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

Superchick (1973)

Directed by Ed Forsyth

Starring Joyce Jilson, Louis Quinn, Thomas Reardon, Tony Young, Timothy Wayne Brown, John Carradine, Uschi Digard, Candy Samples 
Rated R
USA

"Last one in bed gets no head!"

Welcome to the swinging '70's, my friends... a land full of hammy melodramatic rich dudes who prefer performance art over actual sex and have crazy germ phobias, pot parties, and horny, loose air-line stewardesses who have a Clark Kent fetish. And the best part? John Carradine as a weirdo S&M enthusiast.

SUPERCHICK (Crown International, 1975) really doesn't have a plot. More like a series of subplots that come to an abrupt end. It basically plays like a feature-length clip show, with elements of three or four different films edited together that just happen to have the same central character.

The finished film is like watching some crazy retro travel documentary about a stewardess, Tara B. True, portrayed by future psychic quack Joyce Jillson (who for the record has amazing boobs, and shows them off alot in the film, though the end credits proclaim she utilized a body double in some scenes), and her need to have sex with multiple partners in several different cities.

True leads a double life (hence the "Superchick" title, I'm assuming) where she's a mousey brunette flight attendant by day, and blonde-headed vixen by night...we're not told why she does this, and I'm assuming that's just how she gets her kicks, pretending to be two people. Maybe it's a cosplay thing. Go figure...

Now, allow me to stop here for a moment and say something about the opening title sequence. If Quentin Tarintino wasn't inspired in some way by SUPERCHICK's title credits when filming JACKIE BROWN's, then it's some sorta incredible coincidence. Hell, Subplot #1 (which serves as the closest thing as a central plotline this film has) is practically an abridged version of Elmore Leonard's RUM PUNCH, the book the aforementioned Tarintino flick was based on. Loser gambling addict West Coast boyfriend (whom we're introduced to as he's screwing around with porno actress Candy Samples and her huge milk cans) gets caught up in a plot by the mob to rip off a payroll. For some reason the local mob want Tara involved because she's a flight attendant, though the film doesn't really make clear why the gangsters need her help to begin with.

Subplot #2 is Tara's wacky sex antics with an eccentric pop musician whom she meets up with after a party busted by two crooked beat cops where we get to see Rus Meyer girl Uschi Digard's bust. Digard portrays a party-girl named Mayday who's outfit (when she's wearing it) is bursting at the seams, that is when she isn't trying to make some bisexual time with Tara.

Subplot #3 involves Tara and her wealthy New York boyfriend whos's a doctor...and has some serious germ issues. So much so, he and Ms. True engage in an oddly staged bit of performance art that's half beat poetry reading and half simulated bedroom pillow talk that provides a bit of unintentional humor....not that the film needed any more of it.

Thrown in amongst all these subplots are a few goofy skits involving Jillson's character joining the "mile high club" with a travelling Marine in an airplane restroom, and her answering a swingers ad which she comes to discover was written by Igor, a pervy old S&M lover who lives with his mother and looks like he walked off the set of a late-night horror film host's show. John Carradine looks to have been enjoying the role of Igor a little too much, and his appearence in SUPERCHICK solidifies my opinion that he would literally cash a paycheck for any role that fell into his lap.

Is SUPERCHICK a good film? It's hard to say....it's less like a movie and more like a series of skits. The pros are: Jillson is fairly easy on the eyes and there's more than enough background boobs than you can shake a stick at. And there are some funny bits here and there, but that leads to the cons: the film tends to drag at points, which isn't helped by the fact that if a viewer cared to follow the film's storyline, they probably couldn't, because there isn't one there to be had. My advice? Watch it for the eye-candy and cheesecake, and throw any hopes of figuring out what the movie's about out the window. A nice piece of 1970s cheese that goes down a lot easier if you don't put much thought into it...

- Hong Kong Cavalier

Don't Deliver Us From Evil (1971)

Directed by Joël Séria

Starring Jeanne Goupil and Catherine Wagener

Unrated

France

"Help us to be ever more wicked. Help us to do evil. And at the hour of our death, take us to your Satanic bosom."

Banned in France for blasphemy upon it's initial release, Joël Séria's Don't Deliver Us From Evil is a taboo riding romp that will probably leave you feeling a little bit uncomfortable at times, and perhaps a little bored or disappointed at others.

Don't Deliver Us From Evil takes place during the summer break of two 14 year old convent girls (Anne and Lore, played by Jeanne Goupil and Catherine Wagener respectively) as they follow a path of rebellion that ends in a tragic and unexpected fashion.

The two newly befriended girls spend much of their time off from school reading naughty poetry under the covers, riding their bikes around town, and deceptively seducing older men with their budding feminine wiles. One such seduction ends in a Benny Hill style attempted rape chase scene and another ends much worse (for the girls or the seductee, I won't reveal).

As the summer progresses, the girl's boldness grows and their acts escalate from innocent teasing and irreverent misbehavin' to those of violence - both intentional and unintentional.

Overall, Don't Deliver Us From Evil is a mixed bag. When it's good, it's very good, and when it's not so good, all you can do is sit there and imagine how it could have been done better. The moods are all over the place from coming-of-age drama to corny sex comedy and this doesn't fare as well as if it were presented in a serious tone throughout.

Mondo Macabro does a decent job in presenting Don't Deliver Us From Evil. The print is fine, sound is alright and the bonus features are interesting. My nitpicks come mainly with the packaging: the cover is pretty poorly drawn, aren't the characters in the film, and makes the entire presentation look cheap.

One final issue I have is with how the film is marketed. Despite what you would think from title and content details, this is not a horror movie. Yes, the girls have a Satanic ritual in which they swear their allegiance to the dark lord, but in the end, the girls are nothing more than bored, curious teenagers in way over their head.

Even with my gripes, I still have to recommend Don't Deliver Us From Evil. The relationship between the girls is interesting, there are plenty of naughty thrills and quite the unexpected (and oddly humorous) ending. Pick it up if you're into teensploitation, girls-gone-bad-gone-evil stories or just have nothing better to do and want to see very young looking women frolic in their underthings a lot.

- Jeremy Vaca

Buford's Beach Bunnies (1993)

Directed by Mark Pirro
Starring Jim Hanks, Rikki Brando, Suzanne Ager, Monique Parent
Rated R
USA

“Jeeter just needs to find a home for his lost prairie gopher.”

If writer/director Mark Pirro is even vaguely famous for anything, it's the ultra low budgets he's worked with over the years. His first work, 1985 comedy horror A Polish Vampire in Burbank, was filmed for somewhere around $2,500 and immediately became the lowest budget film to reach cable television. By 1992, Pirro's star was on something approaching the rise, and he received the opportunity to work together with Axis Films International – a softcore production company looking to branch out into sex comedies.

You'd be hard pressed to put a figure on Buford's Beach Bunnies' cost. It's clearly not the ultra-low budget extravaganza that Pirro's name has been built on, but there's not exactly a whole lot of expansive beach shots either, which seems something of an omission considering the title and all. They did manage to rustle together enough to cash to pull in slightly-creepy-youngest-Hanks-brother Jim Hanks however, so that's something.

Basically: it's the closest Mark Pirro ever managed to get to a mainstream film. I use the past tense there because, well, it's hard not to play a little game of connect the dots with Pirro's filmography and the five years between Buford's and his next film doesn't exactly speak of a great success.

That's a bit odd, really. What's not to like? I mean, who wouldn't want to see a film in which the opening number details how the titular bunnies have the stuff that “makes your weenie wanna grow-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa”? Check out the following clip at around 1:20, and if you can tell me exactly what the line beforehand is I'll be super grateful, as I've listened to the damn thing tens of times trying to decrypt the preceding mumbling to no avail. In fact, not only can I still not understand what is said, I can't get the song out of my head. (Also, yes, the movie's title is spelled incorrectly in the titles, which is ultra classy.)



The story that follows from there is pretty simple: Jeeter Buford (Hanks) is pathologically afraid of girls, to the point of having psychedelic freakouts in purple and red tint every time he comes into contact with one. His old man Harry (Burt Reynolds-alike Barrett Cooper) is particularly unhappy with that, given that he's the proprietor of Buford's Bunny Hole; the local rabbit-dominated fast food joint which happens to be staffed by scantily clad girls dressed as bunnies. Oh, and a couple of guys in cut-off shirts, khaki shorts and straw hats. Because, I suppose, it was the early '90s.


Anyways, in order to cure Jeeter he presents his three favourite bunnies with the challenge of taking his son's virginity, and offers $100,000 to the first to do it. Probably happens all the time.

The film gives us a little background as we're introduced to a young Jeeter who is dragged by his friends to a brothel, rather naturally run by Kitten Natividad and her massive boobs. Jeeter's there to learn the “facts of life”, but he's only brought along $5. “What am I supposed to do?!” exclaims Kitten. “Buy donuts for the girls?”


She relents – after being informed Jeeter's saved “three days of lunch money” - but warns him not to expect much. Cue foreboding music. Jeeter's led upstairs, handed a blindfold (which he's told will make what's to come easier) and: screaming.

Cut forward ten or so years, and we find out a little about the elder Buford. Namely, the fact that he makes ads like this:



So that's probably something to be proud of. Hell, I'd eat there, and I'm not even into rabbit - “come by for a piece of tail” indeed.

Unfortunately, the news isn't good for old Harry – he's had a mild heart attack and is in the hospital. Also, he has to have his temperature taken via rectal thermometer, though as we all know; this is comedy gold material, and Pirro's not about to disappoint: “What's the difference between taking it there and in the mouth?” Harry asks. “The taste,” replies the utterly believably named Dr. Van Horney (Robyn Webb).


It's the day shift down at Buford's Bunny Hole and bookish Lauren Beatty (Rikki Brando) is late again. Harry's morbidly obese niece Beula Lugosi (Ina Rogers) just happens to be the manager and isn't taking any excuses – she wastes no time in telling Lauren that she just hasn't been paying attention to her work since she started seeing “slimeball boyfriend” Karl (Adam Wahl).


We also meet the co-workers: blonde Boopsie Underall (Suzanne Ager) and red-haired Amber Dexterous (Monique Parent), who is off and having sex with a customer in the toilet within her first three minutes on screen simply because he compliments her on her crystal necklace. Fact: early '90s crystal enthusiasts might be the worst people ever. Amber mumbles something about spiritual closeness because of said crystals, though her new friend is less enthusiastic. “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “Me too. Turn around and bend over.”


Meanwhile, Beula sits on a cook for calling her “fatty” while a rabbit sits in the salad.


After all that excitement, the three bunnies leave work to see Harry, apparently wearing the goofiest damn outfits they could find.


Turns out the incident with the cook wasn't the first time Beula had sat on someone – Harry tells the girls he thinks it's because she's jealous of the attention they get. And finally, we get to meet the adult Jeeter, who has very high pants. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Lauren checks him out in the most obvious fashion possible. Unfortunately, she makes the mistake of shaking his hand soon after, and he goes into tinted freakouts (although, frankly, it seems somewhat less than debilitating, since he's fine about two seconds later).


Still, it's enough to get Harry mad, and he yells at Jeeter for a while about how none of the treatment he's had over the years seems to have fixed his problem and how there must be something out there to make him normal. Then he offers Dr. Van Horney $10,000 to sleep with Jeeter. Naturally, she accepts and drags him off to the morgue under the pretence of a medical examination.

Even though the tell-tale signs of sex are there – soft lighting, smoke machine – he's reluctant to get his clothes off, so Dr. Van Horney has to convince him.

“I'm a doctor,” she declares, pacing around him. “I went through five long months of medical school, and I've read every book from Dr. Joyce Brothers to Dr. Seuss and I saw every episode of Marcus Welby MD! Now, are you gonna take your clothes off, or am I going to have to get hospital security in here?” That's enough to convince Jeeter, so she listens to his crotch with a stethoscope and then makes out with him a bit with her top off until he freaks again.


Harry isn't going to give up that easily, though. He sends a telegram - everyone in the '90s was nuts about telegrams - to Boopsie, who is interrupted mid-shower. When she hears of his mysterious “profitable” offer, she gets so excited her towel falls off.


Although she picks it back up before her boyfriend Scud Blackplowman (Charley Rossman) walks in, he still decides to throw the messenger into a bookshelf. “I caught you this time! Don't you deny it, you filthy stink-whore!” he cries, though he quickly forgives her once she explains, following which he tells Boopsie her nakedness has “inflamed” his “manly parts to unbound heights”.

Jeeter, it turns out, has catastrophic recurring nightmares, which involve a lot of travelling down the brothel hallway dopily looking around. This is invariably followed by a celebrity impersonator (Humphrey Bogart, Clint Eastwood and Marilyn Monroe respectively) giving him some reason to back away, and Jeeter wakes up.


Finally, it's time for Harry to announce his grand plan to the girls.

Harry: Jeeter just needs to find a home for his lost prairie gopher.
Lauren: What are you talking about?
Amber: I think he means sex.
Lauren: You think everyone means sex.
Boopsie: What did you mean, Harry?
Harry: I meant sex.

It's a sex comedy, you see. Anyway, the offer of $100,000 for sleeping with Jeeter seems to go down pretty well: even if Lauren says she's not interested, she still falls well short of being insulted or anything. Amber, on the other hand, seems downright enthusiastic.


