Satan's Cheerleaders (1977)

Directed by Greydon Clark
Starring Hillary Horan, Kerry Sherman, John Ireland, Yvonne DeCarlo
Rated R
USA

"Kill...kill...mutilate!"

Greydon Clark had already given the world the masterful blaxploitation classic Black Shampoo (1975) and the somewhat less-masterful but still sorta-awesome blax/'Namsploitation knuckle-dragger The Bad Bunch (1976) when he concocted this delirious slice of drive-in madness. Talk about being on a roll. Satan's Cheerleaders was destined for infamy on it's name alone - there's already been a couple bands and an actual cheer squad (sorta) that's appropriated the moniker, and let's face it, it's just fun to say - but beyond it obvious shlock appeal, this is actually a tremendously fun film.

Satan's Cheerleaders is actually two movies for the price of one. It's like a vinyl LP: there's the cheerleader side, and the Satan side. Up first, the breezy teen sex comedy. We open with a frolic on the beach. We meet our four heroines: Patti, the vacuous blonde (Kerry Sherman), Debbie (Alisa Powell), the slutty one, Sharon (Sherry Marks) , the half-intelligent one, and Chris (adorable, pint-sized Hillary Horan), the feisty one.

They're practicing their cheers under the watchful eye of their coach, wide-eyed innocent Ms. Johnson (Jaqueline Cole), when the football team shows up to goose the girls and cause all manner of teenage hijinks. Then the coach (Joseph Carlo), an antiquated 50's throwback with Brylcreem in his hair, shows up to grouse and grimace. And then the rival football team (and their cheerleaders) show up to kick sand around. Ms. Johnson proposes a 'chicken fight', and our girls decisively win. But does the rivalry end there? Oh, no.

The next day the girls are goofing around on the field with star quarterback Stevie (Lane Caudell). He starts to take off his pants, and I'm pretty sure they're planning a gang-bang, but then the rival team shows up again to pelt the girls with water balloons. So far, none of this appears to be at all scripted. It's just a bunch of girls wailing on each other. Pretty awesome. The movie could've just continued on like this, and it would have been a winner. But then Billy the Janitor shows up, and things really get nuts.

Billy (Jack Kruschen) is a strutting, barrel-chested 60 year old with an extravagant mustache and a workshirt bedazzled with rhinestones. He looks like a cross between a gay Santa Claus and legendary ladies-man and cult movie director Ted V Mikels. Billy is the classic creepy, put-upon janitor who stutters and mutters under his breath about who he's gonna "Show these r-r-r-rotten kids someday." Oh, and will he ever.


But first, since we are still balls-deep in the teen sex comedy portion of this evening's entertainment, there's the obligatory locker room/shower scene. Seems there's a big game across town tonight, and no place to change there, so the girls'll have to do it now. A likely story, but who cares? The cheerleaders lather up and dance around suggestively in the shower for a good five minutes. Unfortunately, we must detract a couple points because Horan, who clearly has the best rack of the quartet, is the only one who doesn't get naked. That smarted a little. Oh, and Billy has a secret hole in the shower wall where he can peep on the girls. Good one, Bill.

A bunch of mindless stuff happens, but the important bit is when Billy snoops around in the girls locker room after they leave, grabbing dirty towels and chanting incantations while fingering a primitive pentagram necklace. Could Billy be...a Satanist? Yep.

The girls head out for the big game and barely get out of the school's parking lot before they're run off the road. They're completely stumped as to what to do next. Sharon stares at the hood of the car and says "There has to be a motor under here!" Indeed.

Luckily, Billy shows up in his pick-up truck and offers them a ride. The girls are naturally uneasy about it, but with limited options (not really, but whatever), they decide to take him up on it. As Patti climbs into the back of the truck, Billy violently grabs her ass and pushes her in. You can practically hear Kerry Sherman screaming "What the fuck?" at Kruschen after they got the take. Ms Johnson rides up front, and Billy gets grabby with her, too. Something is very rotten in Denmark. Ms Johnson demands he let them out of the truck, but he refuses, driving them to a remote bit of woods where they stumble on a hilariously cheesy sacrificial altar. Basically, it's a stone and a stick and a dimestore monster mask. Still, it holds some strange powers over them.

Everyone falls into a trance, and Patti strips naked. She climbs onto the altar and lies down. There's a psychedelic light show and some jarring monster sounds. And then Billy drops dead.

The girls snap out of it and take off. The run into John Carradine, who was already taking any job that came his way at this point. He's the local psychotic bum who tries to warn them off. They do not listen, and eventually run into Sheriff Bub(legendary character actor John Ireland). Sheriff Beezle Bub. Beezle-Bub, who owns two Doberman pinchers, named Lucifer and Diablo. And yet, no warning bells go off for our heroines. What are you gonna do? They're cheerleaders, man.

