Some years back, in one of those trances that Amazon.com induces, I bought the box set of Kolchak: The Night Stalker DVDs.

It wasn’t expensive, and has proved to be a good investment. They sit on the shelf next to other worthy efforts, such as the Aztec Mummy and Coffin Joe flicks, “The Wire,” and all the “Avengers” episodes with Diana Rigg.

I watch these things about every other year.

Kolchak wears the same seersucker sack suit and battered hat throughout — usually with white tennis shoes.

If he takes notes it’s on pieces of scrap paper. His reporter’s kit includes a portable cassette recorder and an Instamatic, which never fails to produce blurry, useless photos of the Monster du Jour.

I can sympathize with his editor, Tony Vincenzo. He sends Kolchak to interview a transcendental meditation guru, and instead gets an urban vampire story. Both useful contributions, but hardly interchangeable.

Like “The X-Files,” much of the series is shot in the dark — probably because the budget for convincing monster makeup was tight.

It’s all very silly, and very much a product of its time (1974-5). There are go-go dancers and hippies. Wide lapels. Kolchak calls fellow reporter Ron Updyke “Uptight.”

Gratuitous manual typewriters. Hot plates for the coffee. Convertible yellow Mustang, with manual transmission. Knit ties. Buttondown collars. Ghouls. Every character actor known to man, ca. 1974.

Fabulous stuff. A series-wide four coils, and an Iron Coil nomination.

Hattie Farber demonstrating Silas Froont’s prototype Choda-Wick at the Chicago Trade Exposition, 1887. 

The best way to describe Ferlin Husky singing the theme to “Swamp Girl” is to let you hear it for yourself.

Magnificent, isn’t it?

And you get a whole movie too!

Nat, who is black, lives in the swamp with Janine, the Swamp Girl, who is young, blonde, pretty —and pretty nimble in a boat.

Swamp Girl thinks Nat is her Paw, until circumstances force him to tell her the truth, which is that he saved her from the drunken white-slaving abortionist Doc.

So now he’s just Nat.

Meanwhile the local goobers are searching for the Swamp Girl, plus the sheriff, plus the Swamp Ranger, who is Ferlin Husky.

And a Bonnie and Clyde couple decide to cross the swamp on foot, which is not a good idea.

Alligator death. Snake death — twice. No, three times. (Snakes are cheaper than gators.) Air boat. Magic dress on Swamp Girl, that never gets wet or dirty. No nekkidity (automatic one-coil deduction). Brutal speech by mother of Convict Girl, to wrap up loose ends of plot. Convincing demonstration of why loafers are not the right footgear for swamps.

And, of course, the dulcet tones of Ferlin Husky singing the theme song and playing the guitar.

Two and a half coils.

“My Name is Bruce” is an extremely silly comedy horror flick from 2007 starring Bruce Campbell as himself. He is picked by a fan to help combat an Ancient Evil. Very mild hilarity ensues. No nekkidity. Self-referential, in the same sense that taking a picture of yourself making a stupid face and sending it to all your moron “friends” is self-referential.

It’s a harmless and forgettable way to kill 86 minutes.

Mildly amusing, it gets two coils.

I have now rewatched “Deathstalker,” “Deathstalker II,” and the imaginatively titled “Deathstalker III.”

And while number one has a certain flair in the evil wizard with the face tats; and number two has the unforgettable Monique Gabrielle in two roles that both require extensive breastal exposure, plus John La Zar (as the sorcerer) using up all his little riffs that got cut from “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”…

Number three is superior.

Why?

Because of Thom Christopher as the evil wizard Troxartes.

You probably know Thom from “Law and Order” reruns. He usually plays a New York jerk of some kind – boardroom jerk, attorney jerk, ordinary bald schmendrick-type jerk.

Thom’s got damn good teeth, and they really get a workout in “Deathstalker III.” Rarely has so much scenery been chewed by one actor.

He gives us demonic “I shall rule the world while clad in a fleece blanket from Target” laughter. He sashays through what the discerning critics of Mystery Science Theater rightly called the worst swordfight in cinema history. (The longest, too, according to Joe Bob Briggs’ post-screening assessment for The Movie Channel.)

But most of all, Thom’s Troxartes channels Gloria Swanson.

Now is that eerie or what?

The costume department was on the ball in this flick. The head henchman does his thing wearing a helmet clearly inspired by the cover of Cher’s 1978 album “Take Me Home.”

So while John Allen Nelson does not bring the same insouciant charm to the title role as D2’s John Terlesky, and Carla Herd does not get nearly as nekkid as Monique, in Thom Christopher’s Troxartes we have the stuff of greatness.

Three and a half coils, if I can find them.

“Siren” aka “Erotic Siren” is a shot on video, released on video erotic horror film that is neither erotic nor particularly horrifying.

A gang of five guys, dressed unconvincingly as women, knocks off a bank and gets away with a big sack of cash. They drive up to an abandoned house to wait for a confederate to take them to a boat. Then they’re going to sail somewhere.

But dang. There’s a semi-fresh girl messing around by the side of the road, so for no apparent reason they stop, she sees the money and guns, and so now they have to bring her along.

