Full Moon by the Numbers #10 and #11 – The Best of Sex and Violence and Famous T &A

A pair of early-'80s compilation tapes.

In 1978, filmmaker Charles Band got in on the ground floor of the home video business, licensing multiple titles from various companies and launching a VHS company called MEDA -Media-Home Entertainment and Distribution Association, named in honor of his wife, Meda. When you have a home video company and a nation where VHS rental stores are popping up everywhere with a need to fill their shelves, you need to produce plenty of “content,” as it would be referred to these days. And the quickest, cheapest way to produce content is just to take existing footage from multiple sources and cut it together into a compilation video. That’s how we got The Best of Sex and Violence and Famous T&A, a pair of compilations that were cut together by filmmaker / trailer editor Ken Dixon.

Hosted by the legendary John Carradine (with quick guest appearances by his sons David and Keith), The Best of Sex and Violence is actually an entertaining watch, with its 76 minutes being a collection of trailers for action, comedy, horror, and sexploitation movies of the grindhouse era. Here’s the line-up: Bury Me an Angel, The Doberman Gang, Tunnel Vision, The Sin of Adam and Eve, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Fairy Tales, Emanuelle Around the World, Tanya's Island, I Spit on Your Grave, Tourist Trap, The Boogeyman, Zombie, The Single Girls, The Working Girls, The Manhandlers, Dr. Minx, Truck Stop Women, The Twilight People, Beyond Atlantis, The Devil's Wedding Night, Sweet Sugar, Terminal Island; Ebony, Ivory, and Jade; Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde, Dolemite, The Human Tornado, and Disco Godfather. Some of these trailers are very cool to see, and the production was good enough that this compilation even got some theatrical play.

Famous T&A, on the other hand, is very much a product of its time – an era when this might be the closest to porn a VHS renter might be able to find. Hosted by Sybil Danning (wielding blades), this 74-minute movie is made up of clips of nude scenes from other movies that may or may not feature an actor whose name you might recognize. Clips from the likes of Terminal Island, Summer Affair, Slave of the Cannibal God; Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman; The Single Girls, Truck Stop Women, The Working Girls, Secrets, Auditions, Dr. Minx, The Manhandlers, Fairy Tales, Sweet Sugar,  Emanuelle Around the World, Tanya’s Island, and The Harrad Experiment show off the bodies of Ursula Andress, Brigitte Bardot, Jacqueline Bisset, Phyllis Davis, Uschi Digard, Claudia Jennings, Ornella Muti, Joan Prather, Laurie Walters, Edy Williams, and Vanity.

The production and audio quality of the Danning segments are incredibly poor and the whole endeavor is quite sleazy. Unless something in particular really captures your imagination and makes you start drooling over one of the actresses (which is, after all, what the compilation was intended to do), this can be a difficult one to sit through. Sometimes, 74 minutes can feel like a ridiculously long time. In the end, the credits roll over an image of a woman’s bare butt. This is VHS fare from top to literal bottom.