EARLY SHORTS OF JOHN WATERS: HAG IN A BLACK LEATHER JACKET (1964), ROMAN CANDLES (1966) and EAT YOUR MAKEUP (1968) at Lincoln Center

From 2014.

Young John Waters, circa 1972.

Manhattan's Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center has been home to many terrific retrospectives that I've had the distinct pleasure to attend over the years, and last night was the opening evening of the first complete retrospective of the films of John Waters (which, I might add, saw several nights of its program completely sold out online in a matter of moments after tickets went on sale). I've been a slave to Waters's films since I saw the infamous (and fucking hilarious) PINK FLAMINGOS (1972) while still in high school. The film's warped and offensive sense of humor, incredibly twisted content, and in-your-face celebration of its outsider protagonists had a seismic effect on my development as a person and I unequivocally consider seeing that movie to be a life-changing experience. It also instantly rendered Waters my favorite living director and I subsequently went on to see every one of his movies, so I naturally had an interest in experiencing his rare, seldom-seen short film works. Never released on any home video format and only periodically screened when Waters had the whim to do so for friends or as a limited  part of a film series or art show, these early efforts have been the source of great curiosity among the Waters faithful, so their inclusion in the Lincoln Center retrospective is a joyous occasion indeed. The films are apparently no longer extant in their original 16mm prints but they have been preserved in digital form (presumably transferred from archival videotapes), allowing for them to be shown on the huge flatscreen TV in Lincoln Center's amphitheater.

I arrived early and picked up my pre-ordered ticket for the sold-out 6:30pm screening of FEMALE TROUBLE and then made my way across the street from the Walter Reade Theater to the amphitheater. The screening of the shorts was at 4pm and free to the public, and every seat was filled by the time the lights dimmed. Here's what transpired, and I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised by what I got.

HAG IN A BLACK LEATHER JACKET (1964)   17 minutes

Sporting one of the best titles ever, this seventeen-minute experiment was shot by the eighteen-year-old director on a budget of thirty bucks — the actual figure according to Waters and, judging from what's onscreen, he's not lying — utilizing stolen film stock and starring a number of Waters's cronies, including Mary Vivian Pearce, who would later become a recurring featured player in his first five full-length films. The quasi-narrative depicts the marriage of black man to a white ballerina on the roof of John Waters's parents' house, with the ceremony witnessed by assorted weirdoes and presided over by a cross-wielding Klansman. Employing the same kind of ADD-riddled unlicensed soundtrack collage technique as later found in MONDO TRASHO (1969), the film is rough around the edges — very rough, an aspect not at all helped by the dodgy video transfer — but briskly-paced and amusing. It also definitely already has the signature feel and trashy aesthetic of Waters's later work. Oh, and it should also be noted that there is neither a hag nor a black leather jacket to be found anywhere in this film.

ROMAN CANDLES (1966)   40 minutes

Freshly kicked out of NYU film school and influenced by Andy Warhol's CHELSEA GIRLS (1966), Waters aped Warhol's split-screen technique, only going it one better by intending its three free-form non-narratives to be projected onto a trio of individual screens. The result as seen on video at Lincoln Center was a screen composed of two upper tiers of imagery atop a third, with each running a series of unconnected clips and stock footage, including snippets from EARTH VS. THE SPIDER (1958) and THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US (1956). It's dizzying and somewhat headache-inducing if one tries to follow each tier at once, but it's impressively well-constructed and never boring (which, frankly, I expected it to be), unlike many short films that bear the mark of film school influences.

EAT YOUR MAKEUP (1968)  45 minutes

The short opens with an anguished young woman crawling across sand dunes toward a shirtless young man while she repeatedly screams, "Makeup! Makeup!!! Makeup!!!"— an hilariously overwrought performance that elicited gales of laughter from the theater audience — until the mysterious man throws her a plate full of beauty products that she greedily devours. Following the credits, the short shifts location to a Baltimore park where a crazed-looking black-clad woman (Maelcum Soul) has her underlings kidnap young women off the street and take them into the woods, where they are forced to wear ridiculous outfits and repeatedly stalk a bargain basement outdoor catwalk until they model themselves to death for the amusement of a drugged-up and violent throng of spectators. The crazed modeling is periodically interrupted by the models being force-fed makeup, and diversions into fantasy and other odd attractions in what is revealed to be a boardwalk-like setup. The fantasy comes in when a wigless drag queen, played by a seventeen-year-old Divine, arrives to chat with the black-clad mistress of ceremonies and imagines herself as Jackie Kennedy riding and waving in the ill-fated motorcade as canned laughter brainlessly guffaws on the soundtrack. The sheer balls/bad taste of doing such a sequence even five years after the real-life event that shocked the nation and the world screamed Waters, and it was amazing to see something so intentionally transgressive and offensive so early in his catalog.

