#roughie

On this day in sexploitation history: breast-fixated visionary Russ Meyer’s essential b-movie Lorna was released sixty years ago (11 September 1964). (Tagline: "Without artistic surrender, without compromise, without question or apology, an important motion picture was produced: LORNA - a woman too much for one man!”). I definitely would have seen Lorna at London’s Scala Cinema in the early 1990s, possibly on a double bill with Mudhoney (1965), the next film Meyer and memorable leading lady Lorna Maitland made together. (Meyer’s biographer Jimmy McDonough summarizes Maitland as “a stiff swirl of cotton-candy blonde hair, lips like a pair of overstuffed couches mating, a lethal-weapon body – there was something plain wicked about Lorna Maitland. Her terminally unimpressed scowl seemed to suggest your balls were not long for this world … A Venus flytrap in a wighat, Jayne Mansfield’s evil twin”).  And I’ve never seen Lorna again, so my memory of it is a bit misty (sadly, whole swathes of Meyer’s filmography are currently difficult to see. His estate is chaotic). Anyway, Lorna represents the start of what Roger Ebert has termed Meyer’s “Gothic period.” For his part, Meyer said he was inspired by Bitter Rice (1949), calling Lorna his attempt at making an American interpretation of Italian neo-realism.

A Smell of Honey, A Swallow of Brine (1966), directed by Byron Mabe and produced by David F. Friedman. An extreme roughie flirting with some noir tropes. A soundtrack that just won’t quit. Generally unpleasant but probably one of the more visually engaging offerings of the genre. Like if Sam Fuller had dipped his toes in those murky, petrol-slicked waters.

it’s been age and a half since i’ve drawn my tfoc Roughride sooooooo here’s a scribble

A long lost sleazy film from that overlooked and dismissed period of gory post Roughies. I recall Something Weird listing this film as one of their top wanted lost films and then later reading that a single print was discovered. This gave us collectors and twisted movie fans hope that other lost and forgotten films would someday be unearthed. Since the passing of Something Weird Video founder Mike Vraney, Lisa Petrucci has thankfully continued to run the business and is now passing some of the torch fire to like minded companies like AGFA to restore and continue to release some of their titles. One such collaboration is with Mondo Macabro’s new exploitation themed sub-label American Arcana who released a limited pressing of a new 2K scan of The Bushwhacker along with the Ravager. This now definitive release includes a previously missing gore scene from another lower quality source and also included are postcard sized reproductions of both films’ lobby cards. If this sounds at all interesting to you, don’t hesitate before the 1000 discs sell out as Something Weird no longer carries it in dvd-r format. The Bushwhacker, it’s a bit bushwacky!

Yellow Hair