Burl reviews Street of a Thousand Pleasures! (1972)

 

Toora-oop-de-doo, it’s Burl, bringing you a review of a picture that isn’t pornoo, but veil-dances mighty close to it at times! If you’re looking for a story, pass this one by! If you want art or craft, keep on moving! But ha ha, if you’re after a parade of naked ladies being leered at and nuzzled by a first-person camera, then sister, take a walk down the Street of a Thousand Pleasures!

Floppy-haired John Tull, whom we recall as the pig-lovin’ Junior in Sassy Sue, plays “field geologist” John Dalton, leaving his unseen but shrewish-sounding wife to do some field geology in the Middle East! On arriving he manages to save his host, a fake sheikh, from a would-be assassin, and as a reward is allowed to visit the forbidden slave market, which is where most of the rest of this mind-numbing production takes place! The prevailing theme is erotic astonishment, and indeed a truly astonishing number of naked ladies are paraded before his eyes!

We hear the aptly-named John’s creepy thoughts as he observes the unclad ladies: “These girls are naked! She’s so young looking!” Happily none of the ladies are particularly young looking – they’re not old, but they’re clearly beyond their teenage years, and with the camera taking Dalton’s perspective we continue to leer at them and hear his thoughts! “Uhhhh, ohhhh, so soft!” he says as he, or at least the camera lens, kisses a breast! Occasionally it cuts back to Dalton with a disbelieving look on his face, and then it’s back to his gross and unwanted narration as his hairy hands caress the ladies: “Ooh, such hard little nipples! Like elevator buttons!”

You can see from this what kind of movie it is, and one feels for the women on display here – not actual slaves perhaps, but maybe not far off either! The gross creep Dalton keeps up his inner commentary for what seems like forever, moaning things like “Oooh, aaahh, your buttocks are so firm!” and “Nice! Very nice! Very, very nice! Very, very, very nice!” and “I’ve never seen a woman so beautiful! I’ve never seen a woman so beautiful!” And of course he must continue with his POV kisses on their breasts, bellies, and thighs, complete with little lip-smack sounds and occasionally the imprint of the camera lens visible on the body as it pulls away!

Occasionally more human thoughts intrude: “She looks so sad!” Or, commenting on the other fake sheikh and fez-wearers wandering the market, “They look at them like they were livestock! Well they’re a far cry from livestock!” He reacts with mild disfavour when he sees the girls being mistreated, but then it’s back to the same monoto-logue: “Mmmm, so beautiful! Just wandering around, just milling around, all nude! They just never wear clothes it seems! Ha ha!”

Things turn a little darker when he spies a woman tied up and a devilish figure molesting her, but he’s soon back to his old tricks, ogling and fondling the girls as his neverending monologue runs, expressing disbelief and admiration, chuckling and smacking his lips, guessing at the nationalities of the girls and so on! But soon he’s begging “No more delights!” In a different room, a sheikh played by the director is receiving a fake BJ from a lady, and the scene doesn’t end until the sheikh has said “Ho!”

But in the last moments there’s a bit of incident, and suddenly John is on the run with one of the slave girls in tow, then we catch up with the two of them back in America, with John in a secret room in his house where he keeps the slave girl away from the prying eyes and barking voice of his horrible invisible wife! It doesn’t seem like a sustainable situation, but that’s where we leave our floppy-haired protagonist! And yes, more naked ladies dance naked under the end credits!

Some of the ladies in the picture are familiar, like Joyce Mandel of Weird Science and the mighty Uschi Digard from Truck Stop Women and many Russ Meyer productions! But most are just mildly uncomfortable-looking women who’ve been thrown a couple of bucks to stand around in the buff, either tied to posts or dancing lazily! You can really see the difference a few years on from nudie pictures like Hot Nights on the Campus, which had more plot and fewer naked ladies, versus this one, which has endless nudity – and even some dudes, ha ha – and no plot at all! Well, maybe plot is overrated! I give Street of a Thousand Pleasures one half of a pathetically fake Arab sign!

Burl reviews Talking Walls! (1987)

 

Ha ha, it’s Burl - sheep room activated! Unfortunately, to know what that means you have to have seen Talking Walls, and you probably haven’t! That may be for the best, but I’ll be happy to tell you all you need to know about this curious picture so that you can decide for yourself!

Why is it curious? Well, first of all, it comes from a director whose previous picture, released almost a decade earlier, was a sort of gritty, downmarket On Golden Pond/Death Wish mash-up featuring Lee Strasberg and Ruth Gordon as an elderly couple trying to survive in a rapidly de-gentrifying Bronx! It was called Boardwalk, and in no way by watching it could you have predicted the coming, only nine years later, of Talking Walls!

Our alleged hero in this newer picture, Paul, is played as a real weirdo by Stephen Shellen from Gimme an ‘F’; and no wonder, because the character is indeed a big old motel-living, emotionally adolescent weirdo! He’s a sociology student trying to complete a PhD on “personal relationships” or some such bumblefuzz, and proposes to his professor, played by Barry Primus from Boxcar Bertha, that he gather his data by peeping on the various guests populating (on an hourly basis) the motel he lives at!

To this end he cuts through the motel walls and floors with a demented pervert’s energy, waving a skilsaw around and laughing maniacally as he installs his two-way mirrors and cameras! He records a parade of yolk-faced fartmongers as they play bohankie with ladies (some professionals, others not) in the various theme rooms! Yes, there’s a sheep room, and the theme in there appears to be sheep, but not erotic garter-wearing sheep as we saw in Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (but were afraid to ask)! There’s also a car room, a shoe room, and some others I can’t rightly remember!

