Flesh Gordon (1974)

Flesh Gordon is, very obviously, a softcore Flash Gordon spoof. And it’s not done in quite the way you might expect. It was directed by Michael Benveniste and Howard Ziehm. Michael Benveniste and William Dennis Hunt wrote the screenplay.

Earth is under attack. A hitherto unknown planet is aiming a sinister ray at our planet. It’s not a death ray, it’s a sex ray. It causes people to go mad with lust and start having sex with anyone who happens to be in close proximity.

Professor Gordon’s son Flesh Gordon (Jason Williams) is going to be the hero of the hour. Luckily he encounters one of his father’s colleague, the brilliant scientist Dr Jerkoff. Dr Jerkoff has invented a new high-tech spacecraft. Dr Jerkoff, Flesh and the lovely Dale Ardor (Suzanne Fields) voyage to the source of the sex ray, the planet Porno. On the way they are hit by the sex ray so they have a mini-orgy before continuing their voyage.

The planet Porno is ruled by the evil Emperor Wang (William Dennis Hunt). There is a power struggle going on there between Wang and his queen, Amora.

Flesh, Dale and Dr Jerkoff have to find a way to destroy that sex ray but they are inevitably captured. They have the usual series of narrow escapes from danger.

Eventually they make contact with a resistance movement, after a frightening encounter with lesbian amazons. Dr Jerkoff thinks he has invented a device that can end the power of the sex ray.

One advantage our heroes have I that Dr Jerkoff is now in possession of Queen Amora’s pasties. Apart from their accustomed purpose the power pasties are formidable weapons.

The first surprise this movie springs on us is that it has a period setting. It is set in the 1930s, just like the original Flash Gordon serials. This is rather unusual and daring for a very low-budget movie. The decision proves to be a masterstroke. Consciously aping the setting and feel of the 30s serials means that the cheesy special effects become a major plus instead of a minus. Everything looks the way these things looked in those 1930s serials.

Even Dr Jerkoff’s spaceship, which looks like a giant penis, actually looks rather like the spaceships in the serials with a slight alteration in shape. The spaceship interiors look exactly like similar scenes in the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials.

The sets are cheap but they have that 1930s serial look. The matte paintings are very obviously matte paintings but that is totally in keeping with the movie’s chosen aesthetic.

Had the money been available to do more sophisticated and convincing special effects it would have ruined the movie completely. It would have taken most of the fun out of it. And the stop-motion effects are actually pretty good.

It’s also obvious that this movie is not going to make a single concession to realism. The sets are intended to look like movie sets.

And it’s obvious that this is going to be a fun sexy spoof rather than a sex movie. This is not a silly goofy fun movie with added nudity and sex. The nude scenes and the sex scenes are just as silly, goofy and fun as everything else in the film.

This movie is actually quite amusing and even has a few laugh-out-loud moments. It also manages to be off-the-wall and very good-natured at the same time. It’s all much too goofy to get upset about.

There’s a moment, just after their spaceship has passed through the sex ray, when Dr Jerkoff is explaining some scientific principle to Flesh in a very serious manner. While he’s doing so he’s idly fondling Dale’s breasts. She’s not the least bit worried. She knows it’s just the after-effects of the sex ray and he’s not even aware of what he’s doing. She just carries on as if nothing is happening.

Later on the three of them are having a serious discussion about strategy. Dale is totally naked. She seems completely unaware of this and the other two seem totally oblivious to her nudity.

There’s an immense amount of frontal nudity and lots of sex scenes both of which come across as zany and fun rather than arousing. This movie simply doesn’t take itself seriously enough to be erotic.

The basic plot, apart from the sex angle, is pure 1930s movie serial stuff with plenty of conscious echoes of the plots of the original serials.

The acting is mostly bad but bad in a fun way. The cast members all clearly understood that they were meant to make their performances as outrageous and silly as possible.

It’s a rare example of a movie that is deliberately trying to be camp and that gets away with it.

Strangely enough and despite all the sex and nudity this movie is far more successful in capturing the authentic feel of the 1930s movie serials than the 1980 Flash Gordon movie.

Flesh Gordon has a rather poor reputation which I think says a lot about the humourlessness of the modern world. A crazy movie but I enjoyed it a lot. Highly recommended.

The audio commentary by Howard Ziehm is extraordinarily interesting. To say that the movie’s production history was troubled would be an understatement. Ziehm was ripped off by his business partner, he had to fire the director, he had to deal with temperamental crew members and constant persecution by the cops (such as being threatened with a fifteen-year prison sentence). Amazingly he was able to stay out of jail and complete the movie and it went on to be a major success.

The Bride and the Beast (1958)

The Bride and the Beast was scripted by Ed Wood and that today is its main selling point. The movies that Wood actually directed are absolutely terrible (although fascinating and entertaining in their own way). On the other hand an Ed Wood script in the hands of a relatively competent director could produce extremely interesting results, the girl juvenile delinquent classic The Violent Years (1956) being a prime example. As a director Wood didn’t have a clue. As a scriptwriter he was pretty good, if you like movies that are weird, fun, totally incoherent and sexually perverse.

Laura (Charlotte Austin) and Dan (Lance Fuller) have just been married and they’re off to Dan’s isolated but palatial house. He’s sent the servants home so they can be alone together. Well, alone except for Spanky.

