Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1970)

From any other filmmaker, the action/sexploitation hybrid Cherry, Harry & Raquel! would seem outrageous, what with the fever-dream editing and incessant closeups of bouncing breasts. From Russ Meyer, the king of mammary movies, it’s tame both in narrative conception and sexual content. Seeing as how Meyer’s appeal stems from his over-the-top aesthetic, the notion of a “restrained” Meyer flick is not appealing. Running just over 70 minutes, the picture tells the story of Harry (Charles Napier), an Arizona sheriff who spends his work hours patrolling the desert by the Mexican border and spends his private hours cohabitating with voluptuous nymphet Cherry (Linda Ashton). He also works for a drug kingpin named Mr. Franklin (Frank Bolger), whose main enterprise involves smuggling weed from Mexico. Franklin tasks Harry with killing Apache (John Milo), who has stolen some of Franklin’s dope. Interspersed with this threadbare story are innumerable sexual encounters, plus weird cuts to an unnamed topless woman (Uschi Digard) wearing an elaborate Indian headdress while gyrating in various settings (e.g., splashing in a swimming pool while flailing a tennis racquet). Most Meyer movies are cheerfully chaotic thanks to an overabundance of plot, but Cherry, Harry & Raquel! suffers the opposite affliction. The paucity of narrative material invites close scrutiny, revealing that most of what happens is grotesque or nonsensical or both. As always with Meyer, the name of the game is getting well-endowed women naked, so a solid 40 percent of the running time comprises nudie shots and/or sex scenes. Most of the remainder comprises brisk but repetitive chase scenes, as well as an epic shootout during which Meyer seems to echo Sam Peckipah’s style of operatic bloodshed (minus the slow motion). Naturally, there’s some weirdly patriotic speechifying mixed into the sleaze, including the rambling text crawl about freedom of speech that opens the movie—a text crawl, it should be noted, that is superimposed over a frenetic montage of breast closeups. Oh, and for those who’ve been longing for a full-frontal nude scene featuring iron-jawed B-movie guy Napier, here’s your chance.

Cherry, Harry & Raquel!: LAME

The Seven Minutes (1971)

          For skin-flick maven Russ Meyer, making Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) at Twentieth Century-Fox was a singular moment—with all the resources of a major studio at his disposal, he got to indulge his fancies for gonzo editing, in-your-face imagery, outrageous sex scenes, and voluptuous women like never before. For his follow-up, however, Meyer had to keep it in his pants, metaphorically speaking. Although The Seven Minutes tells a story that’s all about sex, the presentation is decidedly chaste. And while Meyer’s films are often hard to follow given his fragmented narrative approach, The Seven Minutes is downright murky—adapted from a novel by Irving Wallace, the picture throws so many characters and plot twists at the audience that it’s challenging to track what’s happening until the extended courtroom sequence that serves as the film’s climax. And even then, one-dimensional characterizations and wooden performances render the people in the movie nearly interchangeable.

          The film’s main thrust, exploring how communities define pornography, should have been a natural fit for Meyer, but it turns out the filmmaker was more skilled at creating actual smut than generating cerebral melodrama about smut. Without getting into the tiresome specifics, the story revolves around a novel called The Seven Minutes, written by a mysterious author named J.J. Jadway. Once banned, the sexually graphic book is reprinted by an enterprising publisher, which leads to the arrest of a California bookseller. Then a disturbed young man commits a rape, and investigators suspect he was driven into a sexual frenzy by reading The Seven Minutes. Politicians pounce on the situation for opportunistic reasons. Eventually, an intrepid attorney scours the globe for clues about Jadway in order to exonerate the book and to strike a blow against censorship.

          Thanks to the weird combination of lifeless acting and lurid subject matter, The Seven Minutes feels like a sexed-up episode of Dragnet. People deliver speeches instead of dialogue, and nearly every “mainstream” character is presented as a grotesque. Therefore, whenever Meyer lets his freak flag fly—for instance, intercutting a sexual assault with a Wolfman Jack radio performance—it feels like part of some other, transgressive movie accidentally got mixed in with the straight stuff. The mostly undistinguished cast includes aging movie queen Yvonne De Carlo and then-unknown Tom Selleck, as well as Meyer regulars including Charles Napier and Edy Williams. All of them seem adrift, because The Seven Minutes is neither sufficiently disciplined to work as a proper drama nor sufficiently wild to qualify as a counterculture statement. After The Seven Minutes crashed and burned, Meyer wisely returned to the realm of independently made skin flicks.

