Drum (1976)

Drum was a kind of sequel to Mandingo, which in 1975 had (for a short time) put the slavesploitation genre on the map. Mandingo actually took itself more seriously than you might expect, trying to be more than just trash. It was trash, but trash with some pretensions. Drum appeared in the following year and it is pure trash. Pure trash, but deliriously entertaining trash.

Drum is the name of a slave. We start with a brief prologue about his birth and upbringing. He is the offspring of a white woman, Marianna (Isela Vega) and a black slave. Marianna’s slave Rachel raised the boy as her own to avoid a scandal.

Now, twenty years later, Marianna runs the most celebrated whorehouse in New Orleans. Drum enjoys a comfortable enough life as a house slave. Then fate takes a hand.

The sinister degenerate Bernard DeMarigny (John Colicos) has organised a fight between two slaves to serve as entertainment for his friends but one of the slaves has been withdrawn from the fight by his master. Rather than be embarrassed in front of his friends DeMarigny coerces Marianna into allowing Drum to fight. DeMarigny’s slave Blaise (Yaphet Kotto) is a formidable opponent. After half-killing Blaise Drum decides he wants to be his friend. It will be an uneasy friendship.

DeMarigny offers Drum anything he wants as a reward for winning the fight and Drum decides he wants a woman. He gets Calinda (Brenda Sykes). As a bonus he also gets Blaise. Things turn very awkward however when DeMarigny tries to seduce Drum and not only gets rejected but gets clobbered as well. DeMarigny vows to get his revenge.

To get Drum out of the situation Marianna sells him to Hammond Maxwell (Warren Beatty). Maxwell’s plantation, Falconhurst, is devoted entirely to the breeding of slaves.

To set up a nicely explosive situation two more elements are added. Maxwell wants Marianna to find him a nice whore to help him raise his very troublesome daughter Sophie (Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith) but Augusta (Fiona Lewis) turns out to be a lady rather than a whore and being a lady she is determined to change things at Falconhurst.

Even more explosive is Sophie herself, whose chief hobby seems to be trying to seduce the male slaves. When set sets her sights on Blaise things are clearly going to get messy. If the master finds out he’ll have Blaise killed, if Blaise is lucky.

The stage is set for the standard slavesploitation ending - a revolt with lots and lots of violence.

The plot offers obvious opportunities for copious amounts of sex and violence. The sex includes every deviation you can think of. There’s a great deal of nudity. Most of it is entirely gratuitous but it doesn’t pretend to be anything else, which at least is refreshingly honest.

This was not an exploitation B-movie. It was a genuine big-budget A-picture. It was originally a Paramount project but ended up being released by United Artists. The switch to UA entailed major reshuffles with Steve Carver replacing Burt Kennedy as director, major cast changes and a complete rewrite of the script. It also meant a cut in the budget but the budget was still insanely high by exploitation movie standards. Not many exploitation movies have a crew of 150. And when they needed a mansion they built one, at a cost of one million dollars (and that’s one million dollars in 1976 money). They then burnt it to the ground.

With lots of money spent on it and an extremely generous 63-day shooting schedule you’d expect Drum to look sensational, and it does. The sets are superb. And they’re big! Having multiple Academy Award-winning cinematographer Lucien Ballard onboard also doesn’t hurt.

The movie’s biggest asset is Warren Oates. He gives a performance that very cleverly combines campiness and subtlety. He gets plenty of laughs but he makes Hammond Maxwell surprisingly complex. Maxwell might be a slave-owner but in his own bizarre way he’s a kindly man with his own individual but rigid moral code. He is definitely no melodrama villain. He’s the most interesting and in some ways the most sympathetic character in the movie.

Ken Norton can’t act at all but he looks the part. Yaphet Kotto can act, and does so to good effect. Fiona Lewis is a delight as Augusta, combining primness with spirit and managing to be scheming but in a good way. Pam Grier gets very little to do as Maxwell’s bed wench Regine (unfortunately most of her scenes were among the many that the MPAA insisted be cut). Rainbeaux Smith is great fun as the terrifyingly slutty Sophie.

While it tries to be a bit more serious at the beginning and at the end the middle part of Drum is outrageous and often very funny.

Drum is the kind of movie that no-one would dare to make today. While it ticks all the right political boxes and takes all the correct political stances (it is certainly very much an anti-slavery film) it still manages to be outrageously politically incorrect. There’s nothing pious or preachy here - despite the big budget this is unequivocally an exploitation movie and it delivers the exploitation elements with enthusiasm. Steve Carver was a graduate of the Roger Corman school of film-making and the end result is exactly like a Roger Corman movie made on an enormous budget.

One thing you have to keep in mind is that if this film seems a little disjointed at times that’s because it was cut to ribbons by the MPAA.

Kino Lorber’s Region 1 DVD includes an audio commentary by the director. The transfer is anamorphic and it’s excellent.

Drum is totally disreputable but it doesn’t care. It sets out to entertain and it succeeds. Highly recommended.

Blacksnake (1973)

Blacksnake is the one Russ Meyer film that nobody seems to like, not even hardcore Meyer fans. It’s nowhere near as bad as it’s usually made out to be but it’s easy enough to see why so many people disliked it.

After his brief and less than happy experience trying to make big-budget Hollywood movies Meyer wisely decided to return to independent productions. He also decided to try a dramatic change of genres. This was understandable enough. Once hardcore porn appeared on the scene it was clearly going to be more difficult for Meyer to find an audience for the sorts of movies he liked to make. And Meyer was adamant that he was going to have nothing whatsoever to do with hardcore porn. His solution was to concentrate on violence rather than sex.

Blacksnake was however a departure from the usual Meyer territory in lots of other ways as well. It was his first period picture, and his first foray into the world of blaxploitation. Blacksnake was to be a savage indictment of slavery.

The setting is the West Indian island of San Cristobal in 1835. The British had by this time abolished slavery but somehow Lady Susan Walker (Anouska Hempel) is still getting away with running her plantation with slave labour. To protect her position she has a private army of French-speaking blacks led by Captain Raymond Daladier (Bernard Boston).

