Teenage Hitchhikers (1975)

Before it descends into mindless softcore, low-budget sex comedy Teenage Hitchhikers evinces a somewhat appealing dialogue style and a relatively empowered attitude toward sexuality. As the title suggests, the picture tracks a pair of young women thumbing their way down America’s highways, often trading sex for transportation. Bird (Sandra Peabody) and Mouse (Chris Jordan, billed as “Kathie Christopher”) are with-it chicks open for adventure, but wary of being exploited. For instance, when a traveling rock band invites the ladies into their RV, Bird and Mouse nix a proposed group-sex situation because the dudes come across as too entitled and pushy. Lest this give the impression that Teenage Hitchhikers is some sort of feminist statement, not long afterward Bird and Mouse grab a ride with a grody traveling salesman, then take turns servicing him until a cop pulls over the saleman’s car. As was true of way too many ’70s sexploitation flicks, Teenage Hitchhikers tries to have it both ways, presenting its protagonists as avatars of women’s liberation while also featuring endless scenes of nudity and screwing. If this disconnect was the only problem associated with Teenage Hitchhikers, the movie might merit closer examination. However, other issues include the failure to gift the protagonists with distinct motivations (where the hell are they headed?), the lack of a plot (unless continued forward motion constitutes a plot), and the presence of an epic orgy scene that edges very close to hardcore porn. Filling the screen with a dizzying array of malnourished hippie types, all protruding ribs and unruly body hair, the orgy scene features unsimulated contact just barely outside the camera’s view. None of this is to say that Teenage Hitchhikers is a total disaster. Some scenes are almost witty, even though the content is distasteful—note the running gag about Bird and Mouse hectoring a rapist for his unsatisfying size and technique. Rape jokes? Really?

Teenage Hitchhikers: LAME

King, Queen, Knave (1972)

          Ten years after Stanley Kubrick released his problematic version of Lolita (1962), another iffy adaptation of a sexy Vladimir Nabokov novel reached the screen, albeit with a much less impressive pedigree. In King, Queen, Knave, David Niven costars with fading sexpot Gina Lollobrigida and minor British actor John Moulder-Brown, while Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski calls the shots. These folks tell an unappealing story about adultery, deceit, greed, lust, and murder. There are even allusions to incest and patricide. The kicker is that King, Queen, Knave is a comedy—or at least it tries to be one. Although Niven lends his signature pithiness, the storytelling never finds the right balance between dark and light elements. At its least surefooted, the picture feels more like a thriller than a comedy, especially during a climactic scene that recalls Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1962), which, not coincidentally, was cowritten by Skolimowski.

          Charles Dryer (Niven) is a super-wealthy European businessman married to icy beauty Martha (Lollobrigida). They agree to look after Frank (Moulder-Brown), the only son of Charles’ recently deceased brother. The college-aged Frank is a nervous, stuttering klutz who can’t see without his glasses, and the minute he gets an eyeful of Martha, he’s overcome with lust. (To ensure we understand this, Skolimowski includes a tacky scene of Frank masturbating to a picture of Martha.) Sensing an opportunity, Martha seduces Frank, then tries to persuade him to kill Charles so they can share his fortune. Complications of the least interesting sort ensue, not least of which is a bizarre running gag involving Professor Ritter (Mario Adorf), whose pet project involves fabricating artificial skin that feels like real human flesh.

          None of the three main characters is remotely sympathetic, because Charles cheats on his wife with random bimbos, Frank betrays his uncle’s trust, and Martha is a would-be murderess. Whatever satirical edge the material may have possessed in its original form did not make it to the screen. Skolimowski renders some imaginative camerawork, such as crane shots tracking characters’ progress up flights of stairs, though just as often, his overzealous angles feel amateurish; the less said about the undercranked fisheye-lens shots during sex scenes, the better. While still quite alluring (she was in her mid-forties at the time of filming), Lollobridgida gives a trite performance, all petulance and teasing, and Moulder-Brown is annoying, his blithering-idiot routine growing tired within seconds of his entrance. So it falls to Niven, ever the smooth professional, to put this thing over. Whenever he’s onscreen, the picture is bearable.