Bub has a weird wife named Emmy (Lily Munster herself, Yvonne DeCarlo), who assures the girls that all will soon be well and gives them some tea. Satanic tea! This distracts the girls enough for Bub to go out, revive Billy, kick his ass and kill him again, rape Ms. Johnson (!), and then gather all the local loonies to prepare for a black mass of some stripe.

The girls finally get it and bail, splitting up in different directions, all in the hopes of finding a phone, or at least some non devil-worshipping local to help them out. Patti stays back to stare down Emmy. Chris gets to a phone booth, but there's a long-haired cowboy in there. After banging on the door, he finally lets her in, but then snips the telephone cord. Only then does she notice that he's wearing the devil-necklace. Debbie finds a weird-mustachioed stuttering farmer digging a ditch, and when she asks him for help, he flashes his Satanic jewelry, as well. Sharon runs into a chicken-feeding monk and immediately falls to her knees, clutching his robe and begging for help. When he rebuffs her, she looks up to see his necklace.
"Jesus," she says.
"Not quite," he laughs.

The girls are rounded up by the half-assed demonic cabal and marched to the barn. They're left there with Lucifer and Diablo standing guard outside. By the way, I cannot express to you how awesome the camera angles are in this film. Cinematographer Dean Cundey has a jaw-dropping resume - he's shot everything from Black Shampoo to Jurassic Park, with scads of cult classics like Rollerboogie and The Thing in-between - but, quite arguably, this is his masterpiece. Every single chance he has in this film to shoot a cheerleader's panty-clad ass or bouncing boobs, he takes it. Dean Cundey, we salute you.

Where was I? Oh, the girls escape when Patti hypnotizes the dogs, and they take off in the woods. They skulk around in the dark for awhile, until they hear a noise in the distance. "I hope it's only like, two guys," feisty Chris says, "So we can overpower them." Unfortunately, it's the whole backwoods Satanic army. They corral the girls once more and march 'em to the sacrificial altar.

Meanwhile, back at the Beezle Bub ranch, High Priestess Emmy has had about enough of these fuckin' cheerleaders as she's going to take. Her gobbledy-gook chanting ("Aba Tura Satana!") suddenly becomes far more pointed.

"Answer my prayers, Satan," She yelps. "Kill...mutilate!" As she says this, the room glows red and dishes start to rattle. The whole room starts shaking, in the most low-budget, cost-effective, shoddy-Wednesday-night-TV-movie way possible, i.e. some dude shakes a houseplant, his arm just out of the camera's range, and the curtains, via transparent string, start to twist themselves up in a most (non) alarming way. Emmy's incantations reach their crescendo as her two bloodthirsty dogs burst through the windows (this is repeated half a dozen times in quick succession; it is, after all, a money shot) and advance on her. So that's pretty much the end of Emmy.

Back at the sacrificin' stump, the sheriff and his motley crew of mustache farmers and cretins are ready to get the evening's entertainment rolling. One by one, he tosses the girls on the slab, asking the big Satan head which one the virgin is. The cheerleaders find this highly amusing. "Is she the maiden, o master?" asks Bub, shoving Chris towards the rock.
"I'm no maiden, man," Chris laughs. I've been a cheerleader for three years!"

Well, big shocker: none of the girls are virgins. Also, Patti's pissed.
"You toad, you worm, you crawling miserable man!" She snarls at Bub, explaining that there really was a virgin in their midst - 26 year old Ms. Johnson - but since he went and raped her in the woods, well, the whole virgin sacrifice scheme is well-fucked. Bub, at this point, is quite confused. "Look," he says, pulling a tape recorder out of thin air, "This is where the sound was coming from!" (There was a lot of demonic wooshing going on). "It's just a trick!" I'm sure I missed something, but I don't really get why he was conning the entire town into a bogus Satanic cult. Unless, of course, it was all a ruse to fuck cheerleaders. That, I would totally understand. Anyway, unfortunately for Bub and his buffoons, Patti really is channeling the powers of darkness. And they are all about to feel her wrath.

In the typically fuck-everything epilogue, Patti, now proudly wearing the macramé faux-pentagram and permanently stuck with the crazy-girl gaze, stomps onto the playing field during a crucial moment in the game against Baker High. Stuporstar quarterback Stevie has twisted his ankle, and all appears lost. Patti simply stares at his leg, and he jumps up, good as new.
"I've got a feeling we're going to be winning a lot of games from now on," beams Ms. Johnson.
As if demonic possession is a positive trait in a cheerleader. The brilliance of this throwaway ending is that it flies directly in the face of 70's demon-fear. Exorcism be damned, baby. The devil wins.


