Reviews

Tawny Kitaen must have been a lot less cooperative an ingenue than Sylvia Kristel had been for director Just Jaekin. His adaptation of John Willie's Sweet Gwendoline adult comic lacks any real erotic content and ends up little more than a cheesy pulp adventure with a little skin. The acting is as awful as any school play and not helped by casual Euro dubbing.

The story sees Gwen and gal-pal Beth arriving in China to search for Gwen's butterfly-collecting father. They cling to skipper Willard, a man so singularly mean, sarcastic, and uncooperative that the girls' action are bizarre. Together, they traipse thru jungle and desert to the fabled Amazonian land of Yik Yak.

The location work is pretty admirable, but the studio sets at the end are the cheesiest you'll ever see. You may not notice at first because of the distracting presence of many lovely women in metal bikinis, but by then you'll know that nothing really sexy is going to happen. There is only one love scene in the film, and Kitaen wears a cloak the whole time! The rest of the film contains nothing more than a few random breasts, and the last act features many strangely industrial bondage setups that aren't really used to any advantage (except, perhaps, the pony girl chariot race). It's all a terrible waste, since the girls are lovely (tho not busty) and the erotic possibilities of Asian girls, jungle love, and Amazonian warriors are endless, but again and again it's obvious that Kitaen refused to do more than flash the camera.

Genuinely awful "comedy" entry in the Black Emanuelle series with Laura Gemser. Gemser is as lovely as ever, but the story is stupid and boring, the acting is amateurish, the dubbing uses hee-haw American accents for the rubes, and the sex is dull and not erotic.

Emanuelle is the new doctor in town, driving all the men wild, but not doing anything more sexy than showering near an open window. The townsfolk create their own romance, fumbling around in barns and boats in decidedly unsexy ways. When Emanuelle's boyfriend arrives, it starts a mistaken identity subplot that couples awkwardly with the main plot, which involves some sort of land rezoning scheme. If that sounds dumb, it is.

I give it a 2 only because no one crawls thru any ventilation ducts to escape from or gain access to a villain's lair.

Sub-par as a sex flick, sub-par as a psycho-thriller, this Misty Mundae vehicle may please fans but it's not going to create many fans. The story follows two sisters who want another troublesome girl out of the way, but who find themselves stumbling into the lair of a lesbian even more psycho than they are. She forces them to compete in some little games at gun point if they ever want to get out alive.

Misty and Chelsea Mundae demonstrate their C-list eroticism and D-list acting skills. Robert Rowell's directorial style consists primarily of jamming a camera as close to his subject as possible, even outdoors. The music is a relentlessly repetitive pounding that doesn't distinguish between a girl masturbating in a shower and someone being murdered.

The story piles on the twists until the early scenes make no sense. The sex scenes are uninspired, unerotic, and sometimes impossible, altho Misty saves a few by being delicious in a short skirt. Julian Wells does all right as the psycho lesbian, but the role doesn't ask much of her and Misty ruins most of her intense scenes by being annoying and sarcastic.

I've certainly seen worse, but if this is one of the best Misty Mundae films, I'm not going to hurry to find another.

Dubbed dialog, artless lighting, and science-film acting weaken what is otherwise a terrible adventure movie. The muddled and repetitive story concerns a white hunter who goes to South America, where he meets pretty Morena, a colleague's daughter. A native comes to town and picks Morena to be the tribe's virgin sacrifice. He and his pals kill papa and drag her off, spurring the white hunter to rescue her.

Early on, we get a little bondage nudity (a surprise for 1959) and jaguar wrasslin'. An excessive cantina dance sequence gets in the way, altho I'm not sure of what... the worst dream-sequence effects ever? Most of the film is a pursuit thru the jungle... with lame booby traps (as usual, pythons stand in for venomous stakes) and a climactic death match of the sort that the original Star Trek was so fond of.

Filmed in color, the location shots look surprisingly good (as does the captive Morena), but are edited with badly-matched studio shots. The producers would have been better off just shooting stock footage to sell to more serious film-makers. The trailer for Tarzana: The Wild Girl had more thrills.

Fantastic nudie cutie one-reeler from the silent era, featuring bare (and shaved!) beauties of all sorts. It's likely this is the best silent -era soft-core you'll ever find.

Wealthy socialite Alva gets a telegram from a detective agency saying they've found her adventurer husband Russell "held captive by the love" of the white(?) native princess, Loma. Alva swaps her silk robe for jodhpurs and jackboots and makes for the dark continent. The trail has gone cold, however, so she gets clues from topless black maidens and is temporarily sidetracked by, then abducted into, a white slaver's harem. But plucky Alva escapes into the jungle, where she comes upon a native village of more black beauties and, eventually, confronts her husband and his exotic lover.

No real fights, animal attacks, or cliffhangers here; just undraped dames by the score. The acting is better than a lot of silent-era films and often rather brazen (charmingly, some of the girls hide their faces from the camera). Quite a shocker, but could have rated higher if only lovely Alva had suffered a little more indignity and injury in the course of her adventure or if the climax had featured more than just a strip-off.

Jungle women exploitation, if you can call it that, with a sandy beach full of lovely girls in tailored animal skin dresses (over bikini bottoms, no less) struggling to avoid the dreadful fate of marrying the brutish men of their own tribe. The acting is awful, with primitive dialog and awkward pauses that don't help. They're pretty much all equally stiff, men and women alike, with 1950s hairstyles and a comical mix of accents. The director doesn't do them any favors, cutting in awkward reaction shots and inserts that don't match.

The women--tho pretty--don't get wild for the first half hour, and even then it's only 1958 wild, which is to say tame enough for afternoon TV. Once their own men disappear, the ladies do a little dancing, a little swimming, fight off a couple of ape men, have a quick catfight, and go off to rustle the beefcake of the Goona tribe. Despite the refreshing protofeminism motif, the Scooby Doo plotting is painful. But the film is shot in color--partly on beautiful beaches and partly at the strange Coral Castle--so it looks pretty good, depending on the print you happen to see.

As film-making, it's strictly hack work. As exploitation, it's less titillating than a stroll on the beach--even back in '58.

Abysmal pulp adventure exploitation in the jungle woman genre. Lousy audio thankfully obscures the dumb dialog. And it's awfully talky for a movie about people who don't speak English. There's no adventure to be found here; it's a jungle adventure with cliffhangers and one wild animal attack that happens in flashback.

Three pale-face dopes wander the African wilderness and encounter warring man-hungry tribes of Amazons. These wild women have advanced out of the Stone Age only so far as to invent makeup, shoes, and underarm hair removal technology. Despite their desperation for "hus-bahnd," the ladies insist that they will fight the men and burn the weaker ones.

The only thing of interest, as if there were any question, is the assortment of young women clad in animal skins cleverly designed like the bathing suits of 1951. Plenty of wrestling and bad dancing mixed with stripless 1950s stripper moves. No nudity or appreciable violence. On the other hand, you may be humming the catchy native song for days.

Better than average low-budget sexploitation flick about a middle-aged married man stopping over in Las Vegas and hooking up with a 17-year-old runaway with no morals. She's a cute teen with no shame about her body who thinks everything is "groovy" and quickly gets on his nerves after a night of passion. But she gets him to take her to what turns into the only orgy ever with too few men.

The acting is weak, and the audio is lousy, but where else can you find late-60s girl-girl vintage vibrating massager action? I ask you, where? Unfortunately, our protagonist is a depressing prude and nearly jinxes all our fun. Man, what a square.

But all the tawdry partying among complete--and sometimes faceless--strangers gets old fast. Our bad girl has her good time and tries to return to her sugar daddy, with predictable results.

Dull-witted, yes, but delivers what it promises.

This quickie exploitation pic tries too hard to be legit and tell the story of a small town girl trying to bust into the big city. As a look at USA circa 1963, it's interesting, but as an exploitation pic, it's a bore. Too little story too coy in the telling make this one of the few genuinely boring Something Weird Video releases. The opening makes the claim that it is a true story; and, as dull as it is, that's very believable. The strippers don't even strip.

To its credit, the leading lady is a genuinely good actress, whose narration, while used too much, is quite well done. She's also very good looking (if you don't mind a bouffant) and gets topless a few times, but it goes nowhere.

Poor Judy runs away from home and quickly gets pawed by a motorist and spied on by a hotel manager. The descent into decadence that follows is painfully slow and prudish. The real 1960s had to swing a lot more than this. Judy claims to be pretty smart, but she's shocked that a man who has requested a girl to model lingerie in his hotel room would try to have sex with her.

Poor, dull Johnny walks the streets in hopes of finding her, and eventually does, with moralistic disappointment. On the other hand, I loved the character of Mona. She was like the Bad Advice Fairy. You say a man tried to rape you? Hey, why not become a stripper?

Easily some of the worst acting and lamest direction ever captured on film, this white slavery cautionary tale is all about sheer nighties, bare breasts, and bound beauties who are a little plumb around the rump. "Helen" narrates the tale in flashback (there is no dialog) after she has escaped capture. We get frequent shots of her explaining it all to the sheriff right there at the side of the road where he found her, bare-breasted and making no effort to fix her dress the whole time.

As a primer on women's dressing habits (and stripping habits) in the early 1960s, it's probably unparalleled, altho I doubt that many had 6-foot tall stuffed rabbits to dance with (while dressing; not while stripping). Helen decides to visit her aunt in the country to avoid the hooded strangler in the news but gets spotted by a California cowboy when she's cooling off in a creek.

"Chick" turns out to be a creep and rapes Helen in the beautiful California countryside before taking her to "Carl's" ranch. Carl has naked girls chained up in his dungeon (which is actually an attic), kept by a "half-witted, monkey-chattering, Mongolian hunchback" complete with sound effects.

A female conspirator named "Marga" drugs Helen to molest her but, for some reason, promises to help her escape. Carl auditions girls for "Mr. Big" as strippers even while other girls are being horsewhipped by Marga. Stripping has come a long, long way since 1965, and the world is better for it, my friends. It's not clear why Carl and Mr. Big imagine kidnapped and tortured women would be suitable strippers, but they painfully audition three.

What happens in the end is immaterial, in addition to being boring and redundant. Helen is played by such a bad actress that she can't stop herself from smiling while describing--or even experiencing--her ordeal. Worthy of its place as third bill on Something Weird Video's triple feature, this is an all-around weak title of interest only for the occasional girls-in-bondage shots.

Lousy camera work and terrible sound recording can't quite sink this late 60s roughie. Toni, an underage minx on her own, is a "technically hideous" ballet dancer who meets her producer date at the door in bra and panties and lets him leer while she finishes dressing. Then she's surprised when Seymour gets all handsy on the couch before they go out! He takes her to a coffee bar that turns into a masked orgy, but luckily Toni is game to be the first to strip!

Toni's friend Sonya is a slightly more awful dancer and "a little foggy about the third movement," even after she's had a long, hot shower to think about it. Other than the shower, tho, she's rather prim.

Titular madman Frank catches up with Toni and Seymour and rapes Toni at gunpoint while gutless Seymour is forced to drive them around. Writer/director Brassloff doesn't bother to show us the awkward aftermath; Toni just shows up at ballet practice with bruises and a clinical case of Stockholm Syndrome.

Frank continues to torment our heroines, both physically and in memory, and eventually stalks them to ballet class, where he slips in afterward to catch Sonya and partner Eddy (sic) practicing for an upcoming gig in Amsterdam. The madman isn't so much mad as he is giddy, laughing like a hyena almost continuously thruout the movie until Eddy rises to the occasion like no male ballet dancer ever has, aside from maybe Baryshnikov in White Nights.

The Bohemian coffee bar scene is a real slice of 60s life. The nudity is fair to middling. The madman is the real weakness (aside from the lousy camera work and terrible sound recording). It's worth a look if you're a fan of the genre.

Agressively atonal jazz and plenty of skin compete for attention in this late-60s grindhouse gem. Mr. Mari is a kind of modern-day Rasputin who keeps lots of cash and hard drugs handy to help out the young women who come to him out of desperation.

Glory is an uptown housewife with a gambling problem and a penchant for receiving guests in a sheer nightie. Mr. Mari can help get the monkey off her front, if not off her back. Stella's a beautiful young junkie, but too strung out to pose for Max's nudie pics. A quick fix and a shower makes her feel like dancing nude. Diana is a smart girl (but a terrible actress) who's "in trouble" in the old-fashioned sense... by her English teacher. This is the worst of the vignettes, with a marble-mouthed, semi-attractive girl a bit thick around the thighs.

Dirt(?) is an exotic lesbian with attitude. Why she comes to Mr. Mari is unclear, since she surely isn't going to "put out" as he expects of the others. Hers is the weirdest story: she's worried her blind lover (who paints!) will leave her after she's donated an eye to cure the girlfriend's blindness! Ann is a cute prostitute enlisted by gangster Cue Stick--a combination of Woody Allen and Jerry Lewis with the anger on the outside instead of the inside--to help pull a jewel heist. Maybe Mr. Mari can help her blow town before Cue Stick gets wise. Maybe.

The conclusion goes for broke and pours on the sleaze as Mr. Mari imagines all the girls visiting him at once and fulfilling his ultimate misogynistic fantasy. Overall, it's a weird trip but a pretty interesting and even erotic one until the bizarre conclusion makes it all too clear what a complete creep Mr. Mari really is. Then it becomes simultaneously ridiculous and sublime.

Another highlight: plenty of exciting rotary phone dialing.

Good example of the 70s Italian ability to mix sex with horror by linking them with believable psychotic behavior. In this case, Oliviero the has-been writer begins a descent into madness with frequent wine-soaked parties and outbursts of violence, the cause being his beloved mother's recent death. His wife Irena bears the brunt of his madness in the kind of domestic violence moments you'll never see in a US film. When one of his girlfriends gets her throat slashed, Oliviero is implicated and becomes paranoid. The pretty black girl who keeps the house running drops dead next, right in the house, so Oliviero gets Irena to help dispose of the body. A complication arrives in the form of his pretty niece, Floriana, a sassy sexpot with few scruples about becoming involved with anything or anyone. As if that isn't enough, Irena has an ongoing feud with Oliviero's preternatural black cat Satan--inherited from his mother. In all, Floriana comes to drive the plot a little too much and a little too recklessly. Director Sergio Martino is juggling a few too many characters and symbols, but does a decent job of keeping the pot boiling, largely with plenty of nudity. The climax cheats the perspective a little, as psycho-sexual thrillers often do, by revealing a hidden relationship even tho we thought we were seeing every relationship. But the literate, Poe-like ending helps smooth things over.

Help Wanted, Female is a mediocre entry in the sexploitation genre, with a convoluted plot about a call girl whose client confesses some nasty habits. The flashback/dream sequence format allows us to know too much before it happens, and too much of what happens doesn't make much sense (like the whole beach sequence). Still, it's an interesting study in snuff, altho a bit of a cop-out in the end. The male lead's foppishness draws away from the pretty girls, but the female lead is the real distraction (she is decidedly NOT one of the pretty girls). As usual, bad jazz scores the sex and crime.

Aroused is a moody hooker-killer drama and a good example of 60s sexploitation flicks. Short, violent, and loaded with discordant jazz, this is only for fans of the genre. Some of the girls are fairly pretty, and the acting is generally adequate, but if it were made in 2004, it would be rated R and star A-list actors. It's a deeper psychological look at the killer than your typical Showtime skin flick, but that hardly makes up for all that bad jazz; but it does feature a nice Psycho ripoff that gives its audience what Hitchcock couldn't.

Rent-a-Girl is a short (77 min) sexploitation flick with all the elements you would expect: topless girls (who often aren't that good looking), a little kinkiness, extremely bad music, poor acting, poorer editing, and unintentionally hilarious dialog.

The heroine in this case is fairly pretty, but we don't actually see a lot of her; other "rented" girls go thru their set pieces more graphically. The plot revolves around our heroine's distress about falling in with a cheesecake modeling agency that turns out to be a call-girl ring--except that the girls apparently don't actually have sex with clients; they just disrobe and play around a little.

A bit of decent acting here and there stands out, and the plot moves along in workmanlike fashion, but there are no real surprises. Yet, as with sexploitation in general, there's something weirdly erotic (to some of us, anyway) about seeing vintage skin, tame as it is--it's the alternating brazenness and shame the characters exhibit, contrasted with the strict innocence of mainstream films of the era. This is a decent effort, but not a classic.