The death of Mike Vraney on January 2nd was a real shit way to start the year. As the founder of home video distro company Something Weird, Vraney was responsible for salvaging and preserving a massive library of films few people would devote the same amount of energy, money and passion into. From the distinctive works of exploitation auteurs such as Doris Wishman and H. G. Lewis to the bona fide smut hucksterism of producers Harry Novak and David Friedman, these films were not slick, classy, polished, politically correct entertainments, but a mixture of sordid roughies, quaintly pervy nudies and lurid genre obscurities, many from the ‘60s-’70s, all catering to the grindhouse crowd and made on non-existent budgets.
Noel Murray at The Dissolve rightfully described Something Weird as the “Criterion Collection of Sleaze”. Although one might struggle to find any SW release that LOOKED as pristine as Criterion’s transfers — some prints looked astoundingly immaculate, but more often than not, they were in ragged, speckly condition — it didn’t matter, considering their rarity. Usually the scratchiness added to the film’s mystique and charm, as if one were discovering a lost treasure that’s just been dug up from the earth. And releasing the film wasn’t just enough for Vraney, who regularly lavished his DVD releases with an abundance of bonus features: trailers, shorts, outtakes, audio commentaries, exploitation art, radio spots, etc. The guy really knew how to please.
When I recently watched Rewind This!, Josh Johnson’s excellent documentary on the history of VHS, Vraney popped up as one of the interviewees. It struck me that I’d rarely seen him in the flesh — the man who had introduced hours of wild and highly unusual cinema into my brain — and the fact that he passed so soon after that viewing hit me strangely hard. In memoriam, I revisited a bunch of my favourite Something Weird “classicks”. If you’ve never seen any, here are five perfectly weird essentials to get you started (heads up: things are about to get sleeazzy):
TOYS ARE NOT FOR CHILDREN
Thought I’d get this one out of the way first, since it’s easily one of the most creepily wrong and sick movies in SW’s vast catalogue. Released on the bottom half of a Harry Novak-presents double feature DVD with the sex-and-aliens mind-fuck The Toy Box, Stanley Brassloff’s 1972 sexploitation shocker is a monumentally messed-up chunk of ickiness about a 20-year-old, newly hitched toy-store clerk named Pearl (Marcia Forbes) who decides to resolve her daddy issues by turning to prostitution. Dramatically overwrought in every way, and marked by a grim, serious tone, Toys Are Not For Children is relatively well-made and acted for what it is, and surprisingly restrained in the nudity department, its suggestiveness only heightening the squirm-inducing, holy-shit factor of its jaw-dropping ending. Consider yourself warned.
THE SINFUL DWARF
Okay I lied — this one’s super-grotty too. In fact, legend has it that SW’s DVD distribution partner Image Entertainment passed on releasing The Sinful Dwarf because it was just. too. much (it’s now available through Severin Films). And who can blame them for being a little cautious? This notorious Danish import features a drooling, hobbling, evil-looking dwarf called Olaf (Torben) who abducts young girls, drugs them with heroin and imprisons them in the make-shift-brothel-attic of his alcoholic mother’s boarding house. Every depraved frame of this dwarfsploitation masterpiece beggars belief. The sex is as near-hardcore as you can get without seeing “it”, but the atmosphere is so unrelentingly squalid it’s difficult to see anyone getting turned on. One-of-a-kind filth.
BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL
As close as Doris Wishman has come to making a perfect film. Much less over-the-top than its pulpy title would imply, this 1965 picture, running just over an hour, is the most accessible gateway into her oeuvre, starring shapely blonde Gigi Darlene as a housewife who, after being attacked by her apartment janitor, embarks to New York where she finds herself the victim of more mishap. Ostensibly a bridge between her early nudies and seedier, more explicit later work, Bad Girls Go to Hell is fairly tame content-wise, but all Wishman’s trademarks — the disconnected post-dubbed dialogue, wobbly camerawork and random fascination with feet and pot plants — come together here to create a noir-like dream-logic movie worthy of Freudian and feminist readings.
THE PSYCHO LOVER
If you need evidence on how great a SW release can look on DVD, seek out Robert Vincent O’ Neill’s delirious 1970 thriller The Psycho Lover (aka The Loving Touch). Bursting with psychedelic colour, this nutty exploiter takes a page from The Manchurian Candidate, following the dastardly plans of psychiatrist Kenneth Alden (Lawrence Montaigne) to rid his wife by brainwashing a patient to kill her. Conveniently, the patient’s a homicidal, misogynistic maniac known to strangle women while Bava-esque green-and-red lighting glows around him. Filled with psycho-babble, ‘70s kitsch, acid freak-outs, speedboats, space-age cars and romantic sled rides, this is one primo trash oddity.
SOMETHING WEIRD
I guess it’s fitting to cap this list with the movie that Vraney’s company was named after. It’s directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast), who took a break from his gore-fests for a mind-boggling mess of ESP, LSD and witchcraft. The “story”, about a disfigured electrocution-survivor-turned-psychic who makes a pact with a witch — un-aided by Lewis’ primitive direction and the terrible, terrible acting — can be a chore for some viewers to sit through. But approached in the right frame of mind, Something Weird is a very vibey and endearing movie with enough bizarre tangents to pack several more movies. The DVD is a must-have, due to the invaluable audio commentary where Vraney, who’s joined by Lewis and producer David Friedman, relays the entire history of how his company came about.
