American Tickler (1977)

In the years before and after Saturday Night Live’s debut, a number of low-budget movies either anticipated or mimicked the show’s format of comedy sketches satirizing mainstream media as well as society at large. Among the least of these endeavors is American Tickler, one of several raunchy comedies that Chuck Vincent directed while moonlighting from his day job as a pornographer. As always, the fact that Vincent demonstrates nominal skill makes watching American Tickler frustrating, because one senses that he could have occasionally rendered passable entertainment if he didn’t pander so shamelessly to the lowest common denominator. In any event, American Tickler combines a trivial recurring story with a whole bunch of throwaway gags. The recurring story involves several groups of people chasing after a treasure chest, and this element of the movie is exactly is forgettable as it sounds. Some of the sketches are truly vulgar, such as the one about New York being terrorized by a giant monster called “King Dong,” which is thankfully never shown. Equally dopey sketches include “The Happy Cooker,” about the erotic culinary adventures of one “Xaviera Collander,” and a PSA for “The National Pervert Foundation.” As did other comedy pieces of the same vintage, American Tickler also tries to make light of senseless murder, hence the bit in which a pre-SNL Joe Piscopo provides color commentary for a contest involving crazed snipers. Probably the best American Tickler has to offer is the game-show parody in which contestants wager the lives of their loved ones against mystery prizes, because at least that bit says something, however trite, about greed. There’s nothing special here, but as junk sketch comedy goes, the most watchable bits in American Tickler are roughly equivalent to the worst stuff SNL ever aired, so set your expectations appropriately.

American Tickler: LAME

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

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

Blue Summer (1973)

How bad is the softcore “comedy” Blue Summer? The best joke in the movie—in fact, quite possibly the only joke in the movie—involves the two lead characters, both male, responding to the revelation of a pair of breasts by simultaneously popping the tops on their beer cans. Yep, it’s an ejaculation sight gag, and that’s as good as it gets, folks. (One could argue that a mid-movie vignette involving a larcenous hippie guy and his compliant gal pals approaches humor, but that scene degrades into tedious sexploitation.) So, should the self-preservation instinct fail you so greatly that you end up exposing your retinas to any of this film’s 79 grimy minutes, let it be known you were warned.  Written and directed by sleaze peddler Chuck Vincent—whose directional output includes both R- and X-rated fare—Blue Summer is one of many ’70s movies about dudes driving vans around the roads of America in order to get laid. When the movie begins, teenager Gene (Bo White) hops into his beat-up minibus, which he christens “The Meat Wagon,” then picks up his buddy Tracy (porn actor Davey Jones, billed as Darcey Hollingswoth) for a last hurrah before college. Soon after hitting the road, the dudes pick up two hitchhikers, who treat the lads to a romp in some woods just off the highway. That’s when Vincent goes to town, unleashing an interminably long sex scene with everything short of penetration. One is challenged to believe the actors didn’t get it on for real while Vincent was filming, but raunchy verisimilitude isn’t nearly enough to make Blue Summer interesting—unless the spectacle of average-looking people mimicking the libidinal acrobatics of porn stars gets your motor running. Most of Blue Summer’s running time comprises sexual encounters that Vincent presents at excruciating length, and because none of the actors evinces charisma, the whole enterprise becomes quite boring and clinical. (Let’s count how many times Jones squeezes breasts together so he can flail his tongue across them!) Toward the end of the movie, Vincent tries, pathetically, to introduce an element of pathos, but by that time, viewers have been bludgeoned into senselessness by the cavalcade of inept acting, grainy cinematography, and trite characterizations.

Blue Summer: LAME