Sir Charles Walker (David Warbeck) is intensely interested in Lady Susan’s activities. One of her many husbands was his brother Jonathan who mysteriously vanished and is presumed to be dead. Sir Charles is convinced that Lady Susan murdered him. He manages to get himself a position as Lady Susan’s book-keeper and sets off for the West Indies to discover the truth about his brother.

He soon discovers that San Cristobal is suffering a reign of terror at the hands of Lady Susan and her henchmen, especially the sadistic white overseer Joxer Tierney (Percy Herbert). A slave revolt is in the offing although no-one on San Cristobal can see it coming. Sir Charles uncovers the horrifying truth about his brother and he is also caught up in Lady Susan’s dangerous sexual games. The violence is pretty much non-stop and builds to a frightening crescendo.

One of the major problems with this film is that Meyer seemed to want to make a sincere and serious anti-slavery film but at the same time he was trying to make an exploitation film (which is after all what he was good at). There’s violence in most of Meyer’s movies but it’s always very stylised and very cartoonish and mostly played for laughs. The violence in Blacksnake is the exception to this rule - it’s over-the-top but it’s also horrifyingly realistic. This was obviously a conscious decision by Meyer but it can be a bit jarring since there’s also (as always in Meyer’s films) a fair amount of comedy.

An even bigger problem is that I’m not sure exactly what kind of audience he expected to reach. Fans of his earlier films were not going to like the combination of realistic violence and virtually no sex and nudity. Earnest white liberals who liked message movies such as Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and To Kill a Mockingbird were not going to deal with the sadistic violence. Blaxploitation fans were not going to like it because there’s no black hero to relate to. The one memorable black character is Captain Raymond Daladier, an effeminate French-speaking homosexual. Art-house audiences were not going to go to see a movie by a disreputable exploitation film-maker (Meyer would eventually gain a following among the film school crowd but that was some years in the future). Mainstream audiences were going to be shocked and mystified. So the danger was that it would end up finding no audience at all, which was in fact what happened.

The biggest problem of all is the acting. Percy Herbert gives the sort of performance that would have been perfect in a typical Meyer movie but it doesn’t quite work in this one. David Warbeck is atrocious. He’s both bland and irritating and comes across as a pompous do-gooder. Bernard Boston’s performance is an absolute delight but it’s as if the the major male characters are all characters in entirely different movies.

And then there’s Anouska Hempel. Nobody has a good word for her performance. Personally I don’t think she’s all that bad but again there’s the problem of the movie being unable to decide if it’s going to be serious or campy. Hempel is slightly too over-the-top for her character to be taken seriously but she’s not excessive enough or sufficiently larger-than-life to make Lady Susan work as a cartoon villainess.

Yet another problem is that there is zero sexual heat in this movie. The most successful of all movies in this slavesploitation sub-genre was Mandingo and it was successful because it had lots and lots of sexual heat which made the violence and sadism easier to endure. With all its other faults Blacksnake could have worked if it had had that kind of overheated perverse sexual tension. Anouska Hempel’s performance is however entirely sexless. Even the brief moments of nudity manage to be sexless. I don’t think it was entirely her fault - with a leading man like David Warbeck giving the impression he didn’t even want to touch a woman she had nothing whatever to work with. Many Meyer fans feel that the problem was that she did not have the kinds of physical attributes that one expects from a leading lady in a Russ Meyer film. That may have been a problem in that Meyer thought she was too flat-chested to be sexy and I guess it’s a bit difficult to motivate yourself to convey sexiness if your director thinks you have zero sex appeal. I don’t really think this was the real problem though. She may not have had the bust measurements of a typical Meyer starlet but Anouska Hempel was still a very attractive young woman.

What it comes down to is that for the story to work we have to believe that Lady Susan is the sort of woman who can drive men crazy with lust and the sort of woman who has insatiable lusts of her own and we just don’t believe it. So we have a Russ Meyer movie totally lacking in sexiness and largely lacking in fun.

It’s not a total loss. Blacksnake was shot on location in Barbados and it looks sensational. It’s also very stylish. It’s not quite Meyer’s usual style (there’s not so much emphasis on lightning-fast editing) but it works and he does come up with some very striking (and occasionally very powerful) images.

The best thing about Blacksnake is that its failure finally convinced Meyer to forget mainstream audiences and mainstream critics altogether and go back to making the kinds of movies he liked making. It also seems to have convinced him to go back to doing his own cinematography and his own editing. His next movie would be the wonderful Supervixens, which is just about the archetypal Russ Meyer movie. Blacksnake is a failure, although it’s an interesting failure and worth a look if you’re a dedicated Meyer fan.

Goodbye Emmanuelle (1977)

Goodbye Emmanuelle (later retitled Emmanuelle 3) was the third of the official Emmanuelle movies. It was also intended by Sylvia Kristel to be her last appearance in the role (although that proved to be not quite the case).

Goodbye Emmanuelle came out in 1977, two years after Emmanuelle 2, and it marks a significant departure for the series. The first thing that is noticeable is that the simulated sex scenes are much briefer, and much tamer, than those in the previous two films. They’re very tame indeed compared to those in the very steamy Emmanuelle 2.

Even more startling is a dramatic change in tone. Goodbye Emmanuelle tries to be a serious look at the actual consequences of the sexual revolution that the first two movies celebrated with such enthusiasm. Whether it succeeds or not is a matter of opinion but director François Leterrier certainly seemed to have his own ideas on the direction in which the series should go.

Emmanuelle (Sylvia Kristel) and her architect husband Jean (Umberto Orsini) are now living in the Seychelles. There’s not much to do there other than have sex but luckily that’s all that Emmanuelle and Jean are interested in doing.

They still have their open marriage and of course they’re blissfully happy because how could you not be happy if you’ve overcome all those silly antiquated notions like jealousy and possessiveness? Emmanuelle and Jean are a liberated couple and being liberated is the key to happiness. And yet there are signs that perhaps Emmanuelle is not quite as happy as she should be. She is starting to suspect that men treat her like she’s a whore. She’s even starting to suspect that they may have some justification for doing so. She’s finding that maybe jealousy isn’t so easy to leave behind. And she’s starting to wonder if a husband who enjoys watching his wife have sex with other men (and women) might not be much of a husband. He might not even be much of a man. Could it be that she has discovered that sexual freedom comes at a price? And that maybe the price is too high?

