Now Playing ABSOLUTELY FREE On You Tube: Erotic Euro Horror!

While I would never claim to be the toast of all social networking sites, far from it, I can claim to have a fairly robust following on old You Tube. I have a following of 5,500 faithful followers who want to be entertained by my posting of rare films unavailable on DVD or even on TV. Unfortunately, the brain police at You Tube have been pulling down many of my posts at an alarming rate, claiming that I have violated the laws of intellectual property.

What this means is that if James Toback can't make a cent off his wobbly 1983 suspense film Exposed then I cannot even post it for people who want to view it. Other films that provoked near-suspension included the noir classics Desert Fury and The Gangster as well as the Brigitte Bardot-Louis Malle potboiler A Very Private Affair.

Meanwhile, sites like Spotify and Pandora are doing more to rip off artists than my movie posts on YT. The priorities are getting dodgy. I've had so many of my posts pulled down that I've gotten leery about posting more movies. But I will persist. Besides, there's always Vimeo.

While all this drama is unfolding other Tubers are posting an exciting stream of classic erotic Eurohorror films. Many of these films have floundered on the VHS gray market for years, and now beautiful prints can be seen on YT. Unfortunately, half of them aren't in English, but hell, it's time to brush up on your high school French and Spanish!

Movies I have seen in their complete form in the past two months on You Tube:

1. The Female Vampire - Jess Franco starring the great Lina Romay
2. Shiver of the Vampires - Jean Rollin with a cool death metal soundtrack dubbed in, and it works
3. Kilink! - great Turkish series about a supervillain dressed like a skeleton
4. Lisa And The Devil - classic Mario Bava with Elke Sommer and a lollipop sucking Telly Savalas, as the devil
5. Evil Eye aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much - more Bava with a classic haunted house theme
6. Four Times That Night - Bava doing a bedroom sex farce with some real sex for a change
7. All The Colors of the Dark - psycho giallo starring Edwige Fenech
8. 99 Women - women in prison classic starring Edwige Fenech, Rosalba Neri, Luciana Paluzzi, and more
9. Virgin Among The Living Dead - more Jess Franco insanity with more nudity (not from him!)
10. The Nude Vampire - Jean Rollin with vampire laboratory rituals with animal masks and hoods! Creepy!

There's also lots of American exploitation in their complete form, like Russ Meyer's Cherry, Harry, and Raquel and Jack Hill's The Big Bird Cage. There's also tons of Laura Gemser sleaze to feast your eyes on. I also caught the Japanese film classic Onibaba. There's no limit to what you can catch on You Tube these days.

And just to compliment all the wild European horror films watched you can also catch an English TV documentary mini-series about the whole genre called Eurotika. Eurotika has segments devoted to the previously mentioned Jess Franco, Mario Bava, and Jean Rollin. It's pretty cool seeing starlets Brigitte Lahaie and the reclusive Pony Castel talking about their mentors.

Eurotika is almost touching in the way it celebrates freedom in sexual and artistic expression, eventually folding up towards the conservative early Eighties (the Moral majority-AIDS-Thatcher-Reagan years). But that's what makes these films so precious: just like the films from the silent era they show us a society that almost resemble aliens form another planet, a much, much freer planet.

It Happened At The Movies

Sometimes the show at the theater is more interesting than the movies themselves, and that’s the thing that makes going to the movies so memorable.

I could mention the time people walked out on Boogie Nights in droves, including an old woman who screamed at the screen. Someone should have told her it wasn’t a comedy. Oh, well.

I remember seeing Juliet of the Spirits in the West Hollywood district with a hooker named Sondra who was tripping on acid and had to be very gingerly led out the theatre, poor thing. The movie scared her ass. Wonder what she’s doing now?

Art can be pain, though. I remember getting food poisoning at an El Torito buffet in the morning and then going out at night to the Chinese Theatre to see the Mickey Rourke bomb Curse of the Dragon. I don’t know what was more painful, the shit buffet or the shittier flick?

But you can’t beat a weird double-bill at the movies, either. One night I went to see Krush Groove because I like The Fat Boys and Run-D.M.C. It came out when rap was still scary and unappropriated by Whitey (early Eighties), so naturally the second feature was St. Elmo’s Fire, a movie about a bunch of whiny over-privileged white kids in New England.

The creepiest movie going experience is when you pass out during the picture, wake up, pass out again, wake up, and fuck you if you can remember whether you were dreaming or seeing a film. This happened to me when I saw Vertigo, a creepy film as it stands by Alfred Hitchcock. To this day I’m not sure if I saw the whole movie or dreamed it! Another time I saw (and slept through) Kiss Me Deadly with that creepy atomic bomb in the Pandora’s Box finish, the film shot mostly in the Wilshire District. I woke up just in time to see the creepy ending. When we filed out at midnight I had to wait for the bus in front of, get this, MacArthur Park.

