-
George
Carlin; The Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television (1972)
In Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982),
Phoebe Cates has a scene by a swimming pool. She is wearing a red bikini and,
in a “dream sequence” shall we call it, she emerges from the pool in voluptuous
fashion, slow motion in full effect, and removes her top while the camera stares
unblinking. It is a fair bet that any kid who saw the movie way too young, like
I did, doesn’t remember anything else about it. Let’s face it, who doesn’t like
boobies? Even conservative blowhards and finger-waggers, who complain quite
loudly to whoever will listen about how such scenes are eroding the moral
fabric of society, are frequently revealed in private to be into all sorts of
the cinematic filth they condemn in public.
You never forget your first time. For many
of us in the Millennial generation, it was probably Kate Winslet getting drawn
like one of your French girls in Titanic (1997). You remember that flick
that was supposedly PG-13? For me, it wasn’t necessarily nudity, because my
first brush with sexiness in the movies (at least, that I can remember) was
James Bond getting between the sheets with at least one or two new babes every installment.
The point is, sex and nudity in cinema have gone hand-in-hand since the
beginning of the medium, and that fact has most certainly had an impact on how
society views such things. Love it, or hate it, that’s just the way it is.
That “hating it” has become louder in
recent years. Those aforementioned moral majority types? They seem to have made
their point loud enough to drive T-n-A mostly out of blockbuster films. Sure,
we get a bit here and there. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023)
showcases a few, honestly brief and uninteresting, scenes of skin. But that
briefness hasn’t stopped anyone from pretending as though it is the most
graphic movie of the year. It’s as if a few nipples and some very shadowy
grinding are enough to send the right-wing into a froth-mouthed frenzy. Won’t
somebody think of the children going to see an R-rated historical biopic about
the inventor of the atomic bomb?
This prevailing attitude towards on-screen
canoodling is puzzling until one takes into consideration the marketability of
manufactured outrage. Generate some controversy about how much sex or bare
bottoms are in your movie, and even the naysayers will just have to see
it for themselves! So, in the wasteland of superheroes, animated nonsense, and
family-friendly everything, the inclusion of even a tiny bit of good
old-fashioned sleaze is nothing more than a calculated aim at a few more
box-office receipts. But it’s not only that. It’s the inexplicably
nonconfrontational nature of it all. The sexiest movie of the year shows you
practically nothing. Classic over-promising, and underdelivering just like your
Comcast subscription. Lily-livered cowardice, all around.
That’s probably why movie sex anymore is
so godawfully boring. One thing I’ve noticed, in all my countless hours
watching the boob tube, is that mainstream films deal with sexuality in a way
that sanitizes it. They make it safe, even when pretending that it is supposed
to shock the audience. Big budgets and delusions of grandeur have made sex scenes
over-important and frankly dull. Gone Girl (2014) was a movie entirely
about sex (all that talking and kidnapping dreck notwithstanding) and it
managed to be two and a half hours of yawning. Even Kinsey (2004), a
flick with a butt-ton of skin in it because it was supposed to be about famed
sex-researcher Alfred Kinsey, ends up nothing more than a snooze-fest despite having
an all-star cast led by Liam Neeson. Mainstream cinema is just bad at sex and
nudity. It’s all about as titillating as a sneeze (unless you’re into that sort
of thing).
That’s why we need exploitation.
Exploitation films have been the fun side
of the movies ever since the beginning. It’s also kind of difficult to define
what exploitation is. This is most likely owed to the fact that it can
literally be almost any genre. The name comes from a simple concept: if we show
people something taboo or shocking, they will pay money to see it! More to the
point, the term ‘exploitation’ originates from early Hollywood, where
independent filmmakers would make movies about themes and content that the big
studios wouldn’t be caught dead with. Most often, the themes exploited in these
cinematic transgressors are violence, and yes, sex and nudity. Film buffs have
started to coin subgenre monikers for whatever a flick is peddling.
Blaxsploitation, Nunsploitation, Cannibalsploitation, Rednecksploitation,
Sharksploitation, Nazisploitation, and, you guessed it, Sexsploitation! This is
a woefully incomplete list, by the way…
In any case, sex and nudity in
exploitation films is much less stuffy. The camera likes to linger, the actors bare
a lot more than their pearly whites, and the action is generally more
interesting. Much more interesting, in fact. Ever wanted to see a girl in Daisy
Dukes and nothing else racing a speedboat in the Everglades while leveling a
shotgun at the law? Gator Bait (1975) will do that for you. How about a
nubile lass eating a chocolate bar on her flight from Australia to Thailand
while she spies on a couple joining the mile-high club? Check out Felicity
(1978). Bad taste? That depends on you, but one thing is for certain: It is
not boring. Sex is much better in exploitation movies.
Something we should clarify before we move
on is that sexploitation is not pornography. Sure, the two genres might
cross paths from time to time. If you want to simply dismiss these films as
dirty movies though, I feel the need to point out that there are art films and
other mainstream offerings that flat-out show you everything and the actors
aren’t… uh… playing make-believe. Things like the dismally unentertaining 9
Songs (2004) or the pretentious Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) are
game to show you all sorts of unsimulated shenanigans, but while they might
have caused a ruckus, no serious person has ever called them porn. Pornography
may require nudity, but nudity does not require pornography. So, now that we
have that out of the way…
Let’s take a deep dive into the history of sex in exploitation cinema! I’m going to make a valiant attempt to give you a birds-eye view of all the banging, snogging, porking, schtupping, boinking, diddling, aardvaarking, and ugly-bumping that grindhouse movies have to offer. Naturally, I can’t mention literally everything, but we’re gonna take a swinging tour through the decades and see what mischief awaits us. So, strap in! This is…
Ugging Bumplies
Sex Was Better in
Exploitation Cinema
Part One
Nudie Cuties and
Bathing Beauties
The 1950s and
1960s
Now, before anybody gets up in arms about starting
at the 1950s, let me just say: Shut up. I can hear some doofus shouting “Pre-Code!”
at me right now through the screen. Yes, exploitation didn’t start with the
50s. Yes, there were plenty of sexy moments in the movies decades earlier.
We’re starting here for a reason. Still, I suppose it would be good to at least
do a quick rundown of earlier decades.
1.
No
picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see
it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of
crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin.
2.
Correct
standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment,
shall be presented.
3.
Law,
natural and human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for
its violation.
The Hays Code effectively neutered glamorous
old Hollywood. It had several specific rules beyond the dominating principles
above, including that religion and religious figures (of the Christian variety,
of course) could never be ridiculed, interracial relationships were unnatural
and therefore banned on screen, and, naturally, no nudity or sex whatsoever
could be shown. The code was finally enforced around 1935, and filmmakers in
the good ol’ US of A were forced to get very subtle and very creative with how
they portrayed anything that people actually liked to watch.
Before it was enacted, however, one might
be surprised at how much films managed to get away with. Herein lies the
moniker “Pre-Code Era.” Films like Cecil B. Demille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932)
featured, in addition to many Christians being eaten by lions and tigers in
the Roman Colosseum, starlet Claudette Colbert taking a nude milk bath. Many of
the famous Universal Monster pictures of the time, such as Dracula (1931) and
Frankenstein (1931), didn’t show any skin, but did have a fair bit of
graphic horror. Boris Karloff flat-out throws a little girl to her death in a
lake for instance…
One of my personal favorites is Morocco
(1930), starring Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper; and directed by Josef
von Sternberg. While the film centers around an honestly rote plot about a love
triangle set against the exotic backdrop of the Paramount backlot… I mean,
Africa… the real draw is just how damned sexy Dietrich is. Proudly out
regarding her bisexuality (something astonishing in the era, no doubt), Marlene
Dietrich does an entire cabaret number while cross-dressing in an extremely
fetching tuxedo, capping it off by full-on kissing a female audience member on
the lips. Predictably, her onscreen presence was dumbed down considerably in
future films after the Hays Code was implemented. A damned shame if you ask me.
The end result of all this moral hysteria
and conservative chastising was essentially two decades of exploitation going
underground. Independently produced films would be made outside the system and
sold to local theaters on an individual basis. Producers often trucked their
own prints around the country and made deals with venues to show these naughty
movies for a week, a weekend, even just one night. More common, however, was the
tendency to take advantage of one little loophole in the code: Educational
purposes. If you claimed that the point of your movie was to deliver some
much-needed essential knowledge, then you could show all kinds of insanity.
Thus, the scare film!
Scare films usually took the same subject
matter as exploitation films – from drugs, to sex, to violence – and presented
themselves as “educating” the masses via the classic “scared straight”
approach. In doing so, the moviemakers took all sorts of license with what
could be shown. The infamous Reefer Madness (1936) is likely the most
well-known of these little pictures, dealing with the blatantly (and
hilariously) wrong assumptions and consequences of partaking in the devil’s
lettuce.
In regard to sex, however, there is no
shortage of examples with titles like Child Bride (1938), Sex Madness
(1938), and She Shoulda Said No! (1949). All depicting the perils of
sex and debauchery, along with a healthy dose of “Don’t do that *wink wink*.”
Perhaps the most oft-cited entry in this genre is a little slice of ick called Mom
and Dad (1945). The film centers around the quite flimsy story of two
teenagers in love. Guess what? The girl gets knocked up, and now the boy has to
do the honorable thing and put a ring on it. Not too egregious, I suppose,
until the ending which shows an actual live birth in all its grody glory!
Afterwards, the movie repurposes some venereal disease content originally
produced for the United States Army during World War II. What was intended to
keep soldiers from getting crabs overseas is now ours to enjoy? Be prepared for
some extremely graphic images of genital warts, is what I’m saying.
The 1940s gave way to the 1950s, and after
nearly twenty years of harsh censorship, filmmakers were getting pretty savvy
at getting around the Hays Code. Society had changed as well, as one might
expect with an entire generation of young men going to war the world over.
Certain things were still frowned upon, but movies could get away with a lot
more. And that is why we’re really starting here. “We’re just starting?” you
say? Yep. Go to the bathroom, grab a drink, stretch your legs now if you need
to. We’re diving in with a flick about a fish that wants to boink a human lady,
and set off one of the honestly weirdest genres in exploitation cinema…
Creature From the
Black Lagoon (1954)
Universal
Studios had a more than two decade run with their monster movies. Studio
president Carl Laemmle Jr. took one look at the box office for Dracula
(1931) and knew that the future of the company was going to be made in
horror films. He rushed Frankenstein (1931) into production, and
thereafter followed more than thirty pictures that included The Mummy (1932),
The Invisible Man (1933), The Wolf Man (1941), and all manner of
sequels (not to mention installments featuring Abbott and Costello).
By the early 1950s however, the well was
running a bit dry. Audiences were clearly tiring of the same monsters, the same
gothic castles, and comedic tie-ins that ultimately failed to breathe any sort
of new life into the franchise. Post-World War II, a new horror had emerged in
the form of a bomb that could wipe out entire cities in an instant. The
collective anxieties of the world were wrapped up neatly in the specter of
nuclear power. Films, especially in the horror genre, have always displayed
society’s fears. The genre of the moment then became science fiction; a way of
exorcising the demons of rapidly escalating tensions with the Soviet Union, as
well as commenting on the dread that we all might suddenly be blown to kingdom
come by some new-fangled technology invented by a nerd who bit off more than
they could chew. Added to that was the information age. With television beaming
into all American homes, the news of the world was just a click away, and the
planet started to seem just a little bit smaller. Laemmle’s solution was simple
enough. The answer for Universal’s monsters would be a new terror ripped from
the atomic headlines.
I mentioned above that Creature From
the Black Lagoon (1954) originated a peculiar subgenre. Well, that would be
the fishman movie. Fishmansploitation? I guess? Anyway, these flicks always
revolve around a humanoid fish thing wanting to get it on with a humanoid
non-fish woman, and killing everything that gets in their way. My favorite of
these rip-offs will always be Humanoids From the Deep (1980), produced
by Roger Corman under his New World Pictures label, and starring Doug McClure,
Vic Morrow, and Cindy Weintraub (who is more remembered for getting bayonetted
in a swimming pool in The Prowler [1981]). Beyond that glorious drive-in
classic, we also have William Grefé’s Sting of Death (1966), wherein the
monster is actually a jellyfish man and Neil Sedaka sings a banger of a
theme song. Follow that with Demon of Paradise (1987), another Roger
Corman-produced venture directed by Filipino grindhouse legend Cirio H.
Santiago. Sexy fishman movies even garnered a Best Picture and a Best
Director Academy Award for Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017).
Everyone likes slimy fish guy sex, apparently.
So, why is this considered a sexy movie?
Well, for starters, what else do you call a fish dude carrying off a buxom
beauty in a bathing suit to his underground lair for some (very) thinly veiled cross-species
intermingling? The film was also released in 3-D, so audiences got to see all
that action up close and personal. It’s not so much racy for what it shows, but
for the theme of watery violation, which is quite stark when contrasted with
Universal’s earlier monster extravaganzas. In films such as Dracula (1931)
and The Mummy (1932), the villain is similarly obsessed with the
heroine, but the overall atmosphere is one of passionate love and seduction. In
Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), the monster simply, maybe even
violently, wants to go to pound town and he doesn’t care about putting his
conquest in the mood. Furthermore, Adams’ character Kay Lawrence is hardly the
chaste, covered-up love interest of those earlier movies. She’s capable,
outspoken, and more than willing to swim around the lagoon in her skivvies
while the camera captures every curve for us. It represents a distinct tonal
shift in exploitation cinema. We’re not just talking about it anymore, we’re
seeing it. Sex was now on celluloid, and you didn’t have to duck into a back
alley wearing a raincoat to catch an eyeful.
This burgeoning frankness in regard to
sexuality that is represented by Creature From the Black Lagoon (1934) found
its way beyond science fiction and horror quickly. Film noir and southern
gothic films soon began to explore the themes of fornication, adultery, and
even rape. One needs look no further than Charles Laughton’s masterful Night
of the Hunter (1955), wherein Robert Mitchum seduces, then cruelly murders
a widowed young mother in the attempt to find a fortune that her late-husband
hid. But no screenwriter was more infamous for the lurid, profane, and heady
atmosphere of sex than Tennessee Williams…
Baby Doll (1956)
Carrol Baker was twenty-five years old
when she played a teen girl married to a rancher (Karl Malden) who is patiently
awaiting her to turn twenty so he can consummate their union. The girl, known
as Baby Doll, sleeps in a crib and exhibits child-like behavior, but that
doesn’t stop every man from wanting to sleep with her. In fact, it’s heavily
implied that is exactly why they want to. Her performatively
long-suffering husband even spies on her through a peephole in her bedroom wall,
as if a middle-aged man married to a teenager wasn’t skeevy enough.
Set against the share-cropping communities
of deep South Mississippi, Baby Doll (1956) may well be Tennessee
Williams’ most shocking script, which is really saying something for a body of
work that includes A Streetcare Named Desire (1951) and Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof (1958). The play write-turned-screenwriter had a fondness for
sweltering Southern settings, brutal male characters, and sexuality that smashed
taboos to pieces. The fame of his stage plays may have added a pedigree to his
scripts that would likely have otherwise been relegated to the black-listed
poverty row production houses with the likes of Edgar G. Ulmer. Instead, what
we get is Baby Doll, a smoldering study in coquettish obsession and
directed by the legendary Elia Kazan.
This dance over whether or not young women
have their own agency – sexual or otherwise – is a calling card of 1950s
exploitation. Where films in later years would shift towards loud and proud
women’s liberation, sex in cinema was not quite there yet. Echoing the delicate,
if uncomfortable balance, of Baby Doll (1956) would be the contemporary
film noirs of the previous decade. Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945)
features Ann Savage as a completely irredeemable femme fatale who uses her sex
appeal as a practically surgical tool against the men she wants something from.
Even more notorious is Barbara Stanwyck in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity
(1944) who ensnares her conquests with her sensual power and forces them to
kill for her. The message is clearly that young women can be dangerous when
aware of the influence their wiles can wield.
Speaking of Billy Wilder, his perspective
on the sexuality of older women is nearly as troubling as depicted in Sunset
Boulevard (1950). Gloria Swanson is an aging star who turns the tables on a
younger screenwriter played by William Holden. While he believes he is taking
advantage of her, it turns out she is completely out of her gourd. He meets his
end after scorning her one too many times. The contrast with Baby Doll
(1956) is what men consider beautiful. When Carrol Baker is young and
ostensibly inexperienced, her manipulations are at the very least tolerated, if
not completely missed. Gloria Swanson is considered pitiable in her middle age,
deemed unworthy of sexual attention unless it means access to her money. She
gets hers though, and her famous close-up at the end of the film reminds us
that women are indeed powerful, regardless of any backwards prevailing
attitudes.
Said attitudes wouldn’t remain stagnant
for long, however. In the late 1950s, exploitation filmmakers found a way
around the restriction involving nudity in the form of simple, everyday
activities. Make way for naturism, sunbathing, and a whole lot of beach
volleyball…
Russ Meyer, HG
Lewis, and Nudie Cuties
Picture, if you will, a man who experiences
an accidental and weird side-effect of a medical procedure. That side-effect
just so happens to be oddly specific x-ray vision that allows him to see
through women’s clothes. And… that’s it. That’s the entire movie. Just this
peeping tom getting to peep as much as he wants without having to hide in the
bushes with binoculars. The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959) is sixty-three
minutes of shallow, pointless, and quite frankly harmless nudity. It’s goofy,
it’s confusing, it’s undeniably fun, but the film (if it can really be
so-called) is really just an excuse to look at naked ladies. Director Russ
Meyer just wanted to make a buck (it is exploitation, after all), but in
retrospect he inadvertently created the first truly accessible genre of
sexploitation movies: The Nudie Cutie film!
So, what is a Nudie Cutie? Well, the
shortest answer might be adorable. I would also accept innocent, or hilarious.
Basically, with attitudes in America starting to relax regarding sexuality and
nudity, movies outside the Hollywood system started to experiment with showing
some of the most inoffensive skin they could. Bare breasts and buttocks, but no
full frontal, and no explicit sexual activity. This would often be in the
context of commonplace activities, such as… uh… jumping on the trampoline? Yeah,
that tracks. Grilling in the nude, running in the nude, swimming in the nude…
and a whole lot of beach volleyball in the nude. Anything that people do
normally, just without clothes on.
It didn’t take long for other producers
and directors to catch on to the profitability of what Russ Meyer had stumbled
onto. Previously mentioned noir director Edgar G. Ulmer got in on the action
with The Naked Venus (1959), and even women broke through in the genre,
the most famous being Doris Wishman with early-career installments such as Hideout
in the Sun (1960) and Diary of a Nudist (1961).
Nudie Cuties had a pretty short run; generally
considered to be from about 1959 to 1963. I’ve in fact discussed them at some
length in a previous essay focused on Herschell Gordon Lewis and how he
transitioned from these skin flicks into making the first true gore movies with
Blood Feast (1963). Lewis was a fine sexploitation director in his own
right, however, and he managed to make a mark with a particular subset of these
movies all regarding the magic of naturism.
I mean, nudism. Nudism is what we’re
talking about. Naturism is a fun little alternative term that is supposed to make
being naked all the time seem boring. I think? Anyway, Nudie Cutie films took
advantage as much as possible of the concept of nudist colonies. Where else
could you see people doing everything you do in your day-to-day, only they’re
naked as a jaybird? Walking the dog, getting mail, buying groceries, watering
the garden, mowing the lawn... all in the buff. If the sun is out, then the buns
are out.
There are literally dozens, perhaps even
hundreds of these films. With the sheer bevvy of offerings in this area, one
might be forgiven for thinking that Americans just never wore clothes. The
funny part (well, one at least) about this nuttiness is that totally nekkid
communities where everyone lives naturally together year-round are few
and far between today. While the internet is game to let you know where you can
be legally nude in public the world over, it’s still a bit shy about detailing
any actual nudists colonies you could potentially move in with. One can only
imagine how much rarer such things were back in the late 1950s! Hell, even
hippies wouldn’t be thing for a few more years yet…
Anywho, Herschell Gordon Lewis
experimented with erotic films beginning with The Prime Time (1959),
followed by a loose retelling of the Playboy/Hugh Hefner story called The
Living Venus (1961). But he really hopped on the Nudie Cutie train with a
direct rip-off of The Immoral Mr. Teas entitled The Adventures of
Lucky Pierre (1961). Thereafter followed titles such as Boin-n-n-g!
(1963), Bell, Bare, and Beautiful (1963), and even Goldilocks and the
Three Bares (1963) (billed as “the first – and to this date the only –
nudie cutie musical!”), but one of the most memorable is Daughter of the Sun
(1962), a film that might not be the most representative example of the
nudist camp film, but is certainly an offering that does what Lewis did best:
it savagely roasts the pious moralizing of conservative society.
Most Nudie Cutie pictures were fairly
loathe to touch politics. They would display some skin, make a few (if any)
statements about how being in the buff was just how the Almighty made us, and that
would be that. Herschell Gordon Lewis never really cottoned to the mainstream,
even when he began his career as a high school English teacher. A great many of
his films – gore movies like Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) and The
Wizard of Gore (1970) included – tend to directly challenge the moral authority
of religion and establishment status quo, and at the very least flout any
contemporary notions of social values.
Another of the director’s installments of
note, while not a Nudie Cutie per se, is the “roughie” Scum of the Earth
(1964), which deals with a small-town gang of pornographers ensnaring young
women to pose for naughty photos via the time-honored method of blackmail. These
filmic fiends coerce teen girls to do some boudoir modeling, and then use the
fear of being exposed to friends and family as a way of forcing them to perform
in black market porn films! While not as graphic as the description may sound,
and even without much of the nudity of the more welcoming nudist colony flicks,
Scum of the Earth still deals with sex in a raw and uncompromising
fashion unseen at the time of its production. It’s about as grimy as any exploitation
movie got in the mid-1960s, marrying the supposed titillation of onscreen bazooms
with the scuzzy atmosphere of the horror genre.
