The Blue Hour (1971)

It’s not fun to bag on The Blue Hour, because it represents a fairly serious attempt to expand cinema language while probing the emotional life of a disturbed young woman. The film’s directors, Sergei Goncharoff and Ron Nicholas, use fragmented editing to dislodge the viewer’s sense of time and place, and they intercut different events to suggest psychological correlations. None of this was new in 1971, by which point the French New Wave had already influenced many American filmmakers, but Goncharoff and Nicholas go way beyond flashy jump cuts. Unfortunately, The Blue Hour not only murky but also laughably pretentious: When the title appears onscreen, it’s accompanied by a French translation, L’Heure Bleu. Really, guys? Really? Oh, and there’s something else readers should know about The Blue Hour. It’s an X-rated skin flick. Yes, for all of the directors’ high-minded cinematic technique, the main selling points of The Blue Hour are softcore humping and a whole lot of female nudity. While screwing her boyfriend on a beach, buxom Tanya (Anne Chapman) freaks out by imagining (or hallucinating or remembering) a corpse. Then, over the course of long therapy-like conversations, she examines her difficult sexual past. While living in Greece, she was nearly raped by an uncle and then drove a young priest mad with lust. Later, she worked as a nude model, and clients sexually assaulted her. It’s all very heavy stuff, though the desired sense of portent is diminished by Chapman’s silly performance and by the directors’ tendency to aimlessly probe her body with their cameras. FYI, those who soldier through all 83 minutes of this strange picture will be startled to encounter future WKRP in Cincinnati costar Gordon Jump in one scene—fully clothed, thankfully.

The Blue Hour: LAME

Dagmar’s Hot Pants, Inc. (1971)

Softcore sex comedy Dagmar’s Hot Pants, Inc. was produced by a consortium of American, Danish, and Swedish companies, filmed in English, and released stateside with an X-rating. Weirdly, the film later became part of the MGM library (primarily, it appears, for streaming purposes), so that means in two different decades, American movie executives thought American audiences wanted to see this thing. Such is and was the mysterious power of the porno-chic period, or else why would a disposable 1971 skin flick remain available for viewing in 2018? Oh, well. Dagmar (Diana Kjaer) is a Copenhagen prostitute about to quit the business, so the movie tracks her frenetic final day as a working girl. Between making arrangements to sell her apartment and relocate, she services several clients, doing everything from deflowering a shy young man to enduring the overzealous ministrations of a chubby orchestra conductor. Despite a few meager attempts at character development, this is strictly lightweight fare for the heavy-breathing crowd. To give a sense of what the movie offers, the wittiest scene features Dagmar calling fellow hookers for help with a busy schedule, only to get polite refusals from one girl who says “I’m just too beat” (while getting whipped), from another who says “I’m all tied up” (while she’s actually bound), from a third who says “I’m dead tired” (while screwing inside a coffin), and so on. Just as Kjaer’s confident portrayal suggests she could have handled real dramatic scenes, the almost-imaginative comic bits suggest cowriter/director Vernon P. Becker could have edged further into outright farce. Instead, they made tepid smut.

Dagmar’s Hot Pants, Inc.: LAME

The Psycho Lover (1970)

There’s a real movie hidden beneath sexploitation sludge in The Psycho Lover, and some psychotronic-cinema fans make the case that The Psycho Lover is respectable compared to similar fare. But is improving just slightly over garbage really all that much of an accomplishment? Between interminably long rape, murder, and/or softcore-sex scenes, The Psycho Lover tells the story of psychiatrist Dr. Kenneth Alden (Lawrence Montaigne) and his deranged patient, Marco Everson (Frank Cuva). Throughout the first half of the picture, Marco kills various women and then, under hypnosis, tells Kenneth about the crimes. Even with pressure from cops, who identify Marco as a suspect, Kenneth seems disinclined to either tell authorities what he knows or use his influence to end the crime spree. Instead, Kenneth spends lots of time cavorting with his hottie girlfriend, Stacy (Elizabeth Plumb), even though he has a depressed wife, Valerie (Jo Anne Meredith), back home. One day, when Stacy somewhat randomly describes the plot of The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to Kenneth, he gets the notion of compelling Marco to murder Valerie. The movie’s halfway over by the time happens, so you get an idea of writer-director Robert Vincent O’Neill’s lackadaisical approach to pacing. That said, The Psycho Lover is not an incompetently made picture. The photography is decent, some of the acting is passable, and a few lines of dialogue are tasty. (Examining a crime scene, a cop says the following about a murderer: “I can smell him in this room, and the hairs on my ass stand on end every time I catch his scent.”) These attributes are insufficient to make watching the picture worth the trouble.

