2069: A Sex Odyssey (1974)

Despite its title 2069: A Sex Odyssey (Ach jodel mir noch einen - Stosstrupp Venus bläst zum Angriff) is not a sexploitation spoof of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This is a West German science fiction sex comedy from 1974, the US title having no connection whatever with the movie.

The plot is pretty much what you would expect from this sort of movie. A spacecraft from the planet Venus arrives on Earth. The Venusians are an all-female society and they’re in urgent need of sperm - large quantities of it. So five Venusian women have been sent to collect as much as possible. They have no idea of the process by which this valuable commodity can be collected but they soon set about learning how this might be accomplished.

Their spaceship has landed in a remote mountain village. They soon find that Earth men are willing to help them. And they discover that their mission is much more enjoyable than they’d expected.

They are mistaken for a French ski team, which makes it easier to seduce the local men. Not that the local men are difficult to seduce. At least until they discover the machine the aliens are using to gather their sperm. Fortunately the alien girls soon find out there are better and more pleasant ways to do the job. 

The jokes are mostly fairly predictable but on the whole it’s a surprisingly good-natured film.

The special effects are ultra-cheap but they’re done in a fun cheesy way. The costumes of the Venusians are reasonably cool and the spaceship set is better than might have been expected (one can’t help suspecting that this set and the costumes may have been recycled from another production).

The acting is very broad but then so is the humour.

It’s all very tame by the standards of 1974 so it seems quite likely that this is a cut version, presumably in order to get a US R rating.

This movie is silly, cheesy fun. Don’t expect to be rolling on the floor with laughter but there’s enough camp value to make it worth a look if you like 70s sex comedies.

Retro Seduction Cinema’s DVD release is fullframe and slightly faded with a fair amount of print damage in places.

my other blogs

I thought I'd take the opportunity to plug some of my other blogs. There's Classic Movie Ramblings, where I review all kinds of classic movies with a cut-off point around the 1970s. There's also Vintage Pop Fictions where I talk about pulp fiction, vintage crime, adventure novels and other popular genres. The cut-off point for that blog is generally the 1950s although occasionally I talk about books published in the 60s.  And thirdly there's Strange Tears where I indulge my love of 19th century art with special emphasis on the Symbolists, the Pre-Raphaelites and the academic painters of that era. I sometimes venture into the early 20th century but I avoid anything with the taint of modernism.

Death Is Nimble, Death Is Quick (1966)

Death Is Nimble, Death Is Quick (Kommissar X - Drei gelbe Katzen) was the second of seven in the Kommissar X series of eurospy films, based on a series of novels by German author Paul Alfred Mueller. He apparently wrote several hundred of them!

This Austrian-French-Italian co-production was shot in German and appeared in 1966 at the height of the eurospy craze.

This time American private eye Joe Walker (Tony Kendall) and his buddy New York cop Captain Tom Rowland (Brad Harris) are investigating strange goings-on in Ceylon. A terrorist group called the Golden Cats which was active in colonial days has sprung to life again. Being a eurospy movie the trail will of course lead to a mad scientist/diabolical criminal mastermind who has invented a deadly bacteria.

It’s impossible for me to describe the plot in any detail - to do so I would have had to understand it all! Luckily in a eurospy movie the plot is secondary to the fun.

The mad scientist is trying to extort a million dollars from a rich plantation owner, money which will enable him to continue his grisly experiments. He naturally has some colourful henchmen including a very large and very nasty karate expert named King (at least that’s what he’s called in the English dubbed version). There’s also an American gangster nicknamed Nitro (again I’m not sure what he was called in the German version) whose favourite weapon is nitro-glycerine. He never goes anywhere without a bottle of this high explosive. He loves blowing stuff up, which makes him right at home in a eurospy flick.

Naturally Joe and Tom (although mainly Joe) will become involved with various beautiful women, including Babs Lincoln (Ann Smyrner), the daughter of the plantation owner who is the extortion victim. The bad guys will make various attempts to kidnap her in order to make her father come across with the money.

There’s a series of slightly confusing double-crosses, many of which involve Philip Dawson (Philippe Lemaire) who spends most of the movie drunk. There are several murders and plenty of fight scenes. There’s also a local police inspector who may or may not be trustworthy.

