The other night I was watching an old VHS compilation of about an hours worth of wild movie trailers from Audubon Films, the New York-based distribution company of stylish, high class erotic filmmaker Radley Metzger (no relation) in the 60s and 70s. Metzger had an especially good eye for well-made softcore erotica and even the Audubon films that he didn’t direct, but merely released, had the same fantastic art direction, groovy soundtracks, lush cinematography and smokin’ hot Eurobabes his own films were known for. It occurred to me that since that VHS had come out in the early 1990s, probably most of the Audubon Films catalog had been released by enterprising DVD companies specializing in “underground” cult movie fare. (Hell, the widely seen Audubon trailers video probably inspired many young fans of mondo cinema to grow up and start these very same companies in order to release the films they themselves wanted to get their hands on so badly).
It’s interesting to note that although Japan most certainly did produce some outlandishly weird and sick films then (and now) Metzger’s company picked up few of them for American audiences. Perhaps US filmgoers, even the most jaded, weren’t ready for films like The Weird Love Makers and Madame O.
The Weird Love Makers is a violence for the sake of violence tale of two thugs and a hooker who get out of jail and then do horrible things to the people who put them in the pokey. It’s unimaginable that this film, made in 1960, could have gotten very far when Audobon Films released it in America in 1963!
And then there is Madame O (AKA Zoku akutokui: Joi-hen (or, roughly, “Vicious Female Doctor Part 2”—a sequel to “Vice Doctor – Maternity and Gynecology Department Dairy,” a film now thought lost). A young girl is raped by three boys. She gets pregnant and contracts a venereal disease. She later becomes a respected gynecologist, but has twisted impulses, a homicidal rage towards men and a penchant for violent sex ending in her unconscious victims being given her syphilis via a cotton swab!