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

Honey Britches (1971)

From a purist’s perspective, the movie Honey Britches doesn’t exist anymore. The low-budget crime/horror picture was produced and released in 1971 before falling into obscurity. Then, in the mid-’80s, schlockmeister Fred Olen Ray bought the movie, shot one new scene (more on that later), and recut the picture, selling the resulting atrocity to Z-movie distributor Troma Entertainment. Since that time, Troma has exhibited the re-edited flick under various titles, including Demented Death Farm Massacre. Yet it’s not as if some minor classic was lost in the process. Based upon the available evidence, Honey Britches was, is, and always will be awful. The movie concerns four criminals who escape New York with $1 million worth of stolen diamonds, then run out of gas in the rural south. After hiding their getaway car, the quartet walks to a farm operated by dim-witted religious nut Harlan P. Craven (George Ellis). An overweight slob in middle age, Harlan is married to a curvaceous young woman named Reba Sue (Ashley Brooke), whom Harlan bought from Reba Sue’s father in order to settle a debt of “almost $200.” What ensues between the country folk and the criminals is a Desperate Hours-type hostage situation punctuated with betrayal, lust, and murder. Featuring endless scenes about nothing and spellbindingly bad acting, Honey Britches (judging from the original scenes that remain intact) is exploitation cinema for the lobotomized, offering only a few nudie shots and some laughably cheap-looking gore as compensation for insufferable tedium. Fred Olen Ray’s ’80s additions are feeble. In addition to oppressive horror scoring that Ray uses to juice dull scenes of people wandering around the woods, the ’80s version features a frail John Carradine (who filmed his bit near the end of his life) reading perhaps three minutes of “ironic” commentary from cue cards. Carradine’s single shot is spliced into the movie at erratic intervals.

Honey Britches: SQUARE

Dragon Lady (1971)

Shot under the title Wit’s End, then given the lurid moniker Dragon Lady for broader release, this exploitation picture was made in Singapore with a cast mixing Americans and Asians. Adding to its dubious pedigree, the flick was retitled yet again as The G.I. Executioner when the shlockmeisters at Troma Entertainment put the movie back into theaters and on home video in the mid-’80s. By any name, however, this is a poorly made compendium of fetishistic violence and leering nude scenes, strung together with a powerful but out-of-place acid-rock score. There’s a germ of an interesting story buried under the muck, because protagonist Dave Dearborn (Tom Keena) is an opportunistic American stitching together a living in a foreign land by taking disreputable odd jobs for hoodlums; a few years after this turkey hatched, director Peter Bogdanovich tackled a similar storyline in his world-class drama Saint Jack (1979). Yet while Saint Jack is a sly character study, Dragon Lady is only a few steps removed from a grungy porn film: Dearborn is constantly in and out of bed with anonymous women, and the climax of the picture features a naked, silicone-enhanced actress racing around a boat while she shoots villains and gets stabbed. The story has something to do with a Chinese scientist trying to deliver military secrets to the West, but the plot is really just a thin excuse for Dearborn to get embroiled with assorted sleazy characters. In a typically crude scene, he gets drugged and chained while wearing a spangled pink vest and harem paints, because, apparently, even the men of Singapore can’t keep their hands off him. In another scene, Dearborn hides under a bed while a prostitute services a john several inches above his face, and then Dearborn chokes a snake that’s crawled under the bed with him; the implied masturbation metaphor is as close as the movie once titled Wit’s End gets to wit.

Dragon Lady: LAME