A teenage preoccupation with breasts could have been attributed to a lack of natural feedings in infancy. Or it could have been simple jealousy – I didn’t have breasts but girls did and they just weren’t sharing enough. A bit of psychoanalysis might have found another root to my fixations. It wasn’t just Anne Francis followed by a legion of B-Flick vixens that had bolstered my taste for supernatural monsters while nurturing a prepubescent sense of perversity. It was something more, something heavier chested than all the rest. It was Ingrid Pitt.

My oldest, non-imaginary friend on earth, Hal Shrader, pointed this out. He noticed there was something I’d neglected in the Bettie Page post and it was the top-heavy, sex-oozy, demonic Ms. Pitt. When we were kids in Yuma we’d decompress from Sunday School by playing Husker Du while monsters shredded humans on TV. On one of those afternoons our favorite board game got stalled by the debut of Ingrid Pitt on the screen. It was The Vampire Lovers. Jesus, even with a stake through the heart she was hot.

I used to collect Famous Monsters trading cards (baseball cards are for the fat kids). They were awesome wallet portraits – The Amazing Melting Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Mushroom People, Linda Blair – and by the time my mom packed us up and returned the family to RI my Ingrid Pitt card no longer had the filmography & trivia on the back. The front was so pocket-worn that the draculicious Pitt looked more like Hedorah, the smog monster from Godzilla movies.

At nine years old, it was a good thing the original, uncut British version of The Vampire Lovers wasn’t available in the states. It is more “European”, in the sense that Pitt has a naked romp with another woman. I was a sexually preoccupied teen as it was, but an earlier exposure to that girl-girl bloodsucker scene would have set me on the path for years of even greater disappointment. Instead of prancing for weeks, deflowered at fourteen, I might have stumbled around in a sour funk like a spoiled brat who only got half the list he gave Santa. What the heck do mean? You can only lose your virginity to ONE girl? I got gypped!

Yikes! The topic of this post may be getting away from me now. So, let’s call this a simple addendum to my reflections on Bettie Page. Anne Francis is still secure atop my list of the most beautiful women, whether or not they frolicked with robots, and Bettie has to squeeze a bit to make room for Ingrid Pitt. And that should do it for my history with celluloid ladies.

Unless…wait…what about The Brain that Wouldn’t Die? That evil, decapitated head kept alive on a lab table? Motherfu…mmm, damn! What a doll!!!