This one takes a while to get going. The real eurospy goodness doesn’t kick in until quite late in the movie but when it does kick in it does so quite satisfactorily. There’s a standard mad scientist’s laboratory and a pretty cool and rather sinister-looking temple which provides the setting for one of the climactic fight scenes. There are sequences which seem to have been lifted more or less directly from Dr No, with an armoured explosive-firing trimaran in a swamp, a device the locals naturally mistake for a malevolent monster.

Being set in Ceylon it’s vital that elephants should play a part in the plot, which they do quite wittily. There are enough explosions to keep fans of the genre happy (with all that nitro-glycerine being hurled about).

Tony Kendall, despite his name, was an Italian actor (real name Luciano Stella). He’s an ideal lead actor for this type of movie, investing the character of Joe Walker with a cheeky charm and always ready with a wise-crack, and always ready to chase the ladies when perhaps he should be concentrating on chasing the bad guys. He had a successful career in all the popular European genres from spaghetti westerns to giallos. Brad Harris really was American and he provides the necessary muscle for the good guys, proving a good foil for Kendall. The women get to do a bit more than just look glamorous, and the diabolical criminal mastermind is adequate if not spectacular.

It’s all low-budget stuff but it gets the job done.

Sadly Retromedia’s DVD presentation is absolutely ghastly - a horribly butchered pan-and-scanned and very faded English-dubbed TV print. This is particularly unfortunate since the Ceylon locations probably looked quite magnificent. Of course if you’re a eurospy fan you’re used to seeing these movies in this kind of very substandard form.

This is not a top-tier eurospy movie but it’s reasonably entertaining. Recommended for fans of the genre but the DVD release is so awful you might want to rent this one.

The Revenge of Dr X (1970)

The Revenge of Dr X (AKA Body of the Prey, AKA Venus Flytrap) is a 1970 US-Japanese co-production, based on a script by the legendary Ed Wood, Jr.

It starts out with the launch of a space mission, but this has nothing whatever to do with the movie. Rocket scientist Dr Bragan (James Craig) has been working too hard and his doctor recommends a complete rest. His assistant, Dr Nakamura, suggests a trip to Japan, a suggestion the workaholic Dr Bragan surprisingly accepts.

On arrival in Japan Dr Bragan is met by Dr Nakamura’s beautiful cousin, Noriko Hanamura. Her family owns several resort hotels, including one in the mountains that has been deserted for several years. It was too remote and the roads were too bad, as well as being rather too close to an active volcano. Its remoteness is just what Dr Bragan craves.

Dr Bragan now turns to his first love, botany. He has a venus flytrap with him and he clearly has a fascination with carnivorous plants. His objective now is to find a rare Japanese aquatic carnivorous plant. To do this he calls on the help of the famous Japanese female ama divers, which offers the opportunity for some gratuitous topless scenes.

By grafting the two species together he will create a super plant carnivore. He does so, and the resulting hybrid is not only carnivorous, it moves. Since it moves it must be basically human and have intelligence. This proves that humans evolved from plants. No, I don’t follow that reasoning either but hey, it’s a horror movie. Of course to bring his new plant to life he needs lightning, and a convenient electrical storm does the trick.

Of course you know that playing around with man-sized walking carnivorous plants is not going to turn out to be a good idea.

Dr Bragan as played by James Craig is clearly paranoid and somewhat unhinged right from the start. He flies off the handle if anyone questions him or takes any undue interest in his work. Craig’s jumpy performance is the highlight of the movie. You know right away you’re dealing with a mad scientist. It’s not good acting but at least it’s entertaining. That’s more than can be said of the other actors in this film.

The actress who plays Noriko is unbelievably dull. Luckily the deserted hotel which becomes Dr Bragan’s laboratory has a caretaker, a hunchback who plays the organ, which offers the opportunity for some gratuitous organ music.

This is something of a mystery movie. No-one knows who directed it (the opening credits on the only surviving print are from a different movie). No-one is even absolutely sure that Ed Wood wrote the screenplay but it’s so typically Ed Wood that there’s not much doubt on that score.

The monster itself is gloriously goofy. You can’t seriously dislike a movie that has a guy in a rubber suit playing a killer plant.

This is a very bad movie indeed but like everything that Ed Wood touched it’s perversely fascinating. Recommended for Ed Wood fans.

Synergy’s DVD release is absolutely atrocious. It’s fullframe and looks like a very inferior VHS copy.

