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

Swim Team (1979)

Several tropes of late-’70s youth cinema converge in Swim Team, a poorly made comedy about Southern Californian high-school kids navigating personal challenges while pursuing aquatic glory. Among other things, Swim Team is an anemic riff on the formula from The Bad News Bears (1979), a timid sex farce showcasing a parade of sun-kissed blondes (naturally, there’s a van tricked out as a bachelor pad on wheels), and a dimwitted celebration of inveterate partyers (two of the leading actors appeared in the preceding year’s bacchanalian hit Animal House). Writer, producer, and director James Polakof squanders nearly all of these elements, generating a movie that feels much longer than its scant running time of 85 minutes. Scenes of kids defying grownup authority figures are too few in number, and the film’s PG rating ensures that leering shots of attractive people in swimsuits never tip into sleaze. In other words, Swim Team is an underdog farce without teeth, and a T&A flick without skin. To the degree the picture has a story, it’s about the Whalers, a team with a long losing streak, partially because the on-again/off-again romance of star athletes Danny (James Daughton) and Erin (Jenny Neumann) makes the team’s roster unstable. For no discernible reason, overweight rich kid Bear (Stephen Furst) is on the team, though he spends most of his time carousing, drinking, and lounging. Things turn around when motivated new coach Johnny (Richard Young) enters the picture, and then a romantic triangle emerges between Johnny, Erin, and Danny. Will the star swimmers get over their drama in time to help the Whalers win a big match? Yawn. Polakof front-loads the movie with a lot of Furst to exploit the actor’s Animal House notoriety, but Furst doesn’t have the charisma to pull off direct-to-camera bits meant to frame Swim Team with irreverent flair. Similarly, jokes about topics ranging from a horny older woman to a little boy urinating in a pool to surly rival coach “Mr. Ouch” are inert at best, insultingly stupid at worst.

Swim Team: LAME

Cheering Section (1977)

Only someone determined to consume every teen-sex comedy from the ’70s can muster a reason to endure Cheering Section, which is as unfunny as it is unsexy. Corey (Tom Leindeker) and Jeff (Greg D’Jah) are stars on their high school’s football team. Jeff has a steady thing with the sexually uninhibited Terry (Patricia Michelle), but Corey is stuck in a rut of meaningless hookups until he becomes infatuated with voluptuous new cheerleader Melanie (Rhonda Fox). Most of the film’s “plot” tracks Corey’s unsuccessful attempts to score with Melanie, an endeavor complicated by the fact that her father is the football team’s new coach. Name a dopey signifier found in countless similar movies of the same period, and a pathetic version of that signifier is present in Cheering Section. Bikini-clad cheerleaders washing cars to raise money? An alluring substitute teacher giving a sex-ed lecture? Pranks traded between opposing schools? A romantic dune-buggy ride? Multiple (off-camera) trysts in vans? Each of these elements gets stripped of its lizard-brain appeal thanks to maladroit execution—excepting attractive young actors, everything about Cheering Section is ugly, from the narrative to the jokes to the cinematography to the editing. Cheering Section is also relentlessly demeaning thanks to leering camera angles and Neanderthal “characterizations” such as the desperate young woman known by the moniker “Handjob.” Through most of its lifeless span, Cheering Section drives, in a lackadaisical way, toward the big moment when Melanie puts out, and, by extension, the curvy actress playing Melanie loses her clothes. That this moment never happens—the picture freeze-frames for closing credits just beforehand—affirms why virtually any other activity is a preferable way to spend 84 minutes.

Cheering Section: LAME

Cherry Hill High (1977)

I will leave to someone else the task of determining which movie was the first to feature a plot about groups of teenagers competing to be the first to lose their virginity. Suffice to say that’s the storyline of Cherry Hill High, in which the competitors are five sexy high-school girls on a summertime bike trip supervised by an adult female chaperone with a permissive attitude toward teen sexuality. (She also digs getting it on in a vat of grapes, but never mind that.) Allegedly a comedy, Cherry Hill High creates one elaborate deflowering vignette for each of the teenagers. Some of these vignettes are mildly imaginative, some are grotesque, and some are both. And while the picture is photographed in a more or less competent manner, the combination of crude dialogue, tacky situations, and weak acting affirms the picture’s status as medium-grade softcore. In other words, it’s all about lingering looks at young female flesh, presented in the context of a male fantasy about sex-crazed girls. Not only do the ladies in the movie spend nearly all their shared onscreen time talking about how horny they are, but the picture even features a girl-on-girl scene designed very much for the male gaze. None of this is surprising or unusual given the climate of late-’70s teen-sex movies, but then again, nothing about Cherry Hill High is surprising or unusual. The picture is brisk and watchable (depending upon one’s tolerance for sleaze), and it delivers exactly what it promises. So if you dig the idea of one girl losing it underwater while a nearby shark goes crazy when her body releases blood, or the idea of another girl making it with a guy in a chicken suit on a Price Is Right-type game show, then this is the low-budget smutfest you never knew you wanted to see.