So he observes, but is such a poor scholar and abjectly stupid person that he learns absolutely nothing, for which his professor regularly upbraids him! “But I have all the latest equipment!” whines Paul! “It’s got to tell me somethin’ about how people are feelin’!” Meanwhile, the motel guests keep up their performative erotica for the benefit of Paul’s cameras and thermographs, and the picture turns into a series of sexual skits, like If You Don't Stop It... You'll Go Blind!!! or one of those kinds of movies!

There are some familiar faces in the theme bedrooms! Sybil Danning from Howling II, Karen Leigh Hopkins from The Running Man, June Wilkinson from The Bellboy and the Playgirls, and Sally Kirkland from Hometown U.S.A. are just some of the ladies; and the fellows include Don Calfa from Return of the Living Dead, Hunter Von Leer from Halloween II, Peter Liapis from Ghoulies, Mickey Jones from Starman, and Richard Partlow from Alligator! Ha ha, it’s quite a gang!

Finally Paul tries dating a real woman, who turns out to be a Pac-Man playing French lady he finds attractive! Her name is Jeanne, and she’s played by Marie Laurin from Creature, and there’s a long montage of them kissing in picturesque places to the sounds of the worst softrock song of all time! Ha ha, bleargh! Of course the relationship goes south when he won’t let her see his place, because then she’ll know what a desperate pervert he is! The old man who owns the motel – my favourite character by a long chalk, ha ha! – counsels flowers, so Paul steals the ones the old man had just bought his wife, and books the cloud room for his anticipated bohankie! But there’s a twist ending, and it drives Paul mad and has him huffing from a big glass pipe and hallucinating a sort of music video that declares him to be on “The Losing Side of Love!”

It’s a weird movie when you get down to it! The protagonist seems so daft and damaged, and his oddball nature infects the entire picture! He videotapes everything, so much of the movie is literally from his perspective, and it's not a perspective any sensible person wants! There are unexpected intrusions of actual craft now and then, but these only make the whole thing weirder, and in any case nothing could possibly overcome the intolerable character of Paul, a petulant, whiny sociopath who wears leather pants for a scene of dramatic climax, then ends up driving the streets yelling “FIND HER! FIND HER! WHERE IS SHE!” There's more after this - ha ha, it seems to go on and on - but it all eventually wraps up in what I suppose was meant to be a happy ending!

The picture feels about eight times longer than it really is! It’s an extremely curious and off-putting thing, with only the charming old man and the weirdness to make it even worth a mention! I can’t say for sure that it was worth watching, but, as with other bizzarities like Mid-Knight Rider or The Worm Eaters, once it's over you know you’ve seen something most other people never will! I give Talking Walls one recalcitrant Coke machine!

Burl reviews Hot Nights on the Campus! (1966)

 

In grimy black-and-white, it’s Burl, here to review olde-tyme erotica! Ha ha, what would you get if you teleported a Michael Findlay roughie like The Touch of Her Flesh together with a regional campus picture like And No Birds Sing? Well, I think you’d open the telepod at the other end, and after the smoke cleared, out would stagger a picture very similar to Hot Night on the Campus!

Of course the focus is more on the hot nights than the campus, and to tell you the truth I wouldn’t have minded a little more mid-60s NYU campus material than we get here, because we get virtually none! Our story, such as it is, concerns Sally, just off the bus from small-town Indiana to attend college in the Big Apple; her family friend, whom she’s long considered an uncle, is a professor at the college and sets Sally up in an apartment with a bunch of other young ladies!

Gigi Darlene from Crazy Wild and Crazy plays Sally, and her new roommates are essayed by a gallery of faces familiar to those of us who’ve seen a lot of Something Weird Video releases! My favourite is Judy Adler from The Sin Syndicate, essaying the role of Fran, the beatnik sex maniac! There’s also Darlene Bennett from Nudes on Tiger Reef and Joanna Mills from The Love Merchant! Soon after Sally’s arrival, the girls hold an erotic rumbustification, which starts off normally enough but soon everyone is down to their scanties and building human pyramids, and Fran is carried off into the bedroom by a posse of men! And, oh gasp, there are two of her female roommates lying together on a bed making sweet love!

Of course Sally is scandalized, declaring in her voiceover narration that this party is the most horrible nightmare ever! Rural Indiana never prepared her for this, ha ha! But after she talks about it with the family friend professor guy, and separately with a young fella she met at the party, she’s soon enjoying the big city ways and performing bohankie on the reg with both of these men! (One at a time, though – ha ha, she’s still a Muncie girl after all!) Yes, she really gets into the swing of things, as one does once one has discovered the magic of sex!

But in these movies pleasure always comes at a price, and it’s not long before Sally is feeling ill and clutching at her stomach! A nudie photographer diagnoses her condition: she’s pregnant! Oh, what will she do? The men in her life are no help at all of course, and they're even worse than that – they instantly transform into jerks who push her around and tell her it’s not their problem! But a roommate called Purice knows what to do! She sends Sally to a horrible abortion apartment staffed by a grim, straggle-haired old lady and featuring the most cheerlessly blazing fire ever seen on film! And while one might have thought such back-alley establishments a part of America’s past, it now seems they, and the many horrors and health risks that go along with them, are a firm part of its future too! America, what are you doing?

It works out for Sally, because the fakey happy ending of this picture has her flee the old abortioness’s apartment before the horrible woman can get out her coat hangers, and then, what do you know, Fran’s boyfriend declares that he wants to be with Sally, to marry her and take care of her and her baby forever! A grateful Sally agrees, but being forced into a lifelong relationship out of desperate circumstance doesn’t seem much like a happy ending to me!

But while the last act of this picture (if it can be said to have acts, other than mildly sexual ones) is depressing, the first forty-five minutes or so are pretty fun, if you like grimy views of mid-60s New York! Ha ha, and I sure do! The content is nonsensical, that’s for sure, but this movie is an artifact above all, and an enjoyably inept one! I just wish it spent a little more time actually on the campus! I give Hot Nights on the Campus two shapeless black beatnik sweaters!

Burl reviews Hurray - The Swedes Are Here! (1978)

 

By all that’s Bavarian, it’s Burl, here to review one of the many, many, many sex comedies made in and around Bavaria in the 70s and 80s, usually involving hotels, burgomeisters, and Swedish girls! You might recall High Test Girls, which was about six Swedish girls arriving to take over a gas station; well, this one is pretty similar, and it goes by the English title of Hooray - The Swedes Are Here!

Of course there’s no plot, ha ha, no plot at all, but if you’ve read my reviews you know that’s not always a problem, especially with movies like this! The setting is a small Bavarian town, and it seems the burgomeister has given a strapping local lad named Niki Moser a big loan so that Niki can buy a hotel; but the agreement is that Niki will then marry the burgomeister’s perpetually nude daughter Marianne! But he doesn’t want to, and so the solution, suggested by Niki’s friend Tony, is to get a government subsidy to develop the hotel, so that Niki can repay the burgomeister and not be obliged to marry Marianne and this in turn requires that a government minister be fooled into believing the hotel is fully booked with guests so he will okay the subsidy!

The handsy old government official brings his girlfriend to the hotel for a dirty weekend while he considers whether Niki deserves the government subsidy, although he stops along the way to first get pooped on by a cow and then to take his mistress dirndl shopping! It looks bad for Niki, as, aside from a newlywed couple, one of whom is the gayest man alive, the other an understandably frustrated woman, the hotel is almost completely free of guests! Luckily a quintet of pulchritudinous Swedes shows up, followed by, out of nowhere, a marching oompah band! Everyone is soon having sex, ha ha!

The picture is full to bursting with hoary old jokes - they even try on the one about the fly in the soup! Ha ha, that one had whiskers when the Muppets did it, which I guess was around the same time as this! And of course there are pies in the face too, ha ha, because you can’t have a picture like this without pies in the face! And as the five Swedes gambol topless around the pool, a small boy in a Tyrolean hat peeks in and demands they give him a Tampax, because he’s heard that with one you can go swimming, horseback riding, hang gliding, and so forth! Ha ha, another fosselized old chestnut! And then of course there's the one about the exploding outhouse!

Now I haven’t seen a lot of these German bedroom-polka pictures, but I still recognized some of the faces here! Marianne, the burgomeister’s daughter, is black for some reason, and she’s played by Scarlett Gunden from Melody in Love! Why Niki is so reluctant to marry her is anybody’s guess, because she’s good-natured and very gorgeous! Niki himself is played by Wolf Goldan, who was also in Melody in Love, and of course played one of The Three Superguys! Bea Fiedler from Summer Night Fever and Hot Chili is in here, as is Renate Langer also from Summer Night Fever! And of course there’s Rosi Meyer, the same gurning old lady who seems to be in all of these pictures, including of course Has Anybody Seen My Pants? Ha ha, in fact the movie opens with some outhouse jokes performed by her and the burgomeister!

Finally Niki realizes that Marianne is a) cute, b) nice, and c) naked all the time, so it all ends the only way it could: with the triumphant blare of an oompah band, some slow-motion running through an alpine meadow, the tearing off of a dirndl, and a tilt up to a mountain that looks like a breast! Ha ha! Because I enjoyed watching it, and because I like writing dirndl, I’m gong to give Hooray - The Swedes Are Here three dirndls!

Burl reviews Dortoir des grandes! (1984)

 

Eh bien, bonjour les gars et les gamines, c’est Burl! Ha ha, today I’m reviewing a French picture for you, and how very French it is! Way back in the mid-80s, when this movie was new, my friend Doug somehow managed to tape most of it onto a VHS cassette, which we then watched over and over again! But the beginning of the movie was missing, and we didn’t know the title, so we referred to the picture as Dormitory F!

Of course the movie was packed to the brim with naked ladies, which accounted for the bulk of its appeal, but it also featured a scene in which the ladies visit a punk club and listen to a catchy song we called “Ansari Anse!” For years since then, I sought out both Dormitory F and that catchy punk song, but being as how I didn’t know the proper titles for either of them, this proved difficult! But once again Doug came to the rescue: once again by mysterious means he found the movie, put it on a little flash drive instead of a VHS tape this time, and gave it to me, and now it’s my pleasure to reveal the proper title of the picture: Dortoir des grandes!

That translates most directly to Senior Dormitory, but I believe the standard English title for it is College Dormitory! In any case, I was excited to see this movie again after so many years of it living (and growing and mutating) in my imagination! It turns out to be the tale of a girl called Adeline, who, her father being dead and her mother who knows where, lives with her stepmother and the stepmother’s creepy doughboy sweetheart! When these two start getting cozier with her than she would like (pulling her into the bathtub, spiking her drinks, double-teaming her in her bed, that sort of thing), Adeline’s superhuman equanimity finally fails her and she demands to be sent to a private school for girls!

