Sinderella and the Golden Bra (1964)

Sinderella and the Golden Bra is a 1964 nudie-cutie and it also belongs to a rather small sub-genre, the nudie musical.

It has what seems like a perfect setup for a nudie-cutie. It’s the Cinderella story, but when our heroine flees the masked ball she doesn’t leave behind her glass slipper but her bra. A golden bra. So in order to find the mysterious girl whom the price hopes to marry the kingdom has to be searched for a maiden possessing the physical attributes that will perfectly fill out that golden bra. It’s exactly the sort of naughty but goofy concept you want for a movie such as this. Honestly, with that setup you can’t go wrong. But surprisingly this movie does go wrong, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment.

The prince is a dreamy lad and his father feels that his son needs to be married off as soon as possible. A masked ball to which every young lady in the kingdom will be invited seems like the answer. Somewhere in this land there has to be a girl capable of arousing the prince’s interest.

The problem is that he already knows which girl he wants to marry - the one he keeps dreaming about.

The king is really much more interested in his knitting than in his son’s romantic problems. The idea of a king devoting himself to knitting is mildly amusing at first but it wears thin real fast.

Derella (Suzanne Sybele) is of course the step-sister of two awful girls, Flossy and Fanny. Both they and their mother treat Derella with contempt. Derella is beautiful but no-one has noticed.

Instead of a fairy godmother she has a fairy godfather who does the magic stuff with pumpkins to get Derella to the ball. He’s well-meaning but he’s a drunk and he’s been a failure as a fairy godfather.

Derella flees from the ball at the stroke of midnight, minus her bra. The rest of the movie follows the basic fairy tale story.

Now, as to what went wrong. Firstly, the songs are rather lacklustre. Secondly, the jokes are rather feeble. The biggest problem however is that by 1964 nudie-cutie standards it’s ridiculously tame. We get a few very brief glimpses of bare breasts. Given that the musical and comedy elements are not up to scratch the movie could still have been saved had it been made genuinely titillating. But it isn’t. And we spend the whole movie expecting that we will see Derella’s presumably impressive bust but all we get is a brief flash. Given that Suzanne Sybele isn’t much of a singer or actress you have to wonder why she was cast if she wasn’t willing to show a bit more skin.

Of course it’s probable that the print that Something Weird found is the only surviving print and it is possible that it was cut at some stage. But it gives the impression that it really was simply a very tame film.

The print is certainly in very poor condition. There’s a lot of print damage.

Sinderella and the Golden Bra is good-natured and inoffensive but doesn’t quite make it. It is mildly interesting if you’re into nudie fairy tales.

Something Weird paired this film on DVD with H.G. Lewis’s Goldilocks and the Three Bares which I am yet to watch. There are of course also the assorted short subjects you expect from Something Weird.

Some online reviews will tell you that this is one of only two known nudie musicals. That is utter nonsense. There have been quite a few, several of which are in fact extremely good.

The First Nudie Musical (1976) is inspired sexy craziness and I highly recommend it. And the 1977 Cinderella (AKA The Other Cinderella) is an example of how to do a nudie musical fairy tale properly. It’s very sexy and very crazy and the songs are a riot.

Cinderella (AKA The Other Cinderella, 1977)

Cinderella (released in 1977 and later retitled The Other Cinderella) is a Charles Band-produced erotic retelling of Cinderella. It’s Cinderella as a sex comedy. But it’s more than that. It’s an erotic musical comedy retelling of Cinderella. Which is just such a fabulously 1970s concept.

It stays relatively close to the familiar fairy tale. At this point one should perhaps point out that the much-loved 1697 Charles Perrault fairy tale is just one of countless versions of a folk tale that originated around 2,000 years ago. So making a few changes to the story isn’t really particularly outrageous. It’s a story that has already been tampered with many many times.

Cinderella (Cheryl ‘Rainbeaux’ Smith) lives with her stepmother and her two stepsisters and the stepsisters make her life a misery. This will come to a head with the royal ball.

