A Mid-’70s Drive-In Triple Bill!

Pin open your eyelids and get ready to scream like a mongoloid! This week I’m highlighting a trio of 1970s exploitation drive-in movies that have mostly been forgotten by today’s movie renting public that rarely stray from the “New Release Wall” in their local Blockbuster. I’ll tell you what — fuck Blockbuster. They won’t have this stuff, so support your local indie video store.

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“I’ll kiss anything that moves!”

I’m sure it’s happened to all of us at one time or another. You’ll be flipping channels and arrive on a TV broadcast of one of your favourite motion pictures, one where you know lots of the scripted dialogue by heart. Then suddenly, as if one of the characters has been possessed, a different voice comes wafting out of their mouth, and whatever they used to say is now gone and changed into something far more vanilla.

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Long Jeanne Silver

A short list of the some of the most bizarre, more outlandish XXX fare of the 1970s wouldn’t be complete without mentioning an eye-opening 1977 Alex De Renzy feature film titled LONG JEANNE SILVER. In fact, of all the porn films in my collection, I’ve gone though the most trouble to get this particular one, so excuse me if I feel overly compelled to tell you its story.

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SCHOOL IS NOW IN SESSION

One of my earliest masturbatory fantasies (I have a feeling it may be a common one for many young boys) was the idea of taking part in a sex education class that involved a physical demonstration. Of course meaning: my grade 6 teacher Miss Dawson taking part in various types of sexual activity while perched up on her desk in front of the class.

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We are all Naked

WE ARE ALL NAKED (1966/69) Starring: Alain Saury, Catherine Riberio, Jacques Normand, Gerard Desales

This sex flavoured art film, a gorgeous Canada/France co-production shot in black and white with pathos and depressing drama to spare, promotes the concept that living with a poverty-stricken dysfunctional family on the beach in France - really SUCKS.

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Japan’s first nude superheroine

I first became aware of the Japanese cult-sleaze-comedy phenomenon known as “Kekko Kamen” (1991 aka Kekko Mask) while looking through a grey market video dealers catalogue — you know, one of those photocopied “hard-to-find movies from many lands” tracts that were the only way to find a lot of this stuff pre-internet. The mini review tagged onto the listing in order to fish people into ordering the tape went something like “Japan’s first and only nude superheroine and protector of schoolgirls”.

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Life is Better Underground

Since the first Cro-Magnon man set foot in the limestone caves of Lascaux, we have has a bittersweet relationship with cool, dank places. They provided mankind with much needed shelter from the elements, yet in their dark recesses they also supplied material for our nightmares — whether they materialised as a flesh-ripping cave bear or a knife-wielding street thug jumping out as you fumble with your keys. Thus the instinctive and primal fear that grips everyone of us anytime we venture into the bowels of our urban sprawl: underground parking lots.

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25 Cinematic Cliches I Never Wanna See Again

Those of you that know me fairly well know that I adore making lists. I get a serious thrill out of it. In that light, here are “25 Cinematic Cliches I never wanna see again.” Enjoy!

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Remembering the Teenage Sex Comedy

It’s probably really tough for today’s male youth to understand what the older generations had to go through in their youth to get some inspiration to burp the worm. Today you just turn on your computer, toss a DVD in the player, or watch pay TV and it’s showtime. What about the young gents of the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s or my wonder years, the ’80s? It wasn’t easy to get even a whiff of a nipple back then. If you grew pubic hair in the Reagan era, you had to either hope you were gonna find some musty stroke books in the woods or make do with something that wouldn’t arouse your parents suspicions; like Teenage Sex Comedies.

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All the Devil’s Angels

The history of smut has as many unbelievably odd characters as it has movies, and it seems one who takes an active interest in this sordid cinema is always uncovering a quirky previously unknown filmmaker or performer worth obsessing over. The cool thing is that it’s nearly always someone who has flown under everyone else’s radar, and you get that raw discovery high usually reserved for treasure hunters and palaeontologists. Classic porn is — even today with a new resurgence of interest — the most under appreciated and under documented genre of film history. In that vein, may I introduce you to a weird little pornographer named Ted Roter.

