Sunday, January 24, 2021

Endangered List updates!

We have several new Endangered List entries that have been waiting in the wings for a while, but before we post those we thought we'd better do a quick recap of last year's finds.
Vinegar Syndrome's Black Friday 2020 sale unveiled a double feature Blu-ray from AGFA pairing THE DIRTY DOLLS and THINGS TO COME, two films on our Endangered List which we also screened in Austin as part of the Endangered Fest (March 23, 2013) and Endangered Fest II (February 20, 2015), respectively.
In fact, it was during that first Endangered Fest that we introduced contemporary audiences to Craig S. Denney's THE ASTROLOGER, and the big surprise of the second Fest was finding out that THINGS TO COME is partly comprised of softcore footage from the Austin-shot SEXUAL FANTASIES U.S.A. (1973).
Ten years ago this week we did an Endangered List post about TOWING, and we followed it with a Movie Ad of the Week entry seven years later. The so-called comedy is now available to view on Amazon Prime.
Case File #43, EDEN CRIED, was filmed in 1965 but premiered on June 7, 1967 at the Ritz Theater in Newburgh, NY, the hometown of co-star Carole Holland. A release through the Walter Reade Organization didn't happen, and by the time the film was submitted for an MPAA rating in summer 1971 it had been re-edited and updated with smartass narration by a Jack Nicholson soundalike who makes fun of the movie. A 16mm print of this version is now available from Sinister Cinema.
Gary Kent's SECRET PLACES, SECRET THINGS was found a few years ago, but we finally got around to watching it in '20. It's a good, episodic softcore drama (with some humor) that its producer, Mike MacFarland, remade a decade later as PINK MOTEL.
We followed that up with WATCH OUT FOR THE BUMMER, a warning we unfortunately didn't heed. The less said about this bummer, the better.
We weren't at the Pandemonium Picture Show at the Skyline Drive-In in Shelbyville, IN last September, but TOS contributor Marc Edward Heuck made it out for that event and reported that one reel of HAPPILY EVER AFTER (Case File #149) was shown in the dead of night, along with a collection of rare soft-X trailers, "after most of the less hardy souls had gone home."
More news from Indiana: our friend Don Zessin called one night with a full report on AIN'T THAT JUST LIKE A HONKEY, which he described as one of the worst movies he's ever sat through. We were under the impression this was a Wildman Steve standup comedy performance film, since the ads referred to it as "the party record movie," but even as grim as that sounds, the truth is much, much worse. This is actually a black-and-white, Florida-shot nudie first released in 1968 as CAMPUS CONFIDENTIAL...
...the CAMPUS CONFIDENTIAL in the ad above, not the one below...
...which is a 1966 reissue of LOLA'S MISTAKE, the adults-only version of THIS REBEL BREED (1960) with the added nudie footage. We know of at least two other titles for that, but CAMPUS CONFIDENTIAL was a new alias to us and - as of tonight - not filed with the IMDb. Anyway, we'll clean up that mess another time, perhaps as a Movie Ad of the Week (unless another Newspapers.com subscriber gets to it first). Now back to that other CAMPUS CONFIDENTIAL, the subject of this Variety article from May 15, 1968...
...the one that did big business, earned great grosses and was held over in New York, Miami and Providence, according to this ad...
Eight years after it was made, with midnight movies all the rage, there was an attempt to turn CAMPUS CONFIDENTIAL into a "spoof" as detailed in this Boxoffice item from Apr 28, 1975...
Apparently that version failed to catch on with the cult crowd, because the lone booking we were able to find was in Blytheville, Arkansas in February 1976...
...so producer/director Charles Harder turned his attention toward black filmgoers next, hiring Miami-based comedian and radio personality "Wildman Steve" Gallon to appear in comical interruptions that were then sprinkled throughout this moth-eaten sex "spoof"...
...or "sort of black-humor laugh-in" as it's referred to in the above Boxoffice article from June 28, 1976...
...and voila! - "Laff riot of the year!"

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