The king has arranged the ball in order to find a bride for his son. The king and queen are concerned that the young man, now twenty-one, is an innocent virgin who knows nothing about sex. In fact the prince already has an immense amount of sexual experience. He may look like an innocent young man but he is fact a debauched and jaded libertine.

Every maiden in the kingdom is to be invited to the ball.

Any feature film adaptation of the story will have to add a few subplots to pad out the running time. In this case we get the various sexual adventures of the Lord Chamberlain (Kirk Scott) as he travels the realm delivering the invitations.

Naturally Cinderella’s stepsisters try to prevent Cinderella from attending. Luckily Cinderella’s fairy godmother shows up just in time.

The fairy godmother isn’t really a fairy godmother. He’s a thief. He’s also black and gay. He’s entered Cinderella’s house with burglary in mind. He feels really sorry for the poor girl. He’d love to help her but he has no means to do so. Cinderella suggests that he needs a magic wand. He doesn’t think he possesses such a thing but he looks through his bag of stolen goods and finds a very weird contraption. Cinderella is sure it must be a magic wand. It turns out that it really is a magic wand. Cinderella will go to the ball after all.

Then comes one of the movie’s many “I can’t believe they did that” moments. The fairy godmother is confident that Cinderella will wow the prince. She has a gorgeous ball gown and a glamorous hairstyle. He’s seen her in the bath and in his view she is very well equipped in the T&A department. Just one final touch is needed. With the magic wand he makes a small adjustment to a certain intimate portion of her anatomy, which will have the effect of giving said portion of her anatomy the ability to provide the most extreme pleasure. Now she really will be irresistible to the prince.

The ball is more an orgy than a ball. The prince is blindfolded while the various maidens pleasure him. Mostly he’s disappointed. He’s had so many women that he finds it difficult to get really excited any more. Until he samples Cinderella’s charms. She offers him pleasures he’d never thought possible. That’s because of that tiny adjustment the fairy godmother made to that vital part of her anatomy.

Of course Cinderella is whisked away at midnight. The prince has no idea of the identity of that special girl but he is determined to find her. He travels the length and breadth of the kingdom, testing out every maiden to find the one with the super-special lady parts.

The first thing to say about this movie is that it’s bonkers. The second thing to say is that it’s actually beyond bonkers. It takes the concept of bonkers to whole new levels.

Visually it’s bizarre and over-the-top. Some of the girls at the ball are wearing the sorts of ball gowns you expect in a fairy tale. Some look like patrons at a 1970s disco. Some would look more at home in a movie about the decadence of the Roman Empire. Some look like refugees from a fetish video. That’s typical of the movie’s crazy visual style. The odd thing is that somehow all this visual coherence does manage to cohere into a strange but fascinating and unique visual style.

This film is packed to the brim with things that some modern viewers will find dated and problematic. That’s its charm. If you’ve always wanted a Cinderella movie that includes a song about Cinderella’s vagina this is the movie for you.

It’s a sex comedy so is it funny? I think it is. It may not have you rolling in the aisles but it’s consistently amusing.

Everything about this movie is crazed. But the craziness works. It all works because it’s so goodnatured. This is just a fun sexy movie. The amount of nudity is positively staggering and it’s fairly explicit. The sex scene (there are lots of them) are reasonably graphic but it always remains softcore.

Cheryl Smith makes a fine Cinderella. She’s sweet and charming and funny, she’s sexy and she’s naked a lot.

At the end we’re told to look forward to the sequel, Cinderella 2. In fact there was a follow-up, called Fairy Tales (1978), also an erotic musical comedy fairy tale movie.

This is a delightfully weird movie that is completely nuts and for that reason it’s highly recommended.

Full Moon’s Blu-Ray release is barebones but the transfer is lovely.

Queens of Evil (1970)

Queens of Evil is a 1970 Franco-Italian co-production directed by Tonino Cervi. It’s a bit hard to decide to which genre this movie should be assigned. It’s not quite gothic horror, it’s not a giallo. It’s really a contemporary fairy tale gothic horror movie.

