Squeeze Play (1979)

By the low standards set by other films from director Lloyd Kaufman and his bargain-basement production company, Troma, the sports-themed sex comedy Squeeze Play is relatively coherent, telling the story of women forming a softball team in order to compete with their boyfriends, who often ignore the women so they can play ball. By any other standards, Squeeze Play is brainless, exploitive junk, a tiresome compendium of crude puns, dick jokes, topless shots, and, naturally, an epic-length wet T-shirt contest that concludes with a male spectator growing so excited that the contents of the beer bottle in his crotch explode forth in a geyser of white foam. And that’s not even the most vulgar ejaculation reference in the movie—at one point, Kaufman cuts from a scene of a man receiving oral sex to the nozzle of a soft-serve machine spewing vanilla ice cream. You get the idea. None of the actors in Squeeze Play is noteworthy, although some have an easy way with lighthearted comedy, but the lack of great onscreen talent hardly matters, since the characters are largely interchangeable. Similarly, the plot is threadbare. The guys ignore the girls, so the girls decide to beat the men at their own game, even if doing so requires such questionable tactics as employing cheerleaders in cutoff shirts whose gyrations and jiggles distract male athletes from their playing. In that sense, Squeeze Play is a typical example of how male ’70s filmmakers sometimes used quasi-feminist themes while trying to make objectification seem palatable. Even though Kaufman presents Squeeze Play with his characteristically irreverent, upbeat style, it’s hard to stomach a picture with so many closeups of breasts bouncing inside T-shirts, with an all-female team called “The Beaverettes,” and with an announcer remaking that a particular occasion is “a banner day for athletic supporters.”

Squeeze Play: LAME

The Battle of Love’s Return (1971)

Before co-founding the low-budget production/distribution company Troma Entertainment in 1974, Lloyd Kaufman was one of the myriad ambitious young auteurs to hit the cinema scene at the apex of the counterculture period. While many of his peers were eager to make serious pictures about the big sociopolitical issues of the day, Kaufman leaned toward whimsy—as well as a uniquely ramshackle cinematic approach. Then as now, Kaufman is a cheerful hack unwilling to invest the time or money it takes to get things right. Hence Kaufman’s second feature, The Battle of Love’s Return, a strange amalgam of physical comedy, pathos, and social commentary. Kaufman stars as dim-witted New Yorker Abacrombie, a putz who lives in a basement hovel and works for a company run by the loathsome Mr. Crumb (played by the director’s real-life father, New York lawyer Stanley Kaufman). Some of Abacrombie’s adventures lampoon the difficulty that stupid people have when trying to accomplish simple tasks, such as getting dressed in the morning, and some of the character’s exploits stem from misunderstandings. In a typical bit, Abacrombie tries to help an old lady, only to be misperceived as a masher. Abacrombie also gets hit by a car, suffers the scorn of his dream girl (Lynn Lowry), whose character is identified in the credits as “Dream Girl,” and winds up in the military during the picture’s arty finale. For long stretches of the movie, Kaufman lets the camera roll while uninspired actors perform what appear to be improvisatory bits, which compounds the problems of an inherently episodic narrative. So even though The Battle of Love’s Return has a certain grungy integrity, the flick is so amateurish, boring, and pointless that it’s hard to muster praise. Strange as it sounds, The Battle of Love’s Return is a pretentious movie by a deeply unpretentious filmmaker.

The Battle of Love’s Return: LAME