Something Weird
“I know I have the largest sexploitation archive on earth. Not just the commercial value of it, but in the collector sense,” says home video distributor and film collector Mike Vraney. For nearly twenty-five years, Vraney’s company Something Weird Video has plumbed the incredibly strange and sleazy netherworld of mostly forgotten sexploitation films, including such subterranean subgenres as nudie cuties, nudie roughies, nudist colony films, and white-coaters. A visit to Something Weird’s website brings up choice titles like Nude on the Moon, Olga’s House of Shame, Shanty Tramp, and The Curse of Her Flesh. The sheer volume of obscure films that Vraney has rereleased—over 2,500—coupled with his support of neglected grindhouse auteurs like gore-meister Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs!), subversive softcore queen Doris Wishman (Double Agent 73, Deadly Weapons), and producers David F. Friedman (The Defilers) and Harry H. Novak (The Agony of Love), is fairly amazing. These are orphan films in the truest sense of the word: bastard cinema that was made to pry money out of people’s pockets and then to be discarded, lost and forgotten, if not for someone like Vraney. If you’re a cinephile, it’s easy to get excited about the rediscovery of the lost 1912 silent Richard III or the missing footage from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but how about Friedman’s She Freak or Lewis’s Scum of the Earth? These are exploitation movies that still feel like exploitation: crude and rude, with the stench of the peepshow clinging to them.
I ask Vraney what it is about sexploitation films that so appeals to him, given that he’s devoted much of his adult life to these movies. “Number one, they were plot driven. They’re not like pornography of the 1970s, which have like zero plot,” he answers without hesitation. “These men thought they had to actually make a movie. The other interesting thing is they were shot in four, five, six days, tops. So whatever fad was going that week, say, the Hula Hoop, would show up in that movie.”
Vraney is tall, gregarious, and good-looking, with shaggy sandy-colored hair just starting to go gray at the edges, and an unabashed love for all things involving punk rock, comic books, movies, and naked women. “The girls were wonderful, lots of beehive hairdos, sexy underwear, sexy lingeries,” he says enthusiastically. “The one thing that my collectors love more than anything is a big hairy bush, and that whole giant underwear and nylons and hose and garters. Because for the last twenty years, everybody is hairless—they look like aliens.” He’s well aware that even in the underground world of film collecting, he’s in something of a class by himself. When I mention that he’s one of the last collectors we’re interviewing, he gives an appreciative laugh: “It makes me feel like I’m at the bottom of the barrel—or below the barrel. It’s okay, because what I specialize in is under the barrel as well, which I’m very proud of. I wasn’t out there trying to collect the classics, or preserve or find Gone With the Wind’s missing footage.” He’s proud to be, as he describes it, a “film scavenger.”
A longtime resident of Seattle, Washington, Vraney was born there in 1957. His father was an engineer for NASA and Boeing who worked on both the Saturn V, the rocket that carried man to the moon, and the classic Boeing 747 airliner. “I grew up during the 1960s when Laugh-In, all these things, made reference to dirty movies, the sexual revolution,” he recalls. “My father belonged to the Playboy Club in the 1960s, and we had Playboy magazines around the house. I remember one time my parents put on a Playboy-themed party where my mother pulled out all the centerfolds and pinned them to the walls, then stuck little doilies over the naughty parts, so when everybody got drunk, they’d pull the doilies off and go ‘ha-ha-ha.’” He clearly inherited his unapologetic love of nude women from his dad. Vraney recalls that when he told his father in the late 1980s of his plans to become king of the sexploitation movies, “all he said was, ‘sex sells.’ So I got a free pass from my dad to do this.”
Mature-looking for his age, Vraney snuck into his first porn film, Alex de Renzy’s A History of the Blue Movie, in the early 1970s, when he was barely in his teens. “I was tall with a light mustache, so nobody questioned me,” Vraney says. But his first love wasn’t nudie films, but comic books, which he began selling as a business while still in high school. Soon he became friends with a collector of Bela Lugosi films, Michael Copner (later publisher of Cult Movies magazine), who worked as a projectionist at several porn theaters in Seattle, including the New Paris Follies and the Mecca Twin. Copner would sneak him into the movies for free, and he started attending porn shows “religiously,” as he says. I ask if he remembers any of the titles he saw in those long-gone days of adult cinema, and he nods, mentioning Behind the Green Door and a wildly obscene film called Long Jeanne Silver (1977), starring an amputee sex actress who used her stump to penetrate her partners.52 “It was like going to the freak show,” Vraney admits about his early exposure to porn. Soon after, he bought his first 16mm projector and his first batch of movies, a box of ten-minute “girlie loops” at an auction from a closed-down Washington theater. Almost inevitably, he started working as a porn-theater projectionist himself. “I begged the owner of the porno theaters for a job,” he says frankly. “I was underage, and he put me in Seattle’s only 16mm storefront house, called the Sultan Theatre. I remember the first movie I ran was Centurians of Rome. So here I am in this porno theater, a gay house. I was thrilled because I was running film; that’s all I cared about.” Around the same time he took over the lease on a 1,500-seat Seattle venue, the Showbox theater, and began staging rock shows, including Iggy Pop and the Police. Soon he began booking and managing punk bands, including TSOL, Flipper, Bad Brains, and the Dead Kennedys, and would often screen his collection of girlie loops between bands. “I learned if you showed a film in between sets, there’d be no fights. Because everybody’d be staring at the film,” he says with a shrug.
