After Mr. Montel is “accidentally” buried alive by his wife, he digs his way out of his own grave and goes on some sexy adventures. In life, Montel was sickly, too cowardly, and quite possibly just plain impotent to fulfill his wife’s desires. Now that he’s out and about in the city, he spies on ladies undressing, getting their lesbian kicks, and he even sees his wife moving on with her horny life. After many failed attempts, Montel finally meets a nice woman who digs cadaverous creeper dudes, but more importantly, she inspires him in the bedroom zone, and he finally makes it. Bent on revenge and full of his freshly proven manly power, he decides to go after his scheming wife.
Love After Death (1968) is just the kind of forgotten trash as only Something Weird can dig up. The film’s star is just the kind of guy you don’t want to watch at the best of times, much less when he’s in the mood to lasciviously leer and/or attempt to rape someone. I must hand it to the filmmakers for even getting this thing done. Chock full of library music, shots edited out of order, and poorly recorded and truly dreadful post-dubbed dialog, Love After Death barely holds together through its short running time. The gritty black and white footage of mid-1960s New York City, a cast of beautiful non-professional actresses just trying to make a buck, its unwholesome vibe, and ramshackle weirdness are the only reasons to poison your eyes with this crap.
The bonus second feature film on this release is The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful (1970), some softcore melodramatic gruel splashed with some very mild dashes of thriller sauce. In it, Bruce Harrington is about to make it to the big time. His jackass campaign manager Michael is convinced that Bruce can win the governorship if things go perfectly at a big dinner coming up. Michael is also putting a ton of pressure on Bruce’s wife Helen to stay looking beautiful for the big event. He’s especially worried about her because Helen once spent some time in a mental institution after a breakdown. When Ralph the blackmailer comes to town with some incriminating photos of Helen, things go south quickly. But it turns out that the squeaky-clean image of Bruce Harrington is just a front. Will all these dark secrets come to light before the election?
Unlike Love After Death, The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful has a more competent crew and a bigger budget going for it (those hippie extras don’t get groovy for free, brother), but it’s actually less interesting thanks to its reliance on a more conventional story. We’re still in the dregs of softcore porn with somewhat realized aspirations of something uh… more. I was just surprised to see an actual plot unfolding before me. The cast is really going for it though and the performances from the main players are quite good. Character actor Allen Garfield who’s been in everything from Nashville (1975) to Beverly Hills Cop (1987) to The Majestic (2001) is here as the drunken and rapey chauffeur who constantly harasses Elizabet the maid, played by the lovely Jennifer Welles, who played one of the lesbians in Love After Death.
I love that AGFA and Something Weird Video paired up for this sleazy double feature, but I can only take watching just so many sexual assaults on film before I want to start slamming my head in a door. Both prints are scratchy as hell but that’s to be expected when the prints were recently found in a cavern on the moon. Nonetheless, both of these black and white features really pop on this Blu. The biggest problem I had with both films is the audio is either too quiet or too loud and obviously, this is a problem with the source material and not the disc. Thankfully, both features have subtitles to make life easier.
The extras kick off with some radical old trailers for live horror shows and sex films. There’s also two short films tacked on, one educational film to help housewives about choose their husband’s coffin and burial plot. Just in case you weren’t thinking about death enough! The other short is an old 7 minute student film that is exactly 7 minutes too long about a guy who loves plants more than his girlfriend. It’s good times and less gross than the main features on the disc. Hey, you should watch this Blu-ray release with your significant other. Who knows? Maybe you’ll wind up sleeping on the couch for a week or two.