May 26, 2025

Though he was far more prolific in adult films as Henri Pachard (Babylon Pink, Every Woman Has a Secret), the late Ron Sullivan got his start on the sexploitation circuit in the 1960s with familiar titles like the Something Weird favorite Scare Their Pants Off. However, much of his work from that period was more under the radar unless you dug deep in the SWV catalog for its DVD-R and VHS curios that didn't make it to major retailers. Finally ready to shock an unprepared public from Distribpix on Blu-ray, Ron Sullivan: The Early Years is a triple feature of rarities restored from the best existing elements. If you're a fan of the SWV golden era of sexploitation shockers, this is essential viewing. First up is Sullivan's debut, 1967's Lust Weekend, a horror-tinged roughie shot with virtually no dialogue as it charts the Sadean experiences of NYC couple David and June who get targeted for an afternoon of debauchery by the local sex cult. Various kinks get indulged and forced upon our initiates by a number of posh sickos until we get to a truly haunting and chilling finale. Restored from the original negative, this looks stunning in HD and easily surpasses the often blown-out version we've had before. Next up is 1968's The Bizarre Ones, essentially a variation on the same theme as an upstate male hitchhiker gets picked up by a female S&M freak who turns his afternoon into an unending wallow in torment. Disposing with the colorful charm of his debut, Sullivan gets slow, arty, and grimy here with a divisive entry that will nevertheless tickle your fancy if you love monochrome roughies that border on the abstract. Again this is transferred from the negative and looks gorgeous. Finally you get the one color entry here and the rarest of the bunch, Scorpio 70, which starts with a dead guy being fished out of the water and onto a boat. Jennifer Welles (in her black hair phase) then has a string of flashbacks showing up sexual shenanigans on said boat led to the death, with lots of infidelity and deception along the way. This one is taken from the interpositive and definitely looks rougher, but it's great to have here in any condition. Extras include a Lust Weekend trailer, a great 68m39s interview with Sullivan for The Rialto Report covering his entire career (played as an audio option for Lust Weekend), a 44m35s Sullivan video interview with Ashley West, a video interview with Variety Films' Don Walters (18m32s) about his long friendship and work with Sullivan, and an image gallery. The limited slipcase edition also comes with a nice 40-page illustrated book with a West essay about Sullivan's early work. Buy here and here.

Far more typical of '80s theatrical adult fare is Ribald Tales of Canterbury, a (comparatively) lavish production written by and starring Hypathia Lee and directed by the very prolific Bud Lee, her husband at the time. This was their second film together (following Tasty, which is also included on Vinegar Syndrome's DVD in what amounts to an unbilled double feature), and the 1985 film is a fun twist on the English lit staple (previously filmed as a scandalous art house comedy by Pier Paolo Pasolini) as a bunch of travelers to Canterbury swap dirty stories. Unsimulated sex aside, it's actually less raunchy than the source material as a group of travelers on a pilgrimage to Canterbury tell (and participate in) a variety of naughty stories, with a number of familiar faces popping up along the way. Both Lees appear (not together) along with Mike Horner (who gets the two best scenes, first with Debra Lee and then with Hypathia), Colleen Brennan again (in a scene-stealing bit as the Lady of Bath), Marc Wallice, Buffy Davis, Peter North, Josephine Carrington, Cheri Janvier, and Beverly Bliss. A nice, bouncy score helps things along, and the colorful costumes and fairly ambitious production design give it a nice, elegant ambiance, reminiscent of some of David F. Friedman's softcore period films from the previous two decades. Lots of fun to be had here. The old Caballero tape and DVD editions were nothing special with fuzzy detail and truly awful audio, but the Vinegar Syndrome DVD from 2015 did it right with a sparkling fresh transfer, proper framing, and a ton of great extras including a Bud Lee commentary moderated by the label's Joe Rubin (pretty much running through his relationship with Hypathia, anecdotes about pretty much every performer, and stories from the industry during this transitional period), plus a 10-minute video interview in which he talks about how Hypathia got into the industry as a dancer in Springfield, Illinois and some pretty funny stories ("Roooned!") about both films on this disc, including how "actor" Buster Cherry got his sole adult gig here.