Cherry Hill High: LAME

Sunset Cove (1978)

Teen-sex comedy Sunset Cove has a serviceable premise, because it depicts horny adolescents from different cliques joining forces to protect a stretch of California coastline from avaricious developers. Yet learning that the film was directed by Al Adamson should give an indication of the many ways the picture squanders its potential. Although Sunset Cove is coherent by Adamson standards, inasmuch as the movie never gets lost in nonsensical subplots, everything is substandard. The acting is weak, the camerawork is rushed, the storytelling is sloppy, and the tone is all over the place. Many scenes aim for light comedy, as when kids jump into hang-gliders so they can buzz a splashy party thrown by the developers, but at one point Adamson stops the movie dead for an endless sex scene set inside a van, complete with repetitious shots of a buxom girl shoving her breasts into a dude’s face and rubbing her hand across the front of his shorts. For an interminable three minutes or so, Sunset Cove morphs from brainless comedy to sleazy softcore. Making bad movies worse was Adamson’s special gift. Notwithstanding a brief appearance by John Carradine as a retired judge, nobody familiar appears in the cast, and several of the one-dimensional characters have nicknames including “Bubbles,” “Chubby,” and “Moose.” As for the nominal protagonist, he’s ostensibly a straight-arrow nerd, as evidenced by his eyeglasses. His inexplicable transformation into a drunken streaker who propositions a girl after inadvertently seeing her naked is par for the course.

Sunset Cove: LAME

Team-Mates (1978)

Another shapeless late-’70s teen sex comedy that hides an exploitive nature behind a pseudo-feminist premise, Team-Mates doesn’t get a proper storyline until about a third of the film is over, and even then, the plot is secondary to loosely connected vignettes featuring feathered hair, pizza joints, and vans. Plus, like so many other drive-in duds of the same era, Team-Mates is a sex comedy without enough sex to satisfy the target audience, and without much in the way of real comedy. Pretty teen Vicki (Karen Corrado) gets tired of the way her football-player boyfriend, Brian (Max Goff), cheats on her with other girls, so instead of dumping him, she tries to earn his respect by demanding and receiving permission to try out for the boys’ football team. After all, Vicki’s the star kicker of the girls’ squad. Had that premise been the sole focus of Team-Mates, the movie could have become a passable battle-of-the-sexes romp. Instead, the flick gets mired in dumb subplots about anxious virgins, classroom shenanigans, and out-of-control parties. As for the main theme of gender equality, it receives lip service by way of clunky declarations from Vicki (“I want to be recognized as an individual!”). That the climax of the movie involves Vicki trying to score car rides to a big game indicates the overall witlessness of the picture. Incidentally, those who enjoy showbiz footnotes will dig learning that one scene in Team-Mates features Estelle Getty as a teacher flummoxed by a student who puts out a classroom fire by urinating, and that another scene features a drunken James Spader face-planting into a cake. Relatively speaking, these are high points.

Team-Mates: LAME

I Love My Wife (1970)

          Yet another would-be comedy cataloging the “difficulties” of being a successful white dude with a stable marriage, I Love My Wife stars Elliott Gould as Dr. Richard Burrows, a self-centered prick whose insatiable lust masks a deep reservoir of self-loathing. There’s actually a respectable character study buried inside the feeble jokes and wobbly attempts at sex farce, so viewers sympathetic to Gould’s shaggy screen persona might be able to cherry-pick this overlong picture and imagine a better film comprising only the most thoughtful scenes. However, doing so requires tolerance for watching Richard cuckold his long-suffering wife; objectivity and deceive his adoring mistress; and regularly ignore his two children, who didn’t ask to get born into a dysfunctional family. Moreover, those who track down I Love My Wife hoping for sexy laughs are bound to be disappointed—although the movie features a steady procession of attractive women in erotic scenarios, the protagonist is an unbearable putz.

