Say It Isn't So (2001)

Directed by James Rogers
Starring Heather Graham, Chris Klein, Sally Field
Rated R
USA

"Do you know what the Bible says about fucking your own sister? Don't."

Although it's less than ten years old, there's something oddly quaint and antiquated about Say It Isn't So. Directed by the co-producer of There's Something About Mary, it carries all the earmarks of the Farrelly Brothers' short-lived comic reign: a village of idiots, adolescent gross-outs, and most importantly, a well-meaning but bumbling hero who is constantly humiliated and mistreated by everyone around him. This sort of role usually goes to Ben Stiller, but in this case, the abuse is heaped on aw-shucks nice guy Chris Klein, the blandly handsome semi-star of American Pie. Another sign that we're dealing with a pre-Apatow comedy is the love interest: Heather Graham. It's almost laughable to think of her getting top billing in a Hollywood film at this point, but in the dark days of '01, the golden-haired, alabaster-skinned beauty was still being fast-tracked to movie star status, hustled and bustled by producers and money-men who were sure this adorable, doe-eyed, young(ish) actress was the next Sandra Bullock, if not the next Sandra Dee. That never really worked out - she pretty much peaked in the late 90's with Boogie Nights (1997) and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) - but you can still see the glimmer of glamour in her here. Even in a dumb shock-comedy about incest.

Gilbert (Chris Klein) is a small town dog catcher, a friendless orphan reduced to spending his Friday nights having awkward dinners with his boss Larry's dysfunctional family.
"Why don't you have a girlfriend?" asks the boss's tow-headed son Buddy over take-out spaghetti. "Dad says it's because you're confused about your sexuality."
"I believe the term he used was 'fagnostic'", says Larry's teenage daughter Cher (Courtney Peldon). Annoyed, Larry tries to send her to her room, but she refuses.

"She's always doing whatever she wants," Larry complains. "Like getting her ears pierced."
"I got my ears pierced because I like it," she says. Then she rips open her shirt to reveal a pair of oversized pendants hanging from her nipples.
"And I got these because I hate you."
And that's Gilbert's life, pretty much.

Gilbert starts to notice that his co-workers are all getting terrible haircuts, and after asking around, he finds out why: there's a new hairdresser in town, Josephine (Graham), and although she cannot cut hair to save her life, she's gorgeous enough to get away with butchering dudes' heads. Gilbert decides to get a haircut himself and, despite the fact that Jo cuts his ear off, he falls head over heels for her. They start dating, and, naturally, Jo wants Gil to meet her parents.

Jo's dad, Walter (Richard Jenkins) has just had a debilitating stroke. That's why Jo's moved back to town, to help her Peggy Bundy-esque mother, Valdine (Sally Field), take care of her. Despite her teased hair, tight pants, and boozy breath, Valdine imagines herself to be someone of taste and distinction, so she's not exactly thrilled when Jo brings home a lowly dogcatcher.

A word, if I may, about Sally Field. This doesn't get addressed very often, but Sally Field is totally, utterly hot. It is a combination of many things, surely: the petite, lithe frame, her ice-melting smile, the teacup-shaped breasts, those half-remembered Gidget memories, that nutty Oscar speech, that time she walked away from a plane crash without a scratch, Smokey and the Bandit, who knows what else. She was 55 years old when she made this, and she's still sexier than Graham. I know, you probably never even considered it before - the Flying Nun thing throws people off - but Sally Field = boners popping. And yes, she's done nudity. Not here, but in the late 70's. Now, back to our review in progress.

Despite Valdine's protests, Gil and Jo decide to get married, and everything's going swell until a private investigator shows up to tell Gil some very terrible news: Valdine is his mother. News spreads around town very quickly that he and Jo are having an (accidental, but still) incestuous relationship. Humiliated, Jo leaves town and moves to Beaver, Oregon, where she gets engaged to Jack (Eddie Cibrian), the town's golden boy. Gil moves in with his new mom and dad, and his lonely life goes on.