Dangerous filmmaking: a parodic reenactment of the Kennedy assassination — with a laugh track, no less — some five years after the dire real-life event and featuring an obese teenage Divine in drag as the First Lady. I'm amazed Waters and company were not tracked down and stoned to death for this at the time.

The boardwalk element includes a Horror House ride (whose signage proudly proclaims "It'll make you sick") that drives a patron to terrified, shrieking apoplexy and apparent death with its depictions of mundane and wholesome suburban life and American values, and would be harkened back to and inverted for the "Cavalcade of Perversion" in MULTIPLE MANIACS (1970). It all wraps up with a "happy" ending cribbed from a mashup of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty's stories, and is once again accented from start to finish with music Waters didn't bother to get the rights to use. Of the three shorts, I would name EAT YOUR MAKEUP as the most accessible of the lot and the one where Waters's later tropes first begin to coalesce. 

Totally worth paying to watch yet kindly screened by Lincoln Center at no cost to the audience, the three early Waters films are a must-see for Waters fans, provided you're lucky enough to have the opportunity to catch them. Waters has stated that they will never be made available on home video because obtaining the music rights would be prohibitive, and also, reportedly, because they are simply too embryonic and relatively crude when compared what came later. I get where he's coming from when it comes to their stylistic/aesthetic primitiveness, as he is a filmmaker whose growth in assuredness and skill is visibly trackable on a film-by-film basis, but it would still be nice to have the shorts readily available for scholarly perusal and also to make Waters completists happy. Too bad about the damned music rights, though.

ALLIGATOR (1962) by I*n Fl*m*ng

 From 2010.

Back cover bio of author I*n Fl*m*ng.

Among my many passions can be counted the adventures of James Bond, in both prose and cinematic form, but my real interest in the character lies in his literary incarnation.

The James Bond of the movies is for all intents and purposes something of a superman (that trait beginning in earnest with 1964's classic GOLDFINGER), but his literary antecedent would surprise those unfamiliar with the books by being, as my friend Kevin so concisely and accurately put it many years ago, "a fucking mess." The Bond of the books is a borderline alcoholic, chainsmoking sadistic asshole, not at all like the fantasy figure found in the films, and he fascinates because of his very human failings while serving as a combination investigator/hitman for Her Majesty's secret service. 

Prior to the advent of the 007 movies, author Ian Fleming's novels enjoyed great success worldwide and even counted President John F. Kennedy among their avid fans (1957's FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE reportedly being his favorite among the novels), so the character and his author's signature prose style were very much in the public consciousness, and anything that gains such a measure of public familiarity is destined to at some point fall prey to parody. That would have been no easy feat at the time of the novels' releases, due in large part to the then-extreme levels of sex, shocking violence and sadism that defined the series and rendered some of the books downright controversial in some circles. Thus it fell to a respected organ of humor produced by collegiate scribes, namely the Harvard Lampoon, to give Fleming's work a much-needed satirizing, and the result was 1962's ALLIGATOR, a dead-on parody of the Fleming oeuvre that's so on target that it's barely distinguishable from an actual James Bond novel, save for a few moments of quite ludicrous exaggeration of Fleming's stylistic tropes.

Front cover to ALLIGATOR.

Back cover to ALLIGATOR.

To those familiar with the Bond editions as they appeared in the 1960's (the versions I grew up with), the first thing to notice about ALLIGATOR is its flawless mimicry of the series' cover design style, right down to the cheesy author's photo on the back, and once the reader dives into the text, it even reads just like a Fleming novel. 

The plot is a hash of several elements that will be familiar to the experienced Fleming reader (this book is not advised for those unfamiliar with the 007 novels since it is such an accurate stylistic parody) and details J*mes B*nd's clash with Lacertus Alligator, an over-the-top megalomaniac whose freakish physical attributes (including a mouth full of sharpened steel teeth) go hand in hand with his behavioral quirks (such as sating his fetish for the color purple by constantly whipping out a spray can of purple vegetable dye and liberally applying the pigment to anything and everyone around him). Alligator would be very much at home among such villainous Fleming creations as Hugo Drax and Doctor Julius No, only in this parody he brings to mind how Chuck Jones or some of the other classic era Warner Brothers animating directors might have handled such a figure with their trademark satirical flavor.