          A prologue shows Richard becoming fascinated with sex during his childhood and, later, losing his virginity to a hooker. Then he meets and marries Judy (Brenda Vaccaro), but she falls from Richard’s favor the minute she reveals she’s not that into oral sex. Worse, she gains weight after bearing his children—hence pitiful scenes of Richard sleeping with a sexy nurse (JoAnna Cameron) and complaining to her that his wife doesn’t understand him. After that dalliance runs its course, Richard aggressively pursues a married model, Helene (Angel Tompkins), who leaves her husband to be with Richard. But of course she’s not enough for him, since no one ever will be. You begin to see how a serious treatment of this material might have clicked, and in fact most of the actors play the material so straight that I Love My Wife feels like a drama much of the time. Alas, it seems writer Robert Kaufman and director Mel Stuart were after hilarity, or at least satire. Viewed from that perspective, the movie’s an utter failure.

 I Love My Wife: FUNKY

Mag Wheels (1978)

Utterly generic teen-sex junk about pretty young white people cavorting and fighting in the Southern California sun, Mag Wheels revolves around a romantic triangle between van-driving jerk Steve (John McLaughlin); his possessive girlfriend, Donna (Verinka Flower); and hot new girl in town Anita (Shelly Horner). Only Anita is remotely sympathetic, since the filmmakers show snippets of her rough home life with a domineering ne’er-d0-well father. After Steve gets an eyeful of Anita wearing a bikini at the beach one day, he loses interest in Donna, so Donna conspires to ruin Steve’s life by telling the cops he’s a coke dealer. Then Donna convinces Steve that Anita was the narc, so he and several of his buddies try to gang-rape Anita for revenge until several lady truckers rescue her. (Yes, that’s really the plot.) The whole mess culminates in a Rebel With a Cause-style drag race. Whereas most teen-sex movies forefront lighthearted comedy, albeit of the crudest possible sort, Mag Wheels wobbles between jokey scenes (such as a weird subplot about Steve treating an underclassman like a fraternity pledge) and grim melodrama. None of it works. The jokes are laborious and mean-spirited, while the drama is contrived and downright cruel. Meanwhile, the acting is rotten and the filmmaking is rudimentary. Only viewers with insatiable appetites for ogling young flesh should seek out Mag Wheels, but fair warning—much more screen time is devoted to storytelling than to smut, unless fetishistic angles of trucks and vans count as money shots.

Mag Wheels: LAME

Dagmar’s Hot Pants, Inc. (1971)

Softcore sex comedy Dagmar’s Hot Pants, Inc. was produced by a consortium of American, Danish, and Swedish companies, filmed in English, and released stateside with an X-rating. Weirdly, the film later became part of the MGM library (primarily, it appears, for streaming purposes), so that means in two different decades, American movie executives thought American audiences wanted to see this thing. Such is and was the mysterious power of the porno-chic period, or else why would a disposable 1971 skin flick remain available for viewing in 2018? Oh, well. Dagmar (Diana Kjaer) is a Copenhagen prostitute about to quit the business, so the movie tracks her frenetic final day as a working girl. Between making arrangements to sell her apartment and relocate, she services several clients, doing everything from deflowering a shy young man to enduring the overzealous ministrations of a chubby orchestra conductor. Despite a few meager attempts at character development, this is strictly lightweight fare for the heavy-breathing crowd. To give a sense of what the movie offers, the wittiest scene features Dagmar calling fellow hookers for help with a busy schedule, only to get polite refusals from one girl who says “I’m just too beat” (while getting whipped), from another who says “I’m all tied up” (while she’s actually bound), from a third who says “I’m dead tired” (while screwing inside a coffin), and so on. Just as Kjaer’s confident portrayal suggests she could have handled real dramatic scenes, the almost-imaginative comic bits suggest cowriter/director Vernon P. Becker could have edged further into outright farce. Instead, they made tepid smut.

