Double Agent 73 (1974)

Directed by Doris Wishman
Starring Chesty Morgan and her giant boobs
Rated R
USA


“Flowers are pretty, aren't they?”

Having score a modest, but presumably quite surprising hit with 1973’s Deadly Weapons – Doris’s first stab at turning glum Polish tit-queen Chesty Morgan into some wobbly, narcolecptic superspy – she quickly returned to the well with this nonsensical, wrong-headed caper, which manages to not only ruin giant boobs for even the staunchest breast man, but also feature the ugliest fashions, furniture, and fixtures that the 70’s had to offer. Add a script that appears to have been written over a liquid lunch, toss Doris’s standard random camera shots and wonky editing into the mix, reduce the production budget to day-old donuts and scratchy stock footage, and sprinkle the whole ugly mess with an incessant, wildly honking stripper-jazz score, and you’ve got the literally amazing Double Agent 73.

Chesty Morgan was a Polish immigrant with a hair-raising, hard-luck story. Orphaned at a young age, she arrived in the US at the start of World War II. She later married a wealthy American, but when he died during a robbery, she took to exotic dancing to pay the bills.

Her mammoth breasts – surely some perversion of nature – measured a whopping 73FF, the largest natural breasts on record, at least during her heyday. A big draw on the topless dancing circuit for decades, it was only natural that some enterprising filmmaker would want to capture this fleshy phenomenon on celluloid. Luckily – or unluckily, depending on who you ask – that someone was the great Doris Wishman, already a legend for her run of nudie-cutie films in the 50’s and 60’s, and well into her roughie/sexploitation phase when she crossed paths with Chesty. They made two films together and, despite the raging ineptitude they both flaunt, both Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73 remain staples in every sleaze-beast’s diet.

During the credits, Chesty takes photos of things with her boobs. She does this by lifting one of them up. It’s a hefty mound of chest-fat that normally hangs from her body like a tortured rubber sack. Opening with the money shot is a strange way to go about things, but Doris clearly assumes that we, the viewers, will be delighted to see this unholy udders again and again. Sadly, she is mistaken. And we still have 72 minutes to go.

The story begins. Exterior house: Camera zooms in, camera  zooms out. No reason. Inside: Two guys, one with a crazy birthmark on his face, play cards. Some other dude roots around the joint. The fellas find him, bust him in the head, and then run him over in their car. Somebody finds him while he dies on somebody’s lawn and he tells them it was some guy named Topler. And also that he had a scar on his face. And then he dies.

Cut to: nudist camp. Naked people playing volleyball. Somebody throws grass on a dog. Chesty is Jane, and Jane has on a crazy outfit, which includes giant shoes, a too-small bra, and pantyhose. This is while she’s sunbathing. But then her vacation gets cut short by a telephone call. It’s her boss – he’s got a new mission for her. She heads to New York and gets her assignment. She must topple heroin kingpin Topler! To do this, she must take photos of all his associates. Why? Because one of them is him, and they don’t know which one. Well, except that they know he’s the one with the scar. By the way, Chesty’s dialogue was overdubbed because her accent was too thick. Which is a  bummer, because this movie would be ten times as awesome is she had an impenetrable eastern European accent.

Anyway, because it would be way too simple for her to find the scarred guy and then kill him – or, even going with the cockamamie plan, just bring along a tiny spy camera – they implant a camera in her boob.
I know what you’re thinking – now she’s going to have to take her shirt off every time she wants to take a photo. Bingo! See how that works?

Also, turns out the nurse at the hospital (actually somebody’s bedroom) is a double agent, so Jane has to choke her to death with a telephone wire! And then she takes her picture!

So then she goes to a hotel and beats a guy with her boobs. And the some dude kidnaps her, and then lets her go. She puts on her lipstick first, though. Lipstick, at a time like this?

She splits, and he plans on shooting her as she wobbles away, but she leaves her lipstick in the seat, and his car blows up! Then Igor – AKA Topler – finds out Jane’s in town, and orders a hit on her.

Meanwhile, she wanders around town in weird bell-bottoms finding clues while her friend – in town visiting – gets stabbed to death in the shower, because the hitman  thinks it’s Jane.

