Dr. Christina of Sweden (1970)

Directed by Nick Philips
Starring Ushi Digard, Anna Travers
Rated X
USA

Dr. Christina is the "work" of infamous nihilist-punk grindhouse director Nick Philips, the sleazedealer behind loony fatsploitation slasher Criminally Insane, to say nothing of the self-explanatory Fraulein Leather, or the depressive psyche-horror Satan’s Black Wedding. Philips’ films are so grubby and heartless that they’re almost anti-fun, a black hole of sexless despair that suck the joy right out of your eyeballs. This one almost manages to claw its way out pf the black pit of Philipsylvania, mostly due to the inclusion of one Uschi Digard, the buxotic Swedish jawdropper known mostly for her turn as the pneumatic barnyard baller in Supervixen. I don’t know about you, but I’m willing to watch just about any piece of sewer trash if her magnificent udders and marble-mouthed accent are involved. Uschi shows up halfway through in a brief lesbian scene, making sweet, furry, freaky 70’s love with some chick on a ratty couch. And that’s the best part of the movie.

The rest involves a Swedish magazine columnist who writes under the name Dr. Christina wandering around Paris, jotting stuff in her notebook, taking a train, sightseeing, and every 20 minutes or so, stumbling into a spliced-in lesbian scene. I should note that there is no dialogue in this film, just the monotone narration of the good Doc gamely combating the squawking jazz score. Does that sound like fun to you? Fuckin’ Nick Philips, man. He’s done it to me again.

But hey, at least there’s a bonus featurette on the DVD called Sex Nurse that has some blowjobs!

- Ken McIntyre

Cindy and Donna (1970)

Directed by Robert Anderson
Starring Debbie Osborne, Nancy Ison, Alice Friedland
Rated X
U.S.A.

This forgotten little drive-in diversion first appeared in 1970, one of numerous titles churned out by the Crown International Pictures factory. It follows the usual skin & sin formula, with more emphasis on the peepshow than the plot than you’ll find in other titles like The Teacher or Pick-Up or Malibu High.

Is perhaps a tad more scandalous than the usual fare, too, with underaged protagonists, sorta-kinda incest, sorta-kinda lesbianism, and other more obviously exploitative elements, all of which helped get Cindy and Donna tagged with an early “X” by the MPAA.

Things begin with 15-year-old Cindy (Debbie Osborne) enjoying an idyllic end-of-summer walk on the beach with her boyfriend, Bob. Their stroll is accompanied by the film’s theme song, a syrupy dollop of pop in which the singer advises “Don’t be afraid to discover, Cindy / Don’t be afraid of a lover, Cindy” and the like.

In other words, the pressure on Cindy begins from the get-go. She and Bob make out a little, then Cindy goes home and is bored for a little while.


Soon her stepsister, the 17-year-old Donna (Nancy Ison) comes home. Cindy quizzes Donna about the boy with whom she’s been hanging out, Greg (Tom Koben), while Donna drinks some booze. Then their mother, Harriet, arrives.

She, too, immediately hits the bottle, a harmonica blasting away as if to mark her as “southern” or “white trash” or something. She speaks with a weird-sounding, highly affected accent, almost as though she’s trying to sound British. Or maybe trying to sound not British.


Harriet is kind of a spectacle, really. Interestingly, for the IMDB entry the obscure actress who played her (Suzy Allen) jumped on to comment on the film. “I agree that Cindy and Donna was a terrible movie,” she writes, “but the stagehands and crew said I was the best actor in the movie!”

One suspects the stagehands might have been being nice. Then again, it isn’t as though the best-actor-in-the-movie title should have been especially coveted by anyone here. Allen says a few more things about the making of the film, which sounds like it was quite fun for her. Her post is under the name “britwit” so perhaps she is British after all.


Meanwhile Dad, Ted Weeks (Max Manning) -- Cindy’s father, and Donna’s stepfather -- is driving home from work. He can’t help but eye the legs of female drivers from the cab of his truck...


