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 Sexcula! (1974)

Wink wink, nudge nudge, ha ha, say no more, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review a rather daring picture for you today, a motion picture decidedly for adult audiences and not for the tots! Yes, it’s Sexcula, a horror-pornoo picture that was made in Vancouver all the way back in the hairy, scary days of 1974!

Ha ha, do you like grimy, ill-lit shots of hairy, heaving buttocks as they thrust and grind and gyrate in a castle laboratory set? Then Sexcula is the picture for you! The story begins as a young lady and her fullback-sized date journey to a busted-up house she apparently has inherited from an old granny or something! There she discovers granny’s diary, and then the couple repair to a field for a pic-nic lunch and a reading of the diary! Oh, and for reasons of her own, the young lady takes off all her clothes!

The bulk of the picture is diary flashbacks! It seems the granny was named Fellatingstein, and she of course was a Modern Prometheus in the vein of our good friend Udo Kier in Flesh for Frankenstein! Her creation, Frank, is a fey individual who can do anything but the act he was specifically created for! No, he has no interest in sex at all! So Fellatingstein must call in her good friend the Countess Sexcula, recognized across Eastern Europe as an expert in such matters!

Sexcula and Fellatingstein embark on a program of sexual encouragement! This involves fondling; co-ed bathing; a carriage ride with a prostitute wearing a Rose-from-Golden Girls wig; and finally a scientific gambit involving the fluids of love purloined from men engaged in the act! And somehow a wedding officiated by an elderly Mennonite which devolves into what I might call a sort of slumber party – and rest assured, the elderly Mennonite preacher gets involved, and if you have ever wondered what an elderly Mennonite preacher looks like in dishabille, you will find out here – becomes a part of it all!

Ha ha, some of the narrative twists and turns here are a little confusing! Perplexing too is the question of exactly whom this picture is meant to, ha ha, turn on! Maybe nobody, maybe everybody! Maybe it was just meant to be weird, and in that it certainly succeeded! Thankfully ol’ Burl likes his movies weird!

I’m not a great consumer of movies in the pornoographic genre, though I have nothing against them either! Still, based on what I have seen – Pretty Peaches, Little Girls Blue, pictures like that, thanks Dave’s mom! – Sexcula is strangely chaste for a pornoo! Perhaps it’s exactly what you would expect from a pornoo movie made by a bunch of youngsters who’d never done anything of the kind before and couldn’t fully commit themselves! That’s kind of what I like about it - that and the weirdness! I also liked the lab set, and that the fellow playing the gorilla pulled off some very simian moves, nearly worthy of Charles Gemora! Ha ha, it should be mentioned too that there's a hefty, mealy-faced hunchback right out of an Andy Milligan movie, or maybe Cannibal Girls, and at one point I believe the gorilla rapes him! It’s hard to tell for sure - some of the scenes are a little murky!

But there are some nice looking scenes too, and if the men all seem rather, ha ha, inadequate for pornoo stars (could be my limited experience showing here), the ladies are game enough! There are a few funny comedy moments too, though despite its horror trappings, only the hunchback is scary, and then only when he’s naked! I give Sexcula two and a half cases of bumne, and a hefty part of that is for merely existing at all! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Autumn Born! (1979)

Hi, Burl here with a sexual obscurity to review for you! This movie’s called Autumn Born, and it features the late Dorothy Stratten as a spoiled heiress named Tara who wants only to shop for clothing and disco dance at Bogart’s, but is kidnapped and enrolled against her will in a school of sexy discipline!

Tara’s actually a pretty unpleasant person at the beginning of the picture, but Dorothy Stratten manages to give her a sort of innocence that makes you want to root for her anyway! It helps that everyone else in the film, from Tara’s gross Uncle Grant who engineers the kidnapping so that Tara can never get her hands on the family company, to Veronica, the headmistress of the discipline school, to the pair of disciplinarians who torment the heiress for most of the running time, are even worse!

The only decent character is Monica, a.k.a. Eyebrows, who works at the shop where Tara buys her clothes! She cuts Tara a break when the evil uncle cuts off her credit, and allows the orphaned heiress to leave the store with $1900.00 worth of smockery! Tara says “You’re a really nice person!” and takes Eyebrows disco dancing at Bogart's, where a guy in a silver suit who looks like John Waters crossed with a nerd demonstrates his moves! But that’s also where the evil bearded Phillippe and his nasty, sadistic lady companion show up to spirit Tara away to Punishment Mansion! Eyebrows does some sleuthing around about the disappearance, but this hirsute Nancy Drew eventually comes to a sticky end at the hands of El Beardo! That subplot really made me sad, because while she was no great shakes as a detective, Eyebrows was still a really nice person!

Tara’s torment comes in many forms: whippings, beatings, sleep deprivation, weird sounds and music, rape, unfortunately, and a small toy mouse which is given to her as a friend and then cruelly smashed before her eyes by the beardo! It’s a pretty depressing and seedy series of events actually, though at least the rape is not really shown for more than a moment! I really don’t like those type of scenes very much I have to say, so the inartful fade to black was a real relief!

The ending is depressing too! I won’t go into it unless somebody asks in the comments below, but there’s at least a bit of a twist which involves the punishment of Uncle Grant! Ha ha, that guy deserves it! It’s when you think of what happened to poor Dorothy Stratten in real life that the movie achieves a whole new level of grotesque horror! But I’d rather concentrate on the positive, which is that the movie also contains some evidence that if she’d had a chance, she could have become a fine actor!

What I did like about the movie was how weird it often was! The toy mouse scenes were strange enough, and the silver-suited disco-dancing nerd, and the oddball bell-jar acting styles from just about all of the cast, but then there are some other crazy touches, such as the fact that the bearded guy’s voice pops up as narration every now and again, even though he’s a decidedly secondary character!

But it’s mostly pretty bad, and like I say, somewhat depressing! Ha ha! For the weirdnesses, though, and the fact that, again, Dorothy Stratten had quite a bit of potential as an actor if you ask me (and of course was mighty pretty!), I give this rare motion picture one brutal spanking!