As for Tasty, it's an amusing little romp about a radio station called KNUT about to go under unless they come up with a radical change in format -- which comes when leading DJ Tasty Tastums (Hypathia) leads the charge in sex-oriented programming including love advice and on-air boinking. Basically it's an excuse for a bunch of free-form sex scenes with Stacey Donovan, Ashley Welles, the popular Kristara Barrington, Gail Force, Steve Drake, and Scott Irish, with Horner and Hypathia teaming up again for a crazy, neon-lit spoof of a Pat Benatar music video. Again the transfer looks immaculate and blows away those moldy old VHS copies by a few hundred miles. Ribald Tales was subsequently released on Blu-ray in 2018 as part of Vinegar Syndrome's 5 Years Five Films - Volume #1. In 2025, the two films were reunited for a Blu-ray edition from Peekarama with both titles looking exceptional, and the commentary and featurette are ported over plus trailers for both films. Buy here or here.

The vintage Essex fun continues with two mid-'70s comedies directed by Alan Colberg, who appeared in front of and behind the camera throughout the decade. Initially paired from Peekarama on DVD in 2014, they highlight one of the era's most popular male stars, John Holmes, whose infamous manhood made up for what he lacked in looks and screen presence. Made in 1975, All Night Long is basically a sex competition between Holmes and softcore/hardcore genre stalwart Ric Lutze to see who can bed the most women in a single night, a bet that starts off at a southern-fried banquet where awards are given out for on-camera carnal accomplishments. The men's exploits (involving a multitude of races, positions, and occupations, including a geisha and a dominatrix) are broadcast to the crowd via closed circuit TV. The female cast is a lively batch of familiar second stringers like Suzy Chung, Desiree West, Veronica Taylor, and Sharon Thorpe, and the comedy works pretty well coupled with gaudy, colorful art direction.

The second film is another in Holmes's string of Johnny Wadd adventures, Tapestry of Passion, credited by series creator Bob Chinn and trotting the stone-faced private eye through another perilous plot involving a femme fatale. Said femme in this case is the murderer of submissive John Leslie, who gets offed after one flashback and leaves behind a mysterious wife (Annette Haven), a potential witness (Desiree West again), and Wadd's client, Jean (Leslie Bovee), sister of the deceased. Needless to say, most of his investigation involves thrusting his way through the entire cast one at a time. A bit glossier and better acted than most of the dirt-cheap Wadd outings before it (some of which were softcore), this one sets the stage for his best-known future exploits like The Jade Pussycat and Blonde Fire. Both transfers from the 35mm negatives look terrific and appear to have been kept in pristine condition, easily blowing away the dull VHS-era masters floating around from Essex and Electric for years; the theatrical trailers for both features are also included. The two films hit streaming in HD from a variety of channels not long after that disc, but you can get the best option of all with a 2025 Blu-ray from Peekarama that looks as impressive as you'd hope. Extras are light (just trailers for both films), but if you're a fan of '70s smut, this should be an obvious choice. Buy here or here.

Likely due to its title and famous poster designed to cash in on the post-Enter the Dragon martial arts craze, The Vixens of Kung Fu has the peculiar honor of being one of Vinegar Syndrome's most reissued titles ever. A quickie porno mounted in 1975 by the industry's East Coast contingent, it's an unholy collision of XXX actors flailing their arms around in karate school outfits, nonsensical "Eastern" philosophy, and arbitrary onscreen coupling featuring some familiar faces camouflaged under more obscure pseudonyms than usual. Subtitled A Tale of Yin Yang, this particular offering cobbles together some random vignettes about a gang of female martial arts fighters in the woods of upstate New York, a mystical instructor of the erotic martial arts played by short-lived adult actress Peonies Jong, and a monk (Tony Richards, who played Tweedledee in Bill Osco's Alice in Wonderland) who wants to get back at the aforementioned female fighters by wearing weights on his manhood and learning how to screw them silly. However, the story actually starts off with Bree Anthony (Richards' other half in Alice) as a hooker sort of attacked by some hunters (including Jamie Gillis and Bobby Astyr) who pop her with an "anesthesia" gun, only to turn up later (as the same person, or maybe not) in the clutches of those strange women, who are led by the lusty C.J. Laing. There's also a random flashback in which she has a menage a trois involving Martin actor Roger Caine, and the ladies all emit mystical vapor from their nether regions. A lot of viewers were caught off guard by this film since its poster really doesn't sell it as a hardcore film at all; a theater owner could've easily stuck this on an accidental double bill with Wonder Women or Deep Thrust, among many others. As a sex film it's pretty much business as usual, but as a martial arts production it's nonstop hilarity as the cast attempts to sound profound, strike fighting poses, and engage in deeply metaphysical lovemaking, turning this into prime comedic material. This also marked one of the earliest films for director Bill Milling, camouflaged here under the unlikely name of "Lin Cho Chiang;" he later went on to go sort of mainstream with the trashy 1990 women-in-prison VHS perennial, Caged Fury. Vinegar Syndrome released this one on DVD in 2013, then upgraded it to Blu-ray in 2018 as part of its limited 5 Films 5 Years: Volume 3 set, and finally in 2025 officially shifted it over to Peekarama as a triple feature on Blu-ray (all united solely by the fact that they were shot in New York) from the same excellent HD scan.

