Act 3, containing his new girlfriend (Caroline McWilliams, TV’s Benson) as a reluctant rider — what could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, the cotton candy counter’s ugly-duckling attendant (Geostorm’s Mare Winningham) is wooed by a socially super-awkward Navy sailor on shore leave (Alligator’s Perry Lang) just so the movie can strand them toward the Ferris wheel’s tippy-top for the climax. Elsewhere, one employee’s pregnant wife (Diana Canova, TV’s Soap) starts having terrifying nightmares and daytime visions of full-blown panic at the park, which her hub (James Stephens, Mysterious Two) coldly dismisses as the result of “sausage and onion pizza,” just so the movie can call him in on his day off — and, therefore, in mortal danger — to fix what is apparently the park’s only popcorn machine!

The precog subplot sticks out for having nowhere to go beyond the obvious foreshadowing and inspiring the plot of Final Destination 3. It also wrongly puts the viewer in the frame of mind to accept supernatural forces at play. A subsequent scene admits as much by suggesting the park has a mind of its own, as a few boys sneak in one night for an after-hours joy ride that goes wildly berserk — yet that angle is abandoned right then and there.

No worries, folks, all the movie’s machinations are the work of Mother Nature and her Physics 101 syllabus, and Swackhamer saves the biggest for last as the park is destroyed — hardly a spoiler since the name of the film promises just that. In real life, the aforementioned wooden coaster was set to be demolished, so Playboy Productions had a movie written around that. (Yes, that Playboy, although you wouldn’t know it; the only concession to Hef’s Playboy Philosophy is a beauty contest of swimsuited ladies Jackson is tasked with judging.)

To witness the Rocket basically take its own name to heart is impressive — the kind of production value any cost-conscious project would skirt union rules to get. And not only that, but unlike amusement parks nowadays, it’s a lot of fun. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway (2019)

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Over the past couple of decades, I think we can all agree two of the best cinematic examples of total mind-fucks have been The Matrix and Inception, right? At least that’s what Entertainment Weekly told me recently.

That being said, I’m pretty sure the Ethiopian flick Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway has them both beat and beaten badly with intense imagination and general weirdness that puts those multimillion tentpoles to increasing shame with each subsequent viewing.

In the far future of a retro world, Special Agent Gagano (deformed actor Daniel Tadesse) is assigned to virtually enter the Psychobook — this universe’s version of the Internet — and try to stop the destructive computer virus called the Soviet Union. After a double-cross or two, Gagano finds himself trapped in the dusty mainframe.

Traveling through the virtual world of New Ethiopia, the pizza-loving Gagano continually tries to wake up and find his way back to his wife, a blonde giantess, to keep his promise of helping her open a kickboxing academy. As an Irish-accented Stalin and corrupt hero Batfro try at every turn to stop him, once he realizes the power of the world he’s in, he becomes unstoppable, with the help of the titular Jesus.

I think.

Expat director Miguel Llanso, cherry-picking from the best (worst?) of 1970s pop culture, from Filipino kung-fu to dystopic Philip K. Dick novels, has crafted a beautifully tacky world for his cast to play in, with the enigmatic Tadesse doing most of the surreal heavy lifting. Jesus is Afro-futurism sci-fi at its best, a future awash in the flotsam of the past and the jetsam of an unpredictable psyche. —Louis Fowler

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Thriller

Night of the Bloody Transplant (1970)

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Flint, Michigan’s renowned coronary specialist, Dr. James Arnold (Cal Seely), could be having a better week. The international medical community is skeptical of his research into heart transplants. His molasses-slow elderly benefactor, Mrs. Woodruff (Roz Kramer), is threatening to freeze funds if she doesn’t see results before her heart sputters out. And back home, his coulda-been-a-contender brother, Tom Arnold (!), is allowing his rentable tramps to raid the doc’s liquor cabinet.

Things look up when Tom (Dick Grimm) accidentally kills some broad, giving Dr. Arnold a chance to take that girl’s ticker and give it to Mrs. Woodruff. Cue the title: Night of the Bloody Transplant, which we see in about two minutes of footage of an actual open-heart surgery. Never mind that it doesn’t match; how a 20-something woman suddenly has the chest of an 80-year-old man is not on director David W. Hanson’s mind.

What is, one assumes, is stealing wholesale from Mexico’s then-recent Night of the Bloody Apes and hitting the magical feature-length mark. With no working knowledge of plot, Hanson (whose only other pic is sexploitation’s Judy) packs a whole lot of nothing into 71 minutes, with such filmed-in-full bar entertainments as several crooned songs, body-painting performance art and a hoochie-coochie striptease down to the pasties.

Although a few scene transitions verge on cleverness, Hanson has little business operating a camera, just as his all-amateur cast has no business standing in front of one. Given its nonexistent sound mix and predominance of wood paneling, Transplant reeks of smut, but isn’t. More crime film than horror, it also isn’t on the level of Herschell Gordon Lewis, following the man’s low-budget template of gore, but ignoring the knowing sense of humor that usually overcame all technical deficiencies. —Rod Lott

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