Santo & Blue Demon vs. Doctor Frankenstein (1974)

Santo & Blue Demon vs. Doctor Frankenstein (Santo y Blue Demon contra el doctor Frankenstein) delivers exactly what it promises - it pits the Man in the Silver Mask against Dr Frankenstein himself.

This movie, released in 1974, is another installment in the long-running series of Mexican movies (in fact there were more than fifty of them) starring professional wrestler and part-time crimefighter and superhero Santo.

Young women are disappearing in disturbingly large numbers. That would be terrifying enough, but the young women are then reappearing as zombies! Even worse, killer zombies. It soon becomes clear that someone out there is performing brain transplants. Unsuccessful brain transplants. The dead victims are then re-animated by means of a remote-control device implanted in their bodies.

Who could be doing such horrific things? Surely it could not be Dr Frankenstein - he must be long dead.

But Dr Frankenstein is not dead at all - he is very much alive and active, even if he is 113 years old! And he is the diabolical figure behind these horrendous brain experiments.

Dr Frankenstein has also devised a way of reversing the ageing process and he uses this promise to recruit two prominent brain surgeons to serve as his assistants. And now Dr Frankenstein has a new victim in mind - Santo! His one successful brain transplant patient is Golem, a huge black man. Golem has enormous strength, but he lacks skill and agility. If he had Santo’s gifts in those areas he would be truly formidable, and nothing could prevent Dr Frankenstein from achieving his aim of unlimited power.

Dr Frankenstein needs is a way of capturing Santo alive and undamaged, and the only way to do that is to make Santo come to him. And that can be achieved quite easily - all he needs to do is to kidnap Santo’s girlfriend Alicia Robles.

What Dr Frankenstein hadn’t counted on was that Santo would figure out what he was up to, and that Santo would not be fighting this battle alone - his friend and wrestling partner Blue Demon will prove to be a valuable ally.

There are the usual wrestling sequences but this time wrestling forms an integral part of the plot - Santo will be matched against Golem, with both Alicia’s life and the safety of humanity being the stakes.

Jorge Russek as Dr Frankenstein makes a fairly effective villain while Golem is certainly a very effective heavy. There’s nothing to say about Santo’s acting - if you’ve seen one Santo movie you know what to expect, and Santo fans don’t expect their hero to be a great actor. He is Santo, he is a legend, and that’s more than enough.

The Santo movies were all fairly low-budget affairs. Dr Frankenstein’s secret laboratory would have cost very little but it looks quite effective. There’s plenty of action, and plenty of thrills. This is a superhero movie Mexican style and it’s a great deal more fun than most such movies.

This is one of the most highly regarded of the Santo movies. The combination of Santo with one of the most famous of all fictional villains has an obvious appeal. It’s all highly entertaining and is a must for fans of the Man in the Silver Mask.

Rise Above’s DVD release offers the original Spanish soundtrack with English subtitles and it’s a decent if not spectacular transfer.

Wicked Women (1978)

I'd like to think that I can find something good to say about just about any Jess Franco movie, but I have to admit that with his 1978 offering  Wicked Women (AKA Women Without Innocence, AKA Frauen ohne Unschul), one of the movies he made for Swiss producer Erwin C. Dietrich in the late 70s,  I’m really struggling.

This was clearly just a movie made for the pay cheque and Franco’s lack of interest is all too obvious.

The movie sells itself as a women-in-prison movie but it isn’t. The women are confined in a mental asylum, and the newest inmate is Margarita (Lina Romay). She was involved with two suspected diamond-smugglers and the unscrupulous couple who run the asylum want to find out where the diamonds are hidden.

Unfortunately for them Margarita is completely mad and they can get no sense out of her. The doctor in charge of the asylum uses various controversial therapies, most of which involve sex. The therapies would seem to be more likely to end someone more crazy than they already are but it does eventually get results, of a kind. And of course it necessitates Lina Romay taking her clothes off a lot. That’s certainly no disadvantage in a Franco movie but in this one the sex seems a bit perfunctory. And it’s not even very sleazy. If Franco can’t be bothered ramping up the sleaze factor then you know he’s not really interested.