...thereby rapidly alerting us to his “dirty old man” status.


He ends up stopping at a bar where he gets a drink and talks to some other dirty old men about this “unbelievable doll” they want to tell him all about.

Then comes a quick, unannounced cut to a strip club, where we are invited to ogle an oily Alice (Alice Friedland).


An unknown here (in fact, she’s uncredited), Friedland would later appear in some small roles in high profile flicks such as John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) where she played one of the “De-Lovlies.”

Her dance lingeringly lasts for three solid minutes, the lengthiness of the scene obviously vital to the plot.

We cut back to Ted, who has left the bar and ends up calling Alice from a phone booth and arranging a meeting later that night. (One of the other dirty old men has given him her number.)

Back home Cindy is still bored. She undresses and puts on a nightie. That takes a couple more minutes.


Then Dad comes home and he, too, hits the booze without hesitation. When he hugs Cindy, she asks if he’s drunk. “You gotta be a little bit drunk to get through the day” he explains.

We watch him then linger over Donna in her bra a little longer than he should, after which he has a drunken shouting match with his wife. She knows all about his “little whooahs,” but that doesn’t deter him much as soon he’s out the door and heading to his rendezvous with Alice.

We hang out with Cindy some while she takes her top off and is bored some more. Then we look in on dirty Ted with Alice who after some small talk quickly get it on.


“You’re blowing my mind, you know that!” says Ted.

Meanwhile, Donna sneaks out the window to meet Greg for a midnight frolic. Cindy sneaks out, too… easy enough since Dad is away and Mom is passed out blotto. Donna and Greg get high and engage in some dimly-lit, semi-clad groping in his car while Cindy watches, then Cindy returns to her bedroom. She rolls around by herself in the bed a little gropingly, too, then frustratingly, teen-angstingly exhales.


Back to Ted and Alice, where Alice is showing Ted some magazines. She’s a model, too, she explains. “I'm kind of a star, you know. Do you know how many men buy these things just to look at me…? It makes me feel kind of creative.”


More small talk, during which we learn she’s 17. “Same age as your daughter,” she notes pointedly, referring to Donna.

We move on to the next day. Cindy chats with her friend Karen at school about what she saw the night before. "I felt like it was really ugly and offensive," she tells Karen, going on to explain how she and Bob haven't gone that far. Karen is only slightly more worldly-seeming than Cindy, her lecturing to Cindy about love-making revealing her to be a bit naive as well.

Cut to Harriet, getting drunk at a bar. Hey, it’s five o’clock somewhere and oh by the way what the hell are YOU lookin’ at? She comes on to a couple of old dudes who play along a little then unceremoniously dump her in her car.


That night Cindy writes a letter to Bob, seemingly away at school, in which she expresses various frustrations.

A drunken harpsichord then announces the drunken arrival of Ted, also frustrated because Alice wasn’t available for a second straight night of fun. He creeps into Donna’s room and kind of shockingly joins his stepdaughter in bed while a horrified Cindy looks on.


The next day Cindy commiserates some more with Karen about her screwed-up family. Then we see Donna meet up again with Greg. She wants weed, but only has five bucks, and he gets her to agree to a favor to make up the rest.

At this point Ted and Harriet take an unexpected business trip to a convention in Las Vegas which they only tell Cindy and Donna about moments before leaving.

They leave, again weirdly accompanied by those banjos and harmonicas. We’ll look in on them again a couple of times -- finding Ted looking and acting like he’s ready to blow his mind out in a car after being forced to endure Harriet -- although they’re essentially riding out of the picture.


What’s left? Well, Cindy takes a shower. Karen comes over and they go to the beach, where Karen shows Cindy how to put on suntan lotion in order to attract the fellas.


The trick works, and soon they find themselves with a couple of horny dudes in their groovy love shack by the shore. Karen is into it, but Cindy not so much.


Eventually Cindy has her way and they leave.