David (Ray Lovelock) is a young hippie riding his motorcycle to wherever it takes him. He stops to help a middle-aged man with a flat tyre. The man gives him an odd lecture. David expects it to be the kind of lecture that middle-aged guys would deliver to kids in 1970 but this is oddly different. Then there’s a car crash and there are police and David, being a hippie, doesn’t want to get mixed up with the police. He takes a side road and finds a house. He decides to sleep for the night in the shed. The following morning he meets the people who live in the house - three beautiful young women. David thinks their house looks like something out of a fairy tale.

There are some situations in life that are too good to be true. Three gorgeous very friendly babes living alone in a fairy tale cottage in the woods is one of those situations. Maybe he should have taken Liv’s advice. She was the first of the girls he encountered and she told him he’d be smart to leave. But of course he doesn’t. And there’s probably no male in the world who would have hopped on his bike and left. These girls are so friendly and gorgeous.

The girls are Samantha (Silvia Monti), Bibiana (Evelyn Stewart) and Liv (Haydée Politoff). They seem to be sisters.

There’s something else in these woods. It’s a kind of castle, the sort you’d expect in a fairy tale.

David notices that the girls seem to appear very suddenly and then, in the middle of a conversation with one of them, he’ll turn around and she’s gone.

Had David been more familiar with fairy tales he might have reflected that although there are certainly beautiful princesses in such tales not every female in fairy tales is a beautiful princess.

David becomes involved with Samantha. There are some slightly odd things about this house in the woods but David is so entranced by the three women that he doesn’t worry too much.

Of course things will end up becoming rather dangerous for poor David. He has no idea what he’s let himself in for. He’s very young and rather innocent.

Tonino Cervi’s career as a director wasn’t very extensive or distinguished but he does a fine job here. He creates a very subtle sense of unease. David knows there’s something slightly odd going on but it never occurs to him that it might be something to worry about. He’s a live and let live kind of guy. These chicks are a bit eccentric but he’s a hippie so that just makes them more fascinating to him.

Then slowly things become stranger. We know that eventually something really dramatic will happen but when it does Cervi manages to make it quite shocking.

Ray Lovelock was a fine (and versatile) actor and he does the innocent idealistic hippie thing extremely well. We really like David.

The three female leads are very effective. The three sisters seem to be slightly odd and a tiny bit disturbing but the three actresses don’t overdo this. And they manage to make the sisters seem a bit like the kinds of girls you might meet if you ever found yourself in a fairy tale. They’re beautiful and entrancing. They’re also seductive.

For most of its running time this movie avoids gothic horror clichés, or uses such clichés in unexpected ways. The viewer is really not at all sure what’s going on. Are the three sisters just free spirits ignoring the rules of conventional society (in other words are they basically hippies like David)? Is one of them a psycho, or are they all psychos? How dangerous are they? How crazy are they? Are they witches? Are they good witches or bad witches? Is this a giallo or a gothic horror film? We come to suspect that something supernatural or paranormal may be going on. Of course we’re seeing things from David’s point of view, which may be distorted. He’s a hippie. He might be having a drug fantasy.

Things become clearer towards the end but we’re still left with a few questions. And the ending is not quite what we expect. It remains a movie that doesn’t quite slot neatly into a particular genre.

Mention should also be made of the production design which is both dazzling and unexpected. The sisters’ house might appear to be a fairy tale cottage in the woods but no fairy tale cottage has this kind of ultra-modernist interior decor.

Queens of Evil is a wonderful fascinating oddball movie. Highly recommended.

Mondo Macabro’s Blu-Ray presentation looks great and there are some nice extras.

Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989)

Sinbad of the Seven Seas is a 1989 Cannon Films adventure fantasy with an interesting history. It was originally a Luigi Cozzi project. Cannon then decided it would be cool to do a series instead. Cozzi dropped out and Enzo G. Castellari came in as director. Cannon took a look at the huge amount of footage that Castellari had shot and decided it was totally unreleasable. Cozzi was brought back to try to rescue something from the disaster.

With those things in mind you’d expect this movie to be a trainwreck. In fact it’s magnificent.

Cozzi’s first step was to add a prologue which tells us that this is a story told by a mother to her little girl. That’s perfectly appropriate for an Arabian Nights tale since the Thousand and One Nights had a similar framing story, the tales being stories told by Scheherazade to the king.