Quite clearly a genre classic, Satan's Cheerleaders makes a lot out of very little. The budget could not have amounted to more than pocket change, the nudity is minimal, and the special effects are non-existent, and yet it scratches every sleaze-beast itch: boners are popped, and ribs are tickled. Look past the cheap thrills and you'll start to notice the cracks in the veneer, but even then, the wildly uneven dialogue, the wonky editing and the hilariously threadbare production design only enhance the experience. It's junk, for sure, but it's such glorious, eager-to-please junk that you cannot help to fall under it's idiotic spell.

Clark showed no signs of slowing down after this one hit the drive-ins and grindhouses, and he continued spitting out low-budget mayhem like Joysticks (1983) and Lambada, the Forbidden Dance (1990), for the next 20 years. Billy the janitor went on to play a judge in half a zillion sitcoms. Sorta surprisingly, none of the cheerleaders went on to the cult-actress careers you'd imagine Satan's Cheerleaders would provide. Sherman landed a role on a soap opera for a good portion of the 80's, Powell appeared in the infamous Toolbox Murders (1978) and a Gilligan's Island TV movie, but quit acting in 1978. Sherry Marks appeared in only one other film, Hometown USA (1979), and our girl Horan did bit roles on various sitcoms (Joanie Loves Chachi, Mork and Mindy, Facts of Life), but hasn't acted since 1982. We still feel sorta cheated about that shower scene, Hillary, and quietly await your comeback. Please make it full-frontal, if possible.

Mandatory viewing, quite obviously. And if you can hunt down any LPs from Sonoma, who provided the bitchin' disco tunes on the soundtrack, all the better. Satan AND cheerleaders...you really can't miss with this one.

Availability: Satan's Cheerleaders is available on DVD.

Link: Greydon Clark's official website
Link: Satan's Cheerleaders fansite

Clip: Satan's Cheerleaders trailer.

-Ken McIntyre

PS: If anyone has a copy of The Facts of Life, Season one (1980) episode 13, titled "Dope", starring Hillary Horan as "Tumpy" (!) could you send it to me?

Thank you in advance.

Student Bodies (1981)

Directed by Mickey Rose
Starring Kristen Riter, Joe Talarowski, The Stick
Rated R
USA

"Garbage gets me hot."

Right, so "Student Bodies". The name implies, well, naked college girls, doesn't it? Not so, my friend. In this case, it refers to corpses. In 1981, the slasher movie was in full-frenzy, and in grand Hollywood tradition (Scary Movie, anyone?), a parody film was rushed out to cash in. Slasher films are very close to self-parody anyway, so it's not like Student Bodies was making much of a statement, but regardless, it has its oddball charms.

The story takes place on Halloween. And on Friday the 13th. And on Jamie Lee Curtis's birthday (Nov 22nd, by the way, if you want to send her a card). Julie (Angela Bressler, in her only performance) is babysitting. Toby (Kristen Riter, also a one-time actress) calls her to warn her not to do anything wild or crazy, since wild and crazy things might happen as a result. Toby is clearly our designated "final girl'. Julie hears a cat outside, but when she pokes her head out to check, it's actually a fluffy dog. What? Naturally, she leaves the door unlocked (we know this because there's an onscreen graphic that points to the door and reads 'unlocked'.) All of this is shot exactly like a straight-ahead slasher. So much so that the goofy elements seem wildly out of place.

Julie is being stalked by a very annoying, Asthmatic killer called The Breather (voiced, but not acted, by Richard Belzer). 'The Breather' keeps calling her on the phone. At one point, some sort of viscous liquid pours out. Dunno if it's supposed to be spit or semen, but it's pretty gross. Despite being rattled by the obscene caller, Julie decides it's time for a snack, and wanders into the pitch-black kitchen. She opens the fridge and grabs a fried chicken leg when her boyfriend Charlie (Keith Singleton) sneaks up behind her and grabs her.
It's actually a pretty scary moment.
"What's that chickeny taste?" He asks, when she stops screaming, and he kisses her.
"Chicken," she tells him.

They go upstairs to bone while the Breather goes over his weapons, figuring out what to kill them with. He chooses a paperclip, and starts climbing up the stairs. There are a lot of stairs.
"I hope I don't die first," wheezes The Breather.
And then, who knows what happens? It's dark. Julie gets offed, somehow. A naked Charlie finds her on the bed and tries to figure out what's wrong with her.
"Julie, you're not responding to my maleness!"

An hour or so later, Mom and dad come home (from watching a horror movie, naturally), but Julie is nowhere to be found.
"I hope she's not murdered on our bed," says dad.
Unfortunately, sir, that's exactly where she is.

