Some people just can't handle any excitement.
It's hard to believe that Curtis Hanson—the man who directed The River Wild, the acclaimed L.A. Confidential, and the underrated Wonder Boys, got his start with Sweet Kill, which he directed and wrote, but it's true. Everyone has to start somewhere. Even Francis Ford Coppola started in nudie flicks. Sweet Kill stars Tab Hunter, who plays a sort of beach hunk version of Norman Bates who stabs women when he's sexually aroused—hence the movie's alternate title, The Arousers. Those arousers, who you'll see below in a series of production photos made for the film, include Roberta Collins. Cherie Latimer, Brandy Herred, and others.
Sweet Kill is an interesting mood piece but we can't call the movie a success on the whole because it isn't scary—an aspiration for slasher flicks (its main inspiration Psycho is scary, after all). The main problem here is the acting, that bugaboo of ambitious young directors the world over. Collins is okay, but Hunter is out of his depth, and the other participants clearly didn't have the time and talent to hone their performances. In the end what you get is a lot of standing around, a fair amount of nudity, and minor tension derived from whether Hunter can somehow curb his murderous urges. Spoiler alert: he can't. Sweet Kill premiered in the U.S. today in 1972.
Experts say the benefits include improved blood circulation, increased energy, and better eye health.
This photo shows U.S. actress Cheri Caffaro, and was made around the time she was filming her 1971-73 sexploitation-action trilogy Ginger, The Abductors, and Girls Are for Loving. We haven't watched the middle film but we'll get to it. The others are too crazy to be believed, but we attempt to describe them here and here. Caffaro also appeared in 1974's Savage Sisters, 1977's Too Hot To Handle, and mixed in a few television roles before moving into producing from 1979 onward. There was little she wouldn't do, onscreen or off. She even once gave an interview at the Sherry Netherland Hotel while completely nude. Ah, the ’70s. We'll be seeing Caffaro again a little later.
Franco Picchioni is bad as in good.
Franco Picchioni's hits keep coming. Above is another cover from the respected Italian artist, this time for Georges H. Boskero's Il genio del male, number twenty-two in the crime series Il Cerchio Rosso from Edizioni MA-GA, 1965. The title translates to “evil genius.” In terms of Picchioni, we'll certainly go with genius. See more from him starting at this link.
For a fulfilling killing nothing beats a blade.
Today we have for your pleasure a collection of vintage paperback covers featuring characters on both the giving and receiving ends of knives—or knifelike tools such as icepicks. Above you see Harry Bennett art of a poor fella getting a knife from nowhere. Maybe Damocles did it. It's a funny cover because we don't think we'd grab our throats if we got stabbed in the spine, but let's hope we never find out. Below, in addition to numerous U.S. and British offerings, you'll see covers from France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. There are many, many paperback fronts featuring knives—we mean hundreds—but we decided to stop ourselves at thirty-two today. These do not represent the best (as if we could decide something like that), or our favorites, but merely some interesting ones we've come across of late. If you're super interested in this particular motif we have plenty more examples in the archives. They'd be hard to find, because we don't keyword for knives, so here are some links to get you there: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
She never loses that Loving feeling.
Above are two Italian posters for the 1973 sexploitation action flick Ginger il simbolo del sesso con licenza... d'amare, a very long title for something made in English as Girls Are for Loving. It's basically a spy movie, and the Italian translates as, “Ginger the symbol of sex with license... to love.” Hah hah, those horny Italian marketing guys. Well, they're horny for a reason. The main character of undercover operative Ginger MacCallister is played by the uniquely uninhibited Cheri Caffaro. There's no Italian release date known, which is amazing because we bet everyone who saw this movie remembered it for a very long time.
Everybody wants a piece.
Radley Metzger was the director of perhaps the most stylish films from the golden era of porn, so it's no surprise his output reached Japan. This poster was made for his 1978 film Maraschino Cherry, which in Japan was known as Marasukîno cherî: Musei. Annette Haven, Gloria Leonard, Leslie Bovee, the lovely Constance Money, and Eric Edwards star, and there's an actual plot, as Manhattan brothel madame Maraschino Cherry, played by Leonard, indoctrinates her hick sister Jenny Baxter into the business. Little sis takes to it like a fish to water, so much so that at the end she's left in charge while Leonard heads off to open another cathouse.
Metzer directed this under the pseudonym Henry Paris, which he used because he directed non-xxx features under his own name. So once again we see the blurry line between adult and non-adult entertainment back in the day. Among Metzger's mainstream movies were Camille 2000, Little Mother, aka Woman of the Year, and The Lickerish Quartet, which we talked about several years ago. His most famous xxx effort is probably The Opening of Misty Beethoven, but Maraschino Cherry, with its goofy comedy (“Would you like to be eaten while you wait?” “Oh, no thanks. I'm not hungry.”) also seems well remembered.