In the mid-1980s he continued collecting, mostly 16mm prints of old AIP and Universal horror and sci-fi flicks, but he found himself increasingly fascinated by the forgotten sexploitation films of the 1940s to 1970s, in part inspired by books like V. Vale’s Incredibly Strange Films (1985) and Michael Wheldon’s The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1987). After getting out of the punk rock scene booking bands, he made a life-changing decision in 1988: “I decided I was going to be a video bootlegger, because it was obvious to me that the major studios were not putting out what us collectors wanted to see.” Through The Big Reel magazine, he contacted a Texas dealer named J. G. Nelson who was advertising 16mm and 35mm prints of mondo-obscure sexploitation features for sale. Vraney bought ten features from him, including Naughty Dallas, The Weird Lovemakers, Kitten in a Cage, and Hotter After Dark, and after finding someone in L.A. to do film-to-tape transfers for him, he set himself up in the video business. Inspired by a 1967 Herschell Gordon Lewis movie of the same name, he decided to call his bootleg tape operation “Something Weird.”
In 1989 he made the kind of discovery that collectors only dream about: “I got a phone call from a friend. He told me about an antique shop about thirty miles from my house, and in the back were boxes and boxes, all girlie material, from nudies to burlesque, women’s wrestling, bondage.” The back room of the Everett, Washington, antique store was filled with hundreds of original negatives for lost sexploitation films from the 1930s to the 1950s, with titles like Nautical Nudes, Saucy Sue, and Tea for Two. Vraney paid the owner two hundred dollars for the treasure trove, filled a van and drove off. Soon, the newly launched Something Weird Video label was releasing these strange and forgotten movies in packages like “Wrasslin’ She Babes,” “Grindhouse Follies,” and “Bizarre-O Sex Loops.” Although Vraney obviously loved the nudie content, it was the fact that these movies had been abandoned and neglected that truly appealed to him: “I was fanatical on finding lost films,” he says emphatically.
Of all the carny-like showmen and grindhouse auteurs that Vraney has come across, the one he’s fondest of is David F. Friedman. Friedman (who passed away in 2011) is best known today as producer of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s seminal, gore-filled Blood Feast (1963) and Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), along with later drive-in gems like The Defilers (1965) and Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975).53 His work was larely unseen and ignored when he called Vraney in the early 1990s to complain that Something Weird was illegally bootlegging his 1969 erotic flick The Ribald Adventures of Robin Hood. He and Vraney soon became close friends, the forgotten exploitation guru and the young punk-rock bootlegger, and Friedman kept dropping tantalizing hints about his secret cache of original negatives. “He kept telling me about his film vault on Cordova Street. It’s old Film Row in downtown Los Angeles, where all the exploitation guys were in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s into the 1970s,” Vraney remembers. “I said, ‘I want to put out your movies.” He said, ‘Kid, nobody wants to see my movies, because they’re not hardcore.’ I said, ‘There’s collectors who want to see them.’” Friedman finally relented and opened his vault to Vraney, telling him he could pick out ten movies he wanted to rerelease. “I picked out The Defilers, Mr. Peters’ Pets. The last movie I asked about was Space Thing—I said, ‘What’s this Space Thing?’ Friedman said, ‘Oh, that’s the worst science fiction movie ever made. If Ed Wood hadn’t made Plan 9 from Outer Space, I’d be more famous than Ed Wood because it’s so awful.’ I said to him, ‘I have to have that movie.’” He managed to land a deal with the two largest comic book distributors in the country at the time, Capitol and Diamond, figuring his Something Weird videos would appeal to comic book fans. “A few months went by, and I sent Dave Friedman his first check. He called me up and said, ‘How the hell did you do that?’” Vraney says, grinning.
Through Friedman he soon met other aging exploitation producers with film libraries, like Dan Sonney (The Flesh Merchant) and Harry Novak, a canny but good-hearted character who habitually carried a .38 snub-nosed revolver in his baggy pants. “The first thing Dave said to me is, ‘When you shake Harry’s hand, make sure you count your fingers after,” Vraney recalls. “A producer like Dave Friedman or Harry Novak would make a movie for anywhere between $5,000 and $15,000. They’d have the one negative, and they’d strike no more than fifteen prints. They’d give those prints to states’ rights men,” he says about the long-gone practice of selling films state-by-state. “Dan Sonney had the thirteen western states. There’d be a guy in Atlanta who’d have three or four states; then there was the guy in North or South Carolina, where they had more drive-ins than anywhere in the country. There was a very small print count off of the negative; that’s why these movies are so rare.” Friedman also helped educate Vraney on the importance of researching and clearing rights for the films he was releasing. Many sexploitation films weren’t originally copyrighted, because the producers didn’t want to pay the extra cost of making two 35mm prints for the copyright office—and also because of the questionable content of the movies. To this day, Vraney prefers the term “unregistered” to the more common “public domain” when talking about movies with lost or unknown provenance.
