Cats like you and I (well... you, anyway) are never going to be quite as cool as John Michael McCarthy, and baby, he knows it. So he gave up the lucrative, high stakes world of indie-comix - he's the ink slinger behind the devil girls, zip guns, and kung fu zombie-fest 'Cadevera'- for the equally lucrative world of cult movies, so that he may spread his lusty, rocket-fueled vision to the teeming masses of u-ground film fans in search of vicious kicks from the rock star planet. Just like a leper messiah, he is.

The career spanning reel he sent me starts off with brief clips of a smattering of his hugely entertaining music videos from flame-job faves like the Makers and Guitar Wolf. Of course, it'd be difficult to fuck up a vid with fashion savvy, action packed glam punks like these, but he peppers the performances with plenty of berserker robots and go-go boot girls. I bet the full clips are boss. Not sure where you can catch these, but I can guarantee you that you won't find them on MTV.

Elvis vs. the Beatles is next, with JMM himself dubbing in the Elvi-drawl with the kind of casual authority that makes me think that he drives his friends crazy with it when he's on the whiskey. This black and white 16mm short starts out with the dethroned King having some kind of roadside field report with Richard Nixon, where they discuss the Beatles/Manson/freaks in the street situation, and then Elvis flashes back to when the whole sordid mess started, a late night jam session with the Beatle boys in 1965. Shot in a sort of slapstick-expressionism, like Stephan Sayadian's 'Caligari' meets Batman '66 with a dash of 'Laugh In' thrown in for, well, laughs. EVS.B details the long dark night when Elvis picked up a bass guitar and wrote a Makers sintrumental with the Fab Four while Monkee's style hi-jinx ensued around the mansion, culminating with Ringo Starr eating chicken while Pricilla Presley shows him catfight videos. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls without the hippy tunes? Yeah, pretty much.

The crown jewel in this sinful series, however, has got to be JMM's latest and greatest, Superstarlet AD, which is truly - and John will tell you this himself without flinching- the 'Ben Hur' of lowbrow cinema. An amazon gladiator movie like no other, SSAD follows the misadventures of the title heroine as she roams as penis-free, post apocalyptic wasteland in search of old 60's striptease loops for historical, if not religious purposes. This Sappho-friendly brave new world is divided between warring camps of chicks, but instead of territory or political ideology, it's hair color that separates them all from living together in peace and pillowfights. Superstarlet is one of the enlightened Supergirls, envisioning a paradise where redheads. Blondes and brunettes can all freak freely in harmony with one another. But for now, she dodges blonde machine gun bullets, clobbers cavemen, and digs through the rubble for celluloid evidence of her frugging ancestors.

I'm not sure how many stray cavemen there are wandering around, one at least. With his blacked out eyes, crusty hair and copious belly, he looks like some sort of prehistoric Uncle Fester. A faction of the tough talking brunette clan attempt to teach him the art of hating blondes, insuring a peroxide-free future once he evolves, but he's too stupid, and spends the rest of the film dragging a mannequin leg around, envisioning some sort primitive form of action that he's never going to get. Mostly, though, there are girls in lingerie shooting at one another, and it seems as though peace will never bloom in this desperate land. Except that Superstarlet, she's got a plan.

I don't want to pop the lid on the fate that awaits SS and her burlesque scavenging sisters, but in the final third of the film, things suddenly burst from monochrome to glorious color for a cabaret number, featuring enough cleavage to stop Russ Meyer's heart once and for all. It looks like a lesbo Caligula, if Tinto Brass were a Cramps fan obsessed with Berlin in the '20's, and it sure looks like everything is going to turn out all kinds of all right.

JMM puts this big show together for only $16,000, and the entire budget went on bullet bras and make-up. If somebody in Hollywood gets adventurous and hands John a 35mm camera and a coke dealer budget, he's going to make the next 'Faster Pussycat! Kill Kill!' and the youth of the nation are going to go fucking crazy as a result, I guarantee it. - Sleazegrinder