And then, one day, Leon (Jack Plotnick) shows up, looking remarkably like a younger version of Walter. Seems the detective was wrong. Leon's actually Valdine's son, not Gil. Emboldened by this stunning turn of events, our hero hightails it to Beaver to snatch up his true love before she marries that fuckin' cad Jack. But there are, of course, a few snags to deal with along the way. For one, he ends up running over a legless cropduster pilot named Dig (Orlando Jones). Luckily for him, Dig's a forgiving guy, and instead of suing him, he decides to help Gil on his quest.

And what a quest it is. You remember these kinda movies, right? Gil gets his hand stuck in a cow's ass, wears a beard made of vagina hair, gets beaten up by rednecks, gets thrown into a mental asylum, etc.


Oh, and Sarah Silverman, who plays a cop, blows a dude underwater.

Like I mentioned at the beginning, after Superbad's geek-chic revolution, stuff like this suddenly seemed terminally square, and a lot of Say It Isn't So's attempts at spit-take gags will have you rolling your eyes and wishing for a snarky Paul Rudd cameo. On the other hand, Klein's Gil is a very likable doofus, and you really do end up rooting for him.

Graham doesn't actually have much to do here, but she is very lovely, and you can see why a guy would go to such ridiculous lengths to pursue her. Jones is hilarious, and, as mentioned previously, Sally Field is quite bone-able. So everybody wins, really.

By the way: don't count Heather Graham - or the Farrelly Brothers' brand of super-stupid comedy - out just yet. Both appear to be on the verge of roaring comebacks. Graham's new movie, The Hangover, looks really dumb. And The Farrelly bros next project is the Three Stooges, which looks tragically dumb. So, you know, prepare for the Revenge of the Idiots.

Clip: Say It Isn't So trailer

Availability: Say It Isn't So is available on DVD.

- Ken McIntyre

What's Up Nurse! (1977)

Directed by Derek Ford
Starring Nicholas Field, Felicity Devonshire, Julia Bond
Rated R
UK

"You stupid girl! I told you to prick his boil!"

From everything I've read about the man, writer/director Derek Ford was a perpetually horned-up pussy-hound who made sexploitation movies mostly because it afforded him easy access to tender young flesh. Starting with 1969's This, That, and the Other, he spent nearly a decade cranking out low-budget sex-coms like this one, including several with wife-swapping themes, a topic the married Ford was especially interested in. In fact, Ford's wife Valerie sometimes served as his assistant director, shooting hardcore inserts in their own home to tag onto racy "European" cuts of his films. This would certainly account for the brevity (77 minutes) and choppy editing of What's Up Nurse!. Not that it matters, really. The what-the-fuck editing job only adds to the movie's grimy, bedraggled charm. It is clearly the work of a man who likes tits and laughs, and pretty much hates everything else.

Everything about What's Up Nurse! is half-assed, including the title. Where's the question mark and the comma? Say it loud with the exclamation point. It makes no sense. Also, it's not even about nurses. There's three nurses in the film, but two of them don't even have names, and none of them have a significant role. I am sure there's some method to this film-title madness, but I am not privy to it.

The film opens with a train ride. Olivia (the incredibly named Felicity Devonshire) reads The Story of O and occasionally fondles herself. She's sharing a seat with a dashing young doctor, Robert 'Sweeney' Todd (Nicholas Field), who cannot help but notice the pretty blonde with the wandering fingers. Naturally, he introduces himself. He tells her he's a doctor, about to start an internship at a local hospital.
"Seeing as you're a doctor, perhaps you can help me. I have a little problem," Olivia says. "Can I show it to you?"
He agrees to look at it, whatever it is, and she starts walking over to the bathroom.
"Are you coming?" She asks.
"Very nearly," he cheekily answers.
They crowd into the bathroom and she yanks her shirt open as the infectious psych-pop theme song ('The Love Bug', by Tony Burrows) kicks in.