Among the many grindhouse treasures he discovered through his friendship with Friedman, one score stands out above all. In 1994 Friedman took Vraney to the abandoned East Coast Movielab, once one of the busiest film labs in New York City. “I end up going to this building and into the basement. It’s the size of a football field, floor to ceiling, with racks and racks of negatives,” Vraney says, eyes still shining with wonder. I fly back home and toss and turn in bed, thinking to myself, ‘I just hit the jackpot. I just saw the largest cache of abandoned films that’s ever been around.’” He returned two weeks later, and with the help of his friend, director Frank Henenlotter (Basket Case), he started desperately pulling lost negatives off the shelves. “Frank is screaming, ‘Do you want The Monster of Camp Sunshine?’ And I scream back, ‘I’ve never heard of it, but it has “Monster” in it. It must be a nudist movie. I want it!!’” I ask if The Monster of Camp Sunshine, a 1964 nudist colony/horror mash-up, turned out to be any good. “It’s so awful, there’s a reason it was never released. But it’s fantastic,” Vraney replies. All in all, he and Henenlotter rescued over 130 abandoned negatives from Movielab, including Way Out Topless, Olga’s House of Shame, and a number of director Barry Mahon’s films, such as Crazy Wild and Crazy, The Adventures of Busty Brown, and Forbidden Flesh. “Every single one, because it was not available on video, it was considered lost,” he says of the once-in-a-lifetime score. “In my mind, every single one was a gem.”
Although he talks about sexploitation with a fanboy’s enthusiasm, he has in fact spent a great deal of time studying the history and etymology of his favorite genre. “Sexploitation started with guys drinking coffee, Brigitte Bardot, all that crap. They’d be watching these French movies with a little tits and ass. Then Russ Meyer came along with The Immoral Mr. Teas, which is just a nudie cutie,” he observes. “In 1965 the Supreme Court ruled that full-front nudity was not obscene. Prior to that you could just show tits and ass and guys in their underwear. The term the sexploitation guys had [for full-frontal nudity] was ‘pickles and beavers,’” he says, chuckling. “By 1965–1966, with nudist colony films, nudie cuties that held women up on a pedestal, they had gimmicks like ‘magic spectacles,’ where you put them on and could see a woman nude. That was a gimmick in a lot of movies: a guy would turn invisible and walk into a woman’s room to see her naked, or put on X-ray specs. But after 1967 the next genre of movies were nudie roughies that involved nudity but had a lot of violence.” The nudie roughies, epitomized by films like Friedman’s stark, still-disturbing The Defilers and A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine, are among Vraney’s personal favorites: “Most of these are shot MOS [i.e., without sound], silent with narration, in a very disjointed, surrealist, almost dreamlike way. They’re also very forbidden—that’s what I love about them,” he admits about this most un-PC of subgenres. “The last piece of the puzzle before legal pornography was a group of movies in 1970–1971 called ‘white coaters.’ They had titles like Man and Wife, He and She, Black Is Beautiful. Basically what they were was, a phony doctor in a white coat would be behind a desk, and he’d tell you you’re about to see the sixty-nine positions of love.” Although Vraney soaked up more than his share of pornography as a teenage projectionist, it’s clear that his real interest—at least as far as Something Weird goes—ends with the advent of hardcore films like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door in the early 1970s and the death of the strange, sleazy sexploitation genre.
Although he has slowed down buying movies in recent years, he’ll still leap at a good deal, most recently twenty titles from a man who’d worked for Alfred Sack of Sack Amusements in Texas, whom Vraney describes as the “cheapest distributor in the whole country—if you made a sexploitation movie and couldn’t sell it to anybody else, you could sell it to Alfred Sack.” Among the prints he bought were Strange Confessions—“a Peeping Tom psychological-sexual movie, which was considered lost”—and Wild Hippie Orgy, which Vraney confesses he had to have just based on the title. In 2005, realizing he had acquired literally mountains of film spread out over several warehouses, he began selling some of his prints on eBay. But by his own admission, he barely made a dent in his vast archive. He also, it turns out, had a hard time dealing with his fellow film collectors. “I stopped because film collectors are worse than comic book collectors. They’re horrible. ‘What kind of film stock is it on? Is it IB Tech, blah blah?’” he says with exasperation.
“I paid royalties regardless of the copyright status. I paid royalties to everybody,” he notes about his evolution from video bootlegger to (almost) respectable businessman and, yes, film preservationist and champion of a long-forgotten genre. “Dave Friedman always said to me, ‘If you do this legit and honest, you never have to look over your shoulder.’” He pauses for a moment, considering his own place in film history. “I figure years to come from now, I get that little niche in history: there was this joker, and he really loved sexploitation, and he saved literally hundreds and hundreds of movies that would’ve been destroyed if it wasn’t for his passion.”