Speaking of horror, the 60s were primed
and ready to inject all sorts of sex into a genre that for decades had largely
been considered to be aimed at children! So, let’s take a jaunt to the
Philippines, with a curious little entry all about carnivorous radioactive
plants and hideously deformed sex monsters. And also tits…
Brides of Blood
(1968)
American-backed productions took to
the Philippines beginning in the 1950s when they realized they could get much
larger-seeming films for much less money. This lasted well into the 1970s, with
even well-known production companies such as American International Pictures
and Roger Corman’s New World Pictures getting in on the action. They would
frequently use local directors, as well as actors and crew, often paying only
one US dollar per day. Cheap indeed.
Two of the most successful Filipino
directors in this era were Gerry de Leon and Eddie Romero, both attached to
Hemisphere Pictures – a movie house owned and funded in the United States but based
firmly in the Philippines. Gerry de Leon kicked off a horror franchise known as
the Blood Island series with a loose Island of Dr Moreau
adaptation titled Terror is a Man (1959). Unlike a few of the company’s
previous endeavors, the production made a deliberate attempt to court American
audiences by filming in English and bringing in US actors as the main cast
(while still populating the background with local talent). The film also
features a few seconds of fairly graphic surgery, and the gimmick of a loud
bell ringing to let those in the audience that are squeamish know what is
coming in case they want to avert their eyes!
While Terror is a Man was a
modest success, its sequel wouldn’t establish the Blood Island series until
nearly ten years later, when de Leon teamed up with Eddie Romero to codirect Brides
of Blood (1968). Subsequent sequels The Mad Doctor of Blood Island
(1969) and Beast of Blood (1970) (as well as Al Adamson’s unofficial,
California-lensed entry Brain of Blood [1971]) leaned into the gore and
gimmickry as well, but Brides of Blood is literally all about sexy time.
Sex and violence are often paired together in cinema, especially in
exploitation. This little gem takes that one step further by making these two
things one and the same.
Beverly Powers sets the tone for the
film from the very first scene in her role as Carla, the long-suffering wife of
scientist Paul. It’s heavily implied that Paul is impotent, though one couldn’t
blame him for not getting it up when his wife constantly shames him for it in
front of everyone from the deckhands to the captain of the ship on their way to
the island. When a sailor roughly pulls her into his cabin and throws her on
the bed, she only puts up a fight until he kisses her and then all bets (and
clothes) are off! Even once… errr… exposed to the horrors of their south seas
isle, she still finds time to eye the bare pecs of the locals and even tries to
jump into bed with the rich dude Esteban, who somehow lives in an old mansion
complete with hot showers and electricity while the native islanders make do
with dirt floor huts on an ocean-bound atoll with exactly zero infrastructure.
Powers began her career as a
burlesque performer and stripper in Los Angeles, California, before landing a
background role as a nightclub dancer in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). She
was rumored to have dated organized crime boss Mickey Cohen, and her most
recognizable part aside from Brides of Blood would probably be a side
character in the Vincent Price vehicle Comedy of Terrors (1963). She
also featured in an episode of The Mod Squad and went uncredited as a
“topless swimmer” in Jaws (1975). While the exact nature of the role is
hard to find any details about, it’s likely she was the nude body double for
the skinny-dipping first victim of the shark! Ironically, by 1987 she became an
ordained Christian minister and founded The Living Ministry in Maui, Hawaii. At
the time of this writing, she is listed as missing in the 2023 Lahaina wildfire
along with her husband.
John Ashley was an American actor
who got his start with American International Pictures, including several
juvenile delinquent films, and as the lead in a fun little take on science run
amok called Frankenstein’s Daughter (1958). He did several television
shows, many of them westerns, before getting pigeonholed in a bizarre branch of
exploitation: the “beach party” teen movie, alongside heartthrob Frankie Avalon
in titles like Muscle Beach Party (1964) and Bikini Beach (1964).
In fact, the franchise he featured in was literally called the Beach Party series.
Eventually, as work dried up like it did for many American actors of the 1950s
and early 60s, Ashley went abroad. Unlike many of his contemporaries who went
to Italy (looking at you Clint Eastwood), he found himself in the jungles of
the Philippines. There he would make what are likely his best-known pictures
with the likes of Eddie Romero, starring in the rest of the Blood Island
franchise, as well as a personal favorite of mine The Beast of the Yellow
Night (1971). Oddly enough, it was John Ashley who broached the idea to
Roger Corman that The Big Doll House (1971) should be made in the
Philippines instead of Corman’s intended Puerto Rico (but more on that later).
The sex in Brides of Blood (1968)
is beyond kinky. It’s weird. Monstrously weird. It’s barely a secret (and
not even a spoiler at this point for a fifty-year-old movie) that the savagely
ravaging and ravishing creature is wealthy old Esteban himself, who looks
thirty even though he is fifty. Rich people are assholes everywhere, it seems,
and this one is caused by radioactive fallout to transmogrify into a randy
plant thing every night. That he completely eviscerates and dismembers his partners
in the act of sweet lovemaking seems to call into question what exactly directors
de Leon and Romero had to say about sex. Up until the very end when the
oppressive creature is finally eradicated, every act of fornication in the film
is horrifically violent. Every time a breast is bared, it’s due to someone
tearing off a top. In the most grotesque (read: exciting) shot of gore in the
movie, we even get to see Beverly Powers’ ta-tas after she’s been torn to
shreds (“to shreds you say”) with her naked, dismembered torso being
devoured by a very hungry tree. Well, it is actually a mannequin, but still… Afterwards,
when the locals get to party with a good old-fashioned orgy, it appears as
though the specter of death has been released and getting it on is good again!
If the Philippines were an ideal
location in the late 1960s for some onscreen bumping and grinding, the island
nation is in good company with Europe’s famous boot. Nowhere was as swinging in
cinema during the counterculture as Italy…
The Dawn of Giallo
A killer dons leather gloves. Shadows
dance across the wall. The soundtrack pumps. A young woman screams. Blood.
We’re watching a giallo movie. Perhaps the most essential genre of Italian
cinema, and perhaps even European cinema as a whole. Simply calling them
Italian murder mystery films is woefully underserving. The category itself is a
delirious overload of style over substance, and sex and violence over plot. From
the waning years of the 1960s, through the majority of the 1970s, and even into
the 1980s, Italian directors bludgeoned audiences with images of wealthy
debauchery and barbaric cruelty, all the while saturating the screen with
pulsing rock and jazz music and impossibly vibrant colors. Naturally, they also
often gave us a heaping helping of hanky-panky.
The giallo film, as a genre, is a
remarkably varied one. Early installments usually centered around the
powerplays of upper-class dilettantes who have nothing better to do than to
scam each other out of money with increasingly convoluted schemes. After Dario
Argento’s smash hit debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970),
nearly every subsequent picture just had to have a black-gloved
psychopath murdering gorgeous women using uncomfortably sexual methods. The
genre is even divided often between M-Gialli and F-Gialli.
In the M-Giallo, the protagonist is
male and generally obsessed with catching a murderer of some sort. He tends to
be a bit less masculine than his derring-do American counterparts – see
Argento’s Deep Red (1975) – and must overcome some flaw in order to nab
the villain, be that his sensitive nature, alcoholism, or a gap in his memory.
The F-Giallo is of course female-centric, and typically involves a woman being psychologically
tortured in some way to nefarious ends. A classic example would be Sergio
Martino’s The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (1971), wherein multiple men
attempt to drive Edwige Fenech insane for her money, or Umberto Lenzi’s Orgasmo
(1969), starring our very own Baby Doll Carrol Baker in much the same
predicament! And of course, no matter the gender, there is significant lurid
sexual behavior along the way.
It’s probably old news by now to most that
the term giallo – Italian for yellow – comes from the
long-running series of pulp fiction novels in Italy known for their erotic and
violent content, as well as their characteristic yellow paperback covers. Just
as common knowledge, I would guess, is that the (mostly) undisputed inventor of
the giallo genre was director and horror master Mario Bava.
Full disclosure: Bava is one of my
all-time favorite directors, so I must confess that I might be less than
objective when I say that he may not only be the first, but the best of the lot
when it comes to the giallo template. There is some disagreement among fans as
to which of his efforts is the first true entry. Many point to The Girl Who
Knew Too Much (1963), some contend that it is the first act of his
anthology Black Sabbath (1963) which revolves around a lesbian with a
jealous lover who keeps receiving threatening phone calls. Even his gothic
debut Black Sunday (1960) showcases elements that would come to define
the approach. For my money, the giallo wasn’t firmly established by Bava until
he made Blood and Black Lace (1964). It isn’t just arguably his best
film, it’s undeniably his most salacious.
The setup is deceptively straightforward. After
an haute couture model is mysteriously killed, her fellow runway
strutters at the fashion house she worked for find her diary. The journal
contains dirt on all of them, and soon they begin getting offed one by one in
increasingly ghastly ways. This mechanism of the killer wanting to keep a
secret by slicing and dicing anyone who might be in the know predates the
slasher by nearly fifteen years! As the bodies pile up and the suspect pool
begins to dwindle, one gets an idea of who the culprit might be… until time and
again, Bava pulls out the rug from underneath.
Right about now you’re probably wondering
where the sex is in all this. The answer is… everywhere! Sensuality practically
drips down the screen at all times. It’s more than simply mentioning that
so-and-so was sleeping with what’s-his-nuts. It goes beyond the quite frank
discussions of cocaine abuse and back-alley abortions paid for by stealing from
a coworker’s purse. And it certainly isn’t just because the overconfident
detective supposes that the killer is, “a sex maniac in a homicidal fury.” It’s
an overall lewd atmosphere.
Bava may not necessarily be the same kind
of voyeur that Alfred Hitchcock was, but the way he pans the camera through the
fashion house, detailing the ladies in various states of undress as they rush
to prep for a show, is both leering and shameless. While it might seem tame
today, in 1964 it was the cinematic equivalent of peeking into the women’s
locker room. Moreover, the murder sequences have an intense sexual component
far and above the Americanized subtext of Psycho (1960) or the brief
acknowledgement of perversity in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). Each
kill is drawn out to extremes, highlighting not only the killer’s anger, but
also their apparent carnal satisfaction in the act of homicide. The female
victims frequently find their clothes ripped before being done away with, and
the modus operandi becomes more elaborate with each successive scene. We
start with simple blunt-force trauma, and quickly escalate to medieval
implement face impalement, and even hot stove facial roasting before the end! Though
the sexual component to the murders is eventually revealed to be an elaborate ruse
designed to throw blame at the feet of some imagined psychotic pervert, their
presentation in the film itself remains startling to the present day. No doubt
about it, Mario Bava wanted Blood and Black Lace to give you some
interesting and deeply confusing feelings…
While the majority of
exploitation in the 1960s opted to allude to sex rather than show it outright
much of the time, things were about to change. The Hays Code was on its way out
in the United States, soon to be replaced by the Motion Picture Association of
America rating system in 1968. The sexual revolution of the counterculture that
began mid-decade the world over was in full swing as 1970 approached. The 60s
drew to a close with the onset of a social and cultural rebellion against the
stifling repression of past generations. Sex in the movies was about to break
loose.
Part Two
The Revolution Was
Indeed Televised
The 1970s
Now, I know I made a big deal about
“This is NOT porn!” Well, I guess this is my own fault, but we have to talk
about porn. If the 1950s and 60s had filmmakers dipping a toe in the warm
waters of sleaze, the 1970s saw them doing a double axel from the high dive. It
was the decade of debauchery! The era of erotica! The proverbial pinnacle of perversion
on celluloid! Porn made a bid for the mainstream, with some production budgets
rivalling those of the more respectable studios, and that new competition
seemed to invigorate the exploitation market. Skin became chic, and every
variety of dirty shenanigans just demanded to be shown at the drive-in. It was
the heyday of New York’s 42nd Street, which teemed with theaters
showing everything from the average grindhouse actioner, to scuzzy skin-drenched
horror, to sexy European imports, to the latest XXX, complete with sticky
floors and even the occasional live performance! Moreover, some
distributors felt encouraged to splice in hardcore inserts for territories that
demanded that sort of thing (read: France). The free-love movement of hippies
and communes had gone an untapped revenue stream for long enough, and the movie
business wanted a piece of the pie.
It bears mentioning that laws governing
obscenity in the United States of America saw several significant challenges
beginning in the latter half of the 1950s that enabled this cavalcade of
carnality. Many dealt primarily with the distribution of physical materials
such as magazines and photographs of a lewd and lascivious nature, since at the
time home video was mostly relegated to Super 8mm reels (unless you were rich
enough to have a full 35mm home theater). Nevertheless, as the US Supreme Court
is wont to do, the outcomes of these rulings ended up having farther reaching
effects than simply the cases at hand. I bet you didn’t think this article
about tits and ass in the movies was going to dive into obscenity law! Well,
bear with me, or… bare with me, if you will (bad puns are free of
charge).
Butler vs The State of Michigan (1957) is often one of
the earliest-cited examples, wherein it was established by the court that
adults could not be barred from obtaining or viewing material that was unfit
for children – something most of us today would consider obvious, unless, of
course, one was running for elected office under the party banner of a big,
dumb elephant. The essence of the determination in this case was that the
current laws limiting objectionable material in the state applied too broadly
to be justifiable, thus violating the 14th Amendment of the US
Constitution. Judge Felix Frankfurter (yes, you read that right) is quoted as
saying “Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig.”
At the national level, Stanley v.
Georgia (1969) declared resolutely that no person of age could be
prohibited from possessing pornographic material. The case centered around the prosecution
of a Georgia man for the simple act of having porn in his home, which then
contemporary laws of the state deemed obscene and therefore prohibited.
Justice Thurgood Marshall himself, in his
majority opinion wrote, “… Mere categorization of these films as
"obscene" is insufficient justification for such a drastic invasion
of personal liberties guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
Whatever may be the justifications for other statutes regulating obscenity, we
do not think they reach into the privacy of one's own home. If the First
Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man,
sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may
watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving
government the power to control men's minds. And yet, in the face of these
traditional notions of individual liberty, Georgia asserts the right to protect
the individual's mind from the effects of obscenity. We are not certain that
this argument amounts to anything more than the assertion that the State has
the right to control the moral content of a person's thoughts.” The end result?
Porn for everybody! Graphic depictions of sex were officially lawful to own for
the average horny American!
These (among other) cases combined with a
landmark ruling that redefined obscenity in the United States in the form of Miller
v. California (1973). While the details here are really boring… um… I mean,
not necessary, the outcome was that the definitions of what was obscene
were narrowed and what was allowable was significantly broadened. So, like I
said, tiddies for everybody! Come one, come all!... heheh…
The nature of this social evolution of the
1970s might be best represented by the porno chic phenomenon set off by
the infamous Deep Throat (1972) directed by Gerard Damiano. It’s not a
good movie, hell, it isn’t even good pornography, but it was one of the first
hardcore sex films to have anything approaching a real production budget and a
script. While it would be followed by even larger budgets and certainly better
screenplays in the form of flicks such as Behind the Green Door (1972), The
Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976), Sex World (1977), Debbie Does
Dallas (1978), Pretty Peaches (1978) – even Damiano made a much
better effort himself with The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) – Deep
Throat was the dirty movie that made porn fashionable and turned the genre
into a pop culture craze.
Linda Lovelace stars as a sexually
frustrated young woman who can’t seem to get any pleasure out of anything. Her
psychiatrist discovers her love button isn’t where it should be. Instead of
between her legs, it’s in the back of her throat! So, Linda trades one set of
lips for another and sets about trying to find and keep a man using her
newfound oral prowess.
“Porno Chic” was the term coined for these
upper-class yokels getting their jollies by going to sexy movies. “Hey look!
Rich and important people watch porn too!” Let’s be real, the rich and poor and
everyone in between always liked art depicting people getting freaky. The
difference after Deep Throat (1972) was that it wasn’t a dirty secret
anymore. More than laws being loosened, it was perhaps the high society
thumbs-up that made it okay for people to go to the cinema and see a buffet of
boobies and booties. It was the core principle of exploitation: if people will
spend money on it, then it shall be done.
That fiscal tenet so important to moviemaking
is likely the greatest and most apparent reason that both the major and
independent studios seemed to feel free going forward to show naked bodies
doing all sorts of the nasty. After all, what the average exploitation film
featured was (mostly) softcore, so they could sell it as a more acceptable way
to see what you really wanted to. This included older production outfits that found
themselves suddenly in their twilight years…
Hammer Films
Undresses: The Karnstein Trilogy
While much more well-known for their
horror pictures, Hammer Films in fact began in 1935 with a now-lost comedy
called The Public Life of Henry the Ninth (1935). The low-budget studio found
itself located in Berkshire, just west of Greater London beginning in the early
1950s. Hammer’s first horror film was The Quatermass Xperiment (1955),
but it wasn’t until the one-two punch of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
and The Horror of Dracula (1958) – both directed by Terence Fisher and
starring the dream team of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee – that the label
found its true calling as the go-to for all things gothic, macabre, and scary
in the British sort of way.
Christopher Lee’s take on the
character of Dracula was feral and vicious, much unlike the typically seductive
performances of Bela Lugosi, and the breakout hit of his showdown with
Cushing’s Van Helsing spawned an expansive franchise for the Count, totaling six
appearances by 1973 (not including The Brides of Dracula (1960) in which
Lee is conspicuously absent). All told, by the time 1970 rolled around, Hammer
Studios had released an astonishing torrent of around forty horror films since
1955, averaging nearly three per year in addition to the usual supplementary
action and adventure offerings they produced as accompanying features. Therein
would lie the problem.
It is no secret that audience tastes
can be fickle, especially over the course of several years (just ask Marvel). A
decade and a half of the same actors performing the same roles in the same
gothic horror genre was wearing thin. When The Horror of Dracula debuted
in 1958, many moviegoers were quite unused to seeing blood in such quantities
(in technicolor, no less!) and they had certainly never seen Dracula
graphically burst into flames in the sunlight before crumbling into skeletal
ashes! Once the 60s were drawing to a close, however, the same viewers had
already seen the likes of Blood Feast (1963) and Night of the Living
Dead (1968). Simply indulging in a bit of the red stuff wasn’t going to cut
it anymore. In a bid to stay relevant, Hammer Horror decided to take its
clothes off.
The first film the studio released
in 1970 was also the first to show tits. Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)
was the fourth in the series to star Christopher Lee, and the fifth overall.
The nudity is brief though and amounts to nothing more than a flash, so don’t
get too excited. Hammer wouldn’t embrace skin until later that same year with
the first of a trilogy based on the Sheridan Le Fanu novel Carmilla.
Now, this might be sacrilege to
some, but I consider the Carmilla-based films – often referred to as the
Karnstein trilogy – to be among the best and most entertaining that Hammer
Studios ever produced. First of all, they are sexy. And we know vampires have
to be sexy. I adore Lee’s interpretation of Dracula, but let’s be honest… He
doesn’t do outright seduction well, or even at all. His Nosferatu is fierce,
animalistic, and straight up a villain. It’s a stark divergence from the
character in Bram Stoker’s original novel, where the Count is capable of
grotesque violence, but is in reality a charmer, able to bring young women into
his grasp with nothing more than a gaze. Much has been written about the
commentary Stoker was making on the repressive Victorian society of his era, so
it is accepted by now that Dracula is a sensual force of nature. Make no bones
about it, vampires are supposed to be all about sex.
And sex is exactly what Hammer aimed to
achieve with The Vampire Lovers (1970). Lesbian sex, to be precise. Even
better I say! Most fans acquainted with this era of the British production
house’s output tend to agree that the company was on its way out. In fact, the
final theatrical horror film released by the studio was To the Devil… A
Daughter (1976), a fun, albeit nasty, piece of work that is most remembered
for a full-frontal nude scene of then fourteen-year-old Natassja Kinski (oops…)
But with that still some years in the future, The Vampire Lovers made a
valiant swing at injecting some skin into the aging gothic stylings of the
genre.
The plot is a fairly straightforward
retelling of the Carmilla novel, in which the ageless vampire Carmilla
Karnstein (played with delicious sensuality by Ingrid Pitt) poses as a young
adult woman and ingratiates herself into the home of an Austrian General (Peter
Cushing) in order to befriend and seduce first his niece, and then his friend’s
daughter, both for carnal and nutritional purposes… Naturally, she gets away
with it for some time, leading to all sorts of lightly sapphic tomfoolery and
it comes to an end with a good deal of bloodletting and some staking and
decapitating.
The film isn’t necessarily
remarkable for its execution, though director Roy Ward Baker does a suitable
job, but more so for its brazenness in depicting hot, naked love between two
women. In the present day, lesbian relationships have been more or less
normalized (not to mention that they have always been treated as at least a bit
more acceptable than male homosexual liaisons). In 1970, the subject was still
a little taboo, with same-sex relations only having been legalized in the
United Kingdom a few years earlier in 1967. The scene in which Carmilla emerges
fully nude from the bathtub and chases her costar Madeline Smith around the
room before wrestling with her on the bed (and insisting that she wear one of
the vampire’s dresses) is still heady today but was no doubt something of an
erotic atom bomb at the time of its release.