Cut to: a double funeral for Julie and Charlie, held at their school.
Bertha (Anita Taylor) and Jeff get horny at the funeral, you know, like you do at funerals, and decide to fuck in Jeff's car. He runs off to get protection, and Bertha gets her skull bashed in with a wooden horse. And then Jeff gets suffocated with a garbage bag.

Then a blind guy and a crippled guy get into a fight over a parking space.
The guy in the wheelchair says: "I'm more handicapped then you, I can't even make love to a woman."
The blind guy says, "Oh yeah? I can't even find a woman."
He has a point. I'm not sure how he drove to school, though.

So then we meet the woodshop teacher, Mr Dumpkin (Joe Flood, Delta Fever), a maniac who is obsessed with horse-head bookends. That might be a clue. In fact, it almost certainly is, because there's an on-screen graphic that reads "Clue" and points to a box in the woodshop.

And then, there's a locker room scene, but it's from The Breather's point of view. He gets too worked-up and blacks out when the girls start taking their shirts off. By the time he wakes up, they're fully dressed and on their way to the gym already. Stupid Breather.

The virginal Toby is the last one in the locker room. She's startled by The Breather as she's getting dressed, and he chases her through the halls of the school. She never actually puts on her shirt, she just holds it in front of her, which is a nice touch. She ends up in the boiler room, where she's cornered by the creepy janitor, Malvert (The Stick). Luckily, he just wanted help with his crossword puzzle. She escapes, but is now Scooby Doo-ing her way around, intent on cracking the case.

Then there's a parade.
"I'd like to make a special appeal to the killer," says the principal, during his welcome speech, "Hasn't there been enough senseless killing? Let's have a murder that makes sense."
During the parade, another horny young couple, Ralph (Tom Cannon II) and Dagmar (Tammie Tignor...why did no one in this film ever act again? Was there some sort of tragedy on wrap day?) crawl into a bull float to bone, but The Breather kills them with an eggplant. Toby discovers the bodies, and is therefore blamed for 'em.

And then some guy comes on the screen to tell us that we're not getting any tits. And then he says "Fuck You" to secure an R rating. Haha.

They send Toby to see a psychiatrist, Dr Sigmund (Carl Peters, RIP), but being insane himself, he draws no conclusions. Meanwhile, The Breather continues to stalk the student body. There's a football game that features a hilariously belligerent hot dog salesman (if you want mustard, he'll just spray it right into your stupid face!), Malvert and his blow-up fuck doll girlfriend (she's filled with helium, for some reason, and floats away), and yet another couple who sneak off to have sex, and then get moidered by The Breather. Later on, Breather calls the principal and tells him that his next murder spree will take place at the prom. Toby gets wind of the plot (yes, the scene involves fart jokes), and decides to infiltrate the prom in disguise to unmask the killer. She chooses a hooker outfit, which is a little weird for the prom, but her tits looks fantastic in the outfit, so whatever.


The teachers decide that, since all the potential prom queens are dead except for Patti (Sara Eckhardt), they won't name anybody queen this year. In fact, they just give the crown to Principal Peters (Joe Talarowski). Patti does not take the news well.
"I want to slash my face," she snarls. "If I can't be the prettiest girl in school, than I'll be the ugliest!"

She was a safe distance from prettiest anyway, if we're gonna be honest here. Anyway, the resident ROTC nut convinces her that sex will ease her pain, and they bail.
Of course, Patti and war-kid get separated, and she gets murdered. When he comes back, he sees her corpse and tosses his condom.
"Well, guess I won't be needing this," he says, as he unzips his pants.
So, necrophilia is ok, but no naked tits?

Then Toby has a really inappropriate conversation with the principal, who is in his underwear. He also has 'I Love New York' written on his chest. He tells her how difficult it is to keep his clothes on with all these 'naughty' high school girls around. And then he excuses himself to go get a typing trophy. He didn't win it, he just wants to show it to Toby. And then he slips on some marbles (?) and stabs himself in the ass with the trophy. To death. He is not The Breather, however. He is just a weirdo.

Speaking of weird, the final segment is seriously bananas. Toby runs down the hallway while calliope music plays and Mr Dumpkin hurls horse-head bookends at her. Then the vice principal, Miss Mumsley (Mimi Weddell, 94 years old and still acting at the time of this writing) climbs into a trashcan and chases her in it. Plus there's zombies. The Stick's fuckdoll is in there, too. And then there's a shock ending. And then there's a twist.

And then there's another twist!
It is a slasher movie, after all.