However, they're overheard by Beula, who looks shifty and scampers off. Later, she reads an ad for a hypnotist, The Amazing Foreskin (David Robinson), which is probably the worst name any stage performer of any variety could pick. Meanwhile, Amber's using a Jeeter doll to conjure up good vibe gods by rubbing its crotch.


Having already pulled out of the competition, Lauren's at home with her boyfriend. He's trying to get her to have sex after two weeks of waiting, so he sneaks on a porno starring a dry-humping Pirro and Lissa Walters, who I assume was his girlfriend or something similar.


Despite the leading man's drop-dead gorgeous hair, she's not buying it. “It's...fascinating how they do that,” he says in a hugely strange attempt at convincing her to keep watching it.

At the theatre, Beula's sneaky plot continues, as she explains to The Amazing Foreskin (“call me Forey”) that she needs him to hypnotise Jeeter so that everyone thinks he's crazy.

The next day, Karl's still bothering Lauren about having sex with him, and she's still not interested. He storms off, so she sits down for a chat with Jeeter, who just happens to be walking along the beach at exactly the same time. Amongst other things, they discuss Jeeter's dream, and Lauren suggests that it might be caused by a traumatic event that he's trying to block. Which, uh, seems kinda obvious really.

Boopsie shows up too, and drags Jeeter off to her house, under the pretence of heading to see Harry. “I can't go to the hospital dressed like this,” she explains. But oh, it's a ruse and she's trying to seduce him! So Jeeter does the purple thing again.


Before he's even recovered, Scud's at the door and proceeds to throw Jeeter into a book shelf. Boopsie tries to explain that it's all for money, but Scud doesn't quite grasp the concept: “You take money for extra joy? You slut-hobo!” While they're puzzling it out – and Scud does eventually realise the benefits of the proposition – Jeeter walks off nursing his head.

He's not home for long before Amber shows up, but they're soon joined by Scud and Boopsie. While the girls are arguing, Scud and Jeeter share a bro-ment on the beach. There are, Scud says, five reasons why Jeeter needs him around to help with his “mental problems with girls”.


“One, you need a manly role model. Two, Scud manly man who make good role model. Two...”

“Three,” suggests Jeeter. “Three,” Scud concedes, “I introduce you to high class women. And five...”

“Four,” prompts Jeeter.

“Four,” repeats Scud. “I forget four. We walk now.” And so they do, right back to the brothel where it all began. This time though, it's run by a different madame, who asks about Jeeter.

“That's Joiter,” Scud explains. “He'll need A-number-one cavity to place his male organ wiener glans into.” The madame and Scud walk upstairs, where he has another purple moment after seeing the door from his dreams. Eventually managing to open it, he's confronted with the following sight:


It's not entirely clear what the hell that is, but it's there, and it's enough to make Jeeter run from the building. “Looks like my friend suffer from premature evacuation,” Scud remarks to some prostitutes.

Later on that night, Lauren and Karl are trying to patch things up on the beach. And things seem to be patching up pretty well, so Karl tries one last time to seduce her.



She's not so convinced, so Karl tries to rape her. Fortunately, Jeeter has been running around since daylight and wanders onto the beach in time to rescue Lauren. As a reward, she heads back to his place and tells him about another time she was almost raped. Jeeter's into that whole tragic scene though, so it gives him the courage to put his hand on her shoulder. Immediately after, they fall in love and there's a montage, during which they have sex.


Harry sees them asleep afterwards and smiles proudly, which is pretty creepy: imagine if your parent(s) did it. Yikes.


Lauren can't stay however – she's got to work. Bumping into Harry on her way out, he tells her not to worry about even showing up and hands her the cheque, but she's not interested. Instead, he gives her a lift to work and proceeds to happily tell the other two girls all about it while Lauren's out back changing, except for the bit about her not wanting the money.

Hours later, Boopsie and Amber are still talking about it, so when Jeeter drops by the Bunny Hole to give Lauren flowers, he overhears the whole proposition, and assumes the worst. So he goes home and stares at the world's saddest cupcake for a while before knocking it onto the floor.


Beula comes by and invites him to dinner, but it's all part of her plan to make him appear crazy. Sure enough, The Amazing Foreskin shows up to join them at the restaurant. He hypnotises Jeeter, who goes into the ladies' toilets and rips a girl's shirt off.


You might get away with that sort of thing in some sex comedies (most even) but unfortunately the cops are right in the restaurant ready to haul Jeeter off to jail. Will he be put away for life in a mental institution? Will he forgive Lauren? What happened to him in the brothel? All is revealed in half an hour of extraneous movie that really doesn't need to be there, including some bizarre sub-plot involving the girls getting jobs at the brothel and a court case that drags badly so badly it feels like a three hour telemovie. And has all the humour of one.