Hammer Studios continued the Karnstein
trilogy with Lust for a Vampire (1971), with Ingrid Pitt being replaced
in the lead role by Danish actress Yutte Stensgaard, and centering around a
private school for girls in the European countryside. Honestly, this
installment isn’t much to write home about save for Stensgaard’s significantly
voluptuous attributes and a few fantastic sequences of horny men simping after
her, only to get their blood drained to the dregs. The final entry in the
series is much more interesting, which is why we’re jumping to Twins of Evil
(1971).
A pair of sisters – identical twins named
Maria and Frieda – arrive in an out-of-the-way European village to live with
their uncle after their parents’ death. Said uncle (Peter Cushing in yet
another appearance) is a religious zealot who leads a group of radicals known
as The Brotherhood in seeking out nubile young ladies, labeling them as
witches, and burning them at the stake. They get their jollies this way, you
see. Overseeing the town is Karnstein Castle, in which Count Karnstein (who so
desperately wants to be evil, please oh please, ever so much) resides and
partakes in Satanic rituals with the help of his hopelessly cucked servants.
In any event, during the course of
throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, the Count happens upon a ceremony
that resurrects the vampire Carmilla, who promptly sexes him and turns him into
one of the undead. Karnstein then turns his sights upon the sisters, seducing
Frieda while the virginal Maria tries to catch the eye of the local music
teacher played by David Warbeck. Chaos ensues! As the famous tagline
questioned, “Which is the Virgin? Which is the Vampire?” Levity aside, the film
really is very good.
Twins of Evil (1971) is pound for
pound the naughtiest of the Karnstein movies. The Count himself fornicates with
any young lass he can get his weirdly smooth and rich hands on, while Cushing
and his band of lunatics burn the same poor girls out of pent-up frustration
(seriously, has nobody in 18th Century Europe considered whacking it
once in a while?) We get totally nekkid human sacrifice, lesbian vampire
exposed breast bloodsucking, and even a gratuitous shot of Carmilla
masturbating a lit candle while she’s doing the do with Count Karnstein… who, I
should say, is probably her direct descendent? So, there’s some incest vibes
going on too. Speaking of which…
The centerfolds… I mean… centerpiece of
all these creative couplings are the real-life twins Mary and Madeleine Collinson.
Not that the average randy watcher could tell them apart, but Mary is the
chaste Maria who wants to harmlessly nuzzle the choir director, and Frieda is
the interesting one who likes to drink blood from peasant girl nipples. The
Collinson ladies were actually famous prior to being cast in the film because there
are apparently a lot of people who have a kink for, shall we call it, twincest
and Playboy magazine was evidently well aware of that fact. Mary and Madeleine have
the distinction of being the first identical twin models to be featured in the
magazine’s centerfold in October of 1970. Unfortunately, like many of the stars
we have discussed here, both sisters have left us: Madeleine in 2014 at the age
of sixty-two, and Mary in 2021 at the age of sixty-nine.
Hammer Films would limp along making
television productions, most notably Hammer House of Horror (1980)
before finally closing its doors shortly after. The production house was
revived in 2008 and, despite recently changing hands once again, has been
soldiering on with a return to their classic brand of gothic horror chillers.
While the Brits were attempting to spice
up their offerings with a little T-n-A, across the pond in America, sex was
barreling ahead at full steam. One of Hollywood’s most notorious mavericks of
exploitation, lauded for his work adapting Edgar Allen Poe for the screen with
Vincent Price in the 1960s, had founded his first production studio and had
zeroed in on boobs as a tried-and-true way to financial success…
Roger Corman and
the New World
When the legendary exploitation
director Roger Corman began to feel the walls closing in, both financially and
creatively, he left American International Pictures to form his own production
company. The result was the now equally infamous New World Pictures, the home
of nudity, action, horror, and entertaining rip-offs throughout the 1970s and
80s. The first film Corman released under this new banner was a biker flick titled
Angels Die Hard (1970) meant to ride the wave of Bikersploitation movies
from the 60s like The Undertaker and His Pals (1966) and She-Devils
on Wheels (1968). It was a modest success – Corman himself claims to never
have lost money on a movie – but it would be a series of sexy nurse pictures
that really put New World Pictures on the map.
Corman’s second film for his fledgling
operation was The Student Nurses (1970), a lightly softcore
sexploitation effort that kicked off an entire cycle of films about, well,
nurses getting into all sorts of compromising and dramatic situations, usually while
making their way through school. This first film set the blueprint for all the others,
revolving around four young nursing students rooming together who each fall in
love with unattainable men. The first with a doctor after sleeping with his
friend, the next with a drug-dealing biker gang leader, the third with a dying
patient at her hospital, and the last with… yup, that’s right, a violent
socialist revolutionary!
Of course, some of the details differ
slightly, but the format is essentially the same for each film. Private Duty
Nurses (1971) deals with racism, seeing a Black nurse and doctor teaming up
to expose a local hospital’s conspiracy to prevent medical professionals who
aren’t White from being hired. Candy Stripe Nurses (1974) involves a
murder mystery plot! Nonetheless, nobody would pretend that these dramatic
goings-on are anything but the seasoning for a main course of bare breasts and
buttocks.
The skin in and of itself might be
considered a feminist statement. The Student Nurses (1970) was directed
by Stephanie Rothman, who would also direct The Velvet Vampire (1971) –
a seemingly fast and loose competitor for Daughters of Darkness (1971) –
for Corman later that year. Her film clearly reflects the concurrent “bra
burning” attitude of the era (one of the nurses makes a direct point about not
wearing one) and makes no excuse for depicting women who own, enjoy, and wield
their sexuality without shame or hesitation. While the rest of the Nurses
series were directed by men (with the one exception of Summer School
Teachers helmed by Barbara Peeters), Rothman’s progressive approach to
female sexuality was established as a must for the genre. Roger Corman himself
has been on record as deliberately using New World Pictures’ exploitation films
as a platform for drawing attention to important issues through a leftwards
lens. In that light, The Student Nurses is a powerful roundhouse kick
right out of the gate! Corman was prepared to go even further still, and
decided to bring back an old exploitation genre that would marry the feminism
and sex with a good deal of gunplay and raucous humor, and in the process
accidentally discover one of the greatest grindhouse stars of the 1970s.
In a booklet included with Shout!
Factory’s Women In Cages Collection DVD release of The Big Doll House
(1971), Women in Cages (1971), and The Big Bird Cage (1972),
Roger Corman states, “…Hollywood had a long tradition of women-in-prison
movies, and no one had done one recently… [ ]… After the success of The Big
Doll House, Pam Grier became our standard leading lady for several
pictures. We developed a formula where we’d have two girls in trouble. One
would be a white girl and the other would be Pam Grier.”
Another first of yet another cycle, The
Big Doll House (1971), directed by Jack Hill, is quite simply one of the
most entertaining films that New World Pictures has ever produced. It’s a bit
softer than contemporary women-in-prison flicks from other countries, like Jess
Franco’s 99 Women (1968) or the Meiko Kaji vehicle Female Prisoner
#701: Scorpion (1972), but one might argue that it is more accessible as a
result. Nonetheless, it is packed to the brim with communal full-nude shower
scenes, female-on-male zap (“R-A-P-E, zap!”) at knifepoint, lesbian
warden interrogation, rice paddy mud wrestling, feline-assisted jailbreaking, and
of course, the obligatory sexy ladies wielding machine guns!
The women-in-prison subgenre demands sex
as a matter of course, and so does Roger Corman, so The Big Doll House
(1971) is stuffed to the gills with it. Grear and Alcott have a traditional
mud wrestle through a rice paddy where they become progressively less clothed
and more drenched as they go. Grear also runs a racket where she exchanges her
services as a protector for sexual favors from the other ladies. For my money,
the best scene features Roberta Collins brandishing a blade in a walk-in
pantry, as she forces one of the men who brings supplies to the prison to drop
his pants, saying “Get it up, or I’ll cut it off…” Yes ma’am, right away!
That moment in particular somewhat
summarizes the peculiar feminist bent of the film. Women are put in roles and
positions previously reserved for male characters, often dealing with the same
threats and situations. Prison movies usually show us men confined, breaking
out, jockeying for position, and the ever-looming “threat” of becoming another’s
bitch. Like the Hammer offerings discussed earlier, homosexuality
between women is portrayed in a much more accepting light. Grear’s preference
for girls is only problematic because it’s coercive, not because it’s
“unnatural”. This flip-turn-upside-down dichotomy is especially evident in the attitudes
of the few men present in the cast, who are portrayed as demure and reticent to
challenge authority. The most obvious example is Sid Haig’s character and his
aforementioned partner, who deliver produce to the facility weekly, being
outwardly nervous and afraid of being sexually assaulted by the pent-up gals
behind the walls. It may be a bit cheeky, but still, it’s rather satisfying to
see those tables turned, isn’t it?
As mentioned prior in this article, it was
American actor John Ashley who purportedly convinced Roger Corman to make the
movie in the Philippines, as opposed to the originally intended location of
Puerto Rico. He tapped Jack Hill, most known in the business at that time for Spider
Baby (1967) with Lon Chaney Jr., to direct, and sent him off to the island
nation with a host of actors that would become New World regulars. While some
attribute the stroke of luck to Hill, it is also frequently claimed that Sid
Haig was the one who discovered the ebony Queen of the Grindhouse Screen, Pam
Grier.
Grier’s performance in The Big Doll
House (1971) is the true standout. Her willingness to show off her ample
assets is matched only by her ability to utterly chew the scenery. She herself
credits her costar Haig as teaching her how to act on the job during the
shooting of the film. Her acting is frequently highlighted as a primary reason
the picture was successful, and she was able to parlay that success into a
career, starring in a number of further women-in-prison efforts beginning with Women
in Cages (1971) and The Big Bird Cage (1972) for New World Pictures,
and the excellent American International Pictures release Black Mama, White
Mama (1973).
It would be tempting, and probably
correct, to brand Grier’s casting in these movies as fulfilling the requirement
of a token Black character. She is clearly the only woman of color in the main
cast (aside from the background local talent from the Philippines) and that,
for better or worse, clearly contributed to her popularity at the time. The
good news is that popularity quickly opened the door for roles in entirely Black
productions. Acknowledging that director Jack Hill is white, Pam Grier’s
starring turns in Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) cemented her
as the top female talent of Blaxploitation movies, in which she continued to
kick ass and take her clothes off in equal measure, usually at the same time. Her
list of achievements is lengthy and astounding, boasting titles such as The
Twilight People (1972), Scream Blacula Scream (1973), The Arena
(1974), Sheba Baby (1975), Bucktown (1975), and Friday
Foster (1975).
Grier is still working today, familiar to
more modern audiences from Quentin Tarantino’s Blaxploitation homage Jackie
Brown (1997) and the mid-2000s HBO drama The L Word, all about the
lives of lesbians in Hollywood! She currently lives on a ranch in my home state
of Colorado.
Roger Corman owned New World Pictures
until selling the company in 1983, and afterward forming New Horizons Pictures,
rebranded as Concorde Pictures in 1985. He maintains his status as the “King of
the B’s” to this day, and still produces movies chock-full of violence, sex,
and nudity. A class act, all around, wouldn’t you say?
Now, we adjourn our discussion regarding
the King of the B’s to take a hop across the pond to Europe with a look at the
King of Sleaze…
Jess Franco in
1973
Jesús Manera Franco. Jess Franco.
Uncle Jess? Born in Spain, 1930, the purveyor of all things sexy, sleazy, and
salacious made over two hundred films in a career that spanned nearly five
decades. He has been lauded as an auteur and derided as a hack. I say, “¿porque
no los dos?” The man was absolute, unfettered, rampaging id, whose libido
dictated nearly every single frame of nearly every movie he made. Yet, it is
inarguable that many of his films rival those of far more praised directors
like Dario Argento for style and craftsmanship. Call it the duality of man? Franco
is the master when it comes to slamming the viewer with a nonstop barrage of
sex, nudity, perversity, and arresting, artful imagery.
The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962)
was the director’s first internationally distributed effort, and regularly
cited as Spain’s first true horror film. It also has naked boobies of the black
and white variety! Franco’s output in his homeland during the 1960s constantly
pushed boundaries, showing as much horror, violence, and skin as he could get
away with in similar flicks like The Sadistic Baron Von Klaus (1962) and
The Diabolical Dr. Z (1965), but his predilections found themselves in
constant conflict with another Franco – that is, Francisco Franco, the
dictator of Spain from 1939 to 1975. The fascist Franco’s strict control over
media was unforgiving and harsh, forcing the filmmaker Franco (who, like his line-crossing
moviemaker colleagues Pier Paolo Pasolini and Lucio Fulci, is said to have identified
as a socialist) to relocate his work to more accepting territories. After
making films abroad for a few years, beginning with Necronomicon (1967),
Jess moved to France sometime between 1968 and 1969, where the depths of his
cinematic depravity began in earnest.
These years were the first of many
prolific rotations around the sun for the director, generating the
women-in-prison actioner 99 Women (1968), the psychedelic Venus in
Furs (1969) starring Star Trek: Deep Space Nine crooner James Darren
as a saxophone player in the throes of passion with a mysterious Maria Rohm,
and two adaptions of the Marquis De Sade –Marquis De Sade’s Justine (1968) and
Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion (1969) – something
that would become a staple of Franco’s work. All of these movies display a much
greater quantity of nakedness than his previous films. 99 Women was even
distributed in a hardcore cut in France, with unsimulated acts performed by
body doubles (read: Swedish porn actors) inserted into the already lurid sex
scenes. Uncle Jess wouldn’t really hit his stride though, until he joined
forces with Spanish starlet Soledad Miranda.
In 1970, Soledad Miranda, born
Soledad Rendón Bueno in 1943, was not much more than a former child actress in
her native Spain. She had acted in more than thirty films, in addition to
featuring as a vocalist in a number of pop music albums, but had felt her star
fading and decided to take a couple years off to raise her new child with her
husband. As the story goes, she wanted to return to acting for one last shot at
becoming an international star.
Miranda first met Jess Franco as a
teenager in 1960 on the set of his film Queen of the Tabarin Club (1960),
her very first film role! Well, “met” is probably not the right word. She was a
background singer in a scene in a group of traveling musicians. Nevertheless,
Franco claimed that he noticed her presence way back then, and when the
opportunity to feature her in his work presented itself, he took it with gusto.
Their collaboration began with a non-Hammer Christopher Lee vampire outing Count
Dracula (1970) and in total gifted the world with six films, but two of
those in particular set the direction for the rest of the filmmaker’s career – the
deliriously mod and swingingly sexy onslaught of Vampyros Lesbos (1971)
and She Killed in Ecstasy (1971).
Vampyros Lesbos (1971) is the
decidedly more artsy of the pair, with Franco delivering a heady mix of sex and
surrealism set against the old-world beauty of Istanbul. Miranda plays the
titular undead fiend in a story that is effectively a spartan and
gender-bending retread of the Dracula tale, dealing with the loneliness of
immortality and destructive, all-consuming obsession. The film opens with the
starlet doing a provocative strip routine with a mannequin (a scene that will
return multiple times throughout). This is our first real taste of the sheer
magnetism that she is capable of putting on the screen. While her turns in at
least two previous Franco titles – Nightmares Come at Night (1970) and Eugenie
de Sade (1970) – are certainly well-acted, it’s here that she really seems
to find her voice.
Soledad Miranda plays the vampire
Countess Nadine Carody, not as seductive predator or violent night creature
driven by animal lust, but as a tormented soul in search of eternal
companionship while she is forced to drink blood to live. In a captivating
close-up, she recounts the horrors she endured as a peasant girl hundreds of
years earlier, and how she was turned into the undead by (it’s intimated) Count
Dracula himself. The violence she suffered at the hands of the opposite sex
burn in her memory. “Men still disgust me,” she intones, “I hate them all.”
True to its name, Vampyros Lesbos
(1971) is a smorgasbord of sapphic shenanigans. Most ladies in the movie go
full-frontal at a minimum of once, and Soledad Miranda spends nearly the entire
runtime in at least some state of undress. It’s worthy of note that, in spite
of the almost constant nudity and girl-on-girl sex, the film never really feels
graphic or dirty. That’s not to say that it is boring like more mainstream
offerings often can be, quite the opposite. The film is one of Franco’s most
engaging works, and it’s often due to Miranda’s smoldering presence that the
sexuality on tap comes off as natural and intimate instead of forced and
affronting.
Less than a month after shooting wrapped
on Vampyros Lesbos (1971), Jess Franco and Soledad Miranda began work
together on their next collaboration. She Killed in Ecstasy (1971) is
easily one of the most accessible of the director’s films and often regarded as
one of his absolute best. It offers the uncomplicated narrative of a woman
(Miranda) whose husband commits suicide, so she sets about seducing and
murdering everyone she believes is responsible. Cut and print.
Widely considered as the actress’ best
performance, Soledad Miranda plays a rollercoaster of passionate love and
murderous rage as she makes her way through the pious bigots who drove her
husband to his death. Speaking of which, the canoodling here is much darker
than the previous flick, with every coupling generally winding up in a good bit
of wild-eyed homicide. My personal favorite is the lesbian sex suffocation with
an inflatable psychedelic pillow scene, but Miranda also castrates genre
stalwart Howard Vernon during the act of boinking, so there’s that too. Her
portrayal is ferocious, with heel-turns between icy stares and eyes burning
with vengeance, all the while intercut with shots of her utter despair at the
loss of the love of her life.
I firmly believe that She Killed in
Ecstasy (1971) would have been Soledad Miranda’s ticket to international
stardom, had she lived to see the picture’s release. Tragically, she passed
away in a car accident in Portugal on August 18, 1970. She was only
twenty-seven, now a sadly overlooked member of that infamous club. Her race-car-driver
husband, who was behind the wheel, suffered only minor injuries. She had just
completed filming on her final team-up with Jess Franco, The Devil Came from
Akasava (1971).
Miranda’s death came as quite the blow to
the director, who was planning on a continuing future in their career
partnership. They had mutually signed a contract just days before the accident
that would have sealed the deal on multiple productions aimed at turning the
actress into a household name in Europe. It all came apart in an instant. Uncle
Jess was forced to start over once again, this time happening upon another
young actress who would become his partner of almost forty years.
Jess Franco made anywhere between eleven
to fourteen films through the course of 1973, depending on how you count them.
The director was working so feverishly that it’s somewhat difficult to nail
down just how many projects were started, finished, released, or abandoned that
year. The number is certainly larger if you count films completed, but not
released until 1974. In any case, it’s undeniably the most prolific time of the
filmmaker’s career, rivalled only by his early 80s output for Golden Films
Internacional.
Franco met Lina Romay in 1972 when she was
just eighteen, at what time she featured in two very small roles in his films The
Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (1972) and The Sinister Eyes of Dr. Orloff
(1972). Their chemistry must have been instant, because she would end up
starring in over one hundred of the director’s pictures. For those keeping
score at home, that would be around one half of his entire filmography! Romay
was a self-described exhibitionist, eminently game to get nude and much, much
more for the camera – a wicked combination when paired with a man whose entire
cinematic drive was his raging hard-on. It was a perfect match, so it’s only
fitting that we take a look at what fruit this impassioned partnership
produced.
The actress’ first substantial role for
Franco was as the mute and very politically incorrect love slave of Alice Arno
and Robert Woods in How to Seduce a Virgin (1973). Alternatively titled Plaisir
a Trois, it was Jess’ second whack at adapting the Marquis De Sade’s Philosophy
in the Boudoir. Arno and Woods are wealthy aristocrats who are sexually
depraved and bored to tears because that’s just how rich people are. Tired of
their intellectually impaired sexual plaything (Romay), they set about a plan
to seduce and corrupt a virgin before using her for their other pastime: murder
most foul! The successfully besmirched young lady then turns the tables on her
would-be killers! Lina Romay is all in as the devoted sex servant Adèle. Her
centerpiece scene involves simulating some girl-on-girl antics with a mannequin
(just to give you an idea of how weird this movie is). Though the role is
considered to be her first major part in a film, it plays mostly as a warmup
for Countess Perverse (1973).
Le Comtesse Perverse (1973) is my favorite
take on the classic novella The Most Dangerous Game. Alice Arno, this
time opposite Howard Vernon, is yet another homicidal rich bitch who gets her
kicks using a bow and arrow to hunt and kill people she seduces and abducts to
her personal island (the same impressive location Franco used for She Killed
in Ecstasy (1971), an art deco mansion in Calpe, Spain). Her cucked husband
(Vernon) is a fetishistic cannibal who obsessively dresses and cooks her “game”
for the sumptuous meals they serve to guests and potential victims at apparently
frequent dinner parties. Oh, and naturally Arno is thoroughly unclothed during
her hunts, as are the unfortunate souls that she uses for target practice. Yeah,
it’s a lot.
Our cherubic Aphrodite Lina is the
ultimate and final victim in the film, running full frontal through trees and
tall grass, over sand dunes and beaches in her futile and breathless
desperation to escape the onslaught of arrows. It’s an absolutely gorgeous sequence
that encompasses everything that Franco is capable of bringing to the screen,
from brutal violence to delicate sensuality and somehow both in the same
instant. It’s no wonder that Romay became the lead for the director’s next
opus.
By opus, I really mean a nonstop barrage
of sex and (literal) blood baths. Female Vampire (1973) (also released
as Erotikill and The Bare-Breasted Countess) is the definitive
evolution of the vampire film. It might be the only movie I can think of that
features a constantly unclothed succubus killing men and women by sucking…
their sexual fluids! Sure, there’s the alternate Spanish cut where Romay gets
her sustenance from the usual blood, but who wants to watch that version,
really?