Meanwhile we learn that the favor Greg had asked of Donna involves her posing for some topless photos, and the session quickly devolves into a couple of other horny dudes taking turns engaging in some semi-nude couch wrestling with their model.


Back to Karen and Cindy, who get high and wrestle some themselves.


That goes on a while, complete with freaky-deaky echoes helping to indicate their baked status. They talk about what happened over breakfast the next morning, with Karen assuring Cindy she was “marvelous” but that “you’ve no idea what it's like until you’ve tried it with a guy. I mean it’s wild! It’s the greatest.”

Cindy remains skeptical, but when Greg comes around for Donna a little later, Cindy’s trying the suntan lotion thing again.


Could it be? Is Cindy is finally no longer afraid to discover? No longer afraid of a lover? And, well, is anybody gonna face any consequences for this uninterrupted sequence of hedonism, or are lessons never gonna be learned?


While Cindy and Donna isn’t exactly what I’d call a swinging good time, it is certainly engaging enough for those with a tolerance and/or penchant for low-budget ’70s sexploitation, with crazy Ted and Harriet adding a touch of added camp value and a few groovy jams along the way.

- Triple S

Bat Pussy (1973)

Directed by?
Starring Dora Dildo, Sam, Buddy
Rated XXX
USA

"How does it feel?"
"Terrible."

There are no credits on either end of Bat Pussy. It's a complete mystery, perhaps the world's last truly 'underground film', found in a trash heap somewhere and resurrected by the kind/cruel souls at Something Weird Video. An ultra-cheap porn quickie with no production values to speak of, Bat Pussy was most likely in and out of the XXX theaters in a day upon its release. Certainly, it does not work, on any level, as masturbation fodder or even kitschy erotica. It is, however, stunningly weird, grubby, and ugly, an unintentionally hilarious bit of homespun cinematic folk-art so senseless, so maddeningly random in its execution that it very nearly approaches some sort of terrible genius. I can only imagine what the raincoat crowd thought of it in 1973, stumbling into some rathole porn theater on the Deuce, hoping for a little light jack-off material and getting nearly 60 minutes of two drunken idiots yanking on each others genitals and spitting out slurred insults/threats like "You never can get a hard on, so I have to use a rubber dick, you son of a bitch!" and "I'm gonna fuck my secretary right in the ass and then come home and make you suck my dick!" The next day, they must have thought they'd dreamt it, unless they just hung themselves in the mens room stall during intermission, convinced that they'd never again pop a boner after witnessing such a nauseating display. Not surprisingly, Bat Pussy has garnered a small-but-ferocious cult following of drunkards and sleaze-beasts over the years. The gang at the AV Maniacs forum even had a "Bat Pussy Dirty Motherfuckers" club for awhile back there, complete with membership cards and fridge magnets. There was also a petition being passed around for awhile to get Bat Pussy re-released on DVD. It worked, sorta, since Something Weird released it as a DVD-R, coupled with another feature, Baby Bubbles. I'm assuming a Blu-Ray is in the works somewhere, but for now, thank goodness for Something Weird Video. For without them, how would we know what the worst/best porn film ever made was?

Buddy, a drunken hillbilly with a Duane Eddy haircut sits, naked, at his kitchen table, guzzling whiskey (for real, from the sounds of it), and reading Screw magazine. His freckly, pug-faced, beehive-hairdo'd wife Sam - who may or may not be a prostitute - sits in their conjugal bed, begging him to fuck her. The copy of Screw would suggest New York City, but their accents suggest...well, swamp people, really.
"Wow," says Buddy, staring at the smudgy pictorials in the newspaper. "Would you look at what they're doin'? Shoot, I wouldn't submit you to something like that," he grumbles to Sam.
"Although I'd like to!"

She finally coaxes him to bed, and starts slime-sucking his flaccid penis. It looks like a sickly pink eel that just wants to die in peace. That goes on for awhile, and then they switch to the '69' position, just like Buddy saw in Screw.
"Darlin', you're gonna have to move your sweet leg," he offers, politely.
This goes on, mercilessly, for quite some time. Apparently Buddy is just now realizing the erotic potential of his partner. He usually prefers, from what Sam implies, "Girls at the office". Of course, he is still not erect after ten minutes of her slobbery suck-job, but whatever. Interestingly, the couple get increasingly hostile towards one another the more time they spend together. Sam starts to call Buddy a "Bastard" with increasing disdain in her voice, while Buddy - gamely trying to perform cunnilingus on his woman - says crazy shit like "Goddamnit, stop coming in my mouth!" and "Every time I run my tongue up your pussy it comes out your asshole. What's the goddammed deal with that?"

Meanwhile, at Bat Pussy Headquarters (scribbled on a piece of cardboard, taped to a cement wall), "Dora Dildo", an angry, undernourished looking woman in a dirty nightgown, lies on a grungy sofa, absent-mindedly grabbing at her crotch. The narrator informs us that she's waiting for her super-sensors to kick in. They tell her when a crime is about to be committed. How does this manifest itself?
"She can always tell," says the narrator, "When her twat begins to twitch".

So, I guess it starts twitching, because Dora gets up and starts pacing. "Somebody is making a fuck film in my holy Gotham city!" She growls. "I better put on my Bat Pussy uniform!"
She whips off her dingy negligee, and starts to pull on her puke-green costume, all the while muttering to herself: "Dirty motherfuckers trying to make a fuck film in my fuckin' city..."

Meanwhile, the two hillbillies continue to flop around awkwardly on the bed.
"That ain't a pussy you got," Buddy says at one point, "That's an ol' warsh tub."
Romance! This goes on for a long time, the two of them trading back nonsensical insults while they paw at each other's privates.

"You wouldn't know how to eat somebody," says Sam, "Even if you was fuckin' your own grandmother."

Meanwhile, Bat Pussy emerges from her secret lair - an outhouse - straddling one of those hippity-hop bouncy balls kids loved in the early 70's. She proceeds to bounce slowly through a park, ostensibly on her way to thwart crime. Amazingly enough, she manages to bounce her way right into the very lap of criminality. Some dude is man-handling a woman near a clump of trees. Bat Pussy sneaks up behind him and bashes his brains in with her bouncy red ball All of this is shot from a squinty long-distance angle, The cameraman had to be a hundred feet away during these scenes. Why? Why would this happen?

Anyway, we cut to more squabbling from Sam and Buddy, juxtaposed with scenes of Bat Pussy bouncing down the side of the highway, giant 70's cars carelessly zipping by her.

Buddy, for some insane reason, decides they could "Make a fortune" if he took pictures of Sam's rancid red vagina and send them to Screw, so he pulls out his camera and starts snapping away. On cue, in barges Bat Pussy, demanding Buddy put the camera down.
"See?" Says Sam, completely misinterpreting the situation. "I knew you were cheating on me. You been messing around with this chick."

Bat Pussy effectively ends the photo-session, but does nothing to stop the horrible carnal display. Within seconds, Buddy has her stripped naked and thrashing around on the bed as the third leg in their mortifying three-way sex-blunder.
"Suck Bat Woman's pussy!" Demands a clearly demented Buddy. "We're all gonna live together now. Suck her pussy!"

There's more naked wrestling to endure. Interestingly, this part of the film looks like it is literally covered in vomit. One of the girls starts coughing a lot. Sam pulls out a flesh colored dildo and starts working on herself, and later on,on Bat Pussy. Buddy never manages to penetrate anybody, although he does accidentally knock Bat Pussy off the bed at one point. And then he flashes a panicked look at the cameraman, unsure of whether he just broke the actress's neck or not.

And then it ends, rather abruptly, with an unsatisfied Bat Pussy pulling her uniform back on and storming out of the apartment.
"Fuck you," says Sam, summing up the experience. "Fuck you in the ass."