The Psycho Lover: LAME

The Body Shop (1973)

At some point during this mindless gorefest, a local cop knocks on the door of the castle-like mansion where a mad scientist performs unholy surgery. The scientist answers the door politely, so the cop makes an inquiry: “You’re not doing anything illegal, are you?” “No,” the scientist says, “I’m a doctor.” Inexplicably satisfied with that answer, the cop says, “Well, I hope I didn’t bother you.” Huh? As goes that idiotic scene, so goes the rest of this unwatchable movie, which is sometimes known as Doctor Gore. Written and directed by J.D. Patterson Jr., who also plays the leading role, the picture concerns a medical man determined to replace his deceased wife with a simulacrum. Aided by his hunchbacked assistant (yes, really), the doctor seduces and murders young women, then cuts up their bodies with the intention of building a new bride for himself. Variations on the same ridiculous presence are nearly as old as Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), in which the monster demands a mate, so Patterson doesn’t get any points for originality. Nor does he deserve praise for anything else—from acting to directing to writing, everything he does here is inept. For instance, what’s with periodically cutting to portly country singer Bill Hicks, who repeatedly croons the song “A Heart Dies Every Minute”? And what’s with those dull montages of Patterson, as the doctor, making out with curvy young women? Excepting some quasi-realistic gore, this flick runs the gamut from incompetent to indulgent. Luckily, Patterson only made one more movie, The Electric Chair (1976).

The Body Shop: SQUARE

Blood Freak (1972)

          This one’s a turkey. No, not in the sense of being an absolute cinematic failure, although that’s true, as well—the monster described in the title is a turkey, or more specifically, a dude wearing a giant turkey mask over his face. Welcome to the strange world of Blood Freak, an atrociously made horror flick with heavy elements of Christianity and reefer. If you think those things don’t belong in the same movie, much less a creature feature, then you’ve identified what makes Blood Freak unique. Cowritten and codirected with spectacular incompetence by Brad F. Grinter, who also appears onscreen at periodic intervals to provide bizarre narration, Blood Freak is a whole lot of things at once. In some scenes, it’s anti-religion and pro-weed, and in other scenes it’s the opposite. Similarly, the movie’s attitude toward casual sex changes like the colors of a mood ring, because the protagonist is just as likely to call a loose woman a tramp as he is to sleep with her. And we haven’t even gotten to the whole were-turkey business or the grimy scenes of the monster slashing women’s throats so he can drink their marijuana-laced blood.

          The movie begins clumsily, with Grinter’s voiceover accompanying shakily filmed scenes of a motorcyclist approaching a woman whose car crapped out on a Florida highway. As Grinter remarks: “A pretty girl on the side of the road—who could resist? Certainly not Herschell!” That would be our hero, Herschell, played by Steve Hawkes, who shares writing and directing chores with Grinter. A big dude with an Elvis pompadour, he seems to incarnate a different character in every scene, because the script is so bad the filmmakers never decide whether Herschell is a rebel, a swinger, a zealot, or whatever. In any event, meeting the girl on the road leads Herschell to a collective of pot-smoking partiers, and he scolds his new acquaintances for their wanton ways. Yet soon afterward, he becomes a pot addict—at which point the filmmakers confuse the symptoms of heroin addiction with the habits of heavy pot smokers. Herschell makes bad decisions and sacrifices his morality because he’s just gotta have that demon weed. Among his drug-induced choices is taking a job for scientists at a turkey farm, who task him with consuming turkey meat they’ve injected with chemicals. Hence his transformation into a were-turkey who prowls the Floridian night, draining fellow addicts of their pot-infused plasma. All of this leads to a big story twist about three-quarters of the way through the running time, but the twist renders the story even more nonsensical.

          It’s hard to identify the weirdest aspect of this flick, though a strong contender is the way Grinter and Hawkes seem to perceive their bloody, low-rent saga as an important social message about the evils of—something. Another contender is the vignette of a chain-smoking Grinter reciting narration, which he appears to be reading for the first time, until he succumbs to an epic coughing fit. Together with the many out-of-focus shots in the picture, the inclusion of this awkward moment suggests Grinter and Hawkes had so little money (or aptitude) that they included every frame they shot. FYI, Blood Freak received an X-rating during its original release, presumably because the kill scenes are so nasty—murder most fowl, if you will.

Blood Freak: FREAKY

Mardi Gras Massacre (1978)

All the worst aspects of grindhouse sludge appear in Mardi Gras Massacre, a sexed-up horror picture with so much nasty gore that it received an X-rating during its original release. We’re talking closeups of women’s torsos getting sliced open so their hearts can be yanked out. Telling the story of a psychopath luring New Orleans prostitutes back to his lair so he can sacrifice them in weird rituals—maybe it’s Satanism or maybe it’s voodoo, but the end result is the same—Mardi Gras Massacre offers crappy filmmaking, exploitive nude scenes, and rotten acting. Worse, it drags on for nearly 100 minutes thanks to slow pacing and the presence of two long interludes: a documentary-style sequence featuring on-the-street footage of Carnival celebrations, and a dance number. More specifically, a disco dance number. Because, you see, instead of proper local flavor for a picture set and shot in New Orleans, Mardi Gras Massacre is driven by a soundtrack of thumping, upbeat disco numbers, and at one point the picture stops dead so leading lady Gwen Arment can swirl and twist her way through several minutes of generic gyrations. As can be said of so many other bad movies made for the grindhouse circuit, Mardi Grass Massacre has nowhere to go and isn’t in any hurry to get there. The plot, such as it is, concerns a detective (Curt Dawson) and his hooker girlfriend (Arment) getting mired in the search for a dude preying on the Big Easy’s working girls. From start to finish, this is a reprehensibly bad film, so it’s only of interest for the most masochistic viewers. That said, scuzz-cinema freaks may dig some weird elements, including the opening scene, during which the killer solicits his first victim by searching for the “most evil” prostitute in New Orleans. Also worth mentioning is the occasionally disquieting score, a bizarre mixture of bouncy dance tunes and creepy electronic noises.