Jane comes home, finds her friend dead, and then shakes her head and looks at her watch.

And then she goes to the zoo to look at monkeys. While their, she runs into another agent and they go for a walk. She says, “Flowers are pretty, aren’t they?”

Ivan finds out the guy killed the wrong girl, and he’s pissed. The guy goes back to kill her – but she’s ready for him. She gasses him with a magic tea kettle, and then chokes him to death with ice cubes! And then she takes his picture. Then the agent dude calls her for a date. She’s pretty siked. She wears a hideous outfit, but it seems to go ok. They even smooch on the couch. So that was nice for her.

Suddenly she’s somewhere else entirely. The house has leopard skin wallpaper and there’s zebra striped sheets. Some guy walks in and she kills him by throwing her earring at him. It stabs him in the neck and kills him.

Almost every guy in the movie has a bad haircut and a mustache, which makes it difficult to follow who’s who. The chief mentions something about a race. So I guess we’re going to the races. And then the agent calls somebody and says he’s falling for Jane.  So then Agent Mustache shows up at the race track in a denim ensemble, including a jaunty hat. Doris can’t afford to shoot inside the racetrack, so she just inserts stock footage while Agent Denim loiters in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette.

It’s all for nothing, though. She’s not at the racetrack, she’s at some dentists house, wearing a clown outfit.

She hides in the shower and karate-chops and chloroforms the dentist’s girlfriend. Then she rubs salve of some kind on her boobs.

Naturally the dentist – who cannot tell Chesty’s gargantuan melons from his girlfriend’s more reasonable breasts, proceeds to slobber on ‘em once Jane enters the room. She’s boob-poisoned him!

Then Ivan finds her and ties her up! He spits in his eye, so he punches her in the face!
And then Gerta, the dentist’s girlfriend shows up, and slaps her around some more.
Strangely, Ivan’s boss, Topler, AKA Mr. T, tells him to let her go. But why? We may never know, because Kjane takes a busted bottle and rakes Ivan’s face with it! And then she splits.
Meanwhile, Jane’s boss tells his crony some bad news…the camera in her boob is set to explode! Will they be able to remove it in time? And did she get the elusive Toppler?

Yes and no. Surprise ending!

There is really no way around it – Double Agent 73 is a terrible movie. But it’s terrible in many unique and captivating ways. From Chesty’s eye-scorching bell-bottom ensembles to her droopy mega-boobs to her dead-eyed stare, Miss Morgan is a revelation, less an actress than a suicidally depressed sideshow attraction.

Together with Doris’s penchant for nausea-inducting camerawork and her knack for ugly-ing up every set she uses with gaudy knick-knacks and clashing patterns, these two cinematic juggernauts have achieved the near-impossible: they’ve created a sexploitation film that can put you off of sex for a month.

PS: Doris kept making movies until her 90’s. Death is pretty much the only thing that stopped her. Chesty Morgan is alive and well and living in Florida. She owns her own apartment building and makes lemon pies and watches Fox News a lot.



- Ken McIntyre

Satan Was a Lady (2001)

Directed by Doris Wishman
Starring Honey Lauren, Glyn Styler, Edge
Rated R
USA

"Next time, take your entertainment somewhere else!"

Sexploitation legend Doris Wishman had already made Satan Was a Lady once before, in 1975. That version starred Annie Sprinkle, and was mostly wall-to-wall groping. Pretty unremarkable stuff, really, for a maverick like Doris, who forged her career on jaw-droppers like The Amazing Transplant (said transplant is an evil penis!), Let Me Die a Woman (sex change antics), and Nude on the Moon (the moon is full of...nudists!). But clearly, she saw something in this title, and after a very lengthy sabbatical from filmmaking - 17 years - she chose it for her comeback vehicle. At that point, Wishman was nearly 90 years old, well over the median age for sick kicks. Would Satan Was a Lady show a more mature, mellower side of the notoriously rough and raunchy filmmaker?

