Hello and ha ha, it’s Burl here to review
movie madness! Yes, I’ve recently watched Joe Dante’s first film, The Movie Orgy, which he made a full ten
years before Piranha, back when he
was a student and still wanted to be a comic artist! I guess The Movie Orgy represents Dante’s swing
from comics into pictures, and as such I suppose it has historical value to
those of us who appreciate the man’s work, even though one waits in vain for a clip with Dick Miller in it! But Dante's a fine director and, ha ha, you all know how I feel
about Matinee!
But what is The Movie Orgy? Well, it’s a long pastiche of movies - mostly B
pictures - and television snippets, all
cobbled together into a four-and-a-half hour beast that you can easily imagine
the aliens from Explorers watching on
their space TVs! A few pictures seem to occupy more real estate than others:
Dante has distilled the likes of Attack
of the 50 Foot Woman, Earth vs. the
Flying Saucers, College Confidential
(an Albert Zugsmith joint, natch, featuring Elisha Cook Jr. as The Angry Dad), The Giant Claw (the turkey gobbler from
outer space, as big as a battleship) and something called Speed Crazy into just the good parts, and woven them all together
like stripes on a mackintosh!
Laced into these are bits from other
movies, like Teenagers from Outer Space, the 1933
King Kong, Beginning of the End, Moby Dick, and The Giant Gila
Monster! We get many olde-tyme television moments too, like an episode of You Bet Your Life in which Groucho
enacts something I’ll call The Humiliation of John Farbotnik! Other TV gold
includes Andy Devine’s demented kids’ show Andy’s
Gang, featuring good old Froggy; a clip of Elvis singing Hound Dog to a big
basset in a top hat; US Treasury Bond appeals asking you to Underwrite Your
Country’s Might; Nixon’s Checkers speech; and a series of insane Bufferin ads best
described as inconclusive mini-dramas about “sensitive people” who care so much
about others they need an extra edge to their headache medicine! Ha ha!
There are plenty of clever little editing
room goof-offs, like a bit that starts with the opening title to The Naked City, followed by a short
silent vignette from the 1920s involving a young inventor who has created a
strange viewerscope upon which he can call up images of a topless ladies! Of
course he is interrupted by his mother, which must be a familiar scenario to
many of to-day’s computer-screen teenagers! Then we pop back to The Naked City, and the closing spiel:
“There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them!”
We come away from The Movie Orgy with some fine quotes, like “That Skippy is too much
for television!” from College
Confidential, and the endlessly repeated “Everybody’s always crowdin’ me!”
from Speed Crazy! There are lots of
funny juxtapositions and a few editing tricks, and assorted monster movie,
Western, and jungle picture clips, and lots of credits too, which I appreciated; and
on top of all that the funniest Abbott and Costello skit ever: the Susquehanna Hat Company! Ha ha,
great stuff!
The last reel jumps equally between 50 Foot Woman, Giant Claw, Earth Vs. the
Flying Saucers and Giant Gila Monster,
with other clips salted in to make an ironic point, or a joke, or an ironic
joke, or no point at all! Finally there’s a bloom of The End cards, and people
signing off or walking out or saying goodbye, and even Nixon claiming this would
be his last press conference and you wouldn’t have Nixon to kick around any
more! Cut to an audience clapping with enthusiastic approval, ha ha! And there
are a few other good jokes at Nixon’s expense, and, looking forward, a couple
of jabs at Ronald Reagan too! None of it's very slick - ha ha, you can practically hear the rattle of the Moviola and see the tape splices - but you can tell it was made with heart!
Dante, who created this college collage with his pal
Jon Davison, remembers “great drifts of funny-smelling smoke” coming from the
crowd wherever this was screened (mostly university halls), and it seems to me funny-smelling
smoke is the right mindset to adopt for this experience! It’s got lots of easy
jokes, sure, but it’s equally easy to forget that this would have been a lot of
work to put together back in the actual-film days! Oh those glory days! The Movie Orgy is a pretty special
creation, and I give it three Skippies who are too much for television!
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