Dagmar’s Hot Pants, Inc.: LAME

Fairy Tales (1978)

Twisting children’s stories to insert adult subject matter is nothing new, so it’s not as if Fairy Tales—a sleazy sex comedy with musical numbers—gets points for novelty. In fact, it doesn’t get points for much of anything, though an honest review must acknowledge that perhaps one of every hundred jokes approaches wit. Furthermore, a couple of the songs are executed competently. Beyond those not-worth-the-trouble attributes, Fairy Tales is dreary. A prince awakes on his 21st birthday and discovers expectations that he will soon copulate, presumably as a means of demonstrating his ability to produce heirs, so three old men—his “sexperts”—provide a compliant woman who strips off her clothes and mounts the prince. He fails to perform, explaining that he only has eyes (and sex drive) for someone named Princess Beauty, occasioning a quest to find her. Along the way, the prince meets a horny Little Bo Peep (“I’m up to my ass in smelly old sheep!”), an oversexed Snow White (who sings about her “seven times a night” living arrangement), a frustrated Jill (turns out Jack is gay), and, eventually, the Old Woman Who Lives in a Shoe. She’s a madam, and her shoe is a brothel with lots of kinky BDSM chambers. (The Andrews Sisters-type number featuring naked dominatrixes is particularly distasteful.) Like other low-budget sex comedies of the ’70s, Fairy Tales is so boring to watch that one’s mind wanders to questions about the film’s creation. How did the producers find so many women willing to humiliate themselves onscreen? Why did so many has-been and/or never-were comedians agree to participate? And what the hell is Motown singer Martha Reeves doing here as a witchy chick singing a disco number from inside a smoking cauldron? Whatever. Even contemplating these notions for a moment requires giving Fairy Tales more time than it deserves.

Fairy Tales: LAME

Preacherman (1971)

          Porno director Albert T. Viola went legit, more or less, with this R-rated sex comedy about a con man who dresses as a preacher in order to woo gullible young women into bed. Preacherman offers satire of the most simplistic type, lampooning hicks too stupid to recognize obvious scams, backwoods babes too horny to reject odious advances, and country folk too narcotized by Bible verses to recognize bogus religiosity. Viola wears multiple hats, because in addition to cowriting, producing, and directing, he plays the lead role under a brazen alias: “Starring Amos Huxley as Himself.” Although he never acted or directed again following this picture and its sequel, Preacherman Meets Widderwoman (1973), Viola’s performance in Precherman is adequate. He seems confident while spewing Gospel-inflected bullshit, and his delight while frolicking with down-home honeys seems genuine. To Viola’s mild credit, he keeps the movie’s skin quotient to a minimum, so one doesn’t get the impression he made the picture as a means of getting his jollies.

          In the opening sequence, Amos gets run out of town by a sheriff who catches the ersatz clergyman sleeping with the sheriff’s daughter. Then we meet Mary Lou (Ilene Kristen), a dimwitted country girl who services four local brothers on a regular basis, apparently because she’s too idiotically compliant to draw the line between friendliness and fornication. Amos wanders onto Mary Lou’s farm and convinces her long-suffering father he can save the young woman’s soul. Specifically, Amos claims that Mary Lou should await nightly visitations from “The Angel Leroy,” who is of course an aroused Amos. Slow-moving and uninspired high jinks ensue. Made for the undemanding drive-in crowd, Preacherman delivers a low-octane shot of ribald mischief. Other movies with similar themes are more overtly crude, and the storyline is clear, so it’s not entirely surprising that Preacherman was successful enough to trigger a follow-up. Alas, Preacherman Meets Widderwoman, in which Amos duels with a distaff hustler, could not be tracked down for review.

Preacherman: FUNKY

The Statue (1971)

          Turns out David Niven’s close encounter with a streaker during the 1974 Academy Awards broadcast wasn’t the only time when the exhibition of male anatomy caused him grief. A few years earlier, the debonair Brit starred in The Statue, a randy UK/US coproduction in which the public display of a phallus is pivotal to the plot. Very much a product of its historical moment, The Statue tries for scandalous laughs by exploring subject matter that could not be explicitly depicted onscreen at the time, therefore creating a sort of wink-wink/nudge-nudge relationship with the audience. And though time has dulled any edginess the picture once possessed, luckily The Statue has other virtues, not least of which is Niven’s smooth comic timing. So even though the movie is quite trivial—a fault not uncommon to sex comedies—it’s palatable and relatively harmless.

