The Swinging Barmaids (1975)

          When collaborating with producer Roger Corman, writer Charles B. Griffith often infused B-movies with an offbeat brand of social satire. When operating beyond Corman’s influence, however, Griffith frequently succumbed to lesser impulses. And so it goes with The Swinging Barmaids, a befuddling exploitation flick revolving around sexy women who sling drinks at a joint called the Swing-a-Ling. The movie is perplexing because it has aspects of respectable filmmaking, inasmuch as nudity is kept to a minimum and lip service is paid to workplace issues. The barmaids fret about grabby customers and sore feet, and one barmaid notes that she’s been able to put her boyfriend through medical school by letting drunks objectify her. Yet The Swinging Barmaids—a misnomer of a title, since none of the women sleeps around—isn’t about the plight of put-upon women. It’s about a nutter who gets off by killing them and photographing their corpses.

          The Swinging Barmaids gets darker and darker as it goes along, which is saying a lot seeing as how the picture opens with an uncomfortably lengthy real-time sequence of a dude stalking and slaughtering a busty blonde. (This first victim is played by sex-movie queen Dyanne Thorne.) Once the plot gets moving, B-movie stalwart William Smith joins the mix as the lead police detective on the case, though he doesn’t do much of anything until the grim climax. Receiving most of the focus is curvy waitress Jenny (Laura Hippe), the one with the boyfriend in medical school. Griffith’s script gives Jenny a fair amount of dimension, at least compared to the non-people one normally encounters in this sort of picture, but Griffith’s efforts are not sufficient to create any sort of emotional involvement.

          In lieu of proper drama, the picture becomes a ticking-clock scenario while the killer works his way through other victims on his way to Jenny. Even scenes of the killer covertly interacting with the barmaids once he talks his way into a job as a bouncer at the Swing-a-Ling feel like filler between murders. Regarding those murders, they’re rendered in a fairly restrained fashion, excepting the nasty opening kill. So even though it would be a huge stretch to describe The Swinging Barmaids as worthwhile cinema, the picture isn’t as relentlessly hateful as the usual women-in-peril grindhouse offering.

The Swinging Barmaids: FUNKY

Point of Terror (1971)

With apologies for the crudeness of this remark, I suggest that ’70s-cinema fans adopt the following policy when considering which movies to watch: If it’s Crown, flush it down. The misbegotten sprawl of the Crown International Pictures release Point of Terror explains why. Firstly, the movie isn’t a horror film, despite the misleading poster and title. Rather, it’s a soapy melodrama about a wannabe pop singer who falls into the web of a murderess. Secondly, the movie suffers flaws that are common to the myriad low-budget clunkers bearing the Crown brand—the acting is inconsistent, but mostly awful; the direction occasionally rises from incompetent to perfunctory; and the script is a big, oozing blob of nothing, peppered with a few nuggets of trashy stimulation. Peter Carpenter, a blank-faced stud also credited (or blamed) with creating the film’s story, stars as lounge singer Tony Trelos. One day, he meets rich dame Andrea Hilliard (Dyanne Thorne), the sex-starved wife of a paralyzed record executive. Despite the fact that he has a girlfriend, Tony sleeps with Andrea in exchange for a recording contract. Complications ensue, including a murder and the arrival of Andrea’s hot daughter, Helayne (Lory Hansen). Most of this crap unfolds like an episode of some Aaron Spelling series, all histrionic acting and overwrought dialogue, punctuated with campy sex and violence. About the only novel element is cinematographer Robert Maxwell’s addiction to color gels, since some scenes are as multichromatic as a harlequin convention. It should also be said that Thorne’s performance reaches a special peak of atrociousness—we’re talking full-on screeching harpy—during the final showdown between Andrea and Tony.