The two attempt to make sweet 70's love while the train barrels down the tracks, but the young doctor finds himself in a delicate predicament.
"I'm...I'm stuck!" He says.
"Yes, well, that's my problem!" the girl tells him.
They call for help, and the creaky old ticket-puncher shows up.
"Oh dear," he says. "I hope you haven't been like that since the train was in the station."
At the next stop they call for an ambulance, and the still-stuck couple are whisked off to a tiny hospital, Banham on Sea General. They get wheeled in, and a ditzy nurse (Julia Bond) takes a look under the sheet.
"Are they Siamese twins?" She asks.

Grumpy Doctor Ogden (John LeMesurier, RIP), called away from his golf game, prepares to separate them via an injection of some sort, and grouses about being disturbed on his day off.
"I'm on my own," he snorts. "It's awfully difficult, because this idiot intern hasn't arrived yet. There's no sign of him at all."
"Well," the young doctor stammers, "That's the thing, sir. I am your intern. I'm Dr. Todd."
Doc Ogden is suitably outraged. It gets worse, however, when he finally gets an eyeful of the blonde with the convulsive vadge.
"Hi, daddy!" She says.
"I see you've met my daughter Olivia," says the mortified Ogden.
Ha ha, what a mix-up!

After he's finally released from Olivia's iron grip, Dr. Todd heads over to his new home, a furnished room in the home of sexy widow Helen Arkwright (Angela Grant). After meeting a neighbor who spouts an amazing, innuendo laden monologue about the comings and goings of all the boat-loving folk in their seaside neighborhood ("You know that young fisherman down at number 13, well, last night was trying out his dinghy for size, to see if it was big enough..."), she points him towards the Cleopatra, the yacht Helen owns. After dumping a bucket of water on his head, she invites him on board and then seduces him.
"There's a storm brewing," she says. "Should we lower the main sail?"
I guess if you spend a lot of time on boats, you just pick all this salty language up.
"After all," she purrs, while they roll around on the floor, "I did invite you to come aboard."
So then he ends up falling overboard, and they have to rush him back to the hospital in an ambulance.

What's Up Nurse! has this odd habit of slipping between narrative-driven comedy and pure slapstick, and you never really know which you're getting from scene to scene. For example, after Todd gets wheeled into the hospital, Carthew the ambulance driver (Graham Stark) stands there in the hallway, cracking walnuts.
"You're making a mess on the floor!" Snaps Matron (Kate Williams), the head nurse.
"Well, I'm quite fond of me nuts," he explains.
And then the other nurse pirouettes through the frame.
"I thought I told you to stop pirouetting!"
Every so often, weird shit like that happens.

Dr Ogden is, of course, annoyed that he's been called in for more of Todd's bullshit.
"You needn't have come in," Dr Todd tells him. "It's only a mild concussion."
"More's the pity," snaps the doctor, and then storms off, leaving the slightly concussed doctor in charge. A guy shows up in the emergency room with a jam jar shoved up his ass, so Todd and Carthew use plaster of Paris and a broom handle to get it out. They milk this lame gag for a lot longer than you'd think. Eventually, the guy ends up rolling down a hill on his gurney, a broom handle sticking out of his ass. He crashes into a guy holding a sign that says "The End is Here".

And so on. There's a fairly awesome scene with a group of girls tossing a ball around in the nude, but it takes a while to get there: a patient comes in suffering under the delusion that he's swallowed a live frog. Matron tells Todd he comes in regularly with the same complaint. They usually just give him a sugar pill and send him on his way. Todd figures he can cure him once and for all by pretending to do a surgical procedure on him to remove the phantom frog. They put the man under, but now Todd needs a frog. First he goes to the local pet shop, but the owner is no help, and tries to sell him a stuffed owl. Next, he decides to go to the source, heading down to a local creek and wading around in the mud looking for frogs. That's when he runs into the naked girls. They think he's a masher, and call their boyfriends, who beat him with sticks and drag him off.