B*nd is brought into direct conflict with Alligator when B*nd's boss, *, tasks him to discover if Alligator is cheating at cards at an exclusive London men's club (a plot lifted directly from Fleming's MOONRAKER) and once B*nd takes the villain for an outrageous sum of cash, the agent is assigned to investigate the murder of a British intelligence section head in Bermuda (a nod to the plot catalyst of 1958's DR. NO). That seemingly routine assignment soon spirals into the expected web of sex, violence and mayhem that one has every right to expect from a 007 yarn, and it's all communicated with astonishing brevity since the book is but a mere seventy-seven pages in length (which is just fine because a goosing of Fleming's storytelling could easily be achieved in short order by a talented parodist). 

But while it's a great idea to give the world a knowing spoof of the Fleming books, the problem with ALLIGATOR is that it simply isn't funny. It hews far too close to its source material and other than a few moments having fun with B*nd's general arrogant assholism, Alligator's bizarre/insane villainy and B*nd's in your face and totally irritating flaunting of his epicurean leanings, there's nary a chuckle to be had, and what little laughs are generated depend heavily on the reader's intimate familiarity with the ten 007 books ranging from 1953 through 1962. When all is said and done, ALLIGATOR is best left to Bond completists and curiosity seekers who want to check out just how closely a writer can ape one author's style.

Having been an avid collector and reader of Fleming since my early teens, I picked up a copy of ALLIGATOR a little over thirty years ago but never got around to reading it in full because I didn't get what it was going for at the time, a lack of understanding stemming from only having read the first two or three of the original novels, so I set it aside to be read at some later time. During the years since those formative days, I lost my copy of ALLIGATOR and pretty much forgot about the book's existence until recently, shortly after re-reading all of the Fleming novels over a two-year period, so I recently found the cheapest copy I could get on eBay for around $36. Simply put, it's an item of interest, but it wasn't worth the wait or the cash expenditure. Save your money or shell it out for a worthy parody, such as the infinitely better and frequently hilarious BORED OF THE RINGS (1969), written by Henry N. Beard and Douglas Kenney, both founding editors/contributors of the NATIONAL LAMPOON magazine. (Doug Kenney notably wrote "First Blowjob" for the magazine and later co-authored NATIONAL LAMPOON'S ANIMAL HOUSE with Harold Ramis and Chris Miller, so that'll give you an idea of how funny that guy was. Kenney died as age 32 in 1980 after a fall from a cliff in Hawaii, a death that may have been a suicide).

LIKE A SEX MACHINE

This morning the van that transports me to dialysis arrived over a half hour early, and when I went downstairs I noticed and open case containing what looked like a dis-assembled mic stand or something, but I could not investigate because the van was there and ready to roll. The mysterious case was still there when I got home from treatment, but I ignored it as I staggered up the front steps.

Then, just ten minutes ago, my down-the-hall neighbor, Ruth, texted me freaking out. She had just gotten home with a friend and the two of them encountered the case, so, curious, they investigated and sent me a video of them trying to figure out what it was. Ruth noted a brand logo on one of the bulkier components, so she did an Amazon search when she came upstairs and here's what has been laying next to our stoop since sometime late last night. 

 

Who just leaves an expensive sex toy up for grabs on the sidewalk? Did it belong to someone in the building? All of the residents know each other, so Ruth and I demand answers!

A LONG-OVERDUE CONNECTION

While preparing dinner, I listened to a YouTube piece on forgotten one-hit wonders of 1977, and for the first time since the late 1970's I heard a snippet of the song "Heaven on the 7th Floor" by Paul Nicholas, a hit that was never a favorite of mine, but it was certainly memorable. When Nicholas's name was mentioned, it rang a bell in my memory, and upon mulling it over I went "Nooooo..." and ran to the internet to check on what was jogging my brain. 

The films of director Ken Russell are among my favorites for their sheer madness, and my search revealed that my memory of Nicholas's name was correct. He has prominent roles in two of my favorite Russell films, specifically TOMMY and LISZTOMANIA (both 1975). I saw TOMMY in during its theatrical run with my parents — notably, TOMMY was the final film we saw together as a family unit — but that was two years before "Heaven on the 7th Floor," and I did not see LISZTOMANIA until I obtained a VHS copy during the late 1980's, and when viewing both of those for the first time, I did not not any of the actors' names, as situation that changed once I had both films on home video and went on to study them in depth over the next three decades.

 

Paul Nicolas has a brief-but-unforgettable role in TOMMY as the gleefully sadistic Cousin Kevin, complete with his own musical number that drags the audience along as Kevin spends a day torturing the deaf/dumb/blind titular character. 

 

Tormenting Roger Daltrey in TOMMY (1975).

 

But my favorite of his Russell performances is in LISZTOMANIA, where he has an ogoing and significant part throughout the film as composer/German nationalist Richard Wagner. It's an incredibly loopy and cartoonish portrayal that finds Wagner undergoing numerous visual changes to indicate his growing fascistic nationalism, among which are him becoming a vampire to leech off of composer Franz Liszt's music, only to be reborn in the 20th Century as a literal chimera of Frankenstein's monster and Adolph Hitler. 

