By 1964 the nudie-cutie genre was starting to run out of steam. The problem was that while you could get away with quite a lot of nudity you could only do so by avoiding overtly sexual situations. The more you were able to keep things non-sexual the more nudity you could pack into your movie. The nudist camp movie had initially been the easiest way to do this but by 1964 movie audiences had seen as much nude volleyball as they ever wanted to see.
There were other ways to show large amounts of naked female flesh in a non-sexual way but they required some imagination. Dr. Sex is one of the more successful attempts.
Three sexual therapists recount their more interesting recent cases. We see the patients’ stories while the therapists narrate. This obviously offers ample opportunities for showing attractive naked ladies but since they’re sex therapists it might seem to be a bit tricky to keep the nudity non-sexual. In fact Mikels manages this very cleverly.
The nudie-cutie was essentially a good-humoured light-hearted genre and so the cases recounted are odd but in a very harmless way and the emphasis is on humour (humour being considered to be a very desirable ingredient in a nudie-cutie). There’s even some reasonably effective satire at the expense of both psychiatry and art.
The first case involves a peeping tom and a dog and the idea is silly but it is amusing.
The second case involves a window dresser and his shop-window mannequins. To this window dresser the mannequins are real. Very real indeed. More real to him than any real girls he knows. Which of course offers the movie the opportunity to switch between the mannequins and real girls, and since this chap likes to help the mannequins undress every night after the store closes (mannequins not being able to undress themselves) there’s the opportunity for some more nakedness.
This story can almost be regarded as a homage to one of the most famous of all Twilight Zone episodes.
Then in the next segment we get a young female exhibitionist who satisfies her urges to disrobe in public by working as an artists’ model. Her encounter with modernist art quickly convinces her to find another way to satisfy her cravings. She goes on to find fulfilment as a strip-tease artiste (and her routine suggests that the actress in question was obviously a professional stripper).
After this we’re back in paranormal territory with a haunted house story. This patient’s house is haunted by lovely nude women with a passion for doing the housework. Now you might think that being haunted by beautiful unclad girls whose only desire is to wait on you hand and foot is actually not such a terrible situation. The problem is that he wants to make contact with them but he can’t touch them. Which, as I’m sure you will admit, takes some of the fun out of being surrounded by beautiful nude women.
It has to be said that Mikels found some remarkably luscious young ladies prepared to spend most of the screen time without their clothes on.
Unfortunately the source material was in very poor shape with a great deal of print damage. It’s still watchable.
Something Weird paired Dr Sex with Wanda, the Sadistic Hypnotist for a double-header DVD release. The DVD includes a swag of extras. Most notable among these are five short films and these are truly bizarre examples of the sexploitation short subject.
The Casting Director is quite amusing and features a rather lovely lady. The Handyman is really strange. The idea is straightforward - a janitor discovers naked girls in all the rooms on the 19th floor of a hotel. The treatment of the subject and the visuals are however fascinatingly weird and surreal. Things get even stranger with Duelling Divas. Who knew that girls in bra and panties and stockings was an actual fetish? But on the evidence of this film that’s the case. It has to be admitted that it has a certain fascination. Naked Devil Doll features an undraped young lady who does look like a naked devil doll. Jane on a Train is very brief - a man travelling on a train tries out his skills at hypnotism to persuade a young female passenger to shed her clothes.
There’s a jokiness to both Dr. Sex and to these shorts that you don’t really get these days. The idea of combining nudity and comedy has rather gone out of fashion. Considering what some of the sex comedies of the 70s were like it’s perhaps understandable but the very concept of sex comedies became discredited but it’s still a bit sad that the element of fun has largely gone.
Dr. Sex isn’t exactly art. It’s a nudie-cutie and as such it’s an excuse to show as much naked feminine pulchritude as possible. This objective is however accomplished with a certain style and cleverness, there are amusing moments, there are a couple of stories that achieve a low-key weirdness, the girls are extremely pretty and while there’s no frontal nudity (which you weren’t going to get away with in 1964) there are enough bare breasts and bare bottoms to satisfy any reasonable person. In other words Dr. Sex has to be considered to be a rather successful nudie-cutie. If you have a soft spot for this oddly good-natured genre then this one can be highly recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment