I bring you sad news: Doris Wishman is dead. The genial Jewish sultan of softcore sexploitation, who directed more feature films by far — 24 — than any woman in the sound era (silent-film maker Alice Guy Blache is her only competitor), succumbed August 10 at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami after suffering complications from lymphoma. I give you the e-mail from ex-Bostonian Michael Bowen, her dedicated as-told-to biographer: "Our dear friend Doris Wishman passed away last Saturday night after a thankfully brief illness. Her immediate family had decided not to hold a public service. . . . Cards and condolences can be sent to her beloved sister: Pearl Kushner, 430 Valencia Avenue, Apt. 3RW, Coral Gables, Florida 33134."

Is there anyone who doesn’t know the unlikely story of the little New-York-to-Miami lady who looked most fit for mah-jong? No NYU Film School for Doris Wishman. Totally self-taught, she wrote and directed, from 1959 to 1983, nudies, "roughies," and sexploitation films, some starring the stripper Blaze Starr and the aptly named "Chesty" Morgan, she of the 73-inch bosom. The New York Underground Film Festival had a retrospective of her unusual œuvre, as did the Harvard Film Archive in 1994 with its "The Renegade Films of Doris Wishman." Here are some typical titles: Blaze Starr Goes Nudist (1960), A Night To Dismember (1983), Keyholes Are for Peeping (1972). John Waters worships Wishman’s Chesty Morgan cycle, the B-52s’ Fred Schneider calls her sci-fi Nude on the Moon (1962) "one of the greatest films ever made," and Phoenix film editor Peter Keough has opined that "she’s indeed a ’60s filmmaker worth reclaiming."

The female Ed Wood? Like Wood in his defense of cross-dressing in Glen or Glenda?, Wishman used her "B" cinema to stirring didactic purpose. The Amazing Transplant (1970) concerns a penis attachment; the pioneering Let Me Die a Woman (1978) was a sympathetic look at transsexuals faced with "trial by knife." Like Wood’s films, hers are sublimely daffy and deliriously incoherent, on the cusp between beyond-belief-badness and primitivist genius, and with editing choices so odd they challenge Eisenstein. I can’t imagine a more accurate description of her signature mise-en-scène than this brilliant paragraph from the Onion’s Noel Murray hailing a DVD release: "While the narrator lays out a befuddling array of facts, Wishman cuts rapidly between footage of human butchery, lovely outdoor photography, and handheld shots of feet walking. Eventually, A Night To Dismember settles into a steady rhythm: new characters show up, converse in overdubbed and asynchronous non-sequiturs, creep around tacky apartments, and then meet their untimely ends to the accompaniment of disconnected pieces of stock music."

Precisely. Check doriswishman.com for a touching memorial photograph, where she appears in shades and a spiffy polka-dot dress. Then pay tribute to Doris by heading to the video store to see what’s newly available in straight-to-cassette sexploitation. Here are four movies that I found, all with lurid come-on covers, and in descending order of interest:

The Pornographer (1999). Michael DeGood plays a Dilbert-like paralegal who lives gloomily in LA among cabinets of XXX videos and pays obsessive visits to an orally talented masseuse. But he can’t attract a date, even with tickets to Les Mis. It’s a short hop to making his own pornos, under the tutelage of a Mephistophelean trafficker (Craig Wasson) for whom he entraps a nice belle from Tennessee (the persuasively ingenuous Katheryn Cain). A stupid melodramatic ending mars a tight "B" movie. Doug Atchison wrote and directed.

The Smokers (2000). Lolita’s Dominique Swain is one-third of a messed-up high-school girls’ gang whom you couldn’t exactly call the weaker sex, since they pack a gun to persuade guys to screw them — call it reverse date rape. A misguided idea and a confused script, though Thora Birch enlivens this movie as a nihilist, semi-goth little sister. Christina Peters wrote and directed.

Tart (2001). Swain again, a year older and heftier, as the impatiently virginal 17-year-old pal of free-spirited Bijou Phillips (who, wildly promiscuous also in Black and White and Bully, is replacing young hussy Drew Barrymore). Swain snorts drugs, makes whoopee, witnesses murder, and hugs her mother in consolation. Christina Wayne wrote and directed.

Tease (a/k/a Poison, 1999). Rosanna Arquette should have said no to portraying the self-deceived mother of a psycho killer’s trampy daughter (boring Mandy Schaffer). Offings-by-the-number, lousy throughout. Dennis Berry wrote and directed.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com