Dirty Girls: The Films of John Hayes

Kat and Samm return to explore the overlooked work of director John Hayes, in typically outrageous fashion. While many know Hayes’ horror efforts Dream No Evil (1971) and Grave of the Vampire (1972), his extensive work in exploitation, sexploitation, and pornographic film still remains widely unknown to all but a very few cult aficionados. This episode focuses on three different films from three different genres, Help Female Wanted (1968), Mama’s Dirty Girls (1974), and Baby Rosemary (1976), as Kat and Samm attempt to unravel the director’s career.

Help Female Wanted starts out as a typical roughie, before leaving reality to travel into the warped fantasies of an emasculated man; sadism and necrophilia, and much much more, follows. Meanwhile, straight up seventies exploitation number Mama’s Dirty Girls is a late film for one-time Hollywood A-lister, and Queen of the Noir, Gloria Grahame. Grahame stars as an unscrupulous woman, who along with her band of sexually oppressed but overly flirtatious teenage daughters, is out to make her fortune by murder and deceit. And finally, Baby Rosemary, mixes hardcore pornography with occult fantasy, in one of the strangest coming of age tales to come out of the Golden Era.