(1970)
Dir - Joy N. Houck Jr.
Overall: WOOF
The turn of the 1970s doubled as a time when women's liberation was going strong and movie theaters across the globe were desperate enough for content where something as poorly-executed as Women and Bloody Terror, (His Wife's Habit), could get unleashed. This was the second of five straight works in exploitative horror from D-rent filmmaker Joy N. Houck Jr., who seems to be going for sleazy escapades while simultaneously side-stepping those sleazy escapades. Georgine Darcy plays a married women who is both allergic to pants and cannot stop sleeping with any hunky man who crosses her path, but unfortunately she also has to deal with not-hunky men crossing her path. This includes a heavy-set owner of a restaurant and a delusional, schlubby garage attendant who figures that he may as well resort to rape since Darcy will not add him to her list of extramarital affairs. Oh, Darcy also sleeps with her daughter's boyfriend, has Gothic horror nightmares, gets blackmailed, and we are treated to numerous musical montages along the way just to make sure that this ends up being as boring as any other grindhouse cheapie of its kind. Houck Jr. oddly cuts the camera away from most of the consensual sex, but he does make it a point to keep them rolling for the rape so isn't that wonderful?
(1974)
Dir - Sean MacGregor/David Sheldon
Overall: MEH
A movie where every last character is an obnoxious asshole, Peopletoys, (The Horrible House on the Hill, Devil Times Five, Tantrums), is a grating watch, yet it has a sleazy grindhouse appeal for those who clamor towards the evil brat kid sub-genre of horror. Filmed during the blistering winter months in Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear Lake, California, it opens with an implausible scene where a van flies off the road, flips over a dozen plus times, and most of the occupants therein emerge without so much as a scratch. This includes five psychopathic children who vow never to return to a psychiatric hospital, thus trudging through the snow until they find a bunch of adult douchebags who all seem to hate each other yet are vacationing in a remote cabin. The performances are rough, but producer Dylan Jones' script is mean-spirited by design so everyone on screen has the unfortunate task of being unlikable, which makes the audience hate both the victims and the child perpetrators of grisly violence. To the film's unwholesome credit though, some of the kill scenes are memorable, (one guy dies by a kid flying at him on a swing with a blade in between his legs, only to be turned into a live snowman later on), but the production is too meandering and unprofessional to get behind.
(1978)
Dir - Stephan Traxler
Overall: WOOF
One of only two movies from director Stephan Traxler, Spawn of the Slithis follows in a steady lineage of unbearably boring creature features done on a shoestring budget and presented as instantly forgettable hogwash. A Creature from the Black Lagoon-looking reject eventually emerges from the waters around Venice, California and is as cheap as any rubber suit monster from any hackneyed B-movie dating back to when the Creature from the Black Lagoon was initially released. These clumsily-executed, reptilian beast sequences are infrequent at best so that we can spend a torturous amount of time with dull while people, (and one black guy), talking and talking and talking and talking some goddamn more. Alan Blanchard's journalist is the one who discovers that a mutating life form was unleashed from a lab and watching said journalist explore this mystery is as exciting as Andy Warhol's Empire. Hy Pyke shows up to provide some clashing scenery-chewing as a police chief who is too busy and ravenously annoyed to believe anything that Blanchard tells him, which sets off the third act where the good guys rally together to take care of the underwater menace themselves. Yet anyone who is still watching at this point must be doing so at gunpoint.
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