Remember our last group of Japanese posters containing the English word “sex”? No? Go directly there. Also, perhaps visit here, here, and here. Now that you’re back, today we have another set of posters with sex in the text (you have to look closely at some of them, but it’s there). One Japanese word for sex is セックス, and the phonetic transvocalization of the English is “sekkusu,” but their poster artists often seem to prefer plain old sex. Why? Well, why do Americans use the French word “chauffeur” instead of saying, “that underpaid guy who drives my car”? Because it's cooler, that’s why. Most of these posters are for American x-rated films, but panel two, just below, is for the Natalie Wood movie Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, which definitely isn’t x-rated. But it should have been. Because Natalie Wood. And, um, wood. On the other posters you get Kay Parker, Nina Fause, Maria Arnold, Jennifer Welles, Constance Money, Annette Haven, and Inge Hegeler. And if you want to know the titles, those are all on the posters in English too (though sometimes wrong, as in Expose Me Lovely which turns into Exporse Me Lovely), but it’s probably easier to just look at the bottom of the post, where we’ve listed them in order.

Tanya’s Island may not be the best sexploitation flick of all time, but it’s surely one of the most earnest. Before she hooked up with Prince and became known as Vanity, Canadian actress D.D. Winters headlined this deeply Freudian beauty-and-the-beast psychodrama about a young actress who lucidly dreams of going to live with her painter boyfriend on a deserted island, only to discover that they are in fact not alone. The imaginary island’s other inhabitant is a sort of tropical sasquatch (but with soulful blue eyes), and within the reverie Tanya develops, her boyfriend becomes jealous and aggressive while the ape seems to take on increasingly more humanity.

Since this all takes place in Tanya’s head, some pretty interesting questions are being raised about the nature of female desire, as well as both the savage and civilized sides of man. Perhaps you’re rolling your eyes now, and that’s fair enough, but a big reason why these seventies skin flicks are great to watch is because the filmmakers took themselves so seriously. Writer/producer Pierre Brousseau even plastered the 1982 Cannes Film Festival with posters in hopes of generating attention for his movie. His strategy probably didn’t boost box office receipts much, but it did increase interest in his lead actress, resulting in her appearance in Playboy, and thence into the arms of Prince. Since Tanya’s Island is indeed about a woman searching for her prince charming, there’s a certain symmetry in this.

But probably the only symmetry you’re really interested in is Vanity’s, so you’ll be happy to know she’s completely naked before the opening credits have finished and remains half or wholly bare through much of the film. And for our female readers, her boyfriend’s member makes a brief appearance as well (though we suspect you won’t find the man attached to that appendage particularly alluring). Soon after this film Vanity would become famous as a singer and consort, and in one of her most memorable songs she cooed: “Ooh yeah, such a pretty mess.” That neatly sums up Tanya’s Island. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1980. 

She was born Denise Matthews in Niagara Falls, Canada. She began her show business career as an actress, using the name D. D. Winters. Her first starring role was in Pierre Brousseau’s Tanya’s Island, one of our favorite bad sexploitation flicks ever, and as eye-catching a debut as you’re ever likely to see. After that she met up with the musician Prince and under his tutelage became simply Vanity. Under that moniker she released music of debatable quality and continued to act in less-than-stellar-movies, but along the way redefined the word sultry. She posed for this aggressive promo image around 1982.  

Black Shampoo is a monument of gratuitous skin and gunplay almost unequaled in the annals of blaxploitation. The film was a take on the Warren Beatty flick Shampoo, but done on the cheap, with burly John Daniels in the lead as a womanizing hair salon proprietor who runs afoul of the mob. You get every stereotype in the book here, and they’re all good for a laugh. Even Tanya Boyd's copious nudity is pushed to an unintentionally comical extreme, as she is at one point forced to flee for her life wearing nothing but a man’s dress shirt fastened by a single button, making the whole long chase over the hills and through the woods a game of peek-a-bush. In another scene she stares down at her own naked body as if thinking, "My God, I am so hot even I have to look." No argument there. We just love this movie. Social relevance—uh, not really. Entertainment value—extremely high. Black Shampoo opened in the U.S. today in 1976.