| Vintage Pulp | Mar 25 2023 |
Marie Forså starts an uncontrollable forest Feuer.
Did you think you'd seen the last of Marie Forså? We can promise you, that won't happen soon. We love all the old sexploitation stars of the ’70s because their breed is extinct now, but Forså is particularly special because of the heat of her performances. Could she act in the thespian sense? Hell, we have no idea. All her dialogue was in Swedish or dubbed. This West German poster was made for her 1975 erotic classic Butterflies, sometimes known as Butterfly, but which was called Feuer der lust in Germany—“Fire of Lust.” And she's about to burst into flames here. We talked about the movie a couple of years ago. The unidentified head belongs to co-star Eric Edwards. Below is another promo of the pair, as happy as two people can be.
SwedenWest GermanyFeuer der lustButterfliesMarie ForsåEric Edwardssexploitationposter artcinemanudity
| Femmes Fatales | Mar 17 2023 |
Petroleum reserves discovered deep in the jungle.
No wonder the world can't get off petroleum. Photos of slippery actresses keep the addiction going. Above you see Maria Mari, who has starred in some of the most interestingly titled films you can imagine. Nympho Diver: G-String Festival may be her crowning achievement, but she also appeared in Lusty Transparent Man, Apartment Wife: Lust for Orgasm, and Do It Again: Like an Animal. All of those sound like much-watch flicks, and we did indeed watch and write about a couple, here and here. Mari appeared in five other films in a busy three-year career before moving onward to parts unknown. You can see another shot of her here, and more shiny actresses here, here, here, here, and here. Try not to become hopelessly depedent on oil.
JapanNympho Diver: G-String FestivalShikijô ama: Fundoshi matsuriLusty Transparent ManTômei-ningen: okase!Widow's Boarding House: Scent of OrgasmMibôjin geshuku: HatsunakiDo It Again: Like an AnimalMoa sekushi kemono no yoni mo ichidoMaria Mariroman pornopinkunudity
| Femmes Fatales | Mar 1 2023 |
One great photo. Triple the back pain.
We recently saw German actress Marlies Draeger stylishly garbed in a green jacket-dress, and here in a beautiful black and white promo image she gives her all, not because she's nude—though that too—but because she's recumbent across three metal tables that look like sheer hell on her sacroiliac. What resulted is a great shot, though we wouldn't be surprised if afterward she sent a stack of chiropractor bills to her agent. Speaking of sending, this was sent to us by Pulp Intl. reader Herman, who's been of great help in the past with model identifications. No date on this, but figure around the same time as the other image—say 1968.
| Femmes Fatales | Feb 11 2023 |
Hitomi hits the coast for a private holiday.
Here during the depths of winter (for those of you that experience winter) we thought we'd give you the hottest images we could find to stir your blood. Above are a few looks at Japanese actress Hitomi Kozue, who, according to a bit of accompanying text we didn't bother to show, is enjoying a rare sunny day during the 1974 tsuya, or East Asian rainy season. Hitomi is the star of such films as Sukeban Deka: Dirty Mary, Sex-Crime Coast: School of Piranha, True Story of a Woman Condemned, and its sequel, and you may remember we promised we'd return to her after sharing an image last year from this same photo session.
Based on what we've seen Hitomi seems to have been the boldest Japanese cinema star of the ’70s when it came to her promo images. These are nicely conceived and composed, tasteful, yet audacious and visceral. Some cultures, including the U.S., have regressed to the point where almost any nudity is now shocking, but eroticism has always been a valid art form, and it will survive the new puritanism once people remember that bodies forced under wraps are exactly what previous generations fought so hard against in order to wrest free expression from external control. Hitomi is uncontrollably beautiful.
JapanSukeban Deka: Dirty MarySukeban Deka: daati MariiSex-Crime Coast: School of PiranhaNikutai hanzai kaigan: Piranha no mureTrue Story of a Woman CondemnedJitsuroku onna kanbetsusho: sei-jigokuHeibon PunchHitomi Kozueroman pornopinkunudity
| Vintage Pulp | Feb 2 2023 |
They won't be playing by themselves for long.
Above are two 1950s-era Technicolor lithographs featuring a pair of models with playing cards. Only the second is playing solitaire. The first seems to be spokesmodeling: “Call now and you can win a deck of enormous cards!” The first litho is called, “Ace of Hearts,” and the second, which has been retouched to the extent that it has the look of a painting, is titled, “No Cheating.” We don't know who the women are. That's true of about half the lithos we share. Occasionally, though, someone emails us with an identification, so feel free. We're always around.
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 30 2023 |
Some men go head over heels for a woman.
We have another of issue of Adam magazine for you to feast your eyes upon. This one was published in January 1973, and the cover illustrates the story, “Death Rail,” in which author Jack Ritchie asks the eternal philosophical question, “What do men think about when they are falling?” The answer is probably: how to land on the other guy. And what does a woman think about? In the story she congratulates herself for having inherited everything that belongs to her falling husband, and all just by making him erroneously believe she was screwing his business partner, and luring the two into a balcony fight. And the twist, unrevealed until the last sentence, is that it was all a misdirection play. She actually had been cheating, but with the chauffeur, not the business partner. Pretty good work from Ritchie, and another excellent effort from Adam.
| Femmes Fatales | Jan 21 2023 |
Guess who stars in her favorite program?