One thing you'll notice pretty quickly about Student Bodies is how much of a debt Scream (1996) owes to it. In fact, compare the two, and you'll find all of those accolades Wes Craven received for deconstructing and satirizing the slasher formula ought to be handed right over to our man, writer/director Mickey Rose, because a lot of it was lifted straight from here: the self-aware horror movie stereotypes, the scary opening kill (ok, the farting dog and the paperclips throw it off, but otherwise, it does have some very effective scares), the multiple-killer reveal (not a spoiler; it's just one of many reveals), etc. All of it sprang from the fertile mind of Mr Rose in 1981. Which, if you think about it, is pretty remarkable, since the slasher movie was still in its infancy at that point. Incredibly, Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) were so wildly influential that no one ever strayed much from their blueprint, so the various gags and set-pieces in Student Bodies are still just as recognizable now as they were almost 30 years ago.

You may also notice that Student Bodies is pretty funny. Mr Rose made his bones writing jokes and routines for all the comedy greats, everyone from Sid Caesar to Johnny Carson. He was also Woody Allen's writing partner for many years, and co-wrote several of Allen's films, including Bananas (1971) and What's Up Tiger Lily (1966). Good ol' Mick. That cat was a champ.

That being said, the lack of nudity and gore severely dampens Student Bodies' chances of ever attracting the cult following it should have. Dispensing with the genre's two most important elements is a fatal flaw that the film never really recovers from. That's a shame, because it really is a fun and very witty movie, with an adorable final girl, and perhaps the greatest red herring of all time: Malvert the Janitor. The actor who played Malvert, known simply as "The Stick", was apparently a stand-up comedian at the time. He is one of the oddest looking people I've ever seen. He's got to be nearly seven feet tall, painfully skinny, with no chin, and beady rat-eyes. He's also double-jointed and frequently bends his arms and legs at odd angles, which is more terrifying than it is funny. Unfortunately, like most of the cast, this was The Stick's only film. Lord knows where he is now, but he is surely out there somewhere, probably scaring kids to death.

Coincidentally, another slasher parody, Saturday the 14th, was also released in 1981. That one is pretty good as well, but it has no The Stick, so Student Bodies wins whatever sick game we're playing.

Availability: Student Bodies is available on DVD.

Clip: Student Bodies trailer!

- Ken McIntyre

Gwendoline (1984)

AKA The Perils of Gwendoline
AKA The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak
Directed by Just Jaeckin
Starring Tawny Kitaen, Zabou Brightman, Brent Huff
Rated R
France

"Haven't you ever been in love before?"
"Yeah, with every woman in the world, except for you."

Most boner-seekers over the age of 30 or so have probably seen this film in its truncated VHS form, The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak. It would have had to possess some powerful mojo to get people to actually watch it with such a deplorable title, and it did: Tawny Kitaen. Tawny was the gorgeous face (and body) of glam-metal for a good portion of the 80's, due to a couple of high-profile rock n' roll romances. In the early 80's, she dated a former high school sweetheart, Ratt guitarist Robbin Crosby (RIP). Indeed, it is Tawny's shapely legs on the cover of the first Ratt EP (1983). She's also crawling towards the light on the cover of their first album, Out of the Cellar (1984). It was around this time that she began acting in earnest, but it wasn't until her celebrated romance with Whitesnake frontman David Coverdale, and her subsequent appearance in several of their ridiculously popular music videos, that she really became a pop culture icon. Starting in 1987, she appeared as Coverdale's muse in five Whitesnake videos, including Here I Go Again (1987), the one you're thinking of, where she rolls around on the Jaguar. The 80's really were fucking ridiculous, weren't they?

Tawny's post-Whitesnake career was focused mostly on television, but she did appear in three pieces of seminal 80's trash before then: 1986's goofy Ouija-board spookfest Witchboard, Tom Hanks's only raunch-com Bachelor Party (1984), and this rather amazing piece of work. While it is wildly uneven and sometimes painful to wade through, it was shot at the perfect moment for Tawny-watchers. She was merely 22 years old at the time, in full bloom, and not yet wrecked by silicon, shoulder pads, and heavy metal excess. Her acting style was much different here, as well; after Gwendoline, her doe-eyed innocence was gone, in favor of standard sitcom clunk, but here she's natural and utterly adorable. The perfect actress for a perfect role in a seriously imperfect film.

Most people that have seen this in its "Yik Yak" form have complained about its incoherence. The DVD version (from Severin) attempts to rectify this with a longer, un-rated 'directors cut', which is the version we're reviewing here. And while this version is indeed much longer (105 minutes versus 87), and has a few more flashes of tits and ass, the story still makes precious little sense. It's best just to roll with it. The director, Just Jaeckin, was a very successful softcore peddler, having helmed both the original Emmanuelle (1974) and Lady Chatterly's Lover (1981), which is probably still playing on Cinemax or some such cable channel now, nearly 30 years later. He also wrote Gwendoline, based on the erotic, B&D-tinted 1940's comics by John Willie. In the original comic books, Sweet Gwendoline was always getting tied up and threatened by some nefarious type. Fairly fetishistic stuff, and Gwendoline-the-movie does spend an inordinate amount of time trussing up our heroine. In fact, the director's version is almost wall-to-wall bondage. Comparing the two, it's pretty amazing they were able to chop down the kink and mold the film into a woozy Raiders of the Lost Ark rip-off.