The opening shots of the actress baring it
all, while walking toward the camera in a forest adorned in nothing but a cape,
a belt (for some reason), and sexy knee-high boots, are positively exquisite. Her
part in Countess Perverse was certainly much larger than previous, but
it’s here in Female Vampire that Lina Romay finally gets top billing as
the Countess Karlstein (a very obvious nod to our favorite Hammer films),
who is doomed to compulsively kill her lovers in the act of carnal lust. Like Soledad
Miranda in Vampyros Lesbos (1971) before her, she painfully longs for
connection and companionship, but she cannot control the impulse to drain the…
uh… life force from her partners.
The obsession that these characters
display, both for each other and for sex, is perhaps the singular throughline
in Jess Franco’s work. It may sound trite, but the man was obsessed with being
obsessed. Almost every film he made deals with the theme in some form. His
characters are typically aware of their circumstances and the dangers therein,
even to the point of certain and violent death, but are unable to wrench
themselves free from their needs and desires. This device is replete within the
filmmaker’s output, all the way through to the 1980s when he was able to return
to his native Spain in the post-dictator Franco era, churning out low-budget
gems such as Cries of Pleasure (1982) and The Night Has a Thousand
Desires (1984). After nearly forty years of romantic and professional
partnership, Franco and Lina Romay finally married in 2008. Romay passed away
in 2012 at the shockingly young age of fifty-seven. Uncle Jess himself,
ostensibly unable, like his characters, to live without her, died the next year
at eighty-two.
An all-consuming fixation with sexual
freedom is by no means exclusive to Franco. Other European outfits wanted to
get down and dirty too, and thus birthed a torrent of movies all about dipping
your wick. One franchise in particular spawned more than seventy(!)
installments depicting the globe-trotting exploits of a deliciously liberated
photojournalist who sleeps her way through men, women, and danger, all in
service of getting her next story…
The Em(m)anuelles
In 1967, Thai-French author
Emmanuelle Arson published her novel Emmanuelle, an erotic tome
comprised of a loosely connected series of unbelievably horny fantasies
featuring herself as the protagonist. Honestly, the book isn’t very good, and
rumors have circulated for decades that Arson’s husband was in fact the true
randy writer. Nevertheless, it was a paperback sensation. The original Fifty
Shades of Grey! Like that literary wonder, full of spelling errors,
confounding archetypes, and a disturbing misunderstanding of the BDSM
community, Emmanuelle was suddenly a favorite of unsatisfied housewives
everywhere!
The tale of a young wife discovering her
sexuality for the first time despite being married to a remarkably
understanding rich husband was ripe for a movie adaptation in the recently unchained
cinematic landscape of the 1970s. French director Just Jaeckin took up the
dubious challenge of adapting the novel to the screen, and in the process made
an overnight star out of Dutch-born actress Sylvia Kristel. Well, not quite
“overnight”, as Kristel had been voted Miss TV Europe in 1973, likely a
contributing factor in her being cast in the title role of Emmanuelle (1974).
Emmanuelle (1974) is certainly a fun
flick, and aside from an uncomfortable assault scene near the end, it doesn’t
really contain anything all that shocking. It is more notable, not for what it
shows, but for setting the standard for softcore sexploitation in the decade going
forward. And, of course, for launching an expansive series of pictures whose
number of installments rivals – nay, dwarfs – that of James Bond and Godzilla.
The original film has two true sequels, Emmanuelle 2 (1975) and Goodbye
Emmanuelle (1977), but the plethora of spin-offs truly defies imagination. The
French entries go from three through seven, a magic number for the series since
there are seven further made-for-tv French Emmanuelle films, seven Emmanuelle
in Space movies, seven Emmanuelle 2000 contributions, and seven each
of the Emmanuelle Private Collection and Emmanuelle Through Time offshoots.
Oh, also a completely unconnected nasty thing called Emmanuelle and Franciose
(1975) and a late-night television installment titled Emmanuelle in Rio
(2003). A total of forty-four bare naked outings. All of these questionable
endeavors showcasing our titular heroine getting frisky and freaky with
whomever is within reach, and getting progressively less artsy and more
shameless as they go. But that’s not all! The most enduring and rewatchable films
of the franchise have almost nothing to do with Sylvia Kristel or anything performatively
highbrow. Rather, they entertain, arouse, and disgust in the way only films
from Italy can.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that soft
smut shouldn’t usually contain graphic snuff footage, forcible prostitution,
gory cannibal cookouts, murder foiled by road head, or a troublingly erect
horse named Pedro. Nonetheless, here we are. These are but a few of the
insanely head-scratching, mind-boggling, and impossibly watchable treasures
held within the silver screen pantheon of Black Emanuelle.
Black Emanuelle (1975) was first
conceived as a blatant cash-in on two popular properties. First, and most
obvious, was the smash hit that Emmanuelle (1974) provided. Second was
the growing boom of Blaxploitation in the United States. The Italian film
industry never saw a box-office trend it didn’t like, so it was a no-brainer to
jump on the gravy train of sex and glorious ebony skin. The first entry in the
series is almost a beat-for-beat remake of the original, minus an “M" of
course. In place of Bangkok, the action is set in the African plains of the
Sahara, where we get to view the typical malcontented elites battle each other
for social stature via the classic “who is playing hide-the-salami with who”
method. More importantly, Emanuelle isn’t a prudish housewife, but an intrepid
and sexually uninhibited photojournalist as played by one Laura Gemser.
So, record scratch… It’s kind of weird
that the infamous Black Emanuelle is, in truth, not really Black. Laura Gemser
is half-Indonesian, half-Dutch. It’s a bit uncomfortable to point out, but it
seems the general train of thought at the time was that the actress’
comparatively lighter skin would be more of an audience draw, even when aimed
squarely at people of color. Racism and greed are clearly no strangers to each
other, whether it be now or forty years ago. Acknowledging this, one still must
admit that Laura Gemser was unquestionably the correct choice because it is
hard to see anyone else in this part. She simply embodies Emanuelle completely
in heart and soul, and she is almost unbearably sexy as she does it.
That globe-trotting nature might be one of
the direct reasons for the success of the franchise. The mid-1970s didn’t have
internet, after all, and airlines took advantage of a dearth of regulation to
price many average people out of travelling abroad. Today, one can see far off
locales simply by jumping on their smartphone, but that convenience is a
relatively recent phenomenon. Almost as recent is the availability of world
news outlets on cable television. Hell, it wasn’t even until the early 70s that
color television sets were finally affordable enough to outsell black-and-white
options. This all meant that your usual Joe Blow who wanted to experience the sights
and sounds of someplace on the other side of the planet had pretty much one recourse:
The movies. The Black Emanuelle films delivered on that count and then
some, with our daring heroine frequently jetting off to multiple foreign
destinations in every installment and doing interesting things and people!
The majority of the “canon” of Laura
Gemser’s appearances as Emanuelle were directed by Aristide Massaccesi, better
known as Joe D’Amato. The director was a veritable sultan of sleaze, boasting a
body of work that rivals that of Jess Franco replete with horror, sex, and
violence. Two of his best flicks, Anthropophagus (1980) and Absurd
(1981), made Britain’s infamous “Video Nasties” list. In retrospect, it’s at
least a little astonishing that his Black Emanuelle films don’t appear in
that dreadful pantheon of censorship.
The first of D’Amato’s collaborations with
Gemser was Emanuelle in Bangkok (1976), which is frankly a mostly bland
retread of Black Emanuelle (1975), set in Thailand this time instead of
Africa. It is notable for transitioning Emanuelle from only being a horny
photographer to the James Bond-esque investigative journalist we know and love,
but aside from that there really isn’t much else going on in the picture. Her
trip to Bangkok culminates in our heroine being the victim of a tonally
incongruous (and honestly indefensible) gang rape wherein she decides to enjoy
the experience and makes friends with the entire group afterward before leaving
for Morocco. Talk about male fantasy, am I right? Yuck.
The real shot heard round the world was the
next entry titled Emanuelle in America (1976). It is decidedly the most notorious
movie in the franchise, sporting cinematic depravity of the highest order. The
plot is expectedly aimless, seeing Emanuelle investigating sex trafficking
rings and corrupt politicians in between conducting nude photoshoots, escaping
a sexually repressed would-be assassin by giving him a blowjob in her car, and
infiltrating a millionaire’s harem of women designated by their astrological
signs. Following so far? Well, one of the girls is depressed that the
pimp-in-chief doesn’t choose her to share his bed anymore, so our protagonist
does her a solid and bangs her in the sauna. Another of the ladies has a very
ill-advised relationship with Pedro, a horse in the stables that is very
happy to see her.
The film ends on a dour and savagely pointed
note. Emanuelle puts together her explosive report on the snuff ring, only to
have the CEO of her newspaper squash its release. The implication is that the
powerful magnate is either afraid of the important people her exposé would… uh…
expose, or even worse, that he may be involved in the whole perverse business. Disgusted,
Emanuelle storms out of the building, leaving her bewildered editor behind, and
absconds to a South Seas isle, fed up with the bureaucracy and the elites. It
is an affecting conclusion, highlighting the corruption and corporate rule that
has only intensified in the past half century.
Joe D’Amato immediately followed Emanuelle
in America (1976) with an effort that exemplifies the well-travelled motif
of the series. Emanuelle Around the World (1977) somewhat unsuccessfully
attempts to replicate the shock value of its predecessor, but that doesn’t make
it any less fun! This time out, Gemser’s world-spanning exploits take her to
India, where she thoroughly debunks the claims of a guru (played by D’Amato
regular George Eastman) that he has unlocked the secret to the ultimate orgasm!
After being significantly unsatisfied by the holy man who has apparently very
little experience with holes, she flies to Hong Kong to root out yet another
sex trafficking operation, and then to San Francisco when her snooping reveals
that US lawmakers are once again involved in the nefarious goings on!
Like the earlier pictures in the series,
there is just as much problematic material as there is innocent. We get some
more bestiality, this time with a dog and a snake instead of horse (yeesh),
and the standard sexual assaults are almost numbing at this point. The one
exception is the climax where Emanuelle’s investigation of the prostitution operation
results in the assault and murder of one of her friends. The film ends with the
journalist finally getting justice when her article results in the perpetrators
going to prison. That success doesn’t provide her much solace though, and the
final scene has her musing about the costs of her ambition, and the emptiness
she feels at her loss.
Emanuelle Around the World (1977) is the ultimate
evolution of the franchise blueprint in many ways. There is even less of a plot
than previous entries, finding story eschewed in favor of jumping from one
setting (and bed) to the next. Over the course of four movies – Black
Emanuelle (1975), Emanuelle in Bangkok (1976), Emanuelle in
America (1976), and Emanuelle Around the World (1977) – Laura Gemser
visits and bones in Kenya, Bangkok, Morocco, New York, Venice, the Caribbean, Washington
DC, South America, India, Hong Kong, San Francisco, and the Middle East! And
she showed no signs of slowing down. The Black Emanuelle films stand
tall to this day as perhaps the singular travelogue of the jet set, with
further installments such as Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977) (an
attempt to cash in on the burgeoning Cannibalsploitation genre, complete with a
chimpanzee smoking a Marlboro cigarette), Sister Emanuelle (1977) (a
nunsploitation offering), and Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade (1978)
(yet another undercover investigation of sex trafficking).
It's difficult today to explain the
peculiar draw of these films, but they continue to be just as enticing as ever.
We might be able to see anywhere we wish to with the instant gratification of
platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, but there is still something taboo
and exciting about Emanuelle banging beautiful people in beautiful places.
Laura Gemser remains as captivating today as she was nearly fifty years ago,
and her exploits are still far more entertaining than the likes of modern superhero
nonsense. Unfortunately, these films fall prey to one aspect of sexuality in
cinema that the 1970s was inexplicably rife with: rape. Nearly every movie in
the series has at least one scene of sexual assault. This issue was by no means
confined to the Emanuelle films, however, and it’s a theme that merits an
in-depth discussion.
The Bad and the
Ugly: Rape in 1970s Cinema
Let’s get this out of the way at the
start: rape and sexual assault are absolutely reprehensible crimes, and I am
not going to attempt in any way to defend their depictions in film. The level
of comfortability (and I use that word extremely lightly) with such content
depends entirely upon the viewer. Whether or not the inclusion of these scenes
is justifiable is up to individual interpretation, and I am not here to pass
judgment one way or the other. This writing is about covering the gamut of
sexploitation cinema, and rape scenes are unfortunately part of that,
regardless of anyone’s personal opinion on the matter. If you’ve made it this
far, I assume you’re at least passingly familiar with the subject, so fair
warning: we’re going to have to talk about this.
It is shocking to say, but scenes of
rape and sexual assault are practically ubiquitous in 1970s films. I’m not sure
there is any explanation that can absolve filmmakers of constantly brutalizing
their female characters on camera, but it does beg the question as to why
this was such a far-reaching trope at the time. Present day depictions of this
topic are generally handled with appropriate weight, and often shied away from
in mainstream content. Most of the time anymore, if a rape is about to happen
it is only shown to completion if it is necessary for the character’s story
arc. Otherwise, the act is usually interrupted by a hero who does away with the
perpetrators in spectacular fashion. In movies from the 70s it’s often just…
there.
Apart from shock value (which
certainly has something to do with it), the best explanation that I can give
for the pervasiveness of sexual violence in movies of this decade has to do
with the same reasons that sex itself was finally so openly shown on celluloid.
The counterculture free love movement of the 1960s created an atmosphere of
permissiveness in relation to sex that permeated society. It’s reasonable to
deduce that this newfound liberation created an incentive for moviemakers to
test the waters to see just how far the envelope could be pushed. There are a
million and one takes out there over whether said envelope was pushed too far,
but I feel constrained to point out that the sheer volume of rape scenes
present in this time period indicates that the prevailing attitude held them to
be more acceptable than they are now. Personally, I consider the purpose behind
depictions of this sort to matter, and there are a few films that bear
mentioning from this perspective.
Nicknamed “Sasori” (translated: Scorpion)
by her fellow inmates, Nami thwarts multiple assassination attempts plotted by
her former beau, turns a female prison guard into a lesbian by being super good
in bed, topples the abusive convict hierarchy led by the predatory big bitch on
campus, and ultimately becomes the catalyst for a liberating prison riot, all
the while protecting the most vulnerable around her and enduring harsh
punishment by the misogynist warden and his minions. When she finally (spoiler
alert!) gets her well-deserved vengeance, it is very, very sweet.
The central gangrape in the film is
unavoidable. Without it, there wouldn’t really be a story. It is the definite
inciting incident, and therein lies our conundrum. How necessary is this scene,
actually? I can make the case that it is the only possible route for the film
to take. Beyond the fact that the sequence is done in a jarringly gorgeous
fashion – replete with neon lighting and hair-raising shots of Kaji’s eyes
burning with rage – the depth of our heroine’s violation is the one match that
can light the fuse. So many revenge movies revolve around the murder of a
family member or love interest because it is a convenient sidestep for doing
something much more offensive to the protagonist. Violent death is the bread
and butter of exploitation cinema and is generally considered a good enough
motivation for pretty much anything. Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972)
discards this typical plotting in favor of ravaging Nami with the most invasive
abuse a woman can conceivably endure at the hands of men.
A woman paying back her abuser at the end
of a gun or sharp implement is a subgenre unto itself, especially in the 1970s.
Rape-Revenge films enjoy a reputation, along with the likes of Nazisploitation
pictures, as being part of a particularly nasty corner of exploitation.
Considered sick, depraved, and wholly irredeemable, it might be surprising to
find that the origins of this template might in fact come from one of the most
lauded and worshipped directors of all time. The Last House on the Left
(1972), the notorious debut feature directed by horror legend Wes Craven
about two young women who get raped and murdered by a gang who then has the
misfortune of seeking lodging in the home of one of the girl’s parents, was in
truth a remake.
In 1961, Ingmar Bergman’s adaptation of a
medieval Swedish poem The Virgin Spring (1960) won the Academy Award for
Best Foreign Language Film. Set in a feudal Sweden on the tipping point between
pagan traditions and the encroaching spread of Christianity, it stars the inimitable
Max Von Sydow as a father whose virginal daughter is assaulted and killed by
roving bandits who then (unbeknownst to them) request shelter from a violent
storm in his home. When he discovers what they’ve done, he savagely slays them
one by one in retribution.
Wes Craven partnered with producer Sean
Cunningham (of future Friday the 13th (1980) fame) to turn
Bergman’s movie into the nastiest exploitation film in existence. The Last
House on the Left (1972) is a truly harrowing experience, and it’s largely
regarded as the first true rape-revenge effort. Its success was inevitably
followed by further entries in the genre, including Thriller: A Cruel
Picture (1973), Ms. 45 (1981), and Savage Streets (1984), but
the definitive rape-revenge sickie has to be Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your
Grave (1978).
Alternatively titled Day of the Woman,
I Spit on Your Grave (1978) is an hour of rape and forty minutes of
revenge. Camille Keaton plays Jennifer, who is renting a house in the country
in order to find solitude and inspiration for writing her first novel. She
catches the eye of a group of men at the gas station who follow her and proceed
to brutally violate her for the majority of the film’s runtime. After she
recovers in secret, she lures each one of the men back to her cabin so she can
viciously slaughter them. Her methods include, but are not limited to, hanging,
axing, and castration!
The flick is up there with the most
egregious in history when it comes to the sheer amount of violence,
degradation, humiliation, and graphic retaliation on display. It is frequently
cited as one of the most extreme exploitation efforts of the 70s. It is also
almost as often referenced as a work of militant feminism. Jennifer and her
ordeal are depicted as a stand-in for the anguish and abuse suffered by women
the world over. When she slices, dices, and outboard-motors her rapists, it’s
seen as a justifiable cry of outrage and defiance against patriarchy and misogyny.
I admit, it’s very difficult not cheer at the screen when these
despicable men get their just desserts. So, does that balance out the previous
sixty minutes of extremely graphic sexual assault?
I honestly do not know.
Maybe it’s a classic
case of, “your mileage may very”. Maybe it’s eminently indefensible. I guess it
depends, like sex in the movies in general, on the viewer. I maintain that
having a space for women to feel empowered in the face of such evil is good.
Rape is, if nothing else, horrific, and therefore it is reasonable to consider
these pictures to be horror films. In that respect it is at the very least appropriate
in the grand tradition of sex and nudity being part and parcel of scary movies.
As the 1970s bid adieu and we enter the 1980s, skin on celluloid assumed a
softer and more inviting posture, albeit in the guise of flicks all about
hulking masked murders stalking partying teenagers…
Part Three
Babysitters and
Camp Counselors
The 1980s
On the night of October 24th,
1978, the 1980s began. An independent horror film debuted at the AMC Empire
Theater in Kansas City, Missouri before screening in just one hundred
ninety-eight venues nationwide during its opening week. Of those, one hundred
seventy were in either New York City or Southern California, leaving just
twenty-eight screens for the rest of the country to experience John Carpenter’s
Halloween (1978). Word of mouth slowly spread about the film and by the
end of its theatrical run it had grossed over $70,000,000, making it one of the
most successful independent pictures of all time, having been made for only
$300,000. Almost overnight the movie industry mobilized to make as many
cash-ins and sequels as possible, creating a genre that would arguably define
the next decade. The slasher film was born.
Between 1978 and 1989, literally
hundreds of slasher movies were made. A cursory web search will reveal at least
two hundred entries on Wikipedia, but missing from that list are dozens of
European offerings in the genre, as well as the vast selection of shot-on-video
(SOV for short) efforts that ambitious fans and filmmakers literally made in
their own backyards and neighborhoods with nothing but a camcorder and a
misguided yet admirable sense of derring-do. It sometimes feels as though one
could spend the rest of their life viewing 80s slasher flicks exclusively and
never run out of something new to watch.
“See anything you like?”
Yes. Yes, we do. Thank you, PJ
Soles, you are an American hero. Soles’ character Linda is sitting in bed after
doing the do with her boyfriend Bob (who by this point is nailed to the
cupboards downstairs by a butcher knife that is doing a lot of heavy
lifting) when Michael Myers appears in her doorway dressed like a ghost in a
bedsheet with poor old Bob’s glasses. Assuming it’s her dearly departed beau
playing a joke, she sits up and playfully shows her tits. Dear God, it’s
beautiful. So naturally, like everything else that demanded to be copied by
every single subsequent rip-off, sex and nudity was destined to be part and
parcel of slasher films. Praise be! The blueprint was set. A good ol’
hack-n-slash absolutely must contain blood and it must also contain breasts.
Them’s the rules!
Ironically, the Halloween franchise
doesn’t actually sport many instances of bare skin. Halloween 4: The Return
of Michael Myers (1988) for example has a pretty sexy boinking scene in
front of the fireplace where the busty lady in question is wearing some very
lacy lingerie, but even when she takes her bra off, we see it from the back. It
instead falls to another heavy hitter in the slasher pantheon to deliver the
goods. This particular series moves the action from suburbia to summer camp,
where horny counselors get sliced and diced on the banks of the sparkling clear
waters of Crystal Lake.
Friday the 13th
(1980)
and the Slasher Formula
“His name was Jason, and today is
his birthday.”
There is no better representation of
the formula for slasher movies than Friday the 13th (1980).
It has literally every necessary component required to make a great chop-em-up.
Producer/Director Sean S. Cunningham can be credited with the title, noticeably
nicked from Halloween, and the now legendary Tom Savini provided the
wonderfully squishy gore makeup, but it’s the script that really makes the recipe
obvious.