 

 As Frankenstein/Wagner/Hitler in LISZTOMANIA (1975).

 

The insane sight of a Frankenstein/Wagner/Hitler leading female children clad in cheesy Superman costumes (symbolizing the indoctrination of the German youth into the ideology of the Aryan superman) as he stiffly marches through a town, blasting fleeing orthodox Jews with an electric guitar machine gun made my jaw hit the floor when I first saw the film, and that image's audacity and sheer lunacy cracks me up to this day.

 

So, yeah, that was the guy who sang "Heaven on the 7th Floor."

 

MIRANDA (1948)

From 2013.

 

Glynis Johns as Miranda, a lonely mermaid who's out to catch herself a man.

Ever since I was a little boy I have loved and been fascinated by the lore of the mermaid, an interest likely sparked by the adorable Neptina, the tastefully topless half-fish girlfriend of early anime hero Marine Boy. I was one of the rare little boys who never found girls to be "icky," so I was fascinated by the female from Day One, plus I had a deep interest in aquatic lifeforms that led my earliest job aspirations to lean toward marine biology, so the concept of a magical creature that combined my two loves into one was bound to appeal. From the early days of watching Marine Boy and Neptina "fighting evil 'neath the sea," I moved on to reading world mythology and absorbing the many cultural variations on the mermaid, and as I got older I sought out any movies that had to do with them, nearly all of which revolved around mermaids falling in love with men from the surface world. The list of the genuinely good films in this niche category is rather small and until now I held the Daryl Hannah vehicle SPLASH! (1983) as the exemplar of the form, but now that I've seen Britain's 1948 cult classic MIRANDA (based on a stage play by Peter Blackmore), Madison's reign is over and her Cornish predecessor has taken her place in my heart and mind.

Dr. Paul Martin (Griffith Jones) fails to entice his wife, Clare (Googie Withers), into joining him for a fishing trip to Cornwall, so he leaves by himself for a bachelor's holiday. While out angling in a boat, Paul's line is snared by what he presumes to be a very large fish and he is pulled overboard, where he is promptly seized and spirited away to the underwater cave of Miranda Trewella (Glynis Johns), a lonely mermaid who's looking for a man — she'd previously caught other men but threw them back because they were too short — and instantly takes a liking to the married doctor. She makes it very clear that she intends to keep the doctor forever and he is absolutely not immune to her considerable charms while stuck in her hideout (despite his love of his wife, which he immediately tells Miranda about), so, understanding Paul's fidelity (which is fighting a losing battle against her otherworldly allure), Miranda agrees to set him free, provided he takes her back to London with him for a three-week stay. She wants to see and experience all of the things she's read about in books and magazines found mostly on ships, and she would be willing to pretend to be an invalid during her stay, covering her fish tail with long dresses and blankets while riding around in a wheelchair or being carried. Paul agrees to her request and brings the beautiful creature to the London flat that he shares with his wife and their live-in servants, butler/chauffeur Charles (David Tomlinson) and maid Betty (Yvonne Owen), with Miranda playing the role of a patient who needs Paul's care over a specifically-stated period of three weeks. 

During the course of her stay, every male that she meets is completely enthralled with Miranda and not one of them stands a chance against her spell (though Paul puts up the most resistance). She bewitches Charles — who's engaged to Betty — and Nigel (John McCallum), an artist who's betrothed to Clare's best friend, snobbish hat designer Isobel (Sonia Holm), and enters into affairs with both, which of course results in all sorts of romantic mishegoss that postwar British society found scandalous and wholly inappropriate. Yet as all of this extracurricular spit-swapping occurs with the two mesmerized young men — and, to a certain extent, Paul as well — Miranda remains as sweet as honey and it's impossible to hate her for what appears to be simple (albeit powerful) sex appeal, and not even the women whose men she's stealing really hold it against her (their ire is instead directed at their helpless paramours). Especially not Clare, who eventually twigs to Miranda's secret, realizes there's some form of magic involved in all of the seduction going on, and settles back with an amused eye to watch what she knows will be an inevitable emotional train wreck (or as much of an emotional train wreck as the British stiff upper lip of 1948 would allow). It all amounts to a (mostly) one-set sex farce that leads to a rather surprising ending, especially for a film of its vintage and country of origin.