King, Queen, Knave: FUNKY

Summer School Teachers (1974)

          Summer School Teachers is yet another ensemble piece from New World about three young women whose sex lives are intertwined because they work at the same place. Specifically, twentysomething Midwesterners Conklin (Candice Rialson), Denise (Rhonda Leigh Hopkins), and Sally (Pat Anderson) accept temporary jobs teaching in the summer program at a high school in California. Each character has a separate subplot, and each subplot has a different tonality, so while the overall vibe of the picture is gentle drama, some scenes veer into comedy while others venture into thriller terrain. Featuring an unusually strong distaff presence behind the camera (producer Julie Corman, writer-director Barbara Peters), the picture integrates feminist ideals into many scenes, though that doesn’t stop Summer School Teachers from delivering a showcase topless scene for each of its leading ladies. Thanks to a coherent script and some passable acting, this is somewhat more respectable than the usual drive-in sleaze, but it’s still intended primarily to titillate. De facto leading lady Rialson is as charming and feisty here as she is in the outrageous sex comedy Chatterbox! (1977), and B-movie icon Dick Miller lends his cantankerous presence as her character’s sexist nemesis. Their scenes are the best parts of the picture.
          Conklin teaches physical education, so she clashes with the school’s football coach (Miler) upon accepting the challenge to form a girls’ football squad. Concurrently, she breaks one of her own rules by dating a fellow teacher. Meanwhile, Denise teaches chemistry, imprudently becoming involved with a juvenile-delinquent student, and Sally courts controversy by allowing erotic work in her photography class. Outside school hours, she dates a number of men including a former rock star now working as a grocery-store clerk. The Conklin story is fairly enjoyable and also the most effective delivery system for the picture’s equal-rights sloganeering. However, the Denise storyline is blandly melodramatic, and the Sally storyline is silly. In the movie’s goofiest scene, two old biddies listen through a wall while the rock star prepares a meal for Sally with such bizarre techniques as throwing a head of lettuce through the strings of a harp to shred the leaves. The biddies get aroused by misinterpreting what they overhear (“The only thing better than my meat is my sauce,” etc.). Although the scene doesn’t work, at least it represents an attempt at ribald wit.

Summer School Teachers: FUNKY

Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You (1970)

Apparently conceived as a sequel to the 1967 hit What’s New, Pussycat? (starring Peter Sellers and written by Woody Allen), this dreadful sex comedy lost nearly all connection to the earlier film during the development process—and it must have lost many other things, as well, presuming they were ever there. Among other shortcomings, Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You lacks appealing characters, a tangible plot, and viable jokes. Loud, stupid, and tacky, the flick is a pointless compendium of situations leading nowhere, held together by the presence of a borderline repugnant protagonist and infused with such idiotic running gags as a dude in a gorilla suit whose presence causes the protagonist to experience a weird form of gay panic. Set in Rome, the picture stars Ian McShane—a fine dramatic actor unfit for light comedy—as Fred C. Dobbs, an American living in Italy. Never mind that McShane is British, and never mind that his character is pointlessly named after Humphrey Bogart’s role in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). After a truly filthy opening song (“I wanna move and groove and fill you with my love”), the picture explores Fred’s sexual exploits and hangups. He sleeps with seemingly every woman he meets, then complains that life with multiple lovers is too complicated. He also suffers recurring nightmares about a horny gorilla. Various desperate attempts at jokes include the use of the theme song for Mission: Impossible, a would-be farcical visit to the set of a spaghetti Western (where extras dressed as Indians eat plates of spaghetti), and a hideous subplot featuring offbeat character actor Severn Darden in a bizarre red wig. At one point, an onscreen title reads, “This is a time lapse.” Enervated and sluggish despite posh production values, Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You is so formless and misguided and vulgar that it drains the viewer’s will to live.

Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You: LAME

How to Seduce a Woman (1974)

          A sex comedy that’s almost prudish when it comes to putting sex or even nudity onscreen, How to Seduce a Woman is a peculiar sort of picture, especially considering the anything-goes era during which it was released. Methodically constructed, painstaking in its detail, and running a bloated 110 minutes, the film represents a limp attempt at mimicking Billy Wilder’s style of masterfully structured bedroom farce. Yet writer-director Charles Martin is no Wilder, and smarmy leading man Angus Dunan is an amateur compared to the comic pros Wilder put in his movies (e.g., Jack Lemmon, etc.). Worse, nearly every joke in How to Seduce a Woman underwhelms. But here’s the thing. The jokes don’t actually flop, in the sense of making the viewer groan or wince. Rather, the jokes merely exist. They feel, look, and sound like actual humor, but none of the material is genuinely funny. It’s as if the script was filled with placeholders awaiting a punch-up pass that never happened. Here’s an example. At one point, the protagonist brings a guest to his apartment building, and the valet outside is a stout little fellow in a Nazi uniform with a square moustache who salutes by clicking his heels and raising his right arm. The protagonist says this guy “just came in from Argentina.” A throwaway Hitler joke? In a lightweight sex comedy? Huh? But you get the idea—in another context, perhaps some zany Mel Brooks romp, the joke might have worked. Here, it’s just a head-scratcher.

