TWISTED SEX VOL. 1 (1994) ****

Something Weird delivered a home run with this eye-popping bonanza of sexploitation trailers.  It contains more sleaze and depravity than you can shake a stick at.  Among the subgenres included are women in prison (Stefania), cheesecake model movies (Bunny Yeager’s Nude Las Vegas), nudie cuties (The Imp-Probable Mr. Weegee), roughies (The Hookers), nudist camp pictures (Girls Come Too), classy softcore fare (The Libertine), and Italian giallo thrillers (Bad Girls). 

Some of these titles may be familiar to you if you’re a fan of Something Weird releases (like Satan’s Bed starring none other than a pre-John Lennon Yoko Ono as “The virgin bride from the Orient!”), but there are a staggering number of movies here I have never heard of.  Trust me when I say I added a good dozen or so films to my watchlist after seeing them advertised here.  Twisted Sex Vol. 1 also gives us a tantalizing glimpse at a handful of lost movies.  The awesome looking MME Olga’s Massage Parlor (part of the Olga series) and the sexploitation flick A Weekend with Strangers (which is notable for being the film debut of Re-Animator’s David Gale) may be lost to time, but at least a few minutes of those films live on here in trailer form. 

Another highlight is Censored, a Barry Mahon flick that purports to show uncensored scenes that were too steamy for the general public, but it was in actuality a clever marketing gimmick.  Another Mahon production is the early transgender flick I was a Man that looks to be the missing link between Glen or Glenda and Let Me Die a Woman.  There’s also a trailer for a low budget skin flick called The King which features a potentially amazing scene where a woman has lesbian sex while wearing a Bela Lugosi mask.  The preview for Watch the Birdie is backed to the swinging sounds of “The Bird is the Word” by Rocky Roberts and the Airedales (which was also featured in the immortal the Wild Wild World of Jayne Mansfield) and contains an incredible looking death by toilet scene. 

There are also plenty of great taglines along the way.  Among my favorites were My Body Hungers (“See a sexual assault of a young girl in its entirety!”), Vapors (“Filmed by the new leader in underground filmmaking, Andy Milligan!”), and All Woman (“A bold look at Freudian realism!”).  All in all, this is one of Something Weird’s best trailer compilations, which is really saying something. 

The complete trailer rundown is as follows: The Immoral, Stefania, Strange Compulsion, The Weird Lovemakers, a double feature of Pussycats Paradise and A Trip Around the World, Bunny Yeager’s Nude Las Vegas, A Story of Eight Girls, The Imp-Probable Mr. Weegee, Forbidden Beauties, Nudes on the Rocks (AKA:  50,000 B.C. Before Clothing), Satan’s Bed, MME Olga’s Massage Parlor, Censored, A Good Time with a Bad Girl, My Body Hungers, The Hookers, Vapors, I was a Man, The Tomcat, All Woman, Submission, The Warm, Warm Bed, Ride the Wild Pink Horse, The King, Watch the Birdie, My Third Wife George, Girls Come Too, The Orgy of the Golden Nudes (AKA:  Honeymoon of Horror), Sextet, Tassle-a-Go-Go, Fanny Hill Meets Lady Chatterley, The Libertine, Camille 2000, Fanny Hill Meets the Red Baron, I a Woman Part 2, Fuego, The Brutes, A Weekend with Strangers, Bad Girls, The Girl Grabbers, Women for Sale, The Rape Killer, and Girl in Room 2A. 

JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH (2025) **

Jurassic World:  Rebirth is a tired and uninspired remix of Universal’s durable dinosaur franchise.  It’s the seventh entry in the series, and the cliches are beginning to feel as old as the dinosaurs themselves.  Even the original screenwriter David Koepp was unable to breathe life into this one.  (Incredibly enough, this is the third turd Koepp has written this year after the forgettable Presence and the weak Black Bag.)

This time, a greedy Big Pharma jackass (Rupert Friend) hires a mercenary (Scarlett Johansson) and her team to go to one of the Jurassic Park testing islands and retrieve blood samples from some dinosaurs that he can use to wipe out heart disease or some shit.  This set-up feels more like cut scenes from a video game.  In the first level, they have to find a dinosaur in the sea.  The second level, they need a dinosaur from the land.  And in the third, they have to contend with dinosaurs in the air. 

Adding to the movie’s woes is the subplot about a family who becomes shipwrecked on the island.  The crosscutting back and forth between Scar Jo and her team with the family in peril causes the film to lose much of its momentum.  I think either of these plots could have worked on their own.  (Think Swiss Family Robinson, but with dinosaurs.)  Having both just bogs things down. 

One of the biggest disappointments is the dinosaurs themselves.  About halfway through the movie, someone mentions that the island is supposedly inhabited by mutant dinosaurs, but they mostly look like the same shit we’ve seen in the other movies.  The “big bad” dino just looks like he’s got a big scrotum on his forehead.  He only shows up for the last reel though and is kind of underwhelming. 