No, it would not. In fact, Satan picks up exactly where Wishman left off - it's clunky, sleazy fun with sanity-defying camera angles, random cutaways, absurdly gratuitous nudity, and brain-freezing dialogue. Like all great outsider artists, Wishman's vision never faltered, not even after fifty years' worth of criticism. Doris Wishman made Doris Wishman movies, and to hell with you if you didn't like it. Satan Was a Lady is most certainly a Doris Wishman movie.

It's still up in the air as to whether Wishman was a feminist or a misogynist. Either way,  forceful, scheming, sexually-liberated women often figured into her storylines, and that's definitely the case here. Satan stars the imposing Honey Lauren as Cleo Irane, a dominatrix-slash-stripper with an impressive pile of curly red hair and a Jayne Mansfield-esque figure who loves only one thing: a seriously ugly fur coat that taunts her from the window of a local boutique. Cleo decides to get that fuckin' coat, no matter who she has to hurt - or mutilate, or kill - along the way.

Honey Lauren has had a very busy career in two very different acting worlds. Her resume is stuffed with both low-budget exploitation (the Vice Academy series, The Hidden II, Pleasure in Paradise) and a fistful of soap opera episodes. Satan Was a Lady neatly utilizes both. On the one hand, she's frequently topless. On the other, she's acting her brains out, spewing out melodramatic bits of tongue-twisting dialogue during life or death battles with obvious non-actors and an incessant soundtrack of garage-jazz that drowns out nearly every exchange. It is a rare treat to see someone take absurdity so seriously, especially when she's tits-out and wearing a slash of blood-red lipstick that even Divine would think was a little too gaudy.

The very first shot of Satan Was a Lady features both the boobs and the lipstick. Cleo, clad in a leather biker- vest and nothing else, whips a client into a bloody mess. Just another day at the office. After her session, we get a glimpse into her miserable life.

Cleo lives with a wig-wearing Beetle Bailey lookalike named Ed (Glyn Styler) and a broken-legged cat. She's clearly never going to get ahead with Ed around. He's a deadbeat musicians who plays at the local strip club, and then spends all his earnings on whiskey and gambling, So, she hatches a scheme to get some quick cash. She heads over to visit one of her clients, John (the singularly naned Edge, a deadringer for Mr. Burns from The Simpsons) at his office, and tells him that if he doesn't give her $25,000, she'll send photos of their latest tryst to his wife. Then she splits.

Cut to: seedy club, where a girl reverse-strips. Which is, if nothing else, is a novel approach. Cleo's in her dressing room, topless, kissing herself in the mirror, when Jake, the owner of the club, comes into to sexually harass her.

It should be pointed out that we never see Cleo do anything in the club, so her presence there is a little puzzling. Meanwhile, Ed gets up on stage to do one of this amazing 60's loner folk tunes, Come Cry With Me.  And then Cleo goes home with some drunk fucker in the bar, waits until he passes out, and then empties his wallet and splits.

Meanwhile, Ed has a super-obnoxious rehearsal with a new guitar player. Cleo comes home during Ed's practice and gives him an awesomely disgusted stare. Then the camera cuts to the thermostat on the wall, for no reason at all.  And then to a painting on the wall.  Cleo storms out her bedroom in her bra- and later, topless - and that's pretty much the end of rehearsal. Ed tries to get a little something going with Cleo, but she tosses all of his clothes out of the room, and tells him to "Take his entertainment somewhere else!" Haha, what?

Then she gets the dough from John-the-john, and goes home to tell Ed she's quitting her job to become a real dancer. He takes this as a cue to bone. But then he just goes back to playing his guitar on the couch. Sex does take a lot of effort.

So Cleo goes to the club and quits. Jake, naturally, calls her a two-bit whore. And then a really out of shape stripper does her routine for the three customers in the joint.

And then Ed/Glyn shows up and does You Killed My Love, one of the greatest songs of all time. Of all time!

While this is happening, Cleo stalks the stripper and stabs her in the face outside of the police station. "You're not so pretty anymore!" She shrieks, leaving the girl disfigured and bleeding to death on the sidewalk.

So that was weird.