Mardi Gras Massacre: LAME

Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1970)

From any other filmmaker, the action/sexploitation hybrid Cherry, Harry & Raquel! would seem outrageous, what with the fever-dream editing and incessant closeups of bouncing breasts. From Russ Meyer, the king of mammary movies, it’s tame both in narrative conception and sexual content. Seeing as how Meyer’s appeal stems from his over-the-top aesthetic, the notion of a “restrained” Meyer flick is not appealing. Running just over 70 minutes, the picture tells the story of Harry (Charles Napier), an Arizona sheriff who spends his work hours patrolling the desert by the Mexican border and spends his private hours cohabitating with voluptuous nymphet Cherry (Linda Ashton). He also works for a drug kingpin named Mr. Franklin (Frank Bolger), whose main enterprise involves smuggling weed from Mexico. Franklin tasks Harry with killing Apache (John Milo), who has stolen some of Franklin’s dope. Interspersed with this threadbare story are innumerable sexual encounters, plus weird cuts to an unnamed topless woman (Uschi Digard) wearing an elaborate Indian headdress while gyrating in various settings (e.g., splashing in a swimming pool while flailing a tennis racquet). Most Meyer movies are cheerfully chaotic thanks to an overabundance of plot, but Cherry, Harry & Raquel! suffers the opposite affliction. The paucity of narrative material invites close scrutiny, revealing that most of what happens is grotesque or nonsensical or both. As always with Meyer, the name of the game is getting well-endowed women naked, so a solid 40 percent of the running time comprises nudie shots and/or sex scenes. Most of the remainder comprises brisk but repetitive chase scenes, as well as an epic shootout during which Meyer seems to echo Sam Peckipah’s style of operatic bloodshed (minus the slow motion). Naturally, there’s some weirdly patriotic speechifying mixed into the sleaze, including the rambling text crawl about freedom of speech that opens the movie—a text crawl, it should be noted, that is superimposed over a frenetic montage of breast closeups. Oh, and for those who’ve been longing for a full-frontal nude scene featuring iron-jawed B-movie guy Napier, here’s your chance.

Cherry, Harry & Raquel!: LAME

The Telephone Book (1971)

          Tempting as it is to call The Telephone Book highbrow smut, what with the film’s arty black-and-white cinematography and its peculiar collection of kinky characters, the film has many stretches that are indefensibly sleazy. For instance, an animated sequence features giant tongues probing between women’s legs. Rather than providing a frank look at human sexuality, The Telephone Book is a wannabe sex comedy that peripherally includes both artistry and a small measure of sensitivity. As such, The Telephone Book occupies a strange space between exploitation and legitimacy. Most serious movie fans will find the picture way too lurid and tacky, and chances are The Telephone Book lacks sufficient oomph to satisfy the heavy-breathing audience. As such, this film is best classified as an odd byproduct of the porn-chic period, during which “real” filmmakers engaged carnal themes in graphic (or semi-graphic) detail. The picture’s X-rating is appropriate because of wall-to-wall sexual content, although the rating suggests the film crosses lines that it actually does not.

          The premise blends elements of feminist self-actualization with traces of Penthouse Letters male fantasy. Alice (Sarah Kennedy) receives an obscene phone call so arousing that she falls in love with the voice on the other end of the phone, then demands his name so she can find him. He gives her the dubious-sounding appellation “John Smith.” Alice tracks down every John Smith in the Manhattan phone book, leading to encounters with various men. A fellow calling himself “Har Poon” (Barry Morse) invites Alice to join in a group-grope audition for a porno movie. An unnamed psychoanalyst (Roger C. Carmel) flashes Alice on the subway, then pays her to describe her sexual history. (In a somewhat clever bit, he rubs the money changer on his belt while she talks, spewing dimes all over the floor of a diner.) Eventually, Alice meets the John Smith who called her, and he wears a pig mask while providing, in exhaustive detail, the origin story that led him to find gratification only through aural contact. Interspersed with these encounters are “interviews” with obscene phone callers who explain their habits.

          As a viewing experience, The Telephone Book is disorienting. The visual style of the movie, excepting the animated sequence, is sophisticated, almost to a fault—rather than shooting conventional coverage, writer-director Nelson Lyon films the picture like a series of elegant still photos, all delicate light and meticulous composition. Leading lady Kennedy is so bubbly and warm she seems like Goldie Hawn, which has the effect of making the picture feel less overtly dirty. And several proper actors deliver interesting work in supporting roles, notably Carmel, William Hickey, and Dolph Sweet. (Jill Clayburgh, pre-fame, shows up in a couple of scenes as Alice’s best friend.) Still, how is one to reconcile the arty flourishes with the stag-reel stuff? And what is one to make of the fact that scenes featuring Smith in his pig mask have an almost Kubrickian level of creepiness, given the way moody black-and-white shadows accentuate the monstrous contours of the mask? Although there’s a lot to unpack in The Telephone Book, it’s open to question whether deep-thinking the picture is worth the bother.

