Wishman: "Roughies" (Mid-to-Late
1960s Sexploitation Films)
Next for Wishman in the mid-1960s came a series of
grainy, B/W sexual melodramas or sexploitation films, sometimes called "roughies," in
which violence and the gratuitous nudity of tragic heroines was depicted,
but without explicit sex. These films played mostly in grindhouse cinema
houses. Her second release in this genre and first official "roughie"
sexploitation film was Bad
Girls Go to Hell (1965) - about Boston housewife Meg (Gigi Darlene)
who became a female fugitive runaway after accidentally murdering
her buck-toothed janitor-rapist after making love to
her husband and showering. She fled to NYC,
changed her name to Ellen Green (allegedly from Chicago), roomed with
a lesbian named Della, and claimed she was a dancer. She encountered
more abusive violence and exploitative sex - but then woke up - was
it all a dream? However, the cycle began to ominously repeat itself.
Wishman purchased O zestos minas Avgoustos
(1966, Greece) - renamed
Hot Month of August (1969) and Pyretos (1965, Greece) -
renamed Passion
Fever (1969) for $4,000 from
a struggling film company while vacationing in Greece. Both of the
"Adults Only" films were over-dubbed into English (with no regard for
the original scripts which were lost) and added about 10 minutes of
soft-core scenes (mostly nudity from body doubles with obscured faces).
The
tagline for Hot Month of August was: "He blew her cool...She
blew his...and her husband blew all in...". It marked the film
debut of soft-core star Marie Liljedahl (credited as Ann) as a teen
on the beach. And the tagline for Passion Fever was: "He
hungered for the hunt....The ANIMAL...destroying every decent girl
with INDECENT LOVE!" It added: "The Sweet Smell of a Woman...Any
Woman! This was his HANG-UP!...a master at the game!"
Movie Title Screens (or Trailer Titles) - Wishman's "Roughies"
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The Sex Perils of Paulette (1965)
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Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965)
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Another Day, Another Man (1966)
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My Brothers Wife (1966)
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A Taste of Flesh (1967)
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Indecent Desires (1968)
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Too Much Too Often (1968)
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Hot Month of August (1969)
(aka O Zestos Minas Avgoustos (1966, Greece))
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Passion Fever (1969)
(aka Pyretos (1965, Greece))
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"Roughies" or Sexploitation Melodramas
(1960s)
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The Sex Perils of Paulette (1965)
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Bad Girls Go To Hell (1965)
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Another Day, Another Man (1966)
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My Brothers Wife (1966)
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A Taste of Flesh (1967)
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Indecent Desires (1968)
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Too Much Too Often (1968)
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Hot Month of August (1969)
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Wishman: Other Features (Early 1970s)
Movie Title Screen
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Notes
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The Amazing Transplant (1970)
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The Amazing Transplant
(1970)
Tagline: "His
was the most unique of all... women DIED for it!"
Plot: In this Doris
Wishman thriller,
sexual encounters with women wearing gold earrings caused once-nerdy
Arthur Barlen (Juan Fernandez), with a male penis transplant, to
go homicidally crazy. In
the opening, Arthur made love to - and strangled girlfriend-fiancee
Mary (Sandy Eden) - wearing earrings. He went on to further uncontrollable
rapes and murders of women with gold earrings. A detective named
Bill (Larry Hunter) discovered why Arthur was a crazed
psychopath with a fetish regarding gold earrings (with multiple
flashbacks to many of his crimes). He learned from Arthur's
transplant doctor, Dr. Meade (Bernard Marcel), that Arthur's
well-endowed, recently-deceased donor-friend Felix had provided
Arthur with his recent penis graft or transplant. Felix was
a serial rapist who became beserk by women wearing gold earrings. The
film ended with the newspaper headline: "TRIAL ENDS JURY FINDS
ARTHUR BALEN GUILTY" |
The Amazing Transplant (1970): The Opening Scene
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Movie Title Screen
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Notes
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Love Toy (1971)
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Love Toy (1971)
Tagline: "He
knew all the games...She was the plaything!"
Facts: Wishman's first soft-core
color feature film was Love Toy (1971), followed by others
- see below.

Plot: In this sleazy non hard-core thriller,
compulsive gambler Marcus (Vic Lester/Larry Hunter) lost his
own nubile teen daughter Chris (Pat Happel) due to his habit
of gin rummy. She became the sex slave of fiend Alex (Bernard
Marcel) and his wife Mary (Willa Mist/Uta Erickson) - as an
object or 'love toy' for various humiliating, role-playing
perversions, such as domination, spanking, incest, oral sex,
bondage, fetishism. After a while, Chris was converted to enjoying
being a 'love toy' - but was it only a dream? |
Movie Title Screen
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Notes
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Keyholes Are For Peeping (1972)
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Keyholes Are For Peeping
(1972)
Tagline: "Will
Titillate The Cockles of Your Heart!"