Some of Emmanuelle’s friends are also discovering that sexual freedom has its downside. One even suggests to our heroine that the problem with sexual liberation is that one day you get old.

This all comes to a head when she meets handsome sensitive film-maker Grégory (Jean-Pierre Bouvier). She’s attracted to him so naturally the first thing she does when they meet is to perform oral sex on him. Curiously enough this doesn’t seem to make him like her, or respect her. Emmanuelle is very confused by this.

In fact everything about Grégory confuses and disturbs Emmanuelle. He has quaint old-fashioned ideas about love and sex. He even believes it’s only possible to love one person at a time! He thinks jealousy is normal and natural. He thinks there is more to love than just having sex. He doesn’t believe in orgies or threesomes. This guy is seriously weird. The worst thing is, she can’t stop thinking about him. She wants him desperately. She doesn’t just want to have sex with him, she wants to be with him. You know, walking hand-in-hand along the beach and all that outdated romance stuff.

Emmanuelle is, for the first time in her life, falling in love. She’s also learning that other people actually have feelings (something of which she was entirely unaware).

Of course this means that Sylvia Kristel has to do a bit more serious acting than in the previous Emmanuelle films, and she does give a more complex performance that suggests that Emmanuelle might have some actual depth to her character.

The fact that this movie has some serious ambitions isn’t the problem. There’s no reason why you can’t make a serious movie about sex. The problem is that for the story to work, really work effectively, there needs to be a much more intense erotic charge in the developing relationship between Emmanuelle and Grégory. We need to be convinced that for Emmanuelle sex with someone she cares about really is a whole lot better than the empty meaningless sex she’s had before. The sex with Grégory needs to mean something, but that erotic charge just isn’t there and the emotional intensity isn’t really there either. It’s not that the sex scenes need to be more explicit - they just need to be more intense and more passionate.

As director François Leterrier knows how to use the exotic location and how to give the movie the lush look that was the Emmanuelle trademark. Unfortunately he shows no flair for the erotic, which is a bit of a problem when you’re making an erotic movie. He deserves credit for trying to explore the emotional ramifications of Emmanuelle’s lifestyle but overall the movie is just a bit on the dull side. When you have Sylvia Kristel as your star and she spends a good deal of her screen time naked and your movie is still dull you’ve definitely done something wrong.

The Region 4 DVD offers a pretty good transfer, with negligible extras.

Goodbye Emmanuelle is an interesting experiment that had real potential. As an erotic movie it is however decidedly limp. Possibly worth seeing if you’re a Sylvia Kristel completist but it’s difficult to recommend this one wholeheartedly.

Felicity (1978)

Felicity is a 1978 Australian Emmanuelle clone.

And when I say it’s an Emmanuelle clone I’m not kidding. It’s an absolute carbon copy of the Emmanuelle formula down to the smallest detail.

Emmanuelle had been an incredibly clever idea. The French believed that they had a surefire plan for taking advantage of the US X Certificate and making a ton of money. They would make a softcore porn movie but they had no interest in getting into grindhouses. They were going for the mainstream. A full-scale commercial release in major cinemas. They were aiming for the multiplexes. And how were they going to achieve this? Simple. They would make a softcore porn movie for women. It worked beyond their wildest imaginings. They didn’t just make a ton of money. They made many many tons of money. Emmanuelle proceeded to smash box-office records.

Not surprisingly the film spawned several official and countless unofficial sequels. It was not entirely surprising that Emmanuelle’s success would be noted in Australia where it was a massive hit. Producer-director John D. Lamond decided to jump on the bandwagon. His movie would not however be merely influenced by Emmanuelle. It would follow the formula in every single respect. It would be pretty much Emmanuelle Down Under.

There was more to the success of Emmanuelle than naked flesh. To appeal to women the production values had to be high, the cinematography had to be lush, there had to be an air of class about the production, there had to be beautiful and exotic locations, it had to be told entirely from a female perspective and the sex scenes had to be the kinds of sex scenes that women would like with the right mix of romance and stylish raunchiness.

John D. Lamond studied the blueprints and made sure that every element that had made Emmanuelle a success would be present in Felicity. Felicity looks much more expensive than it was and it looks fairly classy. Instead of Thailand it uses Hong Kong as the backdrop, which works just as well. The plot is the same - a sexually inexperienced young woman goes to the Mysterious Orient where she has a sexual awakening. The story is told from Felicity’s point of view. In fact she’s the narrator. There’s lots of steamy simulated sex with the right blend of romanticism and raunch.

The one thing Felicity doesn’t have is Sylvia Kristel. Kristel’s unconventional and exotic beauty and her overwhelming sexuality is certainly missed. On the other hand it has to be said that Felicity’s Glory Annen is very easy on the eye and she’s extremely good at combining innocence with wantonness. And she was a competent actress. She was actually Canadian but she does the Australian accent rather well (and it is unbelievably rare to find non-Australian actors who can do a convincing Australian accent). Lamond wanted her to sound like an educated cultured Australian (stop laughing, we do have such things here) and she manages it without any problems.

As the movie opens Felicity is a schoolgirl somewhere in eastern Australia. For some reason which I confess I didn’t quite grasp she is then whisked off to Hong Kong. Her first priority is obviously to lose her virginity and that is accomplished almost immediately.

Naturally, this being a softcore sex movie, Felicity will have to be initiated into the joys of lesbian sex. This is handled by hew new Hong Kong friend Me Ling (Joni Flynn). Me Ling is supposed to be Chinese while Joni Flynn is actually Indian but that’s a minor detail. Flynn isn’t much of an actress but her job is to be exotic, glamorous and sexy and to embody the dangerous but seductive flavour of the Orient, which she does. Who cares which part of the Orient she represents? And she has a whole bevy of naked young women with her to make sure that Felicity gets her initiation.