The Telephone Book: FREAKY

Satanis: The Devil’s Mass (1970)

          Among the many charismatic figures who achieved notoriety in the late ’60s and early ’70s by popularizing alternatives to mainstream belief systems, few courted controversy as actively as Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in 1966 and spent the next two decades preaching dark gospel from his home base in San Francisco. An expert at cultivating media attention, he cheerfully showcased the most sensationalistic aspects of his style of worship—nude women, ritual sex, sadomasochism—while arguing that Church of Satan principles are more intrinsically honest than ideals promulgated by conventional Judeo-Christian faiths. This documentary, which reached theaters with an X-rating, features footage of LaVey officiating a black mass, interspersed with man-on-the-street comments from neighbors, remarks from representatives of other religions, and sit-down interviews with LaVey.

          As a record of a noteworthy personage, Satanis: The Devil’s Mass is valuable, though the filmmakers took such a kid-gloves approach that the movie sometimes feels like a recruitment video. As an entertainment experience, Satanis: The Devil’s Mass is nearly a dud. The ritual scenes are repetitive and ridiculous, while the interview scenes are dull and flat. To the filmmakers’ credit—and, by extension, to LaVey’s—the ritual scenes aren’t juiced with over-the-top elements, so don’t expect suggestions of human sacrifices or anything truly horrific. Yet this restraint creates a viewing challenge, because it’s boring to watch LaVey proselytize at exhaustive length with no one challenging his dubious assertions.

          The ritual scenes, of course, are the real draw. LaVey officiates in a silly-looking costume, wearing a dark cape and a skullcap adorned with horns. Various female church members take turns sitting spread-eagled atop an altar, nude but for the strategically positioned skull prop they use for modesty. Chalices and knives get passed around while LaVey recites gobbledygook and leads chants. Snakes are integrated into the service at one point, and the “highlight” involves a dude climbing into a coffin with a compliant woman for some ritual humping. It’s basically a softcore sideshow, with a guy in a skull mask playing organ for accompaniment.
          During the interview scenes, LaVey explains that his version of Satanism is based on indulgence rather than abstinence, providing an alternative to the fear of punishment that defines Judeo-Christian faiths. This argument goes only so far, because LaVey can’t resist using shock-value anecdotes to make his points. For instance, he describes a man who found joy by increasing his number of daily masturbation sessions, trading the Christian notion of self-denial for the Satanist tenet of self-pleasure. As for the S&M angle, the film features a long and uninteresting scene of a woman whipping a man’s fleshy posterior. Presumably one reason for LaVey’s participation in the project was to show people that Satanists are harmless, and the film certainly makes the one black mass captured on camera seem relatively innocent. No one’s slitting open goats and drinking blood here. Still, it’s hard to reconcile LaVey’s mellow rap about shedding inhibitions with the traditional connotations of Satanism. Accordingly, the lack of journalistic scrutiny makes Satanis: The Devil’s Mass as deep as a puff piece on the evening news.

          FYI, this picture is not to be confused with another title released in the same year, Witchcraft ’70. Made by an Italian company, Witchcraft ’70 is another X-rated survey of Satanism, complete with appearances by LaVey, but it appears that much of Witchcraft ’70 was staged. Satanis: The Devil’s Mass is goofy, but it feels like the real deal.

Satanis: The Devil’s Mass: FUNKY

A Labor of Love (1976)

          Analyzing the documentary A Labor of Love is a tricky business. Brief but focused and interesting, it’s a movie about movies, tracking production of a low-budget indie called The Last Affair that was made in Chicago, and the documentarians capture elements of artistic obstacles, cast misbehavior, financial pressure, sudden production problems, and the tedium of creating films one camera angle at a time. None of that, however, suggests the film’s main hook and the reason why it’s so complicated to discuss. Prior to principal photography on The Last Affair, backers told director Henri Charr to include hardcore sex scenes or else kiss his budget goodbye—so by the time documentarians Robert Flaxman and Daniel Goldman began filming life on the set of The Last Affair, they had become journalists tracking the creation of pornography.

          This turn of events created two problems, both intermingled with aesthetic and social considerations. Firstly, because A Labor of Love concerns a “real” movie that morphed into porn, A Labor of Love isn’t truly a documentary about the “porn chic” movement that thrived during the early ’70s. There’s a big difference between this film’s squirm-inducing scenes of uninhibited men and women screwing on camera and, say, fly-on-the-wall coverage of professional adult-film stars grinding away on a soundstage in Southern California. A Labor of Love illustrates the surreal working conditions of porn sets without saying anything about the porn industry. Secondly, the documentarians cross enough lines of decorum and good taste to become pornographers themselves. During its theatrical release, A Labor of Love carried an X-rating because it features countless closeups of female genitalia, as well as male-gaze favorites including female masturbation and attractive women receiving oral sex. Yet there’s barely more than a fleeting glimpse of male frontal nudity, suggesting the documentarians felt the true value of their work wasn’t satisfying intellectual curiosity, but rather inspiring hard-ons.