The bulk of the picture plays out at this academy! The other girls are reasonably welcoming, with the only holdout being Juliette, the bad girl, who becomes jealous! Good-natured Mowgli, who I guess is called that because she’s black, becomes Adeline’s good pal, and all the girls are pretty cuddly with one another when you get right down to it! Fanette, the dean, is a very pretty lady, but a grouchy and insecure one who is prone to having affairs with her students! Her current objet d’amour is Juliette, and boy does Juliette get steamed when Fanette’s interest shifts to Adeline!

Instead of a plot, the movie simply features scenes of the girls doing stuff! They take group showers of course, and massage one another, and play little pranks on their teachers, and at one point they lock the dean in her room and have a dorm party with some invited boys and a poster of Rocky watching over them! Of course the highlight is the visit to the grungy basement punk club, where a band called Les Porte Mentaux play a song not called “Ansari Anse,” but rather “Ah ca ira!” Ha ha, I can’t tell you what a pleasure it was to finally see this scene again after all those years, and hear that catchy song! And the scene is just terrific all around, and brought back memories of my own visits to grungy basement punk clubs! Though I don’t recall the punk ladies taking their tops off and dancing around as happens in this picture, and also the bathroom seen here is the nicest punk club bathroom anyone ever heard of, ha ha! Normally you feared for your life in those bathrooms, and if you were smart you stayed out of them altogether! (It was the germs you feared, mind you, not your fellow punks, who by and large were a pacific bunch off the pogo floor!)

So all that was great, and it’s nice that in the last quarter of the film, after a suicide attempt that nobody seems to worry overmuch about, the location shifts to the Caribbean, where Adeline accompanies Mowgli for an erotic holiday, and then the arrival of Fanette complicates matters slightly, and the whole thing takes on a Melody in Love sort of a vibe! But otherwise I must admit that the movie is fairly desultory, with no art and precious little craft in evidence! The script is very piecemeal and the characterizations extremely confused! It’s mainly a series of scenes in which people grope and snog one another for a while before they invariably cut abruptly to a new scene! I’m not sure if more explicit stuff was snipped out, but I don’t really care either because, naked ladies notwithstanding, the bohankie scenes get boring and repetitive as always seems to be the case with pornoo, or near-pornoo! Still, I enjoyed it because it brought me back to those days when movies like this were a big deal! Ha ha! I give Dortoir des grandes, the former Dormitory F, two posters of Ator the Fighting Eagle!

Burl reviews Cindy and Donna! (1970)

 

Ohhh it’s Burrrrlllll, sweeeeet Burrrrllllll, where are you tooooo-niiiight??? Ha ha, that was an attempt to give myself a syrupy theme song, the sort of warbling tune we find in movies as diverse as Sweet Sixteen and Cindy and Donna! And of course it’s Cindy and Donna I’d like to ramble on about today - a Crown International special from the days before they turned fully to the teen sex comedy genre with pictures like The Pom Pom Girls, Van Nuys Blvd., Malibu Beach and The Van, and instead put all their energy into weird nudie dramas!

Cindy and Donna Weeks are sisters, and in fact the movie is really a portrayal of the entire Weeks family, which is spectacularly dysfunctional! At sixteen or whatever age she’s supposed to be (the actress is of course in her twenties), Cindy has already developed a sort of prudish housewife mien, while her sister Donna is a wild child with poor judgment skills! Their mother speaks in a bizarre accent that seems half New Jersey and half just plain Jersey; she’s a nagging, bitter lush who’s of no help to her daughters! Dad is a barfly with a bad case of wandering eye and a hankering for Donna which turns out to be reciprocal! Ha ha, yuck-o-bah!

The father also hankers after the world’s laziest erotic dancer, ha ha, who is played by Alice Friedland from The Young Marrieds and is the same age as Donna! Again, yuck-o-bah! Meanwhile the mother tries to pick up Dad’s barfly friends, but they just put her in the car and send her on her way! Cindy gets more and more prim as her family becomes more and more debauched, but finally she’s had too much, and something within her busts! First she enjoys (or doesn’t enjoy: it’s hard to tell) a touch of bohankie with her more worldly gal pal, and then near the end of the picture she makes a bold play for Donna’s boyfriend! Donna arrives home in the middle of it, raises an objection, and is commanded to leave her own house by the nasty jerk of a boyfriend! Donna flees, trips over a little red wagon, and is creamed by a passing vehicle! As Cindy scream-weeps for her sister, the syrupy title song begins again and the credits roll!

It’s a strange picture, ha ha! Of course there are plenty of ladies in dishabille, but I can’t tell if it’s the work of someone who earnestly wanted to tell the story of a crazy malfunctioning family and the tribulations of being the youngest daughter of such a clan, and then they added all the sex to make it marketable; or if they wanted from the get-go to make a sex picture and then came up with this weird quasi-drama in an attempt to make it dramatically respectable! I suppose it was probably the latter, but I like to think it was the former, and that it was a story director Robert Anderson - whose first movie this was at age fifty-three, and who later went on to make The Young Graduates - simply had to tell!

Not only is it a strange picture, it’s a bad one too, I’m sorry to say! No great filmmaking skills nor cinematic imagination are in evidence, and the simulated bohankie on display is pretty cheerless! It’s got a some value as an artifact or a curio, I suppose, but not a lot beyond that! I give Cindy and Donna one spark plug box mobile!