Facts: This was Wishman's
first attempt at sex comedy or parody.
Plot: Nebbish, Jerry Lewis-like Stanley
Bebble (Sammy Petrillo) took a correspondence course in marriage
counseling, and then solicited his neighbors with hand-written
business cards. He discovered his apartment building's superintendent
Manuel was a Peeping Tom into keyholes. Stanley took it upon
himself to counsel Manuel in finding a real girlfriend for
sex. |
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Chesty Morgan Films (1974)
Then, she hit it 'big' with two low-budget thrillers, Deadly
Weapons (1974) and Double Agent 73 (1974), both starring
Chesty Morgan, a Polish-born stripper with an enormous bust.
She was named for her large physical endowments (73-32-36), although
there was little sex and only a minor amount of nudity in the
films.
Movie Title Screen
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Notes
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Deadly Weapons (1974)
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Deadly Weapons (1974)
Tagline: "Watch
the mob get busted when Chesty takes her revenge."
Facts: Doris Wishman's
notorious and off-beat sexploitation film was advertised
as featuring Polish burlesque stripper and star Chesty Morgan's
(real name Lillian Wilczkowsky) 73-inch enormous and grotesque
bustline (her complete measurements: 73-32-36).
Plot: Chesty starred as an ad executive
Crystal (billed as Zsa Zsa) - she was in love with a seedy,
gangster named 'Hook' Larry
(Greg Reynolds/Richard Towers), who was known to the Mob
for stealing a black book of names and addresses. She sought
revenge when two other mobsters, eye-patched Captain Hook
(Mitchell Fredericks) and Tony Barler (Deep Throat porn
star Harry Reems) eliminated Larry. First, to lure Captain
Hook to her room, she performed an unsexy and
lethargic striptease in a Las Vegas club. Then, she drugged
him with a mickey and then smothered him with her mammoth
'deadly weapons' on the sofa -- it was the first of two
such murders (to the sound of ten-pins falling). Her next
target was Tony in Miami. |
Movie Title Screen
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Notes
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Double Agent 73 (1974)
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Double Agent 73 (1974)
Tagline: "Watch out for the booby
traps...They're explosive."
Facts: This was considered a semi-sequel to
Deadly Weapons (1974).
Plot: Chesty Morgan portrayed Jane Tennay
(aka Agent 73), a big-breasted secret agent. Her objective
was to eliminate heroin drug-pushers (with inferior low-grade
products), led by underworld drug king Ivan Toplan (Louis
Burdi). She was outfitted via a surgical operation above
her left breast, with an implanted spy camera - to photograph
enemy agents. She was unaware that her agency had also planted
a time-triggered bomb inside the camera - in case she was
ever captured. By the film's conclusion, it was revealed
that her own love interest was the lead criminal Ivan - she
shot him to death when he asked her to marry him.
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Double Agent 73 (1974)
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Wishman: Soft-Core Features (Mid-1970s)
When more explicit
sex was demanded by the mid-1970s, Wishman directed a few soft-core
features, although reportedly wasn't present on the set when some
of the more revealing hard-core sex scenes were shot. Satan Was
a Lady (1975) was the first of two hard-core films that Wishman
directed (with the pseudonym Kenyon Wintel), although she undoubtedly
left the most hard-core scenes for others to direct. She publically
denied making the hard-core Come With Me My Love (1976).
Movie Title Screens of Wishman's Soft-Core Features
in Mid-1970s
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Satan Was a Lady (1975)
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The Immoral Three (1975) (aka Hotter Than Hell)
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Come With Me My Love (1976)
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Soft-Core Films (mid-1970s)
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Satan Was a Lady (1975)
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The Immoral Three (1975) (aka Hotter Than Hell)
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The Immoral Three (1975) (aka Hotter Than Hell)
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Come With Me My Love (1976)
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Wishman's Other Features (Late 1970s and Into
the 1980s)
Movie Title Screen
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Notes
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Let Me Die a Woman (1977)
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Let Me Die a Woman (1977)
Tagline: "Born
a Man. Let Me Die a Woman. All True! All Real! See a Man Become
a Woman Before Your Eyes!"
Facts: Wishman's film was
a
semi-documentary (shockumentary) about gender dysphoria and
sex change.
