Back when 
Arrow Video and Something Weird unleashed
that mammoth Herschell Gordon Lewis Blu-ray set in 2016, that was
just a sampler of 
what the Godfather of Gore had achieved over his strange and glorious exploitation career ranging from nudie cuties to filmed children's stage plays. After that the rest of his catalog was pretty much stuck in the realm of Something Weird DVD-R options, but in 2026 the floodgates finally started to open again with the label partnering with AGFA to give some love to the rest of H.G.'s oeuvre. The first one out of the gate pairs up two films from 1967 with "girl" in the title (and little else in common), and they're both welcome examples of what he was doing outside the horror genre at the peak of his productivity.
First up is Blast-Off Girls, Lewis' contribution to the flood of hip boy band vehicles in the wake of 1964's A Hard Day's Night. By this point the rock scene was starting to become more colorful and psychedelic,
and in this case Lewis found his stars in The Faded Blue, a Chicago-based band who were easy to hire since they hadn't signed to a label or released an album. Consisting of Tom Tyrell, Ron Liace, Dennis Hickey, Chris Wolski, and Ralph Mullin, the band (called The Big Blast here) becomes the latest victim of manipulative, unscrupulous small-time agent Boojie Baker (Conway), aided by his toadie Gordie (The 
Wizard of Gore's Sager). His prior band, Charlie, kicks him to the curb at the beginning of the film after being stiffed on all their payments. Offering a 50/50 split, he books the band with some gigs and a recording session using women and blackmail, not to mention a PR stint for Kentucky Fried Chicken that gives us the unforgettable experience of seeing Colonel Sanders and the Wizard of Gore in 
the same scene. Of course, it isn't long before the whole showbiz enterprise goes crashing down in flames.
Though you might expect something salacious from the title, this is purely PG-rated material all the way apart from a minor plot device involving marijuana. You even get the boys frolicking at the very end a la The Beatles and The Monkees, though Lewis delivers less visual style than usual relying mostly on static master shots throughout. Fortunately none of that matters since this is so very, very 1967 complete with groovy rock songs, fun fashions, and Sager chomping on the scenery whenever he's around. Barely given a regional theatrical release at the time, the film was a very obscure footnote in Lewis' filmography until it turned up on VHS from Something Weird in the late '90s and then got upgraded in a fresher, non-watermarked scan on DVD as a co-feature with Just for the Hell of It from Image Entertainment in 2000 (as a snapper case release, later replaced by an Amaray one in 2004). Extras on the DVD included Lewis' swinging topless featurette A Hot Night at the Go-Go Lounge, a "Facts of Life" drive-in book pitch, three intermission shorts, a gallery of drive-in exploitation art with trash-o-rama radio spots, and a bunch of H.G. Lewis trailers (Blast-Off Girls, Just for the Hell of It, The Alley Tramp, The Gore Gore Girls, The Psychic, Something Weird, two for Suburban Roulette, This Stuff'll Kill Ya!, and The Year of the Yahoo). Cited as coming from a 35mm print from UCLA with the negative now decayed, the AGFA release is framed at 1.66:1 with much more image info than the DVD (which was flat letterboxed and had a pinkish-purple tinge throughout). The source print has a fair amount of 
damage and looks quite faded, but that's apparently all we're going to get at this point; the DTS-HD MA English 2.0 mono 
audio sounds fine and comes with optional English SDH subtitles.
Then you'll learn a very valuable lesson: "Don't play with dynamite unless you're sure the stakes are worthwhile. Young people who get into situations they can't handle are ruining their lives playing Russian roulette with life for no stakes whatsoever. It's not smart." Yes, it's time for The Girl, the Body and the Pill, a scare film about the disasters in American society that could be unleashed by the birth control pill since its approval for use in 1960. Written by his Blood Feast screenwriter Allison Louise Downe (who also assistant directed here), the story (bookended by dire proclamations from a stern school principal) takes place at an average high school where Randy (She-Devils on Wheels' Noble) is leading the charge of young women going all the way with their boyfriends. The youngest and most progressive of the teachers (one-shot star Rhea) has to resort to covert sex ed classes to stave off the dangers of pregnancy and disease that could sabotage the teenagers' lives, with hypocritical parents offering the main stumbling block when they're out sleeping around as well and relying on the pill more than they should.
Though 
the beginning pitches this as a morality tale, it's clear the film is thumbing its nose more than a bit at stodgy attitudes from the adult characters. 
The actual sexual content here is very subdued, but the film still has that exploitation vibe in spades with lots of angst, melodrama, and sex scandals to keep you entertained. This balance is always a strange and delightful one in this period of sexploitation, something addressed among many, many other subjects in the terrific new audio commentary on the AGFA disc by The Sin Syndicate podcast's Gentry Austin and Casey Scott. Pretty much anything you could want to know about the actors (at least the ones who aren't still a mystery), the original title The Pill, and filmmakers gets covered here, and though the background audio from the movie gets a bit loud at times, it's an essential listen. The film itself never went beyond VHS and DVD-R before this with an old scan going back to the mid-'90s, and unfortunately the negative used back then has long gone missing. What we have here is from the only known 35mm print, again faded and heavily damaged (the spliciest during the opening with the main title song "The Pill" sadly MIA) but as good as it's going to get. That 2-minute main title sequence is included here as an extra pulled from tape, plus a 56m33s audio interview with Noble and her husband Mike Zorick conducted by Austin and Scott in 2025. It's an invaluable chronicle of the '60s exploitation scene as she talks about her early career, auditioning for Lewis, thoughts on the script for this film, and her later appearances for Lewis and Roger Corman. A Hot Night at the Go-Go Lounge (10m8s) returns here in a gorgeous new HD scan, following by a 51m25s reel of Lewis trailers starting with The Adventures of Lucky Pierre and going all the way through to The Gore Gore Girls with all of the nudity, splatter, and thrift store fairy tale costumes you'd expect. A 2m27s gallery of ad material is also included, plus an insert booklet with essays by Janna Jones and Austin respectively covered Downe's life and career and the often ephemeral '60s garage bands and their rotating members that Blast-Off Girls captures so vividly.
BLAST-OFF GIRLS (Blu-ray)
BLAST-OFF GIRLS (DVD)