Spanky is Dan’s pet gorilla. He keeps Spanky caged in the cellar. Laura naturally wants to meet Spanky. It’s obvious that Laura and the gorilla find each other pretty interesting. Spanky has probably never seen a woman before, and he seems to like what he sees. Laura is fascinated by the gorilla, and perhaps just a tiny bit excited. 

Maybe she's even a tiny bit sexually excited.

The gorilla gets loose and then we get a great scene in which he comes up behind Laura and lifts up the back of her nightie. This seems to get him very excited and he then rips off her nightie completely. This is too much for Dan. He goes for his gun.

As a result of this incident Dan decides that Laura needs to see a friend of his, a psychiatrist. Dr Reiner is an unconventional psychiatrist who thinks that the secrets to our problems lie in our past lives.

Dr Reiner decides to regress Laura to one of her past lives, with startling results.

It seems that in one of her past lives Laura was a lady gorilla. Dan is sceptical but Dr Reiner is a scientist after all.

You’d think that if you find out that your wife was once a gorilla you might think twice about taking her into the African jungle, but Dan is a big game hunter and he’s sure that Laura will love it.

Thanks to the miracle of stock footage the action switches to Africa.

The local authorities need Dan’s help desperately. They have two man-eating tigers to deal with. Yes, I know, tigers don’t live in Africa but the movie deals with that - these are tigers that escaped from a wrecked cargo ship.

After Dan and his gun-bearers have fired about a hundred rounds of ammunition at the tigers without hitting them once I found myself losing faith in Dan’s prowess as a big game hunter.

Worse is to follow. Laura decides to take a walk in the jungle, on her own. And yes, you guessed it, she runs into some gorillas. At this point what was already a bizarre movie becomes really bizarre in a manner that only Ed Wood could have managed.

It’s obviously a bad movie and structurally it’s a complete mess. The tiger hunt sub-plot is irrelevant and it goes on and on. But the first and last quarters are full of prime Ed Wood weirdness and lunacy. And the ending is, well you’ll just have to watch it.

The Bride and the Beast comes to us on DVD paired with The White Gorilla. And there’s a commentary track for The Bride and the Beast, featuring (among others) the movie’s star, Charlotte Austin, who recalls her horror when she first read the script.

The great thing about the movies that were written by Ed Wood but directed by others is that they end up being totally Ed Wood movies, except that they’re technically competent. They’re loaded to overflowing with Ed Wood’s many and varied obsessions. In this case there’s even an angora sweater reference (Ed loved angora sweaters). This movie has Wood’s fingerprints all over it. And the Ed Wood weirdness really does make this one worth watching. Recommended.

Picture Mommy Dead (1966)

Picture Mommy Dead is a 1966 horror thriller produced and directed by Bert I. Gordon.

Edward Shelley (Don Ameche) and his new wife Francene (Martha Hyer) go to collect Edward’s teenaged daughter Susan (Susan Gordon) from the convent where she’s been since the accident. It’s actually more of a mental hospital than a convent. The accident was a fire in which Susan’s mother Jessica was killed. At the time of the accident Francene was Susan’s governess.

Jessica had been very wealthy and she made a complicated will. Susan was left a vast fortune but it’s tied up in trust until she’s 25. Edward was left a sizeable sum plus the paintings and furnishings of Jessica’s palatial house Flagmore House. The house itself was left to the state with the proviso that it would not pass to the state during Susan’s lifetime as long as Susan is willing to live there.

There are further complications. If Susan dies or goes permanently insane the fortune goes to Edward. If Edward dies everything goes to Jessica’s cousin Anthony (who was left a measly five hundred dollars in the will).

And Edward is broke. He’s spent all the money Jessica left him so he wants to sell off all the paintings and furnishings of Flagmore House. He manages to persuade Susan to agree to this, much to the disgust of the family lawyer, Clayborn (Wendell Corey).

That will clearly has plenty of potential to cause trouble. 

It soon becomes very obviously that each one of the major characters could have had a motive for killing Jessica (we don’t believe for a moment that her death was an accident). They also have good motives for killing each other. Edward, Francene and Anthony are all morally corrupt in their own ways. And then there’s Susan, who seems like a nice young girl but she is clearly disturbed and could be totally innocent or a homicidal maniac. What’s also interesting is that while it’s possible that one or more people are trying to drive Susan insane, she may or may not be already insane. Or she may be completely sane but simply unable to remember the events of that fateful night. 

There are major sexual and romantic complications to add extra layers of motivation. And extra layers of perversity. Major league perversity.

There’s a hint at the beginning of the film as to the solution but it’s a cleverly ambiguous hint and you don’t want to make the mistake of drawing too many conclusions from it.

In fact you don’t want to make that mistake at any stage in this film. Some elements are predictable enough but there are other elements that are truly devious plot twists and the ending is one of the great endings in cinema history. And no, I’m not exaggerating. It’s seriously brilliant and twisted.

Andy Warhol once said that in the future it will be possible to be famous for being famous. Zsa Zsa Gabor had already achieved this. Her film career amounted to very little but she was very very famous indeed for being Zsa Zsa Gabor. What she adds to this film (her rôle consists entirely of flashbacks) is her presence and her notoriety.