          The most frustrating thing about A Labor of Love is that it’s made well. The on-set footage is steady and vivid, no easy feat given all the chaos and varying lighting patterns of an active film set, and the sit-down interviews are revelatory, with Charr discussing his anguish about the porn requirements and actresses sharing regret after filming exploitive scenes. Parsing the respectable documentary buried inside the skin show, the best moments involve a hopped-up stud failing to rouse—necessitating the use of a stand-in—and the use of liquid soap to create a skeevy cinematic illusion. Although A Labor of Love lacks all sorts of important context, including postmortem interviews exploring what happened with The Last Affair, it conveys some truth, as when a crew member remarks that filming coitus is like making an industrial film, all numbing repetition. Heavy on the labor, light on the love.

A Labor of Love: FUNKY

Female Trouble (1974)

Trash-cinema auteur John Waters took a step backward with this picture, perhaps because he knew he couldn’t get any more outrageous than he did with his first color film, Pink Flamingos (1972). And since he returned to form with his next picture, the giddily perverse Desperate Living (1977), it’s probably best to regard Female Trouble as a minor effort from a prolific period. As always during Waters’ early days, the star of the show is rotund transvestite Divine. He plays a teenager (!) named Dawn Davenport, who runs away from home. Soon afterward, she has a tryst with a scumbag named Earl Peterson. He’s also played by Divine, leading to the strange image of Divine, dressed as a man, humping Divine, dressed as a woman. (Oh, the things a resourceful filmmaker can do with body doubles.) Anyway, Dawn becomes a hardened criminal and gives birth to Earl’s baby, not necessarily in that order, so adventures ensue, leading to Dawn’s final showdown with the law. Waters has said the picture was inspired by his conversations with an imprisoned member of the Manson family, and that’s telling. Whereas in other pictures Waters celebrates societal rejects looking for acceptance, in Female Trouble he crosses a line by celebrating irredeemable sociopaths for no edifying reason. Partially because of this thematic problem and partially because the story is episodic and weak, Female Trouble drags, no pun intended. There’s plenty of Waters’ usual repulsive stuff, but none of it feels truly brazen. Sure, some of the lines are enjoyably crude (“I wouldn’t jump in a bed that had been defiled by you—I’d sooner jump in a river of snot!”), but too much of Female Trouble comprises such pointlessly grotesque imagery as the shot of dark skidmarks staining (male) Dvine’s tighty-whities while he screws (female) Dvine. So by the time Waters recycles the image of a performer shooting a gun at an audience, previously seen in Multiple Maniacs (1970), it’s clear he’s running on some very unpleasant-smelling fumes.

Female Trouble: LAME

The Devils (1971)

          By the mid-’70s, British director Ken Russell’s penchant for shock value took him deep into the realm of self-parody, despite his myriad gifts as a filmmaker and storyteller—it seemed as if he couldn’t stop himself from creating cartoonish excess. Many would say that Russell lost the thread while making two 1975 movies starring rock singer Roger Daltrey, Lisztomania and Tommy, both of which explode with juvenile imagery. Yet an earlier Russell film, The Devils, is likely the most extreme thing he ever made.

          Cruel, perverse, repulsive, sacrilegious, and vulgar, The Devils dramatizes a gruesome historical incident that occurred in the 17th century. On one level, the movie is purposeful and serious, exploring such heavy themes as groupthink, paranoia, political conspiracies, and unrequited love that sours into deadly animus. Washing over this highbrow material is a geyser of effluvium—Russell depicts enemas, orgies, the sexualized defiling of religious artifacts, torture, and even the vile act of sorting through a person’s vomit for clues. In some scenes, The Devils presents intimate drama with far-reaching moralistic implications, and in other scenes, The Devils presents cheap jokes straight out of burlesque. In sum, those seeking a microcosm of the identity crisis at the core of Russell’s artistic output need look no further. Everything bad about his style is here in abundance, and so, to, is everything good.

          The broad strokes of the narrative are as follows. Charismatic priest Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) gains control over the French city of Loudon during a time of religious conflict. Specifically, the Vatican has persuaded King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) to demolish walls around cities, including Loudon, in order to quell an incipient Protestant revolution. Meanwhile, Sister Jeanne of the Angels (Vanessa Redgrave), the deformed and disturbed Reverend Mother of a Loudon convent, is sexually fixated on Father Urbain. When Father Urbain marries his lover, Sister Jeanne goes insane, accusing Father Urbain of witchcraft. Hysteria ensues, leading to the spectacle of the nuns in Sister Jeanne’s convent becoming sex fiends. Sadistic witch-hunter Father Pierre Barre (Michael Gothard) arrives in Loudon to exorcise demons from the “bewitched” nuns, but few of the players realize that all of these events have been manipulated to scapegoat Father Urbain.

