Blood Orgy of the She-Devils

I used to have a T-shirt of this flick, or the exploitation poster of it. It took me several decades, the internet, and YouTube to finally see it.

No blood (or not much). No orgy (unless I missed it while I was takin’ a wazz). And, arguably, no real she-devils either—except maybe the Satanic Solid Gold Dancers that shimmy-shammy around in ridiculous leather swimsuits during the black mass rituals.

I used to have a T-shirt of this movie thirty years ago—although it has taken me until now to actually SEE THE GODDAMNED MOVIE. The T-shirt perfectly accentuated my punker image at age twenty or thereabouts (yeah, I know, a little long in the tooth even then), and I imagined the movie itself would be an orgiastic free-for-all of blood, breasts, and beasts—the triumvirate of sleaze and slime dripping from the rancid cinematic screen of this odious Limburger of intellectual and moral decay.

Alas, no pickle, kemosabe. Ride out into the wind with nary a bloodied tit anywhere in sight. The movie begins with a pair of staring eyes staring down a kind of swirl void while we are introduced to Mara, who is an all-purpose lady occultnik living in a big creepy mansion in Hollywood that was probably owned by writer/director Ted V. Mikels, a somewhat playboy adventurer who turned out a slew of unimpressively shitty films—except for The Corpse Grinders. The Corpse Grinders effing rocks.

Of course, we haven’t seen many Ted V. Mikels films, and Ted V. Mikels has gone to that great big Hollywood manse in the sky, but we can affirm that, beyond being the inspiration for, like, one of the coolest Misfits songs, Astro Zombies—with John Carradine and Tura “Faster Pussycat” Satana—sucks like an Electrolux (to quote Stephen King from Danse Macabre).

The first narrative thread introed, after we get a witchy bacchanal of half-clad young devil femmes dancing with a guy who’s got a furry horned headdress that makes him look like the QAnon Shaman, is this one guy (I’m not going to pretend these characters are memorable, stand out much, or matter in the long run) who wants Mara to do a little hoodoo on an ambassador from Rhodesia. Okay, so this is accomplished with the aid of an effigy drowned in water—similar to an old episode of "The Hitchhiker," which didn’t exist when this particular pic was made (in fact, I believe it was the pilot episode of "The Hitchhiker").

The film does a stage-illusionist’s switcheroo on us about halfway through, and then we get to see Mara intoning masterfully at a séance-cum-past-life-regression session in which she reveals the witchy lives of her soirée attendees, and then we get flashes to some medieval witch burnings that I take it most certainly did NOT occur in Hollywood, California (although they were filmed there, naturally).

There’s some more stuff. I’m drawing a blank here. Perhaps I’ve been BEWITCHED?

In the end, a doctor or something goes on the Satan-busting warpath and shoots blue beams out of his fingertips. We end the flick with a kind of swirling weird cosmic tunnel that focuses on the hypnotic eyes. Of someone.

Ted V. Mikels made flicks that sound as if they’d be better than they actually are. Blood Orgy is no exception. Much better is The Corpse Grinders, which features mutant gnarly cats going whacko-jacko after eating kitty food made from… well, you already know.

And they go nutzoid, scene after electrifying scene. Okay, so maybe not so electrifying.

Those pussies had a body count. These pussycats do too. But, well, what they do to the viewer—it ain’t exactly witchcraft.

Blood Orgy of the She-Devils | Witchcraft, Cults & Classic Horror | FULL HOSTED HORROR MOVIE

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