Susan Gordon, the daughter of Bert I. Gordon, had a brief career as a child star. Picture Mommy Dead was her final film rôle. The character she plays in this film is supposed to be a teenager (I’d assume she’s supposed to be about fifteen) and it was a bold move casting a 17-year-old actress since it’s quite a demanding rôle. Susan Gordon carries it off exceptionally well. It’s a pretty extraordinary performance. She just nails it.

Don Ameche had been a fairly big star in the 30s and 40s but made only a handful of movies after that until staging a major late comeback in the 80s. He’s very good here. Martha Hyer adds glamour and perversity and it’s appropriate that she’s the same physical type as Zsa Zsa. Maxwell Reed as Anthony is deliciously slimy as well. Wendell Corey’s rôle is very brief, not much more than a cameo, but he makes the most of it as the most cantankerous lawyer you’ve ever seen.

I’d always assumed that Bert I. Gordon was just a hack director of schlocky B-pictures but clearly I was wrong. He does a great job here. This is a very well-crafted movie and it has some very nice visual moments (and lots of symbolism). Robert Sherman’s screenplay has an intriguingly cyclical touch to it. Events repeat themselves, but do they repeat themselves exactly?

While the ending is a shock if you watch the movie a second time there are definite clues pointing in that direction.

Apparently the movie encountered no major censorship issues. I can only assume that the censors simply didn’t understand what the movie was about. If they had understood they’d have gone crazy.

Picture Mommy Dead has been released on both DVD and Blu-Ray by Kino Lorber, with an audio commentary (by Howard S. Berger and Nathaniel Thompson). It’s a movie that really benefits from the commentary since there’s a surprising amount to unpack in this movie. 

Picture Mommy Dead is just a wonderfully twisted motion picture. There’s just enough of a camp sensibility and there’s a lot of outrageousness. Very highly recommended.

I discovered this movie through a review at Michael’s Moviepalace.

Showgirls (1995), Blu-Ray review

Paul Verhoeven’s infamous 1995 film Showgirls may not be the most critically reviled movie of all time but it has to be right up there in the top five. That in itself makes it interesting. I’d already seen the movie twice but recently I gave in to temptation and bought it on Blu-Ray (I already own it on DVD). I guess that has to make me a serious Showgirls fan. And I’m not ashamed.

For those who believed the critics and avoided this film the plot is straightforward. Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) arrives in Las Vegas with a dream. She wants to be a showgirl. She wants to be a superstar showgirl, like the famous Cristal Connors. She is aiming for the top, but she has to start at the bottom, working in a sleazy strip joint called Cheetah’s. She gradually works her way up. All she needs is one big break. If only by some amazing stroke of fortune she could take over Cristal Connors’ spot for one night then the world would recognise Nomi as a star. But will stardom be worth it? It’s pretty much 42nd Street but with lots and lots of nudity.

There are several ways to approach Showgirls. The easiest way is to just accept the almost universal opinion of critics at the time (and since) that it’s a spectacularly bad movie, one of the biggest turkeys of all time. The second approach is to see it as triumph of unintentional camp. Most fans of the movie (and it does have a genuine cult following) approach it this way. The third approach is to consider the possibility that the movie turned out exactly how Verhoeven wanted it to turn out, which means having to try to understand what he was actually trying to do.

I personally reject the first approach out of hand. If mainstream critics are united in reviling a particular film I immediately want to see that film. Sometimes it turns out that the critics were right but often such a film turns out to be something wondrously strange and delightful. Mainstream critics are generally incapable of understanding cult movies. Usually they ignore such movies, but Showgirls was a big-budget major-studio production so they couldn’t do that. So they savaged it.

The second approach has a lot to be said for it. Showgirls is about as camp as a movie can possibly be. Gloriously so. There are lots of moments when you ask yourself what on earth was Verhoeven thinking, or perhaps what was he smoking? Showgirls takes trashiness to places other movies never thought of going.

The third approach can be interesting. The first thing you have to do is to accept that some of the criticism levelled at Showgirls really do miss the point. For example it might be quite true that the world of superstar Las Vegas showgirls who are household names existed only in Verhoeven’s imagination. But while most people think of this movie as a Vegas movie it isn’t really. Verhoeven was not making a movie about Vegas. His target was the entire American media-entertainment world and in fact American consumerism, which (in his view) makes us all whores. I think it’s fair to say that he was also taking a swipe at celebrity worship. You might not agree with him, but those was his intentions. He could just as easily have set the movie in Hollywood but that had already been done many times and it might have been misunderstood as a movie purely about Hollywood. Las Vegas seemed better suited to his purpose. The actual Las Vegas would not have served the purpose so he invented an imaginary Vegas, in which showgirls are like movie stars.

Verhoeven was certainly aiming at satire. It’s not very subtle satire, but then Verhoeven isn’t a particularly subtle director. Verhoeven movies like RoboCop, Starship Troopers and Basic Instinct have many virtues but subtlety isn’t one of them. And even though his movies aren’t subtle they still manage to get misunderstood (Starship Troopers being an obvious example).