          In any event, How to Seduce a Woman offers an episodic recounting of erotic adventures featuring Luther Lucas (Duncan). The framing device involves several former Lucas employees telling stories about him to Hollywood gossip columnist James Bacon (who plays himself). These veterans of Lucas’ “Seduction Squad” explain the roles they played during elaborate schemes Lucas used to bed beautiful women. He ran a racetrack scheme by pretending to be a gambling savant. He posed as an artist to woo a gallery owner. He pretended to be gay so an ice queen would attempt “converting” him. And so on. Each vignette has solid logic, but the acting misses the mark just as widely as the script does. Some players are too broad, and some—including top-billed seduction target Angel Tompkins—can’t muster the light touch needed for this sort of thing. As for Duncan, he’s off-puttingly mannered and smug. One suspects this was Martin’s design, as seen by the way Duncan turns to the camera after each conquest, but the sum effect of the characterization is not charming.

How to Seduce a Woman: FUNKY

Guess What We Learned in School Today? (1970)

          Though he later become synonymous with inspirational movies, thanks to his success with Rocky (1976) and The Karate Kid (1984), director John G. Avildsen dabbled in edgy sex comedies during the early ’70s, making this offbeat picture and the heinous Cry Uncle! (1971). Combining mockumentary and narrative elements, Guess What We Learned in School Today? ostensibly explores the impact of progressive sex education on the hypocritical residents of an uptight bedroom community. It’s the old satirical notion that folks who complain about sex are actually freaks at home. On some level, this sloppy and uneven movie’s politics are in the right place, since Avildsen and his collaborators portray open-minded intellectuals as forces for positive social change, while depicting hateful censors as villains who need their attitudes adjusted. The problem is how Avildsen and his collaborators express these ideas. Much of Guess What We Learned in School Today? comprises naughty vignettes with nudity and simulated sex, so there’s more than a little sensationalism sprinkled into the mix, and scenes of right-wingers getting their jollies are so perverse as to be cruel. Plus, it’s difficult to justify elements including the sexy, grown-up babysitter who nurtures a teenage boy’s nascent sexuality by reading him pornography while giving him handjobs. One suspects the filmmakers were trying to be outrageous, but more often than not, Guess What We Learned in School Today? is simply vulgar.

          The all-over-the-place storyline mostly follows three people. Roger (Richard Carballo) is a creepy cop who entraps women for solicitation arrests. Lance (Zachary Hains) is an insane ex-Marine who crusades against sex education, calling it a communist plot. And Dr. Lily Whitehorn (Yvonne McCall) is a sex educator with a clothing-optional institute. As various episodes unfold, Lily directly addresses the camera with remarks about the need for people to overcome inhibitions, while Lance and Roger engage in crazed antics. Lance has trouble getting it on with his wife until they convince a family friend to service their teenage son, at which point Lance mounts his wife from behind and drives her to climax while she watches her son have sex and moans her son’s name. Similarly, Roger seems averse to sex until a black transvestite goes down on him. You get the idea. Some of this is mildly interesting, but most of the camerawork is garish and ugly, the physical-comedy bits fall flat, and the satire is painfully obvious. Yet somehow, the picture develops a cumulative effect. The actors playing the rational characters are appealing (including a pair of attractive blondes who frequently appear topless), and, every so often, a throwaway scene gets the picture’s point across without lurid excess. The vignette of Lydia explaining the word “fuck” to schoolchildren accomplishes more than all the movie’s over-the-top carnal encounters put together.

Guess What We Learned in School Today?: FUNKY

Cheerleaders Beach Party (1978)

The depressing thing about Cheerleaders Beach Party is the glimmer of wit visible beneath layers of dopey sex-comedy sleaze. Written by Chuck Vincent, a pornographer who occasionally made R-rated fare, the picture is tacky and tedious, rushing from one topless scene to the next and cramming in as many naughty high jinks and sexual references as possible in between. Yet the story makes sense, and it’s possible to imagine a version of the movie, with some comedy punch-up and a little restraint, becoming palatable. The plot involves a quartet of cheerleaders at Rambling University using sex and subterfuge to keep the football coach at another school from poaching Rambling’s top players with offers of better perks. (As the girls shout upon formulating their scheme: “One-tw0-three-four, who do we put out for? Rambling U, Rambling U—yay, team!”) Although the filmmakers don’t bother much with characterization, they provide a lot of incidents, so the story moves along, and every so often Vincent’s script features something resembling an intelligent line or a reasonable plot complication. For instance, the girls steal a van from Rambling’s coach, so in a running gag, he spends the whole movie chasing after the girls while driving their tricked-out animal-print sedan. Similarly, the climax involves the girls stealing medical samples of crabs and releasing the pests into the jockstraps of players before an important practice. These are bottom-feeding jokes, to be sure, but they reveal that a bit more effort was put into this thing than necessary, just as drawing the line at topless shots and partially clothed sex scenes reveals that the filmmakers didn’t go as far down the grindhouse rabbit hole as they could have. That said, this flick is still called Cheerleaders Beach Party, and it’s still a dimwitted sexcapade driven by awful disco music. Saying it could’ve been worse isn’t the same as saying it’s worth anyone’s time.