Buford's Beach Bunnies is even a pretty enjoyable blast up until that point. It's just the last half hour that kills any momentum the film might have been building - the Lauren-Jeeter love montage feels like too much of a climax for the conclusion to retain your attention, especially once the sub-plots just keep on coming.

Ultimately, it's not the worst sex comedy from that period, even if it is far from the best. The characters have some degree of depth, the direction isn't as awful as Pirro's reputation for cheapness might suggest, and the three lead bunnies are super attractive (especially Monique Parent, in one of her first roles). There's even something approaching chemistry between Jeeter and Lauren.

Plus, as a added bonus, Jim Hanks isn't even half as fucking irritating as his older brother.

- Alistair Wallis

Pep Squad (1998)

Directed by Steve Balderson
Starring Amy Kelly, Brooke Balderson, Summer Makovkin
Rated R
USA


"Does Scott sodomize you? Is that why you won't hang out with me?"

It's prom season at Oak Hills high, a tiny school in a tiny town located somewhere between Wichita and Mars.  The candidates for prom queen are being announced at a pep rally in the gym, and lumbering glamazon Cherry (Brooke Balderson, the director's sister) assumes she's a shoo-in, mostly because the student body is terrified of her. When she loses the nomination in favor of mocking hipster-girl Julie (Summer Makovkin), manic polyester queen Terra (Amy Kelly) and a random assortment of drunken cheerleaders and bimbos, Cherry goes berserk, vowing to kill every potential winner in the race.

Cherry isn't the only threat to the students of Oak Hill high. They've also got a lecherous principal (Eric Sherman) to contend with, a beast of a man known as Lester the Molester who routinely calls girls into his office to administer unsavory corrective measures. Not only that, but...well, just imagine what it must be like to churn through your adolescence in Oak Hill, Kansas. No wonder most of the students are suicidal, alcoholic, or homicidal.

And then there's Beth (Jennifer Dreiling), the poster girl for teenage angst. Dressed in the most drab ensembles the local strip mall has to offer, Beth drifts aimlessly through her go-nowhere life, dodging her constantly bickering parents and day-dreaming her way through class. One fateful day she is sent to Lester's lair for one too many tardy slips, and after nearly being raped by the grabby administrator, her life suddenly takes a turn for the criminal. She bashes Lester's head in and stuffs him into a garbage can. Then she hooks up with subversive Julie and her possibly gay boyfriend Scott (Adrian Pujol), and the three disaffected youths try to figure out what to do next. They opt for kidnapping him, holding him hostage in Julie's basement while they throw a raging party upstairs. But when nosy Terra discovers him and cuts him loose, Julie and Beth are faced with a tough decision - whether to let their sex-offending principal live or die.

They choose the latter, naturally. Did I mention this is a comedy?

Meanwhile, Cherry is busy running down potential prom queens in her blood-red SUV. No one seems to mind, which is odd, but clearly Kansas operates on a whole different level. Our two murderous plotlines converge when Julie and company ask Cherry for help in hiding Lester's miserable carcass. All this scheming and bloodshed eventually sparks off an all-out war between Cherry and Terra, a war that will eventually culminate in a guns-blazing massacre in the schoolyard.

Again, this is a comedy. And amazingly enough, it's hilarious.

Although it is somewhat negligent in the boner-popping department - unless you like your high school vixens fully-clothed, and stuffed into weird polyester outfits - Pep Squad is otherwise balls-out amazing in nearly every other department. Consistently funny and frequently outrageous, this film is a treasure trove of surreal one-liners and aggressively over-the-top comic performances. Brooke Balderson and Amy Kelly have created legendary b-flick characters with warring teen-titans Cherry and Terra, and the rest of the cast are as quirky and bizarre as everything else in Balderson's teenage wasteland. Part Napoleon Dynamite - years before Jared Hess's similarly weird farmland epic - part Polyester-era John Waters, Pep Squad is as punky and violent as it is campy and playful. If you took a small-town drag queen and locked her in a dusk-til-dawn drive-in showing nothing but 80's teen sex comedies and nihilistic 70's revenge flicks for a week or so, this is what her nightmares would look like. Obviously, the Columbine shootings add an unfortunate gravity to Cherry's school grounds massacre - especially since they occurred just a year after Pep Squad was released - but beyond that sad twist of fate, this low-budget black comedy is an overlooked gem that will surely please camp and cult film fans alike.

- Ken McIntyre