Cultpix Radio Ep.58 - The Greatest Female Director of All Time (of Sexploitation)

The Smut Peddler celebrates Doris Wishman – The Twilight Years

2022 is Doris Wishman’s year. The maverick director was born in 1912 and passed away in 2002, still making movies. She would have turned 110 this year, and it’s 20 years since her passing.

No one will ever make movies like Doris Wishman. She is one of the most prolific women filmmakers in the history of American cinema, a writer-director-editor who created collisions between surrealism and exploitation that feel like they materialized from an alternate universe.

Thanks to Cultpix cooperation with rights holder Jimmy Maslon, and the diligent work of Something Weird Video, AGFA (American Genre Film Archive) and Vinegar Syndrome, we are able to join the celebration, with the first of three theme weeks with a total of no less than 24 newly restored films, starting off with The Twilight Years – a collection of sleazy flicks from the 1970’s, that highlights the queen of sexploitation’s last era of filmmaking. Followed in the Spring of 2023 by the collections The Moonlight Years (black & white roughies) and the Daylight Years (nudist films).

To hold us by the hand and guide us in this week’s episode of Cultpix Radio, is none other than our bestest partner and friend, Lisa Petrucci from Something Weird Video! Lisa knows all there is to know about Doris, and then some!

Lisa discusses and explains about Doris’ personality, filming style, actors, Something 
Weird Video’s amazing Wishman vinyl album, and dives deep into each film of this week’s theme.

Starting off with the most famous/infamous of all of Wishman’s films: “Deadly Weapons” (1974) and “Double Agent 73” (1974), starring the notoriously well-endowed Chesty Morgan. We also get Doris Wishman’s own voice from time to time, talking about working with Chesty, and about other films.

“The Immoral Three” (1975) is a sequel of sorts to the Chesty Morgan films, but without Chesty. It plays like a female revenge drama.

We move on to her gender benders – “The Amazing Transplant” (1970), where a man gets a penis transplant, but the donor was a sex maniac. And “Let Me Die a Woman” (1977), Wishman’s only (semi)documentary, about transsexuals and sex change operations, very controversial at the time.

Her comedy “Keyholes Are for Peeping” (1972) is a pill hard to swallow, starring “the poor man’s Jerry Lewis”, the unbearable Sammy Petrillo, in a mess concocted from various leftovers from the cutting room floor…

“The Love Toy” (1971) is a real roughie, which pushes a lot of buttons today, in terms of its controversial theme, and Doris’ unsympathetic handling of its subject.

From Vinegar Syndrome, we add Wishman’s first two hardcore films, which she sometimes denied having directed, and which were made under pseudonym: “Satan Was a Lady” (1975) and “Come With Me My Love” (1976), the world’s first “ghost porn” movie?

Finally, Doris gets the last word from beyond the grave… and her own Spotify playlist.