This is very firmly within the porn movie for women genre so there has to be a love story and that love story has to be central to the plot. That part of the movie succeeds well enough and it offers the chance for some very romantic sex scenes which presumably pleased the female audience. And insofar as the movie has any message it’s a surprisingly old-fashioned one. Felicity doesn’t just want to discover sex, she wants to discover love, and she finds out that sex is only good when it’s combined with love. For 1978 that’s a pretty extraordinarily traditional viewpoint for a porn movie to take.

Making a good softcore sex film as distinct from a routine one requires a bit of imagination. You wants to include lots of nudity and sex but you want to do so in a reasonably stylish way. Lamond clearly put some thought into this. Seeing a girl taking her panties off is sexy. Is there a way we can have Felicity taking her panties o0ff a dozen times in a few minutes. Yes there is! We’ll take her shopping for clothes. Naturally the first thing she wants to buy is new panties, but they have to be just right so she has to try on quite a few. And since we want to see how nice her new underwear looks there’s a perfect excuse for lots of close-ups of her nether regions, with and without panties.

It has to be said that Felicity is a remarkably clean girl. She seems to take a bath every five minutes. Since cleanliness is obviously very important to her it’s vital for us to see her take each and every bath. When it comes to finding ways to keep his lead actress naked for most of the film’s running time Lamond has few equals.

To give you an idea of just how closely this movie adheres to the Emmanuelle formula we see Glory Annen lounging naked in a cane chair that is almost identical to the one in which Sylvia Kristel lounged naked in Emmanuelle. In fact this was almost certainly intended as a deliberate homage. Just before the plane sex scene (of course there’s a plane sex scene since there was a very celebrated one in Emmanuelle) we see Felicity reading a copy of Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel on which Emmanuelle was based.

The Hong Kong setting works superbly. Watching the movie today it works even better since this is British Hong Kong, with all the glamour of a vanished world. Arguably it’s even more effective than the Thailand setting of Emmanuelle, Hong Kong at that time being an extraordinarily exciting (and decadent) place.

The visuals don’t quite have the lushness that Just Jaeckin brought to Emmanuelle but they’re stylish enough and there’s far more of a sense of vibrancy and excitement than in Emmanuelle.

The amount of nudity (including frontal nudity) in this movie is truly staggering. I don’t think we ever go more than a few minutes without another lingering loving shot of Felicity’s bare bottom.

Felicity certainly didn’t go anywhere near to equalling the immense commercial success of Emmanuelle but it did do extremely well in box-office terms, and apparently it did particularly well with women. According to Lamond Australian critics hated the film and were offended by its overt heterosexuality!

Umbrella’s Region 4 DVD offers a lovely anamorphic transfer and there are some very worthwhile extras including an audio commentary by director Lamond and star Glory Annen.

To me Felicity is in fact a more genuinely woman-centred erotic movie than Emmanuelle. It takes the Emmanuelle template but it adds a slightly different flavour - it’s definitely more straightforwardly romantic. Lamond obviously felt that if the movie was going to reach women it had to be tasteful and despite all the nudity and sex it really is tasteful. Luckily it succeeds in being  tasteful without sacrificing the eroticism. It also has playfulness, a few moments of humour and even perhaps just the tiniest touch of wit.

It’s very sexy in a very classy way and if that’s what you’re after then it delivers the goods. Highly recommended.

Daddy, Darling (1970)

Daddy, Darling is a 1970 softcore flick about incest so you know this is going to be a sleazy exploitative little film. Except that it’s a Joe Sarno film, and it’s one of his more artistically ambitious efforts (and Sarno could be pretty artistically ambitious). And it isn’t really sleazy or exploitative at all. Sarno approaches his subject matter seriously and with sensitivity, as he often did, and on this occasion it works surprisingly well.

Katja Holmquist (Helli Louise) is a 19-year-old girl whose father Eric (Ole Wisborg) has brought her up on his own since her mother’s death. Katja and her father are very close, which is natural enough. The trouble is that Katja is a teenager, her hormones are raging and she’s a virgin. She’s becoming a bit too attached to her dad. It’s perhaps unfortunate that her father has chosen this moment to remarry. He is going to marry Svea (Gio Petré), a woman for whom Katja has already conceived a certain dislike. It’s not especially unusual for a girl in this situation to be somewhat jealous now that she’s no longer going to be the sole focus of her father’s affections, and it’s not unusual for the girl to feel a little bit emotionally confused. Unfortunately Katja takes things a bit further. Her feelings for Eric have started to become sexual. In the normal course of events she’d probably grow out of this phase without any damage being done but now that there’s another woman staking a sexual claim on her father Katja’s feelings have taken on a new urgency. She’s determined to stake her own claim first and she starts making frankly sexual advances to him and he (perhaps naturally) either fails to get the message or deliberately chooses not to admit what is happening.

As things get more and more tense Katja develops a friendship with a female artist. The artist is your basic predatory lesbian (and where would sexploitation films be without predatory lesbians) but Katja is kind of naïve about such matters and has no idea of her friend’s tastes. Katja’s naïvete is of course part of her problem.

Sarno’s approach was always more successful when he had a decent cast and that is something that doesn’t happen very often when you’re making low-budget sex films. In this case he was pretty lucky.

Daddy, Darling was made during Sarno’s Swedish period. Making films in Sweden generally allowed him to find reasonably good acting talent not afraid to appear in movies about sex. Ole Wisborg as Eric and Gio Petré as Svea are certainly quite competent.

Helli Louise as Katja is another matter. She’s more than competent, she’s very very good. She clearly decided to approach the role as a real acting job and she proves she has the acting chops to do so. It’s a nicely nuanced performance. Katja is dangerous, but she’s dangerous because she’s confused, not because she’s evil or calculating. She’s not crazy and she’s not a scheming little minx.  She’s a teenager. She has the emotional and sexual desires of a woman but she has no clear idea what to do with those desires. She’s not malicious. She can be conniving, but she is conniving the way a child is conniving.

Helli Louise is very pretty and very sexy but she’s not an obvious sex kitten type, and that’s important because Katja is not a sex kitten.