Cheerleaders Beach Party: LAME

Hometown U.S.A. (1979)

After making a pair of entertaining drive-in pictures about the American south, actor-turned-director Max Baer Jr., of The Beverly Hillbillies fame, inexplicably jumped onto the ’50s-nostalgia bandwagon by making a crude ripoff of George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973), even though several copycat pictures had already been released. Baer’s contribution to this disreputable tradition, Hometown U.S.A., starts off innocuously enough, shamelessly replicating scenes of teenagers getting into mischief while cruising down Main Street in hot cars. Then the movie degrades into idiotic sex farce, to the point where the climax seems as if belongs in an entirely different film. Nonetheless, some viewers might find the first hour of the picture more or less tolerable as an homage to Lucas’ nostalgic hit. Set in 1957, Hometown U.S.A. tracks the exploits of three teenagers—nerdy Rodney “The Rodent” Duckworth (Gary Springer), smooth T.J. Swackhammer (Brian Kerwin), and tough Recil Calhoun (David Wilson). Also woven into the mix is a blonde dreamgirl named Marilyn (Pat Delaney), whom Rodney sees driving around town at regular intervals. Is this almost exactly the same premise as American Graffiti? See the use of the word “shamelessly” above. Yet while Lucas’ movie is family-friendly, treating adult themes in such a restrained manner that American Graffiti was rated PG, Baer takes the crude route, earning his movie’s R-rating with vulgar sexcapades. Rodney has dreams in which his classmates cheer while he screws Marilyn. Rodney steals a car and adopts the name “Rod Heartbender,” then squires an awkward girl who turns out to be a freak with a thing for public exposure and taunting bikers. And that’s atop the usual vignettes of juvenile delinquency, with kids pranking cops and stealing hubcaps, all to the accompaniment of beloved ’50s pop songs. Hometown U.S.A. follows a sad spiral from harmlessly stupid to painfully stupid, degrading women and destroying viewers’ brain cells as it slinks along from one derivative and/or dopey scene to the next.

Hometown U.S.A.: LAME

Hot Times (1974)

After making several well-received projects as part of the independent-cinema fringe, filmmaker Jim McBride moved toward the mainstream with this vulgar, wisecracking sex comedy, which nearly becomes pornography during several scenes. Set in the New York City area, the picture concerns a high-school schnook named Archie Anders (Henry Cory), whose hormones are driving him crazy. Archie’s beautiful girlfriend, Bette (Amy Farber), has become a devotee of Eastern religion, so she torments Archie during sex by insisting that he refrain from ejaculating for spiritual reasons. This sets the plot of Hot Times—also known as A Hard Day for Archie—in motion. Put bluntly, this is a movie about a young man with a near-constant erection trying desperately to find a sex partner who’s willing to go all the way. In what one presumes were intended to be outrageous comedy setpieces, Archie tries to score with hookers, porn actresses, promiscuous local girls, and so on. Every so often, something mildly amusing happens, but then McBride bludgeons the moment with an obnoxious sound effect or silly narration. Archie’s pal Mughead (Steve Curry) provides said narration, and here’s a sample: “He’d never been next of skin to so much feminology in all his years!” The movie is full of these would-be witticisms, as when Archie’s sister issues a barrage of puns when she discovers Archie masturbating: “Hey, Mom, he’s gonna have a dishonorable discharge!” Were the rest of the movie not so repetitive and sleazy, McBride’s enthusiastic wordplay might have seemed endearing. Yet Hot Times is mostly an endless procession of nude scenes, interspersed with vignettes of softcore coupling. Those who watch sex comedies to ogle female flesh will get their fill, but those who prefer a balance of edifying and erotic content will be disheartened.