          Grasping the story’s deeper implications is challenging, and even simply tracking the events depicted onscreen requires close attention. Not only are the politics dense, but Russell drifts in and out of phantasmagorical sequences. Even the “real” stuff is sufficiently bizarre to confound many viewers. In the opening scene, Louis XIII performs a cross-dressing stage show. Later, viewers are shown a skeleton with maggots crawling in its eye sockets; Sister Jeanne giggling like a fool before climaxing from the mere sight of Father Urbain; and a silly bit during which the king shoots a man dressed in a bird costume, then says, “Bye bye, blackbird!” (Russell was fond of comedic anachronisms.)

          The movie crosses so many lines with its religiously themed imagery that it’s like a hand grenade thrown into the middle of a crowded church. In a dream sequence, Reed is envisioned as Jesus stepping off the cross, complete with a crown of thorns, and Redgrave licks his bloody wounds as if the act gives both of them sexual pleasure. During the long mass-hysteria sequence passage, Russell bashes the audience with forced enemas that are staged like anal rapes, armies of half-naked nuns, and money shots of said nuns gyrating atop a figure of Christ. The film’s climax contains horrors all its own.

          Saying there’s a resonant movie buried inside The Devils isn’t exactly correct, because there’s no way to separate the tale from the telling. Any dramatization of the Grandier story would be extreme. Furthermore, Redgrave and Reed give exceptionally committed performances, so much so that they risk becoming comical at times. The Devils is what it is, an assault on the senses and a scabrous sort of social commentary. Weirdly, the film was made in such a way as to repulse the very people who might otherwise have engaged most deeply with the subject matter, since it’s hard to imagine the faithful enduring more than a few minutes of The Devils. Even for nonbelievers, the film is as much of an endurance test as it is an artistic expression.

The Devils: FREAKY

Dirty Duck (1974)

Two years after Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat became the first X-rated cartoon, Dirty Duck—sometimes known as Down and Dirty Duck or Cheap—arrived to test the public’s appetite for even more counterculture weirdness involving anthropomorphized animals. Like the iffy sequel The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat, also released in 1974, Dirty Duck proved that X-rated animal pictures were not a growth industry. Crude on every level, Charles Swanson’s Dirty Duck pairs ugly, low-budget animation with tiresome content. Made in collaboration with eccentric rock duo Flo & Eddie, better known as Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, formerly of the Turtles, Dirty Duck features numerous original Flo & Eddie songs, and Volman and Kaylan play the leading voice roles. Kaylan portrays an insurance-company drone named Willard, who dreams of not only escaping his demeaning professional life but also of scoring with women. Thanks to convoluted circumstances involving a suicidal madam, Willard becomes the guardian of a talking duck, who is voiced by Volman. Despite the title, most of the screen time is devoted to Willard and his sexual fantasies. (In one bit, Willard’s penis magically assumes the size and shape of a bullet train as it pummels the nether regions of a compliant female.) Nothing in Dirty Duck is amusing or titillating, since Swanson conveys something like a teenaged boy’s snickering attitude toward sex, and the filmmakers often try so hard for boundary-pushing hipness that they stumble into pointless vulgarity; a song praising sexual experimentation suggests that viable lovemaking partners might include a tree or a corpse. Even the self-referential music jokes are disposable, notably an image of Frank Zappa (whom Flo & Eddie occasionally supported) and a snippet of “My Sweet Duck” to the tune of George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.” Ultimately little more than a hardcore Water Mitty rendered with grungy visuals, Dirty Duck deserves its obscurity.

Dirty Duck: LAME

Groupies (1970)

          Shot in a grungy, fly-on-the-wall style, the rock doc Groupies contains ample evidence of a subculture that has existed almost as long as rock music, that of compliant young women who offer sex in exchange for access to famous players. Some of the ladies captured on film by directors Ron Dorfman and Peter Nevard even gained notoriety of their own. These women include Pamela Des Barres, then known as “Miss Pamela,” who later wrote the definitive groupie memoir, I’m With the Band, as well as the “Plaster Casters,” who immortalized their trysts by making plaster impressions of men’s, ahem, instruments. For the curious, some of the casts are displayed onscreen, though no identifying text is provided.

          In fact, no identifying text is provided for anyone or anything in Groupies, and neither does the film include narration. As such, Groupies unfolds like a stream of disassociated raw footage. Except for shots of familiar musicians, including Joe Cocker and Ten Years After, it’s a mystery who is onscreen at any given time. This lack of information is among the chief reasons why Groupies is a minor historical artifact and nothing more. That said, Groupies tells a story despite the filmmakers’ best efforts to avoid doing so.
          In some vignettes, random women hang out with musicians, trying to one-up each other with outrageous behavior and/or proclamations of sexual availability; all the while, amused musicians watch the spectacle content in the knowledge that they’re getting laid once all the chitty-chat runs its course. Other scenes feature the groupies trying to explain their lifestyles. To a one, the justifications provided in Groupies are pathetic and vapid, so it often seems as if the filmmakers deliberately chose participants who came across as drunk, horny, loud, stoned, or stupid, if not all of the above. Is Groupies a celebration of sexual freedom or a condemnation of misguided young women? Either way, the doc destroys any romantic notions one might have about the groupie scene.