Burl reviews Tampopo! (1985)

 

Noodle-slurpers, hello, it’s Burl! Ha ha, when I was a younger man, working in a video store in the late 80s and early 90s, there were certain movies of which I was aware, and which I knew were supposed to be good, but which were so ubiquitously on the shelves that they became a sort of wallpaper, and I never watched them! Many of these were the sort of 80s international or independent popular favourites that would have played in art houses to sweet acclaim - ha ha, I guess something like My Dinner With André or maybe Babette’s Feast would be other examples of this sort of movie! But the one I’m talking about today is quite simply Tampopo!

Well, I recently caught up with it, and while I’d always known is was a quirky film that mixed together genres the way its characters mix together broth, I wasn’t aware of just how eccentric and culturally specific it was! I found these elements quite delightful, and at times the episodic surreality of the thing reminded me a bit of something like Holy Motors!

And like Holy Motors, this is a movie that’s highly aware it’s a movie! Ha ha! It begins in a cinema, with a white-suited gangster type, played by Kôji Yakusho from such great Kiyoshi Kurosawa pictures as Cure and Charisma, who upbraids fellow patrons for eating noisy chips, and then discovers and addresses the camera to issue a similar admonishment and to talk about the autobiographical “movie” one sees of one’s life at the moment of death! Then the story proper begins: two truck drivers, one an older, taciturn cowboy Goro, played by Tsutomu Yamazaki, known for his appearances in such Kurosawa pictures as High and Low, the other a younger fellow in white called Gun, essayed by none other than Ken Watanabe from Godzilla, stop for ramen in a little restaurant run by a widow named Tampopo, played by Nobuko Miyamoto, the Taxing Woman herself!

But Tampopo’s ramen is unsatisfactory, and so Goro and Gun embark on a quest to help the flustered woman perfect her cooking and turn her struggling business into an all-time blockbuster of a noodle shop! As in The Magnificent Seven, or, more properly, The Seven Samurai, they gather together a group of experts, all men, to help not just with the ramen recipe but with renovating the shop and refining every detail of Tampopo’s hospitality strategy! Meanwhile Goro and Tampopo seem destined from the beginning to be together, but their budding romance is remarkably tentative!

Well, that’s the main tree trunk of the plot, but branching off it regularly throughout the picture are food-centric vignettes, sometimes involving the gangster in white, at other times featuring total strangers: a group of executives scandalized by their junior’s independence, for instance, or an old lady with pinchyfingers gone a-marketing! Some of these are moral tales, others fables, and sometimes they’re just filmed jokes in the manner of If You Don’t Stop It…. You’ll Go Blind!!! I must say I particularly liked a digression involving a gang of hobo gastronomes, and I think you’ll like that bit of the movie too!

With the exception of a scene showing the slaughter of a turtle, which I most certainly didn’t like, it’s mostly a very delightful a study of kindness and generosity between humans! But it has some sharp edges too, along with punchfights, low-key pictorial beauty, and a touch of bohankie too, making it in sum a good, heady brew of noodles and broth! The attention paid to detail, and the gorgeousness of the comestibles on view add still further to the pleasures of the whole! Ha ha, it’s an invigorating filmic experience, and I give Tampopo three shared egg yolks!

Burl reviews The Naked Flame! (1964)

 

Good day, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m in the mountains today to review a picture about Doukhobor unrest in the airy peaks of Alberta Province! Ha ha, this is an odd one all right - a combination of wilderness adventure, romance drama, cultural study and nudie picture, all wrapped into a thing known variously as Deadline For Murder and The Naked Flame!

I’ve chosen to review it under the latter title, because there are flames and nudity in the same frame, but, although there is murder, it’s not committed on any kind of deadline! The tale takes place in a small mountain town populated by both Doukhobors and regular folk! The Doukhobors, a religious group also known as Freedomites or Sons of Freedom, were fond of protesting things by stripping off their clothes and occasionally burning things down, and therein lies the exploitation hook!

Our characters include lovey-dovey young couple, Bob (Barton Heyman from The Secret of My Success) and Cathy; and whereas she is a Freedomite, he is not, and this kind of intermingling is evidently frowned on by the sect! Meanwhile the local bully-man, Sorkin, a slobby, bearded Son of Freedom with a thick but unplaceable accent, wants Cathy for his bride, and so is happy to gin up the Doukhobor outrage against her union with Bob! Bob’s father, who manages the local mine and is played by Mort Van Ostrand, is against the union, and Cathy’s father, a Sven Svensson type, had at one point apparently betrothed his daughter to the unspeakable Sorkin without her knowledge! Into all this wades a mining company lawyer called Paul, played by Dennis O’Keefe from Top Hat and The Leopard Man, who is there to investigate the culture clash, but has his own history with the Doukhobors! Indeed, he too had fallen for a Freedomite girl, Elena, played by Kasey Rogers from When Worlds Collide, but she now hates him for helping imprison her brother on charges of arson!

While the Freedomite ladies of the town get their kit off and fire up the torches to protest Paul’s return, the nasty Sorkin, played by Al Ruscio from Deadly Force and Jagged Edge, feels some incendiary urges of his own! He lights Cathy’s house on fire, then, when she runs out, pursues her in a weird little foot chase, then - thankfully off screen - rapes and strangles her! When Cathy’s body is found, Bob swears blood vengeance on the perpetrator; and then when Sorkin is blasted with a shotgun by persons unknown, Bob is the natural suspect! He flees and is caught by a Mountie with a radio announcer voice, and Paul, believing him innocent, becomes his lawyer for the courtroom-based final act! And yes, there’s a little murder-mystery twist ending!