Lina Romay as usual does her best. She was pretty good at playing severely disturbed women but this movie doesn’t really push her acting abilities as much as movies like Dorian Gray. She was always at her best when there was a lot of weirdness going on as well as just regular madness. And that’s another problem here - the weirdness level is just not high enough.

Many of the sets will be familiar to viewers who’ve seen Voodoo Passion, a much more interesting and generally much better Franco movie that came out in 1977, suggesting that Franco may have been indulging in his 1970s habit of shooting two movies simultaneously. The multiple-mirrored sex scenes are clever but the ones in Voodoo Passion have a bit more spark to them.

Lina Romay’s naked romp in the spa bath with a friend will certainly get your attention though. Of course it’s part of her therapy and Lina understands that if therapy is going to work you have to put some effort into it. Which she does.

It’s essentially a straight murder mystery plot, which was something Franco was quite capable of pulling off, as he did in the excellent and underrated Downtown - Die nackten Puppen der Unterwelt in 1975. But in that movie he was having fun as well, spoofing the private eye genre.

Wicked Women isn’t sleazy enough to be a great women-in-prison movie. it isn’t erotic enough to make it as an erotic film, it isn’t weird enough to be a classic slice of Franco uber-weirdness and it has no sense of fun so it also doesn’t make it as comedy. So it’s really a bit of a nothing movie, obviously cranked out to keep producer Erwin C. Dietrich happy (Dietrich incidentally gets a credit as co-writer). The prodigious number of lesbian couplings would certainly have pleased him.

The German DVD from Ascot Elite is up to their usual standards - picture quality is superb. The movie is in German with optional English subtitles.

This one is really for Franco completists only.

Heaven and Hell (1980)

Heaven and Hell is one of the oddest of all movies made by Shaw Brothers studios. Made in 1980, it’s a bewildering mix of genres. 

Director Cheh Chang was one of the most revered of all Hong Kong martial arts film directors but with this movie he really let himself go.

The movie opens in Heaven. The maid Xixiao is one of the servants of the Queen Mother, but when she makes a fairly minor mistake during a ceremony she is sentenced to 300 lashes. This establishes one of the film’s major themes - that injustice is equally common in Heaven. on Earth and in Hell. Her boyfriend intervenes, there is a fight, and the two lovers eventually make their escape from Heaven to the mortal world.

One of the guards of the Heavenly Portal, Xin Ling, is banished to Earth for failing to prevent the lovers’ escape. He is killed while trying to dave the life of the mortal version of Xixiao.

After this brief interlude on Earth Xin Ling finds himself in Hell. After witnessing the various refinements of eternal torture he has an encounter with the Buddha of Mercy, who tells him that he must find four other heroes with red blood (true denizens of Hell do not have red blood) and with them he will be able to fight his way out of Hell so that they can all be reincarnated.

The first half of the movie is one of the most interesting things ever to come our of Shaw Brothers Studio. It’s a gleeful mix of king fu action, fantasy, 80s music videos, 1950s Hollywood musicals and gangster movie. Cheh Chang takes everything that has ever caught his eye and throws it into the mix. There are epic fight scenes, and spectacular musical production numbers.

Unfortunately in the second half of the movie Cheh Chang loses control of the film and it becomes just an endless succession of fight scenes. They’re often very imaginative fight scenes - the fight on the sword points is truly inspired - but the bold genre-bending of the first half is sorely missed.

Visually this movie is as impressive as anything the Shaw Brothers studio ever did. The production design is spectacular. We only see glimpses of Heaven but we see a great deal of Hell, and it’s a fascinating mixture of western Christian concepts and Eastern concepts. Much of it seems very western, until the Buddha of Mercy makes an appearance.

It’s certainly reminiscent of western mythology, of Orpheus’s descent into the Underworld. So the western influence is not just Christian concepts of Hell but pagan concepts drawn from Greek mythology as well, but intriguingly combined with eastern ideas.

If you’re a fan of kung fu and swordplay movies don’t despair - there is plenty here to keep you happy.

And if you’re a fan of musicals you’ll adore the first half of this movie.

This movie might not be a complete success but even when it fails it does so gloriously and entertainingly. It’s all over the place but it does have a strange visionary quality to it. A real oddity in the Shaw Brothers catalogue but worth a look. In spite of some flaws, still definitely recommended.

Image Entertainment’s DVD release can be recommended very highly - it’s a great anamorphic transfer and the colours are simply dazzling.