And so, the story. Gwendoline (Kitaen) is the pure-as-snow daughter of an exotic (and currently missing) butterfly collector, who, along with her maid, Beth (Zabou Brightman) stows away in a box on a merchant sailing ship to find him. She gets caught in a Hong Kong port and is kidnapped by some evil Chinese drug lord. Luckily, she's saved by a rogue adventurer named Willard (Brent Huff), who, after a good amount of Kung Fu, kills the drug-pusher with a hook in the neck. Dude owed him money.

From the start, Willard's tries to distance himself from the two loony broads, but they're insistent. They follow him to the local bar and badger him for help. Initially, he tries foisting them off on the local police chief. You know it's a tough town when you explain your troubles to the chief of police, and he jams his hand up your frock and fuckin' laughs at you. After Gwen wins at roulette, Willard agrees to help her out. He takes her to see this opium-smoking creep who explains, while getting a blowjob, that he hasn't seen her father in awhile, but that he probably went to the Land of the Yik Yak to find that fuckin' butterfly. Not a good idea, seeing as no one ever makes it back.

And then they all get arrested. Steel bars are no match for the wily Willard, however, so he mashes on Gwen to make her scream (she sorta likes it, so he has to goose her extra-hard), which brings the guard around. Willard knocks that fucker out and steals his keys. They sneak out of jail and he attempts to put Gwen and her pal on the next boat out of town. It does not work.

Willard makes a deal to deliver some mysterious packages on a rickety junk, but said packages were delivered while he was sleeping, and Beth hid them. She won't tell him where they are until he takes them to Yik Yak. After tossing them into the river and killing a seriously rubbery alligator, he agrees. On the way, they are besieged by pirates, but Willard stabs them and burns down their boat.

Eventually, they stop to visit a friend of Willard's named Tom (Andre Julien). Gwen faints when she sees him, as he's wearing her father's clothes. Turns out her dad was killed, and Tom discovered the body. At first glance, it looked as though he was sacrificed to the gods-of-whatever by the local cannibal tribe, but Tom noticed that he had a bullet wound. And none of the natives own guns.

By the way, unless I blinked, we never solve that particular mystery. In fact, I don't think it's even mentioned again. Maybe in the yet-to-be-released, super duper four hour director's cut. I'm sure there's one lying around somewhere.

Willard's had enough of all this jungle madness, but Gwen offers him $2000 to travel deep into the Yik Yak with her to complete her father's work, to find that elusive butterfly. Of course, she doesn't actually have $2000, so she sells Tom Willard's mysterious packages to get the money. She also buys a bitchin' safari suit and a butterfly net, and they hit the trail.

There's an entirely gratuitous scene when it starts to rain in the jungle and Willard forces Gwen and Beth to take their shirts off so he can gather drinking water in them. It's a reasonable excuse to pop the girls' puppies free for a good ten minutes. Shortly thereafter, they are kidnapped by a headhunting tribe called the Keof. The Kiaf? Something like that.

They get thrown into a bamboo cage, but Willard crafts a clever plan involving a thorn and a piece of bamboo, and they get the hell out of there. Then they wander around in the desert for awhile. Then there's a cave (where, besides a theme park, maybe, can you find caves, jungles, and a desert, all in walking distance of one another?) where they spot the butterfly. They chase after it, and end up in some weird concrete underworld inhabited by girls in black leather S&M-esque bikinis. Beth gets captured, so Gwen and Willard dress up in the outfits to blend in and rescue her. First, though, they have a lover's spat.
"You're not man enough to say what you're true feelings are!" Gwen complains.
"Feelings are for creeps," says Willard.

So they follow the glamazon chicks and figure out that it's an elaborate diamond mining operation. This scene really should crackle with more sexual electricity, but every time you get a good shot of Gwen's thong, Willard's is right next to it. When the women figure out he's a man, they pile on top of him in an orgy of desperate woman-need, but all the girls are wearing these odd bald-caps. Crazy Frenchmen. At least there's a lot of ass in the frame.

One of the leather-girls chases Gwen down and almost stabs her to death, but Willard thwarts her, and she ends up getting eaten alive by cannibals. That, I did not see coming.

Gwen finally finds Beth. She is trapped in some giant torture room. She's got an arrow aimed at her guts, and if she lets go of the tether in her mouth, it'll shoot her. Gwen saves her (90% of this movie is somebody saving someone else from some Batman villain-y trap), but is captured by the "The Queen" (Bernadette Lafont) and her fancy-mustachioed man-servant D'arcy (Jean Rougerie, RIP).