Point of Terror: LAME

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975)

          Some subgenres of exploitation cinema border on the unconscionable, such as the rape-victim-seeks-revenge movies that hide misogyny behind feminist rhetoric, and some dive wholeheartedly into the abyss of pure depravity. Really, isn’t it almost sufficient to cite the names of two such genres, “Nazispoitlation” and “slavesploitation”? As lawyer Joseph N. Welch once said to red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency?” Clearly, were that inquiry posed to David S. Friedman, who produced the infamous Nazispoitation epic Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS under the pseudonym “Herman Traeger,” Friedman’s answer would be damning. Just as Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is the apex of tastelessness, it’s the apex of shamelessness, because it’s a noxious blend of sotftcore porn, Third Reich iconography, and torture fetishism. The mere fact that Friedman positions Nazis as psychotic villains does not excuse the picture’s grotesque nature, and neither does the fact that the movie is weirdly entertaining because of its campy excess. Vile is vile, no matter the particulars. 

          Set entirely at a remote Nazi prison camp during World War II, the picture tracks the adventures of the camp’s sadistic commandant, Ilsa (Dyanne Thorne). A twisted medical researcher in the vein of real-life Nazi war criminal Joseph Mengele, Ilsa treats the people in her custody like lab rats and/or sex toys. In her laboratory, she burns, dismembers, freezes, mutilates, and whips people to test their levels of endurance. In her private cabin, she forces male prisoners to service her, and she inevitably castrates her lovers afterward as punishment for failing to fully satisfy her cravings.

          The main threads of the slender plot include the following: 1) Ilsa meets an American prisoner with remarkable sexual stamina, which gives the inmates a means of distraction for mounting an escape attempt; 2) Ilsa brutalizes a female prisoner whom she cannot intimidate, thus making a formidable and mortal enemy; and 3) Ilsa curries favor with a visiting superior officer by first torturing and killing an inmate as a form of dinner theater, and then by granting the officer’s wish for a golden shower. Scenes of prisoners conspiring to break free are brisk and perfunctory, because Friedman, director Don Edmonds, and writer Jonah Royston are much more concerned with stringing together images of sex and violence.

          How nasty is Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS? Well, the bit during which Ilsa drops maggots into a nude victim’s open wound, then smothers the wound with gangrenous pus to transform the victim into a new Typhoid Mary, comes to mind. And how sleazy is Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS? Leading lady Thorne, a tough-looking Amazon with enormous breasts, does myriad sex scenes and striptease bits, and nearly every female in the cast ends up fully naked, usually while being raped or tortured, if not both. Does it matter that the acting is bad and that the production values are patently artificial? Of course not.

          The Canadian-made Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS did so well internationally that Thorne played variations on the character in three sequels (1976's Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks and the 1977 releases Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia and Wanda, the Wicked Warden), some of which shared the original movie’s X-rating, and some of which were coproduced by American companies. Those eager to learn more about Ilsa’s distasteful exploits are duly informed.

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS: FREAKY

Blood Sabbath (1972)

Yet another schlocky ’70s horror picture that attempts to blend hippies with Satanism, Blood Sabbath hits the crap-cinema trifecta: amateurish, boring, incoherent. Anthony Geary, later to find his pop-culture niche as long-running character Luke Spencer on the ABC soap General Hospital, stars as David, a confused Vietnam vet who wanders aimlessly through a forest until he’s nearly raped by a quartet of hippie chicks. Later, David meets the quasi-supernatural Yyalah (Susan Damante). She’s an earth spirit or wood nymph or something. David and Yyalah dig each other but can’t have sex, Yyalah says, because her kind dies upon mating with beings with souls. Naturally, this revelation prompts David to seek advice on how to discard his soul. He speaks to a priest who responds to David’s request with a temper tantrum, and then David chats up a witch whose coven conveniently knows how to perform soul-removal ceremonies. Seriously, this is the plot. Very little of what happens in Blood Sabbath makes sense, and the acting is abysmal. Compounding matters is the cheap costuming and hairstyling, which looks like it was done by technicians from a high-school drama club. The cinematography is competent, but that doesn’t count for much since the action occurring inside the pleasantly composed frames is disjoined and silly. For instance, the movie features countless scenes of topless and/or fully nude coven members dancing in the woods; one suspects the producers got a bulk discount by hiring the entire staff of a low-rent strip club. About the only mildly entertaining thing in the movie is the opening credit that promises an appearance by “Dyanne Thorne as Alotta, Queen of Witches.” Rest assured, however, that tame and fleeting scenes including the future star of the porn-ish Isla series are not reason enough to endure this misbegotten flick.

Blood Sabbath: SQUARE