The plot is stock standard stuff. The city of Basra is a joyous place ruled over by a kind and wise caliph until an evil wizard named Jaffar (John Steiner) casts a spell that turns the city into a cauldron of evil and misery. Jaffar also intends to force the caliph’s beautiful daughter Princess Alina (Alessandra Martines) to marry him. Alina is currently engaged to a prince named Ali who is a member of Sinbad’s crew.

Sinbad is off adventuring when all this happens. He is shocked and dismayed when he returns to Basra.

Naturally he is determined to thwart Jaffar’s plans but the problem is that Jaffar has used his magic to scatter the sacred jewels of Basra to the four corners of the Earth. Only the sacred jewels can restore peace, sanity and happiness to Basra. Sinbad and his brave crew set off to retrieve the jewels. That’s all there is to the plot.

What follows is a series of crazed action set-pieces as Sinbad and his men battle assorted monsters, ghostly knights and wicked sexy amazons. The amazons are particularly dangerous - their main weapon is seduction.

This is obviously not an expensive movie but it looks wonderful. Jaffar’s lair looks more like a mad scientist’s laboratory from a 1930s movie serial than a wizard’s haunt but that just adds more fun and craziness.

The very imaginative production design looks strange and exotic, as it should. There’s no real attempt to maintain the Arabian Nights look. The movie is like a mashup of elements from multiple fairy tales and adventure stories from lots of different historical periods and settings with a few science fiction elements thrown in as well. Anything that seems like it might be fun gets thrown into the mix. Vikings are cool, so let’s have a Viking in the movie. Mediæval knights are cool so we’ll have some of those as well. Mad scientists are fun so let’s make the villain a combination of a mad scientist and a sorcerer.

Some of the effects are cheesy but mostly the effects are clever, inspired and pretty convincing. The monsters are varied and they look terrific. The scenes with the ghostly knights are superb. The knights are just empty suits of armour but they’re very creepy.

All the action scenes are done with style and imagination.

The pacing doesn’t let up. The plot is so simple that there’s no need to waste time with boring exposition. The movie rushes from one frenetic action sequence to another. We know that Ali and Alina are in love so there’s no need for endless romantic buildups. When Sinbad encounters a crazy good wizard with a beautiful daughter we know that she and Sinbad will fall for each other so there’s no need to slow things down while they figure that out.

Muscle-bound bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno had starred in Cozzi’s wild insane Hercules movies. He makes a more than adequate hero. John Steiner chews every piece of scenery he can get his hands on. The actors playing Sinbad’s crew (which includes a dwarf, a Viking and a samurai) put everything into their performances. Alessandra Martines doesn’t have to do much more than look beautiful and frightened which she manages to do quite successfully. The amazon queen is suitably seductive.

Jaffar is an amusing villain. He’s very evil but very cowardly.

The violence is all cartoonish without any gore. There’s no nudity, there are no sex scenes. This is a fairy tale told to a kid.

Sinbad of the Seven Seas makes very little sense but it’s crazy fun from start to finish. Highly recommended.

The 101 Films DVD has no extras apart from the trailer but the transfer is excellent.

I’ve also reviewed Cozzi’s Hercules (1983) and Starcrash (1978). They’re both fabulous movies.

Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972)

The vogue for horror movies featuring great female Hollywood stars of advancing years that started with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was almost played out by 1972 when Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? appeared. This late British-made entry  (actually a co-production between American International and Hemdale Productions) in the cycle is not without interest.

In this case the ageing star was Shelley Winters. She was an actress who, even when young, was perfectly happy to accept unglamorous and even grotesque roles. As such she was ideal for a movie of this type. With the rather underrated but talented Curtis Harrington directing the result should have been a wondrously entertaining over-the-top high camp romp. Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? does not quite live up to these expectations.

Winters plays Mrs Forrest, generally regarded as an eccentric but warm-hearted American ex-vaudeville star living in England in the 1920s. She is a widow, her husband (a famous stage magician) having passed away a few years earlier. Every Christmas she invites ten children from the local orphanage to spend Christmas night in her large and rather baroque house. This year she finds herself hosting two additional children, a rather strange brother and sister named Christopher and Katy Coombs, who stowed away in the trunk of the car bringing the children to the house.

