The Student Teachers (1973)

Roger Corman’s New World Pictures made so many iterations and variations of its sexy-nurses franchise that it’s challenging to keep straight which events occur in which movie, especially with motifs such as Dick Miller playing a sleazy coach appearing in more than one film. Nonetheless, I feel confident classifying The Student Teachers as the most befuddling installment. Amid the familiar tropes of feminist rhetoric, lingering sex scenes, and raunchy comedy, the movie churns through a grody subplot about a serial rapist, then concludes with a bizarre heist sequence featuring one of the leading ladies dressed as a nun—while she drives the unlikely getaway vehicle of a school bus. An early credit for director Jonathan Kaplan, who eventually graduated from drive-in schlock to mainstream pictures, The Student Teachers begins with the usual formula. Three hot women who work at the same place have experiences related to sex, and the experiences eventually interrelate. Tracy (Brooke Mills) moonlights as a nude model and gets involved with a peeping tom. Rachel (Susan Damante) takes a bold approach to teaching sex ed, sanctioning her students to make their own stag film. And Jody (Brenda Sutton) has the oddest adventure, pretending to become a drug dealer in order to help authorities capture a supplier. Naturally, each of these storylines includes an epic-length topless scene—or, in the case of Tracy’s subplot, several epic-length topless scenes. Yet it’s hard to reconcile the disparate elements. The Tracy vignettes are innocuously erotic, scenes of Rachel clashing with Miller’s character are semi-comedic, and the rape sequences—during which the assailant wears a plastic clown mask—are horrific. So by the time the campy finale arrives, the movie has become hopelessly muddled in terms of theme and tone. The unfortunate viewer who soldiers through this flick is left only with a bitter aftertaste and the sure knowledge that 90 minutes have been wasted.

The Student Teachers: LAME

Blood Sabbath (1972)

Yet another schlocky ’70s horror picture that attempts to blend hippies with Satanism, Blood Sabbath hits the crap-cinema trifecta: amateurish, boring, incoherent. Anthony Geary, later to find his pop-culture niche as long-running character Luke Spencer on the ABC soap General Hospital, stars as David, a confused Vietnam vet who wanders aimlessly through a forest until he’s nearly raped by a quartet of hippie chicks. Later, David meets the quasi-supernatural Yyalah (Susan Damante). She’s an earth spirit or wood nymph or something. David and Yyalah dig each other but can’t have sex, Yyalah says, because her kind dies upon mating with beings with souls. Naturally, this revelation prompts David to seek advice on how to discard his soul. He speaks to a priest who responds to David’s request with a temper tantrum, and then David chats up a witch whose coven conveniently knows how to perform soul-removal ceremonies. Seriously, this is the plot. Very little of what happens in Blood Sabbath makes sense, and the acting is abysmal. Compounding matters is the cheap costuming and hairstyling, which looks like it was done by technicians from a high-school drama club. The cinematography is competent, but that doesn’t count for much since the action occurring inside the pleasantly composed frames is disjoined and silly. For instance, the movie features countless scenes of topless and/or fully nude coven members dancing in the woods; one suspects the producers got a bulk discount by hiring the entire staff of a low-rent strip club. About the only mildly entertaining thing in the movie is the opening credit that promises an appearance by “Dyanne Thorne as Alotta, Queen of Witches.” Rest assured, however, that tame and fleeting scenes including the future star of the porn-ish Isla series are not reason enough to endure this misbegotten flick.

Blood Sabbath: SQUARE

The Great American Beauty Contest (1973)

          Like so many things bearing the Aaron Spelling brand name, this brisk TV movie about backstage intrigue at a fictional beauty contest is the equivalent of junk food—it tastes good at first, but regret kicks in almost immediately. The Great American Beauty Contest is very much a product of the producer who later subjected the world to Charlie’s Angels, because the movie comprises one scene after another showcasing vapidly attractive young women. On the plus side, the picture isn’t as sleazy as one might think, since there’s only one fleeting sequence of the contest’s swimsuit competition, and the lovelies in the cast represent an appealing collection of ’70s actresses. Spelling regular Farrah Fawcett is present and accounted for, as are Kathy Baumann (a buxom starlet in various B-movies), Susan Damante (of the Wilderness Family pictures), and Joanna Cameron (of the Saturday-morning superhero show Isis), among others. (Watch for a brief, wordless appearance by glamazon actress/singer Susan Anton in the final scene.)