Way, way better than The Dark Knight, Bat Pussy is Mandatory viewing, clearly. A once in a lifetime experience. Twice would surely kill you.

Bat Pussy is available from Something Weird Video.

Clip: Bat Pussy to the rescue!

- Ken McIntyre

Flesh Gordon (1974)

Directed by Howard Ziehm
Starring Jason Williams, Suzanne Fields, William Hunt
Rated X
USA

"Nobody burns my ass and gets away with it."

Flesh Gordon began like most of Howie Ziehm's movies, with a bunch of willing sex-hippies freaking freely. But after a troubling run-in with the law, Mr. Z changed the film's course mid-stream, hired a special-effects team, and accidentally crafted an enduring sci-fi cult hit. It's a long story, and Ziehm tells it better than I can - listen to the commentary track on the DVD for the hilariously awful true tale - but in a nutshell, the producers had to prove they weren't making a sex film to beat an obscenity charge, so they came up with the cockamamie "It's a sexy spoof of the old Flash Gordon serials" angle, and Flesh Gordon was born.

As our twisted tale opens, the world is in the grips of sex madness, and no one knows why. A group of scientists host a press conference.
"I think it was bad Passover tuna fish," suggests one brainiac.
"Tuna fish? Tuna fish? This guy's got mercury on the brain," deadpans brainiac number 2.
The head scientist, Professor Gordon (John Hoyt, RIP), announces that he's dispatched his son to the Himalayas to figure it all out. Why the Himalayas? Well, why not?

Prof's son Flesh (Jason Williams, Cheerleaders Wild Weekend) and Dale Order (Suzanne Fields, The Stewardesses) are both on that fateful Himalayan-bound flight when the plane is struck with Sex Madness. Bolts of red light strike the plane while a quite-annoying "Whatwhatwhat!" sound drones away on the soundtrack. Everybody starts ripping their clothes off.
"Sir, I've got a boner!" Yells the co-pilot.
The two pilots head to back of the plane to join in on the orgy. Flesh is the only one that's unaffected. At first he tries to land the plane himself, but can't, so he grabs Dale and they parachute out just as the plane goes down. She blows him on the way down. Sex madness!

When they reach the ground, they run into eccentric scientist Flexi Jerkoff (Joseph Hudgins), who has built a penis shaped rocketship that will take him to the planet where the Sex Ray is coming from. Flesh and Dale agree to go with him, so they screw in some lightbulbs, and blast off. Unfortunately, they fly right into the sex ray, and have a boisterous three-way.
"Another incident like that, and I'll be ready for the old folks home!" Says Flexi.

Afterward, they spy anthe offending sex-ray planet and decide to check it out. It is called Planet Porno, and it is not friendly. One of Porno's attack-ships shoots Flexi's penis-rocket, and they're forced to crash-land. When they get out of the ship, a bunch of half-naked Roman soldiers start shooting at them with laser guns, so they duck into a cave, where they're menaced by a Penisaurus. A bunch of them, in fact. Penisauri? Dale narrowly escape from...I'm not sure what. Monster rape, I guess. Then they're captured by the gay Roman dudes, and brought back to Emperor Wang's palace, where an orgy is taking place. An orgy is always taking place at Wang's.

Wang (William Dennis Hunt, in seriously creepy Fu Manchu drag) decides he wants Dale for his bride, which does not sit with Flesh. Not one for competition, Wang sends Flesh off to the 'Sex Depleter', but Amora, Queen of Magic (Mycle Brandy, The Geek) shows up to stop him. They make a deal - if Flesh survives in the arena, he will be spared Sex Depletion. Flesh fights three monster girls with orange frightwigs, and then the queen nabs him, and they disappear in a puff of smoke.

Flesh wakes up in the Queen's swan-shaped ship, and they make sweet love while a green monster watches. Wang finds out what they're up to, and has her ship shot down. Meanwhile, he stages his wedding with Dale. It includes bottomless cheerleaders. Also, he wears the wedding dress.