          At the beginning of the picture, uptight linguistics professor Alex Bolt (Niven) receives the Nobel Prize for his creation of Unispeak, an international language meant to bridge divides between nations. For convoluted reasons, the American government spends a large amount of money to commission a statue commemorating Alex’s accomplishment, and Alex’s hot-blooded sculptress wife, Rhonda (Virna Lisi), gets the job. But when Alex gets an eyeful of the work-in-progress, he’s shocked: Not only is the giant statue a likeness of Alex in the nude, but the genitals on the statue don’t resemble his own. Thus begins Alex’s fevered quest to identify the model Rhonda used for inspiration, since he presumes that man must be her lover. Probing household staff for the names of men who visited Rhonda while she was working on the statue, Alex contrives to see the men naked by attending a hippie musical, visiting a steambath, and so on. In one especially goofy sequence, Alex slips into a photo booth and snaps shots of his own manhood for evidence, alarming those standing near the photo booth.

          It’s tempting to say this material was beneath Niven, as well as costar Robert Vaughn, but the mischievous spirit of the thing comes through in scenes featuring Monty Python’s John Cleese as a friend of Niven’s character. Cleese lampoons the repression inherent to British culture while also skewering the anything-goes ethos of the ’70s. In its best moments, The Statue is ribald and smart; in its worst moments, the movie is puerile and silly. Whether the good outweighs the bad is very much a matter of taste, though it should be said the Cleese/Niven scenes are a cut above the rest of the picture.

The Statue: FUNKY

Sweater Girls (1978)

Teen lust permeated the whole ’50s-nostaligia craze, but perhaps because the family-friendly TV show Happy Days (1974–1984) became the dominant image of this particular ’70s fad, there’s a tendency to think of ’50s throwbacks as wholesome. Projects like Sweater Girls put lie to that. A tacky sex comedy with interchangeable characters, repetitive episodes, and sleazy vignettes of girls removing their tight sweaters so they can chitty-chat while wearing only bras, Sweater Girls is all about the way hormones drive adolescents wild. Whereas better ’50s throwbacks place youthful longing into a larger sociocultural context, Sweater Girls is single-minded to a fault. That’s a shame, because the premise reflected in the movie’s title should have been the launching pad for naughty fun. After one too many episodes of boyfriends getting handsy at the drive-in or the malt shop, several high-school girls form a club called “The Sweater Girls,” vowing to protect their chastity. The good version of this premise might have taken a satirical path, depicting an experiment with feminism years before the concept went national. Instead, Sweater Girls creates one heavy-petting scenario after another, snuffing any hope of expressing a resonant theme. In one bit, a girl gets her guy hot and bothered, then strands him naked in the woods by stealing his car. Even leaning into that direction—punishing the boys for taking their girlfriends’ sexual availability for granted—would have been something. Alas, Sweater Girls is as formless as it is pointless, especially when it gets mired in dopey gags about stupid cops and public urination.

Sweater Girls: LAME

Starhops (1978)

Never mind the title or the Star Wars-ish opening text crawl—the only celestial things in this grubby sex comedy are the stars emblazoned on swimsuits worn by the main characters while serving customers at a drive-in restaurant. After owner Jerry (Dick Miller) quits the business, two of his waitresses, Angel (Jillian Kesner) and Cupcake (Sterling Frazier), take over. They spruce up the place, hire French cook Danielle (Dorothy Buhrman), and switch to barely-there costumes. Meanwhile, an evil businessman who wants to build a gas station at the drive-in’s location sends his son, Norman (Paul Ryan), to sabotage the restaurant from within. This leads to the scene during which he plants frogs and rats throughout the kitchen during a health inspection. Whatever. All the hallmarks of low-rent sexploitation are present in Starhops, from bad acting to leering camera angles to tacky sex puns. Perhaps because both the writer and director are female, the movie (which was released in both R- and PG-rated versions), stops short of the softcore humping one usually finds in pictures of this ilk. Nonetheless, it’s hard to praise Starhops for restraint given the lowbrow nature of the humor. In one scene, Norman gets hot and bothered while misinterpreting an overheard conversation between Danielle and a plumber who’s trying to wedge something into a pipe. Hearing Danielle exclaim “It will not fit—it is too big!” prompts Norman strip off his clothes, rush to Danielle, and suggest a threesome. Excepting the too-brief sequence featuring Miller at his manic best, Starhops offers all the shortcomings of the sex-comedy genre and none of the thrills.