Posing here atop a good old-fashioned console television is Yuri Tsuwano, who acted in films as Rina Hayakawa. Her output includes 1974's Semi-dokyumento: Okaruto sex, aka Semi-document: Occult Sex, and Bakeneko Toruko furo, aka A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse, which we talked about here. This is a great photo. It dates from 1976.
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 18 2023 |
There's something very fishy going on.
This promo poster just screams winner, don't you think? If it isn't a good movie, it's got to be deliciously terrible. It was made for L'isola degli uomini pesce, known in English as The Island of the Fishmen, a movie that starred Richard Johnson, Barbara Bach, and Claudio Cassinelli. No surprise what it's about, thanks to the title, but nothing is spoiled—the fishmen show up within the first few minutes of the film when a group of convicts in a lifeboat are attacked and the five survivors end up stranded on a swampy island. Since the fishmen hunt there, the attrition rate on this parcel of land is a bitch. Two cons are killed almost immediately upon arrival, and a third barely survives a pit trap. They soon learn humans live there too—paranoid misanthrope Richard Johnson, his companion Barbara Bach, their servant Beryl Cunninghman, and others, all residing in and around a baroque slave plantation house.
Johnson, who is a quack scientist, is trying to train the fishmen for what shall here remain undisclosed purposes. It involves going deep underwater where humans can't survive—but strangely, not so deep that Johnson can't simply drop down in his unpressurized wooden submersible and watch them at work. It's all a crock, even for bad sci-fi. But there are three points of note with the film: first, you can actually see that some budget went into creating the fishmen; second, Johnson speaking in a constipated Dick Dastardly voice is flat hilarious; and third, Barbara Bach is Barbara Bach. Or maybe we should have listed her first. The producers at Dania Film, perhaps realizing Fishmen was a total woofer, rode Bach hard, putting out a bunch of skinful promotional photos and getting her a Fishmen-themed nude shoot in Ciné-Revue. There's always a silver lining in 1970s exploitation cinema—and on Pulp Intl. L'isola degli uomini pesce premiered in Italy today in 1979.
ItalyL'isola degli uomini pesceThe Island of the FishmenCiné-RevueBarbara BachClaudio CassinelliRichard JohnsonJoseph CottenBeryl Cunninghamposter artcinemahorrorsci-fisexploitationnuditymovie review
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 15 2023 |
Don't worry! I'm going to get the three of you out of there!
Our girlfriends—affectionately PI-1 and PI-2—rolled their eyes at this one, and why wouldn't they? We did too, but we work with what we're given, and we certainly couldn't ignore the fact that this January 1969 Adam magazine features a cover of a woman whose gravity defying breasts are directly in the center of the art. Men's magazines, those concoctions of macho fantasy set to print, are inherently sexist, but we are mere documentarians of mid-century art, literature, and film—and crime, and weirdness, and sex—in the various forms they take. This one is a particularly eye-catching example.
While literary magazines published prestige fiction, men's mags like Adam carried on the pulp tradition, giving authors without highbrow leanings opportunities to expose their work to wide audiences. Without the efforts of such publications, modern literature might look very different. Stephen King, for example, published many of his early stories in Gallery, a middle-tier smut monthly nobody would have mistaken for Playboy. Speaking of which, Playboy published early works from Ian Fleming, Ursula K. Le Guin, and even serialized the entirety of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 in 1954, a year after its initial publication landed with a thud.
As far as we know Adam didn't produce any major writers except James Lee, aka Jim Aitchison, whose Mr. Midnight books were recently made into a series now streaming on Netflix. But failing to graduate lots of future bestselling authors doesn't change what Adam was—a publication that aimed for mass male appeal by merging all the elements of what was once known as pulp. Those elements included mystery, crime, war, exotic adventure, risqué humor, and a dose of relatively tame sexual content. We have all that and more below in thirty-plus scans, and something like seventy-eight issues of Adam embedded in our website.
AustraliaAdam MagazinePlayboyGallery MagazineMr. MysteryJ. Edward BrownJames LeeJim AitchisonStephen KingIan FlemingUrsula K. Le GuinRay BradburyJack Waughmagazine artnudityliterature
| Intl. Notebook | Dec 31 2022 |
Well done. You survived another one.
A toast, friends, for though the years keep piling high, you've survived yet another. Hopefully those years are getting better for you all the time. Ours certainly are—knock on wood. The festive photo above was made by U.S. lensman Paul H. Oelman, feautures an unidentified model, and dates from the early or mid-1940s. Oelman was born in 1880 and began his career in Dayton, Ohio, where he met the Wright Brothers and shot photos of their airplane flights. His nude period came later, when he moved his base to Cincinnati, a place which, considering its conservative values, seems a dangerous locale for erotic photography. But he made himself a success there just the same.
Oelman eventually became known throughout the U.S., gave talks to regional camera clubs, and in 1948 founded a national lecture program for the Photographic Society of America. Interesting note about his work method: he preferred to shoot local society girls, and did so with their mothers present as chaperones. We can't even conceive of how that would be viewed today. Would the mothers be called groomers? Anyway, Oelman titled this particular work “Pagan,” and that seems as good a wish as any for the upcoming year. We plan to have a positively pagan year, and we hope you have whatever type of year you seek. 2023! Let's do this!