All three main characters are really fairly ordinary people doing their best but sometimes not handling things as well as they should.

Sarno is being very ambitious in this film. He was often ambitious. The results didn’t always live up to the intentions. As a writer he could come up with decent story ideas but he had no great ear for dialogue. As a director he lacked the visual brilliance of a Radley Metzger. What Sarno had was a genuine fascination with the emotional dimensions of sex and his best films did have some emotional depth. And while he may not have had great stylistic flair he knew how to shoot a sex scene that combined eroticism with emotion.

Of course Sarno’s ideas on how to shoot sex scenes weren’t always quite what you expect in a softcore sex film. There’s a fine example in Daddy, Darling. Katja is staying for a few days at a female friend’s house. They have to share a bed. That becomes a slight problem when Katja’s friend decides she wants to share the bed with her boyfriend as well, and she and the boyfriend start having sex. This is an obvious opportunity for a hot sex scene with a hint of kinkiness. So what does Sarno show us? Almost nothing, as far as sex is concerned, just dim blurred shapes in the background. Instead the camera focuses entirely on Katja’s eyes as she lies in bed beside the love-making couple. It focuses on Katja’s eyes for the entire sex scene. The sex in the background is of no interest to Sarno. He is interested in Katja’s reaction. It’s a very effective scene but it’s going to be very disappointing for anyone hoping to see some hot sex. It’s a pretty bold approach to take in a softcore skinflick. We do however get some insight into Katja’s problems. When it comes to sex she’s really all at sea. She’s not afraid of sex but she’s rather bewildered by it.

In another very Sarno sex scene all we see is Katja’s panties around her ankles, and we see her face. That’s all. Perhaps not the sort of scene to please the distributors but artistically it’s devastatingly effective.

This is a movie that certainly deals with incestuous feelings but there’s no actual incest. There’s only one sex scene between Katja and her father and it’s a dream sequence. The subject is handled sensitively and with sympathy for the characters concerned and Sarno’s approach works.

Seduction Cinema released this film as part of their Retro Seduction Cinema line. The transfer has major strengths and major weaknesses, presumably reflecting the source material. There is a lot of print damage. On the other hand the image is reasonably crisp and the colours look pretty good. And there are a few extras including an interview with Joe and Peggy Sarno.

Of course much depends on what you are actually wanting out of this movie. As softcore porn it’s perhaps not a great success. There’s a fair bit of nudity and sex but it’s all very tasteful, possibly too tasteful for some. As an emotional/sexual melodrama it is however fairly successful. And Helli Louise’s performance is superb. This is a very Joe Sarno movie even by Joe Sarno standards and it’s one of his best efforts. Highly recommended.

Hollywood Babylon (1972)

Hollywood Babylon is a softcore sexploitation expose of Hollywood in the silent era. It’s a clever idea - take lots of stock footage from the First World War and the 1920s and lots of footage from silent movies, purporting to tell the story of Hollywood, then mix in some hot softcore sex scenes illustrating the most colourful episodes of Tinseltown depravity. So you get an 87 minute movie but you only need to shoot about 40 minutes of new footage and since all of the new footage is wall-to-wall nudity and sex you still have a potent little sexploitation feature.

There’s also the advantage that all the sex scenes are period scenes, with Jazz Age trappings and clothing (although the ladies tend to shed their clothing pretty quickly). 

And there’s the further bonus that all this depraved and illicit sex involves celebrities.

It’s based loosely on Kenneth Anger’s infamous 1965 book Hollywood Babylon. The book details the degenerate lifestyles of Hollywood’s rich and famous in salacious detail although to a large extent it’s mere gossip. Anger assumed that if there was a scandalous rumour about a Hollywood star then it must have been true. Of course the Hollywood elite did lead lives of staggering excess and there was undoubtedly a great deal of illicit and often perverted sex, even if the particular stories retailed by Anger were not necessarily true.

True or not these stories do make great material for an exploitation movie. And they’re done in full colour, in a fairly glossy style (by low-budget movie standards) with some very attractive actresses and absolutely copious quantities of sex and nudity and assorted naughtiness.

During the 20s Hollywood was rocked by a series of scandals, the most famous being the Fatty Arbuckle case. Aspiring actress Virginia Rappe died soon after attending a party thrown by Arbuckle at a San Francisco hotel. Arbuckle, one of the most popular silent comics, was accused of raping her and causing her death. He was acquitted but his career was ruined. Anger, and the fim-makers, have chosen the most outrageous and titillating of the many rumours surrounding the case, the rumour involving a somewhat unconventional use of a champagne bottle as a sex aid.

Equally over-the-top is the sequence involving Charlie Chaplin, his child bride, his aversion to ordinary sex (given that he’d been trapped into marriage by a pregnancy) and his efforts to persuade his bride that his favoured alternative to regular sex was actually perfectly normal, even though it was contrary to the California Penal Code. She finds his story a bit hard to swallow, if you’ll forgive my unforgivable pun.

And then there’s the celebrated story about the It Girl, Clara Bow, being serviced by an entire football team, a proceeding from which (in the movie) she seems to derive considerable satisfaction.

For cult movie fans the highlight is probably going to be Uschi Digard as Marlene Dietrich, a sequence featuring not just lesbian sex but lesbian domestic violence (you would certainly not get away with such a scene today), some kinky dressing-up games and some fairly hot heterosexual sex as well (Marlene being a gal who played for both teams).

Various drug scandals are dealt with as well, and of course if you’re going to deal with drugs you naturally want the actresses to take their clothes off. There’s also a rare orgy scene that manages to be genuinely decadent, and even genuinely erotic.

The totally episodic format of the movie meant there was no need to worry about a plot and the newly filmed inserts could be concentrated entirely on the sinful doings of the stars.

Hollywood Babylon is included as an extra on Bayview Entertainment’s DVD release of The Beast and the Vixens. Hollywood Babylon is in some ways the more entertaining film.

Hollywood Babylon is amusingly scandalous, genuinely sexy, quite kinky and it achieves a truly decadent feel. It succeeds rather well in doing what it sets out to do. Recommended.