Oh yeah, she came out of the ocean, nekkid, in the first scene of the flick.

Tedious “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” thieves falling out stuff ensues, except in this case they are all looking to cut themselves a slice of the siren girl.

Bottom line, she kills them all, but they die happy.

The same two breasts, repeatedly. Psycho gangster shit, in Japanese. Incredibly bad suits (looks like they knocked over a Men’s Wearhouse, not a bank). Artsy sex shots, decidedly non-erotic.

Starring Japanese porno star Aoi Sola, if that does anything for you.

Phooey. One coil.

Takao Nakano’s 2010 “Big Tit Zombie” is an unusually stupid and tasteless film and as such zooms to the top of the CACA charts.

It stars Japanese porn queen Sora Aoi, aka Aoi Sora, aka Aoi Sola, and aka a few other names that are all remarkably similar.

She doesn’t have especially big tits, either, but le tout ensemble is quite attractive. Especially when wielding a chain saw.

The plot, such as it is, has five strippers working in an unsuccessful club that just happens to be connected by underground passage to a dank dungeon with Cabbage Patch dolls and a well. Oh, and there is a Book of the Dead.

Naturally one of the strippers reads from the Book of the Dead. It is de rigueur in these situations. Otherwise the movie would just be called “Big Tit,” or possibly “Big Tits,” and where would you be?

Zombies emerge from the well, and hilarity ensues.

What sets this one apart from, say, “Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead” are the sushi scenes (once with sushi, once with entrails).

And where “Zombie Ass” had unusual things erupting from the butt-type area, “Big Tit Zombie” has a fiery…

Uhh.

I can’t say it. The area from which the fire explodes is, uh…

Adjacent! That’s it. The fire comes from a region of a lady actor’s personal body that is adjacent to the butt-type area of the personal b.

The film is also very meta, which can mean anything. In this case it means that the subtitles rarely match the dubbed dialogue, which creates an ever-changing dialectic and existential tension that calls into question the very nature of cinema itself.

(Ha! Top that, dog-ass New York Times!)

It also means the director is shouting things at the actors, and you can see the wires on the tentacle things.

Four breasts (each set twice). Chain saw splitting of zombie, twice. Book of the Dead. Gibberish Latin that’s not even Latin. (It’s not even close.) Mt. Fuji as subject of subtextual jokes. Amusing zombies. And that fire thing.

Four coils, unreservedly, and a nomination for the next Iron Coil award.

Not content with the undoubted triumph of 2010’s “Dead Snow,” Tommy Wirkola has made a sequel. “Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead.”

This title is a little misleading, because the “red” refers to some Red Army soldier-zombies who are just as dead as the Nazi zombies.

However, we are dealing with a generation that thinks the Berlin Wall was an album by some old guys called Pink Floyd. So we must make allowances.

If you recall, in the first flick Martin and his dopey friends went to cabin way the hell out in the woods in Norway and accidentally woke up Nazi commander Herzog and his zombie battalion.

In that one, everybody died, including Martin’s girlfriend Sara, who is now called Hanna, but is still dead.

But what we didn’t know is that Martin got away, but somehow wound up with Herzog’s arm in his SUV.

So when the EMTs found him, they brought along the arm, and the kindly doctor reattached it — to Martin, who had cut his own arm off with a chain saw when he was bitten and infected.

Got that?

Well, this arm is capable of all sorts of stuff, including superhuman strength and resurrections.

Now, your Nazi zombies are complex creatures, and rarely do they have a simple agenda.

So Martin thinks they might be satisfied by getting their stupid treasure back, but he is sorely mistaken.

No, they have to finish their original mission, which was to destroy a little town called Tvnkj or something.

There is a whole lot of plot here, and to boil it down a bit, what we wind up with are four teams: the Nazi zombie team, led by Herzog; the Red Army team, led by some big tall zombie; Martin’s team, which consists of Martin, the gay guy from the museum, and three nitwits from the US who call themselves The Zombie Squad; and the police, who are only there for comic relief.

The film is in English, which makes it slightly easier to be confused but lacks the Ingmar Bergman atmosphere that made the original so deep and profound.

However, it expands on the original’s highly creative use of intestines. I have never seen an intestine used as a gasoline siphon before, and neither have you,  I’ll bet.

Wirkola breaks the Glop-O-Meter on this one. Heads, feet, guts, arms all roll. Explosions. Nifty hatchet work. Intestine as garrote, siphon, electrical wire. Necrophilia (implied). Pet zombie. Bad running joke about the language of seagulls. Norwegian cops with Irish accents. No nekkidity (automatic one-coil deduction). Very confusing.

Three coils.

This is Coiled Pleasures — the only Ivy League clothing/exploitation film/fly-fishing blog with poopy-looking sausages in the world.

We are refugees from the Fascist Google Complex of Mind Control and No Sense of Humor. (That’s FGCMCNSH, for those of you who love acronyms.)

Before you know it there will be deep discussions of button-down collars, profound musings on horrible films and pictures of bewildered trout in this space.

And poopy sausage.

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