nazisploitation

Django Nudo gives Smut Peddler a verbal spanking, celebrate George A Romero's birthday; free-to-view films on Cultpix; a new Top 10 and the kids film by Boarna Vibenius.

The career of Lee Frost (1935-2007) pretty much covered every genre going: nudies, comedies, westerns, war films, thrillers and more, as director, producer, DoP, editor and sometimes actor.  According to IMDb: “Lee Frost rates highly as one of the best, most talented and versatile filmmakers in the annals of exploitation cinema.” 

"Surftide 77" (1962) - Frost's directorial debut, about a private eye who has to find a girl with a butterfly-shaped birthmark on her breast. So an excuse to show lots of breasts.

"House on Bare Mountain" (1962) - is a particular obsession of ours, not least as it is where the Cultpix Radio ident comes from with the still of  the werewolf and the beauty. Producer Bob Cresse is back in drag as Granny Good who runs a charm school that's actually a bootleg operation. 

"Hollywood’s World of Flesh" (1963) is Frost's early take on the Mondo genre, a  hilariously bogus “documentary on the film capital of the world”. 

"The Defilers" (1965) - Two amoral and sadistic rich kids "guzzle liquor, smoke grass, cavort with masochistic beach bunnies, and eventually kidnap and imprison a beautiful young girl."

"Hot Spur" (1968) sees Frost tackle the Western, as a young man takes a job on a ranch, just so he can take down a high-and-mighty 'cowbitch' - kidnapped, beaten and tied up in revenge for what the woman and her husband did to his sister. 

"Love Camp 7" (1968) - created the Nazisploitation genre. Two busty female US officers seek to infiltrate a women's POW camp in Nazi Germany to... well, it's not important to the plot. They get caught, with torture and misogyny ensuing. 

"The Animal" (1968) - Perhaps Frost's most disturbing film. Ted Andrew boozes, smokes pot and spies on women neighbours through his telescope. "He made her an animal... Now all he needed was a leash!" is the unforgettable tagline. 

"The Pick-Up" (1968) - Another legendary 'lost' roughie that SWV found in Copenhagen of all places, thanks to a Scandi tour arranged by Klubb Super8. Friedman and Cresse play mob gangsters out to collect some money and torture chicks who steal it.

"The Scavengers" (1969) - Tagline: “They spell love like you’d spell lust, and they’ve already turned ten towns to dust!” This western sees Confederate soldiers trying to rob a Yankee coach of its gold.

"Ride Hard, Ride Wild" (1970) - Cashing in on the twin-trends of biker films and Scandi nudies, this pretend Danish film sees Lee Frost credited with 'Dubbing Supervisor', but we suspect the 'Elov Peterssons' directing credit is one of his many aliases.  We end this episode with the movie's theme song. 

"Zero in and Scream" (1970) - "When a man climbs on top of a woman, she becomes ugly!" explains a proto-Incel sniper. Tapping into the Manson/Zodiac zeitgeist, this film is unique in being filmed extensively through the scope of a rifle.

This week's Spotify list.

Cultpix has now been going for one month and we look back on what feel more like six months of intense work to make the world's leading streaming service for classical cult and genre films everything its members expect it to be.

As we also celebrate VE Day and 86 years since the end of WW2, we look at all things Nazi on the big screen (and almost manage to avoid doing silly German accents), for our weekly film theme.

We look at documentaries by and about Nazi's, including Leni Riefenstahl's notorious Triumph of the Will / Triumph des Willens (1935) and why the father of the founder of Synapse Films that we licensed it from, who was himself a Holocaust survivor, deemed it important to release the film, saying, "Jerry, you MUST release the film, lest we forget." To balance it we also stream the Nazi Concentration Camps (1945) documentary shown at the Nurnberg War Crimes Trials and discuss Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder's involvement in concentration camp documentaries.

We then look at US exploitation films made during the war, including Bela Lugosi's Black Dragons (1942), which pre-dates The Manchurian Candidate in its plot; Hitler - Dead or Alive (1942), where a gang of ex-bounty hunters go to Germany to catch Hitler, for one million dollars; and Enemy of Women (1944), which charts the fall and rise of Joseph Goebbels, a weakling harassing women, who went from failed play writer to Propaganda Minister of the Third Reich.

This is followed by the first of the so-called Nazisploitations films that proliferated in the 1970s and 80s. Love Camp 7 (1969), in which two American Lieutenants with photographic memories and big breasts, volunteer to infiltrate Love Camp 7, a women's POW camp in Nazi Germany.  We chart how this led to the rise of the Nazisploitation genre in USA and Italy and films such as Ilsa She Wolf of the SS and its many sequels.

Finally, there is the bastar offspring of the Nazisploitation that take things to a whole new ridiculous level with Black Gestapo (1975), a crazed blaxplo-nazisploitation film that seeks to equate the Black Panther movement with the Nazis. There is also SS Operation Wolfcub (1983), a legendary US porn star (Harry Reams) in an erotic director’s film (Joe Sarno), with no sex! What were they thinking? Slap 'Nazi' or 'SS' on anything to make it instantly appealing as showcasing the ultimate of evils.

To end on a high note we conclude with Schichlegruber - Doing the Lambeth Walk, a 1942 two-minute propaganda film by Charles A. Ridley of the UK Ministry of Information. It remixes Triumph of the Will to a song the Nazis hated and went viral during the war. Watch the "Gestapo Hep-Cats" goose-stepping in the style of Ministry of Silly Walks and Hitler made to look ridiculous. See the full video here:  Lambeth Walk: Nazi Style - by Charles A. Ridley (1941)