Also meanwhile, Jerkoff escapes from Wang's palace, and finds Flesh. He tells Flesh about the wedding, and then the dead queen shows up to give them her magic pasties. They're the only thing in the galaxy that can stop Wang and his "insidious schemes".

After Scooby-dooing around in the forest for awhile, Flash and Flexi burst in on the wedding, but they're too late: Dale's been snatched by the Amazon Underworld. Wang pulls a lever, and our two heroes fall through a trap door to who-know-where.

Captain Nelly (sexploitation legend Candy Samples) - a peg-legged, hook-handed, cigar chomping pirate queen, explains to Dale that the Amazon Underworld is dedicated to overthrowing Wang and his regime. Dale gets strapped down to a table and then a black chick with a giant afro has sex with her. Flesh and Flexi, who are stuck in a pit, hear Dale's cries, and try to figure out how to save her from the sweet lesbianic lovemaking. Flesh's idea is to just run into the wall. It does not work. Flexi uses the magic pasty. It busts down the wall, and they save Dale. For about a minute.

And then a stop motion metal cricket monster shows up, and Flesh battles with it. It totally kicks Flesh's ass, but Prince Precious (Lance Larsen, dressed up like a gay Robon Hood) shows up and shoots it with an arrow. The prince explains how he's the rightful heir to the throne. Porno used to be the Pleasure Planet, you see, and everybody had an awesome time. But then Wang, an impotent botanist, invented the Sex Ray, because he couldn't stand everybody else having a good time, and used it to enslave the planet.

Flesh and Precious decide to band together, and, after a quick visit to the forest kingdom (another orgy, this time in the woods), they head off to the palace. Jerkoff has developed a counter-ray that will blast Wang's sex ray to smithereens. Unfortunately, one of Wang's henchmen has infiltrated Precious' gang of merry men, and he sabotages their mission by stealing one of the magic pasties and jumping out of the ship with a plastic umbrella.

Our heroes narrowly escape crashing, and make it back inside Wang's palace. Unfortunately, they take a wrong turn and end up getting flushed down a giant toilet. Wang celebrates with a song and dance number. Everybody does the bunnyhop, and then they have yet another orgy. At some point, Wang accidentally inserts the magic pasty into some chick's vagina, and it gets stuck there. Flesh and his pals manage to swim their way out of the toilet, and while Flesh tries to retrieve the pasty from the girl's crotch, Wang lets loose his rapist robots. They have spinning corkscrew penises. All you have to do is turn a dial to stop 'em, though. Bad design flaw.

And then a smooth-talking giant monster (Coach himself, Craig T Nelson) shows up. He snatches Dale.
"This is a tower of murder," he says. "This is where I hang out."
The monster yanks off Dale's dress.

"I just wanna look at your tits," he tells her.
Who knows what he has planned for her?

So...will Flesh save her, defeat the monster and Wang, and the world?

Seems likely.

If you're looking for boners, Flesh Gordon is not the place to find them. With the possible exception of Fritz the Cat, it's probably the least erotic X-for-sex film of the 70's. There is no explicit humping, just lots and lots of hairy black bush. But for sheer disco-era weirdness, it's a must-see. You literally never know what's going to happen next in this film, and so you remain glued to the screen, a near constant 'what-the-fuck look plastered on your confused face.

Many of the FX guys that worked on Flesh later went on to the very heights of the industry - famed and fabled monster maker Rick Baker was on board, as well as several future Nightmare on Elm Street alumni, and one-half of Industrial Light and Magic, and all that talent is evident in the myriad of weird creatures and surreal set designs that litter this loony film. It's no masterpiece, but you do probably need to see this mess before you die.

Ziehm went right back to porn after this one, and didn't manage to crank out the sequel - Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders - until the late 1980's. It did not have the impact that this one did. That's probably because people stopped eating fistfuls of pills all day by then.

Clip: Flesh Gordon trailer!

Availability: Flesh Gordon is available on DVD.

- Ken McIntyre