The Seven Minutes: LAME

Supervixens (1975)

          Russ Meyer, the mad genius of skin flicks, was operating at the height of his singular powers when he made Supervixens, an exuberant combination of action, comedy, romance, and satire. Fast, filthy, and fun, the movie is a joyous celebration of one man’s fetishes, so even though Supervixens is heinous from the standpoint of gender politics, it’s so breezy and silly and upbeat that it’s difficult not to get a contact high. Plus, like all the best Meyer movies, it’s completely batshit insane.
          After cranking out dozens of exploitation flicks in the ’50s and ’60s, including the signature works Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) and Vixen (1968), Meyer briefly dabbled in mainstream cinema, making the crazed Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and the more sedate The Seven Minutes (1971) for Fox. It wasn’t until Supervixens, however, that Meyer truly returned to his comfort zone of independently produced sextravaganzas. Supervixens takes place in a violent alternate universe of Meyer’s own imagining, so every woman is a buxom, insatiable beauty with the word “Super” affixed to her first name. Yet the alternate universe is also morally just, in a twisted sort of way, since bad people pay for their villainy while true love wins in the end. More or less.

          When the story begins, studly everyman Clint Ramsey (Charles Pitts) works at a gas station run by Martin Bormann (Henry Rowland), a nice guy who may or may not be the same Martin Bormann who spent World War II working as Hitler’s secretary. Clint’s girlfriend is SuperAngel (Shari Eubank), a sex-crazed housewife who treats Clint like garbage. One day, while Clint is passed out drunk after a fight with SuperAngel, she seduces a policeman named Harry Sledge (Charles Napier). When Harry proves impotent, he becomes enraged and murders SuperAngel in an epic scene that’s simultaneously funny and grotesque. Once Clint sobers up and learns what happened, he realizes he’s the likely suspect for SuperAngel’s murder, so he hits the road and begins a series of erotic misadventures. He gets robbed by a male-female criminal duo, he finds refuge at a farm until the farmer’s mail-order bride cheerfully rapes Clint, and he falls victim to the charms of a motel proprietor’s deaf daughter. Eventually, Clint meets and falls in love with SuperVixen (also played by Eubank), who is the quasi-reincarnation of SuperAngel, but is as kind as SuperAngel was treacherous. Predictably, Mean Old Harry Sledge turns up to cause more trouble—leading to a surreal climax involving lots of dynamite.

          Also thrown into the mix are flash cuts of nude women writhing on imaginary beds, and such weird musical flourishes as the use of German marching-band music, “Dixie,” and snippets of classical compositions for punctuation during random moments. This being a Meyer movie, the most important recurring stylistic elements are enormous breasts—closeups of cleavage, long shots of women running and bouncing, claustrophobic angles of men’s faces being smothered with massive mammaries, and so on.

          Meyer, who wrote, produced, directed, shot, and edited the movie, executes all of this stuff with a cartoonish kind of high style, creating frenetic rhythms and something very closely resembling dramatic tension. The actresses in the movie are generally quite awful, though Eubank has spunk, because Meyer cast for physical attributes rather than talent. Pitts is merely okay, doing best in scenes where he communicates exasperation. Therefore the heavy lifting falls to Meyer regular Napier. He’s a stone riot in Supervixens, incarnating one of the most gleefully demented rednecks in screen history. By the time his character devolves into the live-action equivalent of a Looney Tune at the end of Supervixens, he’s personified everything from giddiness to psychosis with gusto. Plus, like Meyer, Napier seems totally hip to the self-referential joke at the heart of Supervixens.

Supervixens: FREAKY

Citizens Band (1977)

          While not a particularly interesting movie, the offbeat comedy Citizens Band represents the convergence of two interesting careers. For director Jonathan Demme, the movie was a breakthrough studio job after making three low-budget exploitation flicks for producer Roger Corman. For second-time screenwriter Paul Brickman, the movie provided a transition between working on existing material (Brickman debuted with the script for 1977’s The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training) and creating brand-new characters; Brickman later blossomed as the writer/director of the extraordinary Risky Business (1983). A further point of interest is that while Citizens Band tangentially belongs to the mid-’70s vogue for trucker movies, it’s much more concerned with the possibilities of a communication format to bridge distances between people. In other words, this is an earnest project from serious people, so it can’t be discounted. Nonetheless, watching all 98 minutes of the loosely plotted and sluggishly paced feature requires abundant patience.