MIRANDA is a delight from start to finish and it wastes absolutely no time in getting the ball rolling, with Miranda coming into the narrative about two minutes after the opening credits. Highlights include:

• The eerie-but-charming siren song that Miranda sings at night, a strange melody heard by the entire household.
• The depiction of Clare and her performance by Googie Withers. It would have been easy to portray Clare as a shrewish wife who sought to tear down the invalid Miranda for her obvious effect on Paul, but Clare is both very smart and realistic, gradually realizing there's more going on than her husband's head, and the heads of the other men, being turned by a pretty wheelchair-bound girl. A refreshing change from what's expected in this kind of scenario.
• Miranda's adventures around London while chauffeured by the increasingly-smitten Charles, especially her argument with a sea lion after she orally catches and swallows a fish meant for it during feeding time, an argument loudly conducted in fluent sea lion, no less.
• Miranda's prodigious appetite and consumption of raw seafood.
• Miranda revealing in a throwaway line that she is the bastard daughter of her mermaid mother and a Covent Garden chorus boy named Matthew Trewella.
• British cinema legend Margaret Rutherford as Nurse Carey, the health care professional whom Paul brings in to attend to Miranda's "special needs" who is ideally suited to the case, thanks to her "eccentric" nature. She believes in mythical creatures, so her reaction to the reveal of Miranda being a living, breathing mermaid is one of utter delight, so it is never in doubt that she will keep Miranda's secret.
• The early pairing of Glynis Johns and David Tomlinson, some sixteen years before they were cast as Mr. and Mrs. Banks in the Disney classic MARY POPPINS. Witnessing a still-gentlemanly Tomlinson overcome with lust for the lovely mermaid and losing his battle with himself is very funny.
• The running gag involving Miranda treating the Martin's well-populated fishbowl as a candy dish. At the beginning of the film there are around ten fish in the bowl. By the end...not so much.
• As her time on land grows short, Miranda gifts her three men with neck-worn tokens containing locks of her hair, in celebration and remembrance of "a love that might have been."
• The scandalous notion that Miranda, while owning other undergarments, does not own a single pair of panties, much to the shock of Clare and her maid.
• "Sea Cow?!!? SHE KNOWS!!! If you think you're going to take a peek at my tail, you're very much mistaken!"
• Miranda's tail, which looks exceptionally realistic when its seen flopping about in water. The tail is even afforded an onscreen credit for its maker, namely Dunlop.
• The black and white photography lends the story a dreamlike aesthetic that greatly benefits the proceedings.

One of the things that most fascinates me about this film is that when looked at from the point of view of a rather jaded audience member some 65 years after its release, it's fun to ponder just how risque this movie must have been when it hit the U.K.'s screens during its original release. For one thing, you get a mermaid who's topless when she's seen in the water (though her hair is always strategically placed), and piled on top of that there are several references to fish (and their smell) and wetness that bear intentionally vulgar connotations, and Miranda's sweet-faced, very matter-of-fact sexual aggressiveness, which brings me to the film's ending.

WARNING!!! HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!!!

Far from being merely the male sex fantasy adventures of a beautiful horny mermaid on the loose, Miranda's sexual campaign is revealed near the end of the film to be her acting not only on her personal loneliness, but also taking action to ensure the survival of her species. She earlier states that her mother had an affair with a human man, and she also mentions that mermen do exist but their unattractive looks make them unappealing to her — and presumably other females of her species — so she's opted to mate outside of the more obvious choice, and her dalliances with the three men under her thrall are an effort to widen the genetic options. It's never explicitly stated as such, but that's exactly what's going on. And while the goal of conceiving a child out of wedlock via three different men was probably scandalous enough for its era, an aspect that absolutely would never have flown in an American film, it's the film's very last shot that really raises eyebrows. When Miranda escapes back to the sea after Clare subtly calls her out for being a mermaid — and there is no malice about that; Clare is fascinated, but she wants to make the discovery public, which Miranda (and Paul) is not at all thrilled about — we see Miranda swim away, after which there is a flash-forward that shows a very happy Miranda on the shores of Majorca with a mer-baby on her lap. So in a film made by one of the most propriety-obsessed European societies during the postwar/pre-Profumo era, we get a feel-good story about a hot chick who gets knocked up by one of three possible babydaddies and we're happy to see the unashamed result.

How in hell did they get away with that in a 1948 British comedy, and did it ever get an American release? (I'm guessing that it was okay by virtue of Miranda not being a human woman, but even so it's still a bit of a shocker for its time.)

