Girls in
The Manson Family (2003)

1969 stands as the year that pop culture evolved from the mass grooviness of Woodstock and the far-out giant leap of the moon landing to the horror of the Manson Family murders and the Hells Angels stomping out flower power at Altamont.

It was also the year that Hollywood erupted with new creative freedom, emboldened by expanding societal mores and the new MPAA rating system.

Filmmakers could now dip into the palette of patently adult material, including coarse language, unflinching violence, and, most importantly, sex and nudity.

Let’s trip on back to 1969 and dig nine classic nude scenes from that headiest of daze gone by.

1. EASY RIDER
Toni Basil
(1:26)
Toni strips full-frontally nude in a New Orleans cemetery while tripping on LSD.

Easy Rider is indisputably one of the hippie era’s ultimate artistic statements. Toni Basil’s “Hey Mickey!” video is one of the most indelible media images of the 1980s. How interesting that one cultural touchstone unwittingly begat another. On acid. Naked.

Groovy Times are Rear Again

Welcome back to Castle Rackula, my friends. I hope your Halloween was as eventful as mine. Tony Curtis showed up unexpectedly to the party at about one AM, but I’m still not sure whether that was meant to be a trick or a treat.

But all the debauchery has got me thinking about the most debauched periods I ever lived through (so to speak). There was the French Revolution of course, and the last days of Rome, but nothing really compared to the years I spend hob-knobbing with David Crosby down in Laurel Canyon.

In honor of those heady (pun skin-tended) times, I would like to visit some of my favorite hippie horror movies. So light up that incense, stick on that Blues Image record and join me, won’t you?

Read more after the bite.

On this date in 1969, it was -- as junk-rocker Jim Carroll would later croon -- too late if you were in love with Sharon Tate.

The luminous fair-haired Texan who had starred in Valley of the Dolls and The Fearless Vampire Killers happened to be in the wrong groovy Los Angeles pad on the wrong hazy night, when the knife-wielding minions of larger-than-death psycho Charles Manson embarked on a massively lethal “creepy crawl.”

Sharon Tate was torn from life tragically, and too early. Fortunately, her film work will live forever. Especially the nude stuff. See more after the jump.

Susan Atkins, Woman in Prison

The California board of parole hearings unanimously denied Charles Manson follower and convicted murderer Susan Atkins, who is terminally ill with weeks to live, a compassionate release from prison, where she has been for 37 years. And it’s unlikely she spent that whole time having lesbian sex in the shower, since she became a born-again Christian in 1974.

Click below to continue reading and check out a free clip of Maureen Allisse in a nude hippie orgy from Manson Family.

I've been a fan of horror maverick Jim Van Bebber since his debut film, the low budget and super-violent street gang flick Deadbeat at Dawn. Now, Dark Sky Films has released VanBebbber's entire corpus in a DVD box set called Visions of Hell: The Films of Jim Van Bebber. It contains his two feature films, Deadbeat at Dawn (1988) and The Manson Family (2003) as well as his short films like Roadkill: The Last Days of John Martin (1994) and My Sweet Satan. This box set is a must for fans of exploitation cinema, and the fact that Jim doesn't skimp on skin (especially when it comes to the wall-to-wall naked hippy chicks of The Manson Family) makes this my pick for DVD of the week!