Not only does the movie recycle elements and scenarios from the previous Jurassic Park movies, it rips off other Steven Spielberg films like Jaws (the whole mosasaurus sequence), E.T. (a little girl feeds a creature candy), and the Spielberg-produced Gremlins (said girl carries a baby dinosaur around in her backpack).  It’s also a shame that the film conveniently writes off the lone intriguing element from the Jurassic World series (the humans being forced to share the planet with the dinosaurs) by having most of the dinosaurs dying off or fleeing to the equator.  Because of that, the film feels more like a reboot than a continuation.  Put another way, Rebirth is more like an afterbirth. 

TEENAGE BIKERS (1977) ***

Teenage Bikers begins with a scene of people riding motorcycles set to the tune of “Born to Be Wild”.  (Easy Rider eat your heart out!).  Then the plot begins.  And by “plot”, I mean ‘70s porn stars wearing denim vests fuck while surrounded by biker paraphernalia. 

First, we see everyone’s favorite hardcore lunatic Jamie Gillis banging a biker mama in a public restroom.  Then, Vanessa del Rio gets so hot and horny that she begs a biker to fuck her in the ass.  Meanwhile, Bobby Astyr is getting busy bumping uglies with his old lady. 

These scenes might’ve worked better had the filmmakers allowed them to play out from start to finish as three separate sequences.  Instead, they cut back and forth between the three couplings, which kind of lessens the impact.  Then again, the fact that Gillis’ scene culminates with him receiving a golden shower and del Rio’s begins with her pulling a chain out of her pussy (And I don’t mean like a slim necklace or something.  I’m talking about some heavy-duty Jacob Marley-type shit.), they are, at the very least, memorable.

While Aster’s scene is far less noteworthy, the next sequence where he bangs del Rio and his girlfriend on the back of his hog is good for a hearty laugh or two.  That’s mostly because it’s set to the tune of the theme from Shaft.  At first, you may think it’s weird to steal this particular needle drop as Astyr is not a black private dick (although he is a sex machine to at least a few of the chicks).  It’s not until you realize that a majority of the scene focuses on Astyr’s shaft being sucked, that it begins to make some kind of sense. 

There’s also a great bit where a biker babe dreams about looking at a poster of Peter Fonda from Easy Rider when Gillis and another guy crash their motorcycle through the wall and proceed to double team her. 

One complaint I had is that it ends with the bikers going to an orgy that is never shown.  Oh, and no one in the cast looks remotely close to being a teenager.  Maybe that’s why the alternate title, Sex Bikers is more prevalent.  These problems are minor in the long run though.  If sex and motorcycles are your thing, then Teenage Bikers will likely rev your engine. 

AKA:  Sex Bikers.  AKA:  Young Bikers.

SEX-O-PHRENIA (1970) ***

Rene Bond stars as a lonely housewife who is suffering from cripplingly powerful sexual fantasies.  Whenever she just thinks about sex, she has to strip down and pleasure herself.  After her husband spurns her sexual advances, she goes out and picks up a wino from the gutter and brings him back to their garage to bang.  When he fails to satisfy her, Rene uses his wine bottle to get off!  Later, she seduces her next-door neighbor on the kitchen floor, but much to his chagrin, his wife catches them in the act.  Bond then further spirals headlong into a sexual frenzy with little hope of finding a cure. 

Sex-O-Phrenia is a surprisingly fun skin flick that is packed with amusing moments.  Things kick off with a funny opening when a doctor miraculously appears in Bond’s living room and addresses the audience about her titular condition.  There’s also an odd scene where the camera keeps cutting away from Bond making love to two dead roaches. 

Bond gives an excellent performance in this.  She’s equally good during her dramatic scenes where she is trying to get her disinterested husband to notice her as she is in her sex scenes.  Speaking of which, there’s a hot scene where Bond uses a vibrator while having a sexual fantasy.  I also thought it was a nice touch that whenever she is in the grips of her sexual compulsion, she is shown wearing Raggedy Ann-inspired make-up.  Fans of Bond will definitely want to give this a look as she is practically the whole show. 

It looks like it was at one time a hardcore porno, but some sneaky bastard took a pair of scissors to it and cut it all up.  (Well, there are some fleeting glimpses of near-hardcore footage.)  The relatively scant fifty-seven-minute running time kind of supports that theory.  It’s not any kind of forgotten classic by any means, but it is nice that the filmmakers attempted to at least broach the psychological aspects of sexual desire instead of just indifferently churning out another dirty movie. 

AKA:  Sexophrenia.

DARK ECHOES (1977) **

A hundred years ago, a boat sank in an Austrian lake.  Now, the place is supposedly haunted by the ghost of the vengeance-seeking boat captain.  Things go from bad to worse when villagers begin turning up dead.  Flummoxed, the local police call on the services of a psychic investigator from America (Joel Fabiani) to check the place out.  Along with a reporter (former Bond girl Karin Dor from You Only Live Twice), he does some digging before eventually coming face to face with the gruesome ghost. 

