Up Your Teddy Bear (1970)

          If one scene encapsulates the pervy strangeness of Up Your Teddy Bear, it may be the dream sequence during which an adult man wearing a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit performs what can only be described as an awkward heavy-petting dance with an attractive woman who gradually lifts her miniskirt to reveal . . . something. From the acting and the sound effects, the impression is created that either she’s wearing a wood apparatus between her legs or her nether regions are made of wood. Whether this is meant to be funny, titillating, or both is as unknowable as the truth of what’s lurking beneath that miniskirt. And so it goes throughout Up Your Teddy Bear, a mishmash of sleazy erotica, unfunny comedy, and weird nonsense. Up Your Teddy Bear is written incoherently, shot artlessly, and edited as if strips of film were thrown into the air and then spliced together in the pattern they formed upon falling to the floor.
          Written and directed by a fellow named Don Joslyn, the movie is about Clyde King (Wally Cox), a dorky toy-store employee who spends his downtime stalking beautiful women even though he never touches them. Clyde’s other hobby of hand-carving finger puppets catches the attention of “Mother” (Julie Newmar), the wealthy boss of a toy company. She tries to hire Clyde so she can mass-produce his puppets, but he declines, so “Mother” tasks her second-in-command, Lyle “Skippy” Burns (Victor Buono), with closing the deal. Although Lyle hires a series of prostitutes to seduce Clyde into signing a contract, the scheme never pays off, so a frustrated Lyle decides to murder Clyde. It’s hard to imagine anyone pulling off a story that mixes children’s toys, sex, and violence, but this plot could have provided a workable framework for supporting risqué gags. Making that happen, however, would have required skills Joslyn lacks.
          Every scene with Clyde has a major cringe factor because of the way he follows women, his eyes fixated on their backsides and breasts, but Up Your Teddy Bear tries to portray him as an innocent dope in the Jerry Lewis mode. None of his behavior makes sense—in one scene, he showers wearing a suit and tie, and in another, he breaks into a bizarre dance. The less said about Clyde’s offbeat vocalizing—imagine a bird’s death cries combined with off-key Mongolian throat singing—the better. Cox, best known for voicing Underdog, tries valiantly to play a likable boob, but the script thwarts him at every turn. Cox also voices the movie’s sporadic narration track, which fails to give the discombobulated footage any sense of momentum or purpose.
          Scenes with Lyle venture into the grotesque. Joslyn seemingly revels in accentuating Buono’s obesity, and closeups of the actor often forefront an embarrassing combover, flop sweat, and a pallid complexion—whether Joslyn displays Buono in a Little League uniform, a scuba suit, or streetwalker drag, he seems determined to exploit the actor’s humiliation. Getting back to that streetwalker scene, the film implies that Lyle is molested by a group of johns triggered to amorous delirium by the vision of an enormously heavy man with a mustache and garish whore makeup. In myriad other movies and TV shows, Buono’s campy overacting was delightful; here, his mincing and mugging just seems desperate and sad.
          Newmar, who appears in perhaps a quarter of the film’s running time, mostly barks orders at Buono and looks fantastic, whether fully dressed, sporting a bikini, or wearing lingerie. If she gave a coherent performance on set, it didn’t survive the editing process. Starlets who appear as prostitutes drift in and out of the movie interchangeably, though Joslyn devotes an inordinate amount of screen time to Angelique Pettyjohn’s wholly gratuitous nude scenes. Presumably the skin factor, the presence of two actors from the ’60s Batman series, and the involvement of Quincy Jones (who contributed some original music) explains why this misbegotten picture enjoyed several afterlives. Following its initial run, the movie was reissued under the titles Hot Mother, Mother, and Seduction of a Nerd; at some point it was also known as The Toy Grabbers. Mercifully, Joslyn never made another movie.

Up Your Teddy Bear: FREAKY