It’s an odd sort of a movie, with the brief scenes of bare skin seeming both an afterthought and the central reason for the making of the film! Also, it treats the Doukhobor culture at once with a strange anthropological seriousness and an exploitative disinterest in fact! The courtroom scenes threaten to get boring, and the story perpetually promises to get a little deeper but never does! And the conclusion relies on not one deus ex machina, but two! On the other hand, the unusualness is itself an asset, and there are a few perfomances, like that of Ruscio as the dreaded Sorkin, that are perfectly entertaining! It’s not exactly a gem, but if you think you might be interested in a picture like this, it’s decidedly worth watching! I give The Naked Flame one and a half sunflower seeds!

Burl reviews Crash! (1996)

Beep beep, it’s Burl, here to review a car-crash picture! But it’s sure not one of your hayseed yee-haw skid-out epics like Redneck County or Smokey Bites the Dust, ha ha no sir! If those movies have a polar opposite, David Cronenberg’s chrome-blue, super-citified, anti-action drama Crash is it!

Videodrome is good and weird, but I think Crash was Cronenberg’s first real return to experimental filmmaking since the early half-features Stereo and Crimes of the Future! So for that reason I think it’s a noteworthy work, and of course it’s a serious-minded sex picture with more than sex on its mind, and also tremendously funny! I’ve been watching Cronenberg pictures for a long time, and have loved them over the years on different, highly varied plains, receiving renewed doses of satisfaction from them multiple times for each different genre cloak in which they appear to me! First, horror or science fiction movies! Then Important Cultural Artifacts! After that, perfectly crafted cult pictures! And finally, and I think ultimately, comedies! Cronenberg has claimed it himself, ha ha!

Not only is Crash based on a J.G. Ballard book, but the lead character, played by James Spader from Team-Mates, Tuff Turf, and Pretty in Pink, is named James Ballard! He’s married to Deborah Kara Unger from The Game, and both of them are so jaded by their high-rise Toronto lives that they play games of bohankie with whomever they come across in their daily lives, be they strange men in airplane hangars or simple, sexy camera assistants! Ha ha! But one night a distracted Spader loses control of his auto and runs into a car containing Holly Hunter from The Burning and also her husband! The husband is killed and Hunter injured, and she and Ballard end up recuperating in the very same hospital! They meet a local car-crash enthusiast named Vaughan, played marvelously by Elias Koteas from Some Kind of Wonderful, and become enmeshed in a strange subculture of people obsessed by the remaking by car crash of both the human body and human culture!

Rosanna Arquette from After Hours and Nowhere to Run appears in a small role as one of these subcultists, but she doesn’t have much to do except show off her leg braces and scars, accrued from the many crashes her character has endured! Meanwhile, Vaughan and his cohorts restage famous crack-ups, notably the one between James Dean and Donald Turnipseed! Meanwhile again there is lots of, ha ha, autoerotica going on, with all the characters having car sex with each other, and even old Vaughan catching a bummy at one point! But things take a turn for the alarming, and Spader and his wife are finally consumed by the fender-bending obsession!

This picture worked its automotive magic on me when I saw it in its big-screen run! I think I saw it at some kind of preview screening, and when I came driving up from the parking garage after the show, it seemed to me, as it had to the characters after their near-fatal freeway accidents, that there was now at least three times as much traffic on the road and that a collision was surely imminent! Even if this doesn’t happen to you, you’ll surely be caught up in the strange, defiantly unique atmosphere the movie induces! Ha ha! Some might call it goofball, but I think the movie knows more than its critics do, and I count it as a real accomplishment - perhaps one of Cronenberg’s finest! I give Crash three and a half hood ornaments!

Burl reviews High Test Girls! (1980)

Ha ha and hi-test, it’s Burl, here with a review of a picture that’s not pornoo, but darn near! In fact, as with The Sensuous Caterer, some choppy and abrupt editing leads me to believe the original version probably did dally in the realm of hardcore pornoo, but, ha ha, I’m just fine with the R rated version thank you very much! The picture in question is the work of the prolific German erotechnician Erwin C. Dietrich, and, among other assorted monikers, (Six Swedes At A Pump, Swedish Gas Pump Girls) it’s called High Test Girls!

Brigitte Lahaie, from Night of the Hunted and other Jean Rollin pictures, plays one of a sextet (ha ha!) of Swedish girls who operate a gas station and restaurant called GROTTO in some small Bavarian mountain town! Well, it’s of course a station that offers FULL SERVICE, and this has the burgomeister of the town in a real tizzy! It’s a moral outrage, or so he claims!

Ha ha, the English dubbing voice this burgomeister has been given is a real hum-dinger, and I’m pretty sure I may have heard it before in either Melody in Love or Summer Night Fever! At any rate, the movie is crowded with scenes of the burgomeister arriving for a council meeting and grumping that one member is late; then the council member shows up and makes excuses! Ha ha, but what the burgomaster doesn’t know is that each time a member is late to the five-person council, it’s because he’s been playing a game of bedroom quoits with the burgomeister’s wife!

In between these scenes we get some of the various erotic vignettes that occur at GROTTO, including one bizarre and fastastical scene involving a bearded fellow on television who is able to effect physical manipulation of a lady over the airwaves, providing she gets close enough to her TV! Ha ha, talk about your high definition! And of course every time a gentleman pulls up at the gas bar, one of the Swedes jumps to the pump with an offer of FULL SERVICE! That one never gets old!