Starhops: LAME

If You Don’t Stop It . . . You’ll Go Blind!!! (1975) & Can I Do It . . . ’Til I Need Glasses? (1977)

          The era of the Sexual Revolution unleashed a lot of ribald comedy, some of it culturally relevant and some of it merely vulgar, so something on the order of If You Don’t Stop It . . . You’ll Go Blind!!! was probably inevitable. A fast-moving compendium of crude sketches, the movie essentially adds pictures to a bunch of naughty one-liners, with most scenes lasting less than a minute. Barely any pretense is made of appealing to female viewers, or for that matter anyone but straight dudes, so women are largely portrayed as conniving, horny, or stupid. Similarly, shots of naked ladies are prevalent. The production values are roughly that of a low-end TV variety show, and the style is painfully broad, so the sum effect is numbing—any glimmers of wit are obscured by the adolescent sensibility permeating the whole enterprise. That said, things got much worse in the movie’s sequel (more on that in a minute), so it’s only fair to mention that some bits are passable.
          Consider the musical number in which underemployed hookers sing a tune with the refrain, “We’ve gotta get back on our backs!” Not brilliant, but mildly clever. Alas, most scenes fall short of that mark. A man runs screaming down a hospital hallway, followed by a nurse carrying a metal pot, so a nearby doctor exclaims, “Nurse Owens, I told you to prick his boil!” A gay man at a clinic complains that sex is “a pain in the ass.” A man in an elevator says to the woman ahead of him, “Ballroom, please,” to which she replies, “Sorry, I didn’t realize I was crowding you.” Taken separately, any one of these bits might be amusing in an I-hate-myself-for-laughing-at-this sort of way, but taken together, they’re exhausting. (The less said about the closing musical number, “Don’t Fuck Around With Love,” the better.) Most of the players are unknowns, though busty sex-flick regular Uschi Digard appears, as does second-rate Hollywood funnyman Pat McCormick.

          The diminishing-returns sequel Can I Do It . . . ’Til I Need Glasses? again comprises brief sketches. Brief descriptions of a few sequences should paint the unappealing picture. A chipper “story lady” reads the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, which culminates with Red lamenting that the Big Bad Wolf wants to consume her flesh instead of getting frisky: “Jesus,” she wails, “doesn’t anybody like to fuck anymore?” A guy walks into an IRS office wearing only a barrel, then walks out naked. A husband answers his doorbell, greets a rapist, and calls to his wife, “Honey, it’s for you.” A lengthy vignette featuring “The Lone Stranger and Pronto” revolves around Pronto’s shocked realization that he must suck poison from Kimosabe’s rattlesnake wound—which is located on the masked man’s penis. And so on. Robin Williams shot scenes for Can I Do It that were not used in the original release, but after he achieved fame, his footage was inserted for a theatrical reissue and subsequent home-video exhibition. Even though Williams never let decorum get in the way of a joke, it’s a bummer that Can I Do It endures in posterity as his first credit.

If You Don’t Stop It . . . You’ll Go Blind: LAME

Can I Do It . . . ’Til I Need Glasses?: LAME

Jokes My Folks Never Told Me (1978)

Among the few gags in the filthy sketch-comedy flick Jokes My Folks Never Told Me that are repeatable in somewhat polite company is this one—on their wedding night, a young husband notices that his wife is looking out the window during consummation, so he inquires why and she replies, “My mother said this would be the most beautiful night of my life, and I don’t want to miss a thing.” Yep, it’s a retrograde women-are-stupid joke, combined with carnality for an additional juvenile jolt. Here’s another one—an old man goes to a priest for help with erectile dysfunction, so the priest says, “Brother, I may be able to heal the sick, but I can’t raise the dead.” Dick joke? Check! Degrading portrayal of religion? Done! The makers of Jokes My Folks Never Told Me try to amuse and titillate with every frame of this movie’s 82 tiresome minutes, so of course a few zingers connect and a few shots of naked women provide cheap thrills. But, man, does this picture get old fast. The bestiality jokes. The homophobia. The misogyny. The objectification. And most of all, the unrelenting vulgarity. Consider this elaborate gag. A fellow enters a clinic that offers 36 pounds of weight loss in 12 or 24 hours. First he requests the cheap 24-hour option, so he’s put into a room with a beautiful topless girl wearing a sign that reads, “You catch me, you fuck me.” Excited, he trades up to the 12-hour option—a room where he’s trapped with a gorilla wearing a sign that reads, “I catch you, I fuck you.” Ugh. This sort of junk goes over gangbusters with 13-year-old boys and idiots of all ages, but it’s difficult to imagine any self-respecting viewer sitting through this barrage of bimbos, horndogs, rednecks, scumbags, and sketches so threadbare they wouldn’t make the 12:55 slot on the worst episode of Saturday Night Live.