The movie is dominated by the performance of Glynis Johns as Miranda, and I defy you to find any straight guy who wouldn't willingly end up a slave to the character. She's beautiful, dryly funny, has eyes that draw one in like quicksand, has charm to spare, and she's horny as hell in a classy British way. And while Miranda is a natural-born seducer — which may be magically assisted, though it's never explicitly spelled out — and knows full well that's she's messing with men who are all involved in very committed relationships, she doesn't have a malicious bone in her body, so her man-stealing ways are impossible to hate, especially once we get that she's doing what she's doing by way of acting on a biological imperative. In short, she's an ideal fantasy creation who carries equal irresistible appeal for both adults and kids. This movie can be run for kids and not be considered salacious because when viewed through innocent eyes, Miranda's romantic entanglements can be seen as simply kissing and such, the kind of thing that mermaids get up to in even G-rated kiddie flicks, and the scene fades out during the three instances when it's obvious to adult audience members that the Beast with Two Backs is about to be made. (Don't ask me exactly what the logistics of achieving successful intercourse between a human male and a mermaid may be in this specific instance. Unlike Madison in SPLASH!, Miranda does not have the ability to become bipedal below the waist, so I'd say that magic is a definite factor here. That, or a process similar to the fishy mating process involving the female's eggs being fertilized by the male's milt, which when translated to this sort of scenario would amount to bukkake, which is something best not thought about in this movie's charming context.)

MIRANDA proved popular enough to generate a Technicolor sequel, MAD ABOUT MEN (1954), which brought back Glynis Johns and Margaret Rutherford, but it appears to be unavailable on DVD in an official release, either domestically or in a foreign edition. That makes me quite sad because I loved MIRANDA and I've read several reviews that cite MAD ABOUT MEN as being superior to the original, so I'm anxious to see it. Anyway, take my word for it and check out MIRANDA for yourself. It's a rare and unique treasure. I would love to see it rediscovered because it really is a classic deserving of wider recognition on these shores. (Then again, the one possible negative byproduct of MIRANDA getting rediscovered is that some Hollywood douchebag will greenlight an unnecessary remake, replete with modern day raunchy humor and fart gags, so maybe it's better off staying in relative obscurity.)

Poster from the original theatrical release.

HUNDRA (1983)

From 2007.

As allergy medication rendered the Mighty Bunche a loopy, futon-bound mess, the benevolent gods of DVD obscurity saw fit to take pity upon the stalwart mocha warrior and did bless him with a stack of flicks, among which was found the long overdue release of Matt Cimber’s HUNDRA. And our hero was most pleased.

Let’s get one thing straight. Be they high-class epics (I don’t care what you say, GLADIATOR was a barbarian flick) or low budget sword-and-sandal flesh and blood fests, I love me some barbarian movies. CONAN THE BARBARIAN stands tallest in my estimation of the genre, and even the laughably execrable SORCERESS counts as one of my all time favorite films, so I welcome the DVD availability of even the most obscure entries in the genre, and HUNDRA certainly fits that description. As one of the dozens of loincloth extravaganzas released in the wake of CONAN’s success, HUNDRA came and went in the blink of an eye, somehow being missed during my daily scouring of the movie listings, and that’s no mean feat since I even managed to see DEATHSTALKER during the nanosecond it played at the local grindhouse. For years I heard tell that HUNDRA was a better than usual example of the genre, but having fallen victim to such claims in the past and being burned by such recommended films (CONQUEST and HAWK THE SLAYER among them) I never bothered to check it out even when it periodically turned up on cable or VHS. Then I went to Manhattan’s esteemed Kim’s Video on Sunday afternoon and found HUNDRA just released on DVD with the accompanying soundtrack album (by one of my favorite composers, lifetime achievement Oscar Winner Ennio Morricone!!!), and at $15.95 I figured it was worth taking a chance on. And I was absolutely right.

HUNDRA opens with a narration about a tribe of warrior women who happily live apart from men (requiring them only for reproductive purposes and giving away any male offspring), and how the strongest of their number, the uncouth and unkempt Hundra (Laurene Landon), has left on a hunting mission. Once Hundra’s out of sight we see their village attacked for no reason whatsoever by a bunch of helmeted male assholes who worship the bull, the ultimate symbol of manliness. The women put up one hell of a fight, but they are soon mercilessly raped and slaughtered, leaving the returning Hundra as the next-to-last survivor of the tribe. After killing fifteen of the men who destroyed her people, Hundra visits the cave retreat of the tribe’s aged holy woman for advice on what to do next with her life and isn’t very happy with what she hears: in order to perpetuate her tribe, she must make flaming Osh-Osh with a man (YECCH!) and give birth to a girl child. A man-hater to the core, a disgusted Hundra declares “No man shall penetrate my body, either with a sword or himself!” — you GO, girl! — but she can’t let her people die so she butches up and sets off with her faithful (if cowardly) dog, Beast, on a literal quest for dick.