If you’re going to take the third approach you also need to look at Elizabeth Berkley’s performance in a new light. She gave exactly the performance Verhoeven wanted. It’s actually a very good performance but Nomi is very very unlikeable (and she is not supposed to be a sweet innocent corrupted by Vegas). It’s an extreme performance but Nomi is an extreme person. Every time she has a chance of having something good in her life she smashes it and then grinds it underfoot. That’s the sort of person she is. She’s like a feral cat that nobody is ever going to be able to tame. Berkley gave a great performance and it was the right performance but it was a performance that repelled and angered critics and her reward was to have her career destroyed.

You have to view all the performances in the light of Verhoeven’s intentions. Judged in conventional acting terms Kyle MacLachlan is stupendously awful as Cristal’s boyfriend (sort of boyfriend in a decidedly unhealthy way) Zack, but within the context of the movie he’s just right. Zack is, like everyone else in the film, a whore. He is whatever people want him to be. Gina Gershon is immense fun as Cristal, going wildly over-the-top at every opportunity. At least Cristal knows she’s a whore and she accepts it.

Molly (Gina Ravera) is Nomi’s only real friend and she’s the only character with any real integrity. Which makes her the least interesting character (it’s that sort of movie). Robert Davi provides amusement as Al, the sleazy manager of Cheetah’s, who exploits his girls but in his own weird depraved way actually cares about them.

If Verhoeven’s objective was to strip away every thread of glamour from the glitzy greedy grasping world of Las Vegas and to expose the utter corruption and emptiness of the dreams it offers (and the dreams that Hollywood and the entire entertainment industry offer) then you’d have to say he succeeds. Showgirls has been much criticised for its lack of genuine eroticism but really that’s the point. This is sex as business. If you want it you can get it but don’t expect it to make you feel good. Vegas will chew up all your dreams and spit them out and that’s what this movie does with breathtaking ruthlessness.

The film also wants to play around with the links between money, power and sex (which again made Vegas an obvious setting). Everybody is playing power games with everybody else and all the power games involve sex. Most obviously there’s the bizarre three-way dynamic between Nomi, Cristal and Zack. Everything that happens between these three is about power, made most explicit in the infamous lap dancing scene with Cristal pulling the strings but with Nomi making a bid to take control. The power struggles between Nomi and Cristal never stop. Nomi wants money and fame but mostly she wants control.

Verhoeven did however have other intentions as well. Like so many European intellectuals he seems to have had a love-hate relationship with America. While he’s mercilessly demolishing the American dream he’s clearly besotted with American pop culture and he sincerely wanted to make Showgirls as a big-budget musical. Not quite a traditional Hollywood musical, but a Hollywood musical nonetheless.

Verhoeven was (or rather is) also a director obsessed with religious symbolism and it’s no coincidence that the show which Cristal headlines is called Goddess. The bizarre routines in the show are clearly meant to be a kind of pagan celebration of sexuality, and there’s Catholic symbolism as well.

There are times when Showgirls really does hit the target. James, the black dancer with whom Nomi becomes almost emotionally involved, wants her to give up stripping and join him in doing real dancing with serious artistic intentions but when we see his arty dance routine it’s absolutely no different from what Nomi does at Cheetah’s. James is just a whore as well but he can’t see it. And Cristal sneers that what Nomi does at Cheetah’s is not dancing but her own show at the Stardust is also no different from what Nomi does at the strip club, it’s just more expensively staged. They’re all doing the same thing. Cristal just gets paid more and James deludes himself that he’s doing art.

Joe Eszterhas’s script has been accused of misogyny, which is nonsense. This is a script which is equally brutal to all its characters, male and female. This is misanthropy, not misogyny.

Verhoeven was in fact very happy with the movie, and is still very fond of it. The reality is that nothing quite works as he intended it to, but in a way it still does work. Nothing is believable, the characters are not real people with real human emotions, but that just makes it more fascinatingly weird and hyper-real (or perhaps surreal would be more accurate). This is not reality but it’s a strange alternative kind of reality or unreality. Which perhaps is the point - Vegas is not the real world. Visually Showgirls is also of course wonderfully excessive, again to the point of hyper-reality.

At the end of the day I think the best way to enjoy Showgirls is a combination of the second and third approaches I outlined at the beginning. Verhoeven did succeed in his objective, it just happened to be an objective with which mainstream critics and audiences were violently out of sympathy and it happened to succeed in a very strange sort of way.

It can certainly be enjoyed as a weirdly mesmerising exercise in extreme camp or even out-and-out kitsch, but it’s more enjoyable if you also view it as a movie with serious intentions that often fails but in failing it succeeds on a whole different level of weirdness. Most bad movies are either just bad or they’re just bad movies that are so crazy that they’re entertaining. Showgirls is something else again. It’s bad in conventional terms but it achieves a kind of greatness all its own. They don’t make movies like this any more. In fact nobody ever made movies like this. Except Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas.

It’s essential to realise that the film’s trashiness and emotional emptiness and it’s unerotic eroticism are deliberate. These were not mistakes on the part of the director and the writer. They were conscious choices.

Showgirls flopped badly on its original release but has since made a ton of money.

Showgirls has had quite a few DVD and Blu-Ray releases (testifying to its enduring cult appeal). The UK Blu-Ray from Pathé offers a good transfer with a few extras. I reviewed the DVD release of Showgirls quite a few years back.