          Since Citizens Band never even remotely approaches outright hilarity, the charms of the picture are found in small character moments and—one of Demme’s specialties—scenes that celebrate human compassion and understanding. One wonders, however, whether a shambling assortment of kind-hearted vignettes was what Brickman had in mind, since certain sequences feel as if they were conceived to become full-on comedy setpieces. While Demme’s preference for intimacy over spectacle gives Citizens Band an amiable sense of reality, this directorial approach results in a decidedly low-energy cinematic experience.

          Anyway, in lieu of a proper storyline, the movie has a number of interconnected subplots. The main character, if only by default since he has the largest number of scenes, is Spider (Paul LeMat), a small-town CB-radio operator who watches out for truckers and vainly tries to keep emergency frequencies free of outside chatter. Spider lives with his ornery father (Roberts Blossom), a former trucker, and Spider’s part of a love triangle involving his on-again/off-again girlfriend, Electra (Candy Clark), and Spider’s brother, Blood (Bruce McGill). The Spider scenes are quite sleepy except when he plays vigilante by destroying radio equipment belonging to rule-breaking CB operators. Another thread of the movie involves a long-haul trucker nicknamed “Chrome Angel” (Charles Napier), who is revealed as a secret bigamist; the first meeting of his two wives plays out with unexpected warmth. There’s also some material involving various eccentric radio enthusiasts, such as Hot Coffee (Alix Elias), a plain-Jane hooker catering to truckers. The movie toggles back and forth between various characters, presenting one inconsequential scene after another. (Don’t be fooled by the exciting opening sequence of a truck derailment; thrills are in short supply thereafter.)

          Citizens Band has a slick look, thanks to inventive cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, though it’s questionable whether his moody style actually suits the material. Yet the presence of artful lighting is just one more random point in Citizens Band’s favor. The movie’s a collection of many things, some of which merit attention; the problem is that these things never coalesce into a worthwhile whole.

Citizens Band: FUNKY

Moonfire (1970)

Since there’s not much to discuss with relation to the content of this insipid trucker flick, let’s note something peculiar on the movie’s Internet Movie Database page. The first user review was written by the film’s director, Michael Parkhurst, who spends half his post arguing that his picture isn’t as bad as its reputation suggests (Parkhurst valiantly labels Moonfire “fair”). The filmmaker spends the other half of his review bitching that Leonard Maltin once mistakenly described the plot as having a blackmail element. Only here’s the kicker—Moonfire does indeed have a blackmail element, unless one plays a semantic game and says that a villain taking technology hostage and demanding payment for its release somehow qualifies as kidnapping instead of blackmail. Anyway, one reason we’ve gone so far down this road is to demonstrate how vehement online movie-related discussions can become, no matter how insignificant the picture in question. The other reason is to underscore that even a hair-splitting e-debate about Moonfire’s storyline is more interesting than the film itself. The problem with Moonfire is that virtually nothing happens—Parkhurst’s film comprises 107 of the dullest minutes ever committed to celluloid. The plot is confusing, but it contains enough lurid elements that Moonfire should have amounted to something. First, a manned space mission ends when the capsule falls to the ground in Mexico. Next, an ex-Nazi recovers the capsule and the pilot, triggering the blackmail/kidnapping. Then truckers are recruited to deliver ransom to the ex-Nazi, though they’re told neither what they’re hauling nor where they’re going. (Instead, the truckers stop at regular intervals to receive instructions.) As a result, most of the movie comprises endless, repetitive scenes of the truckers heading to their destination, and Moonfire has enough shots of engine maintenance and truck-stop convenience stores to qualify as a training film. Yawn. The cast includes journeyman actor Richard Egan (who’s barely in the picture), square-jawed B-movie staple Charles Napier, and boxer Sonny Liston. None does anything memorable, though Napier and Liston briefly fight a gang of bikers and both spend lots of time shirtless and sweaty. So, until Michael Parkhurst pops up on this blog to argue with what’s just been written here, that’s about all there is to say.