After being accosted by a warrior midget (?), our girl encounters a drunken, flatulent barbarian dude and attempts to hump him, solely so she can get the noxious deed over with, but his patriarchal assholism earns him a righteous ass-kicking. Undeterred, Hundra heads to the nearest city in search of worthy genetic material and finds it to be the home of those bull-worshipping pricks, run by a priest who enlists the town’s unwilling young women to be trained to service the needs of warlords in the local temple. Needless to say, that shit don’t sit too well with Hundra, so after preventing some soldiers from abducting a girl, the blonde warrior intentionally starts some shit with the authorities in order to hit the temple and teach the harem a thing or two about feminism. After a swashbuckling battle that would have been right at home in THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, Hundra falls through the roof of a handsome, kindly doctor and swiftly finds her loincloth to be a very humid place indeed. When the guy refuses to submit to her demands (made at dagger-point), Hundra has a change of plans and decides that maybe she could learn from the temple women how to appeal to the doctor instead of scaring the shit out of him. Once at the temple, Hundra pretends to submit to her docility and grooming training, all the while teaching her companions about their own self-worth and sneaking out for house calls with the doc. And when the mighty Hundra finds herself pregnant, the shit really hits the fan!

Somehow finding the perfect balance between humor and adventure, HUNDRA is a hoot from start to finish, and star Laurene Landon’s athletic skills more than make up for her thespic deficiencies, allowing her to come off like a less-polished Errol Flynn. It’s cheap, silly, and even kinda stupid, but it’s a perfect Saturday afternoon popcorn-muncher that’s a proto-XENA must for all the little girls out there; sure, it’s rated R and has a smattering of nudity (the raping thankfully takes place off-camera, so the flesh on display is a bit of casualness in the harem and a loony bit with a bare-nekkid Hundra riding her horse in the surf), but it’s a great lesson on taking no shit from patriarchal douchebags and doing what needs to be done for the greater good, namely getting knocked up by a total stranger you tried to coerce with sharp objects. Heartwarming stuff, indeed.

BAT PUSSY (1973)

From 2008.

You know the scenario: You’ve had a shit-ass day at work. You’re flat broke. There’s no beer in the fridge. Your cable TV is suffering technical difficulties that only afford clear reception to a sixteen hour FARM REPORT marathon on Lifetime. Dubya is still in office. Your only hope of momentary happiness is to “relax the gentleman’s way.” “Shake hands with the unemployed.” “Have one off the wrist.” “Rub one out.”

I’m talking about the time-honored hobby of jackin’ off. Oh, yeah.

You drop trou, your manly gristle falling victim to gravity and dangling like obscene Christmas ornaments, and you peruse your stash of well-watched porno. What shall aid in the draining of the wank-tanks today? INSIDE VANESSA Del RIO? VAGINAPALOOZA? BIG WET SLOPPY HOLES Vol. 37? AMAZING PENETRATIONS WITH AMAZON WOMEN? The Bangkok backroom live eel excesses of IMPETUS FIRE 2?

No, none of those will do; it’s time to check out the DVD a friend gave you, a seventies-era tenderloin rarity. All you know is that it’s a parody of the old Adam West BATMAN show with some horny chick in the cape and cowl, so, aching Johnson in hand, you decide to let DNA fly fast and furious to images of a distaff Caped Crusader getting drilled and milking man-poles.

Well, just when you thought your day couldn’t get any worse, you realize you’ve discovered the colossal hard-off that is 1973’s BAT PUSSY, frequently cited on the internet as “anti-porn,” and widely hailed as the worst porno film ever made. By the end of its running time your would-be boner is well and truly extinguished, but you sit there all by your lonesome, utterly gobsmacked by a carved-in-stone example of exactly how NOT to make a skin flick. But be that as it may, BAT PUSSY's Chernobyl-level porn awfulness has unexpectedly turned it into a must-see chunk of bad cinema that actually inspired the following letter to SOMETHING WEIRD VIDEO, the company that resurrected this horror on VHS back in 1996:

To: Mike Vraney/Something Weird Video

As a vanguard in the preservation and continued promotion of exploitation films, Something Weird Video holds the fate of many key works in its hands. Many of the better regarded films from the Golden Age of Exploitation have been given "Special Edition" treatment by Something Weird. Movies such as Blood Feast, House on Bare Mountain, and The Godmonster of Indian Flats have been remastered and released on DVD in the past, boosting their profile among a wide range of film enthusiasts and providing fans an opportunity to own a copy of these films that they can view again and again. 

It is this treatment that we feel should be bestowed upon a little film that would benefit greatly from the exposure. This film is BAT PUSSY, arguably the world’s worst adult film. It is not often that one comes across a film that fails as miserably at attaining the goals implied by its genre status. BAT PUSSY is without a doubt the most unappealing XXX film in the history of adult cinema and has been referred to by some as “anti porn”. It is because of it’s uniqueness that we feel BAT PUSSY deserves to be given a full, “Special Edition” DVD treatment from the good folks at Something Weird Video.