The Pom Pom Girls (1976)

The Pom Pom Girls is a 1976 Crown International release that is probably more accurately described as teensploitation than sexploitation. If you want to get some enjoyment out of this one you need to accept it on its own terms. This isn’t Citizen Kane. It’s a teen comedy/romance.

The four central characters are all students at Rosedale High School in southern California. Jesse (Michael Mullins) and Johnny (Robert Carradine) are football players, Laurie (Jennifer Ashley) and Sally (Lisa Reeves) are cheerleaders. They’re typical teenagers, obsessed with sex but confused by love, rebelling against authority but craving some sort of structure to their lives, and desperately trying to have a good time because they know this is the best chance they will ever have of having fun.

Sally is dating Duane and Duane is a worrying kind of guy, much too tightly wrapped for his own good and inclined towards violence. Johnny has been trying to steal Sally from Duane and he’s finally getting close to achieving that goal. Everyone thinks Johnny is crazy, Sally thinks he’s crazy, but it’s a charming and rather endearing kind of craziness, the kind of craziness that teenage girls can find pretty attractive.

Jesse has been pursuing Laurie. Laurie’s not too certain how she feels about this. Jesse has the reputation of being the school stud and he’s a start football player who’s much too sure of himself. For Laurie these things are both a turn-off and a turn-on but Jesse has fallen for her pretty hard and she’s the kind of girl who wants a guy who is going to be devoted to her.

Rosedale High School has a fierce football rivalry with nearby Hardin High. It’s more like open warfare than rivalry. This provides the opportunity for plenty of pranks and counter-pranks and these in turn provide much of the movie’s comedy, and in fact some reasonably neat comic set-pieces such as the fire engine theft.

The Pom Pom Girls was pretty obviously inspired by American Graffiti although it’s really a film without much in the way of artistic pretensions. Insofar as it’s trying to achieve anything it’s trying to capture a certain spirit, which it does fairly successfully.

This movie doesn’t try too hard to make its four main characters excessively likeable and sympathetic. Teenagers as a breed are neither likeable nor sympathetic. They’re self-involved, impulsive, selfish, thoughtless and they have the attention span of a gnat. They’re exasperating and these four main characters can be exasperating as well. Jesse is way too intense. Johnny is reckless and unstable and his baiting of Sally’s ex-boyfriend Duane is foolish and immature. It’s the sort of thing a teenager would do. Sally’s behaviour towards Duane is at times unnecessarily cruel. Laurie is emotionally capricious. This is something that I kind of like about his movie. It does have a certain realism to it.

On the other hand these characters don’t quite cross the line into obnoxiousness. They are doing their best to cope with life and they’re being overwhelmed by their hormones and their emotions.

This is a movie that has the attention span of a teenager. It’s almost plotless, jumping from incident to incident with no real sense of purpose or direction, rather like a teenager’s emotions. This actually works in the film’s favour.

If there’s no core plot, there vague outlines of what could have been fully developed plotlines - the Jesse-Laurie and the Johnny-Sally love stories, the friendship between Jesse and Johnny, the conflict between the highly strung Jesse and the authoritarian football coach. the battle between Johnny and Duane over Sally.

There is a bit of nudity but less than you’d expect and the sex scenes are very restrained indeed. This is strictly PG stuff. Even the totally gratuitous girls’ locker room scene with lots of naked cheerleaders has a kind of wholesome quality. These are basically nice if high-spirited girls who just happen not to have their clothes on. The female audience is not neglected either - they get to see the football players hit the showers.

Perhaps the best thing about The Pom Pom Girls is that it manages to avoid being mean-spirited. None of these kids really wants to hurt anybody. If they do hurt anybody it just happens in the thoughtlessly accidental way of teenagers. Mostly they just want to have a good time.

The four leads are all surprisingly not too bad with Robert Carradine being the standout. Cult movie fans will want to look out for Cheryl ‘Rainbeaux’ Smith in a small role.

The movie certainly has an appealing time capsule quality. This is a southern California of innocence and prosperity, of endless beaches, of sunshine, of good-looking football players and beautiful girls. Sex was safe and fun. The worst potential calamity on the horizon is the possibility that their football team might be beaten by Hardin High’s team. Maybe this was all a bit idealised even in 1976 but seeing a movie like this today one can’t help feeling that we’ve lost much of our capacity for innocent fun.

The version included in Mill Creek's Drive-In Cult Classics 32 Movie Collection seems to be the same as BCI's Starlite Drive-In Theater release. It’s an adequate if not great transfer. There has been a more recent Blu-Ray release from Scorpion Releasing but I’m not convinced I’d want to spend the money getting this one on Blu-Ray.

The Pom Pom Girls is pretty enjoyable if you’re in the right mood and your expectations aren’t too high. Recommended.

The Beast and the Vixens (1974)

The Beast and the Vixens (AKA The Beauties and the Beast AKA Desperately Seeking Yeti) is a movie of quite staggering awfulness, and yet it has a certain morbid fascination. It is almost impossible to imagine what this movie was intended to be. It’s not scary enough to be horror. It might have been intended as parody although I do have a feeling that most of the humour is unintentional. There are some fairly explicit sex scenes but not enough of them to make this a softcore porn movie. There’s a high camp quotient but since this was 1974 it’s difficult to know how deliberate that might have been.

It’s amazingly badly made. We’re talking Ed Wood levels of incompetence here. The script is frighteningly incoherent. Even the average out-and-out softcore skin flick has a tighter plot than this film.

What makes it worth watching is that you have absolutely no idea what’s coming next. There are three or four sub-plots that have no connection whatsoever with each other, and in some cases the sub-plots just sort of suddenly stop.

The movie takes place in the Pacific Northwest. Bigfoot Country. And Bigfoot plays a major part in this movie. Bigfoot has been collecting girls. He snatches them and takes them to his cave. When he gets them to his cave, he....well, he feeds them and looks after them.