There is no other movie quite like Showgirls. It’s totally off-the-wall but it’s hypnotic and insanely entertaining once you allow yourself to become immersed in its bizarre alternate universe. It creates its own genre. Personally I just love this movie, almost to the point of obsession. Highly recommended.

Schoolgirl Report 2 - What Keeps Parents Awake at Night (1971)

The 1970s was a rough decade for film industries everywhere. Television had been eating into cinema audiences for years and things were getting tougher. It was difficult enough for Hollywood,  even with its resources. It was especially nightmarish for film industries in other countries. What kept them going, to a large extent, was sex. That was one area in which television simply could not compete. In Germany the film industry was at least partially kept afloat by the Schoolgirl Report movies. The first was released in 1970 and by 1980 the series had run to thirteen movies.

The Schoolgirl Report movies were a minor pop culture phenomenon and they made a truckload of money throughout the world. The formula was undeniably clever. They were ostensibly documentaries on changing sexual behaviour among the young. Each movie was a collection of supposed case studies, interspersed with interviews with people in the streets and with panels of experts pontificating, with lots of wise head-nodding. In fact of course these films were simply an excuse to show a lot of young ladies without their clothes on getting up to various sexual escapades. And while the tone was mock-serious the films were clearly meant to be vastly amusing. They really had more in common with the sex comedies of the ’70s than with any kind of actual documentaries.

Now don’t be alarmed by the title. These girls all look to be at least twenty-three and most are probably pushing thirty.

The second instalment in the series was Schulmädchen-Report 2. Teil - Was Eltern den Schlaf raubt (Schoolgirl Report 2 - What Keeps Parents Awake at Night).

The first segment (which is perhaps the best) deals with a hapless science teacher who is set up for blackmail by his female students. If they can get photos of him having sex with one of them he’ll be sure to give them all a passing grade. It’s all quite amusing with some groan-inducing dialogue and more sexual innuendo than a Carry On movie and then there’s a sting in the tail. Which is one of the things that makes this movie so intriguingly odd - the tone is all over the place.

Then there are teenagers discovering sex in a barn. Teenage runaways who want freedom but find it’s not much fun when you have no money and you get hungry and then suddenly going home seems like a really good idea. There’s a guy who think he’s about to lose his virginity to a girl in the woods but he just loses his dignity instead. Then there’s the girl who gets date-raped. There’s a very light-hearted segment about a couple of girls who take up nude modelling to keep themselves in wigs. Yes, wigs. Everybody knows that a girl will do anything for a wig.

Then there’s Elke, the only girl in her class who’s still a virgin. She tells the other girls wild stories of her imaginary sexual adventures and they call her bluff by setting her up with the town stud. With unexpected results. This is the one segment in which there’s a hint that maybe girls enjoy sex more when they like the boy.

Then there are the four girls who are really bored one night. What they really need are some men. One of them gets a brilliant idea. She rings for a cab. When the cabbie arrives she explains that they’re budding artists and they really need a male model. A nude male model. Right now. Would he like to earn some money? He would, but he discovers that these girls want to do more with his body than just look at it. And there are four of them and he’s just one man. This segment is good-natured fun. Then the tone changes to deadly seriousness in the next segment. A girl who has is getting plenty of sex has a problem. No orgasms. Then her parents take in a lodger who is going to help her with her math homework. She thinks it might be different wth this man but events spin wildly and tragically out of control.

Some of the segments are pretty much pure comedy. Some are sleazy. Some are depressing. Some are tragic. Some segments are funny and sleazy and depressing and tragic. Some are terribly earnest warnings about the dangers of immorality and some of them are celebrations of sexual freedom. It was a weird decade so it produced weird movies.

While the moral stance varies it has to be said that on the whole this movie comes down very heavily on the side of sexual freedom, to an extent that might upset modern sensibilities. You have to remember that the ’70s were a lot less strait-laced than today’s world.

Now let’s face it you’re not going to watch a movie like this today for the titillation. So why would you watch it? Well obviously it has exceptional camp value. It is definitely amusing at times. There’s the time capsule element - 1970s fashions and hair-dos, and 1970s free-wheeling sexual attitudes. There’s the WTF aspect. You really have no idea when each segment begins whether it’s going to be funny or tragic or desperately sad or just plain weird. There is also of course the fact that the naked women look like actual naked women, not like the results of vast amounts of cosmetic surgery. And of course they all have pubic hair. There’s lots and lots of female pubic hair in this movie.

Is it a movie that would hold any appeal at all to a female viewer? I’d say that a woman with a taste for ’70s retro style might well enjoy it, and get some laughs.

Impulse’s DVD is barebones but the transfer is OK. The soundtrack is in German with English subtitles and the hilarious translation add further fun. “Do me. Do me several times.” They just don’t write dialogue like that any more.

It’s a fascinating look at an era that now seems incredibly remote, almost a different universe.

The sex scenes are decidedly odd and not especially erotic but there’s an astonishing amount of naked female flesh on display. If you’re fascinated by the ’70s, if you’re interested in changing attitudes towards sex, or if you just like weird movies that will amuse you and make your head spin then you probably need to see at least one Schoolgirl Report movie. So on that basis, it’s recommended.