Hot Times: LAME

Kitty Can’t Help It (1975)

Later re-released as The Carhops (because some of the characters are waitresses at a drive-in restaurant), this abysmal sex comedy involves a group of young women trying to get their friend laid properly. The protagonist, Kitty (Kitty Carl), can’t find a man who satisfies her, so she shares her problem with buddies who include hookers and swingers, as well as carhops. All of them tell their boyfriends and/or husbands to sleep with Kitty, but none gets the job done. It’s not as if Kitty has compunctions about screwing her friends’ significant others. Instead, “comedic” circumstances intrude just when things get hot. In one scene, Kitty and a dude try humping in the desert, but Kitty freaks out when a large iguana appears nearby. Seeking to look macho, the dude not only picks up the iguana but also tries to kiss the lizard, which bites the dude’s tongue. And so on. Kitty Can’t Help It comprises one underwhelming scene after another, and most of the acting is shoddy. One exception is the versatile Jack DeLeon, whose psychopathic character torments Kitty whenever the filmmakers decide, unwisely, to include something serious; DeLeon’s portrayal is miles away from his best-known recurring role as an urbane homosexual on the sitcom Barney Miller. Yet the only genuinely famous person in the cast is Pamela Des Barres, who plays one of Kitty’s generous friends. Previously known as “Miss Pamela,” Des Barres is a notorious rock-music groupie who penned the definitive memoir on servicing popular musicians, I’m With the Band (1987). Weirdly, Wes Craven served as one of this schlocky film’s editors, even though he’d already directed his first horror movie, The Last House on the Left (1972).

Kitty Can’t Help It: 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

The Naughty Stewardesses (1974) & Blazing Stewardesses (1975)

          Exploitation-flick hack Al Adamson brings the Mile High Club crashing to the ground with these awful movies about horny flight attendants. Styled after Roger Corman’s sexy-nurse movies of the early ’70s, The Naughty Stewardesses is a melodrama concerning several friends who score in the air and on the ground. The heroine is Debbie (Connie Hoffman), a nice girl from a small town who’s shocked by her big-city friends’ sexual antics. In a party scene, she recoils when a pal is presented with a man covered in frosting and candles like he’s a birthday cake, then proceeds to, ahem, blow out the candles in full view of party guests. Yet Debbie’s no prude, because when she falls for a photographer named Cal (Richard Smedley), she poses nude during a portrait session. “I feel so free,” she coos. “Perhaps by taking off my clothes, I took off my mask, too.” Oy.
          Things get complicated when Debbie accepts an invitation from an older man, Brewster (Robert Livingston), to visit his pad in Palm Springs. He’s a randy old goat, and he eventually sleeps with most of the stewardesses in the story, even getting one compliant gal to test out an elaborate sex gadget called a “Persian Penguin.” The movie jumps erratically between incompatible storylines and tonalities all the way to a pointlessly violent climax. Yet parts of The Naughty Stewardesses are strangely compelling simply because scenes go on forever. That said,  the picture’s magnetism is strictly of the traffic-accident variety. Still, Hoffman is quite lovely, even though she can’t act, so Adamson might have been able to make something luridly enjoyable from this material if he’d cut this picture down from 102 sluggish minutes to, say, 80 zippy ones.

          Blazing Stewardesses is even worse. Although the sequel features some of the same actors playing some of the same characters, the movie is largely unrelated to its predecessor. Conceived as an homage/spoof of old Western movies, the picture takes part of its title from Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1974), and the sexy-stewardess stuff shares screen time with nonsense about a frontier madam, a noble rancher, and villains on horseback. Making Blazing Stewardesses even more disjointed is the presence of past-their-prime comedy duo the Ritz Brothers, who contribute lots of embarrassing facial expressions and stale patter. At one point, costar Yvonne De Carlo, playing the madam, stops the movie dead to warble a corny song. Blazing Stewardesses is such an overstuffed mess that the stewardesses don’t spend much time blazing, so this wannabe sex comedy has a dangerously low sex quotient. Hoffman underwhelms once more, though her beauty remains arresting, but costar Regina Carrol, playing Debbie’s busty friend, gives a performance so awful, thanks to childish vocal delivery and lobotomized facial expressions, that her scenes are unwatchable. As for the overall movie, Blazing Stewardesses is so dumb that an unfunny joke about the Ritz Brothers eating a giant sandwich gets repeated as the closing gag.

Naughty Stewardesses: LAME

Blazing Stewardesses: SQUARE

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

Cinderella 2000 (1977)

          Usually, the closest thing to enjoyment that one can derive from watching a movie directed by Al Adamson is laughing at something unintentionally funny—a cheap-looking prop, a nonsensical plot twist, a terrible performance, whatever. Whereas the incompetence of some bad filmmakers is charming because they keep trying to achieve something that’s beyond their ability, Adamson’s brand of cinematic awfulness is mostly just tiresome. In that context, it’s almost heartening to discuss Adamson’s bizarre softcore sci-fi musical Cinderella 2000, because while it is unquestionably as schlocky as anything else bearing his name, at least Cinderella 2000 was designed to induce laughter. So even though very few people will actually laugh with the picture, seeing as how it’s stupid and tacky from beginning to end, at least viewers can laugh at the picture with a clear conscience. Any reaction is better than no reaction, right?