Moonfire: SQUARE

Last Embrace (1979)

          Director Jonathan Demme continued his steady climb from the quagmire of exploitation flicks to the rarified realm of mainstream movies with this intelligent but underwhelming homage to Alfred Hitchcock. Just as Brian De Palma did in his various tributes to the “Master of Suspense,” Demme emulates myriad tropes associated with Hitchcock—convoluted plotting through which the discovery of a simple object eventually leads to the revelation of a perverse conspiracy; elaborate action scenes involving iconic locations; the presence of a woman who’s either an angel or a devil, or both; and so on. Last Embrace even features music by veteran composer Miklós Rózsa, who scored the Hitchcock classic Spellbound (1945) and whose music for Last Embrace echoes the style of Hitchock’s most revered composer, Bernard Hermann. About the only thing Last Embrace doesn’t have that one normally associates with Hitchcock’s work is a crackerjack story. Instead, the turgid narrative—adapted by David Shaber from a book by Murray Teigh Bloom—stirs up danger and mystery without generating much in the way of emotional involvement.

          Roy Scheider stars as an American spy named Harry Hannan. In a prologue, Harry’s wife is killed during a bizarre standoff with an underworld figure. The story then cuts forward several months and dramatizes Harry’s attempt to reenter his professional life, despite having spent the intervening time receiving psychiatric care. The reason for all this backstory is to put viewers on edge once Harry starts to suspect that he’s been targeted for murder—is he a marked man, we are meant to wonder, or is he just nuts? The story then adds another layer of mystery, which is related to doctoral student Ellie Fabian (Janet Margolin), who rented Harry’s New York apartment during his hospitalization. Eventually, Last Embrace‘s scope broadens to encompass such random elements as academic rivalries, Old Testament lore, and prostitution. Things get a bit difficult to follow after a while, and a lot of the story strands feel underdeveloped.

          Nonetheless, Scheider’s a great fit for this sort of material, with his slow-burn line deliveries and wiry build making him quite convincing as a man of action on the verge of snapping. Alas, the script never lets him soar. Meanwhile, Margolin is likeable and pretty but hampered by a confused characterization and limited dramatic skills. Worse, there’s zero chemistry between the two, which renders the narrative’s romantic angle inert. Last Embrace features some highly enjoyable sequences, such as a bell-tower shootout between Scheider and a fellow spy (Charles Napier). Further, the film’s finale (which is set at Niagara Falls) has atmosphere to burn, and it’s interesting to watch Last Embrace in order to spot early attempts at cinematic devices that Demme revisited, to much stronger effect, in the 1991 masterpiece The Silence of the Lambs; for instance, the way he probes Last Embrace locations with a Steadicam represents a dry run of sorts for the way he used the same camera rig in The Silence of the Lambs.

Last Embrace: FUNKY

Thunder and Lightning (1977)

Yet another drive-in flick about rambunctious moonshiners, Thunder and Lightning would linger far below the pop-culture radar if not for the popularity of its leading actors, David Carradine and Kate Jackson. Working once again under the penny-pinching aegis of producer Roger Corman, Carradine pours on the rebellious charm to liven up the story’s aimless cacophony of chase scenes, explosions, and fist fights. In fact, Carradine is forced to contribute extra effort—if smirking can be described as effort, that is—because Charlie’s Angels spitfire Jackson is more or less a nonentity given the colorless nature of her co-starring role. Carradine plays Harley Thomas, a good ol’ boy whose graying uncles cook up moonshine that he delivers in his souped-up ’57 Chevy. Harley dates Nancy Sue Hunnicut (Jackson), a wealthy young woman who doesn’t realize her father, Ralph Junior Hunnicut (Roger C. Carmel), hides a massive moonshine operation behind the front of his legit soda-pop empire. Through the machinations of an unnecessarily convoluted story, Ralph Junior gets into trouble with the Northeast mafia, Harley gets into trouble with Ralph Junior, and everybody ends up chasing after a massive shipment of poisoned moonshine. The fast-moving picture also makes room for an alligator-wrestling preacher, a pair of incompetent Noo Yawk assassins, and Ralph Junior’s knuckle-dragging henchmen, two of whom are played by ’70s B-movie stalwarts George Murdock and Charles Napier. Although Thunder and Lightning is ostensibly a comedy, frenetic onscreen action is presented in lieu of actual jokes. Given the movie’s choppy editing, one suspects that director Corey Allen’s on-set camerawork was chopped apart during post-production to rev up the pacing, so if Thunder and Lightning ever had nuance (unlikely), it disappeared long before the movie hit screens. Still, the picture offers a few brainlessly diverting scenes, as well as some choice examples of redneck patois—like the moment when a motorcycle cop sees a pair of cars zoom by and exclaims, “Sweet kidneys of Christ, those boys were movin’!”

Thunder and Lightning: FUNKY