Oh, and then a monkey shows up in the emergency room. And then a constipated gay guy shows up. The gay gets an enema and passes out, and the monkey gives the doctor the slip and ends up blowing the gay guy. At this point, I no longer have any idea what the fuck is going on.

Helen is launching a new boat, so she invites everyone on board for a party. Carthew brings a dropper full of drugs to dose some blonde's drink, but Nurse Julia grabs it out of his hand and gulps it down. Naturally, she ends up performing an impromptu (and impressive) strip tease.

Through a series of ridiculous circumstances, Todd and Olivia end up picking up a yacht for Helen in France and sailing it back to England. Olivia tells Todd the boat is "self-navigating", so they spend all their time fucking in the cabin. Amazingly, they do not get stuck this time, which prompts Todd to propose to her. Olivia gets so excited she sets up some flares, which causes an explosion, blowing them both off the boat. And then it sinks. They're rescued by a bunch of Indian dudes who were stowed away in the yacht.

I am not sure why - it was Olivia's fault, after all - but when they get back, Dr. Todd ends up in jail. Olivia talks the police chief into letting Todd go because they need him at the hospital, but only if he's handcuffed to a constable, which makes for a very uncomfortable scene when a lovely young lady (gorgeous Zoe Hendry, Confessions of a Window Cleaner) comes in, complaining of - ahem - chest pains, and later, when Todd has to perform an appendix removal on the guy who's boat he sank.

Everything comes screeching to a climax in one of the weirdest happy endings I've ever seen. And around here, that's saying a lot.

Like most British sex-coms from the 70's, What's Up Nurse! is full of well-known and well-respected television actors who you will not recognize unless you are actively British, but even without a working knowledge of Graham Stark's resume, this is a relentlessly cornball but often funny bit of tits-out trash that does not skimp on the skin, even in this ridiculously truncated form. The girls are all above average in the looks department - never a given in Britsploitation flicks - and Devonshire in particular stands out for her bubbly, up-for-anything personality. A Page 3 girl before she took up acting, Devonshire appeared in a raft of T&A flicks between '71 and '78, including Intimate Games (1976), Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman (1973), and 3D epic The Four Dimensions of Greta (1972). Sadly, 1979's Sex and the Other Woman was her last film appearance. Sadly for us, I mean. She became a property investor and now has one bazillion dollars.

Director Ford followed this one up with What's Up Superdoc! in 1978. In 1984, he started the amazing Don't Open 'Til Christmas but quit in apparent disgust halfway through shooting. Not enough tits, most likely. He shot a couple direct to video softcore flicks in the 90's, but mostly concentrated on writing erotic novels. He died in 1995. He was only in his 60's, but let's face it, the guy gulped down at least a couple lifetimes while he was here.

Availability: What's Up Nurse! is available on DVD.

- Ken McIntyre

Squeeze Play (1977)

Directed by Sam Weil (Lloyd Kaufman)
Starring Jim Harris, Jennifer Hetrick, Rick Gitlin, Helen Campitelli
Rated R
USA
Shop for this poster!

You could present a good argument that this is Troma's first "Tromatic" film. Directed by Lloyd Kaufman under an assumed name and written by his brother Charles, it looks very much like an embryonic, stripped-down version of their mid 80's mega-hits (Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke 'Em High, etc). Certainly the smash n' grab, cut n' run camera style is already in place, as is Troma's knack for dredging up every rubber-faced lowlife in the five boroughs and half of Jersey to mug and moon for their cameras. What is lacking is the sheer lunacy of their later work, the gutbucket gore and willful outrage. In fact, Squeeze Play's first half looks more like a test run for the cameras than any sort of finished product, as we wander aimlessly through the quietly kooky lives of a few part-time softball players/full time assholes and their hairdresser girlfriends from Springtown, New Jersey, where the winning softball team gets carte blanche to manhandle the women and generally act like half-retarded apes.