Kitten with a Whip (1964)

Kitten with a Whip is a 1964 juvenile delinquent melodrama (based on Wade Miller's novel of the same name) which despite its indifferent reputation is very much worth seeing and not just for Ann-Margret's awesomely over-the-top performance.

It's an absolute must-see for Ann-Margret fans and for aficionados of juvenile delinquent movies.

Here's the link to my review of this kitschy delight at Classic Movie Ramblings.

From Hell It Came (1957)

From Hell It Came may not be the silliest of 1950s monster movies but it certainly has to rank in the top five. This is the infamous killer tree trunk movie.

It opens on a small Pacific island, a US colony, with the execution of a native prince named Kimo. He’s the victim of a plot by a rival and an evil witch doctor to usurp power. Kimo was accused of helping the Americans to poison the previous chief. Kimo vows to come back from the dead and take his revenge.

The island is suffering from an outbreak of plague. The new evil chief blames the Americans. Since the Americans did explode a hydrogen bomb on a nearby island and since the fallout from the explosion did drift on to the island and cause radiation sickness it’s not difficult to see how the  new chief persuaded his people that the Americans are the bad guys. In fact of course the Americans are only there to help and to bring the natives the advantages of modern science and medicine. Spearheading this philanthropic mission are Dr Arnold (Tod Andrews) and Professor Clark (John McNamara). They’ve both been on the island too long and they’re clearly going a bit stir-crazy. Luckily they have plenty of booze.

Complicating things for Dr Arnold is the presence of beautiful American lady scientist Dr Terry Mason (Tina Carver). He’s hopelessly in love with Dr Mason but she’s a career gal.

The American scientists have an uphill struggle to convince the natives to trust them but seem to be making progress when a strange tree trunk appears in the native cemetery. The locals are inclined to think it’s the spirit of Kimo that has come back in the form of the the monster Tabanga and he’s looking for vengeance. The American scientists are sceptical until they discover that the tree trunk has a human heartbeat!

The smart thing to do would be to hit the tree stump with a massive dose of herbicide but if they did that we’d be denied the excitement of seeing a rampaging tree stump creating mayhem.

And this is not just your regular homicidal shrub. Remember that hydrogen bomb I mentioned earlier. This is a radiation-enhanced homicidal shrub!

The evil witch doctor has his own plans for the Tabanga. If he can force it to do his bidding he will have an unstoppable weapon in his possession. He will be able to expel the hated Americans from the island and he will have supreme unchallenged power. No-one can stand against the Tabanga. Of course the Tabanga is just a tree with a bad attitude that moves incredibly slowly and doesn’t seem to have any superpowers but by the standards of the island it’s a super-weapon.

You might be wondering how a movie with a premise like this could possibly void descending into utter silliness. This movie doesn’t even try to avoid that fate - it dives head-first into the deepest pit of silliness it can find.

The three leads are unexciting if competent. The major annoyance is Linda Watkins as the predatory widow Mrs Kilgore. Her accent may well be the worst I’ve ever heard. I assumed she was trying for a cockney accent but then she mentions returning to Australia, so instead of being the worst cockney accent in cinema history it turns out that this is the worst Australian accent in cinema history. Added to which her acting is generally excruciating. You will find yourself praying that she will be one of Tabanga’s first victims.

The makeup effects are impressive in their own way. They wanted a walking tree trunk that looked just slightly human and that’s what they got. It looks really dumb but it does look like a slightly human tree trunk.

You have to admire the cast for being able to play their scenes in this move while keeping a straight face.

Apart from its silliness it’s a movie made with at least a moderate degree of competence. Dan Milner was no Ed Wood. It is excessively talky in the early stages and once the action starts it’s not all that exciting. But compared to some of the worst 50s sci-fi movies (like The Beast of Yucca Flats) it’s enjoyable in its goofiness.

The Warner Archive made-on-demand DVD offers a remarkably good anamorphic transfer. This might be a terrible movie but it looks great.

For all its many flaws From Hell It Came is oddly endearing. If you’re in the mood for a very silly monster movie it’s fun. Recommended.

The Wild, Wild Planet (1966)

The Wild, Wild Planet (originally released in Italy as I criminalia della galassia  or Criminals of the Galaxy) is a 1966 Italian science fiction movie. If you’re not familiar with 1960s Italian science fiction movies then you should take immediate steps to rectify that omission and this is a pretty good place to start.

If you are familiar with Italian cinematic science fiction then you will already have a fair idea of what to expect - this is a shiny plastic and chrome vision of the future with flying cars and a huge rotating space station (called Gamma One) and rockets shuttling back and forth between the planets. This was the 1960s, so everything in the future was going to actually work. Everything in the future was going to be very cool. The men would be handsome and, more importantly of all, the women were all going to be gorgeous.

It’s not actually explicitly stated but this is a future of very advanced biotechnology so it’s possible that the women just stay young and beautiful forever. Or maybe the producers just wanted lots of hot women in the movie.

This is not Star Trek however, where sordid details like politics and business never intrude. This is a future in which real power seems to be in the hands of giant corporations. They’re not just transnational corporations, they’re transplanetary corporation. And it seems that the big money is in post-humanism - which means there’s a huge market in replacement organs. One of these corporations, CBM, has plans to grow artificial organs.