          Although each of the aforementioned startlets gets plenty of screen time, the actual star of The Great American Beauty Contest is the elegant Eleanor Parker, best known as the Baroness in the classic family film The Sound of Music (1965). She plays Peggy, a onetime pageant winner who now runs the contest. When the picture begins, Peggy and her handlers greet various contestants, including Angelique (Damante), an innocent who believes in the fairy-tale myth of pageants; Gloria (Cameron), a quasi-militant feminist hoping to win so she can deliver an anti-pageant speech during her coronation; Pamela (Tracy Reed), an African-American upset about being treated as a “token”; and T.L. (Fawcett), a wild girl who enters the contest on a lark. Also in the mix are movie producer Ralph (Louis Jourdan), who serves as a judge and expects sexual favors from wannabes, and Joe (Larry Wilcox, later of C.H.i.P.S.), T.L.’s rambunctious boyfriend.

          Considering that The Great American Beauty Contest runs only 74 minutes (the standard length for early-’70s TV movies), Spelling and his collaborators include an abundance of “plot,” making up for in quantity what the project lacks in quality. Rest assured, however, that not a single frame of The Great American Beauty Contest will amuse, delight, or surprise. Instead, the picture functions like the broadcast of a real beauty contest—it invites the male gaze with a steady procession of bright teeth, lustrous hair, sexy curves, and twinkly eyes. And it’s hard to get too strident about a movie that not only features Fawcett doing an atrocious harem-girl dance, but also features characters commenting on the awfulness of said dance. In other words, The Great American Beauty Contest may not be an experience in truly guilt-free ogling, but it’s close.

The Great American Beauty Contest: FUNKY

The Adventures of the Wilderness Family (1975) & The Further Adventures of the Wilderness Family (1978) & Mountain Family Robinson (1979)

          Writer-producer Arthur R. Dubs carved a minor niche for himself in ’70s by making a series of documentaries and fiction films celebrating the American frontier, and his most enduring creation is a three-movie series about a modern family that moves from Los Angeles to the Rocky Mountains. Harmless and well-meaning, these G-rated pictures boast spectacular location photography and terrific footage of real animals, even if the acting and storytelling leave a bit to be desired. The first and best picture in the series is The Adventures of the Wilderness Family, which does a solid job of emulating the Disney nature-flick formula, but without the sickly-sweet extremes that make some Disney pictures unpalatable.

          The movie begins in smog- and traffic-shrouded L.A., where construction worker Skip Robinson (Robert Logan) realizes he’s had enough. Skip asks his wife, Pat (Susan Damante Shaw), if she’s willing to leave city life behind, and she says yes. The Robinsons pack up their two young children and their dog, and then relocate to a remote lakeside homestead. During the first movie, which takes place over a summer and early fall, the Robinsons build a cabin, survive close encounters with bears and cougars, and take in stray animals including a pair of orphaned bear cubs and a raccoon. They also forge a friendship with a mountain man named Boomer (George “Buck” Flower).

          Excepting some awful songs played over montages, The Adventures of the Wilderness Family tells a simple story without distracting adornment, and the respect both the characters and the filmmakers show for the dangers of the wilderness grounds the piece in a gentle version of reality. Additionally, the film’s breathtaking Colorado locations make it easy to understand why the Robinsons decide, at the end of the picture, to stay in their new home despite the impending arrival of winter and all the challenges that implies.

          Three years passed before Dubs and his crew returned to Colorado to film the lackluster sequel The Further Adventures of the Wilderness Family. Although the second movie supposedly picks up just weeks after the end of the first film, the actress playing the Robinson daughter was recast, and the replacement performer is about six years older than her predecessor. Huh? Worse, the second movie includes the kinds of syrupy excesses Dubs avoided the first time around. Way too much time is spent on cutesy animal antics and sentimental Boomer scenes (his crusty old heart melts when he becomes a surrogate grandfather to the Robinson kids).

          Furthermore, the crises powering the storyline are beyond contrived. The climax is especially absurd—when Skip leaves the house after a blizzard to fetch help for Pat, who is suffering from pneumonia, wolves attack the cabin and one of the Robinsons’ pets knocks over a lamp, starting a fire, so a bedridden Pat and her two children are left alone to fight flames and ravening predators. The only reason the second movie is borderline passable is the presence of still-impressive production values.

          However, it all goes wrong in the third flick, Mountain Family Robinson, which is so lacking in narrative substance that Dubs pads the running time with endless montages of things like full-costume Fourth of July picnics; gardening sessions livened up with square dancing; and idyllic runs through fields of flowers. Worse, the songs—which are never good in Wilderness Family movies—become truly noxious in Mountain Family Robinson, with a cloying vocal group proclaiming again and again how wonderful it is for wonderful people to live a wonderful life in a wonderful place. Yeah, we got it, already.

The Adventures of the Wilderness Family: GROOVY

The Further Adventures of the Wilderness Family: FUNKY

 Mountain Family Robinson: LAME