Jokes My Folks Never Told Me: LAME

C.B. Hustlers (1976)

A grungy softcore flick thinly disguised as a sex comedy about truckers, C.B. Hustlers is so tacky that a pair of hookers who communicate with potential clients via C.B. radios identify themselves as “Hot Box One” and “Hot Box Two,” advertising their services with crude come-on lines (“Can I check your dipstick?”). In fact, much of the picture comprises drab footage juxtaposed with naughty over-the-airwaves banter. The anemic plot has something to do with police and reporters trying to expose the activities of prostitutes who drive a panel van up and down rural highways, using the vehicle as a portable brothel. About the closest the picture comes to a fully realized joke is the scene during which a client remains so focused on intimate relations with a hooker that he doesn’t realize the van is engaged in a high-speed chase with a police cruiser. To be fair, there are glimmers of backwoods wit in the dialogue, as when someone insults sex workers by calling them “double-clutching degenerates.” Yet the virtues of these comic elements are mitigated by the movie’s abysmal production values (many lifeless scenes are juiced with post-production sound), by the thoroughly rotten acting, and by the preponderance of sleazy sex scenes. While tame by softcore standards, the saucy bits comprise repetitive shots of large breasts being groped by horny truckers or squished against sweaty male torsos. The cast mostly comprises unfamiliar faces, though two “notables” are portly character actor Richard Kennedy (a staple in sex flicks) and, in a small role, Russ Meyer regular Uschi Digard.

C.B. Hustlers: LAME

Frasier, the Sensuous Lion (1973)

          Stories about shy young men receiving lessons in love from aging lotharios are fairly commonplace, and so too are stories about humans gaining deeper understandings about life by bonding with animals. Blending these archetypal narratives was a strange idea, but that’s what happens in Frasier, the Sensuous Lion, sometimes more timidly titled Frasier, the Loveable Lion. The plot revolves around a meek zoologist who becomes friends with an aging African lion. The animal has two remarkable qualities. First, he maintains extraordinary virility despite being the equivalent of an 80-year-old man, and second, he can telepathically communicate with the zookeeper. Somehow, the plot also involves a mobster with (implied) erectile dysfunction, a pair of bumbling hit men, and a public craze during which media reports about Frasier inspire countless Americans of a certain age to get frisky. You might begin to wonder if Frasier, the Sensuous Lion is an outrageous satire, but excepting one pointless f-bomb, it’s a tame picture with a PG rating. Because, hey, isn’t a lighthearted movie about a jungle cat with a preternaturally potent phallus suitable for viewers of nearly all ages?

          Marvin Feldman (Michael Callan) is a 34-year-old zoology professor who still lives with his domineering Jewish mother. He’s thrilled to receive an invitation to work at a nature preserve in Southern California, so he schleps his luggage and his pet bird across the country to begin his new adventure. Upon reaching California, Marvin inexplicably requests and receives permission to take a lion cub back to his hotel room. Somehow, this isn’t a red flag for his new coworkers. The next morning, Marvin is shocked that the cub trashed his hotel room while Marvin slept. Again, Marvin is a zoologist; one imagines he didn’t receive great marks in animal-behavior classes. Soon Marvin is assigned to study Frasier, patriarch of a pride with seven lionesses, all of whom Frasier satisfies regularly.

          Once they’re alone, Frasier begins transmitting messages into Marvin’s mind, explaining in voiceover (performed by Victor Jory) that he has special mental powers. Frasier talks about other things, too—and talks and talks and talks. He jokes about lions eating Christians in ancient Rome, he rhapsodizes about his first love (“her fur was the texture of spun gold”), and he whines about insatiable lionesses. Eventually Marvin’s coworkers learn about his “conversations” with the big cat, and word leaks to the press. As Frasier achieves stardom, seemingly every character in the story becomes sex-crazed. The preserve’s hot secretary, Minerva (Lori Saunders), warns tough-guy game warden Bill (Malachi Throne) not to watch Frasier in action, because doing makes Bill horny. Another preserve worker, Allison (Katherine Justice), becomes amorous around Marvin. A mobster sends hoods to kidnap Marvin so the mobster can learn the “secret” of Frasier’s virility. All of this is played straight, with nobody questioning the idea of fetishizing an animal’s sex life—in one scene, a geezer flashes his Frasier T-shirt as a means of communicating to his nurse that he got laid the night before.