Crowded theatres always make me nervous, though. When I was a kid I remember going to see Help! (the second Beatles movie). My older brother stood in line to get the tickets, we got the custom printed tickets with photos of the Fab Four on them, we got souvenir buttons for each ticket sold, and waited patiently for over an hour in the longest line we ever stood in. It took us awhile to find a seat because the place was packed with teenage girls.
As soon as the movie started EVERY FUCKING GIRL ON THE PLANET SCREAMED HER FUCKING HEAD OFF!!!!!!!!!! RINGO!!!!! If you’ve ever seen the movie there’s a scene where Paul McCartney’s stark naked. Holy shit! My right ear’s still feeling it, 100 years later. PAUL!!!!!!!!!!!! To make a long story short it took us three years to understand what anyone said in the movie because the screaming cut through the audio.

This might come as a shock to you but even porn theaters have their weird experiences, too. I won’t mention the guy I walked in on in the Men’s Room who had his joint aimed into the hand dryer, or the theater manager who was pushing the snack bar big time (um, yeah, I need food in my mouth while I’m watching anal sex), etc.
The worst was when I watched a porn star getting salami-slammed and two guys way in the back were hooting boisterously loud and guffawing. It started out sporadically and then wouldn’t shut up, to the point of drowning out the important moans of ecstasy on the screen. I figured maybe if I take a leak these guys will shut up by the time I get back. As I walked up the aisle I realized the two loudmouths making all the noise were two policemen standing by the theater doors. As soon as they saw me approaching they automatically shut up. One even went for his holster and then caught himself after his partner said, “Cool it”. Yeah, movies are still your best entertainment.

Stuff I Burned From FLIX

Well, it’s all fine and dandy to bemoan movies not released to DVD from the 1940s and 1950s but what about films from the last 20 years? The prints are still in swell condition so what’s holding up their release? They look pretty darn good on FLIX, the movie channel. Here’s three:

The Woman Chaser (1999): Charles Willeford’s hipster crime novel is a hoot but the film version ups its larf-quotient by infusing a large dollop of deadpan humor. The main character is an insane boor with cinema auteur aspirations, played brilliantly by Patrick Warburton who bears more than a passing resemblance to Oliver Stone, haha. What is the director trying to tell us here? The film was shot in color and transferred to black-and-white, and I own both versions on DVD. Thank God for the grey market.

Exposed (1983): Nastassia Kinski plays a farm girl move to the New York City to become supermodel who skyrockets to the top of the fashion world, only to find herself seduced by international terrorists a la Patty Hearst. Whew! The terrorist is played by Harvey Keitel and the vigilante terrorist hunter is played by an overdressed, delicate and lisping Rudolph Nureyev. The only bomb that goes off in this film is the movie itself. If you catch this bomb on FLIX you’ll see why Kinski was pretty box-office poison.

Bandwagon (1996): Great film about a scuffling band from the deep South going on tour across Clubland USA. The music isn’t bad and the guys in the group are actually likeable (for a change). The main attraction is Kevin Corrigan, great as always, playing the spaced-out guitarist. Most rock band comedies are too cool for the room but you’ll actually care about these fuckers.

Stuff I Burned From TCM

You call it bootlegging, I call it killing the wait until a studio releases the movie on DVD. Releasing “Black Legion” or “711 Ocean Drive” on DVD may never happen in our lifetime, so I’ll happily burn away these minor classics from TCM (Turner Classic Movies). Here are a couple I’ve enjoyed recently:

The Killing of Sister George: Sister George is a sappy Mary Poppins-type character on British TV but off camera is a flesh/scenery chewing old chicken hawk constantly yelling at her young live-in chippy named “Childee” (Susannah York at her best). The “killing” in the title refers to her character getting taken out on the series – the movie is less about lesbianism than it is about aging and the feeling of loss whether it’s an acting gig, your youth, or your young lover. Since it’s a Robert Aldrich film you know there’ll be a sick twist ending that’ll drive you insane.

The Fox: a lesbian couple (it was “Outfest” week on TCM) shack out deep in the woodlie woods in sapphic bliss until a handsome Aryan pin-up arrives at their front door (Keir Dullea of “2001” and “David and Lisa”). Sexually he shakes things up and consequently nothing is ever what it appears – the three switch sexual roles and persuasions at the drop of a hat. While none of it’s believable for a second it’s still entertaining and beautifully photographed.

The Mad Magician: Prior to this movie director John Brahm made a film called “Hangover Square” which took place in 1895 about a madman in love with a singer which ended in a blazing house fire. He followed it with this 3-D flick starring Vincent Price as a, well, mad magician and it takes place in 1895, and uh…ends with a blazing house fire. Around this time, um um um, Vincent Price made another 3-D film called “House Of Wax” which uh, takes place around 1895, and ends with a….OKAY! YOU KNOW! Another blazing house fire!!!! Sheeesh!!! And you thought movies nowadays imitated each other!