          Shot on a meager budget, Cinderella 2000 takes place in the year 2047, where The Controller (Erwin Fuller), a riff on Orwell’s Big Brother, has outlawed sex outside of government-sanctioned encounters. Naturally, this means the citizenry is horny, so folks break the rules whenever possible. Only vaguely related to this premise is a retelling of the Cinderella story. Wholesome-looking blonde Cindy (Catherine Erhardt) lives with The Widow (Renee Harmon), this film’s avatar for the wicked stepmother in the classic Cinderella story. The Widow’s daughters, black Bella (Bhurni Cowans) and white Stella (Adina Ross), won’t share their male lovers with put-upon Cindy, so she’s even hornier than everyone else. Yet because she’s the heroine, she’s more lonely than lustful, the notion being that she’s a potential savior who can reintroduce the concept of romantic love. Or something like that.

          Anyway, Cindy mopes in the forest one day until a spaceship (!) delivers her Fairy Godfather (Jay B. Larson), a singing-and-dancing queen who croons a number called “We All Need Love.” This is where Cinderella 2000 crosses the line from dopey to deranged. As the Fairy Godfather prances around the forest, he summons forest animals to demonstrate copulation. They appear in the form of two extras wearing leotards and creepy-looking bunny heads, and as the song drags along, these two hump while the soundtrack punctuates each thrust with a bouncy sound effect. Later in the number—which goes on forever—more forest creatures emerge, including a pair of extremely disturbing man-sized flowers.

          The musical style of Cinderella 2000 is all over the place, with some numbers sounding like show tunes and others sounding like R&B bump-and-grinds; the country ditty performed by a robot that’s upset about not being able to screw a computer is particularly cringe-inducing. Complementing the peculiar music is a generally cheap visual aesthetic, with characters wearing silly-looking sparkly costumes and garish makeup. Naturally, the acting is terrible, although the ladies who spend most of their screen time completely or partially naked have attractive figures. As for the film’s smut content, viewers should know better than to expect real erotica from Adamson, who had a special gift for draining the vitality from anything he captured on camera. Ladies writhe atop interchangeable studs, but the resulting imagery is about as hot as some National Geographic stag reel of actual stags.

          Nonetheless, Cinderella 2000 stands out among Adamson’s filmography because even though it’s low-budget crap, it’s ambitious low-budget crap. The movie fails at every single thing it tries, but at least Adamson left his comfort zone.

Cinderella 2000: FREAKY

Group Marriage (1973)

         Emerging almost inevitably from the anything-goes zeitgeist of the Sexual Revolution, Group Marriage is a lighthearted comedy about exactly what its title suggests, an arrangement by three couples to cohabitate and share sexual favors, thereby escaping the constraints of Establishment society. The movie is not quite as lurid and tacky as it sounds, though there are plenty of nude scenes as well as implications of encounters involving multiple partners. The movie is also not nearly as sharp as it should be, seeing as how it lives in the shadow of Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), which basically ends by crossing the sexual boundary at which Group Marriage begins. Whereas Mazursky’s film was a hip and thoughtful examination of the emotional and psychological effects of social change, Group Marriage merely gives lip service to serious issues while presenting anemic bedroom farce and simplistic clashes between seekers and squares. So even though Group Marriage is ultimately harmless, allowing its characters to display something vaguely resembling dimensionality, the movie is dragged down by knuckleheaded one-liners and a pervasive sense of voyeurism.

          The movie gets off to a rocky start, with cutesy scenes introducing viewers to Chris (Aimee Eccles), a clerk at a used-car dealership, and her boyfriend Sander (Solomon Sturges), proprietor of a bumper-sticker business. Chris meets Dennis (Jeffrey Pomerantz) and brings him home for sex, much to Sander’s chagrin, even though Chris makes the argument that her tryst was okay because she didn’t hide it from Sander. Then Dennis brings his buxom girlfriend, Jan (Victoria Vetri), into the mix, and it’s Chris’ turn to experience jealousy. Eventually, the group expands to include a studly beach bum, Phil (Zack Taylor), and a sexy lawyer, Elaine (Claudia Jennings). Complications ensue in the form of hangups and recriminations, as well as social pressure from folks who disapprove of the group’s arrangement. Some of the plot developments are imaginative, like Elaine’s quest to set a legal precedent for group marriage, and some are less so, like the various scenes involving the screaming-queen gay couple living next door to the group. To its minor credit, the movie never once devolves into outright sleaze, and perky performances keep the tone upbeat even when situations become complicated. 