          Frasier, the Sensuous Lion is the sort of odd movie that raises vexing questions. Who thought this was a good idea? Did no one realize the project was in poor taste? Who was the intended audience? And here’s the kicker. This movie was based on a true story. There really was a Frasier at a preserve in Laguna Hills circa 1972, and he really did get busy with the ladies. In fact, before this film was released, the big cat’s exploits were celebrated in a song called “Frasier (The Sensuous Lion)” by jazz great Sarah Vaughan. Don’t ask why—it was the ’70s, man.

Frasier, the Sensuous Lion: FREAKY

The Blazer Girls (1975)

After an initial theatrical run under its original title, The Blazer Girls, this cringe-worthy sex comedy hit screens again with an even more salacious moniker, Naughty Schoolgirls. By any name, the flick is quite dull, despite a few weak jokes derived from the story’s private-school setting. The plot concerns a group of nubile students who want to purchase a new bell for their beloved school. While that might seem innocuous, wait for the kicker—to raise money, the young ladies sell sexual favors. Oh, well. Things get off to an almost-promising start when an alluring literature teacher gets her students’ motors running with racy poetry, which acknowledges that the young ladies have brains. Later, girls complain about their limited financial opportunities, to the maudlin accompaniment of electric-piano noodling on the soundtrack. More elements like these would have given The Blazer Girls a welcome measure of humanity. Instead, sleaze rules. A running gag about a freaky security guard culminates with the fellow getting caught ripping the panties off a student. Another running gag, about a desperately horny male teacher, lampoons the dude’s failure to perform after agreeing to pay for sex. Despite its focus on carnality, The Blazer Girls is tame by the standards of other mid-’70s sexploitation romps. (For instance, there’s only one extended scene of people grinding away, and it’s played for romance instead of pure titillation.) Watching The Blazer Girls, it seems as if director Jean-Paul Scardino and his collaborators might have started the process with aspirations to making something respectable. Whether they lowered their sights because creating a real movie proved challenging, or because the money people wanted something closer to softcore, doesn’t really matter. The end result is a movie not worth anyone’s time.

The Blazer Girls: LAME

Class of ’74 (1972)

          Shapeless exploitation flick Class of ’74 comprises dippy dialogue, pathetic storytelling, and uneven acting, as well as the usual barrage of nudie shots and softcore humping. So why suggest, by use of the “Funky” rating, that Class of ’74 has redeeming values? Because, thanks to lots of “hip” conversations about sexual attitudes, the picture has minor value as a time capsule. Make no mistake, the film’s gender politics wilt upon close inspection, since the takeaway is that hot young coeds should use their bodies to land older men with money. Yet in the course of expressing retrograde ideas, Class of ’74 articulates aspects of social exploration that were intrinsic to the experience of being young in the early ’70s. An uptight girl tries a threesome. Ladies ask why America is so hung up on old ideas about age gaps and racial differences. And in one surprising sequence, several young people unload about their sexual histories, leading to the vignette of a gay man recalling the time he was molested by his high-school gym coach. If only because of that one scene, Class of ’74 differs from other skin flicks. Codirectors Mark Bing and Arthur Marks might not actually surpass the boundaries of softcore, but they jam into this dubious subgenre elements that can almost be described as thoughtful.

          Here’s the salacious storyline, a simple description of which should be sufficient for dispelling any impression that these remarks constitute praise. When her gal pals realize that leggy Gabriella (Barbara Mills) is sexually inexperienced, they conspire to hook her up with sex partners and sugar daddies. The process triggers a series of flashbacks, montages, and rap sessions delineating the sexual identities and proclivities of various characters. Among Gabriella’s gaggle of girlfriends, swaggering African-American babe Carla (Marki Bey) espouses a cynical get-it-while-you-can attitude; even-more-cynical redheaded beauty Maggie (Sondra Currie) describes how she uses men while trying to sleep her way to stardom; and most-cynical-of-all blonde hottie Heather (Pat Woodell) explains to Gabriella the virtues of screwing older, and often married, men with money. Every so often, Class of ’74 has a fleeting moment of insightfulness, but then it swerves back into the safe lane of drab sleaziness. In sum, Class of ’74 represents an interesting opportunity to learn what two male filmmakers thought (or hoped) young women were saying about sex back in the day.

Class of ’74: FUNKY