And then Ed goes out gambling with his buddy, using Cleo's ill-begotten loot. She should have hid it better, man.  Of course, he loses it all playing dice.  Cleo is forced to try and extort John for some more cash. She heads over to his office, and his mousy secretary Lotte (Laudet Torres) tells her she's pretty, so that's nice.

Then she seduces John's son, Brett (Hans Lohl, a psycho-eyed, Ed Wood grade 'actor'). And then she goes home and stabs Ed in the heart. While she does this, the camera cuts to weird pictures of people with big eyes on the wall.

So, she moves in with Brett, and they spend their days eating pizza and having awkward conversations at sidewalk cafes. On a leisurely stroll home, Cleo stops once again to admire the hideous fur coat in the window of the boutique. She's already killed several people just to get this coat. Seems like it would have been easier to just steal it.

To further this end, Cleo invites Lotte out for coffee to seduce her into a blackmail scheme, but she wont bite.
So then she goes over to see Jake to ask him for some dough. He gives a good one in the chops, so she slaps his eye out.  That's what it looks like, anyway. Then she calls John's wife and tells her that her husband's been having an affair with some chick named Denise. She does not take the news well. And then she goes home tp see Brett, who gives her that ugly fuckin' coat. She responds by taking off her top. Seems fair. Unfortunately, their love-making is cut short when Brett gets a call that his mom just had a heart attack. He rushes over to the hospital - Cleo declines to join him - and argues with dad.

Mom survives - just barely - and Brett goes home to find Cleo packing. Turns out Denise is her dominatrix alter-ego! In a sudden surge of consciousness, she admits everything to Brett, including making the phonecall. So he strangles her. And then she clocks him with an ashtray. And then John shows up. Things get ugly from there.

If you squint a little, Satan Was a Lady looks, remarkably, like a David Lynch film. Or at least one of David Lynch's hazy daydreams. It's filled with impossible characters doing strange and terrible things to each other for no valid reason. It's a sleazy slice of neo-noir that is cobbled, every step of the way, by Wishman's insistence on filming everything from the wrong angle, on jamming every moment with too-loud music and pitting real actors against local numbskulls, on cutting away to virtually anything at all, and with painting her protagonist as a heartless monster who will do virtually anything to get her way. Despite all the false moves - or perhaps because of them - this wobbly, woozy mess still works. She's not a legend for nothing, after all. The story is suitably tawdry, the sets non-existent, and casting is insane, but brilliantly so - Glyn Styler is a revelation as wig-wearing, booze-swilling cad Ed, the Edge looks like the angriest man in the world, and Lauren is a towering, man-killing glamazon that chomps the scenery like Tura Satana with a hormonal imbalance and a really bitchin' perm. It all add up to a singular sort of bad fun, the kind that only the mighty Doris Wishman could provide. Say what you will about her, but the lady had balls. While it is not as outrageous as some of Wishman's stuff - you can't really get much more over the top than her Chesty Morgan films - Satan Was a Lady is a fitting swansong for the grand dame of sexploitation.

- Ken McIntyre

Nude on the Moon (1961)

Directed by Doris Wishman
Starring Lester Brown, William Mayer, Marietta
Unrated
USA

"Here are your messages, Mr. Huntley."
"The devil with the messages. We're going to the moon!"

Sexploitation pioneer Doris Wishman was one of the very first film-makers to bring cinematic nudity to the general public; prior to her nudist camp cycle, it was grubby 8mm loops in your drunk uncle's basement or nothin'. Wishman's first film, 1960's Hideout in Sun, established the aesthetic: throw a few half-sketched characters into a situation that forces them to interact with nekkid people. In the case of Hideout, two bungling bank robbers take refuge from Johnny Law in the warm, sunny embrace of a nudist colony. In the more high-concept Nude on the Moon, two cockamamie 'scientists' build a rocket and visit the moon, which just happens to be populated by naked girls. Hey, it was 1962. Nobody had been there yet. Could be anything up there.