The second film in the set is Shaun Costello's 1979 soapy potboiler Sunny, which was bootlegged a lot until its official DVD bow in 2017 from Vinegar Syndrome paired up with More Than Sisters. Candida Royalle stars here as Sunny, a high class hooker hired by widow Marlene Willoughby to take care of her son, Marc (Rick Iverson), who's set to inherit a massive trust fund when he marries. It's all part of a plan by the mom to get control of her husband's estate, while Sunny herself contemplates ways to get all the dough herself. Along the way you get a lot of sex scenes including a splashy masquerade party that turns as lusty as you'd expect. A few kinky twists keep things interesting in this glossy stab at a crossover film, with Costello obviously working with one of the larger budgets and casts of his career. It's mainly Royalle's show though, and she's great as always.

Finally in our third film you can hit the dance floor with the disco-heavy The Night Bird, one of the first 1977 films to ride on the coattails of the pop culture sensation, Saturday Night Fever. Marc Valentine stars as Southside, a hustler who spends his days hawking hot jewelry on the street and his nights at the local disco, which also features live stripped and sex acts. He and his regular club buddies (David Morris and Michael Ronds) bond by cruising for women and hurling racial epithets (sound like a certain John Travolta hit?), including Southside's on-and-off friends with benefits relationship with the easy Sweet Lips (Beth Anne). The sex scenes are infrequent but well executed (including a menage a trois with club owner Christie Ford and Cannibal Holocaust's Robert Kerman, all under their porn names here), but the real novelty here is the thumping disco score and the colorful patter between our three buddies and the variety of sharp-tongued women they encounter. It's colorful, nicely shot, and another of the better entries in Vinegar Syndrome's Peekarama line, first paired up on DVD with Night of the Spanish Fly from 1976. Both of the latter films feature their theatrical trailers on the Blu-ray and look exceptional. Buy here or here.

More Shaun Costello and his New York City-shot directorial work can be found in the ultimate Christmas adult film, 1976's The Passions of Carol, a porno chic twist on A Christmas Carol. Anticipating the Marlo Thomas made-for-TV movie It Happened One Christmas by two years, this stylish take turns its protagonist into a woman, Carol Scrooge (Mary Stuart), who declares "bah humbug" when the staff of her erotic magazine are forced to work late on Christmas Eve. That includes hard-working Bob Hatchett (Jamie Gillis) who just wants to go home and enjoy his wife next to the Christmas tree, and of course, that night Carol is visited by a succession of spirits who confront her with her kinky past, her underappreciated present, and her sad future turning tricks in fleapit hotels. An all-star cast including Kim Pope, Marc Stevens, Alan Marlow, and Sonny Landham give this one a strong thespian edge, and Costello himself and even Carter Stevens turn up for the proceedings which are scored with an array of familiar yuletide carols (and one out of left field choice that won't be spoiled here). It's all fun and a bit spooky and twisted at times, including a "childhood" sequence unlike anything else you've ever seen and a suitably horror-style final ghost. Readily available on VHS and DVD from years, this looks far better than ever before thanks to the Quality X Blu-ray featuring a fresh, much-needed scan from the 16mm camera negative with extensive work done to reduce an annoying, baked-in buzzing during some of the audio. Costello and Vinegar Syndrome's Joe Rubin deliver a terrific, amusing audio commentary covering the histories of the performers (including Stevens' distraught reaction to doing Dickens dialogue) and New York's sexually voracious atmosphere at the time-- not to mention the frantic film shoot to make a Christmas release deadline that disastrously got missed anyway. Buy here or here.

Also set at Christmas (complete with carols) but with a very different vibe is 1983's Alexandra, a relatively prestigious production that was shot and edited into very different hardcore and soft mainstream versions with the latter geared for the home video and cable markets (a la the radically different Dixie Ray, Hollywood Star and It's Called Murder, Baby). One of the handful of XXX films produced by David F. Friedman and directed by Tim McDonald (Talk Dirty to Me Part 2), it's a very obvious updating of the Hollywood melodrama classic A Letter to Three Wives -- in this case with the mysterious title character threatening to expose illicit, adulterous secrets buried among three married friends. Here it's Rachel Ashley, Lauren Wilde, and Joanna Storm doing the honors with one about to lose her husband among prospects Robert Kerman, Eric Edwards, and Steven Douglas. The numerous classic Hollywood posters stuck around in the background should be a pretty big indicator of what you're getting here, and actually in many respects the softcore version plays better given how perfunctory most of the explicit scenes are. The Quality X Blu-ray features both versions (94 minutes for the X-rated and 99 for the softcore), and it would be impossible to composite them together since there's a huge amount of alternate and exclusive footage in each. Both look excellent as expected, and you also get an image gallery and a video interview with Don Walters again (36m55), producer-screenwriter on this film, about the background of Variety Films and the process of stepping in to pitch in on the editing and directing for what amounted to a very challenging production. Buy here or here.