This year (this year being 1976, a year when tight denim flares were apparently very in among softball-playing yobbos), the big ballers in Springtown are (naturally) the Beavers, a gang of grabby, sexist louts led by curly-haired greasball Wes (Jim Harris). The Beavers are thrown the curveball of their collective lives when lightning-armed southern bell Mary Lou (Melissa Bell) decides she wants to join this boy's club. She pitches a near-perfect game (in a sundress and barefoot, no less) but the men treat her so miserably - pulling up her dress and taunting her until she cries - that she storms off the field in defeat.

Of course you realize, this means war. The various Beaver girlfriends form their own team. Pop (the singularly named Zachary, who may not have been too far removed from his character), a local vagrant seen swilling dollar wine at all the games, convinces the girls he can whip them in to shape. Apparently he'd been a ball player of some renown before the sauce got a hold of him. And so, the training montage happens, to the strains of a cloying, piano-driven mid-70's mush-rock track from Don Yowell about "Seeing through the stained-glass window of your mind." The girls call themselves (what else?) The Beaverettes, and schedule a game against their boyfriend-bullies. But first, they have a wet t-shirt contest. Feminism was wild stuff in the disco era, Jack.

The t-shirt contest ends up dramatically affecting most of the lead characters. A huffy Wes breaks up with his girlfriend Samantha (Jennifer Hetrick), after he sees her getting mauled by a fat bastard named Bozo (Michael Moran). Mary Lou is accosted by a Bogart-impersonating gumshoe named Koch (Tony Hoty), sent by her father to insure her virginity stay intact. After a scuffle, she breaks free and elopes with Buddy (Al Corley), who summarily attends to her virginity problem. Disco-suited Fred (Rick Gitlin), being a shy, retiring type, has so far kept his feelings for melon-chested cutie Jamie (Helen Campitelli) to himself, but that fuckin' contest pushed him over the edge, and so he ends up in a car with the now gloriously shirtless beauty. As dawn breaks, he screams to the heavens: "I'm swimming in it, a real woman!"
And indeed he was.

But ultimately, all the bed hopping and daddy-thwarting must end so the Beaverettes can attend to the real business of the hour: beating the boys in a rousing game of softball. I know, that doesn't sound like the most exciting proposition to me, either. By the way, I am assuming that the cast got their fill of yogurty goodness during filming because if you look closely, empty cups of Dannon yogurt are littered on tables in every other scene. An odd choice for product placement, but you take what you can get in Tromaville.

Game highlights? I dunno man, take your pick. Is it when one girl catches a flyball with her purse? Is it the scoreboard kid reading porn, eating pizza, and peeing when no one's looking? Is it whenever one of the girls takes off their shirt to distract the boys? Or is it when the guy catches a ball with his ass?

Most people seem to go with the ass gag. There's a string on the ball. It's very Ed Wood.
"They're gonna have to call for a clean ball," wisecracks the announcer. "She really cracked that one."

Squeeze Play is played much straighter than you'd expect from a Troma film, so straight it barely passes for comedy half the time. Perhaps it's just because I am not a sports fan, but I thought the half-hour long, inning-by-inning coverage of the climactic game pretty tedious, even with the odd flash of boob. Still, despite it's glacial pace and dearth of laffs, Squeeze Play was Troma's first big success, and most surely got the momentum rolling for all the nuttiness that followed. If you're at all interested in Troma's early, pre-Toxie daze...well, I'd still go with Waitress! (1982) or Stuck on You (1983), I suppose. Listen, it's better than a punch in the face, and at least you get an eyeful of Helen Campitelli's oversized sweater puffs. So whatever. Let's not dwell on it.

Availability: Squeeze Play is available on DVD from Troma.
Buy Squeeze Play! on Amazon.
-Ken McIntyre