You call your movie Bizarre, and you’ve got a lot to live up to, I think. So I’ll give you a rundown of what happens between the credits in this ‘70s UK sex-and-horror anthology of sorts, and you tell me if it lives up to its title:

A thousand-year-old mummy (with the sinister basso profundo voice of Dyall) returns from the dead to illustrate via six stories how the battle of the sexes remains as violent and confusing as ever. Example Number One has a kinky lady photographer and her leather-clad assistant putting a skinny young dude through a series of torture devices for an S&M photo shoot. The session ends on a painful note when the gals hang the guy over a Spanish horse (a sawhorse with a sharp blade instead of the crossbeam)… and leave for lunch. Yikes.

Story Number Two has a young woman discover she’s pregnant by her wealthy older lover – shortly before she learns she has a rare genetic disorder that results in children with horrible mutations. The Silly Putty baby that’s wheeled out for the episode’s shock punchline is wisely relegated to the rarest of glimpses.

Numero Tres features a molto sexy cat burglar in a zip-up leather jump suit who figures out a unique way to bargain for her freedom after the owner of the house she’s broken into discovers her in mid-steal. One lengthy shower (with both participants still in their underpants) and a rollaround on the bed later, Ms. Burglar slips downstairs to finish the job, while images of low-flying planes zoom by…

Episode Four, inspired by a comic strip from UK girlie mag Mayfair, centers on saucy secret agent Lindy Leigh, who’s dispatched to retrieve important documents from a randy foreign dignitary with a very spotty Euro-accent. For my money, this story is the highlight of the film, with producer/director Antony Balch having plenty of fun with the comic’s broad, bawdy approach and splashy visual style.

The fifth freakout is about a Strange Young Man (that’s what he’s called in the credits), played by co-scripter Elliott Stein, who wants to get it on with a prostitute and a small lizard – at the same time. We see through flashback that sex and reptiles are inextricably linked in his mind thanks to a childhood trauma involving a horny couple and some dinosaur statues; however, the girl-for-hire isn’t buying that lizards are all the rage among the jet set, and splits this kook’s pad – where she gets the shock of her life! Well, not really, but there’s a twist ending, and it’s about as “Huh?” inducing as the rest of this episode.

And the final story? Maybe the weirdest of the lot, with a dotty old English auntie explaining to her new butler how she transferred the souls of her former lovers into her hothouse flowers. Jeeves doesn’t take too kindly to this, and throttles the old dame for such supernatural shenanigans. Can’t entirely blame him, I think.

Oh, then back to the mummy, who groans some more about how BIZARRE the whole sex business really is, and then we see a bunch of shirtless dudes with machine guns bearing down on topless chicks (well, birds would be the correct term, I suppose), but then they put down the heaters and start fondling each other while hot naked Swedes fall slo-mo into stacks of hay, and lots and lots of fireworks go off. Over and over and over.

Bizarre? Oh, you bet your ass, and then some.

A funky, freaky fever dream spawned by English exploitation producer Richard Gordon (who gave us Fiend Without a Face and countless other Blighty-made grinders) and director Balch (Horror Hospital), who’d made a splash in the early ‘60s with a handful of experimental shorts he’d directed with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Bizarre is the dimly lit and rarely-traveled intersection where the speeding cars of horror, sex, and art collide headlong into each other. The resulting wreckage contains elements of each genre – there are some unsettling moments, and some softcore-smutty ones, and the art angle is definitely represented in that avalanche of film freakery at the conclusion But really, Bizarre is a totally different and alien animal unto itself – I guess if you had to pin a genre title on it, you’d probably call it just plain Weird, and lump it alongside other neither-here-nor-there oddities as Carnival of Souls, Lemora (also available from Synapse, by da way) and Daughter of Horror (you might also see it as the genteel grandpa of films by such sex-and-horror-obsessed outsider directors as Charles Pinion, J. Michael McCarthy, Eric “Slain Wayne” Brummer and David Aaron Clark). The nice thing is the constant parade of eye candy and weird-oh situations never allows the audience’s interest to flag; you might be confused or amused by Bizarre, and occasionally aroused (especially fans of ladies in leather), but bored? I kinda doubt it.

Synapse’s DVD offers the complete and uncut version of the film (with the Secrets of Sex title card), which is something of a find, seeing as how it’s been available only in shortened and retitled (as Tales of the Bizarre in the States) editions for the past thirty-some-odd years. The Secrets of Sex trailer is also included (“What gruesome depths will the creatures of the night sink to?”), and Gordon and film writer Tom Weaver provide an interesting commentary track, while co-author/co-star Elliott Stein offers some reminiscences about his work on the film and his close friend Balch (who died in 1980), with whom he’d planned a movie adaptation of Naked Lunch. And speaking of old Uncle Bill Burroughs, two of the experimental shorts he made with Balch – 1963’s Towers Open Fire and 1966’s The Cut-Ups – are also featured on the disc. They’re probably best enjoyed by arthouse and scholarly types or diehard Burroughs/Beat fans – Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique translates into endless loops of repeated sounds and footage, but as rare glimpses of Burroughs (who’s seen giving himself a fix) and Brion Gysin (gazing transfixed into his whirling dream machine), they’re hard to beat as sources of genuine old-school cool.