The Floridian oddity SOMETIMES AUNT MARTHA DOES DREADFUL THINGS gets a Blu-ray bump-up from American Genre Film Archive.

On the run after a jewel robbery in Baltimore, Paul (Abe Zwick) and Stanley (Wayne Crawford, HEADHUNTER) are laying low in suburban Miami with plans to flee to South America. While Stanley is constantly drawing attention to them with his girl-chasing and gaudy pink hippie van, Paul inexplicably convinces the neighborhood that he is Stanley's kindly Aunt Martha. The relationship is not too far from the truth since drug-addled Stanley likes to chase the girls but becomes a frightened child once he catches them, and Paul constantly has to remind him that the reason they are really on the run is because he brutally stabbed their robbery victim (Francelia Waterbury) to death during a blackout. It's Paul – or Aunt Martha – who gets stabby, however, when waitress Alma (Marty Cordova) tries to force her way into Stanley's bed and discovers Aunt Martha's secret. Having seen Stanley freak out on heroin herself, Alma's roommate Dolores (Maggie Wood) starts snooping around. Far more worrying, however, is the appearance of Stanley's astrology-loving junkie friend from Baltimore Hubert (Don Craig, VICE GIRLS LTD.) who claims to just be looking for a place to stay but gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar. When Stanley starts flirting with nurse trainee Vicki (Robin Hughes) and her nosy, pregnant, middle-aged mother (Yanka Mann) who decides to bake a cake for Stanley's upcoming 19th birthday, Aunt Martha starts sharpening her carving knife again.

Possibly the strangest 1970s exploitation film to come out of Florida – amidst such company as BLOOD FREAK, DEATH CURSE OF TARTU, and various Herschell Gordon Lewis oddities – SOMETIMES AUNT MARTHA DOES DREADFUL THINGS is not quite the late PSYCHO ripoff it seems or a cash-in on the sudden but short-lived mainstreaming of gay cinema with THE BOYS IN THE BAND and FORTUNE AND MEN'S EYES. The sexuality of its lead couple is maddeningly ambiguous. They share a bed, but only once Hubert has invited himself into their house. Paul claims not to like wearing a dress and a wig, but even Stanley questions his reasoning for it in the first place. Paul's griping about Stanley's girl-chasing seems less like jealousy and more concern about getting caught until the climax when a betrayal of a non-sexual nature has Paul calling Stanley a whore and writing "slut" on his forehead. Stanley at first appears to be the stereotypical for the time younger man or woman dominated by an older gay man or lesbian and eager to get out from under their thumb; however, when a woman gets too close to Stanley, he panics and screams for Paul to get her away from him (not seeming to comprehend that it means death for the unfortunate). There may not be anything to figure out and it may be odd for the sake of being odd since it was lensed in Florida that had yet to embrace hardcore and even the softcore sex films were more nudie (or nudist) than bump 'n grind. Although the film never reaches the heights of delirium it seeks – utilizing solarization and rapid shock cuts during the murders – it definitely lives up to its nutty reputation, moving from bitchy exchanges, pathetically-choreographed action, grisly mutilation and a laughable attempt at pathos to an "Expressionism on the cheap" climax set in a movie studio with inky shadows and probing spotlights. Crawford went on to headline some other Florida-area exploitation films like Harry Kerwin's TOMCATS, GOD'S BLOODY ACRE, and BARRACUDA – Kerwin served as production manager on this film and his actor brother William (BLOOD FEAST) also has a small role – and later became a writer and producer, starring in his own vehicle JAKE SPEED as well as producing VALLEY GIRL and NIGHT OF THE COMET. Director Thomas Casey also scripted and photographed the Veronica Lake late career horror pic FLESH FEAST, and the film does have an odd Floridian exploitation pedigree BLOOD FREAK director Brad Grinter in a bit part as a police detective, FLIPPER cameraman Edmund Gibson as cinematographer, and SCREAM BABY SCREAM's Chris Martell as assistant director.

Seemingly given only scant local release by McCleod Films – whose other pick-ups included the Florida-lensed American/Spanish co-production SWAMP OF THE RAVENS, THE FLORIDA CONNECTION, and William Grefe's WHISKEY MOUNTAIN – SOMETIMES AUNT MARTHA DOES DREADFUL THINGS gained most of its audience from a big box release by Active Home Video and Video Treasures' LP reissue. Vinegar Syndrome utilized the American Genre Film Archive master from 35mm archival materials for their 2015 DVD, and it was the best-looking of the AGFA-supplied Vinegar Syndrome releases at the time (compared to NIGHT OF THE STRANGLER and SUPERSOUL BROTHER). AGFA's own 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray seems to be derived from the same master which has held up after five years since it was a 2K scan that underwent forty-hours of restoration. The colors have a sickly hue that seems to be more a matter of the original processing than the digital restoration, but skintones look mostly naturalistic and colors rich (the commentators are unable to figure out whether a combination of fading and restoration or some considered lighting is responsible for the look of the interiors). The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track boasts clear dialogue and library music but has the same hiss and occasional crackle of the Dolby Digital track on the DVD. Optional English SDH subtitles are enabled only via remote.

The AGFA DVD included an audio commentary by filmmaker David DeCoteau (THE BROTHERHOOD) and critic Nathaniel Thompson but they have jettisoned that track for the Blu-ray in favor of a new track with queer film historian Evan Purchell and AGFA’s Bret Berg. Purchell and Berg are not able to provide significantly more background on this film than the participants of the previous track, although Purchell was able to track down an old interview with Crawford and reveal that Casey's family were instrumental in Florida's filmmaking boom by founding their own studio in the fifties. Berg often asks for Purchell's "interpretation" of the film's gay and "trans" elements, and Purchell puts the film in the context of gay mainstream and exploitation films of the period which often focused on dysfunctional and power-imbalanced relationships and the two ponder what it was like for a young gay viewer to see this kind of representation on the screen at the time (Purchell does not know if Casey was gay but notes that he was also the editor of a magazine at the time called "The Outlook" but can offer no specifics about the content of the periodical, although he does reveal some intriguing things about the later 1980 Bigfoot gore film NIGHT OF THE DEMON in a tangent about the convergence of gay adult filmmakers and exploitation films). They note the incongruity of the film's animated title sequence and psychedelic murder montages, although some similar techniques had previously been utilized in the 1969 film SCREAM BABY SCREAM which was lit by Casey and co-starred Martell (who was also in Lewis' THE GRUESOME TWOSOME which Purchell also cites for similarities in look and tone along with the films of Andy Milligan).

The major bonus on the disc is THE DRAG QUEEN'S BALL (47:38), a 1970 filming of a live drag burlesque show which is pretty much what one comes to expect from the popular depictions of drag, lots of lip-synching, strutting, and choreography. More interesting is the short "Gay-in III" (9:54) from 1970 in which participants at a gay event in a park discuss the difficulties they have encountered in dealing with the police and landlords, particularly the more butch-looking member of a lesbian couple. "Caught in the Can" is actually a seven minute excerpt from an hour-long 1970 film in which two guys tired of the rat race decide to dress up as women to roll men for cash thinking their victims will not dare to report them. They end up getting picked up by vice for soliciting. According to a synopsis of the feature, they end up inexplicably being placed in a holding cell in the female jail wing and bed some female inmates.