          Oddly, some of the film’s most interesting passages veer slightly off-topic. Sequences featuring male groupies—in San Francisco, naturally—are quite grim. A long scene of a drunk male groupie trying in vain to score with British singer Terry Reid is a symphony of weeping and whining leavened only by the erudite sarcasm of Reid’s drummer. Perhaps Groupies is best summarized by one participant’s introspective remarks: “I looked in the mirror and said, ‘Wow, you fucking whore, what are you into?’” 

Groupies: FUNKY

A Place Called Today (1972)

The world was not waiting for a Big Statement from filmmaker Don Schain and his then-wife, clothing-averse starlet Cheri Caffaro, who earned notoriety with the sexed-up espionage flick Ginger (1971). Nonetheless, in between making sequels to Ginger, the couple tackled a slew of social issues in the ridiculous melodrama A Place Called Today, which inexplicably received an X-rating during its initial release. (The version I watched contains nothing more than some bloody violence, coarse language, and simulated sex.) Cynical, heavy-handed, and unbelievable, the movie depicts a young black politician who stokes civil unrest by secretly conspiring with criminals and then runs for mayor by promising to end the unrest. Since it was filmed at a time when plugged-in directors were engaging the Black Power movement head-on, the plot of A Place Called Today is weirdly old-fashioned, like a racially tinged riff on some old Edward G. Robinson potboiler. Furthermore, the filmmakers’ attempts to integrate elements of jet-set debauchery and youthful rebellion fall flat. Caffaro plays the horny daughter of a corrupt businessman, Lana Wood plays an earnest activist, and both of them sleep with a white reporter determined to uncover the black politician’s scheme. So what the hell is A Place Called Today trying to say? That everyone is misguided? That conscientious white people need to save African-Americans from themselves? That sex makes everyone insane? Compounding the muddiness of its rhetoric, A Place Called Today suffers from leaden pacing, wildly inconsistent acting, and a vile portrayal of women. After all, the picture concludes with a gruesome rape/murder scene. In sum, if you’re looking for an inept movie that contains both gratuitous nudie shots and lengthy debates about the pros and cons of capitalism, then A Place Called Today was made for you.

A Place Called Today: LAME

Heavy Traffic (1973)

          Inspired by the street life and the African-American culture to which animator Ralph Bakshi was exposed during his childhood and adolescence, the X-rated cartoon Heavy Traffic offers a statement of sorts. It’s personal and unique, but it’s also disjointed, excessive, loud, and vulgar, a phantasmagoria set in the gutter. Bakshi threads a semiautobiographical narrative through the picture, tracking the adventures of a 22-year-old cartoonist encountering the world of sex for the first time, while subplots touch on miscegenation, racism, and violence. Yet for much of its running time, Heavy Traffic is as freeform as a jazz solo, jumping and diving and grooving through a bizarre amalgam of brash sounds and provocative imagery. One gets the sense of Bakshi sawing open his head and pouring the contents onto the screen.

          There’s something unquestionably thrilling about watching a gifted artist speak this directly and openly to his audience. Alas, there’s also something to be said for restraint and structure, two things this film almost completely lacks. Because it’s such an individualistic statement, Heavy Traffic can’t rightly be described as a mess; better to say that Bakshi felt compelled to make certain things accessible to viewers and did not feel so compelled to translate other things out of his own private language. In sum, make of Heavy Traffic what you will.

          The core storyline follows Michael Corleone—yes, the same name as the protagonist of The Godfather (1971)—as he trudges through the brutality and grime of a New York City that seems to exist out of time. Some signifiers suggest the ’50s of Bakshi’s youth, while others seem pulled from the ’70s. Michael lives with his oppressive Jewish mother and his philandering Italian father, who constantly fight with weapons as well as words. (In one scene, Mom throws a cleaver at Dad’s crotch.) Through circumstance, Michael becomes involved with Carole, an African-American bartender in a dive bar, so Michael’s father goes mad over the thought of his son bedding a black woman. The father even tries to order a Mob hit on his own son. Meanwhile, Carole and Michael hatch a scheme to leave New York for California so he can pursue his dream of becoming an animator.

          Dancing around this linear narrative are myriad running gags and visual tropes, including live-action shots of an actor playing Michael while he operates a pinball machine. (Close-ups of balls bouncing around inside the machines serve as a recurring metaphor representing, one assumes, the vagaries of fate.) If the preceding description makes Heavy Traffic sound straightforward, rest assured it is not. Bakshi takes most scenes into risqué territory by explicitly animating sex and violence. Heavy Traffic may well contain more cartoon penises than any other film, and other startling images include slow-motion gore (e.g., a bullet exploding a character’s skull), as well as various excretory functions. One scene features a drunken stud making out with a dancing girl until exclaiming, “This broad’s got a hard-on!” The stud reacts to his discovery by pummeling his transvestite playmate nearly to death. Other noteworthy moments include the requisite offensive religious scene, with a bloody Christ stepping off the cross, and a black-and-white cartoon-within-a-cartoon depicting a character beating people with his phallus, which is as large as his entire torso.

          Clearly, Bakshi worked through some stuff while making Heavy Traffic, which he began developing well before his breakout hit, Fritz the Cat (1972), and then returned to after the success of Fritz the Cat gave him cachet.

