Blood Orgy of the She-Devils – 1973, US, 73m. Director: Ted V. Mikels.
Hell of the Living Dead – 1980, Italy/Spain, 100m. Director: Bruno Mattei.
Psycho from Texas – 1975, US, 89m. Director: Jack Collins, Jim Feazell.
BLOOD ORGY OF THE SHE-DEVILS (1973) Ted V. Mikels, the director of Astro-Zombies and The Corpse Grinders, strikes again with this psychedelic oddity that doesn’t have much to offer beyond its schlocky title. The grand witch (Lila Zaborin) of an underground coven is assassinated by the people who hired her to carry out a murder via black magic but returns from the grave to enact revenge. By using voodoo dolls, Zaborin takes out her enemies through drowning and a fall out the window. A professor of the occult notices the murders and uses his student to infiltrate Zaborin’s lair. Too talky for what it is, and with endless “past life” flashbacks that don’t amount to anything other than filler. D
HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980) (AKA: Night of the Zombies; Virus; Zombie Creeping Flesh; Zombie Inferno) A chemical weapons factory in Papua, New Guinea accidentally releases a toxic gas known as “Operation Sweet Death,” promptly turning the building’s scientists into flesh-eating zombies. A SWAT-like commando team gets lost in the nearby jungle where they bump into a television reporter and some tourists—tourists?!—fleeing from the growing zombie invasion. The commandos quickly learn the importance of a shot to the head when they come across a zombified child gorging on his father’s innards. In a truly imbecilic scene, the TV reporter (Margit Evelyn Newton) sheds her clothes and paints her face in order to secure safe passage through native territory. This is bookended by stock footage from an Italian/Japanese “shockumentary” dubbed The Real Cannibal Holocaust. Seeking refuge from the walking dead, our protagonists hide inside a Colonial house, but despite everything they’ve been through, the characters are too dumb to secure the place from the zombies and are overcome, including Newton who gets her eyes gouged out in one of the film’s most notorious moments—a fittingly gruesome ending to this ridiculously contrived but unabashedly entertaining Dawn of the Dead/Zombie ripoff. B–
PSYCHO FROM TEXAS (1975) (AKA: Wheeler) An unhinged loon named Wheeler (John King III) is hired by seedy individuals to dispose of a local oil mogul (Herschel Mays) in some deep Texas woods. Mays tricks Wheeler’s idiot accomplice and escapes into the countryside. Back in civilization, Wheeler keeps himself busy by raping and killing the sheriff’s daughter, and terrorizing a barmaid (Linnea Quigley) by stripping her naked and pouring beer on her because she refused to dance with the creep. Why is Wheeler such a psycho? Because when he was a wee lad he saw his hooker mom in bed with a redneck in one of the weakest flashback expositions in the history of negligible screenwriting. But don’t fret—Wheeler gets his just desserts in the form of a shotgun blast to the chest, supplied by the vengeful sheriff. But, does anyone really care? Quigley’s scene was apparently added years after the film’s initial release to give the movie a little more excitement. It didn’t work. A genuinely miserable experience. D–