While this is going on city girls Ann (Jean Gibson) and Mary (Uschi Digard) have taken a remote mountain cabin to get away from it all. Mary is a bit frightened by being in the country so Ann gives her a cuddle to comfort her. Since they’re in bed together and they’re naked this is naturally going to lead to some hot girl-on-girl action, except that it doesn’t. Maybe Ann was just trying to comfort her? Maybe the sex scene got cut, but there are quite explicit sex scenes later in the picture.

Ann and Mary meet up with a bunch of dirty stinking hippies who seem to be living some kind of communal lifestyle in the woods. Ann and Mary immediately take their clothes off and go skinny-dipping with a particularly loathsome male hippie. It is an excuse for Uschi Digard to get naked.

Whole all this is going on there’s a couple of hardened criminal types who are trying to find the loot from a robbery. The loot consists of a valuable coin collection but it’s disappeared from the place where they stashed it. One of these hoods has however noticed a hippie chick wearing a coin around her neck, a coin that looks like part of the collection they’re looking for.

There’s also a strange old hermit guy but I have no idea what he has to do with anything.

This movie does have one major thing going for it - the nude western gunfight scene. It makes no sense whatsoever but it’s the one truly inspired moment in the movie.

The acting is astoundingly horrible. The fact that many of the major characters are hippies and therefore inherently detestable doesn’t help. Uschi Digard’s voice was dubbed in many of her films but this seems to be her own voice. Her very thick Swedish accent is kind of charming. Her acting is terrible, but in an amusingly bad way. Look out for Sharon Kelly in a small role, fully clothed!

One of the hippies gets to sing a song. It’s the sort of song that makes you hope that all the hippies in the movie will die horribly.

The Bigfoot makeup is simply dire. 

Bayview Entertainment’s DVD offers two different versions of the film. There’s a widescreen transfer of what is claimed to be the R-rated theatrical release, which clocks in at 71 minutes. It’s an OK transfer but there is quite a lot of print damage. There’s also a fullframe transfer of the unrated version, clocking in at 84 minutes. This transfer is fairly poor. On the other hand there are some extras. There’s a (brief) audio commentary by Fred Olen Ray. He makes the interesting suggestion that this was a kind of composite movie, that the original movie did not feature Bigfoot at all and that the Bigfoot scenes were filmed later and combined with the original footage to make a totally different movie. That would certainly explain at least some of the movie’s plot incoherence and some of the  jumping about between completely unrelated elements. And speaking of extras, there’s a complete bonus movie, Hollywood Babylon, with Uschi Digard as Marlene Dietrich! It’s a softcore expose of Hollywood depravity during the silent era. So all in all the DVD isn’t bad value.

If Ed Wood had made a Bigfoot movie with softcore sex scenes it would have been very much like The Beast and the Vixens. It’s a terrible movie but you have to keep watching. Recommended, for its oddity, its camp value, its unpredictability and because there just aren’t enough nude western gunfight scenes in movies.

Malibu High (1979)

When you watch a movie made in the 70s with a title like Malibu High you know what to expect. In this case your expectations are going to prove to be dead wrong. This is not a teen comedy, or a sex comedy. It’s not a teen melodrama. Deciding what it actually is presents a bit of a problem. There is teen melodrama here and the central character is a high school senior but mainly this is a crime thriller - although you won’t know that until about halfway through the picture. 

Kim Bentley (Jill Lansing) is just your average high school student but things are starting to go wrong for her. This is 1979 and the American Dream is still alive and this is southern California, the very epicentre of the American Dream. If you’re a bright, pretty high school student and you have rich parents the world is your oyster. Unfortunately Kim is not exactly a bright student. She’s flunking every class. And her parents are not rich. Her father killed himself and her mother struggles to keep things afloat financially. Worst of all her boyfriend Kevin (Stuart Taylor) has dumped her. To rub salt into the wound he’s dumped her for spoilt rich girl Annette Ingersoll (Tammy Taylor).

Everything Kim wanted seems like it’s being taken away from her. She had desperately wanted to graduate from high school, and she is still madly in love with Kevin. Kim decides that something has to be done and she’s going to do it. The first thing is to do something about her grade point average. That’s not too difficult. If her teachers won’t listen to her she’ll just sleep with them and then blackmail them.

Kim also decides she needs to earn some money. For a girl with her modest accomplishments being a hooker seems like the best bet. Tony (Al Mannino) is a sleazebag dope dealer who operates from a van which also serves as a kind of mobile mini-brothel. Kim is soon the star attraction. In fact she’s the only attraction but she’s a major drawcard.

Soon Kim has attracted the attention of a big time pimp, Lance (Garth Howard). This is a chance to earn real money and to show up that snooty bitch Annette. It’s not quite as simple as that however. Kim has taken a step into another world, the world of organised crime. At this point the movie changes gears and Kim starts to change as well, discovering a side of herself that she might have been better off not discovering. Lots of good girls go bad but very few do so quite as spectacularly as young Kim.

It’s hard to say just how seriously we’re supposed to take this picture. It’s not played for laughs at any stage but the plot is utterly outrageous. In some ways it’s more like a 1950s juvenile delinquent movie than a 70s teen exploitation movie. Everybody’s playing it straight but the content is totally off-the-wall.

This was the last of the handful of films directed by Irvin Berwick and while his approach is straightforward and conventional it’s effective enough. The scenes of violence in the latter part of the movie are handled well. He also knows how to pace a movie.

The acting is pretty average for the most part (sometimes below average) which is not surprising for a low-budget movie released by Crown International and destined for the drive-in circuit. The one exception, and it’s a major exception, is Jill Lansing as Kim. She gives the character real depth. Kim is not exactly a sympathetic character but at least we can understand how she got to where she is and we can see that her emotional wounds are very real and very raw. This was Jill Lansing’s only movie role and she then dropped out of sight never to be heard of again. Which is a pity since this performance should have landed her parts in more prestigious movies.