Dark Echoes was the sole writing and directing credit for the awesomely named George Robotham, who was a stuntman and bit player for most of his career.  He specialized in underwater sequences, which probably explains all the scuba diving scenes in the third act.  Fabiani’s extended underwater fight with the “ghost” is OK, but it doesn’t quite make up for the long, pointless slow-motion shots of him skiing early in the film though. 

The investigation scenes into the town’s past are rather pedestrian.  There’s definitely a Scooby-Doo kind of vibe going on as the skull-faced boat captain looks very much like the sort of villain of the week Shaggy and the gang would encounter.  (He was created by none other than Planet of the Apes’ John Chambers.)  The ghost attack sequences are decent enough I suppose, but the pacing is much too leisurely to build any real suspense.

The subplot about a witch and her coven of cult members performing a ritual in the town’s catacombs is kind of fun though, especially when they break out into a half-assed dance number.  It’s here where some of the frenzied ladies in the group slip in and out of their robes.  The nudity from these probably unknown actresses is the definite high point in what is an otherwise tepid horror flick.  Our hero’s frequent psychic episodes, which are accompanied by a humorous sounding sting on the soundtrack, are good for a chuckle or two, and there’s a hilariously bad decapitation in there as well.  Despite those quality moments, I’m sure Dark Echoes won’t reverberate with most viewers. 

AKA:  Dark Echo.

TRANSFORMERS ONE (2024) ****

This animated prequel to the beloved Hasbro toy line shows how Optimus Prime (the voice of Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (the voice of Brian Tyree Henry) became mortal enemies.  They start off as the best of friends, working lowly mining jobs with Optimus generally causing trouble and Megatron having to bail him out.  Eventually, the duo learns that their leader, Sentinel Prime (the voice of Jon Hamm) has been lying to them and giving the planet’s resources to evil alien invaders.  With the help of Alpha Trion (the voice of Laurence Fishburne), they are able to unlock their transformation powers to save the planet. 

At first, it’s a little odd hearing the Transformers voiced by big Hollywood stars instead of the familiar voices from the old cartoon and live action films.   It also takes some time to get used to their new baby-faced appearance.  The good news is that feeling evaporates rather quickly as the script is witty, smart, and surprisingly heartfelt.

Plus, the animation is terrific.  It looks so good that it makes you wish Paramount would let the live action franchise finally die off so they could make this the main series.  (Fat chance since this was not a hit.)  The scenes set in the Transformer home planet look like a robot version of the city in The Fifth Element, and the action sequences are a blast too.  (The big race sequence is reminiscent of the pod race from The Phantom Menace.) 

The biggest surprise is that the characters (even though they are younger and brasher than the versions we grew up with) really pull you into the world.  The friendship between Optimus and Megatron is engaging, and when there is a rift between them, you genuinely feel it.  Megatron’s slow… ahem… transformation from cocky best friend to brooding villain is fully fleshed out and realized.  These kind of simple, yet effective characterizations are sorely lacking in the other incarnations of the franchise and seem downright Shakespearean compared to the live action movies. 

I’m actually shocked how much I enjoyed this.  It might even be better than Bumblebee.  It just goes to show there’s more to Transformers One than meets the eye. 

THE ORAL GENERATION (1973) ** ½

The Oral Generation purports to provide sexual education to the female viewer.  Seeing how an overwhelming amount of these kinds of films caters to the male audience, that’s kind of noble, I guess.  To back up that claim, the first sex scene is a long cunnilingus sequence focusing on the woman’s pleasure.  Next, we meet a housewife yearning to pleasure her husband orally who reads a book about giving head and then shows him what she learned.  Another woman fantasizes about going down on a black martial artist (his karate demonstration is humorously intercut with their lovemaking).  Then, a woman shows off her oral skills and, with a little aid from some petroleum jelly, helps her lover achieve a climax.  In the final segment, a bored housewife acquiesces to her husband’s desire to spice up their love life by allowing another woman into their bedroom. 

The movie begins with a cool look at 42nd Street where the theatre marquees advertise everything from The Bizarre Ones to a Godzilla triple feature.  Sadly, that’s about as seedy as it gets.  The Oral Generation is more of a “white coater” as it provides the audience hardcore action under the guise of “sex education”.  (We are shown many “how to” manuals and hear about laws prohibiting certain types of sexual activity.)  The dry, clinically accurate (for the time) narration enhances the educational feeling, but it consequently prevents the proceedings from getting too sexy. 

Overall, The Oral Generation is a moderately successful hardcore flick.  True to its title, it features a heavy concentration of oral scenes.  Although none of them are exactly high caliber (the nutty Kung Fu scene is at least memorable), there are certainly plenty of them to go around.  Because of that, fans with an oral fixation will no doubt walk away satisfied by this one.  Other folks will probably wish there was a little more variety on hand. 

According to IMDb, director Richard Franklin is apparently not the same Richard Franklin who made Fantasm (and Psycho 2).