Group Marriage: FUNKY

Avanti! (1972)

          It seems fair to call Avanti! not only the best of Billy Wilder’s four ’70s features, but also his last truly satisfying movie—although such remarks may strike readers as damning with faint praise, since Wilder’s late-career output is unquestionably inferior to the classics he made in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. Indeed, Avanti! pales next to, say, Some Like It Hot (1959), but, quite frankly, what comedy doesn’t? That said, Avanti! compensates for significant shortcomings with copious amounts of charm, cleverness, and wit. Although the picture never scales comic heights, instead generating mild amusement from start to finish, it puts across a farcical love story with credibility and sensitivity. Just as importantly, Avanti! reteams Wilder with his most frequent leading man, Jack Lemmon, the perfect interpreter for Wilder’s brand of male angst.

          The story takes place in Italy, where American businessman Wendell Armbruster Jr. (Lemmon) travels to collect the remains of his father, recently killed in a car crash. Before long, Wendell realizes that his father died alongside a female companion, whose daughter, Pamela Piggott (Juliet Mills), travels to Italy to claim her mother’s body. Myriad complications prevent Wendell from achieving his simple goal. Pamela agitates to have the bodies buried in Italy, because that’s where her mother and Wendell Sr. met for annual trysts over the course of a decade. Italian bureaucrats smother Wendell with paperwork. Gangsters steal the corpses in order to extort money. Meanwhile, Wendell slowly evolves from being a fussbudget preoccupied with propriety into an emotional being vulnerable to Pamela’s appeal, echoing the way Wendell Sr. changed during his visits to Italy. Everything in the story is contrived and schematic, of course, but it works. Or, to place a finer point on the matter, it works well enough.

          Adapting a play by Samuel A. Taylor, Wilder and frequent writing partner I.A.L. Diamond expertly coordinate a slew of running gags, weaving comedy and romance together with grace and style. What their adaptation sorely lacks, however, is economy—Avanti! runs a preposterous 140 minutes, with myriad scenes that could easily have been omitted or at least trimmed. The movie is never boring for more than a moment or two, but the narrative bloat diminishes the overall impact. So, too, does the fixation on Pamela’s weight, which, to modern sensibilities, seems as Neanderthal as the film’s overt statements to the effect that all successful men are entitled to mistresses. As always in Wilder’s films, adultery is a joke instead of a cruel betrayal. Still, Lemmon and Mills come off remarkably well, as does Clive Revill, an Englishman dubiously cast as an Italian hotel manager; for a film suffused with authentic local flavor, thanks to alluring location photography and lovely Italian music, Revill’s casting is a false note, albeit an inoffensive one.

Avanti!: GROOVY

Summer Camp (1979)

In the spirit of trying to say one positive thing about the rotten sex comedy Summer Camp, director Chuck Vincent and his collaborators avoided implications of youth exploitation by telling a story about characters in their twenties, rather than teenagers. Accordingly, the film’s numbing barrage of nude shots and sex scenes is distasteful without being truly creepy. That said, Summer Camp has virtually no redeeming values, even though the overarching plot is more or less coherent. Among myriad other problems, this sex comedy is neither erotic nor funny, and in fact some sequences are grotesque. For instance, campers participate in a “Fantastic Feces Contest,” with top honors awarded to the camper whose output is most prodigious. Similarly, one character is a hot-to-trot young woman who comes on to every man she sees, which leads to not only myriad simulated encounters but also to crude remarks about premature ejaculation and the like. Another character—the requisite beer-drinking slob in the John Belushi mode—explains that he’s nicknamed “Horse” because of what he claims to be an impressive endowment. Set to awful disco music, Summer Camp has a workable premise, because Camp Malibu’s director (Jack Barnes) invites past campers to a 10-year reunion in the hopes of persuading the young adults to help raise funds for the struggling camp. Yet the moment the campers arrive, Vincent—who made X-rated porn films prior to Summer Camp—spirals into heavy petting, panty raids, voyeurism, and (shudder) folk music sung around a campfire. For what it’s worth, trash-cinema queen Linnea Quigley, at this point just a few years into her long career, plays one of the sex-crazed campers.

Summer Camp: LAME

Satan’s Cheerleaders (1977)