Screenwriter Victor Miller has said that Halloween
(1978) (once again) was the direct inspiration for his screenplay. He quite
simply took a bunch of teenagers, plopped them in a location where adult help
was impossible to find, and has them methodically murdered one at a time by a
villain with a decades old motivation that he calls “a prior evil”. And that’s all
there is to it! Well, not all there is (because details do matter) but
the bare bones of the slasher schematics are present. In that respect, Friday
the 13th (1980) might actually be more responsible for
the proliferation of the genre than its direct muse. From explicit summer camp pastiches
like The Burning (1981) and Madman (1981), to regional romps such
as Death Screams (1982) and The Mutilator (1984), to major
studio money-grabs like He Knows You’re Alone (1980) and The
Initiation (1984), and even European “classics” with titles like Bloody
Moon (1981) and Pieces (1982)… all can reasonably attribute their
very existence this one little movie about college kids dying horribly just
because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Come on, you’ve seen this one, you know
what it’s about! Camp Crystal Lake is getting ready to reopen! But the locals
nearby – in… I guess New Jersey? The franchise isn’t really clear, but
landmarks from the shooting locations suggest so – aren’t exactly keen on the
idea. They call the place Camp Blood, and if the opening double murder of two
canoodling counselors is any indication, that is understandable. A group of nubile
teens (including Kevin Bacon as the very creatively named “Jack”) have accepted
jobs at the camp and arrive early to help get the place ready. The town drunk
Crazy Ralph warns them – “It’s got a death curse!” – but nobody listens because
why would they? When the sun sets on their first day, the kids set about smoking
joints, getting frisky, playing strip Monopoly (you heard me), and getting
gorily killed in a variety of stabby circumstances! And to be sure, along the
way we get a nice display of skin. Chiefly there is Bacon Butt, for which we
can all be thankful.
Friday the 13th (1980) certainly
satisfies all the requirements to be a slasher film. The first, and most
important, is gory violence. While not every kill is directly shown (though
most are), we at least get to see each aftermath with a gratuitous amount of
blood. We get multiple stabbings, an arrow through the throat, an axe to the
face, throat slashings (one onscreen and two afterwards), and even a
decapitation in all its graphic glory! There is most definitely no shortage of
the red stuff. And while everybody and their sister knows by now that the
killer is Jason’s mother, Pamela Voorhees, and that the hulking titan of terror
wouldn’t show up until the sequel (and not get his iconic hockey mask until the
third film), it should be noted how absolutely good Betsy Palmer is in
the role of the maniacal murdering mommy.
Released less than a year after the first
installment, Friday the 13th Part II (1981) aimed to up the
ante in every way: more kills, more blood, more breasts! A group of
counselors-in-training arrive at a different camp on the other side of Crystal
Lake for a week or two of bolstering their wilderness skills. Mostly they seem
to jog and have cookouts? Anyway, it’s supposedly been five years since the
massacre at Camp Crystal Lake, and the myth of Jason Voorhees turns out to be
all too real. The slasher villain is alive and well, and ready to hack his way
through some fresh meat.
Unfortunately, the gore was infamously
(and ironically) slashed to bits at the behest of the dreaded MPAA. It’s too bad
because the death scenes really are something. A wheelchair-bound counselor
gets a machete to the face. Another gets the wrong side of the same machete
across the jugular while hanging upside down from a tree. An obnoxious sheriff has
his brain impaled by the claw side of a claw hammer. Crazy Ralph (remember
him?) is garroted with barbed wire. And, in a scene clearly stolen from Mario
Bava’s A Bay of Blood (1971), two lovers get shish-kabobbed together
during the carnal act by a spear. Talk about penetration, am I right? All of
these sequences and more were forcibly cut to ribbons, only now surviving as silent
clips on videotape (though they have been salvaged as a special feature on
Shout! Factory’s excellent Friday box set).
An aside before we move on… One of the
oft-mentioned tropes of slasher movies is that the heroine – termed the “Final
Girl” – must be a virgin. Drugs, alcohol, and above all sex are considered to
be deadly sins and a one-way ticket to getting dead at the hands of whatever
form the killer takes in any particular movie. This might be traced back to Halloween
(1978) yet again, wherein Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode is a pensive and
somewhat introverted character. Unlike her besties Annie and Linda, who make a
big to-do about hooking up with their boy toys, Laurie is romantically
unentangled and even has a bit of a freakout when her crush is made aware of
her feelings. Moreover, Annie meets her fate by Michael Myers when on her way
to pick up her beau, and Linda is topless after boning when she is
unceremoniously strangled with a corded phone (something I’m sure any Gen Z readers
are scratching their heads about just now).
The message on its surface appears to be
“have sex and you die,” but I am not so sure that’s strictly the case. Laurie
doesn’t survive the night because she’s a virgin, she lives because she isn’t
distracted. Where Annie and Linda both are supremely preoccupied with their
plans for Halloween night, she constantly has her head on a swivel. She sees
Michael outside her classroom window, behind a hedgerow, and staring at her
bedroom window from her backyard. Every instance that she brings up to her
friends is roundly dismissed as paranoia. Even the famous third act chase comes
about because she is aware enough to notice something amiss with the Wallace
house across the street where the other girls are assumed to pouncing on their
paramours.
The final girls of both Friday the 13th
(1980) and Friday the 13th Part II (1981) also cast doubt
on the virgin narrative. Alice (Adrienne King) in the first film seems a bit
reticent about taking off her clothes during the Monopoly game, but she still
enthusiastically participates at the start. She also is clearly infatuated with
her coworker Bill, and it’s hinted (rather strongly) that she has had some possibly
intimate liaisons with the camp owner Steve Christie. In Part II, Amy
Steele’s Ginnie is likewise quite worldly, also having a relationship with the
boss and ending up in bed with him early on in the film.
Both leading ladies demonstrate that it’s
not closed legs that help them survive their respective long nights at Camp
Blood, but rather their open minds. Alice is the one who insists that something
more is going on than just immature pranks and suggests multiple times that
they should call for help or even flat out leave on foot to escape danger.
Meanwhile Ginnie is the only one of her colleagues who takes the stories about
Jason seriously, and muses about what he might realistically be like –
something that most certainly contributes to her survival by the end. Even in Friday
the 13th Part 3D (1982), Dana Kimmel’s final girl doesn’t shrug
off the advances of her (weirdly and creepily older) love interest out of
chastity, but because of the trauma she experienced in her past. All of this
evidence points to the puritanical assertion that virginity equals victory as
being anywhere from misread, to straight up false.
The arguable peak of slasher skinema (at
least as far as the Friday franchise is concerned) would have to be Friday
the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter (1984). The film is both
beloved and notorious among fans for being one of the bloodiest and “boobiest” installments
on offer, and also for the amusing distinction of being the first to claim to
be the last… and wasn’t.
The series is practically phoning in the
setup at this point, but let’s be honest, who cares? This time out Jason
escapes from the hospital morgue after being declared dead by some very disinterested
orderlies who are more concentrated on making jokes about necrophilia and
watching late-night television aerobics infomercials with a shit-ton of Aqua
Net and leotards. From there, he returns to the woods around Crystal Lake
intent on murdering a bunch of teens partying in a rented lake house, and if
the Jarvis family next door gets caught up in the slicing shenanigans, then…
them’s the breaks!
The cast boasts a buffet of buxom babes, a
couple of nerdy dudes, a fresh-off Gremlins (1984) and on to The
Goonies (1985) Corey Feldman as little Tommy Jarvis, and (regrettably or
remarkably, depending on your own level of weirdness) a pre-Back to the
Future (1985) Crispin Glover. Perhaps more importantly, it sees the return
of the veritable Sultan of Splatter, Tom Savini, and was directed by the now
legendary 80s exploitation journeyman Joseph Zito.
Zito had previously made an excellent and
underrated slasher with Savini titled The Prowler (1981). In addition to
a multitude of bayonettings, pitchfork puncturings, and even an exploding head,
the film gifts us with a nice full-frontal shower scene, and (as we noted
earlier) Humanoids From the Deep (1980) alum Cynthia Weintraub taking a
dip in a swimming pool in her undies. With The Final Chapter, the
director works overtime to make sure that nearly every actress (and their male
counterparts to boot) strip nude for the camera.
When I say every I am very nearly
being literal. Only a couple members of the main cast keep their clothes on.
Judie Aronson has two separate skinny-dipping scenes and one undressing moment
where a very underage Feldman is peeping through her window across the way
(let’s just assume some clever editing on that count). Barbara Howard gets
frisky with Peter Barton (who previously got to almost shag Linda Blair
in Hell Night [1981]) in the shower. And the twins Camilla and Carey
More, much like our favorite Collinson sisters before them, do a double-dare
derriere act by shedding their swimsuits in the lake! The most surprising part
of all this debauchery is that Kimberly Beck, playing Tommy’s older sister
Trish, doesn’t get naked in the slightest despite the fact that she went
completely stark front and back a few years earlier in the excellent
proto-slasher classic Massacre at Central High (1976).
Beefcake gets an honorable mention here as
well. Lawrence Monoson, who would go on to a lengthy career as a character
actor (including appearances on both Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star
Trek: Enterprise) shows his butt when going skinny-dipping with his fellow
teenaged degenerates, while spending the rest of the movie striking out with all
the ladies in the cast. And Judie Aronson’s onscreen beau Paul (played by Alan
Hayes) boasts some prominent cut-off jean shorts mooseknuckle before getting
that impressive set of twig and berries harpooned by Jason in what might be the
most wince-inducing scene of any Friday the 13th film! Sadly
(or thankfully?) Crispin Glover doesn’t show us anything of his pasty,
emaciated bod… though he does get to break a bedframe with one of the
More twins (and honestly, who knows which) before getting a much-welcomed
corkscrew to the hand, a cleaver to the face, and then crucified and
ripped down by Jason in a doorway.
After The Final Chapter, the Friday
pantheon slows down a bit for a while. Friday the 13th Part V: A
New Beginning (1985) has quite a few breasts on display, but nothing below
the waist. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), Friday
the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1987), and Friday the 13th
Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1988) all reveal practically nothing.
This is largely owed to the combination of growing moral majority prudishness
and the MPAA hacking everything they deemed “objectionable” to bits, leaving
the films mostly bloodless and frustratingly covered. It’s almost laughable at
this point that any of the nipples and buttocks present in these pictures were
considered salacious at the time. Looking back, they retain a charming youthful
innocence that directly contrasts with the scuzzy grindhouse shockers of the
previous decade. Once the genie is out of the bottle though, it is notoriously
hard to put back in. All of the glorious nudity of this behemoth slasher series
has remained intact and viewable by horny young eyes for decades thanks to the delightful
advent of home video.
More importantly, Friday the 13th
(1980) set the bar for content both violent and perverse when it came to
body count movies. The 1980s and the slasher boom were just getting started when
the first movie was released. If your flick was worth its salt, it just had to
have some flashes of skin to go along with the splattery kills. Slasher films
would take place on college campuses (Final Exam [1981], The House on
Sorority Row [1983]), out in the backwoods (Just Before Dawn [1981], The
Prey [1984]), in the melodramatic green rooms of theater productions (Nightmares
[1980], Curtains [1983]), in apartment complexes (Eyes of a
Stranger [1981], Blood Rage [1983]), the gym (Killer Workout [1987],
Death Spa [1989]), and of course, in plain old middle-American suburbia
(A Nightmare on Elm Street [1984], Child’s Play [1988]). But none
would ever be so iconic as summer camp. In fact, those dirty old cabins by a
lake with squabbling kids and promiscuous counselors would indeed be the
setting for these little teen-centric horror pictures to take sex and nudity to
the next level! Not necessarily in terms of what we get to see on the screen
(though that is certainly part of it) but in regard to the topics of sexual
orientation, gender identity, and childhood trauma. It’s time to meet at the
waterfront, after the social…
Sleepaway Camp
(1983)
Horror is not just about blood and
guts and boobs and butts. Not that there is anything wrong with that (I do love
a good dose of sex and violence), but the genre’s reputation as being nothing
more than endless depravity is as completely wrong as it is unfair. While
science fiction is usually more associated with social and political
commentary, it would be remiss to discount just how much horror films get in on
this game, often through an expressly progressive point of view. An obvious
example is Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989), wherein rich elites and corporate
executives control everything (wait, it’s not a documentary?) and literally
melt and fuse together in the grossest orgy ever filmed. Likewise, Massacre
at Central High (1976) takes direct aim at fascism, revolution, and the
dangers of removing a power structure without any plan to replace it with a new
framework, resulting in a descent into anarchy and violence.
When it comes to sex, horror is
certainly no stranger. Some relatively recent fright flicks to tackle the
subject include Teeth (2007) – about a teenage girl who gets revenge on
some terrible dudes in the most wince-inducing fashion after discovering she
has some rather sharp chompers in her vagina – and Hard Candy (2005),
featuring a pre-transition Elliot Page torturing Patrick Wilson for an hour and
forty-five minutes because they believe he is a pedophile. The 80s, however,
gifted us with something far more interesting and ridiculously less nuanced. Sleepaway
Camp (1983) is an entry in the slasher canon that absolutely must be seen
to be believed.
Alright, we have to discuss the
finer points of this movie, and that simply won’t be possible for our purposes
without revealing the ending. So, consider this your gigantic SPOILER ALERT. If
you don’t want to know what happens, it would be best to skip this section
altogether. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…
It’s Angela. She’s the killer, and
she isn’t exactly a she either. That boating accident killed the sister,
but her brother (then named Peter) was forcibly gender-bent by their kooky aunt
who reasoned that she already had a boy, so a second one was just out of the
question. The final… uh… uncut shot of the film really lays that bare. From coercive
transgenderism, to homosexuality, to pedophilia, to childhood trauma, and even plain
old puberty, there is a lot to unpack here.
At its core, Sleepaway Camp
(1983) is a movie all about the trials and tribulations of adolescence. It
might be a really messed up one, but Angela’s pubertal teenage gauntlet is extremely
relatable to most viewers. She is expected to be something she isn’t by her parental
guardian, bullied relentlessly by the cool kids, and treated unfairly by
unfeeling adults and authority figures who don’t put even a single ounce of
effort into understanding who she is and what her challenges might be. Despite
all of this, she still manages to find her first boyfriend at camp, and therefore
all of the confusing ups and downs and drama that comes with new teen romance.
Of course, all of these experiences
are confusing enough for hormone-addled teens without the compounding factors
poor Angela has to deal with. Not only is she biologically male, forced against
her will to dress and present as female, but it is revealed through flashback
that her only childhood memories of sexuality revolve around spying on her
father in bed with his boyfriend. Suffice it to say, her perceptions of gender
identity and the nature of sexual attraction are tangled at best. It doesn’t
help that her bunkmate Judy, one of her most vicious adversaries, focuses her
verbal and emotional assaults around Angela’s supposed late development. She
comments on a lack of pubic hair (for some damn reason) and, in one of the
film’s most memorable lines, attacks her for having a small chest, “She’s a
real carpenter’s dream! Flat as a board and needs a screw!” Judy herself is
somewhat promiscuous (one might say desperately so) and spends quite a
bit of time inserting herself into the quiet girl’s growing relationship with
her boyfriend Paul. She offers sex willingly, where Angela is hesitant, and for
a time she successfully poaches the horny guy away from her. She uses her sex
appeal as a venus fly trap in a predatory fashion worthy of classic film noir,
and it is satisfyingly poetic that she meets her end via a hot curling iron
shoved… well… somewhere rather private and thematically appropriate!
Before we continue on our 80s
mega-tour, I think it would be fun to highlight a few of the other downright zany,
nonsensical points of horniness in Sleepaway Camp (1983). Maintaining
the theme of kinda weird gayness in the movie, a bunch of the guys approach the
girls to go skinny-dipping, but when rebuffed by the ladies, they strip all the
way down and jump in the lake together anyway… Moreover, the dudes in Ricky’s
cabin enthusiastically participate in a game designed to put their bare asses
in each other’s faces. Arty the head cook is a not-so-secret pedophile, but his
coworkers don’t seem to mind too much and just laugh it off when he says,
“there’s no such thing as too young, you’re just too old…” And the camp
director Mel is a wrinkled old geezer, but that doesn’t stop plucky and busty counselor
Meg from wanting to climb him like a tree. Meg and Mel, who knew?
If you want to read my previous and
more complete writing about this early 80s slasher gem, you can find the
article here.
Slasher movies of the decade didn’t
only provide boobs, butts, and scathing commentary of the gender binary. By and
large, these pictures took a progressive stance on all the things that society
considered naughty, and that includes the LGBT+ community and even sex work!
One of the best offerings to come about in this period and take these topics
head-on has to do with a serial killer terrorizing the hookers of Hollywood
Boulevard, and the underage prostitute who must hunt him down! She’s a high
school honor student by day, and a Hollywood hooker by night! She is…
Angel (1984)
If ever there was a taboo area in
cinema, it would definitely have to be underage sex work. Some of the most
infamous films ever made deal with the matter. The most well-known would likely
be Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver (1976), which features a then twelve
years old Jodie Foster as a preteen prostitute being rented out to scumbags by
Harvey Keitel. Another example would be Mysterious Skin (2004), wherein
Joseph Gordon Leavitt is a teen hustler dealing with the trauma of sexual abuse
as a child – subject matter so confronting that the MPAA slapped the movie with
an NC-17 rating. The idea that children are not just sexually abused, or
trafficked, but also engage in selling their bodies willingly in order to
survive is beyond uncomfortable. Modern conservatives often even feel pressured
to come up with wild conspiracies to justify their fear and anger over such
dark truths, some going as far as claiming that elite liberals kidnap these
innocent young ones in order to sacrifice them to Satan or drink their blood in
heathen rituals in the nonexistent basement of a pizza parlor. Of course, the
blatant denial from the other side of aisle that the trafficking and
prostitution of those underage even happens isn’t really any better. In all
honesty, nobody really likes to admit that these things occur, and movies that tackle
the issue tend to get eviscerated by censors, picketed at the box office, or
buried in the onslaught of throwaway streaming content.
Donna Wilkes was twenty-four and had already
been in Jaws 2 (1978) and the Klaus Kinski-led slasher Schizoid
(1980), as well as Days of Our Lives in a recurring role, by the
time she played the fifteen-year-old heroine in Angel. You wouldn’t know
it, though. She portrays the part so convincingly; one would believe it if they
were told she was a real teenage streetwalker in the scuzzy gutters of Los
Angeles. Tearing up the scenery with her is comic legend Dick Shawn as Mae, the
kindly aging cross-dressing hustler that raises and guides her better than her
own mother ever tried by half, and Rory Calhoun as Kit Carson, a past-his-prime
Western star reduced to selling autographs and telling glamourous stories of
the golden age of Hollywood. Together the trio make up one of the best core
casts of characters in exploitation history.
Let’s start with Mae, whose given name
(let’s be honest dead name) is Marvin. Here we have another 80s slasher
film that is unafraid of portraying a transgender character with empathy and
kindness. We shouldn’t ignore the fact that other horror pictures of the time
like Brian De Palma’s much lauded Dressed to Kill (1980) and the
delightfully skinful Fatal Games (1984) deal with the subject in a way
that is at the very least insensitive and frankly hasn’t aged well, but
nevertheless it’s important to highlight the surprisingly numerous works like Angel
that take a significantly more progressive stance on LGBT+ equality.
Kit is perhaps the saddest case, being at
an age where he should have been long-retired but still forced to scrape a
living on the streets reliving past achievements. The old codger is wise and
protective, a stand-in granddaddy for our plucky heroine, making sure she
doesn’t bite off more than she can chew (well, as much as he possibly can). He
shows her how to shoot and how to take care of herself, all the while barely
giving a thought to his own needs. In many ways, he is the archetype of the
family she should have had.
Mae’s love-hate relationship with Susan
Tyrell’s cranky landlord and self-described dyke Solly is a proverbial “up
yours” to the prevailing notions of Reagan-era “family values”. A literal cinematic
“a lesbian and a trans hooker walk into a bar” joke! When a snooping school
counselor shows up at Molly’s apartment determined to uncover the truth to the
rumors about her, it’s Mae who defends her saying, “I love that girl more than
her mother ever did.” This fucked up little family of misfits – a child
prostitute, a graying drag queen, a butch rug-munching landlady, and a cast out
cowboy – is about as contrary to the typical American image of a white picket
fence, golden retriever, and apple pie as you can get. And it’s utterly
heartwarming.
Just as confrontational as its fiercely
positive portrayal of the LGBT+ community is Angel’s adamant refusal to
paint sex work as degrading or immoral. We are never encouraged to judge Molly
for her methods of making money, rather to understand and root for her. Even
the various cops who police the strip, though their attitudes are disapproving
at best, treat the ladies with dignity and go out of their way to warn them of
impending danger. The detective investigating the murders goes so far as to
become a sort of surrogate father for the teenage hellion, going to bat for her
when she is in trouble and gallantly putting himself in harm’s way to keep her
safe.
On the other end of the spectrum is the
big bad serial killer methodically offing the gals on Hollywood Boulevard one
by one. His sexual preference is of the non-breathing variety, shall we say…
Beyond a particularly nauseous scene in which is pokes a hole in a raw egg and
vigorously sucks it dry, we’re also treated to images of him molesting a dead
body and scrubbing himself painfully clean afterward. The guy is so
realistically unbalanced, it’s fairly obvious that the inspiration for the
character wasn’t the lumbering, masked baddies like Jason Voorhees or Michael
Myers, but the real-life serial murderers that had only recently come into the
public consciousness. The likes of Ted Bundy, who often wore unassuming
disguises such as fake casts or a new haircut to appear unthreatening. Or the then
at-large Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway, whose preferred victims were also
prostitutes. Even more disturbing, the Milwaukee Cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, who
wouldn’t be caught until 1991, bears an eerie parallel to the nameless
perverted piquerist in the film, preserved assorted body parts of his victims,
both to eat and to fornicate with. Unlike the deliriously gory and morally
ambiguous Nekromantik (1988), Angel is clear and straight forward
when it comes to necrophilia: it’s the bad guys who do that shit.