Sincerely,
The Undersigned

What could possibly be so difficult about making a viable stroke movie? All you need is are two “actors,” maybe some interesting props for possible closeup insertion into a chosen orifice, a script with a line like “Gosh, Mister pizza delivery guy! I have no money. How will I pay for this tasty, four-topping large pizza?” as a preamble to the action, a relatively comfortable location for the participants to fuck on, and a camera (video or film, it’s your call). That’s pretty much it. BAT PUSSY has all of these elements in place, so how does it earn its rep as “anti-porn?” Allow me to explain.

The SOMETHING WEIRD VIDEO print of the movie opens abruptly with no titles, no credits, no music, no nothing, just a grainy closeup of a fat, freckled, ginger-beehived, drawling and naked example of the most HEE-HAWed-out trailer park slag imaginable, kind of like a trashy Kate Pierson from the B-52's, but far less appealing.

Trust me, this still is a lot more flattering than what we get in the actual movie.

Before we’re given more than a second or two to process that image the camera cuts to a nude, out-of-shape blonde redneck sitting at a table perusing the latest issue of SCREW magazine.

This gurk-gurk whoops and hollers over the things he sees in the tabloid, amazed and titillated, but allegedly reluctant to inflict such “degradations” as blowjobs and pussy-eating upon his corpulent concubine. But, since this is allegedly a skin flick, the Jerry Lee Lewis lookalike ends up in bed pawing his wife anyway in a display certain to make the viewer lose all interest in BAT PUSSY as a fuck movie and just stare open-mouthed at this rutting pair of hillbillies.

Their pork rind-flavored groping is staggering to behold, and at one point there’s even a tight shot Jerry Lee’s hand probing what at first appears to be the space between a pair of seat cushions but is soon revealed to be his partner’s lady-parts. The beehived behemoth then administers the first in a series of the sorriest B.J.’s I’ve ever seen, and her technique certainly isn’t helped by Jerry Lee’s complete and utter lack of anything resembling an erection for the entirety of the film.

Nope, that ain’t a Vienna sausage…

Jerry Lee reciprocates with some out-of-focus lapping at the gal’s flappy bits, along with some awkward fumbling about with her goat-like udders, all while the two of them drone on and on, trading amateurishly-delivered insults, unintentionally turning the whole mess into some sort of live sex show revival of Edward Albee’s WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINA WOOLFE?, only minus any trace of a script, artistic value, or talent.

This goes on for about twenty solid minutes (at least it felt like it did) and then we’re suddenly in the cinder block-walled headquarters of one “Dora Dildo,” aka stalwart crime fighter Bat Pussy.

We know this because of the crudely-drawn HQ sign and an embarrassed who narrator clues us in on it, as well as the vital fact that “her twat begins to twitch” at the first sign of trouble.

"Dora Dildo" in repose with a can of air freshener and a tall-boy of brewski.

Dora’s easily the hottest thing in the whole sordid work, but even as such she’s about on par with a skank you might find in a bar such as Jackie’s Fifth Amendment, an infamous Park Slope alky bar that caters to hardcore rummies and coffin-dodgers.

After muttering about how “There’s somebody gittin’ ready to make fuck movie in mah holy Gotham City, gaw-dammit!”, Dora Dons her superhero gear and ventures forth as Bat Pussy to deal with the redneck humping that has so irked her.

Tremble at the awesome sight of... BAT PUSSY!!!

But there’s no Bat Pussymobile for our bargain basement heroine; instead she bounces along the interstate perched atop one of those inflatable “Hoppity Hop” balls that I so fondly remember from my early years.

I swear you can’t make this shit up.

When Bat Pussy finally arrives to confront the inbred lovers, she rips off her Bat-gear and dives into the fray. There’s no trace of actual sex, a hard-on, or even a gooey cooter, but B.P. and Jerry Lee gamely (and probably gamily) roll around, even up flopping off the bed once or twice, while the redheaded pork princess takes care of herself with a convenient, unworn strap-on. Bat Pussy then exits, and that’s it.

By this point your brain has been utterly roasted and your penis has retreated into your lower abdominal cavity, in effect becoming a “man-gina.” Even the most hard-up desperado on death row couldn’t “raise the flag” for BAT PUSSY, and I urge all of you reading this to witness this hilarious abomination for yourself. It’s even suitable for mixed audiences — a sure sign that it’s a failure as a garden-variety chicken-choker — and is one hell of a crowd pleaser at parties. The groans of horror and disbelief are worth the price of the DVD — I bought it the second it became available, replacing the VHS tape I'd had for the past twelve years — so TRUST YER BUNCHE and order yours today!