This kind of medical technology raises obvious ethical questions but CBM doesn’t seem too worried about such things. In fact CBM isn’t the least bit concerned about ethics and as will discover their chief scientist is both evil and insane.

So in some ways this movie actually does a better job of predicting the future than most British and American TV and movie sci-fi of its era.

The future might be cool but it’s not trouble-free. People are disappearing. Lots of people. And in increasing numbers. There’s a suspicion that these disappearances might be connected with flocks of girls hanging around the city. The people who have disappeared may have been kidnapped by the girl. There’s also a weird sinister guy in sunglasses who keeps popping up and then vanishing.

There are some macabre touches. Like miniature people. And people with too many arms.

Commander Mike Halstead of Space Command thinks there’s a connection with the mysterious planet Delphus. Which is a bit of a worry since his girlfriend Lieutenant Connie Gomez (Lisa Gastoni) has accepted an invitation from Mr Nurmi to take a vacation on Delphus. Mr Nurmi works for CBM.

There are no space battles but there are spaceships and they look the way people in the 60s knew spaceships should look. This is the future that we never got and it looks much better than the future we actually did get. The evil robot girls are a nice touch. I’m not sure that they’re actually robots but they do seem to be an artificial maybe semi-organic life form which is actually more interesting. And the evil artificial guys are actually quite spooky.

There is some action, and even some definite hints of horror (the bad guys are up to some pretty nefarious tricks and the results are not pretty). Margheriti had spent the preceding couple of years making gothic horror movies so he had a sound understanding of creepiness.

The acting is adequate for the type of movie this is. In other words it’s enjoyably terrible. Look out for Franco Nero in a small rôle.

I’ve never understood why producer-director Antonio Margheriti doesn’t have a bigger following among cult movie fans. OK, he was no Mario Bava and you aren’t going to get the kind of visual genius that Bava could provide. But by the standards of European low-budget/exploitation film-makers Margheriti was quite competent and he had a very clear understanding of what sells - his horror movies (like The Long Hair of Death starring Barbara Steele) have some reasonable chills and some hints of sleaze and his science fiction movies have glamour and a certain amount of enjoyably cheesy style. His movies are undemanding fun. He went on to make three more Gamma One movies.

While the very low budget is evident the special effects and miniatures work is generally at least witty and fun even when it’s ludicrously unconvincing. Antonio Margheriti had a background in those areas and obviously loved using miniatures. It might be a cheap movie but it’s colourful and filled to overflowing with 60s visual style. The production design is original and impressive.

The plot is goofy and outlandish and basically crazy but it does make a kind of sense, and this is after all a mad scientist movie so the craziness is a feature rather than a bug.

The Warner Archive release offers a very nice anamorphic transfer (the movie was shot in colour and widescreen). The colours look pretty good. There are of course no extras.

The Wild, Wild Planet is not by any objective standards a great or even a good movie but as a silly outrageous popcorn movie with a lot of 60s style it’s gloriously entertaining if you’re in the right mood. And as it happens I’m always in the right mood for this type of movie! So I’m not going to apologise for giving it a highly recommended rating.

Colossus and the Amazon Queen (1960)

I’m rather fond of the peplum genre but it has to be said that on the whole these are movies that you don’t want to try to take too seriously. Mostly they’re enjoyable as silly fun. Colossus and the Amazon Queen (the original title is La regina delle Amazzoni) dates from 1960 and is slightly unusual in that it was intended from the word go as a comedic take on the genre.

The dubbed version which hit the U.S. in 1964 pushes the comic elements even further, in fact it arguably pushes them a little too far.

This movie is also a bit unusual in that its star (or at least one of its two stars) went on to have a real career. That star was Australian Rod Taylor and in the same year that he made Colossus and the Amazon Queen he also made the movie that made him a legitimate movie star, that movie being The Time Machine.

Pirro (Rod Taylor) and Glauco (Ed Fury) are the two heroes. Pirro has the brains while Glauco has the muscles. At least Pirro thinks he’s the one with the brains. They’re broke and Pirro grabs what seems to him to be a great opportunity to earn some easy money. All they have to do is undertake a sea voyage and act as watchmen. The difficult part is tricking Glauco into going along with the idea but Pirro has plenty of experience in such matters.

Everything seems to be going well. They land on a remote island where lots of gold is waiting for them and the rest of the crew. There’s also a feast laid out with plenty of fine wine. Unfortunately the wine is drugged. They’ve been tricked but it’s worse than that - they have been sold to the Amazons. And the Amazons have only one use for men.

This is a Battle of the Sexes movie but with the roles reversed. The women are the warriors and are in control. The men are effeminate slaves who spend their time gossiping and are treated like pets. That is the fate awaiting Pirro, Glauco and their pals.

A worse fate may be in store for Glauco. He has offended the captain of the guard and she wants him put to death.

The Queen of the Amazons is anxious to give up her throne. All the other amazons are allowed to have men but the queen must remain chaste and she’s getting rather tired of chastity. There are two deadly rivals competing for the succession.

And of course there are plenty of romantic complications in store as well. The amazon women are all somewhat man-crazy. There are also some pirates who are mostly there so as to provide the obligatory climactic battle scene.