Wishman was often referred to as 'the female Ed Wood', and the reasons why become glaringly obvious right off the bat. Right away you know that something's amiss, because the entire (awesome) theme song is played over a static painting of the moon. No credits. The credits don't actually start until after the song is over. Never mind the middle, Doris starts padding the running time before the credits even roll. The song, "I'm Mooning Over You (My Little Moon Doll)" is performed by Ralph Young, later of popular 70's easy-listening duo, Sandler and Young. Once you hear it, there's a good chance it will never escape from your brain, so be forewarned.

After that languorous intro, we meet our two space stooges. Dr Jeff Huntley (Lester Brown, in his debut - and final - role) is an impetuous scientist with heady dreams. His partner, known simply as "Professor" (frequent Wishman collaborator William Mayer), is the more grounded of the two. Older and wiser, he goes along with Jeff's schemes, but complains pretty constantly.

Also on deck is Kathy (one-time, singularly-named actress Marietta), Jeff's secretary. Kathy clearly pines for Jeff - she even keeps a bizarre painted portrait of him in her desk drawer - but he barely knows she's alive. I'm not sure what the appeal is for Kathy, since Jeff is a dick, but love is notoriously blind.

Life plods along at the lab until one fateful day, an excited Jeff bursts in to tell the prof that his uncle just dies and left him a princely sum of one million dollars, an almost unfathomable amount in 1961. So what's he going to do with it? Buy a castle? No, he wants to use the dough to build a rocketship and fly to the fuckin' moon. While the professor is amused by this news, he's also a little concerned. He tells Jeff that maybe he should think about pursuing something a little less dangerous, like getting married - to Kathy, for example - and raising a family. Jeff tells the prof off. "I'm not interested in getting married," he says. "All I care about is science." Then he takes off. The professor takes this rare quiet moment to feed his pet monkey, which he keeps in a tiny little dog house.

I'm not sure why they keep brewing up chemicals if they're trying to build a rocketship to the moon, but that's what they do. They spend quite a bit of time staring at bubbling beakers and spouting scientific-sounding nonsense in order to meet their six-month deadline for the moon trip.

Finally, the fateful day arrives. The professor and Jeff drive out to god knows where to take their trip to the moon. They open up a gate that has a "Huntley Rocket Project" on it and stare at something off-camera.
"Well, there it is," says the professor. "Isn't it beautiful?"
How would I know? You have not shown it to us, sir.
So then they both climb some scaffolding that does look like it could be a rocketship bay, only there is clearly no rocketship attached to it. They climb in, tell mission control that they're "all set", and then they shoot off into space. This effect is achieved, naturally, with a model rocket. By the way, no spacesuits for our heroes, no way. They prefer denim for space flight.

Things seem to be going ok, but then the professor, followed quickly by Jeff, falls into a sudden slumber. When they wake up, they've landed safely on the moon.

Now, they put on their spacesuits - they're Ace Frehley sorta deals, with motorcycle helmets and rubber breathing tubes. Naturally, the astronauts are taken aback when they get off the ship to find trees, grass, and blue skies outside. They expected the usual: dust and rocks, or perhaps green cheese. They wander around for awhile and discover that there's chunks of solid gold littering the ground. The prof wants to scoop a bunch of it up to take back with them so that they can use it to finance their next trip, but grumpy Jeff insists they move on, as they are there for "science, not gold." Reluctantly, the professor agrees, and they wander around some more. They encounter a man-made wall with a ladder propped up against it.

"Look, there's a ladder," says Professor Obvious. And so he climbs it.
On the other side of the wall, there's a park where topless men and women (and a couple naked kids) frolic. A couple of brawny moon-men (you can tell they're from the moon because they have pipe cleaners on their heads) spot the peeping prof and snatch him.

Jeff, who is still standing there on the opposite side of the wall, finally decides to climb the ladder and see what's up. Naturally, he gets snatched by the no-nonsense moon men as well. Soon, both astronauts find themselves locked up in a coral grotto. That's when it hits you: everything in this screwy place is made of coral. Maybe it is the moon!