A director who brought a great deal of visual flair to the adult film business thanks to his photography background and extensive work as a producer, Cecil Howard really came into his own during the waning days of 35mm theatrical hardcore. His films were very light on plot but heavy on visual appeal, often feeling like a chic erotic magazine spread come to life as seen in films like Fantasex and Scoundrels. Much of his work has been issued on DVD and eventually Blu-ray via the Command Cinema imprint, and a pretty solid starting point is 1981's star-packed spectacle Neon Nights. Young Sandy (Lysa Thatcher) has a sexual awakening via self-stimulation while listening to her older sister (Kandi Barbour) going at it with boyfriend Robert (Jamie Gillis) in the next bedroom. Robert decides to pay a visit to Sandy later in the bathroom, triggering a series of hallucinatory encounters involving Sandy and other characters. At first the sex scenes are fairly standard, such as a romp with a tennis teacher (Ashley Moore) and family friend Bonnie (Veronica Hart), but things get much weirder when Sandy visits a magician (Jack Teague) who levitates her and brings her to sexual ecstasy. Things finally wrap up in the truly outlandish climax as Sandy and the film's other characters (including Eric Edwards as a goofball prone to re-enacting the Psycho shower scene) take part in a colorful, costumed orgy, followed by a little twist ending. This film arguably makes the best use of Thatcher, who specialized in playing wholesome high school types and earned quite a following throughout the 1980s. Barbour and Hart do their usual professional job and prove their acting chops yet again, while Gillis, Edwards, and the underrated Moore earn their leading man stripes again. Though a few bits may be a tad harsh for some viewers, this is a decent example of a "couples" adult film that flatters and respectfully explores its female protagonists rather than focusing on their debasement. Media Blasters issued this as a two-disc set back in the day with the original mono track and a 5.1 remix, while Howard turns up for a feature commentary track with Casey Scott in which he reminisces about the technical nature of the shooting, the logistical problems of shooting real sex, and the personalities of the various actors involved. He also returns to contribute a hit-or-miss commentary for over 20 minutes of outtakes, which are basically the full raw footage from all of the sex scenes which provide a far more extended, intimate look at how much was shot of the performers. Finally, the disc rounds out with two different theatrical trailers for the main feature. Disc two has the much shorter (barely over an hour) cable TV version, which looks okay but still a couple of generations softer in comparison to the full version. The performers are represented with several new video interviews: Edwards, Hart, Gillis, and cinematographer C. Davis Smith (who shot most of Doris Wishman's films), all of whom seem cheerful and frank about their careers as they talk about their roles in the business. (Smith's opening advice to anyone considering getting into the biz is priceless.) All of the extras except the cable version (and the 5.1 audio mix) are ported over for the 2025 Blu-ray release, which comes from a very vibrant 4K scan from the original negative. Buy here or here.

A funny little salute to classic pulp adventures, 1982's Blonde Goddess unfolds within the colorful daydreams of browbeaten and strangely beefy comic book artist Davis Messa who tends to sneak dirty jokes into his work. Courtesy of Vixens of Kung-Fu director Bill Milling (who shows a lot more style here), you get an Indiana Jones-inspired adventure, a sci-fi orgy, a black-and-white noir yarn, a WWII flying ace sex showdown, and lots of gags, all embodied by stars of the era including Jacqueline Lorians, Barbara Peckinpaugh, Loni Sanders, Ron Jeremy (yikes), Tamara West, and Misty Regan. Distribpix ensured this one could build up a decent cult following over the years thanks to its appearances on VHS and DVD from its Video-X-Pix arm, but that ancient 1-inch video master didn't even come close to the presentation you get on the 2025 Blu-ray from Quality X featuring a fresh 4K scan from the 35mm camera negative. The colors and crazy details of the sets and costumes really pop to life here, and it's a treat to just sit back and laugh along with the film as it bounces from one adventure to another. Extras include the trailer, a teaser, and an image gallery. Buy here or here.

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