“From every act of pleasure comes an equal act of perversion!”

In The Curious Dr. Humpp, a demented Argentinian doctor (who gets his instructions from a talking, megalomaniacal brain-in-a-jar that is all that’s left of his late mentor) kidnaps attractive and horny couples—as well as a few hippies, strippers and lesbians, natch—and uses them for his own nefarious ends.

Dr. Humpp and his team of goofy, rubber-masked zombie henchmen (and a buxom blonde nurse who likes to be smacked around) keep them prisoners in his creepy island mansion. They are injected with an aphrodisiac drug that turbo-charges their sexual desires and they have orgiastic group sex as the doctor drains a “sex particle” fluid from their bodies. The resultant libido smoothie prevents him from doing a Dr. Jekyll and turning into a blood-thirsty monstrous Mr. Hyde
 

 

“The strength of human body-fluids taken during coitus … they help me go on!”

The original early 1960s Argentinian film—which must have been pretty racy to begin with—was spiced up with additional sex footage when a North American distributor picked up this tawdry cult item in the early 70s. The name was probably meant to call to mind the XXX box office smash, I am Curious Yellow, although the two films have absolutely nothing in common, except for perhaps a high nipple count.

“Sex dominates the world and now I dominate sex!”

I doubt that I’d have ever heard about this kooky celluloid atrocity had it not been for these two brothers, slightly older than me, who went to my parents’ church. When I was like ten or maybe even younger, my parents were visiting their parents and they showed me how they lived behind a drive-in movie theater. But not just any old drive-in showing Herbie Rides Again or Jaws, but one that often screened R and even X-rated movies! I mean, imagine that! And this was in West Virginia in the 70s. Go figure.
 

 
Anyway, the thing that was unspooling up the hill from their house on that particular night was The Curious Dr. Humpp, as they informed me and we watched it (from a fairly great distance) from a second floor window, trading binoculars like the kids in Stranger Things if they were in an episode directed by David Lynch. Years later I found a massive poster for the film in lurid shades of yellow and purple along a stack of lobby cards at the Pasadena Flea Market.

Here’s a taste of The Curious Dr. Humpp. If you mistakenly believe that you need to see the entire thing, there’s a deluxe DVD put out by Something Weird and you can buy that here. You can also find it streaming on various other sites that I can’t link to here, on a family-friendly website like Dangerous Minds…