She puts Gwen and Beth in chains (opposite each other, for maximum kink-impact) and informs Willard that her girls will have a gladiator fight, and whoever wins gets to bone him. If he survives, he and his friends can go free. What he does not know is that he will not survive, as it is their practice to kill men after sex. Clearly, this whole movie is being improvised at this point. Anyway, Willard fights the women off, and then there's a girl-driven chariot race, but it's all for naught. They get caught again, and Gwendoline is forced to strap on the gladiator gear and fight the other women for Willard. There's an extended (some would say endless) girlfight that ends when Gwen knocks another chick over and she gets impaled, gorily, on spikes.

And so, the thrilling climax. Gwen and Willard are forced to fuck in front of everyone, and when it's over, she's supposed to chop off his head. But will she? Or will Gwendoline and Willard (and Beth) escape from the queen's clutches? And what about this fuckin' butterfly? And what was in those packages?
Well, at least one or two of those questions are answered by the time the end-credits roll.

Being a French production and all, there's a sub-titled version that makes an eensy bit more sense than the dubbed, but the dialogue matters so little that either one will do. What Gwendoline is really all about is Kitaen's breathless beauty. There are moments here where she looks so astoundingly attractive that you almost feel privileged for the opportunity to gaze at her. So there's that.

As far as the rest of the film goes, at times it looks seriously expensive - like Dino De Laurentiis, suitcase-full-of-coke expensive - and other time when it looks like an amateurish piece of low-budget junk. It may be one of the most dramatically uneven films I've ever seen, in that respect. It's also senseless, and sorta overlong.

In summation:
If you are looking for a cohesive story, you're out of luck. However, it you're looking for a French adventure-comedy that you can masturbate to, bingo!

PS: Jaeckin retired (at age 45) immediately after making Gwendoline. Once you've directed a topless Tawny Kitaen, what else is there? He remains rich, rested, and happy. Tawny spent some time in rehab (and reality television), but is apparently on an upswing. We look forward to more Kitaen-induced boners in the future. The rest of the cast was French, so who knows. The French do not consult with us.

Availability: Gwendoline is available on DVD.

Clip: Gwendoline trailer!

-Ken McIntyre

Class Reunion (1982)

AKA National Lampoon's Class Reunion
Directed by Michael Miller
Starring Gerrit Graham, Michael Lerner, Misty Rowe
Rated R
USA

"Didn't you used to be crippled?"

When we first started this project, one of my co-author Paul's strict rules was no John Hughes movies. I see his point. Hughes essentially stole the teen sex comedy template and reformatted it to fit PG-rated mainstream sensibilities. Hughes either wrote or wrote/directed a fistful of these pastel-colored, watered-down teen-coms (Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Pretty in Pink, etc.) and they made bazillions, while eager-to-sleaze shlock-hounds like Ed Hansen and Rafal Zeilinski made do with down on their luck strippers and one-location shoots. And yes, he's made some seriously treacle-y dreck in his time - just try sitting through She's Having a Baby without screaming - but I still have to commend him for at least two films (Three, if you count the original Vacation): the hilarious and boner-popping Weird Science (1985), and this loony piece of work.

Class Reunion was John Hughes' first Hollywood writing gig, and it's much different from any of his other films. It's an odd genre mash-up that's half slasher flick and half college gross-out comedy, an anything-goes cross between Animal House and Rocky Horror filled with some seriously dark humor, memorable characters, and gruesome deaths. It even opens, in grand slasher tradition, with a prologue.

The Lizzie Borden High class of '72 is celebrating graduation at a bonfire-burning beach party, when everybody's favorite asshole Bob Spinnaker (Gerrit Graham) decides to prank the class wimp, Walter (the awesomely named Blackie Dammet). Bob tells Walt that hot-girl Meredith is waiting in her car to give ol' Walt a handjob. Only snag is, she's very shy, so they'll both have to wear bags on their heads. Walt goes along with it, and things are going pretty well until, mid-stroke, Bob yanks off the paper bags. Not only is the entire class watching them, but it's not Meredith at all, it's....

Well, that part we don't get to see. Instead, we flash forward 10 years to the class reunion, where we catch up with all the wacky characters from Lizzie Borden high. There's the crazy-eyed crippled-girl, Dolores (Zane Husby), now walking just fine, thanks to a deal with the devil. Go-to 80's fat maniac Stephen Furst is Hubert, the class-slob gone disco-slimeball. There's Bunny (Miriam Flynn), the uptight chick, Gary (Fred McCarren), the class zero, Iris (squeaky-voiced Mews Small), the horny blind girl, Meredith (Shelley Smith), class fox-turned-actress, Egon (Jim Staahl) , the creepy kid (who also appears to literally be a vampire), Mary (Wendy Goldman), the class slut, Chip and Carl (Barry Diamond and Art Evans), the class stoners, etc.