Plot: Included
was medical transformation post-op, sex reassignment footage
after changing a man to a woman, and the notorious chisel scene
when a hermaphrodite re-enacted excising his own penis with a
hammer and chisel.
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Movie Title Screen
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Notes
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A Night to Dismember (1983/1989)
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A Night to Dismember (1983/1989)
Tagline: "Lust, Betrayal,
and Dismemberment..."
Facts: This was Wishman's 27th feature,
an incoherent gory, slasher horror cult film. It was her first
and only horror film. Although the film was shot beginning
in 1979 and finally completed by 1983 (patchworked with additional
footage edited in after Wishman claimed that some film reels
- about 40% of the film - were destroyed by a disgruntled lab
worker), it wasn't released on VHS-video until 1989. It was
subsequently released in 2001 on DVD.
In the film's troubled history, a master version
of the original film (previously thought 'lost') was recently
discovered in 2018. The lead role in this original film (with
an entirely different plot) was performed by Diana Cummings.
Her part in the film was excised during the editing process
in the early 1980s, and replaced by Samantha Fox (see below).
It was
entirely narrated by the voice-over of Detective Tim O'Malley
without additional dialogue from the characters: ("I'm
Tim O'Malley. I'm a detective. The story I am going to tell
you happened in October 1986 in Woodmire Lake, a small town
in the Midwest").
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Bath Murder Scene in Original 1979 Film
of Mary Kent (1941-1962)
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Murder of Bonnie Kent in Opening Scene of 1983
film
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Plot: The film opened with
the bloody, axe-wielding bathtub murder of a nude Bonnie Kent
by her elder sister Susan Kent, who afterwards fell on the
axe and killed herself. The sequence was somewhat unrelated
to the remainder of the film. Two other murders happened in
rapid succession - the killing of their mother Lola Kent (Cindy
Boudreau) (also murdered in a bathtub) by her husband Mr. Broderick
Kent (Levi Richards), who then hanged himself.
Six years later, The Kent family's young niece, Vicki
Kent (Samantha Fox porn star) was released from the Brandt
Hospital for the Criminally Insane after serving just five
years for murder. She had been imprisoned
for supposedly killing two teen boys. Vicki went to
live with her father Adam (Saul Meth), her mother Blanche (Miriam
Meth), and her two scheming, jealous and conspiring siblings
Mary Kent (Diane Cummins) and Billy Kent (Bill Szarka) - members
of a murderous and cursed family.
Subsequently, Vicki (and others) went on
a killing rampage involving dismemberment (spikings, impalements,
stabbings, knifings, etc.) - mostly caused by her siblings
who appeared to be framing Vicki for the many murders, or were
trying to drive her crazy, in order to send her back to the state
asylum. |
Movie Title Screen
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Notes
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Satan Was a Lady (2001)
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Satan Was a Lady (2001)
Tagline: "Evil comes in many shapes,
she just had the best one..." and "She worked the corner
of Sin and Shame!"
Facts: After
a 17 year hiatus (from 1983 to 2000), Wishman made a comeback
film - Satan Was a Lady (2001), a remake of her own
film from 1975 (starring Annie Sprinkle).
Plot: This latest
lurid pulp melodrama told about a red-haired, curvy, and sadistic
dominatrix-stripper and hooker named Cleo Irane (Honey Lauren)
who was obsessed with a fur coat and other luxuries. In the
opening sequence, she wore a mask as she viciously whipped
a bare-backed man until she drew lots of blood. Her plan to
blackmail a rich businessman client John King
(Edge) didn't turn out well.
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Cleo Irane (Honey Lauren)
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Wishman's Last Two Films (Released Post-Humously):
Movie Title Screen
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Notes
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Dildo Heaven (2002) (aka Desperate Desires)
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Dildo Heaven (2002) (aka Desperate Desires)
Tagline: "Wild, wicked and wanton!"
Fact: The film, a soft-core sex comedy
(with surreal dream sequences), had its official world premiere
at the New York Underground Film Festival in early 2002. It
was a direct-to-video feature.
Plot: Three lusful female roommates struggled
with their Peeping Tom neighbor, wished to seduce their bosses
for sex, and enjoyed the pleasures of owning
a dildo. |
Each Time I Kill (2007)
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Each Time I Kill (2007)
Tagline: "A shocking story revealing
the brutality of innocence!"
Fact: This last film written and directed
by Wishman, was shot in 2002.
Plot: It was a teen horror thriller about a magical,
mystical locket. If its shy high-school teenaged owner Ellie
Saunders (Tiffany Paralta) committed a murder, she could claim
a physical attribute of the victim. |
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