As you might have discerned, this is a pretty plotless movie! So far as it has a narrative, it involves the town council’s very slow move toward shutting down the Swedish girls’ service station, or at least investigating it more closely! At the same time, however, all the council and many of the townsmen are members of the local oompah band, which needs a place to practice for the upcoming town fete! They settle on using GROTTO as their practice location, and in an climax scored to endless oompah music, the members of the oompah band head upstairs one by one to visit one or another of the Swedes! Ha ha, and by the end everyone is friends, even the burgomaster, and the Swedes are free to continue delivering FULL SERVICE to the gentlemen of the town!

Ha ha, movies don’t get much clunkier than this! There’s hardly anything you’d call a movie here at all, in fact: just a series of scenes! And yet there’s amusement to be had, in the weird dubbing, in the bizarre concepts, in the scenery! So it’s not a total loss! But I do have to say, as many times as the Swedes remove their clothing, the picture is never very sexy! It’s odd, but rarely erotic! Oh well! If you like oompah music, you’ll consider this eighty minutes well spent, ha ha! As for me, I give High Test Girls one Citroën!

Burl reviews Sweet Movie! (1974)

By Trotsky’s beard it’s Burl, here to review a movie about the death of revolution! That’s right, I’m talking about Sweet Movie! Ha ha, have you seen this picture? It’s a wild and weird one, but nothing in it will come as any great shock to those who’ve seen WR: Mysteries of the Organism, the previous film from director Dušan Makavejev!

Well, a few things might be a little shocking, ha ha! Like WR, Sweet Movie is a sort of pastiche or collage film, with revolution as its general subject and the naturally, if regrettably, ephemeral nature of same!

But much of the movie demonstrates the need for it, too: revolution is not futile; in fact is necessary, so long as there are people like Mr. Dollars, the world’s richest man, a Howard Hughes-style clean freak who assumes he can buy and sell people as he pleases! This entity is played by none other than John Vernon, well known from Herbie Goes Bananas, Fraternity Vacation, and Curtains! Ha ha, Herbie fans in particular will be taken aback when Vernon gets his kit off to reveal that he has a solid gold willis! (Vernon too was reportedly taken aback when he saw this at the film’s premiere screening!)

Another person taken aback by this is Miss Canada, played by the comely Carole Laure, whom we of course know from Get Out Your Handkerchiefs and Naked Massacre! She, who had won the Crazy Daisy Show contest to marry Mr. Dollars, is packed away in a suitcase by a big bodybuilder and sent to the Eiffel Tower, where she makes sweet love with El Macho, played by Sami Frey from Band of Outsiders and Black Widow, and emergency attention is soon required, ha ha!

Meanwhile a boat, the Survival, with the head of Marx on the prow, captained by the homicidally revolutionary Anna Planeta, glides down the canals of Amsterdam! It picks up a sailor called Potemkin played by Pierre Clémenti from The Conformist, and pretty soon, after affixing a single tear to the giant Marx head, Anna and Potemkin are rolling around in the big box of sugar, making sweet love, ha ha, but a couple of gory bites and a knife-poking later, the sugar is bubbling with blood! There’s also a very queasy scene in the ship’s sweet shoppe, in which a group of young boys are “seduced” by the lingerie-wearing Planeta!

Miss Canada has by now hooked up with Otto Muehl’s Vienna Aktionists, who are doing their thing in a warehouse somewhere! Ha ha, these bits of the movie might cause viewers some little disquiet: there is all manner of gross foodeating, rank upchuckery, regression to babyhood, and of course a notorious scene of platform pooping! Miss Canada, and indeed Carole Laure, doesn't seem to be enjoying her experience very much! Even worse than all of this, for me, was the German documentary footage of unearthing corpses in the Katyin Forest, which I wish Makavejev had resisted putting in his movie! It’s really awful, gruesome stuff! I didn’t care much for the baby gymnastics either, ha ha!

However, after a friendly reappearance from Mrs. Alplanalpe, played by Jane Mallett from Nothing Personal, the old painted lady whom we’d seen earlier on the Crazy Daisy Show, the sugary theme of the picture reasserts itself! Miss Canada immerses herself in a vat of chocolate and rolls around in it nude for a while, and that’s a pretty good scene! But it’s a sad scene, too - it seems to represent a surrender of some kind, a drowning of ideals in crass, confectionary-excreta!

But the final image offers hope: a row of apparently murdered children, wrapped in plastic, who slowly shuffle out of their wrappings and reveal themselves as an alive, alert new generation, ready, we hope, to continue the struggle! Workers unite, ha ha, you have nothing to lose but your plastic wrap! Anyway, Sweet Movie is an intriguing blumpkin, a relic of a sadly bygone age, and beyond all question an earnestly felt combunction! I give it two and a half strips of yellow suckers!

Burl reviews The Young Marrieds! (1972)

Ha ha, it’s Burl here with an erotic mystery! Before we get to the review portion of this entry, I should tell you the circumstances which brought me to watch today’s movie, The Young Marrieds! It’s a little odd!

I found a videotape in my basement the other day, in a plain black box with no label, just the word PRON written on it in gold ink! Ha ha, I thought, what’s this! I have plenty of old VHS tapes, but I couldn’t remember ever seeing this one before! Well, out of curiosity, I put it on, and guess what! It was a picture called The Young Marrieds, directed by someone called Richard Trent, and, after a strange opening scene featuring bizarre narration describing the birth of mankind from the primordial ooze, the movie quickly revealed itself as a genuine pornoo! It was clearly a product of the early 1970s and the tape looked looked as though it had been Poor Man’s Transferred off the side of a smoke-stained rec room wall! I watched for a while, through scenes of a jerkish man suffering from severe homophobia who first watches a stripper, then, departing the club in his dune buggy, picks up a hitchhiker and is given whistle-dog by her in a remote forest location! Then I turned off the movie and went to my computer, curious to find out what exactly I was watching!