Your usual motley crew, really. Everybody wanders around for awhile either exchanging insults or hitting on each other. And sometimes they're just fuckin' weird:

"Did you send a naked picture of yourself to a men's magazine?"
"You saw it?"
"I ate it!"

Etc. Then Chuck Berry shows up to duckwalk through a few tunes. The party goes south when one of the classmates gets murdered in a back room, and his body is dumped onto the auditorium stage. Out of seemingly nowhere, Michael Lerner shows up as "Dr Robert Young, from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane". This announcement naturally causes everyone to run screaming for the exits. Ah, but the exits are locked!
"We know a way out!" Announces the woozy Chip, pulling a joint out of his pocket.
"Me and Carl will get real high, and then we'll save everybody. Maybe."


Dr. Young tells the class they he suspects it's Walter, come back for revenge. Apparently Walt went berserk after the beach party prank. He killed his parents with a vacuum cleaner, and spent the ensuing decade locked up in Young's hospital.
The partygoers are confused. It was just a harmless prank, after all.
"Do you know who the girl was?" Asks Dr Young. "Do you?"
"Yeah, it was some tramp from the Catholic high school," Bob says.
"No," the doctor informs him, "It was his own twin sister!"
So you can see how that would damage a guy.

The doctor asks for volunteers to form search parties to find a way out. Conveniently for us, all the main characters raise their hands, and the hunt is on. Walter (if it is Walter), runs around in a Catholic schoolgirl outfit with a bag on his head. He runs into chain-smoking lunch lady Anne Ramsey (RIP), who fights him off with hard-as-rock slabs of pizza, but is no match for the madman when he starts swinging a chainsaw around. Her dismembered corpse is discovered in the oven some time later, when Carl and Chip, suffering from a terrible case of the munchies, stumble into the kitchen, looking for food.
"Let's find some roast beef," suggests Chip.
"What about some roast old lady?" Asks Carl, when he opens the oven.

The increasingly Scooby Doo-ish gang skulk around the corridors and classrooms of the school, trying to find their way out. Occasionally, one of the men stops to have sex with the blind/deaf chick. Also occasionally, Bag-man shows up to bash somebody's skull in with a hammer. Oh, and Dolores belches fire at one point. She did, after all, warn everybody that she'd sold her soul to the devil.

The rest of the class huddle in the auditorium and wait to get saved. The popular girls put on a show. No word of where the fuck Chuck Berry is in all of this. Then they play Bingo. Dr Young decides the only way to draw Walt out is to use Meredith as bait.
"Don't worry about a thing," he tells her. "I know Walter intimately."
"Really?" She asks. "Well then, didn't you know he was going to kill Milt?"
"Yes."
"So why didn't you try to stop him?"
"I couldn't find a parking spot."

If you're at all up on slasher themes, than you may have already figured the end out. Suffice to say, there's at least one twist. Possibly several.

Former Hee-Haw girl Misty Rowe flashes some quick side boob during a playful sex romp, but for the most part, Class Reunion is pretty much nudity-free. Luckily, it's funny and weird enough to get along without any significant skin. Endlessly quotable ("I think we ought to go back and die with the others"), and loaded with funny sight-gags (there's two varieties of canned food in the cafeteria kitchen: 'Powered Shit' and 'Creamed Shit'), it's pretty astonishing that Class Reunion has yet to secure cult status. Certainly, all the elements are in place: laughs, oddballs, a creepy atmosphere, instantly recognizable character actors, witty dialogue, and a guy wearing a bag and a dress chasing people around with a chainsaw. I mean honestly, what the fuck more do you want?

Michael Miller had no experience in comedy prior to directing Class Reunion - up until that point, he'd toiled away in gritty, redneck-y fare like Chuck Norris skull-crusher Silent Rage (also 1982) and Tommy Lee Jones bum-out Jackson County Jail (1976). Interestingly, he never went back to funny stuff, either. He's been shooting TV drama for the past couple decades. He probably didn't think this was funny either. John Hughes must own his own island at this point. National Lampoon continued to make movies that nobody liked. They're doing it as we speak. Stephen Furst is skinny and happy. Gerrit Graham will sell you an autographed copy of Used Cars for $35.00. Misty Rowe is 56 years old at this point and is still quite bone-able.


Availability: Class Reunion is available on DVD.

Clip: the best of Dolores!

Link: Gerrit Graham official website
Link: Misty Rowe official website

-Ken McIntyre