Heavy Traffic: FREAKY

Turkish Delight (1973)

          Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, later to scandalize Hollywood with the sexually provocative one-two punch of Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995), first made noise on the international scene with Turkish Delight, an almost-explicit romantic drama that carried an X-rating during its original American release. Starring Rutger Hauer, the charismatic Dutch actor who earned global visibility over the course of several collaborations with Verhoeven, Turkish Delight is a something of a raunchy cousin to the American blockbuster Love Story (1970). Like that picture, Turkish Delight depicts young love tainted by tragedy. Unlike the Ali MacGrew/Ryan O’Neal tearjerker, Turkish Delight is an almost unrelentingly vulgar enterprise, thanks to abrasive characterizations, in-your-face storytelling, and startling onscreen content including excrement, full-frontal nudity, murder (in a dream sequence), projectile vomiting, and seemingly endless variations of sexual coupling.

          Verhoeven has always been a peculiar sort of a sensualist, and rarely has he indulged himself more than he does throughout Turkish Delight.

          Based on a novel by Jan Wolkers, Turkish Delight opens on debauched artist Eric (Hauer). Living in squalor and tormented by grim visions, he spends all his time wooing women back to his studio for aggressive sexual encounters, only to discard the women after he’s satisfied his urges. Before long, the film shifts to an extended flashback depicting Eric’s relationship with Olga (Monique van de Ven). They meet when Eric hitches a ride in her car. Moments later, Olga pulls over so they can have at each other. Afterward, Eric accidentally gets his penis caught in his zipper, leading to a strangely funny scene: Olga drives to a nearby farm and borrows a pair of pliers, so the farmer and his wife watch, aghast, as Eric frees himself, then hands over the pliers, now festooned with a chunk of bloody flesh.

          Similar shock-value moments permeate Turkish Delight. Eric finds a horse’s eye in a bowl of stew. He lovingly handles Olga’s feces, and he offers (twice) to drink her urine. Close-ups depict a dog taking a dump in one scene, maggots crawling on rotting food in another. Woven into this extreme material is an overwrought but well-acted romantic saga. Olga ignores her parents’ disdain for the penniless Eric because she loves him, but her mood swings drive them apart. Then, when Eric discovers that the cause of Olga’s emotional changes is a health crisis, he tries to reconnect with her.

          For some viewers, Verhoeven’s visceral style clearly elevated the experience of the film, because Turkish Delight enjoyed a rapturous response in the Netherlands. Reportedly the most successful film ever made in that country, Turkish Delight also earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film. Indeed, some aspects of the movie are beyond reproach. The acting is excellent, the direction is forceful, and the harmonica-driven score by Rogier van Otterloo is evocative. Yet Turkish Delight is not for everyone. Some may find the gross-out stuff distracting and juvenile, while others will accept those elements as germane to a gritty depiction of intense love. 

Turkish Delight: FUNKY

Dionysus in ’69 (1970)

          Experimental theater being what it is, any document of this offbeat genre is sure to divide audiences. As such, something like Dionysus in ’69 can’t be appraised in only one way. Those with adventurous spirits and an eagerness to see postmodern rethinks of longstanding storytelling conventions will be able to appreciate Dionysus in ’69 as a form of artistic exploration. Concurrently, those who enjoy understanding what the hell they’re watching will lose patience quickly. Even those who seek out Dionysus in ’69 because of Brian De Palma’s involvement are likely to be confounded. The picture has a couple of significant connections to the director’s later work, but he didn’t conceive or singlehandedly helm the piece, at the execution is avant-garde in the extreme.

          Shot in 1968, while De Palma was a film student at NYU, the film captures a presentation by experimental-theater ensemble the Performance Group. Based on the ancient Euripides play, Dionysus in ’69 ostensibly tells the story of a conflict between gods, and layered upon the original text is a postmodern freakout written by William Arrowsmith. Actors strip down to jockstraps (or less) while creating sexualized tableaux onstage, up to and including a pair of lengthy and semi-explicit orgy scenes. In some scgments, actor William Finley (who plays both Dionysus and the role of actor William Finley) speaks in modern language, while his costar, Will Shepherd (who plays both Pentheus and the role of actor Will Shepherd), communicates largely in stilted "classical" vernacular. (FYI, Finley later starred in De Palma’s 1976 rock musical Phantom of the Paradise.) The live audience beholding the filmed performance of Dionysus in’69 becomes involved in the show, as well. Seated on the floor, in chairs, and on scaffolds surrounding the intimate performance space, audience members participate in dance scenes and receive dialogue and physical contact from the actors. All of this serves the familiar experimental-theater concept of transforming a play into an active experience rather than a passive one.

          De Palma, who shares an “a film by” credit with fellow NYU students Bruce Joel Rubin (later on Oscar winner for writing the 1990 hit Ghost) and Robert Fiore, employs one of his favorite cinematic devices, split-screen photography. Therefore, the entire 85-minute film comprises two angles of grungy-looking black-and-white images projected side-by-side. As with everything else about Dionysus in ’69, the split-screen effect is as headache-inducing as it is mind-expanding. Incidentally, Dionysus in ’69 received an X-rating during its original release, though its edgiest elements are full-frontal nudity, rough language, and simulated sex.

Dionysus in ’69: FUNKY