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JAPANESE SUKEBAN AND NAKED NUNS!

Keeping in mind that “Sukeban” translates from Japanese as “Teenage female delinquent”, and that in SUKEBAN GUERILLA (1973) said nubile ruffians initiate each other by holding each other down and tattooing each others entire left tit, you should be fully aware that any filmic trash fan worth their mustard will adore this funky turd from start to finish. That said, the dozen or so Sukeban films made in the 1970s, though released as exploitation, were trojan horse vehicles for powerful social commentary.

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3 times the sleaze, 3 times the fun!

Sexploitation, for those of you uninitiated, is a sub genre of adult film that for the most part predated the first hardcore sex films of the early to mid ’70s. These low budget pictures were nudity packed with full figured women, kooky dialog, and drive-in and grindhouse theater advertising campains that promised the world in a kitchen sink, even if they didn’t deliver much in the way of actual sex. Thankfully, what they lacked in hardcore action, they almost always made up for in terms of enjoyably sleazy degenerate characters and storylines right out of your favorite dime store pulp novel.

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Me N’ Smithee

I’ve never been so nervous or star struck as when I was recently graced with the supreme honor of speaking to the one and only Allen Smithee. This was no ordinary film director. Prior to the interview, I was racked with stressful indecision. Would I ask him about his directing an actress of a high caliber such as Jodie Foster in BACKTRACK (1989)? Or would I query as to what sort of preparation he went through prior to the filming of BLOODSUCKING PHARAOHS IN PITTSBURGH (1991)?

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Little Darlings

I spend a lot of time skimming the DVD listings on eBay, and a couple days ago I scored the nearly forgotten Hollywood teen-sex classic Little Darlings on DVD via someone with the user name “forgotten films”. It’s a rare homemade bootleg these guys offer, but is the best quality bootleg I’ve ever seen. Animated menus, extra features… the works.

There isn’t much to be said in terms of back story for this review except that I saw the movie when I was 12 and because of it I acquired a MAJOR-HEAD-OVER-HEELS crush on both of the movie’s headliners: Tatum Oneal and Kristy McNichol. Seeing the movie again for the first time in 20 years, I’m amazed at how well it holds up…

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Skin-somnia

I’m sitting there watching late night TV and there’s this commercial. It’s nothing special, and nothing I haven’t seen many times before. It’s typical in its banality, but resplendent with this totally inane theme song. He’s not visible, but I can hear that this guy is just rockin’ out while we are looking at these cheese covered disks coming out of an oven, and the guitar is wailing, and he’s just giving his all — singing about goddamn Bagel Bites.

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Joke only about your face, Willis!

I’d like to change speeds this time out, and cast an eye towards the idiotbox instead of the silver screen. Our location will be New York, where a cast of characters featured a wealthy widower named Philip Drummond (Conrad Bain), who lived in a luxurious penthouse with his nubile teenage daughter Kimberly (Dana Plato). As the story went, Drummond’s black housekeeper grew sick, and upon her deathbed bequeathed to her affluent white boss her two sons, Arnold (Gary Coleman) and Willis (Todd Bridges).

This was the ground broken on episode one of DIFF’RENT STROKES entitled “Movin’ in” — when it first aired on November 3rd 1978, and it was the pilot episode of one of my all time favorite sick-coms. Right from the start, critics heaped shit all over it, while viewers ignored the critics and ate it up.

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Bogus Celebrity Nudes Revealed!

Either in their ’40s noir cinema incarnation, or as modern day gumshoes, detectives are pretty low-key and don’t usually announce their presence by yelling out to anyone who will listen about their ability to solve crimes, but a 60 year old Wisconsin man named Ed Lake who is better known to photoshop devotees as “The Fake Detective”, does just that on his beat — the internet.