Okay. Enough of the mushy stuff. We’re
here to talk about all things sex, right? Well, in the celestial pantheon of
1980s horror, the final girls who kept coming back to survive another night
earned themselves a moniker: Scream Queens. Jamie Lee Curtis, Heather
Langenkamp, Sigourney Weaver, just to name a few. They marched their way from
installment to installment, battling everything from dream demons, to aliens,
to good old-fashioned psychopaths and insane boyfriends. But only one took her
clothes off with such regularity to the point that any time you saw her name,
you knew that the movie you were about to watch was going to show you
the goods…
Linnea Quigley:
Scream Queen of Skin
Ask any fan of 1980s horror about Dan
O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead (1985) and it is almost certain
they will mention one scene in particular. You know the one. It features a girl
decked out in punky makeup, skull earrings, and a shock of cropped orange hair
dancing to hair metal in nothing but her birthday suit on top of a stone mausoleum
in the middle of a suitably creepy cemetery. Grinding on the grave! Tapping on
the tomb! Getting down on the six feet underground? Oh mama, yes indeed. What
else do you want, really?
Quigley was born in Davenport, Iowa
on May 27, 1958, and by her own account, was ironically quite shy as a child.
At some point she must have gotten over it because by the time she started
appearing in movies as a teenager she had already learned to sing, play guitar,
dance, and act. Her first starring role was in the sex comedy Fairy Tales
(1978) for Charles Band (of Empire Pictures and Full Moon Features fame),
so it’s safe to say that any lingering introversion was well and truly squashed
by that point. Afterward she began to get supporting roles in many horror films
that are now considered classics in the genre, such as the weird cannibals with
laser eyes shocker Don’t Go Near the Park (1981) and the infamous killer
Santa Claus slasher Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984).
One of the most infamous scenes in
her… um… body of work appears in Savage Streets (1984), directed by
Danny Steinman (best known for Friday the 13th Part V: A New
Beginning [1985]), wherein she plays the deaf, mute, and ostensibly
mentally disabled younger sister of high school girl gang leader Linda Blair.
The film centers around Blair’s fucked up version The Pink Ladies dubbed The
Satins and their ongoing feud with the rival dude gang The Scars. In escalation
of their little turf-war that could, the bad guys brutalize and gang rape
Quigley in the school gym, leaving her comatose and prompting Blair and her
ladies to exact violent revenge! It’s a grindhouse movie to the core if there
ever was one.
Like many of the films from the 70s
that use rape as an inciting incident – one so horrible that retribution is
demanded – Savage Streets (1984) goes one further by making the victim
so utterly helpless that the audience’s fury is sure to match that of the leather-clad
heroines who bludgeon, shoot, stab, and even level a crossbow at the
perpetrators. Linda Blair herself muses at the end that it’s a pity one of her
victims isn’t double-jointed so that he could “bend over kiss [his] ass
goodbye!” Quigley sells her role with aplomb, doing quite a bit of convincing acting
with her eyes and facial expressions in the absence of being able to speak.
It’s a bit of a shame, though, because in roles where she actually has dialogue,
she absolutely chews the scenery!
Arguably, Linnea’s best role is in
Kevin S. Tenney’s Night of the Demons (1988), where she truly embodies
the sassy, precocious sex bomb that most know her as. The setup is pure 80s
splatterfest: A bunch of teenagers go to a party on Halloween night in an old
mansion call Hull House that used to be a funeral home and is built on top of
an ancient Native American burial ground! Of course, any place with that track
record just has to be haunted! Excuse me, I mean possessed. The house is
possessed. It goes without saying that things turn out pretty poorly for all
involved, with a delightful smattering of demon possession, zombification,
fateful fornication, eye-gouging, tongue-ripping, ghoul-torching, coffin lid
dismemberment, razor blade apple pie, and even a pretty impressive Bauhaus
dance number. But remember, Miss Quigley is in this thing, so we definitely get
a big ol’ heaping helping of nudity too!
Our queen of the hour makes her
entrance in the picture from the literal bottom up, bent over in a leotard to
distract the hopelessly horny night clerks at a local gas-n-gulp while her
friend Angela steals all the party snacks and supplies she can get her hands
on. Her first line is one for the ages…
Elsewhere, as the first of her
motley group to fall victim to the Samhain supernatural infesting Hull House, the
actress goes completely full frontal for the camera (while still sporting the
sheer skirt of her Halloween tutu) and manages to make a hilarious mess of her
lipstick. The standout scene that anyone who has seen the movie will never fail
to bring up involves her shoving said tube of lipstick straight through her
nipple… Abra-kadabra! It’s gone! All in all, one of the weirdest and oddly most
impressive practical effects in 80s fright flicks. After that, she sexes the
main protagonist’s shitty boyfriend (who is so up and at ‘em that he quickly
shrugs off how she has smeared that lipstick all over her face) and ends up sticking
her thumbs all the way through the poor sod’s eye sockets. Not exactly the kind
of penetration he was after, am I right?
Linnea Quigley has appeared in over one
hundred seventy films in her career, many sporting gob-smacking titles like Hollywood
Chainsaw Hookers (1988) and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama
(1988). She has never slowed down, despite being somewhat more clothed
these days, and continues to appear in horror films and at conventions. To us,
she will always be royalty: our Scream Queen of Skin! The 80s weren’t only all
scary movies though (sure, the best flicks were, let’s be honest) but there is
another genre that brought skin to the silver screen in abundant measure during
the decade, along with a whole lot of naughty humor…
Cumming of Age:
Raunchy Comedies
Remember how we started this whole
deep dive down the sexy rabbit hole with Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)?
Well, we’ve finally come full circle on that count, because that particular
flick is part of a host of films that started in the late 70s and proliferated
through the 80s, sharing all sorts of tits and ass courtesy of the hormonal
hijinks of sexed up teen dudes just wanting to get laid. That’s usually about
it. Maybe it’s a group of frat brothers, or some high school buds, or even geeks
out for a good time like Revenge of the Nerds (1984), but in general the
details are all pretty much the same. It was the golden age of the sex comedy.
Honesty up front, comedies aren’t
exactly this writer’s thing, so this section is probably going to be
comparatively short. Nevertheless, it bears mentioning because, like many of
the subgenres we’ve already explored, modern day iterations of the formula do
not tend to display the same amount of onscreen sex and nudity that their
forbears did. No Hard Feelings (2023) might be an exception, with
actress Jennifer Lawrence going completely full-frontal for an extended… uh…
*checks notes*… a beach fight sequence where she gets whipped with her own bra
and punched in the cooch? The To Do List (2013) is a more representative
example, centering on Aubrey Plaza’s attempts to check off some sexual
experiences before college. Despite such a promising premise, the movie has
effectively no nudity whatsoever even while sporting multiple sex scenes. Likewise,
For a Good Time Call… (2012) is supposed to be all about a pair of
college grads who start up a phone sex line for extra money and… that’s all.
Just a bunch of dialogue. No T, no A, nada. We’ll talk about this trend later
on in depth, but movies about sex without the sex is just… frustrating, right? Conversely,
the boom of raunchy comedies that amusingly paralleled the boom of slasher
films in the 80s was game to go there in spades.
Now, sexy comedies weren’t exactly
unheard of at the time. They’d been around for decades at that point, including
the aforementioned Nudie Cutie and porno chic genres. The difference was a
certain level of acceptability. That might seem to go directly against the
demands of exploitation, but I feel they still meet the criteria because the
aim of these pictures was to shock the audience with what they dared to show or
make fun of. That being said, the first significant entry is probably National
Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), directed by John Landis.
These raunchy romps didn’t exactly
get the same hysterics and outraged nonsense from conservatives the way their
slasher brethren did. Still, it only took a few years for the level of skin in
these pictures to slowly dwindle away. The turn of the century certainly saw a
bit of a resurgence of the genre. American Pie begat several sequels and
countless rip offs, all showing just a few boobies here and there (mostly in
the “unrated” cuts that went straight to home video). As the 1980s went on,
movie studios found themselves having to contend with the ire of the
evangelical right wing and their – I must say, disingenuous – terror over the ability
to watch all manner of content from the comfort of one’s own home. Most of this
prudishness can easily be traced to the two-fisted trend of moral backlash and
Reagan era family values. Raising the alarm about declines in religious mores,
increased crime, teenaged pregnancy, and drug use, the self-proclaimed “moral
majority” linked every ill they saw in society to the prevalence of sex and
violence in movies. These insufferable killjoys were about to have their time
in the spotlight…
Reagan’s America
and the Moral Majority
On November 4th, 1980,
Republican candidate Ronald Reagan won the presidential election against
Democratic incumbent President Jimmy Carter. He took office on January 20th,
1981, and (while it may sound reductive) that was pretty much the beginning of
all the shit we have had to eat, economically, culturally, and religiously,
ever since. I honestly don’t really want to catalogue the terribleness that
resulted from this former actor’s time in office, but it is pretty relevant to
the subject we’ve been talking about this whole time. Beyond cracking down on recreational
drugs, or conducting multiple coup états in South America to depose
democratically elected left-wing leaders and install right-wing dictators
friendly to American corporate interests, or firing over 11,000 unionized
air-traffic controllers for daring to go on strike, or gutting several popular
entitlement programs aimed at helping economically disenfranchised citizens, or
instituting standardized testing in public schools to prioritize math and
science over the arts, or… you know what? There is way too much here, so…
beyond all that cartoonishly evil nonsense and more, Reagan’s administration
presided over the systematic censorship of film and television in a way that
conservatives had not enjoyed since the Hays Code. And they did it mostly
through the quiet manipulation of the Motion Picture Association of America. Of
course, it didn’t hurt to weaponize some carefully guided public anger…
Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) was released in
theaters on November 9th, 1984, and was immediately picketed by
outraged conservative malcontents across the United States. Despite beating the
opening box office numbers for A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) released
that same weekend, it was unceremoniously pulled from screens after six days
along with all the paid advertising for it by Tri-Star Pictures. The general
objection to the film, by froth-mouthed nincompoops who obviously hadn’t
bothered to actually watch it, seemed to be the image on the poster of Santa
Claus climbing down a chimney with a double-bladed axe in hand. Never mind that
the film is actually a pretty good depiction of trauma both violent and
religious, or that the script goes far out of its way to ensure that the killer
isn’t actually Jolly Old Saint Nick, or that much of the gore was edited out
for the theatrical release, chiefly the scene where Linnea Quigley is impaled
on trophy antlers while topless (though it was thankfully restored on the home
video cut). The truth of such things has never honestly mattered to the kinds
of people that clamor for censorship and their supposed right to infringe on
your freedom to watch, read, enjoy, and believe whatever you want. They bulge
their eyes, throb at the temples, and do their best to pop a blood vessel all
for the cause of their views being superior to those of everybody else.
Horror films were the natural, and
above all, easy target of these protests during the 1980s. Splatterfests like
William Lustig’s Maniac (1980) featured gory violence and exposed flesh
in often equal measure, so it was a no-brainer for the no-brainers to attack
their cinematic content as morally repugnant and detrimental to society. And
much like the same types who waste a lot of our time and oxygen today
attempting to ban books from libraries and schools or decide who gets to use
what bathroom or wear what kind of clothes, they never felt the need to provide
any tangible evidence that these films were actually harming any of the
children or adults or childish adults who watched them. But it wasn’t only graphic
violence that was the subject of scorn, sexual content was decried just as vociferously,
even if the blood took center stage in media coverage.
Among the titles that have been
protested for their sexy content are Caligula (1979), wherein Malcolm MacDowell
plays the titular Roman despot and has multiple dalliances with his onscreen
sister, Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) where a
certain religious figure boinks Mary Magdalene, and, in a case of pearl-clutching
about a book crossing over into pearl-clutching about a film, Steven
Spielberg’s The Color Purple (1985), supposedly in reaction to a lesbian
sex scene between two school principles that… isn’t actually in the movie.
There are many, many other examples, but the outcome of this mobilization of
perpetually pissed-off parents wasn’t necessarily legislation. Instead, it
resulted in a combination of financial panic on the part of studios who feared
that the backlash would affect their most holy bottom line, and the opportunity
of the MPAA to practice a bit of all-American religious and corporate activism.
The first obvious curtailing of
allowable content was the creation of a new rating. Prior to 1985 there was no
such thing as PG-13. There was G (General audiences), PG (Parental Guidance
Suggested), R (Restricted – no one under 17 without a parent or guardian), and
X (No one under 17 admitted). The advent of the PG-13 rating was ostensibly due
to the need for a category between PG and R. Too much objectionable content for
the one, not enough to merit the other. Most contemporary armchair film critics
allege that this is basically the fault of a one-two punch from Joe Dante’s Gremlins
(1984) and Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). The
MPAA is kind of weird about what is allowed in a PG or PG-13 film, often demanding
that there be little to no explicit sexual content whatsoever, which is
hilarious when movies like Sixteen Candles (1984), National Lampoon’s
European Vacation (1985), and Doc Hollywood (1991) all get to show
some fairly gratuitous tiddies. One gets the notion that perhaps it isn’t so
much what any picture might depict, but whether or not it’s expected to make
people a lot of money that really determines whether or not it gets slapped
with a more restrictive classification, evidenced by face-palming moments like The
Dark Knight (2008) garnering a PG-13 despite Heath Ledger’s Joker impaling
some poor henchman through the eyeball with a pencil, while the surprise hit The
King’s Speech (2010) suffered an R for a few fucks. Not even visual fucks!
Just verbal fucks! It really does seem back-asswards, doesn’t it?
The visible manifestations in the
80s of the dirty dealings on the part of the mammoth Motion Picture Association
of America were less outright banning of sex and nudity in film, and more a
steady decline in movies featuring it. Slasher films got less gory and nudity
in major studio examples became practically nonexistent by the end of the
decade. Sexploitation films dwindled to almost no output whatsoever, relegating
explicit depictions of skin mostly to the home video and pornography markets. Sex
in American cinema wasn’t exactly gone, not completely at any rate, but it was
steadily becoming much tamer than it was in the glory days of the 70s.
Across the pond in Great Britain,
things weren’t any better. Truth be told, they were objectively worse. The same
moral panic that gripped the conservative community under Ronald Reagan in the
United States was just as emboldened by the leadership of the so-called Iron
Lady herself, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Elected by the Conservative
party in 1979 and serving (mostly the rich and herself) through 1990, the
doddering old bat was also a baroness, so that should tell you all you need to
know about her attitude towards the common person and those dirty poors. Under
her watch, there was a strident push towards individual responsibility versus
the responsibility of the state to its citizens (sound familiar?), and in
particular a focus on the moral absolute – the position that certain rights and
wrongs are inviolable, regardless of context or choice. As one might guess,
said absolutism leant itself smashingly to the agendas of those who wanted to
censor anything, and anyone, based on the arbitrary judgement that their
worldview was more righteous than yours. Well, not so much righteous as
right-wing, but you get the idea.
So here is where we come to the “Video
Nasties”. The term in question was coined by one Mary Whitehouse, a
conservative activist and the founder of the National Viewers and Listeners
Association (for all intents and purposes, a rather fascist lobbying group).
Whitehouse herself was such an ugly piece of work (in her heart and soul of
course… well, and also just all around) that she makes that aforementioned
little rat bastard Willliam Harrison Hays look like a simple, misguided child
in comparison. She campaigned tirelessly against what she saw as the ethical
liberalization of British society, taking aim at everything from enjoying sex,
to being gay, to apparently the simple act of being happy. It was an unending
war on what she called “permissiveness”.
In concert with Thatcher’s
government, Whitehouse was instrumental in lobbying for multiple successful
legislation efforts, including the Indecent Displays (Control) Act of 1981,
which specifically targeted establishments selling anything sex-related,
forcing them to black out windows and restricting advertising. Seems very
capitalist of her to force retailers not to market their products, no? She even
managed to get the government to prosecute a gay publication for printing a
poem about a Roman soldier having sexual thoughts about Jesus Christ before the
crucifixion, which… does seem deliberately incendiary, I admit… Well, Denis
Lemon, the owner and editor of the publication Gay News that ran the
poem, was convicted of obscenity and handed a fine and a suspended prison
sentence of nine months (though that sentence was eventually overturned). This
loathsome woman just seemed to love persecuting people for liking things she
didn’t, and she was just getting started.
Mary Whitehouse’s greatest and most
infamous campaign was against the films she described as video nasties. The
British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) already had charge of handing out ratings
to theatrical releases, much like the MPAA; though it was a
government-controlled agency as opposed to its privatized American counterpart.
What the organization did not handle up to that time was home video. At the
time, the retail market for VHS was unregulated in terms of content, just as
the US market has always operated. Something that had to be cut for cinematic
exhibition could be sold unedited for personal home viewing. After all, who
exactly is it hurting if you watch a movie with boobs in it from the comfort of
your couch? Well, Whitehouse argued that it harmed… can you guess? THE
CHILDREN! OH GOD, WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN! Naturally, it’s the
kiddies. God forbid if little Johnny sees a tit. Radical conservatives really
do have only one talking point.
She and her supporters took the
position that a lack in policing of home video content was resulting in the
corruption of young eyes who could watch all manner of sordid images at home
without supervision that they would be barred from seeing at the cineplex. Who
cares if the logic breaks down under the slightest scrutiny – what if they
snuck into a theater, for example – it’s the moral outrage the counts! The
desired outcome of the lobbying effort wasn’t only to have movies rated before
going on the home video market, but also to have them forcibly censored. More
than that, Whitehouse wanted certain offending pictures to be seized,
prosecuted, and even outright banned. And that’s exactly what she got.
The Video Recordings Act of 1984 is
without a doubt one of the most embarrassing debacles in British film history.
I say “film history” because just plain old “history” would force us to
acknowledge other unfortunate moments like… oh, I dunno… colonialism for
instance. Still, I contend that this particular moment is still up there. The
act resulted in the wholesale search and seizure of hundreds of titles, the
attempted prosecution of seventy-two of them in particular, and of those, the actual
conviction of thirty-nine. Many were on account of graphic violence, like Sam
Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) – which Whitehouse dubbed the “number one
nasty”. Lucio Fulci, the maestro himself, can boast three films on the list. Zombie
(1979) and The House by the Cemetery (1981) were successfully
prosecuted, while The Beyond (1981) managed to escape that fate, being
afforded the inglorious distinction of only being snatched from shelves by
authorities.
Violence was one thing, but sex was
even more viciously harangued. Titles featuring anything considered aberrant
behavior were wholesale raided and impounded by police. Among the films confiscated
for sexual content were Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Flesh for
Frankenstein (1973) and its companion Blood for Dracula (1974), Jess
Franco’s Devil Hunter (1981), Gestapo’s Last Orgy (1977), and Killer
Nun (1979), just to name a few.
Speaking of the Gestapo, law enforcement
was downright cringeworthy in its ineptitude regarding which flicks they
seized. Often, films were targeted simply on the merits of the art on the
cassette slipcases. Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer (1979) is a mostly
introspective character study but was taken based upon one specific scene of
violence that just so happened to make the cover. Infamously, the Burt Reynolds
and Dolly Parton musical comedy The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982)
was accidentally netted in police raids due to a rather stupid misunderstanding
of the movie’s title.
In the end, the hubbub died down and the Video Recordings Act of 1984 underwent multiple revisions over the ensuing years. The vast majority of the pictures prosecuted or banned have since been rereleased intact and uncut. Nevertheless, the law still remains on the books. The mania of censorship and religious panic over sex in cinema ended the decade of the 1980s on a somewhat sour note, in the opinion of this writer. Sentiments may differ on just how much sex and nudity dropped from sight on the big screen, but it’s indisputable that, by the time the 1990s made an appearance, the amount of skin we got to see just wasn’t what it used to be. All things sexy and salacious did find a home, however, in the unassuming open arms of late-night cable…
Part Four
VHS and Skinemax
The 1990s
I would wager that most people who
have made it this far into my mammoth article on all things lewd, lascivious,
and lusty in paracinema have probably seen their fair share of exploitation
movies. I would also expect that such readers might have plenty of objections
to my assertion that sex and nudity began to practically disappear from the medium
once the 90s rolled around. Nevertheless, I maintain my contention that boobies
and booties were clearly more prevalent in previous decades. Any fan of genre
cinema can readily provide examples to the contrary, especially in some of the
more underground offerings we will discuss forthwith, but familiarity is a bias
unto itself. The more of these pictures you watch, the more you can raise your
finger and interject, “but what about this one?” Frankly, nobody outside
a certain niche remembers the glories of Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout
(1990). Many of us are a part of online and local communities that have
deeper knowledge of things like this than the average viewer. And for said
“normies” out there, I think it’s pretty hard to dispute that gratuitous skin in
the movies has been in a relative dry spell for a few decades now, and this is
the period that it really started. The kinds of flicks that would normally dish
the sexy goods before now featured nary a nipple in sight. Let me offer a prime
specimen in the form of a now classic slasher movie…
This wise-cracking franchise was not
the only cool teen horror installment to take the same bent towards sex.
Williamson’s own I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), as well as Urban
Legend (1998), and even Cherry Falls (2000) – a movie centered
entirely around a killer targeting virgins, which prompts the whole of a local
high school’s student body to lose that v-card as quickly as possible – display
no explicit body parts whatsoever. It seems kind of upside down that those
bodies can’t be naked for us to see, but they can indeed be sliced, diced,
dismembered, and altogether hacked to bits as much as required or desired.