Once you’ve come up with a title like Satan’s Cheerleaders, most of your work should be done. I mean, what’s so complicated about mixing devil worship with sexy teenagers? Based on the evidence of this misbegotten attempt at a comedy/horror hybrid, apparently the process is trickier than it seems, because director Greydon Clark and his collaborators botched the job. Beyond simply being amateurish, dumb, and tacky, Satan’s Cheerleaders doesn’t even have enough sex and violence to pass muster as a guilty pleasure. The story follows a quartet of horny cheerleaders and their goody-two-shoes coach, Ms. Johnson (Jacqueline Cole), through a series of adventures. Among other things, the cheerleaders make fun of a simple-minded janitor, Billy (Jack Kruschen). Later, when Ms. Johnson’s car breaks down while she’s driving the girls to a game, Billy comes along in his pickup truck, abducts the ladies, and announces his plans to rape all of them. Then he gets into yet another accident. After escaping from Billy, the ladies make their way to the home of a sheriff (John Ireland), unaware that he’s the leader of a devil-worshipping cult. Oh, and one of the cheerleaders, Patti (Kerry Sherman), discovers that she has magical powers. Not one moment of this flick is believable or suspenseful, because the acting is as atrocious as the writing, with stupidity guiding the behavior of all of the characters. Jokes fall flat in every scene, leering shots of scantily clad babes are distasteful, and supernatural moments are filmed so clumsily as to create narrative confusion. Sleaze-cinema fans should content themselves with enjoying the movie that the title Satan’s Cheerleaders conjures in their reptile brains, because it’s a damn sight better than this one.

Satan’s Cheerleaders: LAME

Hollywood High (1976)

An abysmal sex comedy that’s basically porn without the courage of its convictions, Hollywood High depicts the exploits of four teenaged girls who spend all their time having sex, talking about sex, or teasing men who want to have sex with them. With their figures crammed into bikinis, crop tops, short shorts, or nothing at all, the starlets portraying these ladies giggle like morons, lifelessly recite lines of inane dialogue, or merely bounce up and down while director Patrick Wright’s camera circles and probes their curves. Watching Hollywood High is a bit like encountering one of those horrific infomercials that used to run on late-night TV for Girls Gone Wild videos. Hollywood High imagines a world in which pulchritudinous young women have nothing in their brains but lust, and relish displaying their bodies to any males in their immediate vicinity. Yuck. The “story” of the picture concerns the girls’ quest for a fresh place to make out with their boyfriends, since they’ve exhausted the possibilities of locker rooms, tents, vans, and so forth. Concurrently, the girls have adventures including a sexual encounter with a dwarf mechanic, a meet-cute with a Mae West-type aging movie star, and a food fight in a burger joint. Typical of this wretched flick is the scene in which one of the ladies responds to a ringing telephone by saying, “If that’s Charles Bronson, ask him if his tallywacker wants some poontang!” Oh, and a greasy-haired tough guy refers to himself as “Fenzie” and “The Fenz.” Shameless! Hollywood High delivers lots of sun and skin, accompanied by hopelessly generic rock music, but this movie is so gleefully exploitive that it probably constitutes some sort of cinematic sex crime.

Hollywood High: SQUARE

The Chicken Chronicles (1977)

          The teen-sex romp The Chicken Chronicles is a pleasant surprise for many reasons. First, it’s almost entirely bereft of sleaze—don’t look for nude scenes here—which means that director Frank Simon and his collaborators exhibited great restraint given the exploitive norm of the teen-sex genre. Second, the movie stars the much-maligned Steve Guttenberg, appearing in his first significant movie role, and he gives a charming performance. Third, the script by Paul Diamond, who adapted his novel of the same name, treats female characters with intelligence and respect, which is even more of a rarity in the teen-sex genre than restraint. Yes, The Chicken Chronicles has the usual tropes of cheap pranks played against school officials, nostalgia for a lost era, a wild party, and a young man questing for carnal bliss. Yet in this context, the tropes are enjoyable and organic instead of contrived and trite.
           To be clear, The Chicken Chronicles pales next to, say, American Graffiti (1973). Accepted on its own humble terms, however, The Chicken Chronicles is endearing and fun.

          Set in Beverly Hills circa 1969, the story revolves around senior David Kessler (Guttenberg), a wealthy jock with girl trouble and a rebellious attitude. The rebelliousness manifests as friction with uptight vice principal Mr. Nastase (Ed Lauter), and the girl trouble stems from all the obstacles that David’s beautiful girlfriend, Margaret (Lisa Reeves), puts in the way of consummating their relationship. As the movie progresses, David becomes more and more frustrated because of Margaret, so he acts out in ways that threaten his graduation—no small problem, with the shadow of the Vietnam draft looming over him. Other elements of David’s life include the misadventures of his dorky younger brother, an unexpected relationship with a girl who is wrongly perceived as the school slut, and David’s shenanigans at a fast-food joint owned by the cheerfully vulgar Max Ober (Phil Silvers).

          While none of this material cuts very deep, the specifics of David’s life feel authentic and complete—everything from the upper-crust mom who wires her house with intercoms to the Hawaiian buddy who weeps after flushing his pot stash during a moment of panic. Better still, the way the major female characters develop over the course of the story makes David’s growth believable. (The plot even has some genuinely serious elements, though sexual yearning and tomfoolery occupy center stage.) More than anything, The Chicken Chronicles reminds viewers that movies about adolescence need not be adolescent.

The Chicken Chronicles: GROOVY