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Just Try and Stop the Music, I Dare You

While the success of the average movie is certainly based upon inspiring in the viewer a suspension of disbelief, great works from the camp genre succeed in their suspension of other qualities. Namely, good taste (what ever the hell THAT is) and the rule that most films are nothing but ball-less scrotums that give you exactly what you expect, but rarely what you want.

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Kamikaze Hearts of Gutter Punk Lesbians

During the “Sharon Mitchell film festival” held at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Boston on June 6th 2000, the legendary porn queen showed clips from her XXX films spanning her 3 decades long career and provided a running commentary for the audience. Sharon held the crowd in rapt attention while she revealed the title from which each clip was taken, the director and, when she remembered, anecdotes about the cast and what drug she was on at the time the footage was shot. It was usually heroin or marijuana, and in some cases, both. One such example was the ultra-rare documentary KAMIKAZE HEARTS, which also depicted Mitchell — then addicted — passionately defending drug use.

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At The 23-Screen Stadium-Seating Nacho-Serving Cineplex Of Madness

Mysterious creatures. Bizarre science. A dark, snowbound fortress. The occult. Tentacled, crustacean-inspired monsters. Hellish apocalypse. Primordial evil. Madness. Hellboy, the well-received latest film from neo-post-schlock auteur Guillermo del Toro (Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, Blade II), offers these and other delights, all of which are common motifs in the work of that impossibly influential champion of the strange: early-20th-century author/weirdo H.P. Lovecraft.

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Learning Vince’s Dirty Moves

In July 1996, Hulk Hogan shocked the world by becoming what oppressed him the most as a hero in the 1980s: he turned heel. As the garbage filled the ring, he told Mene Gene Okerland, “As far as I’m concerned, all this crap in the ring represents the fans out here. ” That year Pro Wrestling Illustrated’s poll voted Hogan as the most hated wrestler.

I consider myself a heel. I have dark hair and dark eyes. And I’m usually up to no good. Catherine Kidd once asked me, after knowing me in Montreal for about a year “Are you nice?”

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The Dominion of Shlock

Nat Taylor invented the multiplex cinema and was one of the founders of the private film-industry lobby in Canada, so feel free to despise him. But since the guy just died this past February 29 at a helpless age 98, why not remember him for his virtues – primary among them his role in bringing the world The Mask (1961), Canada’s first enduring contribution to schlock — and 3-D — cinema.
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Underfoot No Longer

Marty McKee: Yeah, I know you’ve done a lot of different genres, but I’ve always wondered why that [giant animals] was so interesting to you.

Bert I. Gordon: [Pause] I don’t know. [Laugh]

Bert Gordon (AKA Mr. BIG, director of The Food of the Gods) doesn’t know why, and neither do I. I just know that I like movies that feature giant animals: giant rabbits, giant rats, giant sharks, giant snakes, giant insects (i.e., ants, wasps), giant women, giant lemurs, giant chickens, giant men, giant turtles, giant cephalopods (i.e., octopus, squid), giant monsters from space and the rare but delightful giant crustaceans (i.e., crabs).
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Stella Performance

Leiji Matsumoto’s Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5y5tem is a near-feature-length animated silent film with a musical score that almost exactly corresponds to Discovery, an album by French band Daft Punk. This is obviously by intention; Daft Punk have a history of great, weird videos, from the Spike Jonze-directed “Da Funk,” which featured a dog-man walking around and talking to people, all the time carrying a boom box he couldn’t turn off, to the precisely choreographed Busby-Berkeley-meets-robots-and-mummies clip for “Around the World,” directed by Michel Gondry. Interstella 5555 is kind of a different, more ambitious thing. Though only three videos were ever released and shown on TV (for the album’s singles), the band had Matsumoto put together animated shorts for each song on Discovery, which when played together, form a narrative whole.

It’s the right time for it; seems like these days people are complaining less about the pernicious influence videos have had on feature filmmaking , and have woken up to the fact that some of the most interesting stuff being done in the moving-picture business is happening in these clips, their brevity allowing for more experimentation and less concern with the vagaries of the box office.

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