As an added bonus we get to see a very great deal of Miss Lansing’s naked breasts and rather lovely they are too. For the late 70s this is a movie that (despite the subject matter) is fairly restrained on the sleaze front. Apart from a brief glimpse of pubic hair early on all we see is breasts (admittedly with great frequency) and the sex scenes are positively coy. Miss Lansing’s breasts were however presumably enough to keep the attention of young male viewers at drive-in screenings and they also get a fair amount of violence. Unusually though for this type of movie there’s also enough to keep female viewers interested with Kim’s romantic woes and her vendetta with the self-satisfied rich girl Annette.

Kim’s confrontation with the headmaster is the film’s most bizarre episode. It’s bizarre in a good way. I think. It’s definitely bizarre in an interesting way.

A very pleasant surprise is the extremely good anamorphic transfer included in Mill Creek’s Drive-In Cult Classics: 32 Movie Collection. I believe there’s also been a Blu-Ray release!

Malibu High is a strange one. I can’t decide if it’s a bad movie with a good movie inside it struggling to get out or if it’s a good movie with a bad movie inside struggling to get out. It is original and it is entertaining. It’s perhaps too dark in tone to qualify for camp status, but much too outlandish for the arty crowd. And probably too weird for mainstream audiences at the time. It was popular enough with its intended audience. If the story is too over-the-top for you you can always just wait for yet another topless scene from Jill Lansing. 

Movies like this are the reason why it’s worth delving into the strange and often murky world of drive-in fodder. Every now and then you come across a classic of the genre such as this. Highly recommended.

Teenage Bride (1974)

Teenage Bride is one of those movies that should not be judged by its title, given that there are no teenagers in the movie and no brides! It’s a softcore sex comedy with its main drawcard being its star Sharon Kelly, one of the legendary stars of adult movies in the 70s and 80s.

The mention of the term sex comedy might well scare off some viewers. 70s sex comedies  can be among the most dire movies ever made. Teenage Bride however has several things going for it. There’s an enormous amount of pretty intense sex. There’s a lot of comedy and quite a bit of it is genuinely amusing. And it has Sharon Kelly.

Charlie (Don Summerfield) is a loser. He can’t hold down a job for more than a few weeks and his latest position, as a typewriter salesman, is already hanging by a thread. As his boss points out to him, after two weeks on the job he’s already three weeks behind on his work.

Charlie’s marriage is also in trouble. His wife Sandy (Cyndee Summers) despises him and she has taken to being rather generous with her sexual favours - not to Charlie but to other men. Now Charlie’s stepbrother Dennis (Ron Presson) has arrived to stay for a few days. Dennis is a straight arrow bur Charlie is convinced that Sandy will seduce him in short order. And he’s right.

Meanwhile Charlie is having an affair with Marie (Sharon Kelly). Marie in fact is the woman he really loves. He made the biggest blunder of his life in marrying Sandy instead of Marie.

Charlie might be a schmuck but he has some cunning. If he hires a private detective to prove that Sandy is bedding Dennis he could get a divorce and marry Marie. Unfortunately the PI he hires (played by Elmer Klump) is a drunk whose main interest in life, apart from booze, is having sex with his glamorous secretary Abigail (Cheri Mann). Nonetheless the PI assures him that he can get the photos Charlie needs, no problem.

Of course hiring an alcoholic to do a job is always a bit of a risk and the PI makes a mess of things while the erotic tangle of Charlie, Sandy, Marie and Dennis gets more and more tangled, complicated even further by Charlie having sex with his secretary (played by Jane Tsentas).

The plot summary is necessary because there is an actual plot and while it’s not fantastically deep it does provide a rationale for the sex scenes. It even does a little more than that. There is a certain poignancy to the story. Sandy might not be a model wife but she did really love Charlie once. Charlie and Marie are genuinely in love. These are not bad people, just weak people who made poor decisions. They do have emotions and we do get at least the occasional hint of those emotions. The intensity of the first sex scene between Charlie and Marie does have a point to it - they do want each other desperately.

This is also, for a softcore sex movie, surprisingly wholesome in some ways. There are no orgies or threesomes, not even the usually obligatory lesbian encounters. This is a very heterosexual movie. All of the sex is clearly completely consensual. Most of the sex has at least some slight emotional charge to it (even the PI and his secretary have some weird bond between them).

The acting isn’t too bad. There are, interspersed between the constant couplings, scenes in which a couple of them are required to do at least a modicum of acting. Apart from Dennis, the only dull character in the movie (admittedly he’s supposed to be a bit dull) they all prove to be reasonable capable at comedy. Sharon Kelly has considerable presence. The combination of her stupendously voluptuous body with her rather angelic face is pretty enchanting. She would get the chance to display her comic talents more fully in The Dirty Mind of Young Sally, made at about the same time.

Cyndee Summers is able to give Sandy a bit of depth. When we’re told that Sandy really did try to make her marriage a success Summers manages to make us believe her. Charlie is a loser but Don Summerfield makes him an amusing loser. Elmer Klump as the PI gets many of the best lines and his comic timing is quite adroit.

Director Gary Troy isn’t called on to do much other than to make the sex scenes sexy, which he does, and to vary them a bit, which he also does. The PI and his secretary having sex on the desk in his office is a minor triumph in the sex comedy genre - it’s fairly hot sex combined with some actually amusing funny lines. The sex scenes featuring Sharon Kelly steam up the screen, as you would expect. This is softcore porn but as softcore goes it’s pretty hard.

The screenplay has the odd witty moment.

Of course this is the 1970s. Being voluptuous was considered to be an asset. And of course they have pubic hair. They don’t all have the same body type. Jane Tsentas and Cheri Mann are kind of skinny while the charms of Sharon Kelly and Cyndee Summers are rather more ample. In other words they all look kind of like actual women.

Something Weird paired this one with The Dirty Mind of Young Sally in a Sharon Kelly double-header. The transfer is OK. There’s a tiny amount of print damage but these types of films haven’t exactly been preserved like national treasures and we’re lucky Something Weird found surviving prints in pretty good condition. As usual there are various extras.

Teenage Bride isn’t a great movie but it delivers what it promises to deliver - lots of steamy sex and some comedy that provides some actual laughs. It’s obviously a type of movie that won’t be to everyone’s taste but if this is the sort of thing you enjoy then it’s a very good movie of its type. Recommended.