Mrs Forrest, who insists that the children call her Auntie Roo, takes rather a shine to Katy. This is because Katy reminds her of her own daughter Katherine. So what happened to Katherine, you might ask? As the local police inspector explains to someone who does ask, the child simply vanished some years earlier. In fact the audience already has a fair idea what happened to Katherine. That’s actually the biggest problem with this movie - it gives away too much information too soon. The clue that the movie is a kind of retelling of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale is revealed very early, and the movie’s title is itself an egregious example of telling the audience too much right from the very start. To be fair to Curtis Harrington the title may not have been his fault, it may have been imposed on him by the producers.

Mrs Forrest has been trying to make contact with her departed daughter through the auspices of a rather dotty medium, Mr Benton (Ralph Richardson). Mr Benton is alas rather less than honest and is motivated mostly by the knowledge that Mrs Forrest is extremely wealthy.

It’s soon obvious that Mrs Forrest’s interest in Katy is in the nature of a rather unhealthy obsession, and that Mrs Forrest is a long way from being sane. She decides she wants to adopt Katy and she puts her plan into operation by the rather drastic means of kidnapping the children. Christopher has gained an unfortunate reputation at the orphanage by being rather too imaginative and for having an imagination that tends rather too much towards the dark side for the liking of the orphanage’s director. His vivid imagination soon takes hold of him and he convinces himself (and his sister) that Auntie Roo is a witch and that they are likely to meet the fate that the witch in the fairy tale had in mind for Hansel and Gretel.

The principal interest of the movie (and one that is often overlooked by its detractors) is that the events as they unfold are the result of the interactions of two people who are very much out of touch with reality - Mrs Forrest and Christopher. Unlike Mrs Forrest Christopher is not actually insane but he is only a child and he is a child whose exceptionally vivid imagination leads him to mistake a fairy tale for reality.

Shelley Winters hams it up to the best of her very considerable abilities in that direction. Ralph Richardson is as always a delight as the outwardly kindly but totally unscrupulous medium. There’s a fine supporting cast of reliable British charactor actors.

The temptation with such a horror movie is to make the setting a gloomy gothic house and to make copious use of shadows and darkness. Harrington does quite the opposite in this movie. Mrs Forrest’s house is certainly baroque but it’s anything but gloomy. It looks more like a house from a fairy tale, which of course it is. It looks just like a gingerbread house. Most scenes are brightly lit and everything is colourful and rather jolly-looking. It’s a legitimate approach and Harrington uses it quite skillfully to counterpoint the more grisly scenes.

Even among fans of the Grand Guignol Dames cycle of the 60s Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? has a rather poor reputation. That may well be because they misunderstand the film’s intentions. It doesn’t work as a full-blooded horror film because that’s not what it’s trying to be. It’s the fairy tale element that is the the core of the film, and fairy tales both horrify and delight children. That appears to be the intention here. We’re supposed to be both amused and horrified. The real horror comes from the fact that Christopher really believes that he and his sister have become fairy tale characters, and this belief proves to be every bit as dangerous as Auntie’s Roo’s delusions.

One of Curtis Harrington’s major problems as a director is that he never quite achieved enough success to be in a position to choose his own projects. On his first and best film, Night Tide, he was both writer and director but in most of his later movies he found himself filming someone else’s screenplay, and without enough clout as director to be able to make these movies truly his own. As a result he was never again able to do anything as subtle and quirky as the superb Night Tide. With Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? he comes close to achieving something similar, a story that blurs the lines between dream and reality. Had he had greater creative control the movie may have been more successful.

This movie is paired with Harrington’s 1971 horror flick What’s the Matter with Helen? on a double-sided DVD in MGM’s Midnite Movies series. It’s a good transfer and the modest price is certainly an added inducement.

Despite not being a complete success Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? is better than its reputation suggests and it’s definitely worth a look. If you approach it the right way it is rather fun.