It wasn’t all a complete wasteland
of sexlessness, though. A few filmmakers still dared to put flesh out in the
open, often in a bid to garner a tad bit of controversy in the hopes that
people would come see their movie. After all, wasn’t that the whole point of
exploitation in the first place? Paul Verhoeven was – and still is – such an
auteur. The Dutch-born director had his first successful American efforts in
the 1980s, such as Flesh + Blood (1985) and the beloved RoboCop (1987)
and has always had a penchant for mixing graphic violence and sexuality with
acerbic wit and insightful social commentary. Specifically, he often takes aim
at society through a leftist lens and seems to very much enjoy savagely
skewering fascism and censorship in equal measure. He announced his entrance
into the 1990s, fresh off the triple-breasted weirdness of Total Recall
(1990), with a film that might literally have the most backed-up and
replayed scene in movie history, and he did so just in time for the era of the
affordable video cassette!
Basic Instinct
(1992) and the Art of the Rewind
Sharon Stone is sitting in an
interrogation room at a police precinct in San Francisco. She is under
investigation for the very sexy, very naked, and very bloody murder of a man in
bed with an ice pick. Clad in a tight-fitting white dress that comes half-way
up her thigh and facing a number of men behind a table (and the one-way glass),
she calmly uncrosses and recrosses her legs, giving the camera and the audience
an eyeful of her most intimate region. Say it with me everyone… Hallelujah!
The 1990s ushered in a somewhat new
era in the VHS market, despite the format being available for more than ten
years, because prices for personal ownership were starting to become more
reasonable. As hard as it is to believe for those raised in the era of
streaming and DVD, there was a time when these weird, bulky plastic obelisks
housed in flimsy cardboard boxes cost nearly as much as six months of your Netflix
subscription. Flashing back to 1983, Paramount famously shocked the entire retail
market when it debuted its video cassette release of Star Trek II: The Wrath
of Khan (1982) at an astonishing $40, which was, according to your local
Wikipedia article, half the average cost of a new release at the time.
Done the math? Eighty bucks for a major studio release to take a spot on your
shelf, and this isn’t even adjusted for inflation, which would be the
equivalent of a whopping $245 today! And let’s not even get into how much it
would run you to buy the VCR needed to play the tapes in the first place.
Often, that expense was enough for most buyers by itself.
This financial obstacle resulted in
the video store, something that was essential to the Generation X and
Millennial experience. A place where everyone in the neighborhood could come to
rent almost any movie under the sun for just a few dollars for the entire
weekend. Browsing the aisles was as American as baseball and apple pie, and
those of us who are old enough to remember it found some of the happiest of
times roaming the seemingly endless rows of titles and taking in the artwork
that promised us all sorts of content that our parents disapproved of. Like
every new technology though, VHS eventually became quick and easy enough to
manufacture that production became less expensive, and by the end of the 80s
the cost to the consumer became significantly more affordable.
By now, of course, these unwieldy
black boxes that had to be rewound before they could be viewed a second time
can be purchased at second-hand stores and garage sales for a quarter or fifty
cents. Still, at the onset of the 1990s, the format was hitting a golden age.
Now, not only could you back up Sharon Stone’s coochie shot over and over (and
also, over and over again) from the comfort of your living room late at night
when your parents were asleep, but you could do it for much less money and
without the worry that you needed to return it to the drop-box at Blockbuster
in the morning. Precocious scamps like this author may have come up a bit
later, but we still did much the same as our older cousins – sneaking dirty
movies behind our parents’ backs like some sort of grade school black market.
Everybody knew so-and-so who had a friend who could get you on of his dad’s
Playboy magazines, and also, he has a copy of Showgirls (1995)! My first
experience watching The Terminator (1984) happened this way, with a
friend’s tape in the garage in the wee hours of the morning, ogling Linda
Hamilton’s glorious ta-tas with headphones in the family minivan that had one
of those travel VCRs… blissfully unaware that I was draining the car battery.
Anyway, my parents still don’t know about that one, so let’s keep that between
us, okay?
Now then, speaking of Showgirls
(1995), why don’t we talk about Paul Verhoeven? He was born in pre-war
Amsterdam, Netherlands (aka Holland, for those like me who get confused about
what exactly the Dutch like to call themselves) in 1938. As a young boy, he
witnessed both the ravages of World War II, as well as the inhuman crimes of
the Nazis, something would influence him to become a staunch opposer of fascism
and an avowed leftist who has never been afraid to inject his political views
into his films. A side note – it is positively hilarious to me that the gory
violence featured in his pictures, from RoboCop (1987) to Starship
Troopers (1997), is so popular with right-wing viewers who think they go
together with Commando (1985) and Die Hard (1988), when the
actual messages he imparts are so blatantly contrary to their perceptions of
the world. Starship Troopers (1997) especially so, providing us with a
satirically propandistic vision of a fascist future where the only path to
citizenship or parenthood is through military service (along with the requisite
coed communal shower scenes and between giant bug battle boning). Verhoeven
made several flicks in Europe before making the move to Hollywood in the 80s, arriving
on the scene with the Sword and Sorcery epic Flesh + Blood (1985), a title
that quite literally embodies his entire filmography from there on out.
He followed up the smash hit of Basic
Instinct (1992) with Showgirls (1995). The sexploitation epic about
Elizabeth Berkley of the family friendly sitcom Saved by the Bell being
not-so family friendly anymore as she enters the cutthroat world of Las Vegas
strip shows, bearing much more than her soul as she sleeps, backstabs, and
claws her way to the top of Sin City. The film is often considered one of the
worst big budget flops ever made, and honestly, I wholly disagree with that
grossly unfair characterization. It’s a remarkably campy effort that never
takes itself too seriously, which is good because it isn’t serious in the
slightest. The amount of skin contained, however, is an absolute delight.
Verhoeven’s Shakespearean opus about topless dancers is packed to the brim with
bared flesh to the point that it earned the dreaded NC-17 from the MPAA, and
the notoriety of being one of the most sexually explicit blockbusters of the
decade. Berkley even tries to top Sharon Stone by going commando while doing a
high kick to the head of a rapist who definitely had it coming. This is in
addition to the multiple pole-dancing and strip sequences, as well as a wildly overwrought
and exaggerated sex scene with Kyle MacLachlan in a private swimming pool that
sports its own waterfall…
It’s fairly safe to say that Paul
Verhoeven was at the forefront of big screen boobage in the 1990s, when very
little else was making it into theaters that had any naughtiness to speak of.
Where did the sexy stuff go, then? Plenty went straight to video, as evidenced
by the increased output by producer and director Charles Band and his Full Moon
Features label, who understood the coming power of home video before most,
while heading up Empire Pictures in the 1980s. Possibly more surprising, skin
also found refuge in the warm, unsuspecting embrace of another burgeoning platform
in the guise of cable pay-per-view…
Late-Night Lovin’
I really miss growing up in the 90s.
Every boy, and truthfully almost every girl, learned the adrenaline-driven joys
of sneaking downstairs after their parents went to bed and flipping the
television to the channels you weren’t supposed to watch. HBO, Cinemax,
Showtime, and others always had some sort of hazy, softcore shenanigans to take
in. It was the time of fake boobies, impossibly high g-strings, and big hair
that was left over from the previous decade, often accompanied by a sultry (and
awkward) voiceover that you could never quite hear because you were so
terrified of waking up the adults that you kept the volume so low that you had
to sit inches from the screen to make out anything at all. Before the likes of The
Sopranos, these subscription cable channels played mostly uncensored hit
movies during the day, and naughty almost-porn flicks and shows at night. What
a wank – I mean, walk – down memory lane…
Sexploitation made the move to the
small screen with the advent of cable as early as the mid-1970s, with initial
premium channel efforts attempting to sell their services by highlighting the unedited
for television nature of their programming. By the 80s, even hardcore porn
could be found on a myriad of pay-per-view channels, but it was actually
softcore content that became synonymous with flicking on the boob tube late in
the evening, largely thanks to reruns of Emmanuelle films and the
peculiar phenomenon of erotic anthology shows like The Red Shoe Diaries.
The Red Shoe Diaries was created by
Zalman King, who is known for that and… pretty much nothing else. Okay, that’s
bit unfair, because King (an actor first before becoming a producer and
director) seemed to have had his fingers in nearly every pie there was from 1964
onward. This included appearances on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The
Munsters, and even Gunsmoke. He also delivered a show-stealing
performance in the rape-revenge roughie Trip With the Teacher (1975),
and did his time at Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, notably appearing in Galaxy
of Terror (1980) – you know, the one where a girl gets pounded by a giant
outer space maggot? Yeah, that one.
Anyway, good ol’ Z must have learned
something from his role as a rather brutal motorbiking psychopath – a
biker-path? – murdering, raping, and hostage-taking his way through some high
school girls in Trip With the Teacher (1975), because his output as a
director and producer is mostly sex-focused, with a side of either exciting or
depressing violence (depending on the mood, I guess…) He collaborated on the
screenplay for 9 ½ Weeks (1986), a BDSM-fueled erotic drama that should
be right up the alley of anybody wanting to see Mickey Rourke whip Kim Basinger
with a riding crop in a western wear store. His most recognizable filmic work
is probably Wild Orchid (1990), also starring Mickey Rourke, this time
as a man who is somehow irresistible to women while also never being able to
allow himself to be touched. Weird… anyway… after the somewhat questionable
“success” of Wild Orchid II: Shades of Blue (1991), Zalman King decided
to lend his sexually explicit sensibilities to the cable channel Showtime and
set off The Red Shoe Diaries with a pilot movie in 1992.
Another connection in our exploration
of the sultry side of 1990s late-night programming is Anne Goursaud. The French
editor had worked on famous films such as The Outsiders (1983) and Bram
Stoker’s Dracula (1992) before launching into directing herself, a
filmography that just so happens to feature The Red Shoe Diaries.
Apparently noticed by executives regarding her ability to shoot fast, cheap,
and sexy, she was given the opportunity to direct a feature film for Showtime,
and the result was one of the most “skinfamous” direct-to-cable offerings of
the 90s: Embrace of the Vampire (1995).
Alyssa Milano, who up until that
point had been considered a sort of Hallmark channel “good girl”, attempted to
kick that persona to the curb by starring as a tame young woman who has
somewhat less-than tame erotic dreams about a vampire seducing her six ways
from Sunday. In fact, those dreams are so affecting that it starts to get in
the way of her unbearably vanilla relationship with her boyfriend. Is the
vampire real? Who the hell cares, we’re here for the bloodsucking vampire sex,
am I right?
The movie is mostly successful, if
your metric is the number of areolae being beamed at you through the cathode
ray tubes. It’s a narrative catastrophe, but Milano is sexy, the copulation
scenes are numerous, and if you were a preteen boy when you saw it, then it
certainly holds a special place in your… uh… heart.
A significant amount of effort is
expended in Embrace of the Vampire (1995) on assuring the audience that
Milano’s character is, firstly, severely chaste when unencumbered by vampiric
wet dreams, and secondly, definitely going to make the “right” decision and return
to her bland boy toy at the end. He may be dull as dishwater, but he’s the one
she should want, right? This quite frankly odd puritanical streak in a
flick about undead beefcakes boning the living daylights out of the girl next
door raises a lot of questions about the prevailing attitudes toward cinematic
sex at the time. Personally, I can’t be surprised at all that it coincided with
the coopting and wholesale takeover of the evangelical community by the
conservative right…
Focus on the
Fucking Family: How We Grew Up Sheltered
When I was a sophomore in high
school, two separate couples from my grade were caught getting it on. One was
in one of the girls’ restrooms (seems like a rather logical spot, if you ask
me). The other was in a homeroom classroom, ostensibly alongside the cookbooks,
I guess… Location choice aside – I could have recommended a few more discreet
places, including a perfectly good parking lot, or hear me out, after school at
home – it seemed to all of my classmates and I that it was a quite natural
thing for randy teenagers to do! The school administration didn’t agree though,
and the end result of this drama was the entire tenth grade class being dragged
to the gymnasium, forced onto the bleachers, and bombarded by a presentation
about why banging each other was bad.
The presenter was a woman who shared
her sad and, honestly, borderline pathetic story about being a young adult in
the 1980s wherein she remained a virgin until she finally just “couldn’t
resist” anymore. She had sex with a guy she went out with once, and contracted
HIV from him. Then she met her current husband, whom she married even though
they’ve never ever once been able to do the do. So, to recap – had sex once,
got infected with HIV, and promptly married the very literal forty-year-old
virgin. No mention of her key mistake – not using protection when getting nasty
with a total stranger. No discussion whatsoever of safe practices that help
keep teenagers who – and this is true – will definitely have sex anyway no
matter what you tell them. Oral sex was explicitly referred to as “an epidemic”,
as though some poor shmuck suddenly came down with a bad case of fellatio or
caught the cunnilingus… The ultimate solution, in this poor lady’s mind, was to
never have sex before marriage, and then she literally begged us all to come to
Jesus (in the religious way, not the fun way).
Of course, it straight up blew my mind
that the administration of a public school allowed this nutjob to blatantly
evangelize to an entire gym full of students. But it makes a twisted sort of sense
since they also permitted her to spew all the other malicious misinformation
she did. Around four years later, I had the dubious “privilege” of catching her
act again… in college. Her maniacal and manipulative anti-sex grift was a
booming business, it seems, and it checks every box required by the insane
proselytizing of the evangelical right in the United States. If you’re a
millennial such as this writer, then you almost certainly got blasted by this mind-warping
moralizing your entire childhood. It didn’t matter if your family brought you
up religiously, it was just always there. From Saturday morning cartoons to
after-school specials. Everything seemed designed to warn you of the dangers of
having sexual feelings (while also having weirdly sexualized characters and
jokes, I might add.)
The organization got into children’s
entertainment in the 90s with offerings such as Adventures in Odyssey, a
cartoon series all about a kid named Dylan who has crazy experiences thanks to
a kooky old “professor” (sounds like grooming to me!) whose lessons are
invariably of the biblical variety. There’s also the website Plugged In,
which features reviews of current movies and television shows from a Christian
perspective, which usually means a thoroughly judgmental rundown of a film’s
content, as well as a “suitability” rating out of 5 outlet plugs that is
intended to give brainwashed parents an idea of whether or not said movie is
appropriate for the virginal eyes of Christians – I mean, children…
I myself have more than once found that Plugged
In is often, shall we say, less than accurate. One of the glaring examples
I can think of is their (now very old) review of Martin Scorcese’s Gangs of
New York (2002). The post describes a scene where Daniel Day Lewis’ Bill
the Butcher graphically disembowels another character, methodically reaching
into the man’s opened belly to pull out his guts and dump them on the floor.
Gross, right? Except… no such scene exists. It’s simply a blatant lie, designed
to ward off any readers from watching what is actually a fantastic and
award-winning movie. I have thought that maybe the author is referring to a
scene where Lewis stabs Leonardo DiCaprio, but while a bit drawn out and
certainly intense, there are no entrails to be seen and DiCaprio’s character
survives (you know, so the rest of the movie can happen), something he
definitely could not do if his guts were dropped in a pile in the dirt…
This is just one example of the propaganda
machine at Focus On the Family flat-out lying to their audience. There are so,
so many more! But we don’t really have the time or the energy to go into the
rest. Like how their reviews describe the sexual content in HBO’s Six Feet
Under as practically pornographic (with weirdly detailed accounts, in
fact). Or even other instances from evangelical culture in general, such as how
Billy Graham himself once claimed that an actual factual demon from hell was
possessing and living in the film prints of The Exorcist (1973). It
suffices to say that the sum total of the efforts by right-wing religious
organizations in the 1990s was a wholesale repression of the natural sexual
urges of an entire generation, and the large-scale reduction of sex and nudity
in cinema. Agree or disagree, the turn of the millennium saw something of a
wasteland in the movies. A place where even briefest presence of boobs on the
screen was tantamount to an oasis in a desert…
Part 5
Beyond Here Lies
Nuthin’
The 2000s
In 1999, cinematic sexy time made
one last valiant effort to stem the tide of prudishness in the form of a
classic tale of horny teenagers trying desperately to lose their virginity by
their senior prom. American Pie (1999) continued the 80s tradition of
teen sex comedies with a full-throated dose of unmitigated raunch. From Shannon
Elizabeth touching herself topless on a webcam, to Jason Biggs unceremoniously destroying
an apple pie in the most embarrassing of ways, to Alyson Hannigan telling eyebrow-raising
tales about this one time at band camp, the film delivered the goods to thirsty
audiences everywhere. And… that was pretty much it.
Marginally more graphic cuts of
films saved for home video release were utterly rampant in the 2000s. Looking
at the slim differences between the theatrical and disc versions of something
stupid like The Dukes of Hazzard (2005) remake reveal this to be a
deliberate marketing stunt more often than not, as opposed to an originally intended
edit that got shanked by the MPAA. The changes in the film are limited to a few
f-bombs and some substituted footage featuring a few boobs… Hooray? A
side-by-side comparison with the PG-13 cut reveals that the nude scenes were
filmed with alternate “clothed” takes (much like Jess Franco and other Spanish
filmmakers would do to appease domestic markets that didn’t allow nudity). It’s
so unbearably obvious that the studios were going for a lighter rating for the
theatrical run, and then baiting customers with a so-called “unrated” cut on
DVD, with an already prepared variant of the flick that barely registers an R
rating, but now gets to pretend that it’s salacious somehow. It doesn’t really
matter though because The Dukes of Hazzard (2005) sucks. Shame on Johnny
Knoxville, Sean William Scott, Jessica Simpson, and above all Willie Nelson for
letting this happen.
The point is this tactic was standard
operating procedure at the time (and to some extent it still is). Imagine my
disappointment when I received the unrated cut of the underrated King Arthur
(2004) on disc for Christmas that year, only to find that the changes were
all to offer gorier violence – okay, I didn’t mind that part – but featured no
extensions or more revealing shots whatsoever of Keira Knightley’s sex scene
with Clive Owen… All hopes for boobies were dashed. For that I would have to
wait for Domino (2005), and even in that case, the scene is pretty
short. What a shame. Alas, as the millennium continued its first decade, it
became increasingly clear that nothing was safe from big studio box office
calculations. Teens go to the movies more was the reasoning, so prohibitive R
ratings became less and less common. Even sex wasn’t safe.
Everything is
PG-13 Now
Speaking of Keira Knightley, one of
the sexiest debuts in all of movie history has to be her role as Elizabeth Swann
in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). Now,
before anybody gets on me for this… Yes, she was seventeen years old at the
time of filming and I just listed her performance here as unbearably
hormone-triggering. So, now I might appear to be a dirty old man, but I was
thirteen when that movie came out and it was the final push in my journey of
noticing girls after a few years of watching Carrie Fisher in her slave girl
outfit on repeat. Additionally, Knightley is British and had already flashed
her bare-naked A-cups at movie-goers across the pond in the indie thriller The
Hole (2001) when she was sixteen, the legal age of consent in the UK. So…
get off my back, mkay? Now, where were we…
That’s right. Practically every big
movie coming out was garnering a PG-13, and the Pirates of the Caribbean
franchise is a prime example. It has all the makings of a great exploitation
flick. There’s swordplay, hot leads in low-cut shirts and tight-fitting pants,
and even zombie pirates! Keira Knightley has her bust front and center for the
entirety of the runtime, and we get a hilarious corset scene to boot. On top of
that, said zombie pirates at one point capture our buxom maiden and blatantly
threaten to strip her naked and have her “dine with the crew” which this viewer
deems to be more than a little bit gang-rapey. But that’s as far as it goes. One
would think that a picture about pirates who, let’s face it, are famous for
raping and pillaging of all sorts (it’s really their whole thing) would be ripe
for a little more content-wise. Seriously though, this is a film that features
multiple dismemberments (in particular a severed hand that lives on its own),
several people wholesale exploded, a three-person multiple impalement, and an
undead monkey. But not even one solitary areola or buttock. Of course, it was
made by Disney so nobody really expected that sort of content to be a part of
it, but it would have been nice, right?
None of this is to say that there
aren’t any examples of films that actually deliver the goods on the old
T-and-A, but they are simply few and far between. In many ways, sex and nudity
in 2000s film found refuge in the same place it did decades before during the
years of the Hays Code – in low budget and independent productions outside of
the studio system…
Revenge of the
Independents
Picture, if you will, a group of
three college student stoners all rooming together. One is the trust fund rich
kid whose generous allowance enables the group to fund their obsession with the
dank, one is an all-star athlete whose love of bud has somewhat inhibited his
dedication to sports, and the third is an average surfer who rides waves both
literal and substance induced. They have a fourth, hyperbolically nerdy
roommate who is understandably aghast at the severity of their marijuana usage
but is determined to make the arrangement work because he needs a place to
sleep. Together, they must contend with the dastardliest of adversaries. A
diabolical mind determined to suck out their souls and imprison them in an
eternal underworld strip club, populated by killer voodoo dolls, a pissed-off
foot-tall gingerbread cookie, and plenty of topless dancers… It’s a fucking
evil bong.
Charles Band has been… uh… blazing a
trail with real-deal independent movies ever since the 1970s. He has owned no
less than three production companies, putting him just behind the great Roger
Corman in terms of production output. He started in 1973 with Charles Band
Productions, and within a decade sold the company and founded the legendary Empire
International Pictures. The Italy-based Empire would be responsible for giving
us some of the squishiest, goopiest, splatteriest movies of the 80s, including Reanimator
(1985), Rawhead Rex (1986), and TerrorVision (1986). By 1988,
Band had sold his company once again and founded his longest-running production
house known as Full Moon Features.