Below we have images of the film's female cast, excepting Jenny Baxter, who we couldn't find. Top to bottom you see Leonard, Haven, Money, and Bovee. We've uploaded these for a couple of reasons. First, they're beautiful shots. Second, the Pulp Intl. girlfriends are Stateside and when they're gone we tend to post more nude images, possibly because we get a bit lonely. Without their influence we also come up with ideas like “everybody wants a piece.” If they were here one of them would have said, “Really?” And we'd have rethought it. But it could have been worse. We almost went with the header “Fruit Cock Tale.” So there you are, girls. Hurry back before we bury ourselves under an avalanche of crudeness.
She's an acquired taste.
A while back we stumbled upon a low budget action-sexploitation flick called Girls Are for Loving starring Cheri Caffaro. It was part of a trilogy, the first of which was Ginger, for which you see a promo poster above. The movie premiered this month in 1971, and also starred Caffaro, who was one of the bolder actresses of ’70s sexploitation cinema. She plays a New York City socialite recruited to bust a New Jersey drug ring. She's given a few tools to help in her mission, but her main advantage is of course her slinky bod, which she uses at every turn. This is a really bad movie, the type of production where the dialogue is so stilted you'll think time has begun to flow backward, while the equally clunky action moves so slowly it might as well be stop-motion.
But we'll admit that the movie has an underdog quality, as less-than-talented writers, less-than-experienced technical personnel, a far less-than-competent director, and a less-than-conventionally beautiful lead actress strive to put together a gritty erotic action epic. You almost root for them, particularly the supporting cast who are asked to do incredible things, such as Casey Donovan, who gets tied spread eagled to a bed with his junk in full view for an extended scene. Clearly the idea is that if there's a male gaze at work in the movie, let females gaze too, and we applaud that.
Donovan, even with his dick in the wind and his hairy crack on display, doesn't have the hardest job here. That would be Herbert Kerr as a pimp and Herndon Ely as a heroin addicted prostitute, who are asked to act out an interracial hate fuck that might kill your sex drive for months. Later Caffaro drops n-bombs and many variations while relating a tale to Kerr about her rape by black men at age sixteen. Subsequently Caffaro is hogtied and taken against her will by a white guy. By the time Girls Are for Loving arrives Caffaro has the hots for her black partner Timothy Brown, so this franchise is equal opportunity sleaze all the way.
If Ginger sounds out there, trust us, you don't know the half of it. But somehow from this mess came two sequels, which we still can't wrap our heads around. Well, scratch that—we get it. All the hate and craziness in Ginger is woven amid five or six sex scenes that deliver what any fan of erotic cinema seeks—and more. We wouldn't go so far as to say these scenes are realistic, but the amount of genitalia on display is high, so no wonder fans made the film a financial success. But the value of Ginger is not artistic or erotic—it's historic. With its in-your-face nudity and harsh racial language it's a type of movie that may never, ever be made again.
If he's German we're a couple of Midwestern turkey farmers.
Erhard von Sprecher, author of 1954's Les mains rouges, or “red hands,” is a pseudonym. Has to be, right? French mid-century policier and espionage authors loved pen names, so much so that few of the authors wrote under their real names. We're not sure why, but we suspect that they felt it gave their books credibility if they adopted American sounding names like Patrick Rock (Louis Valgrand), Jerry Lewray (Louis de la Hattais), Slim Harrisson (Jacques Dubessy), et al. In this case, the name von Sprecher was used to give this tale about an S.S. agent who refuses to admit the Third Reich lost World War II a sense of firsthand German reality, but he was almost certainly a French writer—though one so obscure there's no information out there. Maybe something will turn up later. In any case, we decided to feature this book not because of von Sprecher's name, interesting as that is, but because of the striking red hand art. And guess what? We can't find out who did that either. C'est comme cela que ça se passe.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
2003—Suzy Parker Dies
American model and actress Suzy Parker, who appeared the films Funny Face and Kiss Them for Me, was the first model to earn more than $100,000 a year, and who was a favorite target of the mid-century tabloids, dies at home in Montecito, California, surrounded by family friends, after electing to discontinue dialysis treatments. 1920—Negro National Baseball League Debuts
The first game of Negro National League baseball is played in Indianapolis, Indiana. The league, one of several that would be formed, was composed of The Chicago American Giants, The Detroit Stars, The Kansas City Monarchs, The Indianapolis ABCs, The St. Louis Giants, The Cuban Stars, The Dayton Marcos, and The Chicago Giants. 1955—Williams Wins Pulitzer
American playwright Tennessee Williams wins the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his controversial play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which tells the story of a southern family in crisis, explicitly deals with alcoholism, and contains a veiled subtext concerning homosexuality in southern society. In 1958 the play becomes a motion picture starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. 1945—Germany Announces Hitler's Death
German radio in Hamburg announces that Adolf Hitler was killed in Berlin, stating specifically that he had fallen at his command post in the Reich Chancery fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany. But in truth Hitler had committed suicide along with his mistress Eva Braun, and both bodies were immediately thereafter burned. 1960—Powers Is Shot Down over U.S.S.R.
Francis Gary Powers, flying in a Lockheed U-2 spy plane, is shot down over the Soviet Union. The U.S. denies the plane's purpose and mission, but is later forced to admit its role as a covert surveillance aircraft when the Soviet government produces its remains and reveals Powers, who had survived the shoot down. The incident triggers a major diplomatic crisis between the U.S. and U.S.S.R.
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