The one and only, Mr. Sammy Petrillo

Sammy Petrillo is best known as the most startlingly accurate Jerry Lewis impersonator ever, the man who starred as half of the Martin & Lewis knockoff team that was the focus of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952). In fact, Petrillo wasn’t a Jerry impersonator intentionally — it was something he fell into, by dint of the fact that he looked identical to, and could sound incredibly like, the Martin & Lewis-era Jerry. Sammy’s career has been spotty, but there were a few more fascinating moments in the peripheral limelight after Brooklyn Gorilla. In an interview I conducted with Sammy back in 1997, he spoke about these cult items.

First, the prank phone call LP he released in the early 1960s:


And also his starring/scripting turn in Doris Wishman’s mind-blowingly weird sex movie Keyholes are for Peeping(1972):

Michelle Bauer on working on homo-erotic softcore

“Scream queen” is a rather flexible term, used to describe everyone from the classic actresses in old horror pictures (Beverly Garland, Barbara Steele) to girls who have made micro-budgeted shot-on-video necro-fetish pics. Michelle Bauer is one of the ladies who truly earned that label by appearing in countless horror movies, as well as many sex comedies and exploitation pictures (and earlier on, some famous hardcore features, like Café Flesh). I had a very nice time talking to Ms. Bauer more than a decade ago at the Chiller Theatre convention. Here is a clip where she discusses her work with David DeCouteau, the low-budget genre director who also made softcore homo-erotic pics under the name “Ellen Cabot.”