Actually, Nude was shot at Coral Castle in Miami, a popular tourist spot with an awesome/sad backstory. Seems there was this Latvian teenager, Edward Leedskalnin, who was engaged to his true love, sixteen year old Agnes Scruffs. For reasons unknown, Scruffs jilted our man Eddie, so he left Latvia and ran away to Florida to escape his heartbreak. When he got there - in 1920 - he started obsessively building a structure out of coral. He continued to build this odd "Coral castle" for 28 years, usually at night, away from the prying eyes of his neighbors. How he moved the incredibly large and heavy slabs of coral back and forth remains a mystery, but build and build he did. He eked out a very modest living by granting tours of the property, but otherwise kept to himself. One day in 1951, Eddie started to feel ill, she hopped a bus to the hospital. When he got there, he found out he was suffering from malnutrition, and died three days later. He left no real explanation for why he dedicated thirty years of his life to the Coral Castle, but then tourists asked him, he'd tell them it was for his "Sweet sixteen". And that is officially the most heartbreaking fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. Billy's Idol's 1986 hit "Sweet Sixteen" was about Eddie. The video even opens with a shot of him in front of the Coral Castle.

Anyway, ten years later, Doris rented the joint and stocked it with booby girls. Back to the story.

So the guys are locked up. Meanwhile, the bosomy queen of the topless moon people (Surprise! It's Marietta again!) has a telekinetic meeting with them (one of whom happens to be about 60) and tells them she's not sure what's up with these new dudes, but she'll have a meeting with the Great Council and figure it out.

So then she has said meeting at a big rock table, but it happens to be with the exact same crew. Maybe the Great Council was busy. She decides the Earth Men are friendly - one blonde disagrees, but what is she gonna do? She's not the fuckin' queen - so they let them out.

Happy to have their freedom, Jeff and the prof wander around, taking photos of rocks and trees. They're surrounded by topless girls, and they take pictures of rocks and trees. Meanwhile the girls do their best to distract them by fiddling with their spacesuits, playing catch really slowly, splashing around in the pond, and taking naps. A couple of the girls goof on the prof's dumb mustache. Moon humor.

The fellas get enough "interesting data" together (Honestly, no notes are needed, are they? You just go back home and say, 'There's naked girls and hunks of gold on the moon!', and that'll pretty much explain everything), but before they split, Jeff wants to hit on the queen. While he does this, "Moon Doll" plays on the scratchy soundtrack again. Jeff gives the Moon Queen a candy bar, which she gobbles up while it's still in the wrapper. This cracks him up. The two fall instantly in love.

The grumpy old prof comes by and tells Jeff that it's time for them to go, since they're running out of oxygen. Dunno why they'd need oxygen, since the moon appears to have the same atmosphere as Miami, but regardless, Jeff says he doesn't want to go back. He wants to stay there and feed candybars to the queen.
"I'm in love," he says. "For the first time in my life, I feel for someone, and it's wonderful."
The queen feels it too, but she knows their love is doomed. So she bonks him gently on the head and sends him on his way.

Jeff and the professor make it their rocket and blast off back to Earth. Jeff's sore about having to leave the queen, but even worse, he forgot his fuckin' camera, and the prof forgot his satchel, so there's no proof of their trip. When they get back, the professor has some scientists look at the rocket ship, figuring that might convince them, and they tell him they don't even think the thing could get off the ground, never mind go to the moon. Now the prof isn't sure where the fuck they went.


Jeff has no regrets, though. Especially when Kathy walks in, and he suddenly notices her resemblance to a certain candy-freak from outer space.

While its never reaches any heights of outrage or high-camp, the good-naturedly goofy Nude on the Moon is still a howl to watch. From the wretched acting of the two leads to the mismatched shots (Shot one: it's day. Shot two: it's night), Nude is threadbare, nonsensical, and thoroughly charming.

Sci-fi sex-flicks would get weirder and raunchier as time went on (see Flesh Gordon, Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders, Zeta One, or even Bimbo Cheerleaders from Outer Space for a few prime examples), but Doris, as she was often wont to do, did it first. Ten years later, she was making some of the most over-the-top sexploitation films of the 70's - and that's saying something - but Nude is very much a fluffy, lighter-than-air Nudie Cutie. Fun stuff.

Here's the trailer!

- Ken McIntyre