Personally, I’ve never been to Florida. While I am partial to their orange juice- preferably mixed with a liter of vodka and ice cubes- these days the panhandle has little to offer celluloid sickos like me. That wasn’t always the case. Believe it or not, during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s the Sunshine State was a thriving Mecca of exploitation films. Doris Wishman directed campy nudist classics like Hideout In The Sun and Nude On The Moon, Herschell Gordon Lewis yanked out tongues in the Suez motel for his gore classic Blood Feast, and William Grefe roamed the swamps for Death Curse Of Tartu. These independent mavericks used the sand, sun and surf as backdrops for their zero-budget epics. Cast and crews for many of these films were interchangeable. In those days you could make movies for very little money and turn profits by playing the drive-in circuit across the country. Something Weird Video rescued many of these deranged gems and preserved them on DVD. But others keep popping up. Here are my five Florida favorites. It doesn’t get any more unHollywood than this.
Mr. No Legs (1981) Directed by Ricou Browning– the man who wore the monster suit in Creature From The Black Lagoon– this film is about a stocky, legless hit man. He has a wheelchair outfitted with machine guns hidden in the arm plates and earns a living executing marks for a drug lord. There’s a hilarious bar-fight sequence between Bitchy Bessie and a white-trash stoolie in a saloon filled with drag queens, dwarves, and thug-like extras. And the 15-minute finale, a car chase involving Mr. Shirley Temple and Z-movie-icon John Agar, is so inept and overlong that it soon becomes convulsively funny. There’s also a jaw-dropping scene by a pool in which the legless killer kung-fu’s his opponents with his stumps. It has to be seen to be believed.
Blood Freak (1972) There was a story in the news once about a tiger that has escaped from a Florida compound owned by a former B-movie Tarzan named Steve Sipek (known in the movies as Steve Hawkes). But that wasn’t his only claim to fame. Sipek starred as a biker named Herschell in this bizarre film by Brad Grinter. When Herschell gets a job at a poultry farm and is fed chemically altered meat, he turns into a giant turkey that drinks the blood of heroin addicts while clucking, “Gobble, gobble.” Eventually he’s saved by prayer, and the chain-smoking narrator of the film has a coughing fit while warning his audience about the dangers of drug use.
Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things (1971) Two gay guys on the run end up in a Miami suburb after they commit a jewel robbery and a murder. Sexy, simpleminded galoot Stanley (Scott Lawrence aka Wayne Crawford) wears snakeskin bell-bottoms, drives a van painted in swirling psychedelic colors and eats doughnuts out of a cigar box. Paul (Abe Zwick) masquerades as his Aunt Martha in ludicrously unconvincing drag and has jealous fits when Stanley gets stoned and brings girls home. Paul usually dispatches them with a knife and a shovel, while Stanley is left to whine. “One minute you wanna kill me, the next minute you wanna ball with me!” A junkie from their hometown of Baltimore shows up to complicate matters, and Stanley helps deliver the baby of a pregnant neighbor with a butcher knife. Brad Grinter, the director of Blood Freak, even appears as a cop in this indescribably sick treat from Thomas Casey.
God’s Bloody Acre (1975) Harry Kerwin (brother of Blood Feast star William) directed this hillbilly massacre movie. William Kerwin (billed as Thomas Wood) plays one of three brothers who live in the wilds and viciously set upon land developers and interlopers. There’s an extended rock-throwing sequence involving a guy on a bulldozer, who ends up getting cut in half. The murderous but environmentally conscious trio attack a couple vacationing in an RV and rape the wife after hanging her husband. They go after a hitchhiking pacifist (Scott Lawrence of Sometimes Aunt Martha… fame), who eventually musters his courage and uses his teeth to tear out one of the redneck’s throats. “I can do it. I can fight. Oh shit!” are the sublimely ironic last lines of this nasty wonder.
Sting Of Death (1965) William Grefe (Stanley, The Naked Zoo) directed this howler about a half-man, half-jellyfish monster in the Florida Everglades that assaults frugging, bikini-clad college students. The ridiculous creature- a man wearing a wet suit festooned with seaweed and a plastic bag over his head- is unforgettable. The director laughingly admitted to me at a Chiller Convention years back that the actor inside nearly suffocated. Neil Sedaka, at the time a recording sensation, sings the theme song “Do The Jelly Fish” with these timeless lyrics: “Wella, you’ve gotta jella/or you’re not any fella/Ring the bella with every Cinderella/when you can jella/and do the jella jellyfish!/Hey! Hoo! Hey! Ha!”