It’s very hard to judge comedy when it’s been dubbed. The original script might well have been quite witty. The dubbed version goes for broad comedy. Mostly it doesn’t succeed in being especially funny but it does manage to be seriously weird. This movie takes high camp as far as it can be taken and then some. There are some awesomely camp dance sequences. There’s also a cheerful disregard for period. The story is supposed to take place not long after the Trojan War but then we get some medieval jousting, not to mention the jazz-inspired dancing (and even without the jazzy score added for the dubbed version the dance routines are clearly jazz-inspired).

The costumes are absurd but they are amusingly bizarre.

The cast clearly understood that subtlety was not required in their performances.

One of the great things about movies of the past is that the film-makers did not agonise over whether their films might offend somebody. This is a rather good-natured movie on the whole but it sure isn’t politically correct.

Colossus and the Amazon Queen is available on DVD from Retromedia in a two-movie pack paired with Goliath and the Sins of Babylon. Goliath and the Sins of Babylon is an excellent film and it gets a pretty decent anamorphic transfer. Sadly the transfer for Colossus and the Amazon Queen is pan-and-scanned and definitely not so good.

It’s generally rather unfair to deliver a harsh judgment on a movie when you’re seeing it in a poorly dubbed version plus the print is not in great condition and to top it all off it’s pan-and-scanned but I think it’s still reasonable to say that this is a pretty bad movie. Despite this it has a certain goofy charm. It’s a bit like a beach party movie in that you have to be in the right mood but I found it to be oddly enjoyable. Recommended, if you have a high tolerance for camp.

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.

The Wild Women of Wongo (1958)

It has to be admitted that The Wild Women of Wongo, released in 1958, is a pretty terrible movie. It’s the sort of Z-grade cinematic shlock that will either bore you to tears or delight you depending on taste.

The opening voiceover is provided by Mother Nature herself. She explains that while overall she thinks she’s done a pretty good job she has made one or two mistakes and she proceeds to tell us about one of her bigger errors of judgment. Ten thousand years ago she tried an experiment with two tribes, the Wongo and the Goona. She made all the Wongo women gorgeous and the men ugly and dorky, while she made all the Goona men handsome studs and all the Goona women rather less than beautiful. In fact much less than beautiful.

At first things went OK since the two villages were unaware of each other’s existence, until one fateful day Engor, the son of the Goona king, arrived with a warning about a marauding tribe of ape-men. The women of Wongo are stunned when they see Engor. They have never seen such a hunky guy. They get really excited when he tells them that in Goona he’s nothing special - all the guys are equally good-looking. Omoo (Jean Harkshaw), the daughter of the Wongo king, is determined to have Engor as her husband. The men of Wongo might be ugly brutes but they’re not stupid. They figure out that they’re going to have a real problem with their women so they decide to kill Engor.

Omoo and the other Wongo gals foil this dastardly plan and for this they are punished by being offered as sacrifices to the dragon god.

Meanwhile Engor returns to Goona and now the studly men of Goona know that Wongo is full of hot babes. As you can imagine they’re extremely excited by this piece of news.

There’s really not enough plot for the film’s 71-minute running time. That’s the main weakness here. Trimmed to an hour or so it would have been much more fun. The plot also tends to wander at times. The ape-men seem like they’re going to be a major threat but then they just sort of get forgotten.

The acting is generally atrocious. In my view that’s a plus. Good acting would have sunk a movie like this. There’s some horrendous dialogue and it sounds better when it’s delivered with such spectacular ineptitude.

Whatever its other deficiencies The Wild Women of Wongo does have some nice visual elements. The various locations (all in Florida) look quite good. There’s a reasonably impressive underwater sequence. What makes that sequence really fun is that it includes a fight to the death between Omoo and an alligator. He’s not exactly the most fearsome of alligators and he’s no match for a strong healthy girl.

Naturally given all the sexual tensions there’s going to be a cat-fight scene. It’s between Omoo and her deadly rival Ahtee and it’s rather amusing. There’s also some very weird dancing by the Wongo women. They might be beautiful but their dancing skills are somewhat questionable.

There’s one moment that is quite gruesome by 1958 standards, a guy getting chomped by a gator, or at least it would be gruesome had it not been so ludicrously (and delightfully) fake.

There are plenty of very attractive women in skimpy costumes but there’s no nudity, which gives it a kind of innocent charm. There’s ample eye candy for the ladies as well, provided by the hot guys of Goona.

The ending is not totally unexpected and it’s probably the only way the film could have ended. This is after all a light-hearted fun movie.

This movie has had several DVD releases, most notably in a jungle triple-feature from Something Weird (the other movies on that DVD being Bowanga Bowanga and Virgin Sacrifice) and as a double-feature from VCI paired with Jungle Girl and the Slaver as Volume 4 in their Psychotronica series. I’m told the VCI release offers the better transfer but not having seen it I can’t confirm that. The Something Weird version isn’t too bad. Image quality is generally OK but the colours are definitely faded.

The Wild Women of Wongo won’t please everybody and perhaps you have to be in the right mood to appreciate it. I happened to be in just the right mood. I found it to be both engagingly goofy and funny and and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I can certainly recommend it for fans of jungle movies and prehistoric women movies.