Well, ha ha, would you believe it! The Young Marrieds turns out to be the last feature film directed not by “Richard Trent,” but by none other than Ed Wood! I could hardly believe it! Not only that, but it had apparently been considered a lost film before a print was rescued from a falling-down Vancouver cinema in 2007! That’s odd, I thought to myself - I didn’t think I’d looked in that box of basement videotapes since sometime in the late 1990s! So could I have had my own tape of The Young Marrieds this whole time, before even the 2007 discovery? If so, where did it come from? Who had written PRON on there in golden ink? Very weird! Oh well, I thought, might as well watch the rest of it!

It’s the tale of a young husband, Ben, a total cras-cren-bon, who’s all bent out of shape because his wife Ginny (played by Alice Friedland from Cindy and Donna) doesn’t care to please him in the bedroom! So he receives whistle-dog from strangers and spends half his time in the strip club, and even when he’s at work he can’t keep his mind on things! One day Ben brings home a camera and starts shooting provocative pictures of his wife, and she starts to loosen up! Ha ha, she even performs whistle-dog on him!

Then he takes her to his co-worker’s house where a desultory orgy is in progress, and the wife returns to her chilly ways! But the bare-chested he-man she is paired with soon has her on the floor with his dominance, at least according to the flatly intonated narration! We then get more out-of-focus whistle-dog and various other oro-genital amusements, all set to a steady soundtrack wash of moans, groans, wet smacking sounds, and lounge music!

Then suddenly the orgy takes a turn to “another strata of sex play” which threatens to take Ben “through the gay veil!” The scene ends inconclusively, with Ben, evidently assailed by imbecilic doubt, imagining still images of himself kissing another man! Then we get some more shots of the ocean, and the narrator drones “Let us be patient, tender-wise, forgiving in this strange task of living, for if we fail each other, each will be grey driftwood relaxing in the sea!” Ha ha!

Well, it’s an odd denouement, but entirely keeping with the oddness of the thing entire! And it’s not just the windy pronouncements of the narrator: this picture has sexual politics so bizarre as to be alien, even for 1972! The virulent homophobia of the main couple is pretty off-putting, and the long scenes of whistle-dog are just boring! Ha ha, I zoomed them, I must admit!  

Sexcula notwithstanding, I’m not really a great one for pornoo - watching other people make sweet love is like watching other people play Pac-Man: you’d really rather be doing it yourself! But as pornoo goes, I suppose The Young Marrieds is compelling enough just for being so weird, and that it was old Eddie’s last picture makes it of historical interest! I have no idea where I got this tape, but I’m going to give The Young Marrieds one little falling-down framed picture! Ha ha, can you prove it didn’t happen?

Burl reviews The Sin of Adam and Eve! (1968)

Ha ha, let there be Burl! Yes, it’s me, just plain Burl, here to review a Mexican picture dramatizing the story of Adam and Eve! It’s called The Sin of Adam and Eve, and quite naturally it spends a good deal of time on the parts before the great fruit-eating sin, when they didn’t wear any fig leaves at all! After the eating of the fruit – which doesn’t look like a terribly appealing viand, it must be said! – things move pretty quickly, because fig leaf shorts and the later accouterments we see are not what the customers paid their money to see!

So it’s your basic nudie flick! Ha ha, do I need to describe the plot? Well, after a Genesis dramatized through stock footage of erupting volcanoes and quaking landscapes, Adam is formed out of dust! He’s a burly fellow with a perpetually bewildered expression, and we see him wander about the Garden for some time, discovering such joys as swimming and shouting! Ha ha, truly a paradise!

Soon enough the Lord decides Adam needs a companion, and after a little rib surgery, Eve is formed! She’s a very comely lass, it must be said, and Adam shows her around the Garden for quite a while! The Lord points out the forbidden Tree of Knowledge and tells them it’s a no-no! But a snake is prowling around the premises and whispering to the not-too-swift-seeming Eve that she really ought to try some of this marvelous fruit – hey, she owes it to herself, and who is this Lord anyway to tell her what to do?

After many scenes in which Eve tries things like wearing an enormous flower on her head or showing off some pebbles, and Adam reveals himself to be an insensitive clod, the fruit is finally eaten! Then there’s the fig leaves, the casting-out (during which the pair lose one another for a while), and the separate wandering of the wastelands! Adam fights or flees from a whole series of animals, which also chase and eat one another – ha ha, no ASPCA on this set! – and eventually the pair are reunited!

Well, I guess the idea is that the picture has a sad ending – if only Eve had been able to resist the temptation, humans would have lived in a perfect, plentiful paradise and everything would be great, and there would be no war, no strife, no privation! But it seems like it could all have been avoided if only the Lord hadn’t put that tree there! Was it meant as some kind of test? If so, why? It makes the Lord seem kind of mean and dogmatic, at least as far as this picture explains things!

Anyway, it’s mostly a nice little movie with plenty of scenery to look at, ha ha! There’s no dialogue besides “Adam!” and “Eve!” shouted incessantly; but there’s plenty of narration! It’s mostly a curiosity: a Biblical picture with exploitation aplenty! It’s not the most thrilling thing ever made, but I enjoyed it in an obscure way, and I’m going to give The Sin of Adam and Eve two flaming swords!