Trash Menagerie

Dir. James Bryan James Bryan and Renee Harmon are dynamite. They’re magic. They're no slouches individually when it comes to low-budget exploitation, but paired together they are unstoppable. How else would you explain Lady Street Fighter? By all accounts it should be an unwatchable piece of crap. The plot makes no sense, the acting and dialogue are uniformly terrible, the action is clunky, and the eroticism is painfully awkward. But somehow Bryan and Harmon are instead able to turn these ingredients into a golden nugget of cinematic insanity that must be seen to be believed. The film opens with a woman being tortured to death by men trying to extract from her the location of a stuffed dog containing sensitive materials. The woman’s twin sister, Linda Allen, arrives in L.A. with said dog, apparently unaware of its significance and is promptly attacked by two thugs in a parking garage. One of the thugs drives a car into the other’s face, but luckily this leaves him only wit...

Dir. Cirio H. Santiago The theme song that plays over the end credits of this film contains the lyric, “they’re vampire hookers and blood is not all they suck,” so that’s the level of tomfoolery we’re dealing with here. And while it doesn’t need to go to the top of your Must Watch List, Vampire Hookers , directed by exploitation juggernaut Cirio H. Santiago, is still a charmingly dopey, if dated, horror-comedy that is smirk inducing and chuckle producing...and a little cringe worthy too. It’s strange. Sociopolitical insensitivity is to be expected in exploitation films usually presenting as women getting raped in service of the plot, women getting naked in service of selling movie tickets, and instances of casual racism. Maybe it’s just from years of desensitization, but these things don’t really phase me anymore when I see them in these kinds of films. While there’s no rape going on in Vampire Hookers , there is a scene where our two leads head into a bar to pick up women, st...