In oh, so many ways, Band has used
Full Moon to carry the torch of low rent exploitation in these dark ages of comic
book drivel and nonsense young adult novel adaptations. He demands heaping
helpings of blood and boobies from his movies, always set against some of the
looniest subjects imaginable. Psychotic nazi puppets, enormous heads engaging
in human experiments in order to transfer their huge intellect into a normal
body, time-travelling cops chasing genocidal psychic criminals, and yes…
supernatural bongs who want to collect the soul of Tommy Chong. And it’s inevitably
weird. Remember that aforementioned gigantic homicidal noggin? In Head of
the Family (1996) it uses its grotesquely ginormous tongue to lick our
heroine’s exposed nipples. Yeah, Band is that kind of insane, but he has
never let that stop him. Full Moon Features soldiered on into the millennium with
multiple series like the Evil Bong and Gingerdead Man franchises,
making sure to give all us naughty boys and girls an eyeful at every turn. Even
better, Charlie Band wasn’t the only one keeping bare flesh alive and well on
the small screen.
Not simply content with their 80s
era hits like Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1986) and Surf Nazis Must Die!
(1987), Troma barreled headlong into the 2000s undeterred. They pissed on
Hollywood itself and lit its shattered remains on fire with Terror Firmer (1999)
and announced their post-Y2K arrival with Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger
IV (2000). While the major studios were shying even further away from tits
and ass and puking up endless PG-13 remakes of much better Japanese horror
films, Lloyd Kaufman gave us Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006),
in which a character working the counter at a fast-food chicken restaurant gets
lost in a fantasy and ends up humping his cash register in front of the
customers. Do you prefer bone-in, or bone-out? You can’t get this
outrageousness anywhere else, folks!
Independent studios like Full Moon
Features and Troma Entertainment kept breasts, buttocks, and boinking in the
movies on life support for over a decade while major releases got more prudish
than a southern grandmother on Easter Sunday. Eventually, perhaps after
realizing there was still money to be made in silver screen debauchery, or
maybe after hitting upon the idea that nostalgia was a way to wring a few more nickels
and dimes out of old properties, Hollywood began to loosen up a little again.
In fact, it was the return of a genre many thought peaked decades earlier that
heralded the reemergence of tiddies: The slasher film.
Friday the 13th
(2009)
If you’ve stuck with it thus far,
you know that this article is absolutely (and nigh unjustifiably) enormous. At
this point, things are sorta, kinda, coming full circle. If you reach an
ungodly number of pages back, you’ll find the section on the 1980s and remember
that a significant amount of text was spent on the glorious and bountiful flesh
found in the heyday of slasher movies. Boobs and butts were expectedly – and
some might say, inextricably – connected to blood and beasts. This writer does
not think it an exaggeration to say that the undisputed leviathan of this
pairing in the genre is the Friday the 13th franchise. It
shouldn’t be shocking, then, that the millennial era reboot went effectively
all-in when it comes to nudity in a winking, salivating, lip-smacking fashion!
But hold up, that’s not all! In the
first three months of 2009, horny horror movie aficionados like us got three
remakes in a row that delivered the salacious goods in egregious measure, each
presenting an unblinking view at a bevy of naughty bits! Before we get to
Jason’s return, let’s take a quick gander at the other two flicks, shall we?
First up, the Patrick
Lussier-directed remake of My Bloody Valentine (2009) hit theaters on
January 16th, 2009. The original My Bloody Valentine (1981)
is a much better-than-average holiday slasher picture (and a personal
favorite), but there isn’t all that much nakedness when it comes down to it.
The remake, however, is another story… Specifically, it’s a full-frontal story,
in fact! Actress Betsy Rue bares literally everything in an extended sequence
that starts in the sack at a sleazy motel, then out to the parking lot to yell
at her dickwad of a booty call (screenwriter Todd Farmer in an equally
revealing cameo), and subsequently running from the killer in the buff all over
the place until she gets graphically pickaxe-ed! Patrick Lussier would serve up
a smorgasbord of grindhouse skin once again in Drive Angry (2011), also
once again featuring Todd Farmer, who one must conclude likes to show his butt
on screen in movies he has written…
Two months later, on March 13th,
2009, mainstream multiplex audiences were treated to a nasty piece of work in
the form of Last House on the Left (2009), a remake of Wes Craven’s
notorious debut effort. The film showcases some fantastic performances from
Sara Paxton, Garret Dillahunt, Aaron Paul, and Tony Goldwyn, as well as a few
pleasingly gross gore effects. The rape sequences – unavoidable in a remake of
one of the nastiest exploitation flicks of all time – are graphic and harrowing.
Moreover, we get a nice bare-breasted shower scene courtesy of Riki Lindholm,
known best for being one half of the comedic musical duo Garfunkel and Oats
alongside Kate Micucci (of all things).
The film was directed by Marcus Nispel,
whose previous remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) is still
considered one of the finest of the reboot era. Friday the 13th
(2009) plays almost like a sort of “greatest hits” of the iconic first four
Friday films, giving us a Jason Voorhees that isn’t a lumbering
zombified numbskull, but rather a fast-moving hunter that not only uses a
machete or axe, but also screwdrivers, a bow and arrow, and bear traps. He even
barbecues a chick in her sleeping bag by hoisting her over a campfire! More
than that, though, the movie graces us with a spread of tits and ass unseen
since the glory days of the franchise more than twenty years before its
release!
All that being said, this “return” was
kind of sparing, if we’re being honest. The majority of Hollywood offerings were
still shying away from displaying anything too risqué, ostensibly in the hopes
of keeping MPAA ratings lower and gaining as wide an audience as possible.
We’re almost up the present day in our attempted panoramic view of sex and
nudity in exploitation movies, but there are still a few things left for us to
get an eyeful of. As the second decade of the millennium approached, titties,
booties, and even ding-dongs cemented their place, not on the big screen, but
the small screen. Taking a cue from the late-night cable softcore of the
1990s, nudity moved to television. This time, it was streaming that provided a
much-needed outlet…
Conclusion
2010s to Present
Pound for pound (of flesh),
streaming service television shows have been the most prolific purveyors of perversity
in the past ten to fifteen years. While movies have tended towards prudishness,
the boob tube has lived up to its name and then some. The Home Box Office (aka
HBO) led the charge from the moment they debuted The Sopranos in 1999. Though
many will point to OZ as technically coming first, that show didn’t make
nearly the kind of splash that Tony and both of his eminently dysfunctional
families did, and though the majority of
the nudity mostly involved a few topless dancers here and there, it’s
difficult not to see this dark comedy about Jersey gangsters as the first real
whack at making something for adults that wasn’t just toned-down soft porn
meant to air around 2am. Since then, HBO has been synonymous with high quality
dramas that also just so happen to feature some very pleasing nudity as the
figuratively “popped” cherry on top!
Subsequent shows such as The Wire
and Six Feet Under certainly delivered their fair share of sex and
debauchery, but the shenanigans were very deliberately paired with serious, and
dare we say respectable, drama. The Wire especially dove into contemporary
issues like the continuing war on drugs, police corruption, the cycle of
poverty, and what is modernly termed “the school to prison pipeline”. Any sex
or nudity involved served world-building and storytelling almost exclusively, to
the point that it never really felt exploitative or titillating. Likewise, Six
Feet Under was centered around a family-operated funeral home, so even the
plentiful disrobing couldn’t really distract from the fact that the whole thing
was inextricably linked to dead bodies (often in the very room, or next door to
the boinking). I guess certain people might like that…?
It wasn’t until 2008 that Six
Feet Under creator and writer Alan Ball gave us a true bucket of popcorn
entertainment and an actual exploitation show in the form of True Blood.
Finally! In the fictional small town of Bon Temps, Louisiana, local waitress
Sookie Stackhouse (the delicious Anna Paquin) finds herself falling in love
with a vampire! These vampires have recently “come out of the coffin”, you see,
due to the invention of Tru Blood, a synthetic blood substitute that
means these unbearably sexy beasts don’t need humans for food anymore! What the
vamps don’t have a replacement for, however, is sex, which gives the show
plenty of leeway in drenching the screen with sweaty, hot fang banging! The
series is also responsible for gifting the world with Alexander Skarsgård,
often in various stages of undress, so there is definitely something for
everyone! After the vampire sex, we eventually get shape-shifter sex, werewolf
sex, fairy sex, werecat sex, witch sex, gay sex, straight sex, sex on camera, sex
with a megachurch pastor’s wife in the bathtub and in the church sanctuary… It
seems safe to say that exploitation had officially moved to television. HBO wasn’t
done though, not by a long shot. True Blood might be a bit better
remembered for the sheer amount of skin it offers if wasn’t for a certain
titanic sword and sorcery epic…
Admit it, you heard the theme song
in your head before I even mentioned the title: Game of Thrones. The
sword and sorcery genre has a time-honored history of blending blood and boobs
ever since it broke out in the early 1980s with films such as Conan the
Barbarian (1982), The Sword and The Sorcerer (1982), and Deathstalker
(1983). Game of Thrones engages in this blueprint with gusto,
telling the tale of a struggle for power and survival set against a medieval
fantasy world with a heaping helping of graphically dismembered limbs and an
equal amount of exposed naughty bits in practically every episode. The first
episode itself pairs scenes of beheading with the literal introduction of Peter
Dinklage’s character having an orgy with at least four comfort women. From that
point on, the audience is treated to practically every kink in existence over
the course of eight seasons. Plain vanilla schtupping, contortionist
prostitutes, exhibitionism, public humiliation, bisexual threesomes,
gender-bending roleplay, multiple deflowering, and an embarrassing amount of
incest… The series is the absolute definition, and perhaps even the pinnacle,
of the genre’s format. Of course, this indulgence courted a mountain of
controversy, with plenty of entertainment news outlets wading into the muck to
discuss the conservative backlash against the adult nature of the show. Nothing
ever really changes, as well we all know, but that didn’t stop HBO one little
bit.
While the sequel series House of the
Dragon may not have the same dramatic gravitas as the original show, it
certainly has soldiered on as a gleeful showcase of exploitative depravity. The
first season began with a young princess (Milly Alcock) and her quest to lose
her virginity, first attempting to seduce her uncle, and finally porking one of
her own guards, before agreeing to a lavender marriage to solidify an alliance
between powerful houses on the condition that she can bed whomever she pleases
behind the scenes. More even than Game of Thrones, House of the
Dragon is directly about who is doing the horizontal tango with who, and it
isn’t really shy about showing it.
Since the unbridled success of True
Blood and Game of Thrones, streaming services have done everything
they can to get in on the action. Netflix blindsided middle-aged moms
everywhere by injecting a multitude of explicit sex scenes into the period
drama Bridgerton, and Hulu went much darker with The Handmaid’s Tale,
not only featuring a significant amount of nudity, but focusing the sex
primarily on rape and a theme of non-consensual oppression. Surprisingly, much
like The Walking Dead did for gory horror, these television series
opened the door for average viewers who would not normally be willing to watch
this sort of transgressive content. Mildred from your church prayer circle
would never be caught dead going to see a dirty movie, but she can’t wait to
discuss last night’s episode at the potluck!
Whereas TV appears to have embraced
exploitation, and all the carnal delights to be found therein, the mainstream
multiplex allows sex and nudity on much rarer occasions these days. Most of the
time, it’s only accepted if the film is considered high cinema, or if it might
be up for an Academy Award…
Only If It’s Art
Stuffy. That’s the best way to put
it. Sex in modern movies is unbelievably, frustratingly, boner-killingly
stuffy. Not stiffy. Stuffy. Even flicks that are pretty good otherwise tend to
fumble the ball(s) these days when it comes to putting the nasty up on the
screen. Unlike those television products we just got done talking about,
full-length features in this post-millennial era are more than a little bashful
about this topic. I mentioned all the way back in my introduction to this
Godzilla-sized self-indulgence of an article that current offerings of the past
ten or so years have given us the blandest, barest glimpses of uncovered mammaries
and yet been subject to both the unmitigated outrage of the evangelical right
wing and the tongue-clucking shock of big time critics and mainstream
media. “Look everyone!” they shout, “This movie has a tit! It’s the most
graphic movie of the year!” A great example (and also a really good movie, by
the way) is Steve (not that) McQueen’s study of sex addiction Shame (2011),
in which we get to see Michael’s Fassbender and Carrie’s Mulligan. What is by
no means an exploitation film, but rather an effective and affecting drama was
bestowed with an inglorious NC-17 by the MPAA simply for daring to show a
penis. Also, as a side note, I know that it’s just the MPA (Motion Picture
Association) now, but I’m going to keep using the extra ‘A’ because, well… fuck
them. Anyway, kudos to director McQueen for refusing to cut anything and
accepting the rating anyway. Go watch it, it’s good! Anyway, the NC-17
classification for this title might fly in the face a little of the point I’m
about to make, but considering it was lauded by critics and audiences, I think
it still fits. Nudity and sex is now somewhat acceptable in film again with one
caveat – it has to be considered… art?
A funny anecdote to get things
started: way back in 2009, and through 2012, I was working at a movie theater. Over
the holiday season in 2010 (and running well into the summer of the next year),
we had multiple instances of carbon copy movies being released at almost the
same time. Natalie Portman starred opposite Ashton Kutcher in the romantic
comedy No Strings Attached (2011), where the two of them played friends
who start sleeping together for fun, only to end up falling in love. Barely a
few months later, Mila Kunis did the exact same thing in practically the exact
same movie with Justin Timberlake in Friends With Benefits (2011). So,
just to sum it up, Natalie Portman boned Ashton Kutcher, and Mila Kunis boned
Justin Timberlake in nigh identical flicks released the same year. Just that
last holiday season, the actresses boned each other in Darren
Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010). Owing to the fact that Portman won a
well-deserved Oscar for that role, the picture was brought back into theaters
several times over the ensuing months. I distinctly remember all three movies
showing across the hall from one another at the same time! So, if you liked
Mila Kunis, you watched her in bed with Timberlake. If you liked Natalie
Portman, you watched her between the sheets with Kutcher. And if you liked them
both? You watched them go to town together! Which I did, several times…
The following year saw another smash
hit with David Fincher’s English language remake of The Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo (2011). Rooney Mara gets assaulted, raped, does some reverse raping,
and has full nude sex with Daniel Craig several times. It’s a tough and
rewarding watch, but the story’s themes are mostly about murder and mystery.
It’s a good movie, even if the Swedish original with Noomi Rapace is usually
considered better. Though it didn’t really get nominated for much, this New
York Times bestseller adaptation was a hit with audiences. But guess what?
That’s right, most of the commentary on it was all about the moral implications
of nudity *sigh*. One would think that people would be more agog at the brutal
murder of a cat… or of various people for that matter. Nevertheless, the
controversy has passed by now, and the picture is well-regarded because it’s
one of those book adaptations and that means it’s art… or something…
This weird prudishness is alive and
well today. This most recent (read 2023) awards season saw several nominations
and wins for Poor Things (2023). I personally consider this a supremely
pretentious modern remake of Frank Henenlotter’s Frankenhooker (1990) – a
far superior work in my opinion, and well worth a watch. Emma Stone gets put
back together after committing suicide by a scientist who reanimates her with
the brain of her unborn fetus. Yeah. Well, she has to relearn pretty much
everything at an accelerated rate and that includes sex. A lot of it. First
with Mark Ruffalo, and then with everyone as a prostitute because, why not?
Stone wasn’t willing to disrobe for anybody in the previously discussed Easy
A (2010), but she holds nothing back in Poor Things (2023). Once
again, it’s… art, I guess? Despite four Oscar wins for Best Actress (Emma Stone
must be so happy to finally get this for going nude), Best Production Design,
Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and Best Costume Design, the film is just (in my
opinion) positively yawn-inspiring. There is, perhaps, a discourse to be had
over the moral implications of slipping your tube-steak inside a woman who is
physically in her thirties but mentally twelve, but neither the script nor the
audience, not even the critics, seem remotely interested in that
conversation.
And that’s really the issue, isn’t
it? Sex and nudity in modern cinema is clearly permissible, so long as it
doesn’t really bother anyone. Performative outrage is everyone’s favorite kind
of outrage, after all, and all the titles I’ve brought up only really amount to
that at the end of the day. It’s not really about whether or not sex on the big
screen is morally justified, it’s simply focused on generating fake
indignation. The discussion centers on the tiniest amount of sexuality in a
picture and uses that to play up the “adult” nature of the content. And… that’s
it. That’s all she wrote. Exploitation isn’t simply about showing us naked skin
and bumping uglies. It’s about the enjoyment of a very natural thing. In the
opinion of this writer, the current attitudes towards sex in the movies are
overwhelmingly negative. The mere presence of adult content isn’t enough to
make it “allowed”, it’s the handling of the subject matter. Exploitation movies
generally have a much more relaxed approach that encourages the viewer to have
a good time, rather than squirming in their seat and looking over their
shoulder in fear that someone might notice that they like what they are seeing.
So, what’s the solution here? All I have to say is… thank God for home video.
Physical Media
Will Save Us
Well folks, here we are at the end.
Finally. We’ve taken a whirlwind tour through the decades, traversing multiple
countries and genres. We have dived deep into the output of individual films
and directors, and we’ve catalogued metric tons of skin on celluloid. That’s
not to say we got to everything, not by a long shot. We only barely mentioned
(if at all) Jean Rollin, a French filmmaker whose personal brand of naked women
wandering through abandoned castles and having philosophical debates with
vampires he dubbed “cinema fantastique”. I probably could have spent over a
thousand further words going on about Just Jaeckin’s Gwendoline aka The
Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik-Yak (1984), but I decided to
spare all of you. An entire section could have been focused on the very weird
relationship Japan has with sex and nudity, from the screen transgressions of Nagisa
Ōshima and In the Realm of the Senses (1976), to the clearly unhealthy
obsessions of Takashi Miike, to the nation’s puzzling need to have dicks and
nipples everywhere while it still pixelates all the real naughty bits in its
pornography. And then there’s Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose films are still
considered some of the most skinful and incendiary of all time, capped off by
his still unsolved murder…
The point is, we have covered quite
a bit in the past forty thousand words, and there is still more out there to
explore. This article was never going to be able to mention all there is to see,
unclothed or otherwise. And yet, I think we’ve done a pretty good job laying
out an overview at large of canoodling and nakedness in the movies. I suppose
the real question is, where does it leave us? What now? I think I have made it
more than obvious where my anxieties lie in terms of the direction that film is
headed regarding this content, especially in the past twenty or so years. Just
recently, I encountered a self-professed “Gen Z”-er online (that’s what they
called themselves, I’d probably have said “zoomer”) who went on at eye-rolling length
about how sex is unnecessary in movies and that they’re only okay with it if it
serves the story somehow. After face-palming myself so hard I left a permanent
handprint on my forehead, I was only able to tell them that… you don’t need a
reason! Boinking each other is only natural, after all, and depictions of such
have existed in human art all the way as far back as prehistoric cave paintings.
The only reason Leonardo Da Vinci painted nude figures was because the camera
wasn’t invented yet, otherwise the Vitruvian Man would have been a one-reel
stag short. Unnecessary? For you maybe…
This young person, so uncomfortable
with naked bodies is, by all accounts, not alone in their generation. I’ve
personally lost count of the number of studies, articles, and news stories I’ve
come across detailing how Gen Z is not only having less sex than the rest of
us, but also prefers to see platonic relationships in their media instead. When
I was a kid, I would have tirelessly worked to bring peace to the Middle East
if it meant I could see a breast! Not even both breasts, just one of them! Like,
maybe just pulling down a solitary bra strap… All of this is to say that
decades of puritanical handwringing and religious indoctrination has
indeed had an effect. Sex in general, and that includes in the movies, isn’t
considered normal, natural, or healthy. It’s viewed as harmful, and that means
we are definitely less likely to see as much of it going forward as we used to.
What’s the solution?
Home video. Physical copies. For the
love of all that is naked and sacred, we need to lean into physical media. I
own literally thousands of films on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and UHD (I admit, I am
lacking in Laserdiscs…), so this might be a bit biased. Nevertheless,
especially in the past decade, physical media has been at the forefront of
preserving old exploitation films. Small companies, literally even just a couple
people in some cases, have been hard at work restoring movies that would have
been lost to time. In some cases, they actually were until these dedicated
aficionados put in the legwork to track them down. Often, original prints are
found in the most unusual of places, from the basements of convents(!) to some
random producer’s attic or garage. These efforts to clean up and release low
budget exploitation films from skin’s golden age are ensuring that future
audiences still get to see, appreciate, and jerk off to them! Uh… anyway… I mean,
it’s important that all of us, to the extent we can, support these endeavors. It’s
a bit unorthodox for such a scholarly article (yes, I’m laughing as I write
that), but I am going to list a few of the companies doing this good work so
that you, dear reader, might hopefully go out and patronize these fine folks
and get to watch somethings sexy. And, no, I’m not sponsored by anyone, I just
really like these labels:
·
Vinegar
Syndrome
·
Severin
Films
·
Blue
Underground
·
Massacre
Video
·
Terror
Vision
·
Arrow
Video
·
Olive
Films
·
Powerhouse
Films
·
Mondo
Macabro
·
Kino
Lorber
·
The
American Genre Film Archive
·
The
Criterion Collection
·
Shout!
Factory
·
Celluloid
Dreams
·
Troma
Entertainment
·
Full
Moon Features
·
Raro
Video
There, that should get you started. One
thing I hope we can all agree on is the need to keep these sexy, debauched, and
undeniably fun films preserved and available for generations to… uh… come.
Thank you for reading this obnoxiously long piece about sex and nudity